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My Story
I was musing today about whether women and children might be evolutionarily designed to subsist on foraging/gathering omnivorousness while men might be best on a warrior/hunter carnivorous type diet. There might have been times when things were like this for long periods. The men would perhaps go off on long hunts or fishing expeditions, leaving the women to hunt and gather and mind the children while the men ate what they could catch on the way.
I can also imagine that men might have necessarily had times of fasting/feasting while the women and children had more of a steady input, as they would have been there minding the store piles.
Muse away, but all the women and children excelling on modern carnivore diets are proof that they categorically do not need carbs. They may have eaten more of them historically, but they don't appear to need them any more than men. And then there's the usual question...where would they have gotten all these carbs in the first place? Aside from seasonal fruit, there probably wasn't much on the table that wasn't mostly fiber and toxins. They probably would have served a greater purpose by making clothing, tools, and shelter if they were not actually moving in tandem with the men, although the prevalence of athleticism among modern women suggests that they were plenty capable of joining in hunting activities if they were not tied down by infants.
Regarding iron intake - it is self regulating on a high fat carnivore diet. The high fat component is very important. Apparently science hasn't understood how animal fat influences iron absorption and why. The body reduces iron absorption on a diet based primarily on plants and increases absorption on a high fat and meat diet because it can. I will not go into details here as to why that is the case but rest assured that it is so. It has little to do with the iron content of meat itself and much more with the fat.
Quote from wavygravygadzooks on July 15, 2022, 2:30 pmWell, a diet of rice and meat is not an all-meat diet, for one. Two, high ferritin does not mean you have excess iron, it just means you have a lot of iron bound to ferritin. Paul Mason thinks that the body mistakenly treats inflammatory conditions like insulin resistance the same way as it would infection because in our evolutionary environment the primary source of systemic inflammation would have been infection, in which case keeping iron bound to ferritin prevents the infectious agent from making use of the iron, thereby helping to fight the infection.
So I guess you kind of suggest that eating rice has developed insulin resistance and thus my ferritin levels went high. If I resume, I eat mostly two foods, of which one is high iron and another not. Then one of iron markers shows high, but the culprit is not the food which is high in iron, but the other one by some obscure mechanism.
This is too far fetched for me, I would think this is a case of "why make something simple when we can make it complicated". Maybe I have insulin resistance, but why wouldn't I have it before? I ate moderately or high carb before the rice/beef diet and still had low ferritin.
This is an interesting discussion. For what it is worth, despite my taking iron supplements (for only a short period) at the time I developed symptoms last year I had a blood test which indicated nevertheless low iron. I am intrigued as to what my blood says now - I am due to do another test shortly.
Some other symptoms that I forgot about in my original post included balding on the back of my calves. Very soon after changing my diet did the hair begin to return here - it was quite remarkable and although the progress has slowed it continues, as indicated by the occasional ingrown hair. I think that @ggenereux2014 mentioned this happening to him also in one of his early blog posts. But by far one of the most interesting and to me conclusive symptoms (can't believe I forgot it) was the yellowing of the skin on my leg, around the veins, as if bruised. It was really quite unnerving, and surely indicated a VA dumping into the skin.
@carnivore - yes I have toyed with going meat only for a while, a prominent pro climber has recently done the same and guess what... his eczema disappeared (obviously). He is now a major advocate of it. I have increased my meat consumption and will see how I go.
I began to take bromelain yesterday between meals, am interested to see what happens over the next few months. My major interest will be the effect on eye floaters and also some fibrous lumps on my shins. I would like to add charcoal to my diet to help with detoxing VA - what is the best way to do this?
Lastly if anyone has any recommendations for getting better sleep, I would appreciate it.
No, I'm not proposing that rice consumption caused insulin resistance for you. I'm suggesting that you have become insulin resistant for some reason (quite possibly Vitamin A toxicity, as my own insulin sensitivity and blood glucose levels seem to have gradually worsened since I began eating Vitamin A, and they continue to be suboptimal on a mostly-meat diet as I eliminate excess Vitamin A), and that eating rice in a state of insulin resistance is causing you additional inflammation. I am then proposing that inflammation is causing a functional iron problem where you don't have excess iron, but most of what you have is bound to ferritin and kept in an unusable state (i.e. functional iron deficiency).
I have been trying to puzzle solve my own issue that sounds very much like this. I, too, ate an extremely high-carb diet until around the time I started consuming a lot of Vitamin A, and had no apparent metabolic problems. I was just hungry all the time. But then I started having fatigue, muscle twitching/cramping, and mental issues that seem quite similar to mild hypoxia. I have a lot of symptoms that appear to be mild anemia, but my bloodwork does not indicate anemia. I've experimented with white rice on my low Vitamin A diet and am not sure what effect it has, but it certainly didn't fix anything, and I suspect it worsens some of my symptoms.
What I do know is that I've been eating a TON of read meat for the past two years and if I was accumulating iron on a regular basis, I would probably be dead by now. I have some symptoms of iron overload, but as with Vitamin A deficiency vs toxicity, many of the symptoms of iron overload are similar to those of iron deficiency (whether absolute or just functionally unavailable).
I'm not sure if you've ever listened to Paul Mason, but he is one of my favorite doctors out there. You should try to find a video where he talks about functional iron deficiency due to inflammation.
@wavygravygadzooks I believe you already stopped eating plants so the issues with low iron and other plant toxin related issues will probably resolve in time. What I'd recommend is to up the fat intake further and possibly reduce the meat somewhat if you eat a lot - say, 80/20 fat/protein in terms of calories and see how that influences things.
In my previous post I should have written the body self-regulates iron use instead of iron uptake. Your mentioning iron bound to ferritin made me realize that the body does take up more iron than it can currently use and sort of keeps it in storage in this unproblematic form until the time when it can use it without harming itself - as would be the case on a high or even moderate carb or plant food diet. From the body's perspective it makes perfect sense to downregulate iron a lot in vegans or vegetarians and plant eaters in general even on a standard diet. I don't know the exact mechanism from a scientific perspective but I do know why the body does that.
All of this has to do with oxygen, the vibration of oxygen, the vibration of the body under conditions of excess (or really, much of any) carb and plant consumption vs animal fat consumption. There's no science about this that I know of because science doesn't much accept or at least work with the individual frequencies at which the various elements and compounds vibrate and doesn't seem to have realized their significance yet. For contemporary science it's still all very much physical instead of energetic. So I've pretty much worked out this concept for myself in terms of diet and healing and it is conclusive even though I cannot prove any of it except anecdotally. I'm not very scientifically minded but rather a common-sense person who looks at the full picture instead of all the tiny details. This includes the natural, optimal vibration of human beings in relationship to food and it practically solved most if not all the riddles for me. Just like nature it's rather simple once the basic concept is understood and I will explain it in detail in my book. It's information that hasn't been talked about in this way anywhere to my knowledge but it has the potential to help a lot of people because it explains things in an easy to understand, unscientific manner and the best thing - it works. Grant's work added the final puzzle piece for which I am eternally grateful.
Anyway, the bottom line is this: animal fat will increase the body's iron usage (and possibly reduce symptoms of iron overload as well), and carbs + plant foods in general will decrease iron uptake and usage, because from the body's point of view the oxygenation of tissues absolutely has to be decreased on such diets.
Update
Firstly, my sleep problem which I alluded seems to have resolved - this I believe now is due to having had Covid recently and it's effect on GABA production in the body (funnily enough I discovered this in a recent scientific paper - Google if interested or I'll find the link) and as a result Oolong tea seemed to almost miraculously solve the problem, despite the caffeine.
Secondly, bromelain seems to be having some sort of gradual effect on the eye floaters, which are slightly less bad now. However, my veins seemed to worsen the past couple of days and then I discovered that I had been making a huge mistake in my diet by recently reintroducing eggs. I essentially had forgotten their vitamin A content.
What I have noticed about the vein/epithelial later situation is that (and this is a common report) the slight sensation of burning around the skin. I think this is quite possibly caused by retinoic acid. Additionally, the leg affected is on the same side as my liver - almost certainly not a coincidence.
Anyhow, I have gotten hold of charcoal which sounds very useful for expediting this detox process. Does anybody know the best time to take it?
I will be cutting eggs out and returning to a stricter set of foods. Gotu Kola is added to my supplements which reportedly helps veins - and yet, interestingly, I have seen papers which suggest how useful it is for healing skin. So, that adds a bit of weight to my theory that veins are a skin problem - and when Gotu Kola works it is really healing the skin and scars.
@andrew Varicose veins are the result of VA and excess carbohydrate toxicity. The capillaries contract and clog and the body has to expand some of the larger arteries to ensure nutrients and oxygen can still be carried to the tissue that's affected by the otherwise reduced blood supply. They heal on a high fat and low VA diet like everything else. Over time the small veins in the eyeballs disappear on a high fat and low VA diet because blood supply through tiny, practically invisible capillaries improves, and it's the same in the rest of the body.
Yes I am keen to try this for a couple of months to see what happens, I'm very curious. I'm just not sure how to go about it!