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Comments |
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 | Saturday, October 25, 2008 at 7:19:32 mst
Comment ID: #1
Name: Aaron Davies
E-mail: agd12(at)columbia.edu
Regarding oils, do you have any recommendations for something as neutral in flavor as canola? I regularly make my own vinaigrette dressing, but I don't want it to taste like olive or peanut oil. |
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| Saturday, October 25, 2008 at 7:24:09 mst
Comment ID: #2
Name: Burgess Laughlin
E-mail: burgesslaughlin(at)macforcego.com
URL: http://www.aristotleadventure.blogspot.com
Do relative portions matter on this diet? For example, would one try to eat, on average, about 50% dairy and meat, 25% vegetable, and 25% fruit? (The percentages might be measured either by volume, weight, or calories.)
On the diet I follow -- http://www.anti-itisdiet.blogspot.com/ -- the content is in part radically different, for specific medical reasons. However, I suspect that no one diet works best for everyone. So, I am curious about other diets proven to work, according to the testimony of those who follow the diets consistently over the long-term. |
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| Saturday, October 25, 2008 at 7:50:59 mst
Comment ID: #3
Name: LB
E-mail: EstiTiEsti(at)gmail.com
URL: http://3-ring-binder.blogspot.com/
Thanks for sharing - you've made my day with an introduction to dry salami and your Whole Foods recommendations. I'm going to have to check them out. Also, do you avoid olive oil for any health reason? |
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| Saturday, October 25, 2008 at 8:14:18 mst
Comment ID: #4
Name: Diana Hsieh
E-mail: diana(at)dianahsieh.com
URL: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog
LB -- I don't avoid olive oil. I prefer to use bacon fat, butter, or coconut oil, however, as they add a great flavor to dishes.
Aaron -- As an alternative to olive oil for salad dressing, you might try cold-pressed, unrefined walnut oil. I've not used it much, but I think it has a pretty neutral flavor.
Burgess -- I'm sure that my diet could be quantified by averages and standard deviations over time, just because I have certain foods and certain combinations that I like. But I don't eat by percentages. That would be too much trouble, and I see no justification for it. Instead, I eat a wide variety of foods (excepting a few major categories) in whatever combinations and proportions I see fit. |
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| Saturday, October 25, 2008 at 8:34:38 mst
Comment ID: #5
Name: Rory Hodgson
E-mail: cowboybebop(at)ntlworld.com
Diana,
I've been trying this diet for a the last week now - not on a reasoned, scientific basis (I still have not got a hold of that book [it's called 'The Fat Delusion' rather than GC/BC here]), but because I wanted to see what the immediate effects are, whether I notice anything.
I've found that I don't get any heartburn like I normally get, which is good. I also find the hunger thing intermittent. I've always been terrible at judging how much I can eat, and either make myself too much or too little... or I think I've eaten enough, that is, I am full, then I'm hungry 1/2 hour later. So, yeah, I'm finding that if I have a big breakfast, I'm hungry by 14:00 but it isn't the desperate hunger I'd normally start feeling about 11:00 to 12:00ish.
I've found that thing about teeth to be true - I sometimes wake up in the morning not feeling the need to brush my teeth. I just don't feel that... bumpy surface... where you can feel all the plaque that's built up whilst you slept. I mean, I still get it, but not as much. And it's only been a week anyway.
One thing I must say though, is when you do stray from the diet, you notice it. Like, yesterday, in a break between seminars, I grabbed a coffee - like, a Mocha Nutty Coffee thing. It was delicious, it gave me a big boost - and then... not a crash... but basically, I had a headache afterwards.
I do not have any equipment for testing blood sugar levels and stuff and it's hard for my to analyse my own state introspectively, because I never paid that much attention to my digestion or body's reaction to food or energy levels before the diet. I really cannot compare it too well.
Four factors may be screwing up me getting any big results:
1) I'm a twig - well, actually, I have a much higher degree of most twigs like me, due to exercise, but I'm not an easy gainer, fat wise. Therefore, I don't notice any great effects on gaining or losing fat, with or without carbs.
2) I've got a mild case of Freshers flu, so my general feeling is a wee bit 'Ugh' at the moment, as I stave off a sore throat, mild headaches when I first wake up and sniffly nose. You know what I mean. It's hard to assess your general state separate from the illness itself.
3) One of the big tests of the diet is how it fits with exercise. I've moved up the University now, so I haven't been to Kung Fu for two weeks now, which is where I can really test the limits of my endurance. Before I go, I always have pasta, meat and some sort of sauce, to get some carbs (on the assumption that carbs are good) and some protein (for muscles). I don't find it helps me out very well, and I find myself absolutely starved after three hours. I have no energy left - at least, my stomach is crippling my will to act. So, once I find a good gym up here, or when I return home to train, I'll be able to give you a fuller report.
Also, the exercise I do do (45 mins in the morning, before breakfast) means I don't get any boost from the food itself - maybe I should try eating first, then exercising (the thing is, that means sitting around waiting for my food to settle).
4) The quality of the food I get isn't as good as yours. I'm on a student budget and I can't afford lots of organic stuff. I am lucky to live in York, where we regularly have farmers markets in town or just normal markets with produce fresher than at the supermarket (and if I figured my sums right, cheaper then or at least at the same cost as at the supermarket). I am making sure I don't stray from the diet and sneak in some pasta or bread or what not, and I'm being careful to look out for any sauces or such that I buy, that they don't have bad stuff in.
Anyway, this has been a long comment and I apologise, I just wanted to give you some feedback on the diet as I have tried it so far. I have noticed no great effects, positive or negative. I don't find my meals that much more satisfying (I do LOVE the taste of pasta and bread and rice and sugars and beans and everything) but this may easily be owing to the fact that the quality of the food I get - and the quality of my cooking (owing to the utensils I have access to) - aren't at the same standard as yours.
Regards,
Rory |
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| Saturday, October 25, 2008 at 10:12:56 mst
Comment ID: #6
Name: Jeff
E-mail: jeff.erno(at)gmail.com
URL: http://ernoj.blogspot.com
Hi Diana,
Your diet looks amazing to me. I do something similar but avoid milk a bit more since I have no access to the raw variety.
One thing that we do different is deli meats. I don't eat them all the time, but I find them fairly good in a pinch for something for lunch or to throw in an omelet. I would love to hear your reasoning why you avoid them as I might be missing something and might be convinced to drop them as well.
As usual, your posts are concise and very well written. I love this line of discussion on saturdays. Keep up the excellent work.
jeff |
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| Saturday, October 25, 2008 at 10:14:35 mst
Comment ID: #7
Name: Cecil R. Williams
E-mail: c1992w(at)gmail.com
Your diet sounds wonderful if one were on a diet to loose weight....., but for maintenance of a high calorie burn life style I would question such a sustained diet for me. The carbs which appear in nature (like most anything else that appears in nature) is good for such a life style when consumption is limited to what is used in an active life style.
You mentioned raw milk in a previous post..... I had that when I was a kid for a while. Sure wish that was available in Ma. Does anyone have any idea where one might get that?
Cecil R. Williams |
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| Saturday, October 25, 2008 at 10:40:46 mst
Comment ID: #8
Name: Diana Hsieh
E-mail: diana(at)dianahsieh.com
URL: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog
Here's where to find raw milk: http://www.realmilk.com/where1.html
It is available in MA. See: http://www.realmilk.com/where3.html#ma
For me, maintaining weight is not a problem. I just eat normally, as per the diet above, including lots of fat. I have to tweak what I eat a bit to lose weight: I restrict my fats (mostly nuts) and fruit a bit. However, for people who have trouble maintaining weight or building muscle, that's another story. I did find some useful comments on this in this thread:
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/statins/is-the-mainstream-starti ...
Just search for "gain" within the page to find them.
As for deli meat, it doesn't taste like meat to me: it's too processed. (I've never been a fan of deli meat, although I used to eat it on occasion.) I might be willing to try some of the preservative-free varieties available at Whole Foods. But I don't eat sandwiches, so I don't see the point.
As for omelettes (or scrambled eggs, since omelettes require cooking browning the eggs, which I don't like), I prefer something meatier like bacon, sausage, or canadian bacon. |
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| Saturday, October 25, 2008 at 11:55:42 mst
Comment ID: #9
Name: brian0918
E-mail: my handle, through gmail
I've been on this diet for the last ~1 month, and have lost about 10-15 pounds easily, all without exercising. I know it's subjective, but I feel like when I'm hungry, it's not nearly as painful a hunger as when I was eating almost exclusively carbs. I will probably start hiking more to get some exercise.
When I first started on this diet, I thought it would be nearly impossible to find the required foods, but there's a great locally-grown health foods store just down the road, which until now I had been shunning for the last 2 years I've lived here. Now I go there every few days, to get eggs, bacon, nuts, vegetables (steamed asparagus is my new favorite), their excellent grass-fed strip steaks and ground beef, and locally-produced whole milk (sold in a glass bottle that you can return for a refund).
I've been eating ~3 eggs and 2-3 strips of bacon per day as my breakfast/lunch, mixed nuts or vegetables as a snack (occasionally fruit), sometimes a salad later in the day, and for dinner I'll broil or pan-cook a steak, veal cutlets, pork chops, chicken strips, or tilapia, with a side of vegetables (steamed in the microwave, then covered with butter and drizzled with olive oil) and a tall glass of whole milk. I never thought I could make such great-tasting food, and it's really easy to do! |
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| Saturday, October 25, 2008 at 12:51:50 mst
Comment ID: #10
Name: Rory Hodgson
E-mail: cowboybebop(at)ntlworld.com
Man, I made myself beef-burgers (cooked in 'organically sourced' butter), served on Spinach, with two chopped tomatoes (instead of ketchup), some slices of cucumber and big mushroom cap. I finished 4/5 of it before I was full and couldn't eat anymore. Then about 20 mins later, I was hungry again, so I had an apple. Then I was still hungry, so I polish off about 200g of salted cashews.
Am I doing something wrong? |
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| Saturday, October 25, 2008 at 13:03:02 mst
Comment ID: #11
Name: Jeff Montgomery
E-mail: jamontgom(at)hotmail.com
URL: http://funwithgravity.blogspot.com/
Great ideas, thanks.
* Whole Foods has been excellent for meats and fish, due to quality and taste. It costs more, but so far I've found it to be worth it.
* Applegate Farms and other organic brands are *actually meat*, that's why I buy them!
* I tried local Colorado's Best Beef this summer and liked it. Good price too. I recommend trying reputable local meat suppliers.
* Although I'm not totally sold on either paleo or no-carb, I do avoid "empty" calories. My standard is functional: does it give me nutrients or lasting energy? Or does it just make me sleepy and interfere with what I want to accomplish? If so I avoid it.
* I have the same rule for sweets, although I do treat myself occasionally.
* I also have almost entirely meat or fish and veggies for dinner. As in: 1/2 or 2/3 veggies by volume. Carbs or sugar eaten (or drunk) late also keeps me awake.
* I don't totally avoid whole grains. It's real food, I love the taste and as long as I don't feel strange from carbs, I don't think twice. The fiber is good for me. This is mainly for lunch sandwiches.
* I don't add fats other than olive oil and butter or butter-like substances (heh). I'll have to do more research before I'd intentionally consume saturated fats in quantity.
I have slowly trended towards the above diet over a period of 20 years, and I've managed to maintain roughly the same weight, and remain healthy so far. |
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| Saturday, October 25, 2008 at 15:03:18 mst
Comment ID: #12
Name: Ariel A.
E-mail: ariel_aviatik(at)yahoo.com
Without yet having read the book, and not having the time right now to trot out counter references, I have to say I'm dismayed about this whole paleo diet thing. FWIW:
Firstly, even if you accept that it's the diet our bodies were evolved to fit, the average paleo lifespan was under 30 years, long before most cancers, heart disease, etc had the chance to show up. Consider all the evidence showing that a meat-and-saturated-fat-heavy diet leads to these very things. I have a family member who has Stage IV colon cancer (I believe) from following an Adkins-inspired diet very similar to the one mentioned here: uncured bacon every morning and all that. I'd really think twice about it. My understanding is that it's due to putrefaction in the gut of meat in particular, because it takes longer to digest and pass thru; hence you're absorbing more toxins as well as nutrients.
If you're concerned about maintaining a healthy weight, blood sugar, metabolism, avoiding diabetes etc. a primary focus instead should be on low-glycemic foods as such. E.g. lots of plant-based foods. I doubt that most people would have glycemic trouble with complex carbos e.g. _whole_ grains, whilst getting the nutritional benefit e.g. fiber, certain B vitamins.
Certainly refined sugars like corn syrup, white sugar can be ghastly, especially considering their prevalence in the American diet. But what about honey, which has been shown to expedite the healing of wounds and sores, and is glycemically better than the refined sugars? I'm loath to give up these kind of benefits.
As far as "modern" oils, my understanding is that canola has got to be among the best, if not the best. It's monosaturated like olive oil, so it's very heart healthy, but it burns at a higher temperature so is more suitable for sauteing and frying. I believe monosaturated fats have even been shown to partially prevent or reverse the buildup of arterial plaques from saturated fat and cholesterol. Also consider that grilled or fried foods generate a _lot_ of carcinogens, so I wouldn't place an undue reliance on those.
So far the Mediterranean diet has worked best for me, and it's come out on top going head-to-head in at least one study with other diets.
Ariel |
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| Saturday, October 25, 2008 at 15:22:00 mst
Comment ID: #13
Name: Ariel A.
E-mail: ariel_aviatik(at)yahoo.com
One other thought:
If you're going to have a diet high in meat and saturated fat, you're probably _better off_ pairing it with wine or some other alcohol, the better to metabolise it. Consider the "French paradox." Conversely if you're going to drink alcohol, better to pair it with meat and fat, which will balance things out glycemically.
A. |
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| Saturday, October 25, 2008 at 15:47:49 mst
Comment ID: #14
Name: William H. Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/
Ariel: I don't understand, specifically, this thing about meat taking longer to pass through the gut, and putrefying. Comparative mammalian anatomy shows that carnivores have the shortest guts, and herbivores the longest; apparently this is because plant matter is less easily digested than animal matter, and by having a constant peristaltic speed and a longer gut you get more time for digestion. That seems to say that meat is the most easily digested substance. What are you basing your statements on, and can it be reconciled with the facts of comparative anatomy? |
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| Saturday, October 25, 2008 at 15:58:01 mst
Comment ID: #15
Name: Richard Nikoley
E-mail: rnikoley(at)gmail.com
URL: http://www.freetheanimal.com
"Firstly, even if you accept that it's the diet our bodies were evolved to fit, the average paleo lifespan was under 30 years, long before most cancers, heart disease, etc had the chance to show up. Consider all the evidence showing that a meat-and-saturated-fat-heavy diet leads to these very things."
Well, you probably should read Taubes, because the foregoing is utter fantasy. The H-G average lifespan is lower on account of accidents from primitive lifestyles and the demands of survival, not diet. There is no study, ever, that conclusively links meat and sat-fat to heart disease, cancer, or any other disease of civilization. |
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| Saturday, October 25, 2008 at 16:02:30 mst
Comment ID: #16
Name: Richard Nikoley
E-mail: rnikoley(at)gmail.com
URL: http://www.freetheanimal.com
Here's some good mythbusting about meat.
http://www.westonaprice.org/mythstruths/mtbeef.html |
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| Saturday, October 25, 2008 at 17:14:50 mst
Comment ID: #17
Name: Diana Hsieh
E-mail: diana(at)dianahsieh.com
URL: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog
Brian -- Your diet sounds delicious -- and my heartiest congratulations on your weight loss. Nothing is quite so revolutionary as thinking of bacon and eggs as diet food! :-)
Rory -- It doesn't sound like you're doing anything wrong. A few thoughts come to mind:
(1) I have no idea what it would be like to be a hard gainer, as I can easily pack on muscle (or fat, if I'm not eating well). My thought is that you might want to experiment a bit, e.g. what happens if you eat whenever you're hungry versus waiting for a while? what happens if you skip meals versus snack throughout the day? what happens if you exercise before you eat rather than after? You'll need to train yourself to be more observant about your bodily states in the process.
(2) Your body might need time to adjust to the new diet. It took me a few weeks to settle into my new eating habits; I noticed major changes over the first two months, not so much in the first week. |
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| Saturday, October 25, 2008 at 18:20:40 mst
Comment ID: #18
Name: William H. Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/
Richard: I'm not endorsing Ariel's specific conclusions about the paleo diet. However, I believe you have mistaken the nature of her argument. It looks to me like it's quite consistent with standard evolutionary reasoning about lifespan and disease. The argument is not, as you suppose:
Stone Age people ate meat and other saturated fats, and doing so made them die young.
Rather, it's
Stone Age people routinely died fairly young as a result of predation, accidents, violence, and environmental stress. As a result, it didn't matter if eating saturated fats killed them in their fifties or sixties, because hardly any of them lived that long anyway. Neither a gene that gave their bodies the ability to process saturated fats more safely over that time scale, nor a gene that made foods high in saturated fats taste unpleasant so tht they would have avoided such foods, added more than a small increment to expected lifespan or to expected (male) lifetime reproductive success; the short-term advantage of eating such foods and getting more energy from them outweighed the small chance of fat-related illnesses in a middle age they probably wouldn't reach.
This is perfectly consistent with the way evolution works, which is not to say it's true. But if it's wrong, it's more subtly wrong. |
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| Saturday, October 25, 2008 at 19:22:35 mst
Comment ID: #19
Name: Richard Nikoley
E-mail: rnikoley(at)gmail.com
URL: http://www.freetheanimal.com
Mr Stoddard:
Bravo. Perfect statement of what the argument ought to be. I'm not, however, convinced that was Ariel's point or position; though, I suppose, she now has the option to claim either, or something else. I wanted to get that out, but I'm not disposed to give a complete response tonight (single malt: involved). Definitely tomorrow. |
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| Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 1:33:34 mst
Comment ID: #20
Name: Ted Coxhead
E-mail: tedcoxhead(at)yahoo.co.uk
Diana: "but bananas, apples, and pears are full of sugar".
Bananas also contain (in the raw state) carotene, a selection of B vitamins including thiamine, riboflavin,nicotinic acid as well as an interesting level of folic acid. They are also a useful source of vitamin C.
Oh, and they are virtually sodium free with a good level of potassium. Not forgetting the calcium, the magnesium, the phosphorous and the iron. And the copper.
I may have left a few goodies out, but you get the idea!
Also they hang from trees and possibly would have been quite available to paleoliths - if they lived in the right place. |
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| Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 7:30:24 mst
Comment ID: #21
Name: Rory Hodgson
E-mail: cowboybebop(at)ntlworld.com
Ted,
Bananas are good:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7GzwddZqP4
I like Bananas |
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| Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 8:13:02 mst
Comment ID: #22
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
Hi Aaron -- try light olive oil sometime if you like canola. I make mayo with it because my boyfriend can't tolerate any product with newfangled veggie oil.
Canola comes from the rapeseed plant and is a new oil that was only granted "generally recognized as safe" status in the 80s in the United States after it was bred for low acid content in Canada. It's "heart healthiness" is nothing more than well-disguised propaganda from farmers and industry (as is the nonsense that polyunsaturated fats are somehow better than others) that the medical community accepts uncontested straight from the USDA -- talk about a conflict of interest. It is not a food that humans have eaten for more than three decades. Personally, I'll stick with foods that have a proven evolutionary record. Before it was bred for low acid content it was used as a lubricant in machinery. canola is polyunsaturated (which means free radicals) and has to be colored and deodorized before it hits your grocery shelf. In other words, if you could see and smell its true nature you probably wouldn't eat it. |
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| Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 8:30:48 mst
Comment ID: #23
Name: brian0918
E-mail: my handle, through gmail
Ted, but haven't bananas, like many fruits, been bred to be sweeter? Those certainly would not have been around the paleoliths. So we've turned something that used to be beneficial into something that may be harmful. |
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| Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 10:59:09 mst
Comment ID: #24
Name: Ted Coxhead
E-mail: tedcoxhead(at)yahoo.co.uk
"Ted, but haven't bananas, like many fruits, been bred to be sweeter?"
No, brian0918, not as far as I can tell, but perhaps you can elucidate. However some bananas are certainly sweeter than others (depending on ripeness as well as origin). It seems that Americans do favour the sweeter varieties. The number of varieties is enormous.
"So we've turned something that used to be beneficial into something that may be harmful". I am not sure who the "we" are that you refer to brian0918, or why a raw banana could be described as "harmful" by being of a sweeter variety. Frankly, there is no evidence that bananas were only beneficial to early man but are now harmful to modern man. Can't really think of much stuff that would be more paleolithic than a banana, assuming we are talking of those paleoliths who found themselves in mainly vegetable and fruit bearing locations. (Of course whatever those guys ate, they didn't live long enough for it to do them much harm!)
And Rory.
Go to your room.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7GzwddZqP4
You have been very naughty. |
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| Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 11:25:39 mst
Comment ID: #25
Name: Mark Wickens
E-mail: noodlefood(at)wickens.ca
URL: http://randex.org/
Thanks for this, Diana. You've inspired me to give it a try. I love carbs, but I think guilt-free nuts, meats, dairy, and eggs -- plus the potential health benefits -- may be enough to offset the deprivation.
P.S.: To make Greek yogurt, I use a cone coffee filter set in a funnel. You need to be careful not to rip it, though. |
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| Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 11:38:17 mst
Comment ID: #26
Name: Burgess Laughlin
E-mail: burgesslaughlin(at)macforcego.com
URL: http://www.aristotleadventure.blogspot.com
> "canola is polyunsaturated . . ."
As usual, as a layman with little time to investigate the many issues disputed among nutritionists, I am confused. On the brand of canola oil I use (about 2 T/day, SpectrumNaturals www.spectrumorganics.com ), the Nutrition Facts label says:
Saturated Fat 1 g
Polyunsaturated Fat 4 g
Monounsaturated Fat 9 g.
If my calculations are right, this canola oil is about 7% saturated, 29% poly, and 64% mono. So, that means to me that canola oil is mostly mono not poly. But, of course, if poly has been proven to be toxic in even normally used small amounts, then canola oil--and perhaps any food naturally containing poly--should be avoided altogether.
I wish there were an easy way to figure these issues out. I have to rely on my own informal, often confused experiments, skimpy understanding at a layman's level, and testimony by people I consider to be generally reliable. Is there a better method? |
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| Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 12:04:32 mst
Comment ID: #27
Name: Richard Nikoley
E-mail: rnikoley(at)gmail.com
URL: http://www.freetheanimal.com
"Of course whatever those guys ate, they didn't live long enough for it to do them much harm!"
This mirrors Ariel's comment, and Mr. Stoddard's clarification of the point. And it's utterly false. In other words, you are arguing that we can't know if our ancestral diet promotes good long term health (absent accidents, the brutality of nature, poisons, predation, etc.) because people didn't live long enough to judge.
It's an assumption that simply has no good evidence. There's lots more, but why not go all out: Inuit. No group has a higher animal protein and fat diet than they do. An intro:
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/inuit-lessons-from-ar ...
Longevity:
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/mortality-and-lifespa ...
Cancer among Inuit:
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/cancer-among-inuit.html
Cancer among the rest:
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/cancer-in-other-non-i ...
Now, an interesting stat brought up my Mary Enig, PhD, in the mythbusting link I provided yesterday, is that in 1930 in the US, 3,000 deaths from myocardial infarction (MI). By 1960: 500,000.
"MI was almost nonexistent in 1910 and caused no more than three thousand deaths per year in 1930. By 1960, there were at least 500,000 MI deaths per year in the US."
So, what changed?
"Today we consume 79 pounds of beef per person per year versus 54 in 1909, a 46% increaseâ€"but poultry consumption has increased a whopping 280%, from 18 pounds per person per year to 70. Consumption of vegetable oils, including those that have been hydrogenated, has increased 437%, from 11 pounds per person per year to 59; while consumption of butter, lard and tallow has plummeted from 30 pounds per person per year to just under 10. Whole milk consumption has declined by almost 50%, while lowfat milk consumption has doubled. Consumption of eggs, fresh fruits (excluding citrus), fresh vegetables, fresh potatoes and whole grain products has declined; but consumption of sugar and other sweeteners has almost doubled."
Clearly, it has to be the beef and fat. Modern ignorance. |
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| Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 12:07:16 mst
Comment ID: #28
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
Burgess, that's probably *relatively* correct. By comparison, however, the polyunsaturated fat percentage in olive oil is only 12%, so the polyunsaturated content of canola oil and other modern vegetable oils is quite high. Butter has something like only 2% polyunsaturates.
There are reasons to be cautious about nutritional labels, however. From this article (http://www.westonaprice.org/knowyourfats/conola.html) is an excerpt:
"Although the Canadian government lists the trans content of canola at a minimal 0.2 percent, research at the University of Florida at Gainesville, found trans levels as high as 4.6 percent in commercial liquid oil. The consumer has no clue about the presence of trans fatty acids in canola oil because they are not listed on the label."
I'm afraid the only way to be sure of the exact nutritional content of your food is to have an experimental analysis done, preferably not by the government (and most nutritional testing is carried out by government). One size does not fit all, and most of the nutritional values for foods are obtained through USDA testing and assume that one size fits all. For instance, it's perfectly accepted practice for me to produce honey in my backyard and use a one-size fits all FDA "Nutrition Facts" label. In fact, it's even encouraged.
I have no reason to believe that food labels are extremely accurate or that one size will fit all -- this is probably both a matter of ignorance on the part of the authorities AND pressure or promotion of special interests. As for the ignorance part, it is simply unreasonable to expect that all varieties of a particular food -- apples, for instance -- will have the same nutritional content. Obviously some varieties of apples are much much sweeter than others. That's not usually accounted for in USDA nutrition facts databases.
Consider raw milk. I don't know of any farm that actually tests the nutritional content. Organic Pastures raw milk from California has had a nutritonal analysis of their milk and it is slightly different from whole, pasteurized milk: the fat content is much higher and the carbohydrate content slightly lower (1 gram less per serving). Whole milk in the store is only 4% butterfat (if we can assume that the Nutrition Facts label is correct). Whole milk from Jersey cows depends on the season but is much higher in butterfat: when we get ours it is at least 15% and sometimes 20% fat by volume. Who knows what else is different in it.
As for the other comment about minerals and vitamins and where do we get them. Yes, fruits and vegetables have vitamins and minerals not commonly found in muscle meats of animals. But paleolithic and primitive peoples do not eat only muscle meats as we westerners do. In fact, they eat organ meats first because they are much more nutritionally rich. The adrenal glands of animals are the richest sources of vitamin C of all plant and animal tissues. This is why Native Americans considered scurvy to be a white man's disease. |
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| Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 12:08:19 mst
Comment ID: #29
Name: brian0918
E-mail: my handle, through gmail
Ted, on bananas, I found this on about.com:
http://homecooking.about.com/od/foodhistory/a/bananahistory.htm
Bananas were red and green, and not sweet, primarily used for cooking, not for eating raw. The sweet variety didn't come about until 1836. So much for the paleoliths having access to them. |
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| Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 12:12:58 mst
Comment ID: #30
Name: brian0918
E-mail: my handle, through gmail
The point being that bananas, like apples, berries, etc, have been bred to be sweeter, and thus the nutritional value has been lumped together with increased sugar content, which is not good. |
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| Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 12:22:40 mst
Comment ID: #31
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
Burgess,
To expand and clarify a tad, here is where the "Nutrition Facts" that you see on your food come from:
http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/search/
If you look up "apple" you will see there is only one label for an apple. Obviously, that's absurd since there are hundreds of varieties of apples and a world of difference in sweetness between a Northern Spy and a Red Delicious. My take on this is that since companies and growers don't do their own testing (I certainly wouldn't even know where to begin to carry out a complex nutritional content of my honey), and since the government label is required, there is no incentive for honesty. In fact, the govt. allows beta carotene to be listed on the Nutrition Facts as vitamin A. This means you think you ar egetting vitamin A when you are not -- unless you are a good converter of b.c. to vitamin A, this is a problem. I am sure there are other such dissemination of "small" falsehoods. Not to mention the completely non-objective and way too low "one size fits all" RDA recommendations for vitamins, etc., an idea stemming from the war rationing of WW II.
The best advice I could give you, if you're really interested, is to google for an independent nutritional assessment of whatever it is you are eating if you really care about exact values. Even then, the values will vary for varieties of plants and breeds of animals. I haven't done this and in many cases I'm sure these independent nutritional analyses have not ever been done. |
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| Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 13:03:24 mst
Comment ID: #32
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
While we're at it (can you tell this is a topic that really interests me?) there's another problem with USDA testing and FDA labels resulting from those tests. They don't consider enzymes as important nutritional factors at all.
I just finished a fascinating little book entitled Enzyme Nutrition by Edward Howell, published sometime in the 50s (I think) with a short summary edition republished in 1985 (which is the one I read because it was the only copy at the library and I'm too cheap to buy the original which includes more data and explanations).
First off, let me say there are many aspects of this book that I disagree with. First, we understand how enzymes catalyze reactions so there's no reason to yet believe that there's some mystical property of enzymes that we can't understand, which Howell asserts. Second, we know from protein structure that there's no "pool of enzyme precursors" in the body from which all enzymes are made, digestive or metabolic. Despite these two problems (and a few others), I think some of these conclusions are not too damning in light of the age of the book. So while I realize those conclusions are incorrect, there are others that may be valid.
The work is somewhat illuminating in that it provides some observational and experimental evidence that food enzymes are useful and necessary in digesting food, and that these enzymes are present only in raw or unheated foods. Of course, this is almost completely ignored by the modern medical and agricultural establishment that claims that no harm whatsoever is done in heating (or irradiating) foods. They parrot the "science" they've been taught in textbooks (unaware that it's rooted in non-objective government dogma and without any objective look at the literature themselves) and place a label of mysticism, pseudoscience, or nuttery on the 10% of people (or less) that have actually done their homework.
There is one fascinating table in this book compiling data from scores of publications in the early to mid 1900s which shows that the enzyme content of foods is correlated to the macronutrient content (that is, that meat will have lots of cathepsin while fruits will have lots of peroxidase while grains will have lots of amylase). The author also shows with reference to other medical literature in addition to his own observations, that there are two compartments in the stomach of humans: that food first sits in the upper "food enzyme" stomach and digests with food enzymes that were either in the food or secreted in the saliva (secreted enzymes in saliva and from the pancreas are far fewer when foods are eaten raw), and then once that digestion is accomplished, moves the lower, more acidic part of the stomach where pepsin digests the proteins. Third, observational and experimental evidence is presented that in overtaxing the "enzyme factories" of our bodies, i.e. in not allowing our food to digest itself with its own enzymes, our health and longevity is seriously compromised. Evidence is supported from observation of humans and experiments on animals. I think the case is often overstated and some of the stuff is clearly incorrect (I think as a result of honest but mistaken assumptions of the time), but certainly there is ample medical evidence that breast fed babies are healthier. Many "raw foodists" have eaten naturally raised raw meats for decades without a problem. Whether they are getting additional benefits from the food enzymes I can't say. The only experience I have is with milk.
While I have some contentions with the some of the author's conclusions, he's definitely onto a good idea when he suggests that science needs to get beyond the rationalistic idea that macronutrients, vitamins, and minerals are the only important nutritional factors to consider.
Obviously when it comes to milk not only are immunoglobulins important for immunity in infant cows and humans, but several enzymes are important for food digestion (e.g. lactase) and mineral absorption (e.g. phosphatase). Those are only the ones I know about. I have to look no farther than my previous lactose intolerant partner who couldn't even drink 1/4 cup of pasteurized milk and can now down 16 oz. of raw milk with no problem. The USDA and the FDA deny these basic scientific facts, known for decades and documented in peer-reviewed literature. The idea that raw and cooked milk are nutritionally equal is unquestioningly adopted as the truth by most scientists, nutritionists, and doctors today. The idea that raw milk is different from cooked milk in its nutritional content is considered by the mainstream to be radical nuttery, pseudoscience, and mysticism. What other myths do we believe as scientific fact? Who knows. |
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| Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 13:35:23 mst
Comment ID: #33
Name: Richard Nikoley
E-mail: rnikoley(at)gmail.com
URL: http://www.freetheanimal.com
Count me as a lactose intolerant who can now drink as much raw whole milk as I want, but since not strictly Paleo, keeps it limited.
Here's a blog entry from a few days back concerning California's stupidity with respect to the product.
http://www.freetheanimal.com/root/2008/10/arnold-the-girly-man-schw ... |
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| Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 14:23:10 mst
Comment ID: #34
Name: Ted Coxhead
E-mail: tedcoxhead(at)yahoo.co.uk
"So, what changed? (Regarding MI).......................
Clearly, it has to be the beef and fat."
Actually it could be any of the changes in consumption you mentioned in your penultimate paragraph,Mr Nikoley, or others or none of them. Especially since, if I may venture, the diet of most people in 1930 was no more "paleolithic" than it was in 1960. However many other aspects of modern life since 1930 would be very different, and of course totally different from that of the Inuit.
"Modern ignorance." Indeed. |
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| Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 14:52:17 mst
Comment ID: #35
Name: Ted Coxhead
E-mail: tedcoxhead(at)yahoo.co.uk
brian0918, I don't want to appear as carrying a torch for the banana (or being thought of as bananas), but American eating habits concerning the banana may not be universal.
Around half a billion people in Africa and Asia depend on the banana as a staple. They are the world's most exported fruit. Maybe what the Americans eat is predominantly the yellow sweet dessert variety (still loaded with the goodies I mentioned earlier), rather than the varieties also known as plantains which are more usually cooked. I really don't know. In the nineteenth century the market developed for the more exotic and naturally sweeter variety.
In both Asia and the West Indies there are several varieties of red and green bananas. All still available and consumed in massive quantities. (I like mine with ground black pepper, for what it's worth). |
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| Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 15:43:04 mst
Comment ID: #36
Name: Richard Nikoley
E-mail: rnikoley(at)gmail.com
URL: http://www.freetheanimal.com
"Actually it could be any of the changes in consumption you mentioned in your penultimate paragraph,Mr Nikoley, or others or none of them."
Maybe true, though meat eating societies such as the Inuit -- exhaustively documented (and I was just reading a section on just how _exhaustive_ in Taubes) -- generally have none of the problems we're talking about.
So, given the numbers, alongside a reference to Friar William of Ockham, which one or combination would you expect, or even guess? Would you, as has institutional civilization around the globe, state with near absolute certainty (and certainly _implied_ certainty) that it's meat -- primarily beef -- and its associated saturated fat content? Given that heavily processed foods and pseudo-foods didn't exist with regularity (though its building blocks did: white flour & sugar), nor in the forms we have seen over decades, combined with vegetable oils, combined with other changes that have taken us _farther_ from an ancestral, paleolithic, evolutionary, animal diet, would you say it's more or less likely that a natural, high meat/fat diet is more responsible, or a modern diet, one increasingly eschewing the ancestral ingredients in favor of lab food?
"...the diet of most people in 1930 was no more "paleolithic" than it was in 1960..."
That depends on what the most essential nutrients are. As it turns out, we know that protein is the most essential macro; that is, it's the one thing that will serve to preserve lean tissue in starvation, such that our bodies are directed to burning fat (this extends survival in starvation). This is long after carbs are entirely out of the picture; which means: carbohydrates, even a single gram, are wholly inessential to survival. Carbs are convenient and we have mechanisms to use them, but we do not require them to live -- for _any_ length of time. Next comes fat, because it's physically impossible long-term to eat enough lean protein to survive, and you'll soon develop "rabbit malaise," as documented in the exhaustive literature on the Inuit (less than 2% of nutrition from carbohydrate). Since you can't eat and not get some fat, but you can eat and get carbs down to irrelevant levels, there you have it: carbs: OK, good even in small doses, but not necessary.
In short, I speculate that due to the relative absence of processed and junk food (flour, sugar, HFCS), and vegetable oils in 1930, combined with the fact that we spent a lot more on food and seemed to care more about "good home cookin'" in those days, that whatever the specific cause or combination thereof, it has a lot more to do with the foregoing than to beef and its fat.
FWIW, the "modern ignorance" jibe was not directed personally, but was rather a general assessment directed at so-called "authorities" and those who blindly follow them. |
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| Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 17:30:50 mst
Comment ID: #37
Name: Anonymous
Regarding canola oil: I read that erucic acid is normally present in rapeseed oil. This may or may not have been either bred out or otherwise removed from the final product.
Richard Nikoley: If you can get hold of goats' milk (especially raw), that is better tolerated, by many people, than even raw cows' milk. Since I'm in California, I can't get raw goats' milk at the present time. Eventually I hope to taste some. For now, I have to make do with pasteurized.
I'm working my way through the Taubes book. Interesting reading. And it's dismaying how politicized medicine and nutrition are. |
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| Sunday, October 26, 2008 at 18:13:53 mst
Comment ID: #38
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
It's true, Anonymous, that the erucic acid content of canola oil is lower than traditional rapeseed. However, the acid content has been bred low enough now that it's legal to grow and sell it as food in the US. Erucic acid is still there to some small extent, though -- I think around 2%? |
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| Monday, October 27, 2008 at 5:10:02 mst
Comment ID: #39
Name: Rory Hodgson
E-mail: cowboybebop(at)ntlworld.com
One last query: does anyone have any advice on saving money whilst on the paleo diet? Let's face it, refined grains make such a good base, and are so cheap, that one can live on 60% grain-stuff, 20% meat and 20% veg, or some approximation thereof. I don't mean healthily, I just mean in terms of satiety.
It costs me about £45 for veg, meat, eggs, butter and milk (and not to mention various other things for flavouring and sauces), per week. By comparison, the people in my house on a carb diet are paying between £20 and £30 per week, much nearer the £20 margin.
The only solution is to shop at the supermarket and choose the cheapest but lowest quality, and therefore least filling and most unhealthy meat (meat being over a third of the bill).
Any suggestions would be most welcome. I really want to make this work, but it's difficult as a student. |
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| Monday, October 27, 2008 at 8:18:44 mst
Comment ID: #40
Name: Anon
After reading this thread, I have one bit of dietary advice: Don't drink the Kool-Aid. |
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| Monday, October 27, 2008 at 10:40:16 mst
Comment ID: #41
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
Rory, I hear you. I tried to keep my monthly food budget to $100 or less as a grad student, which basically meant I was eating beans and rice -- both full of carbs. I would get hypoglycemic all the time because my body was never used to going into ketosis.
I would imagine it's even tougher as food prices are higher where you are. Can you just eat more eggs? :) Over here meat and eggs are cheap due to feedlot practices with eggs being very cheap. I agree that it's not the best way long term but is probably still much better than a grain-based diet. What is the price of liver and kidney? Both very nutritious. Liver, chicken, pork shoulder, and beef brisket are cheap over here -- under $2 per pound. Chicken is the cheapest here. You can often find chicken here for $.69 per pound. |
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| Monday, October 27, 2008 at 17:45:15 mst
Comment ID: #42
Name: Ariel A.
E-mail: ariel_aviatik(at)yahoo.com
Thanks to all who responded. Apparently my hopes of keeping this tidy and brief were in vain ;)
FWIW I've followed Taubes' articles in NYT, and he seems to make some intriguing points, e.g. the idea that the brain runs better on ketones. But I've found a lot of it inconclusive. I've also seen the vociferous opposition to him by mainstream nutitionists elsewhere. I accounted for all this in my post here, and so far no one has been willing to give me a succinct response to especially my concern about saturated fats/arterial plaques/heart disease, other than "go read the book" or links to a couple of obscure websites. Add to that the hazards of not getting important types of fiber (or indeed even enough fiber at all) by shunning the "evil" legumes and whole grains. So I guess this will have to wait until I have the time to follow up.
In the meantime:
@William H. Stoddard:
"Ariel: I don't understand, specifically, this thing about meat taking longer to pass through the gut, and
putrefying. Comparative mammalian anatomy shows that carnivores have the shortest guts, and herbivores the longest; apparently this is because plant matter is less easily digested than animal matter, and by having a constant peristaltic speed and a longer gut you get more time for digestion. That seems to say that meat is the most easily digested substance. What are you basing your statements on, and can it be reconciled
with the facts of comparative anatomy?"
We're talking about humans and the foods they eat, not ruminants.
@Monica:
"Canola comes from the rapeseed plant and is a new oil that was only granted "generally recognized as safe" status in the 80s in the United States after it was bred for low acid content in Canada. It's "heart
healthiness" is nothing more than well-disguised propaganda from farmers and industry (as is the nonsense
that polyunsaturated fats are somehow better than others) that the medical community accepts uncontested
straight from the USDA -- talk about a conflict of interest."
As has been pointed out by someone else, canola is primarily monosaturated. That is why it's supposed to be heart-healthy.
"It is not a food that humans have eaten for more than three decades. Personally, I'll stick with foods that have a proven evolutionary record."
I wonder if this line of reasoning can be taken too far. Doesn't it seem to take a stab at the notion of technological progress as such? "If humans were meant to fly, they'd have wings." And is it all that different from the dubious notion that you can only eat what your ancestors ate, depending on where in the world they lived as a cultural group?
"Before it was bred for low acid content it was used as a lubricant in machinery. [...] (which means free
radicals)"
If you want lots of free radicals, be sure to eat lots of meat and saturated fat, preferably well-charred :/ In that respect you would do better as a vegetarian.
"and has to be colored and deodorized before it hits your grocery shelf. In other words, if you could see
and smell its true nature you probably wouldn't eat it."
The same goes for going to an abattoir and dealing with offal and excrement.
@Richard Nikoley:
"In other words, you are arguing that we can't know if our ancestral diet promotes good long term health
(absent accidents, the brutality of nature, poisons, predation, etc.) because people didn't live long
enough to judge."
It certainly questions the conclusiveness of such a proposition, absent more testing.
"It's an assumption that simply has no good evidence."
Huh? I'm questioning the conclusiveness of _your_ evidence.
"There's lots more, but why not go all out: Inuit. No group has a higher animal protein and fat diet than
they do."
Yes, yes I know. Plus they got their vitamin C from eating the stomach contents of sea mammals. But that's pretty scant, and what about the considerable evidence that we may need much higher amounts of vitamin C than even the current RDA? Again, maybe we have to live with the fact that the evidence is inconclusive. Also bear in mind that the Inuit ate lots of fatty coldwater fish with high amounts of Omega3, which would tend to compensate for all the saturated fat. As far as Inuit that lived far inland, I dunno.
Also bear in mind that the Inuit generally suffered from food shortages on average every seven years, and the very young and very old died. Again, it takes decades for cancer and other diseases of old age to show up.
[various Inuit links]
Thanks. I'll try to take a look at these when I have the time.
"That depends on what the most essential nutrients are. As it turns out, we know that protein is the most
essential macro [etc]"
Yes but what about micronutrients, and where to get them? This is very inconclusive stuff.
"In short, I speculate that due to the relative absence of processed and junk food (flour, sugar, HFCS), and vegetable oils in 1930, combined with the fact that we spent a lot more on food and seemed to care more
about "good home cookin'" in those days, that whatever the specific cause or combination thereof, it has a lot more to do with the foregoing than to beef and its fat."
Speculation indeed. BTW fatty pork was the favored meat in 1930, not beef. And again this ignores olive oil and the evident benefits of a Mediterranean diet. We spent a lot more on food (relatively) because we had a far lower standard of living. Now that we can afford a more varied diet, and have the leisure time to do slow food, we can and do have much better health. And I don't think people cared more about "good home cookin" any more then than now. Their lives were grindingly hard, and the average diet was probably pretty awful. Just look at old movies and see how OLD people look. Even thirty years ago, your average thirtysomething looked middle aged by today's standards. We've got to be doing something right.
A. |
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| Monday, October 27, 2008 at 22:41:42 mst
Comment ID: #43
Name: Anonymous
RORY: It's true that meat-eaters will spend more money than grain-eaters. Several things to save money, however:
1. Get a used freezer... I bought one some years ago for $50; it cost some money to rent a truck to bring it home. It has saved me many times its original cost.
2. Read weekly food advertisements (I'm assuming you have them in the UK as we do here in the States). Every week, I get advertisements from all of the major food markets, usually chain supermarkets. Sometimes there are smaller independent markets with decent prices. We eat a lot of chicken. Recently I have bought locally-grown whole chicken for as low as 77 cents per pound. It was lower a year ago. Organic or free-range chicken is more. Personally I can eat three or four pieces of chicken at a sitting when I'm hungry. I only buy red meat, fish, and pork when it's on sale. But I stock up on what's on sale. I can't afford to shop at Whole Foods or most specialty markets, but I do the best I can with supermarkets. I mostly buy meat and vegetables. Rarely any fruits. Very few snack foods. Not buying bread anymore. Pork can be had for well under $2.00 per pound. Some good cuts of red meat may be on sale in the same price range.
3. If you have any membership warehouse stores (such as Costco and Sam's Club here in the states), they may be worth the membership fees. They have better grades of meat than the supermarkets; the prices are somewhat higher than the supermarkets, but less than places such as fancy health-food stores. You can buy in bulk... I have not yet seen a limit placed on how many chickens you can buy at a warehouse store, for example.
3. Do you have any local sources of food which you can buy direct from farmers? Such things as milk, eggs, butter, cheese, vegetables, etc. are often sold either at farmers' markets or directly at the farm.
4. You might have to visit more than one local chain supermarket to get all your items. Some stores are better for consistently lower prices on packaged things such as canned goods, vinegar, olive oil, etc.
5. Some things are cheaper bought through the Internet... coconut oil, specialty items, etc.
If need be, I can feed my significant other and myself for under $50 per week per person. It's not as cheap as eating rice and beans, but it's healthier. Of course, we would be mostly eating chicken, eggs, and vegetables, but it's doable. Again, if chickens are on sale, I might get 20 or 30 of them and use them up over the course of a month. |
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| Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 7:43:37 mst
Comment ID: #44
Name: Ted Coxhead
E-mail: tedcoxhead(at)yahoo.co.uk
Ariel A: "And is it all that different from the dubious notion that you can only eat what your ancestors ate, depending on where in the world they lived as a cultural group?"
Also what about the food of the ancestors of the ancestors? Why do "paleolithic" advocates, advocate one type of ancestor diet as the one we apparently have not been able to evolve out of. I wonder how the "paleo" diets often referred to here were the ones that evolution decided were the best. And as I have said before, which paleo would we mean?
I must say what is called "paleo" by its advocates today seems a kind of "boutique" paleo - you know, short on carrion, insects and reptiles as well as other, more palatable, paleo specialties like roots and fruits.
FWIW, I checked with my aging mother what she ate in 1930. Typically, the meat component was very frugal because of cost. Stews and casseroles were bulked out with vegetables, lentils, and split peas. Meat when available tended to be ox hearts (braised), chicken necks stewed, sheeps heads boiled, various pig parts pressed into a substance called brawn (in England), and a particular favourite on Thursday nights was pig's feet ("trotters") in jelly. During the war (which of course in England started in 1939!)meat was rarely seen and there was no butter. Funnily enough I think I have read reports that by some standards the English were healthier by 1946 than before the war, but I cannot cite that. |
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| Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 8:26:13 mst
Comment ID: #45
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
Ariel and Ted: Gary Taubes covers all of your objections in his 540 page book, including the fiber myth, the myth that cancer only occurs after age 30 or wasn't looked for in native populations, etc. The arguments are very complicated because of all the obfuscation in the research and funding communities that have gone on in the past 60 years, and cannot be dealt with in comment threads on the internet. If you don't get responses, it's not that some of your assumptions can't be corrected here but that they've already been addressed in elegant fashion elsewhere and we don't have the time for it.
However, I will address some myths. First, both beef and pork are mostly monounsaturated in their fat content. Ariel, as for your comments about free radicals (presumably you are talking about AGEs in meat that are formed when it is cooked) I refer to you Dr. Eades' site to investigate that issue: http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/ particularly this one: http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/sugar-and-sweeteners/vegetarians ...
Re sat. fat, perhaps you are not aware that your body makes saturated fats from carbohydrates but will not make saturated fats from mono or polyunsaturates. Your body only has enzymes to desaturate fats, not to saturate them. Therefore, you're not avoiding the very saturated fats you hope to avoid by eating carbohydrates.
The beneficial omega fatty acids, such as DPA and EHA can be provided in organ meats. In fact, cod liver oil contains both of these things plus vitamins A, D, K, K2, and other fatty acids. It does not contain mercury. The vitamin C issue is solved by eating other organ meats, in which their is some vitamin C.
There is not one single micronutrient needed by your body that cannot be provided with animal tissues. Show me the papers, Ariel.
Of course, that doesn't mean I don't eat low carbohydrate fruits and vegetables in abundance. I do, and I have a PhD in biology so I think I might know something. So please stop worrying about my health. Thanks. |
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| Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 9:03:03 mst
Comment ID: #46
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
Here's another good on on the oxidative stress issue:
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/low-carb-library/low-carb-diets- ... |
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| Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 9:32:20 mst
Comment ID: #47
Name: Richard Nikoley
E-mail: rnikoley(at)gmail.com
URL: http://www.freetheanimal.com
Ted:
"Also what about the food of the ancestors of the ancestors? Why do "paleolithic" advocates, advocate one type of ancestor diet as the one we apparently have not been able to evolve out of. I wonder how the "paleo" diets often referred to here were the ones that evolution decided were the best. And as I have said before, which paleo would we mean?"
That's an interesting objection. Various primitive people's throughout history wouldn't have any problem demonstrating for you. How come you seemingly find the issue so intellectually paralyzing?
There is no one proper kind of "paleo." It can mean anything from a carb-rich diet like the Kitavans and Kuna...
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/08/kitavans-wisdom-from- ...
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/03/say-hello-to-kuna.html
...to a high fat/meat diet like the Inuit. The unifying factor is that none of these diets contain white flour (or "whole grains," for that matter), refined sugar, or concentrated vegetable oils (except the highly saturated coconut and palm that's cold pressed by hand) and all the plethora of "food" products that come from them that bulk out the inside isles of your local supermarket or round out the choices at your nearest fast-"food" chain.
Here's a 2000 paper by Cordian, et al, that attempts to estimate the composition. Short version: it's quite varied:
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/71/3/682?ijkey=KPJ8NPKvC6lVQ
Here's a summary:
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/08/composition-of-hunter ...
So, for me, a "paleo" diet is more about what to avoid than what specifically to eat; and, I do include some non-paleo things like dairy products. While not a food that was likely to be accessed in ancient times, it at least has the virtue of being a by-product from animals we eat anyway. Same goes for things like various sausages and other processed meats like pate and such. I like to get the artisan uncured ones, and I think it's a good way to get some of the organ, fat, and other nutrients. Also, I like to switch things up. Because I don't think there's any one proper diet for all, for all time, I employ a flexibility and intermittency, i.e., sometimes it's all meat and animal fats, and other times it's lots of veggies; sometimes fruits; sometimes in combo. So, for any given number of days or weeks, I might be getting 60-70% of my nutrition from animal fats, while at other times, only 30-40%, and those times would be associated with eating a lot of fruit, so my carbs are quite high, comparatively, but intermittently.
It has worked wonders for me, combined with an hour of intense resistance training per week (you need brief, so you can get intense, so you can turn on the proper gene signalling to transform you into a leaner, H-G looking fellow), combined with flexible, intermittent fasting...
http://www.freetheanimal.com/root/2008/09/periodic-photo-progress-u ...
...And the blood work, mine and my wife's (her's after only three months of kinda following my diet and):
http://www.freetheanimal.com/root/2008/07/lipid-pannel.html (take a good look at those ratios)
http://www.freetheanimal.com/root/2008/09/more-results.html
When I began this in May of '07, I did so because my BP was scaring the bejesus out of me: 160/100, virtually all the time. Now, it's normal, sometimes as low as 110/70. No drugs. I had been on prescription meds for seasonal springtime sinus allergies since a teenager (now 47), and that morphed over the years to having awful nasal congestion requiring meds year round. I stopped them in January and went through spring and summer without so much as an itch -- just a normal sneeze now and then to clear irritants. I had been on meds for gastric reflux for the last 7-8 years, and also thyroid for low thyroid. Stopped those both in January too, and have since lost an additional 30-40 pounds of fat.
Sounds like your mom had a wise family.
By the way, I believe the richest source of vitamin C on earth are the adrenal glands of animals.
I'll put up some stuff on Ariel's post a bit later. |
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| Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 10:38:40 mst
Comment ID: #48
Name: Burgess Laughlin
E-mail: burgesslaughlin(at)macforcego.com
URL: http://www.aristotleadventure.blogspot.com
> The unifying factor is that none of these diets contain white flour (or "whole grains," for that matter), refined sugar, or concentrated vegetable oils (except the highly saturated coconut and palm that's cold pressed by hand) and all the plethora of "food" products that come from them that bulk out the inside isles of your local supermarket or round out the choices at your nearest fast-"food" chain.
This point from Richard Nikoley is very important. What is striking about it to me is how much agreement there is between otherwise radically different diet programs.
McDougall (coarse plant foods only, less than 10% fat total), Pritikin Program (about 10% dairy and very lean meats, 90% coarse plant foods, with less than 10% fat total, and very low protein), Dean Ornish (also very lean on fat and animal products, but still omnivorous), and the advocates of the Okinawan Centenarian diet (which I know only by reputation)--all these people and others agree completely with the very high fat, high protein paleo-diet advocates (as reported here) that "factory foods"--loaded with sugar, refined starches (espec. grains)--should not be a part of diet, _and_ that most people should eat more vegetables and fruits (with conditions on the latter) and in fairly wide variety.
My point is that despite their significant differences, there is agreement on other points.
I would also like to reinforce another point Richard made (if I recall correctly): No one diet works for everyone. I know that with confidence. The diet I am on (fruit, vegs, and "roots") has eliminated 45 years of medical problems--but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone unless they have the same problems ("-itis," inflammation problems). It works, but it definitely is not for required universally. I experimented with foods for three years before I (almost) perfected it for my needs: www.anti-itisdiet.blogspot.com
I sympathize with anyone searching for the healthiest diet. The choices are bewildering. The supposed experts disagree vehemently. The literature is vast and confusing and beyond the knowledge of laymen. |
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| Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 10:42:46 mst
Comment ID: #49
Name: Ted Coxhead
E-mail: tedcoxhead(at)yahoo.co.uk
Richard Nikoley: "Because I don't think there's any one proper diet for all, for all time, I employ a flexibility and intermittency, i.e., sometimes it's all meat and animal fats, and other times it's lots of veggies; sometimes fruits; sometimes in combo."
Frankly, I think that just about wraps it up. I couldn't agree more. It's what I was saying way back when I quoted Marks and Feldman and cautioned against zealous beliefs in the ONE diet whether it is "paleo" or not. In fact looking at your list of what you do eat it looks a bit like, er, what everyone else eats. Lots of meat, dairy, fruit, veg, deli meats (artisan or not), and some malt whisky (I think you said the other night). You don't like the bakery, that's OK and I wonder if you drink enough red wine. After all the red wine has the same connection to the paleo berries, really, as the connection you refer to with the dairy from the animal. They are both processed from the realtively simple original.
(My advice on the red wine though - sorry guys - is keep it French! There is a difference) |
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| Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 11:21:51 mst
Comment ID: #50
Name: Richard Nikoley
E-mail: rnikoley(at)gmail.com
URL: http://www.freetheanimal.com
Ariel:
"...and so far no one has been willing to give me a succinct response to especially my concern about saturated fats/arterial plaques/heart disease, other than "go read the book" or links to a couple of obscure websites."
Where is the onus of proof?
Given the evolutionary past, combined with the plethora of disease that didn't even exist, combined with the massive shift in diet composition tracking right along with the development of heart disease, diabetes, cancer over the same period...
http://www.freetheanimal.com/root/2008/10/what-causes-heart-disease.html
...And it is up to us and others to prove a negative?
Surely you jest.
There's more. Now, I don't know what standards you employ in distinguishing "obscure" websites from others, though I'll trust for now that you're not talking about the sites of established authorities who pick your pockets to do studies in their vain attempt to confirm their failed saturated-fat-causes-heart-disease over and over.
Anyway, here's a bunch of links:
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/10/saturated-fat-and-ris ...
Masai and Atherosclerosis
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/06/masai-and-atheroscler ...
No trace of heart disease in the Kitavans
http://www.staffanlindeberg.com/TheKitavaStudy.html
Tokelauans, who get 55% of their calories from _saturated_ fat (way higher than even the Inuit), apparently have no heart disease
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7270479
Our closest ancestors, the Neanderthal, was likely mostly carnivorous
http://www.pnas.org/content/97/13/7663.full
Me: "In other words, you are arguing that we can't know if our ancestral diet promotes good long term health
(absent accidents, the brutality of nature, poisons, predation, etc.) because people didn't live long
enough to judge."
Ariel: It certainly questions the conclusiveness of such a proposition, absent more testing.
Again, given this...
http://www.freetheanimal.com/root/2008/10/what-causes-heart-disease.html
...And we need "more testing" to determine whether it's "safe" to eat a diet with a 2-3 million year history, in some natural combination, to the exclusion of a 100 year-old-diet heavy in processed grains, concentrated vegetable oils, and refined sugar, during which time has seen unprecedented health ravages, and all in a space of time in which we have tons of data going back from the present to 150 years and more of physicians traveling the world, studying indigenous peoples, noting a complete absence of these same diseases? Taubes lists bunches of these, in many cases covering tens of thousands of people monitored and examined regularly over decades.
That's utterly preposterous; a complete disregard for the epistemological propriety of assignment of burden of proof.
"As far as Inuit that lived far inland, I dunno."
I've never seen anything about stomach contents for vitamin C. We do know that Inuit don't get scurvy, so how about a premise check? What if, for example, vitamin C is mostly required _because_ of high levels of carbohydrate or some other aspect. For instance:
http://www.westonaprice.org/farming/agriculture-nutrition.html
"Albrecht came up with unexpected results when he tested the spinach for vitamin C. The highest level of vitamin C, 28.7 milligrams per 100 grams, came from spinach in the pots with the lowest amount of nitrogen, declining to a value of 20.9 milligrams per 100 grams for the spinach grown in the highest amount of nitrogen. The experiment was replicated ten times and the insect attacks remained the same in all the trials, that is, the attacks were concentrated on the plants with the highest nitrogen levels, the highest yield but with the lowest level of vitamin C.
These results led Albrecht to question our understanding of the nutritional contribution made by vitamin C. Albrecht stated that the decreasing quantity with healthier plants demonstrated vitamin C was not directly contributing to healthier growth. He described vitamin C as a catalyst or whip driving the metabolism of the plant faster by its presence in greater quantity to help overcome the deficiencies in other nutrients. Albrecht asks the obvious question: do higher levels of vitamin C indicate a more nutritious or less nutritious crop for our consumption? Thus, to say that a food is better for you because it has more vitamin C may be the exact opposite of the truth. And as with plants, it may be that people with weaker immune systems may require a larger daily dose of vitamin C than people with healthier, stronger immune systems. The concept of a recommended daily dose of vitamin C for everyone is therefore nonsense."
"Also bear in mind that the Inuit generally suffered from food shortages on average every seven years, and the very young and very old died. Again, it takes decades for cancer and other diseases of old age to show up."
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/07/mortality-and-lifespa ...
Me: "That depends on what the most essential nutrients are. As it turns out, we know that protein is the most
essential macro [etc]"
Ariel: Yes but what about micronutrients, and where to get them?
Inuit PROVE that one can live generally free of all "diseases of civilization" on nothing but meat and animal fat. They lived into their 70s, 80s, 90s and beyond, just as others and early deaths do not appear to be related to diet but to accidents, harsh environment, and infectious disease. Do you understand this? It's proved. It can and has been done, over and over, and even Europeans lived amongst them, in some cases longer than 10 years and did fine. Vilhjalmur Stefansson even did a year under supervision of New York's Bellevue hospital, meat and fat only, didn't develop scurvy was documented to be in fine health, and this was after 13 years living with the Inuit. He lived to the age of 83 and professed the benefits of a high meat/fat diet (with the occasional grapefruit) all his life.
Me: "In short, I speculate that due to the relative absence of processed and junk food (flour, sugar, HFCS), and vegetable oils in 1930, combined with the fact that we spent a lot more on food and seemed to care more about "good home cookin'" in those days, that whatever the specific cause or combination thereof, it has a lot more to do with the foregoing than to beef and its fat."
Ariel: Speculation indeed.
Oh bullshit. That's just hand-waving dismissal for the purpose of of being obtuse and skeptical for skepticism's sake. You remind me of the way environmentalists deal with obvious facts and associations (like: DUH, the sun and its solar cycles). They, apparently, never heard of Occam's razor either. The burden of proof is upon YOU.
"BTW...And again this ignores olive oil and the evident benefits of a Mediterranean diet."
Oh, my. Olive oil? I use it, sure; however, what do you think you know?
http://www.freetheanimal.com/root/2008/09/guess-the-food.html
Benefits of Mediterranean? Again, what do you think you know?
http://www.nature.com/ejcn/journal/v62/n5/abs/1602790a.html
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed ...
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/10/paleolithic-diet-clin ...
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/10/paleolithic-diet-clin ...
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/10/one-last-thought.html |
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| Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 11:28:09 mst
Comment ID: #51
Name: Diana Hsieh
E-mail: diana(at)dianahsieh.com
URL: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog
Ted -- You're not getting it. The fact is that neither Richard's nor my diet is "moderate" my contemporary standards, precisely because not eating grains, sugars, and modern vegetable oils is a HUGE change from mainstream American eating habits. I absolutely refuse to eat about 90% of what's in the grocery store. How is that "moderation"? (Again, I reiterate that -- as Aristotle damn well knew -- the advocacy of moderation without some parameters about what counts as good and what counts as extreme is utterly meaningless.)
Moreover, all along, I've said that I eat a wide variety of whatever I please except grains, sugars, and modern vegetable oils -- and I've gotten nothing but flack from you. So please don't pretend now that Richard has said something new with which you can agree. His diet is -- I'm pretty sure -- nearly identical to mine. |
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| Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 12:40:25 mst
Comment ID: #52
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
Ted, regarding the bananas.
I doubt there's any problem with bananas so long as you're not someone trying to lose weight. If I were not trying to lose weight, I'd aim for about 75 g. carbs daily. That would the level at which I could maintain weight without gaining any weight. That level would even allow me to eat several slices of bread if I wished. Since there are 27 g. sugar and starch in a large banana (assuming we can trust te Nutrition Facts USDA database), I could safely eat 3 bananas per day with a little leftover carbs in my budget and be just fine, since your body needs about 150-200 g. glucose to run daily. It would get the remainder from converting the rest of my diet (protein and fat) to glucose.
However, in trying to LOSE weight, I've repeatedly demonstrated (personally) that I have to keep carbs below 30-40 g. daily. If I ate a banana, I wouldn't be able to eat much else with carbs in it. I would be able to eat a couple of eggs and the rest would have to be meat. I'd have to forego any vegetables higher in carbs, like an avocado. I MIGHT be able to eat some lettuce. SO can you see why people losing weight might forego bananas?
It's certainly true that in depressed economic times and war times that people ate more carbs percentagewise and did not gain. (This is also the case for many subsistence Asian cultures.) They did so by limiting their total consumption to very small amounts of daily calories. That's what you do when you're on a K ration. You can do that if you're forced. It's very difficult when food is freely abundant and cheap, as it is in 2008, to eat mostly carbohydrates and try to limit calories. It's torture for some of us, actually. I get very, very hungry limiting caloric intake to 1600 daily. I have NO problem limiting calories on a low carb diet. In fact it's often at 1200 to 1400 daily. I have not yet had ANYTHING to eat today and I am fine. This is because I never get hypoglycemic because my body is used to making glucose from the protein I eat and burns my body fat to do so.
No one is demonizing bananas here or telling anyone they can't eat a banana. One simply has to consider what the personal goals are in eating them depending on one's individual goals. If you don't need to lose weight, I am sure you are fine eating your bananas. For me, it would be a very bad idea. |
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| Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 14:21:12 mst
Comment ID: #53
Name: Diana Hsieh
E-mail: diana(at)dianahsieh.com
URL: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog
Regarding the relationship between saturated fat and health, Stephan of Whole Health Source just began a series of posts on that topic that promises to be excellent, as usual:
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/ |
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| Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 21:25:06 mst
Comment ID: #54
Name: Anonymous
Regarding Paleo diets: Based on browsing one of Cordain's books, I believe that he has really bought in to the whole "fat is bad" hysteria. Notice the emphasis on low-fat this and that, and asserting that Paleo man had a low-fat diet. In fact, primitive peoples who eat animals for food frequently go for the fat specifically.
I think that Barry Sears ("The Zone") is another one who has been taken in by the anti-fat hysteria. In his case, apparently he has a number of male relatives who died young of heart disease.
That said, I am also familiar with a couple of the alternative dietary treatments for cancer, and they do indeed restrict animal protein and fat in the beginning. At least two such programs (Gerson and Budwig) rely heavily on flaxseed oil. Budwig uses an oil-and-protein combination of flaxseed oil and "quark."
I once researched alternative cancer treatments because a lot of my blood relatives have succumbed to it, and I grew up thinking there had to be something better than the AMA-approved treatments of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. I have since lost a couple of friends to cancer.
I like Weston Price's approach of using high-vitamin cod liver oil and butter oil. But I think that flaxseed oil and quark (similar to sour cream or cottage cheese) works for some people too. |
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| Tuesday, October 28, 2008 at 22:59:55 mst
Comment ID: #55
Name: William H. Stoddard
E-mail: whswhs(at)mindspring.com
URL: http://whswhs.livejournal.com/
On the subject of foraging cultures going for fat, some years ago I read a paper on this, which remarked that hunters in such cultures regard the brain and the bone marrow (especially the big masses of it in the middle of the thighbones) as delicacies. Apparently they often eat those parts out in the field, right after the kill, before bringing the carcass back to the camp. Since wild animals tend not to be as high in fat as domesticated ones, this means that the women (who seldom hunt) are likely to be chronically a bit fat-starved. This could be one of the mechanisms that limits fertility in such societies; not having enough body fat to sustain a pregnancy tends to reduce the chances of conceiving. |
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| Wednesday, October 29, 2008 at 8:41:53 mst
Comment ID: #56
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
Anonymous -- I've not heard of those treatments for cancer. Sounds interesting. I have heard that low carb diets may be effective in slowing or reversing tumor growth. This has been shown in animal and human studies and Gary Taubes presents some convincing evidence on that score as well. I wonder if these separate types of diets may work by similar biochemical mechanisms since neither of them seems to be high in carbohydrates.... I have also heard anecdotal reports of other types of cancer treatment with different diets, and it appears to work. And to think you can be prosecuted for child neglect in this country for not giving chemotherapy to your kid with cancer. |
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| Wednesday, October 29, 2008 at 15:52:23 mst
Comment ID: #57
Name: Ariel A.
E-mail: ariel_aviatik(at)yahoo.com
@Monica:
"Re sat. fat, perhaps you are not aware that your body makes saturated fats from carbohydrates but will not make saturated fats from mono or polyunsaturates. Your body only has enzymes to desaturate fats, not to saturate them. Therefore, you're not avoiding the very saturated fats you hope to avoid by eating carbohydrates."
I'm not trying to avoid saturated fats. I just don't necessarily want them to be the preponderant source of fat in my diet. BTW your body only turns carbohydrates into fat when you eat more calories than you need, e.g. a huge glycemic rush. That's an important consideration.
"The beneficial omega fatty acids, such as DPA and EHA can be provided in organ meats. In fact, cod liver oil contains both of these things plus vitamins A, D, K, K2, and other fatty acids. It does not contain mercury."
Yes I know.
"The vitamin C issue is solved by eating other organ meats, in which their is some vitamin C."
That's where I take issue. The science is far from settled on vitamin C, as it is with many nutrients and how they're absorbed. For now I take 500 mg time release, plus as much whole-food vitamin C with its co-nutrients as I can.
"There is not one single micronutrient needed by your body that cannot be provided with animal tissues. Show me the papers, Ariel."
Please don't take that tone with me, missy. As I indicated at the outset, I don't have time right now to read Taubes' book (to say nothing of following the complicated debate with his detractors) or provide counter references. I shall follow up on the references you provided when I can. Until then, apparently this discussion will have to wait.
But in the meantime, I can't resist. Since you seem to want to make an ironclad, exception-proof case, what about cabbage juice? There's supposed to be a nutrient there found nowhere else.
"...I have a PhD in biology so I think I might know something."
Yeah, and my mom's a dietician. That and a subway ticket will get you uptown.
"So please stop worrying about my health."
I'm not. I'm concerned with mine.
@Richard Nikoley:
In the course of going on about "onus of proof," "proving a negative," Occam's Razor etc. you seem to have missed something crucial the first time. As another poster pointed out, it could be one or more of _many_ factors throughout human history that account for "modern diseases." Simply correlating disease with certain limited dietary factors does not show causation.
And when I harbor a certain amount of skepticism about the obscure websites you cite, that doesn't make me a food-pyramid apologist. And it doesn't mean that I won't look at your references with an active mind; it just means I've never heard of that estimable food authority Weston A. Price.
And when you cite various "paleo" diets that vary widely from one another, that gives further pause. For example Pacific islanders (e.g. the Tokelauans you cite) have a diet _high_ in carbohydrates: taro, cassava, sweet potato etc. Plus there were no "unprecedented health ravages" that I know of with a Mediterranean diet. People have been consuming olive oil for thousands of years, not just decades. So enough about the "evil" vegetable oils already.
"As far as Inuit that lived far inland, I dunno."
When I said this I forgot to take into account salmon runs, so never mind. Inland Inuit were getting their HDLs too. As far as your comments about vitamin C, that just confirms what I said to Monica above. Regarding Inuit that live into advanced old age, that's true of any culture. My point is that the mean was much lower than modern times, on account of periodic famine. So that makes comparison problematic.
@Monica and @Richard:
Look guys, we probably have more in common than you think. We're all more conscious about the foods we eat than your average person, and that's a good thing. I'm likely to trust that something you have prepared won't make me poo and fart (or worse.) ;)
A. |
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| Thursday, October 30, 2008 at 9:53:25 mst
Comment ID: #58
Name: Richard Nikoley
E-mail: rnikoley(at)gmail.com
URL: http://www.freetheanimal.com
Ariel:
"I'm not trying to avoid saturated fats. I just don't necessarily want them to be the preponderant source of fat in my diet."
Not likely, perhaps even impossible eating meat. Less than half the fat is saturated.
"BTW your body only turns carbohydrates into fat when you eat more calories than you need, e.g. a huge glycemic rush. That's an important consideration."
It's not a consideration at all. It's completely false. Given sufficient insulin, your body can and will shunt any amount of glucose (carbs) into fat storage. Carbohydrate drives insulin drives fat storage. You'd know this if you had read Taubes. Perhaps you ought to suspend argument until you have time to read it.
"...you seem to have missed something crucial the first time."
You're not paying attention. I have cited various primitives from high carb to high fat, primitives that have been studied and observed extensively by physicians and other qualified researches going back to the mid-1800s, perhaps farther, and NONE of the diseases of civilization (CVD, diabetes, cancer) show up -- and in many cases that means: not at all, even talking about upwards of 40,000 primitives observed over 10 years. Again: Taubes.
"Simply correlating disease with certain limited dietary factors does not show causation."
See this, which I referenced before, and then you can shut up about logical fallacies I have not committed:
http://www.freetheanimal.com/root/2008/10/what-causes-heart-disease.html
I'll draw your particular attention to my agreement with a commenter on a previous post of mine.
"For example Pacific islanders (e.g. the Tokelauans you cite) have a diet _high_ in carbohydrates: taro, cassava, sweet potato etc."
As do the Kitavans. Again: you're seemingly not paying attention, and this constitutes about the third time that I have reiterated it's about the concentrated grains, sugars, and vegetable / grain oils and the processed and junk food that goes along with it. You seem to be conflating this with low carb diets. It's simply the case that the preponderance of natural diets (excluding the grains, sugars, veg/grain oils) are low carb, as is mine most of the time -- mostly out of convenience, and because I like fat so much. However, I attribute the preponderance of my health improvements to getting off grains and their derivatives. My weight (fat) loss is probably a combination of that (owing to a profound change in appetite), low carb / high fat, and intermittent fasting. The lean gain is attributed to the brief and intense workouts, fasting, and sleep, all of which promote hGH release.
I have not been claiming that one must be low carb to be "paleo," though even, say, 200g per day is low carb by most modern standards, but certainly not low carb in the parlance of today's "low carb" diets where about 60g is the max. Do you have any data showing how many grams the Tokelauans consume, and how that compares with the SAD?
"Plus there were no "unprecedented health ravages" that I know of with a Mediterranean diet."
Non sequitur. I happen to have existed on a "Mediterranean diet" whilst living and working in France, being fed primarily in the excellent officers' messes of two French warships, not to mention at least one dinner party per week at the homes of French navy officers. So, what do you think you know?
A Med diet is one very high in fat. Ask anyone who actually _knows_. I consumed gobs and gobs of fat, in every form imaginable from very fatty charcuterie, to duck fat, to pate, to awesome cheeses at every meal to tasty sauces on everything laden with heavy creams and such. We never ate crap or junk food, and meals were always so good we never ate between them. Within months I had dropped to my HS weight and remained there. Within three months of returning to the US, I had added 15 pounds. Even though there is substantial bread consumption, myself and individuals I observed typically eat very little of it at any given meal (except petit dejeuner), and they rarely eat sadwiches and the sort. I could go on and on, but there's this:
http://www.freetheanimal.com/root/2008/10/paleo-trumps-faux-mediter ...
and...
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/10/paleolithic-diet-clin ...
Participants eating the Mediterranean diet were counseled to focus on whole grains, low-fat dairy, potatoes, legumes, vegetables, fruit, fatty fish and vegetable oils rich in monounsaturated fats and alpha-linolenic acid (omega-3). I'm going to go on a little tangent here. This is truly a bizarre concept of what people eat in the Mediterranean region. It's a fantasy invented in the US to justify the mainstream concept of a healthy diet. My father is French and I spent many summers with my family in southern France. They ate white bread, full-fat dairy at every meal, legumes only if they were smothered in fatty pork, sausages and lamb chops. In fact, full-fat dairy wasn't fat enough sometimes. Many of the yogurts and cheeses we ate were made from milk with extra cream added. Want to get a lecture from Grandmere? Try cutting the fat off your pork chop!
So, next?
"People have been consuming olive oil for thousands of years, not just decades. So enough about the "evil" vegetable oils already."
Non sequitur. For one, it's a fruit. For another, I have often reiterated that I am talking about the modern vegetable and grain oils in use within the last 100 years. I use olive oil, coconut oil, palm and sesame (in small amounts as spice). These all have a very long history.
" My point is that the mean was much lower than modern times, on account of periodic famine. So that makes comparison problematic."
The mean was much lower for everyone, even moderns. And for primitives, famine is no more relevant to the health consequences of diet than are fires, floods, or earthquakes. They have no control over any of these.
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| Thursday, October 30, 2008 at 10:04:29 mst
Comment ID: #59
Name: Richard Nikoley
E-mail: rnikoley(at)gmail.com
URL: http://www.freetheanimal.com
More on the absurdity of the indictment of saturated fat:
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/10/saturated-fat-and-hea ...
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| Friday, October 31, 2008 at 1:01:25 mst
Comment ID: #60
Name: Ariel A.
E-mail: ariel_aviatik(at)yahoo.com
Richard Nikoley suggests that I ought to suspend argument until I have read Taubes' book. Very well; altho I'm not convinced that there will anything there of essence that wasn't in his NYT articles, which I have read. This is my last response to Richard for now, and he can have the last word if he wants. I'll confine myself to what I see as the fundamental so far. After repeatedly accusing me of various logical errors, I responded that the logical error was his, which prompted the following exchange:
Ariel: "Simply correlating disease with certain limited dietary factors does not show causation."
Richard: "See this, which I referenced before, and then you can shut up about logical fallacies I have not committed:
http://www.freetheanimal.com/root/2008/10/what-causes-heart-disease.html"
A reference is not an argument. I indicated that I would check out the references when I can. I was going strictly on the form of Richard's argument here, and I get a lot of bluster in return.
Ariel: "My point is that the mean was much lower than modern times, on account of periodic famine. So that makes comparison problematic."
Richard: "The mean was much lower for everyone, even moderns. And for primitives, famine is no more relevant to the health consequences of diet than are fires, floods, or earthquakes. They have no control over any of these."
I'm really at a loss to understand how this is a response to my point, so I'm not sure that Richard understands my point even now. I'll try one more time:
There are far more people of advanced old age today, that in previous times would have died prematurely of famine etc. Since diseases like heart disease and cancer generally take time to show up, statistically there is going to be a higher incidence of such diseases in the old. How does Richard know that people who died prematurely in previous eras, had they gone on living, wouldn't have developed the "diseases of civilization" as well? It skews the comparison.
A.
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| Friday, October 31, 2008 at 13:21:11 mst
Comment ID: #61
Name: Richard Nikoley
E-mail: rnikoley(at)gmail.com
URL: http://www.freetheanimal.com
"A reference is not an argument."
You're so full of shit, Ariel.
If you don't have the time to read Taubes, don't have the time to check references written BY THE PEOPLE YOU'RE ARGUING WITH, then what in THE F*CK are you doing here? How do you possibly have time for this? You're a phony.
It's a very brief post, and it's not an _argument_ because it simply shows where you're wrong. I never claimed causality was demonstrated, here or elsewhere, and that reference even demonstrates my explicit agreement with someone on that very point.
What is does suggest, however, is that's it's not the meat and fat, and it's even more absurd to act as our health establishment does in indicting saturated fat.
"There are far more people of advanced old age today, that in previous times would have died prematurely of famine etc."
It's a stupid point.
All the references I cite speak in terms of RATE, not absolute numbers. And the point, if you'll check the many references cited, is that the rate amongst primitives is virtually ZERO for diseases of civilization (CVD, diabetes, cancer, etc), and we're talking about tens of thousands observed over decades, in total. But, to understand this, you'll need to review the references. |
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| Friday, October 31, 2008 at 13:23:32 mst
Comment ID: #62
Name: Richard Nikoley
E-mail: rnikoley(at)gmail.com
URL: http://www.freetheanimal.com
...And to make sure it's understood, those observations include people in their 80s, 90s, even 100 -- plenty of time for any disease to develop. |
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| Friday, October 31, 2008 at 15:04:43 mst
Comment ID: #63
Name: Richard Nikoley
E-mail: rnikoley(at)gmail.com
URL: http://www.freetheanimal.com
I might add another little tidbit, here.
My own blog has recently become a means of charting and documenting my own progress over the last 18 months. The photos are there, so anyone can see for themselves. Not from the beginning, but for about the last year, I have endeavored to increasingly _simulate_ the sorts of nutrition and activities a pre-agricultural human would have experienced. I've found that the better the simulation (closer to actual), the better the results.
But it wasn't easy. Oh, the diet, exercising and fasting was easy -- fun even. Far more difficult was coming to grips with the reality.
We all know who said this, and who quoted it:
"Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed."
I had to eventually come to the conclusion that a bunch of "know nothing" primitives, going back eons, live in closer proximity to the obeisance of nature in terms of nutrition and physical activity than we moderns, who can, at the drop of a hat, board an aluminum tube and be half-way around the world before one day has even past -- something I've done a dozen times, never failing to be left awestruck.
I've been at this for a while, and I've yet to uncover even one piece of data demonstrating that primitives have not fared far better than we when it comes to basic nutrition. Yet, they also have lower average lifespans owing to non-diet-related phenomena. Where I'm left is that I want to combine the benefits of a modern society with their _wisdom_. And I know that concept makes some bristle viscerally. Me too, before.
But I really don't know of any other way to describe it. Given the disaster we've created with our bizarre and unnatural ways of eating, _wisdom_ seems like an understatement. |
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| Friday, October 31, 2008 at 18:08:06 mst
Comment ID: #64
Name: Anonymous
My significant other has an elderly guy friend in his 80s. The guy was pretty wealthy at one time; in his old age, he has had to use a lot of his money to intermittently have himself patched up by doctors... heart bypass, etc.--many of the problems with modern diet. He's frail.
The way I see it, there are two ways to get old, barring accidents of one sort or another... take reasonable care of yourself (mostly diet with some exercise), or else spend a lot of money and time having doctors patch you up with things such as bypass surgery, joint replacements, prescription medications, etc.
The first way is cheaper, in the long run, and much less painful. That goes for your critters, too.
Right now I'm still feeding my cats (mostly dry) commercial food, but I take pains to buy stuff that's lower in carbohydrates. I also feed them some canned food, some table scraps (meat only), and some raw meat (they love London Broil when it's cut into tiny pieces and drowned in blood). We only eat red meat when it's on sale, anyway.
What I want to do is to eventually transition them to a mostly raw-food diet... mostly ground-up chicken (with ground-up bones) and some supplements such as salmon oil, vitamins, etc.
Not only will they probably live longer and stay out of the veterinarian's office, but vet care for ailing, elderly pets gets rather expensive. For example, I have read that feeding cats a strictly dry-food diet may contribute to renal failure somewhere down the road--it's an expensive proposition and heartbreaking too, not to mention hard on the cat's ability to tolerate (IV fluids, etc.). Much kinder, safer, and cheaper to feed them raw meat. Also keeps their teeth cleaner.
One of the cats I adopted as a 7-year-old critter had been fed cheap commercial, carb-laden food. Her teeth and bad breath proved it. When I finally got he to the vet for an unrelated problem (ear hematoma), she had to get her teeth cleaned (and two of them pulled) under anesthesia. I'm still feeding her a combination of dry food and other stuff, but her breath hasn't returned to being foul like it was when I took her in. She really appreciates her blood-drenched London Broil, although she still likes "treats" too. |
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| Friday, October 31, 2008 at 18:09:55 mst
Comment ID: #65
Name: Anonymous
From what has been posted here, by Diana and others, and from what I've read, the quality of the food makes a difference too. Maybe someday I will have the cash flow to order myself a side of grass-fed beef and stick it in the freezer. And when I do that, I will be eating/rendering/cooking with/and otherwise saving the fat... because it will be a good source of Omega-3's. |
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| Friday, October 31, 2008 at 18:13:19 mst
Comment ID: #66
Name: Anonymous
If you're worried about controling your blood sugar (like I am), one thing to remember is this: You don't absolutely need fruits... the nutrients you seek out in fruits are also available in vegetables (especially non-starchy vegetables).
And when making soup, I am now having to cut down on the higher-glycemic vegetables even, or else it will spike my blood sugar. I am cutting down on tomatoes, onions, and carrots, and instead using more squash, broccoli, spinach, etc.
Also... as we get older, the body's tissues get less sensitive to insulin, so a lot of folks (who aren't diabetic) are using metformin to increase their bodies' sensitivity to insulin. This is prevalent in the life extension community, as well as among people who are using metformin for the purpose of weight loss. |
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| Saturday, November 1, 2008 at 8:39:36 mst
Comment ID: #67
Name: Richard Nikoley
E-mail: rnikoley(at)gmail.com
URL: http://www.freetheanimal.com
"The way I see it, there are two ways to get old, barring accidents of one sort or another... take reasonable care of yourself (mostly diet with some exercise), or else spend a lot of money and time having doctors patch you up with things such as bypass surgery, joint replacements, prescription medications, etc."
One frequent theme I see in reading the journals and studies of those who've spent a lot of time observing indigenous peoples on their ancestral diets is that if the survive accidents, pathogens, poisons, predation and the general harshness of a primitive existence, they typically live healthy, full, vibrant and active, and when time, they die, right up into their 80s, 90s, and beyond. To me, this is far preferable to living 20+ years under meds of various sorts and undergoing invasive procedures -- not to say that any of these might not not be appropriate anyway, in the right circumstances.
http://www.staffanlindeberg.com/TheKitavaStudy.html
Despite a fair number of older residents, none of whom showed signs of dementia or poor memory, the only cases of sudden death the residents could recall were accidents such as drowning or falling from a coconut tree. Homicide also occured, often during conflicts over land or mates. Infections (primarily malaria), accidents, pregnancy complications, and old age were the dominant causes of death, which is in agreement with findings among other similar populations. Child mortality from malaria and other infections was relatively high, and the average lifespan was around 45 years. The remaining life expectancy at 45 years of age is more difficult to determine, but may be similar to Swedish figures. The number of people examined with an EKG was too small (n = 171) to be able to draw clear conclusions, but when combined with two similar studies of traditional Melanesian populations, the EKG findings provided additional support for the lack of ischaemic heart disease in the area [25, 26].
Our age estimates were based on known historical events: (1) The arrival of Cyril Cameron, a white man from Tasmania, who established a coconut farm in 1912 and remained on the island until his death, (2) American and Australian military occupation of the area during World War II from 1942-43, (3) The founding of an elementary school in 1962, and (4) Cameron's death and burial on the island in 1966. Everyone above 35 years of age could clearly remember one or more of these events, and their personal experience matched information from relatives and friends. The oldest living person during the survey was a 96 year-old woman, and during a previous visit a vital 100 year-old man was interviewed.
There is no evidence to suggest that the people who died before the age of 60 are the ones who would have otherwise suffered from cardiovascular disease. Although bacterial infections are discussed as possible (co)factors in atherosclerosis, infections which can be treated with antibiotics, the idea that present use of antibiotics in western societies would effectively prevent ischaemic heart disease before the age of 60 is not plausible considering the remarkably high prevalence of atherosclerosis in this part of the world (see Chapter 4.3). Furthermore, our findings cannot be explained by positing that the truth has not been exposed. The most serious diseases that actually did occur were described carefully and in an identical manner for each of the various villages. This afforded us some measure of quality control.
The elderly residents of Kitava generally remain quite active up until the very end, when they begin to suffer fatigue for a few days and then die from what appears to be an infection or some type of rapid degeneration. Although this is seen in western societies, it is relatively rare in elderly vital people. The quality of life among the oldest residents thus appeared to be good in the Trobriand Islands.
The main results of the Kitava study, that there is no ischaemic heart disease (and no stroke, see Chapter 4.2), are unanimously confirmed by medical experts with knowledge of the Trobriand Islands or other parts of Melanesia. Likewise, Jüptner noted no cases of angina pectoris, myocardial infarction or sudden death during his 5 years as a provincial doctor on the islands at the beginning of the 1960s, when the population was roughly 12,000. (Jüptner H, unpublished data). His experience is based partly on patients that visited him due to illness, and partly from systematic health examinations given in all the different villages at three separate times. The same observation was made by Schiefenhövel, physician and human ethologist from the Max Planck Institute in Munich (Schiefenhövel W, unpublished data). He can speak the language of the Trobrianders, Kilivila, and has his own hut on Kaileuna, one of the Trobriand Islands, where he examined close to 3,000 patients during his repeated visits over the course of close to 15 years. Like Jüptner, he is very familiar with the nature of cardiovascular disease and did not see any cases of the disease.
The residents of Kitava lived exclusively on root vegetables (yam, sweet potato, taro, tapioca), fruit (banana, papaya, pineapple, mango, guava, water melon, pumpkin), vegetables, fish and coconuts [27-29]. Less than 0.2% of the caloric intake came from Western food, such as edible fats, dairy products, sugar, cereals, and alcohol, compared with roughly 75% in Sweden [30]. The intake of vitamins, minerals and soluble fibre was therefore very high, while the total fat consumption was low, about 20 E% [28], as was the intake of salt (40-50 mmol Na/10 MJ compared with 100-250 in Sweden). Due to the high level of coconut consumption, saturated fat made up an equally large portion of the overall caloric intake as is the case in Sweden. However, lauric acid was the dominant dietary saturated fatty acid as opposed to palmitic acid in Sweden. Malnutrition and famine did not seem to occur. |
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| Saturday, November 1, 2008 at 13:27:01 mst
Comment ID: #68
Name: Burgess Laughlin
E-mail: burgesslaughlin(at)macforcego.com
URL: http://www.aristotleadventure.blogspot.com
Richard, thanks for posting the quotation from the study to which you linked. I found the following intriguing:
"The residents of Kitava lived exclusively on root vegetables (yam, sweet potato, taro, tapioca), fruit (banana, papaya, pineapple, mango, guava, water melon, pumpkin), vegetables, fish and coconuts ...."
Would this diet qualify as "paleolithic"? If I have understood your point, apparently it does. As a joke I can now describe my diet as "prelithic," Excluding the fish, the diet described here, which appears to be very low fat, is similar to mine. I eat large quantities of fruit, vegetables and especially starchy roots (potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, rutabagas, and celery root). I eat no animal products except honey occasionally, and I am thriving for the first time in my adult life. All my medical problems are gone--mainly inflammation problems, which is why it is an anti-itis diet.
Again, hoping I have understood you correctly, a part of the "paleolithic diet" is negative: not eating refined sugars (as opposed to sugars found in whole foods) and not eating grains, for example. The positive part is to eat wholesome foods in variety and in an "original" form where feasible.
Thanks, I have (I hope) a clearer idea of what "paleolithic diet" means. It is extraordinarily broad--e.g., in some cases possibly including little meat or other animal products, but in other cases including substantially more. |
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| Saturday, November 1, 2008 at 14:11:06 mst
Comment ID: #69
Name: Richard Nikoley
E-mail: rnikoley(at)gmail.com
URL: http://www.freetheanimal.com
Burgess:
I consider any diet that draws exclusively from the local environment "Paleo." I'm convinced anyone will do better on such diet regardless of the macro-nutrient content. I think the evidence is very clear that both a diet like the Kitavans and a diet like the Inuit, both at _natural_ extremes, are perfectly healthy diets. The common denominator is that they contain nothing processed: no grains, processed sugar, processed concentrated vegetable oils requiring machinery and solvents to extract, and the plethora of highly processed and refined derivative products that fill your local supermarket, typically in all the center isles as opposed to the permitter where you find the meats, fruits, and vegetables.
I don't know that theirs, however, is particularly low in fat or even saturated fat. Off the top of my head, coconut fat is about 97% saturated. I eat by the gobs. It has become far and away my favorite cooking oil. |
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| Saturday, November 1, 2008 at 14:26:41 mst
Comment ID: #70
Name: Diana Hsieh
E-mail: diana(at)dianahsieh.com
URL: http://www.dianahsieh.com/blog
Regarding the Kitavans: It is not possible to infer that because the Kitavans eat a diet predominantly consisting of fruits and vegetables -- with relatively little meat in the form of fish -- that therefore a diet wholly lacking in any meat (or animal products) is generally healthy. The difference between none and some might well be huge.
Of course, for some people -- namely those with specific medical conditions -- a diet without any animal products might be the best course. But that doesn't show that such a diet is healthy for people without such conditions. |
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| Saturday, November 1, 2008 at 14:56:16 mst
Comment ID: #71
Name: Burgess Laughlin
E-mail: burgesslaughlin(at)macforcego.com
URL: http://www.aristotleadventure.blogspot.com
Richard: "Off the top of my head, coconut fat is about 97% saturated."
Good memory. According to my layman's source, _The Wellness Encyclopedia of Food and Nutrition_, raw coconut has about 33 grams of fat per 3.5 ounce serving, and it provides 85% of calories from fat, with 76% of those calories coming from saturated fat. |
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| Sunday, November 2, 2008 at 7:34:23 mst
Comment ID: #72
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
URL: http://sparkasynapse.blogspot.com
Anonymous -- glad to hear you want to switch your pets over to raw. They will improve dramatically. If you need to know how to get started, check this post, particularly the comments line: http://sparkasynapse.blogspot.com/2008/10/where-i-post-graphic-vide ... |
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| Sunday, November 2, 2008 at 15:43:57 mst
Comment ID: #73
Name: Richard Nikoley
E-mail: rnikoley(at)gmail.com
URL: http://www.freetheanimal.com
Given Diana's comment I should probably clarify mine.
Where I wrote:
"I consider any diet that draws exclusively from the local environment "Paleo.""
I also mean to stipulate that the diet would exploit _everything_ reasonably and rationally exploitable. It would be the height of _irrationality_ for primitives to eschew excellent nutrition from the _most_ _nutritious_ and energy dense sources available: meat and fish and their precious fats. And that's why we find _none_ of them anywhere in the world, at any time in the past who do: ZERO populations of indigenous vegetarians, though there were a. robustus and rabidicus, I believe, which were the last hominoids in the homo sapiens family tree, both of which went extinct about 2.5 mil years ago. Our nearest relative, neanderthal, is only below wild cats and wolves in terms of mammalian carnivory.
What that portends for moderns who abstain from the healthiest and densest sources of nutrition because they are wealthy and advanced enough to do so, I'll leave for others to judge. I can't say it's irrational, per se, but it's certainly not explicitly rational -- as in: more rational than omivory -- whereas, eating meat and fat is our natural ancestry and perfectly in accordance with the nature of man qua animal.
All this vegetarian nonsense, in a Randian context if I may be so bold, is a shabby, malicious attempt to _deny_ man's nature and to _indict_ him with guilt for his own hunger and cravings in terms of his very most basic requirement of survival: sustenance.
Vegetarianism is an _evil_ philosophy, short of specific objective medical reasons for individuals suffering _abnormalities_. |
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| Sunday, November 2, 2008 at 15:45:54 mst
Comment ID: #74
Name: Richard Nikoley
E-mail: rnikoley(at)gmail.com
URL: http://www.freetheanimal.com
"...which were the last hominoids in the homo sapiens family tree..."
...which were the last [vegetarian] hominoids in the homo sapiens family tree... |
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| Monday, November 3, 2008 at 11:15:23 mst
Comment ID: #75
Name: Ted Coxhead
E-mail: tedcoxhead(at)yahoo.co.uk
At the risk of Mr Nikoley saying that I may be full of shit or that I am a phony, I would make a couple of points about remarks such as this: "One frequent theme I see in reading the journals and studies of those who've spent a lot of time observing indigenous peoples on their ancestral diets is that if the survive accidents, pathogens, poisons, predation and the general harshness of a primitive existence, they typically live healthy, full, vibrant and active, and when time, they die, right up into their 80s, 90s, and beyond."
I assume that Mr Nikoley is here talking about modern day or surviving primitive people because the fact is that no-one, including him, can possibly know if this applies to early man. There is simply no evidence - and cannot be - that would enable us to know (a) how healthy paleolithic dead bodies were or (b) whether those peoples historically would have succumbed to MI,cancer or whatever. (As far as surviving primitive peoples are concerned we also do not know exactly how much they have been affected - for good and ill - by being part of a world in which we also live).
It is also of interest to note that even though it is claimed here that "indigenous peoples on their ancestral diets" are healthy and vibrant, I think it is true that all such primitive peoples have a strong culture of medicine men and shamans of one type or another. What did these "witch doctors" actually do if everyone was in such rude health? They did not just try to set fractures as surviving evidence of haemorhoid medicaments would indicate. (Incidentally is it possible that such an ailment would indicate a problem with diet, as it might with the SWD?).
Might I also ask - why the heat in this discussion? Why does disagreement lead to such vituperative language? Diet preferences or beliefs are not part of Objectivism anymore than the work of eminent journalists like Gary Taubes is. I am delighted for Mr Nikoley that he and the close friends he referred to feel so well on his preferred diet. Personally I feel well on mine, and I am in my 60's to boot. But I can't make any generalizations on that basis. |
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| Monday, November 3, 2008 at 11:36:10 mst
Comment ID: #76
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
URL: http://sparkasynapse.blogspot.com
"There is simply no evidence - and cannot be - that would enable us to know (a) how healthy paleolithic dead bodies were..."
Nonsense. Anyone who has looked at the skull and tooth structure of relatively wild Homo sapiens knows better.
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2008/08/saharan-hunter-gather ...
The same observations of ancient skulls were noted by Weston A. Price in his classic on nutrition, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, almost 70 years ago. |
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| Monday, November 3, 2008 at 11:45:48 mst
Comment ID: #77
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
URL: http://sparkasynapse.blogspot.com
And if you don't know how skull and tooth structure is a reflection of health, then do your homework. |
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| Monday, November 3, 2008 at 12:23:31 mst
Comment ID: #78
Name: Ted Coxhead
E-mail: tedcoxhead(at)yahoo.co.uk
"Nonsense. Anyone who has looked at the skull and tooth structure of relatively wild Homo sapiens knows better." Oh I see. And that would tell you all about cancer and MI would it? And diabetes? And you could further deduce, that if only they had lived longer, they would not have got any of those things.
And further, that were they working on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, tucking into their version of the "paleo" diet, whether all veg or all meat or mainly insect, that they would fare better than those who have evolved to do just that?
They must surely be some incredible skulls and tooth structures for "anyone who has looked at" to be able to see that. |
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| Monday, November 3, 2008 at 13:41:45 mst
Comment ID: #79
Name: Richard Nikoley
E-mail: rnikoley(at)gmail.com
URL: http://www.freetheanimal.com
"I assume that Mr Nikoley is here talking about modern day or surviving primitive people because the fact is that no-one, including him, can possibly know if this applies to early man."
You really are quite ignorant, Ted; if even in an intellectually obtuse fashion. That means: you like showing people how smart you are by demostrating how ignorant you can force yourself to be. It's like a comedy act, really.
Clearly, this is a waste of time with the like of you. In the mean time, you get to be just as stupid as you want to be.
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| Monday, November 3, 2008 at 14:11:49 mst
Comment ID: #80
Name: Ted Coxhead
E-mail: tedcoxhead(at)yahoo.co.uk
Thank you, Mr Nikoley. I am indeed puzzled, although unconcerned, at your venom. |
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| Monday, November 3, 2008 at 15:30:47 mst
Comment ID: #81
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
URL: http://sparkasynapse.blogspot.com
"And further, that were they working on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange, tucking into their version of the "paleo" diet, whether all veg or all meat or mainly insect, that they would fare better than those who have evolved to do just that?"
Absolutely, because those living in 2008 and those living 40,000 years ago have evolved to do just that.
Read Taubes. http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Controversial-Science/dp/14 ...
Read Price, the Charles Darwin of nutrition. http://www.amazon.com/Nutrition-Physical-Degeneration-Weston-Price/ ...
Read Eades. http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/
In short, get beyond the word "paleo".
No paleolithic ancestor suffered from altered bone structure, narrow, crowded palates, or the modern extent of tooth decay due to vitamin deficiencies. It is proved. Read the scientific literature, or at least some objective reviews of it, and *get it already*.
I find it incredible that cutting out sugar and refined or unsoaked grains is so controversial. Your mental gymnastics to avoid plain truths are quite remarkable, Ted. |
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| Monday, November 3, 2008 at 16:00:09 mst
Comment ID: #82
Name: OistPostGrad
E-mail: post&Go(at)yahoo.com
Ted, I must admit I'm somewhat confused by your position on this subject. As an observer to this debate, I would say that Diana, Richard and Monica have all made rational arguments to your objections. You don't have to agree but you should at least be intrigued by what they have said. Your hostile reaction seems irrational to me. You seem determined to reject their arguments at all costs.
I'm curious, is your opposition to the nutritional approach being advanced here due to some deeper philosophic point? Do you see the Paleo diet as an example of rationalism or as something deduced from false premises? I ask because as a subscriber to HBL I've noticed that your contributions there have always been well reasoned. Yet here, they are not IMO. |
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| Monday, November 3, 2008 at 16:08:17 mst
Comment ID: #83
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
URL: http://sparkasynapse.blogspot.com
One last comment/reply:
"Might I also ask - why the heat in this discussion? Why does disagreement lead to such vituperative language?"
I have every right to be worked up about a diet that probably contributed to both of my parents' cancer (my father's has recurred twice now), my great-grandfather's Alzheimer's, my grandfather's two cancers and his and his mothers' diabetes, my grandmother's heart disease, my other two grandparents' colon cancers (and subsequent deaths), and my mother's pregnancy diet that resulted in me having a palate so small that I've had to endure many painful procedures to have 8 adult teeth removed and the rest rearranged. I especially have the right to get worked up about this when the modern agricultural and medical establishments and every major nutritional authority is busy rationalizing a defense of whole grains and the standard American diet and avoiding basic realities.
"I am delighted for Mr Nikoley that he and the close friends he referred to feel so well on his preferred diet. Personally I feel well on mine, and I am in my 60's to boot. But I can't make any generalizations on that basis."
No, you can't. But neither are we. We're drawing conclusions based on the totality of the data we have available, which are: 1) personal experience 2) an honest review of the literature spanning decades, and 3) common sense and the evolutionary argument. We have 3 out of 3. You, Ted, have 1 out of 3. You don't even have that in the sense that you don't know if you could feel any better by changing your diet. I thought I was in excellent health while eating mostly beans, bread, rice and the occasional donut. Now we know better, because we've all done controlled experiments. The "before" is the control. The "after" is the treatment.
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| Monday, November 3, 2008 at 16:38:37 mst
Comment ID: #84
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
URL: http://sparkasynapse.blogspot.com
Here's another reason to get worked up about nutrition.
Without government nutritional bullshit and USDA promotion of grain farming for the past 60 years to the tune of (currently) $80 billion US in taxpayer dollars per year, diseases of civilization would be literally LICKED. The entire research and medical communities, instead of being brainwashed by government agencies, would have been working for the past 50 years or so not on heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer's, and diabetes (which, it would appear, can almost always be prevented or treated with the right diet and without one single molecule of drug if caught early enough) but on how to help us live 150 or 200 years. They especially wouldn't be spending time on these diseases if, in addition to first realizing their true nutritional roots, they didn't have altruist ethics.
Instead, we have this: http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=researchers ...
We have researchers developing artificial pancreases to treat Type I diabetes. This, when all the knowledge to control Type II diabetes before it progresses to Type I diabetes is already available and practiced by countless people day in and day out with remarkable success, as evidence here:http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/bogus-studies/petition-to-help-s ...
here: http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/weight-loss/low-carb-diets-impro ...
here: http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/diabetes/the-sugar-hypothesis/
and here: http://www.freetheanimal.com/root/2008/10/type-2-diabetes-rate-doub ...
Why the heat? Because instead of living to 150 to 200 years in our lifetime, we face the following scenario: more of the same grain-based nonsense (particularly if CO2 will be regulated) and the compounding effects of the same diet on subsequent generations, more and more of the individuals of which will develop these diseases if things don't change. Personally, I think that's something worth getting worked up about. |
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| Monday, November 3, 2008 at 16:56:48 mst
Comment ID: #85
Name: OistPostGrad
E-mail: post&Go(at)yahoo.com
Monica,
Your comments are inspiring. I remember first learning of these dietary insights through Art DeVanny and I wished at the time that an Objectivist with a background in science would analyze this information. You are doing just that. Its awesome that you and Diana are bringing attention to this way of eating and the arguments that support it.
Just one question about your comments about the 150-200 year lifespan. My understanding of human longevity is that the outer max for lifespan is 120 years and has been constant for our entire evolutionary history. That is if a person had the right genetics and lived the proper lifestyle of natural diet and exercise (as in Jack LaLane or Art Devany) then they might have a chance at being a centarian. Anything longer would take some scientific breakthrough at the cellular level. That's my understanding. Do you know if longevity science is on the cusp of any breakthroughs?
My thinking has always been that if Ojbectivism caught hold in our lifetimes and we experienced a move toward laissez faire, we would see a significant rise in our lifespans. This is one reason to fight all the harder for Objectivism as it literally is a matter of life or death. |
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| Monday, November 3, 2008 at 17:16:50 mst
Comment ID: #86
Name: OistPostGrad
E-mail: post&Go(at)yahoo.com
Actually, I don't know what would happen if 'Ojbectivism' caught on so I'll just stick with 'Objectivism'. |
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| Monday, November 3, 2008 at 17:51:03 mst
Comment ID: #87
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
URL: http://sparkasynapse.blogspot.com
Oistpostgrad --
I do not know anything about longevity research or how long we could live. My guess is that with people already living past 100, even if they are "doing everything right", that a few decades of serious research in this area by the majority of the medical research community (which we should have, not this studying the same goddamn disease for 40 years when the solutions are KNOWN) would press that limit past 120. Hell, if we all just "looked to nature", so to speak, we could be living far longer than 80 and anything beyond 100-120 would be a huge plus. It pisses me off that my tax dollars are being spent on this junk research and that so many people (even Objectivists) actually think it is worthy.
We will see how long Art lives. I am not sure how long he has been following a paleo-type diet. My guess is at most a few decades? His interest in exercise certainly spans a longer time period -- at least 40 years.
There is an Objectivist who is working in the area of longevity research. I forget his name but I believe he is a graduate student. Someone else may remember his name, as I believe he introduced himself on one of Diana's lists.
A key factor in longevity in rats is caloric restriction. Eades and Art D. have many posts on the issue of intermittent fasting and that it should work equally well at caloric restriction -- not to mention that lack of sugar and grains automatically reduce calories because hunger is not as triggered with a paleo type diet. Most days I am fine on 1200-1400 calories. If I was eating pasta, bread, and potatoes I'd be eating 2000 calories at least.
Eades is not a believer in antioxidant supplements and seems to give good scientific reasons for this that have to do with glutathione not being able to cross one of the mitochondrial membranes where it is used. DeVany is a believer in glutathione, OTOH. I suspect Eades is right but I don't which one to believe until I further suss this issue out in the literature... and cell biology is not my specialty. :) AS far as I know, most of what we know around aging has focused on caloric restriction, antioxidants, and advanced glycation end products -- check Eades' site for that last one, there are some interesting studies. |
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| Monday, November 3, 2008 at 18:38:29 mst
Comment ID: #88
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
URL: http://sparkasynapse.blogspot.com
OIstPostGrad â€" in addition to caloric restriction, antioxidants, and AGEs --
Another area that I believe might bear fruit in longevity research is the investigation of endogenous enzymes in food that digest the food. As I wrote above, I have some serious issues with some of the conclusions of the author of Enzyme Nutrition, Edward Howell, but the book was fascinating from other standpoints. I want to get the longer version to see more citations and data, but he seems to provide some convincing evidence from animal studies that lifespan is shortened by eating cooked foods, or at least, foods without their endogenous enzyme content (as altered by heat or a lack of proper processing for grains and seeds) He also provides evidence that enzymes have a fixed number of reactions to catalyze. If that is true it is completely contradictory to what I learned in biochemistry and cell biology as an undergraduate. I need to have a closer look at the data to know what is true. I do not take anything except the most basic of facts as facts anymore.
Howell’s work is particularly interesting in the context of Weston A Price’s findings. Neither of these authors every referenced each other, to my knowledge, though they were contemporaries.
Price found that cultures eating grains always soaked and sprouted them and had no problems with grains. Though the cultures eating some grains (the primitive Swiss and the primitive residents of the Outer Hebrides) did not have the best dental health as those eating proportionally more meat and seafood, they still did quite well. That's significant in light of today's grain-based problems. And while Asians eat soy, they ferment it. We know today that both the sprouting (for grains) and the fermentation (for soy) inactivate enzyme inhibitors in these foods. I’m convinced we need to take a closer look at food enzymes, which are almost universally dismissed by the current medical, agricultural, and nutritional establishment. (Then again, Price is universally dismissed or unknown as well, though his work is revolutionary.) They are myopically focused on macronutrients, vitamins and minerals. Various native groups around the world, from the Greeks to the Germans to the Asians to various Native Americans, all use lactofermentation to preserve vegetables, for instance. The food is laden with lactobaccilli and their enzymes. We need controlled studies evaluating these foods and their enzyme-less counterparts... we need studies that span decades to find long-term effects.
There are many areas of research that need to be followed up on with an objective review of current literature and more research if necessary. These are only a few. I am sure there are many more I am unaware of. |
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| Monday, November 3, 2008 at 21:00:26 mst
Comment ID: #89
Name: Mark Wickens
E-mail: noodlefood(at)wickens.ca
URL: http://randex.org/
"There is an Objectivist who is working in the area of longevity research. I forget his name but I believe he is a graduate student."
I think you're referring to Robin Mockett. He's a professor at USC.
http://www.usc.edu/schools/pharmacy/faculty_directory/detail.php?id=15 |
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| Monday, November 3, 2008 at 21:41:25 mst
Comment ID: #90
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
URL: http://sparkasynapse.blogspot.com
Mark there is also another person, a grad student, because I am not familiar with that guy.
OIstPostGrad, here is some very interesting stuff on aging.
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/low-carb-library/low-carb-diets- ...
The linked article above has information on antioxidant supplements, advanced glycation end products (AGEs), and caloric restriction.
And then there's this, debunking the myth that meat eaters are suffering from oxidative stress: http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/sugar-and-sweeteners/vegetarians ...
Here is another great article on the difference in how you will look if you are on a low fat diet vs. a high fat diet by the time you turn 100 or so: http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/low-carb-diets/jack-lalanne-vs-a ...
That last one is pretty priceless. |
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| Monday, November 3, 2008 at 21:49:50 mst
Comment ID: #91
Name: OistPostGrad
E-mail: post&Go(at)yahoo.com
Great stuff Monica thanks.
Ancel Keys looks terrible but I have to say that I'm shocked he even made it to 100. He must have eaten a healthier diet than he recommended to others. I doubt anyone can make it to 100 eating the standard American high carb diet. And Jack LaLane is a total stud. I love that guy. |
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| Monday, November 3, 2008 at 21:51:35 mst
Comment ID: #92
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
TO be fair, Jack LaLanne never ate a lot of fat per se. But he sure as heck ate a lot of meat, it seems. |
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| Tuesday, November 4, 2008 at 10:14:59 mst
Comment ID: #93
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
"I doubt anyone can make it to 100 eating the standard American high carb diet."
I don't, really. My grandfather ate loads of sugar and died at 86 of a brain tumor after living for years with scores of fatty tumors on the rest of his body. Refined sugar didn't seem to do him much harm until then. I'm sure he could have lived longer without the sugar but he died with a seemingly healthy heart and was skinny as all get out with a heart rate of about 50 per minute. At an average life expectancy for males in the US around, what, 75?, he seemed to do pretty well. Everyone has a different tolerance for junk based in part on their insulin metabolism.
The issue, I think, is not how long we could live eating junk but why we don't want to live even longer by cutting the junk out. So what if you can live to 80 to 100 eating junk. 85% of smokers never develop COPD and they "feel fine at 60" but that's not a hell of an argument for smoking. Even so, smoking is a hell of a lot safer than eating refined carbs given the very strong evidence linking them to heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and Alzheimer's. The risk of getting cancer alone just by virtue of being an American is what, 40%? A hell of a lot worse than COPD rates, which are described at only 15% as an "epidemic." |
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| Tuesday, November 4, 2008 at 10:31:18 mst
Comment ID: #94
Name: Conrad
Great discussion guys. I've been following all the diet posts on noodlefood since the first post and I am now in progress of switching over to paleo. However I'm having a hard time finding recipes. I was thinking that maybe we can get a site going where everyone can post their recipes and daily food regimens? Mary Dan Eades has something like that going but it's a bit small and isn't attended to enough.
What say you guys? |
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| Tuesday, November 4, 2008 at 13:58:13 mst
Comment ID: #95
Name: Monica
E-mail: monicabeth10(at)gmail.com
Go for it, Conrad. Let us know. You have my email. I would be happy to contribute recipes or my regimen and my weight loss progress, too, but truth be told I do not have many fancy low carb recipes. It is mostly meat and veg -- for dinner it is usually a big salad without starchy veg, or some steamed low starch veggies, with grilled or sauteed steak, burgers, brats, natural hot dogs, or fish, or some roast chicken or lamb. Sometimes I make a decadent cream sauce for the meats with the sauteing oil and meat juices. Breakfast these days is nonexistent, just some coffee with heavy cream. Lunch is very small -- a few pieces of meat, maybe a bit of cheese. I don't eat most days until 2 to 3 PM now, giving me an 18 hour or longer fast every day to get that fasting/caloric restriction benefit. I barely notice the hunger.
I have to say, though, that I would love some new meal ideas that don't take too much time. |
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| Tuesday, November 4, 2008 at 16:42:53 mst
Comment ID: #96
Name: Richard Nikoley
E-mail: rnikoley(at)gmail.com
URL: http://www.freetheanimal.com
Conrad:
I have a "food porn" category on my website:
http://www.freetheanimal.com/root/food-porn/
It's not so much on the recipes as it is you can usually figure out basically what to do just by the photo.
There's also Naomi's site:
http://mypaleokitchen.blogspot.com/
Tons of recipes there. I've seen another site or two, just surfing about. Maybe google 'paleo recipes' and see what comes up. |
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| Tuesday, November 4, 2008 at 18:11:27 mst
Comment ID: #97
Name: Conrad
Richard: Those sites are not exactly what I was thinking. I'd like a database of recipes where anyone can add their own recipe and that can be searched based on ingredients. There's a lot more to my idea but I'm not sure i'll have the time or the knowhow to put it together. However, thank you for the links and I will probably be using some of the recipes. |
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| Wednesday, February 25, 2009 at 15:29:31 mst
Comment ID: #98
Name: Adam Spong
The Objectivist-grad-student-studying-longevity in question may be Adam Spong, as I am in fact a student in biogerontologist Andrzej Bartke's lab. We study the life-extending effects of a calorie restricted diet in mice, as well as various lines of long-lived mutant mice.
As mentioned, Dr. Robin Mockett is an Objectivist aging researcher whose work has focused primarily on the effects of oxidative damage in fruit flies. I gather, by the way, that he is now at the University of South Alabama, not USC.
As far as the question of diet and longevity, I'll just mention that calorie restriction is still the gold standard in aging research for life extension. It has been demonstrated to extend the lifespan of an incredibly wide variety of species, from yeast to various invertebrates to mammals, and recent studies of CR in humans have shown significant improvements in risk factors for major age-related diseases, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cancer. CR can increase the *maximum* lifespan of rodents by around 50%.
For information on the practice of CR in humans, you can start with the Calorie Restriction Society, the primary organization for CR practitioners:
http://www.calorierestriction.org/
As it happens, Dr. Mockett has authored a paper pointing out certain apparent exceptions to the general finding that CR works across the phylogenetic spectrum, and he emphasizes the fact that the efficacy of CR in humans is still unknown.
Indeed, the issue of whether CR will in fact alter human aging and extend the maximum lifespan is very far from being resolved, but there is considerable evidence that it does confer protection against specific diseases of old-age, and could therefore be expected to very likely increase at least the *average* human lifespan.
For the record, the health risks of practicing CR improperly are severe, and genuine CR should not be attempted without the approval of a physician and a thorough study of the proper methodology.
Personally, I did for a time practice a mild form of CR and I am working my way back toward the diet. |
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