Free the Animal

HED: High Everything Diet (If eating garbage is your problem, just eat more of it)

Coming to one or more of your favorite blogs' comments section soon, if the messianic crusade on Peter's Hyperlipid blog is any indication. The comment thread in question begins here. He has also hit Dr. Eades on this post (there's no comment links, but the comments in question begin at 25 April 2009, 23:24). Now, Stephan's blog.

In a nutshell, from one of his comments:

HED = high-carbs + high-fat + high-calories

HED = SAD - sugar - HFCS - PUFAs - TFAs

I'm not going to recount all the specifics, as those are contained in the comments -- over and over -- if you're interested.

I've said before that I don't think carbohydrate is the primary problem (for those without type 2 or borderline, or obsese), and the Kitavans and other H-G groups seem to prove that. In that regard, this HED does seem to eliminate at least some of what migh destroy a high-carb munching Kitavan's health, i.e., refined sugar, high fructose corn syrup, processed vegetable oils (HEDers seem also not too fond of omega-3 PUFA -- the Ray Peat influence) and trans fatty-acids.

He has also posted that lots of the low-carbers ignore the Kitavans, which is true. I don't think that's the case for all the paleo-like eaters, and certainly not true for me, as I've often written that healthful diets exist from equator to arctic circle, from high carb intake (Kitavans, Kuna and others -- mostly from starch) to virtually zero carb (Inuit).

What I think is of far more importance is to find the diet or life way that works for you. First, begin with a principle: Real Food and nothing but Real Food. Next, attempt to determine where your genetic ancestry evolved in the last 50,000 years since coming out of Africa. Did your ancestors evolve in tropical regions with plenty of starches and fruits available year round, in regions with limited starches and fruits only seasonally, or with pretty much nothing but meat and animal fat most of the time?

Start there and go with how you feel as your first and primary authority. It's a process. There is great variability, so you may be more adaptable to one macronutrient mix than another, or, it may not make much of a difference. Some are going to feel better on high carb, and some on zero carb, and some in-between.

But never forget the Real Food principle. That's a safe haven and you just can't go wrong.

The HED people are saying, in essence, that if you don't eat grains in abundance (e.g., replacing the cals with more meat, fat, veggies, fruits, nuts), that you're "stupid" and that you're damaging your health. That's nonsense. It violates a sound and proven principle (Real Food), it's -- so far -- based on short term anecdotes and nothing more, and it proposes a one-size-fits-all diet.

Perhaps most annoying of all is that -- at least in the case of the comment crusader -- they seem to take great stock in each and every anecdote of great health achieved (over the last weeks and couple of months) on this HED, yet discount the thousands of low-carb and paleo anecdotes recounted over decades. Everyone here knows my story, including that I've lost 50ish pounds so far, dropped my BP from 160/100 to normal ranges, have HDLs in the 130s, Trigs in the 40s, cured and reversed gum disease, and have rid myself of a number of prescription medications that I have been on for years, and in one case, decades.

But I'm not munching on unlimited bread, pasta, bagels, pizza and pancakes, so I've actually damaged my health, you see. I am unclean; unwashed; unsaved. I'm ruined. I need salvation: HED, I repent; please save me.

A final note about that last paragraph. He -- over and over -- stipulates that those things are only a problem in a low fat environment and that eating them with plenty of animal fat solves the problem. Well, I was never a low fat dieter, and have probably been over 40% fat most of my entire life, mostly from animal sources. I was never much of a candy or junk food muncher, but I certainly did eat lots and lots and lots of bread (with huge mounds of meat, cheese, and veggies between), pizzas (all meat, usually), always used lots of butter and drank plenty of milk and other dairy sources of fat.

Grains ruined my health, and getting away from them while eating unlimited meat, fowl, fish, animal fat, coconut milk & oil, veggies and reasonable fruits and nuts restored my health.

This post is intended as a public service announcement, aimed primarily at those who, for lack of a good explanation, seem to be influenced by religious crusades. So just remember: Animals don't need gurus. Be your own Master and Control your own life.

Diet Fad Insanity

Here's a couple of articles that came to me by way of email (thanks Karen & Jim).

100-calorie nibbles

For the dieter who's looking to lose a few, the market wants to help you.

For the past couple of years, certain companies have offered small portions of snack foods bundled in 100-calorie packs. Roughly 175 products -- among them Nabisco's Oreos and Teddy Grahams, Hershey's Dark Chocolate and, yes, even Hostess' Twinkies, in the form of Twinkie Bites -- come in small sizes. Do they work?

Weight loss surgery's complications devastate some patients

Sandi Krueger of Turlock dropped 120 pounds with weight-loss surgery, but she is hardly a success story.

The 2002 surgery led to chronic malnutrition and anemia. As the pounds melted away, so did her life.

With a sunken face and protruding collar bones, she is too weak to work and spends most afternoons on the couch wrapped in a blanket.

She has thoughts of giving up, but wants to be there for 12-year-old daughter Megan and 19-year-old son Dustin.

"It's not acceptable leaving me like this," said the 103-pound Krueger, who at 38 looks closer to 50. "I've gone to doctor after doctor and basically they don't help me."

This is a very tragic story and I consider Ms. Krueger and victim of people who should have taken care of her.

Wouldn't it just be so much easier to eat all the meat, natural fat (animal, coconut, olive), vegetables (swimming in fat is A-OK too), fruit (smoothies blended with eggs and lots of fat -- heavy cream and/or coconut milk -- is also A-OK -- (are you detecting a theme, here?)) that you want, get the highest nutrition possible, and watch the pounds melt away, widespread inflammation reduce, and moderate of correct most health problems, particularly those of an autoimmune nature?

Do you know why America is fatter than ever? It is squarely and precisely because its fear of fat is greater than ever. Fat (natural fat) is king. Once you learn this, everything falls right into place.

Paleo Trumps Faux Mediterranean

I'm so far behind in blogging about some of the astounding stuff Stephan has uncovered over the last few months that I better not get any further behind and just run this one up the flagpole instanter.

But I haven't even gotten to the best part yet.

Well, just click on over to get the whole thing. Nothing I can add, except perhaps the comment I posted concerning his correct, first-hand (like mine) identification of the faux in "Mediterranean Diet" here in America. What we think it is and it's reported to be; it aint.

I'll add this. Even as fat as I was, when Bea and I did our whirlwind three-week Europe tour a couple of years back (France, Spain, Italy), I took off 2-3 pounds in spite of the fact that we ate good and lots.

It's the food, folks. There are Good Calories Bad Calories.

The "Groan" Diet

Mark Sisson dissects "The Zone," and precisely so. I respect Barry Sears, and certainly, his prescriptions are far better than, say, those of the attention grabbing low-fat fat-face Ornish (I emphasize: huge understatement).

I tried that diet (Zone) for a couple of months back in the mid-90's when the original book came out. I soon knew it would never work for me. Mark's section on "hunger" is really the essential point.

In the end, it suffers from the same deficit as I think the Paleo diet does. Fat is king. It's more than twice as efficient by volume than either protein or carbohydrate, and it's what really makes the difference in dietary success, and I'm thoroughly convinced of that. Fat (animal, coconut --avoid vegetable oils) is what makes the difference between giving in and dialing Pizza Hut, setting off a cascade of diminished-self-image failure, and going in and fixing a cheese omelet cooked in butter.

At least it was for me.

I said "was." Funny thing is, and you may have noticed: I don't blog nearly as much about the wonders of fats. That's because I don't eat nearly as much, anymore. And it was completely natural. Once I reset my genes, over months and months, I've come to now eat far more "normally." I'd call it something, like: "The Intermittent Diet." The key is intermittency in obsession or excess, and moderation. In a sense, scarfing down loads of fat seems, to me, just about as compulsive and unnatural, in the end, as eating an extremely stupid low-fat diet. But sometimes I eat extremely low fat -- over a period of some hours. Just the other night around the campfire, for instance: there were some carrots. So, I munched on carrots to the exclusion of all else. Sometimes I gorge on fruit. Sometimes I gorge on fat. But I don't do any one thing chronically. It can be meal-to-meal, or even day-to-day, but never longer than a few days in a row. And the shift is natural. Once you discover the wonder of Real Food and get out of the processed food crack-house, everything changes (but it takes months). The point is that you can be a true "foodie," as am I, and yet become highly indifferent to any particular dish or any particular meal. You simply look at the whole thing differently, which, I understand mystifies lots of skinny people and gets knowing nods from lots of fat people.

This is key to the whole approach: Primitive man had zero control over the environment. He generally had primary control only over locomotion, which is why they moved around a lot. That's fundamental; and so we have, by modern convenience, removed the most fundamental aspect of primal existence from our quotidian motivation: most of us can easily live in one spot our entire lives. I really wouldn't want it any other way, but the point is that our genes don't know or understand the difference. They are either active (expressed), or dormant. The good news is that we can simulate the stressors and expressers through intermittency. I think that eating in the whole range, from extreme low fat to extreme high fat, within the confines of Real Food, is really the way to go. The constraint implies that the diet is usually going to be of a rather low carb nature (in calories or relatively), and certainly free of most grains, wheat in particular. But the real point is that by switching it up, you fool your genes into "thinking" that you're migrating, experiencing varying bounty along the way. And then they do their job, like they were evolved to do.

In the end, Dr. Sears misnamed his diet. It's far too restrictive, prescriptive as to have the concept of a "zone" applied. "The Range Diet" would have been more apropos, implying a linear range. A diet proscribed by a fully spacial geometry (zone) would of necessity be one of intermittency in multi-variable macro-nutrients, probably with a big edge for animal fats, given their high-value energy efficiency.

Why All Diets and Exercise Programs are Fads and Usually Wrong

It's because they do not integrate evolutionary thinking. This leads to the eating of highly processed and packaged foods, the eating of non-foods, the eating of anti-nutrients and toxins we didn't evolve to eat (like grains -- chiefly wheat and corn), puts us in chronic caloric depravation, ignores gene expression pathways critical to optimal health, overtrains us, focusses on weight loss instead of fat loss and lean gain, and on and on.

So, why is an evolutionary approach so essential?

From Loren Cordain's free Paleo Diet Update.

The graph below illustrates the magnitudes of the time our ancestors ate a Hunters and Gatherers' (H-G) Diet versus when our ancestors consumed a Mass-Agriculture Diet. The specific times used in this graph are 2,000,000 for the H-G Diet and 10,000 years for the geologically recent Mass-Agriculture Diet. Although exact dates and amounts can be argued, and would change some among different ethnic groups and regional histories, the graph would always look very much the same - because regardless of the specific dates you utilize, it always would very definitively involve magnitudes of change difference.

Bar graph illustrating a ratio of geologic time: 2,000,000 years vs. 10,000 years. These times are good representations of the magnitude of time of the Paleolithic Era foodstuffs of our ancestors as compared to the time our ancestral lineages have been on a Mass-Agriculture Diet. It is startling to see the Mass-Agriculture Diet as a nearly flat, non-existent bar. In a mathematical sense one could almost say it is approaching the inverse of infinity ... or that it is "infinitesimally small" in comparison to our earlier foodstuffs. It is more than a full 2 magnitudes smaller. As a decimal ratio of 2,000,000: it is .005.

While we can continue to debate (and we should) the exact amounts and rates of change in human physiology and the dietary amount of animal products vs. fruits/vegetables, etc. - an obvious fact is that the amount of time we and our ancestors have had mass agriculture and industrial era food is incredibly small indeed ... and not debatable.

When we talk about "evolutionary discordance" in regard to our modern diet vs. the Paleo Diet, this is what it means in one very real sense. A diet based on the way humans ate for a couple million years will lead to optimimum health and reduce the risk of degenerative disease.

IsAgenics

I received the following question in email from a reader.

How would you compare the methods / products promoted by IsAgenics as a route to maintained weight reduction and increased sustained energy versus your program?

A quick bit of Googling got me to the main company website (it appears to be an MLM, so there's lots of "affiliate" websites out there).

OK, where to start? How about with the most obvious: this is simply not an evolutionary approach in the slightest. Can it work for you? Sure, anything can work for you, even low fat high carb -- if mere weight loss is your goal. The question, the only question as far as I'm concerned, is does it hold up to scrutiny from the standpoint of 2-4 million years of bi-pedal hominid evolution prior to the advent of agriculture 10,000 years ago? Taking that approach eventually begins to express genes that you already have, and begins to transform your body into the lean and attractive one designed by nature.

I have begun to think that the one very fundamental problem in all of the diet fad world is the notion of "losing weight." Why do you want to lose weight? Because you're fat? OK, then why not think of it as losing fat, which, of necessity, implies preserving (or even building) lean mass? If you're at 20%+ body fat, for example, you're too fat, which is to say, you have too much body fat as a percentage of your overall mass. Merely "losing weight" could involve a number of things. It could even involve weighing less and actually increasing your body fat percentage. Muscle is denser than fat. If you diet in a chronic calorically deficient mode, while munching on lots of high glycemic index carbs, you're setting yourself up precisely for this sort of "weight loss."

This is not activating and expressing the genes that want you to be lean, attractive, and looking years younger. It's making you into a smaller version of your fat self -- one that weighs less. "Skinny fat." Yippee!

So that's the most obvious and essential judgment I'd render, and it applies generally to just about everything out there that's not integrating a primitive (or "Paleo") evolutionary, pre-agricultural diet, along with simulating the sorts of activities our hunter-gatherer ancestors would likely have participated in while using their own bodies and minds exclusively in the struggle for survival (so, less emphasis on the aerobics or "cardio," more emphasis on brief and intense resistance training).

Imagine living in a group of 25 people, in some natural mix of men, women, and children, and you all had to cooperate together to ensure your survival. You're all alone. Stop and consider the enormity of that task, and what kind of man or woman that would make of you, and what you'd likely look like. Well, that's the way it was for eons and eons and it's only in recent history that people have been able to abdicate authority for what to eat to suits in corporate boardrooms, Madison Avenue marketing firms, Departments of Agriculture, and Food & Drug Administrations around the globe. The results are disastrous. Look around you.

And back to the subject at hand, the very last thing in the world I'm going to do is shift responsibility from those "authorities" to a whole new set in the form of a processed / packaged food and supplement company (IsAgenics) or their multi-level-marketing network of "affiliates."

Diets Don't Work

Practitioners of the Evolutionary way know why.

It takes a stochastic approach, i.e., Paleo eating, intermittent (brief, intense, preferably fun or at least functional) resistance training, and intermittent fasting (offset by intermittent overfeeding).

No Bullshit

One of the things I'll be doing over the next few days is linking to some of the other EvFit (evolutionary fitness) blogs I've been browsing now and then.

First up is Robb Wolf, and not only do I like his demonstrated knowledge and approach, but he's a no bullshit guy (i.e., honest) and there are far too few of those in the world.

Biological- When folks mention they are yo-yo dieting they are NOT having a problem eating meat, veggies, nuts and olive oil to excess. Whatever the clueless Mcdougalites may say, it’s not being ON the low carb diet that’s a problem, it’s going off the rails and eating every carbohydrate in site down to the bark on trees! Calorie restriction doesn’t work and just feeds into neurosis. It sounds great and plays into our puritanical leanings but it is a failed venture. I’m not sure why but everyone from the government to doctors to theologians LOVE this whole calorie restriction thing…”Eat less, be prudent..have more water dense vegetables…drink a glass of water before a meal to blunt hunger.” Bullshit. None of that crap works and it just leads people down a path towards failure.

And everyone with an ounce of sense knows this. Even people like me, who have in the past (a number of times) lost weight by eating like a mouse every meal for weeks; only to gain it back with interest in the not far-off future. Even they cling to the mythology, in spite of what they already know, just hoping and praying that the next attempt will bring a miracle.

180 Degree Errors

Have you ever stopped to consider that it's often easier to be completely wrong than just a little wrong? Consider this; when you're trying to get somewhere in the car, is it more likely that you miss your destination by a few hundred yards, or that you "turned right instead of left," or found yourself "going in the opposite direction?"

Now, how does that apply to science? The more common way to describe a 180 degree error in science is a "cause & effect reversal." Let me give you an example of a cause/effect reversal that almost everyone takes for granted:

"Clean your plate, so you can grow up to be big and strong."

What child hasn't heard that admonition, and what mother, father, or grandparent hasn't uttered it? But in the sense it implies that eating more causes children to grow, it's completely false. In fact, the reverse is true. As children, we don't eat more so we can cause ourselves to grow bigger than we already are. We grow bigger than we are, and the effect is that we eat more in order to sustain our larger base metabolism. Growth hormone causes growth. Food is just the raw material.

The reason this error is so easy to make is because it's self evident that if we don't eat at all, we'll starve and die, and in fact, malnutrition can cause stunted growth. But that's because the minimum necessary raw materials aren't present. Let's draw an analogy in the form of building a skyscraper. If you don't have the minimum amount of concrete and steel, then the building is not going to be built to its full height. But what if you pile up two times the amount of concrete and steel required to build to plan? Is that going to cause it to be built, or built bigger than plan, or faster? No, you need the "growth hormone" to build it: construction workers. They use the raw material, build with it, which creates the demand for additional raw material; but it is the act of building that is the cause for the increased demand for "feeding."

My last post on diet prompted some comments to that post that lead me to think that perhaps I wasn't clear enough in how I described Gary Taubes' alternate hypothesis: that it's not simply the fact of excess calories of any sort that makes people fat, but rather, they are turning on a fat-accumulation hormone that tips a balance, such that fat begins to act much like a tumor (that's my analogy, so I don't know he'd agree). He did invoke the analogy to growing children in his lecture I linked, so that's where I got that. How do they turn on that fat accumulation? Bad calories; i.e., too many carbohydrates. While I haven't read his new book, yet, I wonder if the carbohydrate issue isn't more of an absolute quantity rather than a percentage. You often see conventional diet books talking of cab intake as a function of total calories, like 40% of calories from carbs while the low-carb diets typically express an absolute limit, like 60 grams per day.

I think the tumor analogy is an interesting one, at least in the way I understand Taubes at present. What do you often hear expressed about tumors, short of outright removing them? Well, sometimes they're "small," such that the risk of surgery isn't called for. So, you try to keep them small. Why? Well, because when they're small their effect is minimal. They aren't cannibalizing good tissue sufficiently to cause a large effect. How about shrinking a tumor? Same thing. And what happens when a tumor gets to be of sufficient size? Does it not then become a self-sustaining cannibalistic parasite, sacrificing healthy bodily tissue for its own sake in a positive-feedback mechanism, such that the bigger it gets, the bigger and more parasitic its influence on the rest of the body until eventually its pathological selfishness kills the very host that feeds it?

How would things change in the diet community if we accepted what Taubes demonstrates was universally known prior to WWII? He shows that it was well known that high carbs stimulates insulin, that insulin stores fat, that lean and fat tissue eventually become insulin resistant -- such that it's easier to store than pull out of storage.  Then, could the fat eventually become so tumor-like that it causes hormonal secretions that stimulate hunger, thus feeding themselves, getting bigger, setting in motion the same sort of positive feedback mechanism?

What if we thought of extreme carbohydrate restriction for fat people not as a diet, per se, but as a way to starve and shrink a tumor? And intermittent fasting?

It can't just be that a calorie is a calorie. Otherwise, Atkins could not have put heart patients on 5,000 calories per day of high fat and protein, with no carbs, and see them lose fat weight. Nor does the calorie is a calorie hypothesis explain how in around 1900, the Pima Indians (other examples abound, too), existing on federal sugar and flour, could have produced a high percentage of 300+ pound obese women whose children suffered malnourishment. In other words, the women, even though eating less than is required to sustain a healthy child, nonetheless kept putting on the fat.

So I think we have a 180 degree error and Taubes is right: hyper caloric intake, in itself, does not cause us to be fat. Hyper insulin causes us to be fat, and that issues forth a whole cascade of problems (effects), one of which is hyper caloric intake. Repeat. And the effect of that cause is that very nearly everyone in the diet and nutrition establishment has been [conveniently] fooled.