Meat vs Wheat: Tales From T Colin Campbell's China Study

OK, probably many readers know that T. Colin Campbell believes that animal foods promote disease and plant foods prevent disease.

In 1996, Campbell and his colleagues published a paper entitled Association of dietary factors and selected plasma variables with sex hormone-binding globulin in rural Chinese women.

In this very interesting report of data from the China study, Campbell et al presented the relationships between various foods and sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG) in Chinese women.  SHBG binds sex hormones, reducing their effects on tissues.

I am going to quote extensively because I want you to get it from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. In the introduction, Campbell et al write:

“In women, SHBG is clinically implicated in several conditions, ranging from cancer and cardiovascular disease to polycystic ovarian disease and hirsutism (5-8). Lapidus et al (9)

found that a decrease in the concentration of SHBG was a significant risk factor for 12-y overall mortality, concluding that SHBG, androgens, and estrogens should be evaluated as risk factors for cardiovascular disease and death. Suggested positive physiologic regulators of SHBG include testosterone, prolactin, growth hormone, somatomedin-C, and insulin, whereas enterolactone, oral estrogen, and thyroid hormone are potential negative regulators (10).

“Recently however, a growing body of research supports insulin as the primary regulator of SHBG (1 1-14). Furthermore, SHBG has been shown to be an independent predictor of

insulin resistance (15), which is itself suggested to be the common denominator in non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (NIDDM), obesity, hypertension, dyslipidemia, and atherosclerotic

cardiovascular disease, otherwise known in the aggregate as insulin resistance syndrome (IRS) or syndrome X (16, 17). Thus, plasma SHBG itself may be an important indicator for assessing IRS risk.”

In short, the data suggests that low SHBG may play a role in the development of several diseases and associates with increased overall mortality.  Thus, oversimplified, low SHBG=bad, and higher SHBG=good (maybe). 

So Campbell et al went about teasing out associations between foods and SHBG levels in Chinese women using the China Study data.

One of the things they did was throw out data they had collected in Tuoli province, where the people raise animals for milk and meat: 

“Tuoli county from the province of Xinjiang was not included in the analyses because of unreliable data due to measurement problems for several of the covariates of interest.”

Well, that’s convenient.  Apparently, according to Campbell, the people in Tuoli were ‘feasting’ on the day that they collected data. 

I imagine a conversation about this with Dr. Campbell:

Me:  Well, Dr. Campbell, why did you throw out the data from Tuoli?

Campbell:  Because they were feasting when we collected the data.

Me:  Why do you say that they were feasting?

Campbell:  Because they were eating a lot of animal products.

Me:  Don't you expect people who raise animals for milk and meat to eat milk and meat?

Campbell:  Only at feasts.

Me:  What else would pastoralists eat?

Campbell:  Rice and vegetables.

Me:  But they probably can’t grow rice or many vegetables at that latitude and in that climate. That’s why they raise animals!

Campbell:  Look, by definition, if you are eating animal products, you are feasting.  Therefore, I can throw out of the China Study data all data that shows Chinese people eating meat or dairy on a regular basis.

Anyway, leaving aside why Campbell left out of the data set the data from the county that had the highest intake of animal products, let’s take a look at the correlations his team found between foods and SHBG.  In the table below, taken directly from Campbell’s own work, positive numbers means that the food was associated with higher SHBG (good) and negative numbers means that the food was associated with lower SHBG (bad).  Click on image for larger version.

Well, get a load of that.  The “healthywholegrains” wheat, millet, sorghum, and corn, as well as ‘light-colored vegetables,’ carrots, and legumes, primarily soybeans, all have a negative correlation with SHBG whether using the data from the questionnaire or the 3-day diet survey.  That suggests that those things are ‘bad’ for SHBG status and health.

On the other hand, meat, fish, green vegetables, and rice all have a positive correlation with SHBG levels, suggesting these foods are ‘good’ for SHBG and health.

Also note that rice, green vegetables, meat, and fish have negative association with insulin levels, meaning that the women who ate more of these apparently had lower insulin levels.

Further, the negative correlation of legumes is greater than the positive correlation of meat, although not significantly.  This is very interesting given that the Chinese supposedly eat meat very infrequently and legumes very frequently.

This hardly looks like a ringing endorsement of a grain-based vegan diet, regardless of what grain provides the base. 

Huh.  Campbell et al did not miss this, as evident from this paragraph in the text (click on it for a larger version):

Of course, people committed to promoting a vegan diet have a hard time admitting any benefit to eating meat.  Campbell et al try to downplay the protective effect of meat by dismissing its importance in the Chinese diet in this passage:

Click on it to enlarge.

 In other words, they want to say that the beneficial effect of meat isn't important and we can ignore it because Chinese people hardly ever eat meat (except, perhaps, in Tuoli, but we threw that data out).

The paradox for Campbell here is that even those small amounts of meat and fish had strong positive relationships with an apparently protective factor (higher SHBG). In fact, as I noted above, the apparently positive effect of meat had the same magnitude of correlation as the apparently negative effect of legumes (mostly soy) that Chinese people eat quite frequently relative to meat.  This suggests that, per serving, meat has a much greater positive effect than the per serving positive effect of, for example, rice.  

The effect of wheat compared to rice was marked enough that Campbell et al spend a whole, long paragraph discussing the different effects had by rice and wheat on insulin secretion.  From that paragraph, two lines in particular stand out.  The first:

“Wheat may be unique in its relative capacity to stimulate insulin.”

Which they support by referring to several studies establishing a greater insulinogenic effect of wheat compared to rice.  And the second:

“The relative differences in the fatty acid proportions and/or amylose content for wheat and rice may thus be responsible for modulating serum SHBG, triacylglycerols, and insulin. Our study did not find insulin to be predictive of SHBG variation after the effect of the specific foods were adjusted for (particularly rice and wheat).”

In other words, Campbell et al admit that in the China Study data, the strongest predictor for low SHBG status was wheat consumption.

Meanwhile, meat had an inverse, i.e. protective, relationship with SHBG. 

So, there you have it.  According to this paper co-authored by Campbell himself, among Chinese women, wheat aligns with murder and meat aligns with medicine. 

Imagine that.

More Raw Vegan Truth

One of the most common "arguments" for veganism goes like this:  People don't have well-developed canine teeth like those of dogs or cats, therefore our teeth prove that we aren't adapted to a meat-based diet.

Although they are fond of using chimpanzees as models for human behavior, apparently vegans missed or ignore a prominent feature of chimpanzee dentition:

Source: www.wallpaperweb.org

The chimp eats a 95% vegan, 70% fruit diet, so if you think large canines are evidence for carnivory, how do you explain the fact that chimps have canines several times the size of any human canine?

Simple.  Canines have functions other than tearing into meat.  Chimps display canines as a part of self-defense and social ranking.  You might even say that he who has the largest canines wins.  Canines are weapons useful even to a frugivore.

By the erroneous vegan reasoning, since chimps are frugivores and chimps have huge canines, huge canines must be a sign of frugivory.  Since humans don't have huge canines like frugivorous chimps, we must not be frugivores!

In contrast to chimps, we use our minds as our primary weapons.  Large canines are unnecessary when you can make knives, arrows, and spears.

In most animals, bearing the teeth serves primarily as a threat; in humans, it serves as an invitation we call a smile.  Canines like that certainly spoil a smile.

Finally,  focusing on canines distracts us from the other teeth.  Unlike more vegetarian primates, human teeth have sharp ridges that form shearing surfaces, so they cut like scissors:

Source:  New Scientist

Whenever someone tells me we don't have teeth designed for eating meat, I simply ask, "Have you ever sliced open your tongue or cheek with your own teeth?"  If so, you have proven to yourself that human teeth can easily slice raw meat. 

We don't need canines to eat meat, we only need shearing teeth.  All of human teeth have a more carnivore form than other primates,  and this change in human teeth first appears about 2.5 million years ago.  From the New Scientist article entitled "Meat Eating Is an Old Human Habit:"

In 1999, researchers found cut marks on animal bones dated at around 2.5 million years old. But no one could be sure that they were made by meat-eating hominids, because none appeared to have suitable teeth.

Now an analysis by Peter Ungar of the University of Arkansas has revealed that the first members of Homo had much sharper teeth than their most likely immediate ancestor, Australopithecus afarensis, the species that produced the famous fossil Lucy.

Eating meat requires teeth adapted more to cutting than to grinding. The ability to cut is determined by the slope of the cusps, or crests. "Steeper crests mean the ability to consume tougher foods," Ungar says. He has found that the crests of teeth from early Homo skeletons are steeper than those of gorillas, which consume foods as tough as leaves and stems, but not meat.

"Ungar shows that early Homo had teeth adapted to tougher food than A. afarensis or [chimpanzees]. The obvious candidate is meat," says anthropologist [and vegetarian] Richard Wrangham of Harvard University.

A recent study of the evolution of horses determined that evolutionary changes in tooth form such as this would require about one million years of dietary evolution.  This means that in order for early humans to have sharper teeth by 2.5 million years ago, their ancestors must have been eating meat for at least one million years prior.  No surprise then, that our earliest evidence for meat-eating, stone-tool wielding hominins dates to about 3.5 million years ago.

Meat--its been what's for dinner for at least 3.5 million years, and we have the teeth to prove it. 

For more on this topic:

The Raw Truth About Raw Vegan Diets

More Raw Truth About Raw Vegan Diets 1

More Raw Truth About Raw Vegan Diets 2

If you like my blogging, please consider subscribing ($3.00 per month) or making a donation using the PayPal buttons in the right hand column.

More Raw Truth About Raw Vegan Diets

From the National Geographic, this map shows the Journey of Man out of Africa, an exodus of modern humans that started about 50, 000 years ago:

Now I ask, what do raw vegan advocates think our ancestors were after by leaving Africa 50,000 years ago?

Our ancestors left Africa and went north, into Europe and the Arctic.  Do raw vegans think this was done by an animal adapted to an exclusively raw vegan diet?  Do they think Europe was full of bananas during the ice ages?   

If you think man is by nature adapted to a raw vegan diet, how the hell do you explain his exodus from tropical paradise into ecosystems where meat was the only reliable food for at least half of the year?

How can an animal adapted to a diet consisting exclusively of tropical fruits and vegetables spread out from Africa all over the entire planet, even into ecosystems (e.g. the arctic) where meat is the only food available almost all year round? 

A commenter on my last post in this series said eating 10 bananas every day is no problem.  Since then I tried five in a day.  It gave me the runs.    Enjoy your bananas, but living on them is not, let's say, a-peel-ing to me.

For more on this topic, see:

The Raw Truth About Raw Vegan Diets

More Raw Truth About Raw Vegan Diets 1

More Vegan Ignorance Exposed

A Practically Primal Perspective on Conventional Beef, Part 1: Hormones

7/13/11 update:  I decided that I don't want to endorse or appear to endorse the use of any meat produced by conventional methods of feeding the livestock grains, primarily corn and soybeans.  Since animals consume 80% of the grain and soy produced by U.S. agriculture, this system drives the ongoing destruction of our topsoil both through crops and through grazing.  Animal food production consumes 87% of all freshwater used in the U.S. each year, and thus is the primary driver of depletion of water reserves.  This system also produces most of the water pollution occurring in the U.S.  Our conventional livestock production system has enormous costs detailed in this article from Cornell University.  Since I have known of these costs for more than 20 years, I feel embarrassed and remorseful that I wrote this series and other articles that endorsed the use of conventional animal products.  I served as part of a system that promotes a completely unsustainable approach to human nutrition. 

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Some people wonder if one can safely eat conventional meat as a part of a practically paleo lifestyle.   Documentary films like Food Inc, along with a plethora of anti-meat, pro-vegetarian literature, have given people the impression that conventional meat products come from inhumane production systems and that conventional meat contains hazardous amounts of hormones, antibiotics, and pesticide residues.  Shall we believe this?  Let’s take a look, starting with hormones.

Hormones

Does conventional meat contain hazardous levels of hormones?  Short answer:  No.  For details, read on.

First, a primal perspective.

I once had a native African explain to me that among her people, they have a taboo against hunting female animals.   This taboo makes a lot of sense for a tribe dependent on hunting.  If you kill a female, you are eliminating a bunch of potential offspring at the same time; while killing a few bulls will have essentially no effect on the fecundity of the herd. 

So hunters would have preferred eating bulls to cows, and in Europe still today some producers  raise bulls.  Similarly, in the U.S. we get most of our beef from steer—neutered bulls—while we save the cows for calving and milk production.  

Bulls and steer differ hormonally.  Bull meat samples tested by Fritsche and Steinhart [1] contained medians of 0.34 mg/kg testosterone and 0.32 mg/kg epitestosterone, while steer meat samples (from unsupplemented steers) contain medians of 0.01 mg/kg testosterone and 0.12 mg/kg epitestosterone.   Bull meat had up to 1.05 mg/kg testosterone.  Thus, bull meat contains a median of 34 times more testosterone and more than twice as much epitestosterone than steer meat; and bull meat might have up to 105 times as much testosterone as a steer.

Their data indicates that at least some of the meat typically eaten by hunter-gatherers would have had  between eight and one hundred times more endogenous steroid hormone—in the form of testosterone— than an untreated modern “organic” steer.  Thus, it would seem that through evolution humans adapted to consumption of meat containing considerably greater levels of steroid hormone than what we find in a modern untreated or “organic” steer meat.

Since testosterone promotes muscle tissue growth, a steer has much less growth potential than a bull.  However, testosterone also makes bulls aggressive and harder to handle, so we can more easily control steers.  Modern husbandry attempts to restore the growth potential without the aggression by substituting for a small amount of the lost testosterone other anabolic but less androgenic steroids, primarily estrogens.

Currently the FDA allows the use of five hormones in cattle for meat production: progesterone, testosterone, estradiol-17β, zeranol, and trenbolone acetate.

The first three are natural hormones, the same as produced by an intact animal.   Zeranol occurs naturally also,  produced by fungi.   It acts as a non-steroidal estrogen agonist, meaning it acts like estrogen. Trenbolone acts as an androgenic steroid that promotes muscle growth.

Does the use of these in raising cattle result in meat or dairy products with unusually high, potentially harmful levels of dietary estrogens or other steroids? 

According to Doyle [2], four studies have found that muscle meat from an untreated steer provides estrodiol in a range of 2.8-14.4 pg/g.  Two other studies found estrodiol at concentrations of 12 pg/g in liver, and 12.6 pg/g in kidney.   Doyle also cites an FAO report finding that meat from implanted steers had 9.7 pg/g estrodiol at 15 days after implantation, and 7.3 pg/g at 61 days after implantation.  In short, the levels of estrodiol in hormone-treated meat falls in the normal range found in meat from untreated cattle.  Doyle comments:

“Estradiol levels in edible tissues of implanted cattle are usually significantly higher than in controls but the increases are small, in the ng/kg range. The greatest increases reported in an FAO report on estradiol residues were 0.002, 0.0065, 0.005, and 0.0084 mg/kg for implanted bulls, steers, heifers, and calves, respectively. These increases are well below the FDA recommended limits listed in the table on p. 2 and well below estradiol concentrations in muscles of pregnant heifers (0.016 to 0.033 mg/kg).”

Similarly, Hartmann, Lacorn, and Stienhart examined the “Natural occurrence of steroid hormones in food.” [3]  Using gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, they measured the levels of twelve steroids occurring in market-sourced meats, milk products, plants, yeast, and alcoholic beverages, including both naturally occurring and residues of additional hormones used in production.  They tested beef (bull, steer, heifer), veal, pork, poultry, eggs, fish, and plants (potatoes, wheat, rice, soybeans, haricots beans, muschrooms, olive oil, safflower oil, and corn oil). 

They found no significant difference in hormone levels between meat from hormone-treated and untreated animals.  In the typical diet, meat, poultry, and eggs proved to supply less hormones than non-paleo milk products :

“Meat does not play a dominant role in the daily intake of steroid hormones. Meat, meat products and fish contribute to the hormone supply according to their proportion in human nutrition (average about one quarter). The main source of estrogens and progesterone are milk products (60-80%). Eggs and vegetable food contribute in the same order of magnitude to the hormone supply as meat does.”

Thus, if you eat a paleo diet, and avoid milk products, you actually would eliminate the greatest dietary source of estrogens, and might reduce your total dietary intake of estrogens by more than 50%.

As for health effects of these hormones in foods, Hartmann et al compared the intake of hormones from diet from all sources to natural human hormone production levels, concluding that the food contents of steroids are insignificant compared to endogenous production [p. 18]:

“These values [amounts provided by diet] are far exceeded by the human steroid production (Table 10). Children, who show the lowest production of steroid hormones, produce about 20 times the amount of progesterone and about 1000 times the amount of testosterone and estrogens that are ingested with food on average per day. It has further to be taken into consideration that about 90% of the ingested hormones are inactivated by the first-pass-effect of the liver.  This leads to the conclusion that no hormonal effects, and as a consequence no tumor promoting effects, can be expected from naturally occurring steroids in food.”

For example, a prepubertal boy, most vulnerable to adverse effects of excess dietary estrogens,  produces about 100 micrograms of estrogen daily.  Beef muscle meat contains less than 0.02 micrograms of estrogens per kilogram.  To get from beef an intake of estrogens equal to just one percent of his endogenous estrogen production, i.e. 1 microgram, he would have to consume 50 kilograms--110 pounds-- of beef in a day!  

According to Doyle [2], the lowest observed effect level of exogenous estrogen is 5 micrograms of estrogens per kilogram of body weight.  Thus, a 40 kg prepubertal boy would have to consume 200 micrograms of estrogens daily to observe an effect.  To get this from conventional hormone-treated beef, he would have to consume 10,000 kg of beef every day.  Clearly he isn't going to get feminized by eating beef.

Opponents of the use of hormones in modern animal husbandry often claim that the use of hormones in production of meat and dairy products causes early puberty, obesity, and cancer in modern industrial nations.

Cornell University has a website discussing these Consumer Concerns About Hormones in Foods:

Can steroid hormones in meat affect the age of puberty for girls?
Early puberty in girls has been found to be associated with a higher risk for breast cancer. Height, weight, diet, exercise, and family history have all been found to influence age of puberty (see BCERF Fact Sheet #08, Childhood Life Events and the Risk of Breast Cancer). Steroid hormones in food were suspected to cause early puberty in girls in some reports. However, exposure to higher than natural levels of steroid hormones through hormone-treated meat or poultry has never been documented. Large epidemiological studies have not been done to see whether or not early puberty in developing girls is associated with having eaten growth hormone-treated foods.

A concern about an increase in cases of girls reaching puberty or menarche early (at age eight or younger) in Puerto Rico, led to an investigation in the early 1980s by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Samples of meat and chicken from Puerto Rico were tested for steroid hormone residues. One laboratory found a chicken sample from a local market to have higher than normal level of estrogen. Also, residues of zeranol were reported in the blood of some of the girls who had reached puberty early. However, these results could not be verified by other laboratories. Following CDC's investigation, USDA tested 150 to 200 beef, poultry and milk samples from Puerto Rico in 1985, and found no residues of DES, zeranol or estrogen in these samples.

In another study in Italy, steroid hormone residues in beef and poultry in school meals were suspected as the cause of breast enlargement in very young girls and boys. However, the suspect beef and poultry samples were not available to test for the presence of hormones. Without proof that exposure to higher levels of steroid hormones occurred through food, it is not possible to conclude whether or not eating hormone-treated meat or poultry caused the breast enlargement in these cases.

Can eating meat from hormone-treated animals affect breast cancer risk?
Evidence does not exist to answer this question. The amount of steroid hormone that is eaten through meat of a treated animal is negligible compared to what the human body produces each day. The breast cancer risk of women who eat meat from hormone-treated animals has not been compared with the risk of women who eat meat from untreated animals.

Similarly, we don't have any studies of comparing the prostate cancer risk of men who eat meat from hormone-treated animals to men who eat meat from untreated animals.

In Hyperinsulinemic Diseases of Civilization:  More Than Just Syndrome X, Cordain, Eades, and Eades [4] point out that current evidence actually implicates high carbohydrate intake as the promoter of these hormone-related disorders, because high carbohydrate intake raises insulin levels which increases levels of insulin-like growth factors and increases endogenous production of steroids, by far the main source of steroid exposure, while reducing sex hormone-binding globulins that reduce steroid activity. In the abstract they summarize:

Specifically, hyperinsulinemia elevates serum concentrations of free insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1) and androgens, while simultaneously reducing insulin-like growth factor-binding protein 3 (IGFBP-3) and sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG). Since IGFBP-3 is a ligand for the nuclear retinoid X receptor a, insulin-mediated reductions in IGFBP-3 may also influence transcription of anti-proliferative genes normally activated by the body’s endogenous retinoids. These endocrine shifts alter cellular proliferation and growth in a variety of tissues, the clinical course of which may promote acne, early menarche, certain epithelial cell carcinomas, increased stature, myopia, cutaneous papillomas (skin tags), acanthosis nigricans, polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and male vertex balding. Consequently, these illnesses and conditions may, in part, have hyperinsulinemia at their root cause and therefore should be classified among the diseases of Syndrome X. [Italics added]

Using the paleo principle to evaluate this claim, we should expect ill effects of hormones in meat to appear in heavy meat-eating hunter-gatherer groups since they ate meat from intact animals, particularly bulls having 10 times as much testosterone as domesticated animals.

Alas for the hormone hypothesis, hunter-gatherers eating strictly native foods had no obesity, and, so far as we can tell, no cancer. [5]  Further, in The Paleolithic Prescription, S. Boyd Eaton, M.D., Melvin Konner M.D., Ph.D., and Marjorie Shostak present data on reproductive milestones among recent hunter-gatherers.  Among three recent hunter-gatherer tribes (Agta, !Kung, Ache), the average age of menarche (onset of menses) is about 16 years of age, compared to 12.5 years in the U.S. according to Wikipedia.

Since hunter-gatherers eating bull meat on a regular basis and consuming around 50% of energy from meat had none of the problems attributed to hormones in meat, it seems unlikely that hormones in meat can account for cancer or any other hormone-related problem in modern people.

I prefer to see people eat meat from animals not treated with hormones or hormone analogues, but if for budget reasons you choose to eat conventional meat (hormone treated or not) instead of grass fed, I think you don't need to worry that its hormone content will harm you in any way.  You should worry more that by avoiding the meat, you will consume too many carbohydrates that will much more profoundly alter your endocrine system in harmful directions.

But before you get meat from hormone-treated animals, check to see if you can find a supplier for meats from animals raised on typical feeds (corn, soy, etc.) but without added hormones.  In Phoenix, we have at least two markets--Sprouts and Sunflower--that supply meat that comes from such animals.
These markets sell their meats at prices comparable and sometimes lower than what I see at more conventional supermarkets where the meat comes from hormone-treated animals.

We will look at antibiotics and other issues in upcoming posts.

Thanks to Matt Schoeneberger, co-author of S.P.E.E.D. Weight Loss Book, for help accessing one of the articles I used as a reference for this article.  

Notes:

1. Fritsche S and Steinhart H. Differences in natural steroid hormone patterns of beef from bulls and steers.  J. Anim. Sci. 1998. 76:1621–1625.  Full text: jas.fass.org/cgi/reprint/76/6/1621.pdf

2.  Doyle E.  Human Safety of Hormone Implants Used to Promote Growth in Cattle:

A Review of the Scientific Literature.  Food Research Institute, University of Wisconsin

Madison, WI 53706.  Full text:  fri.wisc.edu/docs/pdf/hormone.pdf

3.  Hartmann S, Lacorn M, and Stienhart H. Natural occurrence of steroid hormones in food. Food Chemistry 62(1);7-20 

4.  Cordain L, Eades M, Eades M.  Hyerinsulinemic diseases of civilization: More than just syndrome X.  Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part A 136 (2003) 95–112.  PDF available here.

5.  Stefanson, V. Cancer:  Disease of Civilization.

Another Way Eating Meat Makes Us Smarter

Just read Richard Nikoley's Free The Animal post entitled "The Latest Uh-Oh for the Vegetarians and Vegans: Creatine" which refers to a study just published in the British Journal of Nutrition entitled "The influence of creatine supplementation on the cognitive functioning of vegetarians and omnivores."  

Discussions of how a meat-based diet made us smart  by spurring human evolution usually center around meat providing concentrated calories or essential fatty acids.  This new research suggests that the creatine provided by meat also supports better cognitive function among carnivores compared to vegetarians.

According to the abstract of the BJN article:

Young adult females (n 128) were separated into those who were and were not vegetarian. Randomly and under a double-blind procedure, subjects consumed either a placebo or 20 g of creatine supplement for 5 d. Creatine supplementation did not influence measures of verbal fluency and vigilance. However, in vegetarians rather than in those who consume meat, creatine supplementation resulted in better memory. Irrespective of dietary style, the supplementation of creatine decreased the variability in the responses to a choice reaction-time task.

Memory is essential to learning, so we can conclude that a vegetarian supplemented with creatine will learn better than the same vegetarian not supplemented.  But why not just eat meat, an excellent dietary source of creatine?  As Wikipedia points out:

In humans and animals, approximately half of stored creatine originates from food (mainly from meat). Since vegetables do not contain creatine, vegetarians show lower levels of muscle creatine, but show the same levels after using supplements.

So, take a creatine-depleted vegetarian, feed him/her some meat, and voila, now you have a smarter animal.  I have some experience with this.  All my life I have had an exceptionally good memory, so long as I ate meat; but during the time I spent trying to make a vegetarian diet support my health, I had a significant decline in ability to memorize and recall information, obvious not only to me but to people close to me. 

One author reported on this study using the title "Creatine may beef up brain function" in an online journal focusing on supplements.  Apt, but I'd rather see people beef up brain function by eating real food: beef! 


Vegetarians will likely protest that the Institute of Medicine (IOM) does not presently classify creatine as an essential nutrient because human cells can manufacture it from the amino acids arginine, glycine, and methionine.  However, the IOM's  failure to classify a nutrient as essential fact does NOT mean that the nutrient is not essential.  

The history of choline illustrates these points further.  Adolf Strecker discovered choline, a water-soluble nutrient often grouped with B-vitamins, in 1864.  Mammals manufacture some choline using S-adenosylmethionine, derived from the amino acid methionine, as a raw material.  Because of endogenous synthesis, the Institute of Medicine did not classify choline among the essential nutrients until 1998.  


Choline is another nutrient better supplied by meat and especially eggs than by plant foods, and the Wikipedia entry on choline includes this bit:

Strict vegetarians  who avoid all animal products, endurance athletes and people who drink a lot of alcohol may be at risk for choline deficiency  and may benefit from choline supplements.

In general, people who do not eat many whole eggs may have to pay close attention to get enough choline in their diets. Studies on a number of different populations have found that the average intake of choline was below the Adequate Intake (AI).

The body needs choline to manufacture acetylcholine, the primary neurotransmitter, and choline is required for full development of the central nervous system, particularly the memory center of the brain.

Choline deficiency during fetal development affects memory profoundly throughout life.  In  Choline: Critical Role During Fetal Development and Dietary Requirements in Adults Steven Zeisel reports on animal studies of choline deficiency:

Mothers fed choline-deficient diets during late pregnancy have offspring with diminished progenitor cell proliferation and increased apoptosis in fetal hippocampus....and decremented visuospatial and auditory memory.

In contrast, Zeisel reports that although adult rodents decrement in memory as they age, offspring exposed to extra choline in utero do not show this “senility.”

Zeisel also reports on results of studies of choline supplementation in humans.  Among the findings:

In a double-blind study using normal college students, 25 g of phosphatidylcholine caused significant improvement in explicit memory, as measured by a serial learning task; this improvement might have been due to the improved responses of slow learners. A single oral 10 g dose of choline chloride given to normal volunteers significantly decreased the number of trials needed to master a serial-learning word test. The precursor for formation of phosphatidylcholine, cytidine diphosphocholine (CDP-choline), also has been tested for memory-enhancing effects. In a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study, volunteers were treated with 1000 mg/d CDP-choline or placebo for three months. CDP-choline improved immediate and delayed logical memory. In a second study, oral administration of CDP-choline (500−1000 mg/day) for four weeks to elderly subjects with memory deficits but without dementia resulted in improved memory in free recall tasks, but not in recognition tests. In a double-blind study, patients with early Alzheimer-type dementia were treated with 25 g/day phosphatidylcholine for six months. Modest improvements were observed compared with placebo in several memory tests. However, there are studies in which the choline effect on memory was not observed in normal subjects or in patients with dementias.

Given the rather poor track record of supplements, and the fact that humans are evolutionarily adapted to food, not isolated nutrients, I wonder what results these studies would have gotten if instead of using isolated choline chloride or phosphatydylcholine they had simply advised the subjects to eat 3-6 eggs and more than 8 ounces of meat daily.

Stephan blogged about research showing that choline also prevents and reverses non-alcoholic fatty liver disease even in the context of high sugar intake.  Eat egg yolks for a healthy brain and a healthy liver.

These types of findings indicate that humans have long ago adapted to and become dependent upon meat.  If humans did not need meat, they would have the ability to synthesize optimum amounts of creatine and choline in the absence of dietary meat.  Chances are, dietary creatine is as essential to human health as choline or vitamin B-12. 

History suggests we might wait perhaps a century for the Institute of Medicine to decide that creatine is an essential nutrient.   Meanwhile, we have enough evidence:  Humans need meat for optimum health of the nervous system, and the anthropological and experimental evidence already indicates eating meat can literally make you "smarter" than if you don't eat meat.

Ted Slanker Says John Robbins Is a Nut Case

For those of you unfamiliar with the world of vegetarians, John Robbins was heir to the Baskin-Robbins ice cream fortune.  He turned down the inheritance to pursue a life promoting veganism as the dietary solution to poor health and ecological disruption.  His book Diet For A New America, and film by the same name, has inspired many to adopt vegetarian or vegan diets, ostensibly to save themselves from chronic disease and "save the earth" from catastrophes that Robbins claims will occur as a result of our consuming land animal foods.   He created an organization called "EarthSave" which has the mission of promoting vegan dieting for health and supposed environmental benefits. 

Robbins wrote a blog post entitled "What About Grass-Fed Beef?"  in which he outlines why he won't eat or recommend grass-fed beef.    The post starts with these paragraphs:

Feeding grain to cattle has got to be one of the dumbest ideas in the history of western civilization.

Cows, sheep, and other grazing animals are endowed with the ability to convert grasses, which those of us who possess only one stomach cannot digest, into food that we can digest. They can do this because they are ruminants, which is to say that they possess a rumen, a 45 or so gallon (in the case of cows) fermentation tank in which resident bacteria convert cellulose into protein and fats.

Traditionally, all beef was grassfed beef, but in the United States today what is commercially available is almost all feedlot beef. The reason? It’s faster, and so more profitable.

Seventy-five years ago, steers were 4 or 5 years old at slaughter. Today, they are 14 or 16 months. You can’t take a beef calf from a birth weight of 80 pounds to 1,200 pounds in a little more than a year on grass. It takes enormous quantities of corn, protein supplements, antibiotics and other drugs, including growth hormones.

Ted Slanker, a rancher who raises grass-finished cattle, got wind of Robbins's post and published a response entitled "John Robbins is a Nut Case."   Slanker's post starts like this:
  

Recently a first-page Google search for “grass fed beef” provided a listing for a John Robbins blog.  Obviously, a lot of folks are reading his blog and for sure it directly impacts us.  One might assume his comments would be a good thing for grass-fed beef, ranchers and farmers, and the American consumer.  But, hold on there partner, that is not the case.  John’s commentary slides around between facts, myths, religious beliefs, and outright distortions.  So, unless one really knows something about nutrition, ranching, grass-fed meat, the conventional food industry, and such, they would be inclined to think John Robbins’ blog is good information.  Since that is not the case, I have responded. 

Some weeks ago I tried to leave a response on the John Robbins blog, but I cannot find its posting.  So, since I have my own forum (one of the good things about the Internet) I am going to post one of my typical straight-talk essays right here where he can’t edit me out of the picture (assuming he did). 

My response may offend many who want to believe the worst about American agriculture and the American food industry.  But those folks are beyond being idiotic because all they do is sit around and complain through their mouthful of food.  And they are so lazy they want to blame American agriculture and the American food industry for their chronic diseases instead of taking measures into their own hands by educating themselves and changing the foods they eat.  Anyone wanting to do just that, can do it.  Therefore I’ll address both parties: the nut case John Robbins and the misguided members of the American mob.

 

Slanker is a grass-rancher but he nevertheless defends grain-feeding of cattle against what he sees as sentimental misconceptions promoted by Robbins and other veg*ns.  I of course agree with Slanker.  For example, I liked these passages in Slanker's post:

John complains that ranchers "make them eat grain, primarily corn, in order to make them as fat as possible."  Then on the other hand he recommends that people eat whole grains for health?!?!  He is so out of touch that he doesn't understand that the feeding of grain to people causes obesity in people just like it does cattle. 

 Robbins wrote:  "The cruelties of modern factory farming are so severe that you don't have to be a vegetarian or an animal rights activist to find the conditions to be intolerable, and a violation of the human-animal bond."  Slanker responds:

Statements like this are designed to inflame the ignorant masses.  I would rather keep animals in their natural environment.  But in actual fact, animals in confinement are like people on welfare.  Everything is provided, they love the feed, they are protected from the cruel world, and they get to visit with their buddies.  Compare feedlots to cities where people live in high densities such as New York City with it's 26,403 people per square mile (41.25 people per acre and an acre is only 208 feet by 208 feet).

Furthermore, the idea that people who depend on the animals they raise for their livelihood routinely mistreat their charges is idiotic nonsense.  Yes, you will always be able to find stupid people doing stupid things (like John promoting a vegetarian existence) but that doesn't mean the idiots are the norm.

 In response to Robbins' claim that we don't have enough grass-land to raise the number of cattle we currently raise on corn, Ted says:

Unbeknownst to John it is estimated that the original buffalo herd numbered up to as high as 70 million head.  They ranged from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi River and from West Texas into Canada.  In that same area today there are about 60.35 million head of cattle.  In total area the buffalo range was comparable to about one-third of the continental United States.  If most of the land used for grain (the seed of a grass plant) production here in the United States was instead grazed for its forage, the nation's cattle herd could probably be doubled or tripled or more.

You get the gist. I like Ted's cut-to-the-chase writing style and he links to sources for his facts, unlike Robbins.  Let me know what you think.

Meat-Based Diet Made Us Smarter

NPR online has published online an article discussing the role of meat-eating in human brain evolution.  The author, Christopher Joyce, interviews both Leslie Aiello, co-author of the Expensive Tissue Hypothesis, and Richard Wrangham, the vegetarian primatologist who believes that cooking meat played a very important role in brain evolution.

This article has some real choice passages, like this one from Aiello:

"You can't have a large brain and big guts at the same time," explains Leslie Aiello, an anthropologist and director of the Wenner-Gren Foundation in New York City, which funds research on evolution. Digestion, she says, was the energy-hog of our primate ancestor's body. The brain was the poor stepsister who got the leftovers.

Until, that is, we discovered meat.

"What we think is that this dietary change around 2.3 million years ago was one of the major significant factors in the evolution of our own species," Aiello says.

In fact, new data suggests that this change took place at least 3.4 million years ago.

Previously unknown to me, Aiello says we have some extraordinary data that indicates that our ancestors scavenged meat from carcasses shared with wild dogs and hyenas:

"The closest relative of human tapeworms are tapeworms that affect African hyenas and wild dogs," she says.

So sometime in our evolutionary history, she explains, "we actually shared saliva with wild dogs and hyenas." That would have happened if, say, we were scavenging on the same carcass that hyenas were.

But dining with dogs was worth it. Meat is packed with lots of calories and fat. Our brain — which uses about 20 times as much energy as the equivalent amount of muscle — piped up and said, "Please, sir, I want some more."

 This "dining with dogs" may have had other consequences for human evolution.  MSN online reports that dogs, not chimps are most like humans in social behavior.  I feel inclined to turn this around to say that humans behave more like dogs than like chimps--more like pack hunters and less like solitary mostly vegetarian chimps.  The lead author of this comparative study of dog and human behavior, Jozsef Topal explained to Discovery News "that shared environment has led to the emergence of functionally shared behavioral features in dogs and humans and, in some cases, functionally analogous underlying cognitive skills."  In other words, humans who dined with dogs and behaved more like dogs and less like chimps had greater success in the hunt so that today we behave more like dogs than like chimps.

Back to the NPR article:

"As we got more [meat], our guts shrank because we didn't need a giant vegetable processor any more. Our bodies could spend more energy on other things like building a bigger brain. Sorry, vegetarians, but eating meat apparently made our ancestors smarter — smart enough to make better tools, which in turn led to other changes, says Aiello." 

Those other changes included reduction of the size of teeth and mouth as we adapted to use of "external teeth" i.e. knives.  I often remark that this adaptation made the smile possible.  After all, when an animal with hefty canines bears its teeth, it doesn't exactly warm the heart with joy.

The Raw Deal


Currently raw food diets seem popular.  The raw fooders seem fond of pointing out the no other animal cooks food, and they think this shows that cooking is "unnatural."  They also like to point out that cooking can destroy components of food.

Well, no other animal uses computers, composes symphonies, or writes sonnets.  Wrangham points out that we have good reason to believe that we wouldn't have the brain we need to do these things if we hadn't started cooking.  From the NPR article: 

Wrangham explains that even after we started eating meat, raw food just didn't pack the energy to build the big-brained, small-toothed modern human. He cites research that showed that people on a raw food diet, including meat and oil, lost a lot of weight. Many said they felt better, but also experienced chronic energy deficiency. And half the women in the experiment stopped menstruating.

It's not as if raw food isn't nutritious; it's just harder for the body to get at the nutrition.

Wrangham urges me to try some raw turnip. Not too bad, but hardly enough to get the juices flowing. "They've got a tremendous amount of caloric energy in them," he says. "The problem is that it's in the form of starch, which unless you cook it, does not give you very much."

Then there's all the chewing that raw food requires. Chimps, for example, sometimes chew for six hours a day. That actually consumes a lot of energy.

"Plato said if we were regular animals, you know, we wouldn't have time to write poetry," Wrangham jokes. "You know, he was right."

Wrangham eats a vegetarian diet, but notes that the art of cooking meat gave our ancestors important advantages: 

Besides better taste, cooked food had other benefits — cooking killed some pathogens on food.

But cooking also altered the meat itself. It breaks up the long protein chains, and that makes them easier for stomach enzymes to digest. "The second thing is very clear," Wrangham adds, "and that is the muscle, which is made of protein, is wrapped up like a sausage in a skin, and the skin is collagen, connective tissue. And that collagen is very hard to digest. But if you heat it, it turns to jelly."

As for starchy foods like turnips, cooking gelatinizes the tough starch granules and makes them easier to digest too. Even just softening food — which cooking does — makes it more digestible. In the end, you get more energy out of the food.

That increased energy goes to our head!  Our brains use about 25% of our resting energy expenditure, compared to 8-9% for a chimpanzee. So if you want to think like a chimp, go for the raw food diet; but if you want to be human, use fire:

Yes, cooking can damage some good things in raw food, like vitamins. But Wrangham argues that what's gained by cooking far outweighs the losses.

As I cut into my steak (Wrangham is a vegetarian; he settles for the mango and potatoes), Wrangham explains that cooking also led to some of the finer elements of human behavior: it encourages people to share labor; it brings families and communities together at the end of the day and encourages conversation and story-telling — all very human activities.

"Ultimately, of course, what makes us intellectually human is our brain," he says. "And I think that comes from having the highest quality of food in the animal kingdom, and that's because we cook."

Paleo Protest: The Great American Meat-Out.

From the Detroit News:

Jerry Schneble, the Michigan director of the Great American Meatout, asked Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm to proclaim a Michigan Meat-Out, an "eat meatless meals" day in Michigan. This sparked a protest from Michiganders , many of whom produce beef, pork, or other meats for a living.  Schneble responded to the controversy like a typical misinformed vegetarian:

"I would point out that two-thirds of all Americans are either overweight or obese, and I can guarantee you they did not get that way by overeating fruits and vegetables," he said.

"Meat has no fiber, no phytochemicals, or antioxidants -- all critical for good health."

These vegetarians continually attack meat because it contains fat, cholesterol, and animal protein, but no fiber, phytochemicals, or antioxidants.  My response to Schneble and all the other meat-bashers:

1. Fiber has never been proven “critical” for good health–mother's milk doesn't have any fiber either–but in case you didn't notice, no one prevents a meat-eater from also eating vegetables rich in fiber. 

2.  Meat contains CLA, which is an antioxidant and has anticancer potential: “...studies on mice and rats show encouraging results in hindering the growth of tumors in mammary, skin, and colon tissues.”   Grass-fattened meat contains larger amounts of CLA than grain-finished.  Meat also contains vitamin E, and more if grass-finished.

Meat also contains cholesterol, which may also act as an antioxidant.

Again, nothing prevents a meat-eater from also eating vegetables and fruits rich in antioxidants. 

3.  Even grain-finished meat contains some carotenes and vitamin E, which are phytochemicals, and grass-fattened beef contains twice as much carotene and nearly three times as much vitamin E as grain-finished meat.

Again, nothing prevents a meat-eater from also eating vegetables and fruits rich in phytochemicals. 

4.  Meat contains vitamin B-12, critical for good health.   Plant foods contain very little if any functional cobalamin (B-12), but that doesn't mean you shouldn't eat plant foods.

5.  I can guarantee people in American did not get overweight by overeating meat, which is actually a bit difficult to do because of the satiating power of protein and fat. 


According to the USDA (page 15), in 2005 meat, fish, and poultry altogether contributed only 15% of all energy (calories) to the US food supply, dairy products only about 8%, eggs only 1.3%, and animal fats (lard, tallow, and butter) only 2.5%, whereas grain products contributed 23%, sweeteners 17%, and plant-sourced oils and fats 23%. 

Hence all animal products contributed only 27% of energy to the U.S. food supply, which means that plants provide 73% of energy in the U.S. food supply.  Plant oils and sweeteners form 40% of the energy supply, 50% greater than all animal products together, and the grain products, sweeteners, and plant fats sum total 63% of total energy, more than double the contribution of all animal products. 

6.  I don't recall any one ever proving that humans must eat only foods that contain fiber, or only foods that contain vitamin B-12.

Finally, human mother's milk contains lots of fat, lots of saturated fat, lots of cholesterol, animal proteins (lactalbumin and casein), and no fiber.  Shall we stage a "breast milk out" also?

Now sugar, that has no fiber, phytonutrients, or antioxidants.  Plant oils have almost no micronutrient value.  So how about a "sugar and vegetable oil out"?

I hope they get their facts straight some day.  I wonder if B-12 deficiency causes delusions?

 

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.