017: Siobhan Huggins – Citizen Scientist Helping to Crack the Cholesterol Code (part 2)

Siobhan Huggins

 is an independent researcher focused on the science of keto, carnivory, inflammation, insulin resistance and how they all interact with each other. Over the past four years she has lost 80 lbs (36kg or 5.5stone), put chronic depression into remission, and made numerous health improvements - all from going on a ketogenic (and eventually carnivorous) diet. She hopes to continue learning the science so she can share it with others, in the hopes of better understanding why ketogenic and carnivorous diets appear to work for improving so many conditions, and why people sometimes struggle even when implementing these dietary strategies and doing everything "right". She is on the board of The Citizen Science Foundation, and is a frequent contributor to CholesterolCode.com where she posts on topics like lipids and immunity, heart disease, and inflammation, as well as the results of her self experiments with diet.

In this episode Siobhan continues to explain the role of insulin, cholesterol and inflammation in a low carb, keto and carnivore way of eating lifestyle. 

She talks about some self experiments she tried on herself and effects these had on her even when she returned to carnivore. Siobhan eats a high fat carnivore diet and she tells us some of the different ways she eats the fat.

Siobhan's Top Tips

1. Get baselines as soon as possible
2. ever stop experimenting and even retrying things if you’ve tried them before.
3. Do your research

Quotes by Siobhan Huggins

“A month of carnivore might be an interesting experiment. I’ll do it for a month, I’ll get blood work, it will be fun!”

“It was a couple of weeks into carnivore, and I was like, wait, this is what people were talking about? Because I was starting to get actually excited for my meals. I was extremely happy when I was eating. My entire perspective on food changed.”

“For two months after [high carb experiment] my mood was completely messed up. I would randomly start crying for no reason, super irritable, just really self critical and it wasn’t normal for me. I have this history of depression, and then I have carnivore where my energy was bursting at the seams, so great. And then I start having these mood issues again.”

“I did this experiment on purpose, it is not a moral failure, I didn’t do anything wrong. It was confusing, why isn’t this fixing itself.” 

“You know, I’ve done no dairy before, but I want to try it again. Just, you know, to see because who knows, switching things up in general can help.” 

“If I am maintaining this weight, I must have some issue with appetite or something. And essentially something has to be interfering with my appetite for me to be maintaining this weight and not losing.”  

“Before the high carb experiment, I had no issues with dairy. I had done a month without dairy before, and I was fine, I didn’t crave it, I didn’t binge on it, I could get full on it.”

“Dairy is acting as an irritant, I mean irritation can cause inflammation as part of the healing and defence response. Inflammation can lead to things like disrupted insulin and disrupted insulin resistance.” 

“When you’re sick, you can become pathologically insulin resistant.” 

“Insulin is stimulatory toward immune cells, it kind of gives them a little bit of boost and potentially why you see them go higher in infection.”

“On the one had we have what often is considered as bad, pathological insulin resistance, but there is a context where it seems kind of appropriate to orchestrate all these differences in metabolism, energy metabolism, substrate metabolism where it actually helps to fight off infection or in severe burns.” 

“Pathological insulin resistance may be part of our inflammatory and healing response and may not go away until the injury is completely repaired.”

“Eat to satiety, your body knows how much energy you’re going to need, that’s what appetite is. For me, if something is disrupting my appetite, it just has to go. I just don’t find it a good sign.”

“In what situation is a food that makes it so that I can’t regulate my food intake is a good thing?”

“There are many things that are tied into inflammation, insulin resistance, autoimmune conditions, depression, mood disorders. And if food can impact all of that, then it makes sense why someone may not see something resolve when they are eating perfect keto, feeling ok for the most part and losing some weight but their psoriasis hasn’t resolved or whatever. They then go carnivore and it does. What’s that about??”

“The overlap between insulin resistance, dealing with irritants and injury, sometimes you do need a specific environment to come back from that.”

“Things can be individual, they may depend on the context of the person, the history of the person, where they are at healthwise, probably a bunch of factors that we’re not even aware of yet. There is always a potential benefit of trying things, if you’re already in a good spot, why change things?” 

“I have people ask: Should I try carnivory? I reply: Do you want to? Is there anything you’re trying to resolve? Because if it does not sound appealing, and you’re already where you kinda want to be, then why bother? Sure, it can be an interesting experiment, it can be fun, you may find an unexpected benefit, which you may not have been aware that it was an issue beforehand. But some people do not need it, that’s the thing.” 

“If I could eat dairy without gaining weight then I would have it every single day. And I would probably be having it with every single meal.”

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Music by Bob Collum

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