When people talk about food it seems they forget about nuance. Somebody catches wind that a high carb diet is bad and before long they're full carnivore and start proselytizing that eating a fruit will kill you.
In my eyes and personal opinion, the diet we are most genetically optimal for is high fat, mostly carnivore, with seasonal fruits and berries, and remembering that modern fruits are nothing like what we have been eating for hundreds of thousands of years. And ideally insects, though they weren't a huge part of our diet. We after all are big herbivore hunters and scavengers.
You are not interpreting genetic information. You are speculating about human evolutionary history and what "paleo" means.
I do not think they are _unhealthy_, but there are some benefits in restricting them in some cases. In mine, cures _my_ digestive and mood issues. One is caused by whacked intestinal flora, and once your gut is completely destroyed, nutrient malabsorption caused by phytates and other phytochemicals worsen into systemic issues, including mood disturbances and inflammation. In my case, the experiment has been an absolute success, but I often succumb to the temptation of a pizza and I'm 5 steps back.
Long term, I will reintroduce some as they are benign, but grains are actually bad for me. Gluten is even worse, again, for me.
There is more, but this is good enough for an internet comment. The science is a google search away.
With diets we don't see the effects fully in the short term and from what you said I highly suggest you work out how to eat a range of vegetables in your diet, to support your nutritional long term needs.
If it's not just fruit but also vegetables that trigger your digestive issues, are you aware of the low Fodmap diet? It is based around understanding which vegetables don't cause the inflammation you mentioned, designed for people with digestive issues and reducing food irritation and inflammation.
"Fuck it i'm just going to eat chicken soup and unaged beef and ghee" is not nuanced, nor is it a great idea long term probably, but it did bring a pretty abrupt end to a lot of the symptoms she was having, including but not limited to: diarrhea, esophagitis, duodenitis, insomnia, random undirected anxiety, lethargy and ovarian cysts. We don't yet know what she was eating before that was causing issues, but it seems pretty clear that the issue was in her diet. She is planning on slowly reintroducing foods but her planned timeline is measured in years.
I say this as a vegan of many years. I hate it, but I can't argue with the results so far.
And no, you don't _need_ fibre. I'm right in the middle of the Bristol stool scale with zero fibre. Another thing that scientists are uncovering right now but "you need fibre, fibre is good" keeps being parroted by everybody because someone said so 5 decades ago. Such is dogma.
Google is not science. Google is not a particularly good way for many people to consume science, either, as unless one has a scientific background and a good deal of perspective, the average person just ends up confirming their biases by only looking at "science" that conforms to their bias.
I for one, was a heavy meat eater for much my life. Going pescatarian (kinda, I really just do fish oil and maybe fish as a dish once a month) recently lead a huge quality of life for myself. Really though, anecdotes are nearly completely worthless.
All other health issues with meat aside, a fully meat diet is going to load you with iron, and iron is a vigorous initiator of free radical oxidations, and high iron is associated with early dementia. Iron is also super hard to remove the body. If I ate an all meat I would watch my iron closely and perhaps donate blood as often as possible. And if you combine lots of meat with junk carbs, then that is most destructive diet possible.
Yeah if you just go on there and do a mostly undirected mosey through whatever it suggests, you'll probably end up with low quality nonsense. The answer is to become better at using the tool.
Like you are preaching that meat gives too much iron and is bad, while in my experience decades of eating gluten have caused nutritional imbalances, one of which is called iron-deficiency anemia, and causes brain fog, tiredness, pallor and shortness of breathing. More meat and iron supplements (rarely) gives me an amount of energy I haven't felt in a decade. I've found this out for myself because even medical doctors keep repeating advice ("you should eat less red meat and more whole foods" is the MD's mantra) which doesn't respect one's own physiology and weren't able to track this down.
Yes, people can thrive on a diet of Mars bars, but it's not that simple and doesn't work for everybody. And I'd be more worried about heavy metals on a pescatarian diet than any other diet, vegan or otherwise.
> The issue with talking nutrition with people is that they think one size fits all and that the body and its digestion is a simple machine we have fully understood.
Anecdotes are worthless. Conditions get worse or better, for a variety of reasons and a sample size of one is statistically and scientifically worthless. It's nearly impossible to perform something like a double blind study on one's self, and even if you could make to bake out the bias, you still have sample size of 1. You may have found a system that you can live with, but the fact that you have concluded that an nearly all meat diet is the healthiest for you means either that you either aren't human or disagree with the vast majority of dietary scientific knowledge.
For what it's worth, I was on a keto diet for a number years and my approach to keto was a nearly all meat with moderate amounts of low carb vegetables. I did good on the diet as a rule and dropped weight as rock, but study after study has found that more meat equates more higher mortality and shorter health-span. I cut out a lot of the meat but continued to abstain from simple carbs and processes foods and now have given myself the best chance known to science to be healthy in terms of diet.
> Yes, people can thrive on a diet of Mars bars, but it's not that simple and doesn't work for everybody.
Also, nobody can thrive off a diet of mars bars, so I fail to see how that adds anything to your point. Are somehow trying equate eating only mars bars with eating a diet with fruits and vegetables? Eating a diet of all mars bars has a lot more in common with eating a diet of nearly all meat than it does eating a varied diet that includes significant portions of fruits and vegetables, in a extremely unbalanced diet sense.
> And I'd be more worried about heavy metals on a pescatarian diet than any other diet, vegan or otherwise.
You are consuming more heavy metals than I am with your daily meat intake than I am with my monthly fish. And antibiotics, dioxins, copper, arsenic, and many other adulterants that end up concentrated in factory farmed meats. So if you are worried about heavy metals, I would be worried.
https://www.teamusa.org/USA-Triathlon/News/Blogs/Multisport-...
I was introduced to the idea of FODMAPs
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FODMAP
A low FODMAP diet basically restricts stuff like gluten, a lot of fruit and vegetables, etc. I've found it has pretty much solved my digestive issues, and if I cave in and eat a bread sandwich... I'm suffering for the next 2 days.
I think the human digestive system is highly complex, and should be the focus of a lot of research. There's so much we still don't know about the effects of what we eat.
I hope one day I can reintroduce "normal" food again... Because frankly FODMAP restriction sucks. At least I'm not wasting away anymore.
But vegs works great as a treat. Today I had a simple salad with my steak and it was lovely, though I'm a little gassier now.
If you use Reddit, look into /r/carnivore or /r/zerocarb.
I'd love to learn more about this type of diet btw, any recommendations before I jump into this rabbit hole?
It would be hard for me not to be in a caloric deficit. Meat and fat are incredibly filling, and once your body switches to ketone bodies and then fatty acid oxidation for fuel, it learns that, if you're overweight, you're carrying a ton of fuel ready for use. It's hard to explain if you haven't experienced it, but it actually feels _good_, as opposed to the regular carb and insulin dance.
Consult your physician.
In other words find people who are advanced in years and with the health results you hope to attain, and observe what they do. Preferably people with similar genetics to yourself!
OTOH, you can pry my veg from my cold dead hands.
Fruit juices however, totally worthless, just as bad as sugar.
Fat is healthy in a vacuum, fat with a carb heavy diet causes metabolic syndrome.
Fruit is healthy in a vacuum, but anything containing fructose, fibre or not, isn't great when you have metabolic syndrome, insulin issues or non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
Plenty of nutritional studies are completely worthless for this reason. There is no double-blind, randomised and controlled dietary studies.
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.120.0...
A study doesn't need to be "double-blind, randomised and controlled" to have value. This study of 108,000+ people over 28-30 years is going to be more pertinent to the average person than, for example, an anecdote.