Evidence: Something that is always changing. Everyone wants evidence of one thing or another before they make a decision. I don't view diet as being any different. Everyone is wanting to know the 'definitive' winner in the diet wars. The trouble with waiting for the studies, when it comes to nutrition, is easy to imagine.
For a definitive answer to what diet is 'best', you would need a large scale, double-blind, placebo controlled study, over long periods of time, in a metabolic ward, under constant supervision. Even better, would be if those volunteers were twins or people of similar enough genetic makeup.
What I've learned is that there is no better evidence than your own personal experience. Luckily, with dieting (a word I strongly dislike) no single strategy will kill you immediately. I'd recommend only trying ones based on real foods. With the human body being highly adaptable, each dietary approach should be given the proper amount of time to play out. For me, I've found it to be about 45-90 days to be ideal. After that amount of time, I can get a general feel for how I feel and perform by prioritizing certain foods or food groups over others.
For me, after trying each diet for over 90 days. I've landed on a Carnivore Diet, and stayed there for over 2 years. I do it because I have never felt better, and I'm ok if the research still needs to catch up before societies misplaced fear surrounding red meat gets crushed for the lie that it truly is.
I've had blood work done, and have found no deficiency. I perform great, have energy all day, zero brain fog, all joint pain has subsided. Muscular recovery is great. Excema and other 'inexplainable' disease states have resolved themselves. I could go on, and probably will in a different post. But I digress...
Here are other diets I've given a fair time in the light (90 days or more):
Standard American (food pyramid) diet - 15yrs
Plant-based - 1yr
Vegetarian - 6months
Mediterranean - 2yrs
Body-Building (chicken, rice, broccoli, every meal) - 6yrs (of varied permutations)
Atkins - 6months
Paleo - 2yrs
Keto - 6months
Carnivore - 2.5yrs
I personally have arrived at this place because first and foremost. I feel 10yrs younger at least. By only eating animal foods, and ditching common dogma of the masses, I feel younger than I ever have before. I can't convince anyone, of anything. But as this debate warms up. I will say this:
There is continued mounting evidence showing the cause of metabolic syndrome to be:
A. excess consumption of carbohydrate.
B. Consumption of 'industrial fats'
But what there is still very little evidence of, is interventional studies to implicate Animal foods in the pathology of disease.
Below are simply a bunch of links to articles, podcasts, and snippets I find.
This is a simple 'dump' ground for a bunch of articles I've found during my reading. Hopefully I will organize it a bit better as time goes on, but it gets updated frequently.
Ldl 150 or lower?
Cooked carbs and toxicity
Georgia Ede, low carb will kill you - Response
Paleomedicina - podcast perfect human diet
Almond Milk vs cow milk
Higher carbs higher risk for dementia
HC Diets and Alzheimer’s
Plants feel pain
Accidental 10-week RCT with no vegetables or fruit.
Finds a decrease in oxidative damage to DNA blood proteins and plasma lipids:
Red meat evidence against cancer, diabetes and others
Climate change from 1950-now
Agriculture or Fossil Fuels?
Optimal human diet - Chris Kresser
Greehouse Gases and the environment - Frank Mitloehner
WHO scientist and recanting the results of 'Meat causes Cancer'
Herbivores get their nutrition by eating copious amount of low quality nutrition.
Primatologists classify the structural parts of plants: roots, stems and leaves of plants as being “low” quality foods.
Moderate quality would come from the reproductive parts like bulbs, fruit, flowers, and seeds.
High quality would be animal sourced food.
Herbivores can get nutrition from fiber through their specialized digestive tracts. They house microbes that can digest the fiber into fat that the animal uses for energy.
For-gut fermentation (sheep and cattle). Special stomach called rumen.
Hind-gut fermenters (horses, rabbits, apes)
Can only ferment one time because it happens in the cecum and rectum.
We have a small cecum and colon. The presence of a colon doesn’t necessarily mean we need to be fermenting. Even cats have colon.
We were increasing the volume of our brains by 3 times the size during this evolutionary period.
Because we gave up the ability to turn fiber to fat, we had to get our fat from somewhere consistent and sustainable over time.
If we had modern conveniences and cooking back then, we would have been able to get nutrient from things like tubers much easier. But when we evolved, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
Left Hunter gatherer population today cooking tubers.
How much fiber can we digest. Even ADA says having more than 30g a day can cause gastrointestinal stress. (Cramping, diarrhea, blockage, etc)
Also our brains require lots of micronutrients
Most of these are available in seafoods, and can be found in animal stuffs, but not in plants in large amounts. Some aren’t found at all in plants like DHA and Vit B12.
Some plants don’t have the vitamin but have the precursor to it. (Iron and vitamin A/retinol) because of the conversion, you end up needing to consume orders of magnitude more plant stuffs to get the same nutrition.
VitC is in meat. You need around 10MG to prevent scurvy. I didn’t get scurvy. RDA is based on speculation on antioxidant needs.
The microbiome argument for fiber is circular. If you are trying to digest fiber and you Don’t have the micro biome to do so. And yes, you will have a problem digesting fiber. But if you are eating a diet with zero fiber, and not having a micro biome that supports fiber is not a problem.
I don’t find it to be a good story to believe that I gut has not evolved to go time periods without food. I.e. fasting, or time. Without fiber or vegetable matter because That is not what the record shows.
I find it hard to believe that a species would evolve to continually need to forward porridge for something on a continual basis, that we have very little case for, and our digestive system has moved on to other more nutrient dense sources of nutrition.
What I see is the USDA being very anti-red meat -based on, what turned out to be, very poor scientific backing.
He study where they took green tea and wanted to see if that helped smokers is a very interesting study concerning vegetables. This was done practically on accident.
They gave one group green tea and the other group of smokers none, and they wanted to see the anti-oxidant status results. They quickly realized that there could be confounders in their study since vegetables contain many of these antioxidants. So they took vegetables out of the diet for the study.
GHG emissions myth
No improvement in vegetarian diet for All Cause Mortality (ACM)
Beef and water consumption as of 2018
Statin induced Diabetes
Methane due to fossil fuel spike
For a long time it was assumed that anything so miraculously energetic as radioactivity must be beneficial. For years, manufacturers of toothpaste and laxatives put radioactive thorium in their products, and at least until the late 1920s the Glen Springs Hotel in the Finger Lakes region of New York (and doubtless others as well) featured with pride the therapeutic effects of its “Radio-active mineral springs.” It wasn’t banned in consumer products until 1938.
Advertisement for beauty products using radium. Musée Curie, Paris
Vit C deficiencies
Methane and cows
David Klurfield red meat is healthy
Why the guardian is so anti-meat
Vegan diet for infants and children
Inuit have same microbiome diversity on high animal low fiber diet.
Vegan diet in childhood, cognitive function impairment later in life
Hormones found in Food you eat: plants take the W once again
Low carb diet positively impacts knee osteoarthritis
Early humans and Neanderthal ate rhino and mammoth, meat heavy diets
Multiple Sclerosis (MS) RE-myelination of brain lesions
Animal agriculture not responsible for climate change
Climate change report from nasa 2019
LDL-C does not cause cardiovascular disease: a comprehensive review of the current literature. - 2018
Neanderthals and Iodine Deficiency - NY Times
CHOLESTEROL 101
OXALATES 101
A Mitochondrial Etiology of Metabolic and Degenerative Diseases, Cancer and Aging
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