So if carnivore/muscle meat is intended, for argument’s sake, as an elimination diet, aren’t there going to be problems adding veg back in?
One of the symptoms of adaptation reported is diarrhea/loose stool (tmi?) so doesn’t that suggest a serious change in the nature of your gut that returning to veg would subsequenltly upset?
That seems super low to me. I don’t know if aiming for something as low as is “achievable” is the best goal. It certainly isn’t for me. If I ate that little protein it would be about half of what I typically eat! I know Dr. Fung and Rosedale support the WHO analysis, but there are lots of others who think this is too low. More often I hear something like 1g/kg of total body mass or .7g–1.1g (depending on activity level)/lb. of lean mass.
I’m not really interested in being a carnivore, but I do think getting adequate protein is important to sustaining and building our bodies. YMMV.
Its very individual. I chose to make exceptions and include some plants for specific medicinal benefits. I see no issue with it. No digestive issues. No microbiome issues.
Do I think it’s healthier? For me, I believe it is or I wouldn’t do it. But for some people, this is a problem. It triggers autoimmune reactions that cascade into neurological disease and depression. Are they wrong ? No- it’s their personal truth…
Some people choose to add dairy (it’s not carnivore if the animal lives 
)… others add honey (see dairy)…
if you’re weightlifting, your needs are different than if you’re not.
I did keto for a year, zc for a month. going back to the usual keto, meaning 30 net carbs of non starchy veggies, avecado and olive oil was no disruption. As mentioned previously, I enjoyed carnivore eating. The problem was I couldn’t stop eating. The big dinner salad mostly cures that just by being filling.
We mostly speculate about primordial diets. I imagine the men going off hunting and the women and children gather plant foods in season.
I’m allergic to pretty much all raw veggies. And while I do enjoy cooked veggies, they make me bloated and sometimes result in blowout. I just retested this earlier this week with broccoli after three months of Carnivore. My body has no problem with veggies as a flavor or a medicine, but apparently it doesn’t appreciate them as a food.
I absolutely agree that we’ve always had plants in our collective diet, to some degree.
TBH I’m not sure there’s much meilage in talking about what primal man used to eat, primal mans is hardly a model for us living today and i doubt it was much more than mere survival.
So why not have plants… in fact why not try a vegan way of eating? It might suit you well…?
I wonder if this happens naturally to some people on the Carnivore diet? Maybe you have always been this way but I wonder if this issue can be accidentally developed by always avoiding vegetables?
From what I understand, plants provide a certain amount of challenge to our systems - usually not toxic levels for foods we commonly eat but, enough to trigger a “hormetic effect” (small doses allow you to have more in the future with less and less ill effect - I am sure there is a better way to explain it).
Consistently not eating vegetables for an extended period of time might mean you lose that capability and have to very slowly reintroduce them to avoid problems (3 or 4 spinach leaves a day - add a couple more each week for 10 weeks for example).
Strange thing about Bikman is when he talks his about his own dietary intake in one of his interviews with Dr. Mercola he openly admits he is mostly a sugar burner and plant eater, he doesn’t like staying in ketosis very long, I’m rather dismayed by that, which leads me to believe he is not entirely sure about the whole ketogenic diet thing? But maybe he is not really concerned about being in ketosis constantly?
That’s a shame because all I’m hearing is “whelp, back to Carnivore.”
I’ve never been a big vegetable person (the only one I liked as a kid was corn, and that ain’t even a veggie lol), and while a lot of that was my OAS I also just don’t think I was really meant to eat a lot of these things.
I’ve done stove top for over a decade, primarily in winter and spring. Stove top slow cooking is pretty common in colder climates - as it also can make the kitchen feel a little bit warmer!
The non-electric cooking is an ancient tradition going back to wood stoves and open fires. As I use gas stoves, always important to crack the window for ventilation, have the simmer low but not too low, have a good fitting lid, and not have any draft threat that may blow out the flame on a gas stove - thus, a safer route is to take 3-4 days to simmer it, turning off the stove every night. 
Nope - Ribeye, ground beef, chuck roast etc. is what I think of as muscle meat. Fish (likely beneficially) would be adding variety to a muscle meat only eating pattern - especially potentially better fats.
Except that evolution over 67,000 generations is probably a wee bit more relevant than the experience of the last 5, don’t you think? Even agriculture was discovered only about 400 generations ago . . . just saying.
Take nitrates, for example: plants contain nitrates far in excess of what is found in meat, and the nitrates in meat are why meat is supposed to cause cancer. Doesn’t that mean we should worry far more about the plants we eat?
How old was that interview Mercola did with him? It might be out of date, because in a recent interview with Mike Mutzel (High Intensity Health), a recent LCDU presentation, and another recent interview with that guy Sean, the name of whose podcast I’m blocking on (Biohackers’ Lab, perhaps?), he talks about regularly being in ketosis. In one of those interviews, in fact, he talks about eating popcorn with his kids and says that surprisingly the popcorn does not kick him out of ketosis.
I do not think that follows.
We evolved to handle what is in plants as a food source - being omnivorous is a distinct advantage. Meat let our brains grow and plants fattened us in summer / fall to help us make it through potentially lethal winters (eating only meat does not fatten so a distinct disadvantage to stick with a meat-only diet before winter - depending on your latitude).
Nitrates (along with anything else added to processed meats) might cause us harm after being brought to a high temperature (crispy blackened surface) compared to what is naturally found in celery.
From the link below:
So, it seems that eating just cooked meat gives you nitrosamines but does not supply anti-oxidants needed to counteract the potential carcinogen.
I’m not trying to argue that plant foods are required or even important, only that we’ve been eating them for a long time. In principle I would prefer the capability to eat only animal products. I haven’t given up on that, just haven’t figured out how to do it successfully–yet. Even so, based on what I know so far, plants don’t seem to cause me any of the problems I read about.
I know you didn’t mean to be insensitive, but if your nephew is a trans man, his parts aren’t female, just fyi. And no need to put his pronouns in quotation marks.