I died of scurvy last year. Twice.

I was looking through some old posts the other day and saw an old comment I’d ignored at the time.

Do you take vitamin supplements? How do you keep from getting malnourished or even gout?
Just curious. Love the idea of steak for breakfast, pricey though.

I was asked the same thing just a couple of days ago, and the day before that, and a few weeks before that. I get it all the time. The simple answer, and the one I usually give, is this:

There is nothing in plants that you need that you can’t get more efficiently and completely from meat. (By the way, steak isn’t that expensive when you don’t eat the sides.) The only thing plants have that meat does not–sugar, fiber, anti-nutrients, that vegan sense of moral superiority–are things you don’t need anyway, and many which you may be better off without. Especially that last.

That’s my story, and I am sticking to it. It’s a nice, pat, accurate answer, as far as it goes. But as with most things in life, it can get a little more complicated than that. And that is what blogs are for.

So, what about scurvy? What about anti-oxidants? What about eating the rainbow?

Usually, Vitamin C is at the forefront of people’s minds when thinking of the potential pitfalls of a carnivorous diet. As far as I can tell, there has not been one documented case of scurvy in a strict carnivore. Contrary to popular belief–and most beliefs about food in our culture are merely popular, not accurate–muscle meat does have a small amount of C in it. It’s not a lot, compared to some plants, but because cellular uptake of vitamin C is inhibited by hyperglycemia,  when you’re not spiking your blood sugar all day long, year after year, your cells don’t have any problems utilizing whatever amount of ascorbic acid you you do take in.

Most of the vitamin C found in that much-vaunted morning glass of “healthy” orange juice goes into the toilet, not your cells, because of all the sugar that rides along with it hindering absorption. You’ll still absorb some, but ironically, without the sugary fruit delivery system, you don’t need the massive amounts of C found in the fruit to stay healthy.

Also, as Sally K. Norton explains,

The body tends to metabolize excess vitamin C into a corrosive acid called oxalic acid. This acid immediately steals minerals like calcium as it becomes oxalate. As the kidneys remove oxalate from the blood, calcium oxalate can grow into crystals in the kidneys or elsewhere in the urinary tract causing painful stones. Over time, if the kidneys are forced to handle excessive amounts of oxalate everyday, kidney failure is likely. This is how taking 500 mg or more of vitamin C can promote a loss of kidney function. Perhaps the modern habit of taking extra vitamin C is contributing to the rising rates of kidney stones. One estimate suggests that half of us will get a kidney stone in our lifetime.

So maybe you don’t want your Vitamin C all that high, anyway.

I do think it’s nice that the Lord put the huge amounts of ascorbic acid into the same fruits that inhibit your ascorbic acid absorption, don’t you? Kinda balances things out a little. But you don’t have to drink OJ to get your C boost. At best, it somewhat mitigates through the vitamin C the damage that can be caused by the sugar. At worst, when you’re really insulin resistant, OJ can’t even overcome its own sugary downside.

But C isn’t the only concern, of course. What about all those other vitamins and micro-nutrients in plants? What about the superfoods I feel so good about putting on my plate?

Well, I hate to break it to you, friend, but “superfood” is a marketing buzzword, not a real thing. All of the nutrients found in plants are there for the sake of the plant, and are bound up in ways that the human body doesn’t easily break down into something usable for itself. I’m not saying that there’s zero benefit from these plants. Clearly you are able to get some nutrition from plants. Vegans don’t die immediately. In fact, they can live a long time in an increasingly miserable state. But the amount of, say, Vitamin A that your body can synthesize from the beta carotene found in a carrot is miniscule compared to the amount of already-bioavailable Vitamin A that you’ll get from meat.

Unlike us, the animals we eat are able to extract a great deal of the available nutrition found in plants because they are designed to do that. (Now wait, Christian. Aren’t humans designed to be vegetarians, like in the Garden of Eden? Find my answer to that here.)

Because of the lower animals’ unique digestive tracts, especially ruminant animals, which I think should be a very large percentage of food consumed, carnivores are getting better and more vitamins from animal products. Plant foods are simply sub-optimal compared to the easy-to-absorb nutrition found in meat, which our high-acid stomachs are incredibly efficient at processing.

There are multi-decade carnivores who have eaten nothing but meat, no supplements at all, and are running circles around those of us who have been on a Standard American Diet for the same amount of time. I have no reason to disbelieve these people when they say they don’t take supplements. I can personally attest, nearly six years in, that I feel great and don’t yet show any signs of malnourishment while consuming about 99% of my calories as muscle meat.

But there is a place for mineral and Vitamin D supplementation. It is likely that everybody, including people who think they’re doing just fine, could benefit from supplementation of iodine and magnesium, to name my big two. Plant-eaters have the same problem that meat-eaters do, in this regard. Eating your super-foods won’t help you here, as your body is not very good at extracting even those nutrients that are in your precious kale.

Depending on the location and method of farming, the soils our crops and livestock feed are grown in are likely deficient in a number of minerals. What’s not in the soil, or not absorbable from the soil by the plant because of farming methods and genetic tinkering, cannot pass into the plants, or into the animals and humans that eat them. Inland soil is not going to have a lot of iodine, which comes from sea water. Pretty much all farmed soil is depleted of magnesium at this point. I think everybody ought to be taking at least those two mineral supplements, though I admit I neglect to do so most of the time. There are other mineral supplements that might be useful, based on symptoms and individual circumstances.

And of course, there’s Vitamin D. I do think you can maintain your D levels with enough meat and enough sunshine, but good luck getting enough sunshine, office workers! I like to sunbathe during the late spring and through the summer, but I supplement with vitamin D+K2 for the rest of the year. There is some D to be found in animal products, but the sun is the big stimulator of vitamin D production. Most people do not live in a latitude that provides adequate sunshine, nor do they often go outdoors long enough every day to obtain it even if they do.

Now, maybe you don’t believe me that you don’t need plants to be healthy. I don’t blame you. It’s just not something you’ve ever even imagined before, is it? You’ve been told all your life that you have to eat your carrots to have good eyesight. You have to have your fruit to keep from catching colds or worse. You have to eat your Vitamin F (fiber) or you won’t be able to poop!

You’ve been told a lot of lies, Dear Reader. I understand why this is hard to get past.I had a really hard time letting go of my leafy greens, to be honest. But I’m not eating them anymore, and guess what? I’m better for it, not worse. I have an OCD called trichotillomania (hair-pulling) that goes away 100% as long as I don’t ingest any fiber. I can eat leafy greens for the (largely indigestible) vitamins in there, or I can just eat meat and have eyebrows and eyelashes. I certainly wasn’t looking for this particular benefit when I went carnivore, but it was a pleasant surprise.

Try it sometime for a minimum of 6-8 weeks or so. Really give it the old college try. You might find relief from some symptom or quirk about yourself that you just thought was a cross you’d have to bear forever. At any rate, don’t let the idea that you’ll be malnourished stop you from finding a better way to eat than a high-carb diet.

I am more convinced with every passing year that I do this that meat is sufficient for all of those needs.

I can help with this, by the way, if you’d like diet and lifestyle coaching. Email me at cindy at getalonghome.com or find me on social media and we’ll set up a call. Want to discuss this post? Find me at MeWe, Gab, or Social Galactic.

My life’s comedic timing is perfect.

So, I’m standing here in my kitchen. I’ve just put some suet in my beautiful new 8-quart slow cooker to render down into tallow. Since I’m here, and already coated in glorious grass-fed beef fat from stem to stern, I figure I might as well pack some gel capsules with raw beef suet as well. By the way, those are vegetarian capsules. It says so right there on the bag, as if that were a selling point. I’ll explain why and how I do this strange thing in another post. The point is, I am at this moment doing the most medically scandalous thing a body can do, short of joining Hunter in hitting one of his Daddy’s free crackpipes while consuming said raw beef suet.

Spotted in the wild

And the phone rings.

I: Hello?

She: Hello, this is Such-and-such with your doctor’s office. How are you doing today?

I: Hi there! You tell me: How am I doing today?

She: Well, we got your labs back, and your thyroid and HBA1C look great.

I, waiting for the other shoe to drop, because I already know about this shoe. It’s an old, worn out shoe: Good. And?

She: Your cholesterol doesn’t look so good. She (the doctor) says your good cholesterol is high, which is good, but your bad cholesterol is very high, which is bad. She wants you to back off on saturated fats, eat more vegetables and less meat, and get more exercise.

I, grinning and trying not to actually LOL: OK, can you give me the numbers?

See what I mean about my life’s comedic timing? Here I am, deliberately and with wanton disregard for the opinion of Man, packing pills with saturated fat, and my doctor calls me to tell me to KNOCK THAT OFF RIGHT NOW!

I won’t bore you with the rest of the call, Patient Reader, but after the kind receptionist gladly gave me my scary number, I did manage to wring the other, unimportant numbers out of her, as well. Are you ready for these numbers, my friends? Here they are:

• Total cholesterol: 315
• LDL (not bad, just misunderstood): 211
• HDL (The OTHER good cholesterol): 97
• Triglycerides: 55 (I’ve seen this as low as 37, and I feel a little cheated today. Probably elevated due to stress from rushing out early for the blood-draw. But this is still a very good trig/hdl ratio of about .56)
• VLDL (The actually bad particle): A perfectly relaxing 7.

Now, none of this was a surprise to me, because I got my own bloodwork done in much greater detail, through Own Your Labs just a month ago. I’m way geekier about my health than my doctor is. I wanted more information than my insurance is willing to pay for, so I have a lot of other great numbers to show, off, too! I’m a textbook example of an (I do believe healthy) phenotype known as a Lean Mass Hyper-responder. I am both fit and slender, and of what is traditionally understood as a “risky” cholesterol profile. In fact, the only number that got flagged in my entire comprehensive panel was my LDL–a paltry 151 at the time, due, I think, to a cold I’d been fighting off. That’s quite low for me. Did you know those terrifying little particles are a vital part of your immune system?

While I find conventional medicine to be very useful for many things, evaluating and ameliorating heart disease risk is not one of them. Hormone replacement, trauma and acute care, and antibiotics are all things for which I am very grateful. But you don’t care about my opinion of western medicine right now, do you?

What you care about, I’m sure, is that I’m going to die of a heart attack and need to get on some statins, STAT. In fact, by the time I hit publish, the ambulance should be on its way. I just called them, to be on the safe side.

Don’t hold your breath, veggie lovers. I intend to outlive you all. 

I am not remotely interested in explaining the intricacies of lipids to a general audience. I don’t have time. Besides, you might be convinced to go carnivore, and I really don’t want you to start competing with me for meat at its current price. I’m not giving you a complete run-down, or even trying to convince you of my way of thinking about this. I will, however, give you a few clues to aid you in your quest for truth as you come to realize what many, many people are catching on to of late: The science–the actual science, and not the pharmaceutical industry’s “studies”–should at least awaken you to the possibility, that the saturated-fat-heart-disease paradigm is ass-backwards and hopelessly lost.

Saturated fat intake doesn’t appear to have much to do with LDL levels.

Saturated fat intake is not associated with all-cause mortality.

People with high LDL outlive people with low LDL.

Replacing saturated animal fats with vegetable oils is associated with higher risk of heart events, even though it does lower serum cholesterol levels. (There’s an apparent paradox between this one and the first study I listed, which I can explain, but won’t.)

That will be enough to get you started. You may also enjoy this very layperson-accessible lecture by Dr. Paul Mason about why doctors still believe such insane things about cholesterol.

My doctor wants to see me again in six months, after I’ve behaved myself with the meat and exercise for a while. (By the way, I exercise like a beast at least five days a week. I have the abs to prove it. It’s a testament to the inadequate intimacy of the doctor-patient relationship in times of telemedicine due to “covid” that she doesn’t know this. She hasn’t actually touched me in a couple of years.) If my One Number doesn’t look any better, she will try to prescribe me a statin, I’m sure. Now, I have some choices to make, and I’m not sure which direction I should go.

I could attempt to educate my doctor on the facts of the matter. I’ve wasted my time like this before, printing out reams of studies in which the doctor was (surprise!) not interested. I fired that doctor, naturally. But the gal I’m seeing right now is super-smart, and she might just be interested. Then again, she might be primarily interested in continuing to collect her paycheck, which cholesterol-hypothesis skeptics tend to have a harder time doing in this system. I could also bring to her the results of my CAC scan (the one I keep putting off) and at least convince her that my arteries at least don’t appear to be harmed yet. There are lots of things I could show to an open-minded person to get a conversation started.

Alternatively, I could ghost myself and not show up for the next lab-work, instead choosing to wait until I have another thyroid check, and evade that topic yet again. Honestly, this is my usual course of action.

Or, I could game my numbers, doing nobody much good at all, but at least getting it on the insurance record that my cholesterol numbers are “healthy”. Funnily enough, all I’d have to do is eat a bunch of carbs for a few days before my labs and I’d look like the healthiest patient you ever saw. There would be enough immediate downsides to this that I doubt I’d ever attempt it. But it would look better for insurance purposes, for sure.

What do you think I should do? We can talk about this on Gab, MeWe, or SG, my current social media hangouts.