Read more (and find the usual podcast access links) about this podcast on Dave Aprey’s blog here.
Dig a Little Deeper
Big Tech Manipulating Health Data? Say It Ain’t So
There have been whisperings over the past several months, actually more than just whisperings, that “Big Tech” (most accounts name Google as the principle player given their dominance in search technology) have been manipulating search data results in a way that downgrades “alternative or non-mainstream” health and wellness information.
Mark Sisson actually wrote about it in his weekly missive this past weekend (quoted in part below), and posted the image above borrowed from Robb Wolf’s IG account –
In other words, so-called “alternative” health websites—ones that offer substantive counterpoints to the conventional wisdom regarding diet, health, and wellness—have taken a massive hit on their visibility in Google search, while the ones peddling the conventional lines of advice have seen a huge increase in their visibility. Since Google is the world’s largest search engine by far, so much so that “to google” means to search for something on the Internet, this has inevitably reduced our search (and overall) traffic.
Some of this is due to Google weighting their algorithms toward “expert” advice, toward opinions and articles written by people with MDs and PhDs after their names. I’ve tried to overcome this by changing the way I cite research. I’ve always cited and linked to tons of medical studies, far more than the “experts” like Mayo Clinic and WebMD ever have, but now I’m actually listing a “References” section with those proper citations in the proper academic format. You’ve probably noticed. It’s helped a bit, but the drop-off has been larger than this can account for.
In my opinion, this development just means that people like me and Robb are over the target. We’re a threat, and institutions are worried. We’ve already had a huge effect on the way people eat, live and exercise. Grandmas are going keto. Grandpas are doing CrossFit. Your kid’s school teacher is IFing. Large multinational food corporations are buying boutique avocado oil-based mayo brands for large sums of money. It’s an interesting time. Conventional institutions are feeling the heat, and this might be one way to try to stem the tide.
Does Big Tech Really Manipulate Health Search Data? Say It Ain’t So, Joe
I have to admit, I actually chuckled a bit when I first read Sisson’s weekly email.
Big Tech has been censoring and manipulating search results for years, often targeting groups over political and religious ideology, despite being castigated over and over again for it, and even hauled before Congress on multiple occasions with the requisite harrumphing and handwringing testimony broadcast on C-Span.
If you don’t believe that’s been happening for years now, I have some swamp land in southern Arizona you’d probably be interested in buying.
The bigger question, at least from where I sit as a classically trained physician having fairly recently “defected” to the ancestral health world, is why the push now to filter and downgrade access to what a bank of Google engineers appears to view as “alternative” health information?
While I’m not one prone to run to conspiracy theories to explain strange things observed in today’s world, I’m with Sisson on this one. The alternative health world, driven largely by the evolving science related to ancestrally-oriented nutrition and practically oriented, functionally-driven fitness approaches, is beginning to turn what has been conventional medical wisdom on its collective ear in some areas, and the powers at be are getting itchy – and defensive.
There are a number of issues to consider here, one critical point being this – there are some charlatans and wackadoos peddling nonsense in the ancestral and alternative health worlds (just as there are ensconced in the conventional health provider arena); with a bit of digging, they’re pretty easy to identify, and are most often shrouded in a mist of anecdotal spiels versus anchored to objective science. Big Tech will likely argue they’re “protecting the masses” from these agents by censoring results, though of course they’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Good science is going to win the day here, and I’m convinced we’re going to see long-standing thinking about nutrition turned on its collective ear more and more each year; the Virta study is doing that right now in terms of carbohydrates and T2DM, and the lipid wars are picking up impressive steam month by month.
More than ever, caveat emptor in terms of the information you read. Trust, but verify. Read widely, and ask questions – about everything. These are indeed very interesting times…
Informed by History: Thinking About Ancestral Health and D-Day
Those of us who invest time pondering the principles espoused by the ancestral health community often spend a fair amount of effort digging through what we can ferret out about the health, and feeding habits, of our humanoid ancestors.
We do so, at least in part, to gather pertinent intel to inform our own nutritional choices, with goals of optimizing our ability to face life’s challenges, and to prosper.
We choose to be informed by history, at least the best version(s) of human history we can derive and digest, and often work very hard to tailor the clues our ancestors left behind to fit our (seemingly) very different modern day.
The benefits we gain from choosing to be informed by history are often life changing (they certainly have been for me and my family).
Today on the 75th anniversary of D-Day, one of the most monumental human efforts and events in modern history, and yet one that is fading from our collective consciousness, I’d encourage you to spend a bit of time pondering what the young men and women of the world in that day faced, and the courageous choices made by participants around the world in the days and weeks leading up to 6 June, 1944.
By the way, one of the most moving accounts of that day I’ve ever come across was one published in The Atlantic in 1960; read it here, and the image below is sourced from their site.
Choosing to be informed by history isn’t necessarily the most popular activity these days, but there are lessons to be learned, choices and behaviors to be admired and emulated, and futures to be written.
Don’t miss the opportunity to remember and learn from D-Day.
Five Fruits Packing the Most Antioxidant Punch
As people I talk to begin to rethink their food and nutrition paradigm, at some point along the way they begin a quest for foods that not only taste good (or great), bring a host of nutritional benefits, and offer additional healthy impacts on metabolic function, physical performance, and maybe even impact longevity.
One focus of this quest is often pursuing foods that pack a powerful antioxidant punch, given the multiple benefits that antioxidants have upon our human physiology. We’ve been conditioned over the past several decades to often think of certain fruits as possessing high levels of accessible antioxidants – and some certainly do.
We’re going to take a quick look today at the five fruits with the highest levels of accessible antioxidants, choosing to blatantly ignore today the fructose baggage that fruits drag along with them (we’ll come back and look at the downsides of fructose in detail shortly).
First, Let’s Talk About ORAC (Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity)
ORAC is the acronym for Oxygen Radical Absorption Capacity, a nifty test designed back in the day to measure the collective antioxidant power of the various substance found together in a given food.
One of the better lay-audience-targeted explanations of the test I’ve ever read was in this article from a few years back, in particular this excerpt –
The theory is that you can’t really compute the antioxidant capacity of a food just by knowing the component parts, just as you can’t predict how great a band is going to sound just by knowing who’s in it. (You’ve got to hear them play together!) In much the same way, scientists at the USDA figured out that “teamwork” in antioxidants is a big factor, and that the synergistic impact of a bunch of antioxidants working together is bigger (or different) than the sum of the parts.
So they developed the ORAC test, which basically pits a nasty bunch of free radicals against the synergistic effect of the antioxidants found in a given food. ORAC measures how powerful the natural combination of antioxidants in a given food are by seeing just how well they do in “absorbing” (or incapacitating) a particular free radical.
So far so good. Free radicals are the “bad guys,” antioxidants are the “good guys,” ORAC is a measure of how well the good guys do against the bad guys, and all is well with the world. Foods that consistently scored high on the ORAC ratings were blueberries, prunes, raisins, kale and beans. You could pretty much count on these foods being at the top of the rankings as regularly as Federer, Nadal and Djokovic in any given Grand Slam event.
Then the marketing people went to work…
The article goes on to explain why, back in 2012, the USDA Nutrient Data Laboratory removed their USDA ORAC Database for Selected Foods, citing principally the overt misuse of data by food and dietary supplement in product promotion.
Count me among those who consider that to be damn shame, as it can be useful to peruse the ORAC data when contemplating food choices.
Superfoodly still maintains a fairly active ORAC database / list; it’s available here for your perusal.
The Top Five Fruits with the Highest ORAC Scores
Elderberries (14,697)
Wild blueberries (9,621)
Cranberries (9,090)
Blackberries (5,905)
Goji berries (4,310)
Ranked by published ORAC scores, the top five probably aren’t a huge surprise to those who’ve spent time reading and researching on their own in the antioxidant space, berries of various sorts have long been touted as antioxidant champions.
Elderberries aren’t necessarily the easiest to access commercially, though wild blueberries (and their cultivated kin), cranberries, and blackberries are quite easy to procure, delicious, and when eaten in their native forms (avoid the dried and sweetened versions like the plague) in thoughtful moderation, can be a wonderful complement to your food plan.
We’ll come back in the next few weeks and look at how thoughtful fruit consumption fits into a Primal food plan, as well as if and how fruit might play for those of you taking on a run of nutritional ketosis.
Questionable Science Thursday: The Save the World Dietary Guidelines (and 7 Grams)
There’s been a flood of commentary on the EAT-Lancet Commission’s report in the general media, conventional health, and ancestral communities over the past week.
I’ve not had time this week to round up everything worth sharing about the commission’s report and ongoing work, though some of the talking points presented (via the media, and the dietary recommendations released) are certainly worth noting.
From a Guardian article posted 17 January 2019 (emphasis mine) –
A complete overhaul of what we eat may be the only way to meet the needs of a planet in crisis. So what’s on – and off – the menu?
The world faces many challenges over the coming decades, but one of the most significant will be how to feed its expanding global population. By 2050, there will be about 10 billion of us, and how to feed us all, healthily and from sustainable food sources, is something that is already being looked at. The Norway-based thinktank (sic) Eat and the British journal the Lancet have teamed up to commission an in-depth, worldwide study, which launches at 35 different locations around the world today, into what it would take to solve this problem – and the ambition is huge.
The commissioners lay out important caveats. Their solution is contingent on global efforts to stabilise population growth, the achievement of the goals laid out in the Paris Agreement on climate change and stemming worldwide changes in land use, among other things. But they are clear that it depends on far more than just these basic requirements. The initial report presents a flexible daily diet for all food groups based on the best health science, which also limits the impact of food production on the planet...
7 Grams You Say???
The article goes on to ponder what the plan would allow the typical Brit to consume; one point of interest to the author (and Mark Sisson at Mark’s Daily Apple as well) is the suggested limit of 7 grams of red meat per day (the allowable range is listed as a whopping 0-14 grams).
Just for grins, I thought it might be notable to see what 7 grams of food might actually look like.
Seven grams of red meat is so tiny it’s all but impossible to creatively capture in a simple, single image, hence the use of small (about the size of my little finger nail) salad olives above – three of which weigh right at 7 grams.
Impressive.
Some Further Reading to Do After Enjoying Your Steak Tonight…
By all means read the full article linked in the Guardian above as an example of recent media coverage.
Here’s the EAT-Lancet Commission on Food, Planet, Health site. For the inquisitive, there are a series of “Briefs” posted at the bottom of the landing page.
Here’s the EAT-Lancet Commission Hub page at The Lancet.
There have been a plethora of spirited responses to the guidelines across a broad spectrum of perspectives, one particularly insightful one from an ancestral health angle is this one from Diana Rogers, RD at Sustainable Dish – 20 Ways EAT Lancet’s Global Diet is Wrongfully Vilifying Meat.
More to come (getting a big project put to bed this week…).
Enjoy that steak tonight, even if you chew up (literally and figuratively) an entire year’s EAT-Lancet allotment of red meat in one meal.
Cracks in the Conventional Wisdom Wall: Debunking the Obesity Paradox?
Just a quick comment taking on the “fat but fit” mantra you’ll see almost everywhere today – here’s a quick read (Debunking the ‘obesity paradox’: Can fat be fit?), published on the 17th over on MDLinx, an internal medicine aggregator site.
Simply put, the obesity paradox, not to be confused (though it often is) with the fat paradox (working on a series related to the fat paradox to follow), stems from a group of research studies in which the august clinicians suggested that being obese (or overweight), particularly when looking at the elderly, wasn’t a bad thing, didn’t induce deleterious impacts, but in fact was protective (both for cardiovascular events and all-cause mortality).
The linked article above reports the key findings in recent three studies arguing otherwise (recently published in the European Heart Journal, The Lancet, and JAMA Cardiology), which clearly demonstrate that higher BMIs lead to greater incidence of cardiovascular problems in particular.
I don’t have time today to go into details here, though we’ll be revisiting this concept here on the blog over the next several weeks. The linked article above provides a very readable summary and links out to the three studies mentioned.
More to come.
Dig a Little Deeper: A Time to Fast
Recently a very insightful article posted at Science – A Time to Fast, written by a team from the Translational Gerontology Branch, National Institute on Aging at the NIH in Baltimore. [Science 16 Nov 2018:Vol. 362, Issue 6416, pp. 770-775]
If you have any interest whatsoever in the concept of fasting, even if doing something as ridiculously simple as compressing your eating window during a given day, take a few minutes to read through this article at your leisure.
A section of their of opening comments from the article, emphasis mine –
…Besides socioeconomic status, energy, environmental quality, and genetics are the most powerful determinants of health and longevity. Although environmental quality and genetics are not under our direct control, energy intake is. The consumption of food provides energy and nutrients necessary to sustain life and allows growth, repair, and reproduction. Proper nutrition can influence health and survival and delay or, in some cases, prevent the onset and progression of chronic diseases. However, both hypo- and hypernutrition have the potential to increase the risk of chronic disease and premature death. Furthermore, manipulation of a nutritionally balanced diet, whether by altering caloric intake or meal timing, can lead to a delay of the onset and progression of diseases and to a healthier and longer life in most organisms (2–4). In general, both prolonged reduction in daily caloric intake and periodic fasting cycles have the power to delay the onset of disease and increase longevity. Data from experimental studies in short-lived species and emerging clinical and epidemiological observations indicate that dietary interventions are valuable strategies that can be applied to promote healthy aging. In model organisms, caloric restriction (CR) provides beneficial effects on health and survival, and there is an extensive literature that provides insights into its molecular mechanisms of action (4)…
The authors go on to review key aspects of, and a bit of the history behind, simple caloric restriction, time-restricted feeding (what many of us in the ancestral/Primal worlds identify as intermittent fasting), intermittent fasting and periodic fasting, which the authors define as an eating pattern in which no or few calories are consumed for periods of time that range from one to several days, and what they labeled as fasting-mimicking diets.
There are several excellent diagrams, emphasizing key points from the article, and offering comparisons of the different approaches.
For those who wish to dig a little deeper in the subject of caloric restriction and different approaches to fasting, something all of us have the potential to benefit significantly from, the article is well referenced.
On a personal note, we’ve been, for the most part effortlessly, practicing what the authors term time-restricted feeding for more than two years now. In the ancestral / Primal worlds, this approach is often labelled as using a compressed eating window or intermittent fasting, consuming the predominance of the day’s nutrition in a six to eight hour window.
As we became more Primally-aligned in our own nutrition, and consciously applying the WHEN principle (eat When Hunger Ensues Naturally), eating in a compressed eating window evolved quite naturally, and provided a host of benefits, including better overall energy and endurance, improved mental clarity and cognitive function, improved sleep, intentional/desired weight loss, and more. I personally plan on giving a 5:2 fasting routine a trial run this upcoming first quarter of 2019.
If you’ve tested some form of fasting in your own routine, it’s time to dig a little deeper and give one (or more) of the approaches a spin.
Dig a Little Deeper: The Carbohydrate Insulin Model of Obesity
Dr. David Ludwig recently published a nifty article over on Medium – The Case for a Low-Carb Diet is Stronger Than Ever – in which he discussed a recent study his team conducted looking at the Carbohydrate Insulin Model of obesity.
From the article, in way of introduction –
…The conventional approach to obesity considers weight control as a matter of accounting — too many calories into the body, not enough calories out. The solution: count calories, eat less and move more. As long as you have a negative “energy balance,” you’ll eventually solve the problem.
Sounds simple. The problem is, calorie restriction is devilishly difficult for most people to sustain over the long term, because the body fights back when it’s deprived of calories. Decades of research shows that, as people lose weight, their hunger inevitably increases and their metabolism slows down.
The more weight you lose, the harder it is to burn off those extra calories, even as hunger and cravings for extra calories keep rising. This isn’t a matter of will power. In the battle between mind and metabolism, metabolism wins. According to nationally-representative data, fewer than 1 in 5 people with overweight or obesity have ever lost just 10% of their weight, for just 1 year.
We each have a sort of set-point, a weight that our body seems to want to remain — it’s lighter for some people, heavier for others, and determined in part by our genes. Some people can eat whatever they want and stay thin. Others seem to gain a few pounds by simply walking past a bakery. For both groups, attempts to either lose or gain significant amounts of weight run into biological resistance…
And the alternative, the Carbohydrate Insulin Model (again, from the article, and there’s a great image summarizing the following at the link)-
…There’s another theory of obesity called the Carbohydrate-Insulin Model (CIM), which argues that we’ve had it backwards all along: Overeating doesn’t cause weight gain, at least not over the long term; the process of gaining weight is what causes us to overeat.
Think of a teenage boy. Eating a lot doesn’t make him grow; his rapid growth makes him hungry and and so he eats a lot. (Of course, adults won’t grow taller no matter how much they eat.)
According to the CIM (see Figure 1), processed, high-“glycemic load”carbohydrates — mainly refined grains, potato products and added sugar — that flooded the food supply during the low-fat diet craze of the last 40 years have raised insulin levels, forcing people’s fat cells into calorie storage overdrive. Our rapidly growing fat cells take up too many calories, leaving too few for the rest of the body. That’s why we get hungry. And that’s why our metabolism slows down if we force ourselves to eat less…
Well worth a read; it’s written as a laymen’s-oriented overview of his study, and the diagrams included are quite illustrative. Despite conventional wisdom’s collective panning of the CIM theory, there’s more research coming down the pike about thoughtful and intentional carbohydrate consumption that’s NOT typical of the standard American diet.
