Paleomedicina Clinical Open Days

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I have just returned from Zalaszentgrót, Hungary, for the Paleomedicina Clinical Open Dayswhere I listened to many interesting case reports and lectures about the Paleolithic Ketogenic Diet (PKD). The PKD is a diet that takes the best from both the Paleo and the ketogenic diets, and in its most strict form excludes all plants.

I presented a talk there as well, “Personal experiences in long-term carnivorous eating: benefits beyond carbohydrate restriction”, in which I retold my own story, made some distinctions between the goals, benefits, and pitfalls of ketogenic diets vs carnivorous diets, and showed some data I collected from the Zero Carb style carnivorous dieters who generously filled out the survey I designed. The video will be released soon, and I will post a link and the slide set then.

I have been avidly following the research of this group since I first encountered the case report Crohn’s disease successfully treated with the paleolithic ketogenic diet by Csaba Tóth et al. a couple of years ago. They have published several such papers describing the results of their clinical experience in successfully treating a wide variety of conditions with the PKD, including cancer. Given my own first and second hand experience with the unexpectedly profound difference between a ketogenic diet including plants and one excluding it, I am as sympathetic as one could be toward their approach. Nonetheless, visiting in person and hearing more about their methods, measurements, and clinical experiences deepened my appreciation for their work, and I anticipate spending a great deal of time in the coming weeks studying intestinal permeability and autoimmune conditions. Even though I have heard a little about this topic previously, I have never studied it deeply or fully understood its potential as an explanatory mechanism in the array of conditions that I know plant free diets address.

In particular, the putative connection between intestinal permeability and microbiome cultivation biased me against delving into it further, because my short, but not insignificant forays into studying microbiome research has always led me to ideas promoting plant intake which not only did I find incoherent and untenable, but they directly contradicted my own experience and that of many others. I did not realise that the mechanisms involved are perfectly consistent with plant intake causing detriment, and so this event has completely changed my attitude toward this work, and I am eager to learn more.

I am greatly indebted to all the staff from the clinic for their work, and especially to Zsófia Clemens, Csaba Tóth, and Andrea Dabóczi for their generous hosting at this event.

I also want to mention this PKD recipe book, The Human Carnivore Recipe Collection by Mária Schimmer which I understand is being translated into English!

29 replies
  3. Jim
    Jim says:

    This is exciting news. Can't wait to hear more. Having an open-mind to all this is a great way to learn and grow in health.

  5. Sharon Kenney
    Sharon Kenney says:

    Wondering, I keep trying to add some dairy fat, cheese and cream or butter. Always diarrhea ��. Is this something you have heard of before. Also, try to avoid fat on meat. Very frustrating. Doing mainly carnivore for over a year and 73 years of age. Everything else great!

  8. Spanish Voice Overs Blog
    Spanish Voice Overs Blog says:

    Hello Amber, this is Nina Hutch. I was just on the phone with my mom and thinking about how to substitute butter and not only use lard or tallow, I remembered something she used to make many years ago, when FAT was not the guilty party yet. My family is Mexican/Lebanese, so she used to make qawarma. That is a very ancient recipe. You take a leg of lamb, cut it in little pieces and put it in a pot with about 1/3 of water and cook and stir until all the fat is melted and the meat is crunchy but not burnt. Then you fill molds and keep in the fridge for months. You can cook anything with it, especially eggs. I have to give it a try! Here is an article I found. https://www.greenprophet.com/2011/10/sheeps-tail-fat-ancient-middle-eastern-shmaltz/

  9. Bill DeWitt
    Bill DeWitt says:

    Always interesting to hear more about "biome" stuff. I don't have my appendix so I've always considered it crucial to care for my biome. But like you say (in recent video), why would we need a biome but not have a way to maintain it short of daily replenishment? Makes no sense evolutionarily. I make tiny biomes in sealed jars with plants and insects and don't consider it a success unless I don't have to replenish things. And yes, it seems odd to need plant digesting biota which we must eat plants to sustain, to fix a disorder caused by eating plants.

  10. L. Amber O'Hearn
    L. Amber O'Hearn says:

    The sheep tail sounds wonderful! I'll have to look for it.

    I'm curious whether your mother added anything else to that qawarma. I've been doing something sort of similar with very fatty pork (I realise that's not halal) — slow roasting it and then putting it into a blender to make a pate. It would probably be even better chopped by hand, though.

  15. Tim
    Tim says:

    Love your writing and content, Amber! Where I can find the full description of the diet they recommend for serious conditions? I have tried searching the site. Thank you!

  17. Magnus Eriksson
    Magnus Eriksson says:

    Was your talk at Paleo Medicina recorded? It would be interesting to hear it. Also have to thank you for being open and sharing this way of eating with the rest of us. I found this WOE only recently, having been in the keto-sphere for a long time. I'm two months in and I like it! 😀

  18. Angela A Stanton PhD
    Angela A Stanton PhD says:

    Amber, are you familiar with any research on gut flora in the carnivore diet? In my migraine groups (both keto and also LCHF) I use the zero carbs (carnivorous) diet for my subjects to reverse their insulin resistance, since many have serous reactive hypoglycemia and I can go around RH events with the ZC diet very well. Some do get diarrhea but it goes away for most (not all) after a few weeks.

    As a result of such differences among the members (in terms of diarrhea or not), I am wondering about gut biome. Obviously there is no point in taking probiotics meant for the carbohydrate-based diet as that will just increase diarrhea. But so many people ask me about gut bacteria and I cannot answer–other than that the SAD diet gut flora generate butyrate–something not needed to be generated in the keto or ZC diet as they both create their on butyrate already… so do we actually need gut flora in the ZC diet?

    Do you have any info on that?

    Thanks,
    Angela

  21. Terri Compton
    Terri Compton says:

    Thank you for any and all information you have on eating carnivore. I've been strict keto for the last 13 months. It appears Ive slowed down on my weight loss. I just a week ago started reading about carnivore and have been doing it for a week. I can already see a difference in my state of depression. Thank you again.

  22. Aya Katz
    Aya Katz says:

    I recently saw two videos about the Carnivore Diet in which you mentioned that apes, and chimpanzees in particular, regurgitate and re-digest fiber several times, rather like ruminants, but without extra stomachs, and that in so doing they were able to get fat out of fiber, and subsist on the fat by metabolizing it for energy. I found that very interesting. Can you cite any scholarly articles that cover this topic?

  25. Kat
    Kat says:

    20 months on meat only and if I eat more than 10% fat on my meat I end up with explosive diarrhea. High fat does not work for everybody.

  28. Charndra
    Charndra says:

    I'm looking forward to that cookbook coming out, and yours, too! For Tim May, I'm using information collected from podcasts and videos by Drs Toth and Clemens, as well as their protocol found here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323151200_Therapeutic_protocol_of_Paleomedicina_Hungary I'm working on autoimmune conditions of psoriasis and arthritis (that was discovered yesterday in my hips, after two years being told it was something else) as well as obesity and prediabetes.

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