Archives for August 2009

Can you think of a fundamental reason not to expect that it’s healthy and good, not particularly to be limited below what you have a taste for?

Stop and think about it. Forget everything you think you know (which, if we’re talking knowledge, is probably not much: many are just regurgitating). Why would it not be healthful, beneficial? Because it’s so tasty and we’re depraved by nature, naturally seeking mostly those things from "the devil’s playground?" Could it be, rather, that it’s because it’s so good for us that we have a such a taste for it? And then, if it turns out that it actually is good for us, does that not make the "experts" and "authorities" more evil than well meaning, and, does it not make us more childlike and foolish than inquisitive and honest?

Why wouldn’t it be healthful, naturally, when you find it in large percentages in the animal fats associated with all meats? You even find it in the animal fat associated with human meat, in roughly the same proportion as pigs (i.e., lard). …And what of a "lard ass," to whom you might recommend a low-cal, low-fat diet? Would that be advisable if saturated fat is unhealthy? After all, the fat is locked away in that large rump. A low-cal, low-fat diet is just going to release it into the bloodstream where it can wreak its havoc.

If we were all thinking straight — perhaps like a hunter-gatherer all on his own, responsible on a daily basis to look around, observe, think, integrate, plan, exercise extreme caution — and all that just to eat –we might scoff at the notion of animal fat being "bad for us." In comparison, supermarket cart-wheeling moderns are woefully ignorant — perhaps even those hunters and fishermen among us. Sure, you can get out there for a weekend or so, but do you go without any groceries? Could you do it for life?

So, would you expect these super informed and experienced HGs to eschew animal products in favor of leaves and various fibers? You wouldn’t, would you? What you would expect is for them to go after the most dense nutrition they could safely source, which would be various animals of all kinds — along with their saturated fat. And they’ve been doing it for hundreds of thousands of years, which is very clear from the anthropological record. Moreover, their skeletal remains are larger in stature, with healthier, straighter teeth when compared to those of ancient agricultural populations.

And, so, given our millions of years of evolution, one would naturally expect saturated fat to be not only "OK," or, "taken in moderation," but actually healthful! Really healthful. One would expect it to be quite an astounding shocker if that wasn’t so. In fact, the level of unabashed shock at such speculation should have been so profound as to have demanded decades of contradictory-free hypotheses, gold standard research…leading up to infallible proof…before even giving it a second thought.

Instead, we we were led down a fool’s path by opportunistic miscreants who, to this very day, ignore what honest people like Dr. Uffe Ravnskov, MD, PhD, have been saying for years. Not only that. These researchers are so opportunistic that they actually obfuscate with purposefully flawed studies designed to get the results they set out to get in the first place, which isn’t science, but rather the equivalent of a Ponzi scheme, just to keep the crap afloat. Dr. Ravnskov, author of The Cholesterol Myths and Fat and Cholesterol Are Good For You has up a three part series on saturated fat at Spacedoc.net.

• Saturated Fat is Good for You – by Uffe Ravnskov MD – Part 1 of 3
• Saturated Fat is Good for You – by Uffe Ravnskov MD – Part 2 of 3
• Saturated Fat is Good for You – by Uffe Ravnskov MD – Part 3 of 3

For several years skeptical scientists including myself have asked the experts on the Swedish National Food Administration for the scientific studies that allow them to warn against saturated fat. Their usual answers have been that "there are thousands of such studies", or they refer to the WHO ( World Health Organization ) guidelines, (1) said to have been written by the world’s greatest experts.

The main argument in that document is that saturated fat raises cholesterol, but we now know that high cholesterol is not a disease. What we want to know is if we shorten our lives or if we run a greater risk of getting a heart attack or a stroke by eating too much saturated fat.

Recently the Swedish Food Administration published a list of 72 studies that they claimed were in support of their warnings. Together with eleven colleagues I scrutinized the list and found that only two of them were in support.

Eleven studies did not concern saturated fat at all. Sixteen studies were about saturated fat, but were not in support. Three reviews had ignored all contradictory studies. Eleven studies gave partial or doubtful support. Eight studies concerned reviews of experiments where the treatment included not only a "healthy" diet, but also weight reduction, smoking cessation and physical exercise. So how did they know whether the small effect was due to less saturated fat or to something else? Furthermore, all of them had excluded trials with a negative outcome.

Twenty-one studies were about surrogate outcomes. In most of the reports the authors claimed that saturated fat raises cholesterol. But again, high cholesterol is not a disease. Twelve studies were listed because they had shown that people on a diet with much saturated fat and little carbohydrates reacted more slowly on insulin than normally. From that observation the authors claimed that saturated fat causes diabetes, but they had jumped to the wrong conclusion.

Saturated fat does not produce diabetes; on the contrary. More than a dozen experiments have shown that the best diet for people with type 2 diabetes is one with much saturated fat and very little carbohydrates. In a few days their blood sugar normalizes and many of the patients are able to stop their medication. (2)

That’s the first part of part 1, so go read the whole series, which isn’t very long. You might also want to go read about the generally good health of the highest saturated fat consuming people on the planet, the Tokelauans.

Oh, but there’s more. And, since I have to thank Dr. Eades for alerting to these articles via Twitter, I’ll thank him for the other link too, which I’ll get to in a minute.

In part 2 of Ravnskov’s series, he brings to light some research done in India.

For six years Indian researcher Malhotra registered how many died from a heart attack among the more than one million employees of the Indian railways.

According to Malhotra’s report employees who lived in Madras had the highest mortality. It was six to seven times higher than in Punjab, the district with the lowest mortality, and they died at a much younger age. But people in Punjab ate almost seventeen times more fat than people from Madras and most of it was animal fat. In addition they smoked much more.(14)

Hmm. Well, there’s also this, just out, about how vegetarian Indians are dropping from coronary artery disease at an alarming rate.

Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, Delhi, India.

The incidence of coronary artery disease (CAD) is increasing at an alarming rate, especially in developing countries, such as India. It is often advocated that a vegetarian lifestyle could reduce the burden of CAD. However, in spite of a majority of Indians being vegetarians, the incidence of CAD is highest in this population. This may be due to deficiency of vitamin B12, a micronutrient, sourced only from animal products.

See how it all comes together? Vegetarianism is a myth, a menace. No wonder they’re such bedfellows with that other menace: those with the audacity to sweep aside 2.5 million years of evolution to implicate as unhealthy a core building block of our very bodies.

Curse them all.

Many people trying to implement the paleo way are confounded about milk. It’s not paleo and could not have been, for two primary reasons:

1. Try milking a wild animal.
2. We were genetically programmed to lose the ability to digest lactose (milk sugar) in early childhood (weaning). What we refer to as "lactose intolerance" is actually the previous normal human state of affairs.

Here’s a good overview of the whole issue, in USA Today.

Instead, people who are lactose intolerant can’t digest the main sugar —lactose— found in milk. In normal humans, the enzyme that does so —lactase— stops being produced when the person is between two and five years old. The undigested sugars end up in the colon, where they begin to ferment, producing gas that can cause cramping, bloating, nausea, flatulence and diarrhea.

If you’re American or European it’s hard to realize this, but being able to digest milk as an adult is one weird genetic adaptation.

It’s not normal. Somewhat less than 40% of people in the world retain the ability to digest lactose after childhood. The numbers are often given as close to 0% of Native Americans, 5% of Asians, 25% of African and Caribbean peoples, 50% of Mediterranean peoples and 90% of northern Europeans. Sweden has one of the world’s highest percentages of lactase tolerant people.

Curiously, it now seems that the genetic mutation to allow lactose persistence took place independently in several populations (technically different genetic adaptations with similar end results), from 2,700 years ago in parts of Africa, to 7,500 years ago in the Balkans and Central Europe.

Now, to tie some things together and connect dots, there’s this from Mail Online: White Europeans ‘only evolved 5,500 years ago after food habits changed’. The idea is that the change from hunter-gatherer to agriculture is what drove a rapid evolution of skin color for those living at increasingly higher latitudes.

Scientists at the University of Oslo believe this change in diet may have led to our dark-skinned ancestors evolving paler skin to overcome this problem.

The link between skin colour and Vitamin D from sunlight has been suggested before.

It had previously been believed that our ancestors’ skin had gradually lightened to generate more Vitamin D the further north they moved away from the equator to places where there was less sunlight.

Now scientists believe that the change in their diet away from foods rich in Vitamin D also played a major factor in the skin lightening in colour.

And the particularly pale skins of people in Scandinavia may have evolved to maximise the amount of Vitamin D that could be produced, the research suggests.

If the theory is correct it would mean that until this period in history, the ancient inhabitants of Britain and Scandinavia – our ancestors – would have had a dark skin tone.

Johan Moan, of the university’s Institute of Physics, said in a research paper: ‘In England, from 5,500-5,200 years ago the food changed rapidly away from fish as an important food source. This led to a rapid development of … light skin.’

The research paper, written with Richard Setlow, a biophysicist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state, states : ‘Cold climates and high latitudes would speed up the need for skin lightening.

‘Agricultural food was an insufficient source of vitamin D, and solar radiation was too low to produce enough vitamin D in dark skin.’

So, could milk have played a role in why "the food changed rapidly away from fish as an important food source"?

In the end, my suspicion is that’s it’s some of both. Otherwise, how do you explain white skinned Asians, with significant fish in the diet? At any rate, interesting ponderables.

Which is what we like to do as practitioners of a paleo / primal / evolutionary / ancestral life way. We get to figure this stuff out on our own, because we have the information to do so. We don’t have to wait for "experts" and "authorities" to tell us that in order to prevent all the diseases that have cropped up over the last couple of hundred years of civilization, we need to eat way less of the foods we evolved to eat over millions of years, instead eating more of (even when not hungry) the foods and concoctions that have cropped up in…the last couple of hundred years.

So, should milk be a part of your diet? Well, obviously, if lactose intolerant, or you know you do worse on it, no. But what if you do quite well on it (you should go for whole, raw milk if you can get it, otherwise organic whole pasteurized)?

I see no problem, even from the perspective of the "paleo principle," i.e., the idea that we restrict ourselves to pre-agricultural food sources. Why, when clearly we have evolved to handle this food? Yea, I know there’s talk about hormones and such (which I know little about), but there’s simply no doubt that animal milk is loaded with excellent protein and fat nutrition.

I make raw milk, cream, butter and cheese part of my diet. In terms of milk, due the higher carb count, I tend to keep it pretty intermittent, like a half-gallon in a week or two. Raw milk keeps very well.

As a final note, I find it interesting, given the above, that when rickets showed up in kids, it was milk that they chose to fortify — which is now essentially worthless, as D is fat soluble and everyone’s drinking skim (those "experts"). Vitamin D deficiency is now epidemic. Now, the other part of it, again given the above, is that if you can’t have whole milk as part of your diet, perhaps you should be getting a lot more fish…

And, you should be supplementing with vitamin D in any case, especially the darker your skin and the farther north you live.

~ Most people aware of lowcarb and paleo dieting are well aware of insulin’s role in promoting fat storage. But how about the role of leptin and leptin resistance? Dr. Mercola gives a good overview.

You become both insulin and leptin resistant by eating the typical American diet full of sugar, refined grains, processed foods … and not a whole lot else.

The solution is fairly straightforward, and this is to instead eat a diet that emphasizes good fats and avoids blood sugar spikes — in short the dietary program detailed in my nutrition plan, which emphasizes healthy fats, lean meats and fresh vegetables, and restricts sugar and grains.

~ So how many saw the latest news? Low-carb Diets Linked To Atherosclerosis And Impaired Blood Vessel Growth. "…mice placed on a 12-week low carbohydrate/high-protein diet showed a significant increase in atherosclerosis, a buildup of plaque in the heart’s arteries and a leading cause of heart attack and stroke." Yea, well, my friend Peter, the UK veterinarian, takes the study to task both here and here. The bottom line?

One offspring from the impatience of cardiologists is the apoE-/- mouse. This mouse is a genetic cripple who’s ability to process fat has been severely damaged. There are a very, very, very small number of people in the world who are homozygous for defective apoE.

~ More bonus footage from Tom Naughton & Fat Head. The eight minute clip includes interview portions with Dr. Al Sears, Dr. Mary Dan Eades, and Dr. Mike Eades.

~ Don Matesz, in addition to many great posts at Primal Wisdom, has the definitive list of ten reasons you can’t lose fat.

Most people simply don’t understand that reducing calories and increasing activity just don’t work for many people in the short term, or for most people in the long term. Hard losers may have a slow metabolism, but its not genetic, and their problem is hormonal, but not due to estrogen, testosterone, or thyroid.

~ And from Time Magazine, for once getting some things right, Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin.

I have exercised like this — obsessively, a bit grimly — for years, but recently I began to wonder: Why am I doing this? Except for a two-year period at the end of an unhappy relationship — a period when I self-medicated with lots of Italian desserts — I have never been overweight. One of the most widely accepted, commonly repeated assumptions in our culture is that if you exercise, you will lose weight. But I exercise all the time, and since I ended that relationship and cut most of those desserts, my weight has returned to the same 163 lb. it has been most of my adult life. I still have gut fat that hangs over my belt when I sit. Why isn’t all the exercise wiping it out?

~ While I have yet to go through all of this carefully, it has been sitting in my inbox courtesy of reader Rachel, for over a month: Vitamin D and Vitamin K Team Up to Lower CVD Risk.

Conclusion

As research documenting the widespread and significant beneficial actions of vitamin D continues to appear in the peer-reviewed medical literature accompanied by reports that the majority of the U.S. population is deficient in this nutrient, more clinicians are evaluating their patients’ vitamin D levels and prescribing supplementation, often in amounts as high as 5,000 to 10,000 IU/day, without awareness of the risk of provoking an imbalance among vitamins D, K and A. Consideration of the synergistic relationship among these vitamins could allow vitamin D to be administered in doses of greater therapeutic value without incurring the risks of osteoporosis and vascular calcification associated with hypervitaminosis D.

Here’s the link to part 1 of the article.