Entries tagged "paleo"

For the last six months or so, I've been transitioning my diet closer and closer to the nutritional theories of the Paleolithic Diet, which prescribes that the optimal foods to eat are the ones similar to what our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have eaten. There really are two major strains of Paleo: a philosophical paleo that argues hunter-gatherers ate it therefore it must be healthy, and a nutritional paleo that questions why hunter-gatherers at as they did and identifies the nutritional underpinnings of that diet to prescribe a modern manifestation. It's led me to do a lot of reading and a lot of discovery that has turned my understanding of nutrition on its head.

For a decent lay summary, an older New York Times Magazine article contains a lot of the revelations. In a sentence or two, when you consume high-glycemic carbohydrates, your blood sugar and insulin spike, telling your body to store fat, disabling the brain's mechanism for turning off hunger, and resulting in a 2-hour surge of energy before a complete crash. Eventually the brain's insulin receptors become numb to such high quantities of insulin. When your primary energy source is fat and you prevent your insulin levels from spiking, your body burns the fat as its primary fuel source, the satiety mechanism works as advertised, and your energy levels remain constant.

That's the unintuitive conclusion: by increasing dietary fat and cholesterol, you can lower your body fat and blood cholesterol.

Not really addressed in the article, but very important to mention, is the modern American diet has a radically skewed ratio of omega-3 to omega-6 polyunsaturated fats. Historically, the human diet had a balanced ratio of these fats. Since the replacement of corn and soy as the primary feed for livestock and the infusion of corn and soy derivatives into most food products, the ratio has strongly favored omega-6 fatty acids. The problem is that omega-3 fatty acids have anti-inflammatory properties, and omega-6 fatty acids have inflammatory properties. Omega-3 fatty acids are found in grasses, seeds, leaves, and algae, thus they're also found in fish, pastured livestock, and seed-fed poultry products.

The Paleo Diet prescribes eating vegetables and meats primarily, seeds and nuts secondarily, some fruit, and little to no starch. Off the table are grains, legumes, dairy, sugars, and processed foods. Meats should be naturally raised and fed the diet they'd naturally pursue in the wild. That's it.

I've been eating Paleo with about 85% fidelity for the last six months. I still have honey and milk in my coffee. I still have cheese in my salads. I still eat ice cream. I drink beer and whiskey. I eat more fruit and drink more fruit juice than I should. None of this is Paleo.

At Potomac CrossFit, I've entered a five-week Paleo Challenge -- to eat 100% strict Paleo. It means giving up a lot of the things I love for five-weeks, and as Brian at PCF says, the things you need to give up to be successful at this challenge are the things you don't want to give up. The goal isn't to get you to give up these things for life. The five weeks is to set a baseline of health -- look, feel, and performance. From there I can scientifically and experimentally reintroduce these other elements back into my life in a controlled fashion to see the impact they have on my health. At that point I can decide if it's worth it to leave it out of my diet completely.

It's certainly not going to be the easiest diet challenge I've undertaken, but it will be an interesting ride.

The first resolution of my Paleo Challenge is to buy better coffee. Just because I've been too busy to stay on top of ordering good stuff, I've been drinking Whole Foods and Starbucks beans the last couple weeks, which once I've diluted them with honey and milk were drinkable. On its own, not very enjoyable at all. Typically I've been buying my beans from Jim's Organic Coffee and mixing their Sumatra French Roast and their Italian Roast in equal proportions. I may end up switching to a single-source subscription from Counter Culture which seems to offer the freshest roast I'll be able to find easily. Coffee nerds rule.

I've been 100% strict so far, and it's had some rather nasty effects. I was grumpy as all hell yesterday morning. I developed a bit of a headache around afternoon time, but I think that may have more to do with the fact my apartment complex hasn't turned on their HVAC compressors yet and the daytime temperatures have been a bit high here. I do find myself craving natural sugars -- orange juice, an apple, honey, and the like. But it's interesting to be able to recognize these cravings.

I started reading Loren Cordain's book The Paleo Diet and after that I'll be reading Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories. Even just the first chapter of Cordain's book has me sifting through contradictory information.

The materials I've read have largely suggested that the body can function off of fat as its primary energy source, using ketones instead of glycogen; that saturated fat has largely gotten a bad reputation which in a Paleo diet is undeserved; that absent contributory factors, there is not a direct causal link between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol; and that salt in the diet is largely benign. Cordain's first chapter argues with the unwavering certainty assignable to the law of gravity or the rules of shotgun that saturated fats are still largely unhealthy; that protein is the primary energy source one should use; that there is a clear and unmistakable direct causality between dietary cholesterol and blood cholesterol; and that salt in the diet is so detrimental to blood pressure one should eliminate salt from the diet. I'm hoping some of my PCF friends can help me resolve these contradictory claims.

My favorite part so far is that it's gotten our household into a better routine. At 10:30 we dim the lights in the house and all sit around the living room reading our respective books. At 11:15, we start getting ready for bed. We're lights out before midnight. I've been getting to sleep easier, staying asleep more, and getting up at 7am has been less of a chore.

One of the difficulties in presenting nutritional information to the public in ways it can comprehend is that it necessarily involves oversimplification. If it can't be summarized in one sentence as a general nutritional prescription, it is unlikely to enter the public consciousness, but it is also highly likely to be generally inaccurate. Nowhere is this more true than with the general nutrition guide to fats.

There are seven major classes of fats. Among them, there are even more specific manifestations of fatty acids. As part of the Paleo Challenge, I'm trying to understand more about how our bodies react to various nutrients, and fats seem to be the best place to start. Drawing from a 2009 summary published in Current Treatment Options in Cardiovascular Medicine, I present the table of fats.

Download as a PDF

In the "Good or Bad" column, green means it's overall healthy, red means it's overall unhealthy, and white indicates a fairly neutral profile. In the "Modern Intake Comparison" column, for good fats, red means we're not getting as much as we used to and green means we're getting as much if not more than we used to; for bad fats, red means we're getting more than we used to and green means we're getting as much if not less than we used to. As a quick refresher on blood cholesterol, in general, you want your HDL to be higher, your LDL to be lower, and your triglycerides to be lower.

So what can we conclude from this table?

First we can conclude that the standard American diet differs sharply from our paleolithic ancestors, particularly in regard to saturated fat makeup, monounsaturated fat intake, and EPA+DHA intake. The switch of livestock feed to grain has damaged the fat profile of the standard American diet over the last 100 years in ways not seen in the previous 2.5 million. The fact that almost the entire "Comparison" column is red should be reason enough for us to pause and reconsider our diets.

Second, even though labels on food products don't contain the granularity of information to understand its full fat profile, we can extract a prescriptive list of foods that contain fats that improve our overall health. When using oils in cooking, focus on using oils like olive oil, coconut oil, or canola oil, or alternatively use the fats from naturally-raised, pastured animals or from wild-game. When eating meat, eat naturally-raised, pastured animals or wild-game. Avoid fats from dairy products, grain-fed animals, and hydrogenated oils. Eat plenty of cold-water fish and shellfish, being mindful of mercury intake, or supplement your diet with an EPA+DHA rich fish oil. Include healty-fat rich foods like nuts and avocados into your diet.

Which sounds a lot like... the Paleo diet being prescribed in the Paleo Challenge. Funny how that works.

I love to cook. There are very few artistic mediums in which the artist specifically crafts his work in full knowledge of who will consume it, and the emotion the artist shares for the consumer is immediately infused and transmitted into the work. Sushi at a ready-made counter isn't nearly as lovingly crafted as sushi made for a customer sitting at a sushi bar, for the human connection between who is cooking and who is eating becomes part of the food creation. I get the pleasure every evening of cooking for my little family, and it's one of my greatest daily joys.

My biggest complaint so far with the Paleo Challenge is that it's limited my cooking options significantly. Ordinarily, I get to wield a wide variety of flavors and textures: sweet, savory, salty, creamy, tart. Eliminating both creamy and sweet from that list has stifled my creativity in the kitchen. Last night I made a slow-roasted brisket, and my intuition was to make a nice braising liqueur of roasted tomatoes, apple-cider vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, molasses or honey, mustard, garlic, and soy sauce. Leave out the Worcestershire sauce and the honey, and it's still good, but instead of a slightly sweet glaze on the outside of the meat, which was dry-rubbed with coarse sea salt and cracked pepper, the tomato/vinegar/mustard/garlic/soy left us with salty and slightly tart. It wasn't nearly as satisfying.

Breakfast today was a lightly-sea-salted avocado half, a handful of raw pecans, and two scrambled eggs with fresh dill and sea salt. A cup of black coffee washed it down. Lunch yesterday was a salted/peppered pan-fried pork chop, a broccoli crown steamed and tossed with bacon grease and lemon juice, and napa cabbage stir-fried in soy sauce and champagne vinegar. Salty, savory, and tart -- all of it. All I'm drinking is black coffee and chilled tap water with lemon juice.

I'm just getting bored, and I hate getting bored with food. It's far too much of a joy and pleasure to make and consume to be so unenthusiastic. I would love suggestions on how to broaden the flavor palette while staying true to the challenge.

My mood hasn't improved much, but I'm willing to blame it more upon the sweltering heat. My building hasn't kicked on the condensers for building air-conditioning, so I've been fighting the 95° heat and sweating profusely day and night. It's made sleeping much harder, and I've had a headache for three days. Supposedly this morning they're repairing a water pump leak in the condensers, so once that repair is complete, we should be able to cool this apartment down.

My prettier half and I have been engaged in a rather significant shift in our diet, and many of our friends, because they're awesome and are doing what friends do, expressed concern about it. For several months she and I have been eating in accordance with a diet called the Paleolithic Diet, or "Paleo". For the last three weeks, we've amped up our efforts as part of Potomac Crossfit's Paleo Challenge - eating strictly Paleo for 5 weeks and aiming toward shifting our bodies into ketosis (to be explained in this series). So to help our friends and family understand better what we're trying to do and why we think it's a good idea, I'm presenting this multi-part series on eating Paleo and trying the Paleo Challenge.

It Stands to Reason...

As capable as the human mind is, it's extremely bad a comprehending large numbers. Sometimes we need clever or funny demonstrations to really comprehend them. This is particularly true with time.

Let's imagine that the time since the earth's formation is a 24 hour day. Here are when various events would have happened:

• 4:00am: First single celled life appears
• 2:30pm: First complex cells appear - cells with nuclei and other organelles
• 6:45pm: First multi-celled bacteria appear
• 10:40pm: Dinosaurs appear
• 11:39pm: Dinosaurs go extinct
• 11:59:12pm : First proto-humans appear
• 11:59:59.8pm : Invention of agriculture and dawn of civilization

If you live to be a hundred years old, your lifetime in this scale would be 0.0018 seconds of time. By means of comparison, a blink of an eye is somewhere between 0.3 and 0.4 seconds, so over 200 people could live 100 year lives in the time it took you to blink.

Time stretches on longer and further than you could ever imagine. However long you can imagine is a mere pittance to reality.

Let's adjust our scale and imagine the time since the first proto-humans walked the earth is the 24 hour day. On this scale, the invention of agriculture occurs at 11:54pm. From the beginning to six minutes before midnight, humans subsisted on a diet of fruits and vegetables, meats, eggs, nuts, and seeds. In the last six minutes, we added to our diet grains and dairy products as we began to cultivate cereals and master animal husbandry. And at 11:59:56pm, we began to unmake the fabric of our diet shifting nearly all emphasis to cereals and cereal-derivatives.

It stands to reason that as natural selection functions, humans spent those first 11 hours and 54 minutes evolving to operate most effectively on the foods readily available to us - the fruits, vegetables, meats, eggs, nuts, and seeds. It defies logic to imply that in the six minutes since then we've somehow evolved to adapt to a diet high in cereals, grains, and dairy products - evolution simply does not work that quickly. So philosophically, since anatomically and biochemically we are identical to our paleolithic ancestors, it would make sense if we were best suited to subsist on the same foods they ate. It remains to be seen if the science supports that line of reasoning.

Go on to part 2 - "What changed in the last 20 years that made us fat?"

This is part 2 in a series. Part 1 - Entire series

What Changed That Made Us Fat?

In my profession as a systems administrator, one of the many hats I wear is as a troubleshooter. Something breaks that always worked before, and we're not quite sure what broke. The first question we generally ask is, "What changed?" Most of the time there was some unrelated change that was made to the system that coincided with the breakage or preceded it by some reasonable margin - and by identifying that contemporary change, the underlying problem is often discovered.

The obesity epidemic we hear about every day in the news really only started about 30 years ago. The NIH and CDC have compiled the various surveys and found that from 1960 to the late 70's, obesity in the United States was fairly fixed. Somewhere around 1980, it started trending upward, and it hasn't stopped.

So what changed? With the standard caveats about correlation and causality, I'd like to suggest a series of major shifts in our diet that I believe hit a critical threshold in the late 70's that toppled us over.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the food landscape was very different. Refrigeration was just beginning to be introduced, but it would not be found in homes until the late 1930's - however refrigerated train cars began eliminating seasons from the markets as food could be transported long distances while staying fresh. Many of the household brands we know of today were becoming national brands, like the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco), Campbell's, General Mills, Quaker, and Kraft. Diets consisted of a mixture of fresh and preserved meats, dairy (evaporated or sweetened-condensed when fresh was unavailable), cereals and breads, and fruits and vegetables.

Oh, and also corn liquor. Massive quantities of corn liquor. This country loves to drink and always has. We drank liquor at every meal. We drank before, during, and after work. According to W.J. Rorabaugh, our present tradition of the morning coffee break derives from what used to be a late-morning whiskey break. In the 1820's, an American man on average drank a half pint of liquor a day. And farmers enjoyed supplementing their income by distilling their extra grains into the sauce. Liquor taxes were up to 40% of the tax revenue for the Federal government prior to the passage of the 16th amendment in 1913. And according to the Smithsonian Magazine, the passage of the 16th amendment, authorizing the Federal government to levy a general income tax, cleared the way for the 18th amendment passed in 1919. And prohibition began.

Suddenly, the giant market for grain alcohol disappeared, and demand for grain decreased relative to supply. In most markets, this is not a problem - natural price pressures in the face of waning demand encourage producers to decrease production, and prices stabilize. The agricultural market strangely does the opposite. When the price of grains drops at the market, farmers grow extra yield to attempt to make up the difference - and supply goes up instead. Ingenious inventors and ambitious salesmen developed new industrial machinery to help give the farmers continually greater yields at comparably lower costs. Supply continued to rise, demand continued to stagnate.

And then the Depression hit. Demand fell. Prices went to zero.

It took heavy handed interventions from Roosevelt and the New Dealers to bring this overproduction under control. The problem was farmers overplanting to prevent falling prices from lowering their incomes. Under the new farm policy, the USDA set a target price for all storable cereals as a function of actual cost of production. If the prevailing market prices for those grains dropped below the target, farmers could take out a loan from the government using the crops as collateral. Over the course of the year, if the market improved, the farmers would sell the grain, pay back the loan, and move on. If the market failed to improve, the government would forgive the loan, take the collateral, and store it in its own granaries as a Federal grain reserve. If prices subsequently spiked due to a poor harvest or other unforeseeable conditions, the USDA would supplement the market supply with its own reserves. Prices and production levels stabilized, and grains remained abundant and cheap.

From the 30's to the 70's, this farm policy remained in place, but it became less relied upon. The market continually devised new uses for this enormous supply of grains, and farmers continually expanded their yields to meet this new demand. Livestock farmers had always used grains as a finisher for their meats - it was well known that grains fattened the animals before slaughter. More meat meant more money. But with grain prices so low, post-WWII demand for meat on the rise, farmers used more and more of these storable cereals as their animal feed until grass-fed became the oddity. A new process of oil extraction by using solvents like hexane led to the cheap, mass production of cooking oils from grains - cheaper and more efficient than the prior method of pressing oils.

And it all culminated in the early and mid 1970's.

In 1972, President Richard Nixon announced that he had brokered a deal with the Soviet Union to create an exception to our broad economic embargo of the USSR and permit them to purchase $750m of grains over the course of several years. The Soviet Union's domestic agriculture production was insufficient to feed its population, and Nixon saw the grain sale as both a humanitarian imperative and as an opportunity to improve the US standing in the Cold War. However, the Soviets exceeded their total purchasing quota in the first year. The US grain market might have been able to absorb the added demand without a price spike, but the farm belt experienced a coincidental spell of bad weather lessening expected crop yields. Food prices surged, including meats and dairy whose production now depended upon a surplus of cheap grains.

Nixon ordered the USDA to employ drastic measures to get food prices under control. Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz dismantled the New Deal-era farm policy and instead implemented a new subsidy program that instead of nonrecourse loans relied upon direct payments to producers. Farmers received a check from the government, and were free to dump their grains on the market regardless the price they fetched. In the immediacy, grain prices fell, but the new policy shifted the economics of agriculture radically. Farmers received direct subsidies based on yield, and as such had a perverse incentive to overproduce. Agribusiness companies began consolidating farms in order to minimize production costs but maximize the yields and profits.

Then came sugar. In 1937, the Federal government passed the Sugar Act which dictated the system of import duties and quotas for cane sugar based on the assumption of a world surplus in sugar. The energy crisis, inflation, and global commodity shortages made that assumption invalid - sugar consumption exceeded production from 1970 to 1974, and sugar prices climbed to 57 cents per pound. The Sugar Act which had been extended continuously by the Congress since its enactment was allowed to expire in 1974, and just three years later, the price of sugar fell to 8 cents per pound. A new system of tariffs and quotas was implemented in 1977, and sugar prices in the United States began to climb again. With the newly swelling surplus of corn being produced, US food producers began replacing sugar with a chemical substitute invented in 1957 - high fructose corn syrup. By 1985, individual consumption of HFCS grew to 45 pounds per year.

As these shifts were happening in the late 1970's, the predominant nutritional paradigm was also shifting. In the 1950's, Dr. Ancel Keys of the University of Minnesota in introduced a theory that a diet high in fat raises cholesterol levels and promotes heart disease. Researchers tested this hypothesis over the succeeding decades but the evidence was ambiguous - some studies positively correlated a high fat diet with higher cholesterol and cardiovascular disease while others found no such positive correlation. When science is unable to come to a consensus on the issue, as it often happens politics takes over. In 1977, Senator George McGovern led a committee to publish "Dietary Goals for the United States" which modified the guidelines in place since 1941 to advise Americans significantly reduce their fat intake to avoid "killer diseases" they alleged were sweeping the country. The NIH got on board in 1984, recommending that all Americans over the age of 2 eat less fat. The Center for Science in the Public Interest called fat "the greasy killer". Government pronouncements as such create headlines, and headlines alter market trends - food manufacturers highlighted their low-fat, high carb products. The low-fat, high carb recommendation was canonized in the 1980 USDA Dietary Guidelines publication and again in the 1992 publishing of the "Food Pyramid" - 6 to 11 servings of grains and cereals per day, use of fats and oils "sparingly".

The NIH has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in the intervening years trying to establish a conclusive connection between eating fat and getting heart disease. Out of the six major studies, five showed no such connection. The sixth conclusively demonstrated that statins, a prescription drug intended to minimize cholesterol imbalances, could prevent heart disease. The conclusion drawn by the NIH was that, even though they had failed to demonstrate that a low-fat diet had any health benefits, if statins could lower cholesterol and prevent heart attacks, a low-fat diet should do the same.

Instead during this time, we've seen historically unprecedented increases in the frequency of obesity, diabetes, heart and vascular disease, asthma, depression, liver and kidney failure, and cancer.

In the last ten years, nutritional scientists have been collecting an increasing corpus of data that strongly suggests the low-fat, high-carb strategy isn't just wrong - it's killing us. And the nutritional prescriptions that come out of this body of evidence tend to conclude that the fuels and nutrients that help our bodies function best are the ones that our paleolithic ancestors lived on for millions of years. I'll discuss those prescriptions and the evidence found in part 3 of this series.

Go to part 3 - "The Science of Paleo"