Alkaline vegetables and acidic meat, really? That sounds pretty bogus to me. Ask 'em for links to the research, that ought to shut 'em up.
Furthermore, as Dr. Phinney and others like to point out, there is no such thing as a carbohydrate deficiency disease.
I know, right! - but then I donāt know. Thatās why I ask. 
The only vegetables I eat are spinach, asparagus, cabbage, cauliflower, and brussel sprouts (but no brussel sprouts within the last couple of months for some reason). I have a tendency to eat the asparagus and cauliflower more than anything. The more I eat them, the more I want them. Like tonight I made mashed cauliflower (butter + sour cream) and āsampledā someā¦ I started wolfing it down. I had to make myself stop eating them. I am wondering if my body really wanted something within the nutrients there, or just how bad my senstivity to carbs isā¦and that is why Iām considering zc.
And yeah, I guess I forgot about that āno such thing as a carb deficiency.ā ha!!
You may simply be needing more fat and the plants are a convenient fat āvehicleā for you.
I cook my burgers and steaks in lard or butter and then scramble a couple of eggs in the remaining fat and juices to make sure I get enough fat and all the minerals in the meat juice.
Organ meats are an easy way to get any extra micronutrients you might be needing. I eat pork liver pate several times a week.
I notice that I am most satisfied when I eat eggs and bacon. Or rib eye steak. I scramble the eggs and they are cooked in the leftover bacon grease. I can still feel unsatisfied, even if my stomach is stretched, if I have too many eggs in relation to baconā¦ or basically not enough bacon. I think my body is weird. I have lots of stored fat I can access (a lot of weight to lose), I donāt know why my body would want so much more of it when I eat!
In the big scheme of things, you are pretty new to Keto, and more dietary fat is really helpful when getting adapted.
Also, being so highly insulin-resistant, you may do better with a lower amount of protein and more fat until your body is healed. So it makes sense to me that your body wants more bacon than eggs right now.
Iāll give that a tryā¦ modify my protein down a bit and up the fat intake. I think I was like that at the beginning and have slowly added more protein and dialed back the fat. I donāt know whyā¦ every little bit of info I hear, I tend to take to heart and try it. But I donāt think I had given the lower protein higher fat much of a try before I adjusted those levels.
If youāre eating ZC there is no need to fiddle with protein levels. Just eat meat until satisfaction. ZC 14 months
True!! Right, of course that would be the answer for zc. Iām a keto eater contemplating going zc. 
Hi, Jeanne.
I donāt put any stock in the acid-alkaline theory, because I donāt think thereās any compelling science in support of it. Iām sorry I donāt have a post on it right now to point you to. I think the onus should be on your friends to give you science to back up the claim. What do they think they mean by it? What evidence do they have? Itās hard to rebut something vague, but much easier when they give you specifics.
PS thanks for listening to the podcast!
Our body does a good job of regulating our pH, as only a very narrow range is compatible with life. Since neither vegans or carnivores are dropping dead from alkalosis or acidosis, our bodies are clearly capable of adjusting to a wide range of nutritional inputs.
There is no such thing as an essential carbohydrate, but there are essential nutrients that are more plentiful in vegetables.
But more to the point, skeptics want to know, whatās optimal about eating ZC?
Living off subsistance hunting in Alaska isnāt equivalent to eating grass fed ribeye from Whole Foods everyday. Unless someone has extraordinary access to
An additional issue I see is the massive quantity of protein necessary in order to approach the typical TDEE of ~2000 calories. Consuming 1.5 - 2 lbs of meat per day may not cause health problems (at least in the short term) but what would suggest that it be optimal?
Lastly, I wonder why. It wonāt cause faster weight loss, or be more effective at fixing metabolic derangement, or be cheaper than other modalities. Therefore, whatās the advantage of a ZC diet?
I had a long winded rebuttal thought up, but frankly, I donāt care enough to bother arguing. Thereās plenty of info available for you to answer your own questions.
Also, grass fed ribeye from whole foods is 20$ per pound. I need a roof over my head, too, so factory farmed will do.
Start here:
Agreed @Dread1840
Although I will add that 3 months of ZC has put me in better health, better spirits and with more stamina than I had after years of keto (which involved unprocessed foods, plenty of fibre, a carefully selected range of supplements and veg across the rainbow). So that makes me very happy indeed. As well as being simpler and less expensive.
I guess it takes all sorts, eh?
I donāt think it gets better than a ribeye. Its like sitting on top of a throne after winning the nutritional lottery everytime you get to eat one. Fortunately with the state of food today, eating ribeye 2x a day is easily obtained, and for manyā¦ sustainable. Anything less feels like eating suboptimal.
At $8lb its pretty much break even vs SAD for me. at $6, Im coming ahead. And I probably am anyways by not snacking, eating, then being hungry and hour laterā¦ Costs more upfront each payday, but by the end of the week, Im either at break even or ahead (and feeling great and in better health than I started the week)
Thanks for answering @amber! Yeah your Q&A on Daisyās 'cast was great too. Iām especially intrigued by the uptick in sex drive. But Iāll save that conversation for another time.
I had thought about lobbing back the āshow me that scienceā reply, but even though we are at complete opposites in eating protocol, they are dear friends nonetheless. We show each other respect and donāt get nasty about it. So my dilemma was how to say that without coming off high minded or vague myself. In any case, as I used to be in that court a good 10-12 yrs ago myself, I can tell you that most if not all the books out there on that way of eating tells you all kinds of epidemiological studies proves it. One such was The China Study, which I treated as my food bible for years. The information seemed incontrovertible, but I am not a scientist and could not see the gaps and flaws. So my best guess is that they have sources such as that, and the writersā own results to go on. N=1 et allā¦ and even personal results are oftentimes flawed, because the proper blood tests to find out truth health markers are not doneā¦they are not recognized as important.
I have looked into it. I follow podcasts by intelligent folks (like Mutzel, Cummings, Masterjohn, Patrick, Wolf*) and listen to every episode I come across about a ZC diet. Iāve read countless blogs. Most of what I see is a counter argument to a vegetarian or the SAD diet. Thereās plenty of evidence that meat has nutritional value. Vegetarians tend to ignore or minimize this āfactā. Thereās plenty of evidence that vegetables have nutritional value. ZC advocates tend to ignore or minimize this āfactā.
Paleo and ZC tend to glamorize what humans ate 100,000 years ago. Itās faulty on several fronts, including that diet varied tremendously based on location and season. Google Inuit and !Kung to see how different diets were for example. In America today it takes extraordinary effort to eat like our great great grandparents did just 150 years ago. Genetically engineered/modified meats and vegetables, pesticides, antibiotics, pasteurization, hormones, and numerous chemicals werenāt in the food supply. The more I learn about the corporatization of our food production, the more I realize how detrimental it is to optimal health. A diet of 100% factory meat (and select cuts at that) doesnāt approximate what any our ancestors ate. I hear a lot about eating bacon and ribeye, I donāt hear ZCers talk about obtaining food the way our ancestors did- hunting deer, raising rabbits, backyard chickens, fishing at local ponds, or buying a whole calf from a local farmer. I donāt hear a lot acknowledging the high nutritional value of unpopular parts of the animal, like recipes using offal and sweetbread, which they ate in the old days. Or the benefits of eating freshly killed raw meat, as is still done by modern hunter gatherers.
Iām not trying to tell ZCers what to do with their bodies. I feel compelled to chime in from time to time for those that are searching and come across a ZC thread. I donāt want claims to go unchallenged, I donāt want folks to think itās better than a well formulated LC diet. Most LC experts do not consider a ZC diet to be necessary, let alone optional, for most people.
*The Paleo Solution Podcast by Robb Wolf episode 385 interviews Shawn Baker, an orthopedist whoās been doing ZC for more than a year with good results.
Anything other than meat is suboptimal.
Meat>Veggies
Meat>Nuts
Meat>Fruit
Meat>Grain
Meat>Artificial Sweeteners
Meat>Oils
Meat>sugars
Meat>Dairy
Meat>Cheese
Meat>Fish
Meat>eggs
Meat>Beans
Meat>Legumes
Missing anything?
Well yeah, the reasons why. Because to someone just stumbling into this thread it sounds completely incredulous (I say this as a ZCer).
I think youāre confusing some issues.
First, from the carnivorous perspective, it doesnāt matter that plants contain nutrients. What matters is whether they contain nutrients that canāt be obtained with ASFs, which they donāt. The fact that you can get nutrients from plants has no bearing on whether they add something to a meat based diet. If carnivores minimise the nutritional value of plants, itās only because itās irrelevant.
Second, the diversity of diets that modern hunter gathers have thrived on doesnāt show that there is no advantage to carnivory. In particular, it doesnāt show anything about the relative merits of meat with plants vs. meat without plants, which is an empirical question. Moreover, some researchers, such as Miki Ben-dor point out evidence that before the loss of the megafauna, āPaleoā diets werenāt really very diverse. Itās likely that these dietary adaptations are local solutions to the general problem of loss of high fat meat. I.e. they are making do with carbohydrate as energy after the evolved diet was less obtainable.
If there were some special magic that imbues only meat thatās hunted in the ways modern hunter gatherers did, the best that could do is add something to the benefits of a carnivorous diet. It makes absolutely no sense to say that if you donāt get that extra magic then you need to add plants to make up for it. Since it sounds like youāre paraphrasing Mike Mutzelās recent rant, you might appreciate this bullseye rebuttal to it from a non-carnivore, Tristan Haggard. Start at 12:22. It pretty much sums it up.
For what itās worth, Mike apologised to me in person for his rant, conceding that what Iāve personally achieved by eating the way I do is itās own justification.
And thatās the bottom line. I and many other people have found, empirically, that a carnivorous diet improves our health. It may not do this for everyone, but it does for many. No amount of theorising takes that away.
As to LC experts, Iāve heard Mike Eades say publically in the Q and A after his AHS 16 talk, that he feels best when he eats only meat, and Phinney, who is much too careful to say anything that could be construed as advocating anything not rigorously lab tested, nonetheless has waxed eloquent on nomadic societies who eschewed plants, both in talks Iāve seen, and in this interview with Shelley Schlender:
Itās quite clear he considers it a decent, if untested hypothesis.
Necessary? Perhaps not for the majority.
Beneficial compared to LC? Demonstrated in many.
It took me a while to respond to your post because I had to watch Mutzelās and Haggardās videos. I think Mutzel is really smart, but I hadnāt see his video on ZC. It is the worst piece Iāve ever seen from him. His philosophical and moral platitudes were unwarranted (and fortunately not typical). His other points were valid. Haggard called him on his crap, while acknowledging and emphasizing some the points Mutzel talked about. Some were the same points I raised in my post.
What I was trying to say in my previous post was that it takes great effort to create a well formulated ZC diet. Since excessive protein is detrimental, getting sufficient fat without carbs is especially challenging. Well formulated ZC means consuming a variety of different species, not just cows. It means eating unpopular animal parts and organs, not just muscle meat (which has lower nutrient value and too much protein). Challenge also comes from factory meat being low quality, which takes on even more importance when ZC. Well formulated ZC means obtaining wild or local grown meat.
In summary, I tried to say (though not as eloquently as Phinney in the article you linked) that modern ZC diets are not like the diets of indigenous peoples.
Iām sure thereās a tiny subset of the population that does better on a ZC than a LC diet. Many more people have a problem with too much protein (as former Atkins dieters can attest). Whether LC or ZC, the predominant macro should be fat.