Free the Animal

Interview With Healthy Cooking Coach Rachel Matesz

A couple of weeks ago I was pleased to receive a comment to one of my posts and, as I often do, I visited  the commenter's website; when they have one. And what a find it was. After about three minutes of browsing, I immediately emailed Rachel to ask if she had time for an email interview to be conducted at our leisure.

I think we're really fortunate that she did. Before we get to my questions and answers, let's meet the chef.

"I teach people how to cook up healthier, more productive lives. From cooking classes to cooking parties and through cookbooks,  one-on-one coaching, magazine articles, and speaking engagements, I teach people how to improve the way they shop, cook, eat, and look at food –– so they have more energy for life!

"I am particularly skilled at helping people with special needs follow special diets, such as wheat-free, gluten-free, dairy-and/or casein-free, corn-free, grain-free, peanut-free, egg-free, or preservative-free diets. Do you have a child on the autism spectrum, with ADD or ADHD, or frequent respiratory infections? Do you have Celiac Disease, food allergies or intolerances, an autoimmune disorder, migraines, PMS, acid reflux, excess weight, or other health challenges you would like to deal with holistically?

"I wrote The Ice Dream Cookbook: Dairy-Free Ice Cream Alternatives with Gluten-Free Cookies, Compotes & Sauces (Planetary Press, October of 2008). I co-authored the award-winning book, The Garden of Eating: A Produce-Dominated Diet & Cookbook (Planetary Press, 2004) with Don Matesz. I also developed 130 recipes for two books by best-selling author Barry Sears, including Zone Meals in Seconds (HarperCollins, 2004)."

~~~

Can you tell us how you were led to a low-carb, paleo way of eating and cooking, if that's an apt description of who you are now.

I got into the paleo diet as a way to recover from more than 12 years I'd spent following various permutations of the macrobiotic diet, nearly nine of them as a vegan (dairy-free vegetarian).  I developed so many chronic nutritional deficiencies eating that way. Dissatisfied with the macrobiotic approach, my husband and I adopted a dairy-free, omnivorous whole foods diet. We experimented with a Zone-style diet and then with a hunter-gatherer (or paleo) diet. The work of Dr. Weston Price was a huge inspiration to both of us. We didn't follow a strictly low-carb paleo diet but it was a huge improvement over the a grain based diets we'd followed for years before.

The Thing With Grains

Another reader question today.

Why is grain so dangerous to health? can you send me a listing of those grains that are not to be eaten and why?

Well, fortunately, there's a lot of good info out there and so rather than rehash it, let's just call attention to it here, particularly for the benefit of newer readers. I just checked the number of RSS subscriptions to Free the Animal and it's now over 1,000, which would represent regular, daily readers. Just a couple of months ago, last I checked, it was less than half that. Growing all the time, so thanks for the support I get from readers.

Let's begin with Mark Sisson and his Definitive Guide to Grains. First, let's look at the principle behinds the thing, which I call The Paleo Principle. Here's Mark:

Those of you who have been with us a while now know the evolutionary backdrop I mean here. We humans had the pleasure and occasional scourge of evolving within a hunter gatherer existence. We’re talking some 150,000 plus years of hunting and foraging. On the daily scavenge menu: meats, nuts, leafy greens, regional veggies, some tubers and roots, the occasional berries or seasonal fruits and seeds that other animals hadn’t decimated. (Ever seen a dog at an apple picking?) We ate what nature (in our respective locales) served up. The more filling, the better. And then around 10,000 years ago, the tide turned. Our forefathers and mothers were on the brink of ye olde Agricultural Revolution. And, over time, grains became king. But, as countless archaeological findings suggest, people became smaller and frailer as a result of this new agrarian, grain-fed existence.

And actually, the 150,000 years is just for Homo Sapiens and could be upwards of 200,000 years. but, before that, more primitive ancestors of humans go back at least 2.5 million years. Grains never played any significant role in diet.

Why? It's certainly not that people would have considered them unhealthy. In fact, had they been eaten for all those years, we would certainly be well adapted to them by now -- just as people worldwide have become increasingly adapted to lactose in milk beyond weaning age, owing to a genetic mutation about 8,000 years ago that left the lactase producing gene on, and that mutation has been spreading far and wide ever since. Unfortunately, we know of no such stark mutation for grains, and it's important to remember that we were already genetically adapted to milk. The mutation merely allowed us to continue to drink it into adulthood.

But the principle reason ancestors didn't take grains into the diet is because it's too much work for the reward. Think about how much work it would take you to locate and pick wild grains, just to get a handful -- a few hundred calories at best. Now, compare that with the effort required to take an animal and the thousands of calories you get from that.

So, somewhere along the line someone realized that it's better to lay around most of the time, hunt occasionally, bag the meat, and enjoy life. The life of a gorilla, for example, is pretty dismal. They literally have to eat all the time, the nutrient density of the food they eat is so low. Moreover, look at the size of the gut needed to break down and digest all that fibrous plant matter.

Continuing with Mark (be sure to read his whole entry, as I'm just excerpting):

Among my many beefs with grain, the first and foremost is the havoc it plays with insulin and other hormonal responses in the body. For the full picture, visit the previous Definitive Guide to Insulin from some months ago. Guess what? The same principles still hold. We developed the insulin response to help store excess nutrients and to take surplus (and potentially toxic) glucose out of the bloodstream. This was an adaptive trait. But it didn’t evolve to handle the massive amounts of carbs we throw at it now. And, yes, we’re talking mostly about grains. Unless you have a compulsive penchant for turnips, the average American’s majority of carb intake comes from grains.

That's one, but there's more.

And as for the nutritional value of grains? First off, they aren’t the complete nutritional sources they’re made out to be. Quite the contrary, grains have been associated with minerals deficiencies, perhaps because of high phytate levels. A diet high in grains may also reduce the body’s ability to process vitamin D.

Why not get the same nutrients from sources that don’t come back and bite you in the backside? If you have the choice between getting, say, B-vitamins from chicken or some “whole wheat” pasta, I’m going to say go with the chicken every time. Is pasta cheaper? Yes. Is it healthier? No. The B6 in chicken is more bioavailable, for one. The fact is, you pay too high a physiological price for the pasta source. Let’s get this point on the dinner table as well: whatever nutrients you can get from whole grains you can get in equal to greater amounts in other food. In terms of nutrient density, grains can’t hold a candle to a diverse diet of veggies and meats. (And if the label says otherwise, look closely because the product is fortified. Save your money and buy a good supplement instead.

This is a big one that, frankly, pisses me off. Even not considering the problems with grains in terms of insulin, gluten, and other lectins, they are not very nutritious. Listen, everyone, and listen closely: if you eat grains as a significant part of your diet, you are getting CRAP nutrition as compared to a paleo-like diet. It's simply a fact, the "healthy-whole" fraud notwithstanding. You are feeding your children an inferior diet, and considering the phytic acid in grains, you are sacrificing their ability to absorb minerals, potentially setting them up for arterial calcification later in life (contributed to by the vitamin D deficiency that goes hand-in-hand with a high grain diet).

Want proof that a diet with any significant grain content is nutritionally inferior, and woefully so? See here, and here (really, take a moment). In fact, for most micronutrients, a Paleo diet outstrips a standard, grain-based diet by 100-300% in terms of nutritional content.

Grains are junk and garbage that barely pass for "food," and yet this is what the "authorities" advise that you eat as your primary source of "nutrition." Why? Wish I knew, definitively. Much is a result of the huge subsidies paid to producers, much is modern ignorance, and the rest is simple inertia. Anyway, the nutritional deficit from grains pushing out far more nutritious and bioavailable foods like meat and veggies (you can only eat so much, so what's it gonna be?) is the prime reason why they ought to be avoided in any important quantity.

But, wait, there’s more. Enter the lurker substances in grains that cause a lot of people a whole lot of obvious problems (and probably all of us some kind of damage over time). Grains, new evolutionarily-speaking, are frankly hard on the digestive system. (You say fiber, I say unnecessary roughage, but that’s only the half of it.) Enter gluten and lectins, both initiators of digestive mayhem, you might say. Gluten, the large, water-soluble protein that creates the sludge, err, elasticity in dough, is found in most common grains like wheat, rye and barley (and it’s the primary glue in wallpaper paste). Researchers now believe that a third of us are likely gluten intolerant/sensitive. That third of us (and I would suspect many more on some level) “react” to gluten with a perceptible inflammatory response. Over time, those who are gluten intolerant can develop a dismal array of medical conditions: dermatitis, joint pain, reproductive problems, acid reflux and other digestive conditions, autoimmune disorders, and Celiac disease. And that still doesn’t mean that the rest of us aren’t experiencing some milder negative effect that simply doesn’t manifest itself so obviously.

Now for lectins. Lectins are mild, natural toxins that aren’t limited to just grains but seem to be found in especially high levels in most common grain varieties. They serve as one more reason grains just aren’t worth all the trouble that comes with them. Lectins, researchers have found, inhibit the natural repair system of the GI tract, potentially leaving the rest of the body open to the impact of errant, wandering (i.e. unwanted) material from the digestive system, especially when these lectins “unlock” barriers to entry and allow larger undigested protein molecules into the bloodstream. This breach can initiate all kinds of immune-related havoc and is thought to be related to the development of autoimmune disorders. Some people are more sensitive to the damage of lectins than others, as in the case with gluten. Nonetheless, I’d say, over time we all pay the piper.

So, there you have the most of it. However, I urge anyone who's interested to read Mark's entire entry.

For even more, check out Life Spotlight's post just today: The Real Truth About Those "Healthy Whole Grains." Also, Scott linked up Stephan who has a three part series that I probably already linked at some point, but let's do it again.

Leptin and Lectins

Leptin and Lectins: Part II

Leptin and Lectins: Part III

The punch line, from Stephan the biologist as pulled together by Scott from those three posts:

For this model to be relevant to us, we'd expect that humans with metabolic syndrome should be leptin-resistant. Well what do you know, administering leptin to obese people doesn't cause satiety like it does in thin people. Furthermore, elevated leptin predicts the onset of obesity and metabolic syndrome. It also predicts insulin resistance. Yes, you read that right, leptin resistance comes before insulin resistance.

…

Many plants use lectins as a defense against hungry animals. Thus, an animal that is not adapted to the lectins in the plant it’s eating may suffer damage or death. … Grains and legumes (beans, soy, peas, peanuts) are rich in some particularly nasty lectins. Especially wheat. Some can degrade the intestinal lining. Some have the ability to pass through the intestinal lining and show up in the bloodstream. Once in the bloodstream, they may bind all sorts of carbohydrate-containing proteins in the body, including the insulin receptor. They could theoretically bind the leptin receptor, which also contains carbohydrate (= it’s glycosylated), potentially desensitizing it. This remains to be tested, and to my knowledge is pure speculation at this point. What is not so speculative is that once you’re leptin-resistant, you become obese and insulin resistant, and at that point you are intolerant to any type of carbohydrate.

…

One of the molecules they use to probe the function of the leptin receptor is our good friend wheat germ agglutinin (WGA), a lectin found in wheat, barley and rye. They used WGA to specifically block leptin binding at the receptor.

This fits in very nicely with the hypothesis that grain lectins cause leptin resistance. If WGA gets into the bloodstream, which it appears to, it has the ability to bind leptin receptors and block leptin binding. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this could cause leptin resistance.

As to the last part of the question, what grains would be OK, I'd have to pass. I'm so over grains, don't think about 'em and don't miss 'em. I'm just sticking to Real Food.

A Morning Video Juxtaposition

The first video is about food, the second about conditioning. The first video is about a sustainable, delicious, easy, fun, anti-inflammatory, and gene expressing way of eating that will shed fat, promote lean mass, and get rid of that awful "carb face" most of you start getting at age 40, or even before for the most serious carb junkies. The second video is about lazy, fake, fool yourself "conditioning" that, even beyond being a scam fraud, will once again reinforce the false notion that getting in shape requires inhuman drudgery rather than fun.

Carb face? I'll demonstrate. To the left is me, 2 1/2 years ago, age 45, on a trip to Europe. And to the right, age 48, just a month or so ago in Puerto Vallara.

What I did do is replace my cauliflower brain with a real brain (watch the video) and ate mostly in a way that Methuselah has outlined, and for exactly the same reasons.

What I didn't do was pretend to work out, like the folks pretending to jump rope using the "Jump Snap" and twirling their wrists.

As one commenter pointed out, "Why not just use two hair brushes and save the money?" That video is courtesy of the folks at Windy City Crossfit. What a laughable sad state of affairs.

Oh, and by the way? I have not one single time in the last two years worked out for more than an hour...per week. In fact, I'm down to about 50 minutes per week and on my way to 40, in two 20-minute sessions.

More intensity = less time = better results.

Grass Fed Beef Giveaway

Well, Kristen was nice enough to go to the (no small) task of sponsoring this little drawing, thoughtful enough to email me about it, and so no way I'm going to pass on the chance to let readers know.

Details here.

Thanks, Kristen.

Steve Jobs' Health

Mr friend Dr. BG of Animal Pharm, in including an addendum comment to my Oprah Diet post, suggested I take on Steve Jobs' health issues.

I was set to do that, but I backed off because reports seem to demonstrate a relationship between his pancreatic cancer and subsequent surgery, to what's going on now. So, while Oprah Winfrey is clearly a victim of diet-induced metabolic syndrome, I can't be so certain about Jobs.

There is this, however:

Steve Jobs' Diet Secrets

And while Apple employees eat healthy, Jobs takes it to an extreme, one employee says, eating dark green vegetables such as broccoli and asparagus, grilled or steamed. Jobs has been a vegetarian for years but his enthusiasm for green may have taken on an extra dimension since his brush with cancer. Jobs has surgery in 2004 to treat pancreatic cancer, and, again, earlier this year, according to The New York Times, to address "a problem that was contributing to a loss of weight." The veg-heavy diet, however, likely will not help him pack on any pounds. "No wonder he's cranky all the time," one Apple insider says.

Modern ignorance, coupled with audacious arrogance, I'd say.  Recipe for disaster. It'd guess that for a guy like Jobs, it's even more unlikely that he would come to adopt a sensible -- natural, Paleolithic -- diet like an average Joe would. After all he seems to have bought into the environmentalism catechism lock, stock, & barrel  -- though I have no objections to Apple trying to manufacture as "clean" as they can. (Notice, however, that it's the same religious-like pitting of man against his own nature I talked about in the Oprah post, inducing [unearned] guilt, and then demanding repentance in the form of sacrifice -- i.e., crappy boring food, cardio drudgery, driving sardine cans, wasting time separating trash into bins, and other innumerable sacrifices so as to reinforce the "authority" of those demanding repentance and sacrifice.)

And, hey, Apple is now mainstream. It's not really "think different," anymore (disclosure: 20 year hard-core PC user who switched to Mac over a year ago and will never look back).

Here's what I'm pretty sure of: if that's his diet, it's not helping him in the slightest, and it's far more likely to be exacerbating the situation than doing anything to help. Then there's this, from Byron Richards, a nutritionist:

STEVE JOBS' WASTING-AWAY HEALTH PROBLEM

Seemingly sound nutritional advice, but I say: eat a healthful diet first, then see where you are. And, we know what the most healthful diet is. It's a diet with plenty of meat, fish, fowl, natural fats, vegetables, fruits, and nuts. Get off all grain products, refined vegetable / grain oils, sugar, artificial sweeteners, and all processed foods. Consider getting off dairy (milk, mostly), too, if it makes you feel better as it did for me; or, as I do, use butter, cream, and bits of cheese as spice. Cook your own food over 95% of the time, and keep it real.

Addendum: You know, there's one thing that might get Steve to view his health issues vis-a-vis a proper diet from an evolutionary, Paleolithic, pre-agricultural perspective. I've often heard him say, in reference to a new product "when you get your hands on it." Whether he meant it explicitly or not, what I always took from that is, hey: our products are designed with the hardware interface (human hands) in mind.

Evaluation of diet ought to be no less complicated.

"Makes My Mouth Water."

That's the funniest thing Stephan said here. He quotes at some length from a history of vegetable oils, and both are certainly worth a read.

The quote from Stephan, however, relates to the quoted bit about how vegetable oils are manufactured.

Typically, a mixture of refined oil and finely powdered nickel catalyst (comprising 0.05-0.1% of the weight of the oil) is pumped into a cylindrical pressure reactor of 5-20 tons capacity. It is heated by heating coils to 120-188°C (248-370°F) at 1-6 atmospheres pressure. Hydrogen is pumped into the bottom of the reactor and dispersed by a stirrer, continuously, as bubbles into the oil... After hydrogenation is completed to the desired degree, the oil is filtered to remove the catalyst (which may be reused) then pumped to a storage tank; it may later be blended with other harder or softer fats or oils to make margarine or shortening.

Yep. A regular chop licking affair. Virtually every household has this frankenfood-crap in the cupboard and as Stephan alludes, they might not if they had any idea.

How Animal is That?

We're going to roast beef bone marrow tomorrow night, to have along with my aunt's French onion soup, which incidentally, she makes from scratch using this exact same thing, roasting and then making stock to a nice thick reduction over about two day's time. Her French onion soup is essentially demi glace with onion in it (and without the roux).

There's two of them like that, now cut up into 16 pounds worth. Inspiration here and here.

Bones & Fat

Back a month or so ago I posted about Jennifer McLagan's book Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient.

I've been going through it and, well, it's just fabulous. It's really reminiscent of a sort of "tragedy" where it's the virtuous and the good who are vilified which, is bad enough in itself. But to add insult, this all comes at the injustice of elevating the completely fraudulent to undeserved lofty heights.

Now think about that. Here we have wonderful, nutritious foods with literally millions of years of evolutionary credentials, not to mention the visceral pleasure almost anyone in their right mind gets from eating them when handled and prepared properly. ...And they get tossed aside by self-important minions -- those arrogant and obstinate, but ultimately woefully ignorant.

And they have blood on their hands, as far as I'm concerned; and I'm never going to let anyone forget it. They have, through their arrogant ignorance and disregard for human evolution and its unassailable logic, condemned millions upon millions to moribund lives of physical unattractiveness, gross obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and the list goes on. And as we have seen the statistics get worse, year after year in the very face of their changing advice, do we ever get humility, or is it just more authoritarian arrogance? "You eat too much. You don't exercise enough. You haven't been listening to us and you're not properly following our diktats."

And the bulk of nutritionists are just as bad, or worse. Most of them are just shills, hawking the latest BS "advice" to eat more whole grains and less fat -- especially animal fats. Can you guess why? Not to step on any sensitivities out there, but it rather reminds me of the Christian foundational doctrine of Original Sin, the whole point of which is to pit man against his very nature so that he always -- systemically -- falls short of the mark. And guess who's coming to the "rescue?" See, failure is baked right into the cake. Virtually No one succeeds under the current dietary guidelines short of becoming the nutritional equivalent of a monk or a nun who practices his or her flagellation three times daily, to correspond to three squares.

They have relentlessly pursued an agenda -- at the urging of huge producers of grain and vegetable oils, who unsurprisingly fund many of the "studies" -- to vilify Real Food and supplant it with Frankenfood. And though grains have been around for 10,000 years, vegetable oils -- of the sort that require solvents to extract -- have only been around for maybe 100 years or so. Then, add to that the astronomical increase in the use of refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup and the plethora of derivative crap in every conceivably packaged combination now being consumed by the American public, and increasingly the rest of the world.

And while obesity and diabetes skyrocket -- now even in children -- in the very face of the advice from these self-serving "authorities," many of whom get their paychecks out of your taxes, you are still being told to cut the fat.

Fat is king, folks. In terms of evolutionary logic, it has to be. Pound for pound, fat has more than twice the energy of either protein or carbohydrate, and thus, must have had to be treasured above all by our primitive ancestors. Next were the organs, and only then, the muscle meat. And, paradoxically, eating a high fat diet will tend to lean you out, and eating a high carbohydrate diet will tend to fatten you up. But what we see in the modern processed-food world is high carbs in the form of processed grains and processed sugars, often also fairly high in fat from heavily processed vegetable oils. And this is at the cost of protein, critical in the restoration and repair of lean tissue. The result? Everyone's getting fatter and fatter. The only good news there is that adding the weight increases lean mass too (so you can carry it), and generally keeps the bones strong. For some of the skinny people it's actually worse. Often, they have been losing lean mass while filling in the void with fat tissue. They are "skinny fat." Above all else, animal fat is what has made me so successful in losing fat and improving my blood work -- my wife's too.

Well, this is going on and my original intent before I got going on the rant was to alert you to the fact that Jennifer McLagan, author of both wonderful books you see above, has a food blog. It's not "Paleo," but it ain't really far off. And anyway, if I'm going to cheat now and then, I can't think of a better way to do it. Here's a suggestion if you've got an hour to kill. Check the right sidebar of her blog for the archives, and beginning with August when she began, click on each month in succession, which will scroll up all her posts for that month. Can't say I read each one, but I skimmed them all in the very least, and there's a lot of great stuff and a lot of great photos. Be sure to read her interesting bio. I liked this bit at the end:

Now based in Toronto. Jennifer survives life in the frozen north by escaping with her husband, as often as possible, to Paris. On either side of the Atlantic, she maintains a friendly relationship with her butchers, who put aside their best bones and fat for her.

Quit dying on crap, people. Live. Eat in luxury. Dump the notion that the eating of animals is the original sin of nutrition, which only serves to make you feel guilty and defeated each time you give in and so enjoy that grilled ribeye smothered in rich, sweet, garlicky butter. If you didn't feel guilty for so enjoying what's so natural, you could quickly replace all the crap with actual good food. Once you go through the withdrawals (and you will), you can emerge into a world where food is fun and makes you feel genuinely good. It'll make you look a lot better, too.

Keeping it Real: Food

You'll read here often, and other places: nutrition is 80% of your overall health. The rest is accounted for by activities such as work, exercise, and play.

I'm going to be doing some bits of review over the next few days, as there's quite a few new subscribers. I'm also reorganizing the general "fitness" category from the old blog into more specific categories on this one, such as diet related, exercise, cooking (food porn), and so on.

I was all prepped to give a brief primer on what foods to eat and by coincidence was reading Scott over at Modern Forager, where he drew attention to a post of his from a few months back that really explains it perfectly. There's also a Part II. Even though I'm predominantly "low carb," as it goes well with my inner carnivore, I do eat vegetables, very often have fruit for breakfast and desert, and I even eat starchy potatoes now and then. What I very nearly never eat is stuff that is not real food. I also avoid grains, most particularly wheat, because we simply didn't evolve to eat it. Refined sugar? Same thing. In both cases, it's the concentration that's the chief problem. Ancients could never have gathered sufficient grass seed to mill into flour for the various grain-based products we have in abundance. If you look, you can surely find the disastrous results for primitive peoples formerly on their natural diets and, subsequently introduced to white flour and sugar. I'll be covering that a lot over time.

But even though I'm low carb, you rarely see me linking to any of those low-carb / Atkins guys. I wish them well, but so many of them are falling into a trap. How? Because they have lost sight of the really good probability that the reason Atkins can work is that it focusses on real foods, contains very sufficient amounts of protein to preserve and promote lean mass even in caloric deficit (I hate that term; we metabolize food, we don't "burn" calories), and provides sufficient essential fatty acids with the necessary fat-soluble vitamins to ensure the proper distribution of minerals like calcium (think: bones and teeth, not atherosclerotic lesions).

Back to Scott Kustes.

We can argue about low carb, low fat, The Zone, Ornish, Atkins, and Weight Watchers until we’re blue in the face. But civilizations have thrived on diets of varying macronutrient proportions throughout history. The Inuit ate a diet of almost no carbs and mostly fat with no ill effects. The Masai drank cow blood and milk and ate meat like it was going out of style. As the nutritionists gasp, I’ll mention that the Masai achieved prime health too. The diet on the island of Okinawa is heavily weighted towards vegetables and rice with some fish and little meat, high in carbs, low in fat. Again, very good health; Okinawans have excellent longevity.

For more on the amazing Inuit, see here. They don't get cancer, either. Also, one might consider the Kitavans. Excellent health, but on a high carbohydrate diet. But: they eat real food. And once again, my favorite neurobiologist (everyone should have one), Stephan, has a great series on the Kitavans.

Cardiovascular Risk Factors on Kitava, Part I: Weight and Blood Pressure
Cardiovascular Risk Factors on Kitava, Part II: Blood Lipids
Cardiovascular Risk Factors on Kitava, Part III: Insulin
Cardiovascular Risk Factors on Kitava, Part IV: Leptin
Kitava: Wrapping it Up

Need more convincing? Well, there's the Kuna.

Back to Scott, again.

So it’s not so much about the macronutrients, as long as you’re getting enough protein and fat to allow the body to function properly. It’s about the types of food being consumed. Dr. Weston Price noted that traditional civilizations thrived until they were introduced to processed grains and sugars, at which point, health declined markedly. We all know someone that follows a low-fat diet or low-carb diet by eating every processed product in the store that excludes their chosen macronutrient (”Angel Food Cake is a fat-free food!”). They rarely make the progress they’d like to. Why? Because before you can worry about macronutrients, you need to focus on food. You don’t eat nutrients. You eat food.

Speaking of Dr. Weston A. Price, DDS, his amazing work, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, is perhaps the most shocking and eye-opening book I may have ever read (still reading, actually). Long story short is that he was appalled at the tooth decay of Western Civilization and set out on a 10-year quest around the world to find and document people who had no evidence of tooth decay. He found lots. This was in the 1920s and 30s. You guessed it: all relatively primitive peoples on traditional diets that included no white flour, sugar, canned or packaged goods. Soon, I'll post how he discovered how to get cavities in teeth to re-calcify  (in one documented case, 42 of them in the mouth of one girl). Hint: fat-soluble vitamins A, D, and a "secret" one I'll reveal later, in another post. Clue: none of them are to be found in any vegetable sources whatsoever; it's meat, baby, and especially organ meats. If your mom made you eat liver from ruminators and forced cod-liver oil down your throat, she was a wise woman. Of course, these results were verified and his work published in medical journals 60 years ago. I would never even mention it, otherwise.

I recently came across the following quotes from Dr. Loren Cordain's free newsletter (Paleo Diet, in the Acknowledgments section to the right).

George Catlin, the famous chronicler of American Indians, circa 1832-39, glowingly used these words to describe the Crow tribe: "They are really a handsome and well-formed set of men as can be seen in any part of the world. There is a sort of ease and grace added to their dignity of manners, which give them the air of gentlemen at once. I observed the other day, that most of them were over six feet high . . ." "It is but to paint a vast country of green field, where the men are all red - where meat is the staff of life . . . ." .

Cabeza de Vaca, the Spanish Explorer, saw native Florida Indians in 1527 and called them, "wonderfully well built, spare, very strong and very swift. Similar observations of the indigenous inhabitants of Florida were made in 1564 by the French explorer Rene Laudonniere, who noted that, "The agility of the women is so great that they can swim over great rivers, bearing their children upon one of their arms. They climb up, also, very nimbly upon the highest trees in the country. . . . even the most ancient women of the country dance with the others". In his account of California Indians in 1869, Begert notes, "the Californians are seldom sick. They are in general strong, hardy, and much healthier than the many thousands who live daily in abundance and on the choicest fare that the skill of Parisian cooks can prepare".

Captain Cook who visited New Zealand in 1772 was particularly impressed by the good health of the native Maori, "It cannot be thought strange that these people enjoy perfect and uninterrupted health. In all our visits to their towns, where young and old, men and women, crowded about us, prompted by the same curiosity that carried us to look at them, we never saw a single person who appeared to have any bodily complaint, nor among the numbers that we have seen naked did we perceive the slightest eruption upon the skin, or any marks that an eruption had been left behind . . . . A further proof that human nature is here untainted with disease is the great number of old men that we saw. . . . appeared to be very ancient , yet none of them were decrepit; and though not equal to the young in muscular strength, were not a whit behind them in cheerfulness and vivacity."

For a good 15 years, I've actively eschewed the idea that primitive peoples have anything to teach us. I was dead wrong. The clear facts clearly demonstrate otherwise. That doesn't mean I want to live in the primitive manner they lived. What I want to do is benefit from their wisdom in a modern context.

How to Cook

My brother rings in from Texas.

Here's my problem: I am not a cook. You want a over/under absorption and recapitalization analysis on revenue of fifty million dollars per month? No problem; I'll have it done in a day or two. Ask me to plan a healthy menu for the next week, and, well, it's a deer in the headlights look. I don't have a clue. Where do I start?

Well, first, you have to determine that you're going to cook. Eating out -- even at nice restaurants -- is a very poor substitute for sound nutrition and physical health.

Second, if you're going to cook and you don't know how, you have to learn.

Third: simple simple simple. You can teach yourself through trial and error, which means you'll really learn. And the more you teach yourself, the more you learn. Repeat.

Don't overthink it. First: real food only.

• meat (inlcuding any organ meats you might like), poultry, fish, shellfish
• most vegetables (keep potatoes to minimum)
• some fruits (berries and melons, primarily)
• nuts (peanuts aren't nuts but legumes -- focus on almonds, macadamia, walnuts, brazils, hazels, pecans)
• fats (lard, butter, ghee, COCONUT OIL, olive oil). Excellent review of oils both here and here.
• dairy is OK for some people, i.e., milk, cheese, cottage cheese, heavy cream, etc. If you can, get the organic, or, if TX in its infinite wisdom permits it, raw whole, non-homogenized milk
• spices of all sorts on stuff. Good source of all sorts of nutrients. This is where the particular creativity in cooking comes in. It also gives your preparations a very individual touch. Don't be too afraid to ruin something. It's how you learn; plus, gives you an excellent opportunity for a brief, intermittent fast <wink>.    

Then, just cook stuff. Use your imagination. Experiment. Grilling meats is easy. Stir frying veggies in coconut oil in a wok is easy. Salads are easy, and I always do my own dressings. I don't even mix them first. Just olive oil to start, toss, and then I add in some lemon or lime (usually about half a fruit), or a few dashes of vinegar, or some balsamic -- or sometimes a combination. Try apple cider vinegar (it also makes a refreshing drink: 1-2 tsp in a glass of ice water). Get Greek Kalamata olive oil if you can find it. You can always make your own blue cheese or other sorts of salad dressings if you like -- plenty of recipes on the internet. Mayonnaise too (with olive oil).

Stay away from all vegetable/grain/seed oils except olive, sesame, coconut and palm (canola, sunflower, safflower, corn, etc). We simply didn't evolve eating poly unsaturated oils in concentration. It's essentially the same issue as with fruit juices (would you sit down and eat 2 dozen oranges?). Eating the whole fruit (or vegetable) has it's own built in STOP mechanism that we evolved with side-by-side: the fibrous bulk fills us up before we overload on sugar (with some exceptions -- but also recall that non-equatorial primitive man only had fruits part of the year).

Also, stay away from grain-based products. All of them, except perhaps on a very occasional splurge. If you asked your ancestors over the last 2-3 million years (save the last 10,000 or so) to go get enough grain to bake a loaf of bread, it would have taken enormous energy expenditure and time to collect even a handful or kernels (think saffron and why it's so expensive for a comparison). Not only was there no mechanization, but no cultivation either. So, no fields of wheat, per se. They'd have had to forage. Far easier to hunt or trap a high-density, nutritious meal in the form of an animal.

Virtually all plant matter contains various natural "toxins," most of which we are probably well adapted to, as we've been eating those plants (evolved along with them) over millions of years. Not so with grains, most high in gluten, lectins, and other things that cause an awful inflammatory immune response for a lot of people (that puffy look). I suspect that virtually everyone, however, has some level of sensitivity. That's one reason I stay off them. The other reason is that they are converted to sugar, sugar drives insulin, and insulin immediately shuts down fat burning (and turns to segregating toxic glucose away from lean tissues and into fat cells).

But anyway, just cook stuff. Really. We've been doing it for about 1.5 million years, perhaps longer.

Here's a few resources that feature mostly simple preparations:

Mark's Daily Apple (amongst his other super-fabulous postings)

My Paleo Kitchen

Food is Love

Carbohydrates = Sugar

Regina Wilshire is absolutely right.

Would you willingly sit your child down, offer him/her a bowl filled with 1/2 cup of sugar and a spoon to dig in?

It's like I often say when people try to insist to me how great fruit juices are: would you sit down and eat a dozen or two dozen oranges in a single sitting? Think your body was designed to do that?

And sure, we can handle it (infrequently). I'm quite certain that primitive man gorged on sweet stuff opportunistically, like on honey when he came across it, or some sweet fruits (though primitive fruits were largely fibrous and tart -- not like today's selectively bread stuff). More likely, they gorged on berries when they could, seasonally and very intermittently -- not a daily thing.

Yummy; Not

Hey: vegetarian and vegan junk food.

Soya veggie burgers and sausages generally use the same chemically extracted fraction of the bean. This meal is the product of the industrial crushing process the vast majority of the world’s soya beans go through. The raw beans are broken down to thin flakes, which are then percolated with a petroleum-based hexane solvent to extract the soya oil. The remains of the flakes are toasted and ground to a protein meal, most of which goes into animal feed. Soya flour is made in a similar way. The oil then goes through a process of cleaning, bleaching, degumming and deodorising to remove the solvent and the oil’s characteristic “off” smells and flavours. The lecithin that forms a heavy sludge in the oil during storage used to be regarded as a waste product, but now it has been turned into a valuable market in its own right as an emulsifier.

What does 2-3 million years of evolution know? This stuff's gotta be better than "artery-clogging-saturated-fats."

Quick Links

Just a couple of tidbits.

From Chris at Conditioning Research, eat lots of eggs. They're really good for you and it's probably because of the cholesterol. I know (heresy).

And from Peter the veterinarian at Hyperlipid, higher fat, primarily of the saturated variety (animals baby!) does lots of good things. Here was a funny recent quote from Peter.

"Are all these experts wrong, as well as the expert advisory panels on cardiovascular disease?"

Yes!

A much better question:

Which hormone converts a vascular smooth muscle cell to an osteogenic cell (calcium phosphate secreting) in the vascular media?

Answer: Insulin

The NCEP answer: It's a statin deficiency! (what was the question? Oh never mind)

In case you don't follow, the working hypothesis is that cardio-vascular disease is caused by high cholesterol, statins reduce cholesterol, so the fundamental problem is that we're born with a statin deficiency. Funny.

As a side note, unless you read medical journals (probably even if you do), the best sources for keeping up on ALL the studies are some of the blogs I link to. You won't get it in the standard media. They are uninterested in the dozens and dozens of studies that pound away at the myth that high (saturated) fat: bad / high (grian) carbs: good.

Jesus. Had a look around you lately? Never have carbs been so high and saturated fat so low in the American diet.

Shopping

Here's a picture of my latest run to Trader Joe's. The emphasis is meats with a high percentage of animal-fat content. Trader Joe's is good because you can get a lot of that sort of thing uncured, as are the kielbasa, beef franks, and chicken sausages. Same with bacon, but I already had two packages in the frige. Pate is an excellent food for 70-80% of cals from fat. To the right is prosciutto, with a nice huge band of lovely tasting fat on each delectable thin slice. The veggies are frozen and available on demand. I particularly like the medley, which includes lots of butter & herbs, so it's just like I would prepare anyway. No bread, pasta, rice, beans or any other of that stuff.

Sent Items

Got an email today from a reader interested in cheese and whatnot in my diet. I love getting stuff like this. It repeats much of what I've written, but what the hell. The main point I'm trying to get across is that it's the fasting that dramatically changed everything. Up to that point, it has always been a struggle. Adding lean mass through the workouts helped. Eating in more of a Paleo fashion helped a bit more, but nothing so turned on the fat loss, plus fundamentally altered my appetite like the fasting.

Here goes.

A:

Mine has been an evolution. When I began pushing weights last May I wanted to focus on that, so I did and I built muscle and lost a little fat. Tried to eat good some of the time, but still lots of burgers (which are fine, without the bread). I was losing about 1 pound per month net (I was also gaining muscle).

Then around October I began to eat well most of the time. Probably the closest approximation is "Paleo." This is the authoritative resource:

http://thepaleodiet.com/index.shtml
http://thepaleodiet.com/faqs/
http://thepaleodiet.com/articles/2006_Oxford.pdf

Now I was losing maybe 2 lbs. net per month. However, I kept hearing about intermittent fasting at Art's site...

http://www.arthurdevany.com/

...and so I decided to try it. It made a lot of sense from and evolutionary perspective. After the first 30-hr fast, ending with a workout and a nice meat dinner, I knew I was hooked for life. I just cannot begin to express all the benefits. I simply think that we evolved to go long periods with hunger and that the body adapted itself to do things over those periods of time that just might be necessary for full health and well being. Think about it: the average person has sufficient fat stores to go two, possibly three months with no food. That didn't just happen by accident.

So that was the major piece to the puzzle, and then I realized something. Since I was putting myself in a state of evolutionary hunger, I was allowing for gene expression to mold my appetite to a greater extent than the complex hormonal biochemistry that prevails when we're perpetually in a fed state. (That's my speculation, so it may be gobbledygook, but I doubt it.)

I just really can't believe how my appetite has so dramatically changed with the fasting. I seriously don't even have a craving in the world for a pizza, and that is almost unbelievable to me. I always crave pizza -- every day of my life. Haven't been to a fast-food place in 2-3 months (I haven't paid attention) and that was probably 3-4 times per week for years. Love fast food burgers & fries.

But this has nothing to do with will power. For me, it takes no will power to fast for 30 hours (well, maybe the first two did) twice per week, and the change in appetite is a natural result. And what I crave is lots of animal fat and meat. I couldn't even finish a light vinaigrette salad last night coming off a 30-hr fast. Instead, I ate nearly a pound of ribeye smothered in butter-sautéed mushrooms, and broccolinni blanched and bathed in melted butter, lemon, and parmesan.

So, I think the Paleo and all those are fine, but a person ought to feel great doing them; naturally great. Given my experience with fasting, I now understand that I would have never known and understood my true appetite had I not started that.

As to the specific question, yea, I eat quite a bit of cheese. And butter; and bacon dripping and dipped in the grease. I now eat the strip of fat on steaks because it's so appealing.

Radical; but I feel fabulous, I'm gaining strength and muscle, and fat is falling away.

Your mileage may vary, but that's my story.