Should I do this?

[TylerDurden]

Dr. Kurt Harris suggested that drying meats like beef will reduce their allergenic potential. To get enough fat on ZC with just turkey and fish for meats you will probably have to include plant fats like coconut oil, avocado oil, etc.

Yet, some RVAFers react to even the simplest processing, such as drying/making jerky. As for ZC, for obvious reasons, one would have to include animal fats with turkey and fish, not plant-fats. I once tried a 100% raw (widlcaught) seafood diet and got some RB -related symptoms, I think.

[Sherri]

Is dehydrating considered cooking?  It seems to me that if you are eating jerky, you need to be munching on a blob of fat, too? 70 percent fat to 30 percent protein is what I'm aiming for.

[TylerDurden]

Is dehydrating considered cooking?  It seems to me that if you are eating jerky, you need to be munching on a blob of fat, too? 70 percent fat to 30 percent protein is what I'm aiming for.

  Dehydrating is considered cooking if the temperature goes above 104 degrees fahrenheit(40 degrees celsius). Much drying occurs at mostly lower temperatures than 40/104, but some is at 110 degrees fahrenheit or above.

[Sherri]

TylerDurden:

My pemmican recipe has me keeping the meat below 104 degrees, so that'll be a good start to raw.  I've also been reading a lot of the other posts that have helped me out a lot.

You've all given me so many things to try in just one day.  I'm amazed. I really do think each day is going to be different for me now than I've previously lived.

This week, I'm going to find grass fed bison and try it straight out, then try it aged, and I'm going to try grass fed beef aged.  Give me a week and I'll report back on how things have worked out.

[TylerDurden]

Just thought to add a minor caveat:- even if the meat in the pemmican is raw, if the addedfat in the pemmican is heated above 104 degrees fahrenheit, then that pemmican cannot really be considered to be raw.

[Sherri]

Ah, okay.  I just looked up tallow and it liquefies at 40C, which puts it at exactly at 104 degrees.  All the fats are different, though, so it would depend on which one I can eventually eat.

Thank you.  I'll definitely keep that in mind.  I hadn't thought of the fat possibly going into the cooking range.

I do have another question.  My mother-in-law is insisting i need to soak raw meat in water with a few drops of iodine for 10 minutes before eating it raw to kill the bacteria on the outside without cooking it.

Would the iodine soak into the meat and kill the good bacteria inside?

[PaleoPhil]

....I'm not sure why he thought he'd need to talk me into it or that I was wanting to debate anything.

That forum was designed from the start as a place for ZCers to find support, not for debating it or questioning it. Your reporting being allergic to meats is probably viewed as being potentially too negative about meats to allow on the forum. I don't favor their forum approach, since I find it too stifling, though I recognize their right to take that approach.

I am okay with eating raw meat, but i must admit I didn't know you COULD safely eat raw meat until yesterday.  When I read "Raw Paleo" I thought it meant something like 'strict' or "down-n-dirty dedicated". I didn't know you literally meant raw until after I had posted and read a few other posts. (Okay, I'm an idiot)

LOL. I had a similar experience. The first time I saw the term "high raw" on a raw diet forum I thought it was referring to high raw meat (meaning fermented/aged/rotted). It turned out to mean trying to eat 100% raw vegan. I don't know why some people there act as if the term "raw" necessarily means vegan, especially considering that there are other members there like me who eat raw meat/fish, eggs, etc.

I only know what the allergy tests showed.  My blood reacts to it, and supposedly it was all grass fed meats in order to keep it as pure as possible.

I don't know whether it will be applicable to you, but my blood test showed moderate to high levels of antibodies to some meats, but I never noticed any increased symptoms from eating them, or decreased when I cut them out, so I resumed eating them and have experienced numerous benefits as a result. However, I didn't have a problem with brain swelling, so you will of course have to proceed more cautiously than I had to.

When I developed whole body shakes, we thought I might have developed early Parkinsons and paid $20,000 to see a doctor in New York. I had read a book of his and felt he was more up to date on research than all the other quack traditional doctors I had been seeing.

What doctor was this?

I've only tried straight coconut oil once, and it was the virgin supposedly most organic you can get.  A friend told me to make it simple and take a tablespoon out of the jar.  I only did it once, and it gave me indigestion.  (I think I need to fire all my friends, don't I?)  Up until then, I had just used maybe a teaspoon here and there for cooking.

You may be sensitive to medium chain triglycerides the way I appear to be. Because they are easily and rapidly digested, in sensitive people MCTs can overwhelm the system and cause nausea and even vomiting and diarrhea in severe cases. I tried to get gradually adjusted to coconut oil but instead found that it was becoming more nauseating and distasteful to me over time. Putting it in pemmican resulted in a product that I found simply awful tasting and nauseated me even more, also causing upset stomach and malaise for most of a day. I haven't been able to stomach even a teaspoonful of coconut oil ever since, though I don't rule out some day being able to eat some of it again. I find I do much better on the long chain triglycerides in animal body fats (like air-dried 100% grassfed suet), which digest more slowly.

PaleoPhil, does drying meats predigest it a little?

Yes, reportedly so, though they also make it tougher to chew, so sometimes bits go through me mostly undigested. Some people find pemmican easier to digest because the jerky is also broken down into shreds or a powder. Others find the high levels of saturated fat in pemmican, suet, tallow, etc. to be difficult to digest. I had some trouble digesting even animal body fats at first myself, but it has improved much better for me than MCT digestion did.

The pemmican recipe someone sent me used dehydrated raw meat as the protein part.

I sometimes eat pemmican for convenience or as a treat and have had no ill effects from it (though it doesn't give me quite as much of a feeling of well being as raw 100% grassfed meat and fat do), but pemmican is not generally highly regarded here, as it is not truly raw, except by William who reports great benefits from it and claims it is raw by his standards that I don't understand.

As always on any of this YMMV (your mileage may vary).

[Hans89]

Ah, okay.  I just looked up tallow and it liquefies at 40C, which puts it at exactly at 104 degrees.  All the fats are different, though, so it would depend on which one I can eventually eat.

During production, tallow is most likely heated over 100°C, so it's not raw, unfortunately.

I do have another question.  My mother-in-law is insisting i need to soak raw meat in water with a few drops of iodine for 10 minutes before eating it raw to kill the bacteria on the outside without cooking it.

Would the iodine soak into the meat and kill the good bacteria inside?

Don't do that. You want the bacteria in and on the meat. Both are 'good.'

[Sherri]

PaleoPhil:

It turned out well that I didn't get accepted to their forum.  It would be too stifling for me as well, and perhaps I wouldn't have found this place.

I think I'll skip the coconut oil, too, and the pemmican for now.  The pemmican was attractive to me because it doesn't spoil and I can take it anywhere, even camping for a week, without worrying about food preservation or a refrigerator, and not be limited to the canned things the rest of the campers take.  I also thought it would be good to begin things with, to keep me out of the kitchen in case I crave anything else that might be in the kitchen.

My New York doctor was Dr. Eric Braverman, with PathMed.  He does the most thorough exam I'm ever had and insists it all must be done before he can make a diagnosis.  He believes when doctors ordered a few tests based on a few symptoms, they don't get the whole picture and miss things, and I certainly agree.  He found things wrong with me I would never have considered and ultrasounded every body part connected to me.  He had several doctors working beneath him, and I went through all of them before getting to him for all the final results.

One of the doctors believed a lot of allergies come from not having the right bacterias in the gut, and that we don't know enough about them to determine all the ones we need or what happens when one is missing.  The bacterias you buy at health food stores are only the basic ones we know.

The more I read about eating raw meat, the more it sounds like more bacterias are introduced that perhaps I'm missing.  

I'm glad I went for a year, but Dr. Braverman is very expensive and a year was all I could do.

Thanks for the iodine answer.  Probably I need to not tell my extended family and friends anymore what I'm doing.  I know they mean well and think I'm trying to kill myself with e. coli, but maybe they don't need to know about it.

[William]

I'm allergic to some meats

Dr. Harris of http://www.paleonu.com/ found an allergen (something to do with albumin) in beef blood; this is neutralized by drying or cooking.

There seem to be a lot of things that can trigger allergic reactions; the blood might be what you react to. It might also be something in the kind of beef found in food stores. Grass-finished from a farmer works for most of us here.

[Sherri]

William,

That gives me a lot to experiment with.  I'm going to add drying the beef in addition to aging it this week.  And doing the same with buffalo.  Grass-fed is fairly easy for me to get here, although wild game besides buffalo isn't.  I've noticed some online places with wild game, though.

It will be interesting to see if one of them works.  I am hoping beyond hope.

[djr_81]

I'd like to give my sympathies about ZIOH. They can be a bit bull-headed (trying to be diplomatic here) over there and while it saddens me that you were treated that way when just looking for help it's not surprising. On the bright side you managed to find us here which may be more fortuitous than you realized; while many others eat in a carnivorous manner to attain or maintain a body shape/size (and the health benefits are a plus) most of us here eat raw carnivorous primarily as a means to recover and maintain health.

The more I read about eating raw meat, the more it sounds like more bacterias are introduced that perhaps I'm missing.  

Quite a few of us on the forum supplement with "probiotics", if you will, that we make ourselves. If you look in the culinary section you can read up on "High meats" which you may find helpful in your re-balancing of gut flora.
Granted, the thought of, essentially, controlled rotting and then ingestion of meat sounds both dangerous and crazy but it does work. The probiotics sold in stores do work, in varying degrees by manufacturer, but it's all for grains. By making high meat we get bacteria specific to aid in the digestion of meat which it sounds like you might need.

[miles]

William: I thought you couldn't get hold of Grass-finished beef?

Sherri: On ZIOH, before you apply there's a section you have to read first. It says that to become a member you should already have started eating ZC. As a non-member you're able to look at all the information there, which is arranged in an easy format to work through, but they don't consider you can contribute anything valuable to a ZC forum when you've not even started it. I think that's the idea. Nor can they contribute anything to you if you're not eating the same way as them.

Tyler: What's RB s?

Sherri: If you thought that the problem was in the blood, and that drying may reduce it, what would be the benefit of drying the fat?

[RawZi]

Dr. Harris of http://www.paleonu.com/ found an allergen (something to do with albumin) in beef blood; this is neutralized by drying or cooking.

There seem to be a lot of things that can trigger allergic reactions; the blood might be what you react to. ...

    I used to test in the office allergic to albumin, to beef blood, to my own blood, to my own saliva, to many of my body tissues etc.  Eating raw meat helped me get over that.  I still get a reaction to my saliva occasionally, if I eat something not as natural.

    As a child, it was very hard to eat what I was compelled to eat.  I wound up in the emergency room a bunch of times.  They'd ex-ray my throat and stick their hands down my throat, but never found anything in there but my throat.  The fact it got generally swollen too much and I couldn't swallow and felt so nauseas didn't phase them.

[TylerDurden]

Tyler: What's RB s?

The "s" was a misprint. I meant "RB" as in rabbit-starvation"-like symptoms. At the time, I was eating just 100% raw seafood, no plant foods or whatever.

[PaleoPhil]

...The more I read about eating raw meat, the more it sounds like more bacterias are introduced that perhaps I'm missing.  

Correct. Read what you can about the hygiene hypothesis and high meat, stink fish, etc.

I'm glad I went for a year, but Dr. Braverman is very expensive and a year was all I could do.

I see that he apparently favors legumes, low-fat and cooked foods in his recommended diet. By coming here, you apparently think he may not be right about which foods are optimal. If he could be wrong about that, he could also be wrong about you having to avoid most meats, at least in the longer run.

[Sherri]

Sorry, I went away for spring break, then caught a really bad cold when I got back. With my other family memebers, this cold has lasted anywhere from 3 weeks to a month.

I really have appreciated all the helpful advice.

So far, I've found I can eat buffalo meat!  I'm so excited.  Thank you, Ioanna.  I would have been too chicken to try it if it hadn't worked for you first.

djr_81:

Thank you for the warm welcome.  I do appreciate it.  I plan on checking out the homemade probiotics page; I DO think I will benefit from it.  Aging meats doesn't sound appetizing at the moment, but it seems as though most people here end up liking raw and aged better than cooked after a while.  I'm lucky in that I had a dad who made me eat things I eventually liked when I was growing up, and it made me open to anything.  I'm also searching for 'health' and willl do what it takes.  (Doesn't mean I won't gag a time or two, though.)

miles:

Can you dry the fat part or is it only the lean that can be dehydrated?  

RawZi:

I had the same problem with the doctors.  One doctor stuck his finger down my throat and it felt as though the back of my thoat was pushing forward with a huge, hard lump.  THe only remark he made was something to the effect that the lump must not be cancer because it came and went.  It was the way my throat closed when I got something allergic, which I didn't know at the time, but all he could relate a lump to was cancer.

PaleoPhil:

Regarding Dr. Braverman and diet, you are correct.  In the beginning, I felt soooo much better cutting out the allergen foods he found.  About a year later, I felt the low-fat diet wasn't working for me.  I felt more and more tired.  I think maybe I'm one of the people who processes energy best from fats.

He did want me to eat the meats I could and wasn't advocating vegetarianism.  The different brain chemicals need different amino acids in order to be produced, and our glands must also have different ones to produce hormones.  He did feel meat would supply them best.

When I get over this grungy cold, I'll try some aged raw beef.

[PaleoPhil]

Raw grassfed meats and/or animal fats should help you get over the cold. It's not only the best food, it's some of the best medicine.