Are We Crazy? – NorCal S&C

The Robb Wolf Paleolithic Solution book tour has begun. The party got started in style with St Peter’s Sorgham Beer Sponsoring the tour.

Prepare the space ship…shit is about to get crazy.

***Sorgham beer is a gluten-free beer suitable for consumption by celiacs. It has received approval from celiac UK, the charity for those afflicted with celiac disease, to carry their license. It is supplied in the famous St Peter’s oval 500ml bottle.

Tasting note: Clean, crisp, gluten-free ale with a pilsner style lager finish and aromas of citrus and mandarin from American Amarillo hops.

Robb Wolf & co. were featured on T Nation in an article called “Pumped Up On The Paleo Diet”.

“The Paleolithic era is the period in human pre-history between 2.5 million and 20,000 years ago. And if you’re a veteran to the diet industry, it might seem that the Paleo diet craze is even older than that…Rob Wolf, a former research biochemist specializing in lipid metabolism, has gained a cult following with his nutrition seminars and weekly podcast, The Paleolithic Solution. Wolf follows in the footsteps of Paleolithic Diet founder Professor Loren Cordain and focuses on the practical implementation of Paleo nutritional concepts to support fat loss, build muscle, and improve athletic performance…This improves digestion and absorption and if you want to get big, does it not make sense to actually absorb your nutrients instead of shitting them out? The net effect is improved nutrient partitioning (energy goes to muscle, not fat) leanness, and decreased inflammation…”

If you want to read more…click here!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HkqBxpPBeI

Just posting some information about the dangers of fructose on the body on Talk To Me Johnnie.

“…If you are an athlete trying to gain weight or doing a high volume of training, eating 4000 – 5000 calories is very doable. However, for most people to get consume this amount of food they will have to resort to crap carbs and refined sugars as a means to getting there. Eating a high volume of food is paramount of bigger muscles and the realization that consuming large amounts of sugar has negative and pronounced effects on the body. With high volumes of fructose leading that way to obesity, metabolic derangement, diabetes and cancer…”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oSuFQ1BE_s

www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7SifouLN54

www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uGyVTwDLKg

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq2fczX78jI

www.youtube.com/watch?v=veuPXN9SIvk

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ap6oP-V-JeY

www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5EFc6AMOBY

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

Talk To Me Johnnie – I have to start the email by thanking you for your awesome programming and sharing your knowledge. So very much appreciated!

What is your stance on saturated fats? Previously, (the last couple months), I have dismissed it as I think a lot of the CrossFit community has as something that shouldn’t be worried about. But after buying The Paleo Diet book I am confused. Cordain writes that sat. Fats should be limited and that the consequences of too much sat fats are undeniable.

It wouldn’t be hard to limit them if I wasn’t trying to gain weight, wasn’t a hard gainer, and could consume milk (lactose intolerant). These all force me to eat a fairly large amount of meat.

Thanks again,

Ryan

I contacted a very knowledgeable friend about saturated fats and he stated…

There is no convincing evidence that saturated fat is unhealthy. Interestingly, the body possesses desaturase enzymes that can turn saturated fat into monounsaturated fat. As such, it appears that saturated fat is a superior source of fat due to its stability and versatility. The one fat that is a problem in the diet is the polyunsaturated omega-6 fatty acid called linoleic acid. Food sources of linoleic acid include: corn oil, soy oil, cottonseed oil, grapeseed oil, oats, peanuts and peanut oil, rice bran, safflower oil, sesame seeds and oil, sunflower seeds and oil, walnuts, wheat products, brazil nuts, pine nuts, hemp, pecans, and pistachios. Walnuts are recommended because they have a good omega-3 to omega-6 ratio. However, the omega-3 that is present is alpha-linolenic acid, which, due to its poor conversion to EPA and DHA, simply does not balance the linoleic acid (omega-6).

Attached is a research paper by Ronald Krauss, one of the world’s most prominent lipid researchers. Meta-analysis of prospective cohort studies evaluating the association of saturated fat with cardiovascular disease – Siri-Tarion, Sun, Hu & Krauss

Krauss concluded, “A meta-analysis of prospective epidemiologic studies showed that there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD. More data are needed to elucidate whether CVD risks are likely to be influenced by the specific nutrients used to replace saturated fat. A meta-analysis of prospective epidemiologic studies showed that there is no significant evidence for concluding that dietary saturated fat is associated with an increased risk of CHD or CVD. More data are needed to elucidate whether CVD risks are likely to be influenced by the specific nutrients used to replace saturated fat.”

Our bodies produce about 20 times more cholesterol than we eat in a day. Insulin does not control the cholesterol particle size. Rather, hyperinsulinemia and small dense lipoproteins are correlated. Small dense cholesterol will result from excess carbohydrate, especially fructose, consumption. The increase in large buoyant LDL that is accompanied by increased saturated fat consumption is nothing to of huge concern.

John

“Our genetic make-up, shaped through millions of years of evolution, determines our nutritional and activity needs. Although the human genome has remained primarily unchanged since the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, our diet and lifestyle have become progressively more divergent from those of our ancient ancestors. Accumulating evidence suggests that this mismatch between our modern diet and lifestyle and our Paleolithic genome is playing a substantial role in the ongoing epidemics of obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Until 500 generations ago, all humans consumed only wild and unprocessed food foraged and hunted from their environment. These circumstances provided a diet high in lean protein, polyunsaturated fats (especially omega-3[ω-3] fatty acids), monounsaturated fats, fiber, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and other beneficial phytochemicals. Historical and anthropological studies show hunter gatherers generally to be healthy, fit, and largely free of the degenerative cardiovascular diseases common in modern societies. This review outlines the essence of our hunter gatherer genetic legacy and suggests practical steps to realign our modern milieu with our ancient genome in aneffort to improve cardiovascular health.”

“Humans evolved during the Paleolithic period, from approximately 2.6 million years ago to 10,000 years ago. Although the human genome has remained largely unchanged (DNA evidence documents relatively little change in the genome during the past 10,000 years),1 our diet and lifestyle have become progressively more divergent from those of our ancient ancestors. These maladaptive changes began approximately 10,000 years ago with the advent of the agricultural revolution and have been accelerating in recent decades. Socially, we are a people of the 21st century, but genetically we remain citizens of the Paleolithic era.”

THE IDEAL HUMAN DIET

What is the ideal human diet? I would have to say one we evolved eating for the last 2 million years. A diet of meat, vegetables, fruits and fats is a diet that is consistent with the diet that Paleolithic humans evolved eating. “…This is the diet that our hunter-gatherer ancestors thrived on until the advent of the agricultural revolution. Through the millennia, our genome and physiology became adapted to this diet. Of course, this diet varied by paleontological period, geographic location, season, and culture, but many characteristics remained consistent until recent times…”

REAL FOOD, NOT SYNTHETIC FOOD

Eat real food. A Zone bar is not a meal. A shake is not a meal. We evolved eating real foods. Processed and chemically engineered foods are not the road to health.

Caloric Intake

Your calorie intake should be consistent with your energy expenditures. What does that mean? It means that do not consume more then you burn off. If your consists of running, moving and training eat to sustain your body’s needs. If your activity is limited to changing channels on the couch, eat accordingly.

ω-3 Fats

We evolved for millions of years eating a diet rich in Omega 3 Fatty Acids. “…The polyunsaturated fats are classified as ω-6 (generally proinflammatory) and ω-3 (anti-inflammatory with several other inherent cardioprotective effects). ω-3 Fats were abundant in the diet of our Paleolithic ancestors…” These are found in wild caught fish and grass-fed meats.

HUNTER-GATHERER FITNESS

“Our Paleolithic ancestors exerted themselves daily to secure their food, water, and protection. Although modern
technology has made physical exertion optional, it is still important to exercise as though our survival depended on it, and in a different way it still does. We are genetically adapted to live an extremely physically active lifestyle. A sedentary existence predisposes us to obesity, hypertension, the metabolic syndrome, diabetes, and most types of cardiovascular disease, whereas regular exercise decreases the risks of developing all these diseases. Even in times of caloric excess, hunter-gatherers avoided weight gain in part because they were extremely physically active. Studies of obesity consistently show that the best way to maintain weight loss (regardless of the type of diet used) is by daily physical exercise. Our remote ancestors participated in various physical activities daily. They walked and ran 5 to 10 miles daily as they foraged and hunted for their food sources. They also lifted, carried, climbed, stretched, leaped, and did whatever else was necessary to secure their sustenance and protection. Days of heavy exertion were followed by recovery days. In modern terms, these people cross-trained with aerobic, resistance, and flexibility exercises. According to recent data on physical activity, fitness programs that use various exercises are the most effective in preventing cardiovascular diseases.”

Where does all this leave us? It leaves us working to decode the genes locked inside us, genes that are wanting us to become strong/fit and free from modern disease. We evolved for millions of year eating a certain way and living a life of exercise and hard work.

Can you imagine how much exercise it was to eat a basic meal a millions years ago. It was probably the amount of work you might see in an Olympic Decathlon. Running, Jumping, Throwing and sprinting for your life.

Unlock your inner Hunter Gather.

Here’s a little FYI on cancer cells, like all cells, they require glucose (sugar) to grow.  But unlike other cells, they consume 4 to 5 times more glucose/energy.  So, logic would say – restrict sugar (carbohydrate/energy) and kill cancer.  This has been proven to be effective as demonstrated by this study and numerous others.  Following a restricted calorie, ketogenic diet literally ‘starves’ the cancer cells.  But, instead of instructing cancer patients to follow a diet like this the American Cancer Society recommends a ‘plant-based’ (primarily vegetarian), whole grain rich, low fat diet instead.  Scroll down this page and take a look at the ‘nutritious’ snack examples…

This is not to say that the knowledge of how to ‘starve’ cancer isn’t out there.  In fact, according to some recent research (here it’s broken down into non-geek language), they have developed an anti-cancer agent that acts as an ‘energy restriction mimetic’.  The researcher states that “Energy restriction may be a powerful ‘new’ strategy for treating cancer because it targets a survival mechanism used by many types of cancer cells.”  The research shows that it’s possible to develop drugs that act to simulate glucose and energy-restriction.

Since we have this information, does it not make sense to use it to prevent and help stop the growth of cancer now; instead of waiting until the drug is developed and approved by the FDA?  When it comes to cancer it could be the difference between life and death. Is that piece of cake really ‘to die for’?