I looked at the nutritional information. For 400 mg gels, the amount of vitmain A and D is better than the brand I'm currently taking, teaspoon for teaspoon that is... I'm taking Garden of Life (recommended by Weston A. Price foundation).

Per gram (3 gels), the dose would be 3125 IUs A and 337.5 IUs for vitamin D.

With 4.745 grams = 1 teaspoon, that comes out to 14828.125 IUs of A and 1601.4375 IUs of D for 1 teaspoons worth.

I'd say those are pretty good numbers, even though they are in small 400 mg gel form - just have to pop a bunch. If they said they are natural, I'd say don't worry about because they probably are. If you don't trust them, switch to a different brand after you've finished your current supply. No worries!

Thanks for the response. I think I'll trust them atleast for some time. After all it doesn't seem very likely that synthetic vitamin A and D would hurt you very badly, atleast if not eaten for too many years.

Yeah, no worries.

No problem!

Hmm, I found this: http://www.fsai.ie/surveillance/foo...marydioxins.asp

They scored pretty high on toxins.. so maybe it's not good to eat big amounts of their CLO. But in small doses it should be fine..

I'm wondering which had more effect on toxin contents of different CLO's.. different refining process or different fishing area.

I got an email back from the twinlab CLO, and I'll post what they told me here:

Our cod liver oil is molecularly distilled removing all detectable levels of heavy metal and pcbs. The A & D comes naturally in the fish oil. If you bought the plain cod liver oil then, it is not emulsified. Thanks for your inquiry!



Best Regards
Darla
Consumer Affairs
IdeaSphere, Inc

..so they did the same thing to me. I think they're lying because I honestly had some weird pains in my lower back while taking 4-5 tsp on their cod liver oil a day..and isn't that where the kidneys are? IMO that's a sign that the CLO was toxic and my kidneys were filtering them out of my body; I also have these areas on my left and right face that I think are subcutaneous lymph, and while on their CLO, they were dark (which has since gone away after discontinuing their CLO and going on the Blue Ice CLO).

It's been really nice weather the last few days, so I've gotten outside a bit, which is probably really good for me getting adequate vitamin D.

RK900, I agree with you that vegetarians have cravings for meat products more often than the other way around. Meat and meat products are essential. But my energy level sky rockets when I'm eating fresh, organic, raw veggies, especially greens. I don't think it was merely an incidental part of the paleolithic diet. Even more than whether they ate meat or plant foods, the key to their diet was diversity. They could eat upwards of a 100 different items per day. If you look at the healthiest cultures, you see that diversity is essential to the diet. Meat is a small part of the whole picture, notwithstanding isolated cultures which did not have access to plant foods (though I'm sure they sneaked it in somewhere). Survival does not necessarily mean good health. The neolithic age brought in an explosion of population, but that doesn't mean the people were healthier. There were just simply more calories to sustain a certain level of survival. But I still think meat is crucial to a large extent. I also soak/sprout my grains, nuts, and legumes (to the extent I eat it) to get rid of phytates and make them more digestible.

I know some people think we can get sufficient C from meat, but that's another crucial nutrient that we can only get from raw veggies and fruits in my opinion. I learned that humans, like other animals, used to make our own. At some point we lost the ability, though our bodies never stopped needing it. Scientists think this accounts for human diversity. We had so many mutations from the lack of this crucial anti-oxidant. C is one of the only vitamins I supplement (though most forms are toxic, so one has to be careful with it) if I don't feel I'm getting enough from raw plant foods.


Capo, I do what's called 'no-poo'. I use baking soda for my hair, or a combo of cheap conditioner and baking soda. Never use pantene. Then do an apple cider vinegar rinse, diluted with water. Maybe you can do a search on google on the how-to's. It's pretty easy. I get compliments on my hair frequently, so believe me, it works! Your hair may need an adjustment time, so it may get greasy at first and build up has to come off. But now my hair is really clean, and does not merely look clean because of artificial binding agents. For laundry, I grate castille soap into borax and baking soda. I use a proportionate amount of each. Liquid castille soap would work just as well. My laundry is very clean. I have sensitive skin too. Did you know that most commercial products have formaldehyde in them as a preservative, along with other chemicals? And laundry detergent is totally toxic. I think along with breathing and eating, the pores in the skin take in whatever is on the surface into our bodies. So we try to eat healthy, but then the chemicals we use on our skins deplete our resources. Our bodies have to use the resources to fight the poisons and get rid of them.

As for career choices, go with your heart. That never fails as long as you're committed enough.

JKK, Apparently many if not all cod liver oil companies use micro-filters to deodorize and filter out metals, which also filters out A and D. They add that back into their oil. So though they may say they add A and D, they can also be naturally occuring if they're using the same A and D they filter out. But I'm not a 100% sure about that. I try to stick with companies that the Weston Price Foundation recommends, so that I don't worry about those issues.

Hi, Lucysdream. I just wanted to reply and respectfully disagree with your statement regarding veggies. Yes, I am another 100% carnivore, but I do not believe that meat was only a small part of the picture for paleolithic diets. Meat was the ultimate part of the picture, IMO.

I am not trying to attack you by any means, I simply would like to reply with my opinions on vegetables and plant foods in the human diet. I mean no disrespect or offense to you.

I agree with theBear on his statements that summarize my feelings regarding the paleolithic time period and diet:

"...humans were totally hunting peoples until the end of the paleolithic age. No paleolithic archeological dig has ever produced any food residues from vegetables. Chemical analysis of bones from the digs indicates they are the same composition as the African lion- thus,
virtually no intake of vegetation. There were no 'hunter-gatherer' societies until the neolithic, even though some modern HG tribes still made and used typical paleolithic napped-stone tools. The so called Nearthin and Paleodiet thus are both nonsense, true paleolithic people were total carnivores and ate no veggies whatsoever. In the relatively short evolutionary period since the consumption of vegetables as food there has not been any real adaptation to such low grade low energy, difficult to digest foods. Because we have no adaptation to digesting or processing vegetables as food, they are all basically very bad
for us.

We evolved as an active, group-hunting animal. We have a high natural requirement for physical exercise and cannot live long or be healthy without a lot of it."

Additionally...

"Except for a few fish, meat has no toxins. The "fear or flight" reaction causes the release of a natural animal hormone called adrenaline, which is destroyed by an enzyme in 0.01 seconds, causing a very brief flush or flash feeling, I am sure you have experienced it. Adrenaline is not toxic, and is not present in food meat, no matter how the animal died.

There are no "antibiotics" injected into meat animal prior to slaughter, and there are no "toxins" in the meat of a healthy animal. Meat is the ONLY food wholly without anything toxic in it, unlike vegetables which universally have various more or less toxic chemicals in them as defenses against being eaten.

Meat is actually living tissue as long as it is refrigerated and not cooked. Cells from a fresh steak can be cultured. The flesh of a healthy animal is sterile and has no bacteria in it. On the other hand (I will repeat this once more), ALL vegetables contain both toxins and copious amounts of bacteria.

Hormones which in some places are used to enhance growth, (mostly they are not cost-effective nowadays with the lower fat content sought-for) are withdrawn well before slaughter These are not human growth hormones anyway, and even if the animal were dosed with a human hormone, say estrogen, the amount your (male) adrenal glands produce would be 100
times the amount you would get by eating five kilos of that animal's meat. This is science, not folklore. All the arguments the veggie-fascists use are fairy tales."

And...

"Green leafy vegetables have little or no nutritive value, and are eaten as "eye food". In fact some, like celery and lettuce have less caloric value than it takes to process them through your system, like sand. Some, like spinach, contain a toxic blood poison, oxalic acid. This dangerous chemical is so high in rhubarb that the green leaves are capable of causing death. Why eat this rubbish?

I agree that there is only maybe 20 percent of the weight of "leafy greens" which is carbs, but why eat something so toxic and rough? Would you intentionally put a pinch of sand in the crankcase of your car? Older people suffer from malnutrition in spite of "excellent diets" due to the scar tissue in their intestines from a lifetime of exposure to roughage in their food. In the short term it causes the intestines to coat themselves with mucus, which also interferes with absorption of nutrients.

All plants have toxins, chemical defenses against herbivores are much older than the mechanical ones like the spines of cacti. People have struggled for hundreds of years to breed out most of these defenses, which is why you cannot grow them without pesticides.

If you doubt me, eat a cupful of wild lettuce (a very common weed), and see how long you can remain awake. It contains a glucoside, letucin, called "lettuce opium", which was bred out of the cultivated plant."

Hi back Jayppers. No offense taken. I appreciate you taking me seriously.

I have to do more reading on this issue and see your sources. But though I haven't read as extensively as I would like, my research conflicts with yours. See how two intelligent people can both have different opinions?

What you call "rough", I call "fiber". I also acknowledged that there are anti-nutrients in plant foods that we need to be aware of. But even people who take oxalic acid seriously acknowledge that foods should not be chosen in terms of its content because its presence is extremely low, except for in a very few plants. We're talking a really high content being 1% (as in spinach). Only those who have kidney issues should really be careful. I personally avoid eating spinach raw. But the fact is plant foods are more complex in chemical composition period. This is a good thing. Medicinal herbs require this complexity. There are also some very dangerous chemicals in plants, like as in pointsiettas and poison ivy, but that doesn't mean we should avoid all plants altogether. I don't have any specific health issues that I'm dealing with, so maybe we're on different pages.

But let's look at our closest primate ancestors. Their diet is primarly based on plant foods. We're 97% genetically related. So even if humankind primarily ate meat as you're saying, our biologies have evolved for millions of years to be suited to a primarily vegetarian diet. Along comes hunting, and for hundreds of thousands of years, a tiny percentage of our evolutionary history, some cultures ate meat primarily. To me, that is as lacking as a diet consisting of only grain or only veggies. Only a true omnivore diet reflects the full diversity of eating habits from time immemorial. Anything that deviates from that to me is a limitation.

But as I said, I'm not even sure this scenario is even true. From my understanding the paleo people were hunter-gatherers , where women collected plant foods, while men hunted. Their diet reflected both. To go back to Rk900, the traditional Swiss diet and the Masai diet, as Price speaks about, are examples of non-veggie eating societies, but their diets consist primarily of raw dairy, which is not even paleolithic. So obviously people can survive without too many veggies, but although their faces are well-formed, perhaps they might have been even healthier in other ways had they also had more veggies. Asian cultures, which are some of the healthiest people in the world, eat hardly any meat or dairy, with some fish and lots of veggies.

But I do think that there can be variations based on heritage. Someone with an allergy to rice would not have survived in Asian cultures. But someone with an allergy to milk would probably have been weeded out from the Masai a long time ago. So perhaps two people can enjoy two different diets and still thrive.

Lets stop the debating about the veggie issue because ultimately we'll NeVer know for sure..so wouldn't it be wise & save time to let it go, things can change new facts can be discovered we'll never be 100% sure about this veggie/paleolithic problem for awhile. No point in debating it.

Holy crap! I come back and there's like three new pages!

I'll jump in here, if ya don't mind

I, too, respectfully disagree



Fiber = Rough. No two ways about it. Fiber has been known to literally scrape against the intestinal wall and rupture cells, which release a mucousal defense mechanism. This mucous interferes with nutrient absorption in the short run, and in the long run, supposedly it causes permanent scarring, which will forever inhibit nutrient absorption. But I haven't confirmed the latter, except maybe by the fact that scientists don't know how many times the intestinal cells can recycle themselves, which could be suggesting that they can only take so much scraping from fiber.

The plant toxins in modern neolithic vegetables were bred to be low- it is absurd to imply that we evolved to digest these foods, as for millions of years any plants that didn't have a high toxin content were eaten to extinction by the bugs- what survived to reproduce back in the day were highly poisonous plants. I thought the goal of paleolithic eating was to match as closely as possible what we evolved to eat, not consuming specially bred neolithic 1% oxalate content spinach. Even if it ends up being not that harmful (which I doubt anything with fiber and a significant carb content is healthy in the long term), one question: WHY? Why consume such rough hard-to-digest foods when you can get your nutrients elsewhere? Addiction to variety? A dogmatic fear of missing some "important" chemical not found in meats? (Even though we didn't evolve to derive full nutrition from plants). If you want medicinal value, drink tea, it's more easily absorbed and utilized anyways.

I suspect your research sources date to the neolithic or proto-neolithic (40,000 years to present, for a concise time period). As humans became very successful hunters, we overhunted our game, and started to grow in population size and density, which in turn required the increasing dependence on plant foods to sustain our population. The domestication process took from 40,000-10,000 years ago, and then 10,000 to the modern day is agricultural (obviously, but just to reiterate). Any research on these time periods will of course demonstrate the use of significant and increasing plant food consumption, as domestication and agriculture were well under way. What does not follow is to deduce from these time periods that plants are healthy, or even necessary, for human beings, as 40,000 years is hardly enough time to develop into truly omnivorous creatures. Sure, we opportunistically took what plant foods we could digest (which wasn't much) if we found them, but this number was so small that plants' impact on our nutrition was insignificant.



STOP RIGHT THERE! We have diverged from our "closest primate ancestors" millions of years ago- plenty of time to evolve away from a mostly vegetarian diet. Chimpanzees and apes aren't even our ancestors- we share a common ancestor, but we both diverged separate ways millions of years back, thus what they eat is irrelevant to what we should eat. 97% may sound like a lot in common, and in the broadest sense it is, but when it comes to nit-picky things like what we are primarily designed to eat, it is all the difference. Simplified: We began our divergence into carnivory by scavenging the dead carcasses of carnivores' prey- the hominids cracked open their bones and skulls with rock 'tools' to get to the brains and bone marrow- these highly nutrient dense foods allowed us to develop more intelligence, which allowed us to create even better tools, which in turn allowed us to actually begin hunting animals ourselves, so even before we were hunters, we were scavengers, incorporating increasing amounts of animal foods into our diets, until we developed into almost 100% hunters. We didn't just decide to make a spear one day and start eating meat- we evolved an intelligent hunter's brain over time from originally scavenging.



Yeah, like I said before, the only thing that matters is that the various nutrients themselves are present (vit. A,D, minerals, proteins, etc.)- but meat and animal foods are the richest, most complete, most easily digested, and most nutritionally dense sources of these nutrients- tell me, if you went back past 40,000 years, would you be able to find your special fermented grains, sweet potatoes, and domesticated cow's milk? I doubt we evolved eating any of these foods (plant foods, as we both know milk is neolithic). Maybe some individuals have begun to develop the necessary genetics the past ~10,000 years to digest these foods to an extent (particularly cow's milk), but probably 75% of the global population hasn't. Funny how the ONLY thing no human being is allergic to is fresh raw meat, organs, and fats- some may react to aged meat, but we didn't eat it aged in most cases, we ate it on the spot, and later cooked the rest around the campfire- aging takes weeks, not a day or two (spare Native American use of pemmican, which I don't know if it had significant amines or not) Any other food, and SOMEONE has a sensitivity or allergy to it- soybeans, cow's milk proteins, vegetable toxins, you name it.

With regards to the Asian cultures- what??? I was under the impression, from first hand journalist and foreign exchange student accounts, that Asians eat fatty beef, fish, and pork, and then just use stuff like rice as a sort of 'after meal' finisher. They don't even eat the rice if they are full by the end of their main course- the meat course. I'd give you one of the links to a great account about China on this, but I can't find it at the moment. It explained how the Chinese actually eat very high fat, high meat, diets, with small amounts of veggie foods, as opposed to our Americanized high carb version of "Chinese" take-out food centered on veggies and rice.



But nobody is allergic to fresh meats and animal fats- nobody. Also, there is not a SINGLE essential nutrient that is not found in the flesh, organs, and fats of prey mammals. Any essential vitamin, mineral, whatever: you name it, is not needed from plant foods. Vitamin C for example can be obtained in significant quantities from liver, heart, and brains, and fresh rare meat bypasses the need for vitamin C anyways in terms of collagen production. Plants are just supplemental for medicinal qualities. Got a cold? Find some garlic (or leeks back in the paleo day). Insomnia? Try a relaxing herb like chamomile. Parasites? Try wormwood. But in terms of nutrition, plants are worthless and unnecessary, and are unhealthy in food-sized quantities. Even if they were eaten frequently (which I doubt they were), they did not have very much digestible nutrition to be derived from them- the plant foods back then were small, more indigestible, and poisonous in higher amounts, so I doubt they formed a significant part of paleolithic evolutionary biology.

We evolved primarily as hunting carnivores, and our recent little vacations into plant food consumption have not lasted long enough for us to evolve any necessity for plant foods. Any plant-based eating was either a result of starvation, or a product of the neolithic revolution.

rk900: That's awesome- at the moment I'm just reading up from various websites and forums so I can have the mental information down first. I am currently not able to get out to any gatherings- I still don't have a driver's license This summer, though, I'll be driving, and I'm totally getting out to some gatherings- it's probably much better for actually learning hands-on skills than reading primitivist websites, not to mention probably 1000 X funner. I find it so ironic though that my primitivist experience is being limited by something so modern and civilized as being able to drive a car

At your encounter with that raw food guy- LMAO!! Oh man that's hilarious! I'm surprised that there even was a raw vegan at a primitivist gathering- what, did he think that the wild is just one big fruit orchard and vegetable garden waiting for him? haha oh well you probably got him thinking at least, especially if he piled on the eggs later

Insoluble fiber is rough, soluble fiber is not.

Hmm, is there really toxins in ripe fruits (including berries) that are "meant" to be consumed by animals (in order to spread the seeds around)? Wild berries are as easily digested (by humans) as animal products. (Sugar isn't toxin). No, I'm not claiming we need plant products.

Liver, kidneys, and brains aren't very good sources of vitamin C in my opinion.. they contain about 15-30mg of C per 100g of organ.. atleast not those from land mammals. Adrenalin glands should be very good source, atleast according to Weston A. Price.

http://www.members.shaw.ca/karen.fe...heInuitdiet.pdf

It's pretty lenghty, but probably worth reading, very detailed (don't be scared by the france text in the beginning). I'm not completely sure, but I think it mentions that some Inuits believed that seal liver was very good source of C vitamin (and probably they were right in their belief, as it's wisdom derived from experience). One interesting important source is muktug (maktaak?), a skin and subcutaneous fat of Beluga whale. It's dynamic storing organ of many important nutrients, like selenium and vitamin C.

Hi again, capo!

Forget modern society and its stereotypes- do what you want to do. If the civilized label you a hippie, so what? They're only wasting their breath perpetuating their game.

The women in primitive cultures had much more respect and importance, from what I've researched. The carriers of tradition and wisdom, the bearers of the next generation who will carry on the genetics- they served a vital role in society, arguably more important than men's role of provider. But women these days have been reduced down to a sex object, thanks to mainstream feminism. Also, we can't forget that our culture has been atomized under capitalism, thus reducing the woman's role further- cultural conditioning takes place in front of tv sets and in public schools, not in front of the child's mother like it should be.

Thanks to the feminist movement, women have been forced into trying to behave like men, when they simply aren't men. Since modern feminists try to emulate man's role in society so much, they have nothing feminine left to offer except sex. When a women naively refuses to be a caretaker and nurterer in a family relationship, then what left is there for the man to want in her besides sex? How's she going to help out otherswise? She can't hurl heavy spears like a man can, she can't load heavy logs onto a truck or cart, just like men can't take care of children like a woman can. These roles overlap to an extent, obviously- men will play with their kids, and women will do some light physical work, but ultimately we have our roles that we are just biologically designed for.

Men are best at doing most of the physical work, the analyical speculation, etc. while women are best at passing on tradition, nurturing our children, etc. Both can be intellectual in their own styles, as humans are inherently a thinking species, but ultimately we can't evade our "natural" roles. That's just the way our social-psychological structure has evolved. Women can put on a business suit in a sad attempt at rigid "equality", but they are really only doing their gender a disfavor by displacing what it means to be a female in society.

Call me a sexist, whatever, I only describe the reality, not an illusion of equality that most people think exists. Men and women are equal, sure, but we are different. You can't call a football a soccer ball, even if they are pretty much equal in value. You can't kick a football, and you can't spin throw a soccer ball.

Most people would label what I just wrote as conservative, but I find it funny how I don't even identify with conservative politics. I guess it's because I'm eclectic- I take various ideas that have the most empirical support from whatever ideology or group of thinking I want- anarchism, conservatism, whatever.

Anyways, I'm kind of at that point in my life too where I honestly couldn't tell you what I'll be doing in the next five years. I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Thanks for pointing that out- I totally forgot about the two types of fiber. Both are indigestible, though.

Actually, yeah, some people are sensitive even to the chemicals in fruits- including berries. Not many, though. Sugar may not be a toxin, but the action of insulin that the digestion of sugar requires is not healthy- insulin is responsible for much damage to the human body- arterial damage being one form. Of course, paleolithic fruits had less sugar and more fiber, so there were simply less digestible calories from them, even if they were eaten in significant quantities.

True, but those amounts are still significant, and one must also remember that blood glucose competes with vitamin C for absorption- a steady BG from zero carb = steadier utilization of vitamin C, thus less is actually required. Kind of like how less calcium is required on high fat since the vitamins A, D help maximally utilize calcium, thus requiring less total calcium since a smaller amount is being used fully.

Adrenalin glands? hmm... would you happen to know which glands "sweetbreads" would be? I remember being told they were the 'glands in the neck', but I can't remember if they were adrenal or not.

Yeah, thanks for posting that link! I've heard some before about the vitamin C in the arctic animals- oh man those arctic animals sound loaded compared to things like domesticated beef, I really REALLY wish I could get my hands on some northern critters!

Hi there Forefather,

Unfortunately, expressing the above opinions goes against the spirit of support that we foster here.

At one time we had a Current Affairs forum, but we were forced to close it as described in this post (a sticky in the Everything Else forum): http://forum.lowcarber.org/showthread.php?t=218284

It would also be a good idea for you to remind yourself of our forum rules, and in future stick to discussion of low carb issues rather than your opinions of societal roles.

Thank you for your co-operation.

Rosebud