Skip to main content

A Mystery, A Warning, and a Solution

If this were a short story, it would be full of foreshadowing. But like a good mystery, it's hard to connect the dots until the end. If you can't, don't worry--I'll tie it together at the end.


  • I follow a mostly lacto-paleo diet and live pretty cleanly. But I've had a sinus infection for a month, and it's survived one and a half rounds of antibiotics. 
  • I normally eat liver once a week, but haven't had the stomach for it lately. (Even when I'm well, I'm not a liver lover.)
  • A few months ago, I started buying those big, dark chocolate bars--the 70% cocoa ones--and eating one per weekend. (I know what I said last night about hating sweets. It seems to be fruity sweets that I hate; maybe they remind me of medicine.)
  • I started dreading my breakfast smoothie of butter, hot water, pumpkin pie spice and vitamins, even though I like the taste. I sometimes skipped it on the weekend. The vitamins included large doses of zinc and magnesium, a middling dose of potassium, and some GNC Hair, Skin & Nail vitamins. 
  • A few weeks ago, I started watching the video "Mello's Chocolate Party" about 10 times a day. (No link--the naughty bits aren't suitable for a family web site.) I even ordered a CD with the song "Chocolate (Choco Choco)."
  • The other night, I ate all the nuts I'd had around the house for months. Yesterday I raided the cashew jar at work.


Patterns: Large doses of zinc and magnesium. Cravings for the chocolate and nuts, aversions to fruity sugar and the vitamin drink. (Butter and spices still appealed to me, though.) No big change regarding liver, except that I didn't eat it as much. And a persistent infection. Get it? Neither did I. So I went to Dr. Michael Eades's Protein Power blog, searched for "infection" and got my answer, which I should have done a month ago.

Dr. Eades read about a young doctor, Lisa Pastel, whose patient developed a severe, seemingly intractable infection.

In going over the patient’s list of supplements [the patient's] doctor noted that along with his multivitamin that patient was taking extra vitamin A and zinc. In fact, he had been taking 10 times the recommended amount of vitamin A and 15 times the recommended amount of zinc. His doctor read up on these supplements and learned that excess zinc could cause all the problems that her patient was suffering, not because of the excess zinc itself, but because of the copper deficiency the excess zinc causes.

The doctor suspended the vitamin regimen and within days, the patient's white blood cell count was normal. (As you know, white blood cells fight infections.)

Dr. Eades cautions low-carbers:

We modern humans typically eat the muscle meats of animals. We eat steak and ham and chicken and lamb chops and pork chops....All the organ meats, especially liver, are rich sources of copper. Other foods our ancient ancestors would have eaten–seeds, nuts, and shellfish–are also rich sources. If you eat a lot of these as part of your ‘modern’ low-carb diet, you probably get plenty of copper. If you stick mainly with the muscle meats and low-carb fruits and veggies, you’ll be getting a lot of zinc, but may be walking the low-copper tightrope.

What to do?

One bright spot is that dark chocolate and cocoa are rich sources of copper, so if you can make your chocolate-coated nuts and/or your hot chocolate low-carb, you’re in business.

Chocolate-coated nuts for my health: hooray! I also ordered some sweetbreads (thymus glands, high in copper and vitamin C) from my butcher and had homemade hot cocoa for dinner. (1/2 c water, 1/2 c cream, heated in a pan, add 1T cocoa and 1t Splenda, stir and serve.) It tasted good on this cold, rainy night. I think I'll have it tomorrow for breakfast, too. Sans vitamins, except for D. I've been taking a large dose of zinc for a long time, seemingly without ill effect. Perhaps this means I'm no longer deficient in zinc.

Sources:
"Low Carb Diets and Copper" by Michael Eades, MD. November 13, 2006. http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/uncategorized/low-carb-diets-and-copper/

"The Healing Problem" by Lisa Sanders, MD. New York Times. November 12, 2006.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/magazine/12wwln_diagnosis.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What $115 Buys--Junk Food vs. Real Food

A lady recently went off about how little food $115 buys, complaining that the pile of (mostly) junk food she bought wouldn't make a week's worth of lunches and snacks for her children. Sad to say, but this looks like what I see in a lot of grocery carts.  Fat pic.twitter.com/qbM23ydaOq — shellshock (@shellshockkk) March 7, 2025 Coincidentally, I paid almost exactly the same amount today on groceries that would make lots of healthy lunches. It's filling food that won't leave you hungry every few hours for snacks. If we want to make America healthy again, this is the way.  

Celebrities Shilling for Big Soda

There's a push in Washington and ten states to ban soda (and other junk food) from SNAP, a program for low-income people to buy groceries. This seems like a no-brainer: the N in SNAP stands for nutrition, and soda doesn't have nutrients. It's liquid sugar, the last thing we need in a country full of diabetics. People can drink water for virtually nothing and save their SNAP money for actual food. Yet a number of posts from otherwise sensible accounts have opposed this.  Reporter Nick Sorter says that a company called Influenceable has been paying influencers to post these opinions. (Click on the link for the full thread.) 🚨🧵 EXPOSED: “INFLUENCEABLE” — The company cutting Big Checks to “influencers” on behalf of Big Soda Over the past 48 hours, several large supposedly MAGA-aligned “influencers” posted almost identical talking points fed to them, convincing you MAHA was out of line for not… pic.twitter.com/PpPwH9lHGe — Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) March 22, 2025 Sorter adds...

$17/pound chips! Real food is cheaper

 My latest video on YouTube: Real food is generally cheaper than junk food--the pictures prove it. I took these at Kroger and from their website in March 2025. Prices are either straight from the tags or calculated based on product weight.  Music: On We Go (ClipChamp)  First photo by AS Photography: https://www.pexels.com/photo/vegetables-stall-868110/

Not Only Cheaper, But Easier

A while back, I wrote about saving money on break time coffee and snacks. I haven't done very well putting it into practice. But a post by James Clear today got me thinking about it again: Warren Buffett uses a two-list system to prioritize things. Check it out --and follow the instructions. Using Buffett's two-list system, two of the goals I ended up with were taking care of myself and saving $400 more per month than I already am. As I said, I've been wanting to save money, and the system made me really focus on this. I came up with 11 money-saving ideas, six of which had to do with food. Buying hamburger in bulk. Ranch Foods Direct sells one-pound packages of 80% lean pastured ground beef in bundles of 20 for a lot less than Whole Foods. Sprouts only carries super-lean beef that's grass-fed, and it's more expensive, too.  Not driving to Whole Foods. Whole Foods is out of my way, and saving a weekly trip saves gas. Coffee at home, tea at work. Tea is fr...

1972: Carole King, M*A*S*H and...Food for 2014?

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning  to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and...