I’m going to tell you about the best low-carb book I’ve ever read. In fact, it’s exactly the book I wish I had written myself.  And I’ll tell you why I didn’t in a bit, but first I want to clear up a few misconceptions I may have spread in my last post.

I get feedback on the posts I write from three sources.  First, MD looks at them and tones them down if I’ve gone off on some sort of political tangent or if I’ve scattered in a bit of too colorful language.  After she gives me the go, I put the posts up and wait to see what the commenters have to say.  The third source for feedback is my friends, some MDs and/or PhDs and some not, who pick up the phone and call me.

MD okayed what I wrote. The readers who commented seemed to realize what I was trying to say.  But the phone calls were a different story.

One friend called to say she had been low-carbing since Jan 1, and when she read my post she became so depressed she almost quit.  “How can you tell people it’s hard,” she said.  “It’s the easiest thing I’ve ever done. I can eat till I’m full.  I’m losing weight; I’m losing the water I’ve been retaining; I feel great.  What a downer that post was.”

I heard different versions of that rant from three other people.  They all wanted to know why I would be idiotic enough to put up such a post right at the time everyone was trying to commit or recommit to losing weight.  Depressing was a word everyone used.

I guess I got off easy with the written comments on the blog.

I didn’t really mean for the post to be a downer.  Really.  I wanted to tell people who might be struggling to lose that MD and I fall prey to all the same problems.  We gained weight over the holidays.  We are back on the straight and narrow.  I was trying to say that we were right in there with everyone else working away to reestablish our own thinner selves.  (In fact, we’ve made great progress in the week or so we’ve been on the plan.)  I just wanted people to be aware that long-term weight loss requires effort and constant vigilance.  And to view the process as a life change and not a quick one-time fix. My goal was to get people to recommit seriously, not to depress them.

Obesity is a medical problem caused by a damaged metabolism, which is why one person, without the damage, can eat the same foods without gaining weight that pack the pounds on someone else.  Once you realize you have the underlying problem that leads to obesity, you simply have to recognize that you have to deal with it for the long term.

Let’s look at it in terms of another medical problem: high blood pressure.  For argument’s sake, let’s ignore the fact that about 80 percent of cases of high blood pressure can be reversed with a low-carb diet, and let’s just assume that the case we’re talking about is responsive only to high blood pressure medication.  If you were the patient with the high blood pressure, and I gave you a pill that brought your blood pressure down to normal, you would consider the medication effective.  Would you then say, Hey, my blood pressure is normal, yippee! now I can quit taking the medicine?   I doubt it.  You would say, Great, the medicine is working.  Furthermore, if you quit taking the medicine and your blood pressure went back up to what it was before you started taking the medicine, would you say the medicine didn’t work?

Of course not.  Your high blood pressure was kept in check with the medicine, and your BP, not surprisingly, went back up when you quit taking the medicine.  The medicine itself was effective.

Same thing with dieting.  If you have an obesity problem that responds to a low-carb diet and you lose to your target weight, then go back to your old way of eating and gain your weight back, it isn’t the low-carb diet’s fault.  You have a problem that responds to a low-carb diet, and you pretty much have to stick with a low-carb diet (although not in nearly as extreme a structure as when you are trying to lose) for the long haul.

Having said all that, I can tell you that in my experience there is nothing that helps people lose weight more quickly and with less deprivation than a good quality, whole food low-carbohydrate diet.  You don’t have to be hungry.  You can eat rich, delicious foods, you’ll get rid of heartburn, drop your blood pressure, ditch excess fluid, and feel remarkably better.  You’ve just got to hang in there until you lose what you need to lose (which process you can speed along if desired with a little Metabosol), then you can loosen up and start adding some of the foods you’ve been foregoing.  And continue to eat them in moderation on maintenance.

Virtually all the studies in the medical literature show that at worst the low-carbohydrate diet equals the low-fat diet in all parameters and at best completely leaves it in the dust.  As far as I’m concerned, there is no faster, safer, more delicious way to lose weight. Hell, a study was just presented recently showing that women who did low-carb just two days a week lost almost twice as much weight as women following a calorically-restricted Mediterranean diet daily.  So, to be clear: Is weight loss tough?  Sure.  Is it easier when you cut the carbs? Absolutely! Low carb rocks!

Which brings me to the book that started this post.  In my opinion, The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living is simply the best how-to book on low-carb dieting ever written.  As I wrote above, it is the book I wish MD and I had written.

The reason we didn’t write it is because a) some of this information wasn’t available when we last wrote a book (much of it is now available thanks to the work of Drs. Volek and Phinney), and b) no mainstream publisher would pay an author for this book.  If a mainstream publisher would buy it, the editor would force the authors to change it.  What do I mean by that?

All books fall into different genres, as they’re called in publishing.  One genre is diet/nutrition books.  So if you come to a publisher offering a diet/nutrition book, it gets pigeonholed into that genre and has to conform structurally to that genre’s standardized format.  Editors of mainstream publishing houses believe that the great mass of readers of nutritional books are not very bright and so have to be served real scientific information in small, small bites and not very many of them at that.  So the genre formula for a diet book is to have the actual diet regimen way up front because these editors don’t believe the readers of these books are smart enough or patient enough to wade through the explanations of why a particular diet works in order to get to the plan.  They want the plan up front within the first couple of chapters so people can get started without really having to read the book.  They also want a ton of recipes and meal plans to fill up the last half of the book.  Squeezed in between the plan and the recipe section is where they want to meat of book cubbyholed, and, in their view, with as little science as possible.

MD and I fought this structure tooth and toenail with Protein Power and ended up beating our editor down by agreeing to write a summary of each chapter called The Bottom Line that explained what each chapter said in non-scientific terms.  (Fortunately, we’ve been able to use this strategy in most of our books.) We worked well with our first editor, but we ended up in the hands of another editor when the paperback came out.  Editor Number Two hated all the stuff on the Paleolithic diet and the data from the ancient Egyptians.  This info was the first time in the popular press that the pre- verses post-agricultural diet was used as an argument for low-carb dieting.  And she wanted to ditch it from the book.  We went postal on her, so she ended up agreeing to leave it but only if we buried it in the very back of the book as an Epilogue.  That was one of the chapters of the book I wrote, and I thought it was pretty exciting information.  So, apparently did many others. But not this editor.  Sadly, she is not unusual.  Most want to conform to the genre.

Drs. Volek and Phinney self-published their book, and, as a consequence, could write it however the flip they wanted.  It is extremely well written and suffers none of the usual flaws of a self published book.  And it lays out the rationale for a low-carb diet as the treatment of obesity and other related disorders in a linear fashion instead of adhering to the typical diet book format.

As I finished writing the above paragraph, I clicked over and checked for comments on my latest post and found one with the following line:

This low-carb world can be a lonely place if one needs a navigator…

I can think of no better navigators than the authors of this book. Both of them have done a large part of the hardcore research on low-carb dieting that is in the medical literature today.  Go to PubMed and enter Volek JS or Phinney SD in the search window, hit ‘Search,’ and you will be rewarded with more peer-reviewed scientific papers on low-carb dieting than you will have time to read.  Many of the experiments described in these papers are explained in easy to understand language in their book.

Disclosure: Both Dr. Volek and Dr. Phinney are friends and colleagues of mine.  But they did not send me a copy of their book for review.  I purchased it from Amazon and paid the full price of $29.95 (it is now $19.95).  I bought it months ago and carried it with me all over Europe and on a half dozen other trips since but didn’t have time to even crack it until I was on the last leg back from our holiday trek.  It sounds cliché, but I couldn’t put it down.  I read and annotated the entire book over the course of two long flights.  Virtually anything anyone could want to know about the science behind low-carbohydrate dieting can be found in this book.

I’ll give you just one example.  It is common knowledge among many nutritionist, doctors and journalists that saturated fats are bad for us.  Most believe eating saturated fats leads to higher levels of saturated fats in the blood, which they inevitably describe as ‘artery-clogging saturated fat’.  Drs. Volek and Phinney, who certainly don’t believe this nonsense, understand adaptation to a low-carbohydrate diet changes the way the human body metabolizes different fats.  Eating more fat on a low-carbohydrate diet speeds up the burning of fat in general and saturated fat in particular.

There are only three things the body can do with saturated fat from the diet (or saturated fat made from dietary carbohydrate — and, yes, the body can and does make saturated fat from dietary carbohydrate).  It can burn them, store them, or convert them to a mono-unsaturated fat.  When people go on low-carbohydrate diets, they reduce their insulin levels, which in turn allows fat to escape from the fat cells to become the body’s primary fuel.

But what happens when a person increases saturated fat intake as part of a low-carbohydrate diet?  Drs. V & P knew that saturated fat burning would increase, but would enough burn to offset the extra amount of saturated fat coming in as part of a high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet?

To find out, they put 20 subjects on a low-carbohydrate diet for 12 weeks and another 20 subjects on a low-fat, high-carbohydrate weight loss diet for the same length of time.  The subjects in the low-carb group consumed three times the saturated fat per day (36 g vs 12 g) as did those in the low-fat group.  The blood from the subjects in both groups was then tested to determine total triglyceride level and specific fatty acid composition.

What did the good docs find?

In the serum samples done at baseline and again after 12 weeks, serum triglycerides  in the low fat group went from 187 to 151 mg per 100 ml, a tidy 19% reduction.  But in the low carb group, the before and after values were 211 and 104, a whopping 51% fall.  Both visually (just looking at the numbers) and statistically, the low carbohydrate group had a much greater (better) reduction in serum triglycerides.

The above should come as no surprise, because everyone knows that a low-carb diet reduces triglyceride levels.  But what about the amount of saturated fat in the blood?

As a proportion of the total, the low carb group had 33% saturates [saturated fatty acids] at baseline and 29% after 12 weeks, whereas the low fat group started at 30 and ended at 29%.  So after 12 weeks of dieting, the proportion of saturated fats in the blood triglycerides was the same for both groups despite the fact that the low carb group was eating three times as many grams per day of saturated fat in their diet.

But there’s more.  Because the low carb group ended up with blood triglycerides of 104 mg per 100 ml compared to the low fat group’s 151, they actually had about 30% less total triglycerides circulating in their serum.  So although the two groups had similar relative proportions of saturates, this means that the absolute serum content of saturates in the low-carb group was 30% lower than the low fat diet group.  So what we found, in a nutshell, is that despite a higher intake of saturated fat, the proportionate blood level of saturated fats did not increase, and their absolute levels fell dramatically with the low carbohydrate diet.

The bottom line on this point is that when our metabolism adapts to a low carbohydrate diet, saturated fats become a preferred fuel for the body, and their levels in blood and tissue triglyceride pools actually drops.

To summarize, a three times higher intake of saturated fats leads to a 30% drop in saturated fats in the blood of those following a low-carb diet as compared to those following a low-fat, high-carb diet.

Which means, of course, that if you want to decrease the artery-clogging saturated fats (should that be what you want to call them) in your blood, a low-fat, high-carb diet, the very diet almost every health care professional recommends for the job, isn’t the way to do it.  All you have to do is simply follow a low-carb diet.

The description of what happens to saturated fats in the blood during a low carb diet took two pages out of a 300 page book, so you can imagine how much content the entire book contains.

There is so much invaluable information in this book that I’m having to fight back the impulse to quote the whole thing.  You’ll learn

why you need more sodium on a low-carb diet and why the sodium prevents lean tissue loss,
why you need to increase fat intake during maintenance,
why a low-carb diet decreases inflammation,
why the low-carb, high-fat diet improves gall bladder function,
why excess carbohydrate converts to saturated fat and how,
what all the lipid parameters mean and how they’re affected by a low-carb diet,
and what the Paleolithic evidence tells us about diet.

And this list is just scratching the surface.  As I read this book, I kept marking parts that I needed to use for this blog.  In going back through, I would have to practically reprint the whole thing to give you just the important parts because the entire book is a gem.

Unlike most traditional diet books, The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living doesn’t contain a lengthy section on how to execute a low carb diet.  There are plenty of books out there – some written by MD and me – that do that.  The book does have about 10 pages of the authors’ favorite recipes for low-carb foods and a seven day meal plan incorporating many of these recipes. (Another disclosure:  The authors recommend Protein Power as a good book on low-carb dieting, but I would have written this review the same had they never mentioned our book.)

The strength of this book isn’t in its meal plans and recipes, although those are delicious, it is in the wealth of information about all aspects of low-carb dieting.  If you have a question, almost any question, about any facet of low-carbohdyrate dieting, this book will have the answer.  And the answer will grounded in science, and in many cases from work done by these two scientists on the front lines of low-carbohydrate research.

As far as I am concerned, if you are planning on going on a low-carb diet and can afford only one book, make The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living that one book.  If you are a long time low-carber, this is the one essential reference book you should have on your shelf.

If you are getting going on a low-carb diet the first part of this year, grab this book before you do another thing.  Once you see the world of benefits that will accrue to you from following such a diet, you will probably be able to overcome any depression that may have been inflicted on you from my last post.  So don’t hold off, grab a copy of this book today.  You will be very glad you did.

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.

Over a half decade ago Professor Jared Diamond, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel, famously wrote

“The adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered.”

Dr Diamond was referring, of course, to the devolution of human health that took place as mankind suffered the corporal transformation driven by the mismatch between hunter-gatherer genes and an agricultural diet and lifestyle. Smaller stature, decreased cortical bone thickness, obesity, increased incidence of infectious diseases, dental caries, periodontal disease, vitamin deficiencies, and even famine – all common in agriculturists – were not, for the most part, the lot of pre-agricultural man.

Humanity doubtless gained more than it lost in this hunter to farmer changeover when viewed in a big-picture sort of way.  Farming made possible larger communities filled with workers, workers who, for the first time, made specialization of labor a possibility.  And fewer people could till the fields and provide food for the many, freeing the others to pursue the arts, business, politics, and warfare.

Stephen Budiansky, author of one of my favorite books, Covenant of the Wild, describes how domestic animals formed a pact with humans in which the animals traded a period of safety and survival for their lives.  Had this covenant not been made, it is highly likely – virtually a certainty – that cows would now be extinct.  Big, slow, stupid and tasty, had they not been amenable to domestication and entered into the covenant with their domesticators, cattle would have been hunted to extinction long, long ago.  But they did – however unwillingly – make the covenant and so exist by the tens of millions today.  The deal they cut was a phenomenal deal for cattle as a species, but not a particularly good deal for the individual cow when the time comes to pay up at slaughter.

Homo sapiens entered an almost mirror image of this same covenant when they domesticated cereal grasses.*  We gave up our independence and mobility for the promise of a constant and plentiful food supply.  But, as with our covenant with domestic animals, there is a catch.  And this time it’s with us.  Humans emerged from this deal with the short end of the stick.  In the same way as did cattle, we made a good-for-humans-as-a-species/bad-for-the-individual-human trade.  Like it or not, we traded the health of the individual human for the overall good of mankind and the development of civilization.

We traded a diet based primarily on fat and protein with a little carbohydrate thrown in from roots, shoots and tubers for one centered predominantly on carbohydrate.  The main source of the carbohydrate was cereal grains, chiefly ancient forms of wheat, the predecessor of the wheat that now occupies a large part of the human diet everywhere.  Ancient forms of wheat didn’t do our forebears a lot of good, and, according to Dr. William Davis’s new book Wheat Belly, the modern forms of the grain do us even less good.

Before we get to the problems modern hybrid wheat causes us, let’s take a look at the afflictions a diet of primitive wheat visited upon our predecessors.

The ancient Egyptians consumed a diet that would be considered optimal by many people today.  Both wealthy and poor Egyptians consumed primarily bread and a type of cloudy, almost gruel-like beer.  To these staples were added a variety of vegetables (mainly onions), and a small selection of game, fish and meat.  The bread was made from coarse ground, whole grain emmer wheat, a primitive, high-protein wheat.  Sugar didn’t come on the scene until about 1000 AD, so the Egyptians used honey sparingly (it was expensive) as a sweetener along with figs.  In short, these people consumed a diet the vast majority of modern nutritionists would prescribe to people to prevent obesity, heart disease, obesity and the rest of the diseases associated with the Western diet.

But, as their mummified remains and their contemporary artwork demonstrate, the ancient Egyptians were often fat and were riddled with heart disease, dental caries, bad periodontal disease and no doubt diabetes and hypertension.  Many people have argued that since only the wealthy were mummified, the mummy data applies only to them, and since the wealthy ate more red meat, the rates of obesity, heart disease and the other disorders common to them didn’t apply to the rest of the population.  Even the common man, however, was often portrayed as obese in Egyptian artwork, and despite greater consumption of meat, the main staple of even the wealthy was bread and beer. And it didn’t do them a lot of good.

The 5,300 year old mummy of Ötzi the Iceman found in the Italian Alps showed a bad case of dental caries and periodontitis along with a stomach-full of einkorn wheat (another primitive variety). Said the researchers who examined Ötzi:

Although the Iceman did not lose a single tooth until the his death at an age of about 40 years, he had an advanced abrasion of his teeth, profound carious lesions, and a moderate to severe periodontitis.

In particular, the molars of the upper jaw showed loss of alveolar bone as a sign of periodontitis (inflammation of the ligaments and bones that support the teeth), while evidence of “mechanical trauma” was found on two teeth.

…the most surprising find is the high frequency of cavities.

These dental pathologies are a sign of change in the Neolithic diet.

We already know that he was eating grains, such as einkorn or emmer. The contained carbohydrates clearly increased the risk of developing dental diseases

One would assume these findings would be common among the rest of Ötzi’s contemporaries, who doubtless consumed a similar diet.

Sadly, these same findings are also common among modern man who consumes a more malign version of primitive wheat.

Until I read Dr. Davis’s book Wheat Belly, I didn’t really think much about wheat other than its being a major source of carbohydrate in the American diet.  It never had occurred to me that the wheat we eat today is not the same wheat of our great-grandmothers cooked with nor probably even our grandmothers.  And it really hadn’t dawned on me how pervasive wheat is in the diet.  Since reading Michael Pollen’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma I had been conscious of the amount of corn in our modern diet, but I hadn’t thought much about wheat.  As Yogi Berra supposedly said, “You can see a lot just by looking.”  So I went out and looked.  And I can tell you that we are much more Children of the Wheat than we are Children of the Corn.

In most grocery stores, an entire aisle is devoted to nothing but bread in all its forms.  Then there is typically another large aisle full of cakes, cupcakes, cookies, pies, tarts, sweet rolls, bagels, croissants, brownies, and other sweet baked goods.  The vast majority of the cereal aisle displays products containing primarily wheat.  And if you look at processed foods of all kinds, you’ll find wheat in there.  If you make or buy gravy, roux, or just about any kind of sauce, you’ll find it’s thickened with wheat flour. (MD bought some demiglace a few days ago, and noticed as she was removing it from the container that even it had added wheat.) Then there is the aisle full of different beers, many of which are made with wheat.  These are just a few of the items you can find containing wheat in a grocery store; don’t even get me started on restaurant fare.  Wheat is everywhere – corn should be so lucky.

When I was roaming around looking for pictures of dwarf wheat (more about which later), I came upon the website for the Kansas Wheat Commission that listed a few facts about wheat.  Here are several that caught my eye.

Wheat is the primary grain used in U.S. grain products.  Approximately three-quarters of all U.S. grain products are made from wheat flour.

More food is made with wheat than any other cereal grain.

U.S. Farmers grow nearly 2.4 billion bushels of wheat on 63 million acres of land.

About half the wheat grown in the United States is used domestically.

A little back-of-the-envelope calculating using the above statistics tells us that each of us in the United States consumes about four bushels of wheat per year.  Another statistic from the linked website states that each bushel of wheat makes about 90 one-pound loaves of whole wheat bread.  So, we all eat the equivalent of 360 loaves of bread per year, or approximately one loaf per person per day. That’s a lot of wheat, in fact, it’s almost approaching ancient Egyptian levels. (Moreover, since MD and I don’t eat any, that means two other people out there are each eating two loaves per day.)

It would be bad enough if we consumed all this wheat as emmer or einkhorn or other primitive varieties, but we don’t.  We get most from a hybrid of Triticum aestivum – our great grandmother’s wheat – called dwarf (or semi-dwarf) wheat, which now comprises more than 99 percent of all wheat grown worldwide.

As Dr. Davis tells it, the hybridization of wheat came about in an effort to improve yield, which is now about tenfold greater per acre than it was a century ago. Older strains of wheat were taller and more prone to damage from wind and rain.  And

When large quantities of nitrogen-rich fertilizer are applied to wheat fields, the seed head at the top of the plant grows to enormous proportions.  The top-heavy seed head, however, buckles the stalk.  Buckling kills the plant and makes harvesting problematic. A University of Minnesota-trained geneticist…is credited with developing the exceptionally high-yielding dwarf wheat that was shorter and stockier, allowing the plant to maintain erect posture and resist buckling under the large seed head.  Tall stalks are also inefficient; short stalks reach maturity more quickly, which means a shorter growing season with less fertilizer required to generate the otherwise useless stalk.

In the photos below you can see the difference between wheat grown in the Middle Ages and the dwarf wheat grown today.

Dr. Davis writes that modern wheat is approximately 70 percent carbohydrate by weight.  The carbohydrate is in the form of a starch called amylopectin A.

The most digestible form of amylopectin, amylopectin A, is the form found in wheat.  Because it is the most digestible, it is the form that most enthusiastically increases blood sugar.  This explains why, gram for gram, wheat increases blood sugar to a greater degree than, say, kidney beans or potato chips.  The amylopectin A of wheat products, “complex” or no, might be regarded as a supercarbohydrate, a form of highly digestible carbohydrate that is more efficiently converted to blood sugar than nearly all the other carbohydrate foods, simple or complex. [Italics in the original.]

But what about the much vaunted whole grains.  Won’t ‘whole grain’ bread or wheat products be better?  Not according to Dr. Davis:

…the degree of processing, from a blood sugar standpoint, makes little difference: Wheat is wheat, with various forms of processing or lack of processing, simple or complex, high-fiber or low-fiber, all generating similar high blood sugars.  Just as “boys will be boys,” amylopectin A will be amylopectin A.  In healthy, slender volunteers, two medium-sized slices of whole wheat bread increase blood sugar by 30 mg/dl (from 93 to 123 mg/dl), no different from white bread.  In people with diabetes, both white and whole grain bread increase blood sugar 70 to 120 mg/dl over starting levels.

And aside from the blood sugar and, consequently, insulin problems caused by the consumption of too much wheat, there are other problems.  As with almost any food, the newer the food, the greater the likelihood that it will be problematic to some humans who consume it.  Since dwarf wheat has been around for less than 50 years, it should come as no surprise that it does indeed cause it’s share of problems.  Dr. Davis spends the better part of his excellent book detailing many of these problems and describing his clinical experience in helping many of his patients shuck their wheat habit.  He describes the increase in celiac disease over the past 50 years and believes, as I do, that celiac disease is a continuum.  The severe form of it that is recognized as celiac disease is pretty easy to diagnose (if a doctor has sense enough to look for it), but there are milder forms that manifest themselves as anything from mysterious rashes that come and go to diarrhea and other GI disturbances to arthritic aches and pains. And we can’t forget a number of other afflictions that may well have their basis in wheat intolerance that include osteoporosis, acne (bagel face?), neurological disorders, and the creepily- dubbed ‘man boobs.’

It’s good to learn in Wheat Belly that Dr. Davis has finally shucked his bred-in-the-bone cardiologist’s antipathy toward fat in general and saturated fat specifically and has come over to what most of his peers must view as the dark (read: low-carb) side:

The fat phobia of the past forty years turned us off from foods such as eggs, sirloin, and pork because of their saturated fat content — but saturated fat was never the problem.  Carbohydrates in combination with saturated fat, however, cause measures of LDL particles to skyrocket.  The problem was carbohydrates more than saturated fat.  In fact, new studies have exonerated saturated fat as an underlying contributor to heart attack and stroke risk. [Italics in the original.]

Dr. Davis wraps up his meticulously researched book with a straightforward plan to help free the reader from the tyranny of wheat, while at the same time providing instructions for a delicious and satisfying wheat-free diet.  He furnishes an extensive list of wheat-containing foods that should be avoided and imparts his caveats about going facedown in products advertised as being gluten-free.  And best of all, he provides a short section filled with matchless wheat-free recipes for many meals that would otherwise be wheat-laden. (MD and I have tried a few of these recipes and found them to be superb.  I especially enjoy his wheat-free granola recipe even though I go a little easy on the rolled oats part of it.)

Wheat Belly hit the New York Times Bestseller list shortly after it came out (and has been there for two weeks now), which I can tell you from experience, is not an easy thing to do.  As a result (because being on the NY Times list means a book has had big sales numbers), the wheat producers have not taken their hits lying down.  They’re fighting back with full venom, because a book like this one can do them serious economic damage. Expect it to get worse. (Remember all those shelves in the grocery stores stuffed with wheat-containing products? They don’t want to see that go away.)  You can read about some of their tactics here and read Tom Naughton’s interviews with Dr. Davis here and here.

I can’t recommend this terrific book highly enough.  Wheat Belly is fully referenced and indexed (unless you somehow got the little freebee paperback review version that I received from the publisher), and is a must have for the library of any serious low-carber or anyone concerned about health.

*MD and I wrote about this domestication of humans by grains in The Protein Power LifePlan.  In that book we referenced an interesting paper by a couple of Australian researchers on the hypothesis that the addictive nature of cereal grains helping this domestication along.

In an example of more brain damage from the mainstream medical press, a recent online article from heartwire savaged the low-carb diet as a treatment for diabetes along with one of its main academic proponents.  This piece, when read critically, provides a blueprint for how to subtly (and not so subtly) disparage an idea that doesn’t meet mainstream approval.  And it shows why the low-carb diet – despite the mountains of evidence demonstrating its superiority – continues to have difficulty gaining traction.

Here’s the story.  Dr. Eric Westman, from Duke University, gave a talk at the European Association for the Study of Diabetes (EASD) conference last month in Stockholm.  Dr. Westman made the point in his talk that since 98 percent of the research presented at diabetes meetings involved a pharmaceutical approach to treatment perhaps it was time to take a look at the benefit of lifestyle changes, specifically diet, to treat the disease.  He went on to provide data showing the benefits of low-carbohydrate diets in the care of diabetic patients.

As might be expected, the mainstream – and let me assure you, the EASD meeting was the most mainstream of mainstream meetings – didn’t like what they heard.  Neither, apparently, did the writers at heartwire, another mainstream organization.

(Heartwire is an online magazine, available to anyone but requiring free registration, that goes out to physicians – cardiologists, primarily – and provides the latest news of various drugs, procedures and therapies for heart disease.  Heartwire is owned and operated by another mainstream medical news agency, Medscape, which is owned by the even more mainstream (if possible) WebMD.)

Let’s take a look at this abysmal excuse for balanced coverage and see how the writer sprinkled seeds of doubt about the efficacy of the low-carb diet throughout the article.  As we go through this exercise, bear in mind that most readers of this piece are busy cardiologist who most likely scan these pieces in an effort to get the gist of them without spending the time reading the entire thing.

(In case you don’t want to register for heartwire to read this piece online, I’ve uploaded a pdf for you to read here Kill or cure? Atkins diet debated in diabetes )

The bias starts early: right with the title:

Kill or cure?  The Atkins diet debated in diabetes

Most cardiologists (and other physicians) reading this article more than likely already have a bias against the low-carb diet.  Imagine for a moment that you are a busy cardiologist and have come across this article as you scan your emails between patients. (Heartwire is delivered to subscribers via email.)  You’ve had a few patients who have done well on low-carb diets, and you’ve heard about these diets in the media, but you don’t really know all that much about them.  You do have a bias, however, because you are a cardiologist, after all,  and therefor you are more than likely to be a believer in the lipid hypothesis, and you know that these diets are high in fat. Reading this title, most will assume the article is anti-low-carb and that it will confirm their own anti-low-carb bias.  And even the little picture at the top of the piece (reproduced above left) hints at bias because of the large chunk of red meat the questioning physician is holding.  You will then scroll down, skim through and have your eyes caught by the bold quotes set apart from the body of the piece.  If you’re in a hurry, these quotes are probably all you’ll read.  They tell you everything you need to know: heartwire – and by extension, mainstream cardiology – believes these diets to be bad.

Read these quotes as a stand alone substitute for the meat of the article and see what you think the takeaway message is.

I would never prescribe an Atkins diet to a person with type 1 or type 2 diabetes.

There are no long-term data comparing the different diets in diabetes management.

Low-carb is not defined consistently across all the research studies, it’s very confusing.

If you want your patients to love you, improve their glucose; get them off insulin and injections.

It’s my hunch that it’s both—it’s the weight loss, but how you do it gives you a little extra power.

With these diets there is no suffering, no hunger and there is a feeling of satiety.

Atkins is atherogenic. I’m concerned about . . . its impact on LDL cholesterol.

The ADA does not recommend an Atkins type low-carb diet because of the concerns about the impact of that fat load on heart health.

Based on these quotes, the low-carb diet doesn’t sound like an effective option for diabetes treatment, does it?

But what about the body of the article?  Let’s take a look.

The piece starts out presenting the crux of the problem.

The fact that lifestyle interventions can often do better than drugs at controlling type 2 diabetes is recognized by many in the field, but implementation of this approach is hampered by the fact that it is difficult to get busy general physicians to actively encourage lifestyle change or to get affected individuals to alter lifelong habits.

The next paragraph introduces Dr. Westman, who may have a solution for the problem.  But let’s take note of how they introduce him.

But one nutrition expert believes he has the answer: the Atkins diet. Dr Eric C Westman (Duke University, Durham, NC) admittedly has vested interests in promoting this approach—he is the coauthor of the latest Atkins book and receives honoraria from Atkins Nutritionals—but argues that he values his reputation above all else and that his aim is to convince people that the science exists to back his claims.

The above is absolutely outrageous!  I’ve read many articles about statin drugs in heartwire, Medscape and WebMD (and countless other mainstream publications), and I’ve never seen this kind of introduction.  Could you imagine reading the following:

But one expert believes he has the answer: statin drugs.  Dr. Joe Blow (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA) admittedly has vested interests in promoting this approach – he is paid tens of thousands of dollars every year as a consultant to several pharmaceutical companies that make statin drugs – but argues that he values his reputation above all else and that his aim is to convince people that the science exists to back his claims.

Believe me, that would never, ever happen despite the fact that in the majority of cases it is true.  Most of the people who promote statins in print and in lectures are on the payroll of the statin companies.  Annoying as this is, it is even more abhorrent since most of the controlled studies that have been done (and there have been many) demonstrate the efficacy of the low-carbohydrate diet whereas controlled trials showing any benefit from statins are scarce as hen’s teeth.

As you read on through the piece, you’ll find Dr. Westman’s answers to questions being characterized in the following ways:

Westman acknowledges…

Westman admits…

Westman concedes…

This way of stating Dr. Westman’s responses imply that he is, well, admitting or conceding to the other point of view.  When describing the responses of those chosen to refute Dr. Westman – all lipophobes to their very cores – the writer uses a different characterization.

Eckel [Dr. Robert Eckel] says…

Eckel believes…

says Eckel…

And he [Eckel] is keen to stress…

Eckel begs to differ

Dietitian Stephanie A. Dunbar…says…

she adds…

Dr. Arne Astrup says…

Astrup says…

Dunbar says…

she notes..

You can see that all the mainstreamers trotted out to refute the low-carb guy all ‘say’ and ‘believe’ and ‘note’ and ‘add’ and ‘beg to differ’ and are ‘keen to stress.’  They don’t ‘concede,’ ‘admit’ or ‘acknowledge.’ (They actually do in one or two places, but mainly they ‘say’ whereas Dr. Westman ‘concedes’ or ‘admits’.)  This is a subtle but effective way of presenting material to the reader in an appallingly biased way.  The writer should be ashamed.

I’ll leave it to readers of this blog to peruse the entire heartwire article to notice the rest of the bias that runs throughout.  Those who choose to go ahead and register (free) can read the rollicking debate following the article containing comments by Gary Taubes, Richard Feinman and a number of other people most will recognize.

I do want to take a moment to show how easily a mind can be closed.  I would like to look at a couple of specific responses from Dr. Robert Eckel, the academic heavy hitter the author used to refute Dr. Westman’s approach.  Dr. Eckel is a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado and has held numerous lofty positions in the academic world including the presidencies of the American Heart Association and the North American Association for the Study of Obesity, now the Obesity Society, the organization of academic obesity researchers.  (Full disclosure: I am a member of the Obesity Society.) Dr. Eckel has written and lectured extensively on the dangers (as he perceives them) of the low-carb diet, and has attacked numerous specific low-carb diets and their developers, including yours truly.

Throughout the article while Dr. Westman is ‘admitting,’ conceding’ and ‘acknowledging,’ Dr. Eckel is (pompously, in my opinion) is attempting to refute whatever it is Dr. Westman admits, concedes, etc.  It quickly becomes clear that Dr. Eckel is so close minded about the subject of low-carb diets that he has lost all objectivity.

Dr. Westman makes the case that a recent study in the Annals of Internal Medicine demonstrated that low-carb diets raised HDL-cholesterol levels.  Most of the readers of this blog – at least those who have gone on a low-carb diet – know that HDL-cholesterol goes up on such a diet.  We all know that saturated fat raises HDL-cholesterol levels.  And we all have seen or at least know of the countless studies showing the benefits of having higher levels of HDL-cholesterol.  In fact, a number of studies performed over the past few years have shown that infusing HDL into subjects with coronary plaque brings about a reversal of the plaque.  Dr. Eckel has got to be aware of at least some of these studies, but look what he says when Dr. Westman raises the issue:

“This claim that Atkins preserves the HDL level” is irrelevant, he [Eckel] says, since “the science is not advanced enough yet to say whether a rise in HDL is a good thing. To make any conclusions on this is really premature.”

The very model of a modern closed-minded academician.

And it’s obvious that Dr. Eckel wants to remain close minded.  He doesn’t even want there to be the possibility that the low-carb diet could be shown to be beneficial.

At the end of this extended attack on him, Westman, disappointingly to me since there is so much data already out there, seeks not to do battle with the large body of existing research showing the benefits of the low-carb diet but instead bolts for the ever-present refuge of all researchers and recommends even more research.

Westman says a long-term outcomes study comparing low-carb and low-fat diets is sorely needed; such data do exist for the Mediterranean diet, he notes.

“Everyone talks about the Mediterranean diet, but the low-carb one looked just as good in the DIRECT study. I’m an advocate for studying this kind of approach within mainstream medical research; it’s been avoided, and that’s too bad. It needs to be given the same attention as other approaches,” he concludes.

Surely, you may think, Eckel would agree with this.  Let’s gather some good data and settle this once and for all.  But that’s not the case.

But Eckel is vehemently opposed to any such outcomes study with Atkins, telling heartwire: “I feel that would be an irresponsible trial.”

Irresponsible?  Why?  Because just about every study done so far shows the low-carb diet to stabilize blood sugar, reduce high blood pressure, and improve the lipid levels Dr. Eckel so believes in.  It seems unbelievable.  But maybe not so unbelievable when you dig a little deeper.

Why, you might ask, is this scientist so obdurate in the face of all the evidence that’s out there?  Perhaps because much of the evidence isn’t in accord with his religious beliefs.  I try never to mention a person’s religious faith, but when it impacts his scientific thinking it at least needs to be made known.  Unless he’s changed his thinking recently, Dr. Eckel apparently is one of the few academic scientists who are literal interpreters of the bible.  I assume this because Dr. Eckel serves on the technical advisory board of the Institution for Creation Research, an organization that believes that not only is the earth only a few thousand years old , but that the entire universe in only a few thousand years old.  And they believe that man was basically hand formed by God on the sixth day of creation.  And Dr. Eckel’s own writings on the subject appear to confirm his beliefs.

I don’t have a problem with people who have such beliefs (or any other beliefs, for that matter) as long as they don’t conflict with my own life and activities.  But when my own notions of what constitutes the most healthful diet based upon my education, study and work with thousands of patients is denigrated as hucksterism, as it has been by Dr. Eckel, then I do take exception.

Part of my own coming around to the low-carb diet was driven by my many hours of study in the anthropological and paleopathological literature.  Using technology available today, it’s possible to see what early man ate, and it’s very easy to determine his health.  As it turns out, when early man made the conversion from a hunter-gatherer diet and lifestyle to an agricultural one, he experienced an enormous decline in health.

In a post I recently wrote, I put up the graphic below showing all the factors confirming the low-carb diet to be the best for the greatest number of people.

Of all the evidence that exists, I think the evolutionary/natural selection data and the anthropological data are the most compelling because they provide the largest amount of evidence over the longest time.  To Dr. Eckel, however, these data aren’t applicable because in his worldview prehistoric man didn’t exist and therefore wasn’t available to be molded by the forces of natural selection.  I haven’t a clue as to what he thinks the fossil remains of early humans really were or where they came from.  Perhaps he believes – as I once had it explained to me by a religious fundamentalist – these fossilized remains of dinosaurs, extinct ancient birds and mammals and prehistoric man were carefully buried by the devil to snare the unwary and the unbeliever.  If this is the case, I guess I’ll have to consider myself snared.

In Dr. Eckel’s view, man was created post agriculturally.  In fact, in his view, there was never an pre-agricultural era, so how could man have failed to adapt to agriculture?

Whatever the reason, Dr. Eckel seems to have a preternatural hatred for anything low-carb.  His mind is made up, and not only does he not want to be confused with the facts, as the old saying goes, he doesn’t even want research to be done to perhaps come up with the facts that might confuse him.  It is even more troubling that he sits as an editor and is a reviewer for numerous mainstream medical and nutritional journals.  What chance do you think a low-carb paper has to make it through his review?  Until he retires, all we can do is understand his biases and try to work around them.  I would suggest that whenever you read or hear reported anything Dr. Eckel says or writes about low-carb dieting – including his responses in this piece to Dr. Westman – you should take it with a very large grain of salt.

The first Dietary Goals for the United States (DGUS) were released in 1977 to not a lot of fanfare.  At that time, the great unwashed masses hadn’t really heard much about the word cholesterol, a substance the DGUS recommended that we should limit to 300 mg per day.  Doctors didn’t routinely screen for it, and if they did, they didn’t pay much attention to it.  In fact, at that time – as I recall, anyway – the upper limit of normal for total cholesterol was 240 mg/dl.  I was in medical school back then, and I don’t really remember any emphasis on cholesterol or blood lipids.  I think we had one lecture on it in biochemistry, given by a nebbish little professor we called Mighty Manford (his first name was Manford), who labored away in the obscurity of the biochemistry department. It’s hard to believe in today’s world of lipophobia that as little as 30 years ago, no one much cared about cholesterol.

One of the major players in bringing cholesterol to the public’s awareness was Time magazine. Its piece on cholesterol in the March 26, 1984 issue was a devastating hit piece on both dietary cholesterol and dietary fat.  Both – the article explained – were a main driving force behind the development of heart disease.

Reading this article today, it’s amazing how it drips with misinformation.  At the time, however, most people – physicians included – accepted it as gospel.  Sadly, even today, many physicians who should know better believe in and act in accordance to the bountiful misinformation contained in this piece.

I could write a blog longer than the article (and it’s a long article) describing and dissecting all the many errors, but I’m going to go over just one.  And that one just briefly.  But before I get to that, let me show you just a few of interesting small parts of the article beginning with the very first sentence:

Cholesterol is proved deadly, and our diet may never be the same.

Hmm.  Dietary cholesterol has been proved pretty benign.  But the writers are correct about our diet being changed.

And take a look at this:

For decades, researchers have been trying to prove conclusively that cholesterol is a major villain in this epidemic [heart disease].  It has not been easy.

Have you ever seen a better example of the confirmation bias at work.  We know cholesterol is a problem, and we’re going to prove it no matter what it takes.  So what if the evidence keeps blowing up in our faces, if we work hard enough, we can by God prove what we know to be true.

Although most cholesterol found in the body is produced in the liver, 20% to 30% generally comes from the food we eat.

Actually, the figure is about 15 percent that comes from the food we eat.  Most cholesterol is made in the liver, but not all.  Virtually every cell in the body has the ability to make cholesterol, because it is so important to survival.

The main thrust of the article is about a study demonstrating that lowering cholesterol levels brought about a decrease in cardiac death rate.  Here it is presented in the breathless prose of the Time writers:

That was the reason for the N.H.L.B.I, study. The elaborate, ten-year program recruited 3,806 men between the ages of 35 and 59, all of whom had cholesterol levels above 265 mg per deciliter of blood (the average for U.S. adults is 215 to 220). Half the men were put on daily doses of cholestyramine, an unpleasant, cholesterol-lowering drug that was mixed with orange juice and taken six times a day. One participant likened taking it to swallowing “orange-flavored sand.” Among its side effects: constipation, bloating, nausea and gas. The other half received a similarly gritty placebo. Researchers had decided to use a drug rather than diet to lower cholesterol, because it would have been virtually impossible to control or measure the diet of so many men over so long a period. By the end of the study, the cholestyramine group had achieved an average cholesterol level 8.5% lower than that of the control group and had suffered 19% fewer heart attacks. Their cardiac death rate was a remarkable 24% lower than that of the placebo group.

The lesson is plain, says Dr. Charles Glueck, director of the University of Cincinnati Lipid Research Center, one of twelve centers that participated in the project: “For every 1% reduction in total cholesterol level, there is a 2% reduction of heart-disease risk.” This, says Project Director Basil Rifkind, is the evidence scientists have been waiting for. “It is a turning point in cholesterol-heart-disease research.”

Pretty powerful stuff, you might think.  Which is just what the authors of this article must have wanted you to think.  After all, a failed study doesn’t produce cover stories.

There are more than a few flies in this anti-cholesterol ointment, however.  Let’s take a look at what Gary Taubes writes about this study in Good Calories, Bad Calories:

In January 1984, the results of the trial were published in The Journal of the American Medical Association.  Cholesterol levels dropped by an average of 4 percent in the control group – those men taking a placebo.  The levels dropped by 13 percent in the men taking cholestryramine.  In the control group, 158 men suffered non-fatal heart attacks during the study and 38 men died from heart attacks.  In the treatment group, 130 men suffered non-fatal heart attacks and only 30 died from them.  All in all, 71 men had died in the control group and 68 in the treatment group.  In other words, cholestryramine had improved by less than .2 percent the chance that any one of the men who took it would live through the next decade.  To call these results “conclusive,” as the University of Chicago biostatistician Paul Meier remarked, would constitute “a substantial misuse of the term.”  Nonetheless, these results were taken as sufficient by Rifkind, Steinberg and their colleagues [those who had been searching for ‘proof’ for decades that cholesterol causes heart disease] so they could state unconditionally that [Ancel] Keys had been right and that lowering cholesterol would save lives.

Aside from the lack of any real meaningful data, the authors tried to palm off what they had found from a drug study as being applicable to diet.  Again, from Good Calories, Bad Calories:

Pete Ahrens [a cholesterol researcher at Rockefeller University] called this extrapolation from a drug study to a diet “unwarranted, unscientific and wishful thinking.”  Thomas Chalmers, an expert on clinical trials who would later become president of the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine in New York, described it to Science as an “unconscionable exaggeration of the data.”  In fact, the LRC investigators acknowledged in their JAMA article that their attempt to ascertain a benefit from diet alone had failed.

But that certainly didn’t keep them from trying.

Although there were several people mentioned in the Time article who were examples of the benefits of healthful, low-fat living, the star of the piece had to be Fred Shragai.

Fred Shragai, 59, of Encino, Calif., is a good example. Fourteen years ago, the prosperous real estate developer had a cholesterol level above 300 mg. At the time, he smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, was overweight (202 lbs. on a 5-ft. 5-in. frame) and routinely put in five or six 14-hour, pressure-packed days a week at the office. Rich sauces and fatty meat were his standard fare for both lunch and dinner, and exercise meant reaching under the bed to grab from his stash of pretzels and potato chips. Shragai was a classic candidate for a heart attack, and at the age of 45, he had one. Nine years later he was hospitalized for an operation to bypass five seriously blocked coronary arteries. In desperation, Shragai enrolled himself in U.C.L.A.’s Center for Health Enhancement. By changing the way he lived, he was told, he could lower his cholesterol level and reduce his risk of another heart attack.

There was much to learn. Cholesterol, as Shragai found out, is packaged by the body in envelopes of protein, and only some of these packages are potentially harmful. The main culprit, LDL (for low-density lipoprotein), is the body’s oil truck, circulating in the blood, delivering fat and cholesterol to the cells. Studies have shown that the higher the level of LDL, the greater the risk of atherosclerosis. Another type of cholesterol package is called HDL (for high-density lipoprotein). It appears to play a salutary role, helping remove cholesterol from circulation and reducing the risk of heart disease. Shragai’s goal was to lower his level of LDL and raise his HDL.

Diet was a first step. To begin with, such cholesterol-rich foods as eggs and organ meats and most cheeses can directly add to the level of potentially harmful LDL. Fat has an even bigger impact, although the reasons are not well understood. Saturated fat tends to raise LDL levels. Butter, bacon, beef, whole milk, virtually any food of animal origin is high in saturated fat; so are two vegetable oils: coconut and palm.

Polyunsaturated fats, which are typically of vegetable origin, have the opposite effect; thus corn, safflower, soybean and sesame oils tend to lower the level of potentially dangerous LDL. Fish oils do the same. In the middle are the mono-unsaturated fats such as olive and peanut oils. These may lower LDL slightly, but tend to be neutral.

The amount of fiber in the diet also seems to influence cholesterol levels. “LDL cholesterol can be reduced 20% in people with high levels just by consuming a cup of oat bran a day,” says Dr. Jon Story of Purdue University. However, Story adds, “that does not mean you can go and eat whatever else you want.”

For reasons that are still under study, cholesterol levels are influenced by a number of life-style factors. For instance, regular exercise can significantly raise the level of protective HDL. Alas, a couple of push-ups a day will not do the trick, says Dr. Josef Patsch of Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine: “You need sustained aerobic exercise for 20 minutes at least four times a week to really benefit.” A less strenuous way to raise HDL levels may be to have a daily shot or two of alcohol. “The evidence is indirect,” reports Epidemiologist Stephen Hulley of the University of California at San Francisco, “but social drinkers have HDL levels as much as 33% higher than those found in teetotalers.” On a more sober note, U.C.S.F.’s Dr. Richard Havel warns: “Anyone who recommends raising HDL by drinking is playing with fire.” Stress too has a detrimental effect. Studies have shown that the cholesterol levels of medical students peak at exam time, while accountants hit their high point around April 15.

By applying these lessons, says Shragai, “my life was totally changed.” Today the man who used to love steak says, “I won’t touch it.” At a restaurant, “if I choose fish, I ask the chef to skip the butter or please to sauté it in wine.” Every morning, regardless of weather, the man who once spurned exercise goes for an eight mile, two-hour hike through the wooded mountain trails near his home. He no longer smokes. His workdays average between eight and ten hours, but he insists, “I can absolutely stay away from the tension now. If I feel the pressure, I take off. Business associates get used to it; I set my own pace.” Shragai no longer lives in fear of a sudden heart attack: his blood pressure and pulse rate are down, and most remarkable, his cholesterol level has dropped to an exemplary 195.

Do a little Googling on Fred Shragai and a few things turn up.  Apparently, Mr. Shragai, a Holocaust survivor, was quite an interesting character.  In addition to being a successful businessman, he donned a Santa suit and entertained children around Christmastime.  As described in a December 1990 article in Orange Coast Magazine,

Shragai, in his late 60s, stands 5 feet 5 inches and weighs 165 pounds, down from his former rotund 200-plus since the doctor put Santa on a diet.  His beard and twinkling blue eyes are his own, he says proudly.

The article describes Mr. Shragai’s joy in his long-term job as Santa to many of his area’s poor residents.  He would visit houses, tell stories and bring presents.

“I’ll do this as long as I possibly can,” Shragai says, his eyes twinkling behind his Santa glasses. “After all, Santa can’t just quit.”

Unfortunately, that wasn’t all that long.  Mr. Shragai died of a heart attack about two months later on Feb 8, 1991 at age 66.

You can read about his life in an article in the Guardian written by his daughter as she came to grips with his death.

Many people who were in Mr. Shragai’s condition – overweight, overworked and overfed – bet their lives that the promise made by the Time article would be fulfilled.  If they quit smoking, cut the fat from their diets, took up exercise and dropped their cholesterol levels, they would avoid an early death from heart disease.  As the Time article said about Mr. Shragai:

[he] no longer lives in fear of a sudden heart attack: his blood pressure and pulse rate are down, and most remarkable, his cholesterol level has dropped to an exemplary 195.

As if these changes undo the risk of heart attack.  We can see from Mr. Shragai’s unfortunate case that they don’t.

Basically, he bet his life – literally – on the recommendations of doctors who were responsible for most of the hype in the Time article.  It’s hard to say whether he won, lost or broke even on the bet, because we don’t know what the outcome would have been had Mr. Shragai continued on his previous path.  Or what would have happened had he gone on a low-carb diet instead.  Based on my years of experience, I would bet that he would have done better on the low-carb approach, but, as I say, there is no way to know for sure.

There are a couple of take-home messages from Mr. Shragai’s case.  The first is that we don’t really know what constitutes true risk for heart disease.  Reduction of blood pressure, weight and cholesterol levels – measures of risk in the estimation of most physicians – didn’t prevent a disastrous outcome.  The second, and, in my view, the most important is that when we make nutritional and lifestyle decisions, we are betting our lives that we’ve made the correct decision.  Even those maintaining their course are making the decision not to change.  Decisions precede actions, and actions definitely have consequences, which means decisions have consequences.

I’m betting my life that saturated fat is good for me and that carbs are bad.  I eat a ton of saturated fat and very few carbs (unless I’m being a very bad boy as I was last night when I indulged in some of my granddaughter’s birthday cake).  So, if Dean Ornish is right and I’m wrong, I could be in deep trouble and maybe live a dramatically shortened life.  But I don’t think so.  Why?  Because the indications that the low-carbohydrate diet is the correct diet for humans comes from so many different sources. (And that’s not even counting my years of hands-on care of many thousands of patients on such diets.)

If you look at the scientific literature, you find that the low-carbohydrate diet is, at worst, the equal of the low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet and at best triumphs over it in spectacular fashion.  If you look at the anthropological evidence, the health of early humans took a turn for the worse when agriculture (read: high-carbohydrate diet) came along.  Pasta, even whole-grain pasta, was the fast food of antiquity.  If you look at the evolutionary evidence, it’s pretty clear that the forces of natural selection molded us to function optimally on a higher-fat, higher-protein diet.  And, finally, if you just look at the human physiology and biochemistry involved, it is clear that a diet high in carbohydrates is not good for us.  Looking at all this graphically from one of my slides below, we can see that all the evidence vectors point to a low-carb diet as being the one most optimal for human health.  Can a low-fat, high-carb diet make this claim?  I don’t think so.  Though many misguided vegans try to make such a claim, their arguments are risible.

You can find a few studies that show a low-fat, high-carb diet performs OK, but where is the anthropological, evolutionary and biochemical data to confirm?  When deciding what diet to follow, remember: you’re betting you’re life.  Consequently, you should view the diet through the various lenses as laid out in the graphic above.  If a new diet looks acceptable through one or two lenses, but not the others, just stick with your low-carb diet and be done with it.

Had Mr. Shragai performed the above analysis, he probably would not have followed the diet he did.  As I wrote earlier, we have no idea as to what his outcome would have been had he gone on a low-carb diet instead of a low-fat one, but I can’t help but believe it would have been better.  Although Mr. Shragai’s case is that of but one individual, since this vapid 1984 Time article came out launching the jihad against fat and cholesterol, the entire country became unwitting subjects in a long-term experiment testing the hypothesis that a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet is healthful.  And in the intervening 26 years, obesity has skyrocketed and type II diabetes has reached epidemic proportions, leading me and many others to say that the low-fat diet has failed.  At least as applied to large groups of subjects.

Let me sum up the take home message with an unrelated story that oddly illustrates the point.  When I was taking flying lessons years ago, the tower once told me to cross one runway we were stopped short of and proceed to the next one.  I goosed the engine and started across.  My instructor pushed on the brakes and stopped us and asked me what I was doing.  I said, “The tower told me to proceed to runway 15L.”  My instructor said, “Yes, but you didn’t look for traffic coming in on runway 15R (the runway we had to cross) before proceeding.  Here’s what you’ve got to learn.  If the pilot make a mistake, the pilot dies; if the control tower makes a mistake, the pilot dies.  Always check for yourself.”

Sobering words, but ones I remember.  The same applies to diet.  Don’t let Time magazine or anyone else tell you what to do.  It’s your life.  Don’t bet it heedlessly.

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

One of the problems – if it could be called a problem – in writing this blog and moderating the comments is most readers are pretty intelligent. Occasionally I have the angry vegetarian wander in, take me to task for my errant ways, and, after a comeback or two on my part, drift away to never be heard from again.  Thanks to the confirmation bias, this blog pretty much selects against the non-meat eater.  So, I tend to forget how many people there are out there who are pretty much clueless about basic nutrition, and how many people there are who bobble through life spouting cliches they’ve heard along the way as great nutritional truths.  Based on the comments I get on this blog, it seems to me that most people are pretty nutritionally sophisticated and reasonable.

But I have just recently been disabused of that notion.

My friend Tim Ferriss put up an excerpt of our new book The 6-Week Cure on his site a few days ago and asked me if I would mind answering a few of the commenters.  I told him I wouldn’t mind at all, but I didn’t realize what I was getting myself into.

Tim’s blog isn’t really a nutritional blog – it’s a lifestyle design blog (said term invented by Tim himself).  There is a little nutrition thrown in here and there, but mainly the blog is focused in other directions.  As a consequence, it attracts mainly youngish readers who enjoy following Tim’s adventures and want to learn how to model their lifestyles after his.  My blog is specifically directed to folks more interested in nutrition who are willing to put up with my digressions into other areas from time to time, so I expect them to be more nutritionally aware.

I wasn’t prepared for what I got in the comments on Tim’s post.  Surprisingly, there were a fair number of commenters – maybe even a majority – who would feel right at home on my blog.  But there were also a fair number who made me realize that nutritional sophistication is far from a universal phenomenon.  You can take a trip over to the comments section of his blog to see what I mean.  I pretty much answered only those who I thought were totally off track, so you’ll be able to read my comments, then track back to the comment I was responding to and see what I mean.

The experience made me realize just how much of a void there is in good info out there explaining why humans really are meat eaters at heart, so I’ve decided to do a couple of posts on the subject to be able to refer to in the future when this issue arises.  While I was mulling this idea over, I received a link to a piece of sheer idiocy that really pushed me over the edge.  It made me realize that if this kind of stuff is out there circulating, it’s no wonder these people have such bizarre notions of what constitutes a rational diet.

I’m going to start off this first part by examining some of this nonsense, and I’ll finish off in the second part by going through one of the classic papers of all time showing why we humans aren’t just meat eaters, but we are humans because we eat meat.

The link I had sent by a friend of mine is one I’ve seen referred to on a couple of other low-carb or Paleo sites.  I didn’t give it much thought until the Tim Ferriss blog experience (which, BTW, is still going on.  I just got binged on my email that Tim approved another 15 or so comments that I need to take a look at, so keep checking his blog) made me realize that there were really people out their buying into this nonsense.

The piece from AlterNet starts out with a big, bold headline:

Eating Meat Is Not Natural

No equivocating there.  A categorical statement if I’ve ever seen one.  Let’s see how the author of the piece – Kathy Freston – backs it up.  She starts out with a short introductory paragraph that ends with another categorical statement.  I’ve noticed that these folks love to write these things with such authority.  Same with the people on Tim’s blog.  There is no doubt in their minds that they’re correct.  But they are operating in an informational void.

Which brings to mind a great quote from Lierre Kieth’s book:

I was on the side of righteousness, and like any fundamentalist, I could only stay there by avoiding information.

Here is the intro paragraph to the AlterNet piece:

Going through the reader feedback on some of my recent articles, I noticed the frequently stated notion that eating meat was an essential step in human evolution. While this notion may comfort the meat industry, it’s simply not true, scientifically. [My italics]

No hesitance there.  “It’s simply not true, scientifically.”  Not even a smidgen of doubt.

How does our author prove it’s not true?  By referring to the writings of people who present themselves as scientists but who are ideological vegetarians.

Dr. T. Colin Campbell, professor emeritus at Cornell University and author of The China Study (please check out the link), explains that in fact, we only recently (historically speaking) began eating meat, and that the inclusion of meat in our diet came well after we became who we are today. He explains that “the birth of agriculture only started about 10,000 years ago at a time when it became considerably more convenient to herd animals. This is not nearly as long as the time [that] fashioned our basic biochemical functionality (at least tens of millions of years) and which functionality depends on the nutrient composition of plant-based foods.”

Ah, our old friend Dr. T. Colin Campbell and the China study.  Many commenters on Tim’s blog referenced this study as if were gospel.  Before we get into The China Study, I’ve got a disclosure to make.  I’ve never read the thing.  So how can I talk about it intelligently?  Because I have appeared on the podium with Dr. Campbell.  A few years ago we both spoke at a symposium somewhere (I can’t even remember where now), and his talk preceded mine.  As I sat on the stage, I listened intently and made notes as I watched his slides.  What I realized right off the bat is that his whole shtick is nothing but an epidemiologic or observational study, which, as I’ve written about in these pages  before, proves no causality and serves only to derive hypotheses.  He spent his entire presentation trying to prove his thesis with studies that can’t he used to prove diddly.  Since I spent an hour listening, watching and then rebutting, I figure I’ve earned a pass from reading the book.

If you want to read more on The China Study, I suggest you take a look at two sources.  First, read Chris Masterjohn’s review, then you can read Dr. Campbell’s rebuttal, then Chris’s response to that.  And you can read my good friend Anthony Colpo’s review of the book.  The China Study is a pretty sorry piece of work and, since it is an observational study (the results of which are misrepresented in the pop science book available), it doesn’t prove squat.  I certainly wouldn’t rush out and become a vegetarian because of it.  Yet if you read some of the comments on Amazon, you would think this book is the Second Coming.  These poor people who have been so gulled simply don’t realize how worthless such studies are.

In the quote above, Dr. Campbell is obviously unaware that the birth of agriculture involved primarily the turn from a hunting/gathering subsistence to the growing of grain.  The agricultural revolution wasn’t a change from a herbivore existence to the herding of animals for food.  This kind of clap trap shows just how misguided these kind of folks are and how they twist the historical facts to suit their purposes.

[Note: I have since read The China Study and have posted about it here.]

The next ‘authority’ trotted out by our author is none other than Dr. Neal Barnard, the president of the inappropriately named Physician’s Committee for Responsible Medicine and himself a vegetarian.

That jibes with what Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine President Dr. Neal Barnard says in his book, The Power of Your Plate, in which he explains that “early humans had diets very much like other great apes, which is to say a largely plant-based diet, drawing on foods we can pick with our hands. Research suggests that meat-eating probably began by scavenging — eating the leftovers that carnivores had left behind. However, our bodies have never adapted to it. To this day, meat-eaters have a higher incidence of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and other problems.”

This is the Dr. Barnhard of the much-ballyhooed (by him, at least) ‘study’ of the ill effects of low-carb diets that I rebutted a few years back.

He is correct in saying that the earliest of men probably begin to eat meat by scavenging.  The paleontological record seems to bear that out.  But the line about our bodies never adapting to it and the statement that meat-eaters have higher incidences of all the diseases mentioned is pure malarky.  If Dr. Barnhard were asked to come up with references for these statements, all he could possible produce would be a few observational studies, which, as we all know, don’t prove anything.  And for each one he could come up with, I could come up with just as many showing the opposite.

Now we get to the big gun: Richard Leakey.

There is no more authoritative source on anthropological issues than paleontologist Dr. Richard Leakey, who explains what anyone who has taken an introductory physiology course might have discerned intuitively — that humans are herbivores. Leakey notes that “[y]ou can’t tear flesh by hand, you can’t tear hide by hand … We wouldn’t have been able to deal with food source that required those large canines” (although we have teeth that are called “canines,” they bear little resemblance to the canines of carnivores).

Hmmm.  I wonder if Leakey has ever seen the canines of a gorilla?  They certainly have the appearance of the canines of a carnivore yet gorillas are pure vegetarians.  But let’s go on.

In fact, our hands are perfect for grabbing and picking fruits and vegetables. Similarly, like the intestines of other herbivores, ours are very long (carnivores have short intestines so they can quickly get rid of all that rotting flesh they eat).  We don’t have sharp claws to seize and hold down prey.  And most of us (hopefully) lack the instinct that would drive us to chase and then kill animals and devour their raw carcasses. Dr. Milton Mills builds on these points and offers dozens more in his essay, “A Comparative Anatomy of Eating.”

All this anatomical stuff is pure gibberish, yet many people not skilled in the art of critical thinking buy into it.  In part II of this post, I’ll address many of these anatomical issues, so we’ll leave it until then.  If you’re bored, you might want to take a look at the Comparative Anatomy of Eating, which is a not-very-successful attempt to push a square peg into a round hole.  Dr. Milton really has to stretch to get the anatomy to fit with his notions of what it is designed for.  I’ve seen so many variations on this theme – people showing minor anatomical differences to prove that humans are really herbivores – that I’ve lost count.

The author now turns to her last expert, a big time, mainstream doctor.

The point is this: Thousands of years ago when we were hunter-gatherers, we may have needed a bit of meat in our diets in times of scarcity, but we don’t need it now.  Says Dr. William C. Roberts, editor of the American Journal of Cardiology, “Although we think we are, and we act as if we are, human beings are not natural carnivores.  When we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us, because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores.”

This guy really goes off the rails.  He tells us that “when we kill animals to eat them, they end up killing us,…”  A strong statement that he has absolutely nothing but his own opinion to back it up with.  Then he really takes a leap.  These animals we kill to eat do us in “because their flesh, which contains cholesterol and saturated fat, was never intended for human beings, who are natural herbivores.”  Oh, really.  That cholesterol will do us in, eh?  Why is it that we have cholesterol ourselves and plants don’t?  Why is every cell in our bodies capable of making cholesterol?  Because we don’t need it?  The depth of his dumbth is unfathomable.  Realizing that this guy is the editor of a major cardiology journal lets you know really quickly why such journals publish such biased articles.

Our author goes on.

Sure, most of us are “behavioral omnivores” — that is, we eat meat, so that defines us as omnivorous. But our evolution and physiology are herbivorous, and ample science proves that when we choose to eat meat, that causes problems, from decreased energy and a need for more sleep up to increased risk for obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

Here again with the meat causes obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer.  Instead of the “ample science” she claims, there is no proof whatsoever.  She uses an interesting expression: she describes us humans as “behavioral omnivores,” which I think is a good definition, but she’s using it incorrectly.  She means that we are really herbivores, but we’ve learned to become omnivores, therefore we are behavioral omnivores, not real omnivores.  I agree with her, but with a twist.  I think we are designed as carnivores and have adapted to an omnivore existence, so we are behavioral omnivores, just not the way she thinks we are.  Gorillas are behavioral vegetarians.  They have the GI tracts from teeth to the other end of carnivores – and they do fine being fed meat in zoos – but they culturally are vegetarians or behavioral vegetarians.

Old habits die hard, and it’s convenient for people who like to eat meat to think that there is evidence to support their belief that eating meat is “natural” or the cause of our evolution. For many years, I too, clung to the idea that meat and dairy were good for me; I realize now that I was probably comforted to have justification for my continued attachment to the traditions I grew up with.

But in fact top nutritional and anthropological scientists from the most reputable institutions imaginable say categorically that humans are natural herbivores, and that we will be healthier today if we stick with our herbivorous roots. It may be inconvenient, but it alas, it is the truth.

She ends by summarizing all the twaddle she presented earlier.  And she relies on what others say to ‘prove’ her points – all the top scientists at all the most reputable institutions – which is a dead give away that she hasn’t gone to any original sources herself and is simply relying on hearsay.  But, hey, she’s a journalist, not a scientist, so she’s got to rely on the scientists to tell her what’s going on, right?  To a point, but she should also check with some other “top scientists” from other “reputable institutions” to perhaps provide counter opinions.

It almost defies belief that people can be so gullible as to put any credence whatsoever in an article such as this one, yet, after dealing with Tim’s blog, it’s apparent that many do.

One journalist who doesn’t, however, is my friend Amy Alkon, better known as The Advice Goddess who writes a syndicated column that I never miss.  In her latest, published in the Orange County Register, she gives advice to a vegan who has come a cropper in a burgeoning email romance with a non-vegetarian.  As you read the request for advice from the vegan, you can see her innate sense of moral authority start to bleed through.  Amy’s advice is priceless. (It was Amy, in fact, who emailed me the link (after some zealot had sent it to her) to the article above that I’ve just spent three pages dissecting.)

While you’re at it, read her advice to the next seeker after the vegan.  My favorite line:

People say the best things in life – love, friendship, moonlight – are free, but so are the worst things: lymphoma, a really big overbite, and road kill.

How true, how true.

The next post is going to be free, and I hope it will fall into the good kind of free category.  We’ll go over a famous paper from the anthropological literature making a virtually watertight case that it was eating meat that made us human.

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

When I wrote the Overcoming the Curse of the Mummies chapter in Protein Power, I wrote mainly about the evidence of disease found in the mummies of ancient Egyptians and correlated this disease with their high-carbohydrate diet.  Along with all the material on mummies, which is the part everyone seems to remember, I wrote about a study done in the United States in the 1970s that persuasively demonstrated the superiority of the hunter diet as compared to an agricultural diet, which no one seems to remember.  I came across that study a couple of days ago and decided to present it in a little more detail than I was able to in Protein Power.

The anthropological record of early man clearly shows health took a nosedive when populations made the switch from hunting and gathering to agriculture. It takes a physical anthropologist about two seconds to look at a skeleton unearthed from an archeological site to tell if the owner of that skeleton was a hunter-gatherer or an agriculturist.

Unlike the Egyptian mummy data, there is usually no soft tissue material left when remains of early man are found.  But the skeletal remains of hunter-gatherers show them to be much healthier than agriculturalists.  Hunter-gatherers had better bones, had no signs of iron-deficiency anemia, no signs of infection, few (if any) dental cavities, fewer signs of arthritis and were in general larger and more robust than their agriculture-following contemporaries.  One of the theories as to why postulates that hunter-gatherers lived in smaller, more mobile societies.  Consequently, they weren’t as likely to get communicable diseases and were able to travel to find food, whereas agriculturists were rooted to one spot, lived in larger groups, making the spread of disease more likely, and they were subject to lack of food if a drought or other natural disaster decimated their crops.

The study we’re going to look at today is unusual in several respects.  First, there is a large amount of data, i.e., a lot of skeletons of both groups.  Second, it compares sedentary hunter-gatherers to sedentary agriculturalists.  And it compares peoples who probably had the same genetic heritage to one another.  Finally, it compares hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists living in the same general area.  The only real difference between the two groups of people is the time in which they lived and diet.

The group of agriculturalists lived in an area called Hardin Village, which is a famous archeological site located in Kentucky on the bank of the Ohio River across from the current day city of Portsmouth, Ohio.  These people farmed the area from about 1500 AD to 1675 AD.  There is no indication in the archeological record of any European contact with these Hardin Villagers.

The hunter-gatherers lived in the same general area in an archeological site called Indian Knoll, which is a large midden (an ancient refuse heap) located on the Green River in western Kentucky.  Carbon-14 dating dates the age of habitation of these hunter-gatherers to about 5000 years ago.  Based on the excavation of the deep midden, these people lived at this site for a long period of time, i.e., they stayed in one spot instead of roving as most hunter-gatherers did.

Writes Claire Cassidy, Ph.D., author of the study:

Available fauna and flora, water, and climate were so similar in the two areas that it may be assumed that whatever natural stresses existed at one site were probably existent at the other also, and therefore, in themselves, these should not affect the health and nutrition differently.

Population size and degree of sedentarism affect disease spread.  In the cases of the Hardin Village and Indian Knoll, since both are sedentary or semisedentary, this variable should be negligible in explaining differences in disease experience between the sites.

Archeological-reconstructable variability in material culture is also fairly small (though Indian Knollers used the spear-thrower and spear, while Hardin Villagers had pottery, permanent houses, and the bow and arrow).  Thus, in all probability the most significant difference between these two populations is in subsistence technique, with agriculture at the later site, and hunting-gathering at the earlier.

So, we have two societies who both lived in the same area and didn’t move around much, if at all.  One lived by agriculture and one lived by hunting and gathering.  Genetically they were probably the same, although there is no way to tell for sure.  Both groups had the same climate, weather, water, etc.  Neither group had contact with Europeans, so there is no contamination that way.  The groups are separated by only diet and time.  The hunter-gatherers lived in the area approximately 3500 years before the farmers did and had a substantially different diet.

(When I first went through this paper, I went nuts trying to remember whether the Hardin Villagers were the agriculturalists or whether the Indian Knollers were.  After whipping back to the start of the paper a half dozen times to check and recheck on it, I decided to come up with a mnemonic for it.  I started thinking of the Villagers part of Hardin Village as being farmers.  Village = farm.  Farmers live in villages – at least they do in my mind, so it’s easy for me to remember that the Hardin VILLAGERS are farmers.  Readers of this blog are probably smarter than I am and won’t have to go to such lengths, but if any do, this will help.)

What did these folks eat?

At Hardin Village, primary dependence was on corn, beans, and squash.  Wild plants and animals (especially deer, elk, small mammals, wild turkey, box turtle) provided supplements to a largely agricultural diet.  It is probable that deer was not a quantitatively important food source…  At Hardin Village, remains of deer were sparse.

At Indian Knoll it is clear that very large quantities of river mussels and snails were consumed.  Other meat was provided by deer, small mammals, wild turkey, box turtle and fish; dog was sometimes eaten ceremonially.

There are several other dietary differences.  The Hardin Village diet was high in carbohydrates, while that at Indian Knoll was high in protein.  In terms of quality, [some] believe that primitive agriculturalists got plenty of protein from grain diets, most recent [researchers] emphasize that the proportion of essential amino-acids is the significant factor in determining protein-quality of the diet, rather than simply the number of grams of protein eaten.  It is much more difficult to achieve a good balance of amino-acids on a corn-beans diet than when protein is derived from meat or eggs.  The lack of protein at the Hardin Village signaled by the archaeological data should prepare us for the possibility of finding evidence of protein deficiency in the skeletal material.

The Hardin Village site yielded 296 skeletons and the Indian Knoll site 285.

What did this skeletal data show?  Let’s take a look.

Based on the ages of the people whose skeletons were found (anthropologists can easily tell age from skeletal remains), the life expectancies for people of both sexes and all ages were lower at Hardin Village as compared to Indian Knoll.  And infant mortality was higher at Hardin Village as well.

Iron-deficiency anemia of sufficient duration to cause bone changes was present at Hardin Village but absent at Indian Knoll.  And half the cases of serious iron-deficiency anemia occurred in children at Hardin Village.

Iron-deficiency anemia is a true deficiency disease, often an accompaniment of low-meat diets, long-term infection, or chronic disease.  It is also frequently found in cases of protein-energy malnutrition. The classic sign of iron-deficiency anemia presents as a couple of conditions seen in the skull called porotic hyperostosis and cribra orbitalia.   8.2 percent of the Hardin Villagers had iron-deficiency anemia severe enough to cause one or both of these conditions.  These conditions are extremely painful and those afflicted had to have been miserable, especially the children, most of whom were under five years old.

Porotic hyperostosis

cribra orbitalia

There were signs of malnutrition in both populations, but the signs differed between them.

There are a couple of ways anthropologists look for periods of malnutrition.  One is by examining the tibias (lower leg bones) with X-ray looking for a finding called Harris lines (or growth arrest lines).

Harris lines

All these Harris lines indicate is that an episode of malnutrition occurred during childhood while the bones were developing, causing a period of growth arrest that lasted at least ten days or more.  But since these lines appear after the period of malnutrition, they can’t provide information as to the total duration of the lack of food.  The total number of lines found tells approximately how many episodes of dietary lack occurred that were serious enough to halt bone growth.

To determine the severity of periods of malnutrition, anthropologists look for enamel hypoplasia.  Enamel hypoplasia derives from periods of ill-health or hunger lasting long enough to interrupt the deposition of enamel on the teeth.  These defects, like Harris lines, represent periods of growth arrest in childhood, but unlike Harris lines, enamel hypoplasia quantifies the severity of the period of malnutrition.  The worse the defect, the worse the malnutrition.

Enamel hypoplasia

Enamel hypoplasia

Interestingly, there were more Harris lines found in the specimens from Indian Knoll, but these lines were regularly spaced, “indicating that malnutrition occurred at periodic intervals, perhaps as a “normal part of life.”  There were an equal number of jaws at both sites demonstrating teeth with enamel hypoplasia, “but the frequency of severe episodes of arrest was significantly higher at Hardin Village.”

The most parsimonious interpretation of this information is that mild food shortages occurred at regular intervals at Indian Knoll; perhaps late winter was a time of danger.  [Researchers] using growth arrest lines [Harris lines] and … archaeological data, have similarly concluded that in the hunter-gatherer populations they studied, food shortages occurred regularly, probably on a yearly basis.  At Hardin Village growth arrest was caused by illnesses or crop failure which resulted in long-lasting, but randomly-occurring episodes of growth arrest.

Bones can also exhibit signs of certain types of infection.  Bone infections affected an equal number of people at both sites, but affected significantly more children at Hardin Village than at Indian Knoll.

A specific type of infectious disease showing up in skeletal remains and identified as the syndrome of periosteal inflammation was present at both sites, but was thirteen times more common at Hardin Village.  No one knows for sure what causes this disorder, but it is thought to be caused by a treponematosis, a disease caused by a similar but not identical agent as that that causes yaws, pinta or even syphilis.

The author of this study attributes the greatly increased incidence of this disease in the Hardin Villagers to “lack of resistance in the host because of poor diet and general health.”

Teeth are often a window into the diet of ancient populations.  Based on the wear patterns and number of caries (dental cavities), teeth can provide much information on the quality of the diet.  Teeth ridden with decay are typically associated with poor quality diets, and the unhealthy teeth themselves can be a major factor in the overall poor health of an individual.

Tooth decay was rampant at Hardin Village, but uncommon at Indian Knoll.  Adult males at Hardin Village had an average of 6.74 carious teeth per mouth, while at Indian Knoll the corresponding frequency was 0.73 per mouth.  For women the rates were 8.52 and 0.91 per mouth respectively.  No Indian Knoll children under twelve years of age had caries, whereas some Hardin Village children already had developed caries in milk teeth in their second year of life.  Tooth decay is closely associated with sugar content and consistency of food, occurring with higher frequency in sweet or high carbohydrate diets which are soft and sticky.

Dental caries

Here is the summary of the findings of this analysis of skeletal data as tabulated by the author:

1.    Life expectancies for both sexes at all ages were lower at Hardin Village than at Indian Knoll.
2.    Infant mortality was higher at Hardin Village.
3.    Iron-deficiency anemia of sufficient duration to cause bone changes was absent at Indian Knoll, but present at Hardin Village, where 50 percent of cases occurred in children under age five.
4.    Growth arrest episodes at Indian Knoll were periodic and more often of short duration and were possibly due to food shortage in late winter; those at Hardin Village occurred randomly and were more often of long duration, probably indicative of disease as a causative agent.
5.    More children suffered infections at Hardin Village than at Indian Knoll.
6.    The syndrome of periosteal inflammation was more common at Hardin Village than at Indian Knoll.
7.    Tooth decay was rampant at Hardin Village and led to early abscessing and tooth loss; decay was unusual at Indian Knoll and abscessing occurred later in life because of severe wear to the teeth.  The differences in tooth wear and caries rate are very likely attributable to dietary differences between the two groups.

Her analysis based on this data:

Overall, the agricultural Hardin Villagers were clearly less healthy than the Indian Knollers, who lived by hunting and gathering.

The author raises a couple of interesting questions about the diet of early populations and the drive to eat carbohydrates in place of real food once the taste is acquired.  Before we get to these interesting issues, however, I want to delve into a sad situation that obviously prevailed in the Hardin Villagers and continues to be present in some modern day agriculturalists.

Below is a chart from the paper showing the life expectancies by age of people living in Hardin Village and Indian Knoll.  Look at the enormous increase in mortality in the agricultural Hardin Villagers between the ages of two to four.

Why this rapid increase in mortality in these young children.  The author tells us:

The health and nutrition situation at Hardin Village may profitably be compared with that in modern peasant villages.  In may of these, children are typically fairly healthy until weaned.  At this time they are introduced to a soft diet consisting largely of carbohydrates (in much of Africa and Central America, a pap is made of sugar, water, and maize flour: in Jamaica green bananas replace maize).  In many cases, within a few weeks or months these children develop diarrhea, lose weight, suffer multiple infections, and may eventually develop the form of protein-energy malnutrition called kwashiorkor.   In this disorder caloric intake is usually adequate, but protein and other nutrient intakes are extremely limited; without modern hospital care many victims die.

At Hardin Village the highest rate of death occurs between the second and fourth years of life.  This is typical for a population experiencing weaning problems.  Considering the softness of the adult diet and the high caries rate of both children and adults, it is not unlikely that the children were weaned onto a corn pap of some type.

The high prevalence of childhood infection, severity of growth arrest in the first few years of life, and the existence of iron-deficiency anemia all point to a situation at Hardin Village analogous to those in modern peasant villages.  In other words the evidence supports a hypothesis that malnutrition began with weaning at Hardin Village, sometimes resulted in kwashiorkor, and continued at low level – just enough to reduce the resistance of the population to infectious disease – throughout the life of the individual.

Think about this the next time you hear a pediatrician recommend that babies who are being weaned start out on some sort of Pablum or other processed cereal for infants.  And they virtually all recommend it.  Our grandchildren’s pediatrician recommended it, but MD and I interceded after the first feeding.  From then on they all got pureed turkey, pork, chicken or other meat along with pureed vegetables.  They had no grain.

Dr. Cassidy, the author of this fascinating paper, speculates in the discussion section about why a society would abandon hunting and gathering for agriculture when the diet quality provided by an agricultural subsistence is so inferior.  She writes about the possibility of all the game being decimated by over hunting, and she mentions the possibility of inter tribal warfare reducing the male hunting population to the point that those remaining standing couldn’t provide enough food for all by hunting alone.  Then she gets to the heart of the matter, and asks some questions that are pertinent not just to ancient agricultural societies, but to us today.

Thus population expansion, inefficient hunting techniques, loss of game from the area by migration and overkill, and warfare, all may have contributed to force the Hardin Villagers to become more and more dependent on a small number of high-carbohydrate agricultural foods of limited quality, and this may have been so even were they aware of an increase in physical ill-health in the group.

Finally, we must also wonder if people didn’t ultimately begin to prefer corn and beans to meats?  There is some evidence that carbohydrates can become so palatable to humans that they eat them in preference to other foods; such a situation may have further limited the appeal of hunting.

If this is the case, the Hardin Villagers are not the only society in history who have chosen carbohydrates in preference to other foods.  And they certainly aren’t the only ones to prefer corn and beans to meats.  I would venture that most people today prefer carbs to meat, a notion that is confirmed in the nutritional data.  Carbs play a far larger role in the American diet than do meats of all kinds.  And if many so-called nutritional experts had their way, we would all eat even more.

The next time you may be tempted by the siren song of the high-carb pushers, remember what happened to the Hardin Villagers and do the Nancy Reagan: Just say no.

*Cassidy CM. Nutrition and health in agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers: a case study of two prehistoric populations. in Nutritional Anthropology. Eds Jerome NW et al. 1980 Redgrave Publishing Company, Pleasantville, NY pg 117-145