Mark Sisson's Blog, page 59

How to Deal with the Pressure of Never Having Enough Time (and Why It’s Total BS)

If you’ve read Tim Ferris’ 4-Hour Workweek, you can just jump to the end of this post. For everyone else, I invite you to take a closer look at your relationship with time. Especially those of you who are too busy to spend, oh, I don’t know, 5 or so minutes reading this.

Somehow, “I’m busy” has become the new “I’m fine” in response to being asked how you are. I get it thought — I know you actually ARE busy, but stay with me here.

Whenever I’m working with new clients, they’ll typically tell me they don’t have time to sit down for a satiating, nutrient-dense breakfast, so they just grab a “quick toast and coffee.” Or they have too much going on and can’t get to bed on time. It’s not just a once-in-a-while-thing either. It’s day after day after day.

Sound like your life? If so, let me ask you this: why do some people seem to effortlessly crush their to-do lists and others find theirs growing out of control?

Seriously, There’s Not Enough Time

I never like to say “We all have the same 24 hours in the day,” because that logic is fundamentally flawed, and can come off sounding privileged. In truth, all of us are filling our 24 hours in different ways depending on our jobs, lives, families, hobbies, obligations, and unique life goings-on.

Sometimes I choose to be busy during my 24 hours because I have lots of things that are important to me — family, friends, my clients, my home life, my role at the Primal Health Coach Institute. And *usually* I like that because I enjoy my work and I like being productive.

I’m choosing to be busy because it leaves me feeling fulfilled. The problem arises when it leaves you feeling like a victim, like you can’t keep up, or like you just want to bury your head in the sand.

Lack of Time = Lack of Priorities

It all comes down to priorities. If better health or a leaner waistline was really important to you, you’d make it a priority. Unfortunately, if you’re like most people, you unknowingly put other, less important priorities in their place (everything from stewing over a mean comment on social media to worrying how you’re going to get it all done).1

Whenever you catch yourself having an I-don’t-have-enough-time moment, remember that what you’re spending your time on is a choice — and you always have options. This is the perfect time to take a step back and ask yourself these four questions:

What’s important here?
What’s not important?
Am I wasting time on things that aren’t important?
What else could I be doing with my time?

Go ahead and do this exercise with me for a sec. Get out a piece of paper (or the notes section on your phone) and jot down your daily schedule. What time do you typically get up? When do you go to bed? How much time do you spend at work? On social media? With your family? Daydreaming? Running errands? Working on your health?

Looking at your list, what are the three things you spend the most time on?

Like it or not, those three things are your priorities. How you spend your day reflects what you believe to be the most important. If that’s not sitting well with you — or you feel like you have an equal amount of priorities (even though that’s not actually possible), you’re in a good place to start making change.

Because when you learn to eliminate your non-priorities, you free up time to focus on what does matter to you.

How Do You Eliminate Non-Priorities?

It starts by taking things off the table that aren’t important or urgent. Research shows that having too many options can lead you to waste time attending to details that don’t matter or avoid a task altogether. In this experiment, a Columbia University professor set up a booth selling jams at a local farmers market. Every few hours she alternated between offering 24 jams and 6 jams. She found that 60% of the customers visited the booth when there was the larger assortment, however more people actually made purchases when there were fewer options.2

Not only that, when faced with tasks of mixed urgency and importance, participants in this study prioritized to-dos that were time-sensitive over ones that were less urgent but had a greater reward3 Researchers found that the effect was even more prominent in people who describe themselves as busy, adding that they were more likely to select an urgent task with a lower reward because they were fixated on the clock and “getting it done”.

But how do you determine what’s urgent and important? Enter the Eisenhower Matrix, named for the 34th U.S. President, Dwight D. Eisenhower. It’s a prioritization framework (used by everyone from athletes to CEOs) that helps you eliminate time wasters in your life.

And in case you need proof that Eisenhower knew what he was talking about, during his two terms in office, he signed into law the first major piece of civil rights legislation since the end of the Civil War, he ended the Korean War, oh and he created NASA.

Eisenhower recognized that having a solid grasp of time management means you’ve got to do things that are important andurgent — and eliminate all the rest.

Important tasks get you closer to your goal, whether it’s wearing a smaller pant size or not feeling ravenous all day.
Urgent tasks are ones that demand your immediate attention, like a deadline or showing up on time for an appointment.

Once you’ve got that straight, you can overcome the tendency to focus on the unimportant tasks and instead, do what’s essential to your success, whatever that looks like for you.

Let’s Put the Matrix into Action

Using the questions below, you’ll be able to get a good handle on your priorities, evaluating which are urgent, which are important, and which can be delegated to someone else — or ditched altogether.

1. Does it have consequences for not taking immediate action and does it align with your goals?

ACTION STEP: DO IT. This is a task that’s both urgent and important, which means it’s a priority. And getting it done first will take a lot of pressure off your plate. Examples are:

Completing a project for work
Deep breathing when you’re stressed
Responding to certain emails

2. Does it bring you closer to your goals, but doesn’t have a clear deadline?

ACTION STEP: SCHEDULE IT. This is a task that’s important, but not urgent. Since it’s easy to procrastinate here, scheduling time to attend to it is your best bet. Examples are:

Working out
General self-care
Spending time with your family

3. Does it need to get done within a certain timeframe, but doesn’t require your specific skill set?

ACTION STEP: DELEGATE IT. This is a task that’s urgent, but not important — at least not important for you to do, specifically. Sure, it needs to get done, but you could probably pass off this task off to someone else, which frees up your time. Examples are:

Making sure the kids are ready for school
Shopping for groceries for the week
Meal prepping

4. Does it not have a deadline or get you closer to your goals?

ACTION STEP: DELETE IT. This is a task that’s not important or urgent. And it’s a huge time suck! It’s the kind of “task” that makes you wonder where all your time went. Using a browser blocker like Freedom can help a ton. Examples are:

Scrolling your social media feed
Playing online games
Worrying, obsessing, and stressing out about things that don’t matter

Bonus Tip: Figure out what time of day you’re the most focused. When do you tend to get a lot accomplished? Are you a morning person? A night owl? Knowing when you’re the most productive can help you get stuff done with less effort.

Now tell me what you think. Have you tried these strategies? What’s worked for you?

References https://www.marksdailyapple.com/what-...https://faculty.washington.edu/jdb/345/345%20Articles/Iyengar%20%26%20Lepper%20(2000).pdfhttps://academic.oup.com/jcr/article-abstract/45/3/673/4847790

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The Benefits of Barefoot Lifting: How and Why

Before the complex tools, before the projectile weapons and the wheels and the civilization, hominids stood upright and walked—and it made all the difference. Bipedalism freed up their hands to carry objects and manipulate the world around them and see for miles and miles across the horizon. They did all this atop bare feet that closely resembled our own; millions-year old hominid footprints from East Africa look almost identical to ones you’d see today at the beach. Not much has changed down there.

That’s the entire basis for the barefoot running movement. We were born barefoot, we spent the vast majority of our prehistory barefoot and history wearing the scantest of minimalist footwear. It’s only in the last hundred years or so that we began entombing our feet in restrictive leather and rubber carapaces that deform our foot structure and alter our gait and tissue loading. Running in bare feet or in shoes that mimic the barefoot experience can help us move and land the way nature intended, thereby increasing running efficiency and reducing injury risk. The science is sound.

I’ve spoken at length of the terrible effect all that sitting we do has on our body. By taking gravity out of the equation, chairs weaken glutes, slacken hamstrings, tighten calves, and deactivate our overall lower body. That’s not even mentioning the poor posture, reduced cognitive function, and impaired fat-burning capacity. Shoes are even worse. They’re like chairs for our feet, only we wear them all day.

That’s why I’ve always advocated breaking free of the shoe monopoly to go barefoot as much as possible.

Barefoot walking. Barefoot hiking. Barefoot running. Barefoot sprints. Barefoot gardening, trash-taking-outing, dancing, cleaning. All good, all beneficial.

And now I want you to try barefoot lifting. But first, I’m going to tell you why.

Are there benefits to barefoot lifting? Absolutely.

Are there things to watch out for? Yes.

First, let’s explore the potential benefits of lifting weights barefoot.

Better Connection to the Ground

The sole of a shoe is a barrier between you and the ground. A middleman, an interface. This isn’t a deal-breaker. Obviously, people lift in shoes all the time. Most people lift in shoes, so it’s definitely doable and effective enough. But if you’re in bare feet, you are directly connected to the ground, giving you a solid base from which to defy gravity. The soles of your feet have better “cling” than the soles of your shoes.

This effect becomes more apparent on natural, uneven surfaces to which the bare foot can “mold” itself much better than a shoe. Ultimately, the barefoot lifter is closer to the ground with a more stable base than the shod lifter.

And the more solid the foundation, the stronger the house. The same is true for a barefooted person lifting heavy things—once you’re acclimated, you’ll be more powerful and grounded than ever before. Preliminary research suggests this to be the case:1

10 experienced lifters deadlifted for 4 sets of 4 reps in both shod and unshod conditions. Although being barefoot made no difference when it came to some of the performance measures, barefoot lifting did improve the rate of force development. The difference wasn’t massive, but it was there. Barefoot lifters were able to develop more force more quickly than when they were wearing shoes, suggesting that there is a “disconnect” between the shod foot and the ground that must be surmounted before force can develop. Barefoot lifters didn’t have that disconnect; they were connected from the get-go.

Better Proprioception

Proprioception is bodily awareness in space and movement. It’s knowing where your limbs are in relation to the rest of the environment. Good proprioception means you have an intuitive sense of what your body is doing and where it is as you move through the world—where your feet are, where your arms are, where your head is in relation to that tree branch coming right at you. It allows you to respond more effectively to the environment.

Good proprioception is a prerequisite for being a good dancer, a good dodgeball player, a good fighter or boxer.

To create proprioception, your nervous system utilizes all the sensory organs. What you see, hear, smell, and feel—and think. Shoes cut off your proprioceptive interface with the ground. Going barefoot re-establishes that interface, giving your nervous system access to all the data streaming in through the hundreds of nerves located on the soles of your feet.

Better Balance

A shod foot is a single piece, just a big blunt slab of meat atop which you totter. You balance on the soles of your shoes. One linear surface.

A bare foot is a composite of separate muscles and nerves and bones and fascia. You can situate your weight over different sections of your foot much more easily. You can “choose” to focus on balancing on, say, the forefoot, the midfoot, the heels, the sides, the toes, or the whole foot. Balance when barefoot lifting becomes a symphony of constituents all working together—and apart if you so choose.

Barefoot lifting provides a much richer stimulus to your vestibular system.

Better Foot Health

The foot contains dozens of muscles, most of which lie dormant inside a shoe. They go slack, they get weak, they aren’t engaged. Lifting in a shoe is fine but you’re leaving a lot of potential on the table. Now, this isn’t about hypertrophy of the foot muscles. Don’t expect “gains” down there. But you can expect a stronger, more resilient foot that can handle long walks or even runs with regular barefoot lifting. You can also expect fewer foot problems, like plantar fasciitis, provided you ease into your barefoot lifting.

Better Feel

As you can see, barefoot lifting isn’t really about hitting new PRs or extracting more raw power and performance from your body—although there’s a good case to be made that better balance and a more stable base can improve your numbers. It’s more about the entire feel of the lifting experience. It becomes more organic. More real. More Primal. When you’re in bare feet lifting heavy things, you feel like a civilized savage human doing real work.

Convinced? Good. Let’s make sure we do it safely.

First, read this post on how to prepare for the barefoot transition. It has a bunch of drills and exercises you can do to get your feet ready to go unshod. Next, read the following section.

Barefoot Lifting Tips to Keep in Mind

Keep these in mind to stay safe and avoid overuse injuries, especially if you’re new to barefoot training.

Collapsed Arches

The body is a piece. Every component matters. No muscle or joint is an island. Take the arches. If they collapse, is that all there is to it? Your arches collapse and everything else continues to work great?

Of course not.

Your arches collapse and your knee loses crucial support, caving inward. You get knee valgus, which throws off your hips and applies a ton of stress on your knee joint (at the wrong spots, no less). As you travel upstream of that collapsed arch, every joint is compromised. Every joint has to adjust for that initial deficit.

Ideally, your foot musculature forms the arch, is the arch. Most people, their shoes or their shoe inserts provide the arch support. If you’re inexperienced with barefoot movement and training, your arches might not be strong enough on their own to withstand heavy weights, and you shouldn’t take that support away and then expect to succeed with weights. If you are experienced, your arches can probably handle it. Mileage varies, then, depending on the state of your bare feet. Proceed with caution and avoid collapsed arches, especially under load.

No Heel

Olympic weightlifters wear lifting shoes with pronounced, sturdy heels. This raises the heel, reducing the amount of true ankle flexibility you need to get proper depth when squatting. It makes deep squats easier and arguably safer for elite athletes.

Someone like Kelly Starrett with optimal ankle mobility can hit those depths while barefoot, but not everyone has his mobility. If you’re accustomed to lifting in lifting shoes, particularly during squats, the transition to squatting in bare feet will be jarring. Maybe even dangerous, if you use the same weight and attempt to hit the same depth with the same knee angle.

Drop the Weight

With running, big bulky running shoes can mask the damage being done and artificially inflate the number of miles you log past your “natural” capacity. You can go farther, but at what cost?

Strength training isn’t as dynamic as running. It’s also lower impact, so it’s not as risky an endeavor. But you may have to bite the bullet, swallow your ego, and lower the weight a bit when you’re first starting out lifting in bare feet.

Don’t expect to push the weight you were handling in shoes, not right away at least.

Don’t Drop the Weight on Your Feet

This isn’t unique to bare feet: a pair of gym shoes isn’t going to protect your feet from an 80 pound dumbbell in rapid descent. But the advice does grow more urgent when you aren’t wearing any shoes at all.

I don’t think I need to say this, but you never know. Don’t drop weights on your bare feet.

Barefoot lifting can pay big dividends and be incredibly satisfying, as long as you do it safely and intelligently. Hopefully after today, you know how to get started.

Do you lift barefoot? What’s your favorite part about barefoot lifting? What do you get out of it?

Let me know down below and thanks for reading!

References https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29016477/

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Carnivore Diet: What the Research Says

Following up on last week’s big carnivore post, today I want to look at some of the main reasons people choose a carnivore diet in the first place.

There are those who just like meat a whole heckuva lot and don’t want to be bothered with vegetables, but I don’t think they represent the majority of the carnivore crowd. From what I can tell, most people come to the carnivore diet because they’re dealing with persistent health issues that aren’t being adequately resolved through conventional means. Maybe they’ve been trying something like Primal, paleo, or keto for a while, but there’s still room for improvement. Others are doing well but wish to see if they could achieve another level of awesomeness by doing something different or, dare I say, more extreme.

In these cases, carnivore is a sensible experiment for a number of reasons:

Carnivore diets combine the advantages of ketogenic and elimination diets, both of which are already popular for dealing with intractable health problems.

A nose-to-tail carnivorous diet is highly nutritious, providing bioavailable vitamins and minerals, plus plenty of protein, that the body needs.

If carnivore puts you in ketosis—and it almost certainly will—you get the anti-inflammatory benefits of ketones, plus mitochondrial biogenesis, increased fat-burning, appetite suppression, and more.

By removing potentially problematic plant foods, carnivore diets contain little or no:

FODMAPs
Oxalates
Lectins
Phytates
Glycoalkaloids
Salicylates

Carnivore lends itself to intermittent fasting and caloric restriction, both of which have noted health benefits.

You know I’m a fan of self-experimentation. Like any good scientist, you should start by educating yourself. In that spirit, today’s post is a roundup of available research. Use it as a jumping-off point for your own investigations if you are considering going carnivore. As always, I am not providing medical advice here. Please consult your doctors before using carnivore, or any diet, therapeutically.

What Does the Research Say?

Unfortunately, I can’t find any randomized controlled trials looking at carnivore for any health issue. There are a small number of published case studies, and Shawn Baker is currently trying to crowdfund some research. Otherwise, we have to rely on anecdotes and inferences from studies on other related diets (low-carb, high-protein, keto, low-FODMAP, and so on). Anecdotes are important, but they’ll never replace well-designed empirical studies. You can find confirmatory anecdotes supporting any of your beliefs if you find the right subreddit.

I pulled together the best of what I could find for today, but as you’ll see, we still have a lot to learn. The medical conditions included here are ones I’ve been asked about personally or that seem to be popular in carnivore forums. If you’d like me to address another in the future, drop me a comment below.

Carnivore Diets and Autoimmune Conditions

The carnivore diet has been launched into the public consciousness in large part thanks to people like Mikhaila Peterson, who credit carnivore with saving them from debilitating autoimmune illnesses. Using dietary interventions in this context is nothing new. There are more than 100 autoimmune conditions with different etiologies, triggers, and symptoms. What they usually have in common is gut dysbiosis and systemic inflammation. Removing pro-inflammatory, high-glycemic, insulinogenic foods is key to overcoming them.

Many folks are already using low-carb, ketogenic, or gluten-free diets to keep their symptoms at bay. The carnivore diet simply takes those a step further. But does it work? Anecdotally, yes, for some people anyway.

Does Carnivore Heal Leaky Gut?

Many doctors say that autoimmune issues “start in the gut,” since so many autoimmune conditions are characterized by increased intestinal permeability, commonly called leaky gut.1 Two main causes of leaky gut are imbalanced gut microbiome—having too many bad microbes and/or not enough of the good guys—and harmful compounds in food, such as gluten.

Carnivore eliminates plant foods, which are the source of most of those harmful compounds, and it offers a hard reset for the microbiome. One study showed profound microbial changes in the gut after just a few days of shifting to carnivore.2 Of course, different isn’t always better. I guarantee that an all-Oreo diet will produce some pretty profound changes, too, but I wouldn’t call them favorable.

In this case, though, we have some promising evidence from the Paleomedicina clinic in Hungary. They use a protocol they call the Paleolithic Ketogenic Diet (PKD), which starts out as full carnivore, though patients are ultimately allowed to include a small amount of approved, organic vegetables. Doctors administer a test called the PEG400 intestinal permeability test to all patients and claim great success in bringing patients into normal ranges with their protocol.3 However, the precise data is not published anywhere to my knowledge.

Carnivore for Arthritis

Mikhaila Peterson famously overcame debilitating rheumatoid arthritis with her all-meat diet. In his book The Carnivore Diet, carnivore drum-banger Shawn Baker claims that joint pain is frequently alleviated by carnivore, in his experience.

However, most research has focused on vegetarian diets. A few studies have demonstrated the benefits of a Mediterranean diet,4 and omega-3 supplementation5 for decreasing inflammation and pain among rheumatoid and psoriatic arthritis patients. One small, short-term study found no significant benefit of a ketogenic diet.6

A single report from The Medical Journal of Australia in 1964 reports the success of using a high-protein, gluten-free diet to successfully put 20 rheumatoid arthritis patients into remission for a period of up to 18 months.7 Check out the author’s commentary from the discussion:

“When man changed from food-gatherer (nomadic hunter) to food-producer, epochal changes in his ecology (to village community, urbanization and eventually to civilization) were paralleled by similar changes in his diet. The two or three millennia in prehistory during which the transition to agriculture took place is a relatively short period in the biological history of man. In terms of human evolution, this transition could be too sudden for the development of an adequate adaptive response to the drastic changes in his dietetic habits. The idea advanced here is that the challenge to man’s metabolism by the protein-complex of wheat (and rye) could lead to obscure syndromes;…”

Prescient indeed.

Hypothyroidism and the Carnivore Diet

Individuals with hypothyroidism, including autoimmune Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, frequently rely on dietary interventions like the autoimmune protocol (AIP), paleo, Primal, keto, and now carnivore. Despite abundant anecdotal evidence that they help, there have been few confirmatory studies to date.

Two recent papers confirm that AIP8 and a gluten-free diet9 are feasible and can reduce symptoms and improve quality of life for people with Hashimoto’s. The Paleomedicina team has also reported that they can successfully treat hypothyroidism with the PKD, but those data are not available in journal articles.

Carnivore Diet for Psoriasis

On the one hand, calorie-restricted10 11 and gluten-free12 seem to help psoriasis sufferers. Higher intakes of omega-3 fatty acids do as well, which might be expected on a carnivore diet rich in small, oily fish like anchovies and sardines.13 14 On the other hand, case studies going back decades suggest that high-protein and high-fat diets are not effective and in fact worsen psoriasis symptoms.15 16 17 A recent controlled study in mice found the same.18

This is one case where I’d tread cautiously. Of course, a quick Google search turns up plenty of people whose symptoms were improved after going carnivore. It can work, and there’s one case study of a patient who was helped by a low-carb, high-protein ketogenic diet.19 Still, I think it’s likely that some of those lucky folks experienced relief because they removed triggers like gluten, eggs, or dairy. They may not have needed to go full carnivore.

Carnivore Diet for IBS

If a carnivore diet can potentially reduce intestinal permeability, favorably shift the microbiome, and reduce systemic inflammation, it should help with gastrointestinal problems like IBS.

Clinicians often recommend low-fiber and low-residue diets for their IBS patients.20 “Residue” is the undigested stuff in food—the leftovers, if you will—that passes through the gastrointestinal tract and gets excreted. Carnivore is an extremely low-residue and low-fiber diet.

Likewise, low-FODMAP diets show considerable promise for relieving the pain and other unpleasant symptoms of IBS.21 In studies, up to three-quarters of patients find relief.22 Remember, FODMAPs are fermentable short-chain carbohydrates that often cause gastrointestinal distress for people with existing GI dysfunction. You won’t find them on a carnivorous diet.

The Paleomedicina team also published a case study of an adolescent boy with Crohn’s disease—a severe form of IBS—who was able to go off his Crohn’s medication after just two weeks on the PKD. After ten months on the diet, ultrasounds of his intestines were normal, and there were no longer markers of intestinal permeability.23

What about Using Carnivore to Treat Gastritis?

Gastritis is inflammation of the stomach lining. Generally, it’s treated with medications like antibiotics, proton pump inhibitors, or antacids, depending on what’s causing the inflammation. There’s very little research looking at dietary interventions to treat gastritis—in humans anyway. You’re in luck if you’re interested in cheetah or ferret gastritis, though.

If you have gastritis caused by H. pylori bacteria, I’d recommend you tackle that directly with the help of a medical practitioner. Otherwise, it’s certainly worth exploring what foods, if any, exacerbate your symptoms. Starting with a carnivore diet as a baseline and then reintroducing foods slowly is one way to do so.

Could a Carnivore Diet Ease Depression?

Converging evidence suggests a link between diet and depression, and a role for dietary modification in treating depression. First, it’s increasingly clear that there is a strong connection between gut health and depression, thanks to the gut-brain axis.24 25 Many experts also consider systemic inflammation to be a root cause of depression.26 Therefore, any diet that improves gut health and reduces inflammation is potentially useful.

Psychiatrist Dr. Georgia Ede has become an outspoken advocate of carnivore for depression, as well as other mental health disorders, on these grounds. She also correctly points out that the brain requires fat, including cholesterol, and other nutrients that are much more abundant in animal foods than in plant foods, such as choline, carnitine, omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA, and vitamin B12.27

A 2015 review of dietary interventions for depression and anxiety found that they frequently include recommendations to reduce red meat intake, but that makes them less likely to be effective.28 Likewise, one study found women who consume less red meat were at greater risk for major depression.29

Carnivore Diet to Reverse Gum Disease?

You probably learned as a child that sugar is public enemy number one when it comes to dental health. In part, that’s because it disrupts the oral microbiome. That’s only part of the story, though. Gum health also goes hand-in-hand with gut health and systemic inflammation. That’s why gingivitis and periodontitis are common among diabetic folks—because of the hyperglycemia and chronic inflammation characteristic of poorly controlled diabetes.30 31

Carnivore advocate Jordan Peterson, Mikhaila’s father, claims to have reversed his own gum problems once he went all-meat. Some indirect evidence backs his experience:

In one small study, researchers replicated a Stone Age village and set up ten people to live there for four weeks. Despite having no access to toothbrushes or their handy waterpiks, their gum health increased.32
A pilot study showed that when ten participants ate a low-carb (33 In a follow-up, participants experienced less gum bleeding after four weeks on the diet, and they also happened to lose weight.34

Carnivore for weight loss

There’s every reason to suspect that carnivore diets should promote weight loss. If you’ve ever tried, you know it’s hard to overeat protein. Because protein is highly satiating, it tends to lead naturally to caloric restriction.35 High-protein (not carnivore) diets are shown repeatedly in laboratory studies to be favorable for weight loss.36 37 38 And of course, we know that ketogenic diets can be great for burning excess body fat.

Potential Negative Health Impacts of Carnivore?

Detractors will tell you that carnivore must be bad for your health, what with all that carcinogenic red meat and artery-clogging cholesterol (/sarcasm). Not surprisingly, I don’t put much stock in those arguments. Nevertheless, in the spirit of open-minded pursuit of truth, let’s see what the data actually say.

Carnivore Diet and Colon Cancer

I have already debunked the shoddy epidemiological studies that fuel the belief that red meat causes colon cancer, but it’s one of those conventional wisdom “truths” that won’t seem to go away. Sure, don’t eat a ton of processed meats, and don’t eat your red meat on a white-flour hamburger bun alongside fries cooked in rancid oil. But where’s the evidence that a proper nose-to-tail carnivore diet increases cancer risk?

I can’t find any, but I did find two case studies from the Paleomedicina team that are relevant to this question:

One of their patients with grade 1 colon cancer remained stable for almost seven years without conventional treatment thanks to strict adherence to the PKD. 39 It’s not clear if the patient was carnivore over the entire period.
Another one of their patients used the PKD following a diagnosis of rectal cancer. His symptoms and cancer markers improved when he followed the diet religiously, but he was unable to do so long-term. 40

Emerging research also suggests that ketogenic diets exert anti-tumor effects with certain colon cancers.41 42 43 Quite the opposite of what the fearmongers would have you believe.

Will a Carnivore Diet Cause Gout?

Gout is a painful form of arthritis that occurs when urate crystals build up in joints. It can be triggered or exacerbated by foods and beverages that contain purines, which are metabolized into uric acid. Red meat and organ meats are primary sources of purines, so doctors often advise people to limit or eliminate them from their diets—despite consistent evidence that it actually helps.

As I’ve written before, prescribing low-meat diets for gout is a case of faulty logic. For one thing, meat is hardly the only dietary source of purines. Vegetarians and vegans also suffer from gout, and, according to one study, vegans have higher serum levels of uric acid.44 On the flip side, people who follow a high(ish)-protein Atkins diet have lower serum uric acid levels.45

We should be looking to sugar, especially fructose, and alcohol as more likely culprits, and addressing underlying metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance that make gout more likely. That said, if you already know that red meat and offal trigger your gout, there’s no reason to add more in the hopes that that will fix it.

Is a Carnivore Diet Bad for Women?

This is the same concern lobbied against keto, namely that any “restrictive” diet is dangerous for premenopausal women. There’s a kernel of truth here. Women’s bodies are more sensitive to calorie and nutrient insufficiencies during their reproductive years. All that means, though, is that they have to be especially mindful about getting enough nutritious food. This can be more difficult with diets like carnivore and keto, which tend to be highly satiating, but it can certainly be done.

For what it’s worth, some of the most outspoken carnivore advocates are women like Peterson and Amber O’Hearn who used a carnivore diet to completely turn their health around for the better.

General Advice and Cautions

In the absence of solid scientific evidence regarding the benefits or downsides of carnivore diets, what is a data-minded, health-conscious individual to do?

Follow the advice I’ve previously offered regarding eating nose-to-tail, including plenty of healthy fats, and supplementing as needed.

Stay flexible. As more data and new insights come along, be willing to adjust, even abandon, your approach if that seems wise. Never be afraid to pivot.

Consult your doctor about your specific situation. Ask if there are specific reasons a carnivore diet might be contraindicated for you.

Is There Anything Carnivore Can’t Do?

Definitely. It might well help a lot of people with a lot of different issues, but it’s not a panacea.

I’m also not convinced it’s wholly necessary for everyone who tries it. At the end of the day, the average person will benefit tremendously from any diet that gets them away from sugar and ultra-refined grain products, and toward a diet comprised of whole, natural foods. Primal, paleo, Mediterranean—these are probably sufficient for many folks. But then, desperate times may call for desperate measures.

As with any intervention, be it diet, lifestyle, pharmaceutical, or other, there will be some people for whom it works wonder and some for whom it works not at all. Carnivore is no different. Is it worth trying if you have a chronic issue that you believe may be diet-related? Absolutely, with your doctor’s knowledge, of course. Would I feel comfortable offering a 100 percent money-back guarantee? Nope.

The fact remains, all we have to go on right now are anecdotes and circumstantial evidence. These are powerful anecdotes to be sure, and ones that I have no reason to doubt. Still, I’m eager for well-controlled scientific studies, which unfortunately aren’t forthcoming. Until then, I’ll continue to support everyone in wise self-experimentation.

Tell me: if you’ve tried a carnivore diet, what was your experience?

References https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5440529https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3957428/https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323151200_Therapeutic_protocol_of_ICMNI_-_Paleomedicina_Hungaryhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1754463/[ /ref] greater fish intake,[ref]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5740014/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK74220/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10895373https://www.cabdirect.org/cabdirect/abstract/19651402878https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6592837/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30060266https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31309536https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29926091/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31634384https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8219661https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8219661https://www.cabdirect.org/cabdirect/abstract/19671407267https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/279740https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamadermatology/article-abstract/528773https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29605673https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26559897/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4642427/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3966170/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24830318/http://www.academia.edu/download/54060434/Crohn_disease__2016.pdfhttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166223613000088https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25415497https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3285451/https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/diagnosis-diet/201904/the-carnivore-diet-mental-healthhttps://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25465596/https://www.jstor.org/stable/48515238https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17012733https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19958441https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19405829/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/4962497/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30941800/https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/82/1/41/4863422https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc2858200/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17622289https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16129086https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/013e/ed607e1a519877fe336f48a54ab0906051a3.pdfhttps://www.academia.edu/download/56083083/ajmcr-5-8-3.pdfhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5842847/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5852782/https://ascopubs.org/doi/abs/10.1200/JCO.2018.36.15_suppl.e15709https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3572016/https://acrabstracts.org/abstract/high-protein-diet-atkins-diet-and-uric-acid-response/

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Developing our Empowering, Energizing Morning Routine

Starting your day with a deliberate movement routine that you repeat every single day can be life changing, because it creates the leverage and the power to become a more focused and disciplined person in all other areas of daily life. Contrast this with the disturbing stat from IDC Research that 80 percent of Americans reach for their phones as the first act upon awakening.1 Numerous studies confirm that once you activate the shallow, reactionary brain function in the frontal cortex with a smartphone engagement—especially first thing in the morning when you are locking habit patterns into place—it’s difficult to transition into high-level strategic problem solving mode.2 Julie Morgenstern, renowned productivity consultant and author of Never Check Email In The Morning, explains that when you reach for your phone first thing, “You’ll never recover. Those requests and those interruptions and those unexpected surprises and those reminders and problems are endless… there is very little that cannot wait a minimum of 59 minutes.”

The Dope On Dopamine

The reason you’ll never recover is because your morning foray into hyperconnectivity is creating a dopamine addiction.3 When work gets either challenging or boring over the course of the day, you are hard-wiring a reliable method of escape into the realm of instant gratification and instant relief from cognitive peak performance. As detailed in the excellent book by anti-sugar crusader Dr. Robert Lustig called, The Hacking Of The American Mind, we are chasing the dopamine high today like never before. We are doing this in assorted ways that are strongly driven by marketing forces behind Internet fodder (social media, pornography, click bait, and even email and text messaging), prescription drugs, street drugs, alcohol, processed sugar products, overly stressful exercise patterns,consumerism, and other sources of escape and instant gratification.

As a healthy living enthusiast reading this blog, you can acknowledge the great sense of self-satisfaction and peace of mind that comes from implementing self-discipline and persevering through challenges and setbacks to achieve meaningful goals. These behaviors stimulate the serotonin and oxytocin pathways in the brain, triggering feelings of contentment, connection and love. Bestselling author Mark Manson asserts that self-discipline is a key to a happy, fulfilling life.4 Alas, when you hijack the dopamine pathways too often with the aforementioned folly, you down-regulate the serotonin pathways in your brain so you become wired for quick-hit pleasure at the expense of long-term happiness.

The Magic Of Morning Movement

Extricating from this mess starts first thing in the morning! Since most of us have tons of sedentary influences during the day (commute, office work, evening screen entertainment), I’m going to suggest a mindful routine of exercises, poses, and dynamic stretches that build flexibility, mobility, core and muscle strength. Your morning routine will help you naturally awaken and energize (especially if you can do it outdoors), improve the fitness base from which you launch formal workouts, help prevent injuries, and boost your daily movement quota especially if things get hectic and you don’t have time for formal workout.

I’m not a big routine or consistency guy and never have been, so amassing a four-year streak of doing a template routine every single day may be more of a revelation to me than to big-time creatures of habit. If you’re already good at self-discipline and consistency, applying your skills to a morning movement routine will pay big dividends; you’ll likely increase your level of sophistication and degree of difficulty over time. If you are a “go with the flow” type of person, the morning routine will serve as a much- needed anchor for a focused, disciplined day—especially against the formidable foes of distraction and instant gratification.

The original impetus for designing a short morning movement routine was my frustration with recurrent and lingering soreness and stiffness after every sprint workout. I realized that I wasn’t adequately acclimating my body to doing all-out blasts once a week, because nothing else I did approximated what happened on sprint day. Perhaps many weekend warriors can relate: If you never approximate your most difficult workouts or do preparatory drills and exercises consistently, your big efforts are going to beat you up and require extended recovery time. I figured if I could raise the baseline from which I launched these tough workouts, via better core strength, hamstring and hip flexor mobility, and so forth—the workouts would be easier to recover from. I noticed these benefits right away and excitedly shot a video back in 2017 of my original routine. That’s when I learned the sequences actually took 12 minutes instead of five! I also did lots of the moves in bed (to make sure I’d do them right away) until I later discovered that the core stimulation is much more intense on the floor than on a soft mattress.

As I accumulated an impressive streak one day at a time, I started to realize some amazing physical and psychological benefits. My first few steps out of bed in the morning (that is, before starting the routine) were light and graceful—no more limping, creaking and cracking my way to the bathroom. My post-exercise soreness pretty much vanished—something I’d struggled with after every sprint workout for over a decade. Since I typically pair my morning routine with an ensuing chest freezer cold exposure session, the one-two combo gave me a sense of stability, focus and self-discipline that was missing, since I’m not part of rituals like rush hour commuting or an 8-to-5 office workday.

My routine has evolved quite a bit over the past four years. Buoyed by the confidence that I can carve out the time to execute every day no matter what, I continue to add more custom-designed moves to my template, increasing both the duration and degree of difficulty. Currently, the session lasts for a minimum of 32 minutes. Often, I will transition right into a proper strength training session since I’m so warmed up and fitness focused. This video shows the exercises and repetitions comprising my current routine, with an explanation of each.

Yeah, it’s time consuming and some of these moves—especially the grand finale Bulgarian Split Squats—are not easy! It’s important to note that I’ve progressed naturally and gradually from a modest starting point four years ago. If you are ready to take action, here are the important parameters to honor:

Start Small

Design a routine that is simple and do-able every day. Don’t make it too strenuous or too long in duration out of the gate. You must strive for consistency, convenience, and low stress. If five minutes is all you can spare right now, start with that. Over time, when the routine has become integrated into habit, you may choose to increase the duration and degree of difficulty in a manner that feels natural and fun.

Daily Commitment

Place extreme importance on doing your routine as soon as possible upon awakening every single day no matter what. The goal is to establish a streak that will become as natural as current streak of brushing your teeth every day. If you typically have to visit the bathroom, brew coffee, tend to children or pets, or check the stock ticker as your first acts upon awakening, insert the movement routine into a recurring slot in your morning pattern: bathroom, coffee, hit the deck sounds great! If a particularly hectic morning prevents you from doing your routine, perform a makeup session later in the day to honor your commitment to the project.

Repeatable

Perform the same exact sequence of movements and repetitions every time. You don’t want to have to apply any creative energy or waste precious cognitive resources deciding what exercises to do or how many reps to complete. Repeating the same sequence will make it easier to program your routine into habit. Over time, feel free to modify your template by adding or subtracting exercises, but always have a working template in place. Don’t listen to the folklore that you need to confuse your muscles with ever-changing exercises. Let’s check back in 20 years and see how not confused your body is from completing a great routine every day.

Mindful

Doing the same thing every day adds a meditative aspect to the experience. I focus entirely on proceeding through the rep count for each exercise, which is synchronized with my breathing on many of the moves. I’ve made the mistake a few times of trying to listen to a podcast or take a phone call during my routine, and it invariably causes me to lose count during one of the sequences. That’s when I established a penalty of having to start the reps of that particular exercise over if my mind wanders. That will keep you focused! Now my morning routine is a time to enjoy the view of the trees, the sound of birds, and the mind- body connection that comes from sequential movement—as you might enjoy in a guided yoga class.

Outdoors (Sunlight, Fresh Air, And Maybe Even Cold!)

Research suggests that exposing your eyeballs to direct sunlight as soon as you awaken can have a powerful effect to entrain your circadian rhythm. The sunlight hits your retina, travels down the optic nerve to the all-important suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of the hypothalamus. The SCN is considered the master clock of your circadian rhythm, and directs all manner of light-driven hormonal processes.5 Direct sun exposure in the morning (no sunglasses, no window barriers) triggers a spike in energizing and mood elevating hormones like serotonin, cortisol and adenosine. Kick starting these sunlight-driven hormonal processes is actually the first step toward getting a good night’s sleep, as you will optimize the timing of the evening conversion of serotonin to melatonin to help transition into sleep.6 In the winter months, my routine doubles as cold exposure as I’ll wear only shorts in temperatures freezing or below.

Customized

Design exercises that support your fitness goals, address any muscular weaknesses or imbalances, and counter sedentary lifestyle patterns like being hunched over at the car and computer. My leg swings and hamstring extensions are contemplated with sprinting and high jumping in mind, since these muscles take a lot of impact trauma when sprinting. The difficult yoga wheel pose is directly applicable to bending over the high jump bar!

Enjoyable

There are all kinds of expert-recommended exercises that I’ve tried and discarded since I didn’t enjoy them or they don’t work for me. I did the familiar “pigeon” stretch from yoga for a while but I believe I sustained a knee injury from it, so it’s out. I have a few other cool exercises not shown on the video, such as monster walks and shuffles with Mini Bands. I’m tempted to officially add them to the routine, but I prefer to keep them as optional add-ons. With my current routine at 32 minutes, I occasionally experience a bit of time stress to get it done if I have a busy morning planned. I don’t want that feeling to happen more than occasionally, so I’m hesitant to add anything else at this time.

At first, it will be very helpful to write down each of the exercises and number of repetitions as you strive to lock in an ideal template. In particular, you want to discover a rep count that’s a bit of a challenge, but not too strenuous to have you fretting and sweating over it. As I mention on the video, when I first integrated the challenging Bulgarian split squats, I took each leg to the point of mild muscle burn that occurred at 20 reps. Today, I experience that same mild burn after 45 reps. So the degree of difficulty and mental strain have not changed, but I am validating my fitness progress over time. All of your progress with increasing reps and increasing the overall duration and degree of difficulty of your routine should happen gradually and naturally. Today is a good day to start your streak, so try stringing together a few of your favorite moves and get on the books! Good luck, and let us know some great suggestions in the comments section.

References https://blogs.constantcontact.com/smartphone-usage-statistics/https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-wise/201209/why-were-all-addicted-texts-twitter-and-googlehttp://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2018/dopamine-smartphones-battle-time/https://markmanson.net/self-disciplinehttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5372003/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2290997/

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Pickled Vegetables, Two Ways: Home Fermented and Quick Pickles

Backyard gardens are putting forth the last of their bounty, and late summer vegetables are at their peak of freshness. To squeeze every last drop out of your harvest, give fermentation a try.

Fermented vegetables date back hundreds of years. Back before we had freezers, people had to preserve food somehow. Somewhere along the line, someone figured out that salting food and letting it sit for a week creates a crunchy, tangy pickled vegetable that tastes better than what you started with.

A lot of people find home fermentation to be intimidating. And it can be, at first. As long as you sanitize your cutting boards, jars, and tools with boiling water before you start, there’s a great chance you’ll end up with a beautiful pickle at the end.

Here’s how to do it.

Home Fermented Vegetables: Pickled Giardiniera Recipe

Serves: 10-20, depending on serving size

Time in the kitchen: 15 minutes, plus 5 days hands-off fermentation time

Ingredients

1-2 heads cauliflower, cut into small florets
6-7 carrots
5-6 stalks celery
1 red bell pepper
1 large leek
1 lb. green beans
1 tsp. black peppercorns
3/4 tsp. mustard seeds
4 bay leaves
4 cloves garlic, smashed
1 small bunch oregano
3/4 tsp. red pepper flakes (or 1-2 sliced jalapenos)
Water
Salt

Directions

Using boiling water, sanitize whatever vessel you plan to use for your fermenting. Use care not to burn yourself!

Wash all of your veggies and chop them. Double wash your leeks as they’re notorious for being very sandy.

We recommend a 3.5% salt solution for your fermenting. To figure out how much salt you need, weigh your crock or jar on a small kitchen scale. Tare the scale while the empty jar is on it so the weight reads as 0g. Fill the jar with water until it’s a few inches from the lip of the jar. Record the mass of the water and then multiply the amount by 3.5% to find out how much salt you need.

Pour the water out and add the appropriate amount of salt to the jar. Then, subtract the amount of salt you added from the total mass of the water that fits in the jar. This will give you the mass of water you need to add to the jar. At this point, pour the salt solution you created out into another jar, you’ll need it in a minute. Layer your crock or jar with all of the chopped veggies, the peppercorns, mustard seeds, bay leaves, oregano and red pepper flakes. Pour enough of your salt water solution into the jar so the vegetables are fully submerged.

Alternatively, you can keep the salt water solution. Add a few crock fermentation weights to the top which will keep all of the vegetables submerged.

Cover your jar with the appropriate lid. We used an airlock lid kit, which has a small hole in the lid that the airlock attaches to. Fill the airlock with the appropriate amount of water based on your instructions, and you’re good to go! Place the crock in a cool dry place, ideally away from sunlight. The warmer the conditions are in the room you place the crock, the more quickly the contents will ferment.

If you don’t have an airlock system, you can lightly cover the jar with a lid and “burp” the jar 1-2 times daily which will get rid of any carbon dioxide gas that gets produced as the vegetables ferment. This proves to be a bit tedious and runs the risk of your ferment overflowing, so it’s worth the small investment for the airlock system. Check your crock daily to make sure it hasn’t overflowed.

You can taste the giardiniera after 5 days or so and decide how much tangier and longer you want the mixture to go for. We personally like it around 10 days, but it can also go 2 weeks or even longer. Use your nose first! If you taste or remove some vegetable, make sure the contents of the crock stay submerged in the salt solution.

Mold vs. Kahm Yeast

If you see black, blue, or fuzzy circles forming on top, that’s mold. Discard your mixture and start over. If you see what looks like a thin layer of whitish plastic wrap forming on top, with or without tiny bubbles underneath, that’s kahm yeast, and harmless. Do an image search for “mold vs. kahm yeast” so that you can see the difference side-by-side.

Quick Pickled Veggies Recipe

Not interested in fermenting but want to quick pickle instead? Try these quick pickled onions! Perfect for topping salads, primal lettuce wraps, or your favorite burger.

Ingredients

2 small onions
½ cup apple cider vinegar
¼ cup rice wine vinegar (or you could use coconut vinegar)
½ tsp. salt
1 tsp. coconut sugar
handful of black peppercorns
1-2 chopped garlic cloves

Directions

To quick pickle, thinly slice your onions. Some people choose to boil water and pour boiling water over the onions for 5-10 seconds to blanch them prior to pickling, but it’s not necessary.

In a small bowl or saucepan, combine the vinegars, salt and sugar. Stir or lightly heat until the salt and sugar dissolves. Layer the sliced onions in a small mason jar. Add in the peppercorns and garlic and then pour the vinegar on top.

Cover the jar and refrigerate for an hour before enjoying. They’re best after a few days in the fridge, but can be enjoyed for about a week.

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Weekly Link Love — Edition 104

Research of the Week

How did the lockdowns work?

Scientists discover a new gland.

Hominids in a region of Kenya used the same basic stone-age axes and other tools without changing them for around 700,000 years.

Beet juice improves exercise tolerance.

Beet juice improves hemoglobin concentration.

New Primal Blueprint Podcasts

Episode 452: Eric Perner: Host Elle Russ welcomes sustainable rancher Eric Perner.

Episode 453: Dr. Phil Maffetone and Dr. Ron Sinha: Host Brad Kearns welcomes a true power duo onto the podcast to talk burning fat.

Primal Health Coach Radio Episode 81: Laura and Erin chat with Amanda Goldman-Petri about chasing best practices, not trends.

Media, Schmedia

Newer homes and furniture are more flammable.

Cats in prisons.

Interesting Blog Posts

Our parents often sacrifice themselves for us. What are you going to do with the gift?

Could cold water trigger shrinkages in dementia rates?

Social Notes

Do this.

Everything Else

The man with amnesia who filled in his memory gaps with outside sources.

Training like an animal works.

Things I’m Up to and Interested In

Of course it is: UVB appears protective against COVID-19.

Proven once again: There’s no free lunch.

News I’m happy to see: Hospitalized COVID-19 patients have much better survival rates now.

Funny how that works: In animals, a drug that slows glucose absorption and lowers insulin slows down cancer progression.

Question I’m Asking

What are memories?

Recipe Corner

As long as you swap out the vegetable oil for avocado or olive oil and maybe reduce the honey (if you’re worried about carbs), this charred Brussels sprout and leek Korean-style salad looks quite good.
Carnivore keto breakfast casserole.

Time Capsule

One year ago (Oct 16 – Oct 22)

5 Biggest Longevity Myths – What do people get wrong about longevity?
Campfire Cooking: A Primal Guide – What works over fire.

Comment of the Week

“Mark, you always offer a balanced and thoughtful opinion and I appreciated your summation here today. It’s why I’ll continue to follow you! I’ve been eating a carnivore diet for 8 months now and have CURED Type 2 diabetes, arthritis, IBS, and depression. My cholesterol is through the roof, but I’m not alarmed. At 65, I’m experiencing the kind of optimal health I dreamed of in my 20s and 30s.”

-Great to hear it, Vicki!

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Ask A Health Coach: How’s Your Relationship with Food?

Hi folks, today we’re back for another edition of Ask a Health Coach! Erin is here sharing her strategies for making good health a priority during the pandemic, plus what to do when you feel like you’re putting in a lot of effort without a lot of reward and what she eats in a typical day. Got more questions? Keep them coming in the Mark’s Daily Apple Facebook Group or in the comments below.

Annie asked:

“I love the way I feel when I eat clean, but meal prepping always takes a backseat to all the other things I need to do, especially now that I’m working, parenting, and homeschooling. How do I carve out time to eat healthier?”

You’re not alone in feeling the pressure of doing it all. With all of our waking hours being consumed by work and family responsibilities, making time for the non-essentials like exercise and eating well (which I would argue are essential), seems nearly impossible.1

At first glance, the issue is pretty straightforward, right? There’s not enough time. There are only 24 hours in a day anyway. But here’s the deal, people who feel like they have the least amount of free time, the ones who feel the most overworked, are actually doing it to themselves.

In this study, researchers had 7,000 participants estimate how much time was needed to accommodate their basic needs compared to how much free time they had in their schedules.2 It turns out that their time constraints were an illusion.

The pressure of what we have time for and what we don’t has more to do with the things we assign value to rather than how many hours there are in a day.

That being said, everything we do in life is a choice – what we eat, say, and do, where we spend our energy and our money – they’re all choices. And, as you might guess, there are consequences of those choices.

There’s no doubt that your life is busier than ever right now. You’ve probably never worn more hats in your life, but instead of looking at food as an afterthought, or telling yourself you “don’t have the time,” I suggest you try giving it a little more attention.3 Here’s why.

If you choose not to make meal prepping a priority (or at least keeping healthy food on hand), the consequences might be that you find yourself grabbing snacks throughout the day, ordering less-than-healthy takeout, or not eating enough quality food, which can bring on an afterhours binge. And the consequences of those actions might mean you’re feeling foggy and fatigued day after day, making it even more difficult to do all the things you need to do.

Keep in mind, these are just consequences of your choices.

Also, you mention that you love the way you feel when you eat clean, so, you already know it’s worth it to take good care of yourself. You know how it feels when you can’t stop snacking on goldfish crackers in front of the TV versus the satisfaction you get from sitting down for a well-balanced meal eaten slowly where you enjoy every freaking bite!

While you might not have time to spend hours in the kitchen, how about throwing something in the crockpot before the day begins? Or making a big batch of chili or stew over the weekend. Or roasting a whole chicken and some veggies in the oven.

Again, it comes down to choices and priorities. How great would it be to have more focus throughout the day because you decided to put your health first? How amazing would it be to feel energized into the evening hours instead of feeling drained? By making a simple shift in your priorities, you could see a dramatic swing in how you feel throughout the day.

Adam asked:

“I’m really struggling here. With all the time I spend reading labels and tracking my macros, I’m finding that the effort is becoming greater than the benefit. I’m doing all these things but not really noticing any results. What gives?”

Ah, the sweet reward of bigger biceps or a smaller pant size. You’re not alone in wanting results. That’s why health and fitness is a $4.5 trillion industry.4 But I get it. You’re diligently putting in the work, day after day, and not seeing the outcome you’re looking for.

There could be a few different factors at play here, but one you might want to consider is a phenomenon called discounting, which basically means that the more effort you put into something, the less valuable the reward becomes. In a study published in Cognitive Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, researchers had participants do two simple tasks that would be rewarded with a cash prize.5 Sometimes the tasks involved high effort, other times it involved a low amount of effort. They found that the participants who put in more effort responded to the reward with less enthusiasm than those who put in less work.

You can blame the nucleus accumbens for that.6 It’s the part of the brain that’s in charge of the reward circuitand is based on two essential neurotransmitters: dopamine and serotonin. So, in a nutshell, it’s just how we’re wired.

Does that mean you shouldn’t put in the effort? It depends. In general, I don’t subscribe to the typical diet culture where everything is weighed, evaluated, and overanalyzed. I opt for teaching my clients to have an effortless relationship with food where they eat satiating, satisfying, nutrient-dense meals when they’re hungry without micromanaging every detail.

But if you take pleasure out of reading labels and managing your macros as you’re doing, keep doing it. I’ve found that in situations where people actually enjoy the effort they put in, the journey ends up being more rewarding than the destination itself.

“I’ve been following Mark’s diet for several years and I love seeing posts about what he eats during the day. But what does your day look like?”

Let me start by saying that knowing what works for you and your body is nutrition gold. It really is. You can read every nutrition book in the world, follow dozens of “healthy” food bloggers and influencers, and copy Mark’s diet (or mine) to a tee, but since every human is unique — and responds differently to different foods, it’s important to know what works for you.7

For instance, I follow the Primal way of eating fairly closely, as you might expect.8 Most nights you’ll find me with a grilled ribeye and plate of steamed veggies smothered in butter. Maybe a square or two of dark chocolate. But sometimes, I’ll have an evening where I partake in some good old-fashioned carbs and dairy. For me, nothing beats delighting in a few perfectly crispy, salty roasted potatoes accompanied by a thick dollop of rich, organic sour cream.

I know exactly how my body responds to foods like these. And armed with this information, I can choose to treat myself without any fuss or worry. I encourage you to find what works for you too. When you start your day with eggs and bacon do you feel satiated or starving? When you drink coffee are you wired or alert? When you indulge in carbs do you get sleepy or energized? Like I said, everyone’s different and no amount of researching how other people eat will give you the same answers as listening to your own body.

Got thoughts? Share ‘em in the comments below.

References https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/benefit-to-improving-diet-and-exercise-at-the-same-time-201304266126http://jamesmahmudrice.info/Time-Pressure.pdfhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7401000/https://www.globalwellnesssummit.com/2020-global-wellness-trends/https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Effort-discounting-in-human-nucleus-accumbens-Botvinick-Huffstetler/567db1262529ec7b9144269695314fe0f9e76b32https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Effort-discounting-in-human-nucleus-accumbens-Botvinick-Huffstetler/567db1262529ec7b9144269695314fe0f9e76b32https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-the-best-diet-no-such-thing-2019-6https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-the-best-diet-no-such-thing-2019-6.

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The Definitive Guide to the Carnivore Diet

By far the most exciting health trend to hit the scene in the last few years is the Carnivore Diet. Tens of thousands of people are adopting it. Passionate online communities devoted to discussing and extolling the virtues of exclusive meat-eating have sprung up. And while in raw numbers it isn’t as big as keto, “carnivore diet” is running neck and neck with “vegan diet” on Google Trends for the past year. It’s one I’ve been watching for a long time.

Over ten years ago, I addressed the idea of a zero-carb carnivorous diet right here on this blog.

A few years ago, I went over the advantages and shortcomings of the carnivore diet and even gave my suggestions for making it work better.

Earlier this year, I explored the notion of a seafood-based carnivorous diet.

Today, I’m going to pull it all together and give an overview—a definitive guide, if you will.

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Okay, so what is the Carnivore Diet?

It’s quite simple (which is part of the appeal and effectiveness). You eat meat and don’t eat plants.

If it explored three-dimensional space by hoof, claw, wing, or tail, had live kin or laid eggs, and defended itself with direct action, non-violent resistance, or by fleeing, you can eat it (and its products). If it rooted itself to the ground, reproduced by bee, consumed sunlight and water, and defended itself with chemical compounds, you cannot eat it (or its products).

If it sounds extreme, you’re right. The carnivore diet is unlike anything most people have ever considered.

But adoption rates aren’t exploding because everyone’s deluding themselves: People are reporting real benefits.

Clearer thinking: If a carnivore diet induces a state of ketosis, it will also increase mitochondrial biogenesis in the brain and reduce brain fog. This allows your brain to generate more energy and clears out excess ammonia which slows down the thinking process.

Improved gut health: A carnivore diet is an extreme elimination diet. It eliminates all the most common triggers of gut inflammation, including fiber, lectins, grains, legumes, sugar, seed oils, and in some cases dairy. If any of those foods are the cause of your gut inflammation, removing them from your diet will improve your gut health and even allow it to heal.

Weight loss: Weight loss gets a whole lot easier when you’re not starving. Most people who go carnivore find they’re unable to eat enough to gain body fat; the diet that is most satiating while still being nutritious will almost always come out ahead without even trying.

What Do You Eat On a Carnivore Diet?

At the heart of it, the carnivore diet is very simple: eat only animal foods and do not eat plant foods.

Do Eat

Meat: beef, lamb, bison, pork, chicken, turkey, venison

Seafood: fish, shellfish, shrimp, crab, lobster

Animal foods: eggs, bone broth, animal fat, bone marrow, organs

Eating food from all three categories on a consistent basis is important for obtaining all the nutrients you need.

The following foods are contentious and not all carnivores eat or accept them.

Dairy: milk, cheese, cream, butter; some carnivores avoid lactose and only eat low-lactose dairy like hard cheeses and butter and cream.

Honey: since honey comes from bees, which are animals, honey is technically a carnivore-friendly source of carbohydrates.

Most carnivores allow salt and pepper. Some use herbs and spices and even things like garlic. Some carnivore dieters avoid coffee, tea, and alcohol because they’re made from plants. Others permit them.

Carnivore vs. Keto

If carnivore sounds a lot like keto, you’re right. There are many similarities between carnivore and keto.

They’re both lower-carb and higher-fat than other diets.

They may both help you reach ketosis.

They both involve eating a lot of animal products.

The main difference is that keto contains plants and carnivore isn’t necessarily low-carb.

You could be keto and eat entire salad bowls full of leafy greens.

You could be carnivore and eat 100 grams worth of carbohydrates from milk.

You could be carnivore and eat more protein and more moderate amounts of fat, while keto is by definition a high-fat diet.

But, as commonly practiced, the two can be very similar. Most carnivore dieters eat close to zero carbs, a good amount of fat, and are in ketosis much of the time. Most keto dieters eat more animal products than the average person. It’s very easy to combine the two. In fact, there’s a clinic in Hungary called Paleomedicina that does exactly this, using a high-fat “paleolithic ketogenic” carnivore diet (2:1-3:1 fat:protein ratio) to treat patients with otherwise intractable chronic autoimmune diseases like type 1 diabetes, Crohn’s, and rheumatoid arthritis. Not only are they getting great clinical results, they’re getting great results and closely tracking relevant biomarkers.

Which leads me to the next section…

Who Should Try Carnivore?

Anyone can try it. Populations for whom carnivore seems to work best are people with autoimmune or immune ystem diseases like eczema or rheumatoid arthritis, and people with gut disorders like IBS or Crohn’s.

Why?

People with autoimmune and gut disorders almost always have dysfunctional and dysregulated gut biomes, and carnivore represents a hard “reset” for the gut. You pull out all the fermentable fibers and sugars and carbohydrates and gut-disrupting antinutrients found in plant foods and go back to square one.

Carnivore Diet Pros
Animal nutrients are more bioavailable.

Plant nutrients usually undergo a conversion process before humans can utilize them, and not every human has the same conversion capacity. Meanwhile, animals and their constituent parts contain nutrients in the perfect form for other animals to absorb. Retinol is the “animal form” of vitamin A, and it’s far more effective than beta-carotene, the plant form. Long-chained omega-3s found in seafood are far more effective than shorter-chained omega-3s found in plants, which must be converted to the longer “animal form.” Name a nutrient, and it’s probably more bioavailable in animal form.

Animal foods contain unique nutrients you can’t get in plants.

Some of those essential and/or helpful nutrients only occur in meat, like creatine, carnosine, taurine, or vitamin B12. If you don’t eat meat, there’s literally no realistic way to obtain these essential (or conditionally essential) nutrients without relying on supplementation, which didn’t exist until the last hundred years.

Animal foods have no toxins.

Because animals can run and bite and claw and fly to get away from predators, they don’t need to employ kind of passive chemical warfare that many plants use to dissuade predation. Plants cannot run. They cannot move, and so they must manufacture chemicals that irritate guts or outright poison the animals who seek to eat them. There are no phytates, lectins, gluten, oxalates, or other problematic compounds in a ribeye. Except for blatant allergies and intolerances to red meat, like the ones that arise with a Lone Star tick bite, meat is safe from a toxin standpoint.

Eating meat made us human.

When hominids ate very little meat, maybe grabbing a leg bone here, a lizard here or a mouse there, our brains were much smaller and less impressive. As hominids progressed and grew more intelligent, their diets changed to include more and more animal food. They started out as scavengers, cracking bones and skulls left behind by more obligate predators. They developed thrusting weapons.  They became incredible throwers and developed lethal projectiles. They developed language and tactics to coordinate assaults and lay traps. And as the meat poured in, the brains grew. Humans as we are them today emerged stepwise with meat.

My take is that it was a combination of a few things:

Animal meat, fat, and animal-based nutrients. The human expanded as we ate more and more meat, although the causality isn’t clear . It could be the nutrients, protein, and calories found in animal foods provided a stimulus for brain expansion. It could be that our desire for meat necessitated an expanding brain to enhance our intelligence, cunning, tool-making, and hunting ability—that those humans whose brains expanded were better adapted to hunting. It could be all of that at once (my guess).
Fire. With fire, we could extract more calories from both plant and animal foods—cooked tubers are more digestible than raw and fire allowed us to access the residual calories bound up in bones and connective tissue. Paleo-anthropologists call this “grease processing”: boiling pulverized animal bones in animal skins to extract every last drop of fat, gelatin, and protein.
Seafood. Early humans were coastal dwellers. Researcher Stephen Cunanne has been beating this drum for over a decade, showing through anthropological and neurological evidence that the long-chain omega-3 fatty acid DHA was necessary for human evolution and brain development.1

The point is undeniable, though: the expansion in human brain size and intelligence clearly coincided with the rise in meat consumption.

Now, none of these arguments confirm that we should only eat meat and eschew all plant foods. They do confirm that meat is a natural part of the human diet—and a major part.

Carnivore Diet Cons

Detractors point out some potential cons to the carnivore diet. How do they hold up?

No fiber.

Detractors say carnivore is unhealthy because it precludes fiber. Is this true?

For one, it’s not quite true that carnivore diets contain no fiber at all. Animal fiber exists in the form of gristle, cartilage, and connective tissue, and at least in other obligate carnivores like cheetahs, can provide prebiotic substrate that enriches the gut bacteria.2

Two, it’s unclear whether fiber is necessary. Clearly, it’s not essential in the sense that you will die without it. And there’s evidence that “more fiber” is necessarily helpful in digestive disorders, and may even be harmful. But there is good evidence that prebiotic fiber offers beneficial metabolic and gut health effects in the average person eating an average omnivorous diet. And no, it’s not just about fecal hypertrophy. There is real evidence that feeding your gut bacteria soluble and prebiotic fiber can enhance health and produce beneficial metabolites.

Where the question remains is whether those benefits occur in carnivorous dieters, or whether carnivorous dieters need fiber. Is fiber necessary only on omnivorous diets? Perhaps. I suspect we’ll learn more as time goes on.

Micronutrient deficiencies.

While meat is a great way to get bioavailable sources of most B vitamins and many other unique nutrients, plants are the primary sources of folate, magnesium, potassium, and vitamin C in the diet.

If you’re not careful, a low-carb diet can lead to low levels of folate.3 Dr. Ted Naiman has seen this in carnivore patients of his who are otherwise healthy and robust. The best sources of folate on a carnivore diet are liver (which you can’t eat every day because of excess vitamin A) and egg yolks (which must be pasture-raised or follow a specially-formulated diet to be really rich in folate). Eggland’s Best Organic eggs are actually a decent source of folate and readily available if you can’t get pasture-raised.

There are no great animal sources of magnesium, with the best probably being halibut and cod. Snails and fish eggs are also good sources.

Meat is a good source of potassium but you have to make sure to consume all the juice. That means eating your meat rare and letting it rest before cutting into it.

Chris Masterjohn had a great talk with Paul Saladino about the vitamin C/carnivore issue. Chris’ stance was that while a well-made carnivore diet can provide enough vitamin C to avoid scurvy, it might not provide enough vitamin C to be optimal and do the “extra stuff” vitamin C can do. Paul was more skeptical of the need for higher levels of vitamin C. Where both agreed is that a carnivore must eat organ meats (liver and kidney, especially) to obtain enough vitamin C.

If you don’t eat dairy or bone-in small fatty fish, you risk calcium deficiencies—so consider incorporating them.

The potential exists for micronutrient deficiencies. Eating a bunch of turkey breast or ground beef won’t cut it.

No vegetables.

In previous posts, I’ve supported the idea that plants are important to eat, or at least incorporate as medicinal inputs—in marinades, in teas, in small amounts.

I stand by that assessment. I still like vegetables. They don’t affect me in a negative way and they taste good. They’re low-carb, provide helpful micronutrients, and reduce the formation of harmful fatty acid peroxides in the digestion process.4 Used in marinades and sauces, plants and herbs can reduce the formation of carcinogens during the cooking process. And every traditional culture we’ve ever seen—even the Inuit and Masaai—consumed plant foods on a regular basis and considered them important and even essential.

If you are someone who reacts poorly to the plant compounds found in vegetables, you may be better off not eating any. Vegetables aren’t required for survival like meat and animal fat are required. But if you can tolerate vegetables, it’s a good idea to eat them. To me, the benefits are great enough that I recommend most people (even carnivores) sample vegetables until they find some they can tolerate. Remember: there’s a difference between eating vegetables for calories and eating vegetables for medicinal purposes.

There are also acute issues that sometimes arise with carnivore diets.

Carnivore Constipation

What happens if you’re not pooping like you should?

Confirm you’re actually constipated. Carnivore is a low-residue diet. There’s not much left over after you absorb everything. You’re not eating loads of fiber and most of the nutrients you’re taking in are highly bioavailable. No matter what happens, you won’t be practicing fecal hypertrophy like you were on an omnivorous diet containing fiber. Your “lack” of pooping may be totally normal.

Get more electrolytes. Salt, magnesium, and potassium all impact your digestion. Potassium and magnesium in particular are required for optimal muscle contractions, including the muscle contractions that move food along the digestive tract. Salt provides the chloride we need to produce hydrochloric acid, aka stomach acid.

Check your fat intake. A mistake some people make when starting a carnivore diet is eating too much lean meat. Adding in fattier cuts of meat can speed things up.

Give it time. Your gut biome is adjusting to the new environment. Things may take awhile to normalize. Resistant starch can help here.

Carnivore Diarrhea

Back when Joe Rogan went carnivore for a spell, he had incredible energy and body composition shifts but first had to get past the “explosive diarrhea.” Reports from others around the Internet suggest that this isn’t rare for people just starting out. What to do?

Too much fat, too fast. Increase fat intake more gradually.

Rapid shifts in the gut biome. Suddenly removing all the substrate your gut bacteria were eating can throw things off. Give it some time.

Resistant starch if it persists. If the diarrhea lasts longer than a couple days, try a little raw potato starch (for resistant starch) to improve consistency.

If you noticed, the reasons for diarrhea track closely with the reasons for constipation. Changes to the gut biome can manifest differently along the same diarrhea/constipation spectrum and often have the same solution.

Carnivore Diet Supplements

If you do it perfectly, a carnivore diet should contain all or most of the nutrients you need to thrive. But supplements can make it easier, and they may optimize your experience. A few to consider:

Magnesium
Mineral water
Freeze-dried organs
Fish oil
Collagen
Broad-spectrum polyphenol blend
Electrolytes

Magnesium: Important electrolyte, vital participant in over 300 physiological functions, and rather hard to get on a pure carnivorous diet. Almost everyone should be supplementing with magnesium.

Mineral water: A good mineral-dense sparkling water like Gerolsteiner is a nice way to obtain hard-to-get minerals like magnesium and calcium.

Freeze-dried organs: The ideal is to eat liver, heart, kidney, and/or spleen on a regular basis. They’re more nutrient-dense and contain wide ranges of nutrients you won’t find elsewhere in the animal. If you can’t or won’t eat fresh organs, you can get freeze-dried capsules.

Fish oil: If you’re not eating seafood, you need a source of long-chain omega-3 fatty acids. Fish oil is the most straightforward way to get them.

Collagen: Collagen is necessary to balance out your intake of muscle meat—which will be elevated on a carnivore diet. In the absence of a steady intake of gelatinous bone broth or direct consumption of connective tissue, collagen peptides become essential.

Broad-spectrum polyphenol blend: The carnivore people go back and forth on polyphenols. Are they plant poisons? Plant pesticides? The point remains that the evidence in favor of polyphenol intake is quite robust. And yes, polyphenols are stressors. They act as plant toxins that our bodies interpret as hormetic stressors and trigger a beneficial response. I wouldn’t take something like this every day (nor do I), but I would take it intermittently as a stand-in for intermittent plant consumption.

Electrolytes: Electrolytes are essential, especially on any carb-restricted diet (keto, low-carb, carnivore, etc). There’s this dedicated electrolyte supplement that Robb Wolf helped design, or there’s my own Collagen Quench mix that also contains collagen, vitamin C, and polyphenols (from fruit powder) in addition to the potassium and sodium.

So, Does Carnivore Work?

Carnivore appears to work.

A big part of staying healthy in the modern environment is the erection of artificial boundaries and the self-administration of artificial hardships. We could eat 10000 calories of junk food a day if we wanted. We could sit on the couch and be entertained and have all our food delivered to us if we wanted. Most of us never have to do an iota of actual physical labor if we don’t want to. But because doing that would make us sick and fat, we limit ourselves to moderate amounts of healthy real food, we go the gym, and we make it a point to take walks. These are artificial interventions we enact to emulate the ancestral environment to which we are adapted. These are boundaries.

There isn’t a simpler boundary to set than “eat animals, don’t eat plants.” And therein lies the power.

Now, I’m not going carnivore anytime soon. Although I have shifted my eating in that direction, I’ll always die on the “Big Ass Salads are great” hill (even if I’m loading them up with extra meat and cheese). Carnivore is exciting because it reveals that there’s room for extremes:

It shows that eating only meat won’t kill you—and it may make you stronger. It won’t give you diabetes, colon cancer, heart disease, or make you obese. A diet based on animal foods is safe and, for many people, optimal.

Gut health is paramount. Health starts in the gut, as Hippocrates said, and extends to every manifestation of your wellness. Carnivore might not be the only way to fix a leaky, dysfunctional gut, but the fact that it’s so good at improving gut health-related conditions should give you pause.

Plant foods are not benign. The popular conception of a “healthy diet” is one awash in leafy greens, broccoli, whole grains, and other plant foods. Mountains of produce, a “baby’s fist-sized piece of lean meat.” Even those of us who’ve been weird enough to eat low-carb diets rich in animal fat for years often have a tough time washing that stereotype from our consciousness.

Carnivore repudiates what all the health authorities tell us to do. It’s the exact opposite of what our moral and scientific “betters” have been preaching for decades. And because I’ve always been an iconoclast, someone who bristles at the thought of being told what to do, this appeals to me. I’ve never been convinced by the shoddy evidence that meat is bad for us. That entire legions of people are eating nothing but meat and failing to come down with the colon cancer and heart disease they’re “supposed to” is endlessly satisfying.

Once more, I don’t think carnivore is necessarily sustainable for a lifetime, especially if you don’t take special care to eat nose-to-tail-to-tendon-to-tripe-to-skin. But I do think it’s worth a hard look for people with autoimmune diseases, gut disorders, or those people for whom no other diet has worked. I think carnivore-adjacent eating will become a thing. I think carnivore cycling paired with cycles of omnivory will prove useful for a great many people.

What about you, everyone? Have you tried the carnivore diet? Would you?

References https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25373088/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22074361https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/bdr2.1198https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf040401o

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Benefits of Cumin

What do you know about cumin? Cumin seeds are pungent, potent little things with the ability to significantly change the trajectory of a dish. They are featured prominently in Mexican, Mediterranean, Indian, Middle Eastern, and certain Chinese cuisines.

Back in the Middle Ages, cumin was one of the most popular – and most accessible – condiments for the spice-crazy Europeans, and stories tell of soldiers going off to war with loaves of cumin bread in their satchels for good luck. Cumin originated in the Mediterranean, and it was used extensively by the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, the Persians, and just about everyone in that region.

Cumin vs. Caraway

It’s not a good idea to substitute cumin for caraway, or vice versa. They are somewhat similar in appearance, but vastly different in taste. Cumin gives Mexican and Middle Eastern recipes their signature aroma, whereas caraway is most common in Eastern European dishes. Cumin seeds are larger than caraway seeds, and cumin is a more warming spice than caraway.

Cumin is often confused with caraway, which is actually called “cumin” in multiple European languages.

Health Benefits of Cumin

Cumin is in my top 10 favorite spices mostly for taste, but the benefits for health don’t hurt.

As is usually the case with spices that have been in use for thousands of years, cumin appears to provide a number of potential health benefits. It contains anti-glycation agents, antioxidants, and anti-osteoporotic, and much more. Note that many of the surnames in the following PubMed links are of Indian origin.

Cumin, along with ghee and a host of other spices, played a prominent role in the Ayurvedic medicinal traditions, and I love seeing a lot of these supposedly “old wives’ tales” get preliminary scientific justification:

The jury is still out on whether dietary AGEs1 are worrisome, but it’s clear that the formation of endogenous AGEs is a much bigger concern, especially for diabetics. In diabetic rats, cumin extract was more effective at reducing blood glucose and AGE production than glibenclamide, an anti-diabetic drug.2
Cumin’s anti-glycation properties proved useful in another study, in which diabetic rats were able to stave off cataracts after oral dosing with cumin powder.3
Another study found that cumin extract reduced total cholesterol, triglycerides, and pancreatic inflammatory markers in diabetic rats.4 These effects were marked by a reduction in elevated cortisol and adrenal gland size, an increase in the weight of the thymus and spleen, and replenishment of depleted T cells. There was a dose dependent response, but all doses had beneficial effects.
An extract of cumin had anti-osteoporotic effects on rats, similar to estradiol, but without the associated weight gain. Cumin-dosed (orally, 1 mg/kg) osteoporotic rats had increased bone density and improved bone microarchitecture.5
Cumin protected the livers of rats from ethanol- and rancid sunflower oil-induced toxicity.6
One study even seems to suggest the potential for cumin to help weaning addicts off of opiates by reducing tolerance (yeah, it could increase the subjective high, but it would mean less product was required) and dependence.7
Antioxidant content of commonly available commercial cumin in Pakistan was found to be “potent.”8 It’s unclear whether the same holds true for cumin in other countries, but I imagine it probably is. Go with whole seeds and grind as needed, if possible, as ground cumin (and anything, really) will be more exposed to the air and thus more liable to degrade. If you’ve got ground cumin, store it in the fridge in an airtight, sealed container. It also helps to heat the seeds before grinding to really release the flavor. I usually toast them on a cast iron skillet over low heat for a couple minutes (just wait for the smell and don’t let them burn), but one study9 found that microwaving whole cumin seeds actually preserved the aromatic and antioxidant compounds better than traditional oven roasting. Go figure.

It is thought that some of the health benefits are magnified when you pair cumin with coriander.

Black cumin isn’t the same as culinary cumin – its uses are more medicinal.

What Is Cumin Good For?

Curries are great and expected places to insert cumin, of course, but why not branch out and explore? Cumin used to act as a replacement for expensive black pepper for people who couldn’t afford it, so why not treat it like that yourself and add it to things you’d otherwise never think to? Cumin and scrambled eggs. Cumin and sweet potatoes. Cumin and homemade stock for a nice hot drink before bed. If you’d eat it with black pepper, try it with cumin – not for any health benefits, necessarily, but just for a nice change of pace. My latest favorite is beef (any cut will do) marinated in lime juice, wheat-free tamari, and cumin. I just did a batch of bone-in short ribs like that with homemade beef broth, and it was incredible. I highly recommend it.

Cumin Recipes

Here are a few recipes featuring cumin as the star of the show:

Cumin and Coriander Lamb Stir Fry

Salmon Zucchini and Lemon Skewers

Instant Pot Lamb and Sweet Potato Stew

Cuban Mojo Chicken

How Do You Pronounce Cumin?

Depending on who is speaking, you may hear cumin pronounced as KYOO-min or KOO-min. The official pronunciation is KYOO-min.

Now you know.

References http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_glycation_end-producthttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20451573http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18789666http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12220968[/ref] It also prevented excessive weight loss. Again, it beat out glibenclamide.
Oral doses (25, 50, 100, 200 mg/kg) of cumin on consecutive days improved the immune response of mice with compromised immune systems due to restraint-induced stress.[ref]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20156427http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18824723http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16088094http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18550281http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18720171http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6T6R-4B428PM-8&_user=10&_coverDate=08/31/2004&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1603869459&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=166929692c4455e13a903393c32c7a18&searchtype=a

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Dear Mark: What’s With The Bean Protocol?

For today’s edition of Dear Mark, I’m answering a reader question about beans. But it’s not just about beans. It’s about something called the Bean Protocol, a rather new dietary approach that many of my readers have expressed interest in. The Bean Protocol is supposed to improve the liver’s ability to clear out toxins, thereby preventing them from recirculating throughout the body in perpetuity. Today, I’m going to discuss where it fits in a Primal eating plan.

Let’s go:

Hi Mark,

Have you heard about this “Bean Protocol”? From what I can tell people are eating tons of beans and getting great results. It’s supposed to remove toxins from the liver or something else that only beans can do.

What do you think?

Thanks,

Matt

I did some digging around. I read the Bean Protocol coverage over at PaleOMG, where Juli has been following the protocol for several months now and seeing great results. There’s a Bean Protocol E-course that I did not sign up for, but I think I have a decent handle on the topic.

How to Do the Bean Protocol

Here’s the gist:

No caffeine
No sugar
No dairy
No gluten
No processed food
No factory-farmed meats; no fatty meats
Eat 6-8 half-cup servings of beans or lentils a day.
Fill the rest of the food with lean meat, leafy green vegetables, alliums (onion, garlic, leek, etc), and cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower).

What’s Supposed to Happen on the Bean Protocol

The soluble and insoluble fiber in the beans binds to toxins which the body can then flush out more easily. Without the fiber from the beans, your body can’t process and excrete the toxins, so they simply recirculate, stay in the body, and sometimes express themselves in the form of acne and other diseases. Adherents credit the bean protocol for fixing longstanding issues like acne, Crohn’s, and many other conditions.

Is this true? Is there any evidence of this in the scientific literature?

Well, there isn’t much direct evidence for beans improving liver clearance of toxins, but there is circumstantial evidence. For one, prebiotic fiber is good for liver health. There are plenty of studies to support this.

Synbiotics (a combination of probiotics and prebiotics) and BCAAs taken together improve hepatic encephalopathy, a feature of liver failure where the liver fails to detoxify excess ammonia.1 However, it does not do so directly. The fiber isn’t necessarily “binding” to the lead and excreting it. Instead, it does so by increasing levels of lead-binding gut bacteria which in turn bind and excrete it, shoring up the gut lining so that lead can’t make it into circulation, increasing bile acid flow, and increasing the utilization of healthy essential metals (like zinc and iron). The bacteria are essential for the effect; pre-treatment with antibiotics abolishes the benefits. So we can’t say for sure that the fiber itself is “binding” to the toxins.

Allium, Inulin

The Bean Protocol is also rich in allium vegetables like garlic and onions, another source of prebiotic fibers shown to improve liver health and toxin clearance. For instance, inulin given to rats prevents acute cadmium toxicity.2 Inulin also increases bile flow.3 Moreover, compounds found in garlic improve glutathione activity in the liver and enhance its ability to metabolize toxins.4

Cruciferous Vegetables

The Bean Protocol also emphasizes cruciferous vegetable consumption. The crucifers, which include cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, and kale, can exert beneficial effects on liver health. Sulforaphane, one of the most prominent compounds in cruciferous vegetables, has well-established effects on toxin clearance. It can speed up the clearance of airborne pollutants and counter the carcinogens formed from high-heat cooking.56

Back to Basics

By emphasizing lean meats and eliminating sugar, alcohol, and industrial food, you are eliminating the major causes of fatty liver in the diet: sugar, seed oils, and alcohol.

My point is not to disparage the Bean Protocol. I think it has some merit. My point is to point out that beans alone probably don’t explain the benefits people are seeing. There’s a lot more going on than just beans.

Lectins and Phytic Acid in Beans

Okay, okay. So while beans aren’t the only (or even necessarily the best) way to obtain prebiotic fiber to modulate gut bacteria and improve liver health and therefore toxin clearance and metabolism, they are promising. But aren’t beans bad for you? Aren’t they neolithic foods full of lectins and anti-nutrients that are anything but Primal?

Lectins are anti-nutrients and beans do have them. Studies show that they can damage the intestinal lining, prey upon already-damaged intestinal lining, and prevent the body from repairing that damage.7 If they make it into the bloodstream, they can bind to cell membranes throughout the body, trigger autoimmune reactions, and cause real havoc.8 People have actually been hospitalized from lectin poisoning.9

But here’s the thing: cooking and soaking deactivates the majority of legume lectins.

In one study, navy and kidney beans showed 0.1% lectins leftover after cooking.10
One study found that pressure cooking kidney beans for 30 minutes eliminated all hemagglutinin activity.11
In another, a combo of soaking and cooking white beans completely eliminated activity of the most pernicious lectin, the one responsible for kidney bean poisoning: phytohemagglutinin.12

Most of the research indicting legume lectins used animals consuming large amounts of raw lectins. Those people who got lectin poisoning ate undercooked kidney beans. Don’t eat raw or undercooked beans and make sure they’re soaked overnight. Canned beans are also prepared pretty well.

Okay, what about phytic acid?

Phytic acid is the primary storage form of phosphorus in plants. When you eat a food containing phytic acid, it can bind to several other minerals, like calcium, magnesium, and zinc, and prevent their absorption. Diets based entirely in high-phytate foods can thereby lead to nutrient deficiencies. As legumes are one such high-phytate food, people are justifiably cautious about basing their diet on them.

Soaking legumes is really good at reducing phytic acid. In one study, cooking straight up without soaking reduced phytate by 20%, cooking after soaking in the soaking water reduced it by 53%, and cooking after soaking in fresh water reduced it by 60%.13 Another study found that cooking in fresh water after 16 hours of soaking with a 3:1 water:bean ratio eliminated 85% of phytate.14 That basically takes care of the problem.

If you want to really eliminate phytic acid you can sprout your legumes. You can also buy pre-sprouted beans.

What about the carb content of beans?

Legumes are higher in carbs than many other Primal foods but not as high as you might think. The musicality of the legume partially offsets its carbohydrate density. All those sugars and fibers being digested by gut bugs and producing the farts are carbs that you aren’t consuming as glucose. If you pay attention to “net carbs,” you’ll love legumes—at least compared to something like potatoes or bread.

Which, by the way, is why legumes appear to be so helpful in the Bean Protocol.

A half cup of cooked black beans has 20 grams of carbs with 7.5 coming from fiber.

A half cup of cooked chickpeas has 30 grams of carbs with 5 coming from fiber.

A half cup of cooked pinto beans has 22 grams of carbs with 7.7 coming from fiber.

A half cup of cooked lentils has 20 grams of carbs with 7.8 coming from fiber.

And much of that fiber, remember, comes in the form of galactooligosaccharides, that same prebiotic shown in studies to improve gut health and even increase lead excretion. But these are also FODMAPs, which, depending on your gut biome, can be helpful or painful. Some people won’t be able to handle the gas, some will get downright painful bloating, while others will get huge prebiotic benefits. Your mileage may vary, so just figure out what works.

Are beans actually nutritious, though?

Legumes aren’t nutrient-dense compared to something like liver or oysters, but they’re more nutrient-dense than grains and many other foods.

Again, a half cup of beans isn’t very many carbs. Maybe 20 grams, with only two thirds of that turning into glucose. You’ll get a lot of food for your gut and a decent whack of some important nutrients like folate, copper, magnesium, and manganese. That half cup of black beans provides 32% of your daily folate requirements, 20% of copper, 14% of magnesium, and 17% of manganese. A half cup of lentils provides 45% of your daily folate requirements along with 28% of copper and 21% of manganese. Not bad for a measly 20 grams of carbs.

A Plea: Lentils

If you want to try the Bean Protocol and insist on doing the 8 servings a day version, I’d recommend you go with lentils.

A cup of standard lentils gets you:

40 grams carbs, almost 16 g fiber.
230 calories.
18 grams protein. Legume protein can’t replace animal protein, but it can offset some of your requirements.
90% of folate.
28% of vitamin B1 (thiamine), 25% of vitamin B5 (pantothenic acid), and 21% of B6 (pyridoxine). B vitamins generally aren’t issues for folks eating Primal, but they can’t hurt.
55% of copper.
17% of magnesium.
43% of manganese.

Lentils added to a meal slow gastric emptying, which should keep a person fuller longer.15 This is in contrast to most sources of refined carbs, which increase a person’s hunger.

Another benefit is that lentil prep is simple. They contain less phytic acid than most other legumes and require less soaking (or none at all) and cooking time than other legumes to reduce it. If you want to sprout lentils, they sprout much quicker than beans.

All in all, I’d say the Bean Protocol is worth trying if you’re interested or intrigued. I don’t know that the “8 servings of beans” is more important than the other stuff you’re eating or omitting, but I also know that sometimes things just work a certain way even if the hard clinical evidence hasn’t been established. After all, people used to say the same thing about Primal or keto.

If you do try out the Bean Protocol, be sure to keep us all informed and up to date on your progress. I’d be really curious to hear about it.

References https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31390762/[ref/] Beans, sauerkraut, and some sirloin steak are another way to “take” prebiotics, probiotics, and BCAAs.

What about the supposed ability of fiber to bind and excrete toxins? That’s ultimately what it all comes down to. It’s the central tenet of the bean protocol. Let’s explore the evidence.

Galacto-oligosaccharides

Beans are a rich source of galacto-oligosaccharides, a type of prebiotic fiber. In mice, galacto-oligosaccharide supplementation increases excretion of lead, a veritable heavy metal toxin.[ref]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31180403/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28583137/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6125380/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21815229/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22045030https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2959165/?tool=pubmedhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17668065https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25599185https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1115436/http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2621.1990.tb06789.x/abstracthttp://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2621.1983.tb14831.x/abstracthttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26355953https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12887152/https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12887152https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1537516

The post Dear Mark: What’s With The Bean Protocol? appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.