Simple Roots to Health

Did you hear the NPR story about Paleo cavities yesterday? The take away is at the end: “There’s not one kind of paleo diet,” Humphrey says. “I think wherever people lived, they had to make best of the wild food resources available to them….”

To say that the “paleo diet” isn’t as healthy as people are making it out to be, because one small group in a particular area ate acorns, is shortsighted and unfortunate. There are many good things about the “paleo diet”. Mainly, eating less sugar and more unprocessed, straight from the ground kinds of food. They liken the acorn to the “Paleo twinkie.” It’s well known twinkies aren’t good for you, but twinkies are better than starving. That’s probably what these cave dwellers had to eat, so they ate it.
Scientists have found other ancient skulls with healthy teeth, so it’s obvious that diet effects dental health. That was true in the past, and still is. Eat less sugar, get less cavities. Paleo or otherwise.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/01/06/260185944/looks-like-the-paleo-diet-wasnt-so-hot-for-ancient-hunters-teeth

Exactly. Nature made it with a yolk. Eat the yolk. Why would you take out the part with the most nutrition? To save on some calories, yes, I know. And to take out the ‘evil’ cholesterol. Yes, I know. That’s what we’ve all been taught. Avoid calories and cholesterol. But it’s an egg. It’s meant to be eaten whole. Scrambled, fried or boiled. You need cholesterol and fat to keep your hormones in balance. So don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater by trying to cut calories.

http://www.gocomics.com/the-born-loser/2013/10/17

This is a short and sweet summary of the last 3 posts I’ve put on my Facebook page in case you missed them. They are are about how our current stance on saturated fat and carbs is wrong and we need to change(1).

The oils that have been lauded as “heart healthy” are not what they claim to be(2), and the “healthy whole wheat(3)” is anything but. Eating low fat and high carb is actually causing more obesity and co-morbidities. Bottom line, eat more real, unprocessed food, and avoid the “heart healthy” boxed snacks and packaged foods.

Cholesterol is vital. Eating cholesterol free and avoiding saturated fats and replacing those lost calories with low-calorie packaged carbs only reduces the “good” cholesterol and increases your risk of heart disease.(4)

The War on Saturated Fat

The BMJ knows what’s up! “Saturated fat is not the widow-maker it’s been made out to be, …The more likely culprits are empty carbs and added sugar.” Yes, it’s an opinion piece, by a British cardiologist. “Three-quarters of patients admitt…ed to the hospital with acute myocardial infarction do not have high total cholesterol.”

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-saturated-fat-20131022,0,2193813.story#axzz2kXEKu45I

‘Healthy’ vegetable oils

This is a short review of a Canadian study that goes against the “heart healthy” oil mantra. It may also show the lack of connection between cholesterol and overall heart disease mortality.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/11/131111122105.htm

Sweden Rejects Low-Fat Dogma

Sweden has become the first Western nation to develop national dietary guidelines that reject the popular low-fat diet dogma in favor of  low-carb high-fat nutrition advice.

http://healthimpactnews.com/2013/sweden-becomes-first-western-nation-to-reject-low-fat-diet-dogma-in-favor-of-low-carb-high-fat-nutrition/

I was assigned to do a “media project” for school, so I wrote a blog post. I figured I’d use it for the project and figured I’d use it here too, to help people understand some of the nitty gritty of hangry. I’ll post soon about what do do about it. How to prevent it, or at least lessen the symptoms.

Do you get “hangry”? Some describe this as the feeling of “low blood sugar”, “grumpy hungry” or just plain irritable. You know that time of day when it’s just been too long since you last ate.  Huffington Post has an article describing the symptoms and the emotional component added when you get hungry. You’re brain and gut are intricately related and when one needs something, it talks to the other and vice versa. And they usually need the same things, so it works out perfectly.

The avoidance of “hangry” is the biggest argument to eating 5 small meals a day. This comes with the benefits of keeping your insulin levels stable, improving insulin sensitivity and helping prevent diabetes. You avoid the cravings and are less likely to lose your will power.  You may remember my previous post called 2 meals and your pancreas where I talked a little about why a few studies showed eating 2 meals might be better for your pancreas as well as weight loss, but if you are trying to avoid the “hangry.” 5-6 small meals is the way to go.

Your liver is supposed to release stored energy when you haven’t eaten in a while to prevent your cells from going hungry. So why do we get this “hangry” feeling? Food provides much more than just calories made from carbs, protein and fat. There are so many other things we get from food. Vitamins and minerals for sure, but eating (or not eating) also triggers the release of hormones and chemicals in the gut and brain.  You may have heard of ghrelin, which gives you the feeling of hunger, along with leptin, which is released from adipose tissue when the cells don’t need any more energy.

We have a very complex system of back and forth, push and pull, positive and negative feedback loops going on in our body that are constantly in flux, working to keep things in balance. Ghrelin tells your stomach it wants food, and your hypothalamus has a lot of ghrelin receptors, which causes us to become irritable. This irritability increases focus and determination to get food and used to keep us on track and in pursuit of food. It keeps distractions from getting the best of our body’s primary goal.

We’ve only recently (the last ~12,000 years) had a more constant supply of carbohydrates and food in general. Our relatively new position of having food readily available, and having all our other needs like shelter, warmth, medical care and social status essentially satisfied, allows us to more easily listen to our body’s feelings of hunger. We are no longer running from a predator or having to build shelter before a storm. Our modern day distractions, like paying bills, doing homework, and going to work, aren’t exactly life threatening. We have the time and resources to go to the store and buy food, and listen to our wants.

Most people know it’s a bad idea to go to the grocery store hungry. With all the super palatable foods, those oh-so-delicious dopamine and serotonin releasing foods, it’s no wonder why we get annoyed when we don’t have something to eat. We think it’s deprivation, we claim we’re starving, and we get into arguments about nothing. All because our “blood sugar is low.” That ghrelin can get your brain all fired up and focused, on that one ultimate goal of a satisfying meal. Don’t ignore it if you’re about to get into a heated argument with your spouse or boss. Have a snack, and then have a rational conversation, without the ghrelin induced “hangry”.

This article is well written and I found it very interesting. Along the same lines as the book “An Epidemic of Absence” I’m currently reading, this is about how we used to live differently, and mainly, with a lot more bugs. More microbes, more worms, more microscopic germs that gave our immune systems something to work with, as much as against.

It vivdly describes a successful hunt of an impala, and it’s subsequent “cleaning.” It gets a little graphic as a heads up. But it’s how we used to do things. I’m not anti-medicine, nor advocating a return to this type of living, but we should be able to learn something from their lack of auto-immunity, and lack of chronic diseases.

http://humanfoodproject.com/please-pass-microbes/

A little while back the news picked up on a new study that showed improved health markers in people that ate two large meals a day versus the study group that ate 6 small meals per day. The calories were the same, but the calories were consumed in different intervals. The two mealers lowered their BMI more so than the six mealers. Conventional wisdom has been that frequent meals stabilizes blood glucose and helps control cravings for those trying to lose weight. This has trickled down to normal weight folks too and it’s common knowledge that eating smaller frequent meals is ‘more healthy.’ This study, along with asimilar study in 2010begins to disprove this idea, but doesn’t talk about the mechanisms, or why it might help some people.

Today I read a post on Robb Wolf’s blog that focused more on Intermittent fasting (IF), but talked a little about the mechanisms of fasting which I think apply to these low frequency meal studies. I wrote up a short post on why IF might work for some folks a little while ago, and my post here adds to that thinking.

“There are two phases for insulin secretion.” During phase 1, stored insulin is released and lasts around 10 minutes.  In phase 2 the pancreas produces more insulin to shuttle glucose into your cells after your guts have broken things down enough to be absorbed.  This insulin is present in the bloodstream for 2-3 hours after the meal is consumed.  Eating very frequently ends up taxing the pancreas as it’s unable to store more insulin for the first phase of the next meal. This is most likely why the type 2 diabetics in the aforementioned studies did better on the low frequency meal plans. Their pancreases were able to take a break and prepare for the next meal.

I imagine the food the participants were given were more healthful than the meals they were eating prior to the study and we have to assume there are more variables here than just food frequency. It’d be great if they could do a study where people ate the same healthful diet at the same frequency for a month or two before the food frequency difference began. This would minimize the impact of a drastic diet change on the outcome. Besides eating a healthier diet, the reduced food frequency allows the pancreas a break between meals and improves insulin sensitivity since your cells get a break from the constant supply of insulin.

I heard a news report about Intermittent Fasting on NPR this morning. I wrote a short post about IF a little while back.

This NPR article focuses more on the fact that your liver depletes its glucose storage after about 12-18 hrs, and then your “fat burning ‘switch’ gets turned on.” While this is true, eating healthfully and weight training will get you most of the way there. IF can be beneficial during a weight loss plateau, and it could be a good way to reset your true hunger feelings, rather than relying on what time of day it is to eat. Eating no carbs for a short period of time can have similar effects as IF without the hunger pangs. No carbs means no incoming sugar and forces the liver into gluconeogenesis, which uses fatty acids and amino acids.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/07/29/205845319/two-day-diets-how-mini-fasts-can-help-maximize-weight-loss?