User dana - PaleoHacks.com

Answer by Dana for Is synthetic vitamin d problem-free?

2011-04-17T07:12:11Z

Cholecalciferol IS natural vitamin D. Specifically, vitamin D3. It's what your skin makes from cholesterol when exposed to the sun, and then the cholecalciferol goes to your liver and is converted to calcidiol and later into calcitriol. D2 is the one you pretty much have no use for, since it's the fungal form and your body would have to convert it and frankly, from everything I've read, our track record for converting fat-soluble vitamin precursors from plants or fungus is pretty poor.

If you look at Weston Price's work you find that even indigenous people who did not live in the Arctic tended to procure sea foods wherever they could, and some of those are pretty good sources of D3. Salmon is the best; shrimp also contains some and there are a few other sources, at least in terms of what we would recognize as food and want to eat. There is no guarantee that we'll make the vitamin in sunlight, especially if coming off a poor diet (Green Pastures tells me you only make enough vitamin D if you have enough saturated fat in your cell membranes--that pretty much rules out most SAD eaters) or if you live too far north (or too far south in the Southern Hemisphere). So having the vitamin D-containing foods is a smart backup in case sun exposure fails you. Nature may abhor a vacuum but it loves redundancy.

If you really can't do the vitamin D foods thing because you're trying to avoid PUFA as much as possible, NOW Foods makes a D3 supplement in an olive oil capsule. Yeah, I was surprised too. Most vitamin sellers use soybean oil in their oil capsules. You don't have the inflammatory issues with monounsaturated oil that you have with PUFA and it is a lot more stable (takes longer to go rancid).

I would get sun anyway, whether or not you're making D. It's good for keeping your circadian rhythm working correctly (as Kaz pointed out with all those big words), and if you stay out of the sun too much, all it takes is one day at a summer festival to leave you feeling like crap on into the evening. Speaking from experience... I have a bad habit of staying indoors too much and then I go to some festival in town and feel poisoned by the end of the day, and I'm not even sunburned. It's something you have to build up a tolerance to if you're a homebody like me--but it's really good for you, so it's worth the effort. And the nice thing about your skin in relationship to the sun is it will tell you when it's had enough. The same UVB rays that help you make vitamin D are also the rays that give you a sunburn when you have been out too long.

Oh and yes, definitely make sure you get A and K in your diet as well, or at least supplement them some way. Retinol is the usual preformed vitamin A I see; you want it in a 10 to 1 ratio or better to vitamin D (9:1, 8:1, etc.). A keeps D honest in terms of what it does with calcium and D is protective against A toxicity.

With K you want vitamin K2, not K1 (menaquinone, not phylloquinone), and you want analog mk-4, not mk-7. mk-4 is found in animal foods; mk-7 is found in natto. As I understand it the mk-4 form can cross the placenta in a pregnant woman while mk-7 can't, and to me that speaks volumes about which version is important in adults as well. K2 is awesome. Along with the usual stuff people blather about blood clotting, it's also instrumental in the production of osteocalcin, which not only strengthens bone and dentin (which is why some people on WAPF protocol halt cavity production in their teeth) but also signals your fat cells to release adiponectin. And that is a nifty chemical that increases your insulin sensitivity. :) I don't know what the recommended ratio is of A and D to K, not sure whether anyone's even worked that out, but you could probably Google it. I should have been in bed hours ago. >_<

Answer by Dana for How many calories should I aim for?

2011-03-23T16:16:58Z

My experience, really simplified: I could eat at 1500-1800 calories a day, eat mostly carbs and yep, I'd gain weight. I could eat up to 2500-2900 calories of fat, meat, and vegetables, though, and lose weight. Not my exact experience because I don't always track, but based on when I have tracked, it goes something like that.

And no, it doesn't violate any laws of thermodynamics. Number one, I'm not a closed system. Number two, I'm not a bomb calorimeter.

Number three, fat loss (not just weight loss) is hormonally driven. Insulin's a hormone. If you keep it elevated all the time, you won't lose much fat. If you eat in a way that allows your insulin levels to fluctuate in a healthy way, you do lose fat.

sherpamelissa's got a good point. Try changing one thing at a time and see how it plays out in your body. Self-experimentation can be fun and it'll probably shock your body a lot less.

But I think you'll find that with carbs dropped far enough and fat going high enough, you'll be able to attain satiety and the pounds will still drop off. The really fun part will be when you realize you can exercise for fun and don't have to be on the treadmill 5 hours a day--and the weight's still coming off.

Answer by Dana for Is Paleo for me?

2011-03-22T21:12:43Z

No, you're absolutely right: if you have to exercise 2-3 hours a day just to lose weight, you're not on a good dietary regime. I've heard it said that food is 80 percent of weight loss--not so much how much you eat as what you eat. That's probably true. Because there have been times that I was overweight and doing one hell of a lot of walking (and almost starving, on top of that, not voluntarily either) that I did lose weight, but did not get down to a normal BMI. I was like... are you kidding me? I don't think that "calories in, calories out" thing works the way everybody says it does. They're missing something in the calculation.

I highly, highly recommend you go read the blog Mark's Daily Apple. His advice might just be right up your alley. I have his original book, The Primal Blueprint, and it is awesome.

And yes... yes, you can eat a higher amount of fat and feel like you are being healthy. What you think about something is entirely up to you. It is up to YOU to decide whether to make changes in the name of improving your health. It's not "can't," it's "won't." If it helps, try playing around with your fat intake for a few months--make it 30 percent of calories one month, 50 percent the next month, 60 the next month and see how you feel. I know the experts like to scoff at "anecdotal evidence" (also known as "n=1"), but in the end it's how YOU feel that matters. Just like a person allergic to shellfish is never going to be able to get vitamin D from shrimp, a person who improves their health on 60 percent fat is not going to find the idea that fat causes disease to be terribly relevant to their own life.

I'm the last person who will argue that different people have entirely different dietary requirements. Arboreal theory says primates evolved from tree-canopy-dwelling mammals--what are the foods available high in a tree? Leaves, fruit, and bugs. If someone can't thrive on leaves, fruit, and meat (the modern equivalent of bugs--and bugs are fatty, by the way), something's broken in their system, period. But that doesn't mean people's various health issues don't come into play. So do what works for you. "What works" meaning "don't have to work yourself to death to lose fat" and "lab numbers look awesome" and "sleeping well, thinking well, and functioning well." That kind of thing.

P.S. 1500 calories a day is semi-starvation. If you're going to eat that little calorie you need to be eating more fat, and preferably of animal origin. You can't get enough nutrition from grains to get your energy that way at 1500 calories. Not gonna happen. And at least with the fat intake you won't be as hungry.

Answer by Dana for Wisdom teeth and appendix versus Paleo diet

2011-03-22T00:09:00Z

The term "vestigal" means, in practice, "We have no idea what this does, so we have decided it's not important, since clearly we know more about the human body than Nature does."

Look into Weston Price's work. The Paleo movement is already aware that human beings have shrunk in stature and cranial capacity (brain size) since the advent of agriculture. Stands to reason that populations in which wisdom teeth are "vestigal" are populations which have been damaged by that agriculture.

I mean, probably, in a pinch, you could live without about half your teeth. Does that make half your teeth vestigal?

Answer by Dana for Competing and losing last few pounds on paleo!

2011-03-21T20:40:20Z

No idea what to tell you with not knowing what you're competing in (it sounds like bodybuilding but I have no way of knowing for sure), what your height is, what your bodyfat goal is and how you define "good fats."

I'm hesitant to tell a woman she needs to lose fat just because she has it on hips, ass, and thighs. You're supposed to have fat there. Especially if you're intending to have kids at some point. And you're in your mid-20s, as well, and you're not going to be scrawny like you might have been as a teenager (as so many of us were).

Answer by Dana for Are there cancer cells not requiring glucose or fructose for proliferation?

2011-03-21T14:58:44Z

Researchers have noticed a connection between cancer and sugar for a while but it is not completely understood, and it depends on the type of cancer cell. It was once believed glucose was the main feeder of cancer but researchers are discovering fructose also works as a cancer feeder. This does NOT let glucose off the hook, however; it still feeds cancer! And there are good reasons not to eat glucose-forming foods to excess and cancer is only one of those reasons.

Otto Warburg's idea that sugar causes cancer is in dispute (see also here and the related talk page) but no one's denying there's a connection between sugar and cancer, even if the former doesn't cause the latter.

A lot of attention is given to the idea of genetic mutations being involved in cancer. This is a nice little mythology for people wanting to make money from biotech. I suppose there's some validity, maybe, but for example, the second link I gave you cites the "breast cancer genes" as "proof" of genetic mutation being the cause of cancer. How many women with breast cancer actually have those "breast cancer genes"? Very few. Most of them aren't carriers. I think that if genetic mutation is related to cancer, it doesn't necessarily have to exist in the original DNA code. We know radiation contributes to cancer, so that's mutation after the fact, so to speak, not mutation in the original genes.

Well, the fact is we're exposed to mutagens every day. They even exist in the natural world. You may have heard that AIDS patients and other immunocompromised people are more susceptible to cancer. That's because their immune systems are their front line of defense against developing a malignancy. Same for us. On a world that receives daily radiation and also contains radioactive minerals, we need some way to keep rogue cells in check.

I'd say the key to reducing risk is twofold: one, keep your immune system healthy; two, cut way down on sugar sources. Fructose is a gimme, pretty easy to avoid if you're not eating junk food, but if you're intaking glucose-forming foods over and above your energy requirements, that's something to look at critically as well. Possibly it won't matter as much in the absence of fructose. But if you're paranoid, cutting back on glucose production and consumption will at least let you feel like you have some control over possibilities.

Answer by Dana for What are the effects/implications of insulin release when there is no sugar in the blood?

2011-03-20T23:11:12Z

You can't exist without any sugar in the blood. You will always have some sugar in your system because some of your tissues have no mitochondria in the cells, or not enough to get by on fatty acid metabolism, so they need glucose instead. A few examples I can think of off the top of my head are mature red blood cells (no nuclei), certain types of nerve cells and certain cells in the testes, for men.

Now before you go "oh well then sugar must be necessary!", yes, in very small amounts. I believe Dr. Eades said that a healthy level of fasting glucose is equivalent to about a teaspoon of sugar for your entire body. And happily, you don't have to eat carbohydrate of any sort to produce it. Your body can make it from protein or glycerol. The definition of "essential nutrient" is "a nutrient your body cannot make but that you need to live." This is why zero-carb Paleo eaters aren't dropping dead in droves.

(Carb foods have their place, most notably for micronutrient intake, but you can live without them if you eat organ meats.)

Now then, what you're asking is about excess glucose. Your body can tolerate its own fasting level without clearing it out; the insulin release is for dealing with any glucose above that amount. But let's say you're not eating any glucose-producing foods.

Insulin is still necessary for dealing with amino acids, however. Any time you eat protein, your insulin will be elevated 'cause you've got to put those amino acids into your muscles. (Not being able to do this is why type 1 diabetics eventually die without insulin injections--diet helps the sugar problem, but they still waste away.) So any time you eat protein, your insulin will still be elevated in response. Actually it elevates in response to smelling food, too.

So it's normal for your body to deal with varying levels of insulin in the blood. That's OK, as long as insulin is not constantly elevated. What messes people up who have hyperinsulinism is that it's nearly always elevated, with deleterious effects on blood vessels and tumor growth and hormone imbalance and the like.

You don't want to inject the stuff though, not if your pancreas is already working properly. Best to let your body produce it as needed. What would happen if you injected it without a clear need is your blood sugar would drop to a dangerously low level, potentially killing you.

Insulin resistance in the absence of sugar may or may not be a problem. It depends on which tissues are insulin-resistant. As long as your muscles can still get their aminos and the cells that need glucose can still get glucose, you should be OK. Some degree of resistance is to be expected in certain medical situations (i.e., pregnancy causes a certain level of insulin resistance, which is why pregnant women are tested for gestational diabetes). If you're not dumping in a bunch of sugar on top of insulin resistance, you should be OK. What kills type 2 diabetics is the excess sugar, far more than the insulin resistance. It's possible to be type 2 but have normal blood sugar if you're eating sensibly (i.e., low-carbing, not following ADA advice!).

Answer by Dana for If dietary and serum cholesterol aren't always related, could the same thing be said about linoleic acid?

2011-03-20T22:58:01Z

Mainstream advice is also to eat a very lowfat diet and to eat lots of carbs. You are welcome to keep your carbs at 300g a day and your fats at less than 10% (and most of that PUFA instead of SFA) if you'd like.

All I can offer you is anecdotal evidence, short of sitting here raiding Science Daily articles and searching all over Google like you could be doing instead. (sorry for the snark) But I've done the lots and lots of carbs a day thing, and while I probably didn't get my fats under 10 percent (I don't think I have ever consciously attempted to follow a lowfat diet), I can say with some authority that most of my FAs were PUFAs and hydrogenated fats because I ate margarine and a lot of industrial prepackaged foods.

Bottom line: I felt like crap. And probably did some damage I can never, ever repair.

Self-experiment. You sound reluctant to take people's word for it, so feel free to experiment and find out for yourself. At the end of the day, basing one's dietary practices on research studies is playing the odds. There's no need to do that. What's important is how a dietary regime makes YOU feel and how it makes your labs turn out.

I'm going to go right ahead and predict that what makes you feel good is not terribly far off from what makes most human beings feel good--as in genuinely healthy, not high on fat deprivation or sugar overdose--but the only way you will find out is to try.

Answer by Dana for Dairy and cancer risk

2011-03-20T01:41:15Z

Right, because Maasai who eat their traditional diet are dropping dead from cancer.

Saying that we should avoid foods discovered or developed during the Neolithic is a shorthand for healthful eating, nothing more. If you were to sit down and pick apart every food we developed during the Neolithic you'd find that some of them (admittedly not all) have been demonstrated to be healthful. By "healthful" I mean they provide for some macronutrient or micronutrient that we need, without also providing antinutrients that wreck our health.

So when Cordain can show that milk contains actual antinutrients, I'll be convinced no one should use it as a food.

Just smelling food provokes an insulin response. Shall we all hold our noses in the immediate vicinity of food now? Kind of hard to prepare food that way, much less eat it.

Getting back to the Neolithic thing: again, it is a shorthand, for people who don't have the time or inclination to investigate every possible food hazard. Just like telling people "eat low-fat" lets us avoid trans fats and telling us "eat low-carb" lets us avoid excessive fructose--but both those pieces of advice fail to account for the healthfulness of certain foods. Low-fatters miss out on saturated fats; low-carbers oftentimes don't adopt organ meats as a food and therefore run the risk of micronutrient deficiency. What do you suppose modern "Paleo" eaters might be missing? Sometimes rather a lot, depending on their individual likes, dislikes, daily habits, etc. Someone who has no time to make bone broth, like ever, is going to be missing important minerals because while there are minerals present in plant foods they're not always the most bioavailable.

It's a trade-off.

I think insulin's only important in terms of cancer development (1) if you are also eating a lot of digestible carb for sugar to feed a cancer and (2) if your immune system is messed up enough that it's not adequately policing cancer cells--which, incidentally, your body makes all the time, but usually it kills them off before they become a threat. Basically, if you're healthy (at least the way most of us here would define it), you probably don't have anything to worry about. I say "probably" because environmental factors may play a role, and of course past damage may play a role, the more unhealthy you were when you came to the Paleo lifestyle in the first place.

I'm not saying people have to eat dairy, but I think it is getting an unfair rap, hence my snarky tone earlier here. If you just can't take the casein then don't eat it, or be very careful about using clarified butter only. (Can't guarantee that cream doesn't have any.) The lactose question is easily solved with fermentation or skimming or aging (depending on what the dairy food happens to be). If you hate the stuff then find other ways to get the minerals--and the fats; one of the problems with modern meat, quite aside from omega-3/omega-6 ratios, is we just plain eat it too young. We have somehow gotten it into our heads that young animals are gastronomically superior to older ones. That's fine in a pastoral culture to keep the herd a manageable size, but pastoral isn't quite Paleo--and every mammal that hunts grazing animals goes for the slower and the fatter, including us before we discovered animal husbandry. The younger, the leaner. (This is why Big Beef adopted the practice of grain-finishing, ultimately: it mimics the process of aging in the animal, including the laying on of muscle marbling, aka fat.) Dairy works to replace some of the dietary fat we lost when we didn't have to limit ourselves to the old fogies of the herd, and you don't have to import it from a Pacific island (i.e., coconut oil), either. Which, I like coconut oil, I'm just saying.

So... up to you really.

P.S., Before someone argues that maybe the Maasai were dropping dead from cancer and we just didn't know, cancer was a known disease well before the advent of the biopsy. This is why we know President Grant died of throat cancer. Doctors in Africa have also long known when someone had cancer that had advanced far enough, even if they didn't have microscopes; there are certain classic symptoms they looked for. And sometimes you just couldn't avoid knowing. Gary Taubes recounts one doctor who observed an African woman dying of advanced breast cancer, to the point it had eaten through her ribcage and he could see her heart beating through her skin. So if the Maasai were dropping dead of cancer on their traditional diet it should have been pretty obvious.

Answer by Dana for Graveyard shift

2011-03-20T00:37:13Z

You're a member of a diurnal species. I wouldn't work graveyard shift unless your job's riding on it. Yeah, we have lots of nifty inventions now that help mitigate some of it for a little while but tell me, is there any way you can sleep in complete darkness? That's important too. There will never be a time that you are able to make melatonin because you will be under bright lights at night and then sleeping in light during the day.

Now this is coming from a former graveyard shift worker. Been there. My health started going wonky during my swing shift phase of life, and I wasn't even fat yet.

It also seriously messes up your social life. I don't know how they do it, I've not had much luck with this, but it's going to seem like most of your friends hit the jackpot with daytime jobs. They'll have get-togethers and you'll be at work.

If all your friends work nights it might not be such a big deal but it's not like start and end times for work shifts are standardized across all industries and employers. Swing-shift work typically does not have regular weekends either so that'll be an added complication.

So, yeah. Not many reasons to do it except out of desperation.

Answer by Dana for Former Vegetarians/Ethical meat-abstainers gone paleo?

2011-03-19T16:06:13Z

The vast majority of food plants (as opposed to herbs, which are also edible but eaten in small quantities) require full sun for cultivation. It follows that you must therefore clear land in order to grow them. This is particularly true for grains and legumes.

If you depend on plants for your protein then that means you must always clear land to obtain your protein. You also need to find arable land on which to grow that protein. With a population of six billion and only so much arable land, that becomes problematic. This quite aside from the detrimental health effects of eating so much grain and legume, with so many people forgetting the traditional methods of preparing such foods.

Animals do not require cleared land. Cattle can graze under light tree cover, pigs can forage under slightly heavier tree cover, and chickens don't care where you put them as long as there is something to eat. Where humans have found it advantageous to raise animals on cleared land it is so they can look out for predators and keep an eye on the herd or flock, not because the animals require full sun.

Animals also do not require arable land. The land can be fertile enough for grass or forest but does not have to be suited to crops. Therefore animals can be raised in a wider variety of areas than crops are.

This has implications for both deforestation and, as an extension, climate change. In the sense that pumping oil out of the ground for fuel adds carbon to the carbon cycle, it's true enough that petroleum has the potential to contribute to climate change. But removing forest also contributes to climate change because (1) you have fewer trees removing carbon from the air and sequestering it, and (2) fewer trees means higher local temperature. Witness what has occurred in Iraq. Did you know Iraq was once covered by cedar forest, so thick in some areas that sunlight never touched the ground? True story. It was all wiped out for cities and farms. I would imagine, given their latitude, that they had something more like a temperate climate before that happened. If you have ever lived in a house that was partly shaded by trees and partly not, you've noticed this effect too. Or if you've lived in a city and observed that it was hotter in the city than it was in the surrounding countryside.

To add to the petroleum problem, we've gone from using animal labor and biological inputs (what folks call "organic" now--I like the French biologique better, it's more accurate) to using petroleum fuel and petroleum/natural gas inputs. That's not sustainable, it adds to the carbon in the atmosphere and it sucks fertility right out of the ground. People think making plants healthy is all about the NPK. Not so. Soil comes from rotten biological waste as well as from minerals and if you leave part of that out you wind up with less nutritious produce. And refusing to use animals in agriculture also means you have to import exotic plant bits even if you are using "organic methods"--which again participates in the petroleum economy. The more we depend on the latter, the more drilling accidents we're going to see and the more excuses we will make to ourselves for not transitioning away from it as a fuel. You could get everybody to stop driving gasoline cars tomorrow and they'd still panic at the thought of raising food without Big Oil. Until we transition away from that and get back to using animals again, it's going to continue to be an issue. (We'd solve the Big Ag problem too. You can't run a huge industrial farm by plowing with oxen--but you sure can run a smallholding that way.)

And here's the thing about using animals in farming. It's dangerous to have more than one breeding male in a herd. It's annoying (and dangerous to the birds) to have more than one rooster in a flock. Plus, even with one male per animal type, farm animals have babies. What do you do with the surplus? They live for several years and they breed at least once a year (multiple times for chickens); you'll run out of space. You only have so many neighbors to accept your surplus. Then what?

Of course the most sustainable thing to do would be to let the forests come back, and the forest animals with them, and just go hunting. But if we insist on maintaining some sort of sedentary lifestyle, meaning we settle rather than living as nomads, then some degree of farming or ranching will be necessary.

And the best farms are more or less semi-closed ecosystems, with plants and animals sustaining one another and providing meals for you, too.

Answer by Dana for Would you consider a plant-based low carb diet?

2011-03-19T01:03:43Z

No, I wouldn't. That's a one-way ticket to bone loss. Most plant proteins have low or no glutamine and I'd wind up buffering from my calcium stores.

The number one cause of death is birth. If you didn't wanna die you shouldn't have showed up. :P The key is how you spend your life. Personally I'd rather spend mine with as little disability as I can manage. I can't control everything, but of what I can control... you know what I mean?

Answer by Dana for Do you sleep on a minimalist bed?

2011-03-19T00:02:41Z

Ever since I joined the Army in 1992 (got out a few years later though), for a long time I was able to sleep pretty much anywhere. But for some reason my body will not tolerate it as well now. I cannot sleep on the floor or on a futon mattress without my back killing me after a few days of such abuse. I hope this changes someday, because it's not an advantage to only be able to sleep comfortably on something soft, even if I do prefer it.

Answer by Dana for How can I minimize oxalate intake?

2011-03-18T20:08:54Z

I was going to say, "Oh, just cook your vegetables," but thank goodness for Google--I checked first. World's Healthiest Foods is biased in favor of a high-plants diet (which is fine if it works for you, but they think everybody should eat one), but they have a pretty interesting article about oxalate-containing foods.

Here is another link about oxlate foods from the same site.

The Body Ecology people seem to think that you CAN reduce oxalates while boiling, although they offer lower-oxalate alternatives to high-oxalate foods.

Apparently you can have your urine tested for oxalate levels, too. If I were you I'd ask my urologist about that so you can go ahead and rule it out; if you like those types of vegetables, it doesn't make sense to drop them if they are not hurting you.

If you do have high oxlate levels in your urine, you should still be able to source fruits and vegetables that are not so high in them. You can "do Paleo" without poisoning yourself--the world has an amazing variety of plant and animal foods and there is something for everyone. I cannot stress this enough: there is no "the" Paleo diet, only a set of Paleo principles. If you adhere to the principles, you can find foods that fit them that are also very good for you.

Answer by Dana for In what circumstance does CW seem right to you?

2011-03-18T01:16:55Z

Calories count for me when they are carb calories. But it is impossible for me to say how much calories count when they are fat (in the absence of excess carb) or protein, because those macronutrients also provide for structural and biochemical needs. While calorie theorists talk about BMR and take that into account, it covers energy needs only. There is no BMR equivalent for lean tissue maintenance, hormone production, etc., yet those things come from food.

Basically, we're not bomb calorimeters. Food is not just fuel, it's also spare parts.

I throw the term "conventional wisdom" around but I don't like it much; I use it because other people understand what I'm talking about. It's a sort of rhetorical shorthand. But wisdom is not a majority vote. It comes only from experience. When you have a bunch of people sitting around guessing about something without fully testing their ideas, that's not wisdom, it's B.S.ing.

(edit) To provide another angle to what someone else said here: Don't just do something because an ancestor might have done it. Do things that an ancestral group did that allowed the group to exist a long time in relatively good health (not counting infectious disease or accidents--and you can even learn from those experiences). If all your ancestors worked themselves to the bone as serfs in the fields of a feudal lord and none of them lived past thirty, well, you know you don't want to emulate that. But if the people in your ancestral group who survived infant mortality, infections, and accidents lived to be sixty or better, you are probably on the right track, assuming you live in the same area they did.

Context is everything, it would seem.

Answer by Dana for Will FUTURE GENERATIONS behold the healthiest people ever?

2011-03-17T22:33:50Z

I think that if we had enough people eating Paleo their whole lives (or, if they got dairy, had it the traditional way rather than industrial), we'd start seeing more and more NORMAL people--normal for the way the DNA codes, anyway, rather than majority-normal. Right now there are a lot of deformed and metabolically-deranged people in the modern world, and some of them you wouldn't even guess have those problems because the skeletal structure they have has become so common, even though it's not optimal.

I don't care if we're super. Irrelevant. I'm not out to see superheroes taking over the world. I would just like to see my species achieve its genetic potential. And I think some of us have not done that in a very long time. Just since the agricultural revolution we have lost height and brain capacity, to say nothing of everything else that's gone wrong.

Answer by Dana for LCTs and MCTs: best ratio

2011-03-17T17:09:44Z

"Would this behoove the cerebrally-concious person to stick to MCTs exclusively?"

My understanding is that if you like your gallbladder, you don't want to stick with too-easily-assimilated fats all the time. What I've read on it in mainstream sites is that it releases bile no matter what the fat is but I would imagine it's working a bit harder with longer fatty acid chains that have to be broken down. Don't quote me on that, I may be wrong, but just in case, don't give up on the LCFAs yet. I did see a piece on gallbladders indicating that they have found insulin-producing cells in the gallbladder--not enough to stave off type 1, obviously, but still more useful than we had traditionally held gallbladders to be. Anything you can do to keep yours happy would be a good thing. Gallstones form from too little activity. If they are more active with LCFAs then going exclusively MCT would slow them down.

This article explains more about the different fatty acids and where we get them from.

I have not heard any recommendations about ratio. I can say that I haven't heard anything about the brain using fatty acids for fuel. I have heard that fats are important in maintenance of the nervous system but that's a structural issue, not an energy issue.

If it were me I'd just eat whatever saturated fat I felt like eating. If you feel short on energy then hit the MCTs. But try to get the LCFAs at least once a day.

Answer by Dana for Baking Soda and alkalinity

2011-03-17T16:56:50Z

You already have a couple devices that reduce acidity in the blood. Also known as kidneys. As long as you get enough glutamine in your diet to go along with the protein you eat, you are good to go, no need to worry about your calcium stores. (If you run short on glutamine, which is really hard to do when you're healthy because you make some of your own conditionally, you have your calcium stores as a backup. Also known as bones.) Happily, meat comes with its own glutamine.

Oh my goodness. I was just going to pass on what they taught me in the Army, that if you breathe properly during exercise you get less lactic acid buildup. What do you know, that's not true! Also, it's a fuel, not a waste product! Read this. It's recent, from about five years ago. I should have known. This was another issue where the experts guessed instead of conducting studies. Shame, shame... So I'm going to guess, based on that information, that the better-trained you get, the more efficiently your muscles use the lactic acid, the better you'll feel after a workout.

I love this site. I learn new stuff all the time. :)

Answer by Dana for Are you seen by your social and familial circles as a REBEL or a SQUARE for your paleo ways?

2011-03-17T02:08:44Z

I'm not full-on paleo, more in a process of dietary evolution, as it were. And I think I would only get to the point of something like lacto-paleo. (Unless I turn out to have a milk protein allergy or just cannot lose all my excess weight with it in my diet, I am NOT giving up dairy.) But my family's not one that I can really talk with intelligently about this. There are all sorts of intelligence levels in the bunch but there's more than one way to be smart, you know? A while back I had to explain to my father, the former U.S. Navy senior chief petty officer, what kidneys do. Going into diet minutiae would go right over his head.

A shame, too. He could stand to benefit from it. Several of them could.

Answer by Dana for Caffeine and its relationship to Cholesterol

2011-03-16T16:34:15Z

I'm not worried about cholesterol. I like the idea of having higher HDL and fewer VLDL but aside from that I think it's a non-issue.

Any time you smell food you get an insulin release. You can see what the logical extension of that is. The interesting bit about insulin release as pertains to health is when you're eating so much carbohydrate that it's left constantly elevated. Ups and downs are normal and the body adapts to them.

Caffeine might be more important for its effect on the adrenals than on either of those.

Answer by Dana for Is there a paleo lifestyle?

2011-03-16T16:29:44Z

It does seem odd to me that people will go far enough to decide to adopt a diet that they hold to be more healthful because they "evolved" on a diet like that, but they won't look at other aspects of their lifestyle that might be running counter to their body's evolutionary expectations (not a great way of putting it but you know what I mean, I hope).

There is a lot of mythology surrounding the alleged meaning of human existence. For instance, most people who extol survival of the fittest have no idea what that actually means--they think it means they get to beat up weak people, or that Nature will beat up weak people, or that the purpose of human evolution is to produce perfect humans, when of course none of that is true. (Short answer: There is no known purpose to human evolution, or any other kind either.)

This all plays out in interesting ways, socially speaking.

One thing to keep in mind about the "Neolithic" is that it was the age of domestication, including domestication of humans. A lot of what seems to be going wrong with humanity today stems from that domestication. Part of the process of domestication is locking up the food and not letting people obtain their own for themselves. The ability to obtain one's own food is part of what distinguishes adult animals from immature, and neotony (or "being childlike") is a hallmark of domestication. Next time you hear a Paleo adherent extolling the virtues of surplus private property on "libertarian" grounds, think about that. (You can't have "liberty" if someone else owns all the food.)

I hesitate to advocate a prescriptive formula for human living. I can't control anyone else's life. But if you're interested in reading other people's perspectives on human domestication and our responses to it, you could do some research on the human rewilding movement. Urban Scout is an interesting blogger in this genre. Jason Godesky's Thirty Theses are a more academic look but very thorough. (I don't think he's completely happy with them, but as an introduction to the rewilding school of thought, they are very useful.) Daniel Quinn is almost more of a poet, but again, his work will knock your brain sideways. That'll get your feet wet. And there's lots more out there.

Also be aware of word games. A lot of the words used to discuss this issue are culturally loaded. Wild vs. domesticated, civilized vs. not, someone is going to take offense sooner or later at the language you try to use. It's an occupational hazard of thinking outside the box (or the cage), and you might as well get used to the idea now.

Have fun. I sure am.

Answer by Dana for Which eggs would you buy?

2011-03-16T16:08:41Z

I like the lack of soy in the second seller's feed but I like the chickens being able to run around outside even better. It's not that easy to find soy-free feed. If you've got a major soy sensitivity or thyroid problems I'd go for seller number two but if neither of those situations apply to you, I'd double-check the first seller's claim about "free range" and if it checks out, go with her instead.

Answer by Dana for So does any of this info tell me anything about the state of my arteries?

2011-03-16T13:33:55Z

The calcium score is THE best way to tell you what your arteries are doing. Your doctor can tell you whether you're considered a candidate for it. Your labs are good now but I don't know what you were doing before or what they were like then--in that case we'd be looking at past risk, not current, I guess. I have no idea how quickly arteries heal from past abuse.

Inflammation being important in heart disease (now they're saying statins work because they reduce inflammation!), you might try testing your C-reactive protein (CRP) if you can't swing the calcium score. It's not a specific test for your arteries but if you've got inflammation going on, it affects them too, and reducing inflammation is important. I've heard of people having heart disease with a wide range of artery conditions--a few plaques, a lot of plaques, some hardening, lots of hardening, etc. The inflammation might actually be more important than that.

Answer by Dana for Craving carbs since leaning out

2011-03-16T03:08:08Z

Try upping your saturated fat first. People who cook ground beef typically drain it (unless you don't) and I'm seeing either MUFA/PUFA there (in the bacon, primarily) or relatively little fat otherwise. Egg has some saturated, and you do fry it in coconut oil but only some of that's going to stick.

Then make sure your aminos are better balanced. Chris Masterjohn ran a great piece about that in his blog today. Gelatin is your friend. Bone broth too. And liver.

(No, gelatin does not contain MSG, not unless some idiotic food company adds it, but that'll be in the ingredients list. Glutamic acid is NOT MSG.)

If you're craving rice specifically I wonder if your body "knows" it's going to be needing more B vitamins since your main animal protein is coming from muscle and egg.

If those two things don't straighten you out then see if you can re-intro something like sweet potato without gaining fat again. Some people just function better with carb, whether that's from their enzyme production or ethnic history or what. (I don't think anyone's really sure.) If you get a lot of exercise, what the hey, but introduce it slowly, don't overwhelm yourself. Your body has to adjust even if it does function better on carbs.

Answer by Dana for Do we need liver, bones, or greens?

2011-03-16T01:34:17Z

The reasoning appears sound to me. This would be why ancestral foodways always include at least a few of the organs from the animals consumed in those foodways. Probably no culture ate every single bit of the animal, but they all seemed to have their favorite gooshy bits. Heart and liver seem to have been widely favored. Kidneys with the adrenals too. (Where you get vitamin C if there isn't a lot of fruit available. And with much less sugar to compete with C receptors on cells.)

If you're not consuming dairy, plants aren't the best source of bone minerals--bone broth is necessary for those.

People coming off the SAD are already oftentimes short on choline, and apparently lab animals that are short on choline are more likely to have fatty liver, which also plagues SAD eaters. It'd be a shame if someone went Paleo to cure their fatty liver only to find they are not making much progress.

And, well, this answers my question as to whether I should rely on eggs for my choline intake--looks like that is not advisable. Aw, do I have to eat liver? I know it's nutritious and I recommend it to anyone who likes it. Guess I had best learn to like it as well.

Bone broth I have no trouble with. Yum.

I'm a bit nonplussed at his dismissive attitude about people finding wheat evil. He himself reported that there are people in the Middle East turning up with celiac disease now--surely he doesn't believe that comes from the Celiac Fairy. Am I going to be considered crazy if I find pokeberry to be evil too, in terms of potential foods? It's just faster, that's all.

Also getting a bit tired of people talking about THE Paleo diet. Which one? I'm sure there are Paleo adherents (as we understand it in the modern context, I guess) drinking bone broth and eating liver. We just need to get the word out.

Answer by Dana for Are modern dairy products really that healthy?

2011-03-15T00:26:45Z

It depends on the modern dairy. If I'm not mistaken, Organic Valley has a pastured butter that they stock up on in the spring and summer months and then sort of parcel it out year-round, but it's not produced year-round, just in the spring and summer.

This just points up the necessity of getting to know your local animal-food producers and finding out what their practices are. With modern food preservation techniques it is not unreasonable to be able to procure certain foods year-round, you just have to be careful.

(edited for brand name--whoops I screwed that up >_<)

Answer by Dana for How can some people not be able to eat red meat?

2011-03-13T23:01:07Z

Yeah, from what I know, here are at least some major possibilities:

Beef allergy, as someone already mentioned. This is actually one of the better-known food allergies. You wouldn't think so, but there it is.
Not making enough of the enzymes that would break it down. If you've gone years and years without eating red meat, you'll need to re-adjust to eating it. I've heard of the same thing happening with people who've avoided pork all their lives only to try it as adults, and it didn't agree with them at all. Also with vegetarians who've avoided animal protein. Depending on what your reaction is, if it's just your stomach not being happy and not an allergic reaction, you could try starting out with very small amounts and eating it along with an enzyme supplement or a fermented food. Certain marinades would also be helpful--the acidic ones break the meat down somewhat. If you like pineapple, I don't know how the juice would work for a beef marinade flavorwise, but it'll sure get the digestion started. I believe papaya has digestive enzymes in it also (papain, if I'm not mistaken, which is also available in supplemental tablet form) but the juice might be harder to find except maybe in ethnic food aisles or groceries.
And, something I don't see talked about a lot but Dr. Michael Eades mentions it in his book Protein Power: arachidonic acid. Some people are really sensitive to AA for whatever reason--fatty acids out of balance, maybe, or genetic variation--and eating beef causes them problems. If you react to other foods high in AA, this may be your problem with beef. It's worth digging around on Google to see if anybody's got any ideas on how to counteract this if you really want to be able to eat red meat again.

But here's the thing? You don't have to eat red meat to be Paleo. You can eat poultry or fish and do perfectly fine. You are just going to have to find other sources for your saturated fat intake, that's all. The simple fact is that in their indigenous state, uncontacted by European explorers or whatever, there have been many, many cultures worldwide that have never had contact with cows. They were still Paleo. So just think in terms of "would this have been available to relatively primitive people? Would they have recognized it as food?" and you should be OK. You probably want to also make sure you're getting your nutritional needs met, though, since we modern folks don't have intact food traditions anymore that help us eat healthy. But I'd say the same thing to someone who had beef three times a day.

Answer by Dana for Tomato sauce or gravy? Is this still paleo? (minus the pasta, of course)

2011-03-13T22:51:31Z

If you wanted to get really strictly into the re-enactment thing (and I don't stress about whether people do, but it's some people's thing and not others'), almost no modern fruit or veggie is something that our paleolithic ancestors would have recognized. But the early tomatoes were bred by Paleo people in South America, or at least close-to-Paleo. And, hey, fruit off a vine.

The only real drawbacks are (1) what gilliebean said about nightshade sensitivity and (2) tomatoes make some people's blood sugar spike. This doesn't happen with everybody but it's something to keep in mind if you already have blood sugar issues.

Answer by Dana for Coffee: Need it or Like it?

2011-03-12T22:00:12Z

I still drink coffee because I haven't detoxed off of caffeine. That's a health goal of mine because I'm pretty sure my cortisol is screwed up and my adrenals are probably ticked off at me (going by symptoms), I just haven't gotten there yet. If I get a caffeine withdrawal headache I have a pretty good chance of it cascading into a cluster headache or migraine. The former runs in my dad's family and the latter runs in my mom's so I was doubly screwed. I'm HOPING that enough positive dietary/nutritional changes in my life will do away with most of the headache symptoms, and I've been having good luck so far--when I do get the headaches they are a lot less severe. So we'll see.

The other reason I drink coffee is I used it to break a soda habit, both full-sugar and diet. I will still sometimes drink Splenda-sweetened diet soda or Zevia, but I don't need to drink them, and I used to, psychologically speaking. I decided coffee was better for me nutritionally than either kind of soda. It actually contains some minerals, I was surprised to learn. Probably why researchers can't make up their minds whether it will cure you or kill you.

Tea's OK, but I never seem to make it right. My green tea is especially abysmal. The good-quality stuff also looks like it is more expensive per cup than even organic coffee, although I need to sit down and do the math to figure that out for sure. I also need to drink less coffee to get a decent caffeine shot for the day, and making it is pretty much a no-brainer. My favorite method is cold-brewing, although I never seem to plan far enough ahead to replenish the toddy before I run out of it.

Answer by Dana for Gaining unwanted weight on high fat VLC

2011-03-12T19:25:01Z

No idea what's going on, you haven't provided a menu. Been on any new meds? Changed sleep habits? Anything else different in addition to the diet?

How is 50g carb VLC? Atkins Induction is 20g.

Comment by Dana

2011-04-22T05:55:57Z

What on earth is a "men's diet"? Hope you don't mean red meat, we have enough stereotypes to overcome about that one in certain social circles.

Comment by Dana

2011-04-14T04:10:27Z

I just plain love that new word he invented. It is awesome.

Comment by Dana

2011-03-22T00:11:00Z

Sweets = candy for some non-British too.

Comment by Dana

2011-03-22T00:09:36Z

I think pandas do eat other things in addition to bamboo.

Comment by Dana

2011-03-17T22:29:22Z

It's worth noting that those people also lived in lower-g and were fed sugary crap all their lives. They would have had low bone mass even without the sugary crap but it sure didn't help.

Comment by Dana

2011-03-17T19:01:51Z

At least 10:1 or better (9:1, 8:1, etc.). And that's real vitamin A, not the carotenes. I wouldn't count the carotenes in my A intake at all unless you know for a fact you're converting them. Some people don't.

Comment by Dana

2011-03-16T16:11:42Z

Mind you, the added color is USUALLY from a natural source. Always check the ingredients though.

Comment by Dana

2011-03-16T16:10:20Z

Where'd you get the cream? Read the ingredients. Most heavy cream is sold with gums and other adulterants added. I stopped buying Kroger's cream because the additives were bad enough but then they started adding skim milk to it. I want cream, not half-assed-and-half. I found another company that just sells it straight and I can drink it like milk, it doesn't bother me at all.

Comment by Dana

2011-03-16T16:06:57Z

I doubt that a chicken farmer is going to put shell-less eggs, thin-shelled eggs, too-small eggs or misshapen eggs into a carton for sale. Chickens lay some strange eggs, even when treated right.

Comment by Dana

2011-03-14T18:24:26Z

Even with diabetes, getting carbs from liver or eggs is blunted by the fat also present in liver and eggs. No biggie. Liver and eggs are really important as sources of choline, which helps keep your liver healthy and prevent non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

Comment by Dana

2011-03-12T21:55:11Z

Not just your breath. I'll say no more than that. :/

Comment by Dana

2011-03-11T01:43:27Z

Whoops. I needed to read your whole post too. LOL

Comment by Dana

2011-03-11T01:43:13Z

She likes beef. Just not steak. Something about the muscle meat texture gets to her.

Comment by Dana

2011-03-09T17:48:56Z

So you're dirty, stinky, and you don't groom? Gotcha.

Comment by Dana

2011-03-09T17:47:25Z

As a Cajun woman I see a lot of French-bashing around the Internet--and while, strictly speaking, I am not French at this point, I do have the ancestry. I'm kind of tired of seeing the bashing, could we please not bring it here? It's not even based in reality, anyway. I mean, Americans only owe the country our existence as a nation, and French people outside of Paris aren't any ruder than anyone else.