PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

[rogermexico]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

I can attest that non-pasteurized, unfiltered brews are packed with nutrients and other beneficial molecules.

beer tastes good. No argument there.

Beer is loaded with maltose, a disaccharide sugar composed of two molecules of glucose this gives you a massive rise in blood glucose and concomitant insulin response when you drink it - not too good for you.

As beer is fermented and not distilled, it will have some nontrivial amounts of lectins from whatever grain(s) the yeast ate in order to crap out the alcohol that people drink it for.

It's good to remember that many of the nutrients in grains are located in the same part of the seed that the antinutrients which the seed has developed as a defense mechanism are found. (Gluten is proteins found with the starchy part of seed however) Therefore, attempts to keep the "good" part of the seed, by emphasizing whole grain consumption, for instance, necessarily increase your exposure to the lectins (antinutrients).

[BadJuju]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

Beer is loaded with maltose, a disaccharide sugar composed of two molecules of glucose this gives you a massive rise in blood glucose and concomitant insulin response when you drink it - not too good for you.

Bah! Ruin my fun. All things in moderation, I suppose!

[rogermexico]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

Bah! Ruin my fun. All things in moderation, I suppose!

Well, you can just go the next step and distill it.

[BadJuju]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

Well, you can just go the next step and distill it.

Right!

Thanks for your informative posts, rogermexico. They are quite illuminating.

[rogermexico]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

Right!

Thanks for your informative posts, rogermexico. They are quite illuminating.

You are most welcome.

[metalman]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

My sources who are experts on celiac disease say that distilled spirits, even if derived from gluten grains like wheat or rye - do not have gluten grain proteins or peptides in them.

Apart from the alcohol content and its effects on insulin response, hepatotoxicity, etc. whiskey is safe. Alcohol can affect the lining of the stomach and could in binge amounts cause a leaky gut, but used minimally is OK from a dietary standpoint, IMO.

thx... and for the note on beer. so that's why i like it! :eek:

since you are kindly sharing your encyclopedic knowledge of matters nutritional as they relate to alcohol... wine? i'm going to guess not much better than beer. you said earlier that fruit is nature's candy bar on a tree. does that make wine candy bar juice with alcohol?

[Andreuccio]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

thx... and for the note on beer. so that's why i like it! :eek:

since you are kindly sharing your encyclopedic knowledge of matters nutritional as they relate to alcohol... wine? i'm going to guess not much better than beer. you said earlier that fruit is nature's candy bar on a tree. does that make wine candy bar juice with alcohol?

Not just "candy" bar, "Snickers"! Please don't tell me I have to give up Snickers, fruit, and wine.

[rogermexico]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

thx... and for the note on beer. so that's why i like it! :eek:

since you are kindly sharing your encyclopedic knowledge of matters nutritional as they relate to alcohol... wine? i'm going to guess not much better than beer. you said earlier that fruit is nature's candy bar on a tree. does that make wine candy bar juice with alcohol?

The fermentation of the sugar is what makes the alcohol.

So the alcohol, some might call it "yeast shit", is there in lieu of the sugar.
There are some putatively beneficial phytochemicals in red wine, like resveratrol, but no lectin nasties that I am aware of.

On a per-ounce-of-alcohol basis, red wine would be much better than beer for your insulin metabolism.

Red wine is good (consumed in moderation, blah, blah blah...)

[metalman]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

The fermentation of the sugar is what makes the alcohol.

So the alcohol, some might call it "yeast shit", is there in lieu of the sugar.
There are some putatively beneficial phytochemicals in red wine, like resveratrol, but no lectin nasties that I am aware of.

On a per-ounce-of-alcohol basis, red wine would be much better than beer for your insulin metabolism.

Red wine is good (consumed in moderation, blah, blah blah...)

thx. whew!

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

PaNu - A modified paleolithic diet that can improve your health by duplicating the evolutionary metabolic milieu.

I wonder if perhaps trying to understand human diet without considering the affects of cooking is like trying to understand human adaptions to weather without considering the affects of clothing.

In other words, it may well be that the human digestive track is best suited to meats, fish, fruits and nuts, which don't require long fermenting digestive tracks. However human civilization may well have begun to "blossom"

• when humans discovered milling and cooking, so were able to break down grains sufficient to digest them,
• when they learned to domesticate dairy animals and
• when they learned to cultivate grain and legume crops.

In the particular case of animal milk, we know that some human races, particularly northern European, adapted sufficiently to be able to routinely digest milk lactose. It may also be that other such racial adaptions to digestive capacities occurred.

Similary, we know that different races adapted their skin, hair, and other body characteristics to the different prevailing weather conditions, in addition to learning how to clothe themselves, more so in cold climates, and how to raise the plants and animals whose fiber and fir and skins were routinely useful in constructing such clothing.

So perhaps a pure paleo diet has about as much to recommend itself as an insistence on going around naked all the time, because that is how our ancestors 100,000 years ago lived.

The matter of insulin is important. I am confident that the refined carbs and sweetners of the typical modern persons diet lead to much of the chronic disease and obesity that plagues us. But I am unable to conclude that one should abandon such grain and dairy and vegetable foods as one is able to digest easily, once cooked.

In summary, I think it would be a mistake to leave out the affect of the capabilities developed in the last 10,000 years of human civilization on our proper choice of food and clothing (and shelter and transportation and communication, for that matter.)

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

After writing the post just above, a google search for "grains grasses legumes vegetables" quickly led to an interesting article, which provides substantially more detail and convincing discussion on this matter. See
The Late Role of Grains and Legumes
in the Human Diet, and Biochemical Evidence
of their Evolutionary Discordance by Loren Cordain, Ph.D..

[rogermexico]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

http://www.itulip.com/forums/showthread.php?p=99654&highlight=hba1c#post99654[/URL]

I wonder if perhaps trying to understand human diet without considering the affects of cooking is like trying to understand human adaptions to weather without considering the affects of clothing.

Hello Bovine snake

For an excellent discussion of the role of cooking in human evolution, including a fairly convincing argument that cooking (not just control of fire) began with the transition from H. Habilis to H. Erectus, see the book Catching Fire by Harvard paleoanthropologist Richard Wrangham.

All food sources I discuss assume that cooking is pre-agricultural behavior and that we evolved to eat most of our food cooked. The only paleolithic diet that is substantially raw food would be for chimpanzees.

http://www.amazon.com/Catching-Fire-...5035008&sr=8-1

In other words, it may well be that the human digestive track is best suited to meats, fish, fruits and nuts, which don't require long fermenting digestive tracks. However human civilization may well have begun to "blossom"

Wrangham's book has a good discussion of how cooking allowed the human gut to shrink, and thereby freed up metabolic energy that could be devoted to brain growth. Increased meat-eating enabled by more sophisticated and efficient hunting of large mammals and particularly, increased animal fat eating beginning about 4-800,000 years ago likely enabled further increases in brain size (brain growth is highly fat-dependent). In a paleolithic non-food-abundant environment, human omnivores would eat anything that had caloric value that would not kill them. Natural selection favors propagation of the gene, even if the organism is not made "healthy" or does not live as long. It does not follow that any particular thing eaten was or is healthy, particularly if it were a type of plant that uses poisons in its seeds to discourage consumption by wild animals. All plants tend to be in a contest with predators who might consume them. A fruit has completely indigestible seeds surrounded by tasty fructose. The animal eats the fruits and passes the seed undigested - the plant has used the predator to its advantage. Nuts are seeds that have a physical hard shell to discourage consumption. Gluten grains are grasses that use wind to disperse their seeds. The seeds contain carbohydrate and protein meant to help the seed germinate, years later if need be. The seed has lectins and physical structure designed to discourage consumption by predators, whether single cell, insects or vertebrates. Some creatures, like birds, are clearly adapted to overcome the defenses of gluten cereal grains and use them as a primary food source. The question is, are humans?

The answer is no.

First, see 6s and 3s and the logic of grain avoidance, for what happens when bovines that are adapted to eating grasses, eat too many grass seeds (grains) to which they are not adapted. Among other effects, the 6:3 ratio of fatty acids in the herbivore's body is seriously disturbed.

Now consider humans.

My argument that we are insufficiently adapted to gluten grains rests upon the following, in descending order of importance:

1) Fully 1% of the population has celiac disease, with 97% of these currently undiagnosed. 30% of the population has the genetic HLA haplotype that is susceptible to celiac disease -we can only know which of these 30% have it by testing. Celiac disease is caused by gluten grain consumption, with the offending gliadin proteins heat stable and not destroyed by cooking. Nearly every common autoimmune disease described is associated with at least an order of magnitude increased risk of celiac disease. Conversely, celiac patients have increased cancer, osteoporosis, and autoimmune diseases like DM I, thyroid disease, MS, Sjogren disease, RA, neuropathies, and even neurological disorders like schizophrenia. We don't know how big the iceberg is with these diseases, but the tip seems quite large.

2) Gluten grains are grass seeds that are employing a biologic strategy to avoid consumption, including elaborating the heat stable lectin WGA, which is known to damage the human gut. The nutritive value of gluten grains is inferior to the vast majority of non-gluten seed plant sources of carbohydrate and protein that have lesser adverse biological effects, and there is no evidence they provide anything uniquely essential. In addition to wheat germ agglutinin and gliadin proteins, there are a variety of other antinutrients in cereal grains, including phytates that bind essential minerals, and enzyme inhibitors that inhibit digestion. These are known to have their own dose-related adverse effects when included in the human diet. In addition, inclusion of gluten grains and the oils extracted from grains in the diet skews the ratio of O-6 to O-3 fatty acids in an unhealthy direction that adversely affects immune function, and their high carbohydrate content and consequent insulin response, when eaten in a food- abundant environment, makes them metabolic poison in the same dose dependent way as glucose and fructose.

3) The paleoanthropological record shows that humans and their hominid progenitors would eat nearly anything that had calories that would not immediately kill them, including occasional grass seeds. Nevertheless, the evidence tells us that monocot grass seeds in general and gluten cereal grains in particular were inconsistent and trivial food sources prior to agriculture. The fact that a food source was sometimes exploited, and that its caloric value in a food scarce environment might have outweighed the long term effects on health, tells us nothing about whether it is optimal to eat in preference to other foods in our current food-abundant environment. We need to look at current high quality science, including medicine and molecular biology, for that. The evidence is that cereal grains and legumes have antinutrients with clinically significant effects, and the evidence that these are an evolutionarily recent food source supports our observation that we are poorly adapted to them.

Wild honey is a preferred food source for its caloric value among modern hunter gatherers and has probably been a hominid food source for millions of years . Wild honey is just fructose and glucose with dirt and pollen in it. Would there be negative health effects with 100% elimination of sucrose (a disaccharide of glucose and fructose) from your diet ? Honey has been consumed for millions of years and can keep you from starving if food is scarce, but is there some magic ingredient in there with the sugar? I have convinced you, I hope, that in a food abundant environment, sucrose is not healthy, as anything you eat is necessarily displacing somethiing else you could be eating. Clearly the argument in favor of a food must rest on more than simply whether it was ever exploited.

I am now making the same elimination argument for gluten grains, even though the specific biological argument is different. In a food abundant environment where anything you eat displaces something else in a roughly isocaloric diet, eating gluten grains is not optimal for your health. You will have already eliminated most of your gluten grain consumption anyway with the elimination of white flour and processed foods. Why do you need the tiny amount that remains?

What is in wheat that you cannot better get from a green salad with egg on it - without the lectins and the gliadin proteins?

I have never had anyone able to tell me exactly what evil would befall a person without wheat, barley or rye in their diet. I have scores of non-celiacs that say that it made a huge change for the better, and some say it did much more than the sugar elimination.

So to recap, the argument goes like this - Step one - observe that 3 million americans have a disease that is seriously underdiagnosed and is caused by eating gluten grains. Step two - the biology of both the plant seeds and humans explains why this occurs, and gives us reason to believe there may be more adverse effects than what we clinically observe. Also, we know that only some animals (birds) are evolved to live primarily on seeds, and even obligate vegetarians are not adapted to graminae grass seeds. Step three - the paleoanthropological record shows that we have a very short history of eating these grains in the large quantities now consumed. Prior to 10,000 years ago, the evidence is that these gluten grains were a small and inconsistent part of our diets - orders of magnitude less prominent than now. This third part explains why we are not adapted, but is not necessary to say that we are not. Parts one and two have shown that already.

[*]when humans discovered milling and cooking, so were able to break down grains sufficient to digest them,

Cooking at least 500 kya - up to 2,000 kya

Milling at most 20-30 kya -not very long ago

More than wild wheat and barley, which were regional in distribution, there was honey and starchy root consumption. Wild versions of grass seeds are too costly to collect for them to be a consistent and significant food source through human evolution. The evidence for their toxicity is in the here and now. The evolutionary argument for this is explanatory, not necessary.

[*]when they learned to domesticate dairy animals and

5-7000 ya

[*]when they learned to cultivate grain and legume crops.[/LIST]

8-12,000 ya - much less for soya

In the particular case of animal milk, we know that some human races, particularly northern European, adapted sufficiently to be able to routinely digest milk lactose. It may also be that other such racial adaptions to digestive capacities occurred.

Undoubtedly there have been adaptations to diet. The case of lactulose is well studied, perhaps it's even the exception that proves the rule, as lactose intolerance is still very common. Lactulose persistence is neotony, persistence of a trait that we are all born with into adulthood. That is likely much easier to evolve than a general resistance to lectins or evolution of a whole new immune system to deal with molecular mimicry. Once again, selection acts via differences in reproductive fitness. Your genes don't care if you get an autoimmune disease at age 40 if you are done procreating. If there is no difference in reproductive fitness, or if the individual is made less healthy but more likely to survive in the short term, adaptation can be very slow.

Similary, we know that different races adapted their skin, hair, and other body characteristics to the different prevailing weather conditions, in addition to learning how to clothe themselves, more so in cold climates, and how to raise the plants and animals whose fiber and fir and skins were routinely useful in constructing such clothing.

So perhaps a pure paleo diet has about as much to recommend itself as an insistence on going around naked all the time, because that is how our ancestors 100,000 years ago lived.

I think if you have read this far in my response and maybe re-read some of my earlier posts you might agree there never was nor is there a "pure paleo" diet. The EM2 is a metabolic state that can be approximated through changes in our current diets. The evidence comes first from modern science and only is supported and explained by evidence from the past. If I could prove that H. Erectus smoked tobacco 2M years ago, that would not tempt me to recommend smoking as "certified paleo".

"PaNu is an approach to living centered on the thesis that the diseases of civilization are largely related to abandonment of the metabolic conditions we evolved under - what I term the "evolutionary metabolic milieu" - EM2."

The matter of insulin is important. I am confident that the refined carbs and sweetners of the typical modern persons diet lead to much of the chronic disease and obesity that plagues us. But I am unable to conclude that one should abandon such grain and dairy and vegetable foods as one is able to digest easily, once cooked.

There is nothing easier to digest than sucrose. But you might agree that we can live completely without it and that in a food- abundant regime it is metabolic poison. I would therefore caution against using "digestibility" as a criterion of health in a food-abundant environment.

High-fat dairy is great tool for achieving EM2 as the 12 steps indicates.

Nothing wrong with green vegetables or the occasional starchy tuber. Nuts have a few lectins but are likely less problematic than cereal grains. Legumes are best avoided but the evidence against them is so far weaker than that against gluten grains. The PaNu EM2 (evolutionary metabolic milieu) is about health, not paleolithic food re-enactment.

Regarding the devotion to grains, that's a tough nut to crack. Our cultural veneration of grains literally amounts to making a virtue of necessity, as 55% of world calories consumed is from grains. A paradigm shift is possible, though, if you are willing to read some more and adopt a radical skepticism of current government, MSM and industry supported nutritional dogma. I was initially as skeptical as you are, and only came to my conclusions through investigation. I now think the health effects are about 60-70% Insulin and excess carbohydrates and 30-40% Gluten grains.

Again I would ask, what is the exact negative health consequence of eliminating the remaing bits of whole wheat, barley and rye from your diet once your carbohydrate consumption is in the range of 10-20% of calories? It is really very hard to get your HBA1c optimally low with any grains in your diet. Why compromise in the face of all this evidence? Just to honor the USDA food pyramid?

In summary, I think it would be a mistake to leave out the affect of the capabilities developed in the last 10,000 years of human civilization on our proper choice of food and clothing (and shelter and transportation and communication, for that matter.)

Again, my argument always proceeds from the present to the past. If what works in the present works, keep it. If, like our diets, there is evidence what we are doing is harmful, we can look for clues in the past to see how to change things now. You won't see me looking to the paleolithic for better alternatives to my Hi-Fi gear or my electric guitar.


Thank you for your comments

RM

[ViC78]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

Roger -

First of all, let me thank you for starting this thread and contributing your time/expertise towards it. This thread inspired me to read Gary Taubes and I have come away enlightened and less foggy about many nutritional concepts.

After reading your thoughts and Gary Taubes' book, I have cut all sugar and refined carbohydrates from my diet and have already started seeing effects in terms of weight loss and more energy. I have a question about one of your points towards conversion to a paleolithic nutritional lifestyle.

"6 Intermittent fasting and infrequent meals (2 meals a day is best)"

Gary Taubes says that listening to your body would be the best course of action in terms of eating when your body tells you that you are hungry. How difficult was it for you initially to adopt the practice mentioned in your point above?
Also, when you say "intermittent fasting", what is the time period you are talking about?

Again, thanks for sharing your knowledge.

[rogermexico]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

After writing the post just above, a google search for "grains grasses legumes vegetables" quickly led to an interesting article, which provides substantially more detail and convincing discussion on this matter. See
The Late Role of Grains and Legumes
in the Human Diet, and Biochemical Evidence
of their Evolutionary Discordance by Loren Cordain, Ph.D..

Yes, I have read that - thanks for providing the link.

This is an article synthesized from Cordain's posts on the paleodiet listgroup and makes a good summary of the biological, medical and paleoanthropological evidence against grains and legumes.

You can find many of his original articles here at this link (which I provided in an earlier post on this thread) and will provide once again:

http://www.thepaleodiet.com/published_research/

Cordain is a major primary source for me. I respect his work on the evolutionary discordance of grains and find it quite convincing. His own "paleodiet" is still somewhat infected by the lipid hypothesis, so if you read his diet book be aware that you will encounter saturated-fat-phobia that we now know is unfounded.

Cordain also does not place as much emphasis on insulin and the time spent in ketosis as part of the metabolic environment, yet these are core concepts for me.

I have tried to add "what was their metabolism doing?" to the "what did they eat" question.

[rogermexico]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

[LEFT]Roger -

First of all, let me thank you for starting this thread and contributing your time/expertise towards it. This thread inspired me to read Gary Taubes and I have come away enlightened and less foggy about many nutritional concepts.

After reading your thoughts and Gary Taubes' book, I have cut all sugar and refined carbohydrates from my diet and have already started seeing effects in terms of weight loss and more energy. I have a question about one of your points towards conversion to a paleolithic nutritional lifestyle.
[FONT=Arial][SIZE=2]

Very glad to hear of your success!

Gary Taubes...saving the world, one pancreas at a time.

Gary Taubes says that listening to your body would be the best course of action in terms of eating when your body tells you that you are hungry.

"6 Intermittent fasting and infrequent meals (2 meals a day is best)"

My 12 steps contain some advice that is aphoristic.

Step 6 is meant as a cultural counterweight to all the stupid advice you see about frequent healthy snacks in the main stream media. We are told to eat frequent snacks because the SAD with 55% carbs makes you metabolically and emotionally tethered to frequent boluses of glucose. Go watch a kid's soccer game- they can't play for 15 minutes without a break for cookies or corn-syrup-laden juice boxes or gatorade - our children are sugar junkies and the advice to eat frequently is just advice to not stray too far from your dealer so you can get a fix when your blood sugar starts to crash!

So I agree with Gary that we should listen to our bodies, but only after we have kicked the cocaine, the sugar, the cereals and the cigarettes.

Otherwise our bodies are likely to tell us we need something not good for us.

My experience has been that without the frantic hunger of a glucose-eater, I can eat at whatever time is convenient. I eat the right types of foods, with no measurement, counting or weighing whatsoever, and I stop eating when I am satisfied. My weight has been absolutely stable eating this way for almost 2 years, putting the lie to the idea that you need to "count calories' to keep weight off. Gary's point is that our weights and appetites are under hormonal control, and our bodies regulate them quite precisely at given macronutrient ratios and the hormone levels that result.

How difficult was it for you initially to adopt the practice mentioned in your point above?

I began to fast spontaneously a few months into eating low carb (my percentages are about 65% fat, 25% protein and 10% carbs). On LC, the character of hunger changes completely. Without swings in blood glucose, and with cellular adaptation towards fatty acid metabolism, the "sick' sort of hunger that most people think of as hunger goes away. I find that I can arbitrarily fast for up to 18 hours with no discomfort whatsoever. If the goal is to keep your insulin levels low, it is only logical that increased intervals between meals increases the amount of time spent in the fatty-acid-fueled state, and less in the pro-inflammatory, oxidative stress-causing state where your body is trying to deal with excess calories, especially from glucose. I believe IF and infrequent meals decrease the hormonal signals that lead to disease and the hormone sensitive degenerative diseases that we think of as "aging".

1) Enhanced metabolic training in the direction of fat metabolism

2) Lower insulin levels and fewer insulin related diseases (Met. syndrome, degen diseases, Alzheimer's, common cancers)

3) Greater tolerance for fasting makes it easier to tolerate not eating - this give you "metabolic headroom" -it makes you more functional and resilient - You are a Porsche with a 40 gallon gas tank instead of a truck running on lead acid batteries.

4) If you exercise while fasting, the lack of insulin in the fasting state improves the fat-mobilizing and insulin-sensitizing benefits of the exercise.

Also, when you say "intermittent fasting", what is the time period you are talking about?

I eat around noon and again about 9 pm most days. So every 24 hours has a 15 hour fast and once in a while up to 18 hours. Please understand that this is in no way uncomfortable and my weight has been stable at 157-158 lbs for over year. It's not some kind of deprivation and is not an ascetic experience. I have no idea if this is better than 3 meals a day with a 24 hour fast once a week. This is just what I do spontaneously, but my reading of the literature backs it up as beneficial. I am sure my regime is healthier than the 5 meals a day "The Zone" or other pseudoscientific diets tell you you must have, or the advice to snack constantly I get from brochures at my local YMCA. Hunter-gatherers tend to eat a few leftovers in the morning, hunt all day and then have a big meal at the end of the day - sounds pretty similar. I doubt if in paleo times they very often fasted on purpose, but I do believe they were adapted to food scarcity.