So in the last post, I explained the general condition that I am experiencing and the couple initial forays I made into alternative medicine and my subsequent cold feet. There are a few things I see differently about RBTI that are persuading me to give it a chance. I will cover those here.
Trust
Basically this is my trust in Matt Stone of 180 Degree Health. I came across his clear and concise arguments against low-carb over a year and a half ago. I've been following his blog as he explores new ideas and cuts through dietary dogma ever since. Matt, it seems, goes out of his way to explore new off the wall ideas and not get stuck in any one paradigm. He's very well informed and answers questions directly. RBTI is the most promising thing he's seen in quite some time and he's been studying it now for the past month or so.
I don't need to explain my condition
Thank God. RBTI uses one set of tests and one set of numbers for all patients. I'll be more likely to have my conditioned explained to me, then to have to attempt to explain it to my practitioner. The tests themselves aren't all that expensive and I can buy the equipment and then test from home, so any up-front costs are one time only. Also, the consultation can be done over the phone, and most likely will be some simple rules based on my numbers along with some general RBTI guidelines. Also, if RBTI fails to help my condition, it's easier to see it as a failure of RBTI rather than some failure on my part to describe it adequately.
More dietary freedom
RBTI allows for processed foods, desserts, and the like. My understanding here is it's more about the overall context of the diet, avoiding specific disruptive foods, and following a meal pattern that allows the body to rest and heal. I still plan to eat plenty of fruits and vegetables, but many of us recovering from health obsession need to learn to let go and eat a frozen pizza or scoop of ice cream.
The underlying prinicple makes a lot of sense
Ok, if you've already googled RBTI, ignore what you think it means. I'm going to give you mine (and Matt's) understanding: provide as much support balancing the body chemistry as possible while giving it an adequate mineral supply and watch its healing processes increase by an order of magnitude. This is the same principle you would apply in restoring soil health or marine health and it also works for the body. The body is also like its own ecosystem and it is self-regulating. Unfortunately, like any ecosystem, the more damaged it becomes, the more delicate it is and the more difficult it is to restore. This is exactly how RBTI sees it, and the healthier you are (according to the numbers), the more dietary freedom you have. This explains why it seems healthy people can go around eating whatever they want with immunity, while unhealthy people struggle constantly with different diets. The healthy are probably doing enough intuitively to keep things on track.
Intuitiveness
This gets me to a final thought I have about RBTI as I've been learning about it from Matt's blog and from the newly formed Facebook group. There seems to be aspects of it that align with my intuitive eating patterns of seven or eight years ago: drinking water with dissolved lemon juice throughout the day, eating a carb-heavy breakfast, eating a lighter dinner with cottage cheese or similar easily digestible protein. RBTI may end up clearing up some of the remaining dietary dogmatisms I have and I may well end up adopting some of the practices well into the future.
My expectations
My expectations are that RBTI is going to have me feeling a lot better over all. I will be trying to follow it off and on for a month or more. After September, I may try to follow it more stringnetly. My hope is that by holidays (Thanksgiving) I will be feeling very good and would plan to let go of a lot of the RBTI specific restrictions. I may incorporate many of the RBTI recommendations into my lifestyle.
I will do my best to track my numbers (test results), general feeling, and other health measures as best I can, although past experience tells me that can get overwhelming, so I'll do my best.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
Why RBTI Part 1
As I sit here, I hold with me a 7 page intake form, an extensive list of general dietary recommendations, and a list of specific supplements I am supposed to be taking. This is from February of this year. It was from a consultation with a naturopathic doctor. I did no follow-up consultation, no lab tests, and only weakly followed the recommendations. The problem, as I saw it, was I had no guarantee that the program or the doctor in question was going to help me with the problem in question, or that she even understood it. She was not the first time I sought help.
The first was with Sean Croxton of Underground Wellness, who does his own diet and lifestyle coaching. I had a full consultation with him as well. The format was rather similar: a lot of specific questions designed to get a general set of imbalances followed by a recommended set of labs specific to my consultation. There were to be follow-up consultations and dietary recommendations.
Typcically, once you add consultations, lab tests, and supplements together, $1000 isn't a bad estimate for an initial foray into the world of alternative medicine. Unfortunately, it's a lot to ask in a world where you are on your own, and in a doctor who's efficacy you are unsure of and who you are not sure understands your condition. Such are the courses available to people who are looking for very specific, guided help beyond "get more sleep", or "eat plenty of fruits and vegetables", or "you're perfectly healthy", or "we could prescribe something". There are many people bouncing around in the blogosphere that have specific physiological complaints which are medical system seems to just sweep under the rug, or throw into catch-all categories like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or Fibromyalgia.
My Condition
The condition of which I complain did not exist six or seven years ago. It's onset definitely came during my extended low-carb stint. It was a very unhealhty period of my life, characterized by excessive exercise, inadequate sleep, and reliance on chocolate and alcohol. I understand now that an obsessive mindset was pushing my body well beyond its limits. At the time, I attributed my physical malaise to insomnia and lack of sleep, which I was in turn attributing to stress. I now recognize it went beyond that and attribute it to some sort combination of the following: an accumulated nutitrtional deficiency, some imbalance in body chemistry or homones, or atrophy or down-regulation of some important glandular or hormonal system.
What it feels like
On a good day, it's barely noticable. I will go through many of my normal activities without even thinking about it. Then when I sit down to meditate, it will be apparent. On a bad day, it is difficult to ignore, and focusing on work is much more difficult. On an average day, I am aware of a sensation in the upper back, near the neck, and near the front of the head, kind of in and around the eyes. The sensation is not pleasent although I would not classify it as pain, itching, or any other common physical description. The unpleasentness depends on the severity and the more severe, the more likely it is to extend down the legs and arms. I remember back during the midst of the unhealthy period, during a very bad day, describing the sensation to a friend of mine as a "raw nerve" sort of feeling. At that level, it's difficult to even fall asleep.
Why I sought alternative help
Seeking alternative help came months after I quit eating low-carb, well after I'd been stocking up on real, whole, healing foods, long after I'd cut alcohol, chocolate, and other stimulants way down in my diet. For some reason my body just wasn't bouncing back and the variables were just too complex to sort out. This is not the sort of thing I imagine asking a general practitioner about, so I didn't even bother. The times I sought help were periods of doubting that I was actually healing, or healing fast enough. I don't doubt now that my body is recovering. It's just very slow, has large ups and downs, and so is difficult to gauge process.
How it's affected my life
The main problem with my condition is that it's made me far more anti-social than I would otherwise like to be. Rather than going out, going to parties, going to clubs, I have often closeted myself in my house simply for the idea that I need rest, or that if I didn't get enough rest or get to bed early enough, tomorrow may be a cruddy day. I went through a much more liberal month or two recently, but this may have come at the expense of a slowing or halting in my progress, so I have begun pulling back again.
In my next post I will talk about why I've chosen to experiment with RBTI and what my hopes are for it.
The first was with Sean Croxton of Underground Wellness, who does his own diet and lifestyle coaching. I had a full consultation with him as well. The format was rather similar: a lot of specific questions designed to get a general set of imbalances followed by a recommended set of labs specific to my consultation. There were to be follow-up consultations and dietary recommendations.
Typcically, once you add consultations, lab tests, and supplements together, $1000 isn't a bad estimate for an initial foray into the world of alternative medicine. Unfortunately, it's a lot to ask in a world where you are on your own, and in a doctor who's efficacy you are unsure of and who you are not sure understands your condition. Such are the courses available to people who are looking for very specific, guided help beyond "get more sleep", or "eat plenty of fruits and vegetables", or "you're perfectly healthy", or "we could prescribe something". There are many people bouncing around in the blogosphere that have specific physiological complaints which are medical system seems to just sweep under the rug, or throw into catch-all categories like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or Fibromyalgia.
My Condition
The condition of which I complain did not exist six or seven years ago. It's onset definitely came during my extended low-carb stint. It was a very unhealhty period of my life, characterized by excessive exercise, inadequate sleep, and reliance on chocolate and alcohol. I understand now that an obsessive mindset was pushing my body well beyond its limits. At the time, I attributed my physical malaise to insomnia and lack of sleep, which I was in turn attributing to stress. I now recognize it went beyond that and attribute it to some sort combination of the following: an accumulated nutitrtional deficiency, some imbalance in body chemistry or homones, or atrophy or down-regulation of some important glandular or hormonal system.
What it feels like
On a good day, it's barely noticable. I will go through many of my normal activities without even thinking about it. Then when I sit down to meditate, it will be apparent. On a bad day, it is difficult to ignore, and focusing on work is much more difficult. On an average day, I am aware of a sensation in the upper back, near the neck, and near the front of the head, kind of in and around the eyes. The sensation is not pleasent although I would not classify it as pain, itching, or any other common physical description. The unpleasentness depends on the severity and the more severe, the more likely it is to extend down the legs and arms. I remember back during the midst of the unhealthy period, during a very bad day, describing the sensation to a friend of mine as a "raw nerve" sort of feeling. At that level, it's difficult to even fall asleep.
Why I sought alternative help
Seeking alternative help came months after I quit eating low-carb, well after I'd been stocking up on real, whole, healing foods, long after I'd cut alcohol, chocolate, and other stimulants way down in my diet. For some reason my body just wasn't bouncing back and the variables were just too complex to sort out. This is not the sort of thing I imagine asking a general practitioner about, so I didn't even bother. The times I sought help were periods of doubting that I was actually healing, or healing fast enough. I don't doubt now that my body is recovering. It's just very slow, has large ups and downs, and so is difficult to gauge process.
How it's affected my life
The main problem with my condition is that it's made me far more anti-social than I would otherwise like to be. Rather than going out, going to parties, going to clubs, I have often closeted myself in my house simply for the idea that I need rest, or that if I didn't get enough rest or get to bed early enough, tomorrow may be a cruddy day. I went through a much more liberal month or two recently, but this may have come at the expense of a slowing or halting in my progress, so I have begun pulling back again.
In my next post I will talk about why I've chosen to experiment with RBTI and what my hopes are for it.
Monday, March 14, 2011
HB 2490 and Nutritional Dogma
So a number of progressive groups are collecting signatures to petition the AZ state government not to pass HB 2490. Apparently, this issue is so urgent, there's not enough time to provide much detail, either from change.org or democracyinaction.org. From what I can tell, the AZ legislature (specifically the House Commerce Committee at this point) wants to prevent local and municipal governments from placing restrictions on the kinds of give-aways offered by governments.
What this means is that local governments wouldn't be able to prevent companies from McDonald's from using toys as a marketing gimmick. Thing is, I'm not sure I support this. Although I strongly oppose marketing towards children, I also strongly oppose standard nutritional dogma, which local governments, such as San Francisco, will end up enforcing. Enforcing bad nutritional dogma disturbs me more than Happy Meals do, so this is one petition I'm not signing.
Photo Credit: Colin Grey
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
"Eating Too Much"
This is an off the cuff rebuttal of the idea that we “eat too much”. It’s an idea that is deeply ingrained in our culture and sneaks into the phrasing of everyday language in ways we don’t even notice… even for people that don’t believe calorie restriction leads to weight loss.
But I’d like to really ask the question, are we eating too much? Well, usually when we say that, we mean that a person will get fat and then acquire all the health conditions that associate with obesity. Never mind the dubious assumption that the amount of adipose tissue is causal or even correlates with ill health, you have to ask yourself whether calorie consumption would even be the primary driver of fat storage. Why not of muscle growth? Why not of a faster metabolic rate? Why not of more stamina, awareness, or immunity to disease.
But the real clincher: you have to ask yourself, shouldn’t the body be able to keep track and regulate everything using hormones. The answer is most certainly yes, because if it were not, the human race (and every other species that needs to eat for that matter) would’ve been toast long before civilization ever got off the ground.
And that’s where even using phrases like “eating too much” gets tricky, because it implies such a thing is even possible, that the energy storage systems would not be working towards homeostasis over the long term. Unless of course, fat people are just not hungry and feeling stuffed all the time, but just eat anyway. Yeah, that must be it.
So if “eating too much” is what makes you fat, “eating too little” must be what makes you thin. There are certainly plenty of people trying this. The problem with this is most people attempting this seem to suffer the converse of the symptoms listed above: loss of lean tissue, slowdown in the metabolic rate, etc. It makes sense when you think about it. From an evolutionary perspective, the body has to be able to deal with widely varying amounts of calorie intakes over long periods of time, and still maintain homeostasis, just like it has to do with all nutrients.
So if “eating too little” causes these responses in people, then presumably the reverse is also true. From an evolutionary perspective, we’d expect the body to take full of advantage of a calorie and nutrient surplus. Sex drive, lean body mass, etc. should all go up. But here’s the rub for all you chronic dieters. It’s well known that the body isn’t simply going to do this coming out of a starvation state. It’s instead going to store fat for quite a while, which is an appropriate adaptive response to the conditions of chronic dieting.
Some of the more astute out there may have noticed that weight gain occurs under times of stress, but then still rationalize it with sentiments like “stress makes people want to eat more”. But shouldn’t we consider that stress itself might be a primary driver in weight gain, considering that cortisol is one of the main hormones involved in the deposition of belly fat.
And it’s interesting too that animals in captivity seem uncannily to develop obesity and all the Western diseases. And it’s not due to the amount of calories.
So we have to ask the question, if obesity does correlate with Western diseases, then why? Is it because stress causes both belly fat and illness and we are all under some form of chronic stress? Is it because modern processed foods cause hormonal disruption which causes both? Is it because calorie deprivation (i.e. dieting) puts the body in a starvation response which then causes poor health and belly fat growth (later on)?
Personally, I’ve come to the point of never trying to “eat too little”. I certainly want my body to know whatever it needs is available. I don’t want it cutting back immune function or libido just so I can be “skinny fat”. I could go on, but I’ll end here.
Further Reading:
Calorie restriction is not effective for weight loss.
But I’d like to really ask the question, are we eating too much? Well, usually when we say that, we mean that a person will get fat and then acquire all the health conditions that associate with obesity. Never mind the dubious assumption that the amount of adipose tissue is causal or even correlates with ill health, you have to ask yourself whether calorie consumption would even be the primary driver of fat storage. Why not of muscle growth? Why not of a faster metabolic rate? Why not of more stamina, awareness, or immunity to disease.
But the real clincher: you have to ask yourself, shouldn’t the body be able to keep track and regulate everything using hormones. The answer is most certainly yes, because if it were not, the human race (and every other species that needs to eat for that matter) would’ve been toast long before civilization ever got off the ground.
And that’s where even using phrases like “eating too much” gets tricky, because it implies such a thing is even possible, that the energy storage systems would not be working towards homeostasis over the long term. Unless of course, fat people are just not hungry and feeling stuffed all the time, but just eat anyway. Yeah, that must be it.
So if “eating too much” is what makes you fat, “eating too little” must be what makes you thin. There are certainly plenty of people trying this. The problem with this is most people attempting this seem to suffer the converse of the symptoms listed above: loss of lean tissue, slowdown in the metabolic rate, etc. It makes sense when you think about it. From an evolutionary perspective, the body has to be able to deal with widely varying amounts of calorie intakes over long periods of time, and still maintain homeostasis, just like it has to do with all nutrients.
So if “eating too little” causes these responses in people, then presumably the reverse is also true. From an evolutionary perspective, we’d expect the body to take full of advantage of a calorie and nutrient surplus. Sex drive, lean body mass, etc. should all go up. But here’s the rub for all you chronic dieters. It’s well known that the body isn’t simply going to do this coming out of a starvation state. It’s instead going to store fat for quite a while, which is an appropriate adaptive response to the conditions of chronic dieting.
Some of the more astute out there may have noticed that weight gain occurs under times of stress, but then still rationalize it with sentiments like “stress makes people want to eat more”. But shouldn’t we consider that stress itself might be a primary driver in weight gain, considering that cortisol is one of the main hormones involved in the deposition of belly fat.
And it’s interesting too that animals in captivity seem uncannily to develop obesity and all the Western diseases. And it’s not due to the amount of calories.
So we have to ask the question, if obesity does correlate with Western diseases, then why? Is it because stress causes both belly fat and illness and we are all under some form of chronic stress? Is it because modern processed foods cause hormonal disruption which causes both? Is it because calorie deprivation (i.e. dieting) puts the body in a starvation response which then causes poor health and belly fat growth (later on)?
Personally, I’ve come to the point of never trying to “eat too little”. I certainly want my body to know whatever it needs is available. I don’t want it cutting back immune function or libido just so I can be “skinny fat”. I could go on, but I’ll end here.
Further Reading:
Calorie restriction is not effective for weight loss.
Blog Spotlight: Chris Masterjohn
Cholesterol. That is Chris Masterjohn’s main focus. It is one of the most maligned substances and one of the most misunderstood. And it is where we get some of our worst dietary advice from the mainstream media and medical industry.
Some of us give up on modern nutritional dogma after reading too much, when we realize it is too loaded with fallacies and cognitive dissonance. Others, such as Chris Masterjohn, give up after direct negative experience.
Cholesterol, and lipid metabolism, is a complex subject. It’s not surprising it’s been broken down into such stupefyingly simple terms. But this simplification has done the common man a great disservice. It gives the impression people know all they need to know and precludes debate.
Chris has dug deep, learning all that he can. He has provided critical reviews of both Uffe Ravnskov’s The Cholesterol Myths and Daniel Steinberg’s The Cholesterol Wars. I myself have not read The Cholesterol Myths, but I have read The Cholesterol Wars and Gary Taube’s Good Calories Bad Calories.
Perhaps I like Chris because I find he has come to many of the same conclusions I have. That may be confirmation bias. Or it may simply be the fact that he has discovered a way that makes all the pieces fit, and it is similar to how I have managed to put everything together and so far I have yet to see anybody piece it all together any better.
Chris rightly labels his theories as hypothetical and clearly delineates where and what type of studies would need to be performed to validate them. He’s also careful with terminology, with derivation of causation, and with what exactly can be ascertained from any particular study.
Recently, he’s written an alternative theory to the lipid hypothesis, which is really just an old debate that was closed without proper scientific evidence. Personally, I agree with Chris that is more likely the amount of time LDL particles spend in the blood, rather than the total level, that determines their role in athersclerosis. It was one of my biggest beefs with Steinberg, who stated simply that elevated cholesterol as a single variable “proves” that hypercholesterolemia alone is causal to heart disease*. I am impressed and grateful that somebody else has also seen this flaw in Steinberg’s logic.
If you want to get a real understanding of how lipid metabolism works, and what the likely factors are that cause it to break down**, then forget what you already know about cholesterol, LDL, HDL, and dietary fat. These concepts are simplistic, backwards, and will only get in your way. Prepare yourself like a sponge and get ready to start soaking in lots of information, because you’ll need it to start forming your own understanding and making your own decisions.
*Steinberg talks from the very beginning of his book about how he's laying all the groundwork to prove the lipid hypothesis, and I kept waiting for him to provide non-circumstantial evidence, but of course it never happens.
Further Reading:
More on the Lipid Hypothesis
More on Cholesterol and Heart Disease
Example of how misconstrued evidence can turn into wild claims in the media when it supports conventional dogma
Some of us give up on modern nutritional dogma after reading too much, when we realize it is too loaded with fallacies and cognitive dissonance. Others, such as Chris Masterjohn, give up after direct negative experience.
Cholesterol, and lipid metabolism, is a complex subject. It’s not surprising it’s been broken down into such stupefyingly simple terms. But this simplification has done the common man a great disservice. It gives the impression people know all they need to know and precludes debate.
Chris has dug deep, learning all that he can. He has provided critical reviews of both Uffe Ravnskov’s The Cholesterol Myths and Daniel Steinberg’s The Cholesterol Wars. I myself have not read The Cholesterol Myths, but I have read The Cholesterol Wars and Gary Taube’s Good Calories Bad Calories.
Perhaps I like Chris because I find he has come to many of the same conclusions I have. That may be confirmation bias. Or it may simply be the fact that he has discovered a way that makes all the pieces fit, and it is similar to how I have managed to put everything together and so far I have yet to see anybody piece it all together any better.
Chris rightly labels his theories as hypothetical and clearly delineates where and what type of studies would need to be performed to validate them. He’s also careful with terminology, with derivation of causation, and with what exactly can be ascertained from any particular study.
Recently, he’s written an alternative theory to the lipid hypothesis, which is really just an old debate that was closed without proper scientific evidence. Personally, I agree with Chris that is more likely the amount of time LDL particles spend in the blood, rather than the total level, that determines their role in athersclerosis. It was one of my biggest beefs with Steinberg, who stated simply that elevated cholesterol as a single variable “proves” that hypercholesterolemia alone is causal to heart disease*. I am impressed and grateful that somebody else has also seen this flaw in Steinberg’s logic.
If you want to get a real understanding of how lipid metabolism works, and what the likely factors are that cause it to break down**, then forget what you already know about cholesterol, LDL, HDL, and dietary fat. These concepts are simplistic, backwards, and will only get in your way. Prepare yourself like a sponge and get ready to start soaking in lots of information, because you’ll need it to start forming your own understanding and making your own decisions.
*Steinberg talks from the very beginning of his book about how he's laying all the groundwork to prove the lipid hypothesis, and I kept waiting for him to provide non-circumstantial evidence, but of course it never happens.
Further Reading:
More on the Lipid Hypothesis
More on Cholesterol and Heart Disease
Example of how misconstrued evidence can turn into wild claims in the media when it supports conventional dogma
Saturday, February 26, 2011
PUFAs and Heart Disease: Where's the Beef?
I don’t like coming down for or against any macronutrient or any food, even sugar. I have a lot of rants. Just looking at the American Heart Association webpage right now is making me think of some blog posts I need to write. Ok… I’m closing the webpage.
Anyway, I felt I needed to do a post on PUFAs (poly-unsaturated fatty acids). Previously, I did a post on how saturated fats are not bad for you. I don’t care what everyone else says. I don’t care what established authorities say. I’m an ISTJ. If you can’t provide a logically consistent argument. If you can’t adequately answer all the counter-arguments. If your conclusion isn’t in sync with other studies, or even with your own data. If your research techniques leave much to be desired. Then forget it, I’m not jumping on your bandwagon.
So, like, several years ago I was researching all this saturated fat nonsense and really trying to understand the process of lipid metabolism and atherosclerosis. I mean, LDL particles are getting damaged, and a bunch of cholesterol lipids are piling up in plaques in peoples’ arteries, and this does seem to be a pretty significant nationwide problem.
Forget that from my best scientific understanding, saturated fats would actually be protective. Forget that cholesterol isn’t even the main issue. Let’s get to the main issue as I identified it in my research: oxidation and inflammation.
Daniel Steinberg alludes to oxidation in his book The Cholesterol Wars when he starts talking about the scavenger receptor on macrophages and oxidatively modified LDL. He then talks about some study in which pobucol was able to arrest the progression of lesions in rabbits by blocking endothelial cell-induced LDL oxidation and that specifically the effect was not due to probucol’s LDL-lowering effect.
Anyway, where was I? Oh right, oxidation. So here’s the thing. Atherosclerosis is all about damage to your LDL particles. Steinberg may not have followed up on these insights, but I sure as hell did. The thing is macrophages are there for cleaning up. They don’t chomp up healthy LDL. There are some slides I’d like to share, but viewing them doesn’t make the whole thing much simpler.
As I studied all this, I started to come up with my own ideas what promotes atherosclerosis. My conclusions run fairly counter to Daniel Steinberg’s. Since PUFAs contain at least two double bonds, they are highly volatile*. This means prone to oxidation and free-radical damage. It is this sort of damage that macrophages are going to detect**. A diet rich in PUFAs would seem an undue risk for oxidative stress***.
Despite the very apparent risk in using PUFAs, which come mostly from seed and nut oils, we pretty much guarantee these oils will be rancid**** in the way we prescribe their use. I.e. using them as cooking oils and providing no warning about the solvents and heating processes that are used to extract these oils.
And it’s worse than that. As I’ve learned more, I’ve come to discover the high omega-6 ratio of most seed oils may itself be an issue, throwing the O6:O3 balance in our tissues out of whack and making them more pro-inflammatory.
Anyways, suffice it to say, I really haven’t seen any evidence exonerating seed oils, so I started to wonder, is there any context in which these oils would’ve been used in a traditional manner? I.e., would traditional cooking methods ever have had any use for canola, soybean, or corn oil? As far as I can tell, not on any massive scale, and certainly not for cooking. Thing is, seed oils are not like olive oil or palm oil. They’re not that easy to extract. What would extraction look like? Here’s Catherine Shanahan’s take on it in Deep Nutrition:
So there’s the gist of it. Other than eating nuts straight up, this was about the extent to which seed oils were extracted and used in the diet. So what about expeller-pressed canola oil? Well, commercial extraction of seed oils involves hexane, followed by twenty or so additional stages of bleaching and deodorizing. Organic, expeller-pressed oil has only skipped the initial step of extraction using hexane.
So where does this lead me? It leads me to the point that I personally try to avoid all “vegetable” oils except olive oil, palm oil, or coconut oil. Note that seed oils are used in everything from “healthy” salad dressings to “unhealthy” mayo (so like, what’s the difference?). Eating out or eating processed foods or just stopping by the local deli, almost all the fats are from vegetable oils. It’s both sign and symptom of our major industrial agricultural system. There are actually very little saturated or animal fats in any of our restaurant or processed foods (unless you like French food). Show me a place that still cooks french fries in beef tallow, popcorn in coconut oil, or bakes pie crusts with lard. They exist, but they are few and far between. You can’t even buy decent lard, beef tallow, or coconut oil unless you know where to look.
No, I’m sorry, it’s not the saturated fats that are killing us. That’s just an easy scapegoat to a complex problem the heart***** of which lies with our industrial food system. But that system will not change easily. The real solution, on the individual level is to eat real foods. And I’m sorry to say it, but canola oil, soybean oil, safflower, sunflower, what have you… more often than not are part of the industrial food system.
*Compared to mono-unsaturated fats, having two places for oxygen to ineract doesn't make such interactions twice as likely for PUFAs. It makes them billions of times more likely.
**Again, macrophages are there to scavenge the junk. They will not soak up healthy LDL. Part of the whole process is that a macrophage sucks up a modified LDL, which then becomes a "foam" cell, and begins the whole atherosclerotic process.
***The body can protect PUFAs in serum for a short period, but it needs an adequate supply of anti-oxidants. If there is some disorder of your lipid metabolism and your LDL particles are spending more time in serum than they should (possibly indicated by high LDL particle count (LDL-P, not LDL-c)), then there is a much greater risk for oxidation.
****Rancidity refers to the chemical decomposition of fats, one pathway of which is oxidation.
*****No pun intended.
Anyway, I felt I needed to do a post on PUFAs (poly-unsaturated fatty acids). Previously, I did a post on how saturated fats are not bad for you. I don’t care what everyone else says. I don’t care what established authorities say. I’m an ISTJ. If you can’t provide a logically consistent argument. If you can’t adequately answer all the counter-arguments. If your conclusion isn’t in sync with other studies, or even with your own data. If your research techniques leave much to be desired. Then forget it, I’m not jumping on your bandwagon.
So, like, several years ago I was researching all this saturated fat nonsense and really trying to understand the process of lipid metabolism and atherosclerosis. I mean, LDL particles are getting damaged, and a bunch of cholesterol lipids are piling up in plaques in peoples’ arteries, and this does seem to be a pretty significant nationwide problem.
Forget that from my best scientific understanding, saturated fats would actually be protective. Forget that cholesterol isn’t even the main issue. Let’s get to the main issue as I identified it in my research: oxidation and inflammation.
Daniel Steinberg alludes to oxidation in his book The Cholesterol Wars when he starts talking about the scavenger receptor on macrophages and oxidatively modified LDL. He then talks about some study in which pobucol was able to arrest the progression of lesions in rabbits by blocking endothelial cell-induced LDL oxidation and that specifically the effect was not due to probucol’s LDL-lowering effect.
Anyway, where was I? Oh right, oxidation. So here’s the thing. Atherosclerosis is all about damage to your LDL particles. Steinberg may not have followed up on these insights, but I sure as hell did. The thing is macrophages are there for cleaning up. They don’t chomp up healthy LDL. There are some slides I’d like to share, but viewing them doesn’t make the whole thing much simpler.
As I studied all this, I started to come up with my own ideas what promotes atherosclerosis. My conclusions run fairly counter to Daniel Steinberg’s. Since PUFAs contain at least two double bonds, they are highly volatile*. This means prone to oxidation and free-radical damage. It is this sort of damage that macrophages are going to detect**. A diet rich in PUFAs would seem an undue risk for oxidative stress***.
Despite the very apparent risk in using PUFAs, which come mostly from seed and nut oils, we pretty much guarantee these oils will be rancid**** in the way we prescribe their use. I.e. using them as cooking oils and providing no warning about the solvents and heating processes that are used to extract these oils.
And it’s worse than that. As I’ve learned more, I’ve come to discover the high omega-6 ratio of most seed oils may itself be an issue, throwing the O6:O3 balance in our tissues out of whack and making them more pro-inflammatory.
Anyways, suffice it to say, I really haven’t seen any evidence exonerating seed oils, so I started to wonder, is there any context in which these oils would’ve been used in a traditional manner? I.e., would traditional cooking methods ever have had any use for canola, soybean, or corn oil? As far as I can tell, not on any massive scale, and certainly not for cooking. Thing is, seed oils are not like olive oil or palm oil. They’re not that easy to extract. What would extraction look like? Here’s Catherine Shanahan’s take on it in Deep Nutrition:
If we could somehow get canola oil out of the seed without exposing it to heat, it would be good for us, but nobody can.
Well, that’s not entirely true. In the old days, flax and rapeseed (a relative of canola) were gently extracted in the home using a small wedge press. Over the course of a day, the wedge would be tapped into the press a little further until, ever so slowly, the golden oil would start to drip, fresh and full of natural antioxidants and vitamins. These oils were not used to fry food, and therefore never exposed to damaging heat. If you aren’t up for installing a wedge press in your kitchen, a few small enterprises can provide flax, hemp, and other healthy omega-3 rich oils – none of which should ever be used for cooking.
So there’s the gist of it. Other than eating nuts straight up, this was about the extent to which seed oils were extracted and used in the diet. So what about expeller-pressed canola oil? Well, commercial extraction of seed oils involves hexane, followed by twenty or so additional stages of bleaching and deodorizing. Organic, expeller-pressed oil has only skipped the initial step of extraction using hexane.
So where does this lead me? It leads me to the point that I personally try to avoid all “vegetable” oils except olive oil, palm oil, or coconut oil. Note that seed oils are used in everything from “healthy” salad dressings to “unhealthy” mayo (so like, what’s the difference?). Eating out or eating processed foods or just stopping by the local deli, almost all the fats are from vegetable oils. It’s both sign and symptom of our major industrial agricultural system. There are actually very little saturated or animal fats in any of our restaurant or processed foods (unless you like French food). Show me a place that still cooks french fries in beef tallow, popcorn in coconut oil, or bakes pie crusts with lard. They exist, but they are few and far between. You can’t even buy decent lard, beef tallow, or coconut oil unless you know where to look.
No, I’m sorry, it’s not the saturated fats that are killing us. That’s just an easy scapegoat to a complex problem the heart***** of which lies with our industrial food system. But that system will not change easily. The real solution, on the individual level is to eat real foods. And I’m sorry to say it, but canola oil, soybean oil, safflower, sunflower, what have you… more often than not are part of the industrial food system.
*Compared to mono-unsaturated fats, having two places for oxygen to ineract doesn't make such interactions twice as likely for PUFAs. It makes them billions of times more likely.
**Again, macrophages are there to scavenge the junk. They will not soak up healthy LDL. Part of the whole process is that a macrophage sucks up a modified LDL, which then becomes a "foam" cell, and begins the whole atherosclerotic process.
***The body can protect PUFAs in serum for a short period, but it needs an adequate supply of anti-oxidants. If there is some disorder of your lipid metabolism and your LDL particles are spending more time in serum than they should (possibly indicated by high LDL particle count (LDL-P, not LDL-c)), then there is a much greater risk for oxidation.
****Rancidity refers to the chemical decomposition of fats, one pathway of which is oxidation.
*****No pun intended.
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Random Thoughts
So lately I’ve started to wonder how necessary it is to get your RDA of all the vitamins and minerals every day. Or how necessary it is to get those vitamins and minerals mostly from plants. Or how important it is to get protein, fat, and carbs at every meal. Or how important it is that you always eat breakfast. Or that you don’t snack at bedtime.
Here’s my thinking on this. The body would obviously need to be able to adapt to surpluses and shortages of most nutrients, as well as daily variations in macro-nutrient intake. Maybe calcium is abundant in the summer. Maybe beta-carotene is abundant in the fall. The body obviously has storehouses. It packs excess glucose in the liver, excess calcium in the bones, and so forth. As one item becomes abundant or deficient, your taste preferences change to guide you towards what the body needs next.
So often these guidelines are based on a reductionist understanding of some hormone or chemical pathway. This is what some call Nutritionism and it is next to worthless for making statements with any certainty for a complex, dynamic system like the human body. Sometimes, there may be an epidemiological study… but often, certain questions still aren’t asked. For example, studies show correlation between skipping breakfast and long term weight gain, so what’s the cause? Are those skipping breakfast doing so because they are on a diet and the diet is the reason for the weight gain? Or are they eating in an unrestrained manner, listening to their body, yet somehow some aspect of skipping breakfast is causing weight gain? The question I have, if breakfast is so necessary, what were the hunter-gatherers chowing down on before they went out to go hunt and gather? Learn the eating patterns of actual non-industrialized groups and you’ll find the breakfast/lunch/dinner eating pattern isn’t that common.
As for eating lots of vegetables, I’ve never understood this. Isn’t the point of the human species to maximize our resource usage? So why go through all the effort of assimilating all these vegetables into our diet (which often requires a lot of preparation) when other animals have done this already? Just eat the animals… which is precisely the point of eating organ meats. They’re also more bio-available. Liver knocks the charts off any plant for any of the nutrients it provides, which is probably why some people do well getting it only once a week. And again, there’s that concept of getting nutrients over time rather than every day.
We act like phytonutrients are so super-great, but it just means nutrients from plants. And then we say get a variety of colors. Well, it’s polyphenols that are responsible largely for color, but polyphenols are often defensive compounds (what, you didn’t think plants evolved defensive strategies?). So my question is, why would you ingest something designed to interact with your body in a way to give you a selective disadvantage? Wouldn’t that imply negative health consequences? Animal defenses are more about tooth and claw than chemical compounds, which would seem to imply, ingesting nutrients from animal sources would be the optimal strategy.
None of that’s to say plants are for sure bad for you. Doing so based on an argument like the above would just be Nutritionism again. Personally, I find they add flavor, color, and texture. Plus I don’t like eating a lot of meat. I argue for the sake of argument. But things like color, flavor, and texture (assuming you are eating non-industrialized, non-processed foods) are your drivers to maximum nutrition.
Personally, what this comes down to are things I don’t think it’s healthy to worry about:
• Eating too many meals a day
• Eating too few meals a day
• Eating at the wrong time of day
• Anything else that isn’t following your own internal hunger/satiety cues.
• Eating an incorrect ratio of fats/protein/carbs
• Eating too few vegetables
• Eating too many vegetables
• Eating too much animal fat
• Eating too little animal fat
• Eating too much animal protein
• Eating too many refined (non-nutritive) calories in an otherwise nutritionally dense diet
• Anything else that isn’t following your current preferences at the moment you are eating
Here’s my thinking on this. The body would obviously need to be able to adapt to surpluses and shortages of most nutrients, as well as daily variations in macro-nutrient intake. Maybe calcium is abundant in the summer. Maybe beta-carotene is abundant in the fall. The body obviously has storehouses. It packs excess glucose in the liver, excess calcium in the bones, and so forth. As one item becomes abundant or deficient, your taste preferences change to guide you towards what the body needs next.
So often these guidelines are based on a reductionist understanding of some hormone or chemical pathway. This is what some call Nutritionism and it is next to worthless for making statements with any certainty for a complex, dynamic system like the human body. Sometimes, there may be an epidemiological study… but often, certain questions still aren’t asked. For example, studies show correlation between skipping breakfast and long term weight gain, so what’s the cause? Are those skipping breakfast doing so because they are on a diet and the diet is the reason for the weight gain? Or are they eating in an unrestrained manner, listening to their body, yet somehow some aspect of skipping breakfast is causing weight gain? The question I have, if breakfast is so necessary, what were the hunter-gatherers chowing down on before they went out to go hunt and gather? Learn the eating patterns of actual non-industrialized groups and you’ll find the breakfast/lunch/dinner eating pattern isn’t that common.
As for eating lots of vegetables, I’ve never understood this. Isn’t the point of the human species to maximize our resource usage? So why go through all the effort of assimilating all these vegetables into our diet (which often requires a lot of preparation) when other animals have done this already? Just eat the animals… which is precisely the point of eating organ meats. They’re also more bio-available. Liver knocks the charts off any plant for any of the nutrients it provides, which is probably why some people do well getting it only once a week. And again, there’s that concept of getting nutrients over time rather than every day.
We act like phytonutrients are so super-great, but it just means nutrients from plants. And then we say get a variety of colors. Well, it’s polyphenols that are responsible largely for color, but polyphenols are often defensive compounds (what, you didn’t think plants evolved defensive strategies?). So my question is, why would you ingest something designed to interact with your body in a way to give you a selective disadvantage? Wouldn’t that imply negative health consequences? Animal defenses are more about tooth and claw than chemical compounds, which would seem to imply, ingesting nutrients from animal sources would be the optimal strategy.
None of that’s to say plants are for sure bad for you. Doing so based on an argument like the above would just be Nutritionism again. Personally, I find they add flavor, color, and texture. Plus I don’t like eating a lot of meat. I argue for the sake of argument. But things like color, flavor, and texture (assuming you are eating non-industrialized, non-processed foods) are your drivers to maximum nutrition.
Personally, what this comes down to are things I don’t think it’s healthy to worry about:
• Eating too many meals a day
• Eating too few meals a day
• Eating at the wrong time of day
• Anything else that isn’t following your own internal hunger/satiety cues.
• Eating an incorrect ratio of fats/protein/carbs
• Eating too few vegetables
• Eating too many vegetables
• Eating too much animal fat
• Eating too little animal fat
• Eating too much animal protein
• Eating too many refined (non-nutritive) calories in an otherwise nutritionally dense diet
• Anything else that isn’t following your current preferences at the moment you are eating
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)