Expert: RawPalaeoGuy - 3/8/2008

Question
Ok I have been 0 carbing for about 1 year and a half. I am 24 years old, I exercise regularly, weigh 170 and my height is 5'11". I do not eat any carbs and currently eat about 80% fat with mostly beef, chicken or lamb. I also do not take any medications. I have read extensively on the low carb subject reading studies after studies books after books, as well as posting on many different low carb forums. I have found that this diet has cleared up many health problems for myself such as acne, depression,  low energy, low muscle mass, irritibility, as well as many other ailments and find that this is the best way of eating for me even after trying many different ways of eating.

The problem I have been having though and what no one that I ask can figure out is that I have been having symptoms of hypothyroid. I have brain fog, apathy, low sex drive, dry hair and dry skin. This are the most prominent symptoms I have been having. I only got these symptoms since going 0 carb. When I add the carbs back in to my diet the sympotms don't really abate and I get all the problems I had back from before I started 0 carbing. I feel better than ever on this diet and I would rather stick with 0 carbing than go back to my old days of feeling irratible and depressed.

I have spoken to many other 0 carbers and they tell me that their sex drive has increased since on the diet. I don't know what could be causing this ailment. Do you have any idea what could be causing this. I have read some articles on raypeat.com and he said that eating an all muclse meat diet can produce hypothyroid because of the high amounts of tryptophan. He recomends supplementing with gelatin or eating different parts of the animal such as oxtails to compete with the high amount of tryptophan.

What is your take on this? I would rather stay at 0 carb and try to find out what is causing this.  I have tried to up my  carb intake to about 60 grams and nothing happned so I think I may indeed be eating too much muscle. Any thoughts?

Answer
Certainly, eating an all-muscle-meat diet is not recommended, as organ-meats are high in certain important nutrients. Some species of wild carnivores, raised from birth in zoos have commonly turned out to be infertile if not fed on organ-meats. Incidentally, liver contains carbs, and so do some "muscle-meats" like certain shellfish etc., so I think "zero-carb" is a misnomer, really.


Ray Peat has some rather outlandish ideas that I don't generally agree with(eg:- that PUFAs are deadly if in more than very small amounts etc.) On the other hand, he seems to recommend coconut oil as a solution to hypothyroidism(and indeed for any other symptom!), so it's worth a try, I guess, though I'm pretty sceptical re this.

I should mention that my own couple of forays into all-meat diets haven't been that successful(only ever lasting 5-6 weeks at most), and I too experienced similiar results(ie dehydration, dry skin, brain-fog). Reintroducing carbs sorted me out, though.

Another person recently mentioned that he too had these same symptoms - he's also a zero-carber(raw zero-carb), since a few months ago. His idea was that his diet might be lacking in iodine, so was looking around for iodine-rich supplements like seaweed extracts. I have no idea if that works, but it's worth trying.

One of the problems with limiting one's diet to specific foods is that, unless one is careful, one can end up with nutritional deficiencies. For example, when I switched to rawpalaeo, I, at first, could only find  a few reliable high-quality sources(ie grassfed/organic beef muscle-meat and a few other items like raw cod), so I went out of my way to look for raw animal foods which were rich in specific trace minerals/vitamins so as to ensure that I would be OK, in the long-term. I found the online USDA Nutrient Database highly useful as regards working out what nutrients were in which foods.

Other than that, if like some zero-carbers you're consuming dairy products, I should mention that excess calcium in the diet(invariably via diary) generally blocks uptake of magnesium into the body, thus leading to magnesium-deficiency - so it would be a good idea to get rid of them.

RPG