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.

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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.

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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:

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One of the most common things I hear when I talk to someone about carbohydrate restriction is that they have done Atkins, they lost a bunch of weight, but gained it all back after they added carbohydrates back in. There are so many things wrong with this logic that I don't even know where to start, but I digress, because that's not what this post is about.

Let's explore the reasons which make cutting carbohydrates difficult. We'll take a look at the king of hormones, insulin, we'll dive into the world of neurotransmitters and we'll explore a low carb phenomenon called "the induction flew". Finally we'll close with a sermon from Bear about one of the strongest influences; one's own acculturation.

It's interesting to note that out of the three macronutrients (carbohydrates, fat, & protein) few have problems with overindulging in too much fat or protein. This is explained by the fat storage, evolutionary hormone, insulin. Insulin is released by the pancreas whenever you consume carbohydrates. The problem begins when your insulin becomes chronically elevated (too many carbohydrates) which is constantly priming your body to prepare to be fed. This is when hunger becomes insatiable and binge eating usually occurs. Getting ahold of out of control insulin will improve health, keep hunger in check and should be the cornerstone of any way of eating. The carbohydrate level to keep insulin in check is different for everyone (insulin sensitivity) thus dropping to zero carbohydrates is a good square one approach. Check out this post for a short video on the subject.

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Updated on Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 12:00AM by Danny Roddy

Updated on Sunday, December 20, 2009 at 2:38PM by Danny Roddy

Where is the evidence that a healthy diets must contain fruit and vegetables? Is there a scrap of data out there that suggests that something deleterious will happen if you do not consume these foods? Lets take a look at the data from past and present, not listen to the experts, and we can decide for ourselves.

In 1928 Vilhjalmur Stefansson, author of Not By Bread Alone, convinced the "The American Meat Institute" to fund a year-long all meat study supervised by a panel of prestigious doctors. When Stefanson and his partner, Karsten, embarked on the all meat diet, they were closely monitored while they stayed at Bellevue hospital located in New York. 

Charles Washington explains in his Zeroing In On Health Blog the details of the all meat trial:

"During the first three weeks, they ate a mixed diet with fruits, cereals, bacon and eggs, vegetables, etc. They were examined by a group of specialists.  The most tedious part was the calorimeter studies. They would get in these big, wooden, coffin-like structures and they had to lay in there for three hours. They couldn’t read and had to be nearly motionless while a group of scientists peered at them and took measurements. They couldn’t even think about anything particularly stressful or pleasant. 

When they were on the mixed diet, they could come and go as they pleased. Afterwards, they were on the meat and then they were put under lock and key and the scrutiny began. They could not be out of sight of at least a doctor or nurse. This was mostly to calm the skeptics who included the European authority, Dr. Hindhede, who predicted that they could not last longer than 5 days on meat. He tried it on some of his patients and they broke down in 3 days. The good doctor figured it to be physiological even though Stefansson believed it to be psychological.  Dr. Francis Benedict, who performed the landmark study on fasting in 1915, was also present with his prediction that they would only last 3 weeks. This is surprising because he examined people who ate nothing. He should have been particularly interested in how these results compared to what he measured just 13 years earlier. Benedict believed that perhaps Stefansson and his men were lying about their experiences of being in good health on an exclusive meat regimen because this clearly ran counter to his experience."

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I'm trying to track down exactly who said this over at the Zero Carb Discussion Board, but it's pure genius. It explains how a paradoxical high carb diet does not lead to diseases of civilization. Much of this does not apply to todays standard American diet (SAD) because most all carbohydrates consumed are digested completely.

I want to address the term "refined and easily digestible". Only carbohydrate is toxic when it is refined and easily digestible. Protein and fat, even when "refined and easily digestible", remain highly nutritious as seen with our experience with pemmican. In math, we remove the common denominator to simplify an equation. In this case, it would be the term "refined and easily digestible". So the argument that carbohydrate is only toxic when they're "refined and easily digestible" is bogus. It's the carbohydrate regardless of whether it is refined, easily digestible or whole and natural.

When carbohydrate is refined and easily digestible, it makes it more toxic but not because it's refined but rather because it allows a greater quantity of carbohydrate to be ingested. As it is noted earlier in the book, 70lbs/year is the cutoff for the DOCs to appear. The "whole and natural" argument is invoked here because there are a few populations that eat quite a lot of carbohydrate, way more than 70lbs (3 ounces a day), and are don't develop the DOCs. Indeed, Ben Fury pointed out that Kitavans eat about 300lbs/year yet are as healthy as can be. However, since they don't eat refined and easily digestible carbohydrate, we have to conclude that the carbohydrate they eat is whole (read: bulky) and unrefined (read: difficult to digest, i.e. cellulose, and thus difficult to extract any digestible carbohydrate from it). This allows us to speculate that even if they eat 300lbs/year of plants, they don't actually metabolize 70lbs/year of glucose/fructose/sucrose in digestible form.

Note that there is a difference between easily digestible and merely digestible. Cellulose is indigestible so anything that is contained within cellulose is also indigestible. Unless, of course, we refine it.

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.