"Life Without Bread"

[Psalehesost]

I've noticed that my tastes have changed (further) having cut down on carbs for a while - I no longer care for things like buckwheat, even if mixed with mostly egg for the new kind of blinis I made. Could still have it, but don't feel like it. Prefer some meat or eggs instead, and/or, often, plenty of coconut milk.

The blini pan still comes in handy, though - excellent for making meat patties! (and frying eggs - one egg fits perfectly into one slot. I make soft-fried eggs this way)

 

[Stranger]

Sidebar: Oats, Quinoa, and False Friends

Hey Robb, I appreciate your concern, but my dietician told me Oats are gluten-free, so no need to worry about my morning bowl of oatmeal?

Yep, I love oatmeal too, but it contains similar proteins to gluten. Cereal grains tend to have proteins that are high in the amino acid proline. These prolamines (proline rich proteins) are tough to digest, and thus remain intact despite the best efforts of the digestive process to break them down. The result is gut irritation, increased systemic inflammation, and the potential for autoimmune disease. [...]

When we factor in their anti-nutrient properties, and potential to wreck havoc on our GI tract, grains are not a sound decision for health or longevity. For the purposes of our discussion, consider dairy and legumes in the same category. [...]

Quinoa pops up frequently and the refrain goes like this, “Robb! Have you tried this stuff Quinoa (the pronunciation varies depending on how big a hippy you are). It’s NOT a grain! It’s fine, right?”

Well, you’ve likely heard the expression, “If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…” Quinoa is botanically not a grain, but because it has evolved in a similar biological niche, Quinoa has similar properties to grains, including chemical defense systems that irritate the gut. In the case of Quinoa, it contains soap-like molecules called saponins. Unlike gluten, which attaches to a carrier molecule in the intestines, saponins simply punch holes in the membranes of the microvilli cells. Yes, that’s bad. Saponins are so irritating to the immune system that they are used in vaccine research to help the body mount a powerful immune response. The bottom line is if you think grains or grain-like items like Quinoa are healthy or benign, you are not considering the full picture.

That's what Loran Cordain has to say about Quinoa, Buckwheat, ie. pseudo cereals in general:

Quinoa, when it is not milled (e.g. whole quinoa) is a concentrated source of antinutrients known as saponins which increase intestinal permeability and lead to a "leaky gut" which in turn may promote low level chronic, systemic inflammation. This inflammation is caused by leakage of substances (lipopolysaccharide or LPS) derived from resident gram negative gut bacteria that pass through the gut barrier and enter circulation. Chronic low level inflammation in the bloodstream is suspected to fundamentally underlie cardiovascular disease, cancer and autoimmune disease. Quinoa saponins also exhibit immunological adjuvant properties in animal models (meaning that they may increase the immune response when bound to other proteins (antigens) foreign to the body.

Refined or milled Quinoa (which generally is the product available commercially) contains significantly lower concentrations of saponins. Quinoa also contains phytates which inhibit the absorption of its endogenous divalent ions such as iron and zinc. The anti-nutritional effects of Buckwheat have been poorly studied in humans. We advocate that Paleo Athletes obtain their carbs from non-grain sources such as yams, sweet potatoes, fruits, fresh fruit juices, dried fruit and vegetables. Less active people should be careful with fruit juices and dried fruits and consume these foods sparingly.

Loren Cordain, Ph.D., Professor [Link]

More on Buckwheat:

[quote author=Whole Health Source]However, like all seeds (including grains and nuts), buckwheat is rich in phytic acid. Phyic acid complexes with certain minerals, preventing their absorption by the human digestive tract. This is one of the reasons why traditional cultures prepare their grains carefully (3). During soaking, and particularly fermentation of raw batters, an enzyme called phytase goes to work breaking down the phytic acid. Not all seeds are endowed with enough phytase to break down phytic acid in a short period of time. Buckwheat contains a lot of phytase, and consequently fermented buckwheat batters contain very little phytic acid (4, 5). It's also high in astringent tannins, but thorough soaking in a large volume of water removes them. [Link][/quote]

Without fermentation, soaking - like traditional cultures do it - grains in any form are apparently bad, especially as a staple food in ones diet. Even if there are differences in how much harm it does - wheat and other gluten containing grains on top - it seems to be a good idea to abandon grains and pseudograins completely, at least minimalize it's role in the diet.

 

[Gaby]

Even if there are differences in how much harm it does - wheat and other gluten containing grains on top - it seems to be a good idea to abandon grains and pseudograins completely, at least minimalize it's role in the diet.

I know that quinoa inflames me.

There are flours based on roots, for example "chufa" flour which in English is called Tiger nut. Despite the name, it is not a nut, it is a root. Problem is, it is not widely available.

 

[clearmiddle]

The quotes mentioning oatmeal caught my attention because that was one item I didn't want to give up. It is possible to buy certified gluten-free oatmeal (i.e. not combined with wheat while growing or afterward), but oats still contain prolamins (though not "gluten" per se, which is part prolamin). The prolamin concentrations are lower than in other common grains, which may reduce the risk or may just make it more difficult to determine how much of a long-term risk oats present.

The reason I was hanging on to oats, though, was for their fiber. Then one day early this year (2011) I learned from this forum about the book Fiber Menace. I read it and matched some of the symptoms that it attributed to long term elevated fiber intake to a number of long-term issues that I have (some of which were becoming more and more serious), cut out most of my fiber intake (that would include oats, but I had already eliminated them), and within a week or so I started to see improvement.

There was an easier way to make this discovery, but I didn't know at the time. Plant foods that humans are not well equipped to digest are often hard if not impossible to eat without processing. The gluten-free oats I was eating were either "rolled" or "steel cut," an industrial process, and then they had to be cooked for 15-20 minutes to become edible, a practice (cooking of grains) that I believe dates only to neolithic times. I also had to cook them long enough to reduce most of the starchy residue, which I had read was not so good to eat either. Cooking doesn't just make grains easier to chew -- it destroys toxins. These grains are well defended.

So it is good to read about food and about things that to relate to your own particular heath issues, but there may often be a shortcut: look to what paleolithic humans ate and be suspicious of things that came later.

Cooked meat might itself be suspect, but I haven't heard too many people in this day and age advocating eating raw meat. Cooking of meat, however, goes back much, much further than cooking of grains, and the species has had more time to adapt. We might well be able, in time, to adapt to high-carbohydrate plant food sources as well, but a major dietary change like that takes a great many generations and sickens and kills many people along the way. On top of that, an awful lot of what people eat today -- stuff that comes in boxes with long lists of chemical ingredients on the side panels -- may not ever be suitable as food sources. Had the Sumerians discovered and promoted industrial convenience foods, we might not be discussing anything today.

Personally, I would rather evolve along the lines of "The Work," rather than merely being another diseased individual involved in the evolutionary struggle to adapt to a grain-rich diet. My first thought is that we don't even need grains in our diet, but I don't know that. Maybe we needed all the evils that came out of the development of agriculture in order to create an better environment in which we could grow in other ways. Somehow, though, that idea doesn't quite hit the spot with me either.

Buckwheat has been offered here as an exception to the rule. Personally, I don't know. I eat very little of it, partly because of the fiber content and partly because of the carbs, not to mention the fact that it is a grain. I would be willing, once I reach a more sustainable body weight, to experiment with it to see what happens. In the mean time I will leave that task to others that want to take it on.

 

[clearmiddle]

I am currently reading Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham. I first heard about the book from an NPR (US National Public Radio) podcast and thought it would be interesting to explore.

Here are some interesting words about what happens when we eat too much protein:

Without carbohydrates or fat, people depend on protein for their energy, and excessive protein induces a form of poisoning. Symptoms of protein poisoning include toxic levels of ammonia in the blood, damage to the liver and kidneys, dehydration, loss of appetite, and ultimately death.

The grim result was described by Vilhjalmur Stefansson based on his experience in the Arctic in a lean season when fat was so scarce (and plant foods were absent, as usual) that protein became the predominant macronutrient in the diet. “If you are transferred suddenly from a diet normal in fat to one consisting wholly of . . . [lean meat] you eat bigger and bigger meals for the first few days until at the end of about a week you are eating in pounds three or four times as much as you were at the beginning of the week. By that time you are showing both signs of starvation and protein poisoning. You eat numerous meals; you feel hungry at the end of each; you are in discomfort through distension of the stomach with much food and you begin to feel a vague restlessness. Diarrhoea will start in from a week to 10 days and will not be relieved unless you secure fat. Death will result after several weeks.”

...
Because the maximum safe level of protein intake for humans is around 50 percent of total calories, the rest must come from fat, such as blubber, or carbohydrates, such as in fruits and roots.

These concerns echo others that I have encountered since I began trying to improve my diet 16 years ago. While a substantial portion of what I learned has ultimately proven wrong, not all of it has by any means and that is why I am very wary of increasing protein intake.

I know about the ammonia issue because my mother had recurring problems with it (and with her kidneys) and she died at 54. She had a variety of health problems and was chronically underweight. The first time I heard the word "acidosis" was coming from her. Her speech was slurred and I could not entirely make out what she was saying. It is a very odd memory.

I have not noticed any symptoms of protein poisoning myself, but I have maintained my carbohydrate intake at around 50g/day (or higher -- I may not be counting it all just yet, but probably still under 70g/day). As I have mentioned previously, my body warns me (through loss of appetite) when I increase my protein intake, which is why I am experimenting with fat sources, however bad you might think my "cheese experiment" was.

My bottom line I guess is "be cautious and stay alert." We are, to some degree, venturing into uncharted territory. I think that many of us are accustomed to undertaking such ventures regularly, and have lived to tell about it, but not everyone reading this forum has such experience. If you do try anything "unusual," especially if you think that it is based upon recommendations made here, please tell us about it while there is still time to do something.

I can't speak for anyone else, but my lifeline, such as it is, incorporates my own intuition, feedback from this forum, and a practice of reading as widely as I am able, including "good" books and online articles that "seem to be on the right track" and others that seem flawed but still appear to contain useful information. It is important to include sources that disagree objectively with what you think is right. I don't rely on other people to tell me what to do -- after all it is me that is going to pay the price if they are wrong -- but I sift through all the available information, giving weight to consistently helpful sources (such as the present forum).

 

[Stranger]

I am currently reading Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard Wrangham. I first heard about the book from an NPR (US National Public Radio) podcast and thought it would be interesting to explore.

Thanks for mentioning!

I read that book a few month ago and found it really fascinating! Prior to it I was convinced that eating meat (fat!) made us human, as described also by Wolfgang Lutz and others. But apparently it wasn't the meat alone, it was cooking which led to a lot bigger brain. Although I am convinced meat plays a big role in it, the primary process leading to human intelligence and complex human cultures was cooking. I doubt it would have been possible without fatty meat but only cooking gave us the ability to digest it and also vegetables lot more efficient.

Wrangham describes the history off cooking beginning with the earliest humans descending from the trees up to today in a fascinating way. He talks about the social dependencies of this process but also of the advantages of cooking.

I had in mind to post the exact part you quoted about protein because I noticed that Low-Carb without the usual part of a Low-Carb diet - milk products - it could end up with desaster due to protein toxicity. Though, I don't have the book at hand so I am glad you brought that topic up!

I think it is important to notice that diet of almost only meat which tries to mimic the paleo diet of our hunter-gatherer ancestors is not so easy with today's meat. If we would eat raw organs, bone marrow and the brains of animals there would be no problem - but only with today's lean meat alone one will develop protein toxicity. So, enough fat is essential.

By the way, even if there were a period in time when hunter-gatherers lived without carbs and developed ketosis it is likely that they (we) also adapted to a diet so high in carbs that you don't develop ketosis. Those 100 or so hunter-gatherer tribes analyzed by Loran Cordain showed a average meat intake of 40-60% and they all were healthy. Not because they eat low-carb but because they don't eat refined junk-food, pure sugar and sugar-bred fruits at all and grains and beens (if, then fermented or soaked) only in small amounts.

But it is also a fact that every tribe has the tendency to eat as much as meat as possible. (Price showed that he didn't found a vegatarian tribe which was complete disease free.) It is also described by Wrangham, I think. Hunted meat was seen as a good meal. Things the women gathered was only a snack here and there and emergency provision.

Usually, if there was no meat, tribe people were sad. If they hunted something again, all were happy. (Well, at least the men, who had the liberty to eat first and unfortunately often left not much meat for kids and wifes.)

So we can say meat, especially the fatty parts, are what humans prefer and knowing all the research done by Lutz and others, it seems to be beneficial to reduce carbs. Especially for weakend, ill humans apparently there is nothing better than his diet. But as we see, hunter-gatherers are living healthy with their foods - meat, fish fruits, vegetables, roots, nuts - and native tribes even with raw milk products (as far as I know Weston Price discovered this), varying due to cultural differences.

I still struggle with the discrepancies between the Paleo Diet and the Lutz Diet because apparently both do work. Maybe a modified Lutz Diet - i.e. what the Inuits eat (lots of raw or fermented fats, organs) or what some hunter-gatherers ate (lots of bone marrow, organs) - is the most healing one if you are already damaged. One can only mimic this ancient diet, but that's not such a big problem with fats and protein.

The problem with the Paleo Diet is that you can't mimic it perfectly. Especially the sugar-quantity has increased in such a way that it is wise to cut back on fruits and increase meat, fish, eggs and vegetables if you try the paleo style. But then, even with today's Paleo Diet with those fruits there are dramatic improvements only by avoiding toxic foods (grains, milk products, refined carbs, refined products at all, artificial foods) that didn't exist 10.000 years ago as staple food.

Personal experiences in addition to all available information and feedback from others hopefully show where to go here, as Megan already said.

[quote author=Megan]My bottom line I guess is "be cautious and stay alert." We are, to some degree, venturing into uncharted territory. I think that many of us are accustomed to undertaking such ventures regularly, and have lived to tell about it, but not everyone reading this forum has such experience. If you do try anything "unusual," especially if you think that it is based upon recommendations made here, please tell us about it while there is still time to do something.

I can't speak for anyone else, but my lifeline, such as it is, incorporates my own intuition, feedback from this forum, and a practice of reading as widely as I am able, including "good" books and online articles that "seem to be on the right track" and others that seem flawed but still appear to contain useful information. It is important to include sources that disagree objectively with what you think is right. I don't rely on other people to tell me what to do -- after all it is me that is going to pay the price if they are wrong -- but I sift through all the available information, giving weight to consistently helpful sources (such as the present forum). [/quote]

*Edited for a few notes

 

[SolarMother]

Parallel

If you want to cut through skin you would need a proper and well sharp knife and it won't be too much of a struggle me thinks. You could also go for cracklings (without skin which would make it easier to dice) which seem to get crispy alone from the deep fry.

rendering; a frying method : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtL_aALc9Ho
with water added approach : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqkQtiuNbBU&feature=related

is the skin especially nutritious? I always liked the fat but shudder a bit while eating rinds.

Thank you Parallel, for the links. I will try them out as I am on a quest to make crispy but juicy pork rinds. I will report back my findings. I don't know if the skin is especially nutritious or not.

Pork rinds (torresmo) are really common around here. The best one are those that are crunchy (called pururuca).

I made a search about how to make these and it seems that the secret is two do it in two steps.

First you fry it on its own fat or on lard (some websites say "half-fry" it) or take it to the oven or boil it. I think the most common way is to fry it. Then you cool it. Some websites suggest you should cool it in the fridge for one or more days together with all the lard from the first fry. Then you fry it again, that's when it gets crunchy. I'll check with my grandmother how she does it.

I prefer when there is a little bit of meat together with the skin and fat.

Courageous Inmate Sort , let's all keep in tough about our findings. I am thinking of the pork fat and maybe a little meat that may be trimmed off at the butchers (like the way a porkchop used to have a lot of fat,) buying that regularly and then trying out these ideas. Let me know what your grandmother says.

 

[clearmiddle]

Catching Fire can certainly provides more "food for thought" for people trying to puzzle out what best to eat. The author makes reference, as in so many other books I have read recently, to the issue of "scientific authority" -- the tendency to respect the word of "authorities" over the weight of evidence. I don't know how much of his theory to actually believe, but it's interesting that we could conceivably have had 1.8 million years or more to adapt to cooked food, plenty of time to redesign the lower gut I would think, particularly when an ever-growing early human brain was part of the selection process.

I had a flash as I was starting the book, and I realized later that it echoed, a little, something Laura said a year or so ago:

...That's why I say that cooking is part chemistry, part alchemy, part metallurgy. Knowing exactly what your ingredients do, what and how and if you can substitute, how to correct mistakes on the fly, etc, are all part of the process. ...

As the author began his discussion, I imagined an multi-stage alchemical process where first food itself was transformed through cooking, and then our ancestral species were transformed into more advanced 3D species through higher food quality, ultimately presenting the possibility for 3D to move on.

I had another thought, inspired by some of the details I was reading. It seems that there are some fairly significant gaps in the fossil record even among our more recent ancestors. I wonder if these gaps represent "transitional species" that didn't remain very long before something else took their place. Making an evolutionary transition seems to bring with it a lot of casualties. Are we here in some sense the rough equivalent of a "transitional species?" We sure seem to have a lot of trouble with our health, for all the attention we give to it.

Actually, I think this latter idea may have first occurred to me while reading this post from Laura, but the discussion didn't go in that direction (or I lost track of it).

 

[rrraven]

Usually, if there was no meat, tribe people were sad. If they hunted something again, all were happy. (Well, at least the men, who had the liberty to eat first and unfortunately often left not much meat for kids and wifes.)

sez who?

this pic of a kangaroo is like the pics of animals you get in butcher shops showing the different cuts you can get and each part goes to a relative of the hunter who only gets the tail (that's the bit I know) not sure exactly who gets what but its like left hind quarter to maternal grand parents, right hind quarter to paternal grandparents and so on
this was told to me by a local elder of the biripi people
he also told me that the women of his tribe were known for their special fishing ability, and back in the day used to tie off the last segment of their little finger with fishing line until it died and dropped off and then ''offered '' the piece to the ocean/fishes as payment for their future fishing success

Don't we know enough about paleo diet now to realize that giving the women and children the ''offal''while the men eat the ''good lean''muscle meat is not a sign of male dominance ,its the opposite ,its making sure the childbearing women get organ meat and marrow and fat rich brain

 

[clearmiddle]

Oh, one other thing that Catching Fire makes clear: Chew your food well! It makes a big difference as to how well it digests.

 

[Stranger]

Usually, if there was no meat, tribe people were sad. If they hunted something again, all were happy. (Well, at least the men, who had the liberty to eat first and unfortunately often left not much meat for kids and wifes.)

sez who?

Richard Wrangham in Catching Fire.

Don't we know enough about paleo diet now to realize that giving the women and children the ''offal''while the men eat the ''good lean''muscle meat is not a sign of male dominance ,its the opposite ,its making sure the childbearing women get organ meat and marrow and fat rich brain

In this book it is described that the men it most of animal fats.

Your example is interesting. I would hope Wrangham is wrong with generalizing that nearly all tribe-men behave that selfish. I don't have the book in english, otherwise I would quote the part for discussion.

 

[RedFox]

Usually, if there was no meat, tribe people were sad. If they hunted something again, all were happy. (Well, at least the men, who had the liberty to eat first and unfortunately often left not much meat for kids and wifes.)

sez who?

Richard Wrangham in Catching Fire.

Don't we know enough about paleo diet now to realize that giving the women and children the ''offal''while the men eat the ''good lean''muscle meat is not a sign of male dominance ,its the opposite ,its making sure the childbearing women get organ meat and marrow and fat rich brain

In this book it is described that the men it most of animal fats.

Your example is interesting. I would hope Wrangham is wrong with generalizing that nearly all tribe-men behave that selfish. I don't have the book in english, otherwise I would quote the part for discussion.

Having read Paradise Lost today, it may be that the tribes Wrangham observed had already been corrupted by the spread of agriculture (and pathology?) already. Drinking milk is a relatively new thing for example.
rrraven's observations strike me as closer to what I imagine our ancestors lived like. fwiw

 

[clearmiddle]

...Having read Paradise Lost today, it may be that the tribes Wrangham observed had already been corrupted by the spread of agriculture (and pathology?) already. Drinking milk is a relatively new thing for example.
rrraven's observations strike me as closer to what I imagine our ancestors lived like. fwiw

I approach these books "a la carte," taking the good parts and leaving the rest. Wrangham's theory includes the idea that "pair bonding" arose somehow from cooking. Fine, let him believe what he wants. What I found interesting was his description of "protein poisoning" and also his description of the human digestive process and why it is important to chew your food well. Some of the material also correlates well with that in Fiber Menace, which is encouraging. There is a lot of stuff toward the end of the book, however, that I suspect is nonsense.

I must say, though, that Catching Fire and Sex At Dawn make an interesting contrast, and serve to highlight the difficulties of shedding light on our human past. They both have interesting things to say about our pre-agricultural diet. But I think both contain major omissions and errors, and both could stand to be informed by The Polyvagal Theory.

 

[clearmiddle]

There is more interesting material in the epilogue of Catching Fire. The author seems committed to the "calories in; calories out" paradyme, not recognizing the issue of lipogenesis and how it drives appetite, but his comments are still insightful.

Disclaimer: I will quote portions of the text that I found particularly relevant, leaving out much important detail (for reasons of brevity) and undoubtedly skewing the meaning toward my own purposes (all emphasis mine). (Bella contributed too, by standing in front of the screen and walking on the keyboard. I removed her part.)

We would find it easier to choose appropriate foods if we had a better sense of how many calories we obtain from them. We need to become more aware of the calorie-raising consequences of a highly processed diet. To do so, we need to better understand nutritional biophysics.

Consider meat: the biochemistry of protein digestion is well known. Researchers know precisely what secretions are applied to food molecules at each point in their journey down the alimentary canal. They can say which chemical bonds are severed by which enzymes at which point, how the cells and membranes carry the products of digestion across the gut wall, and how mucosal cells respond to changing pH or mineral concentrations. The detail of biochemical knowledge is exquisite. Yet this impressive expertise concerns protein, not meat, digestion. Nutritional science is focused so intensively on chemistry that physical realities are forgotten.

Researchers treat the food entering the stomach as if it were a solution of nutrients ready for a cascade of biochemical reactions. They forget that our digestive enzymes interact not with free proteins but with a slimy three-dimensional bolus, which after a meal of meat is a messy collection of chewed chunks of muscle, each piece of which is wrapped in multilayered tubes of connective tissue. Structural complexity matters because it affects how easily the food bolus is converted to digestible nutrients, and therefore how many calories we get from our food.

As we saw in chapter 3, the rats that gained an extra 30 percent fat in Oka’s experiment had no extra calories in their food. They merely had their diet softened. The Evo Diet, described in chapter 1, was calculated to give the volunteers sufficient calories to maintain weight, yet they lost weight rapidly. Assessing the energy value of foods is a difficult technical problem. Nutritionists cannot calculate the value of foods directly because foods are too complicated in their composition and structure, and digestive systems treat different foods in different ways. So instead of making precise calculations of exactly the number of calories people can obtain from a given food, nutritionists make rough guesses. They do so according to a set of agreed rules that are not perfect but provide a good approximation, at least for foods that are very easily digested. They call these rules a convention. For more than a century, the convention that has dominated estimating energy values in foods, and now under-girds the food-labeling system of the Western world, has been the Atwater system.

The text goes on to tell about Atwater, detailing his measurement system and its underlying assumptions, and making it clear where the key items on our current-day "nutritional labels" come from. From his work comes the initial Atwater Convention:

He knew how much energy each of the three big types of macronutrient contained, how much of each macronutrient was present in the food, and how much of it was used in the body. Ignoring variation within each type of macronutrient, he proposed the convention that still dominates the food industry and government standards. By taking into account the proportion of the food that he found was not digested, which was rarely more than 10 percent, he claimed that on average proteins and carbohydrates each yield four kcal/gram, while lipids yield nine kcal/gram. These are known as Atwater’s general factors. This simple and convenient system forms the basis of the Atwater convention and is essentially what the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Nutrient Database and McCance and Widdowson’s The Composition of Foods use to produce their tables of nutrient composition.

The text then goes on to describe various "modifications" that have been applied to the system to bring it closer to reality.

The Atwater system is thus a flexible convention that is continuously modified but still provides the fundamental basis for assessment of energy value in today’s foods. It allows people eating ordinary cooked foods to track their caloric intake sufficiently to get a good idea of when they are overeating or undereating. But it has two critical problems that undermine its ability to assess the food value of items of low digestibility, such as raw foods or foods like whole-grain flour with large particles.

The first problem is that the Atwater convention does not recognize that digestion is a costly process. When we eat, our metabolic rate rises, the maximum increase averaging 25 percent. The corresponding figures for fish (136 percent) and for snakes (687 percent) are vastly higher, showing that humans pay less for digestion than other species, presumably due partly to our food being cooked. But the cost of digestion is still significant for humans and can be reduced or raised depending on the food type.

When Atwater burned foods in a bomb calorimeter, he ignored this complexity. He assumed that humans could use all the energy present in a food and digested in the body. If food burns in the bomb calorimeter, Atwater seemed to conclude, it produces the same amount of energy value in our bodies. But the human body is not a bomb calorimeter. We do not ignite food inside our bodies. We digest it, and we use calories to pay for this complex series of operations. The cost varies by nutrient. Protein costs more to digest than carbohydrates, while fat has the lowest digestive cost of all macronutrients...

Finally, someone has stated what should be obvious. In all my reading to date I have not seen this simple question addressed: why would we think that burning an item of food down to ash has anything to do with what happens when we eat it and digest it?

Continuing,

...Based on animal studies, we can expect that the costs of digestion are higher for tougher or harder foods than softer foods; for foods with larger rather than smaller particles; for food eaten in single large meals rather than in several small meals; and for food eaten cold rather than hot. Individuals vary too. Lean people tend to have higher costs of digestion than obese people.

Whether obesity leads to a low cost of digestion or results from it is unknown. Either way, the variation is important for someone watching his or her weight. For the same number of measured calories, an obese person, having a lower digestive cost, will put on more pounds than a lean person. Life can be unfair.

Compounding the problem, a second big failure of the Atwater system is closely related and equally important. The Atwater system assumes that the proportion of food digested is always the same, regardless of whether the food is in liquid or solid form, part of a high-fiber or low-fiber diet, or raw or cooked. Recall that one of Atwater’s general factors was the proportion of food that is passed into the feces undigested. He found that this was low—10 percent or less—and he assumed that this proportion was constant.

This assumption has long been known to be wrong. When A. L. Merrill and B. K. Watt introduced the Atwater specific-factor system in 1955, they noted specifically that the digestibility of a grain is affected by how finely it is milled. More extensively milled flour might be completely digested, whereas less milling could lead to 30 percent of the flour being excreted unused. So they called for specific data to be applied to the digestibility of every food. Such data, however, are often unavailable...

...Essentially, nutrition science is faced with choosing between the immense effort of accumulating nutritional-value data that are difficult to quantify but accurate, on the one hand, or using easily quantified but physiologically unrealistic measures, yielding only a rough approximation of food value. Given the difficulty of acquiring the actual, contextually adjusted nutritional values of individual foods (and combination of foods), the general public is provided with estimates of food values that do not reflect the realities of the digestive process.

There is an underlying belief expressed in these passages that excess calories consumed are stored as fat (triglicerides). We have plenty of reason to question that thinking. What I think is important, however, is that the digestive process is very complex, being affected by many factors, some or most of which may still be poorly understood. We should not be fooled by the widespread use of the vastly oversimplified and inaccurate Atwater Convention to think that the results of digestive processes can easily be calculated from "nutritional data." Even other ideas like "carbohydrates stimulate insulin production which causes lipogenesis" could be vastly oversimplified, I think.

Personally, I favor the idea being guided mainly by what we see happening at a high level, taking hints from the underlying science as it is known but recognizing that the science as it exists today is full of gaps and false leads. Others here may feel more motivated to take the science head-on and try to make sense of it on its own terms. I prefer to take a top-down approach when I encounter detailed data that is so problematic.

...As food writer Michael Pollan has argued, we should choose “real food,” not “nutrients.” For Pollan, real food is natural or only lightly processed, recognizable and familiar. By contrast, nutrients are invisible chemicals, such as essential oils and amino-acids and vitamins, objects of scientific expertise whose significance we must take on faith. The less processed our food, the less intense we can expect the obesity crisis to be.

And now a familiar theme surfaces:

We once thought of our species as infinitely adaptable, particularly in our diet. Different peoples survive on diets that range from 100 percent plants to 100 percent animals. Such flexibility buttresses a notion that human evolutionary success depended merely on inventiveness. Taken to extremes, our species seems to be free to create our own evolutionary ecology.

The cooking commitment says otherwise. The human ancestral environment was full of uniform problems: how to get fuel, how to regulate feeding competition, how to organize society around fires. The big problem of diet was once how to get enough cooked food, just as it is still for millions of people around the world. But for those of us lucky enough to live with plenty, the challenge has changed. We must find ways to make our ancient dependence on cooked food healthier.

Once again, what emerges is "what is true is what I want to be true." Where have we heard that before?

And once again, here is an author that seems to have useful insights into certain aspects of the problems of modern foods, but doesn't seem to have the big picture.

This is frustrating for me personally for another reason. In my day job I am involved in, among other things, collecting data about diabetes treatment effectiveness. I see all this effort going into assessing treatment strategies that, as far as I can determine, are based on false premises and cannot work. We monitor blood chemistry (HbA1c & LDL) and other readily measured quantities (screening test participation, office visits), while watching the problems grow worse and never coming close to looking at the causes.

I feel as though I may have learned some useful things from reading portions of this book. I will keep an eye out for other material that looks at digestive factors in combination. And while I probably can't change the status quo at work, I might be able to make contact with researchers that are interested in alternative theories and see what they have to say. It's worth a try.

 

[Peam]

To get more fat in my diet I like having chopped sauteed onions along with bacon and eggs for breakfast. Onions seem to soak the fat up.
I find they go well slathered on a chop and veg for dinner as well.