"The truth about carbs" - an article claiming glucose and fructose are necessary for optimum health. Anyone with more knowledge of biology able to translate this for me?

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #7

The only thing I know about testosterone is that it is made from cholesterol. I suspect that a lot of what people state as fact about testosterone is hypothesised from incomplete data, and that when we eventually get it all sorted, much of what people assume at the moment will turn out to be misguided.

In this matter, as in many others, the temptation is to assume that because testosterone levels associate with certain outcomes, that manipulating the testosterone level will produce those outcomes. 'Tain’t necessarily so. As is the case with every other supplement and micronutrient people get worked up about. I am trying to find the original text, but I read something recently to the effect that the danger of finding a marker for some health condition is that we become fixated on manipulating the marker, not addressing the actual health condition.

(Alli) #8

Thanks for the discussion guys. I should know better than to read junk blogs as they always wind me up.

This was my reaction to it so I’m glad to see it’s not just me who thought it just grabbed at random concepts to make the point they wanted.

I suspect this is the real reason for the effort they’ve gone to to justify it.

The arguments for sugar are a bit baffling for me as someone who finds zero carb a miracle cure for my mental illness, pcos and autoimmune conditions. My takeaway is that the author has cherrypicked ‘facts’ to fit his narrative, and I will just ignore him and keep munching on beef as it makes me feel great and sugar makes me feel like I’m dying.

#9

omgosh and that is super rampant out there in life now ‘on internet media’ cause alot of what we read IS so personal to each of us that the ‘fact from fiction to mental brain games of what we require as an individual’ will always come into play.

think real cold hard science facts first the then the ‘fluff’ after comes into play and if we think that from our life, yea we can ‘read between those blurred crazy’ lines that we think someone else ‘just might’ have that ‘answer we so seek’

hell they don’t and won’t HAHA

again me being my mouth on it all LOL

(Gregory - You can teach an old dog new tricks.) #10

Of course it is. Just like other addictive substances that stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain.
Dr Robert H Lustig " Sweet Revenge "

(Gregory - You can teach an old dog new tricks.) #11

This is so true! Think about all the drugs out there whose purpose is to alleviate symptoms but not address the cause.

Does anyone really have to ask how to lower blood sugar?

No… They just want to be able to do it and still eat donuts…

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #12

If humans actually needed to eat carbohydrates, we would not be here. Our ancestors would have gone extinct long ago. The evidence is quite clear that we evolved to eat fat and meat and spend most of our lives in ketosis. Any carbs our Pleistocene ancetors ate were very different from what we have available today and provided a mere seasonal pittance to their nutrition. In fact, most of the fruits and veggies we currently have did not exist 200 years ago, let alone 20k or 200 k years ago. Yes, glucose is necessary and our liver produces all we need so we don’t need to eat it. As for fructose, it serves no useful purpose and we can live quite well without it. Honey is bee food.

Fire in a Bottle II, lipedema, adipaging, twinkie-fat
#13

and this can be seen literally on this forum and drag it a tad further!

Someone suggested some try DOM supps cause new info hit someone and ‘now it is out there’ and ‘to be applied’ info for another poster about a person’s keto issue thread that they have going down and while I didn’t say a thing on that front in that thread ever, IT SHOWS that while US as people do want to help others suggesting ‘radical off the chart useless’ knowledge of another’s life should not be suggested.

Now I draw to this conclusion that when carnivore people on my plan start, we never suggest ‘supps’ for ‘cures’ to anything and yet that gets dissed like a maniac ploy all the time as in how could ‘meat be the cure’ and it is for many of us…not all but for A GROWING majority finding this path and lifestyle, darn right.

so drugs/supplements/add this vitamin or this ‘fancy azz supp’ that might be some miracle cure WILL NEVER be what fresh real food gives PLUS of course this is not against anyone with real med issues to be adddresd but us ‘know it alls’ think we know it all HAHA yes I was one of them :slight_smile: If a Dr and test reports say you need, then yea you need thru real medical info but the ‘vitamin/mineral/add this fancy BS supp/plant vitamin supp/this tumeric or whatever’ all the time is just insanity.

no one knows what they ‘truly need’ ever without real med report background and their med history.

I say stop the ‘fluff’ on the board :wink: which isn’t much truly cause this is one darn great site! Real facts for real life people…as much as anyone can ‘really know’ a person on the internet post’ :slight_smile:

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #14

@Fangs You can say it - I’m the DOM someone. I think you will admit that those of you eating carnivore are eating very differently from the way our ancestors evolved eating carnivore. When was the last time you ate out in the backyard with only a knife and a cup and a dead cow?

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Yes, our ancestors eventually learned to cook the fat and meat, but they still drained the blood and drank it plain. Just like the Masai still do to this day. Mammalian blood (including our own) has a mineral composition that closely duplicates the mineral composition of ocean/sea water. In another topic someone asked why we need to supplement minerals on keto and I posted this same photo in my response. It’s not only keto, no one has an optimal mineral composition of blood just from what they eat. For you meat eaters: the minerals are no longer in the soil for the animals to get into their systems for you to consume even if you drank all the blood! As for fruits and vegetables, you can look up very nice tables of micronutrients supposedly contained in various fruits and veggies. But again, if those minerals are not in the soil, they’re not in the stuff growing in the soil.

So to DOM. I think it’s a great source of minerals in the amounts and proportions that match our own blood minerals. Since those trace minerals are necessary for optimum health and vitality, I think it a very good idea at least to try them. I’m trying them as a possible final solution to my leg cramps, on the hypothesis that trace minerals are involved in the electrical activity of the macro minerals sodium and magnesium that are most directly involved in muscle control and prevention of spasms. I’ll keep you posted.

I’m not someone who thinks if it wasn’t around 500 years ago it’s bunk. I think humans are very inquisitive and from time to time discover new stuff that actually works. Sometimes better than stuff that was around 500 years ago.

(Bob M) #15

@amwassil That’s a possibility about the trace minerals. At one time, I was taking a liquid trace mineral supplement that I’d add to my water. At that time, I don’t think I had cramps (but I could be mis-remembering things). I quit this when I thought it was causing issues, though I don’t think (looking back) the issues were caused by it.

@PaulL I’m 100% with you about manipulating outcomes. I’m taking some B vitamins to see what happens to my homocysteine. But if this decreases, is that good? Bad? What if it doesn’t decrease?

I also think that people on low carb diets for a long time have never been studied. So, we don’t really know about what happens. Maybe people who are on low carb diets for a long time will naturally have “lower” testosterone? We don’t know.

For thyroid issues, man that is fraught with complexity. There is definitely a train of thought that “normal” markers for thyroid function can be lower for keto/carnivores. But when I looked into it, there were too many different opinions for me to make sense of it.

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #16

@ctviggen I’ve been 5 days now without any magnesium supplementation. Only Himalayan pink salt in drinking water and Aussie Trace Minerals in my morning coffee and flavoured soda water once or twice during the day. On work days (yesterday, Sat; and Thu and Fri of last week I’ve had Ocean Bomb DOM at my meals at work. So far no cramps and only a couple of incipients that I was able to deter quickly by stretching my leg.

PS: I’m OD’ing on the ATM purposely. I’m sure I’m deficient in multiple trace elements and I think the fastest way to get them back into the normal range is to OD for a week or so. The recommended dose is 5-20 drops (!) a couple times per day. I’m using 2 grams or so, which is about 22-23 drops, 2-3 times per day.

#17

personal leg cramps to stopping some extra liquor on an eating plan to ‘lets guess and just suck down’ ancient what we think minerals we might need. Nope, too much of a stretch for me.

so many throw so many ‘take this supp’ and think it is some miracle cure…got some hoodia for weight loss, the tribes used it while running down prey during their hunts to quell their appetites while trying to survive. Chew on this plant and tons of miracles. Suck down some DOM and BOOM we got liftoff LOL

sorry I find it amusing truly but I don’t wanna go further cause I absolutely understanding someone promoting something that might work for them for a particular problem as cure all. I won’t go further on my thoughts on it all.

(Bob M) #18

This might be one reason why pickle juice works for some: pickle juice is likely more than just salty water.

@Fangs I’m not sure Michael is advocating everyone try this or that it’s some type of miracle cure. For those of plagued by periodic muscle cramps, this might work. Will it work for everyone? It’s unclear.

My personal belief is that “something” is missing that’s causing cramps. What that “thing” is might vary from person to person, which is why you’ll see cures using magnesium, potassium, all kinds of stuff. But I think taking a mineral supplement with a small amount of minerals over a wide range of them isn’t a bad idea.

Do you (meaning “anyone”) need to take this? It’s also unclear. My previous doctor advised me to take a daily zinc (which I do not do, but do take them periodically), because she thought soils and therefore animals were lacking in zinc.There are whole studies placing the blame on an element (eg, selenium, zinc) missing from local soils for things like heart disease, covid, etc. Are they true? It’s really hard to know without going into those places and supplementing the missing element and seeing what happens.

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #19

I’m just reporting on my own n=1 and why I think it might be a solution to at least one of my problems. It might not. There is some science to support it, but work for me? - I’ll find out. Do I need to say again that I don’t care what anyone else eats and doesn’t eat nor why they do or don’t? I simply tell folks who ask or ask for suggestions what I think is helpful or might be. If I learn about something that may be a solution or even partial solution to a widespread problem I’ll throw it out there.

(Butter Withaspoon) #20

My cramps which were not too severe or often have gone away, in spite of a huge month of exercise which was heavy lifting and some high intensity. For my N=1 the answer was to stop taking salt. :woman_shrugging: I still salt my food to taste but no more taking a pinch. Maybe the NaCl was competing with another mineral. Who knows, but it’s nice to be feeling good on no supps

(Gabe “No Dogma, Only Science Please!” ) #21

This just goes to show how much of nutritional “science” is pseudoscience. Anyone can use words like “pyruvate” and make themselves sound as if they know something about biochemistry. This is why I take ALL of the dietary advice, even from the Atkins gurus, with several grams of salt!

(Michael - When reality fails to meet expectations, the problem is not reality.) #22

You’ll like this. Amber O’Hearn takes it apart sentence by sentence:

#23

re the first post, I don’t have the detailed knowledge of biology to verify the CO2 etc questions in the article, but as a counterpoint to the above: at no moment has CAurelius or Saladino meant junk or refined foods when they talk about “carbs,” so the mentions above of junk food and beer are out of place.

Saladino has said many, many times that if you’re insulin resistant, then you should absolutely stay away from carbs, and also that many folks will thrive on a purely carnivore diet. I haven’t followed CA as much, but I believe that both of them were strictly carnivore for a while and couldn’t solve a few issues that started cropping up, and I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss their reintroduction to carbs.

Honey and fruit are definitely ancestral foods. Supermarket fruit has undergone a lot of transformation since our ancestors’ times but there seem to have been plenty of high-sugar fruits around, and honey-gathering is an ancient tradition (no link for this one, but there are enough accounts of modern-day hunter gatherer societies who have complex traditions around it that we can reasonably surmise that it’s an ancient practice). Also, by almost any measure honey is an animal product. It might not be a good food for you (or me, for that matter) but it definitely comes from animals.

Most animal-based folks seem to do best when eating only animal foods, and that’s wonderful. If what you’re doing works for you, don’t change a thing. For those who run into problems (and maybe it’s generally very lean and fit males?) it’s great to know that adding some good sources of carbs might help.

Ironically, even though both Carnivore Aurelius and Saladino sell supplements, neither of them sells carb supplements/products, so it’s not exactly in their interest to talk about this. It would be like someone who got popular as a stict vegan mentioning the odd piece of fish that she enjoys. (Of course, maybe they’ll now start selling honey and oranges :smirk: but I can’t imagine that would make much sense for them.)

#24

Honey is animal-processed plant matter, actually… I don’t see how it could be animal product… It’s a hybrid but it originally comes from plants but animals does things to it, transforming it. But it starts as a sugary thing and ends up a sugary things and that sugar comes from the plant.
But it doesn’t matter, carnivores typically don’t eat condensed milk either and that’s a sugary animal product… Even normal milk is rarely and typically never used as far as I know. I surely don’t overdo it even on carnivore-ish and I am pretty relaxed there. (Cream is better anyway.)

I personally found enough meat is best for my keto cramps… I never supplement anything on carnivore. It doesn’t mean others don’t need to do that for some reason, it’s just about me but very many people do that and they don’t go off all the time like me. Still, it was very clear than adding enough meat solved my cramp problem.

(Bob M) #25

Not true. I heard a podcast with Saladino where the main thrust was about PUFAs being the root of all evil. (See the Tucker Goodrich podcast, if you want to listen; it’s below.) Saladino said over and over and over that “carbs don’t cause insulin resistance”. His proof? He ate some honey. And he didn’t get insulin resistance.

Now, you might have heard him at other times say that if you’re insulin resistant, you shouldn’t eat carbs, but that’s not what he says here.

I’ve stopped listening to him for reasons like this.

Furthermore, I’ve reached the conclusion that PUFAs play a role in obesity, insulin resistance, etc., but they are not the sine qua non of these. I can guarantee that if you drink good beer, then eat a pizza, then follow that with ice cream, you WILL get fat and insulin resistant. And that’s a (relatively) low PUFA diet.

And I’ve tried eating croissants with added butter and also fried potatoes in suet, both of which are high saturated fat, high starch, low PUFA. And I could eat them and eat them and eat them…no off switch in sight.

I think hormones play a role for some or many of us, and the PUFA hypothesis does not address this.

(Bob M) #26

I should also note that I believe genetics play a role, too. Maybe some people can eat sat fat + starch and overdo these, while others can’t?