Health & Nutrition by Michael R. Eades, M.D.

I had a question from a friend today about migraine headaches. I remembered reading about them in Dr. Larry McCleary’s new book The Brain Trust Program, so I thumbed through the book to see what he had to say. (I had read the book in manuscript form, but couldn’t remember the specific recommendation for migraine headaches.) I became engrossed in the material all over again, and after a couple of hours of reading it dawned on me that I hadn’t reviewed the book for this blog.

First, a bit of disclosure. Dr. McCleary is a good friend of mine as well as a business partner for a number of years. And MD and I wrote the Introduction to his book. But we didn’t write it because he was a friend and partner, but because the book is so good.

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Based on the number of comments I get and the number of questions that come through the email on our website, it seems that there is much confusion about the interplay of calories, the caloric deficit, weight loss, and weight gain. I’ll use this space to expand on my views of these complex and confusing issues.First, let’s look at a concept that will help explain a lot. It’s a concept that Gary Taubes explores in great detail in his book Good Calories, Bad Calories, which, by the way, is available now. (Grab a copy and spend a fascinating couple of days poring over it. The rewards will be immense.) The concept in question is interpretation of the energy balance equation, which looks like this:

Δ�Weight = Calories in - Calories out

What this equation basically says is that the change in weight (ΔWeight) equals the number of calories consumed minus the number of calories burned off in the process of daily living.

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Since posting the piece on ketone bodies and their causing breathalyzer problems I’ve had enough comments and emails to make me realize that there are probably many people unsure of what ketones really are, where they come from and why. Let’s take a look at the goals and priorities of our metabolic system to see what happens. I’m going to try to keep the biochemistry to a minimum, so fear not.

The primary goal of our metabolic system is to provide fuels in the amounts needed at the times needed to keep us alive and functioning. As long as we’ve got plenty of food, the metabolic systems busies itself with allocating it to the right places and storing what’s left over. In a society such as ours, there is usually too much food so the metabolic system has to deal with it in amounts and configurations that it wasn’t really designed to handle, leading to all kinds of problems. But that’s a story for another day.

If you read any medical school biochemistry textbook, you’ll find a section devoted to what happens metabolically during starvation. If you read these sections with a knowing eye, you’ll realize that everything discussed as happening during starvation happens during carbohydrate restriction as well. There have been a few papers published recently showing the same thing: the metabolism of carb restriction = the metabolism of starvation. I would maintain, however, based on my study of the Paleolithic diet that starvation and carb restriction are simply the polar ends of a continuum, and that carb restriction was the norm for most of our existence as upright walking beings on this planet, making the metabolism of what biochemistry textbook authors call starvation the ‘normal’ metabolism.

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In going through and catching up on all the online issues of Science, I finally reached the most current issue, which contains an article of interest. Originally published in 1970 in the journal Nature, this article was featured in the current issue of Sage KE, an anti-aging supplement to Science, as a blast from the past in their Classic Papers section. The paper was the first to show that the accumulation of non-functional, or junk, proteins play a role in the aging process. This article caught my eye because of another I had read recently and had touched upon in a previous post.

Anti-aging scientists are now pretty sure that one of the forces behind the aging and senescence process is the junk protein matter that accumulates in the cells, hampering cellular function. If the junk builds up enough, it basically crowds out the working part of the cell, killing the cell off in the process. As this inexorable process proceeds, more and more cells function less and less well until we, as a being, cease to function. There are other processes driving the aging function besides this accumulation of cellular debris, but if we can make some headway with cleaning out the junk, then we should be able to make the cells, and by extension us, function better for longer.

We have little chemically-operated waste disposal systems in our cells called lysosomes. Cellular debris that gets hauled to the lysosomes and dumped in gets degraded into individual amino acids, which are released into the circulation and used to re-synthesize other, functional, proteins. The process of transporting the junk proteins to the lysosomes is handled by enzymes designed for that purpose found within the cells. As long as the enzymes are working up to snuff, the junk doesn’t accumulate. But as the Nature paper shows, the aging process takes its toll. Random errors in protein synthesis of these enzymes due to the aging process means that some end up being functional while others aren’t. The non-functional enzymes then not only don’t help haul the junk to the lysosomes, they themselves become junk. It’s easy to see what’s going to happen as time marches on.

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