Foggy brain sensation

Question
Dear RawPaleoGuy,
I read about the Primal Diet and immediately decided to follow it. It was some 6 weeks ago. As a side effect I get the 'foggy brain' sensation. I do drink a few glasses of wine every night. Maybe this is the reason?
But then I did not drink for two nights and the foggy brain sensation was still there.
A week ago I started eating some cooked meats too.
Now I am afraid that this foggy brain is not going to go away for the rest of my life and I am thinking to give up the paleo diet.
What to do?
Could it be the wine?
But I drunk wine every night for more than 10 years!
I'd appreciate your advice, thanks!

Answer
When one transitions to a rawpalaeo diet, one usually experiences a mild to major detox where one gets rid of toxins built up from years of eating cooked-foods, additives etc.  In my own case, I had diarrhea for a  2-3 day period immediately after going raw,  before things returned to normal, but others have experienced different short-term  symptoms.

Usually, eating any cooked-food or toxic substance such as alcohol, can interfere with the body's healing, and can cause side-effects as the body gets rid of the toxins from that food. In my own case, I've  found it difficult to drink alcohol on a rawpalaeo diet, as I would have to make frequent trips to the bathroom/toilet shortly after drinking more than a glass, as my body needed to get rid of it fast. Nowadays, I do very occasionally have to drink alcohol for social reasons(3 or 4 glasses a year!), but I always make sure to drink alcohol which has the lowest amounts of preservatives/congeners in it(these tend to be the more clear, non-coloured  types of alcohol such as white wine, clear gin, vodka, the German variety of schnapps etc.) - it's these congeners(used as colouring agents and preservatives) that worsen one's hangovers.

It is possible it could be the wine that's giving you problems, especially as you seem to have been  drinking several glasses a day, at times - 2 days is a bit too short - the cooked-food is also likely to be an issue.

My suggestion would be to lay off the cooked-food and the wine completely for a couple of weeks, to see if there's any improvement. If there is, then you may have to experiment on your own to see if there is a minimum amount of alcohol/cooked-food that your body can take before suffering such side-effects.

Another possibility is that you could be suffering from a food-intolerance/allergy  to one or more of the main Primal-Diet foods. The Primal Diet tends to be rather artificial in variety, containing many allergenic foods and being rather limited nutrient-wise:- A very large number of rawpalaeodieters report side-effects from raw-dairy consumption(with fatigue being a common characteristic) - others have reported problems with the veggie-juice, or with  eating huge amounts of raw foods(raw food has much higher nutrient-levels than cooked-food so that you don't actually have to eat as much), along with side-effects from  the huge amounts of raw eggs and raw honey that Aajonus typically recommends.

My own solution to these side-effects was to go in for a raw version of the Palaeolithic diet, incorporating a variety of raw  organ-meats along with the raw muscle-meats, making sure to have lots of (non-dairy, non-egg) animal-fat(marrow is my favourite), cutting out dairy completely and greatly limiting raw-egg consumption, as well as cutting down heavily on the raw honey(comb).

If my previous suggestion doesn't work, I would strongly suggest that you then experiment on your own to see which raw foods work best for you, and which don't. Everyone's needs are different, after all. There's no such thing as a one-size fits all diet, even with regard to raw food.
Geoff

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