Great Gifts for People with Diabetes

I wrote a couple posts last year suggesting some diabetes-specific gift ideas and several of you wrote me that you found them helpful so I'm going to reprise the earlier suggestions and add a few more.

In the spirit of transparent disclosure, let me mention that some of these suggestions link to Amazon pages and if you visit Amazon using these links and buy things Amazon gives me 2-3% of the sale amount.

1. A Food Scale. I wrote a whole post about the power of the food scale to get your diet working again and fine tune insulin doses. You can read the whole post HERE

2. Pedometer, blood pressure meter, blood testing strips, etc. You can read more about all these gifts in this post HERE

3. Low Carb Treats. As most of you know, most of the products marketed as being "low carb" aren't, because they contain maltitol, lacitol, and other frankenfood ingredients which will, in fact, raise the blood sugar of anyone who does not have a very strong second phase insulin response. For this reason NEVER give a product labeled "sugar free" to someone with diabetes. They raise blood sugar and taste foul.

Fortunately, there are a couple low carb products that are truly low carb.

Here are some ideas:

a. DaVinci Sugar Free Syrups. These come in a multitude of flavors. They are sweetened with Splenda but have no additional sugars added the way that powdered forms of Splenda do. I use them as the sweetener when baking low carb treats like macaroons. I also use them when making low carb cocoa. One Tbs of syrup is the same as one Tbs of sugar when baking though you might bake recipes a bit longer to boil off the fluid. My favorite flavors are White Chocolate, German Chocolate, Caramel and Vanilla. One bottle lasts me a very long time and never goes bad.


b. Not Starch. This is a mixture of fibers that will thicken gravy or homemade ice cream very nicely. It gives a slippery mouth feel you will immediately recognize as it is used in so many frozen food and restaurant gravies.

c. Protein Powder. Look for one that has no more than 2 g of carbohydrate per serving. You can use these in shakes or you can bake a bewildering selection of low carb baked goods with these. Most include artificial sweeteners or stevia. I just bought a "Natural flavor" one that has no sweetener or flavor at all, which tastes just so-so but would be good for people who have concerns (whether or not justified) about artificial sweeteners.

d. High Quality Dark Chocolate. The higher the percentage of chocolate in a chocolate bar, the kinder it will be to your blood sugar. You can find many 70% and higher bars on the market today and if a person does not have problems with portion control they can make a very nice gift. Read the label and stick with chocolates that have no more than 6 grams per square if possible.

e. Gourmet Cheese. People have different tastes in cheese and some gourmet cheese has become very expensive in the U.S. because of our falling dollar, so find out what kind of cheese your favorite person with diabetes likes before investing. But if you know, you can't go wrong in buying them a premium cheese. I don't mail order these, however as I have yet to find a mail order company whose cheeses weren't filled with additives.

f. Steak. Low carb and delicious and available from mail order companies. Don't send mail order ribs or pork as they tend to arrive bathed in extremely sugary sauces.

g. Fancy Nut Assortments. Full of good fats and delicious. Don't give these to someone who is actively pursuing weight loss, though, as most of us have trouble eating "just one."

h. Gourmet Coffee. The very best coffee I have ever tasted is available by mail order from Dean's Beans. Dean is a real person who I've met. He is obsessive both about buying beans in ways that benefit the people who grow them and the enviornment and finding the most delicious beans available. My personal favorite is the "Half caf" blend which is 1/2 strength but richly flavored. I also like the "Rattlesnake Gutter" blend, named after a local ravine, and the "Liberation Decaf." Dean's baking cocoa makes extremely delicious cocoa when mixed with DaVinci syrup, half and half and boiling water.

i. Fancy Tea. You can find wonderful tea at http://cookscorner.net. Some of the fruit blends contain pieces of real fruit mixed with hibiscus, calendula, rose hips, and other herbs. They are delicious and I have not found that they raise my blood sugar. The Apricot and blood orange pear are my favorites. If you are on a budget, you can find many delicious teas in any large supermarket or health food store.

Please post your own gift suggestions for people with a diabetes in the comments!

 

Rodent Research Blocks Progress in Treating Chronic Disease

A study described in last week's Science Daily points to a problem that has been troubling me about diabetes research: the way that research relies on rodent models that are built on false assumptions about the human diseases they are supposed to model.

You can read about the study describing severe problems with the mouse model for Muscular Dystrophy here:

Science Daily: Mice Holding Back Muscular Dystrophy Research?

It explains that

... two major features of a key DMD [Duchenne muscular dystrophy] gene are present in most mammals, including humans, but are specifically absent in mice and rats, calling into question the use of the mouse as the principal model animal for studying DMD.

This is bad news for people who have been waiting for scientists to find treatments for DMD but this kind of problem is not limited to research on DMD.

A huge amount of "diabetes" research is conducted in db/db mice, ob/ob mice, the New Zealand Obese (NZO) mouse, and Goto-Kakisaki Wistar Rats. A small group of highly respected scientists have built their careers around their knowledge of these particular mice and rats and sent their students out into the academic world where they have spread the use of these rodent models.

The problem is that these rodents became models for human Type 2 diabetes because of their phenotype--i.e. symptoms--matched what researchers 25 years ago thought was the phenotype of Type 2 human diabetes.

They are very fat. They become fat eating high fat diets. The blood sugar of these rodents worsens when they eat fat. Low carb diets are very damaging to these rodent models. In short what we have here is a model of outdated assumptions about Type 2 Diabetes that have not been proven true in humans with the disorder.

Humans with Type 2 diabetes may be fat or of normal weight. Most become fat eating high carbohydrate diets. Human blood sugars usually improve when they eat low carb diets.

The reason that the rodent model does such a poor job matching human experience becomes clear when we look at the genotype of these rodent diabetes models. Their broken genes are not the broken genes found in humans with Type 2 Diabetes.

The ob/ob mouse, for example, is morbidly obese as are many humans with Type 2 diabetes. However, the ob/ob mouse is obese because it has a genetic flaw that keeps it from producing leptin. This makes this mouse catastrophically hungry. But it turns out that after 6 years of hunting for leptin deficient humans, researchers found a grand total of three human families in the entire world who have the same genetic flaw as the ob mouse. Everyone else on earth who is very fat has some other genetic issue causing their morbid obesity.

You would think this discovery would have put an end to the use of the ob/ob mouse in diabetes related research, but you would be wrong. The scientists who have built their careers on their expertise in using this one mouse don't give up easily.

A Google Scholar search for studies conducted after 2005 where ob/ob mice are used as a model for diabetes turns up hundreds of studies.

The db/db mouse is another popular mouse model for diabetes. It is described thus:

"Diabetes (db) is an autosomal recessive mutation located in the midportion of mouse chromosome 4 that results in profound obesity with hyperphagia [compulsive overeating], increased metabolic efficiency, and insulin resistance.

The only problem with this model is that the genes that make the db/db mouse seem to resemble a diabetic human are NOT the genes that have been found in diabetic humans.

This is the problem with all the rodent models of Type 2 diabetes. No one questions that these rodents might have insulin resistance or that they might overeat. But over the past decade the dramatic drop in price of genetic screening techniques has come up with a long list of the most common genes associated with human diabetes. In European populations the list includes genes like TCF7L2, HNF4-a, PTPN, SHIP2, ENPP1, PPARG, FTO, KCNJ11, NOTCh3, WFS1, CDKAL1, IGF2BP2, SLC30A8, JAZF1, and HHEX. Failure of any of these genes can produce diabetes, but the exact phenotype of that diabetes will vary because what is broken is different.

People from non-European ethnic groups have been found to have entirely different sets of diabetic genes, like the UCP2 polymorphism found in Pima Indians and the three Calpain-10 gene polymorphisms found associated with diabetes in Mexicans. As a result the "natural history" of their "Type 2" diabetes is quite different than that of Europeans and they develop different patterns of complications than do people of European backgrounds.

"Diabetic" mice and rats do not have any of these human genetic flaws but other, rodenty gene flaws that give them rodent "diabetes." This does not mean it isn't useful to explore their physiologies, only that we must always keep in mind that they are different from those of humans diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes--just as individuals diagnosed with "Type 2 Diabetes" can differ dramatically from each other.

The chances that any finding in mice might cross over and apply to humans is very slim. When these studies are reported to the media they should not be reported, as they are now, as if they applied to humans.

Beyond this issue, though, lies the problem pinpointed by the Muscular Dystrophy researchers. The mouse is very different from the human being, physiologically and genetically, in ways that researchers have not probed because, face it, the people who know the most about how to study mice are precisely those whose careers come to a crashing end if mouse research ever goes out of fashion.

We don't know enough, yet, about the genetic differences between rodents and people to know how the genes expressed in the livers of mice differ from those expressed in humans. Until we do, it is pointless to study what pattern of macronutrient intake causes fatty liver in mice. We don't know enough about the many genes involved in the regulation of glucose in the pancreas or brains of mice either. The Muscular Dystrophy research discovered that the genes expressed in the brains of people were significantly different from those of mice.

Glucose regulation in any species involves a complex symphony of interacting feedback loops involving gene expression in the brain, liver, pancreas, muscle and gut. The chances are very high that, because of significant differences between human organs and rodent organs, the findings drawn from rodent research--which form a much more significant part of "what everyone knows about diabetes" in the medical world have led us into dangerously wrong blind alleys.

The value of the low fat/high carb diet for people with diabetes was supported by immense amounts of rodent research. Unfortunately, what that research proved was that fat is a problem for rodents whose diabetes is caused by mutations unrelated to those found in humans which disorder metabolic processes quite different from those that occur in humans.

It is possible that there are proteins in humans that are significantly involved in the production of human forms of Type 2 diabetes that mice don't have or that they don't use the way humans use them. By concentrating so heavily on rodent research, researchers may be missing these vital proteins and the impact of the genes that code for them.

But mice are cheap, live brief lifespans, and can be "sacrificed" without causing massive protests. The students of the original mouse expert researchers have grown into a huge grant-gobbling research establishment that thrives on doing mouse research. It isn't going to go away soon.

Another study published just last week shows that another entrenched group is hoping to get their share of the lucrative diabetes research dollar. Lo and behold, they've created a Fruit Fly Model of Type 1 Diabetes. You can read about it here:

Science Daily: Diabetic Flies: Fruit Fly Model Helps Unravel Genetics of Human Diabetes

As described in the article:

"These mutant flies show symptoms that look very similar to human diabetes," explains Dr. Pick. "They have the hallmark characteristic which is elevated blood sugar levels. They are also lethargic and appear to be breaking down their fat tissue to get energy, even while they are eating -- a situation in which normal animals would be storing fat, not breaking it down."

I have friends who are highly distinguished fruit fly gene researchers and I have immense respect for the work they do, but they are doing basic science looking, for example, at the genes that produce neurons to better understand what a neuron really is.

I am left scratching my head to understand how a fly that lacks blood vessels, a liver, or pancreas can be a "model" for human autoimmune diabetes. A fly with high blood sugar is not a fly with "Type 1 Diabetes." And by the same token, a fat fly that eats too much may be an interesting fly that may teach us something new about fly physiology, but it is not a "Type 2 diabetic" fly.

Diabetes is a set of symptoms produced as the end result of failures at various points in a complex organism with its own evolutionary history. It is not a single condition. It is not caused by a single failure of one gene that can be explored at the level of basic science.

Until doctors and the public understand this better, we will continue to be subjected to "medical truths" derived entirely from the same kind of rodent research that has already set back the treatment of the vague collection of symptoms called "Type 2 Diabetes" for decades.

 

The Factor Omitted in Paleo Theories: Parasites

Interlibrary loan sent me a copy of the book, Mummies, Diseases and Ancient Cultures recommended by a knowledgeable blog commentator, but unfortunately it turned out to be the first edition published in 1980 not the updated one from 1998. I'm using an extended ILL feature to request the newer version, but meanwhile I read through the first edition and found it fascinating.

Relevant to the topic of my blog here was one theme that stood out in analysis of all the ancient bodies that had been preserved through time: Ancient people, no matter what time period they lived in or where they lived, carried a significant load of parasites.

The parasites most commonly found in these munmies included hookworms, tape worms and the roundworms that cause trichanosis. Besides sickening us, these parasites can make a significant difference in how we metabolize foods.

The tapeworm, for example, allows people infected with it to live out the dubious fantasy of "eat all you want and never gain weight." Unfortunately, when this happens in a situation where the food supply is marginal--i.e. just about everywhere on earth before the 20th century--worm infestation can predispose people to starve to death.

The roundworms lay eggs in human muscle, which probably produces inflammation, though they also can infect nerves and the brain. In either case, they have a strong effect on metabolism.

Parasites get into our bodies in many ways. Some come from eating meat that hasn't been thoroughly cooked. Some are carried in water where other animals have defecated. Some enter the body from the soil. Others are transmitted by insect bites.

Because parasites were such a common feature of life until very recently, it makes sense that our bodies are highly adapted to live with them. And because the loss of the usual human parasites load is so very recent, some scientists who study the development of the human immune system speculate that the current explosion of autoimmune disease is partly caused by changes in the way that the immune system develops in children whose immune cells don't encounter parasites early in life.

This theory was discussed in detail in the book, Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World, by Jessica Snyder Sachs.

However, while there may be something to this theory, there are plenty of other factors besides parasite exposure that also explain the increase in autoimmune diseases. And a big problem with the parasite explanation is that it doesn't explain why this explosion in diagnoses only kicked in about twenty years ago.

My belief is that the invasion of our food supply by soy protein and its ability to damage the gut and make it permeable to proteins like gluten is probably a better explanation for the changes seen in the past generation. I've discussed that theory HERE.

Still, there is no question that the elimination of parasites from our system is a huge change in human health and one that only took place in developed nations during the past century.

Caleb Finch, a gerontologist from the University of Southern California (USC), has come up with an intriguing theory, published in December issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that links the loss of our parasite burden with the increase in heart disease and Alzheimers.

His theory explains the fact that humans have much longer natural lifespans than apes, as a result of their having developed new gene variants that allow them to tolerate the higher burden of inflammation that comes with eating a meat-rich diet.

You can read the text of the press release describing this study sent out by USC displayed here:

Science Daily: Why Humans Outlive Apes: Human Genes Have Adapted to Inflammation, but We Are More Susceptible to Diseases of Aging

It quotes Finch as saying:

"Over time, ingestion of red meat, particularly raw meat infected with parasites in the era before cooking, stimulates chronic inflammation that leads to some of the common diseases of aging,"

From reading the Mummies book, I would correct this statement, because the data reported in the mummies book makes it very clear that ancient meat-eating humans who did cook their food still carried a high load of meat-borne intestinal and muscle parasites.

But Finch goes on to explain that one way humans adapted genetically that allowed them to flourish with a higher burden of meat-borne parasites is by evolving a human-unique form of Apo(E).

Finch is quoted as saying,

In addition to differences in diets between species of primates, humans evolved unique variants in a cholesterol transporting gene, apolipoprotein E, which also regulates inflammation and many aspects of aging in the brain and arteries.

Other primates who do not have the human forms of Apo(E)develop heart disease very quickly if they eat diets rich in meat, an argument that is often cited by those promoting vegetarian diets.

Still, unlike gorillas who develop heart disease in just a few years after adopting a meat rich diet, humans eating meat-rich diets do not develop heart disease until they are in middle age-- after they have reproduced, which Finch links to the human-only Apo(E) variant. And later-onset heart disease because it happens after reproduction does not impact evolution.

Finch does not pursue this point, but it strikes me that this argument suggests that the loss of the usual human parasite load may also partially explain why the incidence of heart disease has increased over the past century--the period in which humans for the first time cleaned up water supplies and eliminated wild meats with their high parasite load from their diets.

It is possible that when the immune system is not kept busy dealing with a high level of inflammation caused by invading parasites it is more apt to attack cardiac tissue. Recent research suggests very strongly that heart disease is an inflammatory condition. There are also intriguing hints that morbid obesity may be linked to inflamed fat tissue.

None of these theories are fully fleshed out. Though Finch's finding that only humans have the special forms of Apo(E) required for primates to metabolize meats should give us another reason to ignore ALL diet research performed in rodents or other non-human species because these other species do not carry the human adaptations to meat eating that Finch suggests are a large part of why humans have evolved so successfully.

Beyond the changes that allow us to eat parasite-infested meat safely, there are probably human physiological adaptations to parasites that impact on our ability to store fat in an environment were we are competing with parasites for the nutrients in our food.

This suggests to me that followers of the so-called Paleo diet cannot faithfully reproduce the supposed health effects of that diet unless they have taken on the load of intestinal worms early in life and allowed them to mold their immune systems and other physiological parameters.

Even adding these worms in mid-life won't help because, as Sachs' book explains, the balance of the kinds of T cells produced by the immune system throughout life seems to be shaped by the antibodies transmitted from the mother (infected with parasites in a true Paleo state) and the organisms the young creature encounters early in life.

Without a gut full of worms no one is eating a true Paleo Diet. Which is another reason to avoid extremism in dietary theory and to eat a diet that resembles that which your long lived ancestors in the past 150 years were eating.

The Colonial era graveyards in rural New England where I live are filled with graves of people who lived into their late 80s and 90s. Those who died young typically died of infectious disease, child birth, or, surprisingly frequently, fire and drowning.

We know a great deal about their diet. It was made up of fresh meat in summer and fall, salty preserved ham, salt beef, and lots of salt cod the rest of the year, dried fruit, corn meal, wheat, squash, turnips, and potatoes, preserves made with sugar, and milk, butter and cheese.

 

The Scariest Health News of The Year: Nanoparticles Damage DNA

Lost in the usual holiday media noise was the single most disturbing piece of research I have read all year. You can read the abstract here:

Titanium Dioxide Nanoparticles Induce DNA Damage and Genetic Instability In vivo in Mice Benedicte Trouiller et al. Cancer Research, 69, 8784, November 15, 2009. Published Online First November 3, 2009;
doi: 10.1158/0008-5472.CAN-09-2496.

You can read an expanded discussion of this same study here:

Science Daily: Nanoparticles Used in Common Household Items Cause Genetic Damage in Mice.

Nanoparticles are extremely tiny particles, which are found rarely in nature--for example in metallic ceramic glazes--but they only came into prominence over the past 15 years when modern manufacturing technologies made it possible to make them in bulk. They are used for hundreds of applications, from enhancing the sparkliness of cosmetics, to making fabrics stain resistant, and to delivering drugs.

These particles are so tiny they can easily move through cell membranes in ways that normal sized particles cannot. But because many of these new nanoparticles are made out of commonly occurring minerals considered safe--like the titanium dioxide which was the subject of the above study--they moved out of the lab into consumer products without the kind of extensive safety review they should have been given.

The study above found that when mice drank water with titanium dioxide nanoparticles in it, the particles concentrated in their organs. Their bodies have no way to eliminate them since these kinds of particles are very rare in nature.

Worse, because these nanoparticles are so tiny they can pass through cell membranes, the research cited above found they caused "genetic instability" and DNA deletions. They also caused inflammation.

There are many rodent studies that must be viewed sceptically, but that research is inevitably research involving high level functions like the balance of macronutrients in an animal's diet. But this research looks like it would apply to any mammalian cell. And that means these same water-borne particles that get into the mouse organ also pass through human cell membranes with devastating effect.

If if that is the case, we are all in huge trouble, because these nanoparticles are everywhere. Here's what the chief researcher on the above study explained:

The manufacture of TiO2 nanoparticles is a huge industry...with production at about two million tons per year. In addition to paint, cosmetics, sunscreen and vitamins, the nanoparticles can be found in toothpaste, food colorants, nutritional supplements and hundreds of other personal care products. [emphasis mine]

.An study published this past March found that these particles are being discharged into waste water and making their way into the environment in amounts that have the potential to damage life forms at all levels.

Science Daily: Nanoparticles In Cosmetics, Personal Care Products May Have Adverse Environmental Effects

Referring to the nanoparticles found in cosmetics, the chief researcher in the March study explained,

... the particles are washed down the drain in homes as people bathe and end up in municipal sewage treatment plants. From there, they can enter lakes, rivers, and other water sources where microorganisms serve essential roles in maintaining a healthy environment.

She also studied survival of Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria when exposed in laboratory cultures to various amounts of nano-TiO2.

She found surprisingly large reductions in survival in samples exposed to small concentrations of the nanoparticles for less than an hour.

Another study reported in this same article found that another microorganism

... cannot tolerate silver, copper oxide and zinc oxide nanoparticles. Toxicity occurred at levels as low as micrograms per liter. That's equivalent to two or three drops of water in an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

You Have No Way of Knowing What Products Contain Nanoparticles

Because labels only indicate the chemical name of an inorganic substance, not the form in which it occurs in a product, you have no way of knowing if the drugs, cosmetics, or supplements you use contain these particles.

Nor is titanium dioxide the only nanopartcles that is being used in industrial quantities. Nanoparticle versions of silicates and other metal oxides are everywhere. Silver nanoparticles are used in antibacterial applications. Nanoparticles are used in clothing to make socks resistant to odor. Wash the socks and particles enter the water supply. They are in sunscreens. They are in stain resistant fabrics.

The nanoparticle business is huge and the companies profiting from selling these "high tech" substances are not going to give them up without a fight. Only the big chemical companies and their customers know what other nanoparticles might be in products you buy. Clothing, carpet, and furniture are likely candidates, given the increasing use of nanoparticles in fabric.

Nanoparticles in fabrics and cosmetics supposedly do not go through the skin, but that should not make you feel safe because of the way they eventually reach groundwater when you bathe. And because they are also being added to pills and perhaps foods none of us can feel safe.

A quick scan of my calcium supplements shows that they contain silicon dioxide--low on the list of ingredients, which suggests that it occurs in a small quantity. Silicon dioxide is more familiar to us under its common name, "Sand." Given the lack of grittiness in my calcium pill it's likely that this is a nanoparticle introduced to make the supplement look better.

I can't tell you what is in my metformin because there is no requirement that the drug company furnish me with a list of ingredients. However, it is very possible it too contains a nanoparticle introduced to make its whiteness look "purer."

The history of asbestos gives us a good idea of how long it takes to get a dangerous substance out of our environment--decades after lab research has clearly defined its toxicity. Asbestos was mostly used applications where it could be easily identified, not in food, clothing, drugs, and cosmetics.

Given the weakness of our regulatory bodies and the strength of the chemical industry, chances are that what we have here may be an ecological and medical catastrophe that may dwarf anything we have hitherto seen. It will take a decade or two for the effects of nanoparticles to become so obvious even the chemical industry must admit they are real. Because they are so universally distributed, it may be very difficult to link them to the effects they create.

With every new piece of research pointing to the dangers, the chemistry industry will respond, "More research needs to be done" the way they did with asbestos and the way that the cigarette companies did with tobacco.

By the time the danger is understood, these particles will have dispersed through our environment and our bodies in ways that may be irreversible.

Did I say this story was scary? That word is far too weak.

 

Saying Something Over And Over Doesn't Make It True

No, this is not a post about the "eating fat causes heart disease" fantasy, nor is it a post about Going Rogue, but the issue I am going to discuss here shares features with those topics the Low Carb community has been very resistant to confronting.

The issue is this: The very same people who spend hours hunting through overlooked but well-designed published medical research to provide us gems that help us understand metabolism better seem to lose their respect for scientific method as soon as they turn their attention to theories about human prehistory.

People I otherwise respect greatly accept theories about "paleo diets" and the health of early human populations that are either a) based on a very small sample of outdated early 20th century research or b) entirely made up.

It may come as a surprise to some of you that the study of paleontology is a scientific discipline pursued by intelligent, educated scientists using a wide variety of sophisticated tools. These scientists have come up with many findings that tell us a lot about the lifestyles of real "paleo" peoples around the globe.

None of this research is ever cited by the people who have made the so-called "paleo diet" a religious crusade, people who have never taken the time to look into the evidence these myths are based on.

Paleo Fanatics Show Off Their Ignorance

Just this week I read a post on a Low Carb discussion board claiming that the Egyptian mummy that shows evidence of heart disease came from a period "right after the invention of agriculture"--a statement which in off only by about 11,000 years. Agriculture started somewhere around 12,000 BC and the earliest of these mummies are from about 1600 BC.

By the same token, we know a great deal about the lifestyles of hundreds of modern day hunter gatherers painstakingly collected by trained anthropologists who lived with these people for many years. You would never know this from reading the Paleo fantasist's writings, which invariably cite one and only one source, the early 20th century arctic explorer, Vilhjalmur Stefansson.

A recent correspondent went to far as to inform me, based on what he had read on a Paleo fanatic web site, that Stefansson was the only person to ever live with a hunter gatherer culture while speaking their language. This misstatement ignores the work of at least 400 other trained anthropologists who not only did the exact same thing as Stefansson, living with people of pre-industrial cultures all around the world, but in many cases they lived with these people for far longer than the few winter months Stefansson did. They also published more extensively about their observations in writings intended for other anthropologists, not a popular audience, and those writing later in the century were much more aware of the need to see ALL of what was going on in the culture, rather than cherry pick the cultural details that reinforced their personal beliefs and ignore the rest.

So with this in mind, you can see why I find it disturbing that people with a lot of cred in the Low Carb world, including several of the M.D. mega-bestselling authors, continue to parrot Paleo fantasy statements about "our ancestors' diet" or about the diet and lifestyle of modern non-agricultural peoples that have no more basis in science than the idea that eating fat gives people heart attacks.

What Science Knows About Real Paleo Diet and Lifestyle

If you are interested in learning more about what our ancestors really ate, I would highly recommend a new book written by a brilliant Harvard anthropology professor. It opened my eyes to the advances that have occurred in paleontology since I studied it at the University of Chicago in the 1960s when I took my Anthropology degree there.

The book is Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham.

Wrangham's book's very-well documented thesis is that it was the very early discovery of cooking by pre-human hominids which allowed humans to develop the metabolically expensive human brain. His main point is that cooking, because it breaks down starches and proteins, made redundant the long, metabolically expensive digestive tracts found among pre-human hominids and allowed them to atrophy, freeing up the calories no longer needed for 5 hours a day of chewing and round the clock digesting of raw foods to be used to fuel, and grow, our metabolically expensive brains.

But the relevance of this book to our discussions in the online diet community lies not so much in its primary thesis but in the mass of data, derived from extensive research, the author provides about what the historical and anthropological record tells us about what early humans and prehumans ate.

And that research makes it clear that people and "pre-people" eating pre-agricultural diets bear little relationship to the Supermen described in the Paleo Myth invented people ignorant of paleontology and anthropology.

For starters, in most of the many modern era hunter-gatherer societies studied since the late 19th century, it turns out that at least 50% of calories came from gathered, i.e. vegetable, sources not meat, almost always provided by females. And even more importantly, these gathered foods were not made up of leaves which provide very little nutrition, but of starchy foods especially roots, seeds, and tubers.

Wrangham also cites the finding that the Inuit, so beloved by Paleo fantasists, ate more than fat and meat: they savored the raw, full intestines of their prey as well as deer droppings. This suggests the lengths to which humans will go to get the nutrients found from plant-derived sources--and how inadvisable it is to use the Inuit as the model upon which to base your diet.

Nor does research substantiate the idea that the lives of ancient Paleo people were the easy, physically invigorating idylls the Paleo myth describes. Hunting in most environments is an exhausting pursuit that provides marginal sustenance. The usual prey is not an elephant but a few small rodents. In most modern era pre-agricultural societies the sheer volume of food-related labor women are forced to provide is comparable with what was demanded of plantation slaves or the most oppressed factory worker.

The fantasy is that Paleo people lived lives of unparalleled health until they were forced into agriculture and made to live on evil carbs. The reality is that the bones of our "paleo" ancestors show clear signs that they were subject to periodic, severe and crippling famines.

This finding is, of course, reinforced by reports from those who had first contact with modern era hunter gatherers. It is often forgotten that one of the reasons that the earliest French settlers of Canada had so much contact with Native American tribes is that the tribes were starving when Champlain first encountered them, and they came to the French because they offered food.

Wrangham also points out that in modern Africa traditional people's must contend with a long period during the Dry Season when famine is common when game disappears.

I recently read a fascinating biography of a 19th century white child who was raised by Californian Native Americans living a traditional lifestyle, The Blue Tattoo: The Life of Olive Oatman (Women in the West) which made clear what it would be like to live through such a periodic famine. It describes one that occurred in a traditional non-contact Native American society living in SE California. Summary: many children died as did many older adults.

People adopted agriculture because it gave them a much better chance of seeing their children survive. Women probably put a lot of pressure on their men to adopt the agricultural lifestyle because as hard as women work in agricultural societies, their lot in them is far better than those of women in pre-agricultural societies who may have to gather and drag 30 lbs of roots over a range of ten or more miles every single day--before they start cooking dinner for men just returned from hunting.

It is worth remembering that those very few pre-agricultural societies that survived the agricultural revolution--the ones observed by Stefansson and others--were all cultures where people lived in environments where hunting and gathering provided more food than agriculture could--areas with very short (or in the arctic, no) growing seasons, deserts, areas with disease vectors that made settled life fatal, or very rarely, as in Amazonia and New Guinea, tropical areas where nature provided much more food than it does in the temperate zones.

Everywhere else, hunting and gathering was a very hard way to stay alive, and people took to agriculture with the alacrity with which our generation has taken to the computer and for the same reason: because the benefits were undeniable and instantly obvious.

Grain-based agriculture let more children survive to adulthood. Only after its advent did the human population begin to grow at a steady rate, rather than just barely replacing itself.

Grain-based agriculture provides, uniquely in human experience, enough surplus food that some people can put their time into non-calorie producing behaviors, like inventing writing which allows shared knowledge and technology to grow beyond what one person can retain in their memory. It is those grain-provided surplusses that have led to your being able to sit in front of your computer reading this post even if you do it while imagining how much happier you would be if you were "Paleo Man."

Why Does It Matter?

Okay, you might say, maybe the whole Paleo thing is a myth, but why make a big deal about it?

The answer is simple. The minute you support a good idea with made up "facts" and bad science, you invalidate it.

Doctors and nutritionists ignored the Atkins diet because he supported his claims with outdated, discredited studies like the one describing "fat mobilizing substance" and the research that claimed someone lost a huge amount of weight eating ten thousand calories a day of fat. By relying on bad science (and not updating the books to remove it, long after it was known to be bad science) Atkins delayed for a generation the rigorous study of the low carb diet.

We run the risk of doing the same thing to the diet when we argue for it using myths that educated people know to be myths.

What makes it so sad is that there is no need to use myths to make our point. There is plenty of very good science that supports the advantage of cutting down on carbs, eliminating processed foods, and demanding that industry stop polluting our environment with organic chemicals that are damaging our bodies We don't need to argue for our modern dietary improvements by citing imaginary, Eden-dwelling ancestors and misrepresenting their diets to do it.

The truth is, it is irrelevant what ancient people ate 20,000 years ago. Evolution occurs in periods as short as 100 years, so the dietary changes that have taken place in that past 20,000 years have altered our metabolic physiology in thousands of small ways that make us very different physiologically from "paleo" people.

To see an example of this, we need only remember that those of us who are descended from herders can digest milk as adults, while those who did not evolve in cultures with domesticated milk-giving animals are lactose intolerant, like most other adult mammals.

So matter what Paleo peoples ate, those of us who descend from European or Asian stock living in the Temperate Zone can be sure our ancestors' bodies adapted very well to agricultural diets. We are all descended from people who flourished on the energy provided by the stored starchy vegetables and grains that kept them alive through the long cold northern winters when game is very hard to find. Those who did not flourish on those diets did not survive to become anyone's ancestors.

It's Not The Deep Past But The Very Recent Past That Points to The Problems

Rather than imagining the far distant past, we need only look at the very recent past to find much more relevant arguments to support our need for dietary change.

It is the new factors introduced in the past century that we should be focussing the full force of Science on to answer the question of why we have a sudden epidemic of metabolic diseases. Research is turning up a lot of answers, though the corporate-owned media ignore those that point to corporate culpability as the explanation.

The obesity/diabetes epidemic is closely related to the phthalates and other organic molecules that leach from PVC plastics and Bisphenol-A that estrogenize our bodies, the soy proteins that damage our gut linings allowing otherwise benign gluten to get into our blood stream an provoke autoimmune attack, the high fructose corn syrup that turns into intracellular liver fat, the arsenic from coal burning that promotes diabetes, the PCB, pesticide, herbicide and pharmaceutical drugs that are in our water supply and our bodies which all increase insulin resistance.

Let's focus on the real science and make the public aware of the findings of this good science so we can do something about this metabolic epidemic. Until we can heal it, those of us who can't process carbs will have to cut way back on them. But let's leave the myths that reinforce personal belief systems to the churches where they belong. They won't cure what ails us.
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UPDATE: Nov 21, 2009:

Check out this fascinating look at Arctic mummies. The link was posted by "Coach Jeff" in the comment section. The book cited is a real eye opener. I will have go get a copy.

Mummies, disease & ancient cultures By Eve Cockburn, Theodore Allen Reyman

Two of the Arctic and Aleutian mummies described here--those of older people--show distinct signs of atherosclerosis. The starved child who died with a tummy full of gravel and hair points out the impact of cyclical starvation on hunter cultures.