Generally, beef looks very similar, but grass-fed that I've had looks and feels firmer textured; like the muscle strands are larger and more well defined, even in ground beef. The biggest difference is smell. After eating grassfed for a couple of weeks, grain fed just began to smell very... off. On that note, my last batch of Slanker's has been a bit in that direction . Can't really go inspect their farm(s) to check for grain supplementation to get them through the winter either.

Does anyone know anything about these? I can't imagine they're paleo, hence the hot topics forum, but since implementing them into my diet, I've experienced significantly less cramping. Cramping has generally been the only health issue that seems to have been created by switching to predominantly paleo, and I remember reading about others on this forum having the same issue. I tried adding sea salt and azomite with little benefit, although I still take both.

For the record, I mix the yeast and lecithin in with raw milk, and let it sit for at least a half hour before drinking it. I had to cut raw milk out of my diet completely for a year, but have since reintroduced it after my gut has healed from eating predominantly RAF.

Any insights or research from a paleo perspective would be appreciated.

Everyone's experiences seem to jive with mine. It works well sometimes, although not considered optimal. And cultured is better than milk.

Agreed.

The raw milk helped me transition over to mostly raw without losing too much weight.   Soon however it became clear that it messed with my sinuses and stomach, especially compared to raw meat.

Well,

My meat and fat experiment has been getting some interesting results.

On Tuesday I finished my first week. Despite consuming 5232 average daily calories, and 86% average daily animal fat, which should have put 2.8 kg of body fat on me, I actually lost 0.4 kg of body fat. And, the loss continues. Today I was down 0.9 kg! It's really amazing to me.

So much for the calorie theory, huh?

I am not the least bit surprised.  Thanks for taking the plunge as it were.  I imagine body fat might be similar to swelling tissues fighting off infection, only the body fat is trying to stave off toxicity.

I don't have a fever or anything. Actually my foot feels a lot better after the doc cleaned it with alcohol last night and I used a foam spacer to keep the toes separated for air while sleeping last night.

I second, or third, the use of iodine.  Usually what I do is ignore it until it starts to get infected, then soak it in hydrogen peroxide while asking myself why I didn't put anything on it right away.  Then, when the peroxide has broken up the outer layer and solidified pus I drop some iodine on it. 

I would be more afraid of what the antibiotics would do to my gut than I would be of the infection when it has been topically treated.

I also second Lex's suggestion of tape, that stuff has done wonders for me when I've developed open blisters on my feet from backpacking.  I've never used the petroleum jelly before, but I do know the outer edges drying and cracking can be an issue.  I'll keep that in mind if I run into something like this myself.

Also, I recently got a full delivery from Slankers.  Some of it was freezer burned but that is another story.  Anyway, I just now was sitting down to eat a plate of ground beef when I realized that I was eating it without any garlic salt.  That's pretty much how I could stomach grain fed ground beef; lots of garlic salt.  I hadn't thought about it much, but I'd say freezer burned grassfed is about as tasty as standard grain fed.  I don't think grass fed tastes good(yet?), but it sure doesn't taste bad either. 

On a side note, I got a bunch of their D&C mix.  It almost tasted good right out of the box, as it were, but I can only eat a small amount before I get the feeling that I can't eat anymore.  I don't feel nauseous, but after 3-4 bites, I just can't swallow any more of the stuff.  It seems to take longer to digest too.   I kinda figured I'd be able to work up to eating more of it.  Anyone else, especially the carnivores following Lex's diet, have anything similar happen?

I believed all the hoopla about toothsoap but it never seemed to make much of a difference. It did make my teath darker. You'd have thought that I drank coffee, tea, and smoked all day long!

Adding bicabonate of soda made a little differnce but adding clay made quite a bit of difference. To add to that, I've found butter and clay the best! The raw-vegan-induced enamel rot has gotten lighter as well as the rest of my teeth. The spots that disintigrated haven't come back but the enamel along the gumline hasn't given me any problems what-so-ever! My teeth feel and look stronger.

Anyone have a Raw Paleo substitute for butter? No offence to Primal Dieters.

I either use nothing ( a little water...) or baking soda.  I have a sister who uses sea salt, and another sibling who uses Himalayan salt (not much difference).  Raw Paleo substitute for butter?  Maybe making it from human milk 

Thanks for the response, that heart rate is impressive.  I've generally had a quite high resting heart rate, even when I was in relatively good shape, and am hoping an improvement in that area will be another positive side effect of this diet.  That, and getting off my ass and out the door on a regular basis once more .

Every month's been showing 1% bandwidth use, which I assume is being rounded up.
We're allowed 15360000 MB. It will take a long time before bandwidth is a concern. Theoretically, we could get to nearly 10,000 members before we eat up our bandwidth but that would be if no one uploaded any more attachments and we had the same amount of guests. Even so, we should be able to handle 1000 members easily.

There are things that can be done such as not allowing guests to see attachments, allowing no further attachments at all, or reducing the size of attachments allowed. That shouldn't be a worry for years though.

I don't know if price and performance have been an issue, but you might check out https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/

For lower bandwidth sites particularly, they are quite competitive.  Other than that, they are one of the few hosting sites I've found that have almost universally positive feedback.  On the other hand, switching providers can br a royal pain in the ass, so if there is no issue, it obviously isn't worth it.  BTW, their pricing scheme is actually set on the "integral of (1/(1+log(x)) between your start data transferred and the end data transferred."  .  This takes into account your entire membership tenure, not each month separately.

I've had a fair amount of difficulty finding raw meat, especially to start this diet.  I didn't want to decide to try raw meat, and just order a ton online, which meant I had to make do with what I could find in the store.  For some stupid reason, I assumed that the meat at New Seasons was grassfed, and did not bother asking.

I also figured their chicken and the applicable liver was from a decent source.  It was from a 'natural' farm.  I ate about 3 lbs worth over a month's time, and had no issues.  I thought, and still do, that the benefit I received from the extra nutrients out-weighed the possible risk.  In my brief experience, muscle meat does not supply enough nutrition.  On the other hand, I didn't get any food poisoning, or I would likely be singing a different tune .

On a side note, once I started getting grassfed beef, I couldn't stand to finish off the grain fed steaks I had.  Their texture is horrifying.

So, I'm not a long time lurker, but this is one of the few forums I've wandered across and actually felt the desire to sign up for.

A brief intro:

I'm 24, from the west coast of the US, and will be back in Sacramento, CA in a couple of days.  I lived there for 4 years and will be returning to school there at CSUS.  It is not my favorite place, but it does offer my favorite prices for school, ie I can afford to eat, and then sleep through class.

I have a fairly long history of random health issues, although I never would've considered myself unhealthy until I developed some chronically swollen tonsils.  Those tonsils started me on the long path to eating my first raw steak a few months back.  When I was younger I had sensitivities to what seemed like every food: wheat, corn, milk, peanut butter, tuna, etc.  Now, looking at that list I think the problem with diet was woefully obvious, but at the time, since a human could not conceivably be unable to digest all food (no, raw meat, raw dairy and whatnot is not food in that context  ), there must've been something wrong with my brain that led to a lack of appetite.  I lived on oatmeal and sparse dinners. 

Fast forward to after graduating high school, and I work at a lumber mill.  I can eat damn near anything without putting on fat, and worked strenuously for 40h/wk without a problem.  I regularly got less than 6 hours of sleep a night.  At the end of that summer I slept more than 12 hours a night for months.  I assumed I was simply recuperating from lack of sleep.  After wasting some time pining over a lost first love and not going to college, I returned to the home town and that same lumber mill.  Only, this time they had started treating the planed wood with an herbicide.  Everytime a board slapped down, that shit would mist into the air.  Towards the end of the summer I contracted what appeared to be strep throat.  I was, or so I thought, healthily skeptical of doctors, but when it came to strep, I 'knew' that I would need antibiotics.  Sure enough, the doc agreed thats what I had, and gave me a prescription.  Two days later, my tonsils were back down to only twice their normal size, and the Doc calls me and says, "You don't have strep, stop taking the antibiotics.  It must be viral."  So, I did.  The swelling in my throat ceased going down, and a few months later swelled to the point it affected my breathing.  My failures with modern medicine are lengthy and were painful.  Each time I went to the Doc out of desperation I was convinced they wouldn't do anything to help, but I didn't know what else to do.  And, no, they didn't help.

Then, somewhere along the line, I started rinsing out my sinuses.  That led to incredible relief from allergy symptoms.  Not complete, but life was livable again.   Then, since not everything else in my life was masked by constant tonsil related malaise, I noted that milk (ah, cereal, breakfast of champions) made my throat swell up worse.  I cut it out for a few months, and then one day when I had nothing else to eat, or so I thought, I added it back in.  My gut nearly took my life for that, and my tonsils took advantage of my distracted state (portions of my innards seemed to be trying to escape one way or the other) by swelling once more.

Finally, my brain connected the dots.  What I ate actually affected my health.  I know, huge leap of faith right there.  After that, anytime something messed with me, I cut it out.  As I ran out of things to eat, I looked up replacements online.  It seems the first step away from SAD is the easiest to find, and most acceptable to try.  Each step farther out was harder, both the acclimate to and to find reliable literature for.  Here at the polar end, the RAF diet took me almost two years to find.  A year back, I was forwarded something from Mercola (yeah, i think he's a two-bit hack, but the people he makes money off of do give him some good ideas) and it mentioned the protein changes when eggs are cooked.  I drank my first egg the next day.  Cooked eggs, especially scrambled, had always been an issue.  Raw eggs at night, helped me recover from a workout.  At first I was quite afraid of salmonella.  As most of you will be not at all surprised to hear, I never got any sort of food poisoning from raw eggs.  Speaking of food poisoning, the only time I have shat blood was after eating cooked food.  It lasted for a week.

Anyway, when I finally read something in late summer about cooked meat being bad, it immediately occurred to me that it might be the same situation that I had experienced with eggs (and milk actually).  A month later, I was convinced enough to try going vegetarian, if not vegan.  Less than a week later, after having read some more about the Primal Diet, and after a bout with fatigue, depression, and a near constant headeache, I ate my first bloody steak.

Since then, I have noticed problems with both eggs and dairy.  That is to say, I think that symptoms in relation to them finally became noticeable.  After thinking, "great, now what the hell do I eat," I once more turned to the Internet, and was lead to this site after coming across some of Geoff's posts on another forum.

Well, that was an essay or two more than I was planning on, but hopefully someone will get something out of it.

I still haven't tried high meat, and I don't (yet) have a reliable source of suet, but those, I think, will be my next steps.  Thank god someone tried this before me, cause there is no way I would've thought raw meat looked edible .  Speaking of, I still haven't been able to eat raw fowl.  Any suggestions besides lemon marinade?  That made no difference to me...