QuestionHi Geoff,
I wanted to say I really appreciate your advice. After reading a few of your articles I finally understand that I have a problem with milk of any kind. Which makes me a bit sad cause I loved the taste of it and whenever I could get a hold of it I would drink up to 3 gallons a day lol. I surely was addicted to it like you, also my skin would break out with pimples and my hair would fall out, almost in clumps.. now I know why ;/.
Anyway, here are my questions:
1. I was wondering if you have tried buffalo testicles or "Rocky Mountain Oysters" as they are called and if so do they taste good and are they nutritional (like enough fat in them?)?
2. What is your opinion on fasting, how long could you take one without damaging your body? I heard about AV saying more then a day is bad. But I am skeptical about this.
3. I was reading up about meat and how it stimulates your metabolism to accelerate, thereby causing you to age much more quickly then usual.. let me quote here from Stefansson
http://www.biblelife.org/stefansson3.htm:
"It has been said in a previous article that I found the exclusive meat diet in New York to be stimulating - I felt energetic and optimistic both winter and summer. Perhaps it may be considered that meat is, overall, a stimulating diet, in the sense that metabolic processes are speeded up. You are then living at a faster rate, which means you would grow up rapidly and get old soon. This is perhaps confirmed by that early maturing of Eskimo women which I have heretofore supposed to be mainly due to their almost complete protection from chill - they live in warm dwellings and dress warmly so that the body is seldom under stress to maintain by physiological processes a temperature balance. It may be that meat as a speeder-up of metabolism explains in part both that Eskimo women are sometimes grandmothers before the age of twenty-three, and that they usually seem as old at sixty as our women do at eighty."
I suppose if you lower your calorie intake or fast every other day like in those mice/rat experiments it would help you live longer (or maybe its the cold climate)? I would appreciate your opinion on this.
Thanks so much!
AnswerYeah, dairy is very addictive - not surprising given the opioid hormones in it.
Re testicles:- I was given some stag testicles at one point by a farmer, but, after a tentative attempt to chew, I threw them away. They're rock-solid when raw, and taste foul. I suspect that they're not very fatty and more like cartilage than anything, really.
Re fasting:- Fasting can be very useful, contrary to AV's advice. There are some who recommend really long-term fasts, but, IMO, these are very dangerous, especially if unsupervised by others. You hear, every now and then, of people dying after just 13 days of fasting, while others suffer irreparable harm to their nervous system.
Short-term fasting is the way to go. When I first started on AV's diet, I would usually follow his advice re frequent small meals, and couldn't understand why I was always so tired(this was after I cut out the raw dairy-intake). I soon found that I did better when I practised a "Warrior-Diet"-type routine of just one large meal a day, usually in the evening or late at night. (I ought to mention that, to avoid fatigue, I don't eat a small meal in the mornings as recommended by the Warrior-Diet guru, and I definitely do not endorse his diet as a whole, as it recommends cooked food and a number of very dodgy processed supplements).
Anyway, in my view, occasional short-term fasts lasting up to 3 to 4 days are fine, as long as you make up for the fasts by eating more on the other, non-fasting days.
Re Stefansson:- While it's always interesting to read about the various diet-gurus' ideas, IMO they are often full of dubious claims. In Stefansson's case, I reckon his notion of meat-consumption leading to aging is not really credible. Certainly, if the Eskimos really had aged at the extraordinary rate he claimed,solely for reasons of diet, it would have been noted by many other researchers.
Actually, I read elsewhere that switching to a grain-filled Neolithic diet was the reason why Neolithic farmers quickly outnumbered their Paleolithic hunter-gatherer contemporaries. You see, fertility(and time of onset of puberty) in women is, to a large extent, dependent on fat-content, and since it's much easier to get fatter on a grain-filled diet than on a Palaeolithic diet high in meat/fat, this meant girls on Neolithic diets reached puberty earlier, and were able to have more children(though at the cost of greater ill-health:-
http://tinyurl.com/2u3xhs
If you check the data in that report, you'll find that the average lifespan of meat-eating paleolithic man was higher than that of grain-/dairy-eating Neolithic man, despite the fact that the more settled Neolithic man had greater protection from the rigors of nature, being better able to store food for longer etc.
Re IF:- Intermittent Fasting(eating as much as you like on day, fasting the whole of the next) does seem to be the best method. So far the scientific studies indicate that mice do much better with Intermittent Fasting(IF) than on a Caloric Restriction Diet, without the negative effects of the latter. While no study has actually been made on humans practising Intermittent Fasting as such, studies of humans on calorie-restricted diets has shown that, while they live longer, they are subject to the same problems(such as constant fatigue etc.) as the mice in similiar experiments.
In my own case, I feel much better on those times I've practiced IF, (as long as I restricted myself to the one large meal over a 4-hour period on the non-fast day). The trouble is that maintaining such a fixed, on-off schedule is very difficult to sustain, since food-producers can be very unreliable with their deliveries, and social obligations/time-constraints etc. require me to eat on days when I should fast etc. I usually settle, though, for fasting for two to four (non-consecutive) days a fortnight.
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