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.

Read more »

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.

Read more »

In the last post we discussed ramping up the fat intake as the single best way to hurry the low-carb or keto adaptation along.  I didn’t mention it in the previous post, but another little secret is to keep an eye on the protein intake. Too much protein will prevent the shift into ketoses because the liver will convert some of the protein into glucose – this glucose will then be used first and slow down the ketogenic process.  Which, if course, prompts the question, how much protein is too much?  As long as you’re getting your protein from meat, especially fatty cuts of meat, you’re probably okay.  If you go for the extremely lean cuts of meat, say, skinless chicken breasts, or if you are supplementing your diet with low-fat protein shakes, you could have a little more trouble low-carb adapting.  If you’re going the shake route, I would recommend you add some coconut oil to the shakes for a couple of reasons.  First, you’ll hasten the keto-adaptation, and, second, the fat it coconut oil will help remove the fat from your liver (which I’ll discuss more later in this post).

A glass of Tinto de Verano pictured at left. A great way to hydrate. (See note at bottom of post.)

As I said, you need to really crank up the fat intake to push yourself over the adaptation divide as quickly as possible.  If you don’t like fatty cuts of meat, you can add a little medium-chain triglycerides (MCT) to your diet.  MCT are absorbed more like carbohydrates and are used quickly by the body.  They are almost never incorporated into the fat cells, so they burn quickly, and any extra that might be hanging around are converted to ketones.  So, MCT will drive the ketone production process.  And so will coconut oil if you prefer that.

Read more »

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

Listen to your body?

Read more »

A little over two years ago I wrote a post on Pentabosol, a weight-loss supplement we and our research partner developed and made available for a number of years.  In that post I mentioned that MD and I were contemplating actively marketing Pentabosol again.  We reformulated the product and changed its name to Metabosol, but our timing was all wrong because at about the same time, we wound up launching our SousVide Supreme project as well.  Never having been in the appliance business, we had not even the most minimal idea as to how much time that venture was going to take.  As a consequence, the weight-loss product project took a back seat and more or less fell between the cracks.  Now that things on the sous vide front requiring our direct attention have slowed down a bit (for us, not for the company) we decided to turn our attention to the nutritional supplement and made an annoying (to us) discovery that may benefit you. (More about which later.) In case you don’t go back and read the old post, let me quickly review the Pentabosol (Metabosol) story.

Pentabosol

NOTE: DUE TO OVERWHELMING DEMAND, WE HAVE JUST RUN OUT OF ALL OF OUR SUPPLIES OF METABOSOL.  THANKS FOR YOUR INTEREST.

Read more »