Question about fruits and long fast

#1

Hello everyone,

I have a question that I’ve been trying to answer for myself, but I’m not sure. I have an autoimmune disease and can only eat meat. Naturally, this way I don’t get many vitamins and nutrients. I’ve been in ketosis for a long time, long after adaptation, and I eat one meal a day. I’ve noticed that the longer I don’t eat, the better I feel, so I started doing regular extended fasts, around 48 hours or more.

Now, my concern is that during long fasting, the body uses up its resources. But what if those resources are scarce, as in my case? I thought about eating fruits, since I have the mildest reaction to them, to replenish my stores, but the sugar and fructose from them kick me out of ketosis at the same time.

So here’s my question: If my body is in ketosis all the time and I get knocked out of it for few hours by eating fruits, can I day or two after do a long fast? How much does going out of ketosis affect my ability to fast afterward? Do I need to let my body get back into ketosis again before doing an extended fast, or will my body handle it quickly?

If you don’t know, please don’t guess. Thank you.

Cheers
Thomas

(Alec) #2

What makes you think that? Fatty meat contains all the vitamins and nutrients that your body needs. Bar none.

Without eating the anti-nutrients in plants you actually need a lot less than the average plant chomper.

#3

That’s fantastic. That worried me the most. Thank you.

#4

What about acidity? Apparently, large amounts of meat produce a lot of acids in the body. I cannot consume baking soda. Any idea?

(Alec) #5

Nope. Our stomach of course is quite an acid environment, but that is by design and quite normal. Eating meat does not cause any health issues related to acidity.

#6

Thank you for your response,

And regarding the question about, let’s say, fruits. Do you know how it looks from our body’s perspective? Is stepping out of ketosis for a few hours actually a problem? How does the body perceive it? How long does it take for the body to “return” to normal after such an incident? Is the ultimate goal to stay in ketosis as long as possible, or can such a short episode not significantly affect the processes in the body and its comfort during prolonged fasting?

#7

Wow. I consider fruit as a candy, something I eat for joy (and juiciness too) while meat is the proper nutrition… People proved that living on meat is quite possible, not for everyone but a human body doesn’t strictly need nutrients from other things, apparently.

IDK about acid. I eat meat (and other things, mostly eggs and dairy) and my body works just fine. Isn’t this diet is supposed to be suited for humans? :smiley: I never expected it to be a problem. Not even now when I strongly focus on meat. But I always was pretty much healthy…

Going out of ketosis… I do it ALL the time. Well it’s not that often nowadays but it’s pretty frequent. The number one culprit is fruits, I love them. And do my best to eat as little of them as possible but it’s still not negligible here and there. It is fine for me, no idea if it would do good or bad to you. As long as I mostly eat carnivore, my body is happy. Eating fruits every day (in bigger quantities, at least so not 5g or something) wouldn’t be good though. It works for other people though so it’s individual like almost everything food related.

Not for me. Oh and carbs vs fasting. Carbs can drastically improve my fasting abilities (probably mostly because I eat a bigger last meal on higher-carbs) but people seem to have the opposite effect normally. Even OMAD is barely ever possible for me on very low-carb while it’s trivial, 100% success on higher-carb if I put my mind on it… But it’s me, as I wrote, it’s usually the opposite. And IDK how much fruit would you eat and what else… Just getting out of ketosis may not matter at all - but if the extra carbs aren’t excessive, it should be what, several hours at most to go back? Maybe a few if you exercise…
If it’s a longer fast, you will get into ketosis anyway so in the 3rd day or so it’s ketosis either way… :slight_smile: My only longer fast happened in my high-carb times, it was easy. Many people fast on high-carb, we don’t all get painful hunger :slight_smile: Determination always helped me out in the first day(s) but the first 18-20 hours were business as usual for me anyway. It’s not like I was hungry just 14 hours after my carby dinner or something. But apparently people who are not natural intermittent fasters, get much better on keto. So… IDK what will happen to you, we humans are just too different. Fruits often make people hungry but it’s the immediate effect (and some people get satiated by fruits, IDK how and why…). Carbs have a great long term satiation effect on me, apparently, it’s the short term effect that is horrible, they simply make me hungry and I need a ton of fat to get satiated (okay, maybe all the fat satiates me longer term :slight_smile: and the protein, of course).
I personally would eat a big, fatty, protein rich last meal, with or without fruits before a planned extrended fast and expect no big hunger for the next day. I wouldn’t finish it with fruits but maybe it’s individual too. Fruits would be a tool to make me hungry again after I got satiated… Bigger meals last longer…

(Robin) #8

We have many longtime thriving carnivores on here. They usually take less supplements (if any).

#9

Hi, this acidity point is interesting to me. A friend who is quite knowledgeable about health and nutrition (but not from a keto/carnivore perspective) recently pointed out to me that this could be one of the concerns about eating only meat. He said eating a lot of meat can make the body more acidic which in turn can lead to problems with calcium and joint and bone problems. I replied that I hadnt heard of it happening to carnivores and didnt think it would be a problem. However since he is generally a pretty knowledgeable chap I said that I would look into it and keep an eye out for any problems.
So I was wondering if you have any further info about the acidity issue or any links to papers or videos etc that you would be able to share.
Many thanks.

(Robin) #10

My only link is my joints, which no longer ache.

(Alec) #11

I think it’s incumbent on the claimer to provide evidence of their claim. Human gastric juices have a ph of 1.5-3 ie very acidic. The ph of meat is gentle compared to the stomach acid. It makes no biochemical sense to say eating meat “makes the body more acidic”. There are also tens of thousands (if not more) carnivores now, and if there was a problem eating carnivore it would have surfaced by now.

I also think it is very unlikely that an eating style that we know from hard science has been the diet of our species and its forefathers for the past few million years causes health issues. If it did, we would not be here.

(Doug) #12

This. :slightly_smiling_face:

Meat contains protein, sulfur and phosphates, and the body’s digestion of them does indeed make for acidic by-products, but the body is very good at getting rid of acid. For example, we routinely exhale carbon dioxide, and dissolved carbon dioxide in water is “carbonic acid.”

The pH of blood is tightly controlled in a narrow range, and it needs to be. The body is very good at doing this.

Human stomach acid - yes, very acidic, and here too it needs to be. pH is logarithmic, not linear. A pH of 5, for example, is ten times more acidic than a 6, and a 4 is 100 times more acidic than a 6.

Even while anything below 7 is ‘acidic,’ let’s compare human stomach acid, at 1.5, with a 6.5 on the scale. The 1.5 is 100,000 times more acidic than the 6.5. :stuck_out_tongue:

I always think of this stuff when seeing “alkaline water” for sale. It’s marketed as if it’s going to help the body by “neutralizing acidity,” often, but what’s really going to happen? As soon as it goes into the stomach, the comparatively very, very strong acid there will instantly neutralize the water.

“Alkaline water” at a pH of 8 - stomach acid at 1.5 can neutralize well over 10,000 times as much water at 8. If the stomach acid is 2.5, then it’s well over 1,000 times as much. 20 to 100 ml of stomach acid for humans, usually, as I recall. So, if it’s 100 ml of 1.5 pH stomach acid, then it can handle well more than 1000 liters of ‘alkaline water’ at 8. And - as soon as any stomach acid is consumed by such reaction, the stomach will secrete more.

(Alec) #13

Doug
Spot on. One of the things I have learnt in my carnivore journey is that my body knows exactly what to do and when. The only thing I have to do is get out of its way and feed it an ancestrally appropriate diet. My body is wayyyyyyyy smarter than I am. When it has the right fuel it just works.
Cheers
Alec

(KM) #14

I do remember reading this book years ago and thinking it was rubbish, though.

Alkalize or Die: Superior Health Through Proper Alkaline-Acid Balance is a book by Dr. Theodore Baroody that discusses how an imbalance of acids and alkalines in the body can lead to illness and disease. The book offers guidance on how to evaluate your body’s acid-alkaline balance and make corrections to improve your health.

IIR, foods that “alkalize the body” were not necessarily alkaline themselves. Lemon, for example, was considered an alkalizing food based on its metabolic byproducts.

This from Health line

(Foods do not affect blood pH) nevertheless, the Alkaline Diet categorizes foods into three groups:

Acidifying foods: meat, poultry, fish, dairy, eggs, and alcohol
Neutral foods: natural fats, starches, and sugars
Alkalizing foods: fruits, nuts, legumes, and vegetables
Proponents of the diet believe that eating large amounts of acidifying foods can cause your body’s pH to become more acidic, increasing your vulnerability to illness and disease.

In any event, the whole alkaline diet and the idea that foods are alkalizing or acidifying toward the body is “a thing”, however absurd.

(Doug) #15

Indeed. There have been a lot of good threads and posts about things in this realm. So much of it is rather just ‘getting out of our own body’s way.’ This while most of us are incessantly bombarded with commercial messages. To say that it’s usually “all about money” is sadly true.

Well dang, that sounds pretty dire… :wink::stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye::grin::smile:

There’s certainly some truth, there. If I was tempted to argue with it, I’d say that starches and sugars go to glucose, and then when it’s metabolized in our cells, water and carbon dioxide are the by-products, and dissolved CO₂ is carbonic acid, so the deal will be ‘acidifying,’ not neutral. But no big deal.

Yeah - pretty wild, eh? :slightly_smiling_face:

The pH of the body thing - I got into it while arguing about ‘water machines’ like “Kangen water machines” which are very expensive multi-level marketing deals. Maybe $5000 for a machine, and a couple thousand more for packets of stuff you add to it. Such things seem at times to be the rage in Japan and Korea, and I think they’re pretty much available worldwide. In reality, they’re more like just a $100 water ionizer with a not-great, single filter. :roll_eyes:

Our blood pH has a tight normal range of 7.35 to 7.45. You get away from that a little, like 7.1 or 7.6, and you’re going to be suffering. <6.8 or >7.8 and you’re dead.

The body has a great bag of tricks to keep this in line. Our blood has bicarbonate ions HCO₃- and carbonic acid H₂CO₃ as a buffer system - something basic (higher pH) goes into the bloodstream, carbonic acid whacks it; something too acidic comes in, the bicarbonate ions neutralize it.

The lungs get rid of carbon dioxide, and the kidneys can choose - they can reabsorb bicarbonate from urine or let it go out, depending on what the body needs. They can also secrete hydrogen ions (H+) into urine if need be, and to me this is one of the ‘magical’ things the body can do. The most basic definition of an ‘acid’ is a “hydrogen donor,” and here the kidneys can directly get rid of hydrogen ions.

(Peter - Don't Fear the Fat ) #16

You sound like you’ve been talking to people looking for obstacles? Don’t worry, we all get that. Then they see our results and realise they’ve been daft.
I’ve had it all, ‘Hey you must be really constipated’, ‘You’ll need carbs for energy’ ‘aren’t you worried about a heart attack’? … they want us to fail so they can be right.

(Doug) #17

:stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye::smile: That’s a good one!

(KM) #18

Honestly … well hmm. Why do people always assume we do what we do in complete ignorance or for no reason whatsoever? But then again, I suppose I could say the same things about them.