PaNu - Evolutionary Metabolism

NEW LOCATION FOR PANU

2009-06-24T15:25:00.000-07:00

There are no essential carbohydrates, even for athletes

2009-05-18T14:38:00.000-07:00

Despite current nutritional dogma dating from the 1970's, carbohydrate consumption is completely unnecessary for your energy (or any other) needs. Fat is the primary way we store energy in our bodies, and eating fat is the evolutionarily preferred food source in a food-abundant environment.* During aerobic exercise, the predominant fuel source is fatty acids, supplemented by glycogen stores.

It is possible to eat no carbohydrates at all and still do plenty of physical work. Any carbohydrates needed not provided from glycogen or food can be produced in abundance via gluconeogenesis. Glucose provided this way makes you literally burn fat, and keeps your insulin levels low.

You have about about an hour or more of exercise in your liver and muscle glycogen.

If you are a lean runner, you have enough energy in your body fat to walk about 800 miles.

You simply don't need to eat carbohydrates to exercise.

Try this:

Once you are adapted to low carb intake (it may take 6 weeks or more, so go slowly) your mitochondria, including in your muscles and your brain, will literally proliferate and be more energy efficient. Gradually start doing your workouts with less and less carb consumption prior to exercise, to the point where you are solely working out in the fasting state. By fasting state I mean no food for at least 12 hours. Now, most people think I am a lunatic when I suggest this, but hear me out.

I have talked about intermittent fasting as a complement to low carb eating to keep your insulin levels low. One reason they are complementary is once you are off the glucose/insulin hormonal yo yo, your ability to tolerate fasting is increased immeasurably. On a very low carb diet you are literally never hungry, in that desperate way you are when you are carb-dependent. Intermittent fasting is absolutely the best way to keep your insulin levels as low as possible (more on why that is good in the future)

Working up to fasting workouts slowly, and once you have been on a low carbohydrate regimen for several months, you will find that your performance (running time, max lifting) eventually equals or exceeds what you could do before with a meal 2 hours before, as your body becomes more adapted to fatty acid metabolism and less dependent on glucose .

Now here is the good part. When you race, you have new mitochondria and your newly efficient fat-preferring metabolism. Add a moderate carb load and some GU bars if its a long race, and you will be faster than you were before. Glucose is now your nitrous oxide, not your primary fuel.

When you want to climb K2, you train in Leadville, Colorado, where the air is thinnest. Training at 10,000 feet is harder at first but more effective. Same with fasting workouts.

*When food was abundant in paleo times, it was because there were large mammals rich in fat stores. Humans ate the fat, and it was adaptive for them to be satiated because food was abundant. No insulin response to make them store the fat, just use it for fuel and waste the rest. Conversely, when fruits were most abundant at the end of growing season, winter was approaching, and it may have been adaptive to store fat for the coming winter. That is why fructose has a strong insulin response and in fact, is sent straight to the liver to be converted into triglycerides. Eating lots of sugar year round is not something we were adapted to

6s and 3s and the logic of grain avoidance

2009-05-18T14:14:00.000-07:00

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.

2009-05-18T13:29:00.000-07:00

PaNu - A modified paleolithic diet that can improve your health by duplicating the evolutionary metabolic milieu.

How do you do it?

I have patients who don't care about the details, they just want to to cut to the chase about what to do. Here is the heirarchical list I give them. I tell them to go as far down the list as they can in whatever time frame they can manage. I tell them the further along the list they stop, the healthier they will be. There is no counting, measuring, or weighing. They are not required to purchase anything specific from me or anyone else. There are no special supplements, drugs or testing required.

1 Eliminate sugar (including fruit juices and sports drinks) and all flour

2 Start eating proper fats - animal fats and monounsaturated fats like olive oil - substituting fat calories for carb calories. Drink whole milk or half and half instead of skim.

3 Eliminate grains

4 Eliminate grain and seed derived oils (cooking oils) Cook with butter, coconut oil, olive oil or animal fats.

5 Get daily midday sun or take 1-2000 iu vit D daily

6 Intermittent fasting and infrequent meals (2 meals a day is best)

7 Fruit is just a candy bar from a tree. Stick with berries and avoid watermelon which is pure fructose. Eat in moderation.

8 Eliminate legumes

9 Adjust your 6s and 3s. Grass fed beef or bison avoids excess O-6 fatty acids and are better than supplementing with 0-3 supplements.

10 Proper exercise - emphasizing cross-fit or interval training over long aerobic sessions

11 Eliminate milk (if you are sensitive to it, move this up the list)

12 Eliminate other dairy including cheese- (now you are "orthodox paleolithic")

If you can do step 1, that is about 50% of the benefit and alone a huge improvement on the standard american diet (SAD) By about step 6 you are at about 75% , by step 9 about 80% and at 10 you are at 99% for most people.

Here is the skeleton of the theory:

Insulin is a phylogenetically old hormone. It is a biological messenger that in excess, is metabolically saying the following to your tissue and organs: "Go ahead and store energy, and go ahead and mature, reproduce and die." Excess insulin in humans is linked to diabetes, alzheimer dementia, metabolic syndrome, obesity, coronary disease and cancer.

We did not evolve under conditions of insulin excess. Food was intermittently available and not superabundant like today. Scarcity and famine were frequent everywhere until recently in evolutionary time. Preferred foods were available year round and dense in calories and nutrients. Animal products, including organs and bone marrow of mammals, fish, and invertebrates (insects) were the staples, supplemented by edible plants (not grains) until the dawn of agriculture. Fruit was seasonal and not yet bred for maximum sweetness. Food was eaten less frequently, had lower carbs than the typical american diet which is about 60%, and was supplemented by often involuntary periods of intermittent fasting and lower calories overall.

We are not adapted to chronic hyperinsulinemia.

We are also not adapted to eating grass seeds, to which we have been significantly exposed for only about 10,000 years. They contain molecules that are specifically designed to discourage consumption, as well as other problematic chemicals.

The diet is not about eating exactly what "caveman" ate, or killing your own food. It is solely about duplicating what I believe are the key elements of the internal hormonal metabolic milieu that we evolved under from especially less than 1 million years ago to about 10,000 years ago. This is likely to be achieved not by eating specific things, but more by not eating specific things.

Calorie restriction is a severe, uncomfortable way to have low insulin levels and if calorie restricted (starving) your insulin levels can be reasonable even if your carb percentage is high. However, with calorie restriciton you can get muscle wasting, fatigue and weakened immune function. In animal models, calorie restriction increases longevity substantially. Remember the metaphorical message of insulin? It says, "increase your metabolic rate and then die". This message is attenuated by having low insulin levels.

Is there another way to live in a world of abundant food without being hungry all the time, yet avoiding the risk of immune dysfunction associated with eating grass seeds that cannot even be eaten without mechanical processing and cooking ?

Yes, you can work your way down this list.

PaNu - returning to the evolutionary metabollic milieu

2009-05-17T21:26:00.000-07:00

Hello and welcome to PaNu

This is a blog devoted to PaNu - a philosophy of living centered on the thesis that the diseases of civilization are largely related to abandonment of the metabolic conditions we evolved under - what I term the "evolutionary metabolic milieu" - EM2. Returning to EM2 is not a fad. It's not about eating like a "caveman" and does not require you kill your own food. It doesn't require a calculator, or even a recipe book once you learn some basic science about food.

We can make sense of many of the diseases that are prevalent now and relate them to some simple but profound changes that have occurred with the introduction of agriculture.

My conception of the EM2 is not derived from a single science or field of inquiry, but draws on medical science, biochemistry, history, epidemiology, and anthropology and archaeology.

It is becoming clear now that many of the diseases afflicting humanity are not a natural part of the aging process, but a side effect of technological and other powerful cultural changes in the way we eat and live that have only occurred over the past 10,000 years.

Here I will post commentary about relevant scientific studies, critique the dangerous prevailing paradigm about healthy behavior, (not just eating) and provide links so you can do further reading on this topic.