Our bodies are made up of and designed to store saturated fats. Saturated fat does not cause atherosclerosis. It doesn’t make you gain weight. It doesn’t contribute to inflammation. The problems with saturated fat come with high fat intake in combination with high carbohydrate intake. Or just high carbohydrate intake by itself (at least for most people, eating the common carbohydrates in western diets). You can’t cut carbohydrate intake without increasing fat. You need to eat.
Weston Price (and later Gary Taubes) show again and again how healthy populations who switched from their native diets (often high in saturated fats) to a diet with staples of white rice, sugar and flour go from healthy to disease ridden, often in one to two decades.
Insulin is the only hormone in our bodies that signals our cells to store fat. It tells your body’s cells to use glucose, or to take up glucose and store it as fat. All other hormones signal cells to release fatty acids (or have no effect either way). Low carbohydrate eating works to reverse fat storage by lowering your blood glucose (and therefore blood insulin) levels. And then, something happens. One of several theories presented in Good Calories, Bad Calories is probably the winner. The Atkins approach was clinically successful (he knew what worked) but not scientifically successful (In the 1970s he had no real idea why it worked, and he was ostracized by the medical community on top of it all). Because he stirred the pot (as did many before him, starting with William Banting), we know a lot more now. While denouncing him in public, scientists were researching his results.
Of course, Atkins didn’t start anything. The doctors and scientists who were questioning the efficacy of the high carbohydrate diet got bombed away, or just walked away during World War II. The European research faded in the wake of war, to be reshaped decades later in the image of Uncle Sam’s retarded step brother. A new generation of scientists, researchers and doctors are questioning conventional wisdom all over again. A few people who have been paying attention to the research have championed a specific, intelligent, researched and scientifically corroborated style of Paleo eating. These people, like neuroradiologist Kurt G. Harris MD, research biochemist Robb Wolf, and investigative journalist Gary Taubes have fixed the flaws in Atkins’ method (the first was not paying attention to the quality of fats ingested). They’ve used current research (the kind usually ignored by the US government, the American Diabetic Association, and in many unfortunate cases, your own doctor) to inform their decisions, and they obviously aren’t beholden to the grain and industrial vegetable oil industry that feeds most of the US (and much of the world.)
Some of the news? We’re complex machines. There is no single truth that easily fits everyone’s situation. But I can try to describe what’s happening to most of us, at some point in our lives. (I bet you see it all day long, just look at the bloated faces and bodies all around you.)
- Carbohydrates make you chronically hungry through high levels of blood glucose convincing your pancreas to create insulin, and that insulin constantly telling your cells to store all the glucose. In some cases, you can literally be starving as your fat cells soak up the nutrients in your blood while the rest of your body lacks them. (On the other hand, fat intake satiates you. Your body handles it gracefully, without special hormones to mop it up.)
- The only way most people lose weight on a high carbohydrate diet is to limit eating (and thus you remain hungry) or to work out to the point of a calorie deficit (and thus you remain hungry). This is essentially why most people who “diet” end up failing. (Did I mention that fat intake satiates you?)
- Wheat (and its nasty glycoproteins like Wheat Germ Agglutinin, which, despite the name, are present in all gluten grains) is absolutely toxic to humans, for a number of reasons. Gluten grain avoidance isn’t “another fad diet”, it’s basic healthy eating. Anyone who promotes “multi-grains”, or who talks about “healthy grains” is completely full of shit. Food grains are far from being the whole-body health panacea. They are the definition of “processed foods”. Anything that requires extensive mechanical and chemical processing to look or taste like food, isn’t.
- Among many other nasty effects of gluten, WGA directly manipulates your leptin receptors. This is especially important if you have a weight problem, as leptin is the hormone which controls your sense of hunger.
- Chronic excessive fructose intake leads to fatty liver disease, and atherosclerosis (unlike dietary saturated fat). Your liver turns both excessive alcohol and excessive fructose directly into Very-Low Density Lipoprotein molecules.
- VLDL fat, not LDL is likely to be highly atheroscleritic (lines your arteries with plaques), and the only way to check VLDL levels is with an NMR lipoprofile, not a standard cholesterol test. In fact, an NMR lipoprofile may be the only way to determine accurate LDL levels for individuals on a high fat diet.
- Linoleic acid and other omega-6 fatty acids compete with omega-3s in eicosanoid metabolic pathways (and others that researchers have yet to fully identify). The result will inflame your tissues and your immune system (particularly in the huge amounts that most people ingest now that everything is fried in vegetable oil).
- What’s a little inflammation? Omega-6s also encourage atherosclerosis via inflammation. It’s the fucking margarine, not the butter that is hardening your arteries! Not only is weakening your immune system, it is destroying you.
I’ve lost weight on my own self-styled “low carb” diet in the past, a combination of exercise and sugar avoidance. Getting rid of sugar and running 5-15 miles a week only got me so far. Never the less, I was familiar with the low carb idea in a vague way. Eating tons of sugar is obviously a bad idea. So when a good friend bought me a copy of Good Calories, Bad Calories, and later pointed me to the PāNu web site, I learned a whole lot more. I knew this was the knowledge that I had been waiting for. Our food system, our food politics, our degenerative diets, and our high rates of disease (such as the continued progression towards national diabetes) finally made sense.
Here’s what I do. I’ve totally stricken grains (gluten grains, wheat, barley, also non-gluten grains such as corn and rice), omega-6 fatty acids (any and all vegetable oils, and foods cooked in them) and fructose (any foods with ingredients like High Fructose Corn Syrup and/or sucrose) from my diet. I also avoid excess starch (potatoes, starchy vegetables) and other sugars (glucose, lactose) in general. I supplement with 5000IU vitamin D on days when I probably won’t get much mid-day sunlight. I take 1-2 tsp of Cod Liver Oil per day on days when i’m not eating grass fed meats and/or fish. All of this is done in accordance with Kurt G. Harris MD’s PāNu guidelines. I would eat more rice and potatoes from time to time, but I’m following a stricter Very Low Carb/sometimes Zero Carb version of the diet, for weight loss. I’ll add some rice and potatoes back in when I’m ready.
This cuts out most snack foods completely from my life. I snack on nuts or very dark chocolate occasionally, but I try to keep the amounts low (nuts mostly due to the lectins). As you may imagine, the first two weeks of this diet were hell. What am I saying, two weeks? The first month was hard for me. I cut wheat/flour, sugar, and vegetable oil/linoleic acid all at once. I was dreaming about bear claws and savoring the memory of garlic bread every day. The lack of spaghetti in my diet felt like a violation of my Italian heritage. No more jelly beans? The thought broke my heart. I don’t get to eat French Fried Potatoes (as Obama would put it). That was not fun at all.
The net result? I lost nearly 50 lb since starting PaNu, and now I’m 90 lb lighter than I was 5 years ago. I feel like a kid again. I’m not eating a low calorie diet. I’m healthier than I’ve felt since I was 18. I simply don’t get heartburn. My seasonal allergies have completely disappeared (for the first time ever since they started), and my blood sugar is always on the low end of the scale. When people around me are falling down sick, I feel mild throat irritation for a night. My immune system is a rock star, just like it was when I was 14.
Five years ago, I felt like shit. Every day. I went into my doc’s office one day, feeling particularly bad. Dr. Greenleaf’s (who left Bend a few years after, to practice in California) phlebotomist took 10 vials of blood. Who knows, maybe more. The doc could see that I was fucked up and ordered the whole spectrum of tests that he could. Two weeks later my lab results were all in. His advice: eat less fat, exercise more, take some omega-3 fish oil pills, and maybe take a low dose of aspirin each day. About the fish oil, he said, “The kind you get in a big white bottle at Safeway.”
His warnings? He said that I had all the classic indications of metabolic syndrome. I had relatively high blood pressure and cholesterol for my age, I was obese (morbidly obese), I was lethargic (how could you not be in this condition?) and that week I felt like a steaming pile of dog shit. According to the good doctor, I was going to show up at his office in 10 years with full-blown diabetes, sooner than that I would be put on statins to reduce cholesterol (which killed my grandfather just a few years later) and I would be at risk for serious heart disease. Not only that, but the diabetes would slowly develop into neuropathy, retinopathy, and all kinds of other nasty, horrible things that I would spend the rest of my life treating (and regretting) if I didn’t so something about it now.
But the something wasn’t so clear. Exercise was obvious (and it made me feel much better) but it was hard, basically impossible for my fat ass to get enough exercise to really lose weight. This was in part because exercise made me very hungry. Exercise worked to get me down about 30lb. That was it. Spaghetti was good. The doc was not particularly healthy looking himself. Fuck it, what the hell does he know, anyways? So aside from exercise, I didn’t do much else except cut down fat, the “obvious” second choice. Cutting fat made sugar and starch that much more tasty. I didn’t understand that carbohydrates were making me pack on the fat, not the fat itself. My doctor didn’t even know that, or at least he didn’t tell me, so how was I supposed to know?
Two years went by and I didn’t know how I was going to confront the inevitable diabetic complications. I avoided doctors since mine left town anyways. After a three or four years, I instinctively started to avoid sugar. Maybe it was because I knew that Atkins “worked” for people, or maybe it was because Sugar Free Red Bull was for “dieting”. Or maybe neither. All I knew was that I loved sugar, and I ate way too much of it. When I was a kid, I was told that diabetes was from eating “too much sugar”. None of it made much sense when I tried to put it all together, except to avoid sugar.
Six months after I cut back on sugar, I met an amazing woman. She drove my emotions into triple overdrive. But that’s for a different post! Fast forward and now we live together. And guess what, she and I both liked the same foods. Wheat, flour, sugar, starch, and despite our continuous efforts to exercise (and simultaneously avoid dietary fat) we both found it hard to lose weight. I met her, I loved her food (I guess that makes me your typical sexist asshole, she does most of the cooking), and I fell off the low sugar wagon. This worried me. I have a complicated business to run, an amazing, smart, daring woman to cherish, and four loving kids to love back! I didn’t forget about the doc’s warning of looming diabetic disease and complications.
Her and I both started to think more about sugar, especially in the amounts that we had lying around. Also lying around were books like Suicide by Sugar, so we started talking about it. About a year after I fell off the wagon, a friend introduced me first to GC, BC and second PāNu. He was losing weight. The goals of the diet, such as reducing inflammation, lowering blood sugar, and thus normalizing metabolism were simple and straightforward to me. I started it with a full “cold turkey” dietary switch, within two days of being introduced to the web site. I was determined to see if the intelligent PāNu diet made a difference for me.
This paleolithic diet is not about historical reenactment. I don’t carry a spear and eat wooly mammoth. It’s about eating the highest quality calories I can find, the kind that are closer to what our ancestors likely evolved with. No more sugary, oily mass produced shit-based food.
My amazing lady? She watched me progress and now she’s doing paleo too. That’s after swearing that it was an absolutely crazy thing to do as she watched me start. It’s harder for her to handle right now, being pregnant, with morning sickness and craving specific tastes. But she is already finding good results even without a full, instant paleo switch. For her, paleo significantly improves one nagging cavity (if she’s lucky it’ll remineralize), helps clear her mind (you’ll be amazed when the mental chatter disappears after your blood sugar drops) and on top of it all she has a stronger immune system response. Hopefully the baby growing inside will be less likely to have problems down the road, without gluten proteins, high blood sugar and excessive omega-6 fatty acids to poison the environment around it.
The idea of a high-fat, medium-low protein and low carbohydrate diet scares the shit out of most people, and rightly so as the American Heart Association from the 1940s (and later the US Government from the 1970s) has been scaring people away from saturated fat. But most people don’t realize that this was done with no scientific evidence. None. Zero. Much science performed since then is designed with the assumption that all fat is atheroscleritic, but has rarely tested that hypothesis (and virtually never without concurrent high levels of dietary carbohydrate, triggering significant insulin release!).
The studies you can find today on Googe Scholar, the ones which talk about a increase inflammation from high-fat diets are actually describing inflammation from hyperglycemia (or, in some, even gluten proteins)! They try to attribute hyperglycemia to saturated fat intake. Yet, none of their test subjects or controls are low carbohydrate. It is proven that high carbohydrate, high fat diets are worse than high carbohydrate diets alone. It is proven again and again, and yet is unwittingly described only as a “high fat” diet. It’s not. Fat by itself does not raise blood sugar levels. Insulin stays low in response to low carbohydrate intake. I have proven this with my own body. Some studies using high-fat, low carbohydrate diets with herbivores like rabbits show an increase in atherosclerosis. This is an animal with a very different metabolism from my own. Rabbits evolved over the past 10,000 years eating primarily sugars and starches, not fats.
The politics of the American Heart Association, American Diabetic Association and the US Government’s dietary guidelines, as well as that of the researchers influential in policy setting since the early 1930s are all painstakingly explored and explained in Good Calories, Bad Calories. Read this book if you are prepared to completely re-shape your thinking about diet, obesity, disease and well-being. It took Gary Taubes 5 years to write this book. Gary says that a book of this density (and, oh my god is it packed) would have taken 30 years to write by dredging through libraries and other physical archives (without using the Internet for instant access to our society’s archives for the past 150 years). That’s why you haven’t seen anything even remotely like this book in the past.
Wheat avoidance is not very popular. The multinational conglomerates who profit from industrially grown and harvested wheat and seed oils would lose out tremendously if this diet became mainstream American Diabetic Association advice. Several Hollywood stars appear as circus freaks in the media with their own reports of success on low carb diets (as reported in upstanding journals like People just this year) but they don’t skimp on the fact that it works. Paleo diets promoted by the likes of Loren Cordain, and now Kurt G. Harris, Robb Wolf, and Mark Sisson are slowly gaining wider acceptance. People following these schemes are reporting clinical reversal of Type II diabetes. Weight loss with no yo-yo effect. Symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome disappear. Some Type I diabetics follow these diets and are able to use much less insulin, and a few (who apparently still have some beta cell function, and stick to a Zero Carb paleo regimen) have stopped using exogenous insulin entirely.
Since I started Paleo, I strongly encouraged another good friend (who is also a largely untreated diabetic, with fasting blood sugar levels chronically around 300mg/dL for several years) to try it. After much prodding, he figured, what else does he have to lose? He just got back on meds for one month around the time I got to him. He cut down wheat and sugar significantly for several weeks. But, he wasn’t fully invested. I showed him the claim of Type II reversal. He wanted to see what could happen with a full commitment to PaNu. He stopped taking all meds, so that he wouldn’t be measuring their effects. One month after concurrently stopping the meds and starting a stricter PaNu diet, his fasting blood sugar is down to 150-160.
One day after starting vitamin D (5000 IU) and Cod Liver Oil (2 tsp), he got his first ever reading of 137mg/dL. He was so excited with this reading, the lowest in many years, that he tried pricking in both hands, with two different series of test strips just to verify. He got the same results each time. This guy is 41 years old, he’s not in high school. Just maybe, after a few more months of this, his doctor won’t be able to make a clinical diagnosis of diabetes. At very least, his doctor will shit her pants when she realizes that he’s dropped 160 points (or much more by the time he sees her again) without taking any of her prescribed medication. Fuck the medication, he wants to be rid of the disease. Why lower blood sugar with a pill when you can simply eat less sugar? Why shoot up insulin to eat a bagel when you can simply not eat shit in the first place? Like Tim Ferriss says, stop eating shit. I think that will be my new slogan.
The average human body carries about 6 quarts, or 5.6 liters of blood. 137mg/dL is the same as saying 1.37 grams of glucose per liter of blood, or 7.67 grams of glucose floating around in his blood supply at any given time. That’s a lot better than 16.8 grams of glucose circulating in his blood after a 12 hour fast. Once he gets down to 70mg/dL or 3.9 grams of glucose in his blood at fast, he’ll be confident his metabolism is on the right track. I get around 55mg/dL after a 12 hour fast. That’s 3.08 grams of glucose circulating in my system at fast, which is enough for the cells that need glucose, with ketones filling in for the rest. I don’t ever feel woozy or light-headed this way.
I can work hard physically or mentally without eating. I’ve never been the type of person to get light-headed when I didn’t eat, I just got ravenously hungry in the past. Now the hunger has a different tone, and I can usually ignore it until it is convenient to prepare and eat what I should be eating.
I went to see my eye surgeon, Dr. Scott X. Stevens a few weeks ago. He implanted two Intacs deep into my right eye in an experimental treatment for keratoconus. I haven’t seem him in 3 or 4 years since that, so I figured it was time to drop in. I mentioned in passing that I dropped excess linoleic acid/vegetable oils, all wheat/flour, excess starch and excess fructose completely from my diet. I mentioned my weight loss, the lack of allergies, the heightened immune response. Dr. Stevens is a smart guy, always ahead of the curve. He keeps up on research, he has to, several of his patients are part of it. Dr. Stevens went through opthamology residency at Henry Ford Hospital during the same years that my mother did her psychiatry residency there. His first comment was that “nutritional medicine needs to get out of the stone age,” then, “it’s amazing what happens when people eat real food” and he also mentioned that he had “patients who reversed their diabetes that way”. He knew that linoleic acid was inflammatory to body tissues. He thought the diet ideas were great. He also said that fructose was used as quick aging chemical to harden corneas, in combination with UV light. An interesting anecdote…
Even if you aren’t overweight, you are at risk for autoimmune disease via inflammation. You are at risk for heart disease from inflammation. You are killing yourself if you think eating grains, fructose and/or vegetable oil is healthy. It’s absolutely not. It deranges your metabolism. I don’t care how old or young you are. It’s the universal experience that this gets worse with age. My bet is that it will catch up with you. Why? Paleo diets aren’t only, or even primarily, for weight loss. It is a powerful way to keep your inflammation in check. Inflammation affects your health at the cellular level. It’s the natural way for your body to deal with problems, but when it gets out of hand, a variety of disorders develop.
What about work outs? Do your friends tell you that low carb diets suck for working out? It’s important to note that Very Low Carb/Zero Carb paleo increases your muscles’ insulin resistance. This action is part of the metabolic change induced in a VLC/ZC diet. It makes working out feel quite different. Your muscles switch to run on ketones, to keep the remaining blood glucose going to your brain. At the same time, you gradually decrease your liver’s insulin resistance (a very good thing). If you can work out while fueling primarily on ketones (this is a lot harder for some people to do) then your metabolism has switched, and you can master a high fat diet. It takes a while. Some folks have to keep up a certain level of carbohydrate intake (typically using potatoes or rice) to make heavy workouts practical.
There is some discussion going on right now about whether thyroid output is affected negatively by VLC/ZC diets. One thought is that some level of carbohydrate intake, around 50 grams per day, is necessary for certain people. Perhaps this is due to “metabolic derangement” from years of high gluten and omega-6 intake. Or, it is simply an observation that hypothyroidism (whatever the cause) becomes more obvious on a low carbohydrate diet. On the other hand, there also appear to be people who need to stay ZC for a very long period of time, several months, to adjust to regular ketone metabolism.
Questions like these and many others mean there is investigation to be done, but that doesn’t mean you should keep poisoning yourself. If you haven’t already considered buying Good Calories, Bad Calories, give Amazon a look. The Deckle Edge edition sells for $8 to $12 via Amazon and is absolutely worth every penny. Great web sites for practical information are PāNu and Robb Wolf. Whole Health Source expands diet research far beyond Paleo itself (Stephan has an amazing site, this guy is a research powerhouse). I’m not so impressed by the articles at Mark’s Daily Apple, but Mark does have some excellent Paleo recipes and workout tips. Son of Grok is also a great place to go for recipes and workout ideas. If you really want to go for the classics, try Weston Price’s book. Finally, Loren Cordain, Ph.D, who calls himself “the world’s leading expert on Paleolithic diets”, is often cited and worth a look.
If nothing else, consider getting rid of the gluten, omega-6 fatty acids and fructose from your own diet. Even if you don’t go low-carb, high-fat, you will be, as Kurt Harris puts it, healthier than 90% of the rest…