Hello from VT!

[Newbophyte]

Hi everyone,

I am a 24 year old guy tormented by a receding hairline for a few years. Not wanting to go the medication route, I recently found out about the Ray Peat stuff through Danny Roddy, not sure how I ran into that. I'm here to learn, and look into the Peat-arian vs WAPF stuff, and maybe cook my way to better health. I currently cook about 90% of my food, have been gluten-free since my early teens, and want to look at diet, metabolism and hormones. I am a very rank beginner, but want to get away from pro-inflammatory foods, chief among them sugar (or so I had thought). I hope to reduce systemic inflammation, do away with scalp dermatitis and feel more energetic overall.

My diet is quite varied, I just had some fruit and milk upon waking, then around noon cooked some eggs, bacon and potatoes while I prepared a giant bowl of slow-cook chili: 1.5# red beans, 2# ground beef, onions, celery, carrots, zucchini, garlic, etc. My diet has contained many more vegetables than fruits, and most of those have been cooked. I am very conscientious of the oils I use to cook with, and up until recently was consuming a lot of olive oil and using it to cook with as well. I make an effort to get animal-derived saturated fats in the form of dairy products, and am starting to eat a few carrots a day as well. I was intermittently taking cod liver oil, but have stopped that. I will do stuff like roast whole chickens, use the bones for stock, eat the skin, etc.

According to Roddy's guidelines, I should start to monitor my pulse and temperature, and will do so when I get a chance to buy the necessary equipment. Also would like to know what benefits there are to getting work done on blood levels of vitamins/minerals/etc. Is there a step-by-step guide to peating out?

PS: I was shopping for liver and oxtails and bones, they were all more expensive than steaks! What the hell is going on in the supermarket? I thought that people didn't buy this stuff!

 

[tara]

Welcome Newbophyte

Hope you find the information here useful.

There isn't exactly a detailed step by step guide. Different people emphasise and benefit more from different factors. Since we are not all in the same state to begin with, the same solutions don't work for every one. High level:
0. Learn, think, act.
1. Optimise diet for a high metabolism. Get adequate nutrition - enough protein (including the glycine containing ones like collagen/gelatin, which it looks like you are on to) and carbs (quite a bit more than protein for most people), a bit of sat. fat, micronutrients. Limit PUFAs and other anti-thyroid substances.
2. Attend to gut health. Keep it moving to avoid endotoxin buildup, avoid irritating substances. The how can vary. Raw carrot salad is one tactic.
3. Get enough red light (orange through near infra-red)
4. Keep CO2 levels up.
5. Avoid excessive stress. What is excessive varies from person to person.
6. Have a life.

There is a thread in the Diet subforum that gives some suggestions about food. From your food listing, it's hard to tell how much you are getting of thisgs, but my guess is you are probably getting a reasonable amount of protein, but a may be a bit short on carbs/sugar. Some people have trouble with too much carotene from cooked carrots. Raw is what can sweep the gut clean. Not sure which you meant.

Danny would be right that you can get useful information about your metabolism by monitoring temperature and heartrate. You can measure pulse with any clock or watch that shows seconds, but you need a thermometer for temps.
There is at least one thread with suggestions about which blood tests may be worth getting.
You can plug your diet into cronometer.com to see if you are meeting recommended daily intakes of many vitamins and minerals. Lower iron and PUFA is probably good. More calcium than phosphorus is usually good.

Where I am, I get liver and soup bones much cheaper than steak, but oxtail and lamb shanks must have become popular - they're more expensive than at least the cheap steak. But I have to go to a butcher to get them; I seldom see any of them in the supermarket. I'm considering backing off the oxtail, because the fat seems to come off liquid, so probably more unsaturated than I want. Chicken fat tends to be fairly unsaturated.

 

[Newbophyte]

I found a good source of cheap soup bones at the local Coop. At the supermarket they were 10$/lb! And liver (save for chicken) has been surprisingly tough to come by. Still working on it. The coop also sells powdered gelatin for 20$/lb or something like that. I've just got an aversion to running the stove for hours and hours, and racking up a huge propane bill.

Oysters are expensive as well, so I'm not doing that so much. I've been doing the carrot thing (I eat a bag of carrots a week anyway, cheap snack for the light-of-wallet!), and I'm also taking to the habit of adding several teaspoons of sugar to coffee/oj/milk, which I'm now drinking more of. I've been on a big long kick of eating lots of veggies and meat, but cheap meat with a lot of fat. Maybe that's what's messed up my hormones. Who knows. I'm at a 51-54 bpm HR, tracked using a smartphone, and I'm hovering between 96.4 and 97.0 for the past couple weeks.

By carbs, how many of those can come from starch, and how many from things like a salad? Are beans the antithesis of nutrition? The people demand answers!!!

 

[tara]

Peat tends to favour getting more of our carbs from sweet fruit/juice and milk, and honey. He suggests moderate to low starch (or none if you have particularly unfavourable intestinal microbiota). Lots of salad can be hard on the digestion, as can lots of beans. It's also very hard to get enough sugars from salads. Most veges give better value at less cost if they are cooked (the grated raw carrot salad is not there for the nutrition). Beans do not have protein in a very usable form, according to Peat.
Even ruminant fat like beef and lamb has some PUFAs, which are directly anti-metabolic in a number of ways. Also, as i understand it, fat does not generate as much CO2 as oxidising sugar does, and CO2 is important for a strong metabolism - it serves many important regulatory roles, and is the key to good oxygen supply to cells and tissues.

http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/vegetables.shtml

I can't afford oysters often, either. I sometimes buy a dozen, freeze in portions, and just eat 2-3 at a time over a month.
Chicken liver is better than no liver.
Your heart rate and temps seem to indicate low metabolism. 98-99 deg and 80ish bpm is more compatible with strong metabolism, acc. Peat.

Did you take a look at this thread?: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=20