Food for Thought

When I was a child growing up in the 1970's I envisaged a future of food where we all would be eating a single pill that would provide our complete nutrition and thus do away with the need to eat food.

How different the actual future is.  With more variety of food than ever before and cooking shows amongst the most popular shows on TV, eating is still well and truly alive.  Kitchens are getting bigger and fancier, there are more places to go out and eat, and the access to foods from various cultures and the proliferation of super foods has shown that in no way are we ready to give up eating for a nutrition packed pill.

Imagine life, though, if this future had come to pass.

Firstly, all that time spent shopping for, preparing, eating and cleaning up after food would vanish.  That would amount to enormous hours of the day that we could reclaim to do other things.
Secondly, imagine the extra storage space in our houses. Plates, bowls, pots, pans, casserole dishes, cutlery, the "good" crockery, could all go, freeing up mountains of cupboard space.  Also the pantry would be a thing of the past, and who would need a massive fridge anymore?  The oven, the cook top, the microwave, the dishwasher, could all go.  There would be just so much stuff we could get rid of and then have so much less clutter to deal with and so much more cupboard space.  Now that's something I definitely need.
Thirdly, it would eliminate that whole issue of trying to eat a balanced diet and the weighing up of the pros and cons between various ways of eating.  But here is the crux of the matter.  How could any responsible scientific organisation possible come up with the perfect diet encapsulated into a nutrient rich pill when they can't even agree on what constitutes the optimal diet for humans?

For the past 30- 40 years we have been fed the mantra of low fat, high carbohydrate as being the way to live a healthy life.  I believe it, I've grown up my whole life being taught this.  It hasn't stopped me from having an 'apple shape' rather than a pear shape, which is now deemed unhealthy and a precursor to syndrome X and it's attendant diseases of modern living such as heart disease, cancer and diabetes. Nice.  But to a certain extent I feel a bit powerless as my father and his mother before him had the same 'apple shape'. Was it diet related or was it genetics? At least they didn't have to suffer the indignity of being told that they have a waist to hip ratio that is going to kill them.

It is tempting to basically ignore any government health warnings from this day forward.  It seems that no one really knows what they are doing in the field of nutrition. Hundreds of billions of dollars are thrown at all manner of studies trying to prove which is the optimal diet for us. All that seems to happen is that the studies are either inconclusive, are interpreted according to whoever is reading them's bias, or are instantly disproved by another study.

The bottom line is, there are just too many variables in the modern diet because it is such a cornucopia of variety.  To scientifically isolate one variable is well nigh impossible. People have slightly different genetic make up and respond differently to different diets too, which further complicates things.

I have come to the conclusion, after much reading about how the caveman diet is our optimum diet, that although that maybe true on an individual basis, on a population basis a high carbohydrate diet is better.

Think back, 10,000 years ago, we switched from predominately eating meat to growing and eating grains.  We may also have introduced a bunch of chronic degenerative diseases that became more apparent as we became clever enough to eliminate the other major killers of misadventure and infectious disease.  But these chronic diseases of modern living, still allow us to live long enough to reproduce, so they are not bad enough to impact on our survival as a species.  And this is the point.  Our population got to the point where it had to evolve to move further up the evolutionary scale.  As a population, we are incredibly healthy and successful. Perhaps as individuals not so much.

But, agriculture allowed us to guarantee a food supply that had never been guaranteed before.  It lessened our day to day reliance upon capturing or picking fresh foods because now we could store vast quantities for long periods of time.  It also meant that less people were needed to be involved in the actual procurement of food and that freed others to go and progress civilisation.  In the last 10,000 years not only has our population sky rocketed but our civilisation has moved ahead in enormous leaps and bounds that just wasn't possible while we were existing day to day on a tenuous food supply.

So in order for the human race as a whole to make the next development leap and form societies, government, religion, culture, science, technology, the list goes on and on, we had to free ourselves from the grip of the hunter gatherer lifestyle.  This is evidenced by the hunter gather cultures still in existence in the last few centuries, who were primarily living very primitive lives until they were introduced to Western civilisation.  Their rates of chronic disease were low, to the point of non existence, but their populations were relatively small and isolated which impacted their ability to develop technologically.

Reverting to a hunter gatherer diet is a luxury that affluent Westerners can embrace.  It may make their individual health outcomes more positive.  But for the entire world population to revert to such a diet is unsustainable.  We just don't have the capability to feed the whole world on a predominately meat diet.  That ultimately means that the third world and poorer populations will be fed with the cheaper high carbohydrate model and be prone to chronic disease, while the affluent will live long happy lives.  There is an inequality here.  Our success as a species has meant that we are destined to be less healthy individually.  It's a small sacrifice we all make to ensure the species remains strong.  Like herds who have their strength in numbers and can afford to sacrifice the weak few, so that the herd as a whole survives.

If this be the case, then governments trying to control what we eat and haranguing us about our health to do it is futile.  Basically we are damned if we do and damned if we don't.  Arguably Western nations have the wealth to manage expensive health budgets that deal with chronic disease.  It may be the pay off we have to make to avert the greater evil, that of starvation and malnutrition.

As I ready myself and the family for an experimental dietary change to explore the hunter gather diet epitomised by the Paleolithic diet I find myself reducing cupboard stock of carbohydrates and legumes.  I am starting to feel slightly unsettled by this, and we haven't even begun the diet yet. As the large fridge in the shed which houses the 'staples' of rice, pasta, bread mix, flour, dried beans and legumes becomes emptier and emptier I start to feel a small pearl of worry forming. It is ironic that the very carbohydrates that supposedly store themselves as excess fat on our bodies are the same carbohydrates that we store in stockpiles outside the body in order to protect ourselves in lean times.  With an empty 'store' of carbohydrate staples I feel vulnerable.  What if there is a truck strike, or we have an event that wipes out the electricity for a few weeks?  Focussing our diet on just meat and fruit and vegetables is a predominately fresh food diet.  It is extremely reliant on me being able to access the supermarket, butcher and greengrocer.  We grow a few of our own vegies, fruit and herbs and have our own eggs, but in reality, these will not go anywhere near providing adequate calories or nutrition for our family of 6 if the need should arise.  By having a fridge and pantry laden with carbohydrate foods, a short breakdown in the food chain supply, although inconvenient, would not be catastrophic.
As the one who is primarily responsible for the provision of food in the house and the mad one who is proposing we trial this diet, I feel a small sense of responsibility here.  Obviously the likelihood of some disaster occurring and interrupting the food supply is slight, but it is not entirely out of the question either.  Should I cover my bases and stockpile some emergency food in case of need?  After all the advent of agriculture cemented our survival as a species because it insured as against this very thing. But as the Paleolithic dieters advocate, all carbohydrate (particularly refined) needs to be gotten rid of in order to avoid temptation.  Refined carbohydrate is the evil one in all of this, the most likely culprit of chronic disease and obesity, but it is also the food that is least perishable and so the most useful in times of food shortage.

It is a dilemma. Oh wouldn't life be so much simpler if we just had a pill to take and all these decisions would not need to be made.

Who has got a sweet tooth?

I'm reading about sugar at the moment particularly in relation to the Paleolithic diet.

Sugar, or sucrose is made up of glucose and fructose. Together they have a glycemic index of 65 which is similar to white bread which is about 70. When separated out however they have glycemic indexes of 97 and 23 respectively. The interesting part, though, is that fructose tastes way way sweeter than glucose.  So measuring the glycemic index of food through your taste buds and making a judgement based on what tastes the sweetest is fraught with danger.

The theory with the glycemic index is that the higher a food is on the index the more it causes your blood sugar to spike. Spikes in blood sugar is what is supposedly causing us to develop insulin resistance and laying the ground work for metabolic syndrome.

So here we have fructose that tastes incredibly sweet, yet has a low glycemic index value, so presumably causes a smaller rise in blood sugar levels than glucose does.  Wouldn't that make it a good thing to eat then?

Apparently not.  The story gets stranger.  Even though it doesn't trigger blood sugar surges it is the component of sucrose that is driving our propensity towards diabetes. David Gillespie in Sweet Poison postulates that the problem with fructose is that our body just doesn't recognise it. We happily consume it in our table sugar along with glucose and it has a way of by passing all our systems and getting itself into the blood stream by barely registering on the bodily Richter scale.  We notice it on our tongues and then later it appears in our blood stream rising triglycerides and turning up as fat. It's like our body doesn't know what to do with it, doesn't quite have the mechanism to deal with it, so it just  shoves it off into our cells.  And it is here that it starts to cause us the health problems related to diabetes and syndrome X, aka metabolic syndrome.
Loren Cordain advocates a diet free of refined carbohydrates, grains, dairy and saturated fats. Basically it is a high protein diet based on lean animals meats and tons of fruit and vegetables, because this is what our stone age ancestors ate.  A typical meal looks something like this: a piece of steak, 2 cups of steamed broccoli, 2 cups of lettuce, 1 cucumber, 2 tomatoes, 1 grated carrot, followed by half a rockmelon filled with diced strawberries That's a lot of vegetable matter. Every meal requires that level of vegetable matter because fruit and vegetable are now your prime source of carbohydrates.  Corn and potatoes are not permitted.

So based on this meal, Cordain's take on the Paleolithic eating pattern was that they slaughtered a big animal, butchered it, and then ran around finding a large salad of a wide variety of vegetable and fruit to go with their meat. Now I haven't studied the subject to the extent that Corbin has, but I still wonder whether personal bias has intervened here.  I can draw on what I have learnt about the indigenous people in my own country.  The gathering part was pretty hard.  There were bits and pieces here and there, but they were focused on finding dense sources of food like nuts, berries, seeds and tubers.  Some of these required specialist preparation back at camp, some were just plucked and munched on as they went about their business.  Meats were seasonal.  In certain seasons those with access to the beach would gather and gorge themselves on shellfish.  The hunting and eating of the bigger game and trapping of fish were times of plenty.  They would have been subject to periods of feast and famine.  I don't really see where masses of leafy green vegetable would have fitted into their diet, they just wouldn't have been abundant nor able to pack the nutritional punch they needed.

The other premise of the Paleolithic diet is that over just 333 generations we just haven't had the time to evolve to be able to handle the high levels of refined carbohydrate and sugar currently in our diets. That's why we are seeing so much ill health in the way of chronic diseases. Well evolution works on a principle of survival of the fittest.  Our problem is that the refined sugar and carbohydrate diet is not killing us off quickly enough.  The chronically ill are healthy enough that they get the opportunity to reproduce. The diet needs to either make them infertile or dead before reproduction age so that those who cannot adapt to the new lifestyle get weeded out.  Some people seem to have the metabolism that can cope with a pretty crappy diet of refined carbohydrates and resist chronic disease.  Presumably these would be the ones which natural selection would keep, and the majority of us with various syndrome X diseases would get weeded out of the population.  Mother nature is pretty harsh.

Again looking at indigenous Australians we can see an example of this.  If non- indigenous Australians have had 333 generations to adapt to our change in diet, the indigenous population have had about 10. Now if this diet was bad for us, we would see, you would think, greater evidence of it's impacts on the indigenous people. And guess what? We do. They love the sugary sweet stuff and they are seriously over represented in the diabetes statistics. So if you are nodding your head agreeing that this proves we are not adapted to our Neolithic diets, you also have to accept the premise that as rates of disease are higher in the population that has had less generations to adapt, we must be adapting, all be it slowly. The human body is pretty amazing and can take a serious amount abuse. But if we are adapting then a complete reversal to a Paleolithic diet would be a retrograde step.  There were undoubtedly sound reasons why we adapted agriculture to feed us.  I would like to examine some of the whys in a future blog.

But for now, I just wonder whether we really need a strict all or nothing approach?  I can accept that we ate way more protein and fat, and way less refined carbohydrate than our current dietary pyramid recommends. But being the ultimate omnivore we would have been eating some forms of seeds and starchy carbohydrates when we could get them. Predominately we ate meat, also when we could get it.  We couldn't store it, so we had to eat it a lot, and fast if we didn't want to get sick.  Similarly, if we came across fruit, we ate the whole lot.  We couldn't store stuff and when fruit is in season and is ripe you either take advantage of it and eat it all or miss out on its bounty.  This is where I suspect our bodies adapted to not recognise fructose in our bodies.  The fruit was so rare yet so important that when we saw it we needed to eat it.  The pay off was a sweet treat brimming with essential vitamins and minerals. We couldn't afford to be conservative and have our bodies worry about silly things like saiety. We needed to bypass the regular systems and make sure that we loaded up on this good stuff, and yes to the point of storing some of it as fat if need be. Now we have the situation where sugar is abundant and our bodies are still operating the same way by hiding the fructose component from our saiety registers.

The reason children love sweets so much?  It was even more important for them than adults to load up on the fruits and store fat as they were growing. While the harvest of wild fruits was abundant they needed to fill their bodily stores because being smaller with a greater surface area they were more prone to the cold of winter and they needed to ensure that they grew into adulthood in order to reproduce and keep the species going. So maybe that's why evolution hasn't weeded out the sugaraholics yet, maybe they are the ones that have ensured our survival and got us to where we are now.