As ever with these kinds of questions, I really do my best to never talk of anything as being "bad", but rather about the different things they do and how they might affect us depending on our current state of health, and its much the same with vegetables.

What I suggesting here is that most vegetables have evolved extremely good ways of essentially saying"please don't eat me", which involve many different anti nutrients specifically designed to make them less easy to digest and process, such as the lectins, phytates, oxalates, and others.

When we take these compounds in by eating (especially) undercooked or raw vegetables and starches, this can slowly create damage over time, but is also especially dependant on our current energy and levels of function. Of course a healthy young 20 year old can eat whatever they want and feel (mostly) fine....but if your gut is already in a bad way, your digestion already out, and perhaps you're living with SIBO, those fibrous vegetables can certainly make things worse.

Similar with starches, the more fibre available tends to mean more food for the gut bacteria, ALL of which can produce endotoxin, our main source of endogenous inflammations, and thats what so many people do feel better for a time on keto/carnivore/paleo type diets, because they are removing most of those irritants from their diets....with the eventual cost of low thyroid function.

So - depending on how you are and how your gut is doing, you might be fine having vegetables, especially if they are well well cooked and prepared, and for those of you maybe not doing so well, taking most of the vegetables out, at least for some time and focusing on highly digestible foods, might allow your system to recover.

This is a hard one, especially as many people are vegan for moral and ethical reasons, rather than believing that eating plants is always healthier.

I'm not going to lie to you...in my understanding, getting animal proteins and fats is something we have been doing since before we were human, and a vegan diet is something utterly and completely new to us as a species....I don't know that most people could get to the best level of health on a purely vegan diet - and I would say the same thing about a carnivore diet.

I know there are outliers, likely people who were dealt extremely good hands at birth and through their parentage both genetically and non-genetically inherited, and that yes athletes can be vegan too - though I make a note to suggest that athletes are FAR from the people we want to be basing our health on whether vegan or not.

If you choose to continue living a vegan lifestyle, then there will simply be more things that you might want to be thinking about, from bioavailable supplements, especially of copper, iron, the b vitamins, and proteins, to trying to lower the plant fats aside from coconut, olive, and cacao, and ultimately I would consider working with a metabolic coach who can help guide you through some of the other pieces that are worth putting some time and energy into learning.

Yes...I get its a lot! - Sorry about that - my best advice is to give yourself some time...you don't need to make every change under the sun by today or even tomorrow....or even by next month...let yourself process and take things in and give yourself a chance to drop into what you do next - perhaps just start smaller by trying to remove the polyunsaturated fats, then slowly add in a bit of gelatine or glycine to support your liver.

If you want some more learning and a chance to ask me questions personally then sign up for my "Basics" course, where we'll be going through many of these topics more fully, or spend some time working with one of the other awesome metabolic coaches by clicking "The Field" link at the bottom of my page.

Go gently with yourself, and don't let the changes become a stress in themselves.

See - I LOVE this question, and it's one that gets asked in almost every single seminar I hold, and I tend to find myself for the most part rephrasing it into something that sounds a bit more like "Isn't it better to just be natural?".

This is very much the standpoint of people coming especially from the paleo and low carb communities - the idea that we should simply be eating what our "ancestors" ate in order to be healthy.

My response tends to be twofold.

First - That we do not really know what it is that our ancestors ate - we know that they were eating animals as we have found plenty of bones besides ancient dwellings, but as plants do not preserve in the way bones and skeletons do, we have no real idea of whether or not they were consuming, for instance, sweet fruits, honey, and sugar cane as a large proportion of their diets.

The best way I know of at guessing what our ancestors were eating is to look at traditional and indigenous cultures today and to see what they are eating now, and, as far as I'm aware, they eat basically everything the environment provides them, including, whenever they can, vast quantities of ripe fruit, honey, and high quality carbs, as well as animals nose to tail.

Secondly, my response would be that, whatever our ancestors ate, we do not live in the same environment they lived in, and the stress to our systems that we live now on a day to day basis are far FAR greater than they ever had to cope with. Yes they had to occasionally run away from something that was chasing them, but other than that, and especially when comparing to modern hunter gatherers, their days were spent gathering food, talking, playing, and dancing in the community, drinking pristine water from unpolluted sources, and eating extremely nutrient rich diets which included nose to tail animals and everything else in their environment.

They were supplementing their diets with hormones such as thyroid, progesterone, and testosterone via organ meat consumption, and (something I only realised recently) were probably also consuming sugar cane - considering we evolved in South Africa.

So - I believe in supplementation because we eat a nutrient deficient diet in a world full of wifi, chemically altered water, 9-5 jobs, taxes, high PUFA diets, calorie counting, single parent homes, vaccinations and medications, blue light and lack of sunshine....and much more.

The idea of "only eating natural", to me, only makes sense when we live in a natural environment - we need MORE than our ancestors had.....and most of us have FAR LESS.

I would say that certainly regardless of whether you currently have problems digesting dairy or not that calcium is still incredibly important to get in the diet or via supplementation.

Something interesting to think about is that, in the metabolic understanding, dairy or lactose intolerance doesn't come from some pre-defined genetic basis, and most of the people I know who are dairy intolerant were not always so. Metabolic theory would suggest that dairy intolerance comes largely either from damage that has been done to the gut, often over time, via PUFA, endotoxin, pesticides, and other such inflammatory substances, or from simply not eating dairy for extended periods of time.

I know Danny Roddy often speaks about his intolerance to dairy simply fading away after correcting his gut and bacterial endotoxin problems for instance, and many people are actually able to begin consuming dairy again if they take it slow and steady in the doing, as it takes time for the digestive system to up-regulate production of the lactase enzyme needed to digest dairy if we haven't been eating it for a while.

Ultimately it will be individual and contextual based on how you are doing right now, but my experience tells me it tends to be worth it, as consuming milk and dairy has plenty of benefits and is such an easy and plentiful source of calcium, protein, stabilising fats, and various other nutrients.