Paleo Brands

Since the topic of nutrition is so close at heart, we had Jack Reid take a close examination a few different arguments floating around the community of health and nutrition.

Argument 1: Increased calories? If increased calories were the cause of obesity and the disease of civilization then how can you explain the graph below? Did Americans all of a sudden decide at the end of the 70s to become total gluttons and eat until they pop? This conclusion doesn’t seem very logical. What did happen at this time however were the saturated fat scare and a push for people to eat more carbohydrates.

“According to the National Health and Nutrition Examination Study, American men increased their calorie consumption from 1971 to 2000 by an average of 150 calories per day, while woman increased their calorie consumption by over 350 calories. This increase in energy intake, according to a 2004 report published by the Centers for

Disease Control, was “attributable primarily to an increase in carbohydrate intake.” (Good Calories, Bad Calories Gary Taubes Page 232) Using this CDC information wecan explain the graph above and come to the conclusion that our current obesityepidemic is the result of an increase in carbohydrate intake.

Argument 2: The Sioux: (low calorie, high carb)

The staple of the Sioux diet on the reservation was “grease bread,” fried in fat and madefrom white flour, supplemented by oatmeal, potatoes, and beans, some squash and canned tomatoes, black coffee, canned milk, and sugar. “Almost two-thirds of the families, including 138 children, were receiving distinctly inadequate diets,” the report concluded. Fifteen families, with thirty-two children among them, “were living chiefly on bread and coffee.” Nonetheless, 40 percent of the adult women, over 25 percent of the men, and 10 percent of the children “would be termed distinctly fat,” (Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes Page 240)

Argument 3: Trinidad: (low calorie, high carb)

In Trinidad, a team of nutritionists from the United States reported in 1966 that one-third of the woman older than twenty-five were obese, and they achieved this condition eating fewer than two thousand calories a day an amount lower than the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization recommendation to avoid malnutrition. Only 21 percent of the calories in the diet came from fat, compared with 65 percent from carbohydrates. (Taubes page 241) Both the Sioux and the country of Trinidad live on very low calorie diets and have a lifestyle heavy in manual labor making them very active by modern standards but they still have high levels of obesity. This does not jive with modern thinking. Given their low calorie, highly active lives they should be very skinny but this is not the case.

Argument 4: Semi starvation diets (low calorie.)

When you restrict calories you get a restriction in energy out. The organism or person in this case will decrease its metabolism and decreases the amount of energy it expends. Sure people do indeed lose weight on a caloric restricted diet but it’s only temporary and comes with a ridiculous amount of sacrifice in both health and emotional wellbeing. Let’s look at the graph below, which indicates what happens on a semi starvation or caloric restrictive diet. The red line indicates insulin sensitivity and the blue line indicates body weight. As a person progresses through the diet they do indeed lose weight but it isn’t the good kind of body compositional weight that we’re looking for instead it is both fat and muscle mass that they’re losing.

The real kicker to caloric restriction is what happens when the diet is over. Noting the graph above and knowing that the individual will become more insulin sensitive the outcome is always the same, they put all the weight back on and then some.

According to Dr. Scott Connelly, “because of the dynamics of this you will lose the weight in the ratio of 60% fat / 40% muscle and gain the weight back in the ratio of 80% fat / 20% muscle.” This is due to the fact that your body through semi starvation has become more insulin sensitive and can now easily store fat. When Jean Mayer began studying a strain of obese mice in 1950, he observed that if he starved them sufficiently he could reduce their weight beneath that of normal rats, but they’d “still contain more fat than the normal ones, while their muscles have melted away.” (Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes Page 274) In 1944 Ancel Keys and his colleagues put 32 young males on a diet consisting of 1570 calories a day, which is about half the calories they were eating before to maintain their body weight.

“Key’s [subjects] lost, on average, a dozen pounds of fat in the first twelve weeks of semi-starvation, which constituted more than half of their original fat tissue, and they lost three more pounds of body fat by the end of twenty-four weeks. But weight loss, once again, was not the only physiological response to the diet. Nails grew slowly, and hair fell out. If the men cut themselves shaving, they would bleed less than expected, and take longer to heal. Pulse rates were markedly reduced, as was the resting or basal metabolism… They described their increasing weakness, loss of ambition, narrowing of interests, depression, irritability, and loss of libido as a pattern characteristic of “growing old.”… They reduced their total energy expenditure by over half in response to a diet that gave them only half as many calories as they would have preferred.” “When the subjects were finally allowed to eat to their hearts content, they remained perversely unsatisfied. Their food intake rose to “the prodigious level of 8,000 calories a day.” But many subjects insisted that they were still hungry, “though incapable of ingesting more food.” And, once again, the men regained weight and body fat with remarkable rapidity. By the end of the rehabilitation period had added an average of ten pounds of fat to their pre-experiment levels. They weighed 5 percent more than they had when they arrived in Minneapolis the year before; they had 50 percent more body fat.” (Good Calories Bad Calories by Gary Taubes page 253-255)

Argument 6: The Sumo Diet. (High carb)

“The world of professional sumo wrestling, according to Nishizawa, is divided into an “upper group,” constituting the best wrestlers in the country, and a “lower group.” The members of the upper group consumed on average some 5500 calories worth of chanko nabe (a pork stew) a day, out of which 780 grams were carbohydrate, 100 grams fat and 365 grams protein. This constituted more than twice the calories and carbohydrate of the typical Japanies diet of the era, slightly less than twice the fat, and four and a half times the amount of protein. The sumo diet was very high in carbohydrate by our standards 57 percent of calories and very low in fat 16 percent considerably beneath what most public-health authorities in America consider a feasible low-fat target.

The lower group of sumo weighed as much as their more accomplished colleagues, but was significantly fatter and less muscular. They consumed, on average, only 5120 calories of chanko nabe a day, consisting of 1,000 grams of carbohydrates, 165 grams of protein, and only 50 grams of fat; these lesser sumo attained and maintained their corpulence on a diet of nearly 80 percent carbohydrate calories and 9 percent fat.” (Good Calories Bad Calories by Gary Taubes page 307)

So what about low carbohydrate high calorie?

Quoted Section from The Protein Power Lifeplan By Doctor Michael and Mary Dan Eades

If insulin levels are low enough, then fat storage pretty much shuts down. It almost doesn’t matter how much you eat it’s not going to get into the fat cells without the assistance of insulin…. Patients come into

the clinic or send us their diet diaries indicating that they have been keeping their carbohydrate intake within the prescribed limits, or even lower, and they haven’t been losing weight, and they want to know

why… To give you an example… a woman sent a diary showing her daily low-carbohydrate fare and demanded to know why she had only lost 4 pounds over the first few weeks on the program. Her diet was as follows:

Breakfast:

Four-egg omelet with cream cheese, five or six pieces of bacon or sausage, and coffee.

Mid Morning Snack:

4 ounces of nuts and 2 to 4 ounces of cheese.

Lunch:

A large bowl of tuna or ham or chicken salad made with real mayonnaise, a bag of pork rinds, and a dietdrink.

Mid Afternoon Snack:

Nuts and cheese again

Dinner:

A 16-ounce piece of prime rib, a green vegetable, and a small salad.

Dessert:

Sugar free gelatin with whipped cream and coffee.

If you calculate this, you’ll find that she indeed was well below her 30-to-40 gram daily carbohydrate restriction, but she was eating somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 calories each day. The remarkable, even stunning, realization is not that while she was eating all this food she lost only 4 pounds but that she didn’t gain 30 pounds! The point is that she kept her insulin low by keeping her carbohydrates restricted and wasn’t able to store the fat that she ate. Had she added 100 grams of insulin stimulating carbohydrate a mere 400 more calories to this regimen, her weight would have no doubt have skyrocketed.

End quoted Section from The Protein Power Lifeplan By Doctor Michael and Mary Dan Eades