iconic figure of the 1960's Augustus Owsley Stanley III, who died in a car crash this year at aged 76, is famous for a lot of reasons, perhaps the least known being his carnivore diet (see also: 50kzone: Largely carnivorous - "dont buy into fruit & vegetables"). in his own words:
"I have been eating the natural human dietary regime for over 47 years now. I do not eat anything whatsoever from vegetable sources. The only things veggie I use are spices. My diet is usually 60% fat and 40% protein by calories.
I used to eat 80/20 when younger and about twice as much quantity of meat also, but that seems too much energy at my age, which is 71- even though I am very active. I think the body actually becomes more efficient with energy as you age, but I have no way of proving it true. Otherwise, my body today is very like it was at the age of 30.
I figure most of what we call ‘aging’ is due to insulin damage to the collagen and other body structures. No carbs = no insulin. I don’t heal quite as fast when injured as I did as a youngster, however. But I have few wrinkles, and my skin is still strong and elastic.
My seven simple rules for the human carnivore
1) Eat only from the animal world (eggs, fish, redmeat and fowl and some dairy are all animal sourced foods, i.e.: meat).
2) Eat nothing from the vegetable world whatsoever. (Very small amounts of flavourings such as garlic/chillies/spices/herbs which may be added, are not ‘food’).
3) On dairy: avoid milk and yoghurt (heavy carbs- lactose), use only pure (not ‘thickened’- heavy) cream (read the label), cheese and unsalted butter.
4) Don’t cook your meat very much- just a little bit on the outside- for flavour- blood-rare or bleu. For this reason I advise against eating pork.
5) Eat liver and brains only very infrequently- they are full of carbs.
6) Be sure to have plenty of fat of animal origin at each meal and eat mostly of the fat until you feel you have had enough- you can eat more lean at this point if you like- calories are not important, nor is the number of meals/day. Vegetable oils are not good food.
7) You do not need any supplements of any kind. Drink a lot of water and do not add salt to anything.
That is all there is to it."This from Wikipedia:
Diet and health: Stanley believed that the natural human diet is a totally carnivorous one, thus making it a no-carbohydrate diet, and that all vegetables are toxic.[16] He claimed to have eaten almost nothing but meat, eggs, butter and cheese since 1959 and that he believed his body had not aged as much as the bodies of those who eat a more "normal" diet. He was convinced that insulin, released by the pancreas when carbohydrates are ingested, is the cause of much damage to human tissue and that diabetes mellitus is caused by the ingestion of carbohydrates.
Stanley received radiation therapy in 2004 for throat cancer, which he first attributed to passive exposure to cigarette smoke at concerts,[17] but which he later discovered was almost certainly caused by the infection of his tonsil with HPV. He credited his low carb diet with starving the tumor of glucose, slowing its growth and preventing its spread enough that it could be successfully treated despite its advanced state at diagnosis.[citation needed]He had recently posted a more detailed account of his approach on LowCarber.org and how he came to it:
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The real human diet is a totally carnivorous one. : Low-Carb War Zone Forum : Active Low-Carber Forums #1 Fri, Feb-24-06, 23:14
theBear, Registered Member
Posts: 311
Plan: zero-carb
Stats: 140/140/140
BF: Progress: The real human diet is a totally carnivorous one.
Hello all,
I have been eating the natural human dietary regime for over 47 years now. I do not eat anything whatsoever from vegetable sources. The only things veggie I use are spices. My diet is usually 60% fat and 40% protein by calories. I used to eat 80/20 when younger and about twice as much quantity of meat also, but that seems too much energy at my age, which is 71- even though I am very active. I think the body actually becomes more efficient with energy as you age, but I have no way of proving it true. Otherwise, my body today is very like it was at the age of 30. I figure most of what we call 'aging' is due to insulin damage to the collagen and other body structures. No carbs = no insulin. I don't heal quite as fast when injured as I did as a youngster, however. But I have few wrinkles, and my skin is still strong and elastic.
At this point I would like to point out that a zero carb diet does NOT cause ketosis. The body rapidly adapts within a few weeks and begins consuming the ketones from fat metabolism. A fully keto-adapted body excretes no ketones in the urine. A metabolic by product, 'ketone bodies' are actually a special kind of carb, and they substitute for glucose at the structures which use it. They have the added advantage of making you feel good- and well fed.
The body cannot store dietary fat, there is no mechanism for transport across the adipose cell's wall, nor can it 'burn' carbs, which actually are toxic in more than the tiny amount required by the brain and a few other structures. The body converts dietary carbs (all convert to glucose as they are absorbed) into body fat. The conversion mechanism requires insulin which is very tissue-damaging. It is correct to say that dietary carbs are the base cause of both heart blockage and diabetes, (not a disease).
I must warn all of you that it is very unlikely that very many will be able to eat as I do over the long term, or in fact, to follow any diet for long which is much different from the one you were trained to as a baby/child. This is because diet is learned much the same way language, dress and behaviour is, and is buried deep and inaccessible, a part of your acculturation/socialisation. The very thing which makes us human is that deep and almost instinctive complex of behaviour.
It requires a powerful will and a determination to change, in order to succeed in adopting the 'extreme' diet which this website is based on. Even those who are morbidly obese, as powerful a motivation as any I can imagine will have 'cravings' for what I call 'non-food' (all vegetation and carbs) which will eventually prove irresistible. A few may manage to stay on the diet for years, but unless you are prepared to stick with it for maybe ten or more years, you will drift back into eating what I consider poison. For some reason my mum was not interested in forcing me to eat the veggies I hated so, and i was able to eat only what I liked- mostly meat, especially hamburger and the fat those at our table would cut from their steaks. Still I had massive struggles abandoning the 'civilised diet'.
I suggest that no non-food be taken home, none allowed in your fridge or pantry (out of sight is hopefully out of mind). Make a request when seated in a restaurant that the bread bin be removed (but please leave the butter), and when ordering, request that the vegetables be removed from the plate in the kitchen (just say you don't like to see 'good food go to waste').
Even during the years I was soundman for Grateful Dead, I stuck to my guns and remained totally carnivorous. I am restricted by the forums rules (as I read them) from telling about my essay on diet and exercise which is posted on my website. Basically it states that humans were totally hunting peoples until the end of the paleolithic age. No paleolithic archeological dig has ever produced any food residues from vegetables. Chemical analysis of bones from the digs indicates they are the same composition as the African lion- thus, virtually no intake of vegetation. There were no 'hunter-gatherer' societies until the neolithic, even though some modern HG tribes still made and used typical paleolithic napped-stone tools. The so called Nearthin and Paleodiet thus are both nonsense, true paleolithic people were total carnivores and ate no veggies whatsoever.
In the relatively short evolutionary period since the consumption of vegetables as food there has not been any real adaptation to such low grade low energy, difficult to digest foods. Because we have no adaptation to digesting or processing vegetables as food, they are all basically very bad for us.
We evolved as an active, group-hunting animal. We have a high natural requirement for physical exercise and cannot live long or be healthy without a lot of it.
I hope my post is of some help to others. Just persist. I show that it IS possible to overcome your dietary socialisation.
[....THEN ANSWERING BLOGGER QUERIES]
diabowl:
A zero-carb diet is the traditional treatment for diabetes (not a disease) before the development of injectable insulin, first from pigs.
Diabetes is the result of the immune system sensing the widespread tissue damage from insulin, targeting the source cells in the pancreas and destroying them. Insulin resistance type diabetes is the result of the tissues themselves rejecting insulin. Neither form is found in any other animal in nature, man's carnivorous pets fed a grain based diet may also suffer this syndrome.
In the absence of dietary carbs, the body does not need to produce insulin and the diabetes essentially 'disappears'. You will never be told this by a doctor because then you would be free of the need for medical intervention and your daily ration of drugs. All the assorted ills diabetics suffer are actually caused by insulin, cataracts, heart attacks, bad joints, etc. These are the kind of damages done to the tissues by insulin, and the injected kind is a far more powerful damaging agent than the endogenous hormone. Blood monitoring on a zero-carb regime will quickly confirm the stability of blood glucose.
foxgluvs:
Nowhere in my post do I say 'preprogrammed'. I thought I made it quite clear that a person's eating habits, including the composition of the diet is solely determined by that person's mother between birth (and about 8), the same time all the social skills which make us uniquely human ware acquired.
The name of this website is lowcarber.org,, is it not? A low carb diet is 'extreme' relative to the usual western civilised diet. My diet is just the end point of lowering carbs. My statement was not that it took 'far too much willpower', only that it requires strong willpower and great determination.
I am sure that there are a great many things known by anthropologists that you would find 'impossible to believe', however scientific evidence does not require belief, only knowledge. The composition of the materials found in paleo digs as well as bone composition tests are well known and published, I suggest a search on Google. And check the journals of anthropology in a library.
Vitamins. that is easy, there are virtually no sources of any vitamins to be in vegetation (which is why all vitamin supplements are synthetic), but all are found in abundance in meat. For example no source of A other than animal liver exists. The amount of B complex in 30 gm of fresh red meat is more than can be extracted from one hundred kilos of yeast concentrate- once it was done, but at great expense. C is not the only antiscorbitic substance, since a diet of just red meat prevents scurvy (the Inuit diet).
Moderns live a long time in spite of a wickedly bad diet but it is due to medicine. Most paleo people died either of trauma of various kinds in hunting and war, starvation or disease. Lifespan is therefore not a measure of the effectiveness of diet, as even a lousy one can get you to ~30/40. I think you mean nutritious. It is just plan nonsense to claim that there is any basic difference between individual humans so far as body functions, etc are concerned, the biggest cop up in avoidance is ' is ok for you but everybody's different', so please, let's not go there.
bawdywench:
I have eaten nothing but sirloin steaks for months on end, but I do like eggs cheese, many cuts of meat, even organs like liver tongue kidneys and brains (although the Inuit never eat any of them- and most likely neither did the true paleo hunters). Fish and chicken are nice too, in fact I have never 'met' an animal I would not eat. The one meat that needs to e eaten sparingly is liver, which contains a lot of starch (glycogen) and vit. A which is toxic in excess. Excess may be as little as one ounce of the liver of an animal feeding on fish.
Kristine:
Concerning vegetables, there is no 'baby'- it is all just a load of dirty water. Moderns do not eat any raw natural vegetation other than sugary fruit and some difficult to indigestible nuts. All modern veg foodstuff have been extensively modified by selective breeding to reduce to eliminate toxins and still require long cooking, are low in nutrients and cause a growth of harmful bacteria in the intestine, while the fibrous cellulose residues (fibre) scratches the delicate lining and causes mucus and scarring. This reduces nutrition and eventually as you age, this damage will lead to malnutrition even on a good diet. Meat leaves the stomach as a liquid after about 45-60 min, and is totally absorbed in the first foot or two of the small intestine- no scratching and no mucus formation. Human milk is very sweet, hence the 'sweet tooth' is easy to develop if reinforced by lollies as a baby. Without this reinforcement sweets are seldom later sought after. If paleo people actually ate seasonal fruits (quite possible in some places), they ate them where found, no evidence or residue has been found in digs.
The only thing careful about my diet is I don't use salt (a chemical) and I don;t cook the meat much, I make sure I eat a lot of fat. Virtually any meat is ok, even for long periods, it is a matter of personal taste, like- I really like raw oysters and soft shell crabs (and for that matter Aussie mud crabs..)
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