Start with Africa seven million years ago, because that's where human life began. The climate, the creation of our ancestors—our beloved kin of bacteria, fungi, and plants—eased from wet to dry. The trees gave way to grasses and a tide of savannas rippled across the world. Cradled in the grasses were large herbivores. Twenty-five million years ago, in the exuberance of evolution, a few plants tried growing from their bases instead of their tips. Grazing would not kill these plants; quite the opposite. It would encourage them by stimulating root growth. All plants want nitrogen and predigested nutrients, and ruminants could provide those to the grasses as they grazed. This is why, unlike other plants, grasses contain no toxins or chemical repellents, no mechanical deterrents like thorns or spines to discourage animals. Grasses want to be grazed. It was grass that created cows; human "domestication" was, in comparison, just the tiniest tug on the bovine genome, and cows tugged back with the lactose tolerance gene.
Our direct line lived in trees, until the trees began to disappear. We had two evolutionary edges to see us through: our opposable thumbs and our omnivorous digestion. We had the capacity to manipulate tools and we had bodies equipped with both the instincts and the digestion to handle a range of foods. Some animals are monofeeders: koalas eat only eucalyptus, and fig wasps dine only on figs. Monofeeding is a gamble; if your food source fails, you go down with it. But a brain, which is a huge energy sink, can be small for a monofeeder, which spares energy for every other function.
Chocolate notwithstanding, humans are not monofeeders. Back before we were human, when we were tree dwellers, we ate mainly fruit, leaves, and insects. But from the moment we stood upright, we've been eating large ruminants. Four million years ago, Australopithecines, our species' forerunners, ate meat.
Australopithecines were once believed to be fruitivores: the dividing line between the Homo genus and Australopithecines was thought to be the taste for meat. But the teeth of four three-million-year-old skeletons in a South African cave told a different story. Anthropologists Matt Sponheimer and Julia Lee-Thorp found Carbon-13 in the tooth enamel of those skeletons. Carbon-13 is a stable isotope present in two places: grasses and the bodies of animals that eat grass. Those teeth showed none of the scratch marks of grass consumption.1
Australopithecine was eating grass-feeding animals, the large ruminants swaddled in savanna.
Stone tools have laid beside the bones of long-extinct animals, buried in a silence of time, for 2.6 million years. Together, tools and bones have waited to tell their story, the story of us. Some of the bones show teeth marks overlaid by tool cut marks: a carnivore kill followed by a human scavenger. Other bones bear the opposite: cut marks, then the marks of sharp teeth, saying there was a human with a weapon, then an animal with teeth. We come from a long line of hunters: 150,000 generations.2
This is what our line learned, and in the learning, we became human. We made tools to take what the grasses offered: large animals laden with nutrients, more nutrients than we could ever hope to find in fruit and leaves. The result is reading these words. Our brains are twice as large as they should be for a primate our size. Meanwhile our digestive tracts are 60 percent smaller. Our bodies were built by nutrient-dense foods. Anthropologists L. Aiello and P. Wheeler named this idea "The Expensive Tissue Hypothesis." The Australopithecine brain grew to Homo proportions because meat let our digestive systems shrink, thus freeing up energy for those brains.3
Or compare humans to gorillas. Gorillas are vegetarians and they have both the smallest brains and the largest digestive tracts of any primate. We are the opposite. And our brains, the true legacy of our ancestors, need to be fed.
The vegetarians have their own story, a very different one than the one told in the bones and tools, teeth and skulls. "Real strength and building material comes from green-leafed vegetables where the amino acids are found," writes one vegan guru. "If we look at the gorilla, zebra, giraffe, hippo, rhino, or elephant we find they build their enormous musculature on green-leafy vegetation."4 Actually, if we really look at gorillas et al., what we find are animals that contain the fermentative bacteria necessary to digest cellulose. We humans contain no such thing. This man writes books about diet without knowing a thing about how humans actually digest.
For most of us, the bodies beneath our skin, inside our ribs, are unknown territory. But if we lay aside the story we long for and listen to our bodies, our biology will not lie. Here, then, is the long history that trees and savanna, grass and herds, have told in human tissue. (See table on following pages.)
There are two small differences between humans and dogs. One is that our canine teeth are shorter. The consensus is that ours were once longer than they currently are, but that they shrank due to our use of fire and tools. The other difference is that our intestines are longer, though clearly nowhere near as long as a sheep's. This is the remnant of our distant history as tree-dwelling fruitivores. And it's what grants us omnivorous status. But the chart on the following page should make clear what political and emotional attachments—and the FDA food pyramid—have obscured: we are built to consume meat, for the protein and fat it provides. Write Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades, "In anthropological scientific circles, there's absolutely no debate about it—every respected authority will confirm that we were hunters.... Our meat-eating heritage ... is an inescapable fact."5
There is another version of the story as well, one written by humans, not bones and teeth. This version lay waiting 40,000 years in caves from South Africa across Eurasia, and it's told in pictures. Some are schematics, the bare outlines of what matters. Others are lush with texture and detail, the elements arranged so that the curves of the walls supply dimension and motion. "These bison," writes one observer, "seem to leap from a corner of the cave."6 Or, as Pablo Picasso said on viewing the cave art of Lascaux, "We have invented nothing in twelve thousand years." No, we haven't. And even 40,000 years ago, it wasn't just us. The wild herds of aurochs and horses invented us out of their bodies, their nutrient-dense tissues gestating the human brain.
Some writers want to argue that hunting was the first act of domination, of political oppression. Yet life is only possible through death. Everything is dependent on killing, either directly or indirectly: you're either doing it or waiting for someone else to do it for you. Animals from praying mantids to bears hunt, and have you seen a kudzu vine take down a tree? Yet none of them, animal or vegetable, set up CAFOs or concentration camps. And though the human species must also kill, plenty of cultures have been built around reciprocity, humility, and basic kindness. If the getting of food, of life, means we are destined for sadism and genocide, then the universe is a sick and twisted place and I want out. But I don't believe it. It hasn't been my experience of food, of killing, of participating. When I see the art that people who were our anatomical equals made, I don't see a celebration of cruelty, an aesthetic of sadism. No, I wasn't there when the drawings were made and I didn't interview the artists. But I know beauty when I see it.
And the artists left no question about what they were eating. Besides their drawings, they also left weapons, including blades for killing and butchering. The tools are exquisite in their precision—and the ones made of wood are the oldest wooden objects ever found.
Archaeologists have dated an almost sixteen-inch-long spear tip carved of yew wood, found in 1911 in Clacton, England, to be some¬where between 360,000 and 420,000 years old. Another spear, also made of yew, is almost eight feet long and is 120,000 years old. It was found amid the ribs of an extinct elephant in Lehringen, Germany, in 1948. Excavators in a coal mine near Schoninger, Germany, found three spruce wood spears shaped like modern javelins—the longest of which measured over seven feet—that proved to be 300,000 to 400,000 years old.7
And our ancestors knew how to use their tools. Fairweather Eden is the story of the archaeological excavation in Boxgrove, England, a site lush with extinct rhinoceroses and wild horses, mammoths and cave bears. These animals were dangerous, large and strong, and not without defenses: a cave bear had teeth that were three inches long and "the jaw strength to snap a man in two."8 If we could have simply lived on foraged fruit, wouldn't we have? But our hunger gave us courage, enough that we grew skilled. The archaeologists at Boxgrove took flint tools and a fresh-killed deer to the local butcher and asked him to take it apart with the tools. Five hundred thousand years later, the modern cut marks were exactly the same as the ancient ones.9 We have, indeed, invented nothing.
Except agriculture. And with agriculture comes the "diseases of civilization." Understand that no one speaks of the "diseases of hunter-gatherers," because they are largely disease-free. Not so the farmers, who have destroyed their bodies along with the planet. The list of diseases includes "[a]rthritis, diabetes, hypertension, heart dis¬ease, stroke, depression, schizophrenia, and cancer," as well as crooked teeth, bad eyesight, and a whole host of autoimmune and inflammatory conditions.10
These diseases are ubiquitous amongst the civilized and "are absolute rarities" for hunter-gatherers. 11 Writes Dr. Loren Cordain, in his article "Cereal Grains: Humanity's Double-Edged Sword":
Cereal grains as a staple food are a relatively recent addition to the human diet and represent a dramatic departure from those foods to which we are genetically adapted. Discordance between humanity's genetically determined dietary needs and his [sic] present day diet is responsible for many of the degenerative diseases which plague industrial man.... [T]here is a significant body of evidence which suggests that cereal grains are less than optimal foods for humans and that the human genetic makeup and physiology may not be fully adapted to high levels of cereal grain consumption.12
The archaeological evidence is incontrovertible, as is the living testament of the last extant eighty-four tribes of hunter-gatherers. They are eating the diet that all humans evolved to eat: "meat, fowl, fish and leaves, roots and fruits of many plants."13 We are eating foods that didn't even exist until a few thousand years ago: domesticated annuals, especially grains, and even more their industrial endpoint of refined flours, sugars, and oils. As Cordain points out, "More than 70% of our dietary calories come from foods that our Paleolithic ancestors rarely, if ever, ate."14 Our own bodies, with their degenerative diseases and overgrowth of cells, are all the evidence we need that this diet is unnatural.
So this is how we know what our ancestors ate: our teeth are made for meat, not cellulose; our stomachs are singular and secrete acid; both the tooth enamel and the art of our ancestors say so; human butchering tools are found beside butchered bones; and, to state the obvious, contemporary hunter-gatherers hunt.
One version of the vegetarian myth posits that we were "gatherer- hunters," gaining more sustenance from plants gathered by women than from meat hunted by men. This rumor actually has an author, one R.B. Lee, who concluded that hunter-gatherers got 65 percent of their calories from plants and only 35 percent from animals. This 65:35 figure has been repeated endlessly across disciplines, and it simply isn't true. Dr. Cordain ran a computer model with the plant foods accessible to hunter-gatherers. To meet their caloric needs alone, the 65:35 ratio would require eating twelve pounds of vegetation every day. "[A]n unlikely scenario, to say the least," comment the Drs. Eades.15 Lee got his data from Murdock's Ethnographic Atlas, a collection of statistics from 862 different cultures. Of the 181 hunter-gatherer societies, Lee included only fifty-eight. He didn't count fish in his numbers, and he put shellfish in the "gathering" column. Tell me, have you ever been in danger of mistaking a lobster for a wild berry?
The Ethnographic Atlas also classifies small land fauna—insects, grubs, reptiles, small mammals—as plants, by describing their collection as gathering. Cordain refigured the numbers as best he could, by reclassifying fish and shellfish as hunting, and by using data for all the available hunter-gatherers. His conclusion completely reversed Lee's numbers. He suggests that the true ratio is closer to 65 percent animal to 35 percent plants. And that's still including the Ethnographic Atlas's bias of small land fauna as plants.16
The first myth of the nutritional vegetarians—that we aren't meant for meat—is another fairy tale filled with inedible apples. I try to remember what I believed when I was a vegan. There was a mythic golden age, long ago, when we lived in harmony with the world ... and ... ate what? Prehistoric paintings of humans hunting left me con¬fused and defensive, but I was unclear on the timeline anyway. Maybe all that hunting happened before the peaceful vegetarian Goddess culture? Or maybe it was after the fall of the peaceful vegetarian ...?
We ate grains, I decided, and a lot of unnamed leafy things. Never mind that grains were "not even in existence for the majority of our time on earth."17 Or that they would not have been available more than one month out of twelve. Or that the technologies needed to make them edible weren't invented until the birth of agriculture. Grains have to be ground, soaked, and most of all, cooked. You can't eat wheat raw. Try it if you don't believe me, but you don't have to: you will get sick with gastroenteritis. This is true for grains, beans, and potatoes. They contain toxins, politely known as anti-nutrients, to stop animals (us) from eating them. Just because plants can't scream and run doesn't mean they want to be eaten. And just because they don't have teeth or claws doesn't mean they aren't fighting back. Heat is what makes them edible by disabling some of the antinutrients. Grinding, soaking, rinsing, and sprouting also help. But under¬stand the lengths to which plants have gone to protect themselves and their precious offspring, their biological future, and what we have done to ourselves by eating them.
First, plants produce enzyme blockers, which act as a pesticide against insects and other animals, including us. Our digestive systems utilize many enzymes to break down and absorb food. When the food is seeds (beans, grains, potatoes), the seeds resist by blocking those enzymes. The most common enzymes that grains try to disrupt are proteases, which digest protein. Proteases include the stomach enzyme pepsin and the small intestine enzymes trypsin and chymotrypsin. Other chemicals interfere with amylase, the enzyme that digests starch, and hence are called amylase inhibitors.
Beans, grains, and potatoes also use lectins, which are proteins that fill a huge variety of functions in both plants and animals, though the exact function of many lectins is still unknown. In order to understand the damage that these substances can do to the human body, you first need a basic primer on human digestion.
Our digestive tract has a tough job: it has to sort through a huge array of foreign substances—the things we swallow—and decide what's a nutrient and what's a danger. The ones deemed nutrients have to be broken down into the smallest possible components and then absorbed. This work is so labor intensive that your intestines measure twenty-two feet. To increase the work capacity, the intestines are folded up into compacted gathers called villi. "In fact," explain the Drs. Eades, "the folds are so tightly packed that if you were to flatten them into a sheet, a single centimeter (less than half an inch) of intestinal lining would cover a doubles tennis court—an astounding bit of origami."18
Microvilli are even smaller folds. They comprise what's called the brush border, the area where digestive enzymes break proteins down into their constituent amino acids and starches down into sugars. Once food is completely broken down, the lining of the gut lets nutrients into the bloodstream through what are called tight junctions. These are specialized seals between the lining cells. We need to be protected from all sorts of contaminants and toxins that travel from the outside world, past our teeth, and through our stomachs. The tight junctions are the place where substances are either absorbed or rejected. Too big, too scary, or too foreign and they can't get through the tight junctions. But anything small and simple—water, ions, amino acids, and sugars—gets a pass.
That's one mechanical way that our intestines keep us safe. Another is through the rhythmic contractions that keep the input moving through the intestines. The constant motion stops unfriendly bacteria from setting up residence. And the lining cells are continuously shedding, so any bacteria that have managed to grab a hold of our guts are carried away.
If these mechanical methods fail, our guts can also mount an immunological defense, and it's a very specialized defense. The usual immune response elsewhere in the body involves inflammation. Not so in the gut, and if you can picture the surface area of a tennis court folding itself into half a square inch you'll see why. There's no room for inflammation, not if that area wants to absorb nutrients, too. Inflammation would weaken the tight junctions, rendering us vulnerable to dangerous substances that could slip into our bodies. Instead, the gut operates its own rapid response team. Specialized cells take any invaders prisoner. Another set of cells, lymphocytes, will start manufacturing poisons to kill the invading substances. "And not only that," write the Drs. Eades, "the armed lymphocytes will remember the face of the invader forever, so that if one like it ever cares to show up again, the immune response will be swift and sure."19
Eating grains causes three problems. The first is that a grain- based diet will include too many starches and sugars, which will overload the intestines. The gut in turn will pass them on undigested to the colon. These sugars create "a veritable bacterial picnic," and the colon's normal population of bacteria experiences exponential growth.20 This over-productive fermentation can then surge back into the gut, causing an inflammatory response which "blunts its bristly microvilli, impairs proper digestion and absorption, and, in the beginnings of a vicious cycle, sends even more incompletely digested foods downstream."21 Most crucially, the tight junctions are damaged, letting substances like lectins pass through into the bloodstream. And the lectins themselves may bind to the wall of the intestines, altering their permeability and their function.
So what are lectins? Krispin Sullivan explains:
Think of a lectin as a protein containing a key that fits a certain type of lock. This lock is a specific type of carbohydrate.... If a lectin with the right key comes in contact with one of these 'locks' on the gut wall or artery or gland or organ, it 'opens the lock', that is, it disrupts the membrane and damages the cell and may initiate a cascade of immune and autoimmune events leading to cell death.22
Lectins don't break down without a fight: once they're ingested, neither hydrochloric acid nor digestive enzymes can destroy them. In fact, "WGA [wheat germ agglutinin, a cereal grain lectin] is heat stable and resistant to digestive proteolytic breakdown in both rats and humans and has been recovered intact and biologically active in human feces."23 Over 60 percent of lectins "remain ... immunologically intact" in the digestive tract.24 Because of this, the damage they can do is immense.
By the time a meal clears the stomach and enters the intestines, any protein we've eaten should have been broken down into amino acids. This helps keep larger components from passing through the wall of the intestines and into the bloodstream. Smaller bits do sometimes make it through, but the amounts aren't enough to trigger an immune response. But because lectins are able to survive the human stomach intact, the "concentrations of lectins can be quite high, consequently their transport through the gut wall can exceed that of other dietary antigens by several orders of magnitude."25
Lectins can also bond to the walls of the intestines and damage their permeability. Their bonding creates everything from shortened villi to changes in intestinal flora to cell death. This combination of sheer concentration of lectins and damaged guts means that lectins pass through the intestines whole. Once they get past that basic defensive barrier, they wreak havoc all over the human body.
The profound destruction that lectins are capable of lies in the autoimmune response they can trigger. The protein sequence in some lectins is almost identical to tissues in the human body.26 Once the lectins pass through the compromised tight junctions and into the bloodstream, they cause tremendous and tragic damage in a process called molecular mimicry.
The immune defense system attacks the foreign proteins, and having learned to identify that sequence as an enemy, it goes on to attack the similar sequences in the human body.
The lectin in wheat is made of amino acid sequences that mimic both joint cartilage and the myelin sheaths that cover our nerves. 27
Other lectins are nearly identical to the filtering mechanism of the kidneys, the cells of the pancreas that produce insulin, the retina, the lining of our intestines.
And once turned on, the immune system doesn't turn off. Lectins confuse the immune system, teaching it that some primary parts of "us" are a "them."
The lesson learned becomes the terrible suffering of a body attacking itself, the autoimmune diseases such as "Crohn's disease ... ulcerative colitis, rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, systemic lupus erythematosus, psoriasis, type 1 diabetes mellitus, glomerulonephritis ... multiple sclerosis, and potentially many others as well—from thyroid inflammation to allergies to skin rashes to asthma."28
The molecular mimicry of lectins may not be the only catalyst for autoimmune diseases. Some researchers are also investigating viruses and bacteria. For instance, the bacteria M. paratuberculosis, which causes Johne's disease in ruminants, may be implicated in Crohn's disease in humans. There may be multiple causes for autoimmune diseases or there may be a precipitating load of foreign substances that triggers an autoimmune cascade.
But epidemiologists do know that multiple sclerosis—an autoimmune disease where the body attacks its own nerve sheaths—is most prevalent in cultures where wheat and rye are staple foods.
In the archaeological record, rheumatoid arthritis, which leaves very grim evidence in skeletal remains, follows wheat and corn around the world.29 Celiac disease is absolutely caused by cereal grains, and celiac sufferers are at risk for other autoimmune diseases. They are also thirty times more likely to be schizophrenic. In fact, numerous clinical studies show that removing gluten from the diet ameliorates schizophrenia.30
Yet it wasn't until 1950 that a Dutch pediatrician, Dr. Willem Dicke, made the connection between wheat and celiac disease. "Indeed," writes Cordain, "it is astounding that humanity was unaware, until only relatively recently, that an ordinary and commonplace food such as cereal grains could be responsible for a disease which afflicts between 1 and 3.5 people per 1,000 in Europe."31
I actually don't think it's astounding. I think it's almost impossible for most people to step outside their culture and question its practices, especially those practices where power and taboo coalesce— sex, religion, food. To understand that agricultural foods are not the foods we were designed to eat throws the entire project of civilization into a new and uneasy light, and who is willing to do that?
Yet the truth about agriculture is there, waiting in the wreckage of our bodies like it waits in the broken skeletons of forests and in exsanguinated wetlands. Paleopathologists tell us that "autoimmune disorders do not seem to have plagued humans prior to the adoption of an agricultural way of life."32 That's because it's grains that can turn the body against itself. Agriculture has devoured us as surely as it has devoured the world.
And just as agriculture has displaced species-dense communities with its monocrops, its diet has displaced the nutrient-dense foods that humans need, replacing them with mononutrients of sugar and starch. This displacement led immediately to a drop in human stature as agriculture spread—the evidence couldn't be clearer. The reasons are just as clear. Meat contains protein, minerals, and fats, fats that we need to metabolize those proteins and minerals. In contrast, grains are basically carbohydrates: what protein they do contain is low quality— lacking essential amino acids—and comes wrapped in indigestible fiber. Grains are essentially sugar with enough opioids to make them addictive.
The biological truth will be hard to face if, like me, you built the entire superstructure of your identity on a foundation of grain. But these are the facts. There are essential amino acids, the so-called building blocks of protein. They're essential because humans can't make them; we can only eat them. Likewise, there are essential fatty acids— fats—which, despite being vilified, can only be ingested, not made.
And carbohydrates? There is no such thing as a necessary carbohydrate. Read that again. Write the Drs. Eades, "the actual amount of carbohydrates required by humans for health is zero."33
Every cell in your body can make all the sugar it needs. That includes the cells in your hungry brain. The detractors of low-carb diets have created and endlessly repeated the myth that our brains need glucose and hence we need to eat carbohydrates. Yes, our brains do need glucose—which is precisely why our bodies can make glucose. What the brain actually needs is a very steady supply of glucose: too much or too little will create a biological emergency that can result in coma and death, as any diabetic will tell you. And a constant cycle of too much/too little is exactly what a carbohydrate-based diet will provide, leaving a wreckage of deteriorating organs and arteries behind.
A partial list of diseases caused by high insulin levels includes "heart disease, elevated cholesterol, elevated triglycerides, high blood pres¬sure, blood clotting problems, colon cancer (and a number of other cancers), type II diabetes, gout, sleep apnea, obesity, iron-overload disease, gastroesophageal reflux (severe heartburn), peptic ulcer dis¬ease, [and] polycystic ovary disease."34
These are serious diseases and they are endemic to civilized cultures. We accept them as normal because they are ubiquitous. We eat the foods our culture provides; we get sick. But then everyone is sick—who doesn't know someone with diabetes, cancer, heart disease, arthritis?—so no one questions it. And it's a lot to question, from the USDA food pyramid, to the righteous aura with which the Left has infused plant-based foods, to civilization itself. These are powerful forces to which our own native intelligence—both personal and cultural—has long been subordinated.
What we are left with are cravings, both vague and unbearable, that we have taught ourselves to fight. "When I eat, I feel full," a friend of mine said. "But when I eat at your house, I feel nourished." Believe me, it's not my skill as a chef she's acknowledging. It's the quality of the ingredients: real food. Real protein and real fats from animals who in turn ate their real food.
{...}
These are daunting obstacles, and if you can't find your way clear to the true hunger beneath, maybe the damage of a plant-based diet can lead you there. Maybe you don't find the molecular mimicry of autoimmune disorders strong enough evidence. Then listen to this instead: "The diseases that insulin affects directly ... are the cause of the vast majority of death and disability in the US today. They are the grim reapers of Western civilization."36
Heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes are all caused by the insulin surges that grain and sugar demand.
What's the difference between complex carbohydrates and sugar? Despite the intense propaganda to declare the former "good" and the latter "bad," not much.
"Many people are of the opinion that there are good and bad carbohydrates, when in actuality there are barely tolerable and awful sugars," write the Drs. Eades.37 Whether "complex" or "simple," all carbohydrates are sugars. The only difference is whether they are individual sugar molecules or a string of sugar molecules. Glucose is the simplest sugar, made of a single molecule. Sucrose, regular table sugar, is made of two molecules and is, hence, a disaccharide. There are three-molecule trisaccharides. Sugars with more molecules are called polysaccharides. These include grains, beans, and potatoes.
Why don't these differences matter? Because our digestive system can't digest the long chains. They're too big to be absorbed through the intestinal wall. So our bodies break them down into simple sugars. And every last molecule eventually hits the bloodstream:
So whether it began life as a fat-free bagel, a quarter cup of sugar from the sugar bowl, a canned soft drink, a bowl of fettuccine, a baked potato, or a handful of jelly beans, by the time your intestinal tract gets finished snipping the links of those starch and sugar chains, it's all been reduced to ... sugar. Specifically, to glucose. And in the end there's very little metabolic difference between your eating a medium baked potato or drinking a 12-ounce can of soda pop. Each contains about fifty grams of easily digestible and rapidly available glucose. It may surprise you to know that the potato might even be slightly worse in terms of the rise in blood sugar that follows it.38
According to the USDA, we should be eating a diet that is 60 percent carbohydrate. Your body will turn that carbohydrate into almost two cups of glucose, and each and every molecule has to be reckoned with.
That amount of sugar in the bloodstream would lead to coma and death if humans didn't have a way to process sugar, and fast. So the body comes equipped with a mechanism to clear sugar from the blood, but it's a mechanism that agriculturalists wear out. Elevated sugar levels stimulate the pancreas to produce insulin. Insulin is a hormone responsible for nutrient storage. Its primary purpose is to get excess sugar, amino acids, and fats out of the blood and into the cells.
Sugar is the most dangerous of those three, as too much sugar can cause serious consequences very quickly. So insulin's most important job is to keep blood sugar levels out of the red zone. It does this by binding with insulin receptors, which are proteins on a cell's surface that remove sugar from the blood. Insulin is the switch that turns on the insulin receptors, which then do the work of moving glucose into the cell.
Patients with juvenile diabetes have pancreases that produce very little insulin. Their insulin receptors are in working order, but without the stimulating presence of insulin, their receptors are never triggered to act. That's why these patients take insulin.
Type II diabetes has a different etiology. Eating any carbohydrate or sugar results in a glucose surge in the bloodstream. The pancreas responds with insulin, insulin triggers the insulin receptors, and the insulin receptors pump sugar into the cells for immediate use or for storage. So far, so good.
The problem comes with overuse. When blood sugar levels are constantly spiking from a diet high in carbohydrates, the amount of insulin required to deal with that will, over time, damage the insulin receptors, blunting their ability to work. Yet the high levels of sugar still need to be lowered, and lowered quickly. So the pancreas pumps out even more insulin, which temporarily forces the insulin receptors into action but ultimately creates still more damage. Now there is so much insulin in the blood that by the time it's all absorbed by the insulin receptors, blood sugar levels will be too low. This cycle, of high blood sugar — too much insulin — low blood sugar, is called hypo- glycemia, and it ends when the sufferer, biologically desperate to raise her blood sugar levels, puts another dose of sugar into her mouth with a sweaty, shaking hand. That will help, for an hour or two—until her blood sugar crashes again and the whole process starts over.
Where it really ends is in type II diabetes. The resistant insulin receptors demand too much insulin, more than the pancreas could ever make. The chronic excess sugar destroys the nerves, the arteries, the retinas, the heart. Despite every advance in medical science, a diabetic's life can be shortened by one third.39 Such are the wages of civilization's dietary sins.
Because insulin also controls a number of other basic life functions, high levels of insulin will cause damage throughout the body. Insulin triggers cholesterol synthesis, activating the enzymes that spur cholesterol production. About 80 percent of your cholesterol is made in your body: only 20 percent is dietary, which is one reason why low-fat diets have proven basically useless. Though every one of your cells both makes and needs cholesterol, most of it is produced in the liver. Elevated insulin means elevated cholesterol. The Drs. Eades explain why.
Excess food energy increases blood sugar, which increases insulin, which triggers the storage cycle leading to fat accumulation. To store fat and build muscle, the body must make new cells, and insulin acts as a growth hormone for this process. Cholesterol plays a vital role in this building and storing process; cholesterol provides the structural framework for all cells.40
And high blood pressure, heart disease, and arteriosclerosis? Too much insulin triggers the growth of smooth muscle cells that line the arteries, thickening the walls and reducing elasticity. Blood volume of the arteries shrinks, which means the heart has to pump harder, which is another way of saying "high blood pressure." Insulin also triggers the kidneys to retain fluid, which again increases blood pressure. Arteries with less elasticity are more insulin also encourages fibrous connective tissue to grow inside the arteries, providing a scaffold for the first layer of plaque.
Insulin increases oxidation of LDL particles. These hard-working substances have been declared guilty for no good reason and dubbed "bad cholesterol." Like the rest of us, they're only bad when they're damaged. And what damages them? Too much blood sugar and insulin. Sugars are able to attach to proteins all over the body and start a reaction that creates permanent damage to the cells. This process is called glycation and fructation, for glucose and fructose, respectively. It's similar to how "dairy protein and fat with sugar and heat ... make caramel."41 The Drs. Eades explain:
Year in and year out, from the time we're born, this damage wrought by the carmelization process accumulates in our bodies; over a lifetime it wreaks the most havoc in long-lived proteins, including elastin, the protein that gives youthful elasticity to the skin; crystallin, the special protein that forms the lens of the eye; DNA, the genetic blueprint present in all cells; and collagen, the structural protein that accounts for over 30 percent of the body's protein mass, occurring in tis¬sues all over the body, including the hair, skin, and nails, the walls of all arteries and veins, and the framework of bones and organs. Damage to these critical protein structures results not only in such cosmetic maladies as wrinkles and age spots, but in serious health problems ranging from cataracts to failure of major organs, such as the kidneys and the heart.42
That's just from ingesting sugar. The excess insulin required by that ingestion makes it even worse: insulin raises the rate of oxidation of the LDL particles. So on a carbohydrate-based diet, there's lots of sugar to do damage, and that sugar requires insulin that adds even more damage. Once impaired, the LDL heads for the arterial walls. There, it sets off an immune reaction. The body's defenders, the macrophages, will attack and dismember the LDL, creating inflammation and vanquished bits of deranged cholesterol. Those bits are now bio- available and will be used by the body in the formation of plaque.
Insulin triggers the production of fibrinogen, which is the sub¬stance used in the first stage of clot formation. Insulin also stimulates the kidneys to dump both magnesium and potassium, which can lead to heart arrhythmias and life-threatening fibrillation. Is there any stage of coronary heart disease missing from this indictment?
The counterbalancing hormone to insulin is glucagon. When your blood sugar levels are in free fall and headed for the crash, glucagon's job is to get those levels back up. It does this by stimulating the body to burn its reserves of energy, and it has some help: both adrenaline and cortisol are part of the process. Remember that a blood sugar level out of a narrow range—either too low or too high—is a life- threatening emergency, and it requires emergency measures. Adrenaline prepares you for fight or flight. It forces energy out of storage and cranks up the metabolism in your muscles, getting you ready for action. One of the ways it frees up more energy for your muscles is by shutting down your digestive systems: the presence of adrenaline suppresses the stomach's production of hydrochloric acid.
That's fine for the occasional sabertooth tiger attack, but eating a high-carbohydrate diet is a tiger attack three times a day, every day. You can damage your stomach's ability to produce hydrochloric acid, and anyone with blood sugar problems is at risk. The resulting condition is called gastroparesis, and I gave it to myself. Writes Dr. Tom Cowan:
One of the clues to healing gastroparesis is the fact that it most commonly occurs in those who are either diabetic or who have hypothyroidism. Blood sugar regulation is intimately tied to the functioning of the stomach and the health of the nerves. Very low-carbohydrate diets have been successfully used in virtually all stomach disorders because it has been found that insulin is intimately tied up with acid production, the pressure at the esophageal-gastric sphincter and the hormonal control of other stomach functions. Lowering insulin levels through a low carbohydrate diet ... is the first step in resolving this disorder.43
For fourteen years I felt sick, nauseated, and bloated. Anything I ate became a bowling ball lodged in my stomach. When I say four¬teen years, I mean fourteen years solid. The only time it subsided was if I didn't eat for forty-eight hours. No doctor ever diagnosed it correctly or helped—until I found a doctor who worked with recovering vegans. Three weeks on betaine hydrochloride, a form of hydrochloric acid, and the nausea was gone. Am I allowed to call it a miracle? I know that on the scale of global horrors my stomach ranks as the tiniest nanoblip, but it's my nanoblip, and that constant bloated nausea was awful.
So here are some questions for you, vegetarians. Do you feel sick when you eat? Specifically, does your stomach feel distended, bloated, or like it takes a long time to empty? It's not your blood type and it's not because you're "naturally" meant to "eat light"—two things I've heard a lot from vegetarians afflicted with mysterious stomach ailments. If you can't eat the food your body needs, it's because you've damaged your digestion, from too many blood sugar highs and lows, and too much adrenaline. It can be fixed, but you're going to have to eat real protein and fat and not sugars. You need to leave adrenaline for emergencies only: can we agree that breakfast shouldn't be one?
