Carnivore Diet

I've done keto before. Carnivore diet is unrealistic, there are certain vitamins and minerals you need that can't be found in only meat. But with a keto diet, you have a ton of energy with a good diet with tons of variety. However, once your body goes into ketosis, you oretty much will always get tired from eating carbs, regardless if you stick to the diet.

Ethan i try to get as close to keto as i can. Currently i am reading a lot of Jason Fung's fasting advice and I am finding good success with that. If you pushed me hard enough you could probably get me on a rant that the standard American diet is about as upside down as the standard American philosophy but I better not go there.

interesting.... i will check out Sisson.

With regard to diet, different people have different needs. I would recommend using a science based diet which is shown to work against the many diet induced diseases of modern civilization.

From a medical perspective... most of the modern diet schemes rely on a false underlying belief that there is some kind of ideal diet for the human species, a diet which results in "perfect health" (literally the name of a diet book by Paul Jaminet, lol). This has never happened for any species studied. All species are subject to disease, and no known diet is "ideal"-- because what is needed depends on fluctuating environmental conditions. Whenever you see the words ideal, perfect, etc, Plato has shown up, lol!

I have read most of the popular nutrition books out there, from various perspectives, and the hilarious thing is that they almost all start with the same trope: "your doctor only got x hours of nutrition education in medical school, therefore your doctor doesn't know anything, and therefore I'm right." Then they all proceed to cherry pick the data to support their positions, which clash with each other wildly.

The truth is that none of them know as much as they think they do, because the research is extraordinarily complicated and incomplete. So right away, when a writer pops off acting like they have solved the riddle of nutrition, I know they believe in a myth of perfect health and have also ignored the complexity and incompleteness of current research.

Many of them will say things like "you shouldn't wait for a large study to confirm what we are going to tell you"-- which is ok if it means "try things out yourself and see how you feel" but is ridiculous if it means "we are just going to reason things out and then you should believe us." Don't we know by now that reason is inferior to evidence?

Or they pull out the quote about unpopular positions being laughed at, fought against, etc, then accepted. As if that means they are right.

There is a hilarious book called "The Gluten Lie" by a researcher in ancient Chinese religion. He lays out the case that all these diets are religious in nature and then he makes up his own at the end-- then goes and finds studies to support his random, made up diet.

It is incredibly difficult to know what additional factors are causing measured effects-- social factors? Taste-- if you like your food, how does that affect your health? Chewing vs pureed food with same components? Mineral content? Artificial flavors? What are the effects of different amino acids in proteins we consume, such as branched chain AA? Were the olive oils used in various studies actually olive oil or canola oil with food coloring (a common problem in grocery stores)? What's your genetic background (which turned out to be an issue with omega 3 supplements-- why they didn't get the expected results)? Honest researchers will admit there is a lot we don't know.

One problem is that if a person quits eating a food, sometimes they can then have more trouble digesting and metabolizing it later. So a person who has been on a keto diet becomes more carb intolerant than someone who has been eating carbs. If you haven't been eating foods with fiber, even a small amount of salad may give you awful gas. If you have been eating extremely low fat, a moderate fat meal can cause your blood sugar to go up much higher than when you were including some fat all along-- you become fat intolerant.

I have tried a whole bunch of different schemes, especially this year when my fasting glucose went up to 105, prediabetes. Some of that is in a prior post, and I wound up on a vegetarian keto diet because meat didn't get my fasting glucose down... but eventually even that drove my fasting glucose up, a known effect of keto, due to insulin resistance in the liver. Not the direction I wanted, especially since my post-meal glucoses were fine. The ultra low fat vegan diet worked amazingly but I hated it and felt deprived. So now I am back to being an omnivore, and my fasting and post meal glucose is normal again. I have no extreme reactions to any food, because I eat a wide variety, so I am flexible in what I can eat. However, during all that experimenting, I started hiking more, and I think this is probably the key thing for me-- lots more moving around.

Anyway, I am in favor of people trying different things and seeing how they feel. And maintaining a strong level of suspicion when reading popular nutrition authors.

I share Elayne's skepticism of certain absolutist diet trends. I guess I'm specifically responding to the anthropological and anatomic claims of Paleo/Primitive and Veganism. The truth is that diet has always been astonishingly varied. The Inuit might live on whale, the Ancient Chinese on rice and millet; a staple for various primitive tribes was inner tree bark which they pounded into paste. The early Mongols, it is reported, even nourished themselves during thin seasons by drinking not just mare's-milk, but the fresh blood of their living horses.

Thanks to a worldwide network of palatial refrigerated warehousing known as the Cold Chain¹, your choices are nearly endless. You just have to go with what your body and lifestyle agree with!

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¹Did you know, for instance, that there are vast artificial Cave networks of underground temperature-controlled warehouses in the limestone bluffs of Kansas City?

It applies to EVERY area!