BRAIN GUT 4: WHAT WAS HOMO’S SOLUTION?
Posted On:
07/11/2012
READERS SUMMARY
1. Why should we look back to move forward in modern healthcare?
2. Is the Paleo Solution your species real solution?
3. How would have evolution had to build a human brain based upon what we know today?
4. How does lipid chemistry destroy the Savanna Hypothesis with some new knowledge we have in brain chemistry?
5. Will you Epi-Paleo it forward now that you have a deeper understanding how that 3 pounds of jelly works best in your head?
The paleo community has the “Paleo Solution“, and it is a great introductory book to a lifestyle that will improve people to a higher plane of health than we have while eating a standard American diet found in our western world. It is clear from fossil data humans were in better physical shape in the late paleolithic before the Younger Dryas occurred as well. It appears that this deep freeze caused massive dietary change in the homo species from predominate hunter gatherers culture to and agrarian culture because of rapid climate change and elimination of the great megafauna from our food chains. The focus of this series, however, is focused upon when we jumped from purely primate to mainly homo species and to see what diet is really best for the rapid encephalization of our species. I am not convinced the modern paleolithic diet that is quite popular now fits that bill at all. The reason I bring this forth, is because I treat very sick and ill homo sapiens every day. ’Eating paleo’ may just NOT reverse their health. The proof of this is found on every single popular paleo forum you can visit. As a surgeon, I need something that really works in the most resistant cases. That is where I discovered the Epi-Paleo Rx.
In my specialty of spine surgery, this is especially true when we are dealing with cranial and spinal pathology. As a neurosurgeon these neolithic diseases are the ones I am most focused in on in my clinic. Evolution is in large part about epigenetic to cellular communication; it’s comparing notes and copying and pasting new genetic recipes to create a new dish. When we understand how that dish was created we gain deep insight of how to to keep that dish tasting crisp and fresh every time we replicate it.
For this reason, I think we must look back in time to when this transition occurred about 2.6-2.5 million years (mya) when massive climatic shifts occurred in the East African Rift that I laid out in Brain Gut 3. When we go back to the milieu that transitional man found himself in we might gain some insight to learn something about how to really reverse the neolithic diseases all physicians are seeing in their clinic daily. If these forces were strong enough to form us from ape they may hold the keys to what is optimal for our current biology with respect to our guts and our brains. The assault of these diseases to me is akin to an “unending tsunami waves” hitting our shores since the Younger Dryas forced homo to rely on sub-optimal food sources to just survive.
After my Factor X webinar, people learned that the currency of survival for all eutherian mammals was a new biologic strategy to speed up DNA expression to adapt more quickly to the environment. The reasons eutherian mammals survived is because they use a placenta to birth their young. There is now strong evidence from molecular biology that the genes that coded for the evolution of the placenta were heavily selected for after the K-T event. How do we know this?
The first mammals were rather old in an evolutionary scale, about 210 x10 to the 6th years before the present time (YBP). These early mammals (such as multituberculates) were small, furry, egg-laying, monotreme-like insect predators. They were present prior to the advent of the dinosaurs, but became extinct about 35 x 10 to the 6th YBP. We know nothing about their molecular genomes, but what we do know, is that two other mammalian lines developed from them directly, the marsupials and the eutharian placentals. Humans are in the later class. How do we know placenta were heavily selected by a post K-T world? Well, the marsupials are only found in the southern hemisphere with the few exceptions. This fits perfectly with how Factor X occurred 65 million years ago as well as I laid out in my Webinar. Moreover, the placental mammals were far more successful because they radiated over 2000 genera, to about only 140 genera in the marsupial clade.
Most of the surviving species left on the land of this planet is due to that formative moment in evolution. This is a big step in knowing who we really are and how we are built. Factor X is huge for any mammal that evolved after it.
HOW DOES VIRAL MARKETING, CT, FACTOR X, AND CT-6 ALL COME TOGETHER FOR HOMO’S SOLUTION?
Here is the most important fact in all of mammalian evolution in my opinion that is not talked about enough. With these placental mammals, we see clear and compelling patterns of acquisition of genetic parasitic elements in their genomes, mainly in the context of retroviruses like LINES, SINES, and ERVS. After K-T the best source of food was located in the deep polar seas with it huge collection of marine life and cauldron of viral particles as we covered in Brain Gut 2. The predominate macronutrient in the sea is seafood/microalgae.
This means that all the animals left on our planet at some point after the K-T event would of had their food supply tied to the ocean as some point. This is a massive link in the Quilt.
It was also bitter cold for many years after a sudden global event like K-T impact. What would life do in this case like this? It would have to evolve to that environment rapidly and that is precisely what happened to our deepest ancestors by using viral marketing as laid out in Brain Gut 2. That program is wired into the neural structures of every surviving animal left on the planet. This was my thought process when I was thinking about finding the Ancient Pathway in the mammalian brain I laid out in CT-6 blog post. I think it is no coincidence that eutherian mammals 65 million years ago and modern man 13,000 years ago had to navigate the same freezing environment and survive. Clearly, this ancient program was wired into the mammalian nervous system for a deep evolutionary reason.
Let us now fast forward to 2.6 million years ago where our recent ancestors come from, the transitional apes. I have already showed you in Parts 1-3 of this series that primates and humans use massive amounts of these transposable genetic elements to create new genes to adapt quickly. What do you think transitional ape used to become man?
Evolution uses a fractal design where form always meets function, of course, and we did the very same thing again in our speciation as life did after the K-T event.
FACTOR X AND NEOLITHIC DISEASE GENERATION:
Many people wanted to know what they could do to their human biology to make Factor X work for them to reverse the curse of neolithic disease. In my opinion, this series is that first and most important step in that direction. To know who you are, you must first know where you came from. This is the key point in Brain Gut 1. Moreover, you need to know precisely why it happened to make it actionable. Why you ask? Because it tells you where you might be headed if you fall off the path that brought your existence to life.
Today our species has fallen way off that track. That is why humans today are mediocre as a species and are in current decline morphologically and neurologically. Moreover, we are becoming more feeble and useless as we age because of how broken we are metabolically from a physiologic stand point. This is really evidenced in the diseases of the brain and the gut of modern man. They are catastrophe’s in both size and scope, and not to mention cost. It’s why modern medicine needs a new perspective, because they don’t know how and why we evolved. This is where biology’s epistemologic foundation lies. Modern healthcare is blind to this very fundamental fact. This is why we are poor in healing chronic diseases.
In my view, when you use evolution as your North Star…….you get a lot smarter about how to best treat chronic disease we see today.
What happened in Africa at the transition from ape to man?
1. We had retreating forests in the middle of Africa and the opening of the grass lands we see today.
2. We lost a lot of megfauna
3. We began to see a lot new speciation and genera’s show up in the bone collector’s fossil data
4. We begin to see stone tools in archeology
5. We see Homo Habilis show up in the bone collector’s data
6. We immediately see rapid changes in the Homo’s feet from apes
7. We see major changes in the morphology of Homo’s spines, pelvis, and hind limb
8. We begin to see rapid encephalization of Homo
9. With in the first Homo species, Habilis, we see rapid development of the speech areas of the brain called Dr. Stephan Cunnane also shares my view in this area. He is the world expert in how evolution formed the human brain. This implied to me, that homo would have had to have a large ready source of these building blocks available to it in the environment at all times or it would have become extinct as fast as it evolved. Building a brain is very complex business, and it is not the domain of the people who were controlling the THEORIES OF HOMINID EVOLUTION until the last 10 years. That has radically changed now that the neurosciences have put their two cents on the table. The role of water has been strongly emphasized by evolutionary ecologists and largely ignored by the purveyors of the dogma……the bone collectors.
WHAT ELSE DO WE NEED TO BUILD A HUMAN BRAIN?
1. Iodine
2. Iron
3. A placenta that was capable of creating a massive fat furnace to fuel the perfect mix of 03 DHA to 06 EPA to make the neural framework.
4. Lots of oxygen to complete the desaturation converting shorter chain to long chain PUFA’s: DHA requires 6 O2 molecules. This is why previous to the Cambrian explosion we have no ‘big brained’ animals in the fossil record. We had no oxygen to fuel a brain’s growth. When O2 showed up life exploded.
5. Efficient mitochondria carry out the oxidative metabolism and lots of them in the brain.
6. Phospholipids and the special chemistry of lipids in aqueous milieu (brain and spinal cord sit in a bag of CSF fluid)
7. Cell membranes respond to diet, temperature and to pressure changes epigenetically. Since humans are homeothermic, our neural lipid epigenetic variables are diet and environment dependent. These features allow biochemistry to specifically affect the acyl groups on our lipid layers in the brain for optimal cell signaling. You might be a great biochemist or organic chemist but if you do not know neural biochemistry you might not be aware of just how much you do not know.
8. Proteins receptors are inserted in these special lipids to signal cells chemically and electrically. This means lipids and proteins have to be multidimensional in configuration and must thermodynamically matched to the lipids in our membranes. DHA is that “magic lipid” that does all of this. You don’t find that information in fossils or in bones on the land.
NON GEEK EXPLANATION OF THE ABOVE 8 THINGS :
Much of what is published and out in the paleosphere is based on deeply flawed assumptions. Why? Neural biochemistry is that answer, and most have completely ignored it and its massive implications for an optimal human diet.
It means the configuration requires a very precise biochemistry to work in the brain. The lipid content of the brain is altered entirely by the environment the animal is in and the protein component alters the cellular behavior and function. Nothing works optimally without the lipid chemistry being precise. (EPIGENETICS is ridiculously important to a large brained mammal)
9. There are special lipid ligand for signaling nuclear receptors (hormones) and there has to be a stoichiometric relationship between the ligand released and its membrane concentration (We are talking neurotransmitter biology here for the NON GEEKS, ya know leptin and its other hormones I rant on about)
If your diet is off…….your hormones will be off, and that means your brain is working suboptimally. Now go take a look at your labs and realize that those hormone panels tell you directly about how your diet matches your brain function. You get it yet? Hormone panels are your own personal mirror to your brain function clinically.
Want some more data to show you my idea might be correct? Let me go ‘Denise Minger vegetarian style’ for you now.
HOW TO DESTROY THE SAVANNA HYPOTHESIS WITH BRAIN BIOCHEMISTRY 101:
Lets look at mammalian vegetarian brain.
The best way to see how a brain is constructed is to look a brain in a terrestrial vegetarian land mammal. They have an 0mega 3 fatty acid called docopentaenoic acid (DPA) in their non neural tissues and it is very abundant in their bodies. Their neural membranes however, hoard DHA, and conserve it tremendously. WHY is that? Because DHA is so rare on land food sources, land mammals who were herbivores all have really small brain sizes compared to their body size.
Moreover, as their body size got bigger (think elephant as analogy) they got a logarithmic reduction in brain size. This was also seen in the dinosaurs who were terrestrial too! So we know the environmental food sources has limited terrestrial based animals up until we showed up on planet earth.
NON GEEKS: they got ‘less smart’.
More neural biochemistry insight of Homo’s Solution you were not told in any paleo book: DHA and DPA are both 22 carbon fats, but DPA has only 5 double bonds while DHA has 6. The only chemical difference is one double bond between DHA and DPA.
In 600 million years of neural evolution, Mother Nature has made no attempt to replace DHA with any other fat. Why is that?
It suggests to me, that the chemistry of the DHA molecule has a “unique electrical property” that is not fully shared by DPA in the vegetarian mammals brain. In other words, its use has limited their cerebral development. The moral here? You must have a lots of DHA no matter what dogma you currently carry in your own present beliefs to make a human brain.
DEEP IMPLICATION OF THAT FACT: Just living on the land , eating meat predominately, will not give you enough DHA to make the 3 pound brain we have. You might be beginning to realizing then that maybe the ‘paleo solution’ was not really Homo’s original solution at our genesis of speciation. You would also be quite correct in that assumption. It is physically impossible to build a human brain without a steady supply of DHA and brain specific nutrients and neural biology proves it definitively with out any doubt. Its a shame no one looked at the major morphologic difference between transitional ape and man before jumping the gun on what we SHOULD be eating as the base of our food pyramid, huh?
I think the paleo solution is what we CAN eat after the Younger Dryas and remain relatively healthy but to say it is optimal is just not factual. What we can eat is not that important when we are talking brain construction. What we should be eating should be the question we ask! Just because you can eat a vegetarian template does not mean we should. Since we became human we have developed the ability to eat a wide variety of diets and still survive. But when we veered off the path of what was optimal for our brain we began to see neolithic disease generation. We have the opportunity to change that if we want to when we consider what the human brain requires for optimal function.
WANT MORE PROOF MY RADICAL IDEA MIGHT BE THE RIGHT SOLUTION FOR HOMO?
60% of the brain is made of lipid and all brain cell membranes have another particular characteristic. They have high levels of DHA in them! In fact, in different mammals species the content of AA and DHA do not vary but their brain size does vary. This tight relationship is broken by us, HUMANS. Ask yourself why this is the case now? This suggests the genes that control brain growth are tightly related to a deep environmental source of DHA. If you have a neurologic disorder, eating disorder, or psychiatric disorder of any type you might to pay close attention to this part of the blog. It is where you will begin to find the remedies and clues that will heal you from what has ailed you for so long.
GEEK ALERT: DHA is also specifically and selectively incorporated into neural cell membranes and concentrated at synapses between neurons. The synapse is the most unsaturated part of the cell membrane in the brain. That means this is where DHA is needed most. At the synapse is where chemical and electrical transmission occurs. It is vitally important in construction of a human brain. Some DHA can be made from ALA but the process is highly rate limited in human biochemistry. Another major issue is that ALA is very susceptible to oxidation, at a rate of 60% in 24 hours, compared to only 5% oxidation for DHA. That is a substantial difference. This is why I tell all my patients fowl is foul.
Even if they eat flax it is not the right kind of omega three’s for a human brain. ALA forces competition for the desaturase enzymes so that means if you have a large brain you do not ever want to eat flax of vegetarian sources of omega 3. Moreover, excitable membranes do not work well with oxidized lipids in them. Vegetarian sources of omega 3 are all loaded with the highly oxidizable ALA. This is why you need to avoid them like the plague if you are bright. ALA allows for major oxidation and that is why vegans/vegetarians/fruititarians are at serious risks for neolithic disease generation. We know that cell membrane stability is critical in all neurodegenerative disorders we treat in medicine today. The work of Patricia Kane at John Hopkins is also enlightening in this area. If you are not facile in her work you need to be. If you do not believe that, go talk to some one with Alzheimer’s disease.
Today it is well established that dietary sources of DHA are an independent determinant of brain growth and in evolution across all species.(Broadhurst 2002)
It goes even further folks; Pierre Budowski at Hebrew University showed definitively that their is direct competition between omega 6 and omega 3 PUFAS and the balance of both in the brain is critical. This is also a tightly controlled system in the human brain. Moreover, as land based mammals grow, their body plan growth rates outstripped their ability to make DHA endogenously and they had no exogenous supply, so they kept small brains! That is why there is a relationship in all land mammals that the bigger they got the dumber they get.
This implies that DHA is the SINGLE rate limiting to step to a big brain in the entire land food web on this planet. Bye, bye savanna hypothesis!!!
NON GEEK ALERT: Holy moly, I need to rethink my diet and my environmental temperature since I have diseases caused by a bad brain! Think Leptin Resistance, obesity, ED, etc…….
There is only one large mammal that comes close to the brain/body growth of Homo sapiens. Humans and dolphins are the only two mammals that break this evolutionary trend. Stop and ask yourself why that might be the case now? The dolphin’s brain makes up 1% of its total body weight. They also have an affinity for fish in their diet and they eat very few carbohydrates at all.
This strongly suggests that human evolution was somehow tied to the water. We laid this all out without using any of the bone collector theories too.
They ignored the human brain in their theory generation and now it should make you realize all those beliefs they have seared into your brain about fossils is perilous at best. As a neurosurgeon, I embraced the brain to give me Homo’s solution. It is impossible to have the human brain in your head if you were not evolved eating some nutrient source with a lot of DHA! It is no longer tenable to argue about it. And supplementation of DHA does not equal eating shellfish for optimal health. No one can out supplement a great Epi-Paleo diet.
Another major point has to be made. All the genes assimilated over the eons to form the brain use free T3 as their metabolic switch to cause brain growth. Most people in the paleosphere believe that a low carb diet cause a low free T3 state. This false belief is caused because they fail to account for what happens to free T3 in a cold wet environment devoid of carbs that is loaded with seafood high in Selenium, Iodine, Iron, Magnesium, Zinc, and DHA. See context matters huge to neural biochemistry………..
T3 is sensitive to dietary carbs when that is the type of diet you are adapted to eating without much seafood in it. But a diet loaded with the above nutrients, and devoid of carbs, this dramatically increases free T3 while also lowering TSH to a massive degree. This is precisely the environment we found in the Rift Zone where humans came from. The ‘carbophiles’ always forget that evolution might have others ways to skin the cat that we have moved away from today. Somebody also forgot to tell them as we have our brain shrunk too! This implies de-evolution.
They seem to forget that most of us have known for several decades the effect of insulin/carbs on T3. But we also know eating carbs all day is a great way to destroy a brain with Alzheimer’s and neurologic diseases we see today commonly. They need to reconcile these facts with disease data. They can not. Just because we can eat carbs all day long does not make it optimal. This recent link might show you just how wrong many in paleo-land might be. The ‘bad mojo’ that low carb diets get in paleo is disturbing, and is perpetrated by those trying to control the “meme” of what paleo is to them and not to science. Here, I am only concerned what is optimal for our species. Paleo is good. I now believe there is another solution for Homo that maybe best.
The environment provided for a “low carb, high seafood diet” that massively stimulative to the genes controlling brain growth by raising T3 and lowing TSH. In my medical career, I have seen no evidence that a low carbohydrate diet causes any hypothyroidism as many bloggers write about, like its common knowledge to everyone. Maybe it is to them, but I doubt they can cure themselves from even a bad thought, much less a neurologic disease. It’s only common knowledge when you’re beholden to dogma. A low carb diet, with concomitent elevations in brain nutrients, is where optimal brain function happens for homo happens, in my clinical experience.
It limits what hurts our brain function and optimizes the nutrients it needs to function ideally. Question dogma, always even it is right about a lot of things.
NON GEEKS: With regards to brain function…….paleo may not be the optimal solution for homo.
What does this mean for our Optimal Homo diet? Remember, you are still part of the Homo tree…………
It means you better consider becoming Epi-Paleo if you want to remain smart, and not begin your de-evolutionary slide to mediocre like many of our species have already done.
Someone named Jeff, just recently said on an internet site, ” Humans can survive very easily on most foods.
Thriving into old age and keeping the effects of degeneration to a minimum is the holy grail of Nutritional Genomics.
This in and of itself, goes far beyond the Paleo template, which truly is a fad diet based on a lot of assumptions.”
NEXT UP: BRAIN GUT 5
CITES:
1. http://www.wsg.washington.edu/communications/online/shellfishnutrition_09.pdf
2. http://www.livestrong.com/article/339801-nutritional-values-of-meat-fish/
3. http://foodconfessional.wordpress.com/2008/04/16/meat-nutrition-information/
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seafood
5. S.J> Gould. 2002 The structure of Evolutionary Theory. Cambridge, MA Belknap/Harvard Univ. Press.
6. Tobias, P. 1998 Water and human evolution. Out there. 35: 38-44. 4
7. Bazan, N. 2007 Homeostatic regulation of photoreceptor cell Integrity. The Proctor Lecture. Invest. Opthalmol.Vis Sci 48(11):4866-4881
8. Bitsanis, D. Crawford, M.A. et al. AA predominats in the membrane PGof the early and term placenta. J. Nutr 135 135 (11): 2566-2 571.
9. Broadhurst, C.L. et al. 2002 Brain Specific lipids from Marine Lacustrine, or terrestrial food resources: Potential impact on Early African Homo sapiens. Comp Biochem Physiology B Biochem. Mol biol. 131: 653-6. 73.
10. Volek JS, et al. Body composition and hormonal responses to a carbohydrate-restricted diet. Metabolism. 2002 Jul; 51 (7): 864-870
11. Bisschop PH, et al. Isocaloric carbohydrate deprivation induces protein catabolism despite a low T3-syndrome in healthy men. Clinical Endocrinology, 2001; 54: 75-80
