PaleoPhil's Journal

[PaleoPhil]

Reminder to self: never run out of air-dried 100% grassfed suet again. It's amazing how much better I feel now that I'm eating that again after trying to get by on lard, coconut butter, marrow and raw fermented CLO for a while after I ran out of suet. Suet seems to be my single biggest health booster. It could be coincidence, but I doubt it. Will correct my report if it turns out otherwise.

[PaleoPhil]

I bought some pastured marrow from the Healthy Living health food market, but it wasn't 100% grassfed and was the dry kind from narrow bones, so it was only a little better than the supermarket stuff. I rendered it to make it more palatable and re-discovered why I stopped rendering my fats: home-made rendered marrow and suet give me stomach gas when I do this. Strangely, the rendered lard from the market only gives me a tiny bit of gas. Raw marrow and suet don't give me any noticeable gas other than the occasional burp.

[PaleoPhil]

All the promotion of fruits lately triggered my cravings for them again, so I ate some from the company cafeteria. I thought I did well, though, by limiting myself to about 8 red grapes, a couple chunks of pineapple and about a tbsp of shredded coconut, with olive oil. Surprisingly, I had a relatively strong reaction to this small bit of fruit. My lower lip became rather chapped, which is a common reaction I get to carbs, my bladder and flanks became mildly painful, my teeth became crudded up, I slept with my mouth open (which only happens when I eat carbs) and my mouth developed a nasty taste with a yucky coating. I wonder if the couple chunks of pineapple, which I don't normally eat at all, could account for my stronger-than-usual reaction?

[MoonStalkeR]

Maybe the strong acidity of the pineapple contributed to this?

[miles]

Hey Phil have you ever tried eating just {fruits}(mainly), {nuts, comb honey, bonemarrow}(Lesser) and then occasionally a smallish amount of fatty meat when you feel like it?

I do best on Meat/fat only, but also well when I eat like I said above. However I don't do well if I eat meat/fat mainly, and then add in some fruit/honey. If you want to enjoy fruit maybe it would help eating like I said above now and again? I don't know.

Meat(Mostly - by mass)/fat(Lesser - by mass)=Hunter; the other one would be Scavenger & Forager.

[PaleoPhil]

Maybe the strong acidity of the pineapple contributed to this?

That is why I normally avoid pineapple, but I didn't think that two small chunks could have such a significant effect.

Hey Phil have you ever tried eating just {fruits}(mainly), {nuts, comb honey, bonemarrow}(Lesser) and then occasionally a smallish amount of fatty meat when you feel like it?

Yes, I've tried nearly every possible combination and ratio after years of experimentation. I even recently tried a near-fruitarian diet that included a small amount of nuts and fatty fish after some wacko troll who was banned from this forum challenged me to do so and I reported my negative results in this forum. I was curious to see if my ability to handle fruits had improved at all since going raw, but it unfortunately did not. I find that every increase in fruits causes an increase in negative symptoms. Eating plentiful raw fat with raw fruit reduces the symptoms, but doesn't eliminate them.

I do best on Meat/fat only, but also well when I eat like I said above. However I don't do well if I eat meat/fat mainly, and then add in some fruit/honey. If you want to enjoy fruit maybe it would help eating like I said above now and again? I don't know.

As I have reported before, I find that when I eat sequentially and avoid combining, I actual handle fruit worse, not better. That's one reason why I don't pay much attention to the Natural Hygiene advice to avoid combining. When I eat berries or coconut oil I find I digest it better in the style of Yupik Eskimo akutaq--fat mixed with berries, meat or herbs--rather than sequentially. So in this case for me the Yupik way works better than the Natural Hygiene way. I know of no traditional culture that follows rules of sequential eating or mono eating, do you? When it comes to what works for me, I put more credence in my own experience and the thousands of years of experience of traditional cultures than I do the high theory of Natural Hygiene gurus.

If you believe that fats and carbs should not be eaten together, does that mean you don't believe one should eat grubcomb with honeycomb or eat fruits that contain plentiful fats as well as sugars, like coconut (or at least not consume the carby coconut water at the same time as the fatty coconut meat)? When hunter-gatherers or Stone agers were successful in hunting meat and gathering fruit on the same day, do you think they set aside one or the other to avoid combining? If not, do you think they suffered serious ill effects as a result?

[miles]

I'm fine combining fats with carbs, and fats with protein, but not so great combining carbs with substantial protein. So no, I don't believe any of those things, as none of them contain much protein.

Fruits+Nuts+Honey+Bone Marrow I'm fine with; Meat with fat I'm better with; but meat with fruit/honey I'm not good with.

Hmm if a human group has abundant fruits and can even find bones with marrow and even scraps of meat, do you think they will bother to hunt? I don't. Like Hanna's fish-eating wolves, I think they'd go for the easier option whilst it's available.

I'm not talking well-developed groups of humans who have been without change/challenge for centuries, and have their traps set up around the island and know everything so well that a hunt takes no thought or effort. Who have fat bellies and smoke, and strange rituals and traditions.

[PaleoPhil]

I'm fine combining fats with carbs, and fats with protein, but not so great combining carbs with substantial protein. So no, I don't believe any of those things, as none of them contain much protein.

You're not required to believe anything. I know for myself that I experience no additional problems when I eat lean meat protein (like eye of round or top round) with fruit than when I eat fruit alone. I actually seem to do a slight bit better, though fat helps more and neither completely eliminates my problems with fruit, unfortunatetly. Eating fruit alone works worst of all for me.

Hmm if a human group has abundant fruits and can even find bones with marrow and even scraps of meat, do you think they will bother to hunt? I don't.

Apparently you weren't swayed at all by the real-life HG story I shared where they went hunting immediately after they acquired a large amount of honeycomb/grubcomb and gorged on some of it. Can you name a single HG or pastoralist people that follows SE rules? I'm not convinced that my HG ancestors would have followed Natural Hygiene SE rules that weren't even developed until the 1800s, and there's no evidence that any traditional culture does SE/Natural Hygiene even today. More importantly, SE makes things worse for me, rather than better. Like Lex, I notice no benefit from SE. So we'll just have to agree to disagree on this.

[MoonStalkeR]

Eating fruit with other food such as raw meat can reduce irritation for me too, but not with cooked starch, I get a sudden stomach pain if I do.

[PaleoPhil]

For some reason animal fats don't seem to be warming me as much so far this winter as compared to last. Danny Roddy found that cooked tubers made him warmer and by coincidence I've been experimenting with cooked tubers like potatoes and sweet potatoes for other reasons (such as potential help with constipation or bulking up as well as maybe helping reduce the risk of UTIs and kidney stones by reducing protein intake), but I haven't noticed any warming from tubers.

On the other hand, while tubers and other carbs haven't made me any warmer, I'm not noticing as much yawning from them as I used to. Some, yes, but not as much.

I haven't been doing a good job on keeping my water intake up. It's not easy. This is one reason I'd like to be able to eat more omnivorously if I can, to keep my risk of dehydration, super-low urinary pH, UTI's and kidney stones down.

[PaleoPhil]

Speaking of UTI's, I got one recently for the first time since I stopped eating a SAD diet. It started on the day after I ate more carbs than usual, but that could have been coincidence, though I did used to get them when I was eating the most carbs of my life. The symptoms were at their worst for a couple days, though not as bad as the UTI's in years past. Some symptoms lingered on, so I tried 1 tsp baking soda with water before bed on 2 consecutive nights and that did the trick better than antibiotics used to work for me years ago.

The success of the baking soda does make me wonder if there's anything to the acid/alkaline hypothesis after all.

Happy new year everyone!

[PaleoPhil]

The past few days I've been eating much more raw honey than usual, intrigued by the mass-building effects others reported. Unfortunately, I have felt increasing anxiety, my teeth increasingly coated in stuff despite much more brushing than usual, I wake up with my mouth open and dry and with a crappy taste in my mouth, and the cyst on my neck is becoming painful.

[PaleoPhil]

A couple days ago I started experimenting with a softened version of my mostly raw Paleo diet (which was already relatively soft to begin with, but had room for further softening), to see if that would help with my lifelong chronic constipation, poor digestion and underweight. The early returns are promising, but that's no guarantee of longer-term results, so I'll see how it goes for at least a little longer before reporting on it.

I've also continued with my experiments on determining which plant foods I can add to my diet without too much in the way of undesirable side effects. Parsnips are still working out surprisingly well for me and it looks like I can minimize the minor stomach gas from avocado if I mash it and mix it with some raw honey. I certainly handle avocado better than coconut oil. It would be nice if I can add avocado to my staples, as it is both soft and fatty. I suspect that soft, fatty foods will be key to resolving the constipation issue. I'll have to try to balance that goal with the somewhat conflicting goal of minimizing dry skin, chapped lips, foot cramps, dental plaque, etc. (which I tend to get when consuming too much honey and plant carbs).

[PaleoPhil]

Even eating just 1 tbsp of raw honey with 2 avocadoes my chapped lips worsened. They never chap when I eat ZC and almost never chap when I eat no honey and just a small amount of berries once or twice a week. This stinks because honey makes the avocado palatable.

[Iguana]

I can minimize the minor stomach gas from avocado if I mash it and mix it with some raw honey.

Even eating just 1 tbsp of raw honey with 2 avocadoes my chapped lips worsened. They never chap when I eat ZC and almost never chap when I eat no honey and just a small amount of berries once or twice a week. This stinks because honey makes the avocado palatable.

Perhaps you shouldn’t eat avocados if it’s not palatable for you without mixing it with honey. And reciprocally, one certainly shouldn’t eat honey if it’s not palatable without mixing it with something else.

Cheers
François

[PaleoPhil]

So do you have any foods to suggest beyond cassia fistula?

[Iguana]

You mean a food that would be helpful in case of constipation? Some people say figs, prunes and tamarind, for example.

[riy freeman]

magnesium

[van]

raw food.com has cassia sticks, of great quality.  Open and suck on two disks in the morning on empty stomach.  wait an hour before eating.  They work.

[PaleoPhil]

After increased experimentation with eating carb-rich non-meat foods like raw honey, fruits and underground storage organs (including experimenting a few times with cooked tubers), I experienced a urinary tract infection. I used to get UTIs chronically in the days when I was eating a carb-rich diet, so that made me wonder if increased carb intake might somehow inflame my urinary tract or feed the bacteria that cause the UTIs. Luckily it resolved fairly quickly with the help of 1/2 tsp baking soda mixed in a cup of water taken two nights in a row.

Another possibly related symptom I developed was a new dental cavity. I recently went to the dentist and he reported that I developed a new cavity since the last visit 4 months earlier that would need a filling. Things I had changed that might possibly account for it included the increase in non-meat carbs and using toothpaste and mouthwash that did not contain fluoride (which was accidental on my part--I thought one of them did contain fluoride).

I read in this forum about people bulking up and even claiming dental benefits from eating raw honey, including up to a pound a day of raw honey, and following their taste/senses/instincts. Perhaps it was wishful thinking, but I thought that maybe honey was not a culprit in my dental issues and UTI and thought that the occasional random carb binge might provide health benefits in the way that intermittent fasting and fractal exercise have benefited some folks. I fell prey to temptation and increased my honey intake on some days, letting taste and satisfaction be my guide instead of experience and wisdom. I found I could eat up to 1/3 lb of raw honey on its own in a single sitting without any "stop" signal, and at that level of intake started to experience some mild stomach upset, nausea, and feeling of lightheadedness, which I get when my bloodsugar skyrockets, though still desiring more honey and not getting any "stop". I tested and sure enough my BG had exceeded 200 mg/dl. On the bright side, being able to handle 1/3 lb of raw honey was an improvement over the past when more than a couple tbsps of raw honey could start to give me nausea.

After a few days of eating plentiful raw honey of around 1/5 to 1/4 lb per day and experiencing more and more negative symptoms, I cut down further on the honey intake to around 1-2 tbsps/day. The negative symptoms remained amazingly stubborn and my dental health worsened despite the cutback as long as I continued eating raw honey and fruits.

Then suddenly I experienced a hemorrhoid flareup. That was the last straw, I decided I had to make a major change and ignore the advice of the fruit fans and Instinctos and focus on dealing with the decades of constipation that was now more of a problem with a sensitive hemorrhoid instead of relying solely on my senses and the advice to eat lots of raw honey.

Also, with increased honey and fruit intake my lips had become increasingly dry and then painfully cracked and I was again developing dead skin inside my cheeks like in the past when eating plentiful carbs. Amazingly, just eating some avocado with a handful of chopped strawberries caused my lips to further painfully crack not long after eating it. So I switched over to eating pastured marrow with pastured ground turkey, hoping it might help reverse the damage by the next morning. Within an hour of eating plenty of pastured marrow and raw pastured ground turkey my lips had already healed significantly. If I didn't experience it myself I wouldn't have believed it were possible.

Unfortunately, partly under the influence of pro-fruit and pro-honey posts in this forum I think I may have endured unnecessary suffering and possibly done permanent damage to my teeth and posterior. I take full responsibility for it, but I hope my journal will serve as a warning to others to not view raw fruit and raw honey as without risks. Everyone does not respond to them in the same way, for whatever reasons.

In trying to rememdy constipation I had indeed been trying some of the therapies mentioned above. I tried figs, prunes and prune juice with no noticeable results from any of these. Magnesium helped a tiny bit, but nowhere near enough. To get good effects from Mg I had to risk side effects from overdose, so that wasn't something I wanted to do on a regular basis.

Senna helped to get the stools out, but the stools themselves were still visibly suboptimal (per the Brisol scale and other symptoms--I'll spare people the details), so it seemed more of a forcing of the GI muscles than an improvement in the stool itself, and at times it could make going to the bathroom a harsh, unpleasant experience. I find senna tea less harsh than senna tablets, but still a bit harsh and it stops working as soon as I stop taking it. Plus, senna and cassia fistula are legumes that contain lectins and other antinutrients that I'm not sure I want to consume on a regular basis (cassia fistula contains at least 3 lectins--CSL-1, CSL-2 and CSL-3--see http://proj3.sinica.edu.tw/~chem/servxx6/files/paper_8007_1269165892.pdf). Because they're lectin-containing legumes they don't even qualify as "Paleo" under Cordain's definition, though they might under Ray Audette's definition of "edible raw" (he claims that legumes are not edible raw, but if he knew that cassia fistula, tamarind and some other legumes are edible raw he might modify that opinion). I think they are probably fine as short-term therapeutics, but I'd rather not be dependent on them and I'd rather address the underlying issue than rely on thereapeutics.

Fiber supplements just gave me foot cramps. Increased water intake hasn't appeared to help noticeably. A large cup of coffee does help to get things moving, but like senna doesn't address the underlying problem, loses effectiveness over time, may have negative long-term side effects and also gives me short-term negative symptoms like stomach gas.

Would anyone care to guess what it is that has helped of late to reduce my constipation (though it's too early to celebrate success and some improvements in the past turned out to be temporary)? Here's a clue: when I had a colonscopy the gastroenterologist discovered that I have an unusually long colon termed a "redundant colon." This got me thinking and contributed to my coming up with my current approach.

[ys]

sorry to hear about your negative side effects, but looking back at your journal you get burned every single time when you turn to carb binges.  i remember you saying you feel the best with meat and suet. but i'm getting a feeling you'll do another carb experiment.

[PaleoPhil]

Thanks and yeah, raw honey and fruits are the most addictive and hardest Paleo foods for me to give up. I don't know why some people go on about raw honey and fruits like they are pure magic with no downsides despite multiple people reporting negative effects. The forum is thick with dogma about them. I'm happy for the success of those who thrive on raw honey and fruits, but some act like anyone who reports negative effects from them is crazy or wicked. I read the people reporting all the positive results from raw fruits and honey and claiming that everyone does great on them and anyone who doesn't must be just experiencing a temporary detox or the symptoms are in their head and it feeds my addiction. I'm not making excuses, but I do hope people will keep this in mind before their next praising of the magical benefits and zero downsides of raw fruits and honey. To some here it seems to go against some sort of holy writ to report anything negative about fruits or honey in this forum. To them I say, so sue me.

On the other hand, carbs do serve a purpose in encouraging me to eat more calories and have another beneficial aspect I'll get into later. I find it very hard to add or even maintain weight and ameliorate constipation when doing ZC or standard VLC. So I'm in a catch-22 situation and trying to find a "third way" that will work better for me, because neither pure unrestricted RPD (including unlimited fruits and honey), nor pure Instincto, nor pure ZC, nor PaleoNu have worked quite satisfactorily me. I tried giving the advice from these approaches more time, but wasn't seeing any progress. For example, Lex said that the constipation resolved on its own for him on his near-ZC diet and he only needed an enema device in the meantime, but that wasn't working for me (and I bought and tried the exact same device).

It's also hard to know how much of my recent symptoms is due to the recent carb experimentation and how much to years of past damage or perhaps poor ability to digest certain animal foods or other unknown factors. Certain of my symptoms are rather clearly carb related, such as the chapped lips, because I've connected them strongly to carbs in the past, with certain others it's less clear so I suppose it could be at least partly coincidence that they arose at the same time as my carb experiments intensified. Or maybe that's wishful thinking on my part, I don't know.

As I hinted, I think I've made something of a breakthrough re: the constipation that I came up with myself that I'll get into, but I'll let folks guess first, if anyone's up to it. Here's another hint--it's similar to raw Primal, but different from that too.

Perhaps you shouldn’t eat avocados if it’s not palatable for you without mixing it with honey. And reciprocally, one certainly shouldn’t eat honey if it’s not palatable without mixing it with something else.  

Cheers
François

Thanks for trying to help, but raw honey is easily very palatable for me without anything added--too much so--and I actually experience slightly less negative symptoms when I mix it with something fatty than on its own, as I've reported before. It shouldn't be surprising because hunter-gatherers eat the fatty grubcomb along with the honeycomb. I've gone back to artificially restricting my raw honey intake, which goes against Instincto but appears to serve my health better. On this my experience backs what KD and KGH have written more than you and GCB, sorry.

I've found avocado to be useful for a certain therapeutic reason and since the only way I've found that I care to eat it so far is to mix it with something sweet, I'll probably continue to do so but probably do it more with berries than honey and try to get by on as little of the sweet as possible. I need to work out whether the benefits I get from a certain aspect of the avocadoes are offset by the negatives of the carbs or not and whether there are better alternatives for me. I'm trying to find a diet where the bulk of it won't contribute to constipation without giving me excessive negative symptoms of other sorts so that I don't need to chronically rely on the therapeutic benefit of the sennosides in senna and cassia fistula and I think I may be on the right track.

[KD]

A pretty traditional way to eat avocado is with salt and lemon juice. I like the larger Florida kind these days, although the ones they ship are nothing like the ones I used to get off the tree which were like fatty mangos. They have less of a taste in stores here but are more water rich and should be good for internal transit. A little quality salt probably goes a long way to spice things up. I tend to just eat them plain at the end of the day sometimes with some kind of herb or other vegetables or sauerkraut which is a good compliment and salty of course.

Alot of primal-ish stuff is good for bowel transit: raw butter, egg bombardment, soaked chia seeds, the occasional greens with ACV, even juices counterintuitively can work well for some people in that regard. It seems like fresh fat (dairy fat) helps with dryness both internally and externally than just saturated fats that are frozen. Fruits contain water, but whatever underling process of absorption can actually dry out the cells over time or in the short term. You can see the older fruitarian guys/gals  like Graham, Anne Osborne etc..all dried out and leathery. The standard vegans don't have this problem (or as severely I dunno) despite their animal deficiencies.

I don't know how laissez faire people are about fruits here, so I wouldn't let that pressure lead to too many drawn out experiments. Seems like virtually everyone on this forum gives some consciousness to their sugar consumption, so thinking anyone is actually swayed by those debates is probably just a waste of time I imagine. I ate almost exclusively fruits for years and although I experienced various negatives, these types of symptoms you describe were largely absent untill I started actually starving that internal stuff of its food. That is largely what is going on IMO, which is why massive parts of the population can eat tons of carbs and have these same underlying issues without these symptoms...even if they have all kinds of other health problems that are obviously related. This also explains why health forums are filled with such people because they are already undertaking some form of this process by removing the modern fermenting sugars these things love. For many as Nation pointed out in that thread, the fresh fruits are closer to -or worse than- alcohols and modern processed foods than they are to starches and even grains in terms of these issues. For traditional or ancient peoples, there are also reasons other than just seasonality or unavailability for choosing starches over fruits, heck people are doing this research right now, and its no mystery metabolically.

The irony is people claim that all-fruit can cause deficiencies,..but people can least decades eating only fruits..yet an animal rich diet that is seen as more nutrient dense but minus any plant carbs can cause deficiencies/symptoms in weeks?....something doesn't add up there. I like to think positively generally, but most things I've experienced lead me to believe that your body isn't always all rallied together to do whats best in your interest, and alot of things have their own selfish purposes and will fight for survival through you. Its easy to say that fruit detox or whatever, and while it doesn't seem low-sugar or ZC or any of these approaches necessarily work miracles in short periods, other approaches also can just disguise symptomology which can be discovered by...heck..by removing fruits and seeing how one feels and if there is some disruption/symptoms that way too. I can see the urge to present a balanced diet, but obviously the terrain is not some even playing field for such arbitrary reasoning.

[Nation]

PaleoPhil,

how do you do on leafy greens? I've been experimenting with them recently as i also get constipated on RZC and they really help. You could also try liquid chlorophyll which also reduced my constipation. I take 2 teaspoon of chlorophyll a day and eat a little bit of parlsey, onion and spinach or lettuce with meat and constipation is greatly reduced and i don't get candida-like symptoms as i would get if i were eating fruit instead of veggies. Well, i'm probably eating no less than 15 or 20g of carbs a day.

[Iguana]

Sorry to hear that, Phil and I feel a bit guilty. 

Besides, I’m amazed that you still brush your teeth with toothpaste containing fluoride, which is a violent poison and would contribute to tooth fragility (even that it is believed to prevent cavities to some extend) according to what I read decades ago. I cant’ stand any toothpaste and I brush my teeth with seawater only- or plain water in case I have no seawater. Also, didn’t you write that you drank coffee?

Are you absolutely sure the honey you have is 100% correct? It’s very difficult to get really natural honey not heated in one way or another, from bees never feed with refined sugar.

Hope you’ll get better and overcome your health problems anyhow.