Bro. Why So Angry?

When Carnivore Fixed Everything... Except Your Short Fuse

TL;DR

• Doing carnivore or keto "perfectly" but still snapping at your kids over nothing? Hidden mineral imbalances and heavy metal burdens are sabotaging your brain chemistry—no amount of ribeye fixes copper toxicity or magnesium depletion
• Blood work says you're "normal": Standard panels measure what's circulating right now to keep you alive, not the 2-3 month accumulation of toxins and deficiencies buried in your tissues
• Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis (HTMA) reveals the real story: Practitioner-only access to the gold standard test that catches what blood can't—copper shells, calcium traps, sodium/potassium inversions that fuel unexplained anger
• Low-carb doesn't auto-correct decades of accumulation: Amalgams, childhood vaccines, tap water copper, soil depletion—your diet optimizes what you have, but can't erase what's already stored
• Cost-effective data: $225 for 3-month metabolic records vs. years of trial-and-error supplementation that might worsen imbalances

"I feel way better on carnivore—like, my gut's finally good, brain fog's gone. But I'm still kind of a dick sometimes, you know? I'll just lose it on my wife over something stupid. It's getting embarrassing."

You've said some version of this. Or you've thought it.

You fixed your diet. Nose-to-tail, fatty cuts, no seed oils. You're seeing the sunrise every morning. You touch grass—literally. You block blue light after sunset. You train regularly, lift heavy things. All the stuff the Bitcoin health guys say to do.

Your gut healed. Inflammation dropped. Energy came back.

But you're still going zero to sixty over nothing.

Your spouse says something—barely anything, really—and suddenly you're furious. The kind of angry that makes you say things you regret five seconds later. You look at yourself afterward thinking, "What the hell just happened? That's not me."

Or your kid spills juice for the third time today and you snap. Way too hard. You see their face and immediately hate yourself for it.

"It's affecting my marriage. My relationship with my kids. I can't keep doing this."

You're doing everything right. So why are you still like this?

Here's the truth: You're not weak. You're not a bad person. And you're definitely not crazy.

What you're experiencing is biochemical. Mineral imbalances and toxic metal burdens hijacking your neurotransmitter production, locking you in fight-or-flight mode. No amount of discipline fixes broken biochemistry.

The worst part? Your doctor says you're fine.

The Illusion of "Normal"

Maybe you mentioned it at your last physical. The irritability, the short fuse.

"Your blood work looks good. Cholesterol's elevated, but otherwise you're healthy. Stress, probably. Have you thought about therapy? There's medication if you need it..."

They didn't run a mineral panel. Didn't check for heavy metals. They measured what keeps you alive today, compared it to a population that's 70% metabolically broken, and sent you home.

Here's what they won't tell you:

Standard blood work is designed to catch disease, not optimize function.

Blood levels stay tightly regulated for survival. Your body will steal calcium from your bones to keep serum calcium "normal." It hides magnesium inside cells while blood levels look fine. It masks copper toxicity by clearing heavy metals from blood fast—pushing them into tissues where they accumulate for years, doing silent damage.

Dr. Lawrence Wilson, who has researched mineral analysis for over 40 years, explained it this way:

"Blood is kept relatively constant even when pathology is present... too much variation is dangerous. Hair minerals do not circulate and pose no threat to the body. Values often vary by a factor of ten or twenty, making measurement easier and providing a tremendous amount of knowledge about the cells and the soft tissue of our bodies."

Functional medicine works differently. It uses optimal ranges, not average ranges. It compares you to healthy people, not sick ones.

Think about it like this: Standard medical labs are measuring fiat currency in a collapsing economy. Everything looks "normal" by their standards because everyone's broke. Functional labs measure your actual stack—real assets, real storage of value over time.

Blood is a single block. Hair Tissue Mineral Analysis is the blockchain—three months of metabolic history, permanently recorded.

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What's Actually Happening Under the Hood

You're eating clean, training consistently, optimizing circadian biology, and still walking around like a lit fuse. That's not a diet problem. It's not a discipline problem.

It's copper. It's magnesium. It's a sodium/potassium ratio screaming "Stage 4 stress" while you're convinced you're handling everything fine.

The Copper Problem

Most carnivores don't know this: excess tissue copper drives the kind of anger that seems to come out of nowhere.

Not the copper you need for enzyme function. Copper your body can't properly use—the kind that gets trapped in your liver, bound up by estrogen, accumulating from decades of exposure you didn't choose:

• Tap water running through copper pipes
• Prenatal vitamins loaded with copper oxide
• Birth control pills taken years ago
• Copper IUDs

When copper accumulates without enough zinc to balance it, it spikes norepinephrine—your fight-or-flight hormone—while crashing GABA production. GABA is your brain's brake pedal. Without it, you're stuck flooring the gas with no way to slow down.

Here's the problem: blood tests won't catch this. Serum copper stays "normal" because your body clears it from the bloodstream fast. But tissue copper—what's trapped in your liver and brain—shows up clearly in hair analysis.

Here's what happens: Extra copper kicks out zinc, and without enough zinc, your body can't control where copper goes. It builds up in your liver and tissues. This amps up your stress hormones—the ones that make you want to fight or run—while crushing your calming brain chemicals. Your body goes through progressive stages of stress response until it hits exhaustion. That exhaustion shows up as flipped sodium/potassium levels on an HTMA, and you feel it as constant inflammation and a hair-trigger temper.

High hair copper combined with low zinc creates what practitioners call a "copper shell" pattern. Your body responds to copper overload by depositing calcium around tissues—essentially putting up walls to try to contain the damage. But those walls don't fix the problem. The copper is still there, still driving up your stress hormones while your calming neurotransmitters stay depleted.

The Magnesium Lie

Your blood magnesium is probably "normal."

Yet you're probably severely deficient.

Here's why: Only 1% of magnesium exists in your bloodstream. The other 99% is in cells and bones. Your blood will rob tissue stores to maintain equilibrium, which means by the time blood magnesium shows low, you're already in crisis mode.

When you're low on magnesium (which blood tests miss), your brain's excitatory signals get stuck in the "on" position. It's like your nervous system is constantly revving at redline. Your brain is literally on fire. Your cells can't relax—the channels that should close to let you calm down stay jammed open. Your body's "rest and digest" mode can't kick in. You're never truly calm.

Carnivore provides bioavailable nutrients, sure. But if you're a fast oxidizer—burning through minerals at an accelerated rate—even a perfect diet can't keep up with depletion. Especially when modern soil quality is terrible.

The Sodium/Potassium Inversion

You probably thought you were doing the right thing. Salting to taste. Maybe using LMNT packets. "Remineralizing" because everyone on your socials says to.

But here's what they don't tell you: a high sodium/potassium ratio is a red flag for inflammation and adrenal exhaustion.

When you're in the exhaustion stage of stress, sodium climbs while potassium tanks. Your adrenals are screaming. Your body is in full defense mode. You feel it as constant irritability, explosive anger, zero tolerance for minor stress.

Adding more salt? You're dumping fuel on a fire you don't even know is burning.

HTMA reveals these ratios. Blood tests don't even look for them.

Why Blood Tests Betray You

The blood testing model is fundamentally broken for this kind of investigation:

1. Your body hides the problem: Blood levels stay tightly controlled even when tissue levels are in crisis
2. Wrong comparison group: "Normal" ranges come from sick populations
3. Snapshot vs. story: Blood shows right now; hair shows 2-3 months of accumulation
4. Missing heavy metals: Toxic metals clear quickly from blood, hide in organs, show up in hair

Dr. Lawrence Wilson trained under Dr. Paul Eck, who founded Analytical Research Labs. Wilson's research—builds on a database of over 40,000 tests—shows that patterns like "four lows" (low calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium) predict exhaustion patterns with over 95% clinical accuracy.

Blood labs don't even try to measure these patterns. They're looking for disease, not dysfunction.

You don't need a disease diagnosis. You need to know why you're snapping at your kids despite doing everything right.

The Heavy Metal Multiplier

Even with clean diet, filtered water, and minimal exposure to obvious toxins—you're still carrying a burden.

Everyone is.

The sources are everywhere:

• Childhood vaccine schedule (aluminum adjuvants, mercury)
• Dental amalgams from years ago
• Fish consumption (methylmercury)
• Airborne particulates from industry and traffic
• Aluminum cookware
• Lead in certain salts and imported spices

Heavy metals don't just sit there. They actively sabotage enzyme pathways:

• Mercury blocks the COMT enzyme, so catecholamines (stress hormones) stay elevated
• Aluminum disrupts acetylcholinesterase so it can't do its job to stop exciting your nerves
• Lead displaces zinc in over 300 enzyme systems, breaking everything

This is the black pill a lot of people took late: the same captured agencies that told you fiat was sound also told you these exposures were "safe." They weren't. They accumulated silently for decades.

And carnivore—as powerful as it is—doesn't auto-detox decades of tissue burden.

Why Carnivore Isn't Enough

This isn't a criticism of carnivore. For many people, it's the foundation of recovery.

But here's what the diet can't do:

1. Erase stored heavy metals from your liver, brain, and bones
2. Rebalance decades of copper accumulation from hormonal birth control or IUDs
3. Correct fast oxidizer mineral depletion when you're burning through nutrients faster than food can replace them
4. Address soil depletion in the meat you're eating (modern beef has significantly less selenium, manganese, and zinc than it did 50 years ago)

Carnivore optimizes what you have. It doesn't verify what you need.

Think about it: You didn't buy Bitcoin because someone on Twitter told you to. You put in the work. You read the whitepaper. You understood proof of work. You verified the fundamentals yourself until you had conviction.

Why wouldn't you apply that same rigor to your health?

The Patterns Blood Can't See

HTMA reveals things conventional medicine doesn't even look for:

Copper Shell Pattern:

• Elevated tissue copper
• Low zinc
• High calcium
• Elevated Zn/Cu ratio

Translation: Your liver is drowning in copper it can't clear, driving norepinephrine production while starving GABA synthesis. You're simultaneously wired and exhausted. Irritable and depleted. The diet isn't fixing it because the metal burden existed before you changed what you eat.

Four Lows Pattern:

• Calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium all below ideal ranges

Translation: Adrenal exhaustion. Your body is so depleted it's pulling minerals inward, slowing metabolism to conserve what little resources remain. You feel emotionally flat or explosive with zero middle ground. Sleep is terrible. Anger appears out of nowhere.

Fast Oxidizer Pattern:

• High Na/K ratio
• Low Ca/Mg ratio
• Burning through nutrients rapidly

Translation: Even with perfect diet, you're depleting faster than you're replenishing. The anxiety, the skin problems, the sleep disruption—it's not a lack of nutrition. It's your rate of utilization.

Blood tests don't measure these patterns. They're not designed to.

The ARL Advantage: Why This Lab Matters

Not all HTMA tests are equal. Most labs wash the hair samples before testing—seems logical, but it actually corrupts the data.

Why Washing Destroys Accuracy:

Multiple studies show that washing hair at the laboratory unpredictably removes calcium, sodium, potassium, and zinc. The minerals that should be measured—the ones revealing your tissue status—get partially washed away. What's left gives false readings.

Imagine trying to audit a blockchain after someone randomly deleted transactions. The data becomes worthless.

ARL's No-Wash Protocol:

Analytical Research Labs, founded by Dr. Paul Eck in the 1970s, pioneered the unwashed hair method. For over 40 years, this lab has maintained the same rigorous protocols:

1. No washing at the lab - Preserves true tissue mineral deposition
2. Ideal ranges based on healthy populations - Not sick averages from modern diseased populations
3. Pattern recognition database - Over 100 distinct mineral patterns identified through decades of clinical correlation
4. Practitioner-only access - Unfortunately gatekept, but necessary for the quality control they maintain

Most labs use washed samples and compare you to sick populations. ARL compares you to optimal health using preserved tissue data.

Experienced practitioners can immediately spot the difference. Washed-sample labs often produce useless sodium and potassium readings. When someone retests with ARL using the no-wash protocol, the patterns that predict symptoms suddenly become visible and actionable.

The Real Cost of Ignorance

Let's talk about what it costs to not know.

Most people spend 2-4 years cycling through supplements based on social threads, podcast recommendations, or whatever worked for someone else:

• Magnesium glycinate that doesn't help, maybe makes sleep worse
• High-dose zinc that drives copper even lower, worsening oxidation
• Adrenal adaptogens that stimulate a system already in exhaustion
• More salt that pushes sodium/potassium ratio into pathological territory

Average spent: $100-200/month on random supplements = $2,400-$9,600 over 2-4 years

And at the end of that trial-and-error gauntlet? Still irritable. Still snapping at your kids. Still not sleeping right.

Compare that to $225 for an HTMA.

One test. Three months of metabolic history. Patterns that predict symptoms with 95%+ accuracy. Data you can act on.

Even if you interpret it yourself and buy targeted supplements, you've saved 2 years of guessing.

Health is Wealth—Literally

You already understand this principle with Bitcoin: Don't trust. Verify.

You don't trust the Federal Reserve's inflation numbers. You verify on-chain data.

You don't trust custodial exchanges. You self-custody your keys.

You don't trust government narratives. You seek primary sources.

Why would you trust centralized medicine's assessment of your health?

They have every incentive to tell you you're "normal" until you're sick enough to require expensive intervention. Their business model depends on reactive care, not optimization.

Functional testing flips the model: Find dysfunction before it becomes disease. Verify biological status the same way you verify blockchain transactions.

Your health is your wealth. Without energy, stable mood, and solid sleep—your Bitcoin stack is just numbers on a screen. You can't build generational wealth if you're destroying relationships with the people you're building it for.

This isn't abstract. How many marriages have been damaged by uncontrolled anger? How many kids have been affected by a parent who couldn't regulate? How much opportunity has been lost because you were too irritable to show up fully?

Proof of work applies to health.

The work is: verify your status, address root causes, retest to confirm progress.

Not: guess, hope, cope with symptoms forever.

Not for Everyone

This approach isn't for people who:

• Want someone else to fix them without doing the work
• Are looking for a magic supplement or quick hack
• Aren't willing to question mainstream narratives
• Prefer managing symptoms over investigating causes

This is for people who:

• Value data over opinions
• Understand that verification precedes correction
• Are willing to invest $225 to stop guessing
• Want to know what's actually broken before throwing money at random solutions

Some people order the test, review it themselves, and implement changes. They have the background, research skills, and discipline to navigate it alone.

Others look at the results and realize they need help interpreting patterns and prioritizing what to address first versus what to wait on.

Both approaches work. The test is the starting point either way.

The Uncomfortable Truth

You can keep optimizing around the problem:

• Better sleep hygiene
• More time in morning sun
• Tighter circadian protocols
• Another supplement stack someone mentioned on X

Or you can verify what's actually broken.

Light exposure doesn't chelate mercury. Grounding doesn't rebalance copper. Training hard is great for mental health, but it doesn't fix mineral depletion. Sauna helps, but you're optimizing a foundation that might be fundamentally compromised by metal burden and mineral imbalance.

The guys on Twitter pushing steel and steak who seem invincible? They might be genetically lucky. Lower toxic burden. Better detox pathways. Slower oxidation rate.

Or they might be struggling too and just not saying it. Losing their temper behind closed doors. Snapping at their team when no one's watching.

You don't need to be them. You need to know what's happening in your body.

Some people need to go beyond carnivore, beyond keto, with a personalized strategy that respects function and ancestry but acknowledges reality. Most of us can't just move to the perfect latitude for optimal UV exposure. We live in the real world. We have kids. We have jobs. We can't be perfect at every level.

Let not perfect be the enemy of good.

A Final Word

You questioned the monetary system early. You saw through the fiat lies before most people figured it out. You took responsibility for your financial sovereignty because you realized no one else would.

Your health requires the same skepticism.

The mainstream narrative is: "Your labs are normal. Probably just stress. Have you tried this SSRI?"

But you know it's deeper than that.

The same instinct that led you to Bitcoin—that refusal to accept surface-level answers, that insistence on verification, that desire for sovereignty—applies here.

You can't self-custody your wealth if your health falls apart.

Low-carb was a powerful first step. It cleared the noise. But if you're still irritable, still snapping at the people you love, still feeling like something's fundamentally wrong—it's not diet. It's not light. It's not discipline. It's not your training program.

It's what's buried in your tissues that blood won't show you.

Verify your biology. Self-custody your wellness. Build your health stack with the same rigor you built your Bitcoin stack.

You've already done the hardest part: You questioned the system.

Now act on it.

Rabbit Hole Health is a newsletter by Sleuth Wellness, dedicated to helping sovereignty-minded individuals take control of their health through functional testing, personalized protocols, and verification-based approaches. We respect the Bitcoin health pioneers while acknowledging that not everyone fits the "perfect maxi" mold—and that's okay. Let not perfect be the enemy of good.

Want to go deeper down the rabbit hole? Reply to this email or visit sleuthwellness.com to learn more about functional testing options.

P.S. — If you found this valuable, forward it to someone who's "doing everything right" but still losing their temper over small things. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is confirm someone isn't crazy—and show them where to look next.

Note: This newsletter is for educational purposes only and is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any medical condition. Always consult with qualified healthcare providers regarding any health concerns.