Some information about fiber for consideration.
Dr. Zoë Harcombe - 'What about fiber?' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KrmpK_Lckg
118 karma · joined August 30, 2016
Dr. Zoë Harcombe - 'What about fiber?' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KrmpK_Lckg
I tend to agree here. Again it gets back to your goals. (Strict) Carnivore and (strict) keto are great tools to achieve your diet/fitness goals, but I don't really consider these diets in their strict form to be "maintenance" diets. Once you achieve your goals I would relax things and reintroduce more diversity of foods. On the other hand, if keto/carnivore is the only thing that seems to work for you, I'd keep doing it and just listen carefully to your body.
"Regardless of the quality of your meat products, animals still have metabolic processes that concentrate toxins, especially higher in the food chain."
I recommend eating primarily ruminants (cattle, bison, sheep, goats, deer, moose, etc.) and small fish / shellfish. With regard to ruminants, these animals are plant-eating herbivores and are on the bottom of the food-chain-- they are "predators" of only plants. Biomagnification of toxins is more of an issue for consumption of omnivores (e.g., pig, chicken, dunno... bear meat?) and predators (e.g., tuna, shark, swordfish)-- the animals which eat other animals.
"You need to set your body up for success by giving it a varied diet with nutrients from different kinds of food. ... I am in favor of a balanced diet, a little of everything, mostly plants, and high-quality animal organ meats."
I like this advice very much. I'm not much of a detoxification proponent, I don't think there's much science to support a lot of the kooky practices out there. I think your body is surprisingly good at sequestering and eliminating toxins from your system. If you eat a natural, whole-food and simple/unprocessed diet which is varied (including plant and animal sources), this is going to give you great odds of being metabolically fit and free of toxins. Once you get that down, I'd also be sure to try to address other lifestyle factors such as sleep, stress, exercise, personal connections, etc.
Myths and Truths about Fiber https://chriskresser.com/myths-and-truths-about-fiber/
The hot air and cold facts of dietary fibre https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2659900/
Some diets, including a standard american diet but especially exclusionary diets like vegan, vegetarian, keto, carnivore/paleo diets can have major nutrient gaps. Those types of diets require careful planning of meals and/or supplementation to address gaps.
Magnesium isn't hard to get. Vitamin D and EPA/DHA are easy to get if you eat animal foods (esp fatty fish, liver, cheese and eggs).
Probiotics is a vague category and hasn't been shown to be necessary in a diet. Medical science understands so little about the gut-biome that you should be extremely suspicious of anyone claiming to be an expert. The advice usually boils down to general platitudes like,"Fermented foods and fiber feed our gut bacteria and is good for overall gut health." without defining what any of that means or how it works. I guess other animals/omnivores that don't eat fermented foods or fiber must really be undercutting their lifespan potential.
I'm very fit and in excellent health. 50 year old male, a performance athlete, 6'4" 230 lbs, 14% body fat (i.e., lean and muscular). BP is 120/65, lipid panel is:
Total: 235 HDLC: 69 LDL: 154 TRIG: 58
I got a Coronary Calcium Scan (CAC) this year and my score was zero, i.e., no arterial calcification. This is a far superior indicator of heart/cv health than a lipid panel.
Nutrition is a backwater of poor science, mostly backed by epidemiological survey studies rather than randomized control trials. Eating meat is a proxy or associative marker for people with poor lifestyle habits eating a (terrible) standard american diet. The health orgs are usually political animals, esp the AHA who still believes that dietary cholesterol is a cause of heart disease, that polyunsaturated oils are good for heart health, etc. They look at nutrition as follows: "Let's see, you consume sugar soft drinks and beer, you eat hot dogs, bacon-cheeseburgers, pizza, cheesesteaks, french fries, wings, donuts, waffles and pancakes, eggs and sausage, candy bars and ice cream. You don't exercise, don't sleep well, you're obese, pre-diabetic and show signs of cardiovascular disease. THE PROBLEM HERE IS YOU NEED TO CUT ALL THAT UNHEALTHY MEAT OUT OF YOUR DIET!!"
Research gaps in evaluating the relationship of meat and health https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03091...
A more objective view of the science is:
“...the interactions between meat, gut and health outcomes such as CRC [colorectal cancer] are very complex and are not clearly pointing in one direction... Epidemiological and mechanistic data on associations between red and processed meat intake and CRC are inconsistent and underlying mechanisms are unclear... Better biomarkers of meat intake and of cancer occurrence and updated food composition databases are required for future studies.”
If it's weight loss, there are generally three (successful) ways to go about it:
1. Change nothing in your diet, but eat fewer (but larger) meals per day while maintaining a calorie deficit for your age/gender/weight. This is known as intermittent fasting. It may or may not work for you. 2. Eat mostly plants and/or low-fat meats such as chicken (and low fat fish). Plants are carby, so you'll need to keep your total calories from fat under 10% or the plant carbs will block fat burning. This diet tends to be a difficult adjustment for many, since it is a bit like eating like a rabbit. 3. Eat as few carbs as possible, and get your calories from predominantly meat (aka carnivore diet) or fat (keto diet) or a mix. Aim for > 65% calories from fat (while still keeping under daily calorie expenditure). Both carnivor or keto lend themselves well to lipolysis aka fat burning, especially if you also layer in intermittent fasting from item #1 in this list. If you don't like meat/dairy or fat, this option is pretty much dead-in-the-water.
There are a ton of sources for all of the above approaches and their various rules, tips and pitfalls. I recommend trying each for 6-8 weeks and seeing which diets feel like something you could see yourself living with for the next 12-18 months.
I don't hold much stock in the Blue Zones. There are regional/genetic and lifestyle differences in different parts of the world, particularly in isolated places. On the other hand, if you look at Hong Kong, it has the highest per-capita meat consumption in the world and the highest longetivity. I'm not implying that meat is the reason for their longetivity-- just point out that longevity is more complicated than the food in your diet.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/hong-kong-now-has-the-worlds...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Smoke_point_of_cookin...
I've never heard of anyone dying from lack of fiber. Have you? Is there a medical condition for this?
I'm sure that some hunter gatherers ate plants containing fiber. We are omnivores and able to get calories from many different sources depending on availability in our environment. That still doesn't mean that fiber is a necessity or requirement.
Very noble diet/ethos for many reasons, but it is not optimized for nutrition, it's optimized for other goals.
Well, the question I responded to was about inexpensive nutrient-dense foods. Based on this organ meats, eggs and fish/shellfish beats plant foods all to hell.
"Where is the fiber..."
Fiber is nutrient-dense? Nope, it's not. It's not even digestible by the body. Why start out a criticism by leading with your worst card? Let's move on to the rest of your hand...
"Or the vast array of phytochemicals, polyphenols/flavonoids"
What value do these supply? Serious question. I know there is a lot of interest in them as an area of study, but they sound like the hope/hype behind anti-oxidants, for which the science has not panned-out favorably.
"the WHO has recently pointed out that processed/red meat is carcinogenic."
Their recommendation is based on epidemiological surveys, not randomized control trials. I could just as easily point to studies showing higher cancer rates of vegetarians [0] versus meat eaters. But it doesn't matter, because virtually all nutrition studies are based on questionnaires where they ask "How much steak did you eat last week?" or "What percentage of your total diet was leafy greens last month?" which is about as reliable as you might expect. It is extremely difficult to arrive at meaningful conclusions from epidemiological studies, because there are so many built-in confounders and biases. Even then, the associations are extremely weak (For comparison, the p-value of relative risk for smoking causing lung cancer is: 8.96. The p-value of meat causing cancer is... 1.5. [1] Values under 2.0 are typically considered tenuous/weak.). It's fairly ridiculous to believe that animal flesh, something that has been a major component of our diet since pre-human times (2 million years +) is detrimental to our health. By contrast, humans incorporated more plants and grains in the last 12k years-- relatively recent, about 350 generations ago from an evolutionary perspective.
"I don't think you understand what "nutrient density" means."
Sure I do. I _also_ bothered to read the definition put forward by the poster I was responding to [2]. Thanks for the link to your preferred nutrition expert, Dr. Furhman, but I'll pass-- by all appearances the guy is an alt-science (veggies cure cancer!!) anti-vaxx detoxification quack [3].
Look, I replied to a post about cheap (but healthy) nutrient-dense foods. I wasn't trying to trigger the plant-based religious fanatics. I never told anyone not to eat plants, and I think everyone should experiment and keep pushing to find what works for their personal health. Over the last 6-8 years I've done mediterranean (DASH), vegetarian, keto, and paleo/carnivore.
I'm happy to continue the conversation but I think you're the one who could benefit from a bit more homework, particularly on the specific question I was replying to.
0. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19279082 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20663065 2. https://chriskresser.com/what-is-nutrient-density-and-why-is... 3. https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Joel_Fuhrman
From what I've read, the fiber guidelines are basically made-up and not based on any formal nutritional controlled studies. When you think about it, fiber is literally undigestible plant material. It seems a bit strange for your health/body to depend on consumption of something which cannot be digested.
King Mackerel is known to contain a lot of mercury, but that is a different species of Mackerel which is quite large (in general, larger predatory fish have greater concentrations of mercury).
As long as you are eating the tinned Mackerels, the kind which are small like sardines, I don't think you have significant mercury risk. Canned/tinned mackerel and sardines are considered some of the safest and most sustainable fish you can consume.
https://www.csu.edu/cerc/researchreports/documents/MercuryFa...
Vegetable/seed oils are not whole foods or naturally stable. They are modern frankenfoods made from leftover agri-waste via industrial chemical processes. Under high heat these oils become highly oxidated and not the kind of stuff you want your body to deal with.
It's important to account for the fact that plant foods often come with antinutrients (lectins, phytates, oxalates) which block absorption of vitamins. Most plant sources also supply only incomplete amino acid profiles.
Also, plant foods often have their vitamins amounts listed in the form of precursors and not the bio-available kind that your body can utilize without a conversion process. So, iron in spinach? It's not heme-iron, so it's not so great when you consider the above along with a high oxalate payload. Vitamin A in carrots? It in carotinoids such as beta-carotine rather than retinol which is the format your body uses. Your body prefers bioavailable forms of vitamins and nutrients, rather than spending energy converting to usable formats.
This is why animal foods are so hard to beat for nutrient density. E.g., herbivore animals graze on plants, converting the nutrients into animal-appropriate formats and fuller-spectrum proteins.
All human diets come at the expense of other animals and creatures. This is a natural part of life and shall always be so. It is false to beleive that there is a choice to make between slaughtering animals for food and peaceful coexistence with nature/animals. That's not an objective accounting and not reality-based.
For plant-based agriculture, first you take a plot of land away from the wilderness and native animals. Then you clear the land, purging its native plants (which are inedible and toxic to humans) and ground-cover, insects and any pest animals (e.g., birds, woodchucks, racoon, fox, rabbits, mice, to name just a few). Then you plant monoculture agriculture crop, which over time depletes the natural soil, worms and microbes of natural nutrients and requires increasing amounts of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Animal pests continue to be killed as the crops mature, and then also by harvesting machinery at the end of the season.
A dramatized question: Would you rather humanely shoot a single steer (or goat/sheep or similar ruminant) which you could then consume over the course of a year, assuming you make use of the entire animal? Or would you choose to avoid meat, but in the process of eating an all-plant-based diet kill dozens or more wild animals and countless smaller pests and insects while disrupting local flora/fauna/ecosystems and depleting the soil?