A little over two years ago I wrote a couple of posts arguing that we cut our ancestral teeth on meat, and that contrary to all the vegetarian blather about colon length, tooth structure, etc., the archeological and anthropological convincingly demonstrates we were descended from meat eaters, not vegetarians.  (Click here and here for those posts.) A couple of recent developments have now inspired me to write a third.

First, I noticed in both talking with people at the Ancestral Health Symposium last August and attending a number of the talks that many followers of their own version of the ancestral diet are dismayingly including more and more carbohydrates.  And recommending more to their followers.

When MD and I wrote Protein Power in the mid 1990s, we used the Paleolithic diet as an argument for the efficacy of the low-carb diet.  If pre-agricultural man evolved in a milieu devoid of carbohydrate-dense foods, we posited, then natural selection should have culled those who didn’t thrive on such fare, leaving us, the descendants, powered by metabolic processes that performed better on protein and fat substrates.  If the rampant obesity and diabetes (we just thought it was rampant then) was a consequence of a diet we weren’t designed for, then switching to one that better suited us metabolically should produce substantial changes to the good.  Which it undeniably does.

I can’t help but recall the great quote by Dr. Blake Donaldson, who changed the complexion of his practice in New York after spending some time with Vilhjalmur Stefansson.  Wrote Dr. Donaldson in Strong Medicine, his book about an almost all meat diet:

During the millions of years that our ancestors lived by hunting, every weakling who could not maintain perfect health on fresh meat and water was bred out.

Now, it seems, many who have taken to the Paleo diet have started to drift from the Paleo-is-basically-low-carb paradigm into the Paleo-is-anything-that-isn’t-Neolithic paradigm.  And although Neolithic man grew all sorts of crops, most Paleo dieters consider only grains to be truly Neolithic foods.  Some Paleo dieters take it a step further and argue that since pre-agricultural man couldn’t have domesticated animals (other than perhaps canids of some sort), then he couldn’t have eaten dairy products.  So, those Paleo purists avoid grain and dairy products.  Both the dairy and non-dairy Paleo dieters, however, are starting to include larger amounts of carbohydrates – primarily starch – into their diets on the presumption that Paleo man would have eaten it.

I have no doubt that Paleo man would have been face down in a box of donuts had he been given the opportunity.  But he wasn’t.  Nor was he often presented with the opportunity to indulge in a carb fest composed of high-starch fruits and vegetables. Maybe in the fall when the fruit ripened (if he could beat the birds and bugs to it), but not much of a chance during the rest of the year.

(I am aware that Denise Minger put up a post not too long ago showing all the high-starch, high-sugar tropical fruits available in tropical areas, intimating that early man must have consumed these and, therefore, should have evolved to do okay on high-carb diets.  Problem with this reasoning is that archaic homo sapiens migrated out of tropical areas anywhere from 60,000 to 150,000 years ago and went through the crucible of natural selection in other less fruit-laden climes.  People of European descent certainly had ancestors who could not avail themselves of tropical fruits at any time.)

The second event driving me to write is a line out of a guest post on Richard Nikoley’s Free the Animal blog by Darrin Carlson titled “The Five Failings of Paleo.”  In Mr. Carlson’s own words, here is Paleo Fail #1:

We Don’t REALLY Know What Our Ancestors Ate. [Bold and caps in the original.]

I disagree for a couple of reasons.  First, we can be pretty certain what our European ancestors didn’t eat.  They didn’t eat dwarf wheat, Red Delicious apples, bananas, Bartlett pears or any other hybridized or tropical fruits commonly available today. As far as we know, there were no Paleo Luther Burbanks grafting and hybridizing plants to make them bigger and sweeter.  Our predecessors would have eaten whatever plant foods were at hand, which is pretty much what you still find if you go out in the woods today. They would have had to battle the birds and other wildlife to get to these fruits, and would have had them available only seasonally.

The second reason I disagree is alluded to in a way by Mr. Carlson in his explanation of Fail #1: Said he:

We have yet to find a magic phone booth that will transfer us back through time–Bill and Ted notwithstanding–to directly observe how our great-times-450-grandparents lived.

Actually we do have such a ‘magic phone booth’ available to us, or at least to those of us who know how to use it.  It’s an isotope ratio mass spectrometer, and its use has been refined over the past 30-40 years to allow us to peer back in time and calculate what our ancestors ate.

I learned about this ‘magic phone booth’ in the fall of 2000 in Hamburg, Germany where MD and I attended a great conference titled Meat and Nutrition.  After the last talk, on a cold, dreary, foggy, drizzly afternoon, MD, Loren Cordain and I lit out to  make a pilgrimage to Indra and the Kaiserkeller, the dives where the Beatles had gotten their start in the early 1960s.  We asked Michael Richards, a professor at the University of Bradford to join us.  On the first morning of the meeting, Michael had given a riveting talk on the use of stable isotopes to determine the diet of early man, and I wanted to find out more.

After roaming the Beatles early haunts, we decamped to a Hamburg coffee house to get warm.  I asked many questions about the stable isotope methodology and have followed the growing literature on it since.  Michael has turned into an academic superstar and is now at the prestigious Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, where he continues to publish his work on the isotopic analysis of the diet of early man.

Let’s take a look at the ‘magic phone booth’ of stable isotope analysis and see what it shows.  The whole notion is fairly complex so I’m torn between making its science simple enough for Homer Simpson to understand, which really doesn’t do the technique justice, or making it unnecessarily difficult. I’m shooting for something in between.

As most everyone knows, atoms are composed of protons, electrons and neutrons.  The number of protons gives an element its atomic number.  A given element always has the same number of protons but can have varying numbers of neutrons.  Carbon, for example, has six protons (and an atomic number of 6).  But the carbon atom can have 6, 7 or 8 neutrons.  All three versions are still carbon, but the atoms vary by the number of neutrons.  These different versions are called isotopes, so basically isotopes are atoms of the same element with the same number of protons but differing numbers of neutrons.  The atomic mass of an atom is determined by the number of protons and neutrons it contains, so although carbon always carries the atomic number of 6, carbon has three different atomic masses: ¹²C, ¹³C and ¹⁴C.

Carbons with an atomic mass of 12 and 13 (¹²C, ¹³C) are stable whereas ¹⁴C (pronounced carbon 14) disintegrates radioactively over time.  This radioactive decay is what allows scientists to determine the age of organic materials up to about 40,000 years old. The discovery of natural radioactivity of ¹⁴C and its usefulness in determining age garnered Willard Libby the 1960 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.  Although the unstable isotopes such as ¹⁴C have their uses, we are concerned here with the stable isotopes.  Primarily ¹²C and ¹³C and ¹⁴N and ¹⁵N (nitrogen 14 and 15).  From these four stable isotopes, we can learn a lot about the diet of early man.

Nuclear weapons started adding ¹⁴C into the atmosphere in the mid 1900s, so the average ratio of ¹²C, ¹³C and ¹⁴C have change slightly.   Since ¹²C and ¹³C are stable, there has been virtually no change in the ratio between them over time.  But the ratio of the two has been found to differ from one carbon-containing material to another.  For instance, carbon dioxide generated from marine limestone contains more ¹³C than does carbon dioxide generated from burning wood.  In general, marine sources have greater amounts of ¹³C than do terrestrial sources.

Just to make it a little more complex, when researchers run samples through a mass spectrometer to determine the ¹³C/¹²C ratio, this ratio is compared to an agreed standard.  Then the difference between the sample and the standard is called the relative ¹³C content, which is designated by δ¹³C and measured in parts per thousand. (‰)  So if the sample has a ratio less than the standard by 5 parts per thousand, it is defined as having a δ¹³C value of −5‰.

Don’t worry about all the above – just remember when you see δ¹³C from now on, it refers to the ratio of ¹³C to ¹²C.  Don’t despair.  It will be easier as we go along.

Of the dry weight of bone, a little over 25 percent is collagen, and it is collagen that is the tissue of choice for stable isotope analysis.  Virtually all of the carbon and nitrogen in collagen comes from protein, and since most protein in the human body ultimately comes from protein in the diet, the carbon and nitrogen isotopes in the collagen reflect the protein sources in the diet.  And since the stable isotope composition of collagen turns over very slowly, the ratios of carbon and nitrogen stable isotopes reflect diet over about an eight to ten year period.

Stable isotopes of both carbon and nitrogen occur in varying proportions in different foods, and these proportions are passed along to the animals, including humans, that ate these foods.  By knowing the proportions of the stable isotopes in various foods, we can determine these foods by analyzing the stable isotopes in human collagen.

Researchers are able to extract valuable data from the collagen of ancient bones.  Unfortunately ancient bones are not thick on the ground, and since a part of the bone has to be destroyed to perform the stable isotope analysis, these analyses are not done by the thousands.  Each time a skeleton or group of skeletons is unearthed, Michael Richards and other stable isotope researchers try to snare a little piece of bone and go at it with the mass spectrometer.  This kind of work has been done for several decades now, and the results – though painstakingly obtained one specimen at a time – are accumulating, and there is now a fairly substantial body of data.  And this data is remarkably uniform in what it shows of the dietary habits of our ancient European ancestors.

The δ¹³C and δ¹⁵N figures reveal different information about the diet of Paleo man.  Since the ¹³C isotope is found in greater quantities in the marine environment than in the terrestrial, a larger δ¹³C indicates a diet higher in seafood protein whereas a lower δ¹³C is associated with a diet composed primarily of protein foods from the land.  Researchers have accumulated considerable data on the δ¹³C of seals and other such animals that spend their lives in the oceans consuming other marine life to compare with the data gleaned from bones of animals living on the land far from the sea.  By noting how the δ¹³C from ancient human bone compares to these extremes determines whether the human dined on protein from terrestrial or marine sources of from a combination of the two.

The δ¹⁵N tells a different story.  δ¹⁵N basically tells us where an animal or human is on the food chain.  Basic plant foods maintain a fairly constant δ¹⁵N value.  When animals, typically herbivores, eat these plant foods, the stable N isotope in the plant food tends to concentrate by anywhere from 5-8 percent in the collagen of the animal.  So if the collagen of an animal is found to have, say, a 7 percent greater δ¹⁵N than the local flora, one can say the animal was an herbivore.  Animals that are known herbivores, when analyzed, fit this spectrum.

Any animal, including man, that dines on herbivores will have collagen sporting a δ¹⁵N that is about 7 percent greater than that found in the herbivores that are the meal, a fact confirmed by stable isotope analysis of known carnivores.  A super carnivore (for lack of a better name) that dines on other carnivores and herbivores would have an even greater δ¹⁵N level.

So, δ¹⁵N pinpoints us on the food chain while δ¹³C tells us whether the protein we eat is surf or turf or both.

Now that we have a full understanding of the ‘magic phone booth’ of stable isotope analysis, let’s take a look at what the data show.

The data taken as a whole show the following:

Early man was a high-level carnivore. (As was his distant relative the Neanderthal, who lived contemporaneously with ancient man in Europe.)  A higher-level carnivore, in fact, than foxes, wolves and other known carnivores.  The earliest anatomically modern humans got most of their protein from animals of terrestrial origin.  As time passed and the populations of large game thinned due to heavy hunting by both humans and Neanderthals, the human position on the food chain didn’t change, but sources of protein changed from all terrestrial to more and more marine (which includes fresh water fish, mussels, clams, etc., all of which have a similar δ¹³C as animals from the ocean).  Irrespective of whether the protein came from the land or the sea, early man occupied a super-carnivore niche in pre-agricultural days.

Here are a couple of graphics of stable isotope studies done by Michael Richards – one on Neanderthals; the other on early modern man – I presented at the Ancestral Health Symposium back in August at UCLA.

As you can see from this slide, the Neanderthal subjects were ranked a bit above the wolf and fox on the predator/meat eating scale.  As Michael Richards commented in the paper cited above:

…the European Neanderthal diet indicates that although physiologically they were presumably omnivores, they behaved as carnivores, with animal protein being the main source of dietary protein.

When we take a look at another study evaluating ancient humans, we see much the same thing.

As compared to the Arctic fox, you can see that early humans were way off the chart to the right.  Michael Richard’s commentary:

We were testing the hypothesis that these humans had a mainly hunting economy, and therefore a diet high in animal protein.  We found this to be the case…

The bulk of the stable isotope studies show both Neanderthals and ancient humans were, at their robust cores, meat eaters to the max.  What the stable isotope studies don’t show, is how much carbohydrate these folks ate along with their meat.  (Actually some stable isotope studies do show what kind of carbs in the sense that they can differentiate between grains and non-grains, but since there were no grains in Paleo times, that isn’t a concern.) But since we do know that wolves and foxes are predators that consume mainly food of animal origin, and we know that early humans have an even more carnivorous stable isotope footprint, it seems unlikely that these humans would have consumed many calories from non-animal sources.  Remember, natural sources of protein are virtually always associated with fat (copious amounts of fat if the protein is from large game and the entire carcass is consumed), so it’s doubtful there would be either the capacity or the necessity for complementing the basic diet of fat and protein with much carbohydrate.  But, nonetheless, even if our ancient ancestors did eat some carbs they could scrounge while in season, the stable isotope evidence clearly demonstrates they were not vegetarians.

If you would like to read more about stable isotope analysis for determination of the diet of early man, a good place to start is with the publications of Michael Richards.

Other good sources for basic information:

Katzenburg MA (2008) Stable isotope analysis: a tool for studying past diet, demography, and life history. In Katzenburg MA, Saunders SR (eds) Biological Anthropology of the Human Skeleton. (Hoboken, Wiley-Liss) 2nd Edition pp 413-441

Schoeninger MJ, DeNiro M (1984) Nitrogen and carbon isotopic composition of bone collagen from marine and terrestrial animals.  Geochim Cosmochim Acta 48:635-639.

Schoeninger MJ (1995) Stable isotope studies in human evolution. Evolutionary Anthropology 4(3): 83-98.

van der Merwe, NJ (1982) Carbon isotopes, photosynthesis, and archeology. American Scientist 70: 596-606.

As anyone who has done it knows, getting started on a low-carb diet can be a little rough.  Not for everyone, but for some.  All too often these little front-end bumps in the road–coupled with the spirit of the times in which the well-intentioned but ignorant friends and relatives of low-carb dieters tell them their diet is going to croak their kidneys, clog their arteries and weaken their bones–can be enough to make many people abandon the most sincere efforts.  Drawing on my almost 30 years of experience treating patients using the low-carb diet, I can give some tips and tricks for dealing with these difficult early days.

Listen to your body?

The surest road to failure in the first few days of low-carb dieting is to listen to your body.  The whole notion of listening to your body is one of my major pet peeves.  In fact, just hearing those words makes me want to puke.  In my experience, they are usually uttered by females with moist, dreamy looks in their eyes, but not always.  I just read a ton of comments in recent Paleo blog post in which vastly more males than females actually wrote this drivel.

Listening to your body is giving the elephant free rein. If you’re three days into your stop-smoking program, and you listen to your body, you’re screwed.  If you’re in drug rehab, and you listen to your body, you’re screwed.  If you’re trying to give up booze, and you listen to your body, you’re screwed.  And if you’re a week into your low-carb diet, and you listen to your body, you’re screwed.  Actually, it’s okay to listen to it, I suppose, just don’t do what it’s telling you to do because if you do, you’re screwed.

Okay, end of rant.  I just had to get it out of my system.  You just can’t imagine how many times people who have tried low-carb diets then abandoned them early on have said those words to me.  Wait.  I’m about to get started again. Stop!

Low-carbohydrate adaptation

Probably the best explanation of low-carb adaptation (also called keto adaptation) was written by a Lt. Frederick Schwatka (pictured above left) over a hundred years ago.

When first thrown wholly upon a diet of reindeer meat, it seems inadequate to properly nourish the system and there is an apparent weakness and inability to perform severe exertive, fatiguing journeys. But this soon passes away in the course of two or three weeks.

Lt. Schwatka was a doctor, a lawyer, and an explorer of the Arctic, the Great Plains and northern Mexico.  The above quote comes from his book on the unfruitful search for the Franklin party in 1878.  (For all his experience and gifts, and understanding of low-carb adaptation, the good doctor listened to his own body a little too much and did himself in with an overdose of morphine at age 42.) You can read more about Lt Schwatka, low-carb adaptation, and his time with the Inuit in a post I wrote a few years ago.

The period of low-carb adaptation is that time between starting a low-carb diet and feeling great on a low-carb diet.  It can take anywhere from just a day or so to two or three weeks.  During this adaptation period people tend to fatigue easily, experience a slight lack of mental clarity and be tormented off and on by the unbidden lust for carbs that seems to rise up out of nowhere.  Why does this happen early on with a diet that ultimately works so well to increase exercise capacity, mental clarity, and feelings of satiation?

It happens because both your body and brain are going through a profound change in the way they get their energy.  You can’t run your car designed to burn gasoline on biodeisel…unless you install a converter.  Then you can.  We humans have the design for our carb to fat converters coded in our DNA – the low-carb adaptation period is simply the time it takes for the converter to be built and installed.

Our bodies are simply giant piles of chemicals heaped together in a human-shaped form.  Most of the chemicals will react with one another, but only extremely slowly.  If we didn’t have something to help these reactions along, life wouldn’t exist.  The helpers are called enzymes.  These enzymes – which are large folded proteins – catalyze all the chemical reactions that allow us to function.  Mix a couple of body chemicals together and you might have to wait twenty years or more for them to interact or combine in some way to form another body chemical product.  Throw the correct enzyme into the mixture, and you get a reaction in a fraction of a second.

When you’ve been on the standard American high-carb diet, you’re loaded with enzymes ready to convert those carbs to energy.  You’ve got some enzymes laying in the weeds waiting to deal with the fat, but mainly dealing with it by storing it, not necessarily burning it.  All the pathways to deal with carbs and their resultant blood glucose are well-oiled and operating smoothly.  Then you start a low-carb diet.  Suddenly, you’ve idled most of the enzyme force you have built to process the carbs in your diet while at the same time you don’t have a ready supply of the enzymes in the quantities needed to deal with your new diet.  It would be like a Ford automobile factory changing in one day into a plant that made iPads.  All the autoworkers would show up and be clueless as how to make an iPad.  It would take a while – not to mention a lot of chaos – to get rid of the autoworkers and replace them with iPad workers.  In a way, that’s kind of what’s happening during the low-carb adaptation period.

Over the first few days to few weeks of low-carb adaptation, your body is laying off the carbohydrate worker enzymes and building new fat worker enzymes.  Once the workforce in your body is changed out, you start functioning properly on your new low-carb, higher-fat diet.  The carbs you used to burn for energy are now replaced to a great extent by ketones (which is why this time is also called the keto-adaptation period) and fat.  Your brain begins to use ketones to replace the glucose it used to use pretty much exclusively, so your thinking clears up.  And the fatigue you used to feel at the start of the diet goes away as ketones and fat (and the army of enzymes required to use them efficiently) take over as the primary sources of energy.  Suddenly you seem to go from not being able to walk out to get the morning paper without puffing and panting to having an abundance of energy.  Because of this low-carb adaptation period, we never, ever counsel our patients to start an exercise program when they start their low-carb diets because a) we know they’ll be too fatigued to do it, and b) we know that in a short time they will start exercising spontaneously to burn off the excess fat on their bodies once the skids are greased, so to speak.

Anyone with good sense contemplating a low-carb diet would ask the question, How can I make this low-carb adaptation period as short as possible?  Good question.  Why would anyone want to prolong the agony?

The secret to making it shorter is in the second part of what Lt. Schwatka wrote about low-carb adaptation.  Immediately after the above quoted sentences, he follows with:

At first the white man takes to the new diet in too homeopathic a manner, especially if it be raw. However, seal meat which is far more disagreeable with its fishy odor, and bear meat with its strong flavor, seems to have no such temporary debilitating effect upon the economy.

In other words, the white man, used to flour, sugar, boiled meat and all the other staples of the mid 19th century American diet, balked at the consumption of raw meat, especially raw and malodorous seal and bear meat.  And so took it in tiny portions (in a  “homeopathic manner”) instead of going face down in it.  Compared to reindeer meat, both seal and bear meat are loaded with fat, which is why the consumption of those fattier meats didn’t produce the “temporary debilitating effect.”  In those who did eat the fattier meats, the low-carb adaptation period was very short or even non-existent.

Eat more fat

If you want to reduce the time you spend in low-carb adaptation, crank up the fat.  If you go on a high-protein, moderate-fat diet (Schwatka’s reindeer diet), your body will convert the protein to glucose via gluconeogenesis, so you’ll still have glucose to keep the glucose worker enzymes busy and will prolong the conversion to fat and ketones as your primary energy source.

So Rule Number One to reduce the time spent in low-carb adaptation purgatory is: Don’t be a wuss when you start your low-carb way of eating.  Keep the carbs cut to the minimum and load up on the fat. Eat fatty cuts of meat, cooked in butter or lard if you want, and force your body over to using the fats and ketones for energy as nature intended. I mean, don’t try to be noble by eating boneless, skinless chicken breasts – instead insert some pats of butter under the skin of a chicken leg and thigh before cooking, and wolf them with your fingers while the fat drips down your arms.  Do not trim the fat from your steaks – eat them from the fat side in.  If you leave anything on your plate, make sure it’s the meat and not the fat.  If you don’t already, learn to love bacon, and don’t cook it ‘til the fat is all gone: eat it wobbly.  Wallow in Mangalitsa lardo.  And whatever you do, for God’s sake, don’t listen to your body during this adaptation period or you’ll never cross the chasm between fat and miserable on your high-carb diet and slim, happy, energetic and low-carb adapted on the other side.

In my next post, I’ll give you the rest of the tips and tricks to get through low-carb adaptation that MD and I have learned in our combined 50 plus years of taking care of patients on low-carb diet. And I’ll include a recipe worthy of killing for that you can prepare to help you get through.

HAND FOR THE HOG

Well they tell me, but I can’t be sure
that a man’s best friend is a mangy cur.
I kinda favor the hog myself;
how about a hand for the hog.
Ya say a hog ain’t nothin’ but a porky thing,
little forked feet with a nosey ring,
Pickle them feet, folks,
how about a hand for the hog.

From Big River written by Roger Miller

“Okay,” said the lady with the soft Teutonic accent.  “Who’s going to kill the next one?”

“I guess I will,” I volunteered.  I grabbed the captive bolt pistol, loaded it with a 9 mm round, and headed to the hog enclosure where a couple of farm hands were already isolating my victim from the rest of the herd.

It was a damp, drizzly, cold, foggy late November morning in Branchville, NJ.  MD and I were attending a course in hog slaughter, butchery and meat curing at Mosefund Farm.  We had flown in from sunny Santa Barbara the night before, driven to our hotel in Newton, NJ and made the 20 minute drive to Branchville, arriving for our 7 AM introduction to the other participants (11 in all) in a tent set up to provide some minimal protection from the elements.

After introductions, we all proceeded to the hog enclosure where some 15 or so Mangalitsa hogs were penned.  These hogs had been fed out and readied for slaughter while another 150 or so Mangalitsa were roaming freely outside, rooting for acorns and wallowing in the mud.

Christophe and Isabell Weisner, the husband/wife team from Austria who led the course, are the driving force behind the resurgence of the Mangalitsa breed of hogs.  Mangalitsa were developed via selective breeding in Austria/Hungary in the early 1800s and have been around since, but dwindling in numbers because they are extreme lard-type hogs instead of meat hogs. (Heath Putnam, who met the Weisners in Austria several years ago brought the breed to the US.) Whereas meat-type hogs produce lean meat, lard-type hogs produce much fattier meat, well marbled, juicy and flavorful.  But with the tendency in the last few decades to move away from fat and toward leanness in hogs, the Mangalitsa fell out of favor.  Remember, pork has been advertised as the other white meat.  Hogs have been bread to be leaner and leaner over the past twenty or so years, and the taste of pork reflects that intent.  Tasting a bite of Mangalitsa pork, which is advertised as the other red meat – is a world different than the dry, tasteless pork most of us are used to.  Take a look at these Mangalitsa chops and compare them to what you find in your local market.

As we got with the days work, Christophe downed the first hog and took us all through the process from slaughter to dressing out the carcass.  I was amazed at how little things had changed since we slaughtered hogs when I was a kid on the farm many years ago.  The only real difference was that back then we shot the hogs with a rifle from afar whereas now the killing is done with a captive bolt pistol held to the hog’s forehead, which stuns the animal, allowing it to bleed out properly.

Before I get on with the rest of the story, I’ve got to say I learned a lot during my first day at Mosefund Farms.  First, I learned why they call New Jersey the Garden State.  It’s because it’s beautiful.  Having never been outside Newark or Camden in my previous visits to New Jersey, I had always assumed the entire state to be as presented on The Sopranos.  Believe me, it’s not.  Just 30 minutes from the Newark airport will find you in wooded rolling hills dotted with picturesque farm houses.  It looked to me more like New England than New England, where I have spent some time.

Second, I learned that hogs are as dumb as I remember them.  Having spent a lot of time on a farm and around farming as a kid, I had a hard time reconciling the notion that pigs were as smart as dogs, which is something I’ve heard from numerous sources.  The pigs with which I was familiar didn’t even come close, but, I thought, maybe I wasn’t that careful an observer as a youth.  Watching the pigs on Mosefund Farm, I can tell you, they aren’t particularly bright.  And there’s a reason for that.  As near as I can figure hogs are interested in four things: looking for food, eating, sleeping and getting pissed at other hogs.  (There’s also rutting but none were so engaged during my observations.)  That’s about it.  They don’t even notice when one of their pen mates is slaughtered before their eyes.  One time MD and I sailed to Santa Cruz, one of the islands off the coast from Santa Barbara.  We were anchored in a cove with a couple of other boats and about a million seagulls roosting up in the cliffs, when someone from one of the other sailboats shot one of the seagulls with a pellet gun.  The rest of the gulls went absolutely berserk and created a noise like nothing I’ve ever heard.  Obviously they – with their bird brains – knew something bad had happened to one of their flock and let the world know about it.  A hog gets killed about six feet away from a dozen others, all of which snuffle along totally unconcerned.

Why?  Because their brains are so small they don’t have the capacity for much of anything but the four activities listed above.  A certain amount of brain size is used for driving and regulating all of the physiological functions of living – anything left over can be used for thought.  The hogs we were slaughtering weighed between 250 and 350 pounds – about the same as a large human – yet their brains would fit in your hand.  Given the size of their brains as compared to their body size (and in comparison to our brains and body size), I can’t see how they have the excess brain capacity to even get pissed at other hogs, but they do.  But it does explain why they don’t really apprehend what’s happening to their fellow hogs and why they, themselves, go willingly when it’s their turn.

Third, it dawned on me that I might need to rethink the idea of free range.  Mosefund Farm is in a beautiful rural setting with a lot of room for hogs to roam.  The pen containing the most of the pigs was open to a large tree-studded hill where the animals were free to roam and snout around to their hearts’ content, but few of them chose to do so.  To be sure, there were a few roaming around, but the vast majority were crowded around the small enclosure with a concrete base that contained their feeding apparatus.  Others were lying in the mud right at the edge of the concrete.  And this when they could have been rooting for acorns on the hillside and lying in the deep leaves.

It made me realize that we humans are a lot like these hogs.  We, too, by choice live in houses or apartments when we could be free ranging it.  We do occasionally go out into the woods, but only for short periods of time, and we almost always come home to sleep.  Unless, of course, we’re camping, in which case we usually carry a smaller version of our home with us in the form of tents, campers or trailers.  The animals are no  different – we imagine they appreciate the great outdoors and would much prefer to spend their time trundling about the hills.  But the reality may well be that they, like we, may prefer to be in their own version of a snug home.

Finally, I learned that the Austrian way of dealing with these hogs is truly the Paleo way.  From snout to tail there wasn’t but about two large handfuls of hog that wasn’t used for something edible.  It’s truly amazing how delicious many of the parts are that you wouldn’t normally think about eating.  And we ate them all, and there wasn’t a one that I didn’t enjoy.  I’ll post about the various tidbits in future posts.

The three-day course was divided into a day of slaughter and dressing out, a day of butchering and a day of curing and sausage and lard making.  The latter is an event I really got into and will explain in much detail in a post to follow.

As I describe the slaughter and dressing process, I will include photos of the process.  These may seem somewhat grisly to those without a farming or surgical background, so if you’re squeamish, be forewarned.  If you’re going to eat meat, however, you should perhaps take a look at where it comes from.

I stepped into the enclosure as two farm hands used large red plastic shields that looked much like large cutting boards to pen my hog, who seemed to be pretty much unconcerned at the events taking place, against the fence.  I straddled him, pressed the device against his forehead, and pulled the trigger.  He dropped instantly without a sound.

Another participant stuck a knife in the hog’s throat; a third held a large stainless-steel bowl to catch the bright red blood, stirring it with his hand all the while to prevent coagulation.  This blood would be used to make delicious blood pudding.

After the hog had been exsanguinated, we grabbed him by the legs and carted him to the tub to be scalded.  During this procedure, the hog is rolled over continuously by hand using chains for leverage.  The almost boiling water loosens the hair, which needs to be removed in the next step.

The hair removal – and there is a ton of hair on a Mangalitsa (they’re not called Wooly Pigs for nothing) – is the most difficult and tedious part of the entire operation.  It requires a ton of elbow grease.  Every inch of the hog has to be scraped clean of hair with little funnel-shaped metal contraptions.  (We always used butcher knives on the farm, but our hogs weren’t anywhere near as hairy as these.)  As I was scraping away, all I could do was imagine my Paleolithic ancestors doing the same thing – and probably a lot better – with flint knives.

Once the hog was dehaired, we hung him by his feet for dressing, a process involving opening the hog’s belly and removing his GI tract from anus to stomach without spilling the contents.  This is more of a precision job than you might imagine, and one requiring a bit of a delicate touch at times.  Thank God my surgical training wasn’t all a waste.

Once the GI tract is removed en block you extract the lacy, weblike caul fat and separate the liver from the rest of the viscera and the gall bladder from the liver.  You throw the liver in a pan along with the kidneys and spleen, all of which will be consumed later.  Unbelievably, even the spleen is edible.  We had it as spleen on toast.  And the kidneys…  I couldn’t look at the kidneys without thinking of Joyce’s Ulysses and the main character Leopold Bloom, who heads out early in the book to Dlugacz’s, the pork butcher, to get kidneys for breakfast.

Bloom has just taken a fried pork kidney up to his wife, Molly, when she smells something burning.  She asks if he left something on the fire, and he remembers the other kidney.

–The kidney! he cried suddenly.

He fitted the book roughly into his inner pocket [he had been looking at a book when Molly noticed the burning smell] and, stubbing his toes against the broken commode, hurried out towards the smell, stepping hastily down the stairs with a flurried stork’s legs.  Pungent smoke shot up in an angry jet from the side of the pan.  By prodding a prong of the fork under the kidney he detached it and turned it turtle on its back.  Only a little burnt.  He tossed it off the pan on to a plate and let the scanty brown gravy trickle over it.

Cup of tea now.  He sat down, cut and buttered a slice of the loaf.  He shore away the burnt flesh and flung it to the cat.  Then he put a forkful into his mouth, chewing with discernment the toothsome pliant meat.  Done to a turn.  A mouthful of tea.  Then he cut away dies of bread, sopped one in the gravy and put it in his mouth.

Next came the heart and lungs, which required reaching deep into the carcass with the left hand to feel and identify the trachea while using the knife in the right hand to sever it, blind.  Once the heart and lungs were extracted, it was time to split the carcass in two.  (The heart and lungs were used for an absolutely delicious soup called, logically enough, heart and lung soup, which we made and devoured hungrily a couple of days later.  I’ll have photos and the recipe in a future post.)

After splitting the carcass into its two halves with a hacksaw – another arduous task – we set about removing the fat from the insides of the hog, the leaf lard.  This fat, which you can see glistening in the photo, is the inner body fat that pads the organs.  It is almost pure white and soft.

You separate the leaf lard from the carcass with your hands as MD is doing below and save it for rendering later.  Because of its delicateness and lack of taste, the leaf lard is primarily used for baking.

In true Paleo fashion, throughout the dressing process we cut off small parts of the hog and ate them raw.  The leaf lard was evanescent in that it kind of dissolved in your mouth like cotton candy.  The meat was delicious even raw.

Once the carcass was split and the leaf lard removed, the dressing process was pretty much finished.  We cut the heads off some of the carcasses and not on the others.  Ultimately, the heads were removed from all, but for whatever reason some were remove on the day of slaughter while others were removed on the day the hogs were butchered.

A tired and greasy MD preps liver under the glow of the vapor lights.

It was long after dark by the time we had prepped all the organs and hung the last carcass in a refrigerated truck and repaired to the tent where it had all begun early that morning.  We had a dinner of what else?  Mangalitsa.  We debriefed and prepared for the next day.

In the next post, I’ll talk about the butchering process, and in the final post about how the various parts are cooked and/or cured.

I’ll leave you with a video of Michael Clampfer, the executive chef at Mosefund Farm who put on our course, talking about Mangalitsa and how they’re raised, where they come from and how they’re different.  In this video you can see the beauty of New Jersey that so surprised me.

Click here to view the embedded video.

While on a recent whirlwind trip that included a stop in Seattle, I purchased a copy of Meatpaper at my favorite newsstand hard by the Pike Place market.  I always grab a copy of this magazine whenever I’m in Seattle because I can never find it anywhere else. Today I finally broke down and subscribed.

The quarterly Meatpaper was founded by a couple of vegetarians who made the conversion to meat eating a few years back.  (The founders say that when vegetarians cross over to the meat-eating dark side, bacon is the most common conversion food.)  It’s a difficult magazine to pigeonhole.  One would think it would revel in meat eating, and, in a way, it does.  But it does it in a daredevil sort of way, much in the way a magazine on skydiving might portray the thrill of that sport while still noting that certain death is only a chute failure away.  My take is that the writers and editors believe that meat-eating is a perilous undertaking, but one that many people choose for the taste despite the risks involved.  As anyone who had read this blog for anytime knows, my beliefs don’t quite fall that way.

The most recent issue contains a couple of articles I want to tantalize you with.  One that describes an almost unbelievably scrumptious food that I’ve yet to eat, at least knowingly, and another article I find deeply disturbing.

First, to the scrumptious.

In “Schmaltz Redux,” Daniella Cheslow briefly describes the history, disappearance and resurgence of a staple of Jewish cooking: schmaltz.  For those of you who don’t know what it is (and I was in that category until I read this article), schmaltz is basically chicken lard. Small pieces of chicken fat are cooked slowly until they resolve into an oil.  Throw in a few pieces of onion during the process, and you’ve got schmaltz, which can be used much as lard or duck confit.

To give you an example of what I mean about daredevil writing focusing not on just the delicious and nourishing virtues of schmaltz, but on the risks (non-existent, in my opinion) of consuming it.

“I love schmaltz.  But it’s very unhealthy, it’s all saturated animal fats.  I stopped eating schmaltz when my grandmother died in 1972,” said Susan Rosenthal, 59, a physician from East Brunswick, New Jersey. “I have a master’s degree in nutrition [a dead give away that the woman knows almost nothing about nutrition], so if I would have given my children schmaltz, that would have been shameful.”

Shameful indeed.

I’m sure this enlightened woman would have no qualms about giving her children all the olive oil they wanted.  But according to the USDA nutrient database of foods, olive oil contains 14 grams of saturated fat per 100 g whereas chicken fat contains 20 grams in the same amount. But 100 g is 3.5 ounces, and since schmaltz is used as a cooking oil, I suspect most people don’t eat much more than an ounce at a time, which would mean the schmaltz would give the children a little over 5 g of saturated fat while the olive oil would contain 4 g.  A difference of under two grams.  Not a huge difference in my opinion.  And since the schmaltz also contains a lot of both monounsaturated fat and polyunsaturated fat, it can’t really be characterized as “all animal saturated fats.”  But such misinformation is what comes from a master’s degree in nutrition.

The article goes on to detail a little more of the history of schmaltz and its resurgence but, at the end of the piece, once again the specter of early death from eating schmaltz rears its head.

To bring her article to a close, Cheslow offers a quote from David Sax, author of Save the Deli:

There’s something these days that’s sexy about it [making food from scratch].  I think [schmaltz] is coming back for that reason, and also people appreciate the taste, and they realize that it’s going to provide a richer experience.  Literally, figuratively, tastefully, and spiritually, it’s a heart stopper. [my italics]

Jesus wept.

I have elicited a promise from MD that when our brutal travel schedule over the next month and a half comes to a close, she will make us some schmaltz, an event I will dutifully record photographically.  Until then, however, you’ll have to make do with photos and instructions I found online.  The schmaltz in the photos in this blog post look great, but the uses the blogger makes of the schmaltz are not my cup of tea.

Now to the disturbing.

When you think Argentina, you think beef.  The Pampas, gauchos and endless herds of cattle.  For years Argentina has been one of the great beef reservoirs of the world.  But unless things change, that all may be coming to an end because the cattle are being displaced by a more profitable commodity: soy.

“Plowing the Pampas,” an article written by Nicholas Kusnetz, describes how many Argentinian ranchers are hanging up their bolas and picking up a plow.  Why?  Because soybeans are a vastly more profitable use for the land than raising cattle.

Kusnetz spoke about the switchover with scientists at a government research station in the Pampas.

Five years ago, one of the researchers told me, I would have been surrounded by pasture.  Now, nearly all the cows were crowded into feedlots.  The land was a tricolored patchwork as far as the eye could see: thousands of acres of deep green corn leaves, lighter green soybeans, and the straw-colored stubble of cornstalks that had been sprayed with Roundup to ready the field for soy.

At the station, two soil specialists showed me where they experiment with different crop rotations.  They have found that their most productive “rotation” is just the opposite: all Roundup Ready soy, all the time.  They don’t know why, they tell me, but it grows well.  They don’t see any reason to grow anything else.

“If I were a farmer,” I ask, “and I came to you for advice, what would you tell me?”

“Pure soy,” they say. “The more soy you have, the better your profits will be.”

The article goes on to describe how the economic realities are driving the ranchers to become soy farmers.  I don’t have a problem with this; you’ve got to expect that people will follow the money.  What does trouble me is that a crop with such a disastrous effect on health could be more valuable than cattle, which have been providing humans food for millennia.  But the herds are shrinking, and soon, if things don’t change, in a few years Argentina could become an importer of cattle.  An almost unthinkable proposition.

Should this disastrous end come to pass, I wonder if the grand ranches of the Pampas will still raise a few cattle along with thousands of acres of soybeans.  And will these few beef grazing in a small lot allow the farmers to continue to refer to themselves as ranchers despite the vast majority of their income coming from soy?  Probably.  I’ve seen it happen in Arkansas.

The delta lands east of Little Rock are made up for the most part of vast soybean growing operations.  The farmers who own and farm the land were descended from cotton farmers.  Cotton farming was the tradition, but economics won out, and most of the cotton fields were replanted in soy.  But old traditions die hard, and most of these farmers still keep a small patch of cotton on their land, and if asked what they do, they reply that basically they’re cotton farmers but they grow some beans on the side.

I suspect that if things continue in Argentina, many self-proclaimed ranchers will be growing a few beans on the side as well.

Sad. Very sad.

I would encourage you to subscribe to Meatpaper to keep up with what’s new and edgy in the world of meat.  I have no affiliation with the magazine nor do I get any click-through income if you subscribe.  I just like the idea of former vegetarians writing a magazine on meat and making a go of it.  And I want to help.

I’m going to start a new tradition with this post.  As anyone who reads this blog regularly knows, I read a lot.  People often ask me what I’m reading, so I’m going to start putting my current reading list at the bottom of the posts so those of you who are interested can keep up.

Survival of the Fattest by Stephen Cunnane

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.  (This isn’t a reread.  I’ve never read the thing, so I figured it was about time.)

The Plague by Albert Camus  (I’ve never read this one either, and it’s taking me forever to get through it.  But I’m almost finished.)

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson

The Genius in all of Us by David Shenk

The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest by Stieig Larsson (This one won’t be available in the U.S. until May 25.  A friend who visited me from the UK, where it has been available for months now, brought me a copy.)

Last Thursday was Thanksgiving, and in the words of Arlo Guthrie, we had “a Thansgivin’ dinner that couldn’t be beat.”  Along with all the traditional Thanksgiving fare at Casa Eades, we had dueling turkeys: one cooked the traditional way and one cooked sous vide.  And let me tell you, there was no comparison.  I’m not saying this just because we’ve got a sous vide cooker for sale, either.  I’ve never had turkey that tasted so good.  Because I’m not really a big fan of turkey, I eat turkey on Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving only.  I found our sous vide turkey to be so good, because it didn’t really taste like turkey.  At least not turkey cooked in the traditional way that I’m used to tasting.  It was like a different meat entirely.

MD has posted on how she cooked both turkeys on her blog and on the Sous Vide Supreme blog, giving precise recipes for both.  As you can see when you read the posts, cooking a turkey the traditional way is a major pain (both figuratively and literally).  It’s just not worth it when the taste and texture outcome is so much better using sous vide.  Especially since the sous vide method is so much easier and less time consuming. Vastly easier, in fact.

Lest you think this is another post cleverly designed to promote and sell the Sous Vide Supreme, let me disabuse you of that notion.  I’m going to show you how you can try the sous vide method at home without having to purchase a machine to see if it’s really for you.

Not long ago I wrote a post on how MD and I came up with the idea for what ultimately became the Sous Vide Supreme.  We wanted to try cooking sous vide, but there were no sous vide units available for the home cook, and we weren’t about to fork over $1500 for a commercial unit just to give the technique a try.  So, we cobbled together a Rube Goldberg kind of set up and tried it out.

I went back and pulled some of the photos I took of our contraption, which was made of a stock pot, a steaming basket turned upside down, and a candy thermometer.  And, the most important piece of equipment of all: constant attention.

The secret of cooking sous vide is the maintenance of a constant temperature over the cooking period.  Since most things are cooked sous vide at a significantly lower temperature than 212F/100C (the temp at which water boils), you can’t put the container directly on the stove even with the burner on its lowest setting.  The lowest setting is typically for simmering, which holds the temp right at the boiling point.  When we were trying to set up our first try, we experimented with several different ways to get the stock pot high enough up off the flame of our gas stove so that we could get the low temperatures we needed.  We found that the steaming basket (made to set inside a pan) turned upside down gave us the height we needed given the flame on our stove.

Sous vide cooking requires that the temperature be maintained precisely for long periods of time, sometimes up to 72 hours for, say, fall-off-the-bones beef ribs.  On the Sous Vide Supreme, you simply set the temp and walk away.  It’s not so easy with a homemade unit.  You’ve got to monitor it closely because temperature fluctuations of even a degree or two will make a difference in your outcome for many foods.  One of the ways you keep the temp where you want it is to use an important piece of equipment not pictured in the photo above: a pitcher of ice water.  You watch the temp carefully – you don’t have to stand there and watch it minute by minute – checking the candy thermometer every few minutes or so.  If the temp starts to drift up a little (the most common thing), you need to pour in a tiny bit of ice water to bring it down.

Since you’ve got to stay on top of it, it’s best that you limit your cooking in a homemade device to foods that don’t require a long time in the bath.  Which means you’ve got to stick with good-quality beef cuts such as rib eye, New York strips or tenderloin, chicken breasts, salmon, turkey breast, etc.  If you read MD’s post on cooking our Thanksgiving turkey, you’ll notice that she cooked the breast for 2.5 hours at 140F and the dark meat at 176F for eight hours.  If you’ve got a Sous Vide Supreme, you can stick the dark meat in, set it for 176F and get it out eight hours later.  If you’re cooking it using the homemade device, you’re going to be standing close by watching it for eight hours.  Since you probably don’t want to spend eight hours fiddling with it, I would avoid trying the dark meat of a turkey as your first outing in the homemade device.  Try the breast or, better yet, some salmon or even steak, lamb or pork chops.  You want to minimize the amount of time you have to remain vigilant in your temp watching.

Let me give you a couple of never-fail recipes so you can give it a try. And let me say that these were not the same recipes we used the first time we tried our rigged-up machine.  These are recipes that we’ve developed after a lot of bad experiences.  We suffered them so you don’t have to.

Chicken breast sous vide

The first thing you should try is chicken breast.  Why?  Because it’s easy and because the taste difference between a chicken breast cooked sous vide and one cooked any other way is so huge that you can really experience the virtue of cooking this way.

Take your chicken breasts (they can be skinless or with skins in place) and brine for for hours in an 8 percent brine.  You make an 8 percent brine by putting five tablespoons of salt in one quart of water.  Make your brine, put the breasts in, and put in the fridge for four hours.

Pull the breasts from the brine, rinse with fresh water and pat dry.

Put each breast into a food-grade plastic bag along with a big pat of butter.  (If you like it, you can add some cracked pepper or herbs to the bag at this stage)

Vacuum seal the bags with a Food Saver or one of the little hand vacuum pumps.  (You can even press all the air out with your fingers if you don’t have a pump of any kind, though you risk having your meat float and cook unevenly–and perhaps incompletely, which isn’t good with poultry–if any significant amount of air remains.)

Bring your sous vide machine to 140F and put the bags in.  Watch it like a hawk (assuming you’re using your homemade setup) to maintain that temp for about 1.5 hours.

Remove the bags, open and dump out the breasts.  They won’t look particularly appetizing, especially if they have been cooked with the skins on.  If the breasts are skinless, you can actually slice and eat just as they come out of the bag, and they’ll taste something like poached chicken, but infinitely better. But they are better yet if you sear them first to give them a little color and caramelized flavor.

To sear them, you need to put a stainless or cast iron skillet on the stove at the highest temperature you can get.  Gas or electric both work, just put the burner on its highest setting.

Leave the empty skillet on the hot burner for about ten minutes.

Add some clarified butter (ghee), which will sizzle and steam like crazy if the skillet is hot enough.

Put the breasts in the hot skillet and turn from side to side about every 30 seconds with tongs until you get a nice golden brown exterior.

Remove and eat.  You won’t be disappointed.

Steak sous vide

You can also try steak.  Here’s how we did it last night.

Get a nice cut of steak, a rib eye or porterhouse or something tender.  I wouldn’t use grass-fed beef for this experiment because you have to cook it too long to get it nice and tender.  If you use a regular grocery-store steak that isn’t too think – one inch, say – you can get by cooking for only 40 minutes to get it perfectly medium rare.

MD puts a sprinkling of sea salt on each side, a few turns of the pepper mill and a little garlic powder then puts each steak in a food-grade plastic bag and vacuum seals it.

Heat your water bath to 135F, put the bagged steaks in the bath, and watch carefully.

Pull the steaks out after 40 minutes and let them sit at room temperature for 5 or 10 minutes to drop their internal temperature just a bit.  Remove them from the bags and pat dry.  (The patting dry is actually an important part of the process.)

Do the deal with the skillet as described above for the chicken breasts.  Get it hot, add the clarified butter, then sear the steaks.

Sear them on each side no longer than about 20 seconds.  If you want, you can flip them around a bit from side to side.  You should even hit the edges of the steak with the hot skillet as well so that they are seared all around and the fat on the edges gets a nice color.

Serve immediately.

You can see from the photo on the right how the interior looks.  Perfectly medium rare from side to side with a tiny layer of caramelization on the surface.  Must be tasted to be believed.

Several of your fellow readers have used the sous vide method and posted on it.  You can read their posts here, here, here and here.

One of the nice (and sometimes aggravating) things about the sous vide method of cooking is its precision.  If you don’t like your steaks at 135F, try them at 130F or 140F.  Or even at 133F.  You can get as precise as you want.  The meat at each temperature will be a little different than when cooked a degree or two hotter or cooler.  It takes some diddling with and experimentation to find the temperature that works best for you.

Once you do, you can turn out steak after steak after steak or pork chop after pork chop perfectly cooked just as you like it.  The food will be more nutritious because nothing is lost in the cooking process, including the moisture, which is why the meat is so tender.

As anyone who regularly reads this blog can tell, I’ve been a bit hit and miss in posting lately.  The bride and I have been swamped with work on the Sous Vide Supreme project.  MD has been working with chefs to develop recipes along with creating a bunch herself; she has been editing a book on sous vide for the home cook written by yet another sous vide expert; she’s been posting on the Sous Vide Supreme blog (eggs the sous vide way); and, as you can see at the left, she’s been talking sous vide to anyone who will listen.  All this while she prepares for performing the Messiah in about two weeks.  I’ve been heavily involved in the business end of things, which is a never-ending task.  Plus, I’m the taster-in-chief.  Neither of us dreamed that this would turn into such a time-gobbling project after the development of the machine.  But it has.  It seems that we are spending twice as much time now working in some capacity on  Sous Vide Supreme than we ever did before – even when we were at our busiest.  I’m going to have to work harder on my time management if I expect to keep up with all the other projects – including this blog – that I have going.

Twitter

The sous vide time commitments have put a real hickey on my reading.  I’ve probably read less over the past four months than in any four month period of my life.  Instead of five or six books per week, I’m down to about two or three max.  I hate it.  I’m trying to keep up with my daily medical/scientific journal trawl, but that has even slacked off a bit.  When I do find something of interest, instead of blogging on it as I used to, I stick it up on my Twitter page.  I probably post 10-15 times per day on Twitter, so if you want to keep up on a moment-by-moment basis, follow me on Twitter.  If you have a problem thinking of yourself as a Twitter person, give it a try.  I dipped my toes in the Twitter waters with great hesitation, and now I love it.  I’ve found it extremely valuable because I find all kinds of new stuff daily.  You’ve got to be careful who you follow, however, or you can waste a ton of time.  If you get started, start following people who provide you with information you can use.  I avoid following people who do nothing but tell me what they ate for breakfast that day or what movie they’re going to see that night.  Sign up an give it a go. You don’t have to write anything (or tweet, as it’s called) if you don’t want to.  You can simply lurk and be the beneficiary of a ton of good info.   The Twitter people take you by the hand and get you squared away.  It takes all of about two minutes – if even that.  Literally.

Comments

I have fallen way, way behind on dealing with comments.  As I wrote a while back, I had to stop answering individual comments, and I’ve pretty much stuck to my guns on that.  Problem is, I had about three hundred comments stacked up before I started doing that.

When comments come in and I post them, they go up in by date.  So back when I was spending half my day dealing with them, I would often come across a comment that required some thought and a detailed answer.  If I didn’t have time to deal with it right then, I put it off until later.  Often when later came, I had 20 or 30 more that came in after the one requiring the time.  I didn’t want to answer those and put them up ahead of the one I hadn’t answered, so I simply didn’t deal with any of them.  Now I’ve got about 340 of them stacked up and it gives me heartburn whenever I even get on my blog administration screen.  The sad thing is that some of these comments go back months and months.

I’ve been wracking my brain trying to figure out what to do with them, and I’ve finally come to a decision.  I’m simply going to post them as they are.  I’m going to post about 30 of them per day until they’re all up.  Why not all at once?  Because I know many of you are set up to get comments emailed to you when I post them.  I don’t want to clot email accounts with 340 emailed comments all at once, especially since some of these comments are lengthy.  So, I dole them out over the next 10 days or so while keeping up with the new comments as they come in. I won’t start this process for a few days to get those of you who don’t want even 30 of them a day coming in to unsubscribe.

Since many of these hoarded comments contain very good questions, they are a trove of subjects for future blog posts.  As I post them, I’m going to reread them and clip those that would make for good posts into Evernote or my new favorite plaything DEVONthink that I’m just starting to feel my way along with. (See this great Steven Johnson (whom I follow on Twitter) article about the virtues of DEVONthink.)  After I’ve got these blogworthy comments in a format in which I can find them instantly, I’ll start working through them and posting.

Bloggers and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)

I don’t know how closely blog readers attended to the recent announcement by the FTC that they were going to start riding herd on bloggers, but the bloggers went ballistic.

Among its other duties, the FTC patrols the universe of advertising in this country looking for anyone or any company engaging in, as they term it, deceptive practices.  In other words, the FTC is on the prowl seeking out advertisers who make false claims in order to stop them and punish them.  Which all sounds good in the abstract, but in reality is a whole other story.

As I pointed out in an earlier blog, it’s a valuable exercise to read Kevin Trudeau’s first book to see how the FTC operates.  The nutritional and health information he presents is total garbage, but his description of the practices of the FTC is right on the money. (I’ve got to admit that some of the nutritional and health information presented in Trudeau’s first book (the only one I’ve read) is accurate, but I write that off to the law of averages.  He presents so much information that odds are some of it just happens to be true.  So, if you read the book and come across something that is nutritionally accurate, don’t write me about it.  I know a few things are there, but not enough to justify reading the book other than the first part, which is an excellent treatise on the FTC.)

The FTC has the power to absolutely ruin anyone and/or any company it chooses to go after.  If you read the first part of Trudeau’s book, you’ll see how.

So, the FTC opined that they planned on monitoring bloggers to see if they disclosed the fact that they were paid to do reviews on products.  Apparently, many bloggers make money by doing paid reviews on products without disclosing such, and the FTC doesn’t like it.

I’ve never reviewed products for pay, but I have read enough about it to know how it works.  Companies provide bloggers products, then pay these bloggers for reviews of the products.  I guess the fact that bloggers are given the products and possibly paid for the reviews as well might induce them to write positive reviews of products that they thought sucked.  And I assume that’s what the FTC is concerned about.

The FTC’s actions certainly got the blogosphere in an uproar.  So much so, in fact, that the FTC started to crawdad, which I never thought would happen.  Just goes to show that if you turn the spotlight of public awareness on even the most aggressive and powerful of all government agencies, you can get results.

Not that I fear the FTC on this (at least not at this point), I’ll go ahead and disclose where I get dinero from this blog.  Virtually all of the money that comes to me through the blog comes from readers buying products through Amazon.com.  When they buy a book I recommend or go through one of the book thumbnails of Protein Power or the 6-Week Cure up at the top right or any of our other books I have up on the site, I get a little bit of lucre for it.  And I get a little more if they buy anything else after entering Amazon through one of the portals in this blog.  In a good month, it’s enough to cover my hosting and web guy expenses; in a bad month (as this one is turning out to be), it’s about enough to cover the hosting of the site and maybe an hour or so of the web guy time.

Google ads

I get a little income from Google ads, but I’m trying to get them off the site.  I’ve had several web guys working on the site over the years, and I guess code for these Google ads is stuck all over the place.  I get rid of them in once place, it seems they pop up somewhere else.  When I had Google ads everywhere, I made about $150 per month, which, in my opinion, isn’t enough to justify tacky-ing up the site with a zillion ads.  Plus, I don’t have time to go through and spend time trying to figure out which ads to block.  Many people, I’ve learned, don’t realize that these ads aren’t part of the site, and they wonder why, when I’ve just spent 2000 words bashing statins, an ad for a statin pops up.

A while back I was having lunch with Mark Sisson of Mark’s Daily Apple when he asked me what kind of a deal I had going with Atkins Nutritionals.  I told him I didn’t have any kind of deal going with them whatsoever.  I asked him why he asked.  He told me that he gets my blog posts by email, and that at the bottom of each one is a banner ad from Atkins.  I was embarrassed to say that I didn’t even know you could get the posts by email and that I didn’t have a clue why the Atkins ads were there.  I went home and pulled up the blog (I usually never look at the actual blog – only the admin page), and sure enough, there was a way I could get the posts by email.  I signed up to get my own posts, wrote one, and sure enough, here it came with an Atkins ad at the bottom of it.  I thought I had it all taken care of, but I just looked moments ago and there is still a banner ad at the bottom of the emailed post.  I’ve added it once more to the list of things to have my guy deal with when I get with him on Monday.

Book recommendation

While on the subject of Amazon.com, books and book recommendations, I might as well recommend one.
I finished a terrific book not long ago called A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers. As the title implies, this is a treatise about the fall of the House of Lehman, one of the country’s oldest investment banks, and is written by one of the vice presidents who names names and points the finger.

Not only is this book chock full of great information about how Lehman Bros, Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs and others operate, it is extremely well written.  The ‘author’ realized he didn’t have the skills to tell his own story in a readable manner, so he hired a writer.  But he didn’t just go out and hire one of the non-fiction write-for-hire folks that are swarming around out there, he hired Patrick Robinson, a best-selling thriller writer.  As a consequence, the book is absolutely gripping. Not only do you learn a ton about how the financial crisis developed, you learn it in a gripping, racing-through-the-pages fashion.  You’ve heard people say about certain books that they read like a novel.  Well, this one does.  I had real trouble putting it down.

After reading this book, you will know exactly why we’re in the boat we’re in now and will be stupified at the mismanagement at the top.  As I read through and learned about the perfidy of Moody’s, Standard & Poors, and the other financial rating outfits that gave the most worthless financial instruments triple A ratings, I was stunned that these companies hadn’t been prosecuted.  Without their complicity, the whole house of cards couldn’t have been erected because no one would have purchased the products.  I was interested to read in today’s Financial Times that at least  Ohio is going after them.  I suspect Ohio won’t be the last.  According to the author, these companies made billions while failing to do their due diligence before passing out AAA ratings like they were candy at Halloween.

Not long after I read the book, I came upon a piece by Calvin Trillin in the editorial section of the New York Times that summed up the situation nicely.  The problem was the enormity of the amounts of money waiting to be made drew smart people to Wall Street.  A funny but insightful short essay.

After you read the book and Trillin’s piece, take a look at this video I posted about a year ago.  It will make it all that much more funny.  And sad.

The 6-Week Cure blog

All I can say is that it’s about up.  And apologies for not having it up sooner.  I hope we’ll have it operational this week and populated with a few posts.

Another vegetarian myth

I wrote in a bookish post (or maybe in answer to a comment on a bookish post – I can’t remember) a while back that I had read most of the mystery novels out there and was looking for a new series to sink my teeth into.  Someone suggested the DI Charlie Priest mysteries by Stuart Pawson.  I got one and liked it, so I’ve been motoring through those as time allows.

The last one I read was Deadly Friends about a murdered doctor, a serial rapist and a host of other minor villains. At a point about midway through, DI Priest and one of his underlings are walking around scoping out a pharmacy prior to entering to get info about the dead doctor.  All these books – at least the four or five I’ve read so far – are written in the first person, so everything is from Priest’s perspective.  Here’s what he says:

We completed our circuit of the block.  Passing the back of the butcher’s I tried not to inhale and wished I had the willpower to go vegetarian.  Trouble is, I like my steaks.

AAARRRGGGHHHH!  Even in mystery novels I’m being reminded of how deep the vegetarian mantra has wormed its way into our collective brains.  How many times have we all heard variations on this theme?  One of the ideas the vegetarian movement has managed to get firmly implanted in the minds of many is that vegetarianism is a more healthful way to eat.  I’ve heard numerous people wistfully say they really would like to be able to follow a vegetarian diet because it’s so much more healthful, but they just like meat too much to do it.

The truth is, as we all know, that vegetarian diets are decidedly less healthful than diets containing animal protein. But the great unwashed masses don’t seem to have figured this out.

But I’ve got to hand it to the vegetarian brigade: they’ve managed to successfully propagandize most of the population.  And they’ve done so without any real science behind them.  The most they can point to is a sheaf of observational studies that don’t prove squat.

The low-carb/Paleo movement, on the other hand, is producing more data almost daily that a lower-carb, higher-fat, higher-protein diet is infinitely better for a majority of the population.  But, we don’t get the message out as well as the other side does, I suppose.  I went to a Borders Books the other day and found an entire collection of free booklets written for children telling of the horrors of factory farming and encouraging them to go vegetarian.

We are starting to make some inroads into this nonsense, however, with the help of some former vegetarians who have seen the error of their ways.  If you haven’t read Lierre Kieth’s book yet, add it to your Christmas list.

I’m girding my loins for all the hostile comments I’m sure to get from angry vegetarians.  These comments will be from vegans telling me how healthy they are and how many miles they can run and how they could kick my butt in any endeavor I might wish to engage them in.  And they’ll reference the idiotic China Study and a host of other meaningless observational junk.  But wait.  I don’t have to gird my loins.  I’m not dealing with these comments any more.  I’m just posting them as they come in.  Give it your best shot.

To see under what conditions our genome developed, read on.

The hunter-gatherer lifestyle

Just to wrap this long, meandering post up, I want to end with a link to a great article in the December 2009 National Geographic.  And to bring this post full circle, I’ve got to let you know that I found this article on Twitter.  I wouldn’t have discovered it otherwise. At least not as quickly as I did.

The long article is about the Hadza who follow a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in remote Tanzania.  The area the Hadza roam is being encroached upon by all kinds of agricultural and tourist businesses, and the author doubts these indigenous people can maintain their lifestyle for much longer.
The men hunt and the women gather.  The Hadza went on a nighttime baboon hunt and took the author along.  His account of the hunt makes for a riveting read.  Once killed, the Hadza haul the baboon back to what serves as a camp and prepare to serve it up.  I’ll leave you with the author’s description of the meal.

Ngaola skins the baboon and stakes out the pelt with sharpened twigs. The skin will be dry in a few days and will make a fine sleeping mat. A couple of men butcher the animal, and cuts of meat are distributed. Onwas, as camp elder, is handed the greatest delicacy: the head.

The Hadza cooking style is simple—the meat is placed directly on the fire. No grill, no pan. Hadza mealtime is not an occasion for politeness. Personal space is generally not recognized; no matter how packed it is around a fire, there’s always room for one more, even if you end up on someone’s lap. Once a cut of meat has finished cooking, anyone can grab a bite.

And I mean grab. When the meat is ready, knives are unsheathed and the frenzy begins. There is grasping and slicing and chewing and pulling. The idea is to tug at a hunk of meat with your teeth, then use your knife to slice away your share. Elbowing and shoving is standard behavior. Bones are smashed with rocks and the marrow sucked out. Grease is rubbed on the skin as a sort of moisturizer. No one speaks a word, but the smacking of lips and gnashing of teeth is almost comically loud.

I’m ravenous, so I dive into the scrum and snatch up some meat. Baboon steak, I have to say, isn’t terrible—a touch gamy, but it’s been a few days since I’ve eaten protein, and I can feel my body perking up with every bite. Pure fat, rather than meat, is what the Hadza crave, though most coveted are the baboon’s paw pads. I snag a bit of one and pop it in my mouth, but it’s like trying to swallow a pencil eraser. When I spit the gob of paw pad out, a young boy instantly picks it up and swallows it.

Onwas, with the baboon’s head, is comfortably above the fray. He sits cross-legged at his fire and eats the cheeks, the eyeballs, the neck meat, and the forehead skin, using the soles of his sandals as a cutting board. He gnaws the skull clean to the bone, then plunges it into the fire and calls me and the hunters over for a smoke.

Meat eating made us human. The anthropological evidence strongly supports the idea that the addition of increasingly larger amounts of meat in the diet of our predecessors was essential in the evolution of the large human brain.  Our large brains came at the metabolic expense of our guts, which shrank as our brains grew.

In April 1995 an article appeared in the journal Current Anthropology that was an intellectual tour de force and, in my view, an example of a perfect theoretical paper.  “The  Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis” (ETH) by Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler demonstrated by a brilliant thought experiment that our species didn’t evolve to eat meat but evolved because it ate meat.

The ETH is an example of the kind of scientific detective work I love.  In fact, this paper is one of my all time favorites.  (An amazing bit of trivia about this paper is that it almost didn’t get published.  I had the opportunity to talk with Leslie Aiello at a meeting a few months ago, and she told me the journal was reluctant to publish the paper because the editors thought it too technical for their readers.  I suspect they also found it too controversial.  Now I’m sure they’re glad they published because I would imagine it is the most cited of all the papers ever published in Current Anthropology.)  The authors methodically lay the scientific foundation for their experiment, then, like Sherlock Holmes, progress step by step, accumulating little pieces of data until they reach the ineluctable conclusion that meat eating made us human. I would like to walk us all through their thought processes as laid out in their brilliant paper.

Let’s start with the problem.

For years anthropologists have speculated about why humans developed such large brains so quickly – from softball size to what we have now in just a short 2 million years.  Below is a graphic showing hominid/human brain growth over time.

A number of hypotheses have arisen to answer this question.  Some say that humans developed large brains because they had to contend with problems involving group size, others posit that large brains came about as a consequence of developing complex foraging strategies, others yet say the development of a social or Machiavellian  intelligence was the driving factor.  And even others say that the complexities of learning to hunt expanded brain size.

Any or all of these hypotheses may be valid, but the problem isn’t really as much a matter of why as it is a matter of how.  Other primates deal with groups and have complex foraging strategies; and many deal with social problems within their groups, and some even hunt.  Yet they still have small brains.  (Granted, their brains are larger for their size than those of other mammals, but primates sport small brains as compared to humans.)  How did the human brain grow?

This isn’t an easy question to answer because of the thermogenics involved.  Brains consume a large amount of fuel and, consequently, throw off an enormous amount of heat for their size.  The metabolic rate of brain tissue is nine times that of the average of  the metabolic rate of the rest of the body.

So what? you may say.  So we’ve got a big, hot-running, energy-burning brain.  What difference does that make?  It’s reflected in our overall metabolic rate, right?  Well, sort of, and therein lies the crux of the problem.  As we will see below, our total metabolic rate – even with our huge brains – is the same as that of any other animal our size. Or to say it another way, animals our size with much smaller brains have the same metabolic rate that we do with our huge brains.  This fact was the starting point for the authors of the ETH.  So let’s start there as well.

In keeping with a great scientific tradition, Aiello and Wheeler were able to see what they saw because they stood on the shoulders of giants who came before them.  In their case the giant was Max Kleiber, an animal physiologist working at the University of California at Davis, who published a groundbreaking paper in 1947 and a scholarly text titled The Fire of Life in 1961.  Kleiber’s work involved the meticulous measurement of the metabolic rates of numerous animals, including humans.  As he plotted the various metabolic rates, he discovered an extremely strong correlation between the mass of an animal and its metabolic rate.  Kleiber found that this relationship held constant across numerous species.  His October 1947 paper in Physiological Reviews simply titled “Body Size and Metabolic Rate” was a classic.  By using the equations Kleiber worked out, the metabolic rate of virtually any animal could be determined simply by knowing the animal’s body size.  Or, as Kleiber put it in the paper:

Does a horse produce more heat per day than a rat or do some rats produce more heat than do some horses?  Almost anybody who understands what is meant by “heat production per day” will not hesitate to give the correct answer and will even be convinced that the daily rate of heat production of men or sheep is greater than that of rats, but smaller than that of horses.  Thus most people (among those who understand the question) are convinced that in general the bigger  homeotherms produce more heat per day than the smaller homeotherms, that, in other words, the metabolic rate of homeotherms is positively correlated to body size.

The answer to the next question: “does a horse produce more heat per day per kilogram of body weight than a rat?” requires some biological training.  Most biologists, however, will not hesitate to answer that the rate of heat production per unit body weight of the big animal is less than that of the small animal.

The positive correlation between metabolic rate and body size, and the negative correlation between metabolic rate per unit weight and body size, establish two limits between which we expect to find the rate of heat production [basal metabolic rate] of a horse if we know the rate of heat production of a rat.  We expect the metabolic rate of the horse to be somewhere between that of the rat, and that of the rat times the the ratio of horse weight to rat weight, provided of course that we do not regard these two correlations as simply accidental.

If we are firmly convinced that the metabolic rate of horses, and other homeotherms of similar size, is never outside these two limits, then we admit to recognize a natural law between body size and metabolic rate.

This natural law, carefully calculated by Kleiber, is now known as Kleiber’s law.  Below is Kleiber’s law graphed out by him as it appeared in his seminal paper.  And this is exactly as it appeared in the journal, but with the addition here of colors for better legibility.  Since their was no Excel nor graphics software in Kleiber’s time, the graph was hand drawn and appeared in the pages of Physiological Reviews as such.  How times have changed.

As you look along the line running from lower left to upper right, you can find rats and horses and a host of other mammals including humans.  Over the years, mammals that Kleiber didn’t have the opportunity to work on have been measured, and they all fit nicely along Kleiber’s line, following Kleiber’s law.  Because of this tight correlation, Kleiber’s equations can be used to precisely estimate the metabolic rate of any animal just by knowing its size.

Aiello and Wheeler used Kleiber’s law as the jumping off point for their grand thought experiment.

Since all animals measured have conformed to Kleiber’s law, Aiello and Wheeler postulated that animals now extinct – including our human and pre-human predecessors – would have fallen along the same line. Using skeletal remains paleontologists have been able to calculate body sizes of extinct animals along with pre-Homo and early-Homo species.  Then using Kleiber’s law, it is possible to closely estimate the metabolic rates of these creatures.  And here’s where it gets interesting.

According to Kleiber’s law, an australopithecine weighing 80 pounds would have the same metabolic rate as a human weighing 80 pounds despite the disparity in brain size between the two.  The much larger brain of the human would have 4-5 times the metabolic rate of the brain of the australopithecine, yet would have the same overall metabolic rate.  What gives?

That’s precisely what the authors of “The Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis” wondered.

Because the human brain costs so much more in energetic terms than the equivalent average mammalian brain, one might expect the human BMR [basal metabolic rate] to be correspondingly elevated.  However, there is no significant correlation between relative basal metabolic rate and relative brain size in humans and other encephalized animals.

Where does the energy come from to fuel the encephalized brain?

The authors postulated a solution.

One possible answer to the cost question is that the increased energetic demands of a larger brain are compensated for by a reduction in the mass-specific metabolic rates of other tissues.

In other words, if one organ – the brain, for example – is chewing up a lot of energy and contributing a disproportionate amount of the basal metabolic rate for the animal as a whole, then maybe another organ or group of organs are consuming less energy to compensate.  The heart, the kidneys, the liver, the skeletal muscles, the GI tract – all consume energy and contribute to metabolic rate.  Maybe one of these organs became smaller as the brain became larger over time.

We can hone our analysis a little finer if we begin to look at an energy-balance equation, but an energy-balance equation of a different kind.  I have written a number of times in this blog about the energy-balance equation that applies to weight loss: change in weight equals energy in minus energy out.  That is not the equation we’ll be talking about here.  The other energy-balance equation says that the total metabolic rate is the sum of all the metabolic rates of the various organs and tissues in the body.  If you add the metabolic rates of the kidneys, the heart, the brain, the muscles, the digestive tract and so on together, you will get the total metabolic rate of the body, which makes sense because it is the sum of the parts.

Total BMR = brain BMR + heart BMR + kidney BMR + GI tract BMR + liver BMR + the remainder of the body’s tissues.

The authors of the ETH set out to look at the metabolic rates of the various organs.  By a diligent search of the literature, they found that along with the brain, the the heart, the kidneys, the liver and the gastro-intestinal tract account for the vast majority of the total BMR.  They dubbed these organs as ‘expensive tissues’ because they consume a large amount of energy as compared to their size.  (Surprisingly, muscle mass doesn’t contribute all that much to the total metabolic rate (skin and bone contribute even less), which gives the lie to that old notion — that I, myself, have fallen prey to — that replacing fat with muscle increases metabolism significantly.)

Aiello and Wheeler reasoned that if the total metabolic rate stayed the same while the energy-expensive brain grew over time some other expensive tissue had to get smaller.  There could be no other solution.

But which of the expensive tissues got smaller?

Aiello and Wheeler examined the data on the metabolic rates and sizes of the various expensive tissues and learned that for a 65 kg primate, the heart, the kidneys, and the liver were approximately the same size as those of a 65 kg (143 lb) human.  The greater metabolic rate of the large human brain was compensated for by a GI tract significantly decreased in size.  It turns out that the GI tract of a 65 kg human is just a little over half the size of the GI tract of a similar sized primate.

The combined mass of the metabolically expensive tissues for the reference adult human is remarkably close to that expected for the average 65-kg primate, but the contributions of individual organs to this total are very different from the expected ones.  Although the human heart and kidneys are both close to the size expected for a 65-kg primate, the mass of the splanchnic organs (the abdominal organs) is approximately 900 g less that expected.  Almost all of this shortfall is due to a reduction in the gastro-intestinal tract, the total mass of which is only 60% of that expected for a similar-sized primate.  Therefore, the increase in mass of the human brain appears to be balanced by a almost identical reduction in size of the gastro-intestinal tract.

Below is a graphic from the ETH showing the sizes of the different organs as based on predictions from a 65-kg primate and the observed size in humans.

So we know that as humans evolved larger brains they simultaneously co-evolved smaller guts in order to maintain a set BMR.  And this is where the story gets interesting. Why?  Because

the logical conclusion is that no matter what is selecting for brain-size increase, one would expect a corresponding selection for reduction in the relative size of the gut.

Some researchers believe that increasingly complex activities drove the brain to enlarge.  As the authors of the ETH summarized it:

The relationship between relative brain size and diet is often mentioned in the literature on primate encephalization and is generally explained in terms of the different degrees of intelligence needed to exploit various food resources.  For example, [some] have argued that a relatively large brain and neocortical size correlates with omnivorous feeding in primates , which requires relatively complicated strategies for extracting high-quality foodstuffs.  Alternatively, [others] have suggested that frugivores have relatively large brain sizes because they have relatively larger home ranges than folivores, necessitating a more sophisticated mental map for location and exploitation of the food resources.

But it doesn’t matter whether our brains got big because our predecessors were socialized, developed complex foraging strategies, lived in and had to deal with groups or were skilled hunters, in order to obey Kleiber’s law, something had to force our guts to get smaller at the same time.  What could that be?

According to Aiello and Wheeler, it was increased diet quality that allowed the gut to get smaller while still absorbing the necessary nutrients to fuel the metabolism.  As they put it

The results presented here [in the ETH] suggest that the relationship between relative brain size and diet is primarily a relationship between relative brain size and relative gut size, the latter being determined by dietary quality.  This would imply that a high-quality diet is necessary for this encephalization, no matter what may be selecting for that encephalization.  A high-quality diet relaxes the metabolic constraints on encephalization by permitting a relatively smaller gut, thereby reducing the considerable metabolic cost of this tissue.

What the authors are saying is that it doesn’t matter how much more brain power was required, the brain couldn’t enlarge without something else giving.  What obviously gave was the size of the GI tract, and the only way a smaller GI tract could provide the fuel for the body was to have a higher-quality diet. How did the our most ancient relatives the early hominids increase the quality of their diets?

A considerable problem for the early hominids would have been to provide themselves, as large-bodied species, with sufficient quantities of high-quality food to permit the necessary reduction of the gut.  The obvious solution would have been to include increasingly large amounts of animal-derived food in the diet.

Increasing the amount of easily-digested food of animal origin allowed us to shrink our guts while expanding our brains.  Had we remained on a diet high in vegetation, we would no doubt not have been able to expand our brains irrespective of how much more thinking those brains would have needed to do.  It just wouldn’t have been possible to do so without violating Kleiber’s law.

Take the gorilla, for example, almost pure vegetarians that spend their entire ‘working’ day foraging and eating, which they have to do to get enough calories to maintain their enormous bulk.  They have large guts and pay for it by having small brains.  Even smaller than that of our most primitive ancestors, the australophthecines.

Gorilla has one of the lowest levels of encephalization of any haplorhine primate, and the much higher level of encephalization of all the australopithecines suggests a diet of significantly higher quality than that of this genus.

Which makes sense when you consider that carbon 13 isotope analysis has shown that Australopithecus africanus (the species that came right after Lucy) consumed meat.  As you go up the lineage from Australopithecus and through Homo, you find that more and more meat was consumed the higher up the tree you go.

It’s easy to see that, as compared to humans, chimps and gorillas have large, protuberant bellies, which supports the fact that they have larger GI tracts, but what about our ancient ancestors.  All we have to go on are skeletal remains, which show nicely that their heads (and brains) were much smaller than ours, but what about their guts?  How do we really know their guts were larger?  According to Kleiber, they would have to be, but how to we really know they were?

The large gut of the living pongids gives their bodies a somewhat pot-bellied appearance, lacking a discernible waist.  This is because the rounded profile of the abdomen is continuous with that of the lower portion of the rib cage, which is shaped like an inverted funnel, and also because the lumbar region is relatively short (three to four lumber vertebrae).

The drawing below from the ETH shows the inverted-funnel shape of the ribcage of the chimpanzee on the left.  You can mentally draw the lines downward from these ribs and envision the pot-bellied look of the abdomen that these primates evidence.  Looking at the image on the right, you can see that Australopithecus afarensis (Lucy’s species) has the same inverted-funnel shaped rib cage, indicating a large belly and a low-quality diet.

The drawing in the middle is of a modern human.  If you extrapolate the lines down from the human rib cage, you can see that they lead to a more narrow waist.  Makes you think more of a lean, rangy wolf or other slim-waisted carnivore, whereas the other two don’t.

The authors conclude:

If an encephalized animal does not have a correspondingly elevated BMR [which according to Kleiber, it can’t], its energy budget must be balanced in some other way.  The expensive-tissue hypothesis suggested here is that this balance can be achieved by a reduction in size of one of the other metabolically expensive organs in the body (liver, kidney, heart of gut).  We argue that this can best be done by the adoption of a high-quality diet, which permits a relatively small gut and liberates a significant component of BMR for the encephalized brain.  No matter what was selecting for encephalization, a relatively large brain could not be achieved without a correspondingly [sic] increase in dietary quality unless the metabolic rate was correspondingly increased.

At a more general level, this exercise has demonstrated other important points.  First, diet can be inferred from aspects of anatomy other than teeth and jaws.  For example, an indication of the relative size of the gastro-intestinal tract and consequently the digestibility of the food stuffs being consumed is provided by the morphology of the rib cage and pelvis.  Second, any dietary inference for the hominids must be consistent with all lines of evidence.  Third, the evolution of any organ of the body cannot be profitably studied in isolation.  Other approaches to understand the costs of encephalization have generally failed because they have tended to look at the brain in isolation from other tissues.  The expensive-tissue hypothesis profitably emphasizes the essential interrelationship between the brain, BMR, and other metabolically expensive body organs.

I hope you are now armed with enough knowledge to be able to see through these articles and/or charts that are all too common showing how the GI tract of humans is closer to that of a gorilla than it is to that of a cat or some other carnivore.  It seems to me that Aiello and Wheeler have pretty thoroughly demolished the notion that humans are actually designed by the forces of natural selection to be vegetarians.  Based on the data and the argument they present, it is actually the opposite:  we evolved to be meat eaters.

It was our gradual drift toward the much higher quality diet provided by food from animal sources that allowed us to develop the large brains we have.  It was hunting and meat eating that reduced our GI tracts and freed up our brains to grow.  As I wrote at the start of this post, the evidence indicates that we didn’t evolve to eat meat – we evolved because we ate meat.

Lierre Keith had it right in The Vegetarian Myth:

The wild herds of aurochs and horses invented us out of their bodies, their nutrient-dense tissues gestating the human brain.

If we evolved because we ate meat, why would we want to stop now?

Note: I found the full text of this article available on Scribd.  If it gets taken down, let me know, and I’ll put it up here.  I’m just trying to save space on my server.

Painting at top: Monkey Before Skeleton by Gabriel Cornelius von Max

Felis silvestris lybica Photo by Noorderlicht

When you get right down to it, house cats are pretty useless. If you’re overrun with mice, cats can be a help, but that’s pretty much it.  They are fiercely  independent and, unlike dogs, which have a want-to-please-their-master nature, cats don’t really give a flip.  They don’t fetch, they don’t roll over, they don’t sit up and beg, and, for the most part, they don’t come when called. If you had a kid who acted like a cat, you would probably put him/her up for adoption. So why are they the most popular house pet in the world today?

Scientists using DNA analysis have determined that virtually all house cats alive today are descended from a specific line of wild cats, Felis silvestris lybica, that are indigenous to the Middle East.  Although there are a number of lines of wildcats throughout the world, mitochondrial DNA analysis of all breeds of house cats appears to indicate they all descended from this one branch of the wildcat family.

With the geography and an approximate age of the initial phases of cat domestication established, we could begin to revisit the old question of why cats and humans ever developed a special relationship. Cats in general are unlikely candidates for domestication. The ancestors of most domesticated animals lived in herds or packs with clear dominance hierarchies. (Humans unwittingly took advantage of this structure by supplanting the alpha individual, thus facilitating control of entire cohesive groups.) These herd animals were already accustomed to living cheek by jowl, so provided that food and shelter were plentiful, they adapted easily to confinement.

Cats, in contrast, are solitary hunters that defend their home ranges fiercely from other cats of the same sex (the pride-living lions are the exception to this rule). Moreover, whereas most domesticates feed on widely available plant foods, cats are obligate carnivores, meaning they have a limited ability to digest anything but meat—a far rarer menu item. In fact, they have lost the ability to taste sweet carbohydrates altogether. And as to utility to humans, let us just say cats do not take instruction well. Such attributes suggest that whereas other domesticates were recruited from the wild by humans who bred them for specific tasks, cats most likely chose to live among humans because of opportunities they found for themselves.

Turns out that the answer to the domestication question is that cats were useful to our ancestors for the same reason they are useful to use: their mousing ability.  When humans turned to agriculture and started storing quantities of grain, rodents became a problem because they bred like flies and overran the human food supply.  Cats, which don’t eat grain but do eat rodents, were the solution, so we hired them on despite their quirks.

So are today’s cats truly domesticated? Well, yes—but perhaps only just. Although they satisfy the criterion of tolerating people, most domestic cats are feral and do not rely on people to feed them or to find them mates. And whereas other domesticates, like dogs, look quite distinct from their wild ancestors, the average domestic cat largely retains the wild body plan. It does exhibit a few morphological differences, however—namely, slightly shorter legs, a smaller brain and, as Charles Darwin noted, a longer intestine, which may have been an adaptation to scavenging kitchen scraps.

Unlike dogs, which exhibit a huge range of sizes, shapes and temperaments, house cats are relatively homogeneous, differing mostly in the characteristics of their coats. The reason for the relative lack of variability in cats is simple: humans have long bred dogs to assist with particular tasks, such as hunting or sled pulling, but cats, which lack any inclination for performing most tasks that would be useful to humans, experienced no such selective breeding pressures.

As a little diversion let me demonstrate the difference between art and science.  The article on the domestication of cats took up five pages of text in Scientific American.  J.R.R. Tolkien (yes, he of Lord of the Rings fame) pretty much transmitted the same information in a short poem.  I came across this poem in my youth and was mesmerized by it.  I loved the rhyming pattern and was amazed that so much information could be compressed into what seemed to be just a little piece of doggerel.

Cat

The fat cat on the mat
may seem to dream
of nice mice that suffice
for him, or cream;
but he free, maybe,
walks in thought
unbowed, proud, where loud
roared and fought
his kin, lean and slim,
or deep in den
in the East feasted on beasts
and tender men.
The giant lion with iron
claw in paw,
and huge ruthless tooth
in gory jaw;
the pard dark-starred,
fleet upon feet,
that oft soft from aloft
leaps upon his meat
where woods loom in gloom –
far now they be,
fierce and free,
and tamed is he;
but fat cat on the mat
kept as a pet
he does not forget.

As I said, on the surface it appears to be a little nursery-type of poem, but it’s not really.  The rhyme sequence is astonishingly complex for such a small poem.  The odd lines rhyme at the end while the even lines each have three internal rhymes, and it’s all done in just a few words.  Yet is conveys the essential nature of cats better than the long Scientific American article without seeming to stretch to make any of the rhymes work.

It’s hard to believe that Tolkien wrote such a gem intending to include it in The Lord of the Rings, but decided not to.  It ended up being kind of a throw away.

We, ourselves, like cats, walked “in thought unbowed, proud, where loud roared and fought [our] kin, lean and slim, or deep in den in the East [and] feasted on beasts” in a time long past.  And just like fat cats on mats everywhere, we remember, too, those “fierce and free” primal days, if not in our conscious brains, at least in our DNA.  We are hardwired to gobble meat with “huge ruthless tooth in gory jaw.”  If you don’t believe me, take a look at this YouTube of chimps, our nearest genetic ancestor hunting and eating meat.

Beware.  And I’m not kidding.  This video is not for the squeamish, so be forewarned.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m not nearly as clever with verse as J.R.R. Tolkien, so I won’t attempt to capture the feelings this video engenders with poetry.  But it should be obvious from the watching what hunts must have been like in our own past.  I suspect not too different than the one you just saw.  And, friends, that is the primitive circuitry deep inside of us all; we differ from the chimps you saw by a mere 6 percent of genes.  That means that we have 94 percent of our genes in common with them.  Au contraire to what our vegetarian friends would have us believe, we have the GI tracts of carnivores, not herbivores, and we were designed by nature to use every last speck of the nutrients in meat.  We can survive on all-meat diets just fine, whereas we can’t survive on an all-plant diet without supplementation.

We’ve developed our large brains and our social instincts as a consequence of meat eating.  I’m planning a post on this subject in the near future, so you can see how our very humanness arose because we developed a taste for meat.  We are carnivores to our very cores – were we not, we would still be roaming the savannas with brains the size of grapefruits.

We may sleep and dream of larger houses, bigger cars and vacations to exotic locations, but our insides still remember when we were “fleet upon feet” and leapt upon our meat “where woods loom in gloom.”  It was this memory that drove Paleolithic Man, with whom we have 100 percent of genes in common, to hunt to extinction all the large beasts (whose skeletons fill natural history museums everywhere) to extinction from the Bering Strait to Tierra del Fuego in about 1000 years. They didn’t make this effort because they used meat as a condiment.

Whether we like it or not, we are hard wired to our past.

Photo of F.s lybica by Noorderlicht

H/T to Richard Nikoley for alerting me to the YouTube video

The above comes from the October 1927 issue of Popular Science, (Click here for larger, readable view) and proves to be remarkable prescient in terms of food.

The article overestimates the population growth, predicting for New York City proper

a population of 13,948,000. In the area described as “Greater New York” there will be 17,797,000 people; and in the suburban area the total population, according to figures based on the law of growth described in the June Popular Science Monthly, will be 28,705,000.

If I had to guess, I would figure that they would underestimate the population growth, but they didn’t. The latest data show that New York now has a population of a little over 8 million with the surrounding Greater New York (including the burbs) housing about 20 million people.

The article predicts, as all non-aviation experienced futurists do, the notion that everyone will have flying cars and that the buildings will all have landing pads on the roofs. It ain’t going to happen unless some heretofore unknown means of keeping airplanes aloft is invented, and that is highly unlikely. The idea of our all having flying cars is a fun one, but one clearly not based on the laws of gravity. Nor on the realization of just how complex aviation is.

What I found most interesting about this old article was the prediction made about what people would be eating in New York City in the year 2000. Other than the idea that milk would be piped in through some kind of a dairy aqueduct, the prognosticating was pretty much on the mark.

…Professor Edgar M. East, of Harvard University, points out that foods will probably be much less varied fifty or seventy-five years from now than today. There will be a wider use of cereals [my italics], but not so many kinds of cereals. The same will probably be true of vegetables. Fruits will have tended to “standardize,” with a few varieties like apples and oranges, or possibly coconuts or some other tropical product, far outstripping all the rest.

The use of meats, fish and other sea foods will probably have diminished greatly. Seventy-five years ago, in the period before the Civil War, New York menus, Professor East points out, listed a variety of game that would make an epicure’s mouth water today—some fifty varieties. Food is most varied when a country is new; as the population increases, certain staples of diet come to be more and more widely used. The New Yorkers of 2,000 A.D. will probably eat quantities of a prepared food made from some such cereal as Egyptian corn [my italics], that can be grown cheaply and brought in large quantities from lands now only partially productive in the South. Or perhaps it may still be wheat.

They certainly hit the nail on the head with the grain consumption estimates. And they were right in spades on the corn.

They were also correct in their claim that meat consumption would change in that there would be many fewer choices. What can one get in New York (or any major city) these days? A steak, pork chops, lamb chops, duck, turkey, salmon, Chilean sea bass, lobster, shrimp, oysters and, occasionally, wild game that’s usually farm raised.

I’m currently reading a wonderful book about the doomed Franklin Polar expedition of 1845, Ice Blink. The author has a copy of one of the provisioning lists for the ships. I’ve divided it in half so the items can be read. Look at what was commonly available in London in 1845:

And

Quite the difference, I would say.

You would think that as cities became larger there would be more variety, not less. But, it’s pretty obvious that the predictors in 1927 were a lot smarter about all this than I am.

We’ve all had the experience. We go off our low-carb diet for a while, then decide to get serious and get back on the straight and narrow. We start counting every carb and being good as gold, and suddenly we’re fatigued. We find ourselves puffing and panting just walking out to the mailbox. Old time low-carbers know this will pass, but newbies aren’t so sure. No one told them about this, and all they can think of are all the horror stories they’ve been told about low-carb diets.

I’ve had countless people tell me of how they tried a low-carb diet once and got so tired they had to give it up. They then usually tell me that a low-carb diet just doesn’t work for their bodies. I tell them that if they’ll just hang in there a while, it will all get better, and, in fact, they will have more energy and less fatigue than before they started the diet.

There is an adaptation period that takes place when starting a low-carb diet. Someone who has been on a high-carb diet–the standard American diet, for example–has to metabolize a lot of sugar. All metabolic processes require enzymes to carry them out. Our DNA codes for these enzymes, but we don’t make them unless we need them. And when we do need them it takes a while for them to get brought up to the necessary levels. So, when we’re on a high-carb diet, we’ve got a lot of sugar-metabolizing enzymes kicking around, ready to metabolize sugar. All the sugar-metabolizing pathways are working efficiently.

Suddenly we switch to a low-carb diet. Now we don’t have much sugar to be metabolized–we’ve got fat instead. But our fat metabolizing pathways are kind of rusty. We’ve got plenty of sugar enzymes, but not enough fat enzymes. The body stays put for a bit to see what’s going to happen. Is this just a few hours without carbs or is it a real low-carb diet for sure? Once the body gets serious, signals go to the DNA, which starts coding for the fat-burning enzymes. They are soon made and start to work, and the fatigue goes away because the body can now efficiently metabolize fat, the main fuel on a low-carb diet.

For years it was thought that athletes did better on high-carb diets because whenever they were tested the high-carb diet always performed better than the low-carb, higher-fat diet. That was before trainers understood the low-carb adaptation requirement.

These studies were usually done on young, conditioned people who were normally consuming diets pretty high in carbohydrate. These subjects would then consume high-carb meals for a day, then get on a stationary bicycle and cycle to exhaustion. They would then be fed a diet low in carbohydrates and high in fat for a day or two, then put on the stationary bicycle again. They would fatigue rapidly. Consequently, for years it was thought that low-carb diets reduced endurance, and the idea of carb loading was developed.

Several years back some researchers decided to have their subjects go on low-carb diets for a couple of weeks before the testing and found that when the subjects had the chance to adapt to their low-carb diet, they had better endurance than when they had been adapted to the high-carb diet.

Lt Frederick Schwatka discovered this period of adaptation 130 years ago and wrote about it.

In 1849 Sir John Franklin and a crew of 129 men aboard two ships, the Erebus and the Terror, set out to discover the Northwest Passage. Sir John, his ships, and crew made it to Lancaster Sound in northern Canada, but vanished. It was one of the great mysteries of the time. A number of groups searched without success to locate and perhaps save some of the members of the Franklin expedition, but, alas, no living members were ever found.

One of these search parties was led by Lt. Frederick Schwatka, a West Point graduate and an army physician. Schwatka’s team headed north in 1878 not with hopes of finding any members of Franklin’s party alive, but with the intent of discovering what happened to them. Schwatka and his team stayed in the far north for two years living with the Inuit. During this time Schwatka lived on “white man’s” food while his supplies lasted and when he could get it replenished, but when that ran out, he and his crew lived as the Inuits, on reindeer, seal, and bear.

During Schwatka’s expedition he kept a dairy, which was packed away in a chest and not discovered until long, long after his death. Once discovered, his diary was published by the Mystic Seaport True Maritime Adventure Series in a book titled The Long Arctic Search.

Schwatka’s diary records the grim daily toil just to stay alive in the hostile climate, not to mention to travel the many miles he did on foot, in small boats, and by dogsled. He also comments throughout on the abundance of game and how easily the Inuit supply themselves and his crew with fresh meat. He noticed the period of adaptation required when he and his team switched from their regular trading-post diet to one solely of meat.

When first thrown wholly upon a diet of reindeer meat, it seems inadequate to properly nourish the system and there is an apparent weakness and inability to perform severe exertive, fatiguing journeys. But this soon passes away in the course of two or three weeks. At first the white man takes to the new diet in too homeopathic a manner, especially if it be raw. However, seal meat which is far more disagreeable with its fishy odor, and bear meat with its strong flavor, seems to have no such temporary debilitating effect upon the economy.

Quaint, but it pretty much describes low-carb adaptation. And it tells us that markedly increasing the fat content of the low-carb diet (seal and bear are much fattier meats than reindeer) decreases the time for the adaptation to take place. Why? Because the increased fat forces the production of ketones, which replace the carbs as a source of energy, especially for the brain.  The more fat, the quicker this conversion takes place, and the less time is spent in the miserable period of low-carb adaptation.
A tip of the hat to Stephen Phinney for putting me onto this book.