My Meals: 12/29/09

Breakfast at home

Half-pound of raw grass-fed ground beef seasoned with garlic powder, New Mexico chili pepper powder, cumin powder, and white pepper (consumed raw, one of my favorites).

Chinese cabbage and broccoli, steamed, one bowl, seasoned with leftover lemon chicken fat and juices

A few pieces (maybe 2 ounces) of leftover holiday ham.

White sweet potato, baked, with about 1 tablespoon pastured butter.

Half a softball sized orange.

Two of those Yes To Cookies cookies (working through the remainder of the test batches)

Dinner at office

Sirloin tip steak, about 3/4 pound, rare.

Anaheim chili salsa, a few spoonfuls on the steak.

Chinese cabbage and broccoli in lemon chicken juices (prepared at breakfast).

Banana with walnut butter (p. 407 in The Garden of Eating Cookbook).

Large apple.

Finding the spice of life: Cinnamon

The following blogpost is part of a blog party on warming herbs, graciously hosted by Yael Grauer. You can see the whole party here.

Intro: For the past two years at HerbMentor.com we have studied one herb a month. This gives us a chance to really experience each plant and learn about it in many ways. Members of HerbMentor.com have the option of filling out monthly study sheets to both increase their learning and record their experiences. Throughout each month new videos, recipes, how to articles, interviews with innovative herbalists, and other herbal content is posted. In the community forums members are encouraged to post questions, share stories and recipes, and offer general guidance. Every other month, John and I host an Herb Circle Gathering where members can call in and we can interact on a more personal level. For the month of January 2010 we will be studying the sweet, warming, and intoxicating spice, cinnamon. This article was originally posted on HerbMentor.com as the welcoming overview of our studies.


Scientific Name: Cinnamomum aromaticum, Cinnamomum cassia, Cinnamomum zeylanicum

Family: Lauraceae

Parts used: Bark (prepared as sticks, chips, powder, or essential oil), twigs, dried flowers.

Properties: Aromatic stimulant, warming, demulcent, sweet, astringent, anodyne, hypoglycemic, anti-oxidant.

Many of us in the northern hemisphere are shrouded in the darkness of winter. Herbaceous plants hibernate in the Earth as we stay cozy in our homes. At HerbMentor.com we chose to study cinnamon this time of year, not only because everyone will have access to it, but also because it is a warming tonic perfect for this cold time of year.

Cinnamon bark by any other name would certainly taste as sweet… Or so the saying goes.

There is some confusion concerning cinnamon as the common name refers to several different species of cinnamon that are similar, but not the same.

In the United States if you buy ground cinnamon from the store you are most likely buying Cinnamomum cassia (cassia cinnamon). This cinnamon is native to Indonesia and now grows in tropical climates all around the world.

In other parts of the world, Cinnamomum zeylanicum is considered the “true cinnamon” and is also called ceylon cinnamon.

Ceylon cinnamon is considered to have sweeter and lighter flavor, while cassia cinnamon is considered to be spicier and more pungent. Ceylon cinnamon is native to Sri Lanka or Ceylon. Referring to the difference in tastes between these two spices, chefs prefer cassia cinnamon in savory dishes such as meats and soups and prefer the sweeter Ceylon cinnamon in dessert dishes.

There are actually over a 100 different varieties of cinnamon trees out in the world, but these two are the most commercially available. When it’s necessary to distinguish between these two kinds of cinnamon, I’ll refer to them as either cassia cinnamon or ceylon cinnamon. You can buy both of these varieties at Mountain Rose Herbs.





This aromatic spice has a rich history that reaches at least as far back as 2700 BC where it was first written about in Chinese texts. The Chinese continue to use cinnamon extensively and distinguish uses between the bark (rou gui) and twigs (gui zhi). According to Lesley Tierra, among the many uses of cinnamon the twigs are used for fevers with an absence of sweating while the bark is used when there is copious sweating.

We find cinnamon in the Bible when Moses is told to make holy anointing oil using two different kinds of cinnamon. The ancient Egyptians also used cinnamon not only to flavor food but also in the embalming process.

Cinnamon was a highly regarded spice worth an incredible amount. In the 1st century C.E., Pliny the Elder described in writings that cinnamon was 15 times the value of silver per weight. For centuries the Arabs controlled the cinnamon trade and there were many fantastical stories about where cinnamon came from and how it was cultivated in order to enhance the magic surrounding this sweet foreign spice and keep prices high.

Battles were fought over cinnamon. During the 1500s the Portuguese colonized Sri Lanka and began to control the cinnamon spice trade. By 1658 the Dutch East India Company had taken over operations. Finally, by the late 1700s the English defeated the Dutch and took control of the island, but by this time the cinnamon trade was declining due to the introduction of the more abundant cassia cinnamon cultivation in other parts of the world.

Cinnamon trees are in the Laurel family. Although they can grow up to 60 feet tall, the trees under cultivation are heavily pruned in order to encourage the tree to generate small shoots.

They produce leaves that are ovate-oblong in shape and are about 3 to 7 inches long.


The flowers have a distinct aroma and when in bloom bees and other pollinating insects swarm the air, irresistibly attracted to the sweet scent. They are arranged in panicles (similar to lilac flowers) and have a greenish color.


The fruit is a small purple berry containing a single seed. Sometimes these flowers are dried and also used as a spice.


Cultivation of cinnamon is a long, arduous process requiring hard work. This traditional method has been passed down for centuries and remains mainly unchanged.

Trees are grown on plantations and are heavily pruned when they are two years old. This creates a lot of bushy shoots at the base of the tree.

These shoots are harvested after a monsoon, which makes them easier to process. Then the hard work begins by separating the inner bark from the rest of the tree. Layers of these inner barks are pressed together and then laid out to dry whereby the bark curls together to form the cinnamon “sticks” also called cinnamon quills. After they are properly dried, they are then cut to a specific size and shipped around the world.

Although we are most familiar with cinnamon as a culinary spice that really goes well with apples and pastries, cinnamon has a long list of medicinal attributes.

Its pleasing, spicy, aromatic, and sweet taste combined with its warming attributes can ease digestive woes by increasing circulation and moving along stagnate digestion. This makes it useful for a variety of digestive complaints including indigestion, gas, and cramping.

Physiomedicalist William Cook reports, “Cinnamon bark is one of the pleasantest of the spices, warming, diffusibly stimulating, and leaving behind a gentle astringent influence. It acts upon the stomach, and through it upon the whole sympathetic system–also promoting assimilation, and stimulating the entire nervous and arterial organisms to a moderate extent.”

It can be used to increase general circulation of the body in cases where there are chronically cold hands and feet. Or, it can be used in more acute situations like colds and the flu in which the person feels shivery and cold. Herbalist Lesley Tierra says, “Cinnamon bark also leads the body’s metabolic fires back to their source, alleviating symptoms of a hot upper body and cold lower body.”

In the HerbMentor Radio show of December 2009, jim mcdonald gives an almost two-hour lesson on Vitalist treatments of fevers. During that session he discusses using cinnamon for fevers in cases in which the body externally feels cold and clammy but there is copious sweating, as well as diarrhea. In this way you can warm the exterior, astringe copious sweating, and tone loose bowels to avoid dehydration.

In the simple remedies section of HerbMentor.com, John has posted a cinnamon spiced milk recipe. This is a nutritive beverage that warms the body, supports digestion, and can help tone the lower digestive tract to relieve loose or runny bowels.

Cinnamon has an affinity for the mouth and teeth. As an anodyne, cinnamon has been used to alleviate toothaches. You can even use cinnamon powder to brush your teeth for a whiter, brighter smile and fresh breath. The astringent and anti-microbial properties of cinnamon will help support oral health that goes beyond cosmetic improvements.

Cinnamon is a common ingredient in chai teas. A chai spiced tea can be a great base for administering other herbs, especially those to alleviate cold symptoms or that don’t taste as pleasing. You can find Kimberly’s awesome Immune Building Chai recipe in the HerbMentor news section.

Studies have shown cinnamon to be effective in relieving arthritic pain. In a study at Copenhagen University, patients were given a mixture of half a teaspoon of cinnamon powder along with one tablespoon of honey every morning before breakfast. After one week they had significant relief in arthritis pain and could walk without pain within one month.

Helping to warm the interior and clear stagnation also makes cinnamon a great ally for menstrual cramping. You can make a basic chai tea for this purpose while also adding crampbark (Viburnum opulus) to the mix for increased anti-spasmodic properties. You can see my blog post on this here. Cinnamon not only relieves cramping, but according to Felter and Lloyd’s Kings American Dispensory cinnamon is specifically indicated for “Post-partum and other uterine hemorrhage, with profuse flow, cold extremities, and pallid surface.”

Cinnamon has been making headline news lately for its ability to decrease insulin resistance and lower blood sugar levels in diabetics. Most of these studies involve cassia cinnamon. People with insulin-dependent diabetes need to consult their doctor about taking cinnamon so that injected insulin levels can be adjusted as necessary.

Effective against Candida overgrowth, cinnamon can be used to stop yeast infections that are resistant to western anti-yeast drugs. High blood sugar levels can be a contributing cause of chronic yeast infections and I find it interesting that cinnamon can help in that arena as well.

Cinnamon is such an effective blood thinner that if you are taking blood thinning medications it is not advised to take therapeutic doses of cinnamon at the same time.

Cinnamon offers nutrient benefits as well. It is high in manganese and a good source of calcium and iron.

For the next two months we’ll be focusing on learning all that we can from cinnamon and this spice offers a myriad of ways in which to do that.

You can use it in cooking, not only for sweet desserts, but in rich savory dishes as well. The Herbalpedia (an extensive digital encyclopedia of herbs) entry for cinnamon offers many different recipes. Add it to a variety of tea blends for a sweet spicy addition.

You can tincture cinnamon, use it as a liniment or massage oil, brush your teeth with the powder, try it in warmed milk or hot cocoa, or simply mixed with honey.

If you’ve never had a cinnamon shrub before, I highly recommend Kimberly’s incredible recipe for the delicious beverage.

Please note that cinnamon is contra-indicated during pregnancy. Culinary amounts are fine but it is best to avoid it in extremely large doses.

My Meals: 12/29/09

Breakfast (about 8 AM)

Lemon chicken meat and skin, finished off the leftovers from 12/27/09 (guesstimate 10-12 ounces)

Chinese cabbage, steamed, about 1 cup, with lemon chicken juices (delicious)

White sweet potato, medium, baked, with about 2 tablespoons of lemon chicken fat

Large orange, whole thing

Two "Yes To Cookies!" low-carb cookies (holiday treats)

Dinner (about 2:30 PM)

Sirloin tip steak, about 3/4 pound, broiled rare, seasoned only with white pepper

One-half avocado mixed with a couple tablespoons of Sprout's chipotle salsa.

Chinese cabbage, steamed, about 2 cups (cooked measure)

Sweet potato, medium Garnet variety, baked, with about 1 tablespoon Organic Valley pasture butter

Apple, one medium large

About 1/4 cup almonds

Intermittent fasting prolongs life in mammals

Although experiments have demonstrated that caloric restriction (CR) can extend lifespan in yeasts, worms, mice, and possibly primates, few people would want to pay the price of caloric restriction to extend life. The Caloric Restriction Society has a page listing the risks of CR, which include

-chronic hunger, cravings, or food obsession
-large loss of body mass, up to 25% below normal
-loss of strength
-low body temperature
-decreased testosterone
-menstrual irregularities
-slower wound healing
-loss of emergency energy reserves

When Ancel Keys did the Minnesota Starvation Study, he restricted young men to 1800 calories daily, 20-40% below average needs -- similar to recommendations for caloric restriction for longevity. His goal was to get the men down to 25% below normal weight -- the CR society also suggests reaching 10-25% below normal weight.

As reported in the Journal of Nutrition, one of the participants in this experiment, Harold Blickenstaff, "recalled the frustration of constantly thinking about food:

I don’t know many other things in my life that I looked forward to being over with any more than this experiment. And it wasn’t so much ... because of the physical discomfort, but because it made food the most important thing in one’s life ... food became the one central and only thing really in one’s life. And life is pretty dull if that’s the only thing. I mean, if you went to a movie, you weren’t particularly interested in the love scenes, but you noticed every time they ate and what they ate. found men depression, and other effects making for many a long life not worth living.

Energy restriction had numerous adverse effects in the Minnesota Study:

"They experienced dizziness, extreme tiredness, muscle soreness, hair loss, reduced coordination, and ringing in their ears. Several were forced to withdraw from their university classes because they simply didn’t have the energy or motivation to attend and concentrate."

The subjects of the Minnesota Starvation Experiment developed all the visible signs of starvation: "sunken faces and bellies, protruding ribs, and edema-swollen legs, ankles, and faces. Other problems such as anemia, neurological deficits, and skin changes became apparent." The men lost interest in sex, and had no functional energy.

Again from the Journal of Nutrition: "The St. Paul Dispatch reported: '... the ... men on the starvation diet have lost so much physically and mentally that their ambition is gone, their will to go forward is gone, and they cannot do heavy work such as farming, mining, forestry, lifting and many other types of work necessary to rebuild war-torn Europe.'"

So, if you choose caloric restriction, you might spend more years breathing, but would you call that living? Do we have a better way?

On the CR (Caloric Restriction) Society International website FAQ page you can find this:

“Are there any other ways of retarding biological aging or extending lifespan besides CR?

None known to science at this time. .. as of this writing, there is no reliable evidence to support the notion that anything besides CR is capable of retarding biological aging or extending maximum lifespan in adult mammals. “

Yet just above this statement, on the same page, you will find this:

Studies have shown that rodents fed all they can eat [emphasis added], but fasted every two, three or four days, also have an increase in longevity, though the increase is not quite as great as that of rodents on the standard kind of CR (when implemented in mature organisms). For some people, this might be an easier way of doing CR since hunger is limited to two or three days a week.

A humane approach to life extension research would look for a method that would not entail all of the harmful side effects listed above. I personally would not want to live a long, cold, depressed, constantly hungry, food-obsessed, neutered life having insufficient strength, muscle mass, or energy for activities I enjoy, and unable to heal wounds at a normal rate.

I think intermittent fasting can give you more life to live while preserving your ability to live it.

IF extends lifespans of Wistar Rats

In 1945, Anton J Carlson and Frederick Hoelzel of the department of physiology at the University of Chicago published “Apparent Prolongation of the Life of Rats by Intermittent Fasting” in the Journal of Nutrition. This paper detailed the results of their studies in which they put adult rats on intermittent fasting schedules of 1 fast day in 2 days, 1 in 3 days, and 1 in 4 days, compared to control animals allowed to eat ad libitum.

In this study, they fed the rats in four groups, three getting one of three different omnivorous diets and one getting a vegetarian diet.

The three omnivorous diets included:
1) A basic diet consisting of 61.5% cooked and dried whole veal (including practically all of the edible parts of calves, excepting excess fat and blood), 31 % corn starch, 2% powdered yeast, 1% cod liver oil, 1.5% inorganic salt mixture and 3% veal bonemeal. This diet provided 35% protein.
2) The basic diet (#1) plus 10% finely ground alfalfa stem meal.
3) The basic diet plus 5% psyllium seed husk and 5% specially prepared kapok fiber.

The one vegetarian diet consisted of 50% whole wheat flour, 10% peanut flour, 7% lima bean flour, 7% wheat gluten flour (containing 80% gluten), 7% corn gluten meal, 7% linseed meal, 5% powdered yeast, 5% alfalfa leaf meal and 2% NaCl. This diet provided approximately 30% proteins.

Hoelzel had previously performed a study in which he found that rats fasted every other day and fed a diet low in protein on non-fast days developed peptic ulcers within about 2 weeks, but rats fed adequate protein did not develop ulcers.

All groups got lettuce trimmings daily. During feeding periods, they supplied food continuously to all groups, so rats ate ad libitum when not fasting. Fasting began at 42 days (before which all rats received identical feed) and continued until the rats died.

Table 1 of the paper shows the effects on lifespan of fasting 1 day in 2, 3, or 4 days in male and female rats.



Fasting increased the average lifespan of males by 90 days, and that of females by 23 days.

Optimum fasting interval

Upon detailed analysis of their data, Carlson and Hoelzel found that rats fasting 1 day in 4 and 1 day in 2 displayed complications by “extraneous factors” more than either control rats eating ad libitum or rats fasting 1 day in 3. Those factors included:

1) The earliest male and female deaths occurred in the groups fasted 1 day in 4, and it appeared that other rats did not fare as well fasting 1 day in 4 as in 1 day in 3. Carlson and Hoelzel suggested that “Perhaps the amount of food consumed in 3 days of feeding, with increased voracity but without proportionately increased capacity after 1 day of fasting, constituted a greater physiological overstrain than the amount of food consumed by the controls or by the rats fasted 1 day in 3.”
2) Fasting 1 day in 2 produced both a greater mortality rate and the longest-lived rats. The males and females fasted 1 day in 2 also began dying earlier than the rats fasted 1 day in 3. Carlson and Hoelzel commented: “Evidently fasting 1 day in 2 and beginning this at the age of 42 days was too much fasting for some rats. One of the females fasted 1 day in 2 apparently died of a hemorrhage from a chronic duodenal ulcer.” Fasting 1 day in 2 produced the longest-lived male and female rats, 1052 and 1073 days respectively, but the average rat did very poorly on this level of fasting.

Carlson and Hoelzel concluded that the optimum amount of fasting for the average rat in their study was 1 day in 3, or about twice weekly. This fasting frequency produced a 15% increase of average lifespan for females and 20% for males.

Of interest, in their raw data (Table 1), the average lifespan of male rats fasted 1 day in 4 did not significantly differ from those fasted 1 day in 3. Females fasted 1 day in 3 actually on average lived longer than those fasted 1 day in 2, but the reverse for males.

Another way to interpret this: Fasting 1 day in 2 produced a restriction of calories that proved too harmful for the majority of rats. Fasting 1 day in 3 or 4 produced the optimum result without daily caloric restriction.

Taking the average lifespan of 75 years in the U.S., this would mean IF twice weekly could increase the span to 86 to 90.

IF did not affect growth

Whereas 40% CR adversely affects muscle growth and mass, in this study, Carlson and Hoelzel found no or only small effects on growth or body mass in rats fasted 1 day in 4 or 1 day in 3.

Under unrestricted feeding conditions, male Wistar rats reach 450-520 g, and females reach 250-300 g.

In this study Carlson and Hoelzel compared littermates fed ad libitum to those fasted 1 day in 2, 3, or 4 days.

Using litter mate controls, male rats fasted 1 day in 4 attained body mass 91% of males fed ad libitum (413 v. 449 g), those fasted 1 day in 3 attained 85% of the mass of ad libitum males (339 v 397 g), and males fasted 1 day in 2 attained 74% of the body mass of ad libitum littermates (265 v. 356 g).

Female rats fasted 1 day in 4 attained body mass 89% of ad libitum females, those fasted 1 day in 3 attained 89% of ad libitum females, and those fasted 1 day in 2 attained body mass 85% of ad libitum females.

Again using litter mate controls, in some cases fasted rats actually had longer femurs than rats fed ad libitum, illustrating that intermittent fasting did not impair healthy tissue growth. In contrast, as stated by the CR Society's Risks Page, "Physical growth may be impaired by calorie restriction, as observed in lab animals."

Genetic controls

Carlson and Hoelzel found a large variation in response to fasting and feeding regimens. All rats were Wistar variety, and regardless of regime, 67% of all rats died between ages of 550 and 850 days, and 85% between 400 and 900 days. Further, “Some littermate rats, after having been kept from 400 to 1000 days on widely differing nutritional regimens, died within 24 hours or a few days of one another. Four of the twelve rats that lived to be over 1000 days old belonged to one of the seventeen litters.” Thus, genetic factors played a strong role in mortality.

IF influence on development of disorders leading to death

Carlson and Hoelzel also found that fasting rats had retarded development of mammary tumors, both in terms of age of onset and size of tumor, proportional to the amount of fasting. The following table from their paper displays the data.



Mammary tumors occurred in 37% of ad libitum female rats, compared to 29% of females fasted 1 day in 4 , 36% of those fasted 1 day in 3, and only 7% of those fasted 1 day in 2.

Average weight of tumors in ad libitum females equaled 193 g, versus only 67 g in rats fasted 1 day in 4 and 36 g in those fasted 1 day in 3.

Rate of tumor growth was +134 g/100 days in ad libitum rats, +48 g/100 d in rats fasted 1 day in 4, +42 g/100 d in rats fasted 1 day in 3, and +13 g/100 d in rats fasted 1 day in 2.

IF extends healthy lifespan

Carlson and Hoelzel thus showed in 1945 that intermittent fasting 1 in 3 days extends healthy lifespan of rats by 15-20% compared to ad libitum feeding, without daily food restriction (hunger), restriction of protein intake (these rats had 30-35% protein diets), impairing healthy lean tissue growth, or causing extreme loss of body mass.

It looks to me like IF offers a rational alternative to daily caloric restriction.

My Meals: 12/28/09

Some people expressed interest in seeing what I eat on a day-to-day basis, so here you have today's meals (sorry, no photos):

Breakfast (at home, about 8:30 AM)

Half a roasted lemon chicken breast and a wing (educated guess, about 10-12 ounces of meat, with skin and fatty juices (letovers from yesterday's whole lemon roasted chicken, recipe here)

About 1 cup of kale cooked with some red radishes (some lemon chicken juices poured over)

One large banana topped with about 1/4 cup of Rachel's home-made roasted walnut butter (recipe on page 407 of The Garden of Eating)

One-half of a soft-ball sized orange (in season here now)

Two small "Yes To Cookies" cookies (made by Rachel)

Dinner (at the office, about 2:30 PM)

Same chicken, other half of the breast (again, guesstimated 10-12 ounces of meat, with plenty of the juices and skin and some fire-roasted anaheim chili salsa

Two leaves of Chinese cabbage (raw; I prefer it cooked, but didn't want to spend time cooking it today)

One large apple

Other half of the softball-sized orange

Loren Cordain Responds To Mercader Paper on Grains in Stone Age Diets

Today I received an email from Loren Cordain in which he comments on the articles entitled "Mozambican Grass Seed Consumption During the Middle Stone Age" by Julio Mercader in the journal Science, and "Humans feasting on grains for at least 100,000 years," (feasted? can you say hyperbole?) by Katherine Harmon in Scientific American, which stirred up some in the paleo community, and on which I a couple of days ago in Did Stone Age People Eat Grains (Much)?

I reproduce Dr. Cordain's comments in full:

This is an interesting paper ( Mercader J. Mozambican grass seed consumption during the middle stone age. Science 2009;326:1680-83) as it may push probable (but clearly not definite) cereal grain consumption by hominins back to at least 105,000 years ago. Prior to this evidence, the earliest exploitation of wild cereal grains was reported by Piperno and colleagues at Ohalo II in Israel and dating to ~23,500 years ago (Nature 2004;430:670-73). As opposed to the Ohalo II data in which a large saddle stone was discovered with obvious repetitive grinding marks and embedded starch granules attributed to a variety of grains and seeds that were concurrently present with the artifact, the data from Ngalue is less convincing for the use of cereal grains as seasonal food. No associated intact grass seeds have been discovered in the cave at Ngalue, nor were anvil stones with repetitive grinding marks found. Hence, at best, the data suggests sporadic use (and not necessarily consumption) of grains at this early date. Clearly, large scale processing of sorghum for consumption for extended periods seems unlikely.

Further, It should be pointed out that consumption of wild grass seeds of any kind requires extensive technology and processing to yield a digestible and edible food that likely did not exist 105,000 years ago. Harvesting of wild grass seeds without some kind of technology (e.g. sickles and scythes [not present at this time]) is tedious and difficult at best. Additionally, containers of some sort (baskets [not present at this time], pottery [not present] or animal skin containers are needed to collect the tiny grains. Many grain species require flailing to separate the seed from the chaff and then further winnowing ([baskets not present]), or animal skins] to separate the seeds from the chaff. Intact grains are not digestible by humans unless they are first ground into a flour (which breaks down the cell walls), and then cooked (typically in water – e.g. boiling [technology not present]) or parched in a fire which gelatinizes the starch granules, and thereby makes them available for digestion and absorption. Because each and every one of these processing steps requires additional energy on the part of the gatherer, most contemporary hunter gatherers did not exploit grains except as starvation foods because they yielded such little energy relative to the energy obtained [sic -- I think he meant expended - DM](optimal foraging theory).

If indeed the grinder/core axes with telltale starch granules were used to make flour from sorghum seeds, then the flour still had to be cooked to gelatinize the starch granules to make it digestible. In Neolithic peoples, grass seed flour most typically is mixed with water to make a paste (dough) that is then cooked into flat breads. It is highly unlikely that the technology or the behavioral sophistication existed 105,000 years ago to make flat breads. Whole grains can be parched intact in fires, but this process is less effective than making flour into a paste and cooking it to gelatinize the starch granules. Hence, it is difficult to reconcile the chain of events proposed by the authors (appearance of sorghum starch granules on cobbles or grinders = pounding or grinding of sorghum grains = consumption of sorghum). I wouldn’t hang my hat on this evidence indicating grains were necessarily consumed by hominins at this early date. To my mind, the Ohalo II data still represents the best earliest evidence for grain consumption by hominins.

Cordially,
Loren Cordain, Ph.D., Professor

I haven't read the articles myself yet, only the press release with quotes from Mercader, but it looks like Cordain has and, as I imagined, the Mercader paper apparently lacks critical evidence for establishing consumption of grains, let alone "feasting" as Katherine Harmon states in the title of her Scientific American article. To me this looks like a classic example of an author getting a paper published just because it fits with the views of a "knowledge monopoly/research cartel" such as discussed by Henry H Bauer (Professor Emeritus of Chemistry & Science Studies, Dean Emeritus of Arts & Sciences, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University) in his article "Science in the 21st Century: Knowledge Monopolies and Research Cartels" (J Scientific Exploration, Vol. 18, No. 4, pp.643-660, 2004).

That is, the established knowledge monopoly/research cartel serves to support government-endorsed views of nutrition (i.e. food pyramid), so they grasp at any straw to lend support to their conception of good, grain-based nutrition.

How insulin controls aging

Cynthia Kenyon lectures online

If you want to see Cynthia Kenyon explain how the insulin-signaling pathway controls aging -- and how we know that the insulin-signaling pathway controls aging -- you might want to take about an hour and a half to watch her lecture on the subject.

An Evolutionarily-Conserved Regulatory System for Aging

The Regulation of Aging by Signals from the Reproductive System, and, also, a Link Between Aging and Tumor Growth

In these lectures Kenyon shows that caloric restriction slows aging by regulating insulin and IGF-1 receptors. But she doesn't go for it herself; in an interview in New Scientist (I want to live forever) she says "I tried caloric restriction just for two days but I couldn't stand it, being hungry all the time."

As reported in PLOS Biology (Methuselah's Mould), she also did an experiment where she found that feeding sugar to the worms shortened their lifespans. As a consequence, she chooses to eat a low carbohydrate diet:

“I'm on a low-carb diet. I gave my worms glucose, and it shortened their lifespan. [The diet] makes sense because it keeps your insulin levels down,” she says.

She adds:

No desserts. No sweets. No potatoes. No rice. No bread. No pasta. “When I say ‘no,’ I mean ‘no, or not much,’” she notes. “Instead, eat green vegetables. Eat the fruits that aren't the sweet fruits, like melon.” Bananas? “Bananas are a little sweet.” Meat? “Meat, yes, of course. Avocados. All vegetables. Nuts. Fish. Chicken. That's what I eat. Cheese. Eggs. And one glass of red wine a day.”

In the New Scientist article interview she said:

I eat a diet that keeps my insulin levels low. So, for example, at breakfast I have bacon and eggs with tomatoes and avocados. It's bit like the Atkins diet. I don't actually know if I eat fewer calories, but I feel great and I weigh what I did in high school. I certainly wouldn't want to be hungry all the time, but I'm not, I'm never hungry.

By 2004 Kenyon had eaten a low-carb diet for two-and-a-half years. She reports very good results:

“I have a fabulous blood profile. My triglyceride level is only 30, and anything below 200 is good.....Plus, I feel better. Plus, I'm thin—I weigh what I weighed when I was in college. I feel great —you feel like you're a kid again. It's amazing.”

Kenyon feels angry about the general lack of nutritional knowledge:

“It's a little bit embarrassing to say that scientists actually don't know what you should eat…. We can target particular oncogenes, but we don't know what you should eat. Crazy,” she says.

I will second that.

Addendum:

Stephan Guyenet has an excellent discussion of What's the ideal fasting insulin level? in which he notes that Kitavans have very low fasting insulin without eating a low carbohdyrate diet. Frasseto et al also found that a paleo diet containing ~250 g carbohydrate per day from fruits and vegetables reduced fasting insulin to very low levels within just 10 days (Metabolic and physiologic improvements from consuming a paleolithic, hunter-gatherer type diet). Thus, it appears possible to eat a large amount of carbohydrate from fruits and vegetables (including tubers) and still obtain a low insulin level.

High dietary animal protein links to lower population growth and greater longevity

Roger Williams, the biochemist who first identified, isolated, and synthesized pantothenic acid, wrote a book titled Nutrition Against Disease (Pitman, 1971), in which he has a chapter titled "How Can We Delay Old Age?" In this chapter he discusses human population growth, because the goal of extending life span conflicts a bit with the growth of population. He points out that if life spans get extended and population growth also continues, in 200 years "Tokyo, New York, and London would each have populations several times that of the entire present world population."

In this context he remarks that in The Geography of Hunger, the author Josue d Castro states that he thinks that "hunger, particularly protein deficiency, is an important factor in creating the problem of overpopulation." To support his hypothesis, de Castro cites several observations that support, such as the fact that cattle become sterile if overfattened. de Castro also produced the following table indicating that human populations display an inverse relationship between birth rates and amount of dietary animal protein.




Williams comments on this data (collected before the introduction of hormonal contraception):

"There seems, however, to be an interesting principle involve which should be further explored. Nature does take measures to prevent the extinction of a species, and when extinction is threatened––by starvation for example––it may be that an exaggerated sex urge is one of he devices used to perpetuate the race. It may be that this contributes to the high birth rate among people who are ill fed. A parallel is found in the area of plant physiology where t has been observed that plants often grow vegetatively as long as well fertilized, and tend to go to seed (reproduce) only when conditions become adverse.

The contrary possibility that a decrease in human birth rates could automatically be brought about by the provision of certain nutritional factors is at least worthy of study.”

Of interest, international data from 2004 also indicate that healthy life expectancy may also correlate inversely with animal protein intake. The following table based on WHO data shows that nations with lower animal protein intake and higher birth rates (e.g. Mexico, China, Thailand, India) generally have lower life expectancy than nations with higher animal protein intake and lower birth rates (e.g. Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, Italy).



These data suggest that vegetarian diets both increase population growth and decrease life expectancy. It does look like these two phenomena (increased birth rate and decreased life expectancy) arise from a common biological condition, and quite possibly de Castro and Williams have named it: animal protein (and perforce, methionine) deficiency.

Addendum 11/18/11:

I made a couple of important errors in my reasoning in this post:

1.  The reduced fertility found in modern nations with higher protein intake could equally be interpreted as an indication that high intake of animal protein might increase the prevalence of infertility in humans. Thus, the data may indicate that low animal protein intake improves fertility. 

In fact, we have data indicating that high animal protein intake poisons the uterus with ammonia, reducing the viability of embryos.

“These data show that consumption of a high protein [25%] diet results in the excess accumulation of ammonium in the fluid of the female reproductive tract of mice. These high levels of ammonium subsequently impair the formation of the fetal progenitor cells and increase cell death at the blastocyst stage. These data from in vivo-developed mouse blastocysts are similar to those for blastocysts developed in culture in the presence of 300 uM ammonium. Therefore, it is not advisable to maintain mice on a high protein diet. These data have significant implications for animal breeding, and for patients attempting IVF treatment.”

Gardner, D. K., Stilley, K. S., Lane, M., 2004. High protein diet inhibits inner cell mass formation and increases apoptosis in mouse blastocysts developed in vivo by increasing the levels of ammonium in the reproductive tract (abstract). Reprod. Fertil. Dev. 16(2):190.

…amino acid inclusion, especially that of glutamine, significantly increases the level of

ammonia within embryo culture media systems. It was shown that the benefits of amino

acid addition could be annulled by the effect of ammonia build-up, partly from degradation of glutamine over the course of embryo culture, and partly as a result of deamination of amino acids during metabolism. Early embryos appear to be sensitive to levels of ammonia as low as 100 mM and levels above 300 mM yield significant detrimental effects.”

Thompson, J. G., Lane, M., Robertson, S., 2006. Adaptive responses of early embryos to their microenvironment and consequences for post-implantation development. In: Wintour, E. M., Owens, J. A. (Eds.), Early Life Origins of Health and Disease. Adv. Exp. Med. Biol. 573. Springer, New York, NY, pp. 58–69.

2.  At the time the data was collected, the populations with low animal protein intake, high fertility, and low life expectancy also had relatively high infant mortality rates, which drives down the average the life expectancy.  Thus, this data does NOT show that high animal protein intake increases longevity.   Further, although most consider high infant mortality a terrible thing, in fact it is a pretty normal biological phenomenon; most organisms produce far more fertile seeds than surviving offspring.  Modern medical care reduces infant mortality, possibly by preserving lives of weaker, more disease-prone individuals. 

3.  The most long-lived nation on the second table is Japan, but Japanese do not have a 'liberal' animal food intake by U.S. standards, although it is higher than in Mexico, China, Thailand, etc..  However, here again Japan has a low infant mortality rate compared to developing nations, making it look as though adults live longer in Japan than in those developing nations, when in reality the main difference is fewer deaths in infants in Japan versus developing nations.

Did Stone Age People Eat Grains (Much)?

Toban Wiebe brought this to my attention on the paleo-libertarian forum.

I laughed at the title:

U of C archeologist finds Stone Age man better fed than previously thought

So conventional wisdom, eh? Stone Age man was poorly fed and eating grains makes you better fed than not...

First, as well discussed by Michael Eades here, all evidence indicates stone age hunter-gatherers eating no grains normally had superior nutritional status compared to their grain-eating descendants.

Second, modern hunter-gatherers eating grain-free diets clearly maintain a nutritional status superior to most if not all grain-eating populations. Eating grains will make you better fed than not only if you have to choose between eating grains and starvation (and therein may lie the key to understanding this research…read on).

Then the first sentence:

"Long thought to have been full of mainly roots, fruit and nuts, Stone Age man's pantry may also have included wild cereal grains, research suggests."

Uh, why no mention of meat? And why the "may have"? Just finding grass seeds in middens doesn't prove that the people ate them in enough quantity to have any significant effect on human evolution.

And on what basis will you assert that a grains will perforce enhance a diet “full of mainly roots, fruit, and nuts”? Kitavans eat roots (sweet potatoes), fruits, nuts (coconut), and fish and don’t suffer any nutritional deficiencies due to lack of grains. Grains don’t provide any nutrients not found in vegetables, fruits, and nuts, whereas the latter three contain many nutrients not found in grains (vitamin C and carotenes, for examples).

Then it goes on:

"Mercader says it has been hypothesized that the use of starch represented a critical step in human evolution. That's because it improved the quality of the diet in the African savannahs and woodlands where the modern human line is believed to have first evolved.

This could be considered one of the earliest examples of that dietary transformation, he says."

Uh, by 100, 000 years ago we already had big brained people walking the earth, and most likely had already exploited starch from tubers and roots, which can provide it in much larger quantities than wild grass seeds. Just what does he think "evolved" under the influence of some sorghum seeds, beside possibly our amylase output?

I don’t know what "quality" of diet he thinks a few grass seeds will improve. As abundantly proved by modern African foragers, meat with tubers, vegetables, fruits, nuts will make a complete diet without cereals, so I don't see how grass seeds could improve the quality of such a diet, unless some factor had cut off supplies of some or all of these more nutrient-dense foods.

I wonder if Mercader knows that The Journey of Man out of Africa began only 50K years ago, likely due to climate change (drought) that drove big game north, with ancestors of the !Kung apparently the first to leave.



So if some people did eat grass seeds 100K years ago in Africa, they probably did it because drought-driven drops in stocks of wild game drove them to desperation to eat seeds having far less nutritional value than the game meat that they preferred but had trouble getting.

As Richard Nikoley (www.freetheanimal.com) pointed out on the paleo-libertarian forum:

“Why, with all the massive evidence showing we sourced animals above all is it a problem when one small population, probably faced with hunger resorted to the labor intensity of gathering seeds?

I think that's a strike in favor of evolution, not against our primary sources of nutrition.

I'd happily eat grains too, if I was hungry and couldn't kill & slaughter enough animals to feed me and mine.

But I'll bet they were still on the lookout. That's why in addition to bakeries, nowadays, we've also got Ruth's Chris.”

As Spencer Wells shows in The Journey of Man (embedded above), people didn’t leave Africa to follow the spread of grass seeds, they left to follow game seeking greener pastures.

From this press release, Mercader seems a bit anthropologically and nutritionally naive for someone doing that kind of research. I hope his article in Science is more informed than this news release. I have my doubts, though.

Glucose restriction extends lifespan of human cells, kills human cancer cells

Researcher Confuses Glucose and Calorie Restriction

I subscribe to news feeds that report on new nutrition research and today one directed me to this article in Medical News Today:

Calorie Intake Linked To Cell Lifespan, Cancer Development

So I read that headline, then this first paragraph:

"Researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) have discovered that restricting consumption of glucose, the most common dietary sugar, can extend the life of healthy human-lung cells and speed the death of precancerous human-lung cells, reducing cancer's spread and growth rate."

Wait a minute. The headline says that someone linked calorie intake to lifespan and cancer development, but the first paragraph says the research involved restricting glucose.

I read on and find a poorly constructed paragraph relaying that the principal investigator, Trygve Tollefsbol, Ph.D., D.O., a professor in the Department of Biology at UAB, believes that this research points to "ways in which calorie-intake restriction can benefit longevity and help prevent diseases like cancer that have been linked to aging."

But the next paragraph relates this:

"The UAB team conducted its tests by growing both healthy human-lung cells and precancerous human-lung cells in laboratory flasks. The flasks were provided either normal levels of glucose or significantly reduced amounts of the sugar compound, and the cells then were allowed to grow for a period of weeks."

So the experiment actually involved glucose restriction as the form of calorie restriction. Tollefsbol says:

"In that time, we were able to track the cells' ability to divide while also monitoring the number of surviving cells. The pattern that was revealed to us showed that restricted glucose levels led the healthy cells to grow longer than is typical and caused the precancerous cells to die off in large numbers."

After discussing the different effects that the glucose restriction had on healthy and pre-cancerous cells, causing the former to grow more vigorously and the latter to die off, the article again quotes Tollefsbol:

"Our results not only support previous findings from the feeding of animals but also reveal that human longevity can be achieved at the cellular level through caloric restriction," Tollefsbol said.

"The hope is that this UAB breakthrough will lead to further discoveries in different cell types and facilitate the development of novel approaches to extend the lifespan of humans," he added.

So again he calls it caloric restriction, despite admitting that the study protocol involved restricting glucose.

Finally the report gives us the title Tollefsbol and his team gave to their report, published in the online edition of The Journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, or FASEB Journal: "Glucose Restriction Can Extend Normal Cell Lifespan and Impair Precancerous Cell Growth Through Epigenetic Control of hTERT and p16 Expression."

Frankly, this bugs me. He accurately titles his research on glucose restriction, but then when he talks to the press, he calls it caloric restriction. Yes, glucose restriction can be caloric restriction, but glucose restriction could also be accomplished without caloric restriction, by supplying fat to replace calories removed by restricting glucose.

This study did not demonstrate that "calorie restriction" produces the outcome they achieved simply because it appears that they failed to test a glucose-restricted but not calorie-restricted feed. This study showed that caloric restriction will prolong human cell lifespan and kill cancer cells if you achieve it by restricting glucose.

This means that excessive intake of glucose -- carbohydrate in the diet -- shortens cells' lifespans and promotes cancer cell growth. Why not say that?

Might not go over well with advertisers, I suppose.

I wonder what McDougall and Campbell will say to defend their 70% carbohydrate diet recommendations?

This research dovetails with Cynthia Kenyon's research with glucose restriction in C. elegans (roundworms). Kenyon found that glucose and insulin restriction extends lifespan in worms. Now we know that glucose restriction also extends lifespan of human cells.

Now we need to determine just how much dietary glucose restriction we need to achieve this effect.

Fructose makes bellies fat

Thanks to Eric for alerting me to this article.

Consuming fructose-sweetened, not glucose-sweetened, beverages increases visceral adiposity and lipids and decreases insulin sensitivity in overweight/obese humans

Not much time to comment on it, so a quick look. The research team fed people diets in which 25% of calories came from either a glucose- or a fructose- sweetened beverage.

The results: "Consumption of fructose-sweetened but not glucose-sweetened beverages for 10 weeks increased DNL [denovolipogenesis], promoted dyslipidemia, decreased insulin sensitivity, and increased visceral adiposity in overweight/obese adults."

Small dense LDL results: The glucose-consumers had no net increase in the apparently harmfull small-dense LDL. "In contrast, fasting sdLDL concentrations increased progressively in subjects consuming fructose."

Mean 24 hour triglycerides increased 2.5% in glucose-consumers, 18.2% in fructose-consumers.

For glucose consumers, 23 hour triglyceride area under curve decreased by 32%, whereas for fructose consumers it increased by 99%.

Fasting oxidized LDL increased by 0.7% in glucose consumers, but 12.8% in fructose-consumers.

Cane sugar (white or brown) and high fructose corn syrup both provide about 50% of their carbohydrate as fructose. Honey consumed occasionally by hunter-gatherers has less fructose, at about 39%.

This study gives some indication why diets based on starch (primarily glucose) but containing little fructose do less health damage than diets containing plenty of sugars.

My Paleo Cat

Enjoying raw chicken. Cats are obligate carnivores. Please don't feed them grain-based kibble. I feed mine a combination of raw meaty bones, 100% meat canned food, and freeze-dried wild salmon treats.

For good guidance on how to switch your cat or dog to raw meaty bones, check out the Raw Meaty Bones website for some very useful free downloads.

You might also want to read Pottenger's Cats: A Study In Nutrition, which details experiments in cat nutrition done by Francis Pottenger, M.D.. Pottenger found that cats fed cooked and processed foods underwent a process of degeneration similar to that Weston Price observed in native populations of people who transitioned from native diets to "civilized" diets consisting largely of processed high carbohdyrate foods.

This book also include reports of clinical work Pottenger did with some of his human patients.

How to Gain Weight With Paleo Diet

In my experience, people who say they want to gain weight simply do not eat enough and do not have a clear idea of how much one must eat to get enough calories to gain. This is especially true if a person is tall and thin and eating a paleo diet composed of relatively low energy density foods. So here are my suggestions to those who want to eat paleo and also gain weight.

1. Go to the ExRx.net caloric requirement calculator and enter all the required data as accurately as possible (given that tool). Generate your estimated caloric requirement.
2. Once you have your estimated caloric requirement for maintaining your current weight, add 300 to 500 calories to that amount.
3. Next, go to FitDay.com and create a free online account.
4. Now, in your FitDay account, using Paleolithic (and analogous, e.g. butter) food groups, create a sample day menu for yourself that supplies the number of calories you need to gain weight (from step 2), and has the following nutrient profile:

Protein: about 0.8 to 1.0 grams per pound of bodyweight and not more than about 25% of calories
Carbohydrate: about 1 to 1.5 grams per pound of bodyweight and about 25% (20-30%) of calories
Fats: enough to supply the difference, i.e. 50-65% of calories

For example, you may calculate that you need 3000 kcal per day. You would then aim for 150 g of protein, 125 to 225 g of carbohydrate, and 167 to 217 g of fat each day.

This would look something like this:

16 ounces of meat, poultry, or fish
4 whole eggs
3 sweet potatoes (2” x 5” raw)
3 bananas (medium)
2 apples or other medium fruits
2 cups collards or kale (measured after cooking)
1 whole avocado
½ cup of nuts
3 T coconut oil or dairy butter
3 T olive oil

You can use the fats on or in the preparation of the vegetables.

This selection of foods supplies 3111 kcal, 161 g protein (21% of energy), 184 g fat (51% of energy), and 231 g carbohydrate (28% of energy). It also supplies all required nutrients except vitamin D at acceptable levels.

You could substitute a tablespoon of oil or fat for one banana or sweet potato to make the menu lower in carbohydrate and higher in fat, but I think most people would prefer the higher carbohydrate intake when trying to gain weight, for two reasons. First, eating more fat may kill your appetite whereas more carbohydrate may enhance it, and second, carbohydrate intake drives insulin, and a slightly higher insulin level will promote greater uptake of amino acids in muscle cells.

If you've been trying to gain weight, have you eaten like this day after day for at least a couple of weeks? Does it look like a lot of food to you? Get eating!

If you have eaten like this consistently and you still haven't gained, then eat more! Failure to gain simply tells you that you haven't eaten enough for your needs. Tall, thin folks have particularly high energy needs because their high ratio of surface area to body mass results in large amounts of energy lost to the environment as heat. These people simply have higher basal metabolic rates so they will have to eat more than others to get the same gain. Try increasing each food in the list by 20%. You may have to do this gradually, but you can do it if you want the result.

5. Once you have this start, keep in mind that as you gain weight you will have to increase the caloric content of your diet to keep gaining. If you stop gaining, simply increase your caloric intake by increasing the foods in proportion, e.g. increase each item by 20%.

6. Strength training: You must strength train or else you will gain fat, not desirable lean tissue. Your training should consist of squats, deadlifts, chin ups, pull ups, bench presses or dips, and overhead presses.

Before you strength train, correct any joint issues or muscle imbalances you may have, using a program designed for that purpose.

I recommend minimal volume, either high-intensity training (one set to failure after warm-ups), or a plan of 1-3 not-to-failure work sets of 5 repetitions, as prescribed in Starting Strength.

I also recommend full-body routines, because in my experience these most effectively increase the appetite. The increase of appetite tells you that you have stimulated a growth process.

If you have experience with squats and excellent form (see Starting Strength), you might try doing squats for one set of 15-20 repetitions. These can dramatically increase appetite.

A sample routine would look like this:

Day 1:
Squats -- Several warm-ups, then 3 sets, 5 repetitions, or 1 set, 15 – 20 repetitions
Chin ups – 1 to 3 sets, 5-8 repetitions
Overhead press -- 1 to 3 sets, 5-8 repetitions

Day 2:
Deadlifts – Several warm-ups, then one set of 5 – 10 repetitions
Bench press or parallel bar dips -- 1 to 3 sets, 5-8 repetitions
Pull ups – 1 to 3 sets, 5-8 repetitions

Perform day 1 and day two 3 to 5 days apart, i.e. train only twice weekly. If progression slows, increase the rest period by a day or so.

Important note: To progress in muscular body weight you must progress substantially in strength. A fifteen pound gain in lean body weight will likely produce a doubling in initial strength levels in the major movements. This means that if you gain fifteen pounds but your squatting resistance has only increased fifteen pounds, you have put on fat, not lean tissue. A fifteen pound gain of lean tissue will likely require a progression in resistance used in squats by about 100-120 pounds; a thirty pound gain will require a progression in squat resistance of more than 200 pounds. A healthy young male can aim to squat for repetitions with more than 150% of bodyweight, and do deadlifts for repetitions with 200-300% of bodyweight.

7. If in the 24 hour period following a training session you find that your allotted caloric intake does not satisfy your appetite, eat more.

8. Rest. Get enough sleep that you don’t need an alarm clock. Don’t walk if you can stand, don’t stand if you can sit, and don’t sit if you can recline.

Addendum: Its NOT Easy!

For most people, gaining quality (functional, i.e. lean muscular) weight does NOT come easy, it won't happen quickly and it takes discipline.

To illustrate the difficulty, consider this: Over his 15 career, 9-time Mr. Olympia Dorian Yates, a genetically gifted and anabolically assisted individual, gained a total of 70 pounds, an average gain of less than 5 pounds per year. Of course, he gained more per year in the earlier stages and less later, but this illustrates how difficult it is to gain muscular body mass.

The genetically average individual not using pharmaceutical assistance will gain more slowly. Many people have unrealistic expectations and lack the patience and persistence required to get the result they say that they want.

BTW, if you want to see what people doing Starting Strength programs eat to gain weight, check this out the Food FAQ page at 70sBig.com. Here are some samples:



8 eggs, 1/4 lb. bacon, 1/4 lb. brisket, Pico, cheese, and salsa.



A 3/4 pound burger (with a large vanilla milkshake not shown)

Not all paleo (you can substitute bananas and sweet potatoes for the buns), but these illustrate the volume of food a tall young man may need to eat AT EVERY MEAL to gain bodyweight in conjunction with strength training but without the aid of anabolic drugs. Like I said, few people understand the degree of discipline and appetite required for a genetically average person to gain significant body mass.

McDougall on Mammography

I certainly don't agree with John McDougall's dietary philosophy, but I do agree with his recent article on Huffington Post "ACS Chief Sends Mixed Messages On Mammography."

A choice observation he makes:

"The burden of proof of 'the benefits outweighing the harms' rests with those making the recommendations--the American Cancer Society and its Chief Medical Officer in this case. Dr. Brawley has voiced doubt about the benefits of mammography, and now appears conflicted by communicating two opposing stands in less than a month. The American Cancer Society, on the other hand, has remained steadfast in a position that enhances the profits of breast cancer-related businesses, regardless of the effects on women."

As he points out, a typical breast tumor has been growing for ten years (going from one cell to 1 cm in diameter) before a mammogram can detect it:

"Adequate scientific evidence to stop mass screening programs, such as mammography, has been readily available for more than three decades. In 1976 Pietro M. Gullino presented his findings on the natural history of cancer, showing 'early detection' is really 'late detection,' at the Conference on Breast Cancer: A Report to the Profession, sponsored by the White House, the National Cancer Institute, and the American Cancer Society. He explained: 'If the time required for a tumor to double its diameter during a known period of time is taken as a measure of growth rate, one can calculate by extrapolation that two-thirds of the duration of a breast cancer remains undetectable by the patient or physician. Long before a breast carcinoma can be detected by present technology, metastatic spread may occur and does in most cases.' This report was subsequently published in the journal representing the American Cancer Society (Cancer 1977 Jun;39(6 Suppl):2697-703)."

The drive for so-called "early" detection does serve people who have invested in expensive radiologic equipment. If your physician recommends early mammograms, you might want to find out if s/he has investments in or business ties with radiology centers.

It also leads to a lot of unnecessary medical intervention:

"Just as tragic is the devastation to the lives of millions of women with indolent cancers (the latent forms) that would have never appeared in their lifetime if no one had been busy looking for them with screening programs. Once found, these nonthreatening lesions are aggressively treated with life-changing surgeries, radiation treatments, and/or chemotherapies."

Having studied it for about 20 years now, the "science" of cancer treatment in the U.S. has about as much "science" to it as the lipid hypothesis. I can only conclude that it has more commercial than scientific basis. And all dissenters, such as Max Gerson, who produced evidence of cancer reversal with dietary intervention, are labeled nutcases, etc.

Imagine if it became commonly known that cancer can be cured by dietary interventions. What would happen to all those cushy jobs for those searching for cures? The ACS etc. have perverse incentive. So long as the cure is elusive, they continue to have cushy jobs and lots of donations.

Why is this relevant on a paleo blog? Because cancer is a disease of civilization, largely caused by neolithic foods and insulin levels, and we have evidence that paleo diets can prevent and probably reverse some if not all cancers.

Another Vegetarian Fallacy Exposed

Forty-Seven Percent of Women Genetically Incapable of Getting Adequate Vitamin A From Plants

Following ill-informed nutritionists and textbooks, vegetarians commonly claim that people can get all the vitamins they need from plants. They say that humans can get all the vitamin A they need from vegetables and fruits high in beta-carotene.

In The Garden of Eating, I pointed to research that indicated that at least 45 percent of adult men and women do not efficiently convert carotenes to vitamin A (retinol), making dietary retinol, found only in animal products, an essential nutrient for these folks [1, 2].

A new study published in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal has confirmed this. Quoting the UPI report:

"Researchers at Newcastle University in England, led by Dr. Georg Lietz, found 47 percent of volunteer group of 62 women carried a genetic variation that prevented their bodies from effectively converting beta-carotene into vitamin A."

This clearly indicates again that at least 47 percent of women have bodies adapted to animal-derived nutrition. It means that their ancestors ingested animal-source retinol so frequently that the diet selected against preservation of the genetic equipment necessary for producing the enzymes that convert carotenes to vitamin A.

If you do a search on PubMed, you will find also that a growing body of research shows that even among people who do convert carotenes to retinol, the conversion occurs inefficiently and rarely suffices to meet vitamin A requirements.

Notes:

1. Lin Y, Dueker SR, Burri BJ, Neidlinger TR, Clifford AJ. Variability of the conversion of beta-carotene to vitamin A in women measured by using a double-tracer study design. Am J Clin Nutr 2000 June;71(6):1545-54.
2. Hickenbottom SJ, Follett JR, Lin Y, Dueker SR, Burri BJ, Neidlinger TR, Clifford AJ. Variability in conversion of beta-carotene to vitamin A in men as measured by using a double-tracer study design. Am J Clin Nutr 2002 May;75(5):900-7.

Cornfield vs. Pasture

Greg asked me if its possible to grow field crops without animal input and still build soil.

Regardless of input, I know of no one who has developed a way to grow field/row crops and build soil. The best integrated systems just maintain topsoil.

These pictures illustrate why row crops always damage the soil, whereas a stocked and well-managed pasture builds soil.


Image source: Seaburst.com

When we raise crops, we expose long rows of soil. We struggle to keep these free of "weeds" whose natural job is to secure the soil. We can't stop wind and water (rain), which inevitably course through these furrows carrying soil away from the field. The roots of these crops reach shallowly, so they don't trap rainfall efficiently. If managed very intensively with manure, rotation with leguminous cover crops, and mulch with compost, at best we can replace the soil lost each time we plant with row crops.

In contrast, a pasture looks like this:

Image source: Rebelwoodsranch.com

The soil accumulates year after year because the tight root structure and full cover of grasses and "weeds" protects it from wind and water erosion. The roots themselves draw the water (rain) into the soil. The grass constantly takes carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, converting it into carbohydrates, stored in the root system. Ruminants are an essential part of perennial grass land ecosystems, providing many services to the grass including fertilization with nitrogen. The grass feeds the soil, the soil feeds the grass, the grass feeds the ruminants and the ruminants feed the grass.

In short, a field of row crops requires a constant battle against natural processes, and its very structure involves us in a largely unsuccessful battle to preserve the soil.

It reminds me of a passage in the Tao Te Ching (Chapter 29):

Does anyone want to take the world and do what he wants with it?
I do not see how he can succeed.
The world is a sacred vessel, which must not be tampered with or grabbed after.
To tamper with it is to spoil it, and to grasp it is to lose it.

The Vegetarian Myth Review Part 2

Political Vegetarians

Political vegetarians advocate a meat- or animal-free diet for the social good. These people believe that by eating a vegetarian diet they are increasing the amount of food available for humans, and that this is a good thing, i.e., that it will prevent starvation.

These people believe that every time you eat a steak, chicken leg, or any other animal product, you are depriving starving people of food.

These people also believe that raising animals causes global warming and causes the majority of agriculture-related pollution, and that adoption of a vegetarian diet based on grains would thus simultaneously feed the starving millions of people and create an ecological paradise.

Unfortunately, as Lierre Keith points out in The Vegetarian Myth, these people lack crucial information.

First, they don’t understand the animals. They calculate the amount of grain you must feed to, for instance, a steer, to produce a pound of beefsteak—some say 4.8 pounds—then conclude this wastes resources since we could send that grain to starving people somewhere (more on that later). In a startling non-sequitor, they then conclude that eating beef causes people to starve.

What they miss, Keith points out by quoting Rodney Heithschmidt and Jerry Stuth:

“[H]umankind has historically fostered and relied upon livestock grazing for a substantial portion of its livelihood because it is the only process capable of converting the energy in grassland vegetation into an energy source directly consumable by humans.”

In other words, as Ms. Keith notes:

“Nineteen billion metric tons of vegetation are produced by plants in grasslands and savannas, and we can’t eat them. Humans and ruminants are not naturally in competition for the same meal: This is where the political vegetarians have gone wrong.”

Put otherwise, if we stop raising and eating ruminants, we would in that be refusing to produce food for humans from grass.

Of course, cattle don’t have a natural adaptation to a diet of corn or grains in general. Ruminants display exquisite adaptation to a diet of grass, leaves, and other plant matter indigestible to humans. It doesn’t matter how many pounds of grass it takes to grow a pound of beef, because we can’t eat grass directly. The problem with our food system lies not in omnivory, but in forcing animals to eat diets to which they are not adapted.

Now let’s say we implemented the vegetarian plan. We take all the livestock off grain, and continue to raise the grain. Then we send it to the people starving wherever. Shall we pat ourselves on the back for our benevolence?

No. The moment you dump free grain into an environment of hungry people, you have destroyed the local farm economy and created an unsustainable economy.

No farmer can compete with giveaways. If you give food en masse to a population, the increase in supply and unbeatable price will drive prices down to nothing and put local farmers out of business.

As Ms. Keith puts it, “It may seem counterintuitive, but the last place to put cheap food is near chronically hungry people.” She quotes Lyle Vandyke, the former Canadian Minister of Agriculture:

“Consider a farmer in Ghana who used to be able to make a living growing rice. Several years ago, Ghana was able to feed [itself] and export their surplus. Now, it imports rice. From where? Developed countries. Why? Because it’s cheaper. Even if it costs the rice producer in the developed world much more to produce the rice, he doesn’t have to make a profit from his crop. The government pays him [subsidies] to grow it, so he can sell it more cheaply to Ghana than the farmer in Ghana can. And that farmer in Ghana? He can’t feed his family any more.”

And quoting Oxfam: “Exporters can offer US surpluses for sale at prices around half the cost of production; destroying local agriculture and creating a captive market in the process.”

On top of that, as Daniel Quinn has pointed out, if you give a population an amount of food that could not be produced in the local ecology, this will cause the population to grow to numbers unsupportable by local food production. Increasing grain production, and increasing the availability of grain for human food, will simply increase the human population.

As I wrote in The Garden of Eating:

“Vegetarians assert we should stop eating meat to increase the supply of food for humans. In the mid-1990s, U.S. livestock consumed 130 tons of grain annually, enough to feed about 400 million people. Food supply experts Russell Hopfenberg, Ph.D., of Duke University (Durham, North Carolina), and David Pimentel, Ph.D., of Cornell University (Ithaca, New York) explain why the vegetarian idea is misguided: ‘Certainly there would be even more human food available if dependence on livestock was decreased. However, because human population is a function of food availability, the resulting increase in available human food would induce a commensurate rise in population. This population increase would ultimately exacerbate the starvation and malnutrition predicament.’[1]”

Political/environmental vegetarians often make claims about the productivity of vegetarian agriculture as oppose to animal husbandry. For example, the British group Vegfam claims that a 10 acre farm can support 60 people growing soybeans, 24 people growing wheat, 10 people growing corn, and only two producing cattle. Keith responds:

“ Set aside the fact that a diet of soy, wheat, or corn will result in massive malnutrition—along with fun stuff like kwashiorkor, pellagra, retardation, blindness—and ultimately death. The figure of two [for] cattle might be true if you assume grain feeding, though I can’t make the math come out.”

She then points to Joel Salatin’s Polyface farm as a refutation of the assumptions in the Vegfam calculations. On ten acres of land, Salatin’s grass-based husbandry produces:
3000 eggs
1000 broilers
80 stewing hens
2000 pounds of beef
2500 pounds of pork
100 turkeys
50 rabbits

This would support at least 9 people for a year, and as Keith points out, “in full health,” since people can live on a diet composed solely of the foods above, whereas none of the foods proposed by Vegfam form a complete diet.

In addition, Salatin’s farm produces a few inches of topsoil per year whereas monocultures proposed by Vegfam destroy topsoil.

Keith also addresses claims that livestock consume too much water. She goes through the figures, showing that vegetarian claims don’t hold water, and more importantly, that animals don’t either:

“But most importantly, animals aren’t ever-expanding water balloons. For a steer, almost all of that water will be returned in the form of urine and feces laden with nutrients and bacteria, value-added as it were, to the land that needs it. For a dairy animal, there’s also milk.”

In other words, animals aren’t consuming and destroying water, they are part of nature’s water-flow cycle, essential to fertilization of the land. Vegetarians appear ignorant of this. I liked this passage Ms. Keith penned:

“The political vegetarians, however noble their intentions, are planning a planetary diet in compete ignorance of where food comes from. Advocates like Peter Singer and John Robbins want us to grow annual grains and no animals at all. Set aside the topsoil, water, climate, and typography [sic, I think she meant topography] problems. What is going to fertilize that grain? Peter, John: what is going to feed your food? Vegetarians, like everyone else in an urban industrial culture, have no concept that plants need to eat, that soil is alive and hungry. They seem shocked when I ask them what will feed their food. Do plants eat? Their expressions say. They don’t just … happen? There was a time when I didn’t know either, so I’m patient. But eventually the question has to be answered: fossil fuel, or manure?”

Ms. Keith addresses all of the other claims made by political vegetarians against animal husbandry, like that it uses more fuel than monoculture or causes global warming. In fact raising animals on grass is more fuel efficient than raising row crops, and monoculture of row crops has a net effect of releasing carbon into the atmosphere whereas raising ruminants on pasture has the net effect of sequestering carbon. Get a copy for your favorite political vegetarian.


Notes:

1. Hopfenberg R. Pimentel D. Human population numbers as a function of food supply. Environment, Development, and Sustainability 2001;3:1-15.

An exciting sponsorship opportunity

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The Vegetarian Myth Book Review

By Don Matesz


Bottom line: If you believe eating a vegetarian diet improves your moral standing, you need to read this book. If you believe that eating a vegetarian diet will solve world hunger, you need to read this book. If you believe that mass adoption of a vegetarian diet will “save the Earth” from environmental catastrophe, you need to read this book. If you believe that eating a vegetarian diet will give you health and longevity, you need to read this book.

Although Ms. Keith directs her prose to those who eat a vegetarian, particularly a vegan diet, I think everyone needs to read this book. If you believe in agriculture as a way of life, i.e. you believe that agriculture will sustain civilization, and feed people indefinitely, you need to read this book.

Ms. Keith writes from the perspective of a 20-year veteran of vegetarian and vegan dieting who has sustained irreparable damage to her body as a result. As she watched her health deteriorate under the influence of vegan dieting, and made efforts to actually grow her own food, she gradually lost faith in the holy trinity of vegetarianism:

1) Moral vegetarianism, based on the belief that a vegetarian diet reduces bloodshed.
2) Political vegetarianism, based on the belief that widespread practice of a vegetarian diet would produce a sustainable agriculture and social justice.
3) Nutritional vegetarianism, based on the belief that a vegetarian diet produces better health than an omnivorous diet.

In my view, these three legs of vegetarianism are merely logical extensions of the near universal belief in moral, political, social, and nutritional superiority of agri-culture in comparison to hunting-and-gathering culture.

Moral Vegetarians

Moral vegetarianism espouses a principle of non-violence. The advocates wish to eat without killing or stealing from any other organism. As Ms. Keith puts it, the vegetarian nearly prays:

“Let me live without harm to others. Let my life be possible without death.”

This chapter recounts Ms. Keith’s inner and outer struggles with life and death on her path to realizing that, of course, life and death are not really two opposites.

“If killing is the problem, the life of one grass-fed cow will feed me for an entire year. But a single vegan meal of plant babies—rice grains, almonds, soybeans—ground up or boiled alive, will involve hundreds of deaths. Why don’t they matter?”

Throughout this chapter, Ms. Keith shows us how her own moral understanding evolved from the juvenile ethical code of veganism to an adult understanding of how nature really works, as a result of her engaging directly in food production herself. Ms. Keith tells us how, as a vegan attempting to garden, she learned that plants need to eat animal products to thrive. Her garden would not grow without the nitrogen and minerals packed up in blood and bone. Even apple trees eat meat:

“I found one small comfort in The Apple Grower by Michael Phillips. He quotes a book called The Apple Culturist from 1871, recounting the story of an apple tree near the graves of Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, and his wife Mary Sayles. The roots of the tree were found to have grown in to the graves and assumed the shape of human skeletons while ‘the graves [were] emptied of every particle of human dust. Not a trace of anything was left’”

As she developed her own garden, it attracted other animals. As she puts it, she got “locked in mortal combat with the slugs.” Eventually she had to decide whether to save the slugs or save her garden for her own needs. After much internal struggle, she settled on getting chickens and ducks to eat the slugs. She rationalized that the killing would fall on the ducks and chickens, not herself because “it was their nature, their instinct to hunt insects.” Which led her to ponder:

“Wasn’t death natural? Was it? Or wasn’t it? Which way did I want the answer to fall?

“Because if death was natural—a part of life, not an insult to life—then why was I a vegan?”

Why indeed.

Moral vegetarians believe that agriculture does no damage, that grains and legumes have no blood spilled in their fields. Ms. Keith points out that only someone who has never really understood agriculture could believe this:

“So here is an agriculture without animals, the plant-based diet that is supposed to be so life-affirming and ethically righteous. First, take a piece of land from somebody else, because the history of agriculture is the history of imperialism. Next, bulldoze or burn all the life off it: the trees, the grasses, the wetlands. That includes all creatures great and small: the bison, the grey wolves, the black terns. A tiny handful of species—mice, locusts—will manage, but the other aimals have to go. Now plant your annual monocrops. Your grains and beans will do okay at first, living off the organic matter created by the now-dead forest or prairie. But like any starving beast, the soil witll eat its reserves, until there’s nothing—no organic matter, no biological activity—left. As your yields—your food supply—begin to dwindle, you’ve got two options. Take over another piece of land and start again, or apply some fertilizer. Since the books, pleading and polemical, say that animal products are inherently oppressive and unsustainable, you can’t use manure, bone meal, or blood meal. So you supply nitrogen from fossil fuel. Do I need to add that you can’t produce this yourself, that its production is an ecological nightmare, that one day the oil and gas will run out?

“Your phosphorous will have to be made from rocks. There’s a reason for the popular image that equates hard labor in prison with chopping rocks. How will you mine it, grind it, or transport it without fossil fuel, using only human musculature and without using slavery? …Meanwhile the soil is turning to dust, clogging the rivers, blowing across the continent. In 1934, the entire eastern seaboard was covered in a thick haze of brown, the topsoil of Oklahoma plowed to cotton and wheat, drifting like an angry ghost to cover the eastern cities and further, to ships hundreds of miles out to sea, a final, fitting tribute to the extractive economies of the civilized. This is where agriculture ends: in death. The trees, the grasses, the birds and the beasts are gone, and the topsoil with them. More of the same is no solution.”

So what does she settle on as the ethical solution?

“It’s so simple, as simple, really, as my vegan morality: we need to be a part of the world to know it. And when we join, when we participate, we see that life and death can’t be separated any more than night and day. I will face what is dying to feed me and I will do my best to ensure that it is individuals—cared for, respected—not entire species; that soil—the work of our grandparents for half a billion years—is built, not destroyed; that the rivers keep their waters and their wetlands and that the oil stays in the ground. Only then can I claim the title ‘adult.’”

Ms. Keith’s struggle with to reconcile life and death is a classic example of the suffering endured in a culture based on a juvenile philosophy of dualism. Western philosophy has long suffered from dualistic thought, in which life/mind/male/action/hardness/white is good and death/body/female/rest/softness/black is bad. This has led to a culture that tries to pull nature apart at the seams, to isolate the good from the bad, to kill death and everything that resembles it because of its dimness. Think of how hard we strive to eliminate the night by powering up the lights. It is a losing battle.

Image source: Wikipedia

Chinese philosophers and scientists represented the non-dual nature of nature in the Yin-Yang symbol. Yin represents death and yang represents life. The symbol shows how they mold and feed one another; each ultimately transforming into the other. The play of yin and yang is simply the course of change. Reality moves and this movement naturally produces polar phenomena like life and death. Long ago the Chinese realized that dualistic thought is really a mental illness, a state of mind that does not accurately reflect reality. If you try to eliminate death, you will undermine life; and if you try to exaggerate life, you will also exaggerate death. It makes you crazy.

Next time I will reflect on Ms. Keith’s chapter on Political Vegetarians.