When I was a vegetarian I found that potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, sprouted grains, sprouted beans etc don't digest as well raw as when they are cooked.
I find raw carrots and overnight-soaked raw sweet potatoes relatively easy to digest, and I'm someone with a history of GI issues. Raw carrots taste quite sweet to me now. Also, one of my Paleo nephews is a raw-carrot-aholic. They are like his candy. Granted, carrots of today are reportedly sweeter than their ancestors, but chimps have been observed digging up and chewing raw tubers (and spitting out the fiber, which is what the Bushmen do with the less easily digested tubers) and scientists have found evidence of raw tubers in the diets of human ancestors going back to at least Australopithecines. Even the inland Eskimos traditionally ate something called "Eskimo potato" (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_potato)--don't tell the ZIOH folks.
I might even make the leap of intuition that it was the inclusion of these plant foods to our diet that started the cooking revolution - but that is just a guess.
The evidence indicates that some roots and tubers were already in the diet, but cooking made them more important and made more toxic ones available as foods.
Trouble may be brewing in paradise as I'm begining to notice some relatively minor problems poping up. Some may be due to just getting older,
I've learned to become generally skeptical of that reason. I've seen every imagineable illness attributed to it and have found that many that are attributed to aging can be halted or even reversed.
As I’ve reported previously in this journal I suffer from BPH (enlarged prostate) and take an Alpha blocker (Doxasozin) to help make passing urine easier. I’ve been taking 2mg/day for almost 10 years but have recently upped the dose to 4mg/day. This would indicate that the problem is slowly getting worse so the ZC diet may have slowed the progress but it hasn’t stopped it. Not sure where to go from here on this issue. May try some of the herbal remedies, but if I did so, I don’t think I could say that I was eating Zero Carb in good conscience.
I wouldn't remain wedded to ZC if your health is declining, though if it were me, my first step would be to go back to eating my fat raw, and forego the rendered fat for a while. I've noticed that I don't fare as well on rendered fat as I do on raw fat. However, that's no guarantee it would work for you, just trying to come up with some potential ideas to test.
The herbal remedies may be tablets of concentrated plant extracts, but this only means that if I were actually eating the plants themselves, I’d be eating a lot of them.
I don't think you have to eat a lot of plants to get the hormetic benefits. Instead, I think you could randomly eat occasional moderate amounts of very strong medicinal plants. My hunch is that very strong tasting and richly colored plants may have the most of what Native Americans call "medicine" (which is, paradoxically, often also "poison," aka biocides) and thus the greatest hormetic benefits--something along the lines of horseradish, sour cherries, tart wild berries, wild grapes, kale, sauerkraut, etc. (though not necessarily those specific foods--I would do some more research on which ones have the greatest potential for your specific issues)--and some scientists appear to share this view.
I’m currently looking at “The Prostate Formula” from Real Health Laboratories which has good reviews, as well as “Crila” which seems to be a relative newcomer to the field and is a plant extract from Vietnam. Neither of these is a cure, but they may reduce the dependence on the more invasive Alpha blocker drugs.
FWIW, when I had prostate issues I tried various prostate supplements with no benefit whatsoever.
Your experience sounds like mine years ago. I was even put on a 9 month regimen of antibiotics, when the urologist decided it was time to really annhilate the bacteria to put an end to the chronic UTIs (the physicians and urologists also seemed puzzled that a male would have so many UTIs). That helped for a while but in the long run I think the loads of various antibiotics I was given caused more harm than benefit, and I think it's one reason I have such a low tolerance of carbs--gut dysbiosis. Dietary change cleared up all the chronic UTIs and chronic kidney stones for me.
I'm currently trying probiotics (raw fermented foods, not powder supplement probiotics, which never did me any good), and that might be something for you to consider as well. Oddly, the most benefit I've gotten so far is from raw fermented honey. Don't ask me to explain it. This is territory that no scientist has dared traverse, AFAIK. Raw fermented cod liver oil also seems to help a bit.
Anthony Colpo and other former VLCers are of the opinion that rather than rely on the crutch of VLC or ZC, it makes sense to try to ameliorate the underlying conditions that are causing the above-avg carb intolerance in the first place, and that seems sensible to me. FWIW, one thing Anthony found that improved his carb tolerance was lowering his ferritin level. Excessive ferritin stores can cause carb intolerance, apparently via insulin resistance. Again, these are just brainstorms, not necessarily right for you.
After much testing and handwringing it turned out to be a fungal yeast infection and had to be treated with Miconazole Nitrate as well as the antibiotic. This seems to put to rest the idea that Zero Carb will prevent fungal and yeast infections as this is clearly not the case. Another Myth busted.
That is my experience also, ZC did not resolve gut dysbiosis in me. I never intended to do ZC forever, but when my gut health started to relapse back towards the old poor level, it was a good motivator to end the ZC experiment.
Though diet clearly did not prevent this problem both my doctor and I don’t believe it to be the cause of it either, but again, you get to decide.
Most doctors don't have a frickin' clue (and like you I experienced little to no benefits from acupuncturists or chiropractors, though Chris Kresser is a chiropractor who actually gives seemingly sensible advice). I rely on them mainly for the tests they do. I find their advice generally worse than useless, with rare exceptions, and I should know, I review the notes of dozens of physicians and witness how futile their efforts are at helping people with chronic illnesses. They are much more effective at dealing with acute crises. The goal of every patient should be to eventually get off all the chronic medications that their physicians have prescribed.
This also puts another nail in the coffin of the belief that you can’t gain weight on Zero Carb.
Yup, I've seen many other folks report the same phenomenon. It seems the body eventually adapts to becoming an efficient fat utilizer and the brain increasingly recognizes animal fat as a marvelous source of calories and nutrients and people start gaining body fat again.
My belief is that my weight should be stable if I’m doing things right.
I suspect the same.
My eyesight has also progressively gotten worse over the last few years.
Could be age, but from snippets I've read here and there, it seems that hunter gatherers of years past had incredible, seemingly supernatural, vision that was not thought possible (see Peter McAllister, author of Manthropology
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-mcallister/pre-modern-man_b_836265.html).
Probably not caused by diet, but again, a ZC diet didn’t halt or prevent the problem. Five years ago I needed reading glasses of +1.75 and no correction for distance. Today I need reading glasses of +2.75 and though I still don’t correct for distance, I’m noticing problems, so will most likely need a small amount of distance correction in the near future as well.
That does seem like more than age.
Last but not least, I’ve been noticing allergy type symptoms. This has manifested itself as sneezing several times during the day, coupled with a constant runny nose with minor sinus congestion.
Sounds like a red flag. I have yet to encounter a single report of a hunter gatherer living in the wild on a wild diet with any allergies. Doesn't mean it isn't possible, but it's much more likely due to a non-natural problem than simple age. My own allergies have gotten less and less with age, after I did dietary change. At this point, when I sneeze, it's an unusual rare event that surprises me. When I was eating SAD, during the late summers I used to sneeze like crazy every morning and have to go through about a third of a box of Kleenex.
If all was well in Zero Carb land then suddenly being afflicted with allergies shouldn’t happen.
Correct.
Not sure I buy into all the hormone replacement therapy stuff that is so derigueur these days, but it is a place to start looking, and other than giving up a bit of blood to the medical vampires, the testing should be fairly harmless.
Yup, when things are going sour, it's time to re-examine. You're one of the last extremely low carb Mohicans and it sounds like it may be time to try something a bit different. One thing I do recommend is making one change at a time and carefully noting the results, but that seems to be your standard approach anyway.
A friend of mine died from kidney failure from drinking a popular herbal tea (since removed from the market) in the 1970’s. I know that some of the popular concentrated prostate remedies have led to heart and other issues so will tread with caution here.
My hunch is that one factor is that people are mistaking hormetic effects for purely good things. They figure if a small amount is good, then a ton must be better. That's not how hormesis works. The tea/supplement makers love it, though, because the tendency for folks to go to extremes means they can sell more product.
Just not willing to do this without a clear understanding of what I’m dealing with and a well thought out plan.
Might be a good time to consult with some of the other former VLC gurus, like Paul Jaminet, Kurt Harris, Stephan Guyenet, etc., or at least peruse their blogs.
You might also want to read up on bloggers who are into hormesis, like Todd Becker
http://gettingstronger.org/ and Stephan Guyenet and self-experimenters like Seth Roberts
http://blog.sethroberts.net/, though you already know a lot about self-experimentation.
I don't know why you doubt the power of zappers. I don't use them on myself, but I do use them to fry the brains of unwitting passersby on my street. They really work!
People need to know that there is no magic bullet. No matter what we eat, drink, or do, we will age, become infirm and die.
Right, but we can use the beam ray zappers to take some bastards with us!
Good luck. Please keep us informed.
