Six common beliefs addressed, Part 271

1. Why do so many low carb diets fail, even though you have explained how they would be the most beneficial treatment for metabolism?

Because most diets are fads and scams. Unfortunately, low carb diets have not been immune to this.

There are many iterations of low carb diets online which are full of junk foods (wrong macronutrient compositions), unrealistic/unsustainable protocols (bone broth fasts), floggings/binge eating (fast for a week/eat 3 pounds of bacon) and symptom chasing (postprandial blood glucose/gained five pounds). I have said before that the low carb community is full of frauds, scammers, snake oil salesmen and quacks. Low carb diets attract a lot of desperate, misinformed and serial dieters with eating disorders. All of these people are easy to manipulate, lie to and rob.

This is why I made this blog. In order for anyone to get the information they need, for free and simply explained so they have a better chance of reversing their condition.

2. What is the correct insulin to glucagon ratio?

Insulin in the pancreas is at its purest and most undiluted form. It is no coincidence that the alpha cells are right next to the beta cells in the pancreas. This close proximity causes for insulin to be potent enough to stop the secretion of glucagon, as its potency begins to reduce as it enters the liver and finally the peripheral tissues.

Insulin is released during the fed state so that's when glucagon should be properly suppressed. The fed state means no glucose should be produced as blood glucose naturally rises from the breakdown of the food we eat. The correct insulin to glucagon ratio at this point should be around 7 - 4.

3. I just watched a video on YouTube from a "low carb doctor" and he was basically saying that the dietary advice given on a national news network was wrong but he never said how exactly. He was just pissed at certain recommended items like fruit, barley and broccoli. He only seemed to agree with any item that was "low carb". I browsed through the comments and they were mostly of people saying they only had to take their insulin twice since going carnivore or how there is a war against meat. There wasn't a single dissenting voice in all of the comments. I remember, some years back, there would be challenges to these claims but now I see none.  

Because they most likely filter out comments. I remember when there would be a lot of unanswered questions in the comment sections of these charlatans but those are gone too. They know its bad for business to leave questions unanswered. Jimmy Moore was notorious for cleaning up his comment sections. He would ban people from his page, in a hot second.

Look, all of these people are frauds and scammers. Most of them have given up and moved on to something else but there are a few still holding on to their flock. They have just moved to another platform like YouTube instead of Facebook. Too many people from their past are still on Facebook so they look for a new audience elsewhere. I have said it many times before, snake old salesmen have to keep moving from town to town or their gig will be up.

Aside from that, all of these frauds are one trick ponies. They see dietary food choices from one myopic viewpoint - no carbs. For them, this is the "cure". Of course, they know its not but they peddle it because, just like you saw in the comments, someone will pipe up and say they were taken off their insulin or their HbA1C is lower than ever before. For these people, this signals that they have been miraculously "cured". They don't understand diabetes any more than the fool they are following. Of course your blood glucose lowers if you don't consume dietary glucose but the condition is still progressing. By the time your postprandial blood glucose shows a significant rise, you have been having blood glucose dysregulation for years. This is why these people will remove the carbs and then start complaining that now their blood glucose is going up from meat.

I hate to say this, but they are all dummies. Back in the day, when you could only get information from your doctor or some quack you met at the pharmacy, I could understand the ignorance but there is internet now. The same time they put into watching a clown on the low carb circus, is the same time they can put into reading some obesity medical journals. They are all free online, ready for viewing. They don't do it because they are lazy. It's easier to keep watching the clown comes out of the car than to do actual research so I don't feel sorry for them and you shouldn't either. Forget the ones that can't be saved and save yourself.

4. Why is it that a lot of carnivore proponents have become sick and had to leave their diets if this is the diet we evolved with?

Because they are quacks. Let's be real, the only "carnivore proponents" I have seen are just regular people who tried out a diet, found it beneficial and decided to write a book, make a website, create a program and charge for all of them. I hate to say it but they are grifters. They know where the money is at. It's at every single fad diet that can be thought of. These people did not take time to research the diet or its possible side effects.

We absolutely evolved eating meat. In fact, meat made us human, particularly when we learned how to cook it. Cooking meat extracts its nutrients exponentially. There is just one problem - we are not living in caveman days so the meat we have access to is very different from the meat hunter/gatherers have access to.

Hunter/gatherers have access to wild game. Wild game is very lean so it packs a much higher amount of protein per serving than farm raised animals. Eating lean meats for a long period of time can cause health problems (rabbit starvation) as you need fats to be able to metabolize certain nutrients. For this reason, hunter/gatherers eat nose to tail. This means they consume the entire animal, particularly the organ meats. Organ meats are where most of the nutrients, fats and electrolytes are found. It is also where you can find already digested and fermented plant matter which has beneficial bacteria.

In modernity, these "carnivore proponents" sit down to large plates of muscle meat and claim they are eating like their ancestors. They are not. Muscle meat is not as nutritious as organ meats and over time, you start experiencing electrolyte imbalances. This is particularly true on a diet that tends to keep your insulin very low. This can be detrimental in the long term because the more you deplete your electrolytes, the more difficult it is to replenish them and you end up in a state of chronic dehydration that's hard to reverse. This will cause all sorts of nasty health problems that can even become dangerous and in some instances not reversible.

Electrolyte imbalances are the worst case scenario of eating muscle meat carnivore but another problem is the fat in the meat. The muscle fat in farm raised animals is very different from the organ fat in wild game. Consuming too much dietary fat, over the long term, will only deteriorate your insulin function since fat keeps basal insulin levels higher than normal. This is why a lot of "carnivore proponents" end up seeing their metabolic markers deteriorate over time. This is particularly true if they already had some stage of metabolic syndrome. Farm raised meat packs quite a load of fat, especially when all you eat is cattle. Wild game is not cattle. It's a wide array of animals, including insects. Also this extra fat comes at the expense of protein. This means you can be carnivore and still suffer from not consuming adequate protein because that rib eye will fill you up before you can get the most protein out of it. Meat is very satiating so it is difficult to hit your protein goals without going over your fat goals.

All of this means that carnivore is the most difficult diet to follow out of all low carb diets. A lot of people do not like organ meats. They cannot become accustomed to their taste, they are difficult to find and you have to learn how to prepare and cook them. It is hard to have a Thanksgiving dinner table that features lamb hearts instead of turkey and fish eyeballs for hors d’oeuvres. For this reason, if you want to do carnivore using only muscle meat, you have to be knowledgeable in the right supplementation of electrolytes and possibly protein as well. You have to watch your fat intake through careful tracking of macros and choosing the right cuts of meat.

It's a science to do carnivore correctly in modernity because the carnivore of today is very different from the carnivore of the past. So don't follow "proponents", follow information. You must do the right research to ensure the diet you choose is right for you and will get you to your goals.

5. I keep hearing "fasting" people say that you can add fasting to any diet. Can fasting help with better blood glucose control.

I have touched on this before but it's been quite a while so I will recap in this reply. The term "fasting can be added to any diet" is a marketing slogan. Why limit your customers to only low carbers when you can have a wider audience covering all kinds of diets? These people are selling fasting. It's a business that's also a gimmick. They could care less about anything else except if its profitable at the end of the day. So they can't even explain how it works or why it should even work. We have already discovered it doesn't.

Fasting used in this fad way is a symptom chasing approach. Diabetes is not a symptom. It is a syndrome. There's a difference. If you want to have better blood glucose control, which is just another way of saying you want to obtain proper blood glucose regulation, then you can't try to resolve it using one method and destroy it with another. Every time you eat the wrong macronutrient composition, you are once again disrupting your blood glucose and fasting won't correct it. Instead, fasting would reinforce it because it lengthens your time in hypoglycemia after a bout of hyperglycemia. Hyperglycemia disrupts insulin function and hypoglycemia makes the disruption permanent.

The premise of fasting is to lower blood glucose so that insulin release/expression reduces. This helps normalize your fasting insulin levels, breaking the resistance and allowing for better leptin expression. This is done after a proper meal that does not disrupt blood glucose to begin with. The last thing you want to do is fast after very high postprandial blood glucose as you will release excessive insulin after. This insulin will not be cleared after fasting so fasting further will only cause a severe drop in blood glucose. This strengthens the disparities between postprandial and fasting blood glucose, allowing the condition to be reinforced and progress.

Remember, diabetes is caused by chronic, large disparities between postprandial and fasting blood glucose so that is what you want to avoid.

6. I was told that carnivore was not a good diet because our ancestor's diet varied greatly depending on region and climate. I was also told that a balanced diet would get you all the nutrients you need.

Yes. Our ancestor's diet varied wildly as humans are highly adaptable when it comes to diet. How this translates to carnivore not being a "good diet" is unknown.

As far as a "balanced diet" goes, that is a product of modernity. Like I mentioned above, humans are highly adaptable when it comes to diet and can thrive on many different types of diets. This means they can thrive on a modern "balanced diet", the same way they can thrive on a restrictive carnivore diet. A "balanced diet" is no better than a vegetarian diet or a ketogenic diet.

No one who recommends "balanced diets" can even define what that even means. I suppose they mean any diet that is not restrictive of any macronutrient. Why the restriction of a macronutrient would translate to the restriction of micronutrients is unknown.

Humans have evolved with and thrived with diets that fall anywhere between 100% animal based to 80% plant based. The only diets that humans have never evolved with are 100% plant based diets (vegan), "fat free" diets or "balanced diets". Just like "balanced diets", vegan diets are a concoction of modernity as well but even so, they can be followed successfully if done right. That means that humans are so adaptable that they can even thrive on diets they didn't even evolve with.

A "balanced diet" does not guarantee you will get all the nutrients you need. The Standard American Diet (SAD) is a "balanced diet" but it is still quite nutrient void. The nutrients in your diet are completely at the mercy of you including bioavailable nutrient rich foods and your body's ability to metabolize them.