... something as horrifying as cancer, here's another:
So it's disappointing news indeed that the Food and Drug Administration has deemed that tomatoes, so rich in antioxidants and other good things such as beta carotene, may not protect against many types of cancer after all, as some earlier studies had found.
The agency responded Tuesday to applications from two tomato-product groups, including H.J. Heinz Co., which planned to tout the anticancer benefits of tomatoes on their product labels. After a review of dozens of studies, however, the FDA found that there was "very limited evidence" to support any association between tomato consumption and reduced risks of prostate, gastric and pancreatic cancers. As for the believed cancer-fighting effects of lycopene, the key anti-cancer fighting ingredient in tomatoes, the FDA was even more discouraging, saying there was "no credible evidence" to suggest that the chemical could reduce the risk of such cancers of the prostate, lung, colon, breast, ovaries or pancreas. I'm all for ditching the FDA, which mainly serves to re-enforce the bond between government and the government crony capitalists we all depend upon to supply our food and medicine. But if they are going to reel in this kind of "inconclusive science", I sure wish they would do that with all the other inconclusive science. There's no conclusive science on the benefit of a low fat fad diet, for example, but the FDA does not typically trumpet that when they are trying to get you to eat less meat and more grain and 300 servings of fruits and vegetables every five minutes. But hey, what could go wrong with a diet that requires mankind to destroy the ecosystem through plowing, poisoning and dumping oil (ammonium nitrate) all over creation in order to provide mankind with an amount of vegetables and grain, and their industrial by products ("vegetable oils" and soy products and grain products, processed to kingdom come) that are completely novel to the genome? Why would anyone need research to know THAT'S A GREAT PLAN! OF COURSE IT IS A GREAT PLAN!
(Please forgive that temporary digression, we'll now return to our regularly scheduled blog post)
As to the tomato theory of cancer prevention, when I read about some magic ingredient that's going to save us all from everything, it always makes me step back and ask: "Why did cancer prevalence follow the advent of agriculture around the world? Could this ingredient be connected to the paleolithic model?"
If an ingredient no kidding prevents illness, I don't care what its place in any model is. But in general, most of the claims of magic dietary bullets are proved false - no proof that anti-oxidant intake benefits real humans and/or "protects" from cancer; no proof high fiber intake benefits humans and/or "protects" from cancer; no proof that high fruit/vegetable intake benefits humans and/or "protects" from cancer. In fact, some studies show the opposite is as likely - deliberate feeding to get more nutrients quite likely feeds cancers. The only strategy that works across all species, humans too, for extending life, which by default means reducing the incidence of cancers, is under feeding. In theory that indicates that any diet which reduces intake without resulting in chronic nutrient deficiency is the diet most likely not to interfere with the healthy expression of the human genotype, in which people live well, and live into their 80s with normal function.
Sometimes, the magic ingredient is just the ingredient that we've processed out of our diets, or eliminated through modernity - like vitamin K (grass fed beef or wild caught fish liver, anyone?), or vitamin D (yes, complete elimination of "cancer causing sunlight" does cause cancer), all the other vitamins (present in adequate amount in paleolithic foods, and not subject the "anti-nutrient" qualities of neolithic foods), or magnesium (used to get all we could stand in the water, now we get none). Most of the time, the magic ingredient does no good at all upon further review - exempli gratis: fiber, additive anti-oxidants, and lycopene. And this makes perfect sense. The genome is not likely to be adapted to and/or manipulable by some strange, exotic ingredient.
So here's the question for those who have actually read this far, which I'm sure most of you are on to in any event - what's the most nutrient dense diet, which does the best job of managing appetite, and therefore allows you to most easily eat the least amount of food while getting the minimum required amounts of essential nutrients?
I know there's not much drama here because you read this so often:
Meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch, and no sugar/wheat.
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