CrossFit for Hope

We hope to be on the national mall today performing CrossFit for Hope and enjoying the incredible day.  Supporting St Jude Children's Hospital in this way makes me feel very proud to be a CrossFitter.

Goal for CrossFit:  Raise one day's operating expenses for the Hospital, $1.7 million dollars.

Go check the website for more information:  hope.crossfit.com

And if you have not, please sponsor me for $10 or more, from this link:
https://hope.crossfit.com/sponsor?id=U66772

And for those that already donated, thank you!!

How The Inuit Lived Carb Free

Abstract

Background. The question whether even-chain fatty acids can be converted into glucose has a long-standing tradition in biochemistry. Since the glyoxylate shunt is absent from mammals, the question has been considered to be solved. It is of particular relevance for understanding the metabolic state of natives of the arctic regions due to the very high fat content of their traditional diet only containing negligible amounts of carbohydrates.


Methods & Results. Using an in silico approach, we discovered several hitherto unknown routes in human metabolism that allow the conversion of even-chain fatty acids into carbohydrates in humans. These pathways proceed via ketogenesis over the intermediate of acetone and produce the gluconeogenic precursor pyruvate. While these pathways can make a contribution to glucose production during times of limited carbohydrate supply, we found that their capacity might be limited due to a high demand in reducing equivalents in acetone degradation. Considering the traditional diet of natives of the arctic regions, the detected pathways are not only important in order to improve carbohydrate supply, but moreover reduce the amount of protein that needs to be used for gluconeogenesis.


Conclusion. In summary, our study sheds new light on our understanding of the metabolic state of natives from the arctic regions on their traditional diet. Moreover, they provide an avenue for new analyses that can reveal how humans have adapted metabolically to a practically carbohydrate-free diet.

http://www.circumpolarhealthjournal.net/index.php/ijch/article/view/18436

The takeaway is - when someone tries to tell us that we have to eat a certain amount of carbs per day to feed the brain, they are either lying or ignorant.  The body can make the glucose the brain needs by several alternate methods.  What you must eat is protein and fat.

Guessing and Advising

In 1972, when the National Institutes of Health introduced the National High Blood Pressure Education Program to help prevent hypertension, no meaningful experiments had yet been done. The best evidence on the connection between salt and hypertension came from two pieces of research. One was the observation that populations that ate little salt had virtually no hypertension. But those populations didn’t eat a lot of things — sugar, for instance — and any one of those could have been the causal factor. The second was a strain of “salt-sensitive” rats that reliably developed hypertension on a high-salt diet. The catch was that “high salt” to these rats was 60 times more than what the average American consumes.

Still, the program was founded to help prevent hypertension, and prevention programs require preventive measures to recommend. Eating less salt seemed to be the only available option at the time, short of losing weight. Although researchers quietly acknowledged that the data were “inconclusive and contradictory” or “inconsistent and contradictory” — two quotes from the cardiologist Jeremiah Stamler, a leading proponent of the eat-less-salt campaign, in 1967 and 1981 — publicly, the link between salt and blood pressure was upgraded from hypothesis to fact.

In the years since, the N.I.H. has spent enormous sums of money on studies to test the hypothesis, and those studies have singularly failed to make the evidence any more conclusive. Instead, the organizations advocating salt restriction today — the U.S.D.A., the Institute of Medicine, the C.D.C. and the N.I.H. — all essentially rely on the results from a 30-day trial of salt, the 2001 DASH-Sodium study. It suggested that eating significantly less salt would modestly lower blood pressure; it said nothing about whether this would reduce hypertension, prevent heart disease or lengthen life.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/03/opinion/sunday/we-only-think-we-know-the-truth-about-salt.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

So who pays for the damage if the government says "eating less salt with help you live longer", but in fact, eating less salt raises the liklihood that you perish early? 

You do. 

Which is why the government should constrain itself from offering dietary advice until the science is rock solid, confirmed by interventions studies, and well publicized and critiqued. 

Ioannidis - "Full Disclosure. We Don't Know Much."

We could solve much of the wrongness problem, Ioannidis says, if the world simply stopped expecting scientists to be right. That’s because being wrong in science is fine, and even necessary—as long as scientists recognize that they blew it, report their mistake openly instead of disguising it as a success, and then move on to the next thing, until they come up with the very occasional genuine breakthrough. But as long as careers remain contingent on producing a stream of research that’s dressed up to seem more right than it is, scientists will keep delivering exactly that.

“Science is a noble endeavor, but it’s also a low-yield endeavor,” he says. “I’m not sure that more than a very small percentage of medical research is ever likely to lead to major improvements in clinical outcomes and quality of life. We should be very comfortable with that fact.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/

For anyone wanting to puzzle apart the confusion about science and health, this article is a must read.  

Watch, Watch Again, Watch the Next Day

... and you'll know more than most doctors about this topic.

Observational studies and causality, understanding "Number Needed To Treat" or NNT, and how stats have been grossly abused to get us using expensive drugs with nasty side effects that don't do much to help us.

This video is medical self defense.

Movie Non-Review Forks Over Knives

Vegetarians, and vegans - I like them, they taste especially good with fava beans.  But seriously folks ...

The movie "Forks Over Knives" was good enough to generate a question from a friend about that movie - so this is my answer, but unfortunately, I have not watched the movie, nor do I think I will.  When I know a thing will prick my ire, I avoid it.  Life's too short to be angered unnecessarily.  So I will go by assumptions, what I know about the folks behind the movie, and summaries, such as this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forks_Over_Knives

My friend pointed out how the premise - eat right to prevent the diseases of civilization, rather than using a surgery knife to treat them - is appealing.  It is for me, too.  There are good reasons to believe that most chronic illness, the diseases of the West, is a result of what we eat, and that by avoiding certain foods, we can also reduce the rate at which we age and become infirm and "demented."  My model is to avoid the most novel foods in the human diet - grains, legumes to a degree, mass produced sugars most of all, but also industrial "vegetable oils."  The vegans and vegetarians avoid animal products.  And I'm good with that, if a person can avoid eating animals and enjoy their life and be healthy, that's a win-win.

I appreciate the vegan/vegetarian conviction to an ideal, and the fact that they leave more animals for me to eat.  I don't respect their approach to science at all.

I've blogged about T. Colin Campbell before.  He's the author of an observational study conducted in China, and of a popular book called "The China Study."  His work is apparently the star of "FOK".  Here are some additional takes on his "science":

-Denise Minger's devastating critique of Campbell's "science":  

http://rawfoodsos.com/2011/09/22/forks-over-knives-is-the-science-legit-a-review-and-critique/

-Chris Masterjohn provides the scientific geek's analysis: 

http://www.cholesterol-and-health.com/China-Study.html

Campbell's answer to these criticisms is generally to accuse the critics of having no credentials, bad intentions, or both, but he has not to my knowledge addressed the substance of their critiques.

The vegan argument is even more problematic than the vegetarian one.  First, it does not provide adequate nutrition to thrive - B vitamins, creatine, quality protein, adequate saturated fat.  Richard Nikoley provides excellent and pithy comments on these points at www.freetheanimal.com.

To me, the only thing one really need know is that a human can thrive on virtually no carbohydrate intake, but cannot live without protein or fat.  That's right - proteins are essential, fats are essential, carbs - nearly optional.  The human gut is not optimized to extract nutrition from large quantities of vegetation - it is longer than a cat's gut for example, but much much shorter than an ape's gut or a true herbivore's gut.  The human gut is more like a rodent or bear's gut - IOW, an omnivore's gut.  The human teeth, likewise, are not made for grinding vegetation, but rather for chewing high nutrition foods like meat and vegetables.

Another very important matter is simply the volume of vegetables and other non-animal food one must eat to get a minimum amount of calories each day - 2000-2500 kcal/day.  If you don't have agricultural mono crops - like wheat, corn or soy - good luck finding adequate calories without animals.  You might get buckets of blueberries for a few weeks a year like the bear does - but a better bet is to let the bear eat berries all day, while you snack on the berries for a bit while you figure out how to kill and eat a bear every now and then.  With the massive cache of nutrition you harvest from the bear's fat and the liver and the brains and the marrow and the kidneys and etc, you end up working about 18 hours a week as a hunter gatherer, whilst your extinct vegetarian predecessors were eating all the time.

Animals fats are good human nutrition, and cholesterol is good human nutrition, no matter what T. Colin Campbell's epidemiological studies say.  If he could produce an intervention study that showed otherwise, you can bet he would.  This link provides a link that highlights an enlightening debate between Campbell and Loren Cordain - read the entire debate or just the summary at the link above.  Either way, the good doctor Campbell admits to throwing in the towel on the scientific method in favor of his own personal philosophy of science in which observational/epidemiological studies can magically determine cause and effect.

As to the health of vegetarian diets v. a paleolithic modeled diet, 7th Day Adventists eat vegetarian and have lower rates of colon cancer than the rest of us - but so do the Mormons, who eat more meat than anyone on the planet.  The Mormons also outlive the supposed healthiest population not the planet, the Swedes.  In other words, it's not impossible to be healthy eating only veggies, but it's not the only way to be healthy, either, and vegetarian eating includes compromises I will not make.  In other words, it's all good with me what anyone else eats or believes until someone tries to use the vegetarian fake science to force the issue through government policy.

I have two movie recommendations for further study - "Fathead the Movie" and "In Search of the Perfect Human Diet".  I've seen Fathead several times and enjoy it very much.  I'm assuming the "In Search" is good because I know one of the subjects of the movie, Robb Wolf.

The ultimate condemnation of Cambell's work is not his half baked science, or the discovery of discrepancies in his mathematical work.  It is that his advocacy of a diet that is both completely unnatural and environmentally unsustainable.  As Lierre Keith brilliantly describes in "The Vegetarian Myth", annual mono crops are massively destructive to life; from the bugs in the soil that make it fertile, to the animals of the plains that are displaced permanently, to the animals that are crushed by plows or poisoned by sprays, to the fertilizer dead zones in the seas.  Industrial grain production is a literal blood bath.  If I don't see Keith's solutions as practicable, they are still correct in that you can't dump ammonium nitrate and salty water on fertile plains forever and still extract food from the mess you make.  It is disconcerting to think that 85% of the calories our food system produces are derived from annual mono crops.

The argument is often floated that it takes 13 pounds of grain protein to get a pound of protein from an animal - thus eating animals fed by grains is theoretically depriving a hungry person somewhere of their food.  Aside from the economic errors in that chain of illogic, those facts are based on the assumption that animals should be fed grain to make them fatter, faster, thus bringing their meat to market at a lower cost.  It's not a great idea to feed cows corn to make them fatter faster.  Corn makes the cows so sick they have to be stuffed with antibiotics in order to thrive, which creates all kinds of sustainability problems ("Would you like some antibiotic resistant bacteria with that steak?").  The "13 pounds of grain" argument, in other words, is a straw man, in which the evils of industrial grain production look good compared to the evils of using industrially produced grains to feed animals.  OK, thanks for that brilliant but irrelevant comparison.

Letting animals graze on plains of grass is infinitely sustainable, and is the way the ecosystem was designed to work - large, herd animals eat vegetation all day.  The herd animals and the birds that accompany them to feast on the bugs that follow the herds (and even the ground rodents that get into the mix), fertilize the grass.  Apex predators - humans being the apexiest example - feed on the animals and whatever else they decide to eat, including tubers, fruits and veggies (in season), eggs and fish.  In this scenario, fertility killing irrigation is not required.  The closer we get to this model, the better off we'll be.

Vegetarians and vegans (aka the VVs) like to think their approach is more humane because it allows them to live without eating animals - but they ignore the massive quantities of death caused by industrial food production, denial of habitat and the downstream effects of ammonium nitrate runoff and pesticides.  As Lierre Keith put it, industrial agriculture is genocide against anything that lives under the farmed area.  There has not been an example that I know of in which the VV only approach can be accomplished without killing animals (or without utilizing the other great satan, ammonium nitrate (aka oil derived fertilizer)).  The VV idea of eating without killing is false, and just plain ignores the unseen deaths of millions of animals.

Moral high ground?  The VVs do not have it.

Eat meat, vegetables, nuts and seeds, little fruit or starch, and no sugar/wheat.

NOTE:  Tomorrow and Wednesday's posts address additional aspects of scientific philosophy that are directly relevant to the "science" of "FOK".

Edited June 4, 2012, 10:03 AM & 10:10 PM

NAFLD

http://abcnews.go.com/m/story?id=16374773

Nearly 10 percent of U.S. teens have nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, a largely silent accumulation of fat in their liver cells that puts them at risk for developing later cardiovascular disease and additional liver problems, new research has found.

"Puts them at risk for developing later ...."  I would say it a little different - since the same thing that causes NAFLD is the most likely cause of CVD and the rest of the diseases of civilization - fructose specifically and excess carbohydrate consumption in general - NAFLD is just another symptom of excess fructose/sugar consumption.  I don't see any way one could separate the other adverse results from excess fructose/sugar consumption from those that result from NALFD itself. 

Anyone willing to bet that any population goes from consuming 5% of calories as fructose to 20% of calories from fructose they'll hatch a bunch of NAFLD cases?  That is what happened in the US. 

I dare anyone to show me a case of this that is caused by excess fat consumption.