Face-Palm Thursdays: Because two million years of evolution is obviously wrong

I should start a new trend where I publish things that make me face-palm on Thursdays. Actually, in this subject I could probably find enough things to make me face-palm every day of the week, possibly multiple times a day. US News has the skinny on what will make you skinny. Not really.

Face Palm: Best Diets for the New Year 2012

Top of the list? A diet, called the DASH diet, developed by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). You guessed it, eat your recommended number of carbs plus all those "healthy" whole grains, and just don't eat salt and saturated fat and you'll lose weight, especially if you cut back on calories! How does that work anyway? And they say that "rigorous studies" showed that this diet can lower blood pressure. Funnily enough, they don't quote exactly which "rigorous studies" they're referring to.

I'm not going to list all of the craptacular diets they put at the top of the list, (and believe me, I know all about craptacular diets having been obese for most of my life and trying repeatedly to lose the weight and being unable to), but they put Atkins towards the bottom. While their "rigorous studies" obviously prove that cutting back salt and eating whole grains defeats heart disease (really! I'm super cereal! pun totally intended) they dis Atkins because all the studies were too short and the data was not statistically significant. You can read that again, but I assure you, you didn't misread it.




Now, the Vegan Diet did better than Atkins and the Paleo diet despite the fact that it "may not provide enough of some nutrients." No kidding. But it ranks higher than ones that are better for you? Well, I believe that's called cognitive dissonance.

And what did they put at the bottom of the list? The Paleo Diet. Because 2 million years of evolution is obviously wrong. To whatever quack job wrote the article on US News, go live with the Inuit for a year like Stefansson did and get back to me on the lack of dairy and grains. Here's what they say about the nutritional breakdown of the Paleo Diet:

Fat. At about 39 percent of daily calories from fat, a sample Paleo menu exceeds the government’s 35 percent cap by a bit.

Protein. The government recommends 10 to 35 percent of daily calories come from protein; the Paleo diet clocks in around 38 percent.

Carbohydrates. At 23 percent of daily calories from carbs, it’s far below the government’s 45 to 65 percent recommendation.

Repeat after me, THERE ARE NO ESSENTIAL CARBOHYDRATES.

Newest Designs at Cafe Press

I have some new designs at my cafepress store! Grains are for the birds and oats are for horses! This is just a sampling, so please look around.

Bumper Stickers

Adults' Shirts

Kids' Shirts

The Cholesterol Lie: They'll never let it go

If you've read anything by Uffe Ravnskov, you'll know that cholesterol does not cause heart disease. So, when I read this article this evening, I thought, they'll never let it go will they?

Fat Alone, Not Where It Sits, May Be Key to Heart Problems

"That challenges the widely adopted notion that not all obesity is alike, with so-called apple-shaped people, who carry fat mainly in their midsections, facing a bigger risk for heart problems than those whose excess fat is carried on the hips or elsewhere.

Not so, say the researchers behind the new study. When it comes to obesity and heart disease, no excess fat is good fat, regardless of where it ends up, their analysis has found.

"Society has accepted the idea that if you carry more weight around the middle, your risk of heart disease is higher," said Dr. Emanuele Di Angelantonio, the study's co-author and a lecturer in medical screening at the University of Cambridge in England. "But actually this study shows that it doesn't matter where your fat is located. If you're overweight you're at risk, full stop."...

They also found that tracking a person's blood pressure and cholesterol levels, as well as monitoring their history of diabetes, appeared to be best way to assess heart disease risk. When such indicators were readily available, they noted, adding in BMI and waist measurement information did not improve risk diagnosis..."

So, basically they do mention that diabetes is a risk factor for heart disease. What causes diabetes? Elevated blood sugar over a prolonged period of time that causes insulin resistance. What causes elevated blood sugar? Eating carbohydrates. Bleeding simple, and yet they're like Don Quixote, tilting at windmills. Forget testing for cholesterol. It's irrelevant! Test for blood glucose levels instead. That would give a better idea of whether someone is healthy or not.

If you are overweight, then you probably have elevated blood sugar and/or are insulin resistant. In fact, I'm not sure that it's possible to be overweight and NOT be insulin resistant. Hence why being obese is associated with cardiovascular disease, because every time your blood sugar is elevated, you are damaging your internal organs. Yes, you read that right. Every time you drink a Coca-Cola, every time you eat a piece of chocolate cake, you are DAMAGING YOUR INTERNAL ORGANS. In fact, even if you are not overweight and even if your insulin works well and it brings your blood sugar down quickly, it is probably never quick enough to completely avoid the damage that is done. Add this up over days and years, and you have cardiovascular disease. Not to mention all the other disease of civilization, like cancer. If you damage your cells repeatedly, they repair or regenerate themselves. If your cells are required to do this frequently, the cells regenerate quickly, leading to high cell turnover, leading eventually to a cell that doesn't regenerate in the right way, which leads to cancer.

The good thing is, your cells will repair themselves if given a chance. The bad news? You can never go back to eating the way you did if you want to remain healthy. You have to ask yourself what is more important. The slice of chocolate cake or your health? Death is inevitable. Health is your choice.

Exercise and take your medicine

This morning on a local morning show, KENS5 Great Day SA, they had a cardiologist on the show. He said that Cardiovascular Disease was preventable, I'm assuming he meant the non-genetic type, and listed the usual risk factors for it. A risk factor in their terminology means that it's "associated with" not that it causes it. Something that most people I don't think quite understand and the "experts" don't usually differentiate between.

Cholesterol was of course included, even though it seems it has little to do with cardiovascular disease. Cholesterol is vital for cell function, and acts to repair damage, which may be why it was erroneously thought to cause heart disease. The line of reasoning goes like this: There are house fires, and there are always firemen at house fires, therefore firemen cause house fires. That of course is ridiculous... unless you're in a sci-fi book, but I digress. So that means that just because Cholesterol is present doesn't mean that it has anything to do with the cause. Correlation is not causation.

The most important thing about cardiovascular disease that we now know, the thing they left out on Great Day SA of course, was inflammation. Inflammation is probably the cause of cardiovascular disease, and yet, they didn't even mention it. Eating a low-carb or paleo diet reduces inflammation. Of course, the day they tell people they ought to eat like that will be the day that the eighth circle of hell has frozen over and Dante has come back to life and is singing poems about homocysteine.

Anyway, what do you suppose they said on the show that you ought to do to prevent heart disease? "Exercise and take your medicine." Yes, folks, that's right. Be sure to take all of that expensive, profit inducing medication. I didn't catch the cardiologists' name, but I assume he's been listening to drug reps.

The Ancient Paleolithic Diet

One argument used by people who are against low carb diets is that our paleolithic ancestors ate mostly fruit and vegetables. The argument is absurd of course. How did paleolithic people get fruit and vegetables in the middle of winter? They didn't have refrigeration or greenhouses or delivery trucks. This means that in most parts of the globe, Paleolithic people would have had to have hunted for meat, or they would have starved to death.

This means that they ate meat primarily most of the year, and in some places, as with the Inuit, they ate meat pretty much all year. And they were excellent hunters. Most of what we know about paleolithic people is derived in one of two ways. The first is by archaeology, where the remains that are dug up are studied. The second is by anthropology, where we study people who survived into the 20th century as hunter-gatherers.

A lot of what is found at dig sites from the Paleolithic is weapons, for example stone spear heads. They made lots of spears, both wooden and stone, although the wooden parts don't usually survive. Both homosapiens and neanderthalensis used spears to hunt medium and large sized mammals.

Atlatls were used as a means of extending a spear's throwing range and increasing the amount of force behind the throw. Atlatls have been used for probably 400,000 years, and would have allowed even a child to bring down large game.

Research at a site in Russia shows that ancient people could easily have hunted very big game like mammoths.

"Ethnographic sources and experimental work confirm that recent African elephants can be killed with spears or projectile points. According to Trilles (1932), Forest People from Gabon hunted elephants by sneaking under a standing elephant and thrusting a spear into its belly; the elephant could also be killed by arrows... According to Janmart (1952), the Ituri hunted elephants by creeping under an elephant and plunging a spear into its belly. The Ogiek people from Kenya hunted with dogs and used spears to kill elephants... Frison (1989) showed experimentally that Clovis projectile points used with atlatl and darts or thrusting spears can penetrate the thick hide of African elephants and inflect lethal wounds on elephants of all ages and both sexes. The hunting strategy should include several persons.

Comparison of the size of recent African elephants and mammoths shows that it is plausible that prehistoric hunters used the same techniques for hunting mammoths as recent hunter use to kill elephants."

So much for a lack of food. A large animal like a mammoth would feed a lot of people for a long while. Even smaller animals like deer or elk would feed a good number of people. In the winter, the meat would have lasted for a while, in areas where the temperature was cold enough to inhibit decay. And unlike fruit and vegetables, when the meat was gone, they could go and hunt some more.

Evolution has not had time to alter our genes to adapt to an agricultural life style. It has especially not had time to alter them to deal with the massive increase in sugar consumption that has happened since the early 1980s.