The Experiment:
I am still in Japan due to a business trip and am therefore regularly invited into restaurants. Most of them do not have an english menu and so therefore the other colleagues order for me what they recommend.
I said to myself I will not make my life incredible hard here diet wise and therefore I am experimenting here now with the inclusion of meat and fish back into my diet.
I call it an experiment because it challenges all my believes about healthy eating. I get major digestive issues very quickly when I eat the wrong foods. That then also leads to whole body inflammation showing itself in painful joints and skin outbreaks.
So I had bad feelings about eating meat and fish. I was thinking this would leave me with bad stomach pain and constipation. And would probably lead to indigestion and many other issues.
As I am on a low carb diet, meat and fish fit in there quite nicely, so my body was used to digesting fat and protein.
In Japan it is common to order food and then it is shared between everybody. So no individual dishes. That was good, because I was able to choose the fattiest pieces of fish and meat.
What was the outcome of suddenly eating meat and fish again?
As hard as it is for me to write this blog-post, I have to admit, that I felt surprisingly good. My digestion improved from slightly constipated to perfect, I felt mentally very good after eating animal fat and I had no other side effects.
What is strange about this experiment is that it went along with stopping muscle spasms, which I had for several weeks now. And as I was thinking I was doing every correctly on my vegan diet, I can not imagine the reason for this. Maybe there is something in fish or meat that my body was deficient in. Or I just adapted completely to eating low carb. I can only speculate. But I will keep an eye on this and once I return to eating vegan when I am back in Germany I can judge it, if the symptoms should return.
But this diet experiment right now really challenges all my beliefs about animal products and health. Especially if they are part of a low carb diet, where the body is able to utilize the nutrients and it is not blocked by the action of insulin.
Now that I am thinking about is, eating meat and fish comes very close to the fasted state. With the difference that you are not metabolizing your own body tissues (mostly fat) but that of another animal. And because fasting usually comes with many health benefits, maybe my beliefs about meat and fish are more wrong than I thought.
Once I will be back to eating vegan I am going to observe if I have any cravings for animal products. But there are so many reasons for me not to eat meat that I am most likely only going to implement organic grass fed butter as a source of fat. If I feel that does me good.
Conclusion:
Having my beliefs about diet challenged is interesting and can only contribute to a more wholesome picture about healthy nutrition. Many studies that formed my beliefs about meat, were probably not done on people eating a very low carbohydrate diet. So the outcomes might not even be related to the properties of animal products themselves, but to the combination with foods that block the proper utilization of them.