Mark Sisson's Blog, page 140

Reader Survey—I Want To Hear From You!

Good morning, everybody. Hope you all had a great holiday weekend. Today we’re back in the saddle, and I’m getting in touch to ask a favor….

Specifically, I’m asking you to tell me a bit about yourself—where you are in your health journey, what challenges you, and what brings you (and keeps you coming back) to Mark’s Daily Apple. I’d like to use your feedback in this brief survey to help push MDA into new territory—to make a resource that better engages you and supports your interests.

Will you take just a few minutes with me today?

Over the years you’ve gotten to know me here on the blog, and I’ve loved meeting many of you through events like PrimalCon, Paleo f(x), and Primal Health Coach gatherings—or through your emails and letters. I’ve enjoyed answering as many of your questions as I can here and continuing the dialogue with you on the comment board as well as in our Facebook group and on our Instagram page. All of the success stories and progress photos you’ve sent over the years are truly inspiring and keep me doing what I do—so keep them coming!

For those of you who may be new to our community — first, welcome — or those who may have been less outspoken in comments, we’d love to hear more from you. Even if you feel like you’ve shared a lot about yourself over the years, I encourage you to take the survey as well. My hope is that this reader survey my staff and I have created will tell me more about what you want to read, what you find difficult, and why YOU do what you do.

And as a thank you for your time, you’ll receive a coupon for $10 off any purchase of $50 or more in our Primal Blueprint store.

Will you share your story with us? Complete the survey HERE.

Thanks for being here, and I’m grateful for your help today. Grok on, everybody.

Best,

Mark Sisson

The post Reader Survey—I Want To Hear From You! appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Dear Mark: Tick Red Meat Allergy, Seventh-day Adventists, Magnesium and Carnivory

For today’s edition of Dear Mark, I’m answering a few questions and comments from last week’s post on the carnivore diet. First, Dawn gives us the unfortunate but necessary information that it’s not just the lone star tick who causes red meat allergy. Great. Second, what are 7-Day Adventists so healthy? Is it all because of their tendency to avoid meat, or is there something else? And third, I give some more thoughts on magnesium requirements on a carnivorous diet.

Let’s go:

Dawn wrote:

It’s not just the lone star tick that causes an alpha-gal allergy, aka red meat allergy. Other ticks can cause it as well. https://www.med.unc.edu/medicine/news... The info about other ticks is about 3/4ths of the way down, under “Clearing up Misconceptions About Alpha-Gal.”

And to be precise, it’s an allergy to meat from non-primate mammals. Primates don’t have the alpha-gal carbohydrate, but other mammals do.

That is very good information. Unfortunate, but good to know. Thanks for the note.

Also good to know I can still eat my braised orangutan shanks even if I get an alpha-gal allergy.

Edward wrote:

The healthiest, longest lived people, now live in Loma Linda, CA. What is it that is unique about Loma Linda? They have a bunch of 7 day adventists that live there. Also, they have the highest density on earth of pure ‘vegans’ in their population.

Coincidence? Possibly, but highly unlikely.

By the way, if animal products is the only way to get vitamin B12 in the diet, where do

cows, deer, zebras, great apes, ect……. get their vitamin B12? They get it from where ALL B12 really comes from……..bacteria in the soil and water. It’s just that we humans wash it off our produce and treat our drinking water.

I love the Adventists. Their diets get the most attention, but there’s a lot more to it.

Seventh-day Adventists follow Eight Laws of Health.

Eat a nutrient-dense diet. This is usually a vegetarian or vegan diet, but it doesn’t have to be.

Exercise regularly to improve mind, body, and spirit. Note the . They recognize that training is good for our cognitive and psychological function, not just for the body. That’s something that modern science is finally getting around to recognizing, and the Adventists have known for 150 years.

Drink plenty of water. While I’d take umbrage with “plenty”—just drink what you need, not some predetermined quantity—the fact that they’re drinking water and not other stuff is a point in their favor.

Spend time in sunlight. The benefits of this are numerous: vitamin D, nitric oxide, better endothelial function, sun-derived opioids coursing through their veins.

Don’t overdo the good things and avoid the bad. This rather open-ended law covers a wide range of inputs that can get in the way of health and happiness. Good things often become bad when we overdo them; bad things are, well, bad.

Breathe pure air and do so with proper technique. This is another law with double effects. It captures environmental health—you’re more likely to choose to live in a healthy, pollution-free area and spend as much time in nature as you can if you’re worried about pure air. Second, breathing properly, leading with the diaphragm, carefully heeding each inhalation and exhalation all tend to produce a state of relaxation akin to miniature meditations throughout the day.

Work hard and rest well. Not “work hard, play hard.” Not “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Not “you only live once.” Instead of those trite and frankly counterproductive slogans, “work hard and rest well” implores you to follow the most rewarding, fruitful, and sustainable path through life and work.

The final law is to “trust in divine power as you make choices and seek inner peace.” I’ve never been religious. Yet, in a sense I have a “religious” estimation of my own tendency to make things work out. When I had a wife and two kids to support, I left my cozy gig and started my own business. It was a risk. I knew it would work though. And it did. I can imagine having the confidence that a transcendent force is pulling for you would make for a similarly robust mindset.

As for the B12 question, I’m sure someone somewhere is working hard on edible soil for humans. And there’s certainly a market for “raw water.” But what does that mean for the average person avoiding animal foods?

Are they going to drink untreated water with the perfect balance of vitamin B12 and raccoon poop? Are they going to eat enough soil-caked spinach?

I’m skeptical.

“A recent paper showed that the majority of people following a “paleolithic ketogenic diet” with at least 70% of calories from animal foods and including offal had adequate serum magnesium levels. That’s a great start. But earlier studies show that serum magnesium may not be the definitive marker. A person can have normal serum levels but inadequate tissue levels—and in the tissues is where magnesium does its work. A person can have normal serum levels but still be deficient.”

Dear Mark. First: “majority people”, in fact 99.9%

Second. What you write, is not real. The magnesium function depends only on the degree of glycolysis. Tissue and intracellular magnesium also depend on glycolysis. If is ketosis, very little magnesium is required. Any magnesium supplement can make a cardiac complication, sinus tachycardia, extrasystole etc. But it can cause diarrhea, warmth, sweating. Also made increased intestinal permeability and changed membrane functions. Magnesium dosage is not a game.

To talk about past investigations are a professional mistake because these study made not during healthy diet.

Animal fat is important in nutrition. So it is better to say a meat / animal fat-based diet, a paleo-ketogenic diet as a carnivore. The only meat is not as healthy as meat and animal fat.

Anyway, the real paleolithic diet is actually paleolithic ketogenic diet or carnivorous diet.

This is important for magnesium.I apologize for the bad English, I hope you understand what I wrote.

Thanks for writing, Dr. Csaba. Your English was perfectly fine. For those you didn’t pick up on it, Dr. Csaba is one of the researchers who ran the “magnesium on paleo-keto/carnivore” study I referenced last week.

You’re right that magnesium figures prominently in glucose metabolism, and that if you’re not eating much glucose, you probably don’t need as much magnesium for that purpose. After all, magnesium is used to treat many diseases and problems related to glucose metabolism. It’s effective against type 2 diabetes, protects against pre-diabetes turning into full-blown diabetes, reduces blood sugar levels, improves insulin sensitivity. Low levels seem to increase diabetic complications, and high sugar intakes do make low magnesium intakes more problematic. If glucose isn’t a major part of your diet, I can buy the assertion that you probably don’t need as much.

But magnesium does more than that. It also fights depression, reduces post-op complications, improves bone health, 

The number of people who find they need to increase magnesium intake when going ketogenic, and the number of ketogenic diet writers (including me) and researchers who recommend magnesium supplementation when going keto make me wonder though. Is there something different about carnivory that reduces magnesium requirements? It can’t only be the lack of carbohydrates, because basic ketogenic diets also lack carbohydrates yet still require magnesium.

Perhaps it’s the anti-nutrients in low-carb plant foods, like nuts and greens. Dietary phytate, lectins, and oxalates can reduce magnesium absorption. A carnivorous diet has none of these compounds, making any magnesium present in the diet far more bioavailable. I can see that playing a role. Yet, what of plant (or plant-like foods, like mushrooms) foods with low anti-nutrient levels? One study found that eating high-oxalate spinach reduced magnesium absorption, while low-oxalate kale (sorry, carnivores, I know kale is your favorite nemesis) increased it. 

Some people have suggested that the fiber in low-carb plants is inhibiting magnesium absorption, artificially elevating the magnesium requirements of plant eaters. While that may be true for other nutrients and different types of fiber—I’ll have to dig deeper in a future post—it looks like fermentable fiber increases magnesium absorption in humans. That assertion doesn’t really seem to jibe with the evidence.

Magnesium deficiency tends to increase low-level inflammation. To be on the safe side, any carnivores worried about magnesium deficiency and wary of magnesium supplementation could track their hs-CRP levels. If it’s elevated or begins trending upward upon going carnivore, you probably need more magnesium.

My point is let’s not be too hasty in claiming that all the benefits of magnesium supplementation are predicated on a glucose-based metabolism.

Dr. Csaba, I look forward to more research from you and your team!

Thanks for reading, everyone, and take care! I’m sure I’ll be covering more of the questions from the carnivore post, as you folks asked some good ones.

The post Dear Mark: Tick Red Meat Allergy, Seventh-day Adventists, Magnesium and Carnivory appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Weekend Link Love — Edition 505

Research of the Week

Mice with breast cancer who do yoga (there’s a visual) have smaller tumors.

Chess grandmasters enjoy longer lives, just like elite athletes.

Throwing could be primarily a male adaptation.

More and more kids are overusing ADHD drugs.

New Primal Blueprint Podcasts

Episode 247: Dr. Alvin Danenberg: Host Elle Russ chats with Primal Health Coach and dentist Dr. Alvin Danenberg about the interplay between modern technology and ancestral health when treating gum disease.

Each week, select Mark’s Daily Apple blog posts are prepared as Primal Blueprint Podcasts. Need to catch up on reading, but don’t have the time? Prefer to listen to articles while on the go? Check out the new blog post podcasts below, and subscribe to the Primal Blueprint Podcast here so you never miss an episode.

Interesting Blog Posts

One side benefit of the fracturing of society into thousands of weird subcultures is that there are more opportunities for prestige than ever.

Media, Schmedia

Are farmers still using antibiotics to increase animal weight, despite the FDA banning it last year?

While I still recommend you sit as little as possible, being fit makes it less bad.

Everything Else

Medieval peasants took more vacation than the average American.

Weight loss is 80% diet, 10% sleep, 5% exercise, and 5% whether or not you wear shoes inside your house.

I still hold out hope for Nessie.

Changing weather patterns has California farmers placing uncertain bets on the future.

Things I’m Up to and Interested In

Keto breakfasts I’d eat: This guy’s.

Study I found interesting: Another reason not to skip leg day.

Article I’m pondering: Why New Antibiotics Are So Hard to Find.

This is very cool: Yin and yang types have different brain activation patterns in depression, and the fMRI results look incredibly similar to the traditional yin and yang symbol.

Heard in the Roman Empire: “What about barbarian-on-barbarian crime?”

Recipe Corner

(I recommend ditching the sugar).
This coconut cabbage stir-fry looks and sounds really interesting.

Time Capsule

One year ago (May 20 – May 26)

10 Tips to Boost Your Serotonin – Get sero-tonin’.
8 Primal-Friendly Flours – For those times you need flour, what’s the best to get?

Comment of the Week

“I love how you ended this article. So many people hug but don’t really *feel* the hug. My granny would hug very tightly for a very long time, and she always told me I gave the best hugs. Hugging my granny is a great memory I hold dear.”

I agree. There’s nothing quite like a grandma hug, Tiffany.

The post Weekend Link Love — Edition 505 appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Spicy Chicken Wing Cobb Salad

Why serve bland chicken breast in Cobb salad, when spicy chicken wings taste so much better? This salad is especially great for parties and potlucks. A big, colorful Cobb salad is always a hit. Plus, it’s easy (and affordable) to grill up a bunch of chicken wings for a crowd.

These chicken wings are delicious hot off the grill (or out from under the broiler), but if you want to make this salad ahead of time, go for it. The wings are just as good chilled from the refrigerator.

A Cobb salad is really just another Big-Ass Salad, with all sorts of good things thrown in. Tomato, bacon, hard-boiled eggs, avocado, and blue cheese are the classic Cobb combination. There’s no reason to stop there. Go ahead and pile on all your favorite healthy salad fixings (along with your favorite PRIMAL KITCHEN® dressing), for a deluxe Cobb salad that can feed a crowd.

Servings: 4

Time in the Kitchen: 1 hour

Ingredients

Spicy Wings

2 pounds chicken wings/drumettes (900 g)
2 tablespoons PRIMAL KITCHEN Avocado Oil (30 ml) https://www.marksdailyapple.com/12-su...
½ teaspoon kosher salt (2.5 ml)
½ teaspoon smoked paprika (2.5 ml)
3 tablespoons melted butter (45 ml)
2 tablespoons hot sauce (30 ml)
1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar (15 ml)

Cobb Salad

Butter lettuce or romaine, ripped into bite-sized leaves
3 ounces crumbled blue cheese (85 g)
8 ounces cherry tomatoes (226 g)
4 hard boiled eggs, sliced or chopped
2 avocados, sliced
4 slices cooked bacon, crumbled
Kefir salad dressing https://www.marksdailyapple.com/kefir... or PRIMAL KITCHEN dressing of choice

Other optional salad ingredients: Nuts, olives, chives, bell peppers, mushrooms, shredded carrot, shredded beets,

Instructions

Toss the wings with avocado oil. Season with salt and paprika.

Grilling:

Heat grill to medium heat. Grill the wings, with the cover down, until wings are browned and crisp, 15 to 20 minutes. Flip wings 2 or 3 times while grilling.

Broiling:

Spread wings out on a rimmed baking sheet. Heat broiler to high, with a rack 6 inches from the flame. Broil 15 to 20 minutes, until wings are browned and crispy. Turn the wings several times as they cook. Expect some smoking from the rendered fat.

While the wings cook, combine butter, hot sauce and vinegar in a large bowl. Toss the cooked wings in the mixture until evenly coasted. Return wings to the grill or broiler for a few minutes more, until sizzling.

Combine all the salad ingredients in a large bowl, toss with kefir salad dressing, and serve spicy chicken wings on top.

The post Spicy Chicken Wing Cobb Salad appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

I Found My Health—and My Purpose In Life

It’s Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. I’ll continue to publish these each Friday as long as they keep coming in. Thank you for reading!

Six years ago, I was a freshman at Kalamazoo College, majoring in biology and tentatively planning to go to vet school. I was known for my ability to pack away refined junk food and not gain a single pound. I was a two-sport collegiate athlete, starting goalkeeper for the soccer team, acing my classes, and working in a research lab. By all measures, my life was wonderful. That is, except for my eczema.

I’d had it for as long as I could remember. As a baby, it was on my cheeks. Through middle school, it was the inside creases of my elbows and the backs of my knees. In high school, it was cracked, dry eyelids and painful, scaly skin around my mouth.  In college, it also began to show up on my hands. I hated it with a vengeance. I’d tried all kinds of steroid creams and seen dermatologists, pediatricians, and allergists to no avail. I basically assumed I would be stuck with eczema for life.

In summer 2013, my sister sent me a few articles on the connection between eczema and food intolerances. At this point in my life, I was a full-blown sugar addict, and my definition of a vegetable was Ragu sauce or corn.  I was skinny and fit, so clearly my diet was fine, right?

I was skeptical that changing my diet would do anything for my skin, to say the least. But I was desperate. I was sick of being asked things like “Is that paint on your hands?” (in neurobiology lab) or “Are you wearing pink eyeshadow?” (one of my relatives at Thanksgiving).

So, I began to slowly cut out grains, refined sugar, and dairy, replacing them with whole foods. I found Mark’s Daily Apple and ChrisKresser.com and spent nearly all my free time poring through evidence-based articles and research studies related to nutrition. I quickly transitioned to full paleo and found that eating a diet of fresh, whole foods from quality sources made all the difference in the world.

Not only was my eczema disappearing rapidly, but I had increased energy, less joint pain, and faster recovery from workouts. I slept better, got sick less frequently, and generally felt great throughout the day. It was almost as if I hadn’t fully lived the first seventeen years of my life, and was finally experiencing how great I could feel once the heavy fog of chronic inflammation had lifted.

I became a true believer in this new healthy lifestyle and dove further into research. I learned about the connection between the microbiota, leaky gut, and autoimmune diseases like eczema. And it made a lot of sense; I had experienced many of the environmental triggers known to cause microbial dysbiosis and leaky gut: repeated antibiotic use, heavy consumption of processed foods, etc. After eighteen-some years, I had finally found some answers as to why I had this awful chronic skin condition. And more importantly, some hope that it could be reversed.

My eczema improved significantly on paleo, but it didn’t go away completely. After many more hours poring through articles, I decided to try the paleo autoimmune protocol (AIP). Thanks to a few hiccups along the way (i.e. don’t eat a full forkful of raw sauerkraut if you’ve never tried it and have histamine intolerance), it was a slow process. I was full AIP for about seven months, and AIP/low-histamine for the last three before the last of my eczema cleared up. But hey, a year and a half is pretty good to undo the damage of eating nothing but junk food for 17 years! And I had the best soccer season of my career, even earning Academic All-American status, while on low-histamine AIP.

It soon became obvious to me that nutrition, gut health, and ancestral medicine was something I was truly passionate about, and that I should pursue it as a career. I switched from pre-vet to pre-med, got involved with research on the gut microbiome, and started looking into dual degree M.D./Ph.D. programs.

Today, I’m still eczema-free and am in the third year of my Ph.D. in Nutritional Sciences at the University of Illinois. My research focuses on the effects of diet and exercise on the gut microbiota and gut barrier function, and how this impacts health. (Our latest study was recently featured in the NYT.) I’m also a part-time research assistant for Chris Kresser.

I will be starting the M.D. portion of my training in the spring of 2019, after which I plan to practice functional and integrative medicine. It’s going to be tough to navigate four years of conventional medical school, but I hope that having the credentials and background of a traditional degree will allow me to be at the forefront of the movement towards a new and improved healthcare system—one that recognizes the power of diet and lifestyle to combat chronic disease and brings together the best of functional and conventional medicine. I also hope to perform clinical research that provides evidence for the ancestral approach.

In the meantime, I’ve started a blog at NGmedicine.com to help others discover the power of nutrition and optimal health. I am incredibly grateful to Mark and all of the other people who helped me on my journey, because I not only found my health—I found my purpose in life.

P.S. As for my diet nowadays, I successfully transitioned off AIP/low-histamine to full paleo and now hover in what Mark calls “the keto zone”—dipping seamlessly in and out of ketosis. I love the mental clarity, sustained energy, and improved management of my lingering SIBO. You can read more about my personal experience with a ketogenic diet here.

P.P.S. My husband also experienced major improvements in his health thanks to a paleo-type/primal diet. I may have to convince him to write his own success story some day!

The post I Found My Health—and My Purpose In Life appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Gaining (and Maintaining) Wisdom From Life Experience

My staff and I are quite close. Things stay busy these days, so there isn’t a lot of downtime, but I’ve worked with some of these folks for over a decade. We don’t discuss every grisly detail of our lives with each other. But we do share. We care about each other.

So when one of the Worker Bees mentioned he was having some potentially serious medical issues, I asked for details. Turns out he went to his doctor for a hard lump on his throat that was getting progressively bigger. Initial pokes and prods were inconclusive. An MRI led to a biopsy, which led to an email in the middle of the afternoon with the results and a hell of an opener: “This may be a cancer.” May helped. It wasn’t a sure thing yet.

For the next couple months, he continued getting tests to confirm one way or the other. A full body scan confirmed hypermetabolic activity in the lump, just like an active cancer would show. No other tissues showed up on the scan, meaning nothing had spread or originated elsewhere. No cancer confirmation, but his doctors were definitely leaning in that direction. He had meetings at the cancer center, filled out end-of-life directives, got a special parking pass. It was intense.

It wasn’t supposed to happen to a man like this. A wife, two kids, dogs, chickens, a new house, a job working in the health, fitness, and nutrition industry. Mid 30s. Fit, eats well, a strong foundation in Primal health principles. But happening it was.

Here’s what he said to me:

“Whatever happens, this has changed my perception of reality for the better (I think). I live in a different world now, rich with meaning and love and powerful emotions. It’s remarkable.”

Better?

Yep.

As he put it, when you think you’re dying, the nonsense you’ve been perpetuating falls away to reveal the essentials. It just happens on its own, and you get a glimpse of what really living entails.

Hugging your kids. Kissing your wife. A stroll after dinner to watch the sun dip below the horizon. A hawk soaring overhead. All things you’ve done and watched before, only now it’s different. Everything becomes imminent. Your concepts of the world and space-time condense. There’s less time now, but instead of getting frantic about it, you slow down and savor the moments. You’re present. Things that might have ruined your day or mood just roll off your back.

He saw it as a rare gift, and I have to agree. For all intents and purposes, he was dying (he wasn’t, but his nervous system didn’t know the difference). He got to make all the amends, undergo the self-realization, think about all the dreams and regrets he had accumulated or almost accumulated, and view things he took for granted in a new light. He got to prepare for death.

And then, he got good news. Exploratory surgery with an immediate biopsy right there in the operating room revealed that it wasn’t cancer. It was a cyst. They removed it. He went home, none the worse for wear.

The trickiest part of his whole experience has been figuring out how to keep it fresh in his heart and mind. How can he take what originated as a visceral response to the perceived threat of dying young and make it established policy? Turn it into wisdom that persists even when the threat has gone? The lump’s gone, and it never actually was a real threat. Will the insights remain?

That’s the eternal battle raging inside us, isn’t it?

We have these massive epiphanies triggered by events large and small. They change us, make us see the world from a different perspective. The prospect of random cancer helped the Worker Bee realize what he was taking for granted and glossing over. But when the direct effects of the trigger wane, we tend to let ourselves go. We get sloppy, complacent, and return to our previous incarnation.

Figuring this out seems like the key to happiness, success, meaning, world peace, and everything else we claim to hold dear. If we could get a handle on that slippery aspect of human psychology—the tendency to let learned wisdom flit away because the initial trigger resolves—there’d be no limit to what we could do as individuals and a species.

As we near the halfway mark of 2018, I want you all to ruminate on this matter.

How can we keep the spark of learned wisdom alive?
How can we turn tragedies into sustained improvements?
Better yet, how can we turn the tragedies of others into fuel for our own enduring improvements and realizations?

Let me know what you think, what you’ve learned down below. We all have stories like this. Candid details welcome and encouraged.

Thanks for reading, everyone. Take care, be well, and next time you hug a loved one, feel that hug for the miracle it is.

Because it is.

The post Gaining (and Maintaining) Wisdom From Life Experience appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

The Carnivore Diet: Pros, Cons, and Suggestions

All-meat diets are growing in popularity. There are the cryptocurrency carnivores. There’s the daughter of the ascendant Jordan B. Peterson, Mikhaila Peterson, who’s using a carnivorous diet to stave off a severe autoimmune disease that almost killed her as a child. The most prominent carnivore these days, Dr. Shawn Baker (who appears to eat only grilled ribeyes (at home) and burger patties (on the go), recently appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience and Robb Wolf’s podcast, and is always breaking world records on the rower. Tons of other folks are eating steak and little else—and loving it. There are Facebook groups and subreddits and Twitter subcultures devoted to carnivorous dieting.

What do I think?

I’m no carnivore. I love my Big Ass Salads, my avocados, my steamed broccoli dipped in butter. My blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries. My spoonful of coconut butter.

Yet, I get the appeal.

We’ve been eating meat for three million years. Its caloric-and-nutrient density allowed us to dispense with the large guts needed to digest fibrous plant matter and build massive, energy-hogging brains. There isn’t a traditional culture on Earth that wholly abstains or abstained from animal products. Nearly every human being who ever lived ate meat whenever he or she could get it.

Thus, meat appears to be the “baseline food” for humans. If you look past the cultural conditioning that tries to convince us that meat will give us heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, meat looks pretty damn good as a place to start.

The question is if it’s where we should stay exclusively…. 

All this said, I’m skeptical about the “steak and water” or “ground beef and water” diets of modern carnivory. Let me explain….

A Few Key Arguments For It (and My Feedback)
“In its natural state, meat is relatively safe as far as toxins go.”

Animals can run and bite and claw and fly to get away from predators; most don’t need to employ any chemical warfare that causes problems when you eat the meat. Sure, allergies and intolerances can arise, like if you get bitten by the Lone Star tick and pick up a red meat allergy, but those are quite rare.

“Whereas plants’ phytonutrients are pesticides.”

This is technically true. They are toxins the plant produces to dissuade consumption by predators—toxins that the plants manufacture to maim, poison, kill, or even just make life uncomfortable for the animals who eat it.

But just as we can do with many other “harmful” inputs, we tend to treat plant phytonutrients as hormetic stressors that make us stronger, healthier, and more robust. 

There’s an upper limit, of course. And many of the phytonutrients have been primarily applied either to populations eating normal omnivorous, often downright unhealthy diets or to unhealthy subjects trying to improve a disease marker. As I’ve said before, there aren’t any real studies in healthy human carnivores, so we don’t know one way or the other whether the promising results of the extant studies apply to people eating only animal products. 

“Meat nutrients are highly bioavailable.”

The protein has all the amino acids we need to live and thrive. We readily absorb and utilize the vitamins and minerals in meat; they already come in “animal form,” requiring little to no conversion before we can start incorporating them into our physiology. Plant nutrients usually undergo a conversion process before humans can utilize them, and not every human has the same conversion capacity.

Some of those essential and/or helpful nutrients only occur in meat, like creatine, carnosine, vitamin B12. There’s literally no realistic way to obtain them without relying on supplementation, which didn’t exist until the last hundred years.

“Nutrient requirement studies don’t apply to us.”

I could see that. They haven’t tested the requirements for selenium, magnesium, and iodine on a zero-carb carnivorous diet. Do they go down? Can you therefore get by and thrive on lower intakes—the low levels found in muscle meat?

It’s a tough call.

It hasn’t been empirically tested. That’s true. It largely hasn’t undergone a series of RCTs. You can’t pull up a Cochrane meta-analysis of carnivore studies. All we really have are anecdotes.

I’m not disregarding the power or relevance of anecdotes and testimonials. Those are real. They’re not all suffering from a mass delusion. They’re not all lying. Peer-reviewed? No. Admissible in a scientific paper? Not unless you call it a case study. When you’re there in the room with someone pouring their heart out because something you wrote helped them drop 50 pounds and reclaim their lives, you don’t go “Yeah, but where are the clinical trials?” At some point, the weight of anecdotes adds up to something substantial, something suggestive. And hey, if it’s working for you, there’s no arguing that. 

But I can’t point to anything solid and totally objective in the research. Not yet anyway.

Still, any time you embark on a historically unprecedented way of eating, whether it’s pure muscle meat carnivore or vegan, you should be a little more careful about what you think you know. 

What Do We Know About Carnivory in Human History?

We don’t know if there have been any purely carnivorous human cultures. We haven’t found any yet, and you can’t prove a negative, so I won’t say “there were none.”

In all the best candidates so far, though, plants sneak into the diets. The Inuit actually utilized a wide variety of plant foods including berries, sea vegetables, lichens, and rhizomes. They made tea from pine needles, which are high in vitamin C and polyphenols.  The Sami of Finland, who primarily live off a low-carb, high-fat diet of meat, fish, and reindeer milk (I have to imagine that’s coming to Whole Foods soon), also gather wild plant foods, particularly berries and mushrooms (Finland’s forests produce 500 million kg of berries and over 2 billion kg of mushrooms each year!), sometimes even feeding their reindeer hallucinogenic mushrooms to produce psychoactive urine. The Maasai are known for their meat, milk, and blood diets, but they often traded for plant foods like bananas, yams, and taro, too, and they cooked their meat with anti-parasitic spices, drank bitter (read: tannin- and polyphenol-rich) herb tea on a regular basis, and used dozens of plants as medicines (PDF). Even Neanderthals used plants as food and medicine, we’re learning.

Even if we discover evidence of carnivory in human prehistory or in some extant group, the emerging science of genetic ancestral differences suggests that the habitual diets of our recent ancestors shapes the optimal diet for us today. If your close ancestors weren’t carnivores, you might not have the adaptations necessary to thrive on an all-meat diet.

Still, what about Vilhjamjur Stefansson, an Arctic explorer who came away very impressed with the native Inuit diet and underwent a series of studies on the effect of an all-meat diet in man? He and a colleague did great for over a year eating only meat. But Stefansson wasn’t eating ground beef. In his own words, he ate “steaks, chops, brains fried in bacon fat, boiled short-ribs, chicken, fish, liver, and bacon.” Definitely carnivorous. Definitely not just steak or ground beef, as many modern carnivores seem to be eating. All those “weird” cuts gave him critical micronutrients otherwise difficult to get from just steak.

How To Best Optimize a Carnivore Diet

While you won’t find me switching to the carnivore side, if I were to do a carnivorous diet, here’s how I’d try to optimize it (and why).

Take Magnesium

A recent paper showed that the majority of people following a “paleolithic ketogenic diet” with at least 70% of calories from animal foods and including offal had adequate serum magnesium levels. That’s a great start. But earlier studies show that serum magnesium may not be the definitive marker. A person can have normal serum levels but inadequate tissue levels—and in the tissues is where magnesium does its work. A person can have normal serum levels but still be deficient.

Eat Eggs

They’re not quite animals, but they contain everything you need to build a bird from scratch. That’s cool·—bite-sized whole animal.

Eat Liver

Liver is unabashedly animal flesh. It absolutely qualifies for a carnivorous diet. Loaded with choline, folate, vitamin A, copper, and iron, it’s nature’s most bioavailable multivitamin. There’s no reason not to include it. If you get your hands on some fish livers, you’ll get a ton of vitamin D along for the ride.

There’s frozen liver tabs, where people dice up liver into little chunks and swallow them hole.
There’s liver smoothies, where absolute savages blend raw liver and drink it. I know a guy who fixed severe iron deficiency by drinking raw chicken liver orange juice smoothies, with the vitamin C in OJ meant to enhance iron absorption.
Liver is also great sauteed with fish sauce, citrus, salt, pepper, and sesame oil. Do it quick, don’t overcook.

Eat Seafood

A few oysters, some mussels, a filet of wild sockeye salmon… You’ll get vitamin D, long-chained omega-3s (which tend to rare even in pastured ruminant flesh), selenium, iodine, copper, iron, manganese. Not every meal has to—or should— be a New York strip. 

Implement Intermittent Fasts On a Regular Basis

A constant influx of muscle meat will keep mTOR topped up. That’s great for muscle growth and general robustness. Just do something to stop the protein intake for a day or two to  lest you start fueling unwanted growths.

Treat Spices and Other Low/Non-Calorie Plant Foods As Medicinal Supplements That Don’t “Count”

All the nearly-carnivorous cultures we have good data on did similar things, using bitter herbs and barks and the like as supplements to their diets. You’re not getting calories from this stuff. You’re getting non-caloric compounds that provide health benefits.

Get the Best Quality Meat You Can Find and Afford

While I’m sure a diet of snare-caught hare, Alaskan elk, and choice sockeye salmon you wrest from the grasp of picky grizzlies poised over rivers preparing for a long winter would be ideal, it’s not necessary. Yes, grass-fed and -finished/pastured as well as organic are ideal, but do the best you can with what you have.

Use Bone Broth

It’s a great way to get collagen and the glycine it contains to balance out all the methionine you’re eating, especially if you’re doing the muscle meat-only thing and avoiding most gelatinous cuts of meat.  Make it yourself or buy. Collagen supplementation, of course, works here, too.

The carnivore diet isn’t for me. I like plants way too much. But I’m cautiously optimistic that it could work for more people than you’d expect, provided they heed as many of my suggestions as possible.

That’s it for me, folks. What about you? Have any experience eating a carnivorous diet? Interested in trying? Let me know what you know!

The post The Carnivore Diet: Pros, Cons, and Suggestions appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Summer Preview: What’s In Store For Mark’s Daily Apple

Where I’m from, snow showers aren’t unheard of over graduation weekends. To this day, I hold to the traditional “Memorial Day to Labor Day” timeline—and, well, here we are finally (or almost anyway). I love summer, which may explain why I fled to Southern California decades ago and just recently migrated to Miami, where life is just as awesome. But even in these warm locales, I still get excited for the summer months themselves. There’s a more casual, maybe even improvisational rhythm, a deeper focus on relaxation, more intention toward fun.

As we head into Memorial Day weekend, today I thought I’d offer up a look at what’s coming to MDA this summer. Because I aim to make it a good one.

Right out of the gate, we’ll be kicking off the season with a staff-led 21-Day Challenge, beginning Monday, June 11th.(Mark your calendars….) Yup, the Bees will be at the helm, sharing their favorite Primal recipes and fitness routines, taking over Instagram, and highlighting their recommendations for active vacations across the globe.

Of course, we’ll have contests—in traditional MDA style. Along with comment giveaways, we’ll be asking you, our community, to submit some of your best Primal work, for our grand prizes. I won’t let the cat out of the bag, but let’s just say for a couple of these you’ll be eating well for a year—and fighting the kids to enjoy the fun. Having seen what the Bees are ready to give away, I want some of these myself now….

We’ll be doubling up with twice the information and resources each day of the Challenge to guide and motivate your 21-Day commitment, however you choose to structure it. We’ll also be serving up Challenge resources on our Vimify app—and, for the utmost in support and instruction, offering a TOTAL reboot of our 21-Day Online Program, now the 21-Day Primal Reset. I’ll have more on that the first week of June, but I’m excited for what this fully expanded, multimedia program will mean for anyone who wants to do the 21-Day Challenge—or get extra support in the powerful initial phase of a Keto Reset.

But that’s not all…. I’ll be announcing several brand-spanking-new Primal Kitchen® products that go hand-in-hand with summer eating and entertaining. (Can you take a guess?) And look for a new Primal cookbook as well next month…this time with inspiration from a different continent.

Beyond the June festivities, we’ll be talking camping food, women’s health, omegas, tea, and grilling recipes to name just a few topics. I’ll also be introducing you to my new digs in Miami, and I’ll share videos on some of the latest strategies I’ve learned and am living—brand new looks at my “day in the life” of Primal food, fitness and sleep. 

So, that’s a  quick rundown—with much, much more to come. Do you have ideas you’d like to see on MDA this summer? Shoot me line on the comment board, and thanks for reading, everybody. Let’s make this the best summer yet. 

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Dear Mark: More On Women and Fasting

Last week, I updated an older post on women and intermittent fasting. For today’s edition of Dear Mark, I’ll be answering some of the comments and questions from that post. First, should a lean woman with a stressful life try fasting to heal her gut? Maybe, maybe not. Second, does coffee break a fast? Now, where have I heard that one…? Is a 12-hour fast a good starting point for women? What are the IF “pre-reqs”? And finally, what do we make of women who can fast successfully? Does habituation have an effect?

Let’s go:

Megan asked:

I am a 33 yo woman. I am 5’9 and between 129-133 lbs. My longest fasts have been 4 days and we’re medically indicated (i.e. I was hospitalized and not allowed to eat) due to painful flares in my Crohn’s/ileitis (I have recently switched to all meat as my worst flare left me in the worst pain of my life and was from eating veggies/fiber). I naturally do some amount of intermittent fasting (16 to 20 hours).

I am interested in longer fasting than what I do for its potential to help heal my gut, but a several things stop me. 1. I become voracious by about hour 21. I can’t seem to push through. And I have been keto-adapted since August 2017. 2. Though my BMI is in “normal” and I have good muscles, I am on the lean side. 3. Life is kinda intense this year. Yeah, yeah, I meditate and all that. But life has been very intense.

Does anyone have any thoughts on extended IF for gut healing for a lean, probably too stressed, woman?

Check with your doc first. It’s worth a try.

In one study, patients with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) were fasted for 10 days after four weeks of regular IBS treatment. Another group continued the regular treatment. The fasting group saw improvements in 7 of 10 markers, including abdominal pain, abdominal distension, diarrhea, anorexia, nausea, anxiety, and general interference with life.

Crohn’s isn’t the same as IBS. Crohn’s is generally more serious and can result in physical damage to the gut. But the symptoms are similar enough that this fasting study piques my curiosity.

Improving gut health and reducing inflammation doesn’t require full-out fasting, though.

In obese women, severe calorie restriction (800 calories per day) reduced overall inflammation and improved gut barrier function. They also had a lot of weight to lose, and they lost an average of 15 pounds over 4 weeks. That’s quite good for a short study. It’s hard to know whether it’s the calorie restriction or the weight loss improving the gut health.

Side note: a really cool part of this study is that 14 days after the very low calorie diet, when they were back to their regular diets, the women had gained about half a pound back, but it was lean mass. They actually lost more body fat and had a smaller waist circumference than they did after the 14 day low calorie diet.

My point is that calorie restriction was good enough.

Fasting may very well work for you, but it might not be necessary. It might even be too much of a good thing, given your stress levels. Try it—that IBS study is pretty convincing—and be aware.

Micki asked:

Question: I’ve heard both, that black coffee breaks your fast and that black coffee doesn’t break your fast. Opinions? Evidence to either?

Check out my recent post on the subject. It should answer your question.

Micki wrote again:

I’ve reached the point of not trying to force any specific IF protocol other than a regular 12 hour fast every day, which is usually 8pm-8am.. If I go longer, I go longer but I have ceased shooting for any other IF time period. This is what suits me but may not suit anyone else that tries IF. We’re all different, eh?

For what it’s worth, my experience talking with dozens of women is that 12 hours is a sweet spot. Anyone (especially women) curious about fasting should start there, see what happens.

Stacey Martin asked:

Where would we find the IF pre-reqs?

It’s there in the article:

If you haven’t satisfied the usual IF “pre-reqs,” like being fat-adapted, getting good and sufficient sleep, minimizing or mitigating stress, and exercising well (not too much and not too little), you should not fast.

Fat-Adapted: You should have your fat-burning machinery up and running, as fasting places great demands on your ability to burn your own body fat for energy.

Stress: Fasting can be stressful, so don’t add it to an already-stressful life. Stress adds up, whatever the source.

Sleep: Poor sleep makes dieting less effective. It also makes you hungrier, especially for junk food.

Exercise: Too much exercise and you’ll make the fast more stressful than is helpful and hamper recovery. Too little exercise and, well, I don’t have any objective reasons. I just know that exercise and fasting go perfectly together. There’s nothing more delicious and satisfying than a meal after a fasted training session.

blah wrote:

I’m a woman, have been skipping dinners for over 5 years, going 12-16 hours with no food daily. I still consume around 2000 cal a day and weigh about 130 lb. My cycles seem to get less regular the more I deviate from this routine and gain weight.

Also if fasting was hurting fertility how do we explain India and other 3rd world countries?

The key here may be your consistency. This conditions your body to expect food (and get hungry at the right time, not before), and it improves the metabolic response to eating.

In one study, the authors actually tested the effect of breaking your eating habits by separating overweight women into habitual breakfast skippers and habitual breakfast eaters and then having them either skip breakfast or eat breakfast.

Habitual breakfast eaters who skipped breakfast experienced way more hunger at lunch, had worse blood lipids, and higher insulin levels. They had worse blood lipids and their insulin skyrocketed. Habitual breakfast skippers who skipped breakfast experienced none of these deleterious effects.

Meanwhile, habitual breakfast eaters who ate breakfast were more satiated at lunch. They had better blood lipids and normal insulin levels. Habitual breakfast skippers who ate breakfast were still hungry at lunch. Eating breakfast didn’t inhibit their regular lunch-time appetites.

Other research has found that maintaining a regular eating schedule improves insulin sensitivity, increases energy expenditure, and improves fasting lipids. Overall, sticking to an (rough, not draconian) eating schedule results in the best metabolic effects, which appears to be what you’re doing.

That’s it for today, folks. Thanks for reading, asking, and writing. Take care!

The post Dear Mark: More On Women and Fasting appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Weekend Link Love — Edition 504

Research of the Week

Healthy food rules at home stick outside of the home.

CBD (marijuana compound that doesn’t get you high) reduces seizures.

Smart people’s neurons have fewer connections.

People who live in small towns and rural areas are happiest, at least in Canada.

New Primal Blueprint Podcasts

Episode 245: Wayne Levine: Host Elle Russ chats with Wayne Levine, who coaches men and helps them become the best fathers, leaders, husbands, and authentic human beings they can be.

Each week, select Mark’s Daily Apple blog posts are prepared as Primal Blueprint Podcasts. Need to catch up on reading, but don’t have the time? Prefer to listen to articles while on the go? Check out the new blog post podcasts below, and subscribe to the Primal Blueprint Podcast here so you never miss an episode.

Interesting Blog Posts

What’s the most vegan item in the supermarket?

Interesting research findings regarding the psychology of combat sports.

Media, Schmedia

Get ready for drug-resistant fungal infections.

Everything Else

This explains why ancient European hunter-gatherers never got around to planting things.

Back when China regulated that every apartment receive at least one hour of sunlight per day.

Things I’m Up to and Interested In

I can see this being a kitschy product or gag gift available in the next ten years: Miniature (living) neanderthal brains in jars.

I have to wonder: Did he get to choose which one he got?

I’m curious: Does the same thing happen in other species?

I wasn’t expecting this: People with more extreme political views are happier (and have more sex).

I’m sadly not surprised: Even the world’s remotest ocean has microplastics.

Recipe Corner

Instant Pot oxtail stew. No Instant Pot? You can still do it, but it won’t be so instant.
Perfect steak in a cast iron (plus how to care for the iron).

Time Capsule

One year ago (May 13– May 19)

How Your Oral Biome Influences Your Overall Health – It’s way more than just the teeth.
7 Reasons to Love Wheat – Give it up for the greatest grain of all.

Comment of the Week

“I am very proud of myself, through many years of self-reflection and meditation I’m sure I have the least Ego of anyone … possible ever. #myEgoIsLessThanYours”

– Exactly, HealthyHombre.

Want to make fat loss easier?

Try the Definitive Guide for Troubleshooting Weight Loss for free here.

The post Weekend Link Love — Edition 504 appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.