Monday, February 28, 2011

Bryoria - Edible Black Tree Lichen

Filled with envy, I've been watching my southern friends posting about their emerging spring plants. To add insult to injury we just got another 6 inches of snow in the past two days with more on the way.


However, even though the ground is still covered in several feet of snow, there are still plants to be found!


On a recent walk Xavier and I were tracking a cougar near our cabin and found bryoria, or black tree lichen growing in the trees. You can watch the video below to learn about this plentiful plant - and see our blustering northern weather.


Sunday, February 27, 2011

Spring Tune-Up: A weekend retreat in the North Cascades



Awaken to the vitality of spring with a weekend of nourishing food,  herbs and yogic presence. We will explore the idea of 'food as medicine', preparing simple ayurvedic recipes and herbal teas, supplementing this with asana and pranayama practice, sauna time and silence. Support body and mind as we move into the season of heightened energy and activity! 







Led by


- Rosalee de la Foret, traditional herbalist and Structural medicine Specialist. Rosalee is the author of dozens of articles and several ebooks on herbal healing.


- Becky Studen, certified yoga teacher, has studied various types of yoga including Vinyasa, Ashtanga, Pre- and Post-natal, and Power Core and Yin yoga. Yoga has reminded her to breathe deeply when parenting, love her body and to take time to simply be.


Schedule

Friday night ~ Restore
Arrive at 5:00
5:30 - 6:30 
Grounding yoga practice
7:00 - 8:00 
Dinner
8:00 - 9:00 
Opening circle; introductions, intentions


Saturday ~ Rejuvenate
8:00 - 8:30 Awakening yoga practice 
8:45 - 9:30 Breakfast 
9:30 - 10:30 Free time (outside time encouraged) 
10:30 - 12:00 Discussion: Exploring the therapeutic value of taste 
12:30 - 1:30 Lunch 
1:30 - 3:30 Free time, sauna 
3:30 - 5:30 Deepening yoga practice 
6:00 - 7:00 Dinner 
7:30 - 9:00 Laughing yoga, spring seed-planting ritual


Sunday ~ Radiate
8:00 - 8:30 Awakening yoga practice 
8:45 - 9:30 Breakfast 
9:30 - 10:00 Free time 
10:00 - 11:00 Discussion: Nourishing Herbal Infusions 
11:00 - 12:00 Completion yoga practice
12:30 - 1:30 Lunch 1:30 - 2:00 Closing circle

All meals will be eaten in silence, and silence will be encouraged in common areas. Participation in meal prep and clean up is part of the weekend experience.


Registration
We are joyfully offering this weekend at an exceptionally low price in order to serve those who need this retreat. Space is limited to 11 participants - register early to ensure your spot. 


$175 before March 4, includes meals and lodging


$190 after March 4th


Please visit Skalitude Retreat Center to register. Or email Linsdey here.  

Friday, February 25, 2011

The Week's Links

A London specialty ice cream shop starts serving the ultimate primal ice cream today, made from human breast milk.  From the Reuter's article:

The breast milk concoction, called the "Baby Gaga," will be available from Friday at the Icecreamists restaurant in London's Covent Garden.
Icecreamists founder Matt O'Connor was confident his take on the "miracle of motherhood" and priced at a hefty 14 pounds ($23) a serving will go down a treat with the paying public.
The breast milk was provided by mothers who answered an advertisement on online mothers' forum Mumsnet.
Victoria Hiley, 35, from London was one of 15 women who donated milk to the restaurant after seeing the advert.
Hiley works with women who have problems breast-feeding their babies. She said she believes that if adults realized how tasty breast milk actually is, then new mothers would be more willing to breast-feed their own newborns.
"What could be more natural than fresh, free-range mother's milk in an ice cream? And for me it's a recession beater too -- what's the harm in using my assets for a bit of extra cash," Hiley said in a statement.

Duo Li presents the evidence that vegetarians and vegans can have increased platelet stickiness and higher risk of thrombosis due to dietary deficiencies of vitamin B12 and omega-3 fatty acids in his article "Chemistry Behind Vegetarianism" in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry online.

"Collagen- and adenosine-5′-diphosphate (ADP)-stimulated ex vivo whole blood platelet aggregation were significantly higher in both vegetarian and vegan groups than in both high- and moderate-meat-eater groups. The vegan group had a significantly higher mean platelet volume (MPV) than the high- and moderate-meat-eater and ovo-lactovegetarian groups (35). Increased MPV in vegans suggests the presence of larger, activated platelets. Evidence from case control studies has indicated that an increased MPV is an independent risk factor for acute myocardial infarction (MI) (39) and for acute and/or nonacute cerebral ischemia (40). Large platelets, in such cases, have been shown to have increased reactivity. When platelets become activated, they change from their normal resting disk-like structure to assume a spherical shape and their volume increases substantially, leading to the potential for thrombus formation. In a multiple linear regression analysis, after controlling for potential confounding factors such as dietary group, age, exercise, body mass index, and dietary PUFA and saturated fat, cholesterol, carbohydrate, and fiber intake, the MPV was still strongly negatively correlated with platelet PL 20:3n-6 (p = 0.003) and 22:5n-3 (p =0.001). The data suggest that 22:5n-3 and 20:3n-6 may play a role in the structural function of the platelet membrane (41). This, in conjunction with the increased platelet aggregability, suggests what should be an increased thrombosis tendency in vegans, and in the case of the platelet aggregation is associated with low dietary intake of n-3 PUFA. " (emphasis added)

Ronda Bokram, a nutritionist with Olin Health Center in Lansing, Michigan, proves herself ignorant of the biochemistry of eating disorders in this article in the Lansing State Journal online.  Bokram is quoted as endorsing an MSU program that distributed Twix candy bars to students as part of National Eating Disorders Awareness week:

"Students found miniature Twix bars all over campus and were encouraged to eat them without guilt.

It's one of several campus activities in recognition of National Eating Disorders Awareness Week.


The message behind the Twix bars?

"Eating disorders are not about food," said Ronda Bokram, a nutritionist with Olin Health Center. "Students come to my office and they say, 'My problem is I like food.' The problem isn't that you love food.

"The problem is you feel guilty about it ... and that leads to a distorted relationship with food. We label food as good or bad, and then when we eat the food, we put that label on ourselves: 'I'm bad if I eat this.' "

I'm sure this is a bonanza for Mars, Inc, but Bokram clearly has not read the research showing that eating refined carbohydrates like Twix bars will elevate insulin and activate dopamine centers of the brain, leading to transient hypoglycemic reactions, sugar addiction, and chronic insulin resistance, all of which can distort appetite.   Anorexia nervosa occurs only in civilization, i.e. it is a disease of civilization, and includes metabolic dysfunction, namely loss of appetite combined with inability to store fat in fat cells.  Most likely we have something like fat cell insulin resistance.  We don't have the details yet but I know that guilt has nothing to do with it.   I suggest Bokram and her colleagues take some time to read Good Calories Bad Calories, particularly Part 3, especially page 440, and also brush up on her human biology.  Its not about whether food is "good" or "bad," its about whether humans have adapted to an item or not.  If chimps developed anorexia nervosa while on a diet of refined carbohydrates, we wouldn't blame it on "distorted relationships with food" and guilt about eating "bad" foods, we would immediately suspect the food.  Why this escapes human nutritionists I don't understand.


Last but not least, new research shows that children with low vitamin D levels have a higher risk of allergies.

Friday, February 18, 2011

Shamanism As Evolutionary Medicine


Although it appears that our paleo ancestors inhabiting temperate and tropical ecosystems had no modern diet-related diseases, they did suffer dis-eases, and universally had "medicine men," also known among anthropologists as "shamans."   As a medical system, shamanism maintains that many apparently physical dis-eases have spiritual causes.  Indigenous/shamanic tribal cultures “believe” that spirits exist and play roles in individual, tribal, and ecological health. Shamanic interventions address traumas affecting the soul/spirit through direct interaction with the spiritual realm, achieved through altered states of consciousness that provide entrance to a non-ordinary reality.

All this talk of spirits certainly makes anxiety for modern “scientific” atheists and some Judeo-Christian religionists alike.  The former will dismiss such talk as mumbo-jumbo without empirical basis, a threat to rationality and logic.  They will tend to dismiss shamanism as dealing with non-existent “supernatural” entities.  Some of the latter believe that for some odd reason the One True God chose to reveal himself and the Rules for the Right Way of Life only to the members of several middle Eastern desert tribes, leaving everyone else in the dark. Some of these also believe that their God gave these chosen people not only the right but the duty to convert all other tribes to their faith and way of life, if not by persuasion then by force, perhaps basing their belief on some passages in the Bible such as these found in Deuteronomy 12:1-4:

"1-These are the statutes and judgments, which ye shall observe to do in the land, which the LORD God of thy fathers giveth thee to possess it, all the days that ye live upon the earth.

"2-Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree:

"3-And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their pillars, and burn their groves with fire; and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place."

These people call non-believers by various names like heretic, infidel, heathen, pagan, and so on, and some of them have called shamanic culture "demonic." 

In either case, shamanism directly competes with the “authorities.”  Atheists may consider shamans a threat to the authority of "reason," science, and scientists, and some religionists certainly consider shamans a threat to the authority of their faith, dogma, and priests.  Shamanism comes from non-hierarchical tribal culture in which no one has ultimate authority over another, and thus it conflicts with civilization and all types of authority.

To illustrate the modern discomfort with shamanism, in 1892,  in a speech at the Smithsonian Institution, John Bourke called shamans “an influence antagonistic to the rapid absorption of new customs”  and said “only after we have thoroughly routed the medicine men from their entrenchments and made them an object of ridicule can we [whites] hope to bend and train the minds of our Indian wards in the direction of civilization.” 

Shamanism as Experimental Science

Khakas Shaman. Source:  Wikipedia
Shamanism refers to a universal conceptual framework found among indigenous, uncivilized (i.e. politically unstratified), tribal humans.  It includes the “belief” that nature (the world) has two aspects, the ordinary world,  accessed through ordinary consciousness, and the spiritual world, accessed through an altered state of consciousness, or “trance,” induced by shamanic practices such as repetitive drumming, fasting, or herbal drugs.   According to shamanic theory, the spiritual and ordinary worlds interact continuously, and a shamanic practitioner can gain knowledge about how to alter or to guide interaction with ordinary reality by taking direct action in the spiritual aspect of the world.

Importantly, according to the shamanic perspective, the spiritual realm is NOT what both atheists and theists would call "supernatural."  The spiritual realm described by shamans does not lie outside of nature or experience.  On the contrary, just like gravitational force and the subatomic realm of quarks and photons, also invisible in ordinary states of consciousness, the shamanic spiritual realm occurs as part and parcel of nature.

I put the words “belief” in quotation marks because, unlike modern religious beliefs, the shamanic “belief” in a dual aspect world is not faith-based.  Rather, it arises from direct and replicable experiences induced by specific, repeatable procedures.  That makes it an experimental science, not a faith system.

To wit, the indigenous belief in a spiritual realm and spiritual entities is no more “mystical” than the belief that the typical modern educated individual has in quarks and other subatomic particles.  In fact, it may be less so. 

The typical modern person’s belief in subatomic particles is based on hearsay and authority, not on direct experience.   To get anything like a direct experience of subatomic particles, you have to go through a certain procedure.   You have to complete adequate training in the conceptual framework known as modern physics, which will prepare you to perform certain types of experiments and supply you with the conceptual tools you will need to interpret certain types of data (e.g. particle movements in a cloud chamber) as evidence of the existence of quarks.  Very few people have completed the required training and experiments, which makes modern physics a type of non-ordinary knowledge of a non-ordinary reality accessed directly by only a few people, the high priests of physics.  The rest of us accept their description of subatomic worlds on faith.

In contrast, the typical tribal human’s belief in a spiritual realm inhabited by spiritual entities is based on personal direct experience of that realm and those entities by following certain experimental procedures, i.e. inducing non-ordinary states of consciousness using shamanic techniques such as repetitive drumming, fasting, vision quests, dreams, or herbal drugs. Thus, we should not confuse neolithic religious belief with paleolithic religious experience. The average modern believer in God does so not based on experience, but on doctrine or hearsay.  In contrast, shamans don't "believe" in spirits, they actually know and work with them directly in altered states of consciousness.

I want to emphasize that the shamans' claims about a spiritual realm are as scientific as the physicists' claims about quarks.  They are open to confirmation by experimental procedure.  If you have not performed the experiments yourself, you really are not in a position to deny the claims of the shamans or the physicists.  Similarly, if you want to confirm (or dispute) the claims made on basis of these experiments, whether shamanic or modern physics, you will have to do the conceptual training and the experiments yourself.

The rub here is the personal difficulty and discipline involved in replicating shamanic experiments compared to physics experiments.  I mean, performing basic physics experiments does not involve anything as physically or mentally arduous as extended fasting, vision questing, or controlled entrancement.  But you can't be an armchair shaman any more than you can be an armchair subatomic particle physicist. 

Although called by some “trance,”  I put the word “trance” in quotation marks because it is typically taken to imply a “false” state of mind, when it does not.  In fact, people enter “trances” regularly as a part of ordinary life.  If you have found yourself so engrossed in an activity that you had an altered perception of time, you have been in trance.  If you have ever driven somewhere, then, upon arriving, wondered at how you did not remember doing the driving, you were “entranced” during that drive.  If you have ever experienced “the zone” of peak performance, you have been entranced.

In fact, shamanic "trance" differs from the usual "trance" in that the practitioner must tread into "trance" territory without losing control of his intent.  It is this need to harness the ordinarily quite restless mind that makes shamanic experimentation with "trance" more difficult and arduous than physical experiments which require control only of isolated physical events.

Shamanic Experiences Versus Cognicentrism

In fact, we have absolutely no way of determining which of the many waking states of consciousness we experience is the "real” state.  Michael Harner, an anthropologist who specialized in studying shamanism, wrote a book  The Way of the Shaman in which he discussed the hostility that 'authorities' express toward shamanic knowledge of alternate realities such as presented by Carlos Castaneda in his series of books reporting his experiences under the tutelage of don Juan, a Yaqui “sorcerer:”

"To understand the deep-seated, emotional hostility that greeted the works of Castaneda...one needs to keep in mind that this kind of prejudice is involved. It is the counterpart of ethnocentrism....But in this case it is not the narrowness of someone's cultural experience that is the fundamental issue, but the narrowness of someone's conscious experience. The persons most prejudiced against the concept of nonordinary reality are those who have never experienced it. This might be termed cognicentrism...." 

Natural Selection of Shamanic Practices

Using the principle of natural selection as a guide, Harner also addresses the prejudice that the ordinary state of consciousness (OSC) is real reality, while the altered shamanic state of consciousness (SSC) is illusion:


"Some might argue that the reason we spend most of our waking lives in the OSC is that natural selection intended it that way because that is the real reality, and that other states of consciousness, other than sleep, are aberrations that interfere with our survival.  In other words, such an argument might go, we perceive reality the way we do because that is always the best way in terms of survival. 

But recent advances in neurochemistry show that the human brain carries its own consciousness-altering drugs, including hallucinogens such as dimethyltryptamine.  In terms of natural selection, it seems unlikely that they would be present unless their capacity to alter the state of consciousness could confer some advantage for survival.  It would appear that Nature itself has made a decision that an altered state of consciousness is sometimes superior to an ordinary state. 

We are only beginning in the West to start appreciating the important impact the state of mind can have on what have previously been too often perceived as questions of purely 'physical' capability.  When, in an emergency, and Australian aborigine shaman or a Tibetan lama engages in "fast traveling"--a trance or SSC technique for running long distances at a rapid rate--that is clearly a survival technique which, by definition, is not possible in the OSC."


Since shamanic practices and knowledge are human universals, I conclude that evolution by natural selection favored the survival of shamanism.  In other words, the fact that shamanism occurs in all tribal cultures indicates that it enhances survival.   If shamanism didn't enhance survival then the people who relied on shamans would have died out, not spread universally.  As a corollary, shamanism must tell us something important about the constituents of the world/nature, or it wouldn’t have survival value.  

On the same evolutionary basis that we expect ancestral diets to have therapeutic effects for diet-related diseases, we can expect ancestral medicine--i.e. shamanism--to have strong clinical efficacy when appropriately applied.  This would also apply to interventions having strong similarities to shamanic practices, such as hypnotherapy, biofeedback, and other psychophysiological interventions exploiting the mind-body relationship.

Shamanic Intervention Clinical Trial

Shamanism maintains that physical dis-ease may arise from disturbances of the spirit, and consequently that by addressing the traumas affecting the soul/spirit through direct interaction with the spiritual realm, we can restore health.   If efficacious, this would make it an important medical method to apply in cases that do not respond to dietary, physical, or chemical treatment.

According to shamanism, dispiritedness can cause dis-ease.  In case an individual exhibits signs of dispiritedness, a shaman will take steps to restore the spirit through shamanic interventions including direct interaction with non-ordinary reality. 

Vuckovic et al  decided to put the shamanic perspective to the test.  They recruited 23 women suffering from temporomandibular joint disorder (TMD) who had not responded to conventional treatment.  They randomly assigned each woman to 1 of 4 shamanic practitioners.  Each woman attended 5 shamanic healing sessions.

The team evaluated the outcome using several measures  including change from baseline to posttreatment in diagnosis of TMDs by Research Diagnostic Criteria (RDC) exam and participant self-ratings on the "usual" pain, "worst" pain, and functional impact of TMDs subscales of the RDC Axis II Pain Related Disability and Psychological Status Scale.  They performed evaluations at 1, 3, 6, and 9 month follow-ups.

As a result of this intervention, of the 23 women who started the study, only 4 had a clinical diagnosis of TMD at the end of the study, an 83% cure rate.  Self-rated usual pain and worst pain declined by about 50%, and functional impact of the pain declined by about two-thirds.   

Keeping in mind that these individuals did not respond at all to conventional medical therapies for TMD, shamanic intervention had an astounding cure rate. In fact, given that most of conventional medicine only achieves chemical management or surgical removal of a diseased process or tissue, not cure, this shamanic intervention may actually have greater therapeutic power than the conventional approach focused on 'physical' reality.  Its like the difference between managing diabetes with medications, and curing it by use of a paleo diet.   

Thus, it appears that shamanic practices, like paleo diet, may qualify as evolutionary medicine, that is, the medicine to which humans are naturally adapted. 

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Kava Hot Cocoa

Kava Hot Cocoa
Kava (Piper methysticum) comes to us from the Pacific Islands. It has a long traditional and ceremonial use, dating back thousands of years. 

The root of the kava plant is used as a beverage and it was traditionally prepared by mastication or chewing of the root. When Europeans made contact with the Pacific Islanders they discouraged this practice. We now know that mastication and fermentation of kava root makes a potent brew. 

Kava can be a little tricky to work with. It doesn’t like heat and the alcohol percentage in a tincture is very specific. The recipe below calls for kneading the powdered root in cold water which is an effective means of preparing this root. 

Kava is a wonderful relaxing nervine. It can relax muscles and give a sense of calm. A friend recently described drinking kava to getting a luxurious massage. That’s a pretty good description! 

Kava can also be used for acute pain due to spasms. Kidney stones or menstrual cramping are good examples. 

Chocolate is a good source of magnesium. Magnesium can stop muscle spasms and also promotes a sense of calm. The two go together quite well! 

If you’ve never had kava before you’ll quickly notice a very distinct acrid taste and numbing sensation on your tongue. If the kava doesn’t produce this effect it probably wasn’t prepared correctly. 

Recently kava made the sensational news headlines as being a dangerous herb. It’s true that kava contains some potent alkaloids. However, in all cases where injury was established it was from extracts that had potentiated certain constituents of the kava root (Kavalactones). There have been no injuries associated with appropriate use of the whole plant. However, it is contraindicated in pregnancy, breastfeeding and those with liver disease. If you visit jim mcdonald’s incredible article index and search for “kava” you’ll see many articles on the safety of kava. http://www.herbcraft.org/articleindex.html

Kava has been over harvested in the wild. Please do not buy wild harvested kava. Get it from a sustainably cultivated source. 

Kava Cocoa Recipe
1/2 cup powdered Kava
1/2 cup fair trade cocoa powder (I use 100% cacao)
6 cups water
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 teaspoon cinnamon
Honey and cream to taste


Step One: Make the Kava
Place 1/2 cup of kava powder into a muslin bag. 







Place the bag in a large bowl along with 4 cups of lukewarm water. 



Knead the bag for an extended period of time. How long? 20 minutes should do it, although longer could be better. 

Once you are done kneading you can start making the cocoa. The kava mixture should look cloudy. 


Step Two: Make the cocoa
Combine the cocoa, cinnamon and water into a small saucepan on medium high heat, stirring constantly. Once the cocoa has dissolved and the temperature is fairly warm, remove from heat. Add the vanilla. 



Step Three: Combining the two

I like to mix equal parts cocoa to kava, but you can mix it up anyway you like. 


I add cream and honey to taste. 


You can buy Kava and Cacao at Mountain Rose Herbs

Enjoy!





Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Pungent Herbal Medicine ebook

Last night I had the honor of presenting a webinar on the Pungent Taste in herbal medicine alongside Michael Tierra. 


For those of you who missed the presentation there is another opportunity to learn about this spicy topic. 


For the next 36 hours my Pungent Herbal Medicine ebook is on sale for $10. 






This ebook is 59 pages in length and covers philosophical considerations of the pungent taste as well as lots of classical and modern herbal recipes and formulas. My goal is that you can start using what you learn immediately in your own life. 


Here's what people are saying about the webinar and ebook... 


Thanks for sharing so much of your knowledge! Enjoyed the Webinar last night, very much. Just downloaded your E-book and bonus recipes. So excited to try them. Thanks for all you do.KL

I just downloaded Rosalee de la Foret's ebook ($10) "Pungent Herbal Medicine". There are a lot of uses: digestion, expectorant, diuretic, diaphoretic, blood mover, anti-microbial, kidney support, carminative, anti-viral, anti-depression, coughing, muscle spasms, muscle tension, etc. 40+ common herbs discussed, plus recipes. This is a treasure trove of natural medicine!PR

Incredible webinar and I purchased the ebook on Pungent Herbal Medicine. I am very impressed with your style of presenting as you are very succinct and I like that I can easily understand the information and be able to utilize it immediately!!!D



For more information about this ebook you can visit my website here. 


www.Rosalee.info/spicy 


Also available at this link  is a free pdf download of a summary table on the Taste of Herbs. 


In March I'll be presenting another free webinar on Bitter Herbal Medicine. To be notified of the whens and wheres of the event you can sign up for my newsletter in the left hand column. 

Friday, February 11, 2011

Taste of Herbs: Free Webinar Series

Welcome to the official blogpost regarding my free webinar series, The Taste of Herbs. Over the past two months it has been my honor and pleasure to present this free webinar series alongside renowned herbalist, Michael Tierra. 


The next webinar is on Pungent Herbal Medicine and will take place February 15th at 5:30 PST. Please see below to register for this event. 


By signing up for my newsletter in the left hand column you'll be emailed occasional emails updating you on the latest dates for this webinar series. 

Understanding the taste of an herb is an important part of learning herbalism. However, it is rare to find books that give more than a paragraph or two explaining the tastes of herbs. Furthermore these traditional explanations can seem over simplified and too philosophical for the modern herbalist. This webinar series explains each taste in a focused way, giving practical examples of how to use these understandings in your every day life. 

Using our senses to learn how plants work is an innate human skill and one herbalists would benefit from honing. Understanding herbalism through the tastes and through taste sensations helps us to deeply understand the therapeutic qualities of a plant in a concrete way. We can (and probably should) spend hours memorizing information about plants, but once we know a plant through our sensorial experience we will never forget it.   


To me, any herbalist who doesn’t know the taste of an herb but attempts to use it can be compared to a painter who doesn’t know the colors of the rainbow, or a musician who doesn’t know the scales.

 Alan Keith Tillotson

Herbalist 

Series Overview

Taste of Herbs
In the first webinar we had a brief look of each of the classical categories of tastes. 


Sweet Herbal Medicine
In the second webinar we looked more closely at the sweet taste. 

Pungent Herbal Medicine
In this next webinar we'll be gaining a planetary understanding of the pungent taste. This webinar takes place February 15th at 5:30 PST. 

These webinars are completely free and you can join any of them even if you missed previous webinars. 

In order to attend please register at the following address. 



We will be giving three more webinars in the future. 

Bitter Herbal Medicine
March (Specific date TBA) 

Sour and Astringent Herbal Medicine
April (Specific date TBA)

Salty Herbal Medicine
Date TBA

Again, if you'd like to be notified of future events, sign up for my newsletter in the upper left hand column. 


Thanks to all those who have participated in these events so far. Wouldn't be nearly as fun without you all! 




Thursday, February 10, 2011

More Raw Truth About Raw Vegan Diets


Raw fooders like to point to other primates as evidence that humans should eat a raw plant food diet.  
For example, Steve Pavlina :


“There’s very compelling biological evidence that a high fruit diet is optimal for human beings. I can’t share the volumes of info I’ve read about this, but one of the more convincing points is that the nearest animal species to human beings, including gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, and bonobos all naturally favor a high fruit diet, meaning that when fresh fruit is readily available, they’ll get the vast majority of their calories from fruit. How they get the rest of their calories varies (nuts, seeds, insects, or even other animals), but a clear preference for a high fruit diet is something they all have in common.”


Like other raw fooders, Pavlina here confused quantity consumed with preference.  The fact that chimps eat more fruit than any other type of food does not indicate that they prefer fruit to all other types of food, any more than the fact that Chinese eat mostly rice means that they prefer rice to all other foods. In fact, chimps prefer to eat termites over fruit, and always start their foraging looking for insects, only moving on to fruits after they have exhausted their insect supplies. The preference for animal matter occurs in other apes; see "Omnivorous Primate Diets and Human Overconsumption of Meat" by William J Hamilton in Food and Evolution edited by Harris and Ross.

Far from vegan, the wild chimpanzee diet is about 5% animal food in the forms of insects (primarily termites) and hunted monkeys and antelope. 

Like other raw vegans, Pavlina appears either to ignore or not know that humans have different gut anatomy and physiology from the great apes. Milton discusses this in detail in "Primate Diets and Gut Morphology: Implications for Hominid Evolution" also found in Food and Evolution.

Briefly, both of the apes closest to humans by genetic constitution (about 98% identical), chimps and gorillas, are hindgut fermenters.  In chimps and gorillas, the hindgut, or colon, comprises about 52 percent of the total gut volume.  It houses microbes that ferment fiber, converting it to fatty acids that supply up to 65% of the animal’s energy requirements.  In contrast, in humans the hindgut comprises only about 17 percent of total gut volume, and has relatively small microbial population.  At most, microbial fermentation in the hindgut can provide about 10% of human energy requirements. 

Because hindgut fermentation provides the majority of the energy used by a chimp or gorilla, the colon is a vital organ for these animals and they will die if you amputate it.  In contrast, the hindgut is of so little importance to human energy acquisition that humans can live without the colon (as shown by victims of colonectomies).

In the human gut, the small intestine dominates, comprising 67 percent of the total gut volume. 

In great apes, most digestion and absorption occurs in the hindgut, aided by microbes, whereas in humans most digestion and absorption occurs in the sterile small intestine.   Human digestion occurs using enzymes released from the pancreas and small intestine, not microbial action.

Non-human primates have more guts than us.


In short, the largely vegetarian apes are, well, adapted to a largely vegetarian diet composed primarily of cellulose.

OK, let’s say you don’t know all of this and want to eat a raw diet based on the chimpanzee model, but don’t want to lose body weight because you already have a desired body composition.  What would that look like?

I expend about 2500 calories daily, so, using the chimpanzee diet as model, to meet my energy requirements for one day, I would have to eat something like this:
·      2 pints blueberries
·      8 apples (106 g ea., 2.5” diameter)
·      8 bananas (101g ea., 6-7” long)
·      4 large oranges (~3” diameter)
·      4 cups raw bok choy
·      16 cups raw collard greens
·      7 ounces raw antelope or termites (vegans substitute nuts)

This comes to 4778 g, or about 10.5 lbs., of food. 

The typical person consumes only 3-5 pounds of food daily.  Can you imagine downing the volume of food in the menu listed above?  Probably not.  Even raw vegan blogger Steve Pavlina had difficulty getting it down:


“The mental adaptation was more difficult than the physical adjustment. Even during the last week of the trial, I still found it difficult to come to terms with how much food I had to eat each day. For example, on the first day of the trial I ate 8-1/2 pounds of food, and I was 2.8 pounds lighter on the scale the next morning. That really takes some getting used to.”


On this note, Pavlina expressed amazement that he increased his total food and crudely calculated caloric consumption yet lost body mass over a 30 day period of eating only raw food:


“During the 30-day trial, I lost 8.0 pounds, about 1.9 pounds per week. I started at 186.0 and ended at 178.0. My body fat also dropped 1.8 percentage points. As of the morning of Feb 3rd, I weighed 174.0.”
“Before this trial I averaged about 2,000 calories a day on a cooked vegan food diet, so I actually lost weight even as I increased my daily calories by 15%.”


Unbeknownst to him, his weight loss despite increased food intake demonstrates how difficult it is for humans, by nature lacking cellulase, to extract nutrients from raw plant food.  

A Losing Proposition

Since Pavlina reports a loss of 8.0 pounds, we can calculate the bioavailability of calories from his raw diet. He reports that his body fat also dropped 1.8 percentage points, but he does not state his beginning and end body fat percentages so I don’t know if he lost only fat or also lost lean mass.   Generally caloric reduction results in weight loss that is at most 75% fat and at least 25% lean, but I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he lost no lean mass at all. 

Eight pounds of fat lost would represent 28,000 calories if it was all fat, or a deficit of 933 calories per day.  Assuming 2000 calories as his maintenance based on his report, this indicates that his caloric absorption was only 2000 minus 933, or 1067 calories per day.  So, of the 2298 raw plant food calories he reports eating, he absorbed only 1067 calories, or 46%.  

That means his carbohydrate intake (into the blood) was nowhere near what he believed; he reports 532 g per day, but since we now know that he absorbed only 46% of what he ate, we can conclude that he probably only absorbed about 244 g of the 532g he ate. 

Let’s guess that his low-fat cooked vegan diet supplied 60% of its 2000 calories as carbohydrate (with 30% as fat and 10% as protein).  That would amount to 1200 calories from 300 grams of carbohydrate.  Hence, by going all raw, he may have actually reduced his total carbohydrate intake!

Further, since he reports consuming about 10% of those 1067 absorbed dietary calories as fat, and 933 calories each day came from his fat stores, we can calculate that each day he was actually burning at least 107 calories of dietary fat plus  933 calories of body fat, or 1040 calories of fat daily. Of the 1067 calories from food,  90% was not fat, or 960 calories. 

So his fuel mix was 960 non-fat dietary calories, and 1040 calories from total fat (dietary plus adipose), so during that month he obtained 1040÷2000 = 52% of his calories from fat.  In other words, he was running on a high fat fuel mix, most of the fat coming from his own adipose. 

He thinks he was running on a low fat diet, but if he was, he couldn’t have lost fat weight.  In fact, he was burning a fuel mix of which about 47% was the dreaded saturated animal fat, i.e. his own body fat.  So, if you feel good eating your raw vegan diet, its because you're burning animal fat!

Can you say "Crap!"?

By these calculations it appears that caloric absorption from a completely raw food vegan diet may be as low as 46%.  Given the data I showed above, this means that I would have to eat more than 20 pounds of raw vegetation daily to absorb enough calories to maintain my current body mass and activity levels.

Eating would be a full time job.  Given a 16 hour waking period, I would have to eat 1.25 pounds of food every waking hour to meet my energy needs.   I'd probably spend a good chunk of the time I wasn't eating sitting on the toilet excreting all the undigested carbage.  My life would consist largely of eating and crapping, just like other primates.  Not quite what I had in mind, how about you?

The Raw Deal

Pavlina's experience confirms previous research showing how much difficulty humans have getting adequate energy from raw vegetal foods. For example, Koebnick et al found BMI below 18.5 in 14.7% of males and 25.0% of females eating raw food diets.  Among these raw fooders, the more raw food they ate, and the longer they had been eating “raw,” the lower their body mass.

Beyond body mass,  Koebnick et al also found general malnutrition among the raw fooders resulting in young women losing their menstrual cycles:


“About 30% of the women under 45 years of age had partial to complete amenorrhea; subjects eating high amounts of raw food (90%) were affected more frequently than moderate raw food dieters.”


Most likely, these women were suffering severe iron and vitamin B12 deficiency, just like the subjects of another study by Koebnick’s team, which found B12 deficiency in at least 38% of raw food adherents.  These people also had low HDL concentrations and elevated homocysteine levels.  

If you believe that humans are designed to eat a diet that leaves 38% of people vitamin B12 deficient, 15% of males and 25% of females underweight,  and stops the menstruation in at least 30% of women in their reproductive years, good luck to you.

Who's Toxic Now?

Sadly, raw fooders claim that eating only raw food will detoxify your system.  Apparently they don’t know that by avoiding meat containing vitamin B12, they pump up their blood levels of homocysteine, a potent toxic by-product of protein metabolism. 

So, if you really want to detoxify, go eat a steak.

I shared this post at ParadigmShift Blogshare.

I wrote more on this topic:

The Raw Truth About Raw Vegan Diets

More Raw Truth About Raw Vegan Diets

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Tuesday, February 8, 2011

The Raw Truth About Raw Vegan Diets: A Primal Perspective


Raw vegan diets are all the rage these days.  Advocates claim that a diet composed exclusively of raw plant foods will support optimal health, protect animals, and save the planet. 

The raw truth is that raw vegan diets don't support health for most people, for a very simple reason:  Humans are not adapted to a raw vegan diet.  For that matter, not even our closest primate relative, the chimpanzee, is adapted to a raw vegan diet.

Let's take a critical look at the rationales and effects of raw vegan diets.

Raw Rationale

David Wolfe, raw food advocate, wrote a book entitled Nature's First Law (Don't buy it!).  In this book, he suggests that the "first law" of nature is that food is raw; if not raw, its not food.   He derives this "law" from the observation that no animal other than humans cooks anything before eating it.  Thus, humans break the "law."

Let's try more reasoning like Wolfe's:
  • No other animal uses language, therefore humans should not use language.
  • No other animal wears clothes, therefore humans should not wear clothes.
  • No other animal makes violins, therefore humans should not make violins.
  • No other animal writes sonnets, therefore humans should not write sonnets.

These people apparently have not noticed that by their reasoning, we humans probably should not be, well, human. 

And, particularly pertinent to the raw food lifestyle, no other animal uses metal knives, blenders, dehydrators, grinders, or juicers, therefore humans should not process foods with any of these items either.  Yet raw foodists seem plenty happy to apply the knife, high speed blending, mechanical grinding, and juice extraction to food.  

Flimsy Analogies

Wolfe and other raw foodists also are fond of using analogies like this:  "If you set fire to your house, it does not improve the house, it destroys it.  Therefore, we can conclude that applying fire to food can only destroy, not improve it."

Raw vegan blogger Steve Pavlina states it this way:

“Incidentally, if you want to see what happens to protein when you cook it, pluck a hair off your head and put a flame under it. Cooked protein becomes a sticky mess that doesn’t digest well at all. Raw plant foods provide all the protein we need, in the right form for easy assimilation.”
Wolfe and Pavlina have constructed straw man arguments against cooking by conflating it with incineration.   

Simply put,  incinerating a house or human hair with a direct flame is, well, not quite the same thing as cooking.   Cooks don't light food on fire, they use finesse to capture and employ radiant heat arising from flames to alter the physical properties of the foods.  Strictly speaking, it is not the fire that they use, it is the heat.

Does cooking make food less valuable?  On the contrary, skillfully applied heat dramatically increases the nutritional value of plant foods.

Hedren et al performed an experiment designed “to develop an in vitro digestion method to assess the impact of heat treatment, particle size and presence of oil on the accessibility (available for absorption) of alpha- and beta-carotene in carrots.”  Their methods:

“Raw and cooked carrots were either homogenized or cut into pieces similar to chewed items in size. The carrot samples, with or without added cooking oil, were exposed to an in vitro digestion procedure. Adding a pepsin-HCl solution at pH 2.0 simulated the gastric phase. In the subsequent intestinal phase, pH was adjusted to 7.5 and a pancreatin-bile extract mixture was added. Carotenoids released from the carrot matrix during the digestion were extracted and quantified on high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC).”

Their results:  

“Three percent of the total beta-carotene content was released from raw carrots in pieces. When homogenized (pulped) 21% was released. Cooking the pulp increased the accessibility to 27%. Addition of cooking oil to the cooked pulp further increased the released amount to 39%.”
Look, although they treated the finely chopped (chewed-simulation) carrots with an HCl solution at pH 2.0, only 3 percent of ß-carotene was released.  Don't you think this tells us something?  For example, maybe our gut isn't equipped to adequately digest raw plants as they occur in nature?

The human gut can’t extract high amounts of anything from raw carrots or similar vegetables for one simple principal reason:  our bodies do not produce the enzyme cellulase required to digest and break down the plant cells that contain all the nutrients supplied by fibrous plants.  

Source:  Wikipedia


Almost all of the valuable nutrients in plants occur inside the cells of the plants.  These cells have walls composed of cellulose.  Lacking any enzyme to break down this cell wall, humans must use other means to open the cells to extract the nutrients.  Outside modern industrialized nations, most people apply heat to the food, which causes the juice in the cells to expand and this causes the cells to explode open, making their contents more available for absorption.

Thus, carrots cooked to a soft texture deliver 9 times as much ß-carotene as chewed raw carrots.  This experiment explains why raw foodists love and need their blenders and juicers.  Let’s say some raw food person eschews machinery.   Here’s the data:

  • One hundred grams of raw carrot contains 16, 706 potential IU of potential vitamin A activity in the form of carotenes. 
  • A human requires about 1000 mcg daily of retinol equivalent (RE) activity from food. 
  • If only chewing the carrots, a human will extract about 3% of the carotenes, or 501 IU. 
  • 10 IU of ß-carotene from plant foods provides one RE.

From this we can conclude that 100 g of raw carrot provides only 50 RE.  Since a human requires about 1000 RE daily, he would have to eat 20 x 100 g, or 2 kg/4.4 pounds of carrots daily to even have a chance of meeting his vitamin A needs. 

Since the typical person eats only 3-5 pounds of food daily, he would have to eat nothing but carrots.  Two kilos of carrots supplies only 820 calories, assuming that we can extract 100% of available calories from raw plants, or only about 24 calories if we extract calories from chewed carrots at the same 3% rate that we extract ß-carotene (the safer assumption, since all the sugars in carrots are also locked up in the indigestible cells). 

So this guy better be up for spending a lot more time eating to meet his 2500 calorie daily requirement.  How about at least 6 kilos of carrots daily, and possibly 200 kilos daily, to meet your energy requirements?

So the raw fooders fall back on their blenders, which will increase the nutrient delivery  by about 7 times.  Now you only need a mere 600 g/1.3 lbs. of carrots to get enough ß-carotene to have a chance at adequate vitamin A production.  The caloric delivery soars to 84 calories per kilo. Now we’re making some progress.

Perhaps you can begin to see why some people rave about weight loss achieved when they gorge on raw foods.  The caloric delivery can be so low, you may as well be fasting. 

Back to the vitamin A, all of that assumes that he was not one of the approximately 45% of people who don’t convert carotenoids to vitamin A at all. It appears that in the course of human evolution, the activity of ß-carotene 15,15'-dioxygenase (needed to convert ß-carotene to retinol) has declined substantially, such that up to 45% of people do not convert ß-carotene to retinol vitamin A. Hickenbottom et al  found that 45% of 11 men tested did not convert ß-carotene to vitamin A (retinol).  Lin et al found the same in women. Leung et al  identified gene polymorphisms contributing to this variability in carotene conversion capacity. 

Now apply this to calcium.  Take a raw vegetable with a fairly high calcium content, such as collards, which may contain up to 250 mg calcium per 100 g.  Like the ß-carotene in carrots, this mineral lies inside the cells of the collards, surrounded by cellulose that we can’t digest.  This means that we might extract only 3% of the calcium from raw collards, i.e. 7.5 mg per 100 g raw.  A human requires about 750 mg calcium daily, so he’d have to eat 10 kilos of raw collards daily to get adequate calcium.  Let's get chewing!

Actually, one might rightly question whether we can rightly call a food that has gone through a juice extractor, blender, or grinder of any sort "raw," "uncooked,"  or even "unheated."

All of these devices treat the food with friction, and friction always generates heat, the key element of the “cooking” that raw foodists so passionately attack.  One might call the products mimimally heated, but they are heated nonetheless.

Moreover, no other animal has to use blenders to get adequate nutrition from its raw food diet.  If you vegan raw fooders discard cooking because “no other animal does it,” shouldn’t you also discard blenders and juicers for the same reason? 

If your raw food diet only works if you use a blender, I have to wonder what you think your raw food ancestors did without those blenders, only invented in the 20th century.  So far as I know, no archaeological dig has found blenders or juicers in early human tool kits.  Can you imagine stone age women trying to juice carrots by grinding them against rocks?   Not quite optimal foraging.

I've a few more things to say about the claims of vegan raw fooders.  Until next time, have a steak.

I shared this post at ParadigmShiftBlogShare.

I've written more on this topic:  

More Raw Truth About Raw Vegan Diets, 1

More Raw Truth About Raw Vegan Diets, 2

P.S.  If you like this post and want to see more like it, please consider making a small donation or a recurring subscription payment using the PayPal buttons in the right hand column.  Fighting fallacies is a full time job I love to do, but I need support to continue doing it.  Also consider sending a link to this post to all of your Facebook and other friends.