The Pro-Metabolic Approach to Mast Cell Activation and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome

What to Eat (and Avoid) When Your Nervous System and Immune System Are Both on Fire

Mast Cell Activation Syndrome (MCAS) and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS/ME) often go hand-in-hand: one is a hypersensitive immune response, the other is a crash in energy production. The overlap is staggering: histamine intolerance, post-exertional crashes, food sensitivities, insomnia, gut issues, and chronic inflammation.

And yet, in today's mainstream health culture, you're often told that nutrition doesn't matter. That what you eat has no real impact on these conditions, that nutrients can't touch what's "broken," and that the only path forward is pharmaceuticals and symptom suppression. You're expected to manage, not recover. To cope, not heal.

But this simply isn’t true.

Much of the insight in this approach is inspired by the excellent breakdown in this article on healing histamine intolerance and MCAS, which explains how nutrient deficiencies, chronic stress, environmental toxins, and microbial imbalances contribute to overactive mast cells and energy collapse.

There is a massive body of evidence — and growing clinical experience — showing that chronic illness is not a random stroke of bad luck. It’s often the result of a body that’s been undernourished, overburdened, and inflamed for years. A nervous system locked in fight-or-flight. A liver overwhelmed by environmental toxins, synthetic hormones, and mold. Gut bacteria producing excess histamine. And mast cells acting like your immune system’s faulty fire alarm — going off at every little thing, leaving you exhausted, itchy, swollen, and reactive.

The right foods can stabilize mast cells. The right nutrients can repair mitochondria. And when you stop flooding your body with inflammatory, hard-to-digest, immune-triggering ingredients, everything starts to shift.

That’s where the pro-metabolic approach shines.

Instead of bouncing between low-histamine elimination diets, vegan detoxes, or keto flares, this strategy focuses on giving your cells fuel and safety at the same time.

🔥 Foods to Avoid with MCAS & CFS

These foods are commonly high in histamine, gut-irritating, or hard on the liver, immune system, and mitochondria. They are also not part of a truly pro-metabolic framework.

Fermented & Aged Foods

• Sauerkraut, kimchi

• Vinegar, kombucha

• Soy sauce, miso

• Aged cheese

• Cured meats (salami, prosciutto, bacon)

PUFA-Heavy & Inflammatory Fats

• Vegetable oils (canola, soybean, sunflower, safflower)

• Peanut butter, nut butters

• Seeds (chia, flax, hemp)

• Walnuts, almonds, cashews

Vegan "Health" Traps

• Lentils, black beans, chickpeas (especially canned)

• Tofu, tempeh, fake meats

• Nutritional yeast

High Histamine or Histamine-Releasing Produce

• Avocado, spinach, tomatoes, eggplant

• Citrus, bananas, strawberries

• Dried fruit (unless verified very fresh)

Other Common Triggers

• Leftovers (histamine increases over time)

• Bone broth (high glutamate)

• Chocolate, caffeine

• Alcohol

✨ Foods to Eat for Calm, Energy, and Recovery

These foods are low in histamine, nourishing to the nervous system, and aligned with a pro-metabolic philosophy. They support gut integrity, blood sugar balance, and mitochondrial repair.

Pro-Metabolic Proteins (Low Histamine)

• Fresh white fish (cod, sole, haddock)

• Pasture-raised egg yolks

• Freshly cooked ground lamb or beef (lean, no leftovers)

• Goat milk yogurt (plain, fresh)

• Collagen or gelatin powder (no additives)

Easy Carbohydrates for Mitochondrial Fuel

• White rice (cooked fresh)

• Mashed peeled white or sweet potatoes

• Well-cooked carrots, zucchini, yellow squash

• Ripe peeled apples, pears, mango, papaya

• Fresh blueberries or cooked peach

Nourishing Fats (Histamine-Safe)

• Virgin coconut oil

• Cold-pressed olive oil

• Occasional ghee (test tolerance)

Extras That Help Heal

• Raw carrot salad (binds histamine, estrogen, and endotoxin)

• Chamomile, marshmallow root, or ginger tea

• Aloe vera juice (inner filet)

Why It Works

Pro-metabolic foods aren’t just about metabolism. They’re about cellular safety. They keep blood sugar stable, reduce stress hormones, lower histamine production, and support the liver in clearing out estrogen and toxins.

This approach gives your body what it needs to repair: glucose, minerals, amino acids, and gentle support for the gut-liver-brain axis.

If you're tired of getting worse from "healthy" foods and you're ready to heal your nervous system and immune system together, pro-metabolic eating is the strategy you've been looking for.

Need help building your low-histamine, pro-metabolic plan? We build personalized protocols that help you stabilize symptoms without starving your cells. Reach out for 1:1 support or browse our course library to learn how to eat for cellular healing.

How to Eat Pro-Metabolic (Even If You’re Totally New)

If you’ve been trapped in diet culture—counting almonds, fearing fruit, or surviving on coffee and cortisol—you’re not alone. Most of us have spent years chasing thinness while unknowingly wrecking our metabolism in the process.

Enter the pro-metabolic approach: a way of eating that nourishes your body instead of fighting it. It’s not a trendy detox or a quick-fix gimmick—it’s a return to biological sanity. Pro-metabolic eating is about restoring cellular energy, supporting your thyroid and hormones, and teaching your body how to feel safe again.

If you’re brand new to this world, here’s your clear, science-rooted roadmap to getting started.

What Does "Pro-Metabolic" Even Mean?

At its core, pro-metabolic means supporting the body's natural ability to make energy—primarily through the thyroid and mitochondria.

When your metabolism is working well:

• You feel warm and energized

• Your digestion hums

• Your sleep improves

• Your cycle is regular and painless

• Your mood is stable

• You burn food efficiently—without stress

Most mainstream diets (keto, fasting, veganism, calorie restriction) achieve quick results by slowing your metabolism down—forcing the body into stress mode. Pro-metabolic flips the script. It feeds the body what it needs to thrive.

Principle #1: You Need to Eat More—Not Less

Most people have no idea how underfed they are. If you’re eating 1500–2000 calories a day and wondering why you’re cold, tired, bloated, and gaining weight—that’s your metabolism screaming. Your body downshifts to survive.

A healthy adult woman generally needs:

• 2,000–2,500+ calories/day

A healthy adult man generally needs:

• 3,500–4,500+ calories/day

You may need even more if you’re healing, exercising, or coming off years of restriction. When you give your body enough energy, it stops hoarding fat and starts functioning.

Our hunter-gatherer ancestors—and even our grandparents—ate far more food than most people do today. We didn’t start gaining weight from eating too much—we started gaining when seed oils wrecked our mitochondria and we responded by slashing calories. All that did was slow us down. Just one degree drop in body temperature lowers caloric needs by nearly 1,000 calories/day, and hardly anyone is sitting at 98.6 degrees anymore.

Principle #2: Carbs Are Not the Enemy—They're the Fuel

Your cells run on glucose. Your liver converts T4 to T3 (active thyroid hormone) using glucose and fructose. Your brain, heart, and reproductive system all rely on it.

Carbs don’t make you fat—PUFAs and stress hormones do.

Choose easy-to-digest, nourishing carbs, like:

• Fresh-squeezed or not-from-concentrate orange juice

• Raw honey, maple syrup

• Ripe fruit (banana, mango, melon, apple, berries)

• Sweet potatoes, white potatoes, carrots

• White rice, masa harina (corn flour), sourdough (if tolerated)

• Dried fruit like pineapple, dates, or mango

Avoid excessive:

• Hard-to-digest starches (beans, whole grains, bran)

• Artificial sweeteners

• Low-carb/fiber-heavy substitutes that tax digestion

Principle #3: Protein Matters—but Type Is Key

Protein is essential for hormone production, liver detox, skin repair, and blood sugar stability—but not all protein is created equal.

Pro-metabolic proteins are:

• Bioavailable (easy to digest and assimilate)

• Low in inflammatory amino acids like tryptophan and cysteine

Top picks:

• Dairy (milk, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, cheese)

• Collagen (bone broth, gelatin, collagen powder)

• Eggs

• Shellfish (especially shrimp, oysters)

• Lean red meat (beef, lamb)

• Skinless poultry (chicken, turkey)

A solid target is 1g/pound per day, depending on body size and goals. Another good goal is up to 1/4 of your protein from collagen and gelatin, and the rest from low-fat dairy and lean meat, to balance your calcium/phosphorus ratio. Calcium builds and maintains bones while phosphorus supports energy and cell function, and getting protein from half dairy (high in calcium) and half meat (high in phosphorus) helps balance these minerals to protect bone and metabolic health.

Principle #4: Ditch the Seed Oils—But Don’t Go Keto

Your body needs some fat—but too much, or the wrong kind, shuts down thyroid and mitochondrial function.

The worst offenders are PUFAs (polyunsaturated fats), found in:

• Vegetable oils (canola, soybean, sunflower, corn)

• Nuts and seeds

• Nut butters and vegan spreads

• Pork and poultry fat (especially with skin) - because these animals are monogastric (one stomach) and store the oils they are fed. Even organic and pastured-raised pork and chicken are usually still fed seed oils.

These fats oxidize easily, promote inflammation, and damage cellular metabolism. They also accumulate in your fat tissue and take years to detox.

Stick with saturated fats in moderation:

• Butter or ghee

• Coconut oil

• Tallow

• Dairy fat (in full-fat milk or cheese)

For most, 15–20% of calories from fat is ideal while healing the metabolism. Going higher slows things down. That’s because high fat + high carb creates a metabolic “swampland” where fuel can’t flow efficiently—your body gets stuck storing instead of burning.
Keeping fat low lets carbs do their job: refill glycogen, increase thyroid output, and drive real energy. The challenging part is keeping fat low—but the good news is you get to eat more food, enjoy plenty of carbs, watch symptoms disappear, and eventually maintain a leaner body on higher calories.

Principle #5: Eat Every 3–4 Hours

If you’re skipping breakfast or intermittent fasting, your body is likely surviving on adrenaline and cortisol—not a good long-term plan.

When blood sugar drops too low, your body raises stress hormones to compensate. This wrecks thyroid conversion, breaks down muscle, and causes energy crashes, irritability, and poor sleep.

A good rhythm is:

• 3 solid meals + 1–2 snacks per day

• Front-load your calories earlier in the day

• Always pair protein + carb (never carbs alone)

Principle #6: Salt + Sugar + Saturated Fat = Yes

You heard that right. Your body needs salt to make stomach acid, adrenal hormones, and digestive enzymes. And sugar (from fruit, juice, honey) feeds your cells, not your waistline—when paired properly.

Skip the low-sodium fear-mongering. Salt your food to taste. Balance blood sugar by eating sugar with protein, not alone.

Principle #7: Heal Digestion, Don’t Fight It

If you get bloated or constipated eating this way, it’s not the diet—it’s your damaged digestion from years of stress and restriction. That can be fixed.

Start slow. Build resilience.

Helpful supports:

• Raw carrot salad daily (antibacterial, anti-estrogen)

• Apple cider vinegar before meals

• Bone broth, gelatin, or collagen for gut lining

• Prokinetics if you’re sluggish (ginger, artichoke, vitamin B6)

• Ox bile or betaine HCl for belching or fat intolerance

What a Pro-Metabolic Day Might Look Like

☀️ Breakfast: orange juice with collagen, eggs, sourdough toast with a little butter and lots of jam, and nonfat Greek yogurt smoothered in honey.

🍓 Snack: lowfat cottage cheese with a bowl of pineapple, gelatin gummies, and a skim milk cappuccino with maple syrup.

🥩 Lunch: grilled chicken breast, white rice, cooked carrots with butter.

🥕 Snack: raw carrot salad with ACV and salt, a glass of fresh lemonade with a side of honey-sweetened Greek yogurt, and a handful of fresh berries or melon.

🍠 Dinner: lean ground beef and shrimp, mashed sweet potato, sautéed squash with butter, and bone broth with sea salt.

🍬 Dessert: 1 cup skim milk hot cocoa with 1 scoop collagen, 1 tbsp honey-sweetened gelatin, and gummy bears.

How Do You Know It's Working?

Watch for these metabolic green flags:

• Warmer hands and feet

• Better energy without stimulants

• Stronger libido

• Regular, painless periods

• Less bloating or constipation

• Improved sleep

• More stable moods

If those signs are trending up, you’re doing it right—even if weight shifts temporarily while your metabolism heals. That’s just water from restoring glycogen stores (carboHYDRATE), and we either increase calories slowly enough to minimize it or follow with a short, strategic cut once your body is ready.

Final Thoughts

Pro-metabolic eating is not about perfection or dogma. It’s about rebuilding trust with your body. It’s about reversing the damage from years of deprivation and learning to thrive—not just survive.

Yes, it’s different from what you’ve been taught. But if you’re cold, tired, bloated, puffy, overweight, hormonal, or just plain stuck—it might be the path back to the version of you that feels vibrant, capable, and alive.

What Is the Pro-Metabolic Diet?

So... What Is Pro-Metabolic Nutrition, Really?

If you’ve ever felt worse on keto, gained weight from "clean eating," or hit a wall with intermittent fasting, this might be the missing piece. Pro-metabolic nutrition isn’t a brand or a fad. It’s a way of eating that works with your biology instead of against it—especially your hormones, thyroid, and energy systems.

It’s not about tracking every macro, or cutting everything out. It’s about finally giving your body the fuel it actually wants: real food, the right carbs, and a break from metabolic stress.

It All Starts with Your Metabolism

Most people think metabolism just means how fast you burn calories. But your metabolism is actually the engine behind everything—your energy, mood, digestion, hormones, temperature, and sleep. When it’s sluggish, everything feels harder. When it’s supported, your body runs like it’s supposed to.

Pro-metabolic nutrition is about helping your cells make energy more efficiently—especially in your mitochondria (your body’s little power plants). More energy = better function across the board.

Wait... So Carbs Are Good Now?

Yep. Your body, especially your brain, thyroid, and ovaries, prefer glucose. And when you deprive it for too long (looking at you, keto and low-carb), stress hormones spike and your system slows down.

Pro-metabolic eating isn’t about eating ALL the carbs. It’s about the right kinds, in the right combinations:

• Ripe fruit and fruit juice

• Raw honey and maple syrup

• Root veggies and tubers

• Maybe white rice or sourdough, depending on tolerance

Carbs help you:

• Sleep deeper

• Keep your hands and feet warm

• Support your cycle

• Improve thyroid output (T3!)

• Restore liver glycogen (aka stable blood sugar + less hanger)

So Why Not Just Add Carbs to My Normal Diet?

Good question. If you add carbs on top of a high-fat, high-PUFA (seed oil) diet, it backfires. Your body gets stuck in “metabolic swampland”—can’t burn fat or carbs efficiently.

That’s why pro-metabolic protocols often start with low fat and high-carb, with protein held steady. That way, your system actually gets a chance to shift gears and heal.

What About Protein?

Yes, protein matters—but balance matters more. A lot of people (especially carnivore/keto crossovers) are eating tons of muscle meat but still feel awful. That’s because:

• Too much methionine (from muscle meats) without glycine (from collagen) = stress

• Not enough carbs = more cortisol

So we focus on protein sources like:

• Dairy (milk, yogurt, cheese)

• Gelatin and collagen

• Eggs, fish, and liver (in rotation)

Minerals: The Spark Plugs of Metabolism

You can eat all the right food and still feel off if you’re low in minerals. Sodium, potassium, calcium, magnesium, copper—they run your cellular engines.

Pro-metabolic plans include:

• Orange juice + salt (adrenal cocktails)

• Bone broth

• High-mineral fruit

• Milk + honey

You’ll feel the difference in your sleep, mood, and digestion.

What Pro-Metabolic Nutrition Actually Looks Like

• Mostly carbs: fruit, juice, honey, roots, dairy, sugar

• Low fat: to reduce mitochondrial congestion

• Moderate, bioavailable protein

• Eating frequently thoughout the day

• Paying attention to biofeedback—not the scale

• Increasing calories slowly to ramp up metabolism and feel amazing, without weight gain

Myth vs. Fact: Clearing Up the Confusion

Myth: Carbs make you fat.

Fact: Excess PUFAs + metabolic dysfunction + stress hormones make you store fat. Carbs, when paired with low fat and metabolic support, actually help your body burn more efficiently.

Myth: Keto is the only way to heal your metabolism.

Fact: Keto can suppress thyroid function and spike cortisol. It may help in short bursts, but it's not designed for long-term metabolic repair.

Myth: If you're not losing weight, you're doing it wrong.

Fact: Healing your metabolism often comes before weight loss. When your body feels safe and energized, it naturally starts to let go of what it doesn't need.

Myth: Low-carb diets are better for blood sugar.

Fact: Chronically low-carb diets can worsen blood sugar control long-term by making your body less efficient at using glucose.

Final Thoughts

This isn’t another food religion. It’s not about rules or fear. It’s about understanding how your body actually works—and feeding it accordingly.

If you’ve been cold, tired, bloated, foggy, or stuck in a cycle of restriction and rebound, pro-metabolic eating might be the thing that finally makes sense.

Eat the carbs. Support your metabolism. Feel like you again.

Healing Metabolism

Let’s set the record straight: slow metabolism isn’t something you’re born with. It’s something that breaks down—gradually, and often silently—through years of stress, under-eating, overtraining, low-carb diets, and toxic exposures that chip away at your thyroid and your cells' ability to make energy.

The good news? You can repair it. But not through crash diets, fasted cardio, or metabolism supplements from the checkout aisle. True metabolic healing takes strategy, structure, and bioindividual support. It’s not a quick fix—but it’s the only fix that works long-term.

What Happens When Your Metabolism Slows Down?

When your body senses a lack of fuel—especially carbohydrates—it downshifts into survival mode. Your thyroid, which is your metabolic thermostat, responds by decreasing output. And often, so does your liver, gut, ovaries, and even brain.

You might notice cold hands and feet, hair shedding, constipation or slow digestion, and weight gain or a stubborn plateau even in a calorie deficit. You may experience low mood, low energy, or anxiety, along with hormonal symptoms like PMS, painful periods, peri-menopause, or missing cycles. Poor sleep, low libido, and feeling "tired but wired" are common, as are mental health shifts like depression or anxiety. Gut issues often show up due to decreased organ tissue and downregulated digestion. Other symptoms include headaches, insomnia, fatigue, muscle cramping, cravings for sugar and salty snacks, constipation and/or diarrhea, cold intolerance, and flaky, dry skin.

Common Lab Markers in Metabolic Dysfunction

And here’s what we often find on labs (even if you’ve been told they’re “normal”):

• Low T3 – the active thyroid hormone that fuels your cells

• High TSH – your brain shouting for help

• Elevated thyroid antibodies – signaling immune stress or autoimmunity

• Elevated cholesterol – from excess fat intake and because low-carb diets suppress T3 which is required to convert cholesterol into hormones

• Low vitamin D despite sun exposure – because your body isn’t converting cholesterol properly

• Elevated prolactin – often a red flag for thyroid dysfunction or chronic stress

• High reverse T3 – from excess inactive thyroid hormone that isn’t being properly converted to active T3

• Low basal body temp + low pulse – cells aren't producing enough energy (ATP)

• Low ferritin, zinc, selenium, or protein status – needed to make and activate thyroid hormone

• Blood sugar instability – often with elevated fasting glucose or insulin, not from overeating but from metabolic downregulation and seed oil toxicity

T3 is the Real Driver of Metabolism

TSH and T4 get all the attention in conventional medicine, but they aren’t the whole picture.

T4 is a prohormone. It has to be converted into T3, which is what actually enters your cells and turns food into energy (ATP). This conversion mostly happens in the liver, intestines, and other organs—and it’s highly dependent on carbohydrates, minerals like selenium and iodine, and overall stress load.

That means your thyroid gland could be making TSH and T4 just fine, and you could still be functionally hypothyroid.

What This Looks Like in Real Life

Clients come to me all the time saying:

• “I can't lose weight on 1400 calories.”

• “I’m cold and tired all the time, but my doctor says my thyroid labs are fine.”

• “If I eat more, I get bloated and gain weight.”

• “I don’t even lose weight when I diet anymore.”

• “I have high cholesterol, and my doctor wants to put me on a statin.”

Here’s the thing: most of these symptoms are rooted in low cellular energy. Your cells are ATP-deficient. And ATP is made with the help of T3. Without enough of it—or without the ability to use it—you’re essentially running on backup systems like adrenaline and cortisol. You feel wired, anxious, and depleted, and you never actually recover.

What Reverse-Dieting Really Means

The reverse-dieting process is about more than calories. It’s about sending a clear signal to your body that the famine is over and it's safe to thrive again.

In this phase, we:

• Increase food strategically (especially carbs)

• Focus on pro-metabolic macros to support liver and thyroid function

• Encourage muscle building without overstressing the body

• Track body temperature, pulse, and symptoms to gauge progress

• Prioritize nutrient-dense, digestible food—not just more food

And no—this isn’t just a free-for-all. We’re rebuilding your metabolic infrastructure. That means we look at what your body can handle, not just what it “should” be able to do.

What a Repaired Metabolism Looks Like

When you get this right, your body starts working for you again. Your waking temperatures rise and your pulse steadies. Energy improves, sleep deepens, and mood lifts. Digestion strengthens, bowel movements become regular and effortless, gut infections clear up, and inflammation calms down. Food sensitivities start to fade. Your menstrual cycles smooth out and become more predictable. You build a leaner body composition while eating more food—not less. Lab markers like cholesterol and hormones normalize as your metabolism regains its rhythm.

You go from running on stress to running on energy.

“But I Don’t Want to Gain Weight…”

This is the hardest part for most people—and it’s the one that keeps them stuck.

If you’ve been under-eating or overtraining, your body needs a season of rebuilding. That might mean a few pounds of scale weight—but often, that weight is water, muscle, organ tissue, and glycogen - muscle fuel reserves. Your body is catching up.

Remember, you can’t burn fat from a body that thinks it’s starving. And you can’t make hormones from thin air. Sometimes you need to gain to lose—and to feel human again.

I call it this: Gain 5 pounds to lose 20, and eat more food for the rest of your life.

We may have to gain a few water weight pounds now to retrain your body to handle 50% more food permanently, so you can lose fat later—with a higher metabolic set point and the ability to keep the fat off and eat more food forever. 

How Did We Get Here?

Let’s zoom out for a second. Humans evolved over hundreds of thousands of years eating real, whole foods from nature—fruit, honey, roots, tubers, meat, raw dairy. We didn’t track macros, skip breakfast, or swap butter for seed oil. Our ancestors moved their bodies, ate to satiety, rested when needed, and passed on resilient metabolic blueprints from generation to generation.

Even just 70 to 100 years ago, our great-grandparents regularly ate 2500–3000 calories per day for women and 3500–4000 for men—without the modern rates of obesity, insulin resistance, infertility, or fatigue. Meals were hearty: meat, milk, cheese, eggs, potatoes, fresh bread, seasonal fruit. Pie after lunch and pie after dinner! Our grandparents ate three meals a day and never needed to “hack” their metabolism. Their body temperatures ran warmer, their pulse was stronger, and they had the metabolic headroom to handle illness, stress, and create lean muscle without sacrificing function.

Then came the industrial revolution. Seed oils replaced animal fats. Processed food replaced traditional meals. Low-fat and low-calorie propaganda flooded our culture. And in the last 60–70 years, we've unintentionally trained our bodies to expect famine—while flooding our systems with fake food and toxins.

Calorie intake dropped. So did protein, saturated fat, healthy carbs, and nutrient density. Over time, body temperatures began to fall. And that’s no small detail: for every 1°F drop in basal body temperature, we burn roughly 1000 fewer calories per day. That’s how powerful metabolism is. You didn’t lose your “willpower.” Your body just adapted.

Now, most women are eating 1200–1600 calories and gaining weight. Men are averaging 2000-2200. The government tells us “based on a 2000 calorie diet”. That’s not a real thing! We’re tired, constipated, anxious, and inflamed—not because we’re broken, but because we’ve drifted so far from the blueprint we evolved for.

The good news? You can return to that baseline. You can teach your body to feel safe again, rebuild metabolic flexibility, and actually thrive on food. And yes—you can be lean, strong, and high-functioning at 2500-3500 calories a day.

What Happens After Metabolism Repair?

Once your metabolism is functioning well again, you’re no longer stuck in survival mode. That means you can actually enter a short fat loss phase—and stay lean—without crashing your hormones or cutting calories to unsustainable levels.

You become someone who can:

• Cut strategically (and briefly) without rebound

• Reach and maintain your goal body fat percentage

• Keep calories high and energy stable after the cut

• Stay lean while eating like a healthy, thriving human being

This isn’t new—it’s how our bodies are meant to work. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors, and even our grandparents just 70 years ago, regularly ate 2500-3500—without obesity, insulin resistance, or chronic fatigue.

Once your metabolic baseline is restored, your body stops fighting you. Instead of resisting fat loss, it participates. It trusts that you’ll feed it again. That’s the goal.

How Do We Know It’s Working?

We track the signs:

• Your basal temperature rises toward 97.8–98.6°F

• Your pulse steadies around 75–85 bpm

• You tolerate carbs again

• PMS, bloating, and fatigue begin to fade

• Your cravings chill out

• Your body feels warmer, stronger, and more stable

These changes often happen before the scale moves. That’s how we know we’re healing—not crashing.

Ready to Get Off the Diet Rollercoaster?

If you’ve been told your thyroid is “normal” but you feel anything but… if you’re eating less and gaining more… if your labs, hormones, and gut are a mess—there’s a reason.

And there’s a strategy.

I don’t share exact macros or calorie plans online because this work is deeply individual. But if you're ready to:

• Restore thyroid function

• Heal your metabolism at the root

• Reclaim your body’s ability to feel warm, energized, and resilient

• And finally get results that last—

Then let’s work together.

Ready to Start Your Healing Phase?

If this resonates and you're ready to stop guessing, I’d love to help you reconnect with your metabolic blueprint and build the strong, high-calorie body you were born for.

Click here to schedule your Initial Session with me and let’s map out your custom strategy for sustainable fat loss, thyroid repair, and metabolic resilience.

Spots are limited, and I work closely with each client—so if your body is asking for help, trust it. Let’s rebuild from the root.

Meditation

All humans can benefit from a meditation practice. Meditation is magical because it assists us in releasing the hold that the mind and emotions have on us. We learn to rest in awareness and to watch the mind’s thoughts and the body’s feelings, becoming the witness, the observer. The highest form of meditation, according to the masters, is to become aware of awareness, conscious of consciousness. When the thoughts arise in the mind, if we identify with them and think that we ARE the thinking mind, we create misery inside. When the feelings arise, and we block them or push them away in order to avoid feeling them, we harden our hearts and create more painful feelings in the long run. Thoughts are not who we are, and feelings are just sensations that want to be experienced, and released.

Meditation is the practice of becoming aware of what is constantly going on inside of us. Meditation gives us a break from being the “thinker” and allows us to be our spirit, the watcher, the observer of the thoughts and emotions. We get to rest back in spirit and feel the awareness within us. This practice allows us to clear away the garbage that is covering up our inate nature, which is joy and peace and love. That is what our spirit is made of, and we can’t experience that unless we uncover it. Children inately know this sense of spirit, they are present in the moment and notice the beauty in the world around them. We can look at the world with the eyes of a child, the beauty of our surrounding, the gratitude we feel when we see the big picture of this amazing planet and our place in it, the joy of being alive, the peace that comes from letting go.

Most of this world we have no control over. I don’t believe that spirituality is the feeling of solid ground, but that spirituality is the feeling of freefalling through space, hurtling down the rapids of life on an inner tube with nothing to hold on to. And rather than feeling fear about this, I believe that knowing how little control I have over life and its events helps me to stay in reality, helps me to let go and have faith and accept things as they truly are. And when I do this, I see a beautiful synchronicity to life and feel protected by life. This world was here for billions of years before me, and will be here long after as well. I am just a human on a speck of dirt flying through space around one of trillions of stars. My problems are not real, they are just thoughts in my mind and emotions in my body. True reality is that I only have a few years here on this amazingly beautiful planet, full of beautiful humans and animals and plants and rocks and mountains and oceans.

Meditation allows me to remember these things, these glimpses of reality. It allows me to quiet the voice in my head by ceasing to identify with it, and resting in the awareness of my spirit, watching this world unfold before me and enjoying the ride. If there are thoughts, I release them and watch them. If there are noises, I detach from them and hold my true center. If there is an ache or pain, I feel the joy deeper inside me and release my judgments of the sensations of the body. If my mind wanders, I guide it back to breath in this moment. We can use mantra - chanting a statement like “breathe in love, breathe out peace” or Om Namaya Shivaya, or anything we want to quiet the mind and give the mind something to focus on. Mainly I just attempt to hold awareness, being aware of being aware like a fun house mirror stretching into infinity. And I rest in spirit, in the present moment, full of love and light and beauty and joy.

​​Seed Oils: The Underlying Cause of Obesity and Disease

There is a hidden ingredient in our food that is causing obesity and common chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease. Although bacon cheeseburgers, carbohydrates, and sugar have traditionally been blamed for rampant obesity and metabolic disease, they are not actually to blame. The hidden ingredient in our food (especially almost all restaurant food and processed food) causing this damage to the human body is vegetable oil – or as nutrition scientists more commonly refer to it: “seed oils”. 

Seed oils are known scientifically under many names: linoleic acid, omega-6 fatty acids, and polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs). Dr. Cate Shanahan, long-time nutritionist for the LA Lakers and author of Deep Nutrition, calls these oils the “Hateful Eight” – including soybean, corn, canola (rapeseed), safflower, sunflower, cottonseed, grape seed, and rice bran oil*.

None of these seed oil fats were historically part of the human diet, as our ancestors did not press the oil out of soybeans or corn in the wild, and in fact humans did not eat beans and grains at all until quite recently. Historically, our ancestors were hunter-gatherers who ate mostly meat and fruit – they mostly hunted large game (ruminant animals) and gathered eggs and ripe fruit. The fat sources in the traditional human diet included lots of fat from animals as well as from fruits that contain fat like olives, avocados, and coconuts.

There are 3 basic types of fat: saturated fat, monounsaturated fat, and polyunsaturated fats. Saturated fat largely comes from animal fats and coconut oil, monounsaturated fats come from fatty fruits like avocado, and polyunsaturated fats are found in seeds. Saturated fat is solid at room temperature (think beef tallow and butter) due to being completely “saturated” with hydrogen. This causes saturated fat to avoid bonding with oxygen, since it does not have any double bonds that can attach to oxygen molecules. This also allows saturated fat molecules to stack together, which is what makes it solid at room temperature. When mono- and polyunsaturated fats have an area that lacks a bond with hydrogen, the fat molecules can bend here, and no longer are able to stack neatly together like they do with saturated fat. Because of these bends in the fat chains, mono and poly fats are liquid at room temperature. 

The 3 main kinds of dietary fat.

If a fat is not “saturated” with hydrogen bonds, oxygen atoms can attach to the long fat chains – mono (which means “one”) fats have one oxygen-attracting bend, and poly (which means “many”) fats have multiple bends. When oxygen attaches to these bends, the fat becomes oxidized, which means that the fats are going rancid and causing inflammation and disease in the human body * . 

The fats we eat get incorporated into the body’s tissues, and all cells in the body have a phospholipid membrane – meaning that the outside wall of each of our cells is made of various kinds of fat. When the cell membrane is composed of the weaker, more liquid mono- (MUFAs) and poly- fats (PUFAs), the cells become weak and damaged which can lead to metabolic diseases such as diabetes, obesity, heart disease, stroke, and cancer.

graph from optimisingnutrition.com

Starting about a century ago, large amounts of polyunsaturated fats were introduced into the human diet. It started with Crisco, a company that began to chemically process cottonseed oil to make it available for popular consumption. Whereas prior to WWI, cottonseed oil had been used to lubricate machinery, after the war ended this fat was advertised to Americans as a “heart healthy” alternative to the tallow, lard, and butter that had been common in those days. 

Not only were seed oils introduced as food for humans, but they were also introduced as food for livestock. Animals like chickens and pigs are monogastric, meaning that they have one stomach - and all monogastric animals store the seed oils they eat without converting them into another kind of fat, like healthy saturated fat. If monogastric animals are fed seed oils, they store the seed oils, and then when we eat the bacon or chicken skin, we are eating the stored seed oils in their fat. 

Cows are the best fat source because they are polygastric (they have four stomachs) and ample beneficial bacteria in their stomachs to help convert the fats they eat – even when the cows are fed corn and corn oil – into healthy saturated fat. So even corn-fed beef still makes healthy saturated-fat rich butter and tallow, and this means that the fat from ruminant animals (bison, goat, elk, lambs, and sheep, as well as cows) is always going to be the safest and healthiest fat for the human body. In the carnivore community, we say “cows are king”.

Despite this, even grass-fed cows have a little bit of polyunsaturated fat in their bodies that we consume when we eat red meat and dairy. The ideal amount of PUFA to consume is less than 10 grams a day. Although eggs have a smaller percentage of PUFA than chicken fat and chicken skin, we get some seed oils from eggs as well (about 0.5 grams per egg, unless your eggs are corn-free AND soy-free). Red meat has about 3% PUFA in grass-fed meat and 6% in corn-fed meat, which is about 3 grams in a pound of 70% lean corn-fed beef *,*. Since red meat and eggs are some of the best foods for the human body, we will already be getting a small amount of PUFA in our diet even if we are avoiding seed oils and eating as healthy as possible.

There is rampant misinformation in the US regarding seed oils, and many in the medical community advise that people consume large amounts of seed oils. This misinformation stems from the idea that consuming PUFA reduces cholesterol, and that high levels of LDL cholesterol is linked to heart disease. This “research” largely benefits the agriculture industry and the medical establishment. It has been proven wrong by a number of studies showing that not only does lowering LDL cholesterol (and cholesterol numbers in general) not protect against heart disease, it actually RAISES the risk *,*. 

Likewise, some nutrition researchers have reported that PUFAs just need to be in a specific ratio with omega-3 fats, but this is not true*. Although omega-3 fats (like fish oil) are also technically polyunsaturated fats with similar multiple bends, they are not as harmful as the omega-6 poly fats from seed oils and may have some benefit in the human body. But, the ratio of omega-3 and omega-6 (another name for seed oil-derived PUFA) is not important. What is important is keeping the total amount of seed oils in your diet down as far as you can, as they are poisonous, get stored in our bodies, and take a very long time to detoxify. 

In fact, researchers have found that the half-life of seed oils in the human body is 680 days – meaning it takes 2 years to clear out HALF of the seed oils that we have stored in our bodies from eating an average Western diet. The total amount of time it takes to remove all stored seed oils from the body is 4-7 years. Since research is also showing that seed oils are likely the main cause of not only obesity, but also all the other metabolic diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, it’s clear that we need to get our seed oil consumption down as low as possible, as fast as possible, and AVOID SEED OILS LIKE THE PLAGUE!!

How do we do this? It’s not as challenging at home, as we can just swap out any “vegetable” oils that we have (which are all seed oils) for healthy beef tallow, butter, and high-quality olive oil, and coconut oil, in addition to avoiding the fat from chicken and pork – while still enjoying the protein from these animals like boneless skinless chicken breasts, fat free ham, and lean pork loin (which are easy to buy at any grocery store). We also need to avoid eating all beans, nuts, and seeds, as their main source of fat is from seed oils. 

The real problem is eating at restaurants. Studies have found that up to 40% of the calories in a typical restaurant meal are from seed oils, as they are very cheap and help keep costs down*. Basically, most restaurant food is completely saturated in seed oils. All fried food, sauteed food, salad dressings, and sauces derive their calories from seed oils. French fries. Ranch dressing. Asian stir-fry. Sauteed onions. Chicken fingers. Chicken wings. All seed oil. BUT, the good news is that there are a couple of restaurants that have beef tallow in their fryer – (one popular restaurant with a 100% beef tallow fryer is Buffalo Wild Wings - carnivore French fries!) and some authentic French restaurants. The two things that you can always order in a restaurant and be fairly confident that they are free of seed oils are beef burgers (no bun or mayo) and steak. Since beef has a good amount of fat in it, cooks and chefs don’t usually add any oil to the pan or griddle when cooking burgers and steaks. If you want to order a salad on the side, ask for oil and vinegar and dress it yourself. If you want to order a baked potato, ask the server to check that they have 100% butter or have them bring you the butter packets so you can read the ingredients. Even some popular chain steakhouses serve “butter” that is a 50% seed oil blend. You can even order beef patties from most “fast-food” restaurants - they are almost always 100% beef with no fillers or seed oils, and just add pickles, tomato, onions and mustard if you want!

Many French restaurants in the US use canola oil in their fryers, although traditionally French food (and Italian food too) abhors seed oils and only uses animal fats. This is the reason for the so-called “French paradox” - the observation that despite eating lots of carbs and high-fat food, French people do not historically get fat or have many of the Western diseases like diabetes and heart disease. If you go to France or Italy, you can be certain the vast majority of your food will be cooked with healthy animal fats. But in America, you will have to ask them to check the box that their fryer oil came in to see if it really is 100% tallow, or if it is instead a blend that includes a substantial amount of seed oils. I like to call the restaurant in the afternoon when they are slow, and politely explain that I don’t eat seed oils and ask kindly if they can check the ingredients on their butter, salad dressing, and/or fryer oil. 

There are a number of beneficial healing effects in the body from removing seed oils from your diet and making sure that you don’t get more than 10 grams per day from all sources, including beef and eggs. Within 3 months of making this change in my own diet, I could eat moderate amounts of carbohydrates again without gaining weight. Before this, if I even ate a tiny bit of carbohydrates I put on weight! I also found that the intense cravings that I would get from having a serving of carbohydrates was gone. I felt normal again, like when I was a kid and could eat carbohydrates and not immediately have intense cravings and end up overeating. 

Another major benefit was the fact that many people who stop consuming seed oils also stop burning in the sun*! This has been well documented with my clients and others in the carnivore community. The reason that we get such high levels of sunburn and skin cancer is likely because the high level of seed oils in our diet is weakening our skin cells and causing our skin to become damaged from sunlight*. Of course our ancestors got a lot of sun - for hundreds of thousands of years humans were hunter-gatherers living near the equator. Why would we suddenly be experiencing so much sunburn and skin cancer? It’s not the sun, it’s the oils (as well as the toxic sunscreens) damaging our skin!

So what should we eat? The most important change we can make is to remove seeds and seed oils from our diet. Unfortunately, if you go out to eat regularly this can be the most difficult change to make. But it is worth it. Our ancestors ate mostly animal foods and fruit. Fruits are defined as “the fleshy and sometimes sweet part of the plant that contains seeds and can be eaten”, which includes all sweet fruits, as well as zucchini and other squashes, cucumber, avocado, olives, and coconut. Many carnivore or animal-based people also do well with root vegetables like carrots and sweet potato - although cooking them first removes some or most of the oxalate toxins. Fruit is the only part of the plant designed for consumption, as most fruit seeds pass through animal’s digestive systems and are planted in the waste. We know that pre-industrial humans were hunter-gatherers - they hunted large game and they gathered fruit. They did not eat seeds, as most are unpalatable, inaccessible, or indigestible in their raw state.

All foods derived from seeds are damaging to the human body - including nuts, grains and beans. Even the seeds in fruit and berries can sometimes aggravate those with a more damaged gut lining. Not only do seeds like grains, beans, and nuts contain seed oils, but they also have many other plant toxins in them to deter animals from eating them. Plants can’t run away like animals, so plants put defense chemicals in the parts of the plant that they don’t want you to eat - mostly the seeds, stems, and leaves.

When humans grind the seeds into flour or chew them, we are releasing these toxic plant chemicals into our bodies and damaging our intestinal lining and all of our cells. A common seed defense chemical is gluten, which is the protein found in the bran (outer) part of the seed of wheat plants and wreaks havoc on the gut and digestive system of humans. Grains were only added to the human diet in the last couple of thousand years with the advent of agriculture. There are hundreds of other harmful plant chemicals, like lectins, oxalates, phytates, phytoestrogens, phenols, saponins, and tannins, to name a few. Meat and fruit do not have any of these toxins and are the preferred foods for the human body, as they were the foods of our ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years.

Although olive oil and avocado oil are monounsaturated fats and don’t contain PUFA, there are a couple of concerns with consuming these forms of fat. They do still have one bend, so they are able to oxidize a little bit, and need to be cold pressed  (so-called “extra virgin”), and stored in dark containers. As they are liquid at room temperature, they are not as healthy for the body’s cells as saturated fats which have no bends and cannot oxidize at all. Saturated fats are firmer fats that are stronger for our cell linings. The second problem with olive oil and avocado oil is the fact that many American companies have recently been caught lying on the label and adulterating these fats with seed oils. One recent study found that over 80% of avocado oils and olives oils have been cut with seed oils*. Luckily, studies have found that Costco’s Kirkland Brand is 100% pure olive oil *! Also the Chosen Foods brand of avocado oil at Costco is 100% pure as well. The only other brand that the study found that contained 100% avocado oil was Marianne’s, which is sold at Costco and Whole Foods *,*.

There is rampant fraud in the food industry in the US. Not only are companies adulterating oils, but the food industry and the US government are allowing misinformation to negatively affect the health of Americans, switching out our fryer oils from healthy tallow and coconut oil to extremely unhealthy seed oils in the 1980s, and driving up levels of obesity and disease in the decades since. It is up to us to change our diets and heal our bodies. The good news is that it’s possible, many of us have already done it, and you can do it too. Throw out your seed oils, stop eating chicken and pork fat, refuse to eat foods at restaurants that contain seed oils, call your local restaurants and grocers and request healthier fats, and bring your own olive oil and butter with you when you go out to eat or go to a friend’s house for dinner. 

The benefits from switching to a diet of primarily meat, eggs, dairy, and fruit include losing weight, eating healthy carbohydrates without gaining weight, tanning in the sun without sunburn, aging more gracefully, and avoiding disease.  We will have a new and improved relationship with food as our bodies heal and we become more intuitive about our eating and nutrition needs. Take charge of your body and watch your body heal. Watch excess weight fall off, long-standing health problems resolve, your ability to tan in the sun return as well as significantly lower rates of sunburn and skin cancer, to once again be able to eat carbohydrates without excessive weight gain as well as an increase in intuitive eating and a lack of food cravings. 

Even if you cheat and eat junk food, DO NOT EAT SEED OILS. Just remind yourself, 680 days to clear out half of them! Within 3 months of lowering my PUFA consumption to 10 grams/day or less, I saw changes happen in my body and I started healing and losing weight. You can do it too! 

Additional references:

https://drcate.com/pufa-project/

https://drcate.com/category/food/seed-oils/

https://www.zeroacre.com/blog/linoleic-acid-facts

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3195369/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27071971/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5492028/

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24853887/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2373379/

https://www.worldatlarge.news/function-health/linoleic-acid-as-driver-of-heart-chronic-disease

https://www.gq.com/story/seed-oil-health

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/records-found-in-dusty-basement-undermine-decades-of-dietary-advice/

https://podcastnotes.org/wise-traditions/episode-262-the-hateful-eight-industrial-seed-oils-dr-cate-shanahan-on-wise-traditions-with-hilda-labrada-gore/

Vitamin D

I recently had a sinus infection that just wouldn’t go away. I rarely get sick, although I am historically prone to sinus problems. Although this one wasn’t very painful, it just wouldn’t quit. I happened across an article by one of my favorite bloggers (link below) that discussed Vitamin D and its importance in killing viral infections like influenza. I’d been largely treating my sinus infection as either bacteria or fungal with 10 different remedies, with no luck, and I suspected it must be a viral infection. Also, my kids had all had a brief bout of the flu right when my sinus problems started, so that was suspicious. The study I found mentioned something called the “vitamin D hammer,” and I had to learn more. Within 24 hours of trying it, I was significantly better for the first time in a month, and within a few days I wasn’t sick anymore. It was magical.

The “vitamin D hammer” is a one-time dose of 50,000 IU in one day (or 10,000 IU 3 times a day for 2 or 3 days), for adults with viral infections who haven’t been previously supplementing with sufficient amounts of vitamin D before they acquired the infection. As the FDA only recommends 400 IU of vitamin D daily for adults, this is a much larger dose than I’d ever heard of taking. Many people recognize that the FDA recommendation is wholy inadequate, and daily doses of 1,000-5,000 are common. According to the research, it takes almost 9,000 IU per day for 97.5% of adults to reach serum vitamin D levels of 50 nmol/L or more. Some vitamin D scientific researchers advise taking doses high enough to reach serum vitamin D levels of closer to 100 nmol/L, especially while fighting a viral infection like influenza. Up to 75% of Americans are deficient in vitamin D, which is actually a hormone usually produced by the skin’s exposure to sunlight.

According to the researchers from Canada who discovered the “vitamin D hammer”, “The results are dramatic, with complete resolution of symptoms in 48 to 72 hours. One-time doses of vitamin D at this level have been used safely and have never been shown to be toxic. We urgently need a study of this intervention. The cost of vitamin D is about a penny for 1,000 IU, so this treatment costs less than a dollar.”

Another group of researchers interested in the “remarkable seasonality” of influenza noted that the sunshine causes “robust seasonal vitamin D production in the skin; vitamin D deficiency is common in the winter, and activated vitamin D, a steroid hormone, has profound effects on human immunity. [Vitamin D] acts as an immune system modulator, preventing excessive expression of inflammatory cytokines and increasing the ‘oxidative burst’ potential of macrophages” (white blood cells found at sites of infection). His research found that not only did a study involving volunteers injected with influenza have more fever and illness in the winter, but that children with vitamin D deficiencies had higher rates of viral respiratory infections.

I was not only amazed by vitamin D’s ability to stop influenza in its tracks, but in my resulting research I found scientific links between high vitamin D levels and the prevention of many other illnesses and conditions, including autoimmune diseases; type 1 diabetes (which many researchers believe to be an autoimmune disease); insulin resistance including prediabetes and type 2 diabetes (also associated with obesity); neuromuscular issues including muscle weakness, a reduction in falls of elderly patients (one study found a 20% reduction and another found a 72% reduction in falls), idiopathic low back pain, and fibromyalgia; multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis (40% reductions in the risks of developing either with supplementation of vitamin D); as well as a possible protective effective in cardiovascular disease by lowering systolic blood pressure and heart rate; and cancer (by inducing cell death in some kinds of cancer cells, including breast, colon, ovarian, and prostate cancers).

Obviously, I had largely underestimated the importance of vitamin D supplementation. It is found in animal based foods like eggs, salmon and other seafood including cod liver oil, beef liver, and cheese; but since the researchers are showing that we need 9,000 IU/day, food sources are not enough. I now buy 5,000 IU gel caps, and recommend taking enough that your levels are close to 100 nmol/L, when tested by your doctor, especially in the winter months.

Learn more:

https://www.cheeseslave.com/how-to-get-enough-vitamin-d/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870528/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4210929/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4463890/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870528/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3317188/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2426990/

Grass-Fed Cows Create Soil and Reverse Climate Change

We often hear about the methane emissions from cows’ burping and farting, but we rarely hear about the contributions that grazing cows can make to reversing climate change. If raised correctly, cows can pull more than 10 times the climate change-causing gases out of the atmosphere that they add to it. Cows can be not only carbon-neutral, but carbon-negative.

Current farming practices involve factory farming of most of our meat, but this is a very different scenario than how cows and other ruminant (grazing) animals acted in the wild. For millennia, ruminant animals covered the grasslands of North and South America. Because of predators, they would stay in tight, bunched groups, and constantly were on the move for new sources of tall grass to eat. Their hooves would press the chewed grass into the soil, planting the seeds, and their waste would fertilize the plants. They would naturally move on when the majority of the tall grass was eaten, leaving short grass behind. They would not stay long enough to kill the grass but only to leave stubble, similar to when we mow our lawn. If we never mow the lawn, the grass becomes too tall and dries out from an excess of plant matter blocking sunlight and using up the water in the soil. If we mow our lawn too short, the grass can die as well. Both situations result in desertification, which is a fancy word for the removal of topsoil.

Soil is made out of carbon, because it is largely decomposed plant and animal matter. When this soil is sent up into the atmosphere, it become atmospheric carbon and contributes to climate change through an increase in global temperatures caused by the carbon trapping heat in the atmosphere. Both removing grazing animals from grasslands, and over-grazing the grasslands, causes desertification. But, mimicking nature with managed grazing actually does the opposite, and causes the grass to pour carbon into the ground - creating new topsoil and reversing climate change.

Grass has a symbiotic relationship with the fungus that lives underground. This means that they trade with each other. Fungus provides the grass with micronutrients, and in exchange grass provides the fungus with sugar, a 6-carbon molecule. Basically, the grass is purchasing nutrients from the underground fungus, and the currency is carbon. The grass obtains this carbon from the atmosphere, using sunlight as the energy source to drive photosynthesis (the creation of sugar). When the grass is eaten down by the cows but not killed, it causes the grass to pour carbon into the ground in order to “purchase” additional nutrients from the fungus to re-grow.

Allan Savory, the scientist who discovered much of this process and how to recreate it with farming practices, claims that grazing animals can create as much as a foot of topsoil a year, underground. The topsoil is created down into the earth, the level part of the ground does not change. Dead sandy areas underground become “humus”, or pure carbon, living topsoil. A teaspoon of healthy topsoil contains billions of organisms, mostly bacteria and fungus, as well as worms and grubs and much more.

Current farming practices, especially of grain and bean crops like the corn and soybeans that covers the U.S., cause desertification, the removal of topsoil, sending the soil carbon into the air. Some scientists believe that the removal of topsoil has contributed more to atmospheric carbon, and climate change, than all fossil fuels use COMBINED. But all we hear about is fossil fuels, no one is talking about soil. When the ground is tilled, broken up, during modern agriculture, it breaks up and kills the underground fungus and ruins the symbiotic relationship between the plants and the fungus underground. The plants are no longer able to “purchase” nutrients from the fungus, which is now dead from being tilled, and the farmer is forced to use artificial nutrients (fertilizers) to feed the plants. Also, the actual tilling of the ground sends more soil carbon up into the air. Then the modern farmer also kills pests and weeds with pesticides and herbicides, further killing the bacteria and fungus underground, creating dead soil that no longer is able to absorb water or support life without artificial nutrients.

When Europeans arrived at the Americas in 1492, there was an average of 10 feet of topsoil covering the continents, created by millennia of ruminant animals grazing the grasslands. Now we are down to an average of 6 inches. Scientists state that we have less than 60 harvests left before all the soil is gone and plants will no longer grow. We need to stand up to the monolithic farming conglomerates that have taken over the small farms that used to cover our land, and are mass-producing corn and soybeans in order to feed not only factory-farmed animals, but humans as well. Humans are not meant to eat grains and beans, and neither are ruminant animals.

Allan Savory states that if we cover the earth’s existing grasslands in grazing animals, we could create enough topsoil (by pulling carbon out of the atmosphere) to completely reverse climate change. Cows can save the planet.

Learn more:

Allan Savory's TED Talk (One of the Top 100 TED talks of all time)

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/cows-beef-farming-reverse-climate-change-global-warming-a8202121.html

https://sustainabledish.com/meat-is-magnificent/

https://www.greenbiz.com/article/how-regenerative-land-and-livestock-management-practices-can-sequester-carbon

https://www.agriculture.com/livestock/cattle/meet-allan-savory-the-pioneer-of-regenerative-agriculture

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/20091209/climate-conscious-ranching-free-range-really-better-feedlots

Cayenne Gargle: A Natural Cure for Strep Throat

Scientific studies have shown that there are many natural medicines that are just as effective as antibiotics against strep throat (Group A Streptococci). The most effective natural medicine against strep throat that I’ve found is cayenne pepper (active component: capsaicin). Two others that have shown promise in studies are oil of thyme or oregano (active compound is carvacrol), and cinnamon oil (Cinnamomum verum EO) - which was found in a study of essential oils to be the most effective essential oil, similar to a common antibiotic (Amoxicillin) in its antimicrobial activity against strep.

My favorite home cure for strep throat, that has worked over 20 times in a row in my family for over a decade, is to make a salt water-cayenne gargle and use it many times throughout the day as soon as one’s throat becomes sore. I use 1/2 teaspoon of sea salt and 1-2 teaspoons of cayenne powder (as much as I can stand) in one cup of warm water, using one medium sip for each gargle. Spit the gargle out after. It’s important to start right away, and to keep the spicy residue on the throat and not drink water right after. Basically every time I eat or drink, I do another gargle of the salt-water cayenne, and I can feel the cayenne killing the bacteria on my throat. I do rinse my mouth out with plain water after the gargle, if the cayenne makes my mouth too spicy, but I leave the spicy salt/cayenne rinse on my throat.

Usually the pain is reducing by the end of the first or second day, if I am strict about keeping the spicy on my throat. The salt is helpful by creating an osmosis effect on the cells of the throat, drawing the bacteria to the surface so they can be killed by the cayenne, and rinsed out of the mouth. We also make sure to not eat any grains or sugars, so that we don’t feed the throat bacteria simple carbohydrates, eating mostly healthy animal fats and proteins, as well as fruits and honey for carbohydrates if needed.

People have also had success with the cayenne technique with young children by using Cholula mild hot sauce, which contains capsaicin, the active compound in cayenne pepper, and isn’t quite as spicy. It can be added to their food, like scrambled eggs, with a little sea salt, and eaten periodically throughout the day. Be sure to visit a doctor if a child’s sore throat doesn’t improve within a day or two.

References:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4643145/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22807321

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25784902/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3638616/

Letter To My Daughter's Teacher

Just ate a huge steak covered in butter while I wrote this letter to my daughter's teacher.
Hey *,

I just wanted to drop a note to you about the earth day lesson that you gave the kids yesterday. My daughter was concerned and I would love to pass on some scientific information to you that you might not be aware of and might be interested in.

So, she let me know that you told the class that meat eating is bad for the planet and that a plant-based diet is best for the environment and our bodies. I am a nutrition researcher by trade (masters in biochem from the U and I'm also a licensed nutritionist) and I'm actually writing a book on the topic. Although in the past, science agreed with you, the emerging science is painting a very different picture.

It turns out that our ancestors were largely carnivorous and every primitive culture that we've studied ate an animal-based diet. Not only is meat NOT the cause of chronic disease (this is commonly called the diet-heart hypothesis and was started at the U where I went to school - the science has been disproven and it is now widely accepted science that all chronic disease is actually caused by sugar and grains) but the environmental science has been off, too. I discovered during my graduate work that all nutrition science in the US is industry funded, and the U of M nutrition department is funded largely by the grain industry, as well as Coca-Cola. The system is very broken and the science disproved the links between animal fat and chronic disease long ago, but the systems in place (including Big Pharma and the USDA - corporate grain and bean farmers) hugely profit off of this misinformation.

Although animal flatulance does contain methane, this addition to climate change is miniscule compared to the carbon that is removed from the atmosphere by grazing animals. When cows eat grass (just like in the wild), they cause the grass to dump carbon into the soil (because the grass has a symbiotic relationship with the soil fungus, providing it with sugar - a 6-carbon molecule - in exchange for micronutrients) sequestering carbon from the atmosphere and creating up to a foot of topsoil/year. If the earth's grasslands were covered in cattle, it would completely reverse climate change in our lifetimes. I am including some scientific articles for you to peruse if you are interested in learning more.

Although I completely respect your right to decide to not eat meat because of spiritual or animal-welfare reasons, I want you to know that it is scientifically a much less healthy diet and ironically, mass agriculture of grains and beans is actually the cause of desertification (removal of topsoil), which has contributed more carbon to the atmosphere and climate change than ALL fossil fuel use combined. Plant based diets are actually causing climate change, and grazing cows is one of the only things that can reverse it. And red meat is actually the healthiest food for the human body. Humans aren't grainivores, we don't have a gizzard (the organ that grinds grains into flour in the animal's body) and grains are one of the newest foods to be added to the human diet.

Her dad and I wanted you to have access to this scientific information and hold no hard feelings about your teachings because we know your motives were pure and you want our kids to be healthy and the environment to be saved. We would really appreciate it if you would look over this additional research I'm sending, and please not spread misinformation in the classroom. My daughter was so upset after your meat-is-bad speech that she went in the bathroom and cried. Since our family eats a meat-heavy diet (all grass-fed and organic, of course) this was hugely upsetting to her, and us. Since I began eating a meat-based diet, I have reversed my type 2 diabetes, all of my digestive diseases (SIBO, IBS, and celiac) have gone into complete remission, and I've lost 70 pounds and kept it off for over 5 years.

Thanks so much for listening. I highly recommend watching this TED talk from the leading permaculture scientist Allan Savory, it's one of the top 100 TED talks of all time, and explains how to reverse climate change and save the earth.

https://www.ted.com/…/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s…

And here is an excellent article by one of the leading scientific nutrition researchers in the US about red meat and how it's actually the heathiest food for the human body and was the primary source of nutrition for our ancestors throughout a million years of human evolution: https://chriskresser.com/red-meat-it-does-a-body-good/ He also has an entire ebook (free) online if you want to learn more about the science behind animal-based diets.

Thanks *, we really appreciate you, but we would like you to be aware of the way our daughter was affected by your lesson and have access to the alternative scientific information.

Love, Marissa

Gluten

It’s just the newest fad diet these days to go gluten-free, right? What is this stuff, “gluten,” anyway?

Turns out this newest “fad” actually makes a lot of sense when we look into it. Gluten is the protein found in wheat and most other grains. Although grains (the seeds of grass plants) are mostly carbohydrate, there is a little fat and protein thrown in there too.

So let’s talk about grains like wheat. Grains are the newest food to be added to the human diet, from an evolutionary perspective. We’ve only been eating grains for about 10,000 years, at most. And that’s only in certain areas of the world. When you look at the fact that homo sapiens have been on the planet for over 400,000 years, and our older ancestors dating back to homo habilis have been on the planet for 2.3 million years, this is only the blink of an eye. Actually, this means we’ve been eating grains for only the last 0.04% of the time our species has been on this planet.

Grains are not human food. We do not have a gizzard, which is the organ that grainivores have that grinds the grains into flour inside their bodies. This is why we have to grind grains and cook them in order to eat them. Grainivores also eat little sticks and rocks to help their gizzards grind up the grains. Have you ever seen a wheat berry? It’s like a small rock. We would never eat that in the wild, that’s why our ancestors did not consider it food for the first 99.96% of human history.

Grain-eating started with the agricultural revolution. Humans realized that they could stop following the herd they relied on for survival, and stay in one place, if they planted wheat fields and kept domesticated animals. Thus was born agriculture. We needed foods that could be stored when animal foods were scarce, and increasingly came to rely on grains and beans, in addition to root vegetables, squash, and other foods that could be stored. These were used to supplement the animal foods that were available at the time.

Humans began experiencing a great increase in sickness and disease with the adoption of this foreign food group. Although many of us think of ancient humans as living short difficult lives, this is the experience of more recent people, after the agricultural revolution (like the middle ages). Pre-agricultural humans, or hunter-gatherers, often lived long and healthy lives. There are mummies that date back to pre-agricultural times that have all of their teeth and are believed to be close to 100 years old.

Our human body evolved over millennia to be an amazing machine, when fed the right foods. Grains cause disease in multiple ways. First of all, there are a plethora of “anti-nutrients” in grains that strip vitamins and minerals out of the human body. The primary anti-nutrients are phytates, which bind to minerals and results in rickets, slowed skeletal growth, iron-deficiency anemia, and leaky gut syndrome. Leaky gut is a very common issue in our society today.

The main diseases that result from grain eating, besides vitamin and mineral deficiencies, are autoimmune disorders. When we eat grains, especially whole grains - which are actually worse for our bodies, the bran part of the grain that makes it a “whole grain” rips tiny microscopic holes in our intestinal lining. (By the way, the reason they tell us whole grains are better for us is because they cause a slightly slower raise in blood glucose. This is similar to saying that low-tar cigarettes are slightly better for you than high-tar cigarettes so you should smoke a lot of them.)

When we have these holes in our intestinal walls, intact proteins from our diet can leak into our blood stream instead of being broken down into individual amino acids. When the body sees certain intact proteins from our diet (like gluten and casein  - milk protein) in our blood, it thinks this protein is a pathogen because many germs and pathogens are long protein strings. The body reacts with an immune response against the imagined invader. When this goes on for years, the immune system eventually turns on its host and causes auto-immune problems. These include: Type I Diabetes Mellitus, rheumatoid arthritis and joint problems, Crohn’s disease, colitis, celiac, lupus, chronic fatigue syndrome, psoriasis and eczema, hypo- and hyperthyroidism, depression, anxiety, Sjogren’s syndrome, and irritable bowel syndrome, among many others.

So why are grains the base of the food pyramid and why are we told to eat a diet high in “healthy” whole grains? Well, the most obvious explanation is because the grain industry likes it that way. They make a lot of money off of our grain-eating ways, and the health care industry makes a lot of money off of treating these diseases. The reason this misinformation has been perpetuated for so many years, especially in our country, is because nutrition research in America is almost exclusively industry-funded. There is almost no federally-funded nutrition research in the U.S., like there is in many other Westernized countries. This means that most of the nutrition research here is funded by groups like the grain and sugar industries. This obviously sways the results of the research, and which studies not only get funded, but which studies get published.

Many people are forced to eat a diet higher in grains and other cheap carbohydrates because animal foods are more expensive. There is also an incorrect belief that grains and plant foods are easier on the planet that growing animals. Ironically, these days we not only eat grains ourselves but feed it to our domesticated animals – like chickens, who are omnivores and eat worms, and cows who are supposed to be eating grass. But is it really cheaper when we look at the costs of health care, and living shorter lives? There is a quote I like that says something like, Pay for food now or doctor’s bills later. When the destruction of the soil and our bodies is taken into account, we find that grain eating is not actually cheaper or better for the planet.

But how can we possibly give up bread? The staff of life… Give us this day… Crusty baguettes and cake and donuts and cookies. Well, gluten-free has been a “fad” long enough that wonderful alternative have been put on the market. I have been off of gluten grains for almost a decade, and don’t miss them at all. One can still eat sandwiches, cake, cookies, and pizza – mostly made out of almond flour and coconut flour, mostly made at home. But I choose to eat healthy animal foods. And in addition to watching the pounds melt away, I got to watch numerous health problems melt away as well.

You Are Only As Healthy As Your Gut

Science is just beginning to study and understand the world of bacteria within our bodies. There are trillions of these organisms inside each human, and they can be classified as beneficial or pathogenic (disease-causing).

Essentially, the human body is a donut, with a hole in the middle that goes from your mouth to your anus. The bacteria and food in the donut hole are not technically “in” our bodies, until they are actively absorbed by our bodies through the enterocytes (intestinal cells). With ten times more bugs than cells in our bodies, we are actually 5% human DNA and 95% bacterial DNA!

Another, more harmful way that food and bacteria make it from the intestines into our blood stream is through tiny holes between the enterocytes. These tiny holes are called loose junctions, or “leaky gut”. Some researchers claim that up to 90% of people in the West have some amount of leaky gut, which is caused by a range of things like gluten (a protein found in grains like wheat) and other plant toxins, antibiotics, yeast overgrowth, a high-sugar diet, pharmaceutical medications, NSAIDS (ibuprofen or Advil), alcoholism, and drug use.

Two problems appear when our enterocytes are damaged and become leaky. First of all, food and bacteria from our gut leaks into the blood stream and the body responds with an immune attack. It not only attacks the invading bacteria, but also sees intact proteins (long strings of amino acids) from our food leaking into the blood stream, rather than the single amino acids that are normally absorbed through the intestinal cells. The body also “thinks” these are bacteria (like gluten from grains, casein from dairy, alkaloids from nightshade vegetables, and more) and attacks them as well. Over long periods of time, these heightened immune responses wreck havoc on the body and likely contribute or cause the development of autoimmune diseases like type I diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, lupus, celiac, and multiple sclerosis.

The second way that damaged enterocytes further cause problems in the body is due to their inability to digest food properly. Instead of the food being broken up right away by enzymes (made by the enterocytes), the food sits in the gut and putrefies. This rotting food feeds the pathogenic bacteria, especially the high carbohydrate, high sugar diets that are common in the West. When there is an imbalance in bacteria in the gut, it is referred to as “gut dysbiosis” and has been associated with inflammatory bowel disease, colitis, chronic fatigue syndrome, and cancer. For many people, the feeding of pathogenic bacteria also leads to bloating, belching, acid reflux, and constipation/diarrhea.

Not only are high numbers of pathogenic bacteria species thought to contribute to autoimmune disease and the diseases of gut dysbiosis, but they also cause inflammation and links are being made to chronic diseases as well like heart disease, type II diabetes, and obesity. The links to obesity are especially fascinating. A study from Washington University, published in the elite journal Science, showed that specific bacterial species are correlated with either obesity or thinness. Previous studies have found that obese people and thin people often have very different strains of intestinal bacteria. In this study, they inoculated germ-free mice (grown in a sterile environment) with bacteria from human twins, one of which was obese and one of which was thin. The mice receiving bugs from the obese twin gained statistically significant more weight than the mice given bugs from the thin twin, despite being fed the same chow. Although there is still much to be studied and learned about bacteria, studies like this show that it is a very promising topic in the field of obesity research.

Another common gut problem that causes discomfort for many people is SIBO – small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. This is caused by an overgrowth of pathogenic species in the small intestine, rather than the beneficial bugs being concentrated in the large intestine, or colon, like they are in a healthy person. When numbers in the small intestine are closer to 10^4 rather than 10^3, which is normal, this can cause also symptoms like bloating, belching, acid reflux, stomach distention and pain.

Although much nutrition advice in this field has centered around adding probiotics like acidophilus to the diet, recent research has shown fermented foods (yogurt, kimchi, raw sauerkraut, and kombucha) to be even more effective at inoculating the digestive tract with beneficial species and healing disease. Foods like coconut oil and bone broth have also been found to be effective at healing leaky gut and helping beneficial species to thrive.

There is new research showing that, in addition to taking probiotics, consuming a gut-healing diet for a period of time can be helpful in starving pathogenic bacteria and feeding beneficial bacteria in cases of autoimmune diseases as well as other diseases associated with gut dysbiosis. One such way of eating that has become very popular and effective for many is the SCD – specific carbohydrate diet. This moderate-carbohydrate diet recommends limiting carbohydrates that are made of two or more sugar molecules linked together (sucrose, maple syrup, and starches from things like potatoes, rice, and flour) based on the idea that damaged enterocytes are unable to produce the necessary enzymes to break them down and they stay in the gut and feed the harmful bacteria. Carbohydrates made of single sugars like fruit and honey are allowed, since they don't require enzymes to be digested and so don’t feed the harmful bacteria but instead are absorbed quickly and used for energy by the body. Most individuals find that after a healing period, problematic foods can be added back into the diet without causing symptoms.

Another similar diet that is growing in popularity is the GAPS diet. This stands for Gut and Psychology Syndrome and was designed by Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride. Her book by the same name details the relationship of high number of pathogenic bacteria and their relationship to issues of mental illness, including depression, anxiety, bi-polar disorder, the autism/Asperger's spectrum, and more. Her theory, which is fascinating and has shown correlation in a number of scientific studies, is that pathogenic bacteria emit neurotoxins which pass the blood-brain barrier and contribute to mental illness. This also explains the exponential increase in depression and mental illness we've seen in Western countries in the last century. She also discusses a phenomenon she calls "glue ear," which is the idea that reoccurring ear infections (otitis media) in children are caused by pathogenic bacteria making their way into the inner ear through the opening into the throat and causing mucus and infection in the middle ear. Many families report success treating depression and autism spectrum disorders in children using this approach. 

There are a number of supplements that are useful in removing the pathogenic bacteria and helping the beneficial bugs to take hold, as well as lowering the numbers of the harmful species present with these intestinal problems. Often the harmful bugs include yeasts like Candida Albicans, which are able to take hold after the administration of antibiotics which kill off multiple species of good and bad bacteria and allow yeasts to take over. The yeasts and other harmful bugs create a home for themselves called a “biofilm” that makes it hard for beneficial bugs to kick them out. A commonly known biofilm is the plaque on our teeth, and one can think of biofilms as a plaque that covers the intestinal lining. There are a number of biofilm disruptors on the market that can be useful, as well as herbal versions like grapefruit seed extract and coconut oil.

Although definitely a strange concept at first, the medical treatment recently discovered that has shown the best results is the fecal transplant. Like it sounds, this involves taking the feces or isolated bacteria from the feces of a healthy person and injecting it or orally delivering it into the colon of the unhealthy person. For diseases with high mortality like Clostridium difficile, it has shown to be astonishingly effective. Although in its infancy, methods like this will likely be explored as a cure for a growing number of diseases and ailments.

Lastly, a group of researchers created the Human Food Project and are now conducting a study called American Gut, looking into the variety and specific species present in different Americans. For $99 (or less for 2 or more people’s samples) they send you a home kit to mail them a feces sample. They then send you a list of your bacteria species and their relative abundance in your gut, as well as on your skin and in your mouth, and compare this to other Americans (including famous author Michael Pollan) as well as a primitive tribe that they have been studying.

This very exciting field of science holds a lot of promise for people suffering from this long list of gut-related, auto-immune, and chronic diseases. There is much to learn but from what we already know, dietary changes and some simple supplements can be even more effective than any of the medications that western medicine now prescribes – which often only treat the symptoms and not the underlying reasons for the disease.

If you suffer from any of these digestive problems or diseases, I am a Licensed Nutritionist and Life Coach with an advanced degree in Nutritional Biochemistry. If you would like to schedule an appointment by Skype/FaceTime or in person (in the Minneapolis area), please email me at marissa@thecarnivorenutritionist.com. We can tailor a diet and supplement schedule tailored to your individual symptoms and food preferences, and create increased health and vitality in your body!

Recommended reading:
http://chriskresser.com/a-healthy-gut-is-the-hidden-key-to-weight-loss
http://www.gapsdiet.com/
http://terrywahls.com/tag/intestinal-bacteria/