PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

[Supercilious]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

Thanks for you answers rogermexico. What you say makes a lot of sense.

How did you get on this path, if I may ask?

When I was in highschool I started rock climbing, spelunking and light sailing. Since we prefered to go in pristine areas far away from the tourist crowded routes we had to carry all the provisions in our backpacks. We discovered in time that after having a chilli dinner, next day the body is not as responsive to intense physical exertion as after a dinner consisting of three trout caught from the nearby stream, filled with mushrooms and berries and cooked at the campfire in a clay shell. Plus one can of chilli weights as much as one bottle of vodka, so the bias in the equation is clear. It take though a steep learning curve for the city man to transform in a well adapted hunter-gatherer.
In time we began to take with us less and less canned/preserved food and rely mostly on local food sources.

What started as a necessity to provide additional calorie intake during longer expeditions became later a diet choice, because once you catch the taste of the good food of the hunter-gatherer there is no turning back to the agro-industrial crap.

[jk]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

rogermex, what do you make of the data from that big chinese study that came out about 1990? here's a quote from an article on it in the nytimes

Reducing dietary fat to less than 30 percent of calories, as is currently recommended for Americans, may not be enough to curb the risk of heart disease and cancer. To make a significant impact, the Chinese data imply, a maximum of 20 percent of calories from fat - and preferably only 10 to 15 percent - should be consumed.
Eating a lot of protein, especially animal protein, is also linked to chronic disease. Americans consume a third more protein than the Chinese do, and 70 percent of American protein comes from animals, while only 7 percent of Chinese protein does. Those Chinese who eat the most protein, and especially the most animal protein, also have the highest rates of the ''diseases of affluence'' like heart disease, cancer and diabetes.

http://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/08/sc...miology&st=cse

[rogermexico]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

Plus one can of chilli weights as much as one bottle of vodka, so the bias in the equation is clear. It take though a steep learning curve for the city man to transform in a well adapted hunter-gatherer.
In time we began to take with us less and less canned/preserved food and rely mostly on local food sources.

A can of commercial chili is mostly carbs in the form of beans and added sugar. i am not surprised it made you sluggish.

I did a lot of rock climbing and mountaineering in my youth. The best way to become an old climber is to switch to hunting and fishing, I think.

...once you catch the taste of the good food of the hunter-gatherer there is no turning back to the agro-industrial crap.

That is my answer to those who think this is some sacrifice or self-denying fad.

[jk]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

another thought: something i often say to patients is that the most striking thing i've learned in my years of practice is how much individual variability there is: in symptoms and presentation, in response to various treatments, and in ability to tolerate various treatments. put that together with the many testimonials out there for any diet you care to name: mediterranian, chinese, low carb, vegan, paleo, and so on. why should we assume that we all would do best on any one particular regime? why should we assume that any one of us will do best on only one particular regime? it seems to me more likely that there will be a variety of healthy diets, each more or less suitable for any individual. what we do know for sure, however, is that some diets are bad for all comers.

[bart]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

For what its worth, some interesting data on both beef and sustainability:




The Amazing Benefits of Grass-fed Meat
By Richard Manning

I have been fascinated by the permanence and healing power of grassland for 15 years now. If we respect the great original wisdom of the prairies, I’m convinced we can heal the wounds inflicted on the American landscape by industrial agriculture.

But in America, the question is always does it scale up? This is the critical test of any potential solution to a major environmental problem. Is a given practice feasible, and are there mechanisms for spreading it to cover a whole landscape?

I first had a hint as to how this might work for America’s farms when a friend explained to me why he chose to raise bison for slaughter, marketing the meat with the guarantee the animals had eaten nothing but native grasses. He thought if he could make such a model pay on his own land, he could do more to save native landscapes than any amount of activism, litigation or regulation. Profitable solutions self-replicate. Like viruses, they creep from one farm to the next, eventually exploding in exponential growth. They scale up.

Now there is big news on this front. A diverse collection of pioneers across the nation is raising not bison, but mostly grass-fed beef and dairy — an enterprise that can scale up quickly. They have a working model. It is not unrealistic to expect that we as a nation could convert millions of acres of ravaged industrial grain fields (plus millions of acres of land in federal conservation programs that cannot currently be used for grazing) to permanent pastures and see no decline in beef and dairy production in the bargain.

Doing so would have many benefits. It would give us a more humane livestock system, a healthier human diet, less deadly E. coli, elimination of feedlots, a bonanza of wildlife habitat nationwide, enormous savings in energy, virtual elimination of pesticides and chemical fertilizers on those lands, elimination of catastrophic flooding that periodically plagues the Mississippi Basin, and most intriguingly, a dramatic reduction in global warming gases.

The Grass-fed Beef Boom

The best evidence of this potential meat production revolution is a label that began showing up on packages of grass-fed beef across the nation early in 2009. The American Grassfed Association, a network of almost 400 graziers, is behind this effort. The label certifies the beef came from cattle that ate only grass from pastures, not feedlots; received no hormones or antibiotics in their feed; and were humanely raised and handled. It signals the emergence of a marketing network that already has placed grass-fed products in virtually every region of the nation in co-ops, health food stores and, in the case of the Southeast, in Publix Super Markets, a chain of more than 900 stores. The grass-fed label is evidence that the idea has reached critical mass. It’s been a long time coming, but what is driving it is profit, plain and simple.

Todd Churchill runs Thousand Hills Cattle Co. in Cannon Falls, Minn., which buys about 1,000 head a year from local producers, then processes and sells them to natural foods stores, restaurants and three colleges in the Twin Cities area. He says demand for his product always exceeds supply, and he sees no leveling for its growth curve.

Churchill’s operation is, in fact, a sort of model, a regional company that buys animals from a handful of graziers and meets a local need. Carrie Balkcom, executive director of the Grassfed Association, says consumers can now find quality grass-fed beef just about anywhere in the United States. All of this has been fueled by demand. Consumers are willing to pay a premium for grass-fed beef and other meat simply because they know it’s healthier than its conventional grain-fed counterpart, and because they don’t like the filth, cruelty and antibiotics inherent in the “concentrated animal feeding operations” that are now so prevalent.

The health claim is not speculation. Grass-fed beef and dairy products are leaner, but more importantly, lower in omega-6 fats that are linked to heart disease. Grass-fed meat and dairy products also are higher in beneficial omega-3 fats and conjugated linoleic acids. Both reduce the risk of heart disease.

Besides, grass-fed beef tastes better. I know because I eat it. However, it only tastes better if it’s raised right. Churchill tells me that when he first considered going into the business, it was because he missed the taste of beef he remembered as a child. So as an experiment, he bought two quarters of grass-fed beef from local farmers. One was the best he had ever eaten; the other so rank he fed it to the dogs.

To be sure, there currently are variables in the quality of grass-fed beef, for instance, genetics. A major problem for today’s graziers is that the industrial beef system has monopolized the gene pool, and for more than 50 years has selected for cattle that are adept at standing in a feedlot and eating grain as efficiently as possible. It may sound odd to say so, but this has left us with cattle not very good at eating grass. That’s pretty much all cattle ate from domestication 8,000 years ago until mid-20th century. But Churchill says it’s virtually impossible to find Herefords, the classic beef animal, that finish well on grass. His operation has done best with Red Angus, and over the years, he has been able to select for a set of traits that now yields animals that fatten well on grass. This selection for appropriate genetics is a key element in building the infrastructure of a scalable solution. We now have the correct foundation traits.

Better Grass and Rotational Grazing

The most important factor in quality beef, however, is the quality of the grass itself. Specifically, the grass should have a high sugar content. That quality is not automatic. It is not as simple as pointing cows at pasture and waiting for results. In fact, a trained eye will notice a similar scene at virtually any modern grass-fed beef operation: a couple of strands of electric fencing running around a bunch of cattle grazing in a clump. In fact, you could argue that the current revolution in grass-fed beef would not be possible without poly-wire electric fencing, which is cheap and easy to move.

For thousands of years, the dominant big grazer of North America was the American bison. It is the rule of co-evolution that when species evolve together they come to thrive on each other’s presence, and this is true of bison and the grasses, forbs and shrubs of the American landscape. But great herds of migrating bison grazed very differently than the way cattle graze on pasture today.

This has led graziers to develop a system that has many names but is often called “managed intensive rotational grazing.” Many people think of intensive grazing as negative, because we’re so accustomed to seeing the erosion that results from destructive overgrazing. But, intensive grazing is actually beneficial for grassland. It works this way: Graziers use the temporary electric fences to confine a herd of perhaps 50 calves or steers to an area the size of a small suburban front lawn for a short period, often as short as a half a day. Then the grazier arranges the easily movable fence to surround an adjacent small plot, on through a series of paddocks in a cycle of maybe 30 days, depending on conditions.

The result is the cattle graze all the plants down to a few inches, and then are moved to fresh grass. Each paddock is allowed to rest until the grass fully recovers. This roughly simulates the tactics of bison and in turn stimulates sweet, highly nutritious and palatable new growth, controls weeds and promotes biodiversity. In short, intensive grazing forces cattle to graze grassland the way bison used to.

Go With Grass, Not Grain

Churchill’s producers are raising cattle this way on converted corn and soybean land in Minnesota, which is a bit like building a mosque at the Vatican. They take this plowed-up landscape and plant it to permanent pasture — permaculture modeled on the tallgrass prairie that was the native cover. Many of Churchill’s producers, in fact, don’t own tractors; they don’t need them. It takes a couple of years for the land to recover sufficiently to produce high-quality beef, but it does recover. And after that initial setup, his producers begin showing a profit; in fact, more profit than the corn and soybeans yielded before. Part of this is a result of lower or no costs for inputs such as fertilizer, fuel, pesticides and machinery. This profit is one of the factors that will allow this system to scale up.

Churchill says that on properly recovered land, he can finish about two steers per acre. That is almost precisely the acreage it takes to grow the grain to finish those same steers in a feedlot. This whole system makes economic sense, acre by acre. More than half of our total grain crop goes to feed livestock, so it follows that we can convert half of the 150 million acres used to grow corn and soy ?to permanent pasture and lose not one ounce of meat production. At the same time, we can produce healthier meat and shift the massive federal subsidies for corn and soybean production to a better use.

Yet there are even more benefits to intensive grazing systems. Consider that the upper Midwest was flooded in the spring of 2008, an inundation that caused catastrophic dislocations, massive erosion of topsoil and billions of dollars in damages. This is the landscape of corn and soy agriculture. Iowa, for instance, has been almost wholly converted to row-crop agriculture, maintaining only about 1 percent of its native habitat, which was largely prairie and oak savannah. A plowed field sheds rainwater almost as fast as a parking lot does; the soil can absorb, at most, about 11/2 inches of rain in an hour. A permanent pasture can suck up as many as 7 inches of rain in an hour. That’s the difference between floods and no floods.

Most astonishing of all is what happens after the land is restored to grassland. Grass, like most plants, reacts to changing conditions. It builds a root system to support its leaves and stems, but when a cow munches off the top of the plant, there’s not enough energy left to support all its roots. The plant reacts by sloughing roots, then builds back deeper roots as aboveground parts regrow.

Deep rooting is, in fact, an overlooked factor here. All of our row crops are shallow-rooted and so for generations they have worked a narrow layer of the soil. Constant harvesting of these crops has depleted this topsoil of essential elements such as magnesium and calcium. As a result, both are now lacking not only in our diets, but also in the diets of livestock. This is a human health issue, but veterinarians say it also creates a mineral imbalance in grain-fed livestock that lies at the root of many of their health problems. In contrast to shallow-rooted row crops, deep-rooted grasses dig down to fresh minerals. Those minerals then become available to everything up the food chain, supporting the overall health of the entire system.

The roots that are sloughed-off after every grazing rotation are equally important; they become decaying organic material that feeds microorganisms, restores subsoil health, creates water-absorbing voids, and ultimately steadily increases the organic matter — or carbon content of the soil. There are big implications here both for building fertile soil and fighting climate change.

Using Intensive Grazing to Store Carbon
When American settlers first busted Midwestern prairies, they worked highly fertile virgin soil that was about 10 percent organic matter. On average, 150 years of agriculture has cut that vital organic matter by more than half and released huge amounts of carbon dioxide, the leading driver of global warming, into the air. Permanent pastures managed correctly can tap solar energy to pump about 1 percent of organic matter back to the soil each year. If we convert from grain-fed to grass-fed meat, we can turn millions of acres of row crops into carbon sinks, and use permanent pasture to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and slow global warming, as well as conserve water.

The carbon balance of any given enterprise is a complicated matter. We’ve understood some of this in looking at the carbon footprint of farming, but in fact, we have not made it complicated enough. There is a complex energy stream feeding industrial agriculture, both in fuels for transportation, tillage, storage and processing, and also in the natural gas used to make chemical fertilizers. All this makes modern industrial agriculture energy intensive and therefore gives it a pretty big carbon footprint.

Yet focusing only on the energy flow of farming greatly understates the problem, because it doesn’t take into consideration the natural vs. unnatural cycling of organic matter. In corn and soy production, tilling adds oxygen which causes organic matter to decay, or oxidize, and be released to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. Researchers have taken a closer look at this and found that tillage not only releases carbon dioxide, but also methane and nitrous oxide (both greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming). True enough, a growing corn field sucks up a lot of carbon dioxide, but then releases it all back almost immediately when the disced down stalks and leaves decay. Without exception, all of the tillage systems examined in one study published in Science were net contributors to global warming, and the worst offenders were the annual crops corn, soybeans and wheat farmed with conventional methods. Meanwhile, fields of perennial crops in the same study pulled both methane and carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and stashed it safely in the soil. There is even some evidence that perennial grasslands are, under certain conditions, even better at sequestering carbon than forests.

A conventionally farmed corn or soybean field is a source of global warming gases, but a permanent pasture is a pump that pushes carbon back into the soil where it increases fertility. Even though we harvest meat from the pastures each year, still the soil grows richer and holds more carbon. We get all these benefits thanks to solar energy, plant photosynthesis and natural cycles of grasslands and grazing animals.

So just how powerful could this tool be, were we to think as big as transforming American agriculture? Collecting data on the carbon storage potential of intensive grazing involves numerous variables, and overall estimates are not yet available. But using figures for annual and perennial crops reported in the recent Scientific American article “Future Farming: A Return to Roots?” we can get a rough idea of what effect the grassfarming revolution could have on global warming. Production of high-input annual crops such as corn and soybeans release carbon at a rate of about 1,000 pounds per acre while perennial grasslands can store carbon at roughly the same rates. This suggests that if we converted half the U.S. corn and soy acres to pasture, we might cut carbon emissions by roughly 144 trillion pounds, and that’s not even counting the reduced use of fossil fuels that would also result. That’s not a bad side benefit to a transformation that makes sense on so many other levels as well.

A conversion on an enormous scale is not out of the question. In fact, we have already done a massive land use change just in recent decades. After the great plow-ups of the 1970s and ’80s (conducted at the federal government’s urging) the country saw an enormous increase in soil erosion, so taxpayers began paying farmers to plant the most highly erodable acres back to grass. This Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) now costs us about $1.8 billion a year, and peaked at a total of about 36 million acres a couple of years ago. That’s exactly the sort of scale we need.

Intriguingly, though, the rules prohibit grazing on CRP lands under ordinary conditions. Imagine what could be accomplished with some creative changes in the rules to allow carefully managed grazing and connect CRP to the market driver of grass-fed beef and dairy!

All this raises the very point missed by industrial agriculture. Intensive rotational grazing offers a corrective to the narrowing diversity on the farm landscape. We are slowly learning that human enterprises work best when they mimic nature’s diversity. Early on, especially in organic farming and with the rise of vegetarianism, we began thinking we could approach that diversity by raising a variety of a dozen or so tilled crops (never mind that an acre of pure prairie contains hundreds of species of plants). But it seems obvious now that this line of thinking needed to step up a couple of levels on the taxonomic hierarchy. Why did we think we could in any meaningful way mimic nature’s biodiversity by excluding the animal kingdom?

Over the years, organic farmers have told me they relearned this important point: Many found out the hard way that they could not make their operations balance out — both biologically and economically (they’re the same in the end) — without bringing animals back into the equation. Handled right, animals control weeds and insects, cycle nutrients, and provide a use for waste and failed crops. Healthy ecosystems — wild and domestic — must include animals. Now there’s a chance we may realize how very important this idea is to the life of the planet.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Multiple Benefits of Grassfarming
More humane animal treatment
More nutritious meat and dairy products
Reduced flooding and soil erosion
Increased groundwater recharge
More sustainable manure management
Less E. coli food poisoning
More fertile soil and more nutritious forages
More diverse and healthier ecosystems
Reduced use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides to grow unsustainable corn and soy



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Considering Cattle Burps

Any discussion of cattle and the environment will move quickly toward the unsavory subject of belching. Simply put, during digestion, a cow’s rumen breaks down lignins in feed, releasing methane, which happens to be 24 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas. So would a grass-fed beef and dairy system mean more methane?

Not necessarily. First, I am not arguing for an increase in numbers of cattle, just moving the existing numbers from filthy feedlots to pastures. So the real question is, do cows produce more methane on grain or on grass?

There are studies to suggest grain produces less methane, but those studies, by and large, compare conventional pastures with feedlots. However, conventional pastures contain high-fiber, low-quality forage, which produces more methane. On the other hand, studies of rotational grazing have shown decreases of as much as 45 percent in methane production, when compared with conventional pastures. All studies seem to agree cows produce less methane when nutrition is best, and the very reason for rotational grazing is to improve forage quality.

Nor do those studies take into account such factors as methane produced by corn and soybean cultivation, which we know is significant, as well as releases from manure festering in feedlots, as opposed to manure cycling immediately into pasture soils.

To further complicate matters, singling out cattle blames them for their position in the grand cycle of nutrients. Remove them from the food chain, and other methane-producing organisms — termites, deer, elk, grasshoppers, not to mention an unimaginable array of microbes — would cheerfully assume the niche.

The world is a big place and cows are a small part of it. Stated another way, in 2004, ruminants — cattle, sheep and goats — accounted for only about 1.6 percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. A massive expansion of rotational grazing is not likely to increase that number by much and could well reduce it. It certainly would reduce carbon dioxide to a much larger degree, and would lead to a net reduction of our greenhouse gas emissions. No doubt, at least some environmental good would come from reducing the world’s consumption of beef, but the trend is in the opposite direction. Humans and cattle have worked together for almost 8,000 years, and that is not likely to change soon. But there’s no reason we shouldn’t learn to raise cattle better.

Resources
Eat Wild
Learn more about the benefits of grass-fed meat and find local sources for grass-fed products.

Polyface Farms
Grassfarmer Joel Salatin’s website includes information about his farm and his books on pasture-based livestock.

The Stockman Grass Farmer
Subtitled “The Grazier’s Edge,” this publication is the go-to source for information on grassfarming.

ATTRA
The National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service provides detailed information on rotational grazing and sustainable pasture management.

Richard Manning is the author of eight books, including Rewilding the West and Against the Grain. He lives in Missoula, Mont.

http://www.motherearthnews.com/Susta...-Benefits.aspx

[rogermexico]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

rogermex, what do you make of the data from that big chinese study that came out about 1990? here's a quote from an article on it in the nytimes


http://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/08/sc...miology&st=cse

JK - I am not ignoring your earlier post - you ask good enough questions I want to take my time responding to some of them.

Let me propose the way the current dietary dogma is promulgated via the MSM

1000 studies proposed

100 that are intended to support the current AHA diet heart/hypothesis eat fiber and not red meat or saturated fat paradigm are funded

20 that can be interpreted to support the paradigm are published

These studies are fed to the typical mouthpieces for the dietary establishment - The Larry Kudlows of diet - like Jane Brody and Gina Kolata of the New York Times.

They are further spun and refined in the framework of the reigning paradigm.

Re: The Chinese study, I'll use Brody's own reporting. Michael Eades did this quite thoroughly with the original paper.

Sixty-five hundred Chinese have each contributed 367 facts

Observational study based on self-reporting which is very unreliable, especially for diet

Obesity is related more to what people eat than how much. Adjusted for height, the Chinese consume 20 percent more calories than Americans do, but Americans are 25 percent fatter.

I don't doubt this at all. This is Taubes point exactly.


To make a significant impact, the Chinese data imply, a maximum of 20 percent of calories from fat - and preferably only 10 to 15 percent - should be consumed.

Notice the word "imply" what she is hypothesiziing was not tested

10-15% calories from fat is Dean Ornish's diet on which you will lose weight, lose muscle mass and your C-reactive protein and HDl levels will be worse than on a high fat low carb diet with the same calories. This would be an insanely low fat level. Thin and hungry with high insulin levels, inflammation and poor immune function. Most people find this unpalatable and much harder than low carb, with good reason.

Eating a lot of protein, especially animal protein, is also linked to chronic disease. Those Chinese who eat the most protein, and especially the most animal protein, also have the highest rates of the ''diseases of affluence'' like heart disease, cancer and diabetes.

This is the hobgoblin of all observational, uncontrolled studies, including Keye's original fraudulent study where he threw out all the countries that violated his hypothesis. Protein and especially meat consumption track wealth. So does refined grain and sugar consumption. In fact, sugar consumption usually goes up much more than protein with improving economic status. You can't control for it if you are not measuring it. Well covered by Taubes.

A rich diet that promotes rapid growth early in life may increase a woman's risk of developing cancer of the reproductive organs and the breast. Childhood diets high in calories, protein, calcium and fat promote growth and early menarche, which in turn is associated with high cancer rates. Chinese women, who rarely suffer these cancers, start menstruating three to six years later than Americans.

This is extremely interesting and makes me ask what could be powerful enough in a "rich diet" to have these profound effect? The answer is insulin. Bis-phenol a and meat eating do not cause early menarche, it is high insulin levels - the same thing causing the epidemic of childhood obesity. Fat has no insulin effect, protein minimal. I guess that leaves carbohydrates. Insulin is the powerful cancer and growth promoter, not calcium or calories per se and definitely not fat.

By matching characteristics, researchers derived 135,000 correlations, about 8,000 of which are expected to have both statistical and biological significance that could shed light on the cause of some devastating disease.



The not-so-polite term for this if you are a scientist is "data mining'

It would indeed be extremely unlikely not to find at least a few "associations'' that support nearly any dietary hypothesis whatsoever if you are doign that many regressions with that much data. Just toss out the ones that don't fit. Unfortunately, that is how most dietary epidemiology is done. It is a field with terrible science.

No study of diet that is not prospective and controlled is reliable.

Almost everything you read in the NYT or on MSN will be abjectly stupid or misleading. I have employees who now make a game of "who can find the stupidest health tip on MSN today."

Thats all the deconstruction I have time for now, but you can check Eades website and look for "China study"

[jk]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

thanks for your thoughtful reply, rm. i hope you don't mind my raising these questions, but [obviously] i find this topic both interesting and important. here's another quote, from a review of taubes' "good calories,..." with its implicit question.

But the problem with a book like this one, which goes on and on in great detail about experiments new and old in areas ranging from heart disease to cancer to diabetes, is that it can be hard to know what has been left out. For example, Taubes argues at length that people get fat because carbohydrates in their diet drive up the insulin level in the blood, which in turn encourages the storage of fat. His conclusion: all calories are not alike. A calorie of fat is much less fattening than a calorie of sugar.

It’s known, though, that the body is not so easily fooled. Taubes ignores what diabetes researchers say is a body of published papers documenting a complex system of metabolic controls that, in the end, assure that a calorie is a calorie is a calorie. He also ignores definitive studies done in the 1950s and ’60s by Jules Hirsch of Rockefeller University and Rudolph Leibel of Columbia, which tested whether calories from different sources have different effects. The investigators hospitalized their subjects and gave them controlled diets in which the carbohydrate content varied from zero to 85 percent, and the fat content varied inversely from 85 percent to zero. Protein was held steady at 15 percent. They asked how many calories of what kind were needed to maintain the subjects’ weight. As it turned out, the composition of the diet made no difference.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/bo...0taubes&st=cse

ps re data mining- good for generating hypotheses, just not conclusions.

[rogermexico]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

thanks for your thoughtful reply, rm. i hope you don't mind my raising these questions, but [obviously] i find this topic both interesting and important. here's another quote, from a review of taubes' "good calories,..." with its implicit question.


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/bo...0taubes&st=cse

ps re data mining- good for generating hypotheses, just not conclusions.

Yep, Kolata is 100% predictable. Read Taubes GCBC, whose book contains 459 references and whose bibliography is over sixty pages and decide for yourself whether Kolata or Taubes is leaving more out.

As far as the metabolic advantage, although neither psychiatrists nor neuroradiologists run metabolic wards, you and I both know that it if a Type I diabetic is deprived of insulin, they absolutely waste away even if eating 3000 calories a day. Both glucose uptake and storage of triglycerides is 100% dependent on insulin. Calories in is absolutely not calories out. How could it be if the wastage of calories consumed is under hormonal control?

FWIW, low carb advocates fight over this issue, with Eades on one side and Anthony Colpo on the other.

My own view is the same as Taubes, which is that the metabolic advantage exists, but who cares if you lose weight because of satiety (eating less calories because fat intake decreases hunger) or because of greater wastage of calories with higher fat intake.

If I had to guess, satiety due to more stable glucose and insulin levels is the more powerful effect but it does not matter to my patients, who all lose weight and none of whom measures a single thing before they eat it.

Key to my hypothesis is that obesity is a pathologic state. Paleo era humans did not avoid obesity by measuring either calories or carbs on a per food basis and they did not have calculators and notepads. The obeyed the rules of what was available and most efficient to spend time harvesting, i am trying to make artificial rules that emulate what their bodies were exposed to, especially hormonally.

[rogermexico]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

70's study -- in South Asians

Incidence of diabetes

Rural South Asians 4%
Urban South Asians 12%
South Asians in the US and UK 35%

Diet very similar except more meat and dairy for South Asians in the US and UK

So what is the difference between the three cohorts?

Degree of cooking and processing of the carbohydrates and legumes!!

Think amylase and sucrase inhibitors that get denatured by cooking and processing!

Look at lbs per year sugar and flour consumed - it will track

[Guest]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

The most telling information on the virtue of any dietary philosophy cannot be found in close up detailed studies. The real truths emerge when you compare entire nations to each other, which have vastly different dietary traditions, and you adopt multi-decade time spans as your sample window. Then you are getting past all the smoke, claims, obfuscations and easy disclaimers to see what it all boils down to.

For forty years, the Italians had the lowest incidence of obesity, the lowest incidence of the insulin dysfunctional illnesses, of any country in Europe - and **by far** the lower incidence of these diseases compared to the US. They were (and still are) the second or third longest lived people in the world. And famously, the very cornerstone of their diet was conceived around meals rich in grains, fruit and vegetables.

It has been heavily bastardized in it's exportation to American culture, and is indelibly ingrained in American views as a heavy, doughy, carb laded diet - well the carbs are there most certainly, but there is a large paradox to Rogers theories nested in there (which JK intuited in a couple of cited objections, but which Roger swats aside and JK compliantly discards. JK should trust his intuitions more.). The classic Italian diet of the post WWII era left them the healthiest and slimmest of all Europeans.

Today that primacy is shattered, and I read with surprise that there is an alrming reversal of trend in the young in that country. Their children are becoming obese - - but what has changed so drastically from 20 years ago, when it was well known that you could travel the breadth of the country and they were far slimmer and more long lived than their English, or Dutch, or German brethren?

Fast food, and the Americanisation (processed everything) has invaded Italy and their weight issues have exploded.

But this is the point Roger does not address satisfactorily - the most definitive assessment of any dietary tradition is captured by putting the largest set of parentheses possible around the sample group. Go large, and sample an entire nation to derive truly robust and inescapable statistics. The Italians captured the "most healthy and slim" title undisputably for 30 or more years after WWII. It is right there in the record, they were far slimmer than Germans and Britons (who traditionally eat a fair quantity more meat than the Italians) for decades.

And they did this by keeping a balance of grains and fruit and vegetables at the front and center of their diet, with meat distinctly in a second position on the dinner table.

I grew up in that country. I am 53 and remember growing up in Italy from the late 1950's and all through the 1960's. The food of Italy was exceedingly healthy, and I remember very few obese people all around me through those decades. I don't even remember many obese people from the 1980's when I came home there to visit family and friends many times. What changed in Italy over those years to cause the epidemic of obesity?

The proliferation of processed foods as American style industrialised food production took over. This is Roger's cultural viewpoint. He may have traveled, but his dietary theses are parochial to America.

If he had grown up in Italy in the 1950's and 1960's as I did, when bread and pasta were part of every meal, he would today find his theories backed into a corner - because at no time was obesity in any particular evidence in that country - that is not a "sampling anomaly" or a "statistical anomaly" or "mainstream media hype" - that is an honest to goodness report to people here from me. I grew up there. I saw with my own eyes for decades how a carbohydrate laden diet actually produces slim people.

Rogers theories contain lots of truthful insights, but they also contain at least one really large, America-centric canard at their very core. Carbohydrate based diets "Italian style" have historically been proven, at a nationwide level, and across decades to NOT be fattening, nor unhealthy, nor leading inexorably to diabetes. I call this notion bunk, because I have seen the opposite in my youth, incontrovertibly.

Understand this - I'm offering you an eyewitness account of the degree of obesity or carbohydrate induced ill health in an old European country - spanning **decades** in the post war years. Either I am a liar, or there is a singular misapprehension in Roger's thesis that lots of carbs produce hyperglycemia. My suggestion is that Roger's culinary breadth of horizons is limited by A) his American upbringing, and B) his incuriosity to explore paradoxes such as the Italian one.

My personal experience growing up in another country informs me that Roger is putting a large falsehood over on everyone here with this theory about carbohydrate rich diets.

Another question Roger has not answered is what advisability there is to keep a 70 year old on a diet consisting of 60% fats? And if the advice in the 70 year old's case is that they reduce this percentage, then evidently the 60% fat consumption is not quite as "inherently natural" to humans as has been portrayed by this theory? A truly balanced and wholesome ratio of foods should be good for all age groups.

__________________


Obesity threatens Italian longevity


Obesity threatens Italian longevity / 24% of children have weight problems

(ANSA) - Rome, October 10 - Farmers warned on Tuesday that soaring obesity levels in Italy would soon undermine the country's record for healthy long living .

In a report marking Obesity Day, farmers' union Coldiretti said that, thanks to the Mediterranean diet, Italian men currently had a life expectancy of 77.4 and Italian women of 83.6. It stressed these figures were far higher than the European Union average but were destined to fall because of growing obesity problems, particularly among Italian youngsters .

"The children of this generation could be the first in history to have a shorter life than their parents because of illnesses caused by obesity," it said .

Coldiretti noted that more children are overweight in Italy than in any other European country .

Statistics show that 24% of children and teenagers in Italy have major weight problems while 4% are "seriously obese". Among Italian ten-year-olds, more than 35% are dangerously overweight or obese .

That puts Italy at the top of the European rankings although Malta, Greece and Spain follow close on its heels .

"The reason is that the traditional Italian diet based on bread, pasta, fruit, vegetables and olive oil has been abandoned," Coldiretti said .

The union called on the government to act immediately, saying that one of the first things to do would be to ensure that healthy food was served in school canteens. Recent studies show that obese children are more likely to have high blood pressure as adults, or suffer from a stroke .

Research has also shown that the average life expectancy of obese male kids is 13 years shorter than their slimline peers, with the figure dropping to eight for obese girls .

Experts emphasise the potential psychological damage or suffering caused by obesity, pointing out that overweight children tend to be picked on or teased and are at risk of developing low self-esteem and depression.

Obesity threatens Italian longevity

__________________

IMO all the people here prattling on about the "innate wholesomeness of a diet based upon wild game" have one ailment in common - they lack a foundational experience in childhood, in a very old country with a depth and wisdom of dietary traditions. So they go chasing off in search of exciting sounding theories of nutrition which extol the regenerative properties of wild game. It they had grown up in a country with a 1000 year old deep and well anchored tradition of wholesome food balancing, they would regard such off-beat wild game enthusiasms with mirth. Such enthusiasms speak more of cultural impoverishment than they do of the fountain of good health.

/

[rogermexico]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

rogermexico, found your views on diet quite intriguing

Was wondering if you could clarify your views on the differences between grains and starches, i.e., although they are both packed with carbs, the former may have the vitamins and fiber that have been hyped for the last generation - I myself am a fan of wheat fiber (insoluble) in that it appears to regulate bowel activity (e.g., prevent contstipation) - do you see any issues with wheat fiber?

Starches are polymers of simple sugars. Starches and sugars are all equally bad for your insulin levels, IMO

Grains are plant seeds. They contain carbohydrate as starches in the kernel.

Carbs are not good for reasons outlined

Unfortunately, plant seeds have carbs in the center, surrounded by fiber and some vitamins in the hull, along with glycoproteins that are not good for you.

White flour avoids some of the nasties of the hull, but then you have carbs with no vitamins. That is why flour has to be enriched to avoid nutritional diseases. So what is the point of white flour unless you are starving?

With whole wheat, you are adding back the vitamins, but also the nasty lectins in the hull and there is still too much carbohydrate. Worse than white bread for that reason. Plenty more vitamins in your meat and veggies.

Wheat fiber has zero nutritive value, and portions of the hull you are trying to avoid due to the lectins.

Eating fiber that is not already in the vegetables you have is of zero benefit IMO

Best to stick to green vegetables, nuts and berries and eat no grains.

If you want pure starch eat yams. Much better than bread.

With

Also, how does the basal metabolic rate figure into your views on diet. I've long been convinced that the calories in/calories out is not a sufficient metric to gauge weight gain/loss. I believe there is a genetic component involved; we all know thin people who appear sedentary and load on the food as well as those who seem perpetually chubby and don't appear to over-indulge.

Lots of nuance to this but treated well by Taubes in GCBC - there are genetic difference in susceptibility to bad health effects of high carb diets -less time exposed to agriculture, more benefit to low carbs and no grains. Pima indians of Arizona.

Any views of vitamin C?, Coffee?, EtOH?

No vitamins necessary with adequate animal products and green veggies.
Vit D is really a prohormone more than a vitamin and only necessary if you get no daily sun.

Coffee is harmless in moderation. Red wine, ditto. Beer is loaded with sugar.

Good Questions

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

This is at the core what irks me about the plethora of diet books being written in America today.

There is a difference, Lukester, between observing something and being irked by it.

Perhaps it is true (I lack the personal experience to comment) that Roger's comments are more relevant to the typical American diet than to many other traditional diets about the world.

Eh - so what if that is so?

That this irks you probably says more about you than about Roger's comments.

Usually when I find myself chronically irked by certain behaviour or comments of others, it is an indicator of something in myself that I have not yet integrated and instead project onto others, some part of myself that I don't like and thus far refuse to accept. (On this matter I unfortunately do have the personal experience to support my comment .)

[Guest]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

Roger - you've mentioned elsewhere, with dismissive tone, how all the "pop science" practitioners skate over any data not consonant with their theories.

Meanwhile, you've posted a large number of comments on diet here in the past week, yet don't choose to discuss those instances where an entire nation's demographic health stats ran flatly counter to your thesis for 40 years?

And how about the question (third or fourth time I've asked) about the appropriateness of a 60% fat component in the diet of a 75 year old? If you hesitate to recommend such a high fat component to someone that age, then maybe this regimen is less "natural" than you like to assume?

(ANSA) - Rome, October 10 - Farmers warned on Tuesday that soaring obesity levels in Italy would soon undermine the country's record for healthy long living ...

thanks to the Mediterranean diet, Italian men currently had a life expectancy of 77.4 and Italian women of 83.6. It stressed these figures were far higher than the European Union average ... children of this generation could be the first in history to have a shorter life than their parents because of illnesses caused by obesity," it said . ... "The reason is that the traditional Italian diet based on bread, pasta, fruit, vegetables and olive oil has been abandoned," Coldiretti said . ... The union called on the government to act immediately, saying that one of the first things to do would be to ensure that healthy food was served in school canteens..

The most telling information on the virtue of any dietary philosophy ... emerge when you compare entire nations to each other, which have vastly different dietary traditions, and you adopt multi-decade time spans ... For forty years, the Italians had the lowest incidence of obesity ... of any country in Europe ... And famously, the very cornerstone of their diet was conceived around meals rich in grains, fruit and vegetables.

The classic Italian diet of the post WWII era left them the healthiest and slimmest of all Europeans. ... But this is the point Roger does not address satisfactorily ... The Italians captured the "most healthy and slim" title undisputably for 30 or more years after WWII. ... they were far slimmer than Germans and Britons (who traditionally eat a fair quantity more meat than the Italians) for decades.

If he had grown up in Italy in the 1950's and 1960's as I did, when bread and pasta were part of every meal, he would today find his theories backed into a corner - because at no time was obesity in any particular evidence in that country - that is not a "sampling anomaly" or a "statistical anomaly" or "mainstream media hype" ... I grew up there. I saw with my own eyes for decades how a carbohydrate laden diet actually produces slim people.

Rogers theories contain lots of truthful insights, but they also contain at least one really large, America-centric canard at their very core. Carbohydrate based diets "Italian style" have historically been proven, at a nationwide level, and across decades to NOT be fattening, nor unhealthy, nor leading inexorably to diabetes. I call this notion bunk, because I have seen the opposite in my youth, incontrovertibly.

Another question Roger has not answered is what advisability there is to keep a 70 year old on a diet consisting of 60% fats? And if the advice in the 70 year old's case is that they reduce this percentage, then evidently the 60% fat consumption is not quite as "inherently natural" to humans as has been portrayed by this theory? A truly balanced and wholesome ratio of foods should be good for all age groups.

Meanwhile it is the heavily patronising tone of your replies - (while the core of your thesis is still in reality very much in discussion) that grates on skeptics like me. Your "Stick to economics Lukester, you are seriously out of your depth" comment arrogates to you a wisdom on nutrition which you assume anyone who is not a doctor must lack. Americans bow instinctively before such claims to authority. For an American, wisdom about food is something which must be referred to scientists for insights. :rolleyes: This speaks of a cultural poverty - it actually says very little that is definitive on what a truly healthy diet actually should be. The American doctor arrogating a wisdom about nutrition greater than that of centuries of tradition elsewhere - this grates upon my clutural upbringing.

[jk]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

lukester, you should really think about pythoniccow's comment. there is no need to be hostile or unpleasant here. i think i have a lot of the same questions you do, but i manage to ask them in a spirit of inquiry, not debate let alone dispute. [not that i'm any paragon:rolleyes:] there's no need to be strident. the more strident you are, the less you are heard. the tone drowns out the content.

[Guest]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

JK - your comment makes no mention of the patronising responses obtained to date. Also, I note you do not press your skeptical questions beyond Roger's first dismissals, nor seem to have much conviction in the doubts you express. These are the differences between us. I find US doctors (he's a radiologist BTW, not a general practitioner) who assume this paternalistic, dismissive tone grate upon my cultural upbringing from childhood in another country. That was a country whose entire population amply evidenced outstanding health characteristics in flat contradiction to Roger's haughtily asserted theories (you are seriously out of your depth Lukester - implies a supreme assurance he's figured all the angles).

I have the impulse to tell the armies of American diet doctors to take a hike, because *actually* I know such theories are based upon a core of bunk which they don't care to squarely address. Notice Roger mentioning how the studies you dig up are busily engaged in self-reaffirmation whereby they systematically cull out all research contrary to their thesis? Then take note of how Roger skates right past points such as I made above, that you can point to a dozen countries in the world where a diet rich in carbohydrates and grains does not produce any trace of the illnesses he warns are it's dire and immediate consequences.

I actually think it is you who could benefit by being maybe just a little more challenging when your intuitions hint to you that something is amiss in the theory. I assure you, based upon my 25 years in another country which had some of the best fitness stats in Europe, that there is indeed something amiss at the core of this theory.

lukester, you should really think about pythoniccow's comment. there is no need to be hostile or unpleasant here. i think i have a lot of the same questions you do, but i manage to ask them in a spirit of inquiry, not debate let alone dispute. [not that i'm any paragon:rolleyes:] there's no need to be strident. the more strident you are, the less you are heard. the tone drowns out the content.