Will I not get sick without roughage?
If you have read this far down the carnivore pages, Then this is the one where most people get stuck. I recall when I was vegetarian, having read that a healthy colon required the person to go three times a day for a number 2!
I certainly managed twice a day and was a wee bit concerned about the conveyor-like lack of movement. Furthermore, I was always bloated, windy, and a tad anxious to as they say “Keep it moving bud!” I believed that I needed extra fibre to keep my colon scoured clean and healthy.
The colon is very absorbent, if you ingest poisons they can easily be reabsorbed. This was a real obsession, for the colon attempts to protect itself with phlegm when it gauges that poisons are travelling through it, and this very sticky phlegm can build up on the inner walls of the colon.
So what is poison to the body? In general terms, sugar, milk and derivatives. For numerous people (not all), citrus fruits (not lemons or limes). Pretty much anything you eat that creates phlegm in your sinuses will do the same at the other end.
And so, I was involved as an alternative therapist in a thriving market of herbs to detox. and cleanse the colon. And my market was? Vegetarians!
Finally, freedom from roughage
What sent me down this alternative road of eating was my suddenly ballooning to 18.5 stones in weight within a matter of 2 years. One of my observations at the time was the size of my ascending and descending colon on either side of my abdomen, when I coughed it bulged outwards!
What is the truth? Did I need all that fibre? I have been a full carnivore for 3 years. My present weight is 12.3 Stones my large intestine has shrunk considerably, and I can share with you, quite unequivocally, that my bowels work better without the fibre than with. – In my case, as long as I don’t eat cheese.
For some strange reason, the cheese will totally constipate me by stopping peristaltic motion within my intestinal tract, otherwise, as long as I eat fat I have small but satisfying number 2’s. Why is this?
Protein is completely broken down by stomach acids and usually fully absorbed in the small intestines, but fat is worked on by the gut bacteria which die and replicate, and what comes out of the other end, true for everyone is dead bacteria, and I imagine, intestinal lining past its sell-by date. So, without the roughage, the stool is soft and easily disposed of.
For those that eat plenty of roughage 50% or so will still be dead bacteria as well as the roughage, which, once in the colon, unless it flows quickly through the system, will be dried out and block the exit.
So if we look at this issue from a slightly different angle? A cow has regular evacuation from its fourth stomach which unlike our colon still functions fully with regard to breaking down and absorption, in this case, the roughage. For it is here that bacteria will create the fatty acids so essential for the cow’s fuel supply.
And so the Cow’s fourth stomach walls are solid and robust, The tube of our colon, by contrast, is paper thin, so much so that when operating on someone the surgeon has to be extra careful not to accidentally cut it, and contaminate the innards with infection.
So we have this paper-thin large intestine, and we have an exit smaller than the width of a large chicken egg, we eat all that roughage for which we don’t even have the bacteria, let alone a suitable stomach in which to process …well… something has got to give…
Let me end by sharing a wonderful and humorous lecture by Dr. Zoë Harcombe – titled ‘What about fibre?’ given at Low Carb Denver March 2019
