Hopefully for the gents losing their hair, my time away will have been well worth it.

For the last 6 months I have been working on a hair loss eBook that outlines how I stopped my progressive hair loss. My aim was to explain in lay man's terms, why our western diet is causing aggressive hair loss in those susceptible to balding.

When a man starts losing his hair the options he has are literally awful. He can turn to pharmaceuticals and risk "chemical castration", he can plan a hair transplant - which no one on this planet wants to go through, or he can gamble on a magic mix of supplementation and hope for the best.

Not being happy with the options out there, I turned to nutrition for answers. With tons of stumbling along the way, I researched tirelessly until I came upon a regime that kept my hair in my head and made me healthier in the process.

The eBook will cover the last four years of my experiment and will detail everything I have learned during my unique journey. I've worked extremely hard on this and I can't wait to bring it to the masses.

In a few more weeks the eBook should be ready. If anyone has any title suggestions, I'm all ears. 

Thank you for your patience dear reader, comment away if you have any questions! 

Updated on Tuesday, August 25, 2009 at 11:45PM by Danny Roddy

July will mark the anniversary of my conversion to an all-carnivorous diet, and if I've learned anything over this past year it's that I don't know shit.

Just when I start to feel comfortable with one concept, I'm confronted with a new information, resulting in my understanding of health and diet to be ever-growing and changing.

These kinds of hiccups in science and self-experimentation are to be expected, especially when you're up against conventional wisdom. By logging my progress and keeping an open mind, I've learned that if things aren't working, I owe it to myself to try something different.

So what has a full year of an all-carnivorous diet done for me? The highlight reel includes: increased testosterone, (I am in the 600's, up from the mid 150's), stronger and healthier hair, way better digestion, increased resistance to stress, complete control over hunger and perhaps most importantly, I can sleep soundly through the night.

Click to read more ...

As some of you know, this weblog was originally dedicated to how you can tour the world and stick to a vegan diet. After this idea irrupted in flames, I thought it might be time for a name that was more fitting for the content on the site. So, welcome to The Carnivore Health Weblog. Update your bookmarks!

Updated on Monday, June 29, 2009 at 11:57AM by Danny Roddy

Updated on Tuesday, July 21, 2009 at 12:42AM by Danny Roddy

Updated on Tuesday, July 21, 2009 at 1:20AM by Danny Roddy

Updated on Tuesday, August 25, 2009 at 11:48PM by Danny Roddy

In my vegan days I considered myself quite the fiber superstar. While the RDA recommended a poultry 20-25 grams per day, I consumed 40-50 grams a day from veggies and fruits. By mainstream health authority standards I was kicking ass. While I marveled at my accomplishment I couldn't help but feel conflicted. I was secretly constipated and feeling terrible.

Where did I go wrong? Too much fiber? Not enough fat? Both? To understand the gravity of how badly I was screwing up my body, we have to understand what fiber is, why it's not needed, and most importantly; why it can be harmful to ones health.

Fiber is the indigestible roughage of plants and grains. In short humans do not have a digestive enzyme to breakdown fiber, so it collects (ferments) with bacteria in the colon until it's excreted.

Click to read more ...

On Tuesday I received a gracious invitation to visit one of the true greats of the zero carb lifestyle, Lex Rooker. He invited me to dinner at the Wood Ranch BBQ & Grill in Norwalk, CA for some bloody rare ribeyes, how could I refuse? The thought of sharing in life experience with someone who has been doing zero carb for more than five years seemed like winning the lottery.

After meeting Lex and spending time with him a couple of things became apparent; Lex is extremely versed in nutrition science and he is passionate and precise in everything he does. These values were evidenced by his pemmican creation process as well as the numerous inventions he had hand built for clock restoration.

The most incredible thing about Lex is his story. I took interest because, although not as severe, the parallels are quite striking between him and I. We have a lot to learn from Lex and his story must be told.

His story like a lot of ours has to do with on onslaught of poor health.

It seems I've always had some sort of health problem. I was born in 1951. My mother had no breast milk so I had to be bottle fed. I was prone to colic and my thymus gland (a baby's 1st defense against infection), didn't shrink at the rate the doctors thought it should so they decided to intervene. At that time the doctors thought that radiation would cure everything so they gave radiation treatments to my lower throat area. This did cause the thymus gland to shrink, however, it also caused tumors to grow on my thyroid gland by the time I was age six. The tumors were removed, they were said to be benign so everyone thought that was that. Unfortunately, the tumors returned when I was 10 and they had to be removed again - this time they took half the thyroid too. Problem apparently solved.

Lex, like myself, decided to try a vegetarian/vegan way of eating to solve his many health ailments:

Click to read more ...

Mostly out of curiosity and rave reviews over at the Zero Carb Discussion Forum, I ordered some meat and beef tallow from US Wellness Meats. From the site you'll notice that the selling point to US Wellness Meats is that all of their animals are grass-fed.

Am I ecstatic over the supposed health benefits of eating grass-fed meat? Not really. I mostly ordered it as a convenient source of beef tallow (so I don't have to render it) and apparently it tastes really good.

Another reason for giving US Wellness Meats your business is that they make a quality product. They ship products next day and they come packaged very nicely. They also have top notch customer service and give you $25 off for every 40lbs. of product that you purchase.

The benefits of consuming grass fed meat according to US Wellness are:

• Ideal omega 6:3 ratio or better. Equal to fish and chicken
• Rich source of CLA (Conjugated Linoleic Acid)
• No hormones
• No antibiotics

I'm currently thawing all the eye of rounds in the fridge. I can't wait to make pemmican out of it.

 

It's not everyday that all of my friends collectively send me a link about health, but today it happened. The ominous link informed me that eating red meat was going to kill me. The killer red meat was going to take my life by two methods, cancer or cardiovascular disease.

Let's take a look at the article by CNN Health.

Over a 10-year period, people who ate the most red meat every day (about 62.5 grams per 1,000 calories per day, equivalent to a quarter-pound burger or small steak per day) had about a 30 percent greater risk of dying compared with those who consumed the least amount of red meat (a median of 9.8 grams per 1,000 calories per day). The excess mortality was mostly the result of cardiovascular disease and cancer.

So my first question, what else did these people eat!? Were they washing their burger meat down with a tall glass of bourbon? Or perhaps a Snickers bar for dessert? You see, unless we isolate fresh fatty beef as the sole food for these 50-71 year olds this study tells us nothing. We can't conclude that a single food in a mixed diet caused harm to these people.

Now follow me on a hypothetical journey. It's possible that the 50-71 year olds who ate the least meat were also the most "health conscious". Perhaps they avoid processed food, sodas, and consume less sugar. As for the ones who weren't so lucky... Maybe they didn't care what went into their bodies. They were the crazy BBQ junkie grandpas that pounded beers and potato chips along with their killer red meat.

As you can see this is just another alarmist article about the American diet. I would encourage anyone to try to read between the lines on these kinds of things.

http://tinyurl.com/d6maa9 (Full CNN Health article)

If you rome around this weblog long enough you'll notice something strange afoot. You'll notice strange food concoctions like green smoothies and raw lasagna. This is because for one hellish year of my life I was a vegan. Not a freedom fry eating lunatic vegan like you usually see, but a mostly raw, no sugar, anxiety driven vegan.

It is important to note that during this vegan evolution I knew nothing about hormones or how the body worked. Like a lot of people I naturally thought that eating less meat and animal products would make me a healthier young man. As I embraced this way of eating I found myself constantly reinforcing my vegan ideals with terrible research by Dr. Neil Barnard as well as T. Colin Campbell author of The China Study (More info on The China Study below).

My diet consisted mostly of fresh produce and fruit. I consumed no sugar, stayed away from refined grains, and even for one reason or another embraced the low sodium mantra. I started my day off with a large green smoothie, packed with cherries, mango, and kale. Lunch would usually be guacamole with some beans I got from Trader Joe's. While dinner was an exotic blend of vegetables, stir fried or raw.

Over the months I noticed that my anxiety and hunger went through the roof. Irritability was a new trait of mine that was not endearing to any of my friends or family. It was almost like I couldn't wait to start an argument, I was always looking for something I disapproved of. If my anxiety wasn't bad enough my friends were consistently commenting on how sickly I looked. When it turned from work friends to family it started to really drag me down. It was during this time, while recording the record, that I pretty much had a total mental breakdown. The stress from recording and my low calorie vegan diet had jump kicked me in the face. I was a total basket case.

Luckily this story ends on a good note. Shortly after my hellish year, I flew to Michigan were I met a doctor who told me to "Rethink my food choices". I got home and diligently started researching what a correct human diet looked like. I started doing Paleo, transitioned to Keto then eventually fell into the loving arms of Zero Carb. The hardest part was apologizing to my friends and denouncing a lifestyle that I had embraced so militantly. I'm nowhere near the end of my journey and still have a lot to learn, but this experience has taught me much. I only hope that by sharing this others can avoid mistakes that I have made.

 

So what about the China Study itself?

Despite it's title, only a small portion of The China Study is actually devoted to discussing the giant epidemiological study of the same name; the rest of the book simply reads like an extended sales brochure for veganism.

Beginning in the early eighties, Campbell was part of a group of Chinese, British and US researchers that presided over the massive epidemiological study known as the China Project, or China Study. The New York Times dubbed it "the Grand Prix of epidemiology", and it gathered data on 367 variables across sixty-five counties and 6,500 adults. After the study data was compiled, the researchers had calculated "more than 8,000 statistically significant associations between lifestyle, diet and disease variables."

According to Campbell, the China Study data showed that: "People who ate the most animal-based foods got the most chronic disease. . . . People who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease."[p. 7]

In reality, the China Study showed nothing of the sort.

The China Study does not contain the actual data gathered from its namesake study. So when Campbell claims that the China Study found a consistent relationship between animal foods and various diseases, readers have no way of verifying this information for themselves.

Unless of course, they get up off their butts and go retrieve the actual China Study data for themselves. To do this, they will need to check their local libraries (university libraries are the best bet) for a book titled Diet, life-style, and mortality in China: A study of the characteristics of 65 Chinese counties[Chen J]. Once readers have this book in their possession, they will quickly discover that there is a galaxy-sized gap between the actual findings of the China Study and the claims made by Campbell in his popular book version.

-Anthony Coulpo (Entire article: http://tinyurl.com/ct2hwa)