Dairy Sensitivity, Beef, and the Atkins Induction Plan

Beef Sensitivity?

I’ve wrestled with myself for the past couple of days about “where” to place this post. I didn’t want to discourage anyone from entering into, or sticking with, a typical low carb diet. Atkins and The Protein Power Lifeplan both work equally well for most individuals, though they do differ in application. Honesty finally won. But since the relevancy of this topic falls across several of my blogs, I’ve decided to focus here on how my current problem relates to general low carb diets.

Recently, I decided that since my weight had reached the upper limits for a maintenance phase, I would enter into Atkins Induction to carve off the body fat I’d gained – knowing that the first week’s weight loss would be mostly glycogen and water. That held true; I weighed in at 158 pounds last Friday, down almost 5-1/2 pounds for the first week.

But I didn’t expect what happened next.

I have one more day to go to keep my Atkins Induction commitment, but…I’m seriously reconsidering that decision today, because my Neuropathy is back. It first started threatening me earlier this week, coming and going, but not too painful. Today, it finally decided to stay. I don’t have any glucose testing strips on hand to check my blood sugar level, but in the past, Neuropathy has always signaled elevated glucose levels for me. I have no reason to believe that isn’t the case today.

The last time I had this problem I was following a no carb diet. Back then, blood glucose flew into diabetic territory and Neuropathy reared its ugly head to warn me. In addition, I put on an unaccounted-for roll of belly fat – even though my diet consisted of only beef and water. This time, however, a typical Atkins ’92 Induction has resulted in the same thing. Over the last two weeks, my vertigo and ataxia (off-balance problems) have grown worse. This week? My weight started going in the wrong direction, and my measurements increased.

So what gives?

I started my maintenance phase last Thanksgiving, and found maintaining the 30 pounds I’d lost on my last PSMF diet round (a protein-sparing modified fast) fairly easy. I weighed myself every day, and designed my meals to reflect the calories and carbs I needed to stay within my maintenance allotment. Even with a couple of homemade, gluten-free chocolate chip cookies, fully accounted for, I wasn’t going over 150 pounds – ever. So when I started packing on body fat, the cookies were the only thing that made sense.

I quickly returned to the Atkins Diet to stop the upward climb, which it did that first week. But then, everything started to go wrong. The only new thing in my diet? A bunch of home-grown beef someone gave me, because they’d butchered out one of their cows.

A couple of days ago, I ran into an interesting question. Someone who is dairy sensitive wanted to know about the possibility of also being sensitive to beef. That question hit me hard. I’d never thought about a connection between beef and dairy before. Beef is very expensive here, so we’ve always eaten it sparingly. Plus elimination diets do allow beef since it’s not one of the 8 major allergens. But…it got me thinking, especially since I’ve been itching all over ever since we started eating beef regularly.

If you visit any number of low carb forums or blogs, you’ll find many individuals are dairy sensitive. They don’t call it that; they say dairy stalls their weight loss, or dairy provides too many calories, so they’ve cut it out for now. But technically, that’s what it is: an allergy or food sensitivity. Regardless of which type of immune system response dairy products give, the treatment is the same: you have to give up dairy products.

Now, some can cheat a bit and give up most dairy products, rather than all of them – which is the path that I’ve been following. I use a little heavy cream in my hot cocoa, a small pat of butter on my vegetables, an ounce or two of cheese a day, if that. I also occasionally make whipped cream for my strawberries or a nice Alfredo sauce for my chicken. But I do mean occasionally.

I know I’m sensitive to dairy, there’s no doubt about that. In fact, when I first went gluten free I didn’t eat dairy at all for the first 6 months. What I don’t know is if the problem stems from the celiac disease, or if it’s a problem with dairy itself.

The tips of the villi in the small intestines produce enzymes needed to digest dairy, so until the villi have fully recovered, many individuals with celiac disease have problems eating dairy products. And since it’s the tips that produce the enzymes, that problem is generally the first to surface when you’ve been glutened – which seems to happen a lot in my life, even though I’ve tried to cut gluten out of my environment as much as possible.

What I’ve read is that cheese and heavy cream contain fewer of the troubling proteins, so when I do eat dairy, I’ve tried to restrict myself to those types of products. But what if there really is a strong connection to beef?

I tried to do an internet search for information, but that’s next to impossible these days – since Google has changed its algorithm. But I did happen to come across an article on Wikipedia that referenced a scientific study published in the Annals of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology that makes a solid connection between beef and milk.

The study dealt with beef allergy in children with cow’s milk allergy, and said that “in the literature, between 13 and 20% of children with cow’s milk allergy also have beef allergy.” But from their own personal study of 28 children allergic to beef, they found 26 children (92.9%) were allergic to cow’s milk. So for those allergic to dairy there is a possibility of also being allergic to beef, while those allergic to beef are almost always allergic to milk.

We only have a couple of rib steaks left, so not eating much beef will return shortly, but in the meantime, I have to get the Neuropathy to calm itself down. Once the body is in hyper-drive, however, that’s not as simple as just moving away from beef. When I last walked away from a no carb diet, I tried all sorts of gimmicks to get my blood glucose level under control, but nothing short of going completely out of ketosis worked.

Course, I didn’t know about the connection between dairy and beef back then – so maybe, once the body is over-reacting to beef, it over-reacts to dairy too. Only time will tell…I guess.


(For a follow up to this post, see: Food Allergies, Neuropathy, and Blood Sugar Control on a Low Carb Diet)