Author Topic: Has anyone else developed health problems from eating the Raw Paleo Diet?  (Read 14632 times)

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Offline 24isours

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What's your diet like? It would help other members considering RZC. I still eat some carbs (90-120 grams daily, some times more) but I'm interested in how you often you eat organ meats too. I eat muscle meat regularly, and once weekly I'll eat 4 oz of liver, brain, and heart. Do you eat more organ meats than muscle meat?

How is your salt intake? How much fat and what type do you use?

Just recently I've bought meat from a new vender but for the past year I've been eating Pet Food from Slankers daily. I'm sure you are aware that it does contain around 10% organ meat. Here is a break down of what I've been eating for the past year:

I eat around 200 grams of Pet Food, along with another 200 grams of regular ground beef for a total of 400 Grams of ground beef. That leaves me with about:

860 Calories
74 Grams of Protein
60 Grams of Fat

I also throw in 190 Grams of Buffalo Fat Trimmings for a total of around:

2573 Calories Per Day
250 Grams of Fat
74 Grams of Protein
---

My salt intake is anywhere from 4g - 6g per day (celtic sea salt).
I also drink around a gallon of water per day. (I go to the gym 6 days a week)
3 Years on a Strictly Raw Ketogenic Carnivorous Diet.
*Currently still on a Ketogenic diet but have now incorporated raw vegetables.

Offline cherimoya_kid

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This is not my  personal experience. At the moment my consumption of calcium is minimal while I have been supplementing magnesium and potassium for years. My average intake of magnesium per day is between 200 and 300% RDA, my average intake of calcium is below 50% a day, and my intake of potassium is about 80% RDA a day. I avoid dairy.  I find it difficult to get more magnesium and potassium from food sources than I actually do, about 50% RDA in each case. I over supplement magnesium because it helps control my atrial fibrillation.I do not place all that much importance on RDA as the values established were based on populations eating refined carbohydrates which cause the wasting of magnesium and potassium and the retention of sodium. The leg cramps appeared after I switched to eating below 50g of carbohydrates a day. If the leg cramps do not improve I think I will have to increase my carbs and potassium rich carbohydrates in particular.

The lack of carbs may STILL be causing a mineral balance problem, resulting in cramps.

Offline 24isours

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This is not my  personal experience. At the moment my consumption of calcium is minimal while I have been supplementing magnesium and potassium for years. My average intake of magnesium per day is between 200 and 300% RDA, my average intake of calcium is below 50% a day, and my intake of potassium is about 80% RDA a day. I avoid dairy.  I find it difficult to get more magnesium and potassium from food sources than I actually do, about 50% RDA in each case. I over supplement magnesium because it helps control my atrial fibrillation.I do not place all that much importance on RDA as the values established were based on populations eating refined carbohydrates which cause the wasting of magnesium and potassium and the retention of sodium. The leg cramps appeared after I switched to eating below 50g of carbohydrates a day. If the leg cramps do not improve I think I will have to increase my carbs and potassium rich carbohydrates in particular.

Ever think you may be restricting carbs now to the point where your body may be going into ketosis and losing sodium stores? Increasing sodium while your carbohydrates are low will more than likely help your cramps.
3 Years on a Strictly Raw Ketogenic Carnivorous Diet.
*Currently still on a Ketogenic diet but have now incorporated raw vegetables.

Offline jessica

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Ever think you may be restricting carbs now to the point where your body may be going into ketosis and losing sodium stores? Increasing sodium while your carbohydrates are low will more than likely help your cramps.

increase all electrolytes, including potassium, magnesium and to a lesser extent sodium and calcium any time you are doing lower carb.

Offline bookittyrun

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to answer the question, in the first year of the rpd transition, no, i've developed no health problems.  to the contrary, i've been able to address prior health problems.  still not perfect, but doing very well...

the majority of people who report health issues and blame rpd seem to be omitting something from a well rounded diet.  gs said it, people are omnivores.  by design, we need a little of everything...

mr rooker is certainly more self aware than i feel most are who try lc / zc.  if his diet works for his body, that's awesome...  but finding a way to do it has obviously taken some serious time and investigation.   for example, if someone performs the act of firewalking with great success for 30 years and proclaims all prior foot odor issues are gone, that does not mean i'm going to jump up, take off my shoes, and follow blindly (to clarify, this is not an admission of a foot odor issue  :) )...  not without a great investment of time and study beforehand.  knowing your body and self should happen before experimentation with a concept that defies what your body is designed for...
"it'll be just like a sleepover, only we'll be sweaty and covered with grease!"  spongebob squarepants

Offline psycoconnetic

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As I said, when I started getting problems I added in every raw paleo food and nothing helped; however, cooking my food did help. If RPD is so great and healing, then I should have healed from my 'ZC' problems(if that's what they were) on that, no? Besides... PaleoPhil seems to think that by 'zero carb' I meant muscle meat only, no... I meant animal foods only, including liver, kidneys, brain, heart, marrow, fat, etc... And once the problems with this started outweighing the benefits I straight away started adding all other raw paleo foods(raw fruits and veg first), as I said, and this didn't make me better.

I'm not suggesting people can't survive on rpd, and not have debilitating health problems. The Eskimos ate largely RPD, I guess because there is no wood in the arctic and blubber is too valuable to use for much cooking, though no other hunter-gather in recorded history seems to have eaten RPD. Anyway, clearly people can be healthy on RPD, and clearly people can become healthier than they were before, but does this mean they could not be healthier with the right cooked food? I don't know, I doubt they tried Paul Jaminet's PHD for example.

It's possible RPD may be an effective therapeutic diet for certain conditions, like how VLC diets are used for epilepsy, but the latter does not seem to be a good diet long-term and perhaps RPD is not either. I don't know.

Anyway, from my experience RPD is no good for me. PaleoPhil, I have actually recently started eating along the lines of the PHD.

When I was doing the RPD, there were many people doing this ZC/animal foods only/a few berries/one piece of fruit a day type thing. There was Lex Rooker; PaleoPhil; TylerDurden; KlowCarb; Sully; Ioanna; Inger; RawRose; Raw; Magnetic; Hannibal; KD; etc etc etc, more than half of the people were doing ZC/VLC diet. Pretty much everyone spent most time talking about the diet of the eskimoes also, I guess because they are the only culture in recorded history eating mostly RPD.

Offline PaleoPhil

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PaleoPhil seems to think that by 'zero carb' I meant muscle meat only,
That's not quite what I meant. I was using the standard understanding of the term at ZIOH that developed out of Bear Stanley's views, where many "zero carbers" also eat added fat, such as butter, bacon, etc., rather than just muscle meat and when they do eat muscle meat it tends to be fatty.

Most ZCers at ZIOH tended to restrict organs due to the evil carb content of some of them, which Bear Stanley advised, or just because they hated them, and claimed that they are unnecessary. While I was a member there they tended to ridicule any positive posts about liver or eggs, due to their carb content, though Charles would sometimes say something along the lines of organs are OK, just not necessary and not the focus of the forum. Quite a few of them claimed that eating fatty "Walmart meat" is plenty sufficient, including one former member from there who became a member here for a while, and there was much ridicule of 100% grassfed meats by Charles and others.

Several of them claimed that traditional Eskimos never ate liver and only fed it to their dogs, and no one disputed this, despite V. Stefansson himself (one of their heroes) reporting that Eskimos loved loche fish liver (I misspelled it as "leche" in my last post).

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no... I meant animal foods only, including liver, kidneys, brain, heart, marrow, fat, etc...
That's why the ZC term is often so bogus and confusing. It's used in many different ways. Liver and brain contain carbs, so that's not truly "zero carb," as I've discussed before in the Carnivore subforum. Why not call it RAF or all-meat, or hypercarnivore or near-ZC or VLC to avoid this confusion? There was even a point where several people at ZIOH were experimenting with drinking milk, including Charles, and for some reason didn't see this as a contradiction of ZERO Carb.

Even when organs are included, such as by you and Lex, I think it's an unnecessarily restricted diet that has caused problems for most who have tried it. Few last more than a couple years on it, based on Internet reports.

Since you started cooking, do you think your calorie intake increased? I don't think 100% raw is necessary for all and it can be counterproductive if it results in stressful undereating, especially if the body shifts into starvation/survival mode.

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Anyway, clearly people can be healthy on RPD, and clearly people can become healthier than they were before, but does this mean they could not be healthier with the right cooked food? I don't know, I doubt they tried Paul Jaminet's PHD for example.
This is an excellent question. I think that the cooked potatoes, sweet potatoes and rice in the PHD are stand-ins for roots, tubers, bulbs, corms and rhizomes that were edible raw in the past, and I've discussed it before. I know it's heresy here, but I think it may be better to include some cooked tubers in the diet than not eat any underground storage organs at all due to raw purism. I even tried adding cooked tubers to my diet, though it didn't work well. I think it may be due to system malfunction relating to so-called "pyroluria".

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Anyway, from my experience RPD is no good for me. PaleoPhil, I have actually recently started eating along the lines of the PHD.
I suspect that's a good choice. The PHD seems to be one of the better Paleo diets and Paul Jaminet is one of my favorite dietary bloggers. I hope you'll share your results from the PHD. After all, the description of the forum says somewhere that it's OK to eat some cooked foods.

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When I was doing the RPD, there were many people doing this ZC/animal foods only/a few berries/one piece of fruit a day type thing. There was Lex Rooker; PaleoPhil; TylerDurden; KlowCarb; Sully; Ioanna; Inger; RawRose; Raw; Magnetic; Hannibal; KD; etc etc etc, more than half of the people were doing ZC/VLC diet. Pretty much everyone spent most time talking about the diet of the eskimoes also, I guess because they are the only culture in recorded history eating mostly RPD.
It's pretty much died out since then. You might want check out the more recent posts in this forum. There was even quite a backlash against ZC and VLC, as I recall. For me near-ZC was a temporary experiment that worked so well that I started to wonder if a VLC intake of say 5-15% carbs might be optimal for humans in general, but my research did not support that, and when I learned about Eskimo potato, which I'd never heard about anywhere in any of the Paleo forums, that really nailed it home for me. Every HG population I've examined ate some sort of starchy food, even the Eskimos (and even the coastal Eskimos who couldn't get Eskimo potato ate lots of seal liver, high in animal starch). I think Paul Jaminet is on the right general track with starchy foods.
« Last Edit: June 24, 2013, 07:17:33 pm by PaleoPhil »
>"When some one eats an Epi paleo Rx template and follows the rules of circadian biology they get plenty of starches when they are available three out of the four seasons." -Jack Kruse, MD
>"I recommend 20 percent of calories from carbs, depending on the size of the person" -Ron Rosedale, MD (in other words, NOT zero carbs) http://preview.tinyurl.com/6ogtan
>Finding a diet you can tolerate is not the same as fixing what's wrong. -Tim Steele
Beware of problems from chronic Very Low Carb

Offline goodsamaritan

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I'll support your starch hypothesis with my personal experience when I came to crave RAW STARCH which I found in singkamas.
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Offline PaleoPhil

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Another wild tuber that's edible raw that I learned about recently is the pignut. It's indigenous to the US and Europe (different species), but not my area.
>"When some one eats an Epi paleo Rx template and follows the rules of circadian biology they get plenty of starches when they are available three out of the four seasons." -Jack Kruse, MD
>"I recommend 20 percent of calories from carbs, depending on the size of the person" -Ron Rosedale, MD (in other words, NOT zero carbs) http://preview.tinyurl.com/6ogtan
>Finding a diet you can tolerate is not the same as fixing what's wrong. -Tim Steele
Beware of problems from chronic Very Low Carb

 

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