They Thrive on All-Meat Diet (1929)
archive.macleans.ca
archive.macleans.ca
Also, worth noting that a meat-heavy diet can also kill you from lack of fat. This is known as protein poisoning. This obviously depends on what your source of meat is.
(1) https://www2.dmu.dk/1_viden/2_publikationer/3_fagrapporter/r...
I don't think not eating muscle tissue makes any sense in modern day. Nobody will just eat whale organ tissue any more, realistically. I mean, if you really do eat it, it might work, but will you really do that? You need those lean proteins from animals and you'll hopefully supplement fats, vitamins and minerals from other sources. Animals muscle is very Omega 6 rich, so ideally you wanna eat lean proteins (chicken, turkey breast, lean red meat...) and supplement your diet with Omega 3 sources like salmon, acai berry, walnut, flaxseed etc...
> At our request he began eating lean meat only, although he had previously noted, in the North, that very lean meat produced digestive disturbances. On the 3rd day nausea and diarrhea developed. When fat was added to the diet, a full recovery was made in 2 days.
Concerning the meat,
> The meat used included beef, lamb, veal, pork, and chicken. The parts used were muscle, liver, kidney, brain, bone marrow, bacon, and fat. While on lecture trips V. S. occasionally ate a few eggs and a little butter when meat, was not readily available. The carbohydrate content of the diet was very small, consisting solely of the glycogen of the meat. The men, except during short periods of special observation, ate as much as they wanted and proportioned the lean meat to the fat as they desired. T. S., in 31 days of special diet in the ward in which he was free from digestive disturbances, took an average of 0.81 kilos of meat per day while K. A. for 110 days averaged 0.70 kilos per day.
There is protein toxemia where the kidneys can't deal with the wastes; it's as far as I know always a symptom of kidney damage. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protein_toxicity
An explorer might last a little while on an all-meat diet but you'd be missing out on a lot of essential vitamins and minerals. The Inuit for example, only avoid scurvy by getting their vitamin C from raw fish. (Cooking it destroys the little it contains.)
Interesting article, though!
Oddly, no scurvy or other health issues. I do not supplement apart from salt and other seasonings. Probably 50% of my calories are from grass fed beef, combined with other high quality meats, eggs and a little diary.
There are people who get good results from only beef. And there are people who have done this for many years without adverse health effects.
There is a ton of conventional wisdom / "science" that says we can't thrive on an all meat diet. Anecdotally, there are a ton of people who do.
My health cares not for your wife's education.
Either you’re getting it from your dairy or other dietary sources or eating enough meat that’s raw enough to get your minimum.
My experience as a lactose person is that people tend to greatly underestimate how much dairy they consume, which is largely fortified (edit: as others point out it’s not fortified with vitamin C).
When you say all meat diet are you sure you’re not exaggerating? You probably consume all sorts of other stuff in small quantities. You don’t have any candy ever (often a source of vitamin C)? No potato chips ever? No cheese ever? No fortified yogurt or milk ever? You don’t ever eat cheeseburgers with buns or cheese or mayo?
I don't think I've ever seen dairy fortified with vitamin C. In the US, at least, dairy is typically fortified with vitamins A and D.
On the other hand there are carnivore Youtubers like sv3rige who drink vegetable juice but don't talk about it on their channel, so who knows if it's true or not: https://youtu.be/rQlvvbHqtj8?t=25
I’ll bet $1000 Jordan Pederson is full of shit when he claims he eats nothing but cooked beef.
Why? There is an incentive to lie for a profit. However, I never claimed that Peterson is a fraud because he charges for consultations. I responded to a comment asking about what he had to gain from lying by showing that he has ample financial incentive to do so.
Just because you disagree with my comment, doesn't mean you should strawman my post.
People wouldn't be suspicious of Peterson's claims if he provided proof. I mean, even breatharians agreed to be documented while following their purported diet. Surely Peterson can do the same.
You're also confusing healthy skepticism with lack of curiosity, almost as if you're jumping to the defense of something you made an emotional investment in without consulting rationality.
Curiosity as to what? The cynical content of your mind?
> just emotional reactions to mine.
Respond to my words, not your imaginations of what I'm feeling.
> You're also confusing healthy skepticism with lack of curiosity,
First of all, yours is a knee-jerk rejection of someone's report of recovering their health. It is unhealthy cynicism, and not even remotely healthy. It is just as well I did not have you advising me, all those years ago, when coming across the likes of Peterson and meatheals.com before proceeding with curiosity to heal my own chronic condition of 4 years, eh? Otherwise this conversation would not be happening.
> almost as if you're jumping to the defense of something you made an emotional investment in without consulting rationality.
Look, factual reports are there to establish a prima-facie case worthy of further investigation (sign of curiosity) – rather than capricious dismissal like yours (sign of cynicism) – and thus find out what it is on about. It is called being sensible. Maybe this is how your mind words, but neither emotional investment nor the counteracting rationality (which ironically tends to be emotion-influenced) is required.
You need to have an emotional investment to be cynical.
If that's the theory, it's definitely wrong. Vitamin C serves basic structural purposes like binding your cells to your other cells.
Looks like we should see several prominent YouTubers die horribly... about a year ago.
> The onset of symptoms of scurvy depends on how long it takes for the person to use up their limited stores of vitamin C. The human body is unable to make vitamin C. For example, if the diet includes no vitamin C at all, the average onset of symptoms is about four weeks. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scurvy#Pathogenesis
[1] https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/scu...
He doesn't say much about the blood's nutritional content in the clip here but he does express what might be a feeling of sexual arousal at around 2:50: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RX9T4xJqxFo
Weight loss isn't a really good metric. I also lost a similar amount of weight in the first few months of going vegan. Around 40 pounds after half a year and I feel great. My blood tests came back more than great even after 3 years now.
A few things to remember:
- 3 months is not enough time to know if a diet is good for you personally in the long term, even anecdotally
- weight loss is a poor metric for the healthiness of a diet
- anecdotes are not what you should base decisions about your one and only body on (remember that some diet pills in the 90s worked well and spread by word of mouth because people lost weight but also caused heart attacks in some)
Most people are near-totally uninterested in their actuarial life expectancy. As a result, close to 100% of people on a diet are looking for weight loss.
Whether you should consider it a "health" objective is a more interesting question. From a Darwinian perspective, attracting a mate is much more important than whether you live to be 67 or 72.
And yeah muscle tissue is the important one. Any diet is sustainable until you burn through all your secondary reserves. How many buff vegetarians do you see? In my experience, you need to be a bona fide nutritional expert to maintain muscle mass on an exclusively plant-based diet.
As buff vegan the proportion of buff vegans among vegans is probably the same as proportion of buff non-vegans among non-vegans. You have to be braindead not to be able to figure out what to eat as vegan to grow muscle, in the worst case I guess you can go to factory farmers who have mastered the art of growing muscle from plants..
- Personal health and nutrition is one of several criteria by which diets can be compared - A carnivore diet is harmful to the environment - A carnivore diet causes more suffering to sentient animals
Death, even if painless, is usually something we prefer not to have happen to us, most of the time.
And regarding death: the alternative for livestock is not a life of leisure where they get to meander through the country side and nibbling a little here and a little there. No, the alternative is never being alive. And death on a farm is usually much more humane than death in nature.
Interesting. If we accept this argument -- that one who has brought someone else into existence is allowed to use lethal force on them (although "gently") -- because otherwise this someone wouldn't be in existence; then wouldn't we then also have to allow human parents to euthanise their children?
> And death on a farm is usually much more humane than death in nature.
Non-human animals are usually transported in trucks or on trains for many hours or days on their way to the slaughterhouse, with little access to food and water, under conditions you surely wouldn't want to travel.
Regardless, if we ignore that, and assume the trip to the slaughterhouse is 100% painless, would you still want someone to give you a "humane" death at the time of their choosing? Often animals are gassed; and I wonder how the same method of causing someone's death can be "humane" when applied to non-humans, but not (and here I'm of course making an assumption on your behalf and might be wrong) when done to humans?
But, no, I do not consider animals to be morally equivalent to humans, so I am okay having a different moral system for animals. And I, personally, would rather live to be executed than never get a chance to be alive. Life is precious. I think we forget that. Here’s something that will perhaps drive home just how precious it is. Almost every black American is the descendant of people who thought it was A) worth living in cruel and brutal bondage, and B) worth bringing children into such a life.
Life is precious. So why do we allow suffering and killing to please our taste buds?
While existing life is precious, do you also believe that not-yet-existing life of a calf is so precious, that we need to forcefully inseminate cows at the highest possible rate their bodies can handle?
If life is that sacred, do you support doing that to human women, too? Because otherwise we'd be acting unfairly to all the unborn children who would otherwise "never get a chance to be alive", right? If we don't do that we'll take away the life of millions of hypothetical humans, right?
> But, no, I do not consider animals to be morally equivalent to humans, so I am okay having a different moral system for animals.
This is somewhat agreeable. Non-humans are not equivalent to humans, and therefore it would be non-sense to argue that dogs should have the right to vote, and pigs should be allowed drivers license. They are so different from humans that they lack the capacity to do any of this.
However, many mammals (dogs, cats, cows, pigs, horses) can feel pain and distress and react to it in a way very similar to humans, by screaming and wrenching and sweating, by trying to escape. Why should their interest in not feeling pain be considered?
If we are OK to just say that we have a "different moral system" for a anyone who is not a member of our species -- regardless of what capacities they may have -- then surely it's also OK to have a "different moral system" for anyone who is of a different gender, or different race, or different nationality than ours, isn't it?
> Almost every black American is the descendant of people who thought it was A) worth living in cruel and brutal bondage, and B) worth bringing children into such a life.
Is your point that life is so precious that it's fine to enslave animals (both human and non-human) because even when someone is living under horrid conditions, it is still "worth bringing children into such a life" and "worth living in cruel and brutal bondage", and that makes it somehow justifiable?
If you ate only meat you eat the equivalent of 1 cow per year.
Compare that with the amount of bugs, nematodes, rodents, etc. killed by modern farming methods.
It's amazing what creating a caloric deficit combined with weight training can achieve.
I've also lost weight, I'm down about 9 kg of real weight (using the weight from week 2 of diet as start point) in 4 months. I took four weeks in Jan "off" from my diet, just eating when I was hungry (unfortunately lots of crisps). I still dropped 2kg over that period but 0.5kg of that was muscle.
I changed me eating pattern such that I ate a normal balanced evening meal (50% veg, 25% protein/carb) with either a banana for breakfast and two slices of bread with filling for lunch OR porridge for breakfast and a banana for lunch. On trainings days I have two eggs on my bread and ham if I have it in stock.
I've also added about 2kg of muscle mass overall.
I would strongly recommend following a "diet" that you can stick to long term. I've done the whole meat-only diet, I've done the 6-a-day bodybuilders diet. I've done soup diets. Every single time I've put most of the weight back on afterwards and have had to battle hunger the whole way through. With my current attempt it's far easier because I'm not hungry and I love what I'm eating.
From all I've seen nutritional sciences barely qualify as a science given the large corpus of falsehoods produced by it, even in recent years. (Remember cholesterol in eggs?)
The older I get, the more I understand why red-state bubba hates most accredited "professionals".
Getting a PhD in nutrition is the same as another other PhD -- you study at a graduate program under an existing tenured professor in that field, do original research and successfully defend your dissertation.
My wife happens to have gotten her undergrad degree at a great school, did her dietetic internship at an excellent hospital and worked as a dietitian for a decade before returning to do her graduate work at an even better school.
But one can call themselves a "nutritionist" with no training whatsoever; the term isn't legally protected like "doctor" is.
Nutrition is a field where the underlying science is difficult as, say, cryptography, but is far more obviously relevant to the average person's life. So popular books are easy to get published and there's no guarantee that the author has much actual nutrition training at all.
And again unlike crypto there are several large, entrenched, deep-pocketed interests in America that aggressively promote low-quality science to increase consumption of their products.
When you make tens of billions of dollars per year, it's not too hard to fund a hundred studies that year and use p-hacking and other tricks to get at least a couple to come out with some result that shows your industry in a good light. Then you make sure that those get covered with a headline in some newspaper or magazine.
> Are there experts with a track record of scientific rigor?
I'm not the one with the PhD but I know that my wife is a big fan of both Walter Willett and Marion Nestle.
The theory is that for highly sensitive individuals, any carb/fiber/allergenic content in food causes inflammation and dysbiosis, which leads to these chronic conditions.
They believe that by removing all these food components, even if the diet has low levels of essential nutrients like Vitamin C, they are absorbed and utilised better than in a regular diet, due to the reduced inflammatory activity.
I haven't tried it and won't be doing it myself, but I have been through episodes in my life where I was afflicted by these kinds of chronic "mystery" illnesses that didn't seem to respond to any kind of treatment, and I can understand the kind of pain and exasperation that would lead people to try this.
[1] https://hvmn.com/podcast/meat-heals-the-autoimmune-disease-c...
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/zerocarb/comments/8f0o1w/my_experie...
First, I love hearing carnivore diet stories because I relate to them a lot. Varying symptoms, cut out some foods, drastically improved health. I lived for 23 years with sinus headaches, I had to figure out how to work through them in college. Life is so nice now that I don't want to take a drill to my forehead.
That said, I think the carnivore diet is the shotgun blast approach. I bet there are specific triggers for their symptoms that they could identify by following a strict diet (e.g. chicken and rice) and slowly reintroducing stuff.
It's an area that is drastically understudied. All the celiac papers are on gastrointestinal issues (which I had, but the sinus headaches were 50 times worse). My understanding is eating gluten while celiac causes your body to attack your small intestine, which causes deterioration. This usually leads to problems with FODMAPs. My brother has issues with lactose, and for me it was fructose.
It's hard going to something that isn't evidence backed, but sometimes the best we can do is do the experiment on ourselves. I'm tracking what I eat everyday and when I get sinus headaches. I primarily eat protein. I get 3 beef patties and 2 small chicken breasts each day from the burger place at work. The french fries and corn chips at work are safe for me to eat, so those are the carbs I get regularly. I take a vitamin C supplement. On the weekends I cook steak, and some brazilian cheese breads. There is also a brand of gluten free bread with no sugar that I really like.
I'm extremely fortunate that I work somewhere that can accommodate my diet and that I can afford meat regularly outside of that. So yea, shout out to everyone else with weird food reactions, stay strong.
Usually for about AU$4.50 a kg, compared to $14+ / kg for "quality" cuts of lamb.
I slow cook them, often with curry powder and extra turmeric, or a tomato base.
If I eat bread or pasta or baked goods regularly, I get intense urges to scratch my skin, cervical lymph nodes become active, my sinuses start getting mucousy, my knuckles and wrists start to ache, and I feel like my ears are a little blocked and sensitive.
A few good meals of mostly slow cooked mammal results in rapid improvement, and if I stay away from the things I know cause general, non-localised inflammation, I generally feel well. More awake when I'm awake, and more asleep when I'm asleep.
Basically, one day, I started getting pressure and pain and ringing in my ear. It was really bad about every other day. I went to an ENT and he diagnosed me with meniere's disease and told me that I had permanent hearing loss. I kept going to doctors. One of them diagnosed me with endolymphatic hydrops.
I spent a month or so obsessively reading research papers, and internet sites seemed to basically be support groups for people whose lives are ruined and can never think straight again.
I had good reason to suspect it was an autoimmune disease, because steroids cured my symptoms. I also had my personal suspicions that wheat was involved but I couldn't correlate anything.
So I started eliminating foods and keeping a food diary. Long story short, about a year later, I was very confident that wheat was my biggest trigger. If I eat a large amount of wheat, my symptoms come back 36 hours later, and last for at least 2 days.
I struggled with the fact that I have no doctor suggestions, or diagnosis, or study of what problem I have, what it is, or any way to prove to anyone else that wheat is causing my problem. Most people think that I'm just jumping on a gluten free fad bandwagon. Oh well. I've tested it about 8 times, including blind tests where I accidentally ate wheat. I've been almost symptom free for like 2 years now.
As mammals, being allergic to mammal muscle meat and organs isn't compatible with life.
[1] Okerblom J., Varki A.: Biochemical, Cellular, Physiological, and Pathological Consequences of Human Loss of N-Glycolylneuraminic Acid, ChemBioChem 18, 1155, 2017, DOI: 10.1002/cbic.201700077
[2] Peri S. et al.: Phylogenetic Distribution of CMP-Neu5Ac Hydroxylase (CMAH), the Enzyme Synthetizing the Proinflammatory Human Xenoantigen Neu5Gc, Genome Biology and Evolution, 2018, DOI: 10.1093/gbe/evx251
Or are you just here to denigrate your fellow human beings?
The data has been pretty clear since the early 90s and the large population studies that were made then.
Is there any other way that a chain of events leading to a scientific finding can begin?
Famously, Jordan Peterson:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/08/the-peter...
You're talking about people who have suffered for years with painful illnesses that have seemed impossible to treat, connecting online and working together as they experiment to find possible treatments, testing the results and reporting back so others can benefit from the learnings.
It deserves better than this kind of grunting dismissal.
Sure, much of the evidence around for this stuff is anecdotal or n=1 pathology results, but it's necessarily the case that anecdote and small-sample data is the first step in the chain of events that can lead to scientific findings.
If your point is simply that sometimes people believe things that are untrue, that is obvious to the point of banality.
If it’s that anyone experimenting with carnivore diets and reporting positive results should by-default be treated with distrust or contempt, your point seems to lack both compassion and scientific awareness.
We're talking about groups of people experiencing similar health problems, engaging in ongoing discussion to experiment with possible remedial techniques and reporting back with their results.
If they are achieving positive results, which seems to be the case, they deserves better than this kind of sneer.
There is nothing absurd about this diet if it is enabling people to successfully manage their diseases (meatheals.com). You should respect and appreciate that fact instead of getting mad about it.
Diet is not religion. It is simply a tool and for some can be a lifestyle.
You write "An explorer might last a little while on an all-meat diet".
As the Maclean's article points out, "The Arctic explorer Stefansson and a former Arctic confrère, Andersen, went on an exclusive meat diet for a year".
I think of "little bit", for a diet, as being somewhat less than one year. How long do you mean by it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilhjalmur_Stefansson#Advocacy... further points out "In the end, the one-year project stretched to four years, during which time the two men ate only the meat they could kill and the fish they could catch in the Canadian Arctic. Neither of the two men suffered any adverse after-effects from their four-year experiment."
Surely four years is enough to show that one can last a long time on an all-meat diet, yes?
You write "The Inuit for example, only avoid scurvy by getting their vitamin C from raw fish."
The Wikipedia article on Inuit cuisine, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_cuisine , says instead, "Vitamin C is obtained through sources such as caribou liver, kelp, whale skin, and seal brain; because these foods are typically eaten raw or frozen, the vitamin C they contain, which would be destroyed by cooking, is instead preserved."
Note that while those meats are raw, they are not fish. The Wikipedia page cites http://discovermagazine.com/2004/oct/inuit-paradox (which in turn cites the same Stefansson described in the Maclean's article) wherein we can read:
> Native foods easily supply those 10 milligrams of scurvy prevention, especially when organ meats—preferably raw—are on the menu. For a study published with Kuhnlein in 2002, Fediuk compared the vitamin C content of 100-gram (3.55-ounce) samples of foods eaten by Inuit women living in the Canadian Arctic: Raw caribou liver supplied almost 24 milligrams, seal brain close to 15 milligrams, and raw kelp more than 28 milligrams. Still higher levels were found in whale skin and muktuk.
This makes it seem that the Inuit were not "only" dependent on fish, but also had non-fish sources for dietary vitamin C.
The underlying scientific article is at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S088915750... . It lists raw fish eggs, raw whale, caribou liver, ringed seal liver, and blueberries as the most notable sources of vitamin C in traditional foods.
I'm aware that the article claims that these two went on an exclusive meat diet for a year. I'm saying that personally I don't believe the claim. Alternatively, that it's true but that they accidentally got required nutrition in ways similar to the Inuit.
Do you think they were lying/cheating on the food they ate, as published in http://www.jbc.org/content/87/3/651.full.pdf ?
Do you discount the observation that "Inuit would often go 6 to 9 months a year eating nothing but meat and fish"?
Do you think the meat items mentioned in the JAMA are incomplete sources of nutrition?
Why "accidentally got required nutrition in ways similar to the Inuit"? After his many years of polar exploration and friendship with the Inuit, how can you dismiss that it was a learned practice?
Do you know of subsequent papers casting doubt on the results? Or replicating it, for that matter?
I found http://home.exetel.com.au/surreality/health/A%20Review%20of%... which says
> This level of protein intake may have been sustainable if hepatic enzymes were given time to upregulate (as there were several years between Stefansson living with the Inuit and the experiment at Bellevue Hospital and any previous upregulation of hepatic enzymes would have diminished), but the result for this limited study (where n = 1) indicates that the values shown in Table 1 are at least realistic, although we would speculate that individuals would tend to be at the lower end of the range for MRUS without a lead-in time for upregulating hepatic enzyme function.
which considers it feasible.
What other vitamins and minerals can’t be found in animal products? So far as I know, pretty much 0.
The vegans on the other hand... no B12, limited K2 (except fermented stuff), limited vitamin A, limited EPA/DHA/DPA/CLA, limited vitamin D (mushrooms maybe have some D2?). I’m being generous with “limited” here.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson's book, "THE FAT OF THE LAND": https://web.archive.org/web/20180802084820/http://highsteaks...
Vilhjalmur Stefansson's coverage of the same topics from Harper's Monthly Magazine, November 1935:
- Part 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20180109155358/http://www.biblel...
- Part 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20180104021843/http://www.biblel...
- Part 3: https://web.archive.org/web/20171206075942/http://www.biblel...
The Harper's Magazine articles cover the same ground as the book but are better written in my opinion.
Also note: I am not associated with any web site.
When eaten raw, there can actually be significant carbohydrates present. The mitochondria for instance contain glucose in-flight that apparently gets destroyed by the cooking process.
At least that's what I've read. It seems plausible to me that one could get all the nutrition they need eating copious amounts of raw animal flesh, drinking the blood, eating the liver, everything.
The classical Inuit diet is more unique than just being meat-based, it's also mostly raw. This detail is often overlooked by those using the Inuit diet as proof for some dietary argument.
[1] https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/401/why-do-human...
http://highsteaks.com/carnivores-creed/owsley-the-bear-stanl...
Stayed healthy till his death in a car crash at 76.
A fun story here:
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/uncle_johns_ham_the_grat...
You're saying she already tried a ketogenic diet for a few months and it didn't help?
100 years and nothing has changed
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and...
Though it’s not really about vegetables either I think I just have some weird food phobias: I don’t like my food to touch, I only eat ‘plain’ things, I need my food to be homogenous (like smooth salsa vs chunky salsa).
I’ve never really met someone like me before, but let me explain my seemingly unique situation. You know how when you look at garbage or vomit you have this viceral reaction of disgust? That’s me, but for most food. I don’t even like to look at salad, it makes me want to vomit.
I’ve been this way since I was born (according to my parents) and maybe if I worked really hard and CBT or something for years I could overcome it. But why fight it? I’m not overweight, if a little bit out of shape. I’m happy with what I eat (steak, pizza, plain hamburgers, chinese food with no vegetables, candy, etc) and feel fine (though I don’t have anything else to reference I guess).
I have many friends and acquaintances who put no effort into directing their kids away from their picky eating habits, and the kids invariably end up living on the canonical kids-menu diet. Some kids naturally grow into more balanced eating habits and preferences, but many don't, and those parents are setting their children up for a lifetime of health issues.
This may or may not have anything to do with you. It's just what I see in my circle.
But at this point in my life (I'm 26), I'm not sure I can do anything to change it (or if I could, it would take a tremendous amount of will power). I take vitamins and omega-3 pills, and, hopefully, this will be enough. But I feel the ship has sailed on my food habits.
If I had a kid, I think I would probably try to encourage them to eat healthy food. I'm not really sure how hard my parents tried, but they're good parents, and probably they tried at least a little bit.
If your kid doesn't want to eat the food you want them to eat, what should you do? Force feed them? At some point, you just have to accept that they are who they are, and they (and you) will have to deal with the consequences.
No! NO NO NO NO! It's never too late! Will power, yes, but you can do it, and I'll tell you, no exaggeration, your life depends on it. I know it doesn't feel like it at age 26, when the shear force of youth can power you through tremendous abuse and neglect. But that won't be true for long.
Your brain is an adaptive, plastic, brilliant fucking miracle of a learning machine, and you've spent 20+ years training it on a tiny, bland set of flavors and textures. It makes sense that retraining it will take time, but I think it'll happen faster than you imagine. I have often heard that children become accustomed to new flavors and foods within a small-ish number of exposures -- around ten or so. I believe this is true for adults as well, at least nearly so. Start small, and make it easy on yourself. Pick a dish or type of food you find challenging. A good prepared dish, not something spare and ruthless like a bowls of spinach, but rather dishes prepared with taste in mind, like a good curry. Eat at a reasonably priced restaurant or get it from a store so you can work on it with minimal effort. Appetizers. Don't force yourself to clean your plate, but give it a good try, every time. Take your time, let the flavors and textures become familiar bit by bit. I bet it won't take more than a dozen tries. Then move on to the next thing.
All kids can be made into picky eaters. The most stubborn picky eaters are created in an instant the first time parents give in and allow the kids to determine the menu. That's insanity. Every two-year-old understands clearly the kind of power they've thus been given, and they'll fight hard to keep it. For my kids, we enforced a simple rule: we never made them eat their entire meal, but they had to try everything. And I mean really try, not a token lick. We put some effort into learning how to cook tastefully, and we we made each meal for everyone, no substitutions, so we didn't train them to win PB&J by refusing to eat dinner. I forbade kids-menu food when we went out to restaurants. Starting as soon as they could eat solid food, they ate what we ate. As a result, I had kids I could take anywhere and eat any almost kind of food, even when they were toddlers. There were struggles, and they still have their preferences; my youngest still doesn't like salads, but she eats them without gagging or complaining. Most importantly, we've given them the foundation for expanding and refining their tastes. They're not hesitant to try new things because their palates are experienced, and they know they won't be punished if it turns out they don't like something. My oldest in particular loves food. She eats blue cheese with a spoon. She loves caviar. Fucking caviar.
This took patience and consistency on the part of my wife and me, and it's still a work in progress, but it's a fundamental, critical part of parenting. It's one of the few things I feel I didn't fuck up as a parent.
All of them?! Gee, there's such a wide range. Even, say, potatoes can be cooked so many entirely different ways - steamed/boiled, baked, chips etc. I guess you can say that because you've never tried almost all of them. Your parents 'forced' you only 'a handful of times' to eat vegetables? I can't begin to fathom how someone could have a child and virtually never give them any vegetables of any kind to eat...
My parents certainly tried to give me vegetables. Even going so far to pay me to eat them, but I always refused. Even as a 2 year old.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/7/24/17606958/me...