Paleo Diet and Paleolithic Diet Questions & Answers

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I recently read this article by ray peat, basically saying that muscle meat is bad because it's high in tryptophan and cysteine and low in glycine. He claims that the former amino acids are inflammatory and inhibit activity of the thyroid, in addition to causing other problems. I know organ meats are good, but are muscle meats really that bad? Also, if tryptophan is that bad why do so many people say it helps them sleep? He seems to contradict himself when he says tryptophan is lost in large amounts when under stress, but then he says it also causes the body more stress. If this were the case shouldn't we have a decent amount of it in the diet in order to compensate for the times we're under stress (which for many people nowadays is every day)? What about the studies showing that people who were fed a tryptophan-deficient diet became depressed? Peat seems to be an outside the box thinker but this isn't the first time I've read him writing things that are the opposite of what most people in the paleo community believe. Here's the article I read http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/gelatin.shtml.

flag	asked Nov 11 2011 at 1:25 Chris Antenucci 3,329●6●24

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i think he just empasizes balance, like gelatin to balance the aminos in muscle meat – Mallory Nov 11 2011 at 1:33

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i tend to agree with Mallory, Peat suggests eating the "whole animal" (my words), not just the muscle meat. here's another Peat article on the topic. raypeat.com/articles/aging/… – daz Nov 11 2011 at 3:04

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Also, studies show tryptophan is effective in helping people sleep, so how could it be raising cortisol when cortisol interferes with melatonin production and high cortisol levels at night are known to cause insomnia? I agree that we should have more glycine in our diets, but some of Peat's claims are hard to believe. I can't find any studies saying serotonin increases cortisol, just that it may have a role in regulating the hpa axis. – Chris Antenucci Nov 11 2011 at 4:42

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This is where Peat confuses me. He talks about keeping dietary tryptophan and cysteine low, yet he also recommends drinking lots of milk. By calorie, milk has about the same amount of tryptophan as muscle meat, and nearly double the cysteine. – Phoenix Nov 11 2011 at 18:45

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@pheonix, he thinks cheese is slightly superior to milk because most of the trytophan is in the whey. You can't compare by calorie either(who eats protein for calories?) you have to compare by protein amounts, for equivalent amounts of protein meat gives you almost double the amount of cystiene but milk does have slightly higher trytophan. Milk contains sugars though which are protective against these anti-thryoid amino acids(I think calcium is too according to him). Ray peat has put pretty everything he preaches into practice on him self and other people, he has also done lots of research. – cliff Nov 12 2011 at 13:31

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Jay · Accepted Answer · 2011-11-11 18:27:00Z UTC

I like Ray Peat because he is right a lot and has interesting ideas. That said, I don't love the way he writes because he pitches mechanistic plausibility as something more established and it is misleading.

Here's the argument for glycine/gelatin:

Early man plausibly ate a higher proportion of glycine to other amino acids than we do now-- by eating things like skin, connective tissue, eyeballs, etc. (Similar arguments can be made with respect to organ meats). Thus, we should be a little suspicious of straying far from this paradigm by eating so much muscle meat and so little gelatin (and organ meats).
To support the view that this potential/likely departure from our evolutionary niche is meaningful, I think it is valid to rattle off a list of plausible problems associated with imbalanced amino acid intake. Peat's discussion includes some interesting ideas. I think you could even add some other potential problems to the ones he discusses... That said, I think Peat's presentation is misleading because almost nothing he wrote amounts to more than mechanistic speculation!! We just don't know that much about human biology to make the kinds of claims he does. For example, thousands of scientists have been studying cholesterol for half a century and still have the theory partly wrong (in my opinion). By comparison, relatively few scientists have been studying amino acid balance (and most of them study livestock).

So, to sum up, there is reason to think early man got a higher proportion of glycine to other amino acids than we do now. And, there are some reasons to suspect that this departure from our past practices might be meaningful. Based on that, I've started to include more bone broths and gelatinous cuts in my diet.

Mike Ellwood · Answer 2 · 2012-01-07 01:58:05Z UTC

I'm relatively new to Ray Peat's ideas, but I've been very impressed by a lot of what he writes (and talks about, in numerous interviews that one can find fairly easily), even if it challenges some of my ideas I've picked up on ~4 years of what I call "real food low-carbing" (no grains, no frankenfoods and minimal PUFAs, for example). Biggest challenge is on fructose, but let that pass for now.

People won't believe this, but IMHO, Peat isn't quite as far from low-carb/"paleo"(some versions of) as a lot of people might think - he recommends e.g. meat, organ meat, cheese, butter, eggs, organ meats, bone broths/gelatine, is against most starches (but goes easy on new potatoes). Although he talks a lot about sugar, when you listen to him, his main sugar is from non-starchy fruit, although he doesn't have a real problem with sucrose (doesn't favour HFCS though), and he's very selective about his fruit. He's very pro-saturated fats, especially coconut oil & very anti-PUFAs. (Controversially, he regards omega-3's as possibly worse than omega-6's, which a lot of the LC/"paleo" world won't like).

People also won't like his support of milk, but he says, when muscle meat is combined with milk, this helps to balance out the amino acids and also the calcium-phosphorous ratio. So he's not anti muscle-meat per se, but strongly suggests it should be balanced out with other things, like milk, but also gelatin (ideally from bone broths), organ meats, gristle, skin ... more or less the "whole animal", as we might imagine "primitive" people having consumed their animals....but this is a slight contradiction, as generally, he doesn't go along with the "paleo" idea, since he doesn't believe we can know with any accuracy what a real palaeolithic diet was like, and its questionable if we have any real evidence that it was any healthier than any other diet. I happen to share that skepticism, which is why I never use the word "paleo" about my way of eating, although a lot of it may correspond to what some other people call "paleo".

However, please don't condemn him because of my possibly faulty paraphrase of his ideas. Read his articles and try to listen to some of the interviews. He appears to really know his stuff. My slight worry about him is that he seems to have been out on a limb for so long, he has been subject to little if any "peer review". However, he is even more skeptical about modern medical research than Taubes or Barry Groves, so it's hard to see how any meaningful "peer review" of his ideas could take place. I'd like to see some sort of debate between him and some suitably qualified (but open-minded) professional. Not sure if it will ever happen though.

cliff · Answer 3 · 2011-11-16 13:44:49Z UTC

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/eastwesthealing/2011/08/25/ray-peat-serotonin-and-endotoxin

"Low thyroid can cause excesses of estrogen and serotonin.... In the 1960s LSD was vilified and there was a campaign against it claiming it makes peope insane. Conversly it was deduced that serotonin (since LSD is an antagonist) makes people sane. That's when the generally accepted, but false, notion that serotonin is beneficial came about....Stress causes serotonin production in the stomach which can cause bleeding....Serotonin works with estrogen - estrogen activates tryptophan to turn into serotonin. Progesterone aids in the detoxification/processing of serotonin."

cliff · Answer 4 · 2011-11-11 21:30:52Z UTC

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Excess trytophan and methionine deplete b6

http://faculty.washington.edu/ely/JOM2.html

answered Nov 11 2011 at 21:30

cliff
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There are three forms of vitamin B6: pyridoxal , pyridoxine, pyridoxamine. The phosphate ester derivative is pyridoxal 5'-phosphate and is the principal co-enzyme form of B6. It also has the most biologic importance in human metabolism. For example, it functions as a coenzyme for glycogen phosphorylase, the enzyme that catalyzes the release of glucose from stored muscle/liver glycogen. It is vital in many stress related reactions and energy producing reactions and can only be gotten from dietary support. We do not make it endogenously. – The Quilt Nov 12 2011 at 0:09

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In brain neurochemistry, the synthesis of the neurotransmitter, serotonin, from dietary tryptophan, is catalyzed by this (B6) PLP-dependent enzyme. Other neurotransmitters, like dopamine, norepinephrine and GABA, are also made using PLP-dependent enzymes. Heme is also made using this enzyme system. Niacin can be made from tryptophan using B6 as a cofactor too. – The Quilt Nov 12 2011 at 0:13

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B6 is used in one carbon transfer reactions that also are crucial in making Nucleic acids in humans. The biggest paleo consideration should be how much protein one takes in on your paleo diet, why?Increased dietary protein results in an increased requirement for vitamin B6, This is due to B6 (PLP) being a coenzyme for many enzymes involved in amino acid metabolism. This is why a high protein diet can deplete B6. When it is depleted it leads to cellular inflammation and then cortisol can rise as a consequence of disturbed cellular signaling. It is not a direct cause of high cortisol – The Quilt Nov 12 2011 at 0:20

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bingo......and your answer shows that you are getting it. This is why I still come here. If I can help one person get to the core issue all the time and effort was worth it. Just pay it forward. Help ten others. That gets us closer to the tipping point. – The Quilt Nov 12 2011 at 4:39

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if peat was on paleohacks as much as the quilt was, people's cursory dismissal of his ideas would change. it's always a case of "i read 2-3 articles by this guy and now i know everything about his theories." – dsohei Jan 6 2012 at 18:57

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Ray Peat and muscle meat

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