Well, I did have to tell him.

It’s lovely to deal with ignorance. First, you have the cowboy I gave mention to in my end-of-year post. Apparently, those who just take other people’s word for stuff don’t fall far from the tree and so Eric posted this:

I was 250lbs. 1 year ago, now I am 190….my secret….a blendtec blender. I never ate my greens and did not get enough fruit and i was relying on meat as my only good source of protien. Ate too much dairy and cruddy sugary snacks.

Well…I cut dairy down to rarity and I cut out cane sugar all most completely , and than replaced 1 to 2 meals a day with 60 oz. Fruit and or veggie smoothie, with legumes or nuts.

Worked great. People even say I look younger, my complexion cleared up and I don’t look pasty anymore. I have muscles where I didn’t have muscles before. And I actually have abs….I did not for this, they just came out of nowhere…I have read that abs and or muscle in general is mostly created by your diet… (scientific stuff told me so). And take that to the bank……fresh food.

So in conclusion, I call BS on elixa.

Bold words, but unwittingly, he only demonstrated how feeding the gut microbiome (which Elixa and other things do too) is very important. Of course, it’s also important to focus on real food, cut out the crap; so admittedly, there is confounding variables here. But, since he and his apple tree saw fit to attack me, Elixa, and my promotion of a great product, I have no problem pointing out how they are being plausibly hoist by their own petard.

My reply:

Oh, so now you want my critique. OK then.

First of all, there’s no need to call BS on any high-end probiotics, ones that actually get to your gut. But they can, depending, be beneficial. For example, for people not as fed-up as you got to be (my weight loss from 240 to 175 is similar), they can really help smooth appetite and cravings (gut-brain connection, and do realize that you are being dismissive from pure ignorance).

You toughed it out. Me too. I used Intermittent Fasting and very heavy lifting for my age and lack of experience (i.e, 325# deadlifts for reps at near 50 yoa, squats 250#, etc). Lots of stuff works and as a fairly prominent “paleo Diet” blogger since 2008, who has changed position many times due comments from my own readers in my own posts (how elegant is that?), I’m kinda almost left with only the fact that it’s the “spirit” that counts.

You’re missing a piece of the puzzle. Gut bugs feed primarily on fiber, from fruits and vegetables. The sorry reality is that so many get themselves into a false dichotomy where it’s either a high meat/fat, or vegetarian.

Both is better. Animal foods are very nutritionally dense (4 oz of beef liver = 5 pounds of mixed fruit & berries in terms of micronutrient density; and oysters, mussels, and clams are crazy dense with low calories on the ocean front), but generally lack the stuff that feed gut bugs, and they actually synthesize many vitamins, given proper substrate. They also influence hormones, pre-hormones, and can even synthesize fatty acids like butyrate, a principle food for colonocytes.

So, long story short, you stumbled on a great strategy. I’m presuming you didn’t stop eating highly nutritionally dense animals, but you made the gut-bug food more palatable and wow, you demonstrated that the gut is hugely important, because your enzymatic digestion doesn’t get tons out of fruits and vegetables. It’s your 100 trillion bacteria, 10 times more than your human cells, in upwards of 1,000 species, in perpetual chemical warfare with each other, who do.

Basically, we’re all arms suppliers.

Cheers, and great job. I love success stories like that, where a person’s own level of outrage has been reached. I have tons and tons of them on my blog, in pictures, always unsolicited.

So, as always, I will absolutely use anything I think might help people with their struggles and in point of fact, I’d never really totally connected the dots (never really thought about it…I have many faults too) that if you find an important quantity of gut food unpalatable because whatever (there is no shame in being a meat/fat addict), then just tossing in the towel and asking “will it blend,” just might work for you (do note he didn’t add dairy or sugar—could be a critical variable)

But, please understand how. I followed up in a subsequent comment.