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Wavy Gravy (Tricky Turkey) 4 Year Update
Quote from Griffin on September 6, 2024, 4:24 amHey Tricky(Wavy),
I just wanted to say I have appreciated your contributions to this forum. They have provided a good counterbalance to the standard approach to low vitamin A diet. Hopefully the forum stays up a bit longer as I still have a lot to learn.
I am new to the forum and on my 7 month of low vitamin A. Unfortunately my main health issue(skin condition) has actually gotten worse during this time. There have been a few smaller health concerns that have improved so I am still hopeful this diet can help heal my skin over the long term. Digestion has been a little better, although this was already improving on my low oxalate diet prior to low vitamin A. The last six months I have mostly adhered to the high protein low fat and high fiber approach. Diet has mostly been muscle meat, white rice, beans and apples.
After reading some of your work it seems you do not feel like fiber is necessary to remove vitamin A from the body? This seems to be L Amber Ohearns(keto carnivore) opinion as well. She mentioned to me on twitter she is still hoping to put out her own article detailing vitamin A toxicity. The majority in this community(especially on Twitter/X) seem to make bold claims regarding toxic bile theory and fiber, but I'm not completely sold on this approach. It seems to work for a lot of people, but I am still trying to decide if the beans/fiber are causing me detox set backs or simple regression. I was worried that without fiber I would not clear enough vitamin A. My skin is continuing to get worse so I may have to make some changes soon.
Not sure if this forum will continue, but have enjoyed reading everyones approach and opinions on how to achieve optimal health. Im sorry you have had to deal with the in fighting with some of the members. It always surprises me how tribal people get around diet.
Thanks for the supportive words.
Yes, I've written my thoughts on fiber in a number of places as Wavy and tried to summarize them recently in my first two threads with the Tricky moniker. While it doesn't specifically address the question of optimal elimination of Vitamin A, the simple logic I've repeated in defense of a fiberless diet is this: If you couldn't clear metabolic waste efficiently on a fiber free diet, then people would get sick and die in short order on a carnivore diet, people on multi-day fasts would get sick and die in short order, and hospitalized patients on liquid fiber-free diets or IV nutrition would die in short order. The first two in that list are often associated with marked health improvements, not decline. The fact that fibers bind to bile acids/salts demonstrates their inherent antinutrient nature - they inhibit digestion and absorption of nutrients from the intestines through physical and chemical interference. I'm not claiming fiber can't improve clearance of toxins in certain cases, but there is obviously going to be a cost associated with it. Maybe there's a net gain in some people despite the cost, but I think it's an unnecessary cost in a lot of circumstances and a ton of people seem to be buying the "Toxic Bile Theory" thing without considering some very basic evidence that opposes it.
I would be very eager to read anything more that Amber has to say on the subject. I don't really use social media and don't have a Twitter account, but I've thought of getting one just so I can follow a handful of interesting thinkers like her who primarily post on Twitter.
Quote from Janelle525 on September 4, 2024, 4:33 pmI am not bashing carnivore, my husband has lost a significant amount of weight on carnivore and I m grateful because he was on the path to dying too young. But he has also lost significant amount of hair, he used to have great hair he would make women jealous! So what is causing that? He looked it up and people were saying once he is eating more it will grow back, he is trying to lose as much as he can so he is limiting things like bacon and cheese. He is pure muscle meat only.
I would be inclined to think it comes from too much iron. I would test for that. I don't know the mechanics for that though.
Quote from grapes on September 6, 2024, 10:52 amQuote from Janelle525 on September 4, 2024, 4:33 pmI am not bashing carnivore, my husband has lost a significant amount of weight on carnivore and I m grateful because he was on the path to dying too young. But he has also lost significant amount of hair, he used to have great hair he would make women jealous! So what is causing that? He looked it up and people were saying once he is eating more it will grow back, he is trying to lose as much as he can so he is limiting things like bacon and cheese. He is pure muscle meat only.
I would be inclined to think it comes from too much iron. I would test for that. I don't know the mechanics for that though.
Yes and also that ketosis is a backup metabolism to survive. And also because I believe fiber removes heavy metals along with toxins. So for those who only eat meat I do wonder what happens to the men not giving blood as they don't have any way of getting rid of it.
Quote from grapes on September 6, 2024, 10:52 amQuote from Janelle525 on September 4, 2024, 4:33 pmI am not bashing carnivore, my husband has lost a significant amount of weight on carnivore and I m grateful because he was on the path to dying too young. But he has also lost significant amount of hair, he used to have great hair he would make women jealous! So what is causing that? He looked it up and people were saying once he is eating more it will grow back, he is trying to lose as much as he can so he is limiting things like bacon and cheese. He is pure muscle meat only.
I would be inclined to think it comes from too much iron. I would test for that. I don't know the mechanics for that though.
I don't have anything definitive to say about iron and hair loss, but it's common for people to mistakenly link consumption of red meat on a carnivore diet with "iron overload" (not sure if that's why you suggested iron as the problem here, but we are discussing someone who's on a carnivore diet). Iron uptake is supposed to be regulated by hepcidin such that you can eat far more iron than your body requires and the excess goes unabsorbed and out in the stool. If someone has hepcidin dysregulation (possibly from serious liver problems) that does not resolve on a carnivore diet and they continue to eat large amounts of meat on a carnivore diet, then yes, it seems there would be risk of excess iron uptake in that situation. However, unless everybody in the carnivore community is straight up lying, it appears that people on carnivore diets generally have a functional hepcidin response without iron problems, and Shawn Baker has indicated that he's seen individuals with hemochromatosis improve their condition on a carnivore diet.
Also, while I certainly wouldn't call myself an expert on iron, I've read enough to know that people often mistakenly equate high ferritin levels with "iron overload" without considering all the other metrics of iron stores in the body alongside ferritin. High ferritin in itself means there's a larger amount of iron bound to the ferritin protein, which should prevent that iron from causing damage to cells. It's possible to have high ferritin due to inflammation (e.g., in response to pathogenic infection) without other iron markers being elevated; in this case, there is no "iron overload", and in fact there can be functional iron deficiency in the presence of elevated ferritin, the opposite of overload. This has been hypothesized to be an evolutionary adaptation to infection because pathogens often rely on iron for replication, and minimizing availability of body stores of iron to pathogens via ferritin binding would hypothetically improve the body's ability to eradicate the infection. Makes sense to me, but I haven't reviewed all the evidence for or against it.
Quote from Janelle525 on September 6, 2024, 11:07 amQuote from grapes on September 6, 2024, 10:52 amQuote from Janelle525 on September 4, 2024, 4:33 pmI am not bashing carnivore, my husband has lost a significant amount of weight on carnivore and I m grateful because he was on the path to dying too young. But he has also lost significant amount of hair, he used to have great hair he would make women jealous! So what is causing that? He looked it up and people were saying once he is eating more it will grow back, he is trying to lose as much as he can so he is limiting things like bacon and cheese. He is pure muscle meat only.
I would be inclined to think it comes from too much iron. I would test for that. I don't know the mechanics for that though.
Yes and also that ketosis is a backup metabolism to survive. And also because I believe fiber removes heavy metals along with toxins. So for those who only eat meat I do wonder what happens to the men not giving blood as they don't have any way of getting rid of it.
Despite all your supposed hard work learning about nutrition, it looks as though you have managed to swallow every last nutritional fallacy out there. In this case, it's the idea that ketosis is a "backup" survival mechanism. It is a survival mechanism, no doubt, but so is every other process that occurs in the body, including the rapid stabilization of elevated glucose in the blood after eating a bolus of carbs that would otherwise cause systemic damage. Ketogenesis and "ketosis" are natural, indicated, appropriate physiological responses supplying substrates for ATP production in the absence of constant carb intake (and associated efforts on the part of the pancreas and liver to get harmful amounts of sugar out of the bloodstream).
I think there is room for debate on whether there is a net benefit to eating a small amount of exogenous glucose in order to reduce the extent to which gluconeogenesis is required, but that consideration needs to equally address the taxes of producing and managing insulin, glycation from circulating glucose, nutrient requirements involved in ATP production from glucose vs fat and protein, efficiency in storage of excess glucose vs fat plus on-demand gluconeogenesis, the elimination of metabolic waste from these different processes, etc.
When you try to weigh all of these processes against one another on paper, the outcome is anything but clear, and even if it were it would be a reductionist hypothesis, not a proof. There is no clarity to be found in published research either because there are no studies directly comparing humans living on a plant-free diet vs. any other diet, and there never will be such a study with sufficient control and/or a long enough period of time to make heads or tails of it (control of variables is at odds with study length in human trials, you pretty much get one or the other, not both).
What is quite clear is that humans evolved as hunters (rotating shoulder for throwing projectiles, bipedalism that enables running, gastric pH for digestion of meat, etc.), we require nutrients found only in sufficient quantities in animal flesh, that animal flesh always comes with some amount of fat, and the combination of sufficient fat and protein results in demonstrably excellent health outcomes for a not insignificant number of modern people (I'd like to say most, but for the sake of making a conservative argument I will simply say it apparently happens with enough frequency to be a regularly occurring and expected outcome). Based on this and anthropological evidence, we can soundly deduce that humans are at least adapted to a carnivore diet even if it is not absolutely optimized (for what though, you would need to define...longevity, healthspan, productivity, intelligence...).
The real debate should center on how well humans have adapted to an agricultural lifestyle following a rise to carnivory. The 10,000 plus/minus years since that happened is arguably a short amount of time for adaptation to occur in a species such as ours given our relatively slow rate of development and reproduction (which is a rate-limiting step for genetic mutation and selection to occur). Obviously, this time span was sufficient for a genetic adaptation enabling lifelong dairy consumption. There's evidence to suggest some genetic adaptations to starch consumption, but the degree of adaptation is highly debatable.
In the end, people continue to argue about this because there is currently no viable way of proving either side correct.
This general subject is basically what started Tim and I at each other's throats. (I think Tim and I actually agree on quite a lot, but once the gauntlets were dropped the animosity exploded and never got reined back in.) Since you've openly declared yourself to have taken Tim's side and shown little appreciation for my commentary, I wish you luck and I hope your husband continues to improve (and shed some first-hand light on the matters at hand...there's nothing like personal experience to change your mind, and I've tried almost every diet short of vegetarianism out there whereas your buddy Tim rails against carnivory without having tried it himself, so take that into consideration).
Edit: I forgot to mention the Randle Cycle, which is a potentially valid reason not to consume a mixed fats + carbs diet. There's been a lot of jibber jabber about it on the internet lately. It's hard to know for sure what the real world implications are, but the concept as described by Bart Kay is that it is the mechanism by which cells prevent excess ATP-generating substrates from entering and causing damage. Bart describes it like a slider effect, where the more glucose there is entering a cell, the less fat there is taken up by that cell, and vice versa. Bart's interpretation is that cells "prefer" to keep using the substrate that has recently been predominate, implying that a diet dominated by carbs that also includes fats will tend to lead to oxidation of carbs for ATP and storage of ingested fats, whereas a diet dominated by fats that also includes carbs will tend to lead to oxidation of fats for ATP and storage of carbs as fat. It seems to me the crux of the issue is (1) whether the combination of certain fats and and certain carbs affects satiety signaling in such a way as to lead to overconsumption of one or both and therefore accumulation of fat, and (2) whether there is more potential damage from glucose or fat remaining in the blood prior to use or storage.
delete
I realized after I made my last post that I forgot to mention the Randle Cycle. I just edited my post to include mention of it, which should address your most recent point.
The carnivore diet may currently qualify as a fad in the sense that lots of people who are trying it will not stick with it. Given the way modern society is structured and people's hedonistic tendencies, it is quite likely to be short-lived as a popular phenomenon. A decline in its popularity would not serve as refutation of its appropriateness though, it would only indicate people's unwillingness or inability to adhere to it for any number of reasons. As I indicated before, we don't have good data (with or without appropriate controls) tracking food consumption over an entire lifespan for modern people, so using a reductionist approach is currently quite uninformative (and misleading). This is why I keep emphasizing an evolutionary approach on this and other fronts, it's not perfect but if we have a reasonably good understanding of how evolution relates to a certain biological parameter then we can make a confident bet as to the optimal way to approach that parameter, particularly when reductionist data happens to align with evolutionary indicators. Evolution is like a dull knife that never stops carving...it might look like a terrible mess up close, but in the larger context it leads to elegant solutions for highly complex systems that we as humans currently do not fully understand (our greatest fault is continually trying to outsmart this system rather than understand it and play by its rules).
I did not intend to restart a carnivore debate. I was responding to you, in particular, one last time before I stopped engaging in your posts (for your good, my own, and that of the forum so I don't create any more unwanted chaos). I'll try to leave it at that, good luck.
For normal healthy people I don't think they need to be too concerned about eating some dessert every now and then. Or adding some cheese to their burrito bowl. I want to enjoy my food! (eating rice, black beans, grilled marinated chicken a little sprinkling of cheese and a dollop of sour cream right now, if anyone thought I avoid dairy like the plaque they would be wrong!) I am definitely not an extremist, so I guess I am not really part of the conversation!
Quote from Jalee on September 6, 2024, 11:45 am@tricky I often noted when I was in Smith's network how many people there had constipation. I also noted how many of them just did not seem to get better on that issue when adding fiber. Literally months struggling to go even after fiber. Many of them have had lifelong struggles with it. That's why I'm also on the fence about its efficacy in clearing toxins.
Supplemental fibers do seem like hammers to me, like supplements themselves. Taking isolated fiber is just disgusting and too unnatural for me. I tried psyllium every 20 minutes for a while and sort of shudder internally every time I think about it. I could not do that again. I don't really think it did that much for me. Same thing with eating beans every 20 minutes. Seems too much for me and some others who don't have constipation issues.
I don't know the exact mechanism here I don't know whether constipation is the chicken or the egg but I feel like having never suffered constipation much in my life maybe I didn't get too much of a buildup of the vitamin A I took in cod liver oil in the first place? My high VA intake didn't seem to cause constipation or any bowel issues at first. Only when I began an elimination diet did I get a problem with it and it was the opposite of constipation. I know I don't have fatty liver currently and have stopped all high VA supplements since 2022 and foods besides eggs and cheese minus a year total for beans and rice and then carnivore (which had eggs).
@jessica2
I had diarrhea predominant IBS throughout my years of carotenoid and retinoid consumption, never ever constipation. The first time I had any experience with constipation was after I went low VA. However, that largely coincided with starting carnivore, so there's a confounder there. It would appear there are plenty of people with normal bowel function and daily evacuation on a carnivore diet, so I'm inclined to blame metabolism of stored VA as the culprit in my case, particularly because I've often swung back and forth between profuse watery diarrhea and not being able to go to the bathroom for days without resorting to osmotic laxatives like magnesium or ascorbic acid. To me, that pendulum action in the presence of minimal dietary change suggests an internal mechanism that might best be explained by "detox".
The outcomes of fiber interventions in the published literature are highly variable. There's plenty there to indicate that adding fiber to the diet can worsen constipation and other bowel disorders in some people. There's one paper that all the carnivore proponents talk about that shows almost 100% relief of symptoms on a self-reported fiber-free or very low fiber diet, but the observational nature of the data make it a very weak study to draw conclusions from in isolation.