There is about 90 seconds of this video essay that got me thinking… or maybe it got my gut biota thinking? The link goes to the chapter, so you don’t have to watch the whole thing.
Anyhow there is a good description of some bacterial species found in the gut biota that are important in producing essential brain chemicals. I can’t find where it says that these bacterial species require dietary fibre as a food source (humans “don’t need it”, fibre “is not an essential nutrient” etc) but they do seem important in terms of human psychology.
It made me wonder if zero carb carnivore may create greater anxiety in practitioners due to the absence of fibre?
Help me out here. Has anybody got some more data points and logical or critical thinking connections?
Have you read The Carnivore Code? There is an entire chapter on fiber with lots of citations. I will try to track down some of them during the weekend if you haven’t read the book.
The biome has to be one of the most confusing areas of research. There is some evidence that certain probiotics can help reduce severity of colds, for instance. There is some evidence that the biome has other effects.
But it’s a morass of conflicting information. For instance, the idea that you can change your biome beneficially (assuming we know what “good” and “bad” bacteria are, and we don’t), is basically bunk. You could take a probiotic and poop out more of it, but you might not change your internal biome. And trying to lose weight via the biome has been pretty much a failure.
On the other hand, studies have indicated that your biome can change rapidly based on what you eat. And this makes sense, as if you don’t eat anything for multiple days, your biome would have to change somehow. (Whether that change is good or bad is an interesting question.)
Because this area is so confusing, I tend to ignore threads with this as a subject. Similar to CICO, you can wade into the research and find support for your “side”, as long as you ignore all the evidence that doesn’t support your side.
In this n=1 life of mine, since introducing home-fermented sauerkraut, pickles and kimchi, my digestive system has never felt better (after an adjustment period of a few days, during which the newly-introduced bacteria were battling it out with the previous squatters).
But as to whether “carnivores have mental issues like vegans?” I firmly believe, yes, everyone has mental issues.
In fact, it’s quite the opposite. A number of prominent carnivores attribute their lack of mental symptoms to the lack of plant foods in their diet. It is, in fact, the reason they started eating carnivore in the first place. Keto helped, but carnivore helped even more.
P.S.—As far as fibre is concerned, you might like this line, paraphrased from Dr. Fung: “Carbohydrate is the poison, and fibre is the antidote. If you’re not eating the poison, why would you need the antidote?”
Tryptophan is one of the nine essential amino acids. It cannot be made by the human body, only ingested.
The other eight essential amino acids are histidine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, and the branched-chain amino acids, isoleucine, leucine, and valine.
I suppose you mean are there any genetically different people who do produce those amino acids? The definition of “essential” in all nutrients is that our bodies can’t synthesize them.
Wikipedia says:
Of the 21 amino acids common to all life forms, the nine amino acids humans cannot synthesize are phenylalanine, valine, threonine, tryptophan, methionine, leucine, isoleucine, lysine, and histidine.[1][2]
Six other amino acids are considered conditionally essential in the human diet, meaning their synthesis can be limited under special pathophysiological conditions, such as prematurity in the infant or individuals in severe catabolic distress.[2] These six are arginine, cysteine, glycine, glutamine, proline, and tyrosine.
It appears that nobody has been found who can synthesize tryptophan, but maybe there’s one or a handful out of 7 billion people with that ability and nobody knows.
I think this field is in its very infancy. I studied microbiology in college in the mid '70s. Everybody knew we had an ecosystem in our guts. Everybody knew it could get out of whack, although that was usually things like dysentery or other diseases. The idea that “you have more bacterial DNA than human DNA so you’re more bacteria than human” was never mentioned. I don’t think I heard it until the last 10 or 15 years.
My take is one paper probably is meaningless, a bunch of papers might mean something and they might not (look at how many papers say to eat low fat, high carb - which works for like 25% of the population). This field is so new and unexplored that I personally don’t think there’s enough known about it to be real science. There are some interesting experiments reported but it’s nowhere near as good as it needs to be.
Thanks Edith. That would be awesome. I remember we had fibre debates on the forum previously that convinced me that fibre was a non-essential component in the diet. I couldn’t even call it a nutrient. Personally I do not find Dr. Saladino appealing when he presents. He reminds me of that curve that Ivor Cummins talks about (something Kruger) where people think they have the knowledge and come across all dogmatic while preaching anti-dogmatism. It’s nice to see him adjust his views on carbohydrates these days. That said, I am interested in learning and interested to see what he may have found in relation to the gut biome.
Thanks Sheriff Joey. I hadn’t thought deep enough, or wide enough before writing the bait line. I agree that at any point in time it would appear that most people have mental issues. I blame Descartes for he noted consciousness is what creates us as a being but on releasing that idea he failed to limit it to within the being, so now we have expanded our thinking into the universes.
Wise words Bob. The field is wide open. I also think of the way that poo samples are used to monitor the distal colonic biome. And that there is variation in the population in the centre of the flow, we could call them the ‘mainstream’ compared to the population at the edges close to the mucous membranes and epithelium of the gut lining we could call those ‘the fringe’ or ‘eccentric’. The bowels mimic human society. Permaculture thinking informs us that the greatest diversity and potential for change is at the borders at the fringes. So I wonder if we are even collecting the samples from the right places to be able to generate useful data and meaningful results. Thanks for you input, as you usually skip these threads.
Dr. Ede is knowledgeable and clear. It is a fabulous talk and helped with my thinking on the subject. There was this slide (below) in the talk but she did not elucidate on the “unneccessary” label and went on to talk about DHA.
So, the talk did not dock nor interlock with the original video. It added more foundational information but did not tackle the fibre part except by associating fibre with veganism and vegetarian diets, and allusion to plant anti-nutrients. That being plants have anti-nutrients associated with that plants have fibre. (I need to know more about the fibre in animal connective tissue and how that may feed the biome to populate the bowel with brain friendly bugs). But at the end Dr. Ede advocates a pre-industrial whole food diet for brain health It included lots of sources of plant fibre in the image. It was not carnivore.
Dr Ede, and I think Dr. Harcombe as well, may be on a different track to what we are exploring here? We should definitely triangulate with them. But there may be a way to go good fibre carnivore? Is it possible?
It is interesting to read and hear that fibre is no longer inert. It is the way it is packaged.
Serotonin producing microbes include these 4 (according to the video in the original post):
The point I’m after is not the nutrition for the human per se but the nutrition for the gut biome, which leads to the expression of bacterial populations that are involved with neurotropic factors and hormones such as serotonin production. Whether there is benefit from fibre in the diet for supporting these microbes and generating biochemical happiness. Then we get to person psychology, and mainly the chemistry of happiness.
Maybe I should have made the title of post other than Do carnivores have mental issues like vegans. I’ll change it now.
Paul said it all: “Carbohydrate is the poison, and fibre is the antidote. If you’re not eating the poison, why would you need the antidote?”
Are carnivores happy? This one is!
I am on ZC sites where we are nothing but zc plan eaters and they are a friggin’ happy bunch. Most say their anxiety has lifted from bad to better. Most say with ALL their health improvements, of course they are feeling healthy and happier!
When ZC gives us these great benefits with alot of them being healing medical issues we do have, why the heck won’t ya be happier? All the ones I know are LOL…and I know alot of ZC people in the communities!
The body requires no fiber for survival. Fiber process/digestion in my opinion was as the backup for survival many zillion moons ago. Eating plants could save you thru starvation times while the hunt was happening and that could take days or weeks for a kill. So to me any fiber we eat was meant as survival short term intake, not long term that meat/seafood provide. Hence seasons. Fruit blooms and is gone. Plants produce and don’t. So they come and go and one had to take advantage whatever plants were around for survival but in the end, the one constant…meat.
I also think all the carnivores on this site are happy happy happy too cause from what they post, they love their plan, getting great results, are doing well and are darn enjoyable great people to chat with
I acknowledge we have had some carnivore diet discussion and that the carnivore diet can be used to treat anxiety and depression. My understanding is that low carbohydrate ketogenic diets are reputed to also be an effective tool at improving anxiety and depression.
We also have the fundamental information that fibre (fiber) is of plant origin. So, automatically a carnivore approach excludes fibre. My gut feeling is there is more of a nuance there, and it is to do with collagenous fibres.
This talk by Dr. Paul Mason (2018) is a classic (I found it linked by @MarkGossage)
this still covers it all for me
there are no nuances regarding plant fiber for me at all. I am ‘one of those’ ain’t there and can easily bow out of the discussion now cause to me this stuff is useless. Again, my very personal view on it all
I love this talk by Dr. Zoe Harcombe (2019). These days I watch it on 2x speed and still get good stuff from it. Dr. Harcombe does mention the gut biome as point 6 in her fibre benefits claims slide.
FrankoBear, Not sure if this is on track but Professor Borody in Sydney has a lot of data, he has been treating with FBT for years in his medical centre in Five Dock. He has references and research on results treating a range of different gastro intestinal diseases and has been successful enough that Westmead public is using the process for antibiotic resistant Clostridium Difficile now; two transplants reverse the Clostridium Difficile. He has walls, masses of files on results for multiple sclerosis and I can’t recall what else but very broad. He uses different probiotics in his faecal biota transplants to treat different conditions and seems to have a successful record. He’s controversial 'cause he also uses Vancomycin pre transplant I believe.
You could search his publications, sorry I don’t have any of his references.
He used to be at NSW Uni, not sure where now.
