Monday, May 18, 2009

6s and 3s and the logic of grain avoidance


Although cows are herbivores, eating predominantly seeds is not really healthy for them either. Beef cows and steers are fed grains (grass seeds like corn) for the financial benefit of humans who raise them, not for the health of the animal. The animal naturally eats grasses. When you feed it just grass seeds, you are giving it something it previously ate in small quantities in huge amounts - a quantitative difference becomes qualitative. The animal will put on more weight faster, will mature quicker and will have muscle that is excessively laden with fat. This fat it adds will go from an 0-6:0-3 fatty acid ratio of 1.5 -2 to more like 10-15, due to the outsize preponderance of 0-6s in grass seeds. The chemical composition of the animal is now changed for the worse and it is worse for you if you eat it. You can imagine how many fish oil capsules it takes to re-balance the 15:1 ratio of grain fed beef. I believe its much more effective to just avoid the extra O-6s in the first place in the ways I have suggested. When you eat too many O-6s, whatever the source, your immune system is weakened against infection and there is evidence that cancer cell growth is promoted. 

The upside of grain for the farmer is higher profits because the animal can reach market weight and be sold a whole year earlier. This is why grass fed beef is more expensive, even it is not certified organic. (As a side note, beware of grass fed beef that is finished with grains to make it "tastier". The grass-fed animal can have its healthy 6:3 ratio ruined with as little as six weeks of grain feeding)

Now here is more evidence for avoiding grains in the optimal human diet. Can you see how the recommendation against grains is not predicated at all on carnivory? A cow is an herbivore eating no animals at all, is well adapted to eating only plants, can synthesize all its necessary amino acids from relatively monotonous plant sources, and is basically a plant-eating machine. Yet, we have just seen that feeding this herbivore corn makes it mature faster, gain weight abnormally, literally alters the chemical composition of its cell membranes, and as is evident to anyone who eats beef, the animal's immune function is seriously disturbed by the excess 06 fatty acids. How so? Bovines fattened on corn must be given antibiotics to gain weight. This is because the grain-fed animal is more susceptible to infection. Now part of this is feedlot epidemiology, but I believe much of it is because the excess O-6s interfere with O-3 metabolism necessary for proper immune function. As a result of this antibiotic feeding, and perhaps also due to the immune disturbance itself, the cows gut is susceptible to e. coli overgrowth, and you have to worry about ending up with a colostomy every time you eat a hamburger.

Now if the case is compelling that an herbivore is healthier without grains and our health can be affected by eating the flesh of an herbivore that is fed too many grains, why isn't it reasonable to ask if an omnivore like us might not be better off without them? Before agriculture, seeds were a trivial to nonexistent, and certainly not necessary, part of our diet. The weight of the evidence here is pretty convincing. I have seen no evidence that any common grain (wheat, wheat flour, barley, oats, rice) was necessary for life before agriculture, and no evidence that they offer anything you cannot get with the huge variety of edible vegetables that have better vitamin, phytochemical and nutrient density than any grain. Of course, ounce per ounce, nothing can compare to an egg (even chimpanzees eat them) or lightly cooked piece of fish or grass fed steak for protein, vitamin and essential fatty acids. So I hope you can see that grain avoidance depends in no way on humans being "carnivores". We are further along that scale than what vegans or your average teenage girl in North America can accept, but that is simply not a necessary part of the argument against grains.

Cats and dogs are carnivores and can survive on fortified cereal when humans force them to eat it.

Cows are herbivores that eat nothing buts plants, but grains in their diet have negative health effects for them as well.

Humans are omnivores that now have a hugely expanded ecological niche through the technology of adapting rot resistant carbohydrate rich seeds that can be stored, milled, ground up cooked and eaten, mechanically planted and fertilised with the aid of petroleum, bred for higher yields, and even genetically engineered. Humans have thrived and expanded to 6 B souls on a finite planet despite the fact that grains are not an optimal food source at the level of the individual. Remember that the gene is the unit of selection. Grains are adaptive at the level of the gene and increasing human poplulation. Your genes do not care if you get coeliac disease, heart disease, diabetes, degenerative arthritis, tooth decay, autoimmune disorders, cancer or alzheimer dementia if by eating grains you were able to avoid famine just long enough to reproduce.

Look beyond the very misleading inter-country and even intracountry observational studies, which you could spend a lifetime trying to parse. Do pay attention to any controlled randomized trial that is well done. Do pay atention to the archaeological record. Do use some inductive reasoning with comparative anatomy, and ground your thinking with the best evidence from clinical and basic sciences like endocrinology and biochemistry. 

Start thinking about a diet that is not a diet at all, just a set of parameters that characterized 99% of our relevant evolutionary past. Huge variation in foods eaten, but no sugar, no mechanically produced white flour, and and few foods to which humans have had no time to adapt.

For most people in most places of food abundance, that will be a relatively low-carb diet with no cereal grains.

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