Paleo Clinic

A quick update and some thoughts

2011-06-16T07:59:00.000-07:00

It has been a while, so an update is due. Yes, I am still alive and still going Paleo, whatever that means these days. But I have some new experiences and thoughts to share.

Last year I was so energised that I got too involved in my work and paid less attention to my diet and lifestyle. There was quite a bit of stress with deadlines and I had to drink quite a lot of coffee (which I normally do not drink and which has a very powerful, drug-like effect on my brain). Stress and coffee also meant seeking comfort/reward in eating. While previously my Paleo diet was mostly bland and relatively lower in fat, now I started to eat processed and fried meat with salt and AGEs. I was also eating twice, rather than once (IF) and to have a tub of ice-cream was not unusual. Still low-carb though. Exercise level was also down.
I considered all that temporary measures to help me live through the busy months. As a result, I put on about 30lbs of fat over half a year. Interestingly, this time the fat was distributed more evenly making me look like I had more muscles, but it was fat and I had to get a new suit.

About 2 months ago I decided to get back to my original Paleo with less fat, more leafy vegetables, no processed meat and no dairy (save for a bit of crème fresh or butter for flavour). I also went back to 4-6/24 IF. This helped me lose the fat, but my weight remained about 20lbs higher than a year ago: more muscle mass and more strength.

So, this seems to be working fine, but I do plan on increasing starchy vegetables and keeping fat at bay. I just feel much better after a bit more carbs, low carb rather than VLC.

I still believe that genetics and epigenetics are very important and that different people have different dietary sweet spots. I did the National Genographic test and now I know that my mitochondria (mtDNA J haplogroup) are probably used to higher amounts of fat and to generating heat through decoupling (those cold nights in the Paleo steppe?). But mtDNA J folks where the ones responsible for the Neolithic Revolution, weren’t they? So, my ancestors probably never experienced Ice Age with its (seasonal) abundance of mammoth fat.

But APOE is much more interesting, and I will probably get tested, considering my relatively high cholesterol last year. It has been claimed that APOE4 are the Paleo-Paleos, the simian ones, more used to plant based diet and that the mutation to APOE3, about 200K years ago, allowed our ancestors to eat more fat. I find it hard to believe that suddenly, 200K y.a. fat became more abundant. But interestingly APOE4 was decimated in the Fertile Crescent, but was it because of high fat diet? Or more likely because of high carb and glycation? APOE4 is more susceptible to glycation and oxidation, which might be a mechanism for its role in Alzheimer’s (with high cholesterol a compensatory mechanism to get more of it to the brain). What is even more interesting, other primates have APOE4, but theirs behaves like human APOE3, possibly making them more adapted to higher carb diet? But what was the adaptive advantage in our australopithecine ancestors to change from simian APOE4 to human APOE4 millions years ago? Was it less carb in the diet with added benefit of resistance to some viral infections?

There is no way to find the truth, whatever the truth means. Humans see patters where there are none, they come up with theories just to reduce uncertainty and cognitive dissonance, they need reassurance. Paleo world was all about uncertainty and insecurity, probably much more than our modern (post-)Neolithic world. Even religion was invented before the Neolithic (see: Gobekli Tepe, June issue of National Geographic)...

Paleo suit

2010-09-20T03:12:00.000-07:00

I did not expect this to happen. I have never had probems buying suits before, except that I always thought that I would need a smaller size . This has changed now when I was told that the store is not selling suits with trousers and jackets differing by two or more sizes! When I was trying on the suits, when the trousers were just right, the jacket was too small and when the jacket fit, the trousers were 8 inches too big. They allowed one size differences, but would not let me pick from suits two sizes apart.

Now, not only my BMI is wrong, but also by body proportions are abnormal. And what I save on the dentist, I will have to spend on bespoke tailors.

Beary good fat

2010-09-20T03:01:00.000-07:00

This was in one of the episodes od Planet Earth with David Attenborough: grizzly bears feeding on moths. Actually, pigging out. They took the trouble to move rocks of considerable size to get at the hiding moths. What was so good about the moth? Fat. Unfortunalty I could not find this bit on YouTube, but here is some info on the phenomenon.

Which makes me think that indeed fat moths and caterpillars could have been a staple in some necks of the wood, along with molluscs. Why bother hunting lean meat when you can just gather the fat a la Mopane! And the fat would be mostly unsaturated (keeps the insect from freezing) with plenty of omega-3. No need for cod liver either.

If environmental issues were to prevent everybody from eating animal protein, farming caterpillars could be the answer. Not necessarily more disgusting than what many people consider food these days. Of course, the caterpillars should not be fed soy - that would be gross.

European hunters-gatherers and cardiovascular risk

2010-09-15T03:24:00.000-07:00

I discovered this on an anthropology blog, and the link to the original release is here.

In summary, men with the I-haplogroup have a higher risk of CHD. These are people who most likely migrated to Europe about 25,000 years ago, long before the first farmers. Chances are they are also less adapted to Neolithic foods.

And there are resons to think that mtDNA also plays a role in adaptation to Neolithic food, as well as glacial cold. Perhaps those of us who have genes of ancestral H-G Europeans fare better on high fat than the later immigrant farmers?

It would be interesting to compare susceptability to chronic diseases in U (first wave of Paleo Europeans), H (second wave) and later Neolitic farmers (J, T).

AGT: a marker for carnivory

2010-09-09T04:04:00.000-07:00

It looks that there might be a marker for the adaptation to predominantly carnivourous or herbivorous diet in our ancestors. It appears that alanine-glyoxylate aminotransferase (AGT) targets two different intracellular locations. In the carnivores, AGT targets primarily mitochondria; in plant eaters, it targets the peroxisomes. Humans are omnivores and there are polymorphisms in both directions.

Interesting story about adaptation to herbivory in taxonomic Carnivora, also explaining the biochemistry. Would be interesting to see the oposite in the polar bear.

The autors cite that:
"Although in most normal humans AGT is peroxisomal, in many PH1 patients AGT is mistargeted to the mitochondria (Danpure et al. 1989). Mistargeted AGT remains catalytically active but is unable to fulfill its metabolic role of glyoxylate detoxification efficiently. As a result, oxalate synthesis increases and calcium oxalate crystallizes out, usually as stones, in the kidney and urinary tract."

Interesting, kidney stones on a vegetarian diet in people who should be eating meat instead? But it also suggests that humans might be omnivores more on the plant side...

But it is more complicated than that.

In another comparative analysis, which essentially supports the association between AGT and diet across mammals, the authors state that:
"The human, in fact, is remarkable because, after having lost the ability to target AGT to mitochondria following a single mutation to the more 5′ ancestral translation start site (Takada et al. 1990), some individuals have reacquired the ability to target a small amount of their AGT back to mitochondria. However, this is not owing to reintroduction of the ancestral MTS back into the open reading frame. Instead, it is owing to the presence of a very common polymorphism which creates a new MTS in a region downstream of the ancestral MTS (Purdue et al. 1990). Whether this reacquisition of mitochondrial AGT targeting in some humans is related to increased meat-eating is unknown."

Also here:
"Some evidence to suggest that populations with greater recent ancestry of meat eating (eg. the Saami) have higher frequencies of the allele favoring the “retargeting” of enzymatic activity to the mitochondria.
The entire article is really worth reading.

So, how do I get my AGT tested?

EDIT: Having written the above I did some more browsing and came across a highly recommended article from BeyondVeg. The autor is making a strong case against veganism, but the evidence for rapid evolution and adaptation, at least in some ethnic groups, could also support the argument for some Neolithic foods in the diet:

"A recent analysis of a major genetic database - the HapMap SNP database - has shown that human evolution has accelerated dramatically in the last 40K years BP, with adaptive evolution in the last 10K years BP occurring at a rate >100 times the rate that prevailed in most of human evolution (Hawks et al. 2007, Hawks 2007). There are two primary drivers for this phenomenon: 1) the major increase in human population caused by the agricultural revolution – a larger population base allows for a larger number of genetic mutations, 2) diversity in human cultures – diets, environments – created numerous environments with different selective pressures to filter the mutations.

The preceding suggests that more human evolution has occurred in the time since the agricultural revolution began, ~10K years BP, than in the 1 million years that preceded the date 40K BP. The conclusion here is that humans are still evolving, and very rapidly, i.e., we are very much a “work in progress” in evolutionary terms."

I like the bit about chitinase, though this is probably an old adaptation. Would chitin count as fiber? Mopane anyone? Should be high in omega-3 if leaf/grass-fed. Excellent source of protein, but I would skip the porridge in the recipe. Yummy.

Adaptation to Neolithic diet: C282Y and H63D

2010-09-08T03:22:00.000-07:00

Vegatarians and vegans often use arcane methods of food preparation or supplementation to make sure their diet is complete. This is clearly an unnatuaral way to make the supposedly natural plant based diet to work. WAPF adherents can also go to extreme to make grains lose most of its toxicity.

But sometimes the meat eating Paleo crowd uses a simillar method to make sure that the unsuitable diet is tolerable: they suggest bloodletting for iron overload. Indeed, giving blood is effective for haemochormatosis and is also laudable, but I doubt it is natural on a regular basis. Perhaps the meat rich diet is just as "unnatural" for sime people as vegetarian or vegan one is in others?

I took a closer look at heamochromatosis. It appears that about a quarter of people of European heritage are carriers of C282Y or H63D mutations which markedly increase the risk of iron overload. These mutations most likely occured some 60 generations ago as a response to grain-based diet, associated in turn with risk of iron deffciency. The mutations occured in Celtic and/or Viking tribes and spread across Europe. Apparently the Southern farmers did not have this trait due to vegetarian sources of iron (or they were not "lucky" enough to mutate). The mutated genes were selected for during the Bubonic plague as low iron in macrophages (due to rapid storing in tissues) offered protection against Yersinia pestis.

All this means that about a quarter of Europeans (more in Ireland, Scotland and Scandinavia than in Southern Italy or Greece) should worry about iron overload, and perhaps stay clear from too much meat.

I suppose they can still be Paleo, eating seafood, snails and other invertebrates, but possibly they would also be more adapted to grains?

One way to find out is to do the tests for Total Iron Binding Capacity (TIBC), Serum Iron (SI) and Serum Ferritin (SF), as apparently genetic testing is unreliable - typically ony those two genes are tested while 40 mutations can lead to iron overload - and expensive.

To me it looks like those people are stuck. Going back to meat-based Paleo is risky, but grains are without doubt suboptimal, even if some adaptation occured. What if there are some other mutations responsible for other metabolic pathways which helped our ancestors adapt to Neolithic diets, but with serious side effects in chronic diseases and decreased longevity? Saturated fat can be a good example. Or gluconeogenesis. Or glucose transport?

What if those genes can be modified epigenetically and our grain eating grandmother had greater impact on expression of our metabolic enzymes than hundreds of thousands of Paleolithic evolution?

I am worried that the Paleo community is starting to become as dogmatic as the entrenched vegetarians, who know better and do not even engage in constructive discussion.

In science the only way to move ahead is to constantly question our hypothesis, try to falsify it. I failed as a vegetarian scientist, but this time I am going to be more careful.

Lamarck again

2010-09-01T11:19:00.000-07:00

I keep thinking about evolution and would like to have the time to explore all things Lamarckian a bit more. This is definitely crucial in the paleo context and it seems that thinking in the paloesphere has been limited to Darwinian theory.

Here is a popular text from Newsweek. Preciusly I also cited an article on Lamarkian medicine. Recently medical relevance of Lamarck's theory has been highlighted again. I also recommend this paper, a good overview of the problem, which also gives credit to Darwin for his "Lamarckian" theory of pangenesis.

If I had the time I would also read Ross Honeywill's book, which clearly looks interesting, though it has to be shipped from Australia.

Understanding this is absolutely essential as it is conceivable that some of us are already adapted to Neolithic food/lifestyle and changing back to paleo could actually be maladaptive! Or perhaps Lamarkian mechanisms allowed adaptation but only suboptimal, relevant to reproductive success, but not optimal for, say, vitality and longevity. It would be different in different populations and even individuals and we would need to find out empirically what works best, though we have only one life for the experiment.

Apparently, some characteristics become inherited after 5-10 generations and this is known as Baldwin effect. Importantly, inheritance requires some compensatory mechanism, such as hypertrophy after exercise or activated metabolic pathway after change in diet. Simple cutting of rats' tails would not make their offspring be born without tails (same with circumcision).

I guess one place to look for would be polymorphisms in metabolic enzymes in populations with different exposure to Neolithic agents.

Can all breeds of dogs be switched to a diet suitable for a wolf? Would that affect their fertility, health, life span? [Dogs have been fed meat and bones for most of the history with grains introduced very only recently, but grains were always cheaper than meat...].

How about polar bears, can they go on a grizzly diet? Polar bears are very relevant, as they apparently switched to a completely different diet during some 10K years! But in this respect Italian wall lizard is even more impressive, whether it was Lamarck or Darwin at play.

It is pure heresy, but this is what is making it so fascinating, particularly if you have read Paul Feyerabend or Thomas Kuhn.

Think of the societal implications.

But natural selection could also work during relatively short time, as in the case of Tibetans and their adaptation to high altitude.

Michel Montignac est mort

2010-09-01T07:29:00.000-07:00

I am not an expert on the Montignac diet, but his death prompted some of my friends to comment on my eating habits. This made me have a look at what this diet was all about.

It appears, it was (it is) a high protein, low fat and moderate carb regime. If people on this diet want to avoid being hungry without putting on weight, they are bound to overdo protein. And what kind of protein would that be? Mostly highly processed animal protein loaded with salt, nitrates, benzopyrens and other carcinogens and oxidized fats (even lean meat contains fat and aged cheese is just loaded with oxidized lipids). Montignac advocated against mixing carbs and fats, but did not see any problems with mixing carbs and proteins, hence Maillard reaction was likely quintessential, as it is in tasty French cousine in general.

And much grain fed meat plus olive oil means loads of proinflammatory omega-6.

On a video from March this year, the guy does not look healthy to me. His skin looks too aged for 66. AGE?

And the high protein itself, with mTOR. If the guy did not do any fasting, or at least skipped some meals "warrior style" (he actually recommended 3 meals a day), then perhaps his mTOR was the driver?

Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel and paleo diet

2010-08-21T04:52:00.000-07:00

Until recently I have not been aware of the discovery of Göbekli Tepe. It certainly is irrelevant if you are trying to figure out the proportions of micronutrients in the diet, but it helps to see the Civilisation in perspective, along with its dietary component.

In short, Göbekli Tepe is the oldest temple, built ca 12,000 years ago by hunters-gatherers in what is now south-western Turkey. Clearly agriculture was not a prerequisite for religion, architecture and complex social structure.

Here is the story of Göbekli Tepe, and here an even more thought provoking interpretation.

Interesting, that in one of the Sumerian myths one of the gods was supposed to offer Adapa (Adam) "bread of death", which was later adopted in the Genesis as fruit from the tree of life.

What fat you are you eating when losing weight?

2010-08-18T09:32:00.000-07:00

Losing weight by losing fat has been compared to eating that very fat. Indeed mobilising adipose tissue storage releases quite a lot of saturated fat into the bloodstream. If nature invented this mechanism to allow seasonal fat storage and mobilisation, then this fat should not be bad. Or at least should not be bad seasonally, in moderation.

Neither palmitic acid does has to be bad, even if it produces transient glucose resistance. On the contrary, it may be precisely why it is good to facilitate glucose supply to the brain, as was argued by Peter @Hypelipid.

I am not assuming that palmitic acid is bad, but would like to know how much palmitic acid was eaten by H-Gs. This applies in particular to trigycerides with PA in sn-2 position.

It is quite possible that the amount of PA in human adipose tissue in HGs was more or less the same as the amount of PA in the animals they ate.

Human fat composition depends on diet. Here in Fig 2B you can see that the percentage of PA varies considerably between 15 and 22, though only sat fat in the diet was vairied. It can be expected that HGs consuming less carbohydates would have even less palmitic acid in their adipose tissue. Releasing that fat during the lean winter months would be more or less like eating fat from wild game.

Perhaps a little more palmitic acid is not harmful, or may even be more adaptive, but still it would be good to know the composition of adipose tissue in HGs.

Neolitic revolution to get a fix?

2010-08-17T12:24:00.000-07:00

An interesting, if very controversial view on the origin of agriculture:

"Climatic change at the end of the last glacial period led to an increase in the size and concentration of patches of wild cereals in certain areas (Wright 1977). The large quantities of cereals newly available provided an incentive to try to make a meal of them. People who succeeded in eating sizeable amounts of cereal seeds discovered the rewarding properties of the exorphins contained in them. Processing methods such as grinding and cooking were developed to make cereals more edible. The more palatable they could be made, the more they were consumed, and the more important the exorphin reward became for more people.

At first, patches of wild cereals were protected and harvested. Later, land was cleared and seeds were planted and tended, to increase quantity and reliability of supply. Exorphins attracted people to settle around cereal patches, abandoning their nomadic lifestyle, and allowed them to display tolerance instead of aggression as population densities rose in these new conditions.

Though it was, we suggest, the presence of exorphins that caused cereals (and not an alternative already prevalent in the diet) to be the major early cultigens, this does not mean that cereals are 'just drugs'. They have been staples for thousands of years, and clearly have nutritional value. However, treating cereals as 'just food' leads to difficulties in explaining why anyone bothered to cultivate them. The fact that overall health declined when they were incorporated into the diet suggests that their rapid, almost total replacement of other foods was due more to chemical reward than to nutritional reasons."

A while ago I touched on exorphins as well.

But what if the fix from exophins helped us develop abstract thinking and mathematics? Did the !Kung know mathematics?

Which fat is fatter?

2010-08-17T05:24:00.000-07:00

I have decided to pay more attention to fat, this time guilt-free. But I am still a bit biased against palmitic acid (16:0) and would rather go for other options.

There are three fatty acids in a triglyceride and I remember reading that position sn-2 is the most important, as fatty acids at sn-2 are most readily absorbed by humans. It appears that beef fat has the least 16:0 at sn-2: 11.6%, compared to 20.8% in lamb and 54.8% in pork. Here are the details in Table 3.

I also remember a study showing that different fatty acids abound in different cuts and that brisket was supposed to have the healthiest fatty acid profile. It was not clear if the analysis was done on a grass or grain fed animal. (BTW, grass is not natural feed for cows; their ancestors, aourochses, fed mostly on bushes and trees).

Fortunately the local organic farm sells brisket, which is otherwise had to get organic.

But the real good stuff is bone marrow and I am now searching for a source. Last time the butcher offered me a hip bone, rather than a marrow bone - the dog will enjoy this one as well. Problem is, I have no dog. Too embarassing to rectify.

Interestingly, the fatty acid composition depends not only on what animals eat, but on the temeperature. Studies showed that the Eskimos prefered the marrow from reindeer's smaller bones closer to the cold arctic ground (more unsaturated) to the more abundant marrow from large femur or humerus (more saturated).

Whoever comes up with a patent for cheap synthetic pure oleic acid production might hit the jackpot. The Chinese have already made some progress:
http://english.xjipc.cas.cn/rh/rps/200910/t20091022_45899.html

No turning back

2010-08-16T01:54:00.000-07:00

It's been 9 months since I went Paleo and it seems to have been the right choice. I am symptom-free and full of energy. The only worry was cholesterol, which now looks as follows:

TC 252mg/dL
HDL 67mg/dL
LDL 172mg/dL (Friedwald, the Iranian formula would give 149mg/dL)
TG 68mg/dL

In addition, inflammation is close to zero:
CRP 3.73mg/L

And the only marker which may need attention is slightly elevated urea: 48.66mg/dL (uric acid close to upper limit: 6.4mg/dL, but higher level might be good for the brain :)

Did I cut down on saturated fat? No. In fact, I have been eating more animal fat and less olive oil and nuts. It seems that plant oils may be better for women. Men need testosterone and not plant sterols and 5-alpha reductase inhibitors which lower the level of dihydrotestosterone. Indeed, it is the latter which is responsible for masculinisation, while testosterone only helps the muscles grow. I have not seen the studies showing that olive oil or hazelnuts lower DHT, but have a gut feeling that it does in me. Plant oils should be ok in moderation, but if we are talking 200-250g of fat a day, you have to make a choice. Besides, even olive oil is loaded with omega-6.

And indeed, I have decided to eat less protein and more fat for a while. Grass-fed meat is almost impossible to get in the UK (may be grass-fed but grain finished), but lamb is probably the closest. There is a lot of organic meat, but mostly lean cuts. Besides, organic means fed organic grains. Good that the season for deer is starting.

I have experimented a bit more with cream (and ice cream), and I really like that stuff, but they do lead to muscus production and there is no way to get unpasteurised milk products here, so this will have to go. Besides, heat processed milk products mean oxidised cholesterol and lipids as well as AGE.

One more obervation: no tooth decay. Previously I had 1-3 fillings a year, now zero and no trace of tooth decay. BTW, I had stopped using toothpaste as well and have only been using thoothbrush and floss.

On the other hand, there was more calculus, so the dentist still made the money. Based on what I have read, more ammonia from dietary protein leads to more basic saliva which protects against dental caries, but facilitates mineral deposits. This has been reported by many Atkins followers. I suppose, cutting back on protein a bit should help me acheive the right balance between decay and calculus. Otherwise I will need to start chewing on raw bones to control calculus :)

Regarding weight, it is up by 2kg from 6 mothns ago, but the waist circumference is still the same. More muscle with moderate exercise 20min 4-5 days a week.

But I am still not 100% sure that I am doing everything right. I had been wrong with vegetarianism for so many years and I also thought I had read all the evidence (the China Study, he, he). But then again, at that time I could not read evidence critically, which now I can do. This is what I do for a living after all.

Nothing new, really

2010-04-13T07:38:00.000-07:00

I have been silent for a while and here is why. The neo -> paleo transformation has given me so much energy and new motivation that I came up with innovative ideas and embarked on new projects, which has been keeping be busy and positively stressed.

Also, I applied the 80/20 rule. I could keep searchng and discussing nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress and other health issues to get more insights and more benefits, but I think the 20% extra benefit would not warrant to 80% time effort. I might still be getting the olive oil, nuts or chin-ups wrong, but I have never felt better in my life, so might as well enjoy life, rather than search for the holy grail.

In sumary, I have lost 24kg and 8in of waistline bringing fat percentage down to about 12%. I am probably 3kg away from being ripped and the muscles have been growing with little effort. I simply can't believe it.

Regarding cholesterol, I have not retested it yet. According to decision analysis retesting would only be justified if the result would influence my choices. In this case - it would not. Even if LDL has not come down, I would still be eating what I have been eating for another three months to allow plenty of time for my metabolism to adjust to more sat fat in diet.

Here is what I have been eating in a nutshell (and that includes nuts :)

1. Every day: about 300-400g of raw green leafy vegetables: lettuce, spring cabbage, broccoli, leeks. Often with added peppers and avaocado and/or EVOO. No salt, sometimes chilli. I make my own EVOO mayonaise and use that sometines to make it less monotonous.

2. Every day: about 500g of organic free-range meat, wild fish or seafood. TYpically it would be deer meet (once a week), chicken (once a week), chicken livers (once a week, not every week), wild salmon (once a week), prawns/shrimp (once a week), other oily fish - sardines, sprats, mackerel or herring (once a week), lamb or beef or pork (once a week). Sometimes lamb's or deer kidneys or deer heart.

3. Every day with fish/meat: cooked/steamed/baked vegatables: leeks, broccoli, cauliflower, mushrooms.

4. About once a week: 3-4 eggs.

5. About twice a week: hazelnut butter (home made) or macadamia nuts about 200g.

6. About twice a week: 90% dark chocolate about 50-70g.

I do not eat fruit, though will eat then in season. Meat is mostly boiled (chcken) or braised in low temeperatures, fish in even lower temperatures. It has to be fresh, though wild salmon is frozen.

Exercise: about 15-20 min a day of pull-ups, chin-ups, dips, press-ups, planks, sprints or bench press.

I might have missed something, but this is pretty much the routine every day and week. By the way, I do the "warrior" appraoch as well: I only eat my salad about 4pm and then meat with veg about 7-8pm. Nuts or chocolate about 9-10pm if I am still hungry.

My culinary contribution: primitive sprats a la Grok

2010-03-01T13:55:00.000-08:00

There are many wonderful paleo cuisine resources on the net, some simple, some for the more refined palate. There is no way I can measure up with Stone Age chefs, such as Richard Nikoley. For me, there are two problems with cooking: time (opportunity cost) and laziness.

For those two reasons, I value simplicity. My ideal paleo foods, if I am to cook myself, are minimalist, yet tasty. Bought unprocessed and minimally processed in the kitchen. Having been vegetarian for 15 years, I had plenty to (re)discover. One discovery was venison: deer hunch braised in the oven with no spices at all. Just put the meat in the casserole dish with a little water and voila, after 90 minutes it was served. And tasty it was. The same could be said about leg of lamb, though here slivers of garlic were added. Wild mallard duck was great with water alone.

But one can not live off meat alone. Fish is essential as well. And there is one kind of fish that is probably ideal for this approach: sprat. It can be eaten whole, with some bones as well as with brains. Not easy to get hold of deer brain. But sprat brains - no problem. And you also eat the gonads with countless nutrients cheaper than caviar. Their tiny stomach contents can add some greens as well.

Here is the minimalist recipe:

* Buy 1lb of fresh sprats
* Stick them in the oven at 100C (212F) - not higher to keep those omega-3s (for this reason sprats from the can don't measure up); no oil necessary, just plain baking sheet (stone?)
* bake for about 30-40 min
* eat them ad libitum (there is an internal set point for them, you can't eat more than 1lb at one go); backbone is not for the uninitiated
* Enjoy the time saved on preparation

Spices are optional: turmeric, chili, allspice, ginger.

Bon appetit!

The photo is of the raw material from Google. I was too lazy to take one of the finished product, and besides, it was too late. Will try next time.

Is eating mammlian meat a risky business?

2010-02-24T12:28:00.000-08:00

This is an old story, but new to me, now that I started to dig a little deeper. And the story is very simple: humans can't synthesise Neu5Gc, a kind of sialic acid found on a surface of all mammalian cells. Humans don't make Neu5Gc, but they do have Neu5Gc from eating meat from other mammals. Sialic acids do get transported and incorporated into human cells!

As a consequence, Neu5Gc is seen by human immune system as a foreign antigen and response is mounted. This can lead to autoimmune diseases. Whether it does, there is no evidence, but Neu5Gc is being closely looked at now. Another possible implication of presence of Neu5Gc on human cells could be increased risk of infection, e.g. E. coli. This might have contributed to survival advantage in our ancestors who lost the Neu5Gc gene for the human race.

The reason it worries me it that instead of a typical winter cold, this year I have been having a strange kind of infection/inflammation in my chest. CRP is slightly increased, but no symptoms of infection other than occasional mild cough and abundant mucus in the morning. It does not look allergic either.

Also, I remember reading somewhere that higher vitamin D can lead to exaggerated immune response. It is supposed to be anti-inflammatory, but also strengthens immunity, which can be not so good if my immune system is fighting Neu5Gc in my chest.

But the whole Neu5Gc story is not very convincing. Neu5Gc has been found in foetal tissues. If Neu5Gc is present when natural tolerance is being developed, then the antigen should be seen as own, not foreign, regardless of whether if came from dietary meat/milk, or synthesised from scratch. It makes perfect sense though, that antibodies against Neu5Gc can form when children of vegetarian (or nearly vegetarian) mothers start eating meat or drink cow milk. This can be quite common on some ethnic groups. Also, vegetarians who decide to eat meat after many years may have lost natural tolerance and can react to the mammalian meat/milk antigen vigorously. On the other hand, it makes sense to recommend to expectant mothers to eat more red meat, so that more Neu5Gc gets transported to the foetus, thus helping induce natural tolerance.

One might try to use the "leaky gut" argument in addressing the fact that Neu5Gc gets into human cells in the first place, but it appears that pinocytosis is used as transport mechanism. Actually, this is the first example of such transfer of complex compounds from gut to nearly all cells.

LDL cholesterol goes sky high on fatty diet

2010-02-24T11:48:00.000-08:00

I am reporting my blood lipids for your perusal:
Total cholesterol = 369 mg/dL
HDL cholesterol = 79 mg/dL
Trojglycerides = 90 mg/dL
LDL cholesterol (direct) = 271 mg/dL
LDL cholesterol (Fried) = 272 mg/dL
LDL cholesterol (Iranian)= 248 mg/dL

I have been on Paleo diet for about three months now, but about a month ago I started to enjoy more animal fat. In addition to chicken skin, fattier cuts of beef (brisket) and even some deer fat collected from stock bones, I gorged on cream and coconuts (whole and oil). And they do have 60% clotted cream in the UK! The LDL results were slightly lower six weeks ago.

Before going Paleo I was vegetarian with low total cholesterol (about 160), high TG (120-150), though not so low HDL (about 50). There are many factors involved, but it is very likely that my LDL went up mostly on extra sat fat.

Is it bad? I don't know. LDL can be dense or fluffy, I did not check Apo(B), but even it is mostly fluffy, I am concerned. I starting to think that diet very rich in saturated fat is not really Paleo, much like dairy, grains and legumes. Some people can indeed thrive on some or all of these foods; others may not, depending on your ancestors, perhaps even the not-so-distant ancestors.

By the way, when I was vegetarian, I had slightly elevated liver enzymes. Only slightly, so I did not bother to check further. Now the enzymes are perfect. This made me wonder if the liver was not getting fatty. Better late than never.

My plan is as follows: even more leafy greens, more EVOO (try making mayonnaise with it!) and avocado, more fish/seafood, more organ meats (ideally bone marrow as well), less fatty meat. (FYI, I have been supplementing 5,000IU vitD3 and fish oil daily for about three months).

Apparently, modern hunters-gatherers have very low total cholesterol. There is no reason to have high LDL and rationalise.

There is one more reason while I plan on cutting down on meat from mammals: Neu5Gc. I will elaborate in my next post.

The key Paleo factor: Food scarcity

2010-02-16T06:40:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you just have to create a bit of a virtual reality, a Paleo re-enactment. Even if our food is no longer strictly Paleo, and even if there is no reason we should be very strict about every ingredient (see my post on epigenetic inheritance) food scarcity was more common than food abundance, even in the Neolithic. This might have to be seasonal, to allow for regeneration and repair, but should be considered critical. If CR and longevity is the only goal, food scarcity would be even more important.

When food is everywhere we are tempted and temptation is bad. When we see food and conceptualise eating eat, even if we forgo the opportunity, the brain still registers food, with all biochemical consequences to follow. Just looking at food elicits conditioned responses, which can confuse out metabolism.

But what can we do not to be led into temptation? I think there is a solution: you have to reprogramme you brain, so that is does not perceive most available foods as edible. You simply have to visualise the unhealthfulness of those foods, even possible toxicity, to develop avoidance reaction. Obviously you already have the right reflexes when subjected to the risk of eating a cake or pasta, but some Paleo-like foods are still tempting.

Here are some suggestions to make these associations:
Nut butter from the jar: roasted (AGE compounds - bad), processed fats, possibly in high temperature (possibly trans-fats). Of course you could make your own healthier version, but have no time, don't want to bother, are not that hungry after all. Result: you wait till you have your salad and steak.

Processed meats: nitrates, oxidised cholesterol, contact with plastic packaging; this is clearly not edible food. It surely might be tasty, but it is not food. Making your own would be too much trouble and you go for the leg of lamb instead.

Honey: find an obscure kind of raw honey which you can buy only at a far away farmers market and only twice a year. Any other honey would be just not good enough or contaminated with toxic pesticides. When you buy this honey, eat the while jar to make your head spin, so that you condition yourself to avid for a while. Visualise glycation and its contribution to wrinkles and infertility.

Chocolate: It may be 91% cocoa solids, or even 100% when you mix cocoa liqueur with cocoa butter, but this is not Paleo and should not be in your kitchen in the first place (it is in mine though). If you can't resist, at least don't add Stevia to it; Stevia is a highly processed extract, which will mess with your insulin and digestive juices through conditioned reflexes. Want a treat: eat some raw coconut, if you can find it at home.

Which brings us to another strategy: not to store food. Fresh food is always better, even freezing increases oxidation of fats. Don't cook too much, fried leftovers can be tasty, but are less healthy and should be avoided. Visualise toxicity.

If cheese or cream is your weakness, there is no remedy. If you consider it "approved", then it would be hard to condition your brain to see it as toxic.

After a bit of training you will be able to walk into a supermarket and see no food there. That restaurants do not offer any food you have already discovered a while ago...

Grow, reproduce and lean or meditate and regenerate?

2010-02-16T05:51:00.000-08:00

The types of food consumed during the Paleolithic varied with time and geography. In that sense there might have been infinite number of diets and nutrient compositions. But I am starting to conceptualise two distinct dietary modalities: one when food was aplenty, the other during times of food shortage.

It all started when I looked at mTOR signalling, which is nutrient dependent. In a nutshell, more protein (particularly rich in leucin) and carbohydrates, as well as more calories (where abundant fat would also enter the picture), activate mTOR. mTOR is responsible for growth, reproduction and learning. But it is also responsible for increased oxidative stress, ageing and cancer. When mTOR is upregulated, you grow, reproduce, learn, you conquer the world. When mTOR is depressed, you slow down, regenerate, repair your DNA, and prepare for better times.

This corresponds to seasonality with abundance occurring in late summer/early autumn, and lean times in winter/early spring. Probably higher metabolism during the summer would benefit from more sunshine and vitamin D, while dark cave would not be problem in the winter (you would have stored a few-months supply of vitamin D from the summer). Most children would be conceived in late summer, to be born just before the next summer begins. When nutritious food was easy to find your brain was working at high speed, with maximum synaptic plasticity for future survival advantage.

Now we have a choice, but we can't have a cake and eat it too. If you want to grow, reproduce and learn, you go higher protein, more occasional fruit/honey, more calories, more exercise. If you want to survive hoping to extend your life, you go caloric restriction, lower protein, higher fat (during the winter months your own stored fat would have been burnt). The optimal strategy: cycle with the seasons?

Possibly, you can beat the system a little bit towards the end of long winter. When food is scarce and little fat storage remains, one option is to intensify hunting or gathering, meaning: more exercise. This would stimulate mTOR and can possibly sharpen your brains again.

By the way, there can be other important reasons for reproducing during the summer or winter months, one having to do with epigenetic inheritance discussed in my previous post.

All this makes be think again about vegetarians. Those who stick to low starch and mild caloric restriction, being in most cases on a relatively low protein diet, can possibly live longer than the summer season Paleo eaters. Vegetarians would not be optimally fit, might suffer from gluten related conditions, but if they don't gorge on soy, their mTOR would be downregulated. Possible nutrient deficiencies can possibly augment the effect. They could probably do better on a diet based on meat and leafy vegetables with mild caloric restriction, but are still better off than well fed summer hunters. At least in terms of longevity. When it comes to growth and reproduction, vegetarianism is probably the worst option.

The paleo/primal paradigm can be all wrong

2010-02-13T04:56:00.000-08:00

The Paleolithic diet/lifestyle paradigm draws from evolutionary theory. In fact, it is based on the validity of Darwinism. While I am hardly a creationist, I maintain that established truths are not necessarily the only truths, attempting to falsify, rather than confirm, in line with scientific method. The first take on the issue was here, below are some more thoughts.

Switch from vegetarianism to Paleo has done me good and there are other testimonials and blogs. For me there is no way back. But is may be premature to draw generalised conclusions. After all, healthy non-Paleo (and high carb) eaters might have never been considered in the equation as a comparison group. While people with metabolic syndrome or other chronic conditions might indeed benefit tremendously from Paleo-like regimen, it does not follow that all people would. There might indeed be some people who thrive on a modern "balanced" and "healthy" diet, and some might be even doing well on SAD. There is no doubt such people exist, the question is: how many and how they can be identified if prevention is to be considered.

Proponents of the Paleo paradigm base their arguments on two critical propositions:
1. Our Paleolithic ancestors ate the diet and had lifestyles which were optimal for their health.
2. Time from the beginning of agriculture (3-10 thousand years) was not long enough for humans to adapt to the new diet/lifestyle.

The problem with the first proposition is that it does not make clear what is meant by health. What was healthy for reproductive success and contributed to physical and mental prowess (more protein, perhaps seasonal abundance of carbohydrates) might not have been optimal for long term health and longevity, where low protein and, perhaps, caloric restriction could be a better choice.

It is the second proposition, however, which is more problematic. True, if natural selection were the sole factor responsible for inheritance, the time was too short. But what if inheritance is not limited to mutation and recombination of DNA? In "Evolution in Four Dimensions" Eva Jablonka argues that there is more to heredity than DNA and genes. In fact, recent publications on epigenetic inheritance appear to be reviving some of the Lamarckian concepts of evolution. Root Gorelick in his "Neo-Lamarkian medicine" speculates that meiotically-heritable epigenetic signals could be transmitted to future generations. Also Arthur Janov makes very interesting observations on the mental health aspects of epigenetic inheritance. A very insightful review of inheritance of acquired characteristics was published in Nature by Yongsheng Liu. Here is another one.

In essence, if indeed Lamarck was, at least partially, right, then perhaps several generations might be sufficient for a simple adaptation, such as lactose tolerance. But lactose tolerance is still not perfect health, we also need time to create adaptations to handle casein digestion, glycation (from galactose), maybe also insulin response. For all this several centuries could have been enough, let alone 3-10 thousand years.

This would fit the observations that different people have different level of tolerance to agricultural diets. In one of my previous posts, I argued that this might have to do with geographic origin of our ancestors. But if epigenetic inheritance were to be responsible for our adaptation to agricultural diet(s), then even few generations can make a difference. If so, then not only geography should play a role, but also the details of out forefathers' menus in the past centuries. We can only infer that indirectly. Were they peasants, artisans, knights, noblemen? Were they rich or poor? After all, it might be the case that they ate hardly any carbohydrates until the 20th century and even then not on a regular basis.

But it gets more complicated than that. Even if environmental signals can indeed translate into inheritance bypassing natural selection (something Darwin believed to be the domain of the future of evolutionary theory) then there are two possibilities:
1. The environmental (dietary) impact is nocuous and induces permanent pathological change, which becomes inherited.
2. The environmental (dietary) impact is challenging and induces adaptation. This can be achieved by activation or amplification of genes (e.g. responsible for free radical scavenging in response to oxidative stress from intensive exercise), which can then be passes by epigenetically. This adaptive response is sometimes described as hormesis, and it applies to low level exposure to normally very harmful factors, such as ionising radiation.

If the impact of agricultural diet was not overwhelmingly harmful (after Darwinian selection took care of the infertile high-carbohydrate early farmers' children), but could be considered a low level stressor instead, then hormesis and epigenetic inheritance could be responsible for adaptation. This might have been the case with knights and nobles, who hunted and/or had more meat on their tables. This could have also applies to fishermen or the poor who nevertheless had ample access to cheap herring. Now, metabolism of peasants who had to subsist on gruel, bread and later potatoes, may have been devastated by excess carbohydrates. Metabolic defects (such as hyperinsulinemia) might have been perpetuated in offspring. But then again some of them managed to poach some small game, gather snails, eggs, and supplemented with plenty of green leafy vegetables to keep metabolism in balance, which would in effect simulate hormesis.

Indeed, if one's ancestors were predominantly grain eaters or vegetarians and their metabolism adjusted with no clinical manifestations, then it is possible than going Paleo with large amounts of meat constitute a new environmental stress! Small amounts of meat would lead to hormesis, but large amount would be overwhelming leading to cancer and early death.

Now, how to we fit Pottenger's cats into the picture?

Lose weight and make money the Paleo way

2010-02-06T12:44:00.000-08:00

This guy is a genius, I mean Winton Rossiter, a financial analyst who is in business to pay people in the UK to lose weight:
http://www.dailyfinance.com/tag/weight+wins

The scheme actually started a while ago as a pilot and now is to be extended:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/journalists/laura-donnelly/7006493/Men-say-money-is-the-way-to-lose-the-pounds.html

As a financial analyst he must have done his Crystal Ball modelling and might be getting the money both from the patients and the NHS (taxpayers). The patients stand to get rewards for achieving target weight loss, but they have to invest their own cash. The balance at the end of the year can actually be positive for the patient, but only is the target is reached. Now, this is being done with the NHS, so the official nutritional guidelines have to be observed. They most likely don't monitor what people are actually eating, but they do send information packs with recommendations. Weight Wins (or rather Accelerated Concepts Ltd) knows that high carbs are not going to be successful in most people, so they will be quids in.

So what? The good news is that if you can, you may want to try to take advantage of the scheme and lose weight the sustainable Paleo way. You will have to invest a bit, but if you are considerably overweight, you can earn several hundred. Of course, you would also earn better health and save the NHS money in the future!

It appears that this has been already done in America. I wonder what kinds of diets were used and how successful it was short and long term.

Onychophagia, ADHD, restless leg syndrome and diet?

2010-02-05T05:28:00.000-08:00

One thing I observed when going Paleo was that I completely lost the desire to bite my fingernails. Now I can confess, I have had this disgusting habit since my teenage years. No more temptation and even revulsion on the thought of it! What happened? Medical science is limited: no publications with onychophagia AND diet in Pubmed. The one study that is found only addresses the speed of growth of fingernails and toenails (puzzling, nowadays nails are growing much faster than decades ago! Is it IGF-1 and/or insulin?). Google search has not been very useful either: biting fingernails has to do wih nerves, which actually might be the case, whether associated with some micronutrient deficiency or not.

I actually suspected micronutrients since the white spots (leuconychia) also stopped appearing on my fingernals; in my vegetarian days I used to have them a few times a year.

But other symptoms also improved: no restless leg syndrome. It was not severe and actually I did not self-diagnose it until a few years ago, but it was something beyond my control and I like to be in control. Which I am now, at least when it comes to restelss leg. So it had to do with nerves, after all.

Probably the biggest improvement after I changed to Paleo involved what I had also self-diagnosed as adult ADHD. It was a very mild case and would have gone unnoticed, but my wife, who is a psychologist, was working with a patient who matched my profile quite well. I did some reading on adult ADHD and: Bingo! Then I had to learn to live with it. Until I gave up gluten, that is. Now everything is in focus, much better organised (except this blog), probably a bit less manic. And no fingernail biting! Gluten has been linked to ADHD in children and gluten-free diet can do wonders, but many adults never realise they might have symptoms of ADHD as well and that for them the Paleo could be the answer.

And the wight has been staying solid rock constant, though perhaps another half an inch of abdominal fat is gone (now probably only half an inch is left). This means more fat in the diet. I am experimenting with coconuts and also with cocoa butter. In a couple of weeks I will have my blood tests done and will report extensively.

In defence of pharmaceutical industry

2010-02-05T04:46:00.000-08:00

I have no time to follow the new on a regular basis, but I always have the time to check the best Paleo-related blogs. Methuselah has made me aware of a recent BBC File on 4 broadcast on pharma industry:
http://paynowlivelater.blogspot.com/2010/01/overpowering-stench-of-pharmaceutical.html

It is good that such things get the attention of the media, all for the public good. But you have to see it in perspective.

Pharma industry is probably the most regulated of all. The number of hurdles in developing a new drug is beyond belief. There is scrutiny at every step. Of course, things happen sometimes because of negligence, sometimes because of greed. But the industry is there to make money.

Now consider the public health experts on a mission to make us live healthier lives on a low fat, high carb diet. What is the level of evidence in official recommendations? Where is the scrutiny? Hundreds, maybe thousands of people gained weight on Seroquel, millions are getting fat and diabetic on the official healthy diet.

A book "The Big Fat Lies" has just come out written by a British lawyer Hannah Sutter. It accuses the Food Standards Agency and its experts with conflicts of interest of making people fat, which essentially translates into more disease and more death.

Did BBC comment on this book, or at least on the evidence it contains? Each day many new people are getting diabetic and die, yet according to Google News, only Daily Mail covered the story, which can actually turn some people off reading the book.

All in all, I think that pharma industry is probably the most ethical off them all, if you consider food, transport (safety, pollution, cosmic radiation on flights), telecom (radiation), cosmetics (unfounded claims, safety, cost), clothing and shoes (chemicals, effect on posture), plastics (leaching), paints, agriculture (hormone disrupting pesticides), etc.

Also, the common conspiracy argument that Big Pharma dwells on the disease and is even interested in more people getting more and more diseased simply does not hold. With less obesity, diabetes, cancer, hypertension and arthritis the companies would simply be developing more lifestyle drugs, perhaps more gene therapies, perhaps more effort would go into longevity research (e.g. how to counter cross-linking Maillard chemicals), sports physiology research. There would always be room for improvement and profit.

Now, eat me alive :)

By the way, the Sutter book is excellent when you realise that it has been written from a lawyer's point of view. It is also an easily read summary of current low carb thinking. The author is not, however, an expert in nutrition and is not aware of nuances, such as oxidation of cholesterol and fats, omega-6 (recommenting nuts as super food) or intermittent fasting (recommending NOT to skip breakfasts). But this book is a gem and I hope things will change quite soon, i.e. in 20-30 years. For Big Pharma now is the time to start thinking strategically about the change in demand which is inevitable.

Gluten, casein, running and thinking

2010-01-19T03:15:00.000-08:00

I have stumbled upon an article "Perceptual Pleasure and the Brain" by Irving Biederman and Edward Vessel discussing the role of endorphins in cognition. It appears that our brain craves novelty, and learning is associated with pleasure via opioid receptors in the brain. This can be a mechanism for survival and for evolutionary success.

What the authors do not discuss is the possible habituation of opioid receptors by continuous stimulation. This can be the result of addiction to drug opiates, but we also know that gluten and casein break down to peptides which bind to opioid receptors in the brain. This is one reason why we crave these foods after all. Interestingly, long distance running or cycling on a regular basis also releases endorphins, leading to mild addiction (I experienced this myself).

Now, with our receptors desensitised by grains, dairy and threadmills, we might need stronger stimulation to enjoy learning or we lose interest in learning altogether.

Opium for the masses?

If indeed the dietary derived opiates have any significant impact on brain function, it would explain why Paleo people are so hungry for knowledge, as evidenced by the high calibre discussions on blogs such as WholeHealthSource, Panu or FreeTheAnimal :)

Perceptual Pleasure and the Brain
http://www.americanscientist.org/my_amsci/restricted.aspx?act=pdf&id=3718998800815
(If you Google the title you can find the full text of other sites, such as:
http://condition.org/as65-6.htm)

Regarding food and thought, I have been thinking a lot about the possible POSITIVE impact of high carbohydrate diet (even with the harmful effects of grains) after the Neolithic revolution. I imagine that glucose (though not fructose) loading can be very good for brain FUNCTION short to medium term (before the degeneration sets in). Brain thrives on glucose and can be turbo charged with more carbs in the diet. Even if that would not mean optimal HEALTH overall, it could mean more brain power for competitive advantage! The analogy would be that maximum fitness does not equal otimum health and longevity (as brilliantly laid out by John Little in Body by Science). For the same reason using stimulants, such as cocoa or coffee (and sugar too!), can translate into more effcient thinking, better strategic planning? Something that the carb lobby can consider in their PR :)

British survival expert on Paleo diet

2010-01-19T03:02:00.000-08:00

It seems that Ray Mears approves, though cautiously, without embracing IF and wary of cholesterol:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/men/article6988492.ece

Progress update

2010-01-17T06:05:00.000-08:00

Just a quick update on my N=1 experiment. The weight has been staying constant for about a month now. I is quite likely that this 90kg is what my ideal weight should be (more then the upper BMI bracket of 83kg though). I have been slimming down though, another inch, which means a bit more muscle. Two more inches waist circumference and I will have no abdominal fat left. But this is not necessarily the best and I do plan to increase carbs a little bit. Now thy are most likely under 60g/day.

But I am still burning my own fat, so still trying to limit fat in my diet. I was tempted to try dairy after a long break. The choice was organic double cream (50% fat). I ate more than 100g of if (whipped) for two days in the row. The result: respiratory mucus and metallic strange taste in my mouth. The latter probably having to do with increased ketones in my blood.

On good meat, bad meat and a bit on lipids

2010-01-17T04:21:00.000-08:00

Paleo people know that meat is good. They also know that organic, grass-fed meat is even better. But there appears to be little discussion on futher details, which may be of critical importance if our goal is optimum health and longevity.

First, there is the lean meat versus fatty meat. Assuming that weight loss is no longer an issue (own fat deposits are no longer being burnt), there should be more fat in the diet if only to provide calories. Saturated fat no longer seems to be a problem, so going for the fattier cuts might be good if we do not want to exceed the 1g/kg daily protein and prefer to stay low carb. But is there an alternative? You say extra virgin olive oil? Perhaps, but I have a problem with EVOO: it contains a lot of phytosterols. While sitosterol in olive oil might reduce total cholesterol and/or LDL, we do not know whether that is always desirable. Here is the phytosterol content is various foods:
http://www.dietaryfiberfood.com/cholesterol-low.php
The real problem is for males: sitosterol inhibits 5-alpha reductase, an enzyme which converts testosterone to dihydrotestosterone (DHT). This is being advertised as good news, as DHT is supposed to be responsible for hair loss and growth of prostate cancer in men who already have it (it is unlikely to be a causative factor). But DHT is 3-4 times more active than testosterone in all aspects of virilisation, which makes men look and behave like men (or at least like Paleo men). While testosterone is responsible for muscle growth, DHT does the rest: body/facial hair, voice, mental function, libido, etc. I will do a separate post on plant-derived phytosterols and phytoestrogens (yes, turmeric and green tea do the same thing), but for now I am convinced that animal fat is better, and is definitely better for men.

Now, this estrogenic (anti-androgenic) aspect is also essential when choosing meat. Non-organic meat (grass-fed or not) is likely to have higher content of pesticides which act as hormonal disruptors making men less virile. I would say, better be vegetarian than eat pesticide loaded meat. And more fat in the meat means more pesticide, because that is where those chemicals are stored. Perhaps if it is not organic, it would have to be nearly 100% lean. (BTW wild game can be loaded with pesticides, as there is little control of what the animals eat when they have uncontrolled access to fields. I used to eat wild pigeons, not anymore).

So, we are left with fatty meat but organic. Grass-fed is also very important, not only because of the obvious omega-3 content, but also because of more antioxidants and lower content of oxidised cholesterol. Lipid oxidation is thought to be one of the major contributors to atherosclerosis, therefore the less oxidised cholesterol, the better. This probably matters less if you are going to eat the meat straight after slaughter, but this is typically not the case. Meat is aged, transported, salted, smoked, sometimes frozen, sometimes irradiated, minced (this is probably the worst). All of this increases oxidation of cholesterol (as well as those omega-3 and 6). This leaves us with organic, grass-fed, fresh, minimally cut meat.

Packaging is also important. Smaller pieces with more surface exposed to air oxidise quicker. Also, sometimes meat is kept in high oxygen atmosphere which protects the pink colour of oxyhaemoglobin, but which also speeds oxidation of cholesterol. In addition, packaging in plastics will add more of the nasty hormone disrupting chemicals.

Then you bring the bacon home and what to you do? The next step is high heat processing, which further increases cholesterol and fatty acid oxidation (BTW, cooking often also means Maillard reaction). Often you do not eat it all up but keep in the fridge for a few days, sometimes you even freeze. Then you reheat it. Now, the more of those oxidised lipids in the food, the more will end up in your LDL, increasing the risk of atherosclerosis.

If you heat process your meat, another factor contributing to lipid oxidation is iron. I suggest not using cast iron pans. Also acidity: if you heat process meat, do not use lemon juice, vinegar etc, as low pH helps heme iron react with lipids. Eating as Paleo as possible really does make sense.

Of course, if you do not eat your meat with fresh leafy vegetables you might contribute not only to greater acidity, but to more oxidation of endogenous lipids. All this can make you realise that vegetarians have a point: the kind of meat people eat and the way they eat it is better avoided. If the choice is between standard ground beef, kept on supermarket shelves for days, then fried, I would say lentils are much better choice. The same applies to dairy, if you decide to opt for this non-paleo food: commercially available dairy is loaded with oxidised cholesterol, salt, Maillard compounds, hormones, as well as hormone disrupting chemicals, so here even vegans may have a point.

As I wrote before, I had been vegetarian for nearly 15 years, but if the only alternative had been diet loaded with unhealthy, high heat processed meat, I think I chose the lesser evil.

It appears that a lot of people compromise of meat quality. They belive that any meat is better than no meat. I disagree. But I believe that there is nothing better than best quality fresh meat, either raw (as in steak tartare), rare or boiled. If you compromise, you might as well eat bread. Bad meat and little antioxidants is probably where Atkins and Kwasniewski followers have gone wrong. Future epidemiologist might disciver that meat was the cause of their atherosclerosos, while it would have been oxidation and glycation end products.

Now, the ideal organic, grass-fed fresh meat is expensive. If money is an issue, I suggest sticking to organs, fat and marrow, if possible, and do not fry it. It seems though that geeting cheap fatty pieces of organic meat is not easy: those who can afford it buy organic lean, those who eat cheaper cuts, do not think organic.

Limit fat when losing weight

2009-12-20T02:00:00.000-08:00

So I have been losing weight the Paleo way. A further 1kg over the last 2 weeks. This is net loss, as muscles seem to be getting bigger and waistline smaller. It is likely that following this regime about 100g of fat is burnt each day.

When trying to figure out how much dietary fat I would need IF I were not losing weight, just to maintain it, I estimated this to be about 100g. So, since I am getting the fat from my adipose tissue, perhaps I should not eat it?

Let us have a look at the fat being burnt while losing weight: the human suet (or lard). Is it good fat or bad fat? Well, on average it is mostly monounsaturated (57.5%) and saturated (26%). It is, however, high on PUFA (14.4%) with omega-6 13.6% and omega-3 only 0.78%:
http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/abstract/42/6/1206
Interestingly, this depends on human diet, so high PUFA in the diet translates to high PUFA in adipose tissue. Most likely people losing weight have higher PUFA content in their fat, even those on low fat diet. Very low fat diet would mean more endogenous synthesis from glucose and fructose, and possibly less PUFA in fat.

Incidentally, losing weight also means "eating" some cholesterol. Burning 100g of your own fat releases about 400mg of cholesterol, roughly equivalent to two eggs a day.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC301844/
This is something to be aware if your concern is that you might be getting too little, rather than too much of it.

The bottom line is: when losing weight limit consumption of total fat, but also make sure you are getting omega-3 to balance the omega-6 released from the adipose tissue. This might mean quite a lot of omega-3, possibly 10g, which can be hard to achieve by just eating fish.

Does it mean that when burning fat we should only be eating almost exclusively meat and fish along with low carb leafy veggies? This is likely to be the case, but I have not seen any recommendations specific to continuous weight loss.

I have about 5kg more fat to lose. After that I am going to indulge in fat.

Cooking, ageing and fertility

2009-12-15T03:22:00.000-08:00

Our ancestors were using fire over 1 million years ago. Even if Homo sapiens began to use fire for regular cooking only 100,000 years ago, it is still a long time. Certainly much longer than 5-10,000 since agriculture became the way of life.

There are plenty of convincing arguments that cooking is Paleolithic enough, and that there is no need to go raw meat, which is why the paleo and primal approaches do no focus too much on cooked vs. raw food. The raw foodists, of course, have made up their minds already and see cooking as source of all evil.

While I will continue eating heat processed meat, for culinary and cultural reasons, I am not al all convinced that this is the optimal strategy. Here are the reasons.

1. While cooked meat is digestible, apparently raw meat is even more digestible. There is less residue left for bacteria in the gut. "Rotting in the gut" is one of the arguments brought up by vegetarians.
2. Organ meats, bone marrow and brain, which were the best Paleo parts healthwise do not require cooking for easier consumption. It is the tougher muscle meat which is more palatable when cooked.
3. Cooked meat has less nutrients.
4. Cooked meat likely contains less carnosine (certainly older meat contains less carnosine)
5. Cooked meat is more acidic. More acidic food requires more fresh vegetables to balance the acids. This can be harder to achieve if you consider the carbs and bulk of the food.
6. Cooked, or more specifically grilled, fried or roasted, contains mutagenic and carcinogenic substances.
7. Meat heat processed together with carbohydrates contains Advanced Glycation Endproducts (AGEs), which are mutagenic and accelerate ageing. This is probably something the Paleo hunters were not used to. Meat was roasted but not with sugar glazing or batter. Soups were probably invented later, when cauldrons became available.

In my opinion AGEs are the most dangerous and most overlooked Neolithic inventions in cooking which only appears to be Paleo. And AGEs are produced easily, even without proper carbohydrate ingredients. Caramelised onion, steak marinated with honey added, soup with meat and carrots, this is all about Maillard reaction and further steps leading to AGEs.

Now, from the evolutionary point of view, AGEs appear not to be a problem as the consequences do to apply to reproduction or parenting. But if you are 40 and considering having children, there are reasons for concern:
"(...) a recent study has found a significantly higher sperm nuclear DNA fragmentation in diabetic men. As advanced glycation end products (AGEs) are important instigators of oxidative stress and cell dysfunction in numerous diabetic complications, we hypothesized that these compounds could also be present in the male reproductive tract."
http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bsc/ija/2009/00000032/00000004/art00003

"We found a class of compounds known as advanced glycation end products (AGEs) in the male reproductive tract. These are formed as the result of glycation (the addition of sugar)," said Dr. Mallidis, "and accumulate during normal ageing. They are dependent on life style - diet, smoking etc - and in many diabetic complications are centrally implicated in DNA damage. We believe that they play a similar role in the male reproductive system." The scientists intend to follow up their work by trying to determine how AGEs cause and contribute to DNA damage. They believe that they may have uncovered a new role for AGEs, and that their influence goes far beyond diabetes and its complications. "We must now try to develop strategies to protect sperm, and to diminish the accumulation of AGEs," said Dr. Mallidis. Such strategies could involve changes in diet, disrupting a step in the formation of AGEs, or increasing the body's protection against AGEs, possibly through the use of dietary supplements.
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/114573.php

And AGEs are relevant not only to diabetes.

But if you want to slow down the clock, it might be worth considering steak tartare, carpaccio, sashimi, stroganina, ceviche or other raw meat/fish dishes instead of well done steak or a long cooked stew. Also, butter made from unpasturised milk might be a better option, though hardly Paleolithic. For some reason butter has the highest content of AGE of all products, which may be due to pasteurisation in high temperatures. Also commercial yoghurt contains AGEs from added powdered milk, which is also "cooked". Here is more on AGE content:
http://andersonclan.us/andersonclan_top/ages_numeric_list.htm
(more scientific sources are easy to Google)

Of course, if you forage for nuts, make sure they are raw, not roasted, as roasting it nothing less than Maillard, Amadori and other reactions wich ultimately end up as AGEs. The same applies to coffee, which is roasted for the very purpose of enhancing flafour and increasing AGE content.

Having said that, high carbohydrate (particularily fruit fructose and milk galactose) vegetarian diet probably generates more AGEs in vivo that can be ingested as food by carnivore cooks. In addition, vegetarians also eat cooked/fried processed foods, such as soy products, quorn, breads, chips, baked potato.

Here is a good overview of the AGE:
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/118510113/PDFSTART
"While it may be impossible to totally avoid glycotoxin consumption, it is possible to reduce their content by changing the way food is prepared, and thus steaming, boiling, poaching, stewing, stir-frying, or using a slow cooker is strongly advised. These methods not only cook foods with a lower amount of heat, they also retain foods moisture during the cooking processandresearchers haveproved that waterandmoisture inhibit the reactions forming AGEs."

And more on AGE in healthy people (non-diabetic):
http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=17028809

Probably the best way to handle AGEs is to eat massive amounts of raw vegetables along with minimally heat processed meat.

Europeans: the hunters, the farmers and the horsemen

2009-12-08T05:06:00.000-08:00

It is often repeated in the literature that humans have been eating grains, dairy and other Neolithic products for only 10,000 years, which is why we are not well adapted to this kond of diet. 10,000 years is a long time but seems much shorter when compared with one million on human existence or even with 100-200,000 years of Homo sapiens.

But 10,000 years ago was when agriculture was first adopted in the "fertile crescent" of the Middle East. While humans populated Europe about 45,000 years ago (Neanderthal had been there), they were hunters-gatherers and remained so until the agrarians came. And they came to Europe from the south-east, along the Mediterranean coast and then northwards to present France. So in southern Europe agriculture was adopted probably around 6,500 BC, a little later more to the North reaching Germany and southern Britain about 5,500 BC and the Baltic, Northern Britain and Scandinavia 3,500 BC.

Eastern Europe was probably inhabited by hunters-gatherers for longer, though they fell under the influence of migrants from Asian steppes, who were not farmers, but bred horses for food, transportation and warfare.

Suddenly Paleolithic story becomes much closer to home. While it can be argued that descendants of the citizens of ancient Mesopotamia could have acquired greater tolerance for grains and dairy, possibly via selection due to influence of Neolithic diet on fertility, this may not be the case with the descendants of the people who lived in what is now Scotland, Northern Ireland, Finland, Poland or Ukraine. It is interesting to observe that incidence of numerous chronic diseases is relatively high in those countries. This could possibly be explained by "bad diet", but can also be explained by genes which make adaptation to "bad diet" more difficult or impossible.

Highly recommended reading:

Lutz W: The Colonisation of Europe and Our Western Diseases. Medical Hypotheses, Volume 45, Issue 2, Pages 115-120
http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/0306987795900578

There have also been some simplistic attempts to link dietary factors with blood types. I disregarded the D'Amato story when the book appeared long time ago. But now it is making me wonder, as the association may have something to do with our heritage. To put is simply: the European hunters are mostly type 0, the farmers type A, and the horsemen type B. It would be very instructive to look at other genes, as already attempted by Dr. Lutz.

Also, we have to be cautious in associating present inhabitants of any region in Europe with the origin of their ancestors. For example, most of the gene stock in Britain appears to have originated from the ancient European hunters-gatherers, such as proto-Basques, who migrated North more than 15,000 years ago. Later Celtic (farmers) influence was more cultural than genetic and the Viking invaders we not avid farmers. Influence of Romans and Normans was also mostly cultural and limited to the elites. Another example: in ancient Grece and Rome there were many African (and possibly northern/eastern European slaves, whose genes might have contributed later to local populations, while Spain was occupied by Arabs who had been eating grains and dairy for much longer.

So, if you are type 0 and your ancestors came from Scotland or eastern Europe, you should be more serious about Paleo lifestyle than if they came from Southern France.

Post water fast follow-up

2009-12-07T02:51:00.000-08:00

Just for the record: I has been three weeks since I stopped my 10-day water fast. As I wrote before, I think it was not necessary, but an interesting experience nevertheless.

The weight before fasting was 97.5kg. After 10 days it dropped to 92kg and on day 11 there was a further drop to 91kg. As I was eating this went up to 95 within a week and then stared to go down again, very slowly over two weeks to 92kg. I attibute the post-fasting gain to filling of the gut (juices, food), replenishing glycogen in the liver and muscles and also structural muscle gain. What is interesting, fat has been disappearing all along, even when I was gaining weight. I do not exercise a lot: about 30 min/day which is either some running involving sprinting, free weights, push-ups or planks; walking for 60min to town also counts as daily exersise. Paleo is definitely the way to go.

Lard or tallow better than extra virgin olive oil?

2009-12-07T02:06:00.000-08:00

This is going too far, certainly for an ex-vegetarian. For the past couple of weeks I have been enjoying sirloin steaks, but beef tallow would border on insanity. I did read on pemmican (tallow mixed with dried meat), but pemmican belonged in the cold Canada, and I am not a Native American.

Olive oil has been my staple for the over ten years. I used it in salads, for cooking, frying and even occasionally made mayonnaise with it. My diet had been most certainly low fat, but aside from olive oil there were no other fats, save for some tahini, a few nuts or oily fish now and then.

When I got into the Paleo paradigm, I had doubts about olive oil, as it is a quintessentially Neolithic product. Nevertheless, it is recommended by Dr Cordain and used widely by the Paleo followers. Olive oil is supposed to be good because it is mostly oleic acid, which is a good monounsaturated fat. Human fat is composed mostly from oleic acid. Our Paleo ancestors did not use olive oil, but they gorged on bone marrow and brain, which are also relatively rich in oleic acid. So, it appears that olive oil is a modern substitute for bone marrow. Not easy to buy organic bones these days...

But bone marrow has a very beneficial omega 6:3 ratio, roughly 1:1, whereas olive oil contains 10 times more omega-9 than omega-3. This is typically not a problem because overall PUFA content in olive oil is considered relatively insignificant. That may be the case if you are using very small amounts of olive oil, but if you are near 50g/day, you might also be getting about 5g omega-6. You have to drink a lot of fish oil to counterbalance this and besides total PUFA can be more of a problem. Another problem with extra virgin olive oil: it really should not be used for frying or baking.

I would have continued with olive oil if it were not for one minor detail: my sebaceous glands. I had acne as a teenager and suffered excessive sebum all my life. Only vigorous exercise and much sunshine alleviated the condition. By in the past I live a happy live of unhealthy eating and many thinks could have caused my skin problems. Later I attributed my acne to dairy, but the excessive sebum remained, possibly because of high carbohydrate diet. But now, after having gone Paleo I expected this would change. It would not. In fact I discovered a few acne spots on my back which made me think about the whole story again.

What I discovered is that while ratio of omega-6:3 seems to be important, the total intake of oleic acid can be even more so. It appears, that normal sebum contains omega-6 and oleic acid, but if there is a lot of oleic acid in blood, sebaceous glands excrete the excess. There would simply be more oleic acid in sebum. Now, sebum with oleic acid has different viscosity and does not evacuate as easily. Also, oleic acid itself acts as irritant and possibly stimulated proliferation of cells lining the ducts, causing clogging. It may also help some pathogens to grow on sebum.

Clearly, when one is losing weight quite a lot of oleic acid is released into the bloodstreem. When this is combined with dietary fat from olive oil, the excess is evident. Now, when this is happening when there is a lot of exercise and limited carbohydrate intake, the fat will get burnt leaving less for the sebum. But doing 20km daily runs on a low carb diet is not easy. Besides, it is not Paleo (or not in our nature).

While a few whiteheads or blackheads should not be a real issue for a Paleo warrior, the skin can reflect some metabolic imbalance. And when there is a small problem with the skin, there might a bigger one elsewhere - resulting from excessive oleic acid. Clearly the composition of all cell membranes would be affected.

This is only a working hypothesis and is about to be tested over the next few months. But if I am to limit olive oil, what else is out there? I will try to get some bones (I actually tried bone marrow as a child and liked it) but that would not solve the cooking problem. My choice is beef tallow. It also contains a lot of oleic acid (about 40%), which is good, but there is less of it than in olive oil, which is even better. I will continue to use olive oil for salads. There is a potential issue with tallow: palmitic acid. By I am not buying the argument that palmitic acid is bad in the Paleo context. After all, easting sugar stimulates fat production in the liver and the oil being produced as a result is: palmitic acid. It is simply part and parcel of our metabolism, like cholesterol is. I believe modest addition of organic grass-fed beef tallow would bring back the lipid balance which was distorted by too much oleic acid from olive oil. Time will show.

BTW, tallow appears to be better than lard because of the lowest PUFA and omega-6 content. Chicken fat seems to be the worst in that repect. I must have been easier to hunt a mammoth than to catch a wild hen.

Meat is the problem with salt and little veg

2009-11-22T07:57:00.000-08:00

"(...) are contemporary humans suffering from the consequences of chronic, diet-induced low-grade systemic metabolic acidosis?"

A very pertinent article though from almost a decade ago:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11842945?ordinalpos=13&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

In essence, meat is acidifying as is salt, but vegetables can balance the acid. Of course, carbohydrates are also acidifying. No wonder the "traditional" diet based on meat, dairy products, bread, pasta and potatoes would lead to a lot of problems spotted by vegatarians long time ago. Unfortunately vegetarians threw the baby out with bath water and possibly made things even worse with sugars. All was needed was to skip the salt and carbs and eat your greens.

Here are more details:
http://www.thepaleodiet.com/nutritional_tools/acid.shtml

Also, raw food, including meat, is less acidic than cooked, organ meats are less acidic than muscle meat and some nuts are more acidic than others. It appears that hazelnuts are the best in this respect (and also due to low PUFA content). Keeping all that in mind we can easlily see that a healthy meat and veg eater can be more alakine than a grain and cooked pulses oriented vegetarian.

The puzzle of meat and gout

2009-11-19T13:49:00.000-08:00

One of the most persuasive arguments in favour of vegetarianism is that meat metabolises to purines. They are most abundant in organ meats (offal) which apparently was the favourite treat in the Paleo days (brain and bone marrow in particular – the bits that big carnivores could not easily access). Purines are also in seafood (but also in chocolate). Tasty as they are, they contribute to gout and to kidney stones. Better to stay away from meat (chocolate is fine).

And indeed, quite a few Atkins followers report on various discussion forums that they had developed gout and had to stop the diet. High protein diet raises the level of uric acid in blood, but the kidney should handle that (actually there is no evidence on harmfulness of high protein diet on kidney function). Perhaps there are studies out there, I have not done extensive searches, but I one thing appears to make sense to me: sodium urate precipitates in more acidic conditions. High protein diet makes the blood more acidic. (Incidentlally, alcohol makes gout worse, possibly by acidifying the body even more). But if high protein diet is complemented by copious amounts of alkalising vegetables, thing should balance out. Something Atkins people might consider.

But why is it that Inuit/Eskimos have no gout, though they eat practically nothing but meat? Absence of salt in their diet? Vitamin D in the fish?

Fasting debunked

2009-11-18T03:53:00.000-08:00

Just to finish the fasting story. It ended yesterday after 10 days. I found it too boring to continue. There was little discomfort apart from moderate weakness and lower blood pressure, which was a bit of pain while getting up from bed (orthostatic hypotension). The tongue was coated, but there was no unpleasant feeling in the mouth. I lost 5.5kg and 5cm waistline. As before the fast when I did not follow the doctrine and had fish the day before, I broke the fast on avocado, egg yolk and juice from one grapefruit. Today I am having fish soup. No salt, of course. And no bird feed (grains). But I do not feel elated. I was still in ketosis and it I occurred to me that the feeling of extreme health and energy typically reported comes from the surge of glucose from fruit juices, carrot/beet juice and fruits. If “whole” grains, pastas, bread etc were to follow, the body would be overwhelmed with sugar. Naturally, this sugar would immediately get converted to fat. At this point people start vigorous exercise to beat the weight gain, but this is the beginning of the vicious circle. Furthermore, products of breakdown of gluten would stimulate opiate receptors in the brain. People are convinced the fast was the best thing they did in their live. Interestingly, when you read books by fasting experts, they often recommend sequential fasting, perhaps a shorter one (7-10 days) once a quarter or a longer one (21-40 days) once a year. I guess this should be the way of life if you chose to live mostly on carbohydrates. Clearly, this is not what nature designed us for.

But it makes sense that nature did design us for fasting as scarcity of food must have been common. This is where the concepts of intermittent fasting make sense: one day on, one day off. Occasional few days on empty, perhaps followed by a feast. Also, the “warrior diet” makes sense: you skip breakfast, have a salad for lung and a quarter of a wild boar for supper . What does not make sense is 5 meals a day at regular times. If your body knows how to burn fat, it will use ketones, and even before that there is glycogen in the liver. On a high carb diet, you better eat five times a day to feed your habit and have the drive to plough the fields.

As for the benefits of fasting, I do not dispute that they are real, but I claim that most of them, if not all, can be achieved by following natural Paleo diet instead. I already discussed weight loss. Another thing is gluten withdrawal, another is cutting off carbohydrates in general. Typical food is proinflammatory (omega 6), so fasting would obviously make visible sites of inflammation disappear. But eating more omega-3 would likely have the same effect, though perhaps less immediate. The thinking is clear possibly because of ketones. Ketogenic diet has been used in treating epilepsy since ancient times. It appears that it may also be beneficial in Alzheimers. ADHD is also benefited from reduction in carbohydrates and gluten.

As for the symptoms of “healing” during the fasting “crisis”. It gets worse because of increasing ketosis to which body is not used to. Then it gets better because the body (muscles, brain, heart) finally start using ketones. This is also when muscle aches go away. I already addressed the symptoms during the first few days. They are likely to appear only in people who had eaten high carbs, salt, drank coffee and had little exercise. I used to run in the morning without breakfast for years, thus inducing ketogenesis and training muscles to use ketones. Two weeks of Paleo diet before fasting made the experience fairly asymptomatic.

My theory is that I will not be putting on weight after the fast. Time will show.

Water fasting revisited

2009-11-13T01:44:00.001-08:00

As the sixth day of my water fast passes, I have been making some observations. If you believe my mental faculty has not been unduly compromised, please continue on, but beware, I am going to challenge the “party line”.

It appears that water fasting is growing in popularity. There are countless blogs, discussion forums, vlogs on YouTube, Facebook groups, Tweets, etc. Books by fasting pioneers, such as Herbert Shelton or Linda Hazzard, are available freely online. As people are more and more frustrated with their chronic conditions which can only be treated symptomatically they will look to alternatives. And an “illegal” alternative, such as water fasting, is even more tempting.

But does fasting make sense? In my opinion it doesn’t. The main premise of the fasting theory is that it “cleanses” the body, rids it of “toxins”, and rejuvenates. The unpleasant symptoms accompanying fasting are said to be the function of healing. The more unpleasant, the better the healing effect. First, imagine the powerful the placebo effect! Fasting requires major disruption in everyday life, constant focus, often visualisation of the healing process. And the expectations of the outcome are tremendously high as people are almost religious about their fasting. While I am not disputing some the often reported positive results of water fasting, I propose that fasting is not necessary to achieve them. Let us have a look today at one of the outcomes, weight loss:

It appears that most people these days are driven to fasting to lose weight. Pythagoras might have fasted for mental clarity, Gandhi for political reasons, but most of us do it to lose the fat, though typically proclaiming that this is expected to be “only a side effect”. True, people lose on average 0.5kg daily, which over two weeks gives 7kg. Impressive! Beyond two weeks weight loss is much, much smaller, as the body conserves resources even more and metabolism is even lower. Most of the weight is, however, gained back after the fast, particularly if the insulin pumping high carbohydrate diet is to follow (starting with fruit juices and fruits while breaking the fast). There are, of course, reports of greater weight loss, such as 1kg a day on average, but it appears that it is typically achieved by those who exercise during the fast. While little exercise minimises loss of muscle mass, vigorous walking, cycling or even running almost guarantees that muscle tissue will be burnt along fat. Let us assume that a prudent person would fast for two weeks, would not exert themselves and would not gorge on carbs while eating again. The initial 7kg weight loss would probably be about 4kg net, unless the gain is prevented by strenuous exercise. Now, from experience I know that a low carbohydrate Paleo diet can lead to easy loss of 2kg over two weeks without much exercise. If you exercise during this time burning 1,000 kcal/day (running 1h, cycling 2h, walking 3h) you are guaranteed to burn another 2kg over two weeks and there is nothing to stop you from walking 6h daily and burning twice as much! And walking can offer some other benefits typically attributed to fasting. In conclusion, water fast for weight gain is unreasonable.

Rat, the true omnivore

2009-11-12T05:37:00.000-08:00

Rats can eat almost anything and thrive. They also eat grains. Quite possibly, if it were for the human farmers, rat's ancestors would have little chance to discover the flavour of grains. But they adjusted their digestive systems and metabolisms and probably do not get diabetes or heart disease, though sometimes they do look a but fat (by the way, the fructose-fed rat is an experimental model used in research on diabetes).

So, perhaps it is possible to adapt, after all. If indeed rat is well adapted to eating grains, it is worth observing that it reaches reproductive maturity at 3 months, and has 4-7 litters per year. Multiplied by an average litter size it would give about 50 offspring. Early Neolithic humans would have probably had one child every 2 years (it was about 4 years in Paleo times when children were breast for 4 years and infanticide was practiced). The difference in the potential for natural selection is hundredfold! So 10,000 years of evolution for humans was worth 1,000,000 for rats! One million years ago Homo sapiens, or even Neanderthal, was not around yet.

I guess we can be optimistic, give it another 990,000 years and will be well adapted to eating grains.

On farinaceous diet

2009-11-11T06:43:00.000-08:00

A quote from William Harvey, a 17th-century English physician, author of The Circulation Of The Blood:

"It had long been well-known that a purely animal diet greatly assisted in checking the secretion of diabetic urine," (...) "and it seemed to follow, as a matter of course, that the total abstinence from saccharine and farinaceous matter must drain the liver of this excess amount of glucose, and thus arrest in a similar proportion the diabetic tendency. Reflecting on this chain of argument, and knowing too that a saccharine and farinaceous diet is used to fatten certain animals, and that in diabetes the whole of the fat of the body rapidly disappears, it occurred to me that excessive obesity might be allied to diabetes as to its cause, and that if a purely animal diet was useful in the latter disease, a combination of animal food with such vegetable matters as contained neither sugar nor starch, might serve to arrest this undue formation of fat."

Evolutionary doubts

2009-11-11T03:26:00.000-08:00

The paleo paradigm has been proposed, all fine and dandy. And it is quite convincing. Scientists looked at markings on bones, studied nucleic acids from early Homo’s poo samples (coprolites) and it is immediately obvious that eating grains was out of the question till the dawn of agriculture, between 4 and 10 thousand years ago. And the argument is that these few thousand years were not long enough for any evolutionary adaptation to new diet to take place. Clearly, there are some reports (I have not seen any raw data though) that soon after people started to eat grains and legumes (lentils were the first) their started to decay and that the jaws did not grow sufficiently to accommodate the teeth, which was a problem particularly with wisdom teeth. Then there was maloclusion (misalignment of teeth of the jaw and the mandible), the skull got smaller as did the stature. Apparently, the life span also shortened. And finally, there was narrowing of the pelvis in women, which led to complications at birth (Not as in the Garden of Eden anymore). Clearly dentists and midwives were in high demand. The records of these ancient times are scarce, but there are also observations, most notably by Weston Price, of the contemporary hunters-gatherers, who appeared to have none of these. This is being explained mostly by the phytic acids in grains which inhibit absorption of vital minerals from food thus affecting skeletal and dental health. Only birds have phytase which digests grain without problems.

So, where is the controversy? The Paleo stand is that humans could not have adapted their digestion and metabolism over few hundred generations. If indeed, the skeletal problems resulted from grain consumption, they would have been manifest at post-reproductive age, so neither natural nor sexual selection was likely to play a role. Besides, time was to short to make considereble changes to the mechanism fine-tuned in the course of eons. We share something like 99% of the DNA with chimps and they do not eat grains either (though they do eat some meat).

There may be another take on that if you forget Charles Darwin and think Jean-Baptise Lamark. Inheritance of acquired traits had been generally discredited as heresy, but some neo-lamarkists survive and even argue that such miracles are possible:
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/epigeneticInheritanceSpermCells.php
http://www.chd.ucsd.edu/seminar/documents/Morgan.08.pdf
In any case it is possible that some adaptations were passed in children at the level of regulation of DNA or RNA expression, rather than modification of sequence of nucleic acids.

If you look around, you will discover people who appear not to be bothered with grains or high carbohydrate diet. They do not do endurance sports and yet they are slim. They never develop diabetes and may not even have heart disease (the association between high carbs and atherosclerosis is probably more convincing that the cholesterol story). I noticed, however, that they tend to have smaller mandibles as well, incidentally the trait of some British aristocrats. I doubt that these people have phytase in their pancreatic juice, so they likely have mineral deficiencies, but they may have better insulin control. Possibly, the descendants of the first farmers from the Fertile Crescent of 10,000 years ago would be better adapted to grains, while the people from the parts of the world where hunters-gatherers prevailed even during the Roman Empire (e.g. northern and eastern Europe), may struggle. Or, to the contrary, those having been exposed to grains for more generations, would have inherited the consequences of grain consumption and now have not only more tooth decay but also smaller brains? Unless of course, Lamark is pure nonsense.

Paleolithic revolution

2009-11-10T01:59:00.000-08:00

I might have slept through the revolution altogether. That is, assuming it started with the Loren Cordain Paleo Diet book. But it might have actually started in 1863 with William Banting, an English coffin maker, who in his widely read "Letter on Corpulence Addressed to the Public", quite contrary to his business plan, indicated that bread, butter, milk, sugar, beer and potatoes were not the way to proceed. And there were a few others, like Wolfgang Lutz in the 60s and his "Leben ohne Brot", but in the pre-internet era the revolution was hardly possible.

The idea is, of course, simple and today it takes only few hours for the uninitiated to discover that paleo life is all about replicating the lifestyle patterns of our forefathers. Naturally, it is the dietary and exercise patterns which are being pursued, which are thought to be evolutionarily conservative. Compared to millions years of human evolution, the few thousands since people started to farm land was simply not enough for our bodies to adapt to new foods and the physical demands of the daily toil. So we now know that "paleo good, neo bad". Simple and overwhelmingly convincing.

But it was not very obvious to me, living in the dark ages of nutrition. In fact, the revolution for me happened fifteen years ago, when I embraced the vegetarian paradigm and long distance running as the way of life. Life couldn't have been better then. I lost 20kg, got in shape, felt more energetic, even run a marathon. I kept proselytising and actually managed to convert others.

It is all about paradigms. No theory is ever water tight and there is always evidence to the contrary. It is rather a matter of momentum, critical mass of evidence that proves enlightening and leads to a scientific revolution. In my case one piece of evidence made me reconsider everything and I started digging deeper.

Being a vegetarian for so many years and having read almost everything on vegetarianism I could challenge every criticism. Obviously, every won argument only reinforced my beliefs. But the problem was, I was never truly challenged as the criticism was quite superficial and typically revolved around protein or vitamin B12 deficiency. With a healthy lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet based on abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables, nuts, seeds, whole grains, legumes, life should be a Garden of Eden. I actually cheated a bit and had occasional fish. This is because I thought that industrially produced vegetables and fruit were less nutritious than the original varieties and some micronutrient deficiencies were possible. The idea was not so much to be vegetarian, but to eat naturally. Since taking supplements seemed quite unnatural, an odd fish did the job. I had known all along that our Palaeolithic ancestors did some scavenging (their teeth marks were made over the marks of teeth of large carnivores) and thought it somehow justified evolutionarily. Meat was out of the question due to pesticides, processing, decay in the intestines, implication in cancer, and the epidemiological stories propagated by vegetarian prophets. But even then, when debating the issue, I would say that meat was probably more natural for people than dairy products. I had quite a lot of cheese and yogurt, though, but felt noticeably better during periods when I stuck mostly to fruit and veg plus eggs and random fish. Dietary cholesterol was not really an issue as I was sceptical of the simplicity of the story from the very beginning. The theory of oxidisation of cholesterol was more appealing, and I though that healthy vegetarian diet controls the formation of free radicals, thus also lowering oxidised cholesterol. But I was busy working on treatments of diseases and on pharmaceuticals, and did not bother to pursue this further. After all, I thought I know everything there was to know from the practical standpoint.

What was it then to turn me back into a revolutionary? The fat. Specifically, the omega-3 fats. I had known how essential they were and had used flax seed oil, the richest source known to humans. But on closer scrutiny, there was a problem. There are three omega-3 acids: ALA, EPA and DHA. Flax seeds abound in ALA, but have much less EPA and DHA. Also, the conversion of ALA into EPA and DHA is quite slow, which in effect, could not provide sufficient amount of EPA and DHA. Now, when you think about it, is flax seed oil the kind of food that out paleo ancestors would have eaten? Did they have the technology? Did they have refrigerators? Plus, there is one problem with flax seeds: they contain lignans which inhibit conversion of testosterones to DHT. That could have consequences for expression of masculine characteristics quite essential for the Palaeolithic hunter, spatial orientation being one of them, but reproductive success also of critical importance (while looking at testosterone, I also found out that vegetarian men have lower levels of this hormone, though this may be due to low cholesterol or low fat diet). The bottom line: you need to eat oily fish or... meat.

But there is meat and meat. When farm animals are fed grains, which are unnatural for them, the meat would contain much more omega-6 oils than omega-3. The problem with standard western diet seems to lie in the ratio of omega-6 to omega-3, which is 20:1 and should be 2:1 or 1:1. So, eating standard western meat would only make things worse. Grass-fed meat is a wholly different story, as is rich in omega-3.

This was the beginning of my revolution. Then I did some more research and some more thinking. The next discovery was lectins in grains and legumes, toxicity and addictive nature of gluten, the fattening carbohydrates, and the futility of endurance aerobic exercises if weight loss was the objective and countless tangential bits. I pondered the dichotomy between the sugars versus ketones and wondered what the role of periodic fasting could be. I will get back to these topics in the near future, though there is no need to reinvent the wheel: most has been already said and I will try to provide the links.

There is, however, one discovery which may be quite new. It is only a working hypothesis and the evidence is scarce: my own experience. I decided to do water fasting for a couple of weeks. More out of curiosity than anything else, though losing some weight would be helpful (I will cover with loss in greater detail in my next posts). In any case, today is the third day of my water fast. I had read Shelton, Malachov and many online testimonials. Did not seem like a big deal at all.

And what did I discover after three days? First, I did not observe any discomfort which is reported in almost all cases: headaches, muscle aches, extreme coldness, nausea, severe cravings, stuffiness of the nose, expectoration, etc. Even my tongue is only mildly white and I have no unpleasant feeling in my mouth. Furthermore, I did not do any enemas and even had smoked mackerel, avocado and vegetables baked with loads of olive oil the day before.

What makes it interesting is that for a couple of weeks before starting the fast I started eating paleo: no grains, no legumes, and no tomatoes. Instead I had more veggies, more nuts and seeds (pumpkin, sunflower) and considerably more fish and seafood. No salt, except inevitable very small amounts in some fish. I also implemented the warrior diet regime, which is essentially eating irregularly, some fruit at lunchtime, a leafy salad with oil in the afternoon and something more substantial in the evening. I actually practiced that for years before with the vegetarian diet, so my body was used to mild ketosis after prolonged overnight fasts.

And the working hypothesis is that the theory behind water fasting may only apply to people fed standard carbohydrate rich diet. In fact, this is the type of diet typically recommended by fasting gurus, such as Dr. Joel Fuhrman. The nasty symptoms which fasting patients develop are related to the switch from glucose to ketosis and possibly from elimination of gluten, lectins and salt. What is descried as cleansing from toxins can actually be a quite predictable physiological reaction.

While long water fasting can be very helpful in these people, the question arises: is it really necessary for health reasons? Perhaps the doctors were right when almost hundred years ago they decided that it was not? Perhaps it could be sufficient to stick to the caveman diet with occasional short or intermittent fasts, as with no grains or legumes in diet, there would be hardly any toxins to detoxify?

Now, this is going to make most people uncomfortable. The meat-eaters (they eat largely grain fed meat), the vegetarians (for obvious reasons), the supplement gatherers (flax seed), the long distance runners (you can’t actually run very far on low carbohydrates, though you can walk and walk) and the fasting fans. I treat this as an invitation to discussion.