Zero Carb and VLC/Ketogenic - A Lethal Recipe for Disaster

[Iguana]

It depends what you call "moderately". We eat a lot of fruits, but not more than what suits us.

I state the obvious but obviously the obvious has to be stated, ha, ha...   

[Sorentus]

What if one happens to be intolerant to every anti nutriment because of a severely deficient gut?

The thing about RS is that they are good for as long as you posses a good gut flora with the bacteria adapted for it, someone who has a messed up GI tract might not tolerate them well, some potato starch I believe also contain anti nutriment even in the extracted form so one could be having a negative reaction from them.

[PaleoPhil]

Excellent question, Sorrentus. Anti-nutrients and toxins are only one side of the coin. There are also pronutrients and antitoxins. To build up one's resilience, so that the natural antinutrients in raw Paleo foods are less of a problem, one can use the pronutrients and antitoxins.

One way to do this is to consume prebiotics that feed our butyrate-producing Old Friends in the gut. Butyrate helps generate glutathione and gut bacteria also help synthesize B vitamins. Both glutathione and B vitamins are antitoxins. Old Friends (such as probiotic bacteria) and butyrate also help calm down an overactive immune system. Someone who has a good supply of Old Friends, butyrate, glutathione, and B vitamins would presumably be more resilient to food toxins.

See also:

The Human Microbiome, Diet, and Health: Workshop Summary, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK154087

Resistant Starch: Now We’re Getting Somewhere, Part 2 (35 links to research), http://freetheanimal.com/2013/06/resistant-starch-now-we%E2%80%99re-getting-somewhere-part-2-35-links-to-research.html

Some of My Best Friends Are Germs, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/19/magazine/say-hello-to-the-100-trillion-bacteria-that-make-up-your-microbiome.html?pagewanted=all

There are multiple sources of RS, so that if potato starch doesn't work well for you, you can use something else. I have multiple sources and potato starch isn't my top fave. Some folks also have good luck by starting out slow and gradually building up their intake of RS. Feel free to PM me about it.

Slainte mhath!

[Sorentus]

Yeah I've tried probiotic a few times from SBO to other lacto/bifidus ones. I tried b-vitamin supplement and eating a lot of ghee for the buryric acid. I haven't found any of it useful and even lots of oil doesn't even make me go. I ate at times 12 tablespoon of coconut oil and although my liver wanted to explode, I didn't go. I likely have severe gut dysbiosis. 

I feel the one only real way to hope to introduce the bacteria strain that we might miss for proper digestion is a Fecal Transplant. Something I want to get done, you just don't know which old friend you might be lacking, it might just not even be there anymore and probitoic might not offer the right strain you need. Bacterias all do very different things and we only know so much about them. I even had a 40 Hookworms injection about 3 weeks ago and I'm hoping it helps my immune system stop attacking itself so that I can introduce fruits.

Right now meat doesn't seem to give me an intolerance reaction, I get several intestinal pain but I think it might be my body having a though time adapting. I don't even eat fruits because I can't safely tolerate them. I tried all elimination diet there is and meat is the only food that doesn't make me look pregnant after I eat it. I also went and decided to limit myself to 1Tbs of raw honey with meat rather then the 3 I would have  .

With fermented honey, fermented veggie and high meat, fecal transplant and hookworm, I HOPE I get to eat fruits without symptoms and be able to introduce RS.

[van]

I suggest you try cassia pods from orkos.  Iguana could tell you more if you're interested.   They are a great laxative and cleanser.  If you do get them ( they're about an inch in diameter and a foot to foot and a half long with many little discs that you suck on,,)  start with just one or two a day on an empty stomach, building up by one additional to what ever your body needs. 

[Sorentus]

What exactly is orkos? I couldn't find it on google.

[van]

it's a distribution co. in France that imports all sorts of food from all over the world.  Why don't you pm Iguana

[Iguana]

There's a topic about cassia fistula: http://www.rawpaleodietforum.com/instinctoanopsology/cassia-fistula-why-when-how-much/
The sticks are a bout 1 cm in diameter rather than 1 inch.
Orkos: http://www.orkos.com/index_FR.php

[Sorentus]

That's too bad, French is my native language but I live in Canada  and they only deliver in Europe, but it's a good reference.

[PaleoPhil]

Yeah I've tried probiotic a few times from SBO to other lacto/bifidus ones.

I was mainly talking about prebiotics, which are the foods that feed our good gut bacteria, such as resistant starch, fruit pectin, oligosaccharides, mucins, gums and inulin. I'm also taking the Prescript Assist probiotic these days, and I eat some probiotic foods.

I also didn't get any benefit from ghee when I tried it, and that and heated EVCO made me nauseous. I ended up throwing them out. I found butter and centrifuged coconut oil to be far superior, with no noticeable negative effects, though I don't notice much benefit from them either, and of course, lots of folks here warn against eating butter and some purists warn against even centrifuged coconut oil because it's "processed."

Fecal transplant is a promising treatment for the future. Doing it on one's own risks getting pathogens from someone, so I doubt I'll try that, at least not as long as I'm getting improvements from prebiotics (and maybe eventually probiotics).

Let us know how the hookworms go.

There are multiple sources of RS, not just potato starch.

[Sorentus]

Which other source of RS would you recommend? Beside potato I can only see corn and banana and I don't digest banana well.

[PaleoPhil]

I'll PM you, as I don't want to possibly trigger a debate over what's Paleo and such.

[sabertooth]

Sorentus, ever try coconut?

[Sorentus]

In what form? I tried Raw coconut, coconut oil, coconut flour, coconut secret aminos(soya sauce substitute) and I bought coconut sugar which I'll likely won't try anytime soon.

Coconut flour is full of insoluble fiber, not sure if that's a RS you refer to.

[sabertooth]

I use coconut butter which is dehydrated blended whole coconut flesh. There isn't a lot of info I could find about coconut in the RS bonanza blogs, but I suspect that coconut fiber can be just as beneficial as other source of resistance starch in producing a healthy gut ecology in certain individuals. 

Raw coconut has a laxative effect that limits how much I can eat, but for some reason dehydrated coconut isn't a problem and I can eat it without the issues which other fiber rich plant foods can cause.

[van]

probably due to the fine particle size of the coconut in the butter, being not as irritating to the wall of either small or large intestine.  To get to that smooth buttery state, the coconut is subjected to a Lot of grinding which more than likely gets pretty hot, and incorporates lots of oxidizing air during the grinding. 

[Sorentus]

Phil, here is something I came across today and I think you might enjoy. It talks about the effects on gut flora and more of doing VLC. It talks about why its good to get RS in the diet and give stuff to feed the bacterias.

http://chriskresser.com/you-are-what-your-bacteria-eat-the-importance-of-feeding-your-microbiome-with-jeff-leach

and someone experimenting ZC and the effects on his gut flora. Although it follows paleo it's unlikely raw.

http://humanfoodproject.com/going-feral-one-year-journey-acquire-healthiest-gut-microbiome-world-heard/

[van]

check out the latter of the links,  can't wait to see what he learned.    I'll say it again,  we are at the very beginnings of knowing what is 'good' flora, for obviously there are many types all over the world..

[sabertooth]

Excellent research premise! These are the kinds of studies I would like to see hit the mainstream.

Perhaps studies like this could validate the claims of people like A.V. and other less known anti germ theory advocates such as the Hi meat eaters on this forum.

[micelte]

Thank you for the links. It's quite amazing to see that scientists are now starting to reveal to the world the importance of having straight contact and ingest microbes in order to gain health.

Here is an extract of another blog post from the same website (http://humanfoodproject.com/please-pass-microbes/) about Hadza's people litteraly eating the bacteria from their dead Impala:

Before the two Hadza men I was with jumped in to help skin and gut the Impala, I quickly took swabs of each of their hands (and 1 hour after, 3 hours after, and so on) to assess how the skin (palm) microbiota change throughout the day/week of a typical Hadza. As they slowly and methodically dismembered the animal, they carefully placed the stomach and its still steaming contents on the fleshy side of the recently removed hide. In a separate area, they piled the fatty internal organs (which men are only allowed to eat by the way). Once the animal had been processed more or less, I was amazed to see all three men take a handful of the partially digested plant material from the recently removed stomach to scrub off the copious amounts of blood that now covered their hands and foreman’s. This was followed by a final “cleaning” with dry grass for good measure.

While I was fascinated by the microbe-laden stomach contents being used as hand scrubber – presumably transferring an extraordinary diversity of microbes from the Impala gut to the hands of the Hadza – I was not prepared for what they did next. Once they had cleaned out – by hand – the contents of the stomach (“cleaned” is a generous word), they carved pieces of the stomach into bite-sized chunks and consumed it sushi-style. By which I mean they didn’t cook it or attempt to kill or eliminate the microbes from the gut of the Impala in anyway. And if this unprecedented transfer of microbes from the skin, blood, and stomach of another mammal wasn’t enough, they then turned their attention to the colon of the Impala.

After removing the poo pellets (which we collect samples of as well), they tossed the tubular colon onto a hastily built fire. However, it only sat on the fire for a minute at best and clearly not long enough to terminate the menagerie of invisible microbes clinging to the inside wall of the colon. They proceeded to cut the colon into chunks and to eat more or less raw.


As a conclusion, the future probably belongs to the bush, city dwellers good luck!

[micelte]

OK, and to go back to the subject (sorry my previous post was a little off...), here is an interesting selected extract from http://humanfoodproject.com/sorry-low-carbers-your-microbiome-is-just-not-that-into-you/:

A bit of a paradox in all of this is the increased likelihood that a low carb microbial community will most certainly lead to increased gut permeability – a well-known phenomenon whereby microbial parts (lipopolysaccharides, which leads to metabolic endotoxemia) and whole microbes themselves (bacteremia) leak from the intestinal track into the blood, leading to low-grade inflammation that is at the root of metabolic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, obesity and heart disease. So it is a paradox that a leaky gut that can be triggered from a low carb (high fat) diet – and a possible increase in gram-negative bacteria and a reduction in healthy bacteria like Bifidobacterium – doesn’t result in weight gain as demonstrated in study after study in mice and humans. Weird.

I hope people do not take this as some kind of attack on low carb diets – couldn’t be farther from the truth. There is NO AGENDA. Again, NO AGENDA. (It’s worth noting I consume a high fat, high protein, high fiber diet). Just wanted to point out some obvious concerns (maybe unfounded) and that if we get a large enough sample of low carb folks in American Gut, we might be able to provide some interesting insight – or not. Who knows, maybe low carb folks have super healthy gut microbiota (whatever that is).

So to my low carb brothers and sisters out there, try and eat a little more fibrous material if you can – diversity matters –  and help your gut bugs help you. It’s what evolution intended.

[Inger]

I have no gut issues at all... eating very little plant matter if any. But I do high meat... and all kind of bacteria rich foods like raw fish head smoothie... oysters... and I eat wild edibles when they grow, with dirt on... in summer own carrots with dirt from the yard.

the only reason I eat the carrots is because of the... dirt.

[micelte]

Great Inger, thanks for sharing. I am actually not criticizing low carbers here - just publishing what I found and what may be of interest to everyone...

In the end, anyways, it's the FEELINGS which matter, not the science

Take care

[micelte]

In the next post, you are the devil by the way, Inger

[Iguana]

Thanks Micelte, very interesting. That's why it's important not to wash our food, especially as we usually don't drink water from puddles as animals do. There are plenty of all kinds of bacteria on the fruit and plant's skin. Juice of washed grapes, for example, won't ferment into wine because the yeast which is present on their skin has been washed away: I learned it at the oenology school back in 1966! Of course, nowadays those random and various yeast are killed with SO2 after which the must is seeded again with a selected species of yeast.