Curiosity – Plants vs. Mammals (Energy, Digestion, Broad Conceptual Explanations, and the Lion Diet)
I read the start of the book The Gluten Lie. Its first main argument is that the gluten scare is similar to the prior MSG scare.
So I researched MSG for like 15 minutes and concluded there might actually be a problem there – the mainstream conclusion that it’s definitely safe is wrong.
I don’t know that MSG is unsafe. I just think I know that the mainstream arguments and evidence are inadequate, and that there are some causes for concern with MSG that have not actually been fully addressed. Given the current state of our knowledge, they shouldn’t be just fulling dismissive people’s concerns about MSG.
Note that the mainstream view seems to be that no one has a real (non-psychological) MSG sensitivity/allergy/problem. Zero people (or maybe like 1 in 100 million, which they round to zero?). Their position is not that it’s safe for 99% of people but a few people have real MSG problems.
Unfortunately (just like with gluten, vegetable oil, caffeine and other issues), I don’t know how to get anyone who disagrees with me, and thinks they know what they’re talking about, to engage in anything resembling rational, organized debate.
I saw nothing in Lion Diet materials about needing to limit the amount of calories you get from protein (to loosely 30% of total calories). But apparently that’s important:
I found out about this issue from Paleo people. If they know, M Peterson ought to know too. Instead I’ve seen her talk about eating lean meat.
That seems irresponsible of the Lion Diet information. There’s a danger involved that isn’t warned of. There isn’t information about how to plan for it and deal with it. The Lion Diet still seems lower risk than some alternatives like SSRIs though…
Also Lion Diet doesn’t seem to know anything about vegetable oils even though Paleo people do. Why? What’s going on there? She must have read lots of Paleo stuff, right? She should be familiar with things the Paleo community knows.
I do remember reading your vegetable oil posts and agreeing with them and finding them useful (I think I had also come across other info in the past about how bad some oils are, especially processed and refined oils like canola but your posts were much more detailed and shed some new light on oils I used to think were good like olive oil) but I think it’s mostly independent as a decision due to health condition that I’m trying to address with diet. More context (ended up being long and rambly)
~4 years ago I was trying keto at my previous job, and trying to optimize my diet back then, but I was wrong about a lot of things and went too far in optimizing.
More recently like ~1.5 years ago I tried a lectin-free diet based on Gundry’s book “The Plant Paradox” but was only able to stick with it for 3 months (Interestingly enough this book recommended a lot of olive oil and touted that as being the main source of energy on the diet, but I think he had some standards for finding good olive oil). My main motivation was to try to see if it could help my autoimmune condition, psoriasis, which manifested when I was about ~21 years old, so like 6 years ago. I tried topical medications and UV light therapy, but at some point I began to want to try to address the internal problems rather than just the skin issues, since the skin issues are just a symptom rather than a root cause of the autoimmune issue.
More recently (Like ~4 months ago) I tried Mikhaila Peterson’s “Lion Diet” which is like just ruminant meat and salt but couldn’t stick with it for more than a week as the after-taste of steak and the smell during cooking and just the process of preparing it was hard for me to sustain, especially since my dad also disliked the smell and other effects. I tried Sous Vide once but didn’t do great at it.
I think I was also reluctant to try Carnivore or Lion diet or stick with it because I remember you wrote somewhere about it being pseudoscientific and a concern about Jordan Peterson following it, but watching interviews it seemed to really have helped with his anxiety and health issues, and I specifically saw stories of people who had psoriasis like Chad Mendes (Link is to the bottom part of a page talking about the diet’s effectiveness sometimes for autoimmune conditions and a section on Anecdotal evidence. The Chad Mendes section has a link to an instagram post with before and after pictures)
(Also cool, I like this feature of the forum to let me know that the Lion Diet FAQ was posted and discussed in this thread back in July, about how it recommended cutting caffeine:
)
To some degree I was afraid of mentioning Carnivore or Lion Diet here because it does seem pseudoscientific, but that’s a bad reason to avoid mentioning something that I took seriously and should want to find out I’m wrong about if there are valid issues in my approach, especially since my personal health is on the line.
I think I tried it because the risks of trying it for ~6 weeks seemed relatively low and the upside seemed decent. There’s also a Youtube Doctor named Ken D. Berry and he had some videos explaining misconceptions around the carnivore diet, and was also sharing how he uses the diet himself, and helps his clinical patients with it, and tracks their blood test results and nutrition levels. Dr. Stan Ekberg also had a video explaining it in a way that I found relatable because he had this slide that surprised me in how it kind of showed my progression of trying better diets since I was like ~22 to try to improve my overall wellbeing, health levels, and later on solve my psoriasis (the first few years I had it I didn’t think it was too bad and didn’t take it seriously enough as something worth addressing early. I was wrong. I later learnt that I should be considered about risks of other issues developing from it if I leave it unaddressed, like psoriatic arthritis later in my life, and also I used to think of it as just a cosmetic/skin condition, but I learnt over time that it’s more systemic than that and I should view it as a problem with my immune system and if I can improve it in a healthy/low risk/low negative side effects way, I should)
So I basically went from Standard American Diet to more vegetables, cutting out soda and junk food, (I skipped the intermittent fasting step at that time), tried Keto where most of my calories were from fat and I was not eating bread/rice/carbs/sugar, and then I tried Lectin Free (The AI stands for autoimmune in the slide), and recently Carnivore. His explanation for why Carnivore can help is because meat is the most neutral food there is. It’s the food that people are least likely to be allergic too and as long as they have enough stomach acid, they can digest it. I did not fact check this claim
I think the way Mikhaila’s Lion Diet FAQ talks about it also seems like the Lion Diet is an elimination diet, and then you can add back foods bit by bit to see if you have any adverse allergic/inflammatory/autoimmune responses. In her case if she ate the wrong thing, she could experience terrible symptoms for weeks or months, which seemed horrifying to me, because it would be so hard to diagnose a problematic food. In my case I feel grateful that I’m more robust so I seem to be able to eat other stuff and not experience major adverse reactions, but I know I could easily fool myself and not be able to judge what a negative response is.
In the end though I have NOT been on the carnivore or lion diet for the last ~2-3 months, and really I’ve been eating the same thing every day, which is like chickpea soup pressure cooked in the instant pot with some spices. I’ve been eating some meat every so often, but nothing like before when I was trying to do what Mikhaila did which was eat two ribeye steaks each day (I still have a bunch of frozen ribeye steaks that I want to learn to cook better and try eating again eventually @_@, maybe with sous vide + searing on a cast iron pan that I didn’t have access to before)
My psoriasis has improved significantly and seems to be continuing to disappear in most places on my body, and I’m guessing that the stuff I’m eating (chickpeas, chilli powder, salt, pepper, mustard seeds, and some other spices) is stuff that my body is not having an adverse reaction to. So it’s not that I needed to just eat meat, but just that cutting out a lot of really bad processed food such as sugar, vegetable oils (I’m only using ghee or beef tallow as cooking fats – I’m not using any of the oils my dad likes to use, like sesame oil, coconut oil, olive oil, avocado oil etc.), potato chips, soda/pop, candy etc.
I also just don’t miss those things as much but I think I’ve always had a relatively easy time avoiding tempting foods because I often forget to eat and seem to eat more for function than for enjoyment. The soup I make everyday is really tasty to me though, and I just recently in the last batch tried adding raw chicken thighs to it and that made it more flavourful and added more protein, which seems important because I’m trying to get into lifting weights everyday at home (using an adjustable kettlebell at the moment) and building muscle for general health and better habits overall.
The habits that have been harder in my life to change and sustain are ones like exercising better, going outside for sunlight, sleeping well (like sleeping and waking up at the same time, napping more when I’m tired so that I can still be effective at work/learning after I wake up), and just in general actually implementing and trying out things that I read about or think about. I tend to read and think and write a lot more than I actually practice and implement, so I’m trying to do more implementation on a day to day basis and just see how things feel and make some habits sustainable. Taking a walk in the sunlight every afternoon, and jogging/running for parts of it for some exercise, has been reasonably sustainable and has felt like a nice break from the stress of thinking a lot about work and other things at my computer, and so it feels nice to use it as an opportunity to do something and experience something positive rather than as a duty/chore/burden/obligation. So I want to find more ways to make my goals and habits feel like opportunities that I get to enjoy rather than things that I have to force myself to do using willpower/discipline to improve. This is where maybe learning more about self-coercion and effective change would be useful for me in the long run. I still have to read those intuition articles you linked so I plan to do that and write about them as I do read them in that thread. I’m glad that in general I just feel less afraid to write my thoughts out here and post them as I read things or think about things. I will try to keep most of my really long writing in that thread that I made though so that I don’t mess up these other threads and disrupt their purpose.
The Petersons have flaws and could explain the diet better, but they do provide some decent info too and there are actually some conceptual reasons the diet makes sense which I talked about at Curiosity – Plants vs. Mammals (Energy, Digestion, Broad Conceptual Explanations, and the Lion Diet) (I moved your post over to the forum topic for that blog post btw).
Basically almost everyone has visible flaws (and no error correction processes available for those flaws) but some of them have correct or partially correct conclusions anyway.
I currently have a basically positive opinion of lion, carnivore, autoimmune protocol and paleo diets, and a low opinion of vegetable oil, processed food and additives, heavily eating a few specific government-subsidized grains, low fat diets, vegan diets, and eating that causes blood sugar spikes. note I think lion, carnivore and autoimmune protocol should be used on a temporary basis, as an elimination diet, unless you have a compelling reason to do it long term. the point of an elimination diet is to get healthy then reintroduce foods to test which do and don’t cause problems.
I later learnt that I should be considered about risks of other issues developing from it if I leave it unaddressed, like psoriatic arthritis later in my life, and also I used to think of it as just a cosmetic/skin condition, but I learnt over time that it’s more systemic than that and I should view it as a problem with my immune system
Yeah this is related to an important philosophical concept. There are visible problems and problems which are harder to find: invisible, hidden, whatever (not impossible to find though).
Visible problems are often the tip of the iceberg. If you “solve” them in a local optima way, then you often leave a bunch of related problems unsolved. This is really bad because those other problems are often less visible. You were lucky to have some clear, visible evidence to alert you to a problem (sometimes you get no obvious warning signs), but then you got rid of the messenger instead of investigating.
A skin condition is a visible problem that warns you about a potential bigger but less visible problem. Being satisfied by topical creams is a way of hiding the visible problem without investigating the extent of less visible problems.
This comes up in tons of debates or philosophical discussions. For every error I actually point out to someone that they made and manage to convince them really was an error, there are over 10 more errors they made, that I know about, where I wasn’t able to show to them, and possibly dozens more errors that I don’t know about. But people will do things like try to concede and drop the matter and not post mortem, rather than being thrilled to have found a problem that, with investigation, could lead to finding about about other less visible problems.
I was trying to do what Mikhaila did which was eat two ribeye steaks each day (I still have a bunch of frozen ribeye steaks
She’s rich. Ribeye is expensive (especially from good farms instead of grocery store meat). Ground beef, beef roasts and other types of beef are fine FYI. She doesn’t talk about this afaik but she should. I think she’s out of touch and doesn’t think about price much. I saw something about her switching to mostly eating lamb which costs more than beef.
The habits that have been harder in my life to change and sustain are ones like exercising better, going outside for sunlight,
You should consider supplementing vitamin D (and if you do, I have read that you should take K with it).