I hate to be wishy-washy, but we probably each have different abilities to tolerate carbs. I was heavily influenced by the publication of the American version of Lutz's German book, Leben Ohne Brot, as Life Without Bread. Lutz there proposes that 72 grams of carb/day as the upper limit of a healthy diet. I found that number to be about right. Lutz argues for that number based on the glucose needs of the brain. I think that that argument is not sound. There are many people who do well on zero carbs, and their brains are doing well too

When I have made my forays into paleo eating, I have reduced my carbs to 25-36 grams or less per day.

So, for me low-carb is <72 grams/day. VLC is <36 grams. I will acknowledge that some people will call a diet low carb with much, much higher limits.

I wrote my last post and then went to eat my lunch. While I was eating, some new thoughts relevant to this conversation occurred to me.

Tyler recently made a post (I don't yet know how to link to a specific post on this forum, or I would) about survivorship bias, ZC, and ZIOH, that I thought was dead on. As I was eating my beef ribeye a few minutes ago, I thought that he had some ideas there that were relevant to this thread.

In the other thread Tyler described the ZIOH board as "Stalinist." Having had some experience with Stalinist organizations as well as some slight study of history, I think that Tyler's description is apt. There is no commitment on the ZIOH board to the belief that everyone's ideas are sharpened and improved when they are subject to open criticism. Instead, there is a party line that is not to be broached and there is what might be termed a Stalinist cult of personality centered around the board's owner. Some people were explicitly told by moderators to butt out of threads because they had no business contributing to the discussion.

In the internet age, I think the idea that people can be so rigidly controlled is a pipe-dream. Although I do acknowledge that anyone has the right to create their own forum in accordance with whatever rules they choose. It just strikes me as self-defeating to control tightly permissible and nonpermissible ideas (I do understand the need to establish rules of civility and decorum).

If my ideas are superior, then let me defend them against all comers. If my ideas are flawed, then let others aid me by pointing out the flaws.

I came to this forum after some Googling on A1c lab values. After doing some reading here, I was attracted to the openness I found here, in contrast to the narrowness and rigidity I found at ZIOH.

So there might be some kind of self-selection here. One could argue that this forum's rules of engagement, so to speak, are inherently libertarian, and people, like me, who come to this forum, already have a preexisting bias towards freedom of expression. Thus, it might be the case that a poll would show that many people here are on the libertarian side of the spectrum. If one were a libertarian, I wonder how long one could remain an active member of a forum run along Stalinist principles.

The thing is, I am not sure that most people are very much concerned about the consistency of all their beliefs. From the discussions I read on ZIOH, I would guess that there was more support expressed there for libertarian sociopolitical forms than not. I tolerated the Stalinism there, for a few months, because there was some good information that I wanted to and ZIOH that seemed to be the center for all things ZC. My problem was that I kept running up against the controlling powers, at which point I recognized that I could not, in good conscience, remain a member of a community the principles of which were so antithetical to my own.

As far as your poll goes, does anyone describe herself as totalitarian? I have never met a socialist who would. I never got close to any fascists, but I kind of doubt that they overtly described themselves as totalitarian either.

Your suggested poll has prompted some additional thoughts. I make a distinction between politics and economics. I highly value the free expression of conflicting ideas in the public sphere. I oppose state interventions to limit free speech, assembly, and the like. So, I suppose, by your labels, that makes me a libertarian. But, in the economic sphere, I have no problem with state intervention, with the caveat that the state be democratically controlled. I believe that this democratic control is possible only if there are strict rules in place guaranteeing individuals the freedom to speak and organize. So, am I a statist or a libertarian? I am guessing that you would suggest that I check one of the statist options. If my guess is correct, then it seems to me that you would be concerned not primarily about politics but about economics. If so, I think it would be helpful to make it explicit that the poll as asking about economic beliefs.

Mel Gibson makes antisemitic remarks when drunk. Does this tarnish all paleos or paleolibertarians?

According to Kwasniewski's book, Homo Optimus (p. 77), Frederick Engels, the coauthor of The Communist Manifesto, wrote (in another work):

What, which in the beginning was cultivated exclusively for animal fodder, soon became fodder for the people. Thus, human animals were invented, the slaves.

So, was Engels actually a closet Libertarian?

I adhere to the old-fashioned belief that there is a world that exists independently of our beliefs about it. I further believe that science is able to learn about that world, and that the information that scientists obtain about that world can be assessed independently of the political/religious/social or other beliefs held by those scientists. I happen to be an atheist, but I believe that there is much that I can learn from theists about things nonreligious. To believe otherwise is to fall victim to the ad hominem fallacy. The value of any proposition does not depend on the personal facts about the person who states that proposition. To fall victim to that fallacy is to deny yourself the benefit of much that is valuable.

Regarding cold showers. I've been doing them for a few years. I haven't had a cold since I started them.

About 8-9 years ago I did them for a year. I did get one cold, which was still a big improvement. The reason I quit was because I had ears jammed full with earwax.

When I restarted the cold showers, I decided to clean out my ears weekly. On week A, I use an ear syringe (a kind of rubber bulb that you can buy cheaply at any drugstore in the US) filled with warm water. On week B, I put some olive oil in my ear and let it sit there for a few minutes. Then I turn on my side, and let it drain while the oil sits in the other ear. (I don't eat olive oil, but I do find it helpful for this purpose.)

I believe Lex Rooker says that he stopped getting earwax once he went to eating only raw meat. I've been all-meat, but raw, not cooked. It seemed to me that I was still producing earwax.

When I used to take hot showers, I would stay in the shower for a very long time. I suppose that the hot water would somehow find its way in my ear and dissolve the wax, even though I never made any effort to clean them.

Now that I take daily cold showers, I try to stay under the water, standing still, while I count to 60. At this time of year, in New York, it can be a challenge.

One method is to finish your hot shower with a cold burst. I just started cold turkey. But I started in the summer. That made it a lot easier.

Martin,

How are you doing. Your journal caught my eye because I am doing some things similar to you. I have had Irritable Bowel Syndrome for decades. I've been low-carb for about 20 years. I started VLC about a year ago and felt worse than I did on LC. More than 6 months ago, I figured my problem was eating any carbs at all, so I went ZC. But I still feel worse on ZC than I did on LC. So, yesterday I started a course of Flagyl and Cipro (the former kills anaerobic and the latter aerobic bacteria).

I am aware of all the side effects that these antimicrobials have the potential to create. But I am willing to take the risk.

It's not uncommon for people to be helped temporarily by antibiotics and then have their digestive problems return. One theory suggests that the underlying problem is a motility issue, whereby the intestines are not moving in a sufficiently coordinated way, allowing bacteria to remain, when they should be cleared out by peristaltic waves.

It's not clear to me whether you think the Flagyl helped you or not. Do you think it did?

Hi Lex,

I have read the forum rules, and, as I understand them, I am free to post here. I mention this because I am a zero-carber but not a raw foodist. I am posting to your journal to get some clarification from you.

First, some personal background. I have been ZC for more than 6 months. In that time, I was eating almost only cooked meat and water. I had eggs a few times when traveling. More recently, I added coconut oil, to test whether its purported antimicrobial properties would improve my digestion. The 6 months before that I was VLC with no grain, dairy, or legumes, with the tiny exception of a few tastes of 100% cacao mixed with coconut. Before that, I've been low-carb for about 20 years.

My whole life I was underweight, so that puts me in a separate category from the start. Also, from my teenage years on I had digestive issues, which would now be termed Irritable Bowel Syndrom (IBS) with the primary symptoms being diarrhea and burping. Until a couple of decades ago, I rarely ate any meat, maybe a serving once a month. About 20 years ago I found that eating meat helped control my diarrhea, enabled me to gain weight, mostly in the form of muscle, and gave me more energy overall.

The reason I am posting to your forum is that I recently got a blood test that gave me my HBA1c measurement. To my knowledge, I've never had that measured before. I am 54 years old. At first, I didn't even look at the A1c result, since, unlike my cholesterol and Friedewald-calculated LDL, it was not outside the reference range. But a few days later I did examine my A1c measurement and noticed that it was 5.9% with a reference range of 4-6.

I wondered how I could be so close to the upper limit of the range when I had been on what is basically an all-meat diet for the prior 6 months. I started Googling and your posts here had the most relevance to my situation.

I have not yet made it through your entire corpus here, I have only gone backwards from today to 8/11/09. But I seem to detect 2 points of view in your writings with regard to A1c, and I wonder if you are interested in taking the time to clarify them. Note, I am not accusing you of being self-contradictory (not that that would be a capital crime), but you do seem to have different emphases at different times and I am wondering if your views have evolved or if you were merely putting the emphasis on different things at different times.

In one of your earlier posts, you write

Did you every stop to think that maybe the lower values of A1c are caused by very low BG levels driven by huge infusions of insulin after eating a carb heavy meal?  Here’s my reasoning:

When eating carbs, glucose spikes quickly and the pancreas responds with a large shot of insulin to control it.  The refined sugars we eat creates a rapid and massive BG spike that causes the body to overestimate the actual sugar content so it over shoots with more insulin than needed. This forces BG to rapidly fall to an artificially low level for extended periods of time.  Of course, if it gets to low then fat and muscle will be sacrificed (and/or you'll crave a snack) to bring the level back up.  Our modern solution is to eat a candy bar or drink a soft drink which zooms BG back up and the process starts over.  This creates a yo-yo effect, and, I expect, a very skewed ‘average’ which could quite easily lead to a skewed A1c level (whatever that is).
 
When eating fat and protein, glucose climbs in a gentle curve over several hours.  The pancreas still releases some insulin but not in the panic mode as there is no large spike to make it think the body is in trouble.  This gentle rise in BG with the associated slow release of insulin to control it, would keep BG in a very stable and narrow range at the high end of the 'normal' scale - right at the edge of where insulin release is triggered.

I'll call this the Lab Value Fetishization position. This critique is similar to Taubes's critique of cholesterol readings. It's something we can measure, so let's measure it and investigate how these measurements correlate with other things we can measure. But, it's not telling us anything of fundamental worth about our true health. Thus, people can have low A1c values and sub-200 cholesterol readings and drop dead tomorrow from cardiovascular disease.

The other viewpoint that you seem to be advocating more recently is that A1c values are important signs of our underlying well-being, and should be examined, and, if possible, responded to when too high. Accordingly, you have been upping your fat-protein ratio in order to lessen the amount of protein available for conversion to glucose.

Let's call this the A1c Essentialism position, because it affirms that A1c tells us something essential about our health. Recently, I read you citing studies that show that people with higher A1c and lower Vitamin D have much higher probabilities of dying in the next 12 months.

It seems as if you have abandoned the Lab Value Fetishization position for the Essentialist position. Do you agree? If you do, suppose there were a carb-eater with healthy Vitamin D levels and 4.8% A1c measurements. Do you think she's better off than a zero-carber with 6% A1c and healthy Vitamin D?

Please note, I am not asking you for advice. I end up following my gut, both literally and figuratively. My biggest concern is digestive health. So far, ZC has not brought me digestive health, but I am not ready to abandon it quite yet. But the ultimate arbiter, as far as I am concerned, of any diet or lifestyle, is how it affects my digestion. But, although I am not asking for you to advise me, I respect the care and thought you put into your postings. So I am genuinely curious how your approach the issues I raise. Thanks.