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This week on the podcast Mikki speaks to Tamzyn Murphy, registered dietitian, about her ketovore approach. Tamzyn discusses her professional background and how this, combined with her personal health journey, lead her to the carnivore diet and the benefits she has gained from this. They discuss the many misconceptions around an animal-forward diet and its impact on health.
Tamzyn is a registered dietitian, science writer, editor, and nutrition educator with a special interest and expertise in Ketogenic Diets (KD) and Therapeutic Carbohydrate Restriction (TCR), particularly in relation to mental and gut health. They hold a Master’s Degree in Physiology (Dist.) (2018), where their research focused on TCR in Type 2 Diabetes under the supervision of Professor Tim Noakes.
Currently, they serve as Senior Editorial Manager, Content Editor and Creator, and Contributing Lecturer at Nutrition Network, the global leader in TCR training for healthcare professionals.
As a science writer, author, and editor, they have contributed to various publications, most recently to the textbook *Ketogenic: The Science of Therapeutic Carbohydrate Restriction in Human Health*. They have also co-authored, contributed to, and edited several books, including *Sugar Free* and *Eat Right Revolution*, and have written for health magazines and peer-reviewed publications on nutrition and TCR.
Passionate about improving health and quality of life, particularly in their home country, they serve on the Board of Directors for Eat Better South Africa, a community-based outreach program focused on implementing nutritional education in lower socioeconomic communities.
Their experience also includes work in nutritional supplements (training, research, and development), as well as clinical experience in private dietetics practice and community interventions centered on TCR.
Tamzyn can be found at https://www.linkedin.com/in/tamzyn-murphy-1228b332/?originalSubdomain=za
Nutrition Network https://nutrition-network.org/
Tamzyn is a registered dietitian, science writer, editor, and nutrition educator with a special interest and expertise in Ketogenic Diets (KD) and Therapeutic Carbohydrate Restriction (TCR), particularly in relation to mental and gut health. They hold a Master’s Degree in Physiology (Dist.) (2018), where their research focused on TCR in Type 2 Diabetes under the supervision of Professor Tim Noakes.
Currently, they serve as Senior Editorial Manager, Content Editor and Creator, and Contributing Lecturer at Nutrition Network, the global leader in TCR training for healthcare professionals.
As a science writer, author, and editor, they have contributed to various publications, most recently to the textbook *Ketogenic: The Science of Therapeutic Carbohydrate Restriction in Human Health*. They have also co-authored, contributed to, and edited several books, including *Sugar Free* and *Eat Right Revolution*, and have written for health magazines and peer-reviewed publications on nutrition and TCR.
Passionate about improving health and quality of life, particularly in their home country, they serve on the Board of Directors for Eat Better South Africa, a community-based outreach program focused on implementing nutritional education in lower socioeconomic communities.
Their experience also includes work in nutritional supplements (training, research, and development), as well as clinical experience in private dietetics practice and community interventions centered on TCR.
Tamzyn can be found at https://www.linkedin.com/in/tamzyn-murphy-1228b332/?originalSubdomain=za
Nutrition Network https://nutrition-network.org/
Creators & Guests
What is Mikkipedia?
Mikkipedia is an exploration in all things health, well being, fitness, food and nutrition. I sit down with scientists, doctors, professors, practitioners and people who have a wealth of experience and have a conversation that takes a deep dive into their area of expertise. I love translating science into a language that people understand, so while some of the conversations will be pretty in-depth, you will come away with some practical tips that can be instigated into your everyday life. I hope you enjoy the show!
Transcript generated using AI transcription, errors may occur. Contact Mikki for clarification
00:04
Hey everyone, Mikki here, you're listening to Mikkipedia. This week on the podcast, I speak to Tamzyn Murphy. Tamsin is a registered dietitian, and we chat all about her Ketivore approach. Haven't heard of it? Well, you're gonna love this podcast. Tamsin discusses her professional background, and how this, combined with her personal health journey, led her to a carnivore diet, and the benefits she has gained from this.
00:33
and how her experience helped her uncover more research and be able to help her clients. We discuss the many misconceptions around an animal forward diet and its impact on health, and also some of the common side effects people might experience when adopting it, and how to overcome these. We also discuss who might benefit from trying this animal forward
01:03
how you can find more information. So Tamsin is a registered dietitian, science writer, editor, and nutrition educator with a special interest and expertise in ketogenic diets and therapeutic carbohydrate restriction, particularly in relation to mental and gut health. She holds a master's degree in physiology where her research focused on TCR, therapeutic carbohydrate restriction, and type two diabetes under the supervision of
01:32
Professor Tim Notes. Currently she serves as the Senior Editorial Manager, Content Editor and Creator and Contributing Lecturer at Nutrition Network, the global leader in TCR training for healthcare professionals. As a science writer, author and editor she has contributed to various publications, most recently to the textbook Ketogenic, the science of therapeutic carbohydrate restriction in human health. She also has co-authored, contributed to and
02:01
and Eat Right Revolution and has written for health magazines and peer-reviewed publications on nutrition and TCR. She's passionate about improving health and quality of life, particularly in her home country of South Africa and serves on the Board of Directors for Eat Better South Africa, a community-based outreach program focused on implementing nutritional education in lower socioeconomic communities. Her experience also includes work in nutritional supplements.
02:29
as well as clinical experience in private dietetics practice and community interventions centred on TCR. And you can hear from our conversation that Tamsin is just so knowledgeable and we really only scratched the surface of that knowledge and I'm really hoping I can chat to Tamsin again on the podcast and dive a little deeper into this area for you. Before we crack on into the interview though, I'd like to remind you that the best way to support the podcast is to hit the subscribe button.
02:58
on your favourite podcast listening platform, because that increases the visibility and it makes literally thousands of other podcasts out there. So more people get the experience of listening to people like Tamsin and get to hear their expertise. All right, team, I've popped links to where you can find out more about Tamsin and Nutrition Network in the show notes, but for now, enjoy this conversation I've had with Tamsin Murphy.
03:29
the opportunity to get them. That's where we connect, right? So we'll have to work at that. Yeah. So Tamsin, I'm really interested to understand more of your backstory actually, because it is rare to find, or maybe it's not so rare now, but particularly when we started out, it was really rare to have a dietitian interested in a low carb approach. And so can we just start?
03:58
there really by you giving us a little bit of your background with your dietetics study. And of course, I know that you did your masters looking at LCHF. So what encouraged that from a professional perspective for you? Well, that's a very good question. So I was traditionally trained as a dietitian where we followed the dietitian's advice.
04:20
normal dietary guidelines where you make grains and starchy foods the basis of every meal with a very heavy emphasis on fruit and veggies and some legumes. You limit fat, especially saturated fat. At least we're all in agreement that you should limit sugar, so at least there's that. But then also the concern around red meat, saturated fat, cholesterol. That's how I was trained.
04:46
And so I went out into the working world within some train. I'm in, I live in South Africa and in South Africa, when you become any kind of healthcare professional, you need to go do a year of community service in the community. So I went out into the lower income communities and I did my year of community service and I pushed the same message in the clinics and in the.
05:06
the day facilities and that, and amongst impoverished people who are struggling with insulin resistant conditions, huge obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, all of that that we're seeing worldwide was no less prevalent, if not more prevalent in the impoverished communities where I did my community service here. Then I actually wanted to carry on working in that scenario, but I didn't end up working out and I moved into the supplement industry because I always had a strong interest in
05:36
the biochemical underpinnings of nutrients in the body. What do they do? What's happening on a metabolic level? I was never interested in cooking or the out-of-the-body experience with nutrients. I was always interested in the in-body experience with nutrients. What happens once they hit your body, once they hit your blood, and what are the processes behind that?
06:06
And then you can go onto Google Scholar or PubMed and into the peer review journals and research what these nutrients do in isolation and then start research and development for supplement products. And then I was involved in the research and development, the training of the RIPs in that area, and the writing of infographics and things like that, which was really a scratched my itch for my love of biochemistry. And then...
06:36
I got involved simultaneously with one of the leading health magazines in South Africa, which has since closed down. But its name was Health Intelligence Magazine, and I became a writer for Health Intelligence. Then I became the nutrition editor for the magazine, where I also took on the role of ensuring that everything within that magazine was science-based. I trained all the journalists that worked for the magazine in how to assess.
07:05
the articles in front of them, how to reference properly, how to back up what they're saying in a scientific matter that actually they weren't just saying sweeping statements, all that kind of thing, and which I really enjoyed. It was during that time, by then it must have been around 2013, 2012 maybe even, and I stumbled across, well actually in South Africa, Prof Tim Noakes.
07:30
was rising to the forefront with his new claims that a low carbohydrate Atkins-esque, that he called Banting diet, cured his diabetes and was the solution to insulin resistance and diabetes and the metabolic diseases that plague mankind. So he came up with this and all the dietitians and traditional people, including myself, were up in arms. How can he be promoting this fad diet? You know, he's this A1 rated scientist.
07:58
with the medical research council behind him. Um, you know, he's got amazing acclaim, huge numbers of citations and peer reviewed, um, journals and articles behind him. How can he be talking about a fad diet? This is insane. And so I decided I wanted to go to, uh, talk by him just to kind of see what this crazy person was saying. And in the meanwhile,
08:26
I continued to now start to write and edit articles for this magazine on the topic of paleo and low carb diets, which had now hit the media and were really of great interest in South Africa and I think worldwide as well. As I started researching and reference checking these articles, I started to see that actually there was more scientific evidence to back them up, back this kind of diet up than I had thought.
08:55
I started looking at paleo and seeing what was thinking about evolutionarily consistent diets. What are humans as a species supposed to be eating? Thinking of those kinds of things. Also looking at, I read Torbz's book, Good Fat Calories, Bad Calories at the time, and I started also reading Lustig's stuff about sugar. I started getting an idea of what was actually going on.
09:24
It was all kind of supporting notes. And then the supplement company that I worked for launched an advert for our new Stevia product, claiming all sorts of terrible things about sugar. So in this advert, we said, eating too much sugar causes diabetes, increases your risk of cancer, makes you get fat, all these kinds of claims. And the South African Sugar Association didn't like it. So they
09:52
took our company, the supplement company that was making Stevia that had this advert, they took them to the advertising standards authority complaining about this advertising. It's not true that sugar does all these things. So my company at the time said, well, why don't you go to see Noakes talk at the, at a local university where he was coming to talk as, and you can get the time off work, but you need to go talk to him afterwards and see if he'll be an expert witness against the sugar association.
10:19
So I did that. I went to his talk and I went to speak to him afterwards and I said, here's the complaint. Would you be interested in being an expert witness? Cause no one wants to stand against the sugar association. And he said, well, if it's against the sugar association, he'll be an expert witness, but he wants to write it in collaboration with me because he doesn't have too much time on his hands. So I started, uh, collaborating with Prof. Tim Noakes on, on, uh, basically a naysaying.
10:49
expert deposition against the sugar association in support of the statements that were made in the advert. Now, at this time, we must understand that I had been researching a lot into this diet and finding that actually it wasn't a fad diet at all. It potentially was the way people were eating before we started getting the chronic diseases of lifestyle that we're all plagued with, before we started seeing the obesity epidemic.
11:15
I think the first heart attack was only recorded in the early 1900s, like 1902 or something like that, if I remember correctly. In those first few years of the turn of the century, we didn't know what heart attacks were before then. They were so rare that they hadn't even been documented before. Something was happening and then obviously all of this started to really rise to pandemic
11:44
in the late 70s, early 80s and since then. We can talk about that, but I don't think that's the topic of this. So basically, that's where I started. It was the research for the magazine and then it was the collaboration with Prof. Noakes. And then he said, well, would I like to come and study further with him? And by then the bug had bitten and I'd realized that there was something big here. And so that's why I ended up doing my master's degree in low carbohydrate nutrition and type 2 diabetes.
12:13
where we did a pilot study of city participants who had already put their own type 2 diabetes into remission following Nox's advice, following a low carb diet. And so we documented these cases. We took their blood reports from before they were diagnosed with diabetes, at the point when they were diagnosed with diabetes, and then, because we have labs that we could access the results for, and then at the time that we saw them after they were in remission. And...
12:42
Yeah. And we found that they, 75% of them were in true remission as defined as normal blood glucose and HbA1c levels without any medication apart from metformin, which most people did stay on. Yeah. So no insulin, no sulfonylureas, nothing like that. Yeah. So that's where I went. And from there, I started working for the nutrition network.
13:07
which is an online training platform where we teach doctors, dieticians, nutritionists, coaches, psychologists, nurses, and even the laypeople about therapeutic carbohydrate restriction, which is what a low carb diet is called when it's used to treat conditions for therapeutic purposes. So, we train on that and it's really wonderful because I get a chance to carry on my research and to continue to learn, continue to grow, and to share the message.
13:36
with clinicians, coaches, and the lay person. And yeah, so that was my professional journey. Yeah, my personal journey is a separate one. Yes, now talk to me about this because obviously, you know, as you're learning, the information is coming to light, which is new to you about the impact that diet has on our health and how the information we were taught didn't necessarily reflect.
14:05
actually what we now understand to be sort of a healthy diet. Like how did your own eating change across that journey, Tamsin? So I've definitely been through phases. So I started out, you know, a bit more paleo and moved on to low carb. So I went low carb because I thought, well, this is clearly it's got evidence. So as I went through the evidence and I convinced myself that this was the better way for humans to eat to avoid all these diseases that we are getting.
14:35
I moved into basically a low carb space where I was avoiding grains. I was avoiding ultra processed foods and added sugars. But initially I first still included fruit and starchy veg and dairy. So not fully paleo then I suppose. But because of my gut, which I will get into, I also avoided legumes and then things like
15:03
Well, mainly legumes and cabbage would be the big ones I avoided because I knew that my gut didn't tolerate those very well. But at that stage, I was even actually including a little bit of oats, like maybe half a cup of oats thinking, well, you know, that's 15 grams of carbs. I can still stick to kind of below 130 grams of carbs, which is low-ish carbs, right? And I wasn't aiming for keto.
15:25
Then as I got more into the space, I moved into a more ketogenic diet where I excluded fruit, I excluded starchy vegetables, I definitely excluded the oats and all the grains, and still the processed foods and all that. Then I avoided milk as much as possible, except for maybe 20 mls maybe in a cup of tea, but that was it. I avoided milk because of its high carb content, but never avoided cream or a little
15:53
small portion of double cream yogurt or cheese or butter. So probably the highest carbs amongst those dairy categories would have been the yogurt. So that's kind of how I ate, but I found that I was still eating plenty of vegetables, right? So I was having an omelet in the morning with lots of fat. I wasn't scared of saturated fat anymore, so plenty of butter, rendered animal fat, all that kind of thing. But I would stuff that omelet filled with spinach and tomato and-
16:20
mushrooms and you know, all sorts of veggies, maybe leftover veggies from the night before. And then for lunch, I might have a tuna mayo salad because I wasn't avoiding seed oils either in the early stages. I was still having mayonnaise. Did Noakes not avoid seed oil? Or did you? He did, but I didn't understand why. He was all about.
16:46
No carbs, no carbs, no carbs. And I was okay, that's fine. I understand that from an insulin perspective. Because the most simplistic way of understanding it that I had initially was carbs increase insulin. Insulin puts your body into one fat storage mode. So you're gonna get fat and shuts down fat breakdown mode or lipolysis. So you can't break down fat, you're storing fat. And that goes with Torb's, which I'd read in the beginning, goes with his
17:14
energy distribution thing where all of your energy is locked up in the fat stores and you can't access them, so you need to continue to eat even though you're storing fat because now all of your fuel is in lockdown mode. Where are you going to get fuel? You have to keep eating to get the fuel to fuel yourselves, right? So I was like, okay, that makes sense. Insulin is the fat storage hormone, but it also, in high amounts in response to chronically high carb intake, it's going to continue to knock on those...
17:42
insulin receptor doors and continue to force the skeletal muscle and other cells to take up glucose continuously, continuously, continuously when they get saturated with glucose. I was like, okay, they're getting saturated with glucose. That glucose gets converted into nasty lipid intermediates. I was thinking, okay, that's not good for insulin sensitivity. Insulin resistance starts developing and then you're moving towards diabetes and all the insulin resistant conditions. I'm like, okay, fat storage problem.
18:11
moving towards insulin resistant conditions, I don't want carbs." Noke said, well, we should also avoid seed oils, processed seed oils. Okay. But then at the time, Eric Westman was still happy for his patients to be eating mayonaises and seed oils and happy for them to eat processed meats. And they were still losing weight and the diabetes was still resolving. So I was like, well, sure, you know, but what's wrong with polyunsaturated fatty acids? Even omega-6s are essential.
18:41
surely, you know, like how bad can it possibly be? Cobbs or the villain? Yeah. That was my thinking at the time. Now don't quote me on this, cause it's not my thinking anymore, but that was my thinking at the time. So I still, so I'd have a tuna mayo salad, you know, with lots, again, lots of salad-y, green salad-y things. And then at dinner, I might have stir fry or something like that with maybe a bit of chicken. Yeah. So that kind of thing. I was eating like that, but I...
19:11
I was diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome when I was 20. My gut was perfect before that. Before the age of 19, I had no gut problems. At 19, I started to develop gut problems, which were then there were scopes and all sorts of things. I was diagnosed with irritable bowel syndrome. Irritable bowel syndrome is the gut disorder that plagues humanity the most of all gut disorders. One in four people have it. I'm not really much of a minority here.
19:39
Most of the, many of the people, your listeners will also have irritable bowel syndrome. What is it? It's one of my worst diagnoses because it is an idiopathic condition. Idiopathic is a big fancy word that clinicians and doctors use to say, we don't know what the hell this is. And they put it into the, I don't know what this is box and they call it idiopathic. So it sounds like they know what's going on with you. But if you have idiopathic constipation, it means you have constipation, we don't know what's causing it.
20:09
you have an irritated bowel and we don't know why. Right? I mean, anything that's idiopathic. Yeah. Did anything occur like stress wise for you at that age that contributed to the IBS? Is that- So stress is something I wanted to talk about. So that's interesting. Yeah. So I think there were two things that happened at that age. At the age of 19, I went, it was my first year university.
20:36
and I moved out of home and I went to live in Rez. And I became vegetarian and I got very sick. I spent most of that year being very sick. And when I was very sick, I went on multiple courses of antibiotics. So I moved out of home, I became vegetarian, I became anemic, I'm deficient, so that my gums were purple and my skin was pale and I had to sleep for three hours every afternoon. It was terrible.
21:06
I wasn't getting enough iron in and I also started to get really fat. I gained six kilos, which for me was a lot and I was well above any weight I've been before or since. So it was what they call first year spread, I suppose.
21:23
I was drinking a lot of alcohol, I wasn't eating any meat, and my vegetarian food, I had no clue about nutrition, so I wasn't trying to balance any amino acids or complement foods or anything like that. I was just eating what they gave me at Rez in the dining hall. I was drinking excessive amounts of alcohol on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturday nights, and I was anemic and exhausted. Then I started to get this chronic cough that wouldn't go away. I was also living in a very, very old building.
21:50
which I think had a mold problem as well. I was living in an area of South Africa that is renowned for its bad water quality. Did mold contribute to it from the building? Did the bad water quality, I didn't even boil the water. I should have boiled it before drinking it or filtered it, but I didn't. Did that contribute to it? We know iron is a very important immunological agent. If you don't have enough iron, you get sick. It's there for the...
22:19
partially for that reason. And was I immunologically impaired? Yes. And then I went and took antibiotic upon antibiotic upon antibiotic multiple courses, messing up my gut flora. So I was even further predisposed. Basically, I was a castle with all my drawbridges down, waiting to be infiltrated by all sorts of pathogens.
22:45
And that happened. And then by the third quarter of the year, I ended up starting to get this diarrhea out of nowhere. And I was like, why? I'm not even sick per se. But I would get diarrhea. And then it started to get particularly bad around stressful times. So my diarrhea would be worse, like when I'm going into the exam room kind of thing. I have to come in late because I have to run to the loo kind of thing. So this is very typical of people with IBS.
23:12
But where did the, where, where did the IBS start? I believe it was less stress because at that stage I wasn't actually doing a very stressful degree my first year. It was quite a chilled year actually from a stress and academic stress perspective. I was having lots of fun, but I was sick. I was iron deficient anemic. I was totally not getting a nutritionally sufficient diet at all.
23:39
being vegetarian, but not even a well formulated vegetarian. And I was drinking excessive amounts of alcohol. I was not exercising. So I was living an unhealthy lifestyle and I messed up my gut with antibiotics as well. So it was just a, it's not even surprising in hindsight. No, it's like a perfect storm. Perfect storm. Exactly. Exactly. So then, you know, I actually
24:07
I don't know where I was with this, but I came home the next year to my part of the world because this was upcountry. I started doing university closer to home and I stopped being vegetarian because no matter how many iron supplements I took, I couldn't. Even the best quality ones with vitamin C, I could not resolve my iron deficiency anemia. I had to start eating steaks. So I did. My iron deficiency anemia went away. I also stopped drinking so much.
24:37
But, and I went for these scopes because my IBS didn't get better. And that's when the doctor found, oh, you've got IBS because we can't see anything structurally wrong, which is how they decide to diagnose you with IBS. They look, they do scopes up your bum, they do scopes down your throat, they do all sorts of tests. They do blood tests to check you not, you haven't got celiac disease, which is the true kind of gluten sensitivity, but it's actually an allergic reaction to gluten. They do all these tests.
25:07
or wrong with you in your blood, they will diagnose you with IBS. So that's what I was diagnosed with at that stage, at the age of 20. And then Thompson, so your shift into a low carb and then ketogenic diet, did that help resolve some of your issues? Yes. When I went keto, I definitely found that my, so I was IBS kind of mixed type, which means I was swinging from being constipated for weeks.
25:37
to suddenly being in the other direction, having diarrhea for a week or whatever, and then swinging again. So I definitely found that my energy levels went up. So remember after, by the age of 20, I wasn't vegetarian anymore, and I wasn't drinking too much anymore. But on keto, which happened how many years later, many years later, my gut started to swing less in one direction. It seemed to be more stable, more resilient. But I was,
26:07
Well, basically I almost never got the diarrhea anymore. But then the gastroenterologist said, well, now you have swung into the constipation predominant IBS category. I had such bloat that I would sometimes look like I was a few months pregnant due to the amount of bloat and it was painful, really painful. That was still happening. It's not only painful, but it's socially inappropriate to have a huge amount of gas as well.
26:36
So, you know, uncomfortable, painful, you look terrible, you feel sluggish. And it was only when I then started to reduce my vegetables that that part started to resolve. So I definitely had an improvement with keto, with plenty of vegetables. I had an improvement. I didn't get the diarrhea anymore. But...
27:01
I got more energy levels, I got higher energy levels, I had absolutely no sign of anemia, and I felt pretty good, but I was very bloated and painful often. Then that's when I moved on to a different form of keto, which is more the keto-vore. I can tell you that journey as well, but that seemed to resolve my gut issues almost completely.
27:25
I can also tell you that my IBS got worse before it got better. I was then diagnosed with an inflammatory bowel disease because I ended up in hospital twice bleeding, passed out, having to be carried to hospital because I had ulcers in my gut. Yeah, so it ended up being, okay, well, maybe you're not IBS. Maybe you actually have ulcerative colitis, which is an inflammatory bowel disease. Since then, the...
27:50
because I've sought so many doctors' opinions, specialist opinions on this. Since then, the consensus seems to think, well, actually, it was never ulstric colitis. It was always really bad IBS, but you did get ulcers and that was likely due to a combination of stress and a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medication and an infection, a gastrointestinal infection, which was then...
28:18
It looks like that actually was the cause of that, whereas I was diagnosed with osteoculitis by the surgeon who did the scope when I was in hospital. It turns out that it wasn't that. It was actually IBS, but I also got a gastrointestinal infection, which then I treated with loperamide, which stops you from going to the loo.
28:37
So then the bacteria just built up a nice little city and colony inside my gut where they started eating away at my intestines combined with the fact that I was treating myself with ibuprofen, which is a non-ceratocyanin inflammatory, which can cause ulcers alone by itself. And it was again, a perfect storm I created for myself that ended me up passed out in a pool of blood. Oh, goodness. Yeah. But luckily it turned out that that wasn't.
29:05
I clearly am predisposed to that because I've got issues, right? I think I predisposed to ulcers. I do want to say because IBS falls into the, I don't know what's wrong with you box, I think everyone should be careful because it means you're predisposed to all the other things then. Your gut is not healthy. Even though they can't tell you what's not healthy about it, it's not healthy. You've got bacterial imbalance called dysbiosis. Some people with IBS, a lot of people with IBS will have a specific bacterial imbalance called small bowel bacterial.
29:35
overgrowth or SIBO or small bowel intestinal bacterial overgrowth. Whatever you have, you probably have a mess up of the bugs in your gut. You probably have leaky gut as well. The tight junctions between your cells, the cell lining in your gut, the epithelial cells, they are probably the kind of cement that holds them together is probably not healthy.
30:03
doing a great job and you're starting to have a permeable gut, a bit like you can imagine if you stick your hand into a lady's stocking leg and you see the little holes in the stocking open up. It's a bit like that. So you're ending up with a lot of bigger molecules that shouldn't be going into your blood, going into your blood. So you're predisposed to all sorts of things as soon as you have a condition like IBS. And for me, I was catapulted into ulcers and that kind of thing. But I wanted to talk about the fiber. I reduced the fiber
30:33
in the form of vegetables when I started... Ketovor. Yes. Ketovor, I'll call it. Yes, because the... So it's rare that a dietitian will make this move. And so what I'm curious to know is like in your head, like when you were, when you thought, hmm, maybe I need to reduce the fiber in my diet to help support my gut, when you were already had removed so many other things, is any part of your brain like...
31:02
The fiber is really important for me, you know, just because we, it's really hard to unlearn information I've realized because I did the similar training to you. And so it's very difficult to unlearn that training. So did you have any sort of brain resistance there? But it was a gradual process, Miki, you know, it was a really gradual process, all of this. So because I was interested in gut stuff, because of my own gut, I stumbled across this paper which I was actually writing.
31:31
writing an article back already when the magazine was still running. This was prior, this was like end of 2010-ish probably. No, it must have been after that because the paper came out in 2012. The paper is entitled in 2012, entitled, Stopping or Reducing Dietary Fibre Intake Reduces Constipation and its Associated Symptoms. I remember I wrote an article on this idea because it became a headline study.
31:59
that actually stopping fiber might help. Now up until this point, I had been supplementing with fiber, psyllium husk, which many IBS patients do, right? I'd been supplementing with fiber, eating plenty of vegetables that were high in fiber, as much fiber as possible. And here it said that adding more fiber to your diet, especially in cases of idiopathic constipation, in other words, constipation of unknown cause, is like adding cars to a traffic jam. And I have never forgotten that statement.
32:29
Because what happens when you add more cars to a traffic jam? Does the traffic ease up? No, the traffic is worse. But do more cars come out on the other end of the highway? Probably. I mean, there's a lot of cars. Now there's so many more cars. They're moving through more slowly, but when they come out the other end, there's a lot of cars, right? Yeah. Similarly, if you add a lot of fiber in people, especially people who are
32:58
I'm not saying this is the case for everyone, but absolutely in cases of idiopathic constipation. I found it with my clients time and time again, if we reduce or cut dietary fiber dramatically, and I'm not talking just one, just the insoluble or the soluble. If you cut them, both of them, you find that often the constipation resolves and the bloating and the gas resolves and the pain that's associated with the resolves.
33:27
your stools, which eventually get passed, won't necessarily be as big, won't be as many cars, because you haven't added all this bulk to them. But you find that you need to go less often because there's less cars and you have less discomfort and less bloating, less pain. Yeah, so I definitely find that that is the case. So this led me to the whole going down the fiber rabbit hole. Should keto be a high fiber diet and meet the fiber recommendations? You know?
33:57
Should, or should it not, is fiber in the case of a keto diet perhaps not as important? And that led me down the rabbit hole of contextual nutrition. Nutrition is contextual. What you need depends on what you're eating. It's not just that there is a blanket thing that we all need, if that makes sense. It makes perfect sense. And in fact, I remember reading a paper, I can't recall when it was, maybe it was in 2016.
34:27
2018, where there are very few papers actually investigating the impact of literally no fiber on the gut in humans. But there was this one paper and you'll know it, I'm sure. I can't recall whether it was a crossover study or not. Was this a David's paper with the 10 patients and half of them were put on an animal-based diet of less than three grams of fiber a day or carbs a day? Yes, that was the one. And others were plant-based.
34:57
Yes. That was the one. Yes, and there was an uptick in bacteria like the short chain fatty acid production, which gave rise to the suggestion that actually there can be a shift in that microbiome which is favorable on a no-carb diet. There are very few papers like that. Yeah, absolutely. I think there's too few papers like that. And I think that's why we really need to start publishing more papers. But I can definitely recommend from a Mac…
35:26
mechanistic perspective to look at Scholl, Mailing and Woods paper, which was published. I know it's a review paper, but it reviews a lot of really interesting stuff. I can't remember when it was published. I think it was relatively recent. 21 or 20 or something? Something like that. Yeah. So they go through all the arguments for the problems or the benefits for the gut.
35:52
with a low carbohydrate or ketogenic diet. They also refer to that David's paper. In the David's paper, they put the people on an animal-based diet or a plant-based diet. The animal-based diet was less than three grams of carbs a day. The plant-based diet was plenty of carbs and fiber. They found that the diversity of the bacteria didn't change with either diet either. It was just the types of bacteria. Scientists think that
36:20
Alpha diversity, which is how diverse your bacteria are, that is a sign of good gut health. If we see a reduction in alpha diversity, we think gut health is getting worse. But there was no reduction in alpha diversity in that study. Like you said, they found that it was merely a change in the types of bacteria. It was a change in the animal-based diet. It was a change to more...
36:48
What is it? No, in the plant-based diet, there was more short-chain producing bacteria, but in the animal-based diet, they found that there was more short-chain acids produced in other ways, and there were more of two other short-chain. So I think it's getting complicated, but can I break that down quickly for your listeners? Because I feel like we're in the weeds a little bit, and I just want to explain where we're going. Yeah, do it. Okay. So short-chain fatty acids are exactly what they sound like, right?
37:18
fats that are short. Now you get long fats, you get medium fats, and you get short little fats. These are short little fats. Interestingly, ketones, which comes from the ketogenic diet, they are short chain fats. They are short chain fatty acids. Ketones are short chain fatty acids. One of them that we produce inside us, which is said to have a lot of the good benefits of the ketogenic diet, is called the three, but one of them is called the beta hydroxybutyrate.
37:47
BHB, but importantly is the word butyrate because fibers purported benefits are from being converted or broken down by bacteria into a short-chain fatty acid called butyrate. We make butyrate on the inside when we have a ketogenic diet and that butyrate is called beta hydroxybutyrate. Our microbes in our gut can convert fiber into butyrate as well.
38:15
So there's two ways you can get butyrate. One is through the gut fermentation, and one is through your blood by eating a low carb diet. So importantly, the benefits of fiber are thought to be mainly from butyrate. But when you're on a ketogenic diet, you might not be getting as much fiber, especially if you're doing a ketovol or carnivore diet, but your body is going to be making plenty of butyrate from the inside, which can access the cells, the gut lining
38:45
as well. So the gut lining can be accessed through blood from the inside, or it can be accessed through the lumen of the gastrointestinal tract, so where your food sits. And the epithelial cells of your gut need butyrate. They eat butyrate. That's their fuel. So if you don't have enough butyrate for your epithelial cells, they're going to start to...
39:07
malfunction, shrink up and you're going to get gaps in those tight junctions that we spoke about earlier as well, which is going to cause the gut to let things through that it shouldn't let through. But you can feed your gut either from the inside through a ketogenic diet and short chain fatty acids that way or from the lumen. Also interestingly, when you eat a ketogenic diet that's low in fiber, you're not going to be making butyrate, much butyrate, from the inside of the lumen, but you will make butyrate alternatives that do the same thing as butyrate.
39:36
These are called isobuterate and acylcarnitine, as well as isovalorate, I think. But basically these are produced from protein and bile respectively, and they go into the same pathway and feed the cells in exactly the same way as buterate does. In fact, they might even be more potent. So in other words, you can feed your gut cells and make a healthy gut by eating fiber, which gets fermented into the short-chain fatty acids. Or you can eat a low-fiber diet.
40:05
ketogenic diet that produces just as much short chain fatty acids to feed the cells, but it does it in its different way. And is that your, I have a question later on, which I know that we won't get to any of those questions today as we talked about, which is fine because we're actually covering a lot of them when we're just talking about your story. But is that the metabolic flexibility of the gut, Tamsin, like the ability to produce,
40:34
pathways, and maybe other bacteria as well, depending on that gut environment and what's being fed in. Yeah, absolutely. So that is what Shull Wood and Mayling's paper proposes or hypothesizes that a healthy gut is a metabolically flexible gut. So if you feed it a ketogenic diet with lots of veggies, which I just want to say isn't bad for everyone. A lot of people can tolerate lots of veggies.
41:03
And I wouldn't say that everyone has to, if you're not having problems eating a keto diet with plenty of salads and stir fries and you know, whatever, then I'm not saying that everyone has to do it the way I do it. I think there is in this space for individual variation. But if you choose to eat that way, then you're going to have a change. You'll have the same alpha diversity, same biodiversity in your gut, but you're going to have different in South Africa. We call them hoes. You're going to have different bugs in your guts.
41:33
for what you're exposing them to. And that's appropriate. Your gut is adapting to what you're putting in. If you eat a more carnivore diet, then it would be inappropriate for your gut to continue maintaining all the bacteria that produce the butyrate from the fiber because you're not giving it fiber. Why would it do that? It will rather change the bacteria so that it's more appropriate to what is being fed.
41:59
And yeah, and that would be what you're describing, Mickey, a metabolically flexible gut. And I just want to say, I do think that people with gut problems, such as myself have reduced metabolic flexibility. A bit like someone with diabetes has reduced as Profnox says, carbohydrate tolerance. They're no longer tolerant to carbohydrates. A lot of people like athletes, for example, can handle more carbs and be fine.
42:25
You know, they might be able to have more fruit and some honey like saladino, you know, and you know, more dairy. And for them, considering their metabolic health and their genetic propensities and their activity level, they can handle more carbs. So for them, it might not be a problem. But if you put a diabetic on the same amount of carbs, you're asking for trouble.
42:51
because it might still be an unprocessed really good whole food diet, but they are already – and I hate to say this – metabolically broken. They are already at a point where their body isn't processing carbohydrates properly anymore. In order to treat that, they need to go very low carb. Now if your gut is broken, like I consider my gut, my gut is broken. I can achieve remission
43:21
carb keto diet, I can end people with inflammatory bowel disease, as was also shown with Nick Norwitz. He's an ulcerative colitis patient who's recently published with Sotomayor a study on a case series on inflammatory bowel disease, people who improve substantially on a carnival keto diet. So you can achieve remission, but if you go back to eating how you were eating.
43:50
you cured. So is it a reversal? Is it a remission? And I believe it's a remission. And I believe that because your gut is so-called broken, you might not be able to tolerate things that people who are the Saladinos of the world can tolerate. Or maybe you, Miki, you know, maybe you can tolerate a more diverse diet than I can because my gut is already so-called broken. And so I have to... I think this is the reason why having like...
44:17
When people talk about like, is this healthy for me? Is this healthy? Is this like, you cannot answer that question without context because you're right. Like my big salad for lunch is healthy for me, but it's going to cause your gut's going to rip your gut to shreds. So it's not a healthy option for you. Totally. Yeah, exactly. And that's, that's, that shows again, the importance of the contextual nature.
44:42
of diet. It's contextual in who you're dealing with and where they are sitting metabolically and health-wise. But also, eating different diets makes your body need and react differently to certain things. For example, someone on a ketogenic diet, they down-regulate their proteins and enzymes and receptors that are required to process carbohydrates.
45:09
So if you give someone an oral glucose tolerance test who is fat adapted and low carb or keto, they're gonna fail, they're gonna look diabetic. Because their body has realized it doesn't need, it's not getting carbs, so why should it continue to produce all these proteins and everything else to process carbs? They're superfluous, it would be a waste on the body's resources. So down regulates them, basically the carb,
45:37
processing factory equipment. It downregulates it. We don't need this. We're throwing out the carb or we're putting it in storage, the carb factory equipment, and we're taking out the fat factory equipment that processes fats and ketones rather because we're getting more of that. And that is adaptive. That is appropriate. It's metabolically flexible. But within three days of feeding an adaptive carb resistance, or in other words, you feed a fat adapted person or keto person carbs again, they will be able to process it again.
46:06
But if you feed them carbs on the day that they're fat adapted, they've been eating this way for two years, their carb factory is in hibernation, they're going to have a blood glucose spike because their equipment isn't there at the moment. And so contextually, they are insulin resistant or carb intolerant, but it's an adaptive, appropriate physiological response. Yeah. And Tamsin, for you. So.
46:34
So you sort of went, okay, I'm going to see if I can push this a little further to help resolve more of my gut issues. And you said, was it a gradual approach to removing all vegetables? How did that look for you? And you also mentioned, which I would really love for you to just chat briefly about, is that things seem to get worse before they get better. And so I'd love you to sort of talk us through that because I see this a lot with diet and I think it's really helpful for people under.
47:03
standard, it's almost a normal sort of part of the process sometimes. So can you chat about those things? So I started to remove certain carbs or certain vegetables that I felt were irritating my gut and causing bloating. And in that way, I kind of removed the more fibrous ones. I started cutting down on the broccoli and the cauliflower and found that helped. I started cutting down on obviously the cabbage and those kind of stir fry kind of things because I found that helped.
47:33
But then the carnivore thing started emerging and I had a friend who was doing incredibly well on it, a patient and a friend actually, who was doing incredibly well on it. So I thought, well, you know what? Let me try and see because I can't start putting patients onto this who are coming to me for a carnivore diet unless I've self-experimented as well. So that was a dramatic thing. I cut all.
48:01
all plant foods apart from coffee, which I had one cup a day. So I removed all plant foods and I found that all of my gas and bloating went away. My tummy was flat for the first time in a long time and my constipation also went away. But then I removed the dairy as well. And when I did that and did a carnival diet without dairy, I found that I had a lot
48:31
I, within three days, I ended up with terrible diarrhea. And so much so, and they said, oh, well, I saw on all the forums and everyone who was doing carnival, they say, well, this often happens. You just stick with it and your gut flora will normalize and the diarrhea will go away. That didn't happen. Three weeks, I was still unable to leave the house. And I thought, well, I can't maintain this. I've got a life to live and I've got school runs to do. I've got work meetings to go to.
48:59
I can't not be able to leave the house because of this for three weeks. Otherwise, I felt great. I reintroduced fermented dairy. Actually first I reintroduced a bit of AVO as well and maybe a little bit of berries. I found that the diarrhea abated. I could do a carnivore diet, but a carnivore diet with fermented dairy and squash as well. I had squash.
49:29
I had berries and a little bit of honey and I had the yogurt or the kefir. I found that then I could be carnivore-ish. Eventually, after the process of elimination, I found that the key ingredient in that was either I had to have enough fiber, so I had to reintroduce plant foods to a certain level, or I had to have fermented dairy, one or the other. If I had one or the other of those, I didn't have those terrible...
49:57
gastrointestinal side effects that lasted for three weeks and longer, I imagine, but I was never willing to try it for longer than that. For me, and I've noticed a lot of, I've had patients since then also with bowel conditions. For them, the same thing seems to work.
50:22
I'm talking about plain yogurt, ideally raw, fermented, ideally A2 dairy if you can get it. But even regular Greek yogurt from the shops seems to work, or a double cream plain yogurt seems to work. Since then, I actually thought, well, perhaps it's to do with an overgrowth of hydrogen sulfide producing bacteria in people with gut problems.
50:49
and hydrogen sulfide producing bacteria, when they are fed a high meat fat diet, they actually produce more of themselves and you end up getting very high levels of hydrogen sulfide, which is associated with all the side effects that I was experiencing and that some of my patients with pre-existing gut conditions experienced, including diarrhea. But also it can be gut hypersensitivity, worsening of IBS symptoms.
51:17
worsening of inflammatory bile disease symptoms and even an overabundance of hydrogen sulfide producing bacteria has been associated with colorexal cancer. You don't want too much of that, but all you have to do to reduce it is to either add in a certain amount of plant foods that you can tolerate to reduce those hydrogen sulfide producing bacteria or from anecdotal experience would be to add in fermented dairy. That seems to resolve it.
51:47
you can still get all the benefits of a carnivore diet. So I really want to know what you eat on a day by day basis. And also, obviously, we met in San Diego at the Low Carb USA metabolic health symposium. And so outside of your usual environment, you have to almost make do with what's available. And I'm interested to know how your gut responds
52:17
So those are two questions. So can we start with the first one? So what do you eat on a day-by-day basis? Okay. So I eat pretty, I eat the same thing every day almost. Most of us do really. Yeah. So breakfast, breakfast is my big meal. I know a lot of people in our space, they only eat at midday and then they eat in the evening. I change that around. I eat in the morning and I eat in the mid afternoon. So those are my two meals.
52:45
For me, I like to do it early. It suits my family's schedule and that works for me. And that's also something I want to just bear in mind, tell everyone is that, you know, everyone thinks, oh, you have to skip breakfast and fast until midday. If that isn't how you work, that's okay. You still want to ideally be doing intermittent fasting to a certain degree, ideally at least 16 to 18 hours of not eating every 24 hours. But that comes naturally in most cases when you eat this way.
53:13
It doesn't have to be any particular time of day per se. In fact, there's some argument to be said that moving, shifting your window early in the day might even be beneficial. I think everyone's different again, and every family's different, and every schedule is different. For me, I will eat about 250 grams of minced beef, the highest fat content I can get. Often, I can't get it at very high fat content where I live.
53:39
In which case I make bone broth and I find a lot of fat is rendered off the bone broth that I make and I add the fat back in, in that way, to my ground beef or my mince meat. I have 250 grams of that. I have two eggs and I have chicken liver pate which I make and freeze as well. The ground beef is made, like I said, with rendered animal fat as well as bone broth in the cooking of that. Then I have plenty of salt.
54:08
And then if I don't eat my yogurt or my kefir, I'll be in trouble with my gut. So I will straight after that and I can't even wait half an hour. Otherwise I'm in trouble. So within 30 minutes of eating that, I will have my half a cup to a cup of double cream or Greek yogurt and I will have half a teaspoon of honey, raw honey with that as well. So I'm not low, low carb per se, but that's still, if you add it up, it's probably, it's
54:37
15 grams of carbs in that meal. Yeah. Then if I get snackish in mid-morning, whatever, I will have a cup of bone broth and maybe some dried beef, like biltong or a piece of cheese or something with butter on it. And then I eat again at around 3, 2 PM maybe, 3 PM, maybe 2 PM.
55:03
And then it will be something like barbecued meat or an omelet with trout and cream cheese in it or something like that, but it'll generally be smaller. So it'll be maybe two eggs and some cheese kind of omelet or a little bit, it will be a slightly smaller portion than for breakfast. And then depending on how my tummy feels, I'll decide whether my tummy feels like it needs yogurt again or not.
55:29
which is it depends on what I've eaten. So if it's like, let's say lamb chops with a lot of fat, I will need to eat yogurt straight after that again, because otherwise I'll end up with problems. So then I will have a small, I'll have half a cup of yogurt with a quarter of some honey, raw honey dribbled over it, and then I'm done. I will have coffee with cream when I wake up as well. Sometimes with cream, sometimes black, it depends. So I didn't mention that. I will also have one cup of Earl Grey tea during the day. If I have more Earl Grey tea than that,
55:58
I end up with often feeling slightly nauseous in the evening, especially if I have like a regular tea or like a salon tea or an Earl Grey tea in the evening. And that's something I also want to mention. When you've got gut issues and you fast, you can sometimes get kind of this nausea feeling. And that's I've also found not just with me, but with other patients and people around me who eat this way and who eat early in the morning. And if that happens in the evening, it often happens when you have a little snack in the evening.
56:27
it's almost suddenly you feel nauseous. Or sometimes it can happen when you haven't eaten anything, in which case I'll have some bull tongue or dried beef, and maybe some bone broth and that generally helps and cures it for me. So my snacks would be that bull tongue and bone broth, but my meals are kind of that's how my meals look and that's how I eat. Yeah, and Tamsin obviously as a woman, you know, we are always told, like, that there is a lot of
56:56
information out there that if you're a keto as a woman, your thyroid function reduces. There's nothing, as I understand in literature, to actually support that, but anecdotally we hear this. You'll have hormone disruption and people blame that solely on the carbohydrate content being so low. So if you don't mind sharing for you personally, but also in your understanding of the literature and with your client base.
57:25
Athene, have you seen with this? Because I think your experience, I think there are many people who may want to try and approach like yours, but have heard a lot of this other information that sort of stopped them from exploring it because they're afraid of these potential side effects. So I think that's a very good question. So firstly, with the thyroid thing.
57:51
There is evidence that thyroid hormone T3 reduces when you go on a low carb diet. So that is true, but the evidence doesn't support that there's clinical signs of low thyroid or hypothyroidism in that context. So I think that's really important because what that indicates is that even sometimes you find people with low thyroid.
58:16
whose thyroid hormone remains low, they actually get better on a keto diet. Their thyroid symptoms get better on a keto diet. That seems to be because of improved thyroid hormone sensitivity. In other words, you don't need as much thyroid hormone to have the end organ effects because the tissues are more sensitive to thyroid hormone. You can get away with less and not end up with the clinical signs of hypothyroidism. I'm definitely an advocate for that theory.
58:46
because I'm definitely not seeing, if anything, I'm seeing improvement in hypothyroid symptoms in my patients. In the literature also, it seems to agree with that there is no sign of clinical hypothyroidism symptoms in people who go on a keto diet. Then when it comes to carbohydrates in women's cycles.
59:10
So this is an interesting one and I'm not 100% sure, but I definitely know that from anecdotal reports, women say that just before their menstruation or the days or the week leading up to the menstruation, they often get cravings, especially for higher carb foods. And I feel that, well, and also anecdotally, again, I can't cite the literature on this,
59:39
If you give yourself a few more carbs, you often feel better and the craving goes away. I do believe in a low carb keto diet for humans. I think that's a more evolutionarily appropriate diet, natural human diet. But I also believe that our body is trying to tell us things. If your body is telling you you need more carbs, then what I do is I eat more carbs. I might have an extra portion of double cream yogurt with a bit of honey.
01:00:08
Or I might go and eat a date and then feel fine. Or I might have a couple of strawberries and then feel fine. So I think you're not going to, as long as you don't go and tuck into the ice cream, then you don't choose, don't choose highly processed foods to satiate that craving. But if it is, if you noticing that it's not an addictive thing, so some people will have cravings and it's a sign of an addictive eating.
01:00:36
But if it's rather something that comes on, you know, a week before menstruation, then your body, I think, is trying to tell you something. And I say follow it as long as you're choosing healthy whole food, real food, unprocessed way of doing that. And we know that there is a change in insulin sensitivity during the different phases of the menstrual or the women's cycle. We know that there's reduced insulin sensitivity.
01:01:06
during half of the cycle and increases in sensitivity during the other half of the cycle. I think that's your body trying to prepare you potentially for growing a baby. While your body might not end up growing that baby, it's still trying to prepare for it and it's doing things to prepare for it. You're fighting it. I don't know if that's really helpful. This isn't based on science.
01:01:32
But I say, if you're having the craving, have a couple of strawberries and some double cream yogurt or some, you know, something like that. And it seems to help. Yeah. And what about the argument for carbohydrate too, because the, and look, if you don't know, no problem at all, but I'm curious. And if any clients have had issues with actually like hypothalamic amenorrhea or like a loss of a menstrual cycle because of a keto,
01:02:01
diet or a carnival diet? No, I haven't, I haven't seen that at all. Um, look, some people seem to under eat when they go on keto, but anecdotally I'm seeing that more in men. I don't know why, but I'm not seeing it so much in women. Men often end up and some women may be too, but I'm the people who I've seen under eat in practice when they go on a carnival diet on men and.
01:02:29
Then they do need to, if you're under eating, you'll see it, you know, if you're a man, for example, in your bloods with higher testosterone and changes in your sex hormone binding globulin and things like that, go to someone who knows how to look at your bloods and figure that out. But you can also see if you're having reduced energy, hair loss is something else you look out for. But I only find that the like amenorrhea, for example, losing your period happens when
01:02:57
there's over-exercising and intentional under-eating. And I've seen that. I've seen that in clients who have gone on to carnivore and they're still scared of saturated fat, so they don't want to eat fat, but now they're not eating carbs either, so they're eating lean protein. There's only so much lean protein you can have without it becoming toxic to you. So you either eat too much and start feeling sick or.
01:03:23
you just stop eating protein at a certain level and then you're basically under eating and not giving your body all the calories it needs. So now you're under eating and then you push yourself and over exercise. Then it's the same as the female athlete triad that we see in people who under eat and over exercise on any diets, you know? Yeah. So I don't think, in my experience, I haven't seen it anymore on a carnival population with women, provided they don't
01:03:53
over-exercise and intentionally under-eat. Yeah, and in my experience, it does appear to be more a function of low calories, which are conflated, which is conflated for low carbohydrate. And this is often the conversation that I have with my colleagues in the space as well. It's like, well, yes, they are low carb, but actually they're also massively...
01:04:19
low calorie too. So if you correct the calories and you know, like the your eating approach has in the way that you described your diet, it's filled with micronutrients, it's filled with fats and proteins providing sufficient calories. And that's the aim of it. And of course, now you can absorb and digest those calories because your gut isn't ripped to shreds. And I think that's a really important piece of it. Yeah, I think that's really important.
01:04:48
I mean, have you found people going onto a carnival lifestyle, Miki, who eat, I don't know, have you found Aminoria? Are you finding that they're having menstrual irregularities when they go on women who go onto a carnival diet? Tamsen, in the small number of women that I've spoken to, because it is small, who really have adopted this lifestyle, they've done it from, because they've been forced to it from a health perspective and things resolve.
01:05:15
you know, and, but what I do know is that there is hesitation if I suggest it to people here, at least in my, in the cohort that I work with, they're somewhat hesitant. Like for them, that would be a quite a restricted approach for them and they're not willing really to do it, if I'm honest, because it feels extreme to them. So I think for people with gut issues, I think
01:05:43
this can be life-saving and life-altering for your quality of life. And then people with autoimmune conditions. That's the other group that I would say if you go carnivore. And then if you work with a qualified and knowledgeable nutritionist or dietitian who can help you reintroduce certain foods to the point where you maintain you have the best quality of life because you can eat, like for example, I can eat squashes.
01:06:10
So I can eat like a jam squash or any other kind of squash and I know I'll be okay. I can eat lettuce and I'll actually be okay. I can eat a bit of cucumber and I'll also be okay. So I've identified, I can eat berries, especially strawberries, but maybe not the blueberries with the skin too much. Then I know what point I'll be okay. If I have more than one cup of coffee, I'm not gonna be okay. I know that if I drink wine in my case, if I have more than two or three sips, I'm not gonna be okay.
01:06:38
So it's about identifying your individual trigger points, using a carnivore diet as an elimination diet, and then being carefully guided to introduce more and more foods up to your individual tolerance level. That's what I believe in. And I think it works incredibly well for gut disorders and for autoimmune conditions. Yeah, and I agree with you. And I guess the other reason why I haven't had a lot of
01:07:06
clients on a carnivore diet is that my typical population is athletes or are fat loss clients and they're not more complex gut related issues, which I think that's where carnivore is really well suited to. Absolutely.
01:07:28
Yeah. And then I'm, I think the clients that you see, Mickey, like I'm sure that they generally keto will be fine for them where they can have salads and they can have a glass of wine and that kind of thing. And I think that that's, again, I think what we're emphasizing a lot here and people need to take home is the bio individuality that exists in different people depends how broken you are in what sort of areas, which is individual, you know, or what your genetic propensities are or, you know, those kinds of things.
01:07:58
And even the case like the back to the nutritional, the dietary contextual nature of diet. I mean, if you see that someone who eats a keto diet may not need to eat fiber because they're getting butyrate in a different way. And so it shows that yes, fiber may still be very, very, very, and probably is very important for someone not on a keto diet because they are not getting butyrate any other way. Similarly, you look at things like vitamin C.
01:08:25
I think Amber Hearn covers this so beautifully in one of her lectures, which you can find on YouTube about the RDAs on a carnivore diet. She points out that people who eat just steaks or eat the whole animal, eat a carnivorous diet, they're not ending up with scurvy. They're not ending up with vitamin C deficiency. Why? They should be from the amount of vitamin C that they're eating. The theory is, well, they don't need as much vitamin C because they're eating collagen
01:08:54
reasons you eat vitamin C is for the production of collagen. But you only have to produce a lot of collagen if you aren't eating a lot of collagen. And if you're eating carnivore diet, you're eating a lot of collagen. And you can think of that. I mean, that makes sense because when you think of scurvy and you think of the salty sea dogs and the pirates who had teeth falling out and holes in their skin, that's because their collagen, their connective tissue is degrading, right? That's what vitamin C deficiency looks like. But if you're eating it in a preformed manner,
01:09:22
you probably don't need it as much. Similarly, I mean, if you're eating a lot of omega-6 fats, you might need a lot more omega-3 fats because the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 is important for health. Whereas if you're eating almost no omega-6 fats, you probably can get away with a little bit less omega-3. So again, there's this contextual nature to nutrition where RDAs aren't the same for everyone actually. And we need to redefine what
01:09:49
what is nutritional sufficiency within different dietary contexts? Yeah, I love that, Tamsin. And that is a perfect way, I think, to round out our conversation. Literally, I could actually talk to you for hours about this. But I think that that's such a good point for everyone to consider. So the whole idea of what is healthy and what isn't healthy, it's not even a question that can be answered without the background knowledge and the context.
01:10:19
Tamsin, can you please tell our listeners where they can find out more about you and your work? Because I know that you also have been an editor for this amazing ketogenic sort of textbook plus also you're a co-author on some books and where they can find out more from you and Nutrition Network. Absolutely. So you can go to our website www.
01:10:46
And that's where you can find out more about the work that I do, find out more about the ketogenic textbook. I'm a lecturer for Nutrition Network as well. So that's where you can find us. We also are on Twitter. We're also on Facebook. And you can find me on all of those platforms as well, although I'm not very active, but you can speak to me directly if you search for Tamsin Murphy, Tamsin with a Z or ZY.
01:11:12
And then you can also search for Tams and Murphy RD and you should be able to find me But you can also find me directly through nutrition network and all the work that we do there Amazing. Thank you so much Tams and then I will include those links in the show note in addition to the gut related papers that we were referring to Thanks so much Tams and you have a great rest of your day. What a privilege to speak to you and to your listeners Thank you for having me
01:11:49
pain.
01:11:50
I hope you really enjoyed that conversation as much as I enjoyed bringing it to you. She's such a wealth of information and it was a really, really a great opportunity to chat to her. Now on the same theme, next week on the podcast I speak to Dr Anthony Chaffee about his carnivore diet. He's currently based in Perth, Western Australia, but from his professional background as a doctor and training neurologist.
01:12:19
catch me over on Instagram threads and Twitter @mikkiwilliden or Facebook @mikkiwillidennutrition or head to my website mikkiwilliden.com where if you're catching this when it drops on Wednesday you've still got a couple of days left to sign up to Mondays matter September edition
01:12:40
In addition to the usual Mondays Matter plans, I also have a four week Keep It Simple plan that tries to meet people a little bit more where they're at with regards to changing their nutrition habits. And also for the first time I have a four week vegetarian plan which is aimed to be repeated and these both come of course with shopping lists also. So that is for the remainder of this week Mondays Matter is on sale for because we kick off Monday 30th of September.
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you have the best week. Talk to you soon, bye.