The Blog of Michael R. Eades, M.D.

I have been dilatory in posting over the past few days and embarrassingly dilatory about approving comments.  I’m way, way behind, but I’ll get caught up ultimately.  So, if you have a comment doing time in comment Purgatory, don’t despair.  I will get to it.  Ultimately.

My excuse for not devoting my normal amount of attention to this blog is that I’ve been extremely busy as of late.  MD and I made a quick trip to Seattle to work on our world-changing project, then came back and spent a couple of days at the zoo that is Expo West (more about which momentarily), then the Seattle team came to us and we continued to work.  During all this, MD had a concert in which she had to perform Mozart’s Requiem and Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna (my favorite piece of choral music) along with a couple of lesser pieces.  And tomorrow we drive back to Tahoe.  So, we’ve been busy little beavers and this blog has suffered.

Expo West has got to be the world’s largest natural foods expo.  It takes place every year at about this time in Anaheim.  And every year at about this time we drag ourselves to it.  The photo at the top of this blog represents one tiny little portion of this gathering.  To see how huge it is, take a look at the photo below of the map of the thing.

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Paleolithic paintings from Lascaux cave in southern France

I imagine most readers of this blog would expect a group of subjects to do better on a Paleolithic diet as compared to a standard American diet, but there are few studies actually making the comparison. One was posted yesterday in the Advance-0nline-Publication section of the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition that shows subjects following a Paleolithic diet made major metabolic changes, and made them rapidly.

Before we get into the study, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page when we discuss the Paleolithic diet. We we say Paleolithic diet, what are we really talking about?

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A couple of weeks ago I posted that Gary Taubes had agree to answer questions from readers of this blog.  Over a hundred readers sent in questions through the comment section.  Many of these questions were actually multiple questions, so Gary ended up with probably 200+ questions to deal with.

I’ve gone through and compiled a list of the most common questions and presented them to Gary.  Here are the questions followed by his responses.

The most commonly asked question was how do Asians and others living a seemingly high-carb existence manage to escape the consequences? Read more »

Dinner tonight at Casa Eades

Last Sunday the New York Times published a color spread on the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) data on the changes in food consumption in this country between 1970 and 2006, which got me to musing.

To the uninformed, which, sadly, probably means most people working in the nutrition industry and even those employed in a nutritional capacity at the USDA, these changes (all save two) seem to be in a positive direction. The intake of dairy products has decreased; the intake of vegetables has increased; the intake of red meat has fallen; the intake of fish, chicken and skyrocketed; the intake of fruit is up; the intake of grains has increased markedly; and the intake of vegetable fats has almost doubled. The only two negatives are that sugar and sweeteners have increased and overall food consumption has gone up by about 11 percent, or an addition 1.8 pounds per person per week.

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