
Dr Mercola
NYT bestselling Author, Founder of Mercola.com
The carnivore diet is a highly controversial approach to optimizing health that has offended many plant based proponents at the most fundamental levels. The Carnivore Code is unquestionably the finest resource to help you address many of the myths and distortions that run rampant on the internet about avoiding all plant foods.
Dr. Saladino, is the rare physician who is completely committed to finding the truth and challenging traditional diet paradigms. He has used his science training to scour the medial literature to support this approach and dispel the many myths and concerns.
Like many who wind up promoting a specific eating style, eating carnivore resolved all his health problems and his extensive regular blood testing on himself and his clients, show that the values are in the optimal or exceptional ranges.
The book provides compelling historical anthropology data that confirms that it is likely our early ancestors ability to hunt that caused them to evolve from earlier primates. It’s thought that the hominid lineage diverged from primates about 6 million years ago when our distant ancestors came out of the trees, and into the open grasslands of North Eastern Africa. The oldest fossils form our lineage are dated to 3.5 million years ago, and were discovered in what is now Ethiopia
About 2.5 million years ago our brains to rapidly grow, and our ancestors became more intelligent. No one knows for sure, but there are a couple of key clues in the archaeological records. A significant change in the rate of growth of our ancestors’ brains coincided with stone tools and hunting. We are the humans of today because we began eating animals.
We didn’t evolve to be the best gatherers, or the best farmers. We evolved to be the best hunters, and it was this hunting which provided us with the best food available, animal foods. The advent of agriculture only happened about 12,000 years ago which is a relatively recent event.
Well,if you have your thinking cap on your are probably concerned about all the phytonutrients”, fibers and polyphenols that are widely promoted as being healthy. The alternative view is that these molecules are in fact “phytoweapons,” meticulously designed by plants to discourage insects, animals, and fungi from having them for breakfast.
There are literally hundreds of thousands of chemicals produced in the plant kingdom that can harm us. Broadly speaking, we can divide the toxic compounds into a few categories. Plant molecules like phytoalexins, polyphenols, oxalates, and lectins, are like computer programs from a different operating system than ours. They are Android and we are iOS, and the programs aren’t very compatible.
When we try and use plant programs in our human operating system they generally just mess things up, sometimes causing massive problems akin to the “blue screen of death” on your computer. Plants have evolved these molecules for their biochemistry and metabolism, not for ours!
Intriguingly, but not surprisingly, humans and animals do not make molecules which are polyphenolic in structure within their biochemistry. Remember the concept of disparate operating systems? This is another illustration of the differences in the way that plants and humans work at a biochemical level. Polyphenols are like Honda parts which don’t work in our human Tesla bodies, and the Tesla factory surely doesn’t make Honda parts.
The good news is that there have been some interventional trials done with polyphenol rich fruits and vegetables, and invariably, these have failed to show benefits in terms of inflammation, DNA damage or immunologic markers with inclusion of lots of fruits and vegetables, and in one case the study showed that this intervention was harmful (green tea extract).
So which foods damage the gut, and cause “leaky gut” with its potential for downstream kindling of the immune system? Which foods are full of toxins, chemical weapons and anti-nutrients that are designed to do exactly this? You guessed it, plant foods! Do animal foods have similar sorts of toxins and weapons in them?
Nope, animals don’t need these, they can run away and bite. Sure, there are few very rare exceptions like poisonous frogs and puffer fish, but no one is eating those as a major portion of their diet. In the animal foods that comprise our diets, there are no chemical toxins intrinsically present. Additionally there are many nutrients that simply don’t occur in plants, or fungi at all, like vitamin B12, choline, taurine, carnitine, carnosine, vitamin K2 and others it is only animal foods
It is Saladino’s experience personally and clinically that plants are triggering most of the autoimmune illness we see today, including everything from SIBO, to psychiatric disease, and even skin issues like eczema and psoriasis. From this perspective, the fundamental way to treat SIBO is to remove the foods that are damaging the gut in order for it to heal, and to allow the immune system to gradually calm down.
In fact if you are suffering with an autoimmune condition, like thyroiditis and secondary hypothyroidism, MS, rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowl disease like Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis, it would be my highest recommendations do give this approach a try.
One of the most common other misconception about plant based diets is the need for fiber for its supposed lowering the risk of colon cancer. Sadly, this has been repeatedly proven to not be the case, and some studies have even suggested an increased risk of pre-cancerous growths, known as adenomas, with fiber supplements
Additionally, there’s no scientific evidence that we need plant fiber in order to achieve a diverse microbiome. There are studies that show a western diet is associated with a lower diversity, also known as alpha diversity, (western diet diversity), but claims that this is causally related to the low-fiber aspect of a western diet are premature. As we know, there are myriad inflammatory components of a standard American diet that could be damaging the gut, and negatively altering gastrointestinal populations.
Study after study has clearly demonstrated that plant fiber is not beneficial for constipation, diverticulosis, diabetes, weight loss, appetite, or colon cancer, nor is it necessary for a healthy gastrointestinal tract, or a diverse microbiome. Elimination of plant fiber from our diet will improve our health as demonstrated by research with a carnivore diet that has demonstrated unprecedented efficacy in reversing autoimmune, and inflammatory conditions.