Thanks, JEY! I'm 90% carnivore, as in animal-based as a portion of my diet. I eat meat, dark poultry, seafood, and dairy, with low oxalate/low carb fruits and vegetables. Which fits right in with this article quote:
Quote:
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“By and large, most people doing the carnivore diet have some persistent health issue that the keto diet did not completely fix, such as not enough weight loss, a mental health condition, an autoimmune condition, or uncontrolled cravings,” says Dr. Paul Mabry, a zero-carb US family doctor who blogs at Born to Eat Meat and manages a Facebook group, Zero Carb Doc, which now has more than 8,500 members.
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Myself, ALL of the above! Keto was great, until it wasn't. Fortunately, the information in
Toxic Superfoods, which came out half a year ago, has a lot of nutrition science which greatly helped. It was the missing piece for me. My symptoms got triggered by rhubarb, a high oxalate vegetable, from a keto cheesecake hobby during the pandemic. I still love my low carb cheesecakes, but I'm a lot pickier about plant content these days.
Autoimmune is known to respond to carnivore, and in January of 2019, it put my terrible flare under control in a
week. But that was an emergency move, because my plan was to use it as an elimination diet. If I added foods one at a time, I could tell how I had triggered the terrible flare in the first place. My answer turned out to be oxalates. Which I think is highly involved in all autoimmune issues.
And perhaps I had clues to what would help me the most, since I only lasted a few months as a vegetarian. I don't have the enzymes to get protein from all the rice and beans I was eating. I would have had to live on eggs and cheese because the carbs involved was messing me up. Which isn't vegetarian, and I'm sure the nice ladies at the health food store thought I was ignoring their advice, when I was doing it "right" and it still didn't work.
While only a few months on Atkins convinced me carbs are my kryptonite. That was my first successful food change and of course it was the one that had been demonized for decades. But I lost down to what I thought was my lowest size, only to eliminate more non-working foods and achieve greater success.
Our own personal bio-availability issues are, I'm convinced, so important to our food choices. Whatever the nutrients, we need a source we can actually extract the nutrition from. I'm reminded of the first time I read one of those hearthealthywholegrains articles and realized the vitamins they were extolling had been added to the flour. Because there's not a lot of real wheat flour in anything people normally eat. They extol the virtues of whole grains, but no one eats so much as a pumpernickel bagel these days.
Still, I've seen people get healthier on food plans that would literally kill me. And I know some people would need disinformation therapy to even consider eating the way I do. And I still, as I always have, know that it's not as expensive as NOT eating enough animal products, and stuffing oneself in a vain attempt at real nourishment. If you factor in the medicine savings, even though we are both retirement age, and it's still cheaper than trying to fix a problem with bad food and medicine.
Real food will always be cheaper than the autoimmune drugs, even with insurance help. I can buy a box of cookies for $5, or a cheap cut of meat. No contest.