http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ojr8L3chdds

Paleo is Expensive?

http://robbwolf.com/2011/09/21/paleo-is-expensive/

Gluten-free and Paleo continue to enter the professional sports world. Check out this article on Djokovic’s diet.

Watch this video.

The same argument Ancel Keys allegedly used back in the 1950′s to PROVE dietary saturated fat causes heart disease in his infamous Seven Countries Study would not hold up today.

I am frequently asked whether snacking between meals is a good idea or not. Mainstream nutritional advice tells us in order to keep our metabolism revved up, 6 small meals spaced 2-3 hours apart is the optimum feeding schedule. Once again, the ancestral health community (and evolutionary history) will disagree with the mainstream and propose that eating bigger meals, less frequently is the pattern our bodies would prefer we follow. Large blocks of time without food is part of our evolutionary history and we can envision a scenario in which hunter-gatherer populations would engage in a long day of hunting without food and then feast when a kill was made. There were frequent, randomly occurring periods when food was scarce, hence we are well-equipped to handle fasting.

After eating, insulin is elevated in response to glucose and amino acids in the blood. Cells can then pack glucose, fatty acids, and amino acids away for fuel. We know that insulin is the master storage hormone and that anytime insulin is elevated, we are in ‘storage’ mode and cannot be burning fat. Depending on the amount of carbohydrate in the meal, and each individual’s unique response to carbohydrate, the degree of insulin elevation varies. However in normal, healthy people, insulin usually returns to the pre-meal level within 3 hours of eating.

This means that after you eat a meal, you will be digesting, absorbing, storing, and burning glucose from your meal (which accounts for the ‘elevated metabolism’ after eating) and will not return to using your own fat stores for about three hours. If you eat again within 2-3 hours, you’ve not allowed your body to ‘reset’, return to baseline, and resume running off of the preferred fuel source: our unlimited fat reserves. If you repeat this cycle throughout the day, you will be burning only energy from the meal you just ate and will not touch fat stores. This type of pattern causes one to be strongly dependent on those feedings every 2-3 hours (ie. those who are very irritable when they get hungry). Because their body is no longer adapted to running off stored fat, as soon as the fuel is gone from that meal, hunger signals immediately cause these folks to seek out food again.

If someone is very active and on their feet all day, they will need to eat more frequently—they require more energy—however, for the majority of people who have fairly sedentary jobs while still exercising consistently, 3-4 meals each day will allow the body to reset after eating and tap into stored fat for fuel between meals.

Sleeping is the longest fast we engage in each day. Oftentimes, we eat out of habit first thing in the morning because that’s what we’ve been conditioned to do. However, by eating larger meals less frequently, you might find you are not very hungry for breakfast—take advantage of this fasting period and put off eating until you are truly hungry. Or, a splash of heavy cream or coconut milk in the morning coffee will likely hold you over and keep you running off stored fat (carbs and protein cause insulin to rise, but fat only does so minimally).

For the Crossfit folks, if you exercise first thing in the morning or in the afternoon 4-5 hours after eating lunch, make sure you give yourself a small boost of energy just before intense exercise (ie. small banana 15 min before exercise) and then get a good meal after the workout. Include starchy carbohydrate for recovery. Otherwise, a ‘bigger, less frequent’ meal pattern will work well. Additionally, with a large portion of calories coming from fat at each meal, we feel satiated, hunger is abated for a longer period, and we avoid insulin spikes from higher carb meals that stimulate hunger.

If fat loss is a goal, do not deprive yourself or fast when you are truly hungry, as this will trigger ‘starvation mode’ which is a stress: cortisol will rise, your body will hold onto all fat reserves, and metabolism will decrease to compensate for the lack of energy intake. We want to find the sweet spot where your body knows it is not starving, as there is plenty of energy coming in, but insulin is low and fatty acids are freely liberated from adipose tissue to fuel you between meals.

There are two main protein-fragments that stimulate the immune system and cause symptoms in the majority of Celiac patients. Researchers compared the concentration of these fragments in the 30 or so modern wheat varieties currently eaten worldwide to those present in the 50 varieties that were most common a hundred years ago. Turns out, there is a lot more gluten in our food supply now thanks to selective breeding to increase crop yields, resistance to climate change and disease, and because a higher protein content leads to more favorable bread-making properties (dough elasticity).

Currently, wheat is the third most produced cereal crop in the world (after rice and corn) and consumption has fluctuated over the past decade or so (graph here). In response to emergence of the ‘low carb’ movement in the early 2000′s, wheat consumption decreased dramatically. However, the wheat industry responded by processing wheat products to include more fiber and protein—two things that are seemingly lacking in diets worldwide. And, ironically, the two portions of the wheat kernel that are the most problematic for the gut and immune system—more protein means more gluten and more fiber means more wheat germ.

Gluten proteins stimulate the immune system (in both symptomatic and asymptomatic individuals), and the germ is where the antinutrients (wheat germ agglutinin lectin) are concentrated. Lectins are chemical defenses the plant has evolved to protect its embryo (genetic material), located in the germ of the seed. Wheat producers are trying to entice us back to eating wheat by advertising products with increased protein and fiber. It certainly seems to be working—demand for wheat products has been on the rise since 2005.

During comparison analysis of the varieties of wheat most common a century ago, the researchers came across several strains that had a much lower concentration of the offending protein fragments, which offers potential for lower gluten-containing wheat crops to be selected and bred in the future.

This type of selective breeding is similar to what we have done to our fruit supply: sweeter, juicier, and bigger fruits are in demand by consumers and as a result, the concentration of fructose has increased dramatically.

Those of us living a Paleo (or pre-agricultural, ancestral, evolutionary, etc) lifestyle have inevitably uttered the sentiment: ‘damn, this diet is expensive!’. The large reliance on animal products is pricey, not to mention we all know it’s best to seek out the grass-fed, pastured, healthy, and happy varieties, which are even more expensive. We all weigh the costs/benefits of the diet in or minds and come up with deals and trade-offs that allow us to manage our individual eating plan (such as: I’ll deal with canned tuna on occasion in a pinch, but will pay more for pastured, free-range eggs since I eat 2 dozen a week). Intuitively, we know animal products cost more, but a recent paper (by Brooks, et al. published in Obesity Reviews) has compared the price of macronutrients across the board and definitively shows the disparity in cost between protein and carbohydrates (abstract of the paper here).

We know that refined-grain carbohydrates eaten in excess lead to obesity and metabolic problems, however, these are the very products that are the cheapest to buy. This is nothing new. We all know that grains are deceptively cheap because our government subsidizes the growth of grain crops. However one could argue, as the authors show in the paper, that subsidizing protein-rich foods would be much cheaper on a large scale compared to the cost of the mounting obesity and diabetes crisis.

The authors have framed their argument in a crafty way: By focusing on the protein requirement, and thereby avoiding being pigeon-holed into either the ‘high-carb’ or ‘low-carb’ camp, they remain credible to both sides. They’ve based their argument on an assertion that more or less everyone can agree on: it is essential for humans to eat protein. Because plant and grain foods have less protein-density than animal foods, it follows that one would have to consume more energy to achieve the same amount of protein when eating plants. In other words, if you choose to eat animal products, you have to eat LESS overall energy to reach your protein requirement as compared to someone who chooses to eat only plant foods and would therefore have to consume MORE energy to reach their protein requirement.

The actual amount of protein humans require is a point of contention, however experts on both sides of the protein debate can agree somewhere around 15% of calories is a reasonable compromise (think minimal rather than optimal). The authors then propose that we are driven (by hunger/cravings) to keep consuming food until we’ve reached this minimal protein requirement. Therefore, if one is eating only or primarily plant/grain-based foods, your body will urge you to continue eating until you’ve met your protein requirement. This is an especially big deal if you are eating refined-grains, which we typically find in our food system combined with vegetable oils. Now you are taking in an inordinate amount of calories (and proinflammatory omega-6 PUFAs) as your body strives to reach your protein requirement.

Excerpt from the paper:

“Evidence from rodents, free-living spider monkeys, birds, fish, and insects illustrates that these animals possess a separate and powerful appetite for protein that dominates overall energy intake on nutritionally unbalanced diets. Thus, when the proportion of protein in the diet is lower than optimal for maintaining health and body composition, such animals overconsume total energy to gain limiting protein, placing themselves into positive energy balance and at risk of obesity. In contrast, when the diet contains a higher than optimal proportion of protein, these animals may end up in negative energy balance as a result of being unwilling to overeat protein. Experimental and population survey data indicate that the same is likely to be true for humans. A shift in diet composition towards incorporation of more fat and carbohydrate would thus drive overconsumption of energy.”

Now comes the monetary motivator: Because of our current grain subsidy-based agricultural system, people are enticed to purchase grain-based carbohydrates because, across the board, they are cheaper than animal products. In this context, one could argue we are setting ourselves up for obesity because the majority of the population is not active enough to burn off the excess energy we are taking on board as a result of striving to meet our protein requirement.

The authors state:

“Several studies have shown that energy-dense foods (energy per unit weight) also cost less per kilojoule of energy. Lower energy density foods such as fruit, vegetables and lean meats not only cost more, but their cost rose more rapidly than other foods between 2004 and 2006 … Food prices can generate a bias towards lower-protein yet higher-energy content in the diet by influencing how much of each food a consumer purchases, with smaller amounts of more expensive protein-rich foods and larger amount of cheaper high-carbohydrate, high-fat foods purchased by consumers who are more income-limited.”

Money is the ultimate motivator; cheap carbohydrates, coupled with the standard nutritional dogma that high-carbohydrate, low-fat diets are healthful, is setting us up for overconsumption of cheap, calorie-dense, nutritionally-poor foods that we are biologically driven to keep eating until we’ve reached our protein requirement. This also offers a potential explanation for why there is an observable clustering of obesity and diabetes prevalence among lower socioeconomic groups. Could it be that the obesity epidemic is ‘not so much a failure of biological systems but a social and economic phenomenon‘ instead?

The authors conclude with a summary of the cost of increasing protein foods in the diet, at the expense of lowering carbohydrate foods, to a level that would bring the average BMI down to the ‘non-obese’ category. This monetary number ($262 per year per person) can then be compared to the annual medical cost in the US to treat each obese person ($1429 higher than each normal weight person). The estimated number of obese people worldwide is 400 million, therefore it would cost $105 billion annually to increase the protein-containing foods, while decreasing carbohydrate foods, in each obese person’s diet. Obesity in the US alone costs an estimated $147 billion annually, so increasing protein worldwide would save the US $42 billion annually. A compelling argument to consider subsidizing protein to alleviate our crisis, no?

Obviously, there is much to consider beyond the economic cost-benefit of increasing dietary protein. With a world population approaching 7 billion, shifting our food supply away from grain/agricultural based would disturb all levels of society and commerce. It would require a wide-scale change in our conventional industrial food-animal production and put additional pressures on our arguably already over-fished oceans. As grain-based agriculture is not a sustainable practice either, the time is fast approaching for us to make a drastic change. A thought-provoking discussion, nonetheless. Thoughts?

(Let me know if you’d like a full-text copy of the article)

Dietary fat is confusing. We cannot make general statements declaring ‘monounsaturated fat is good’ or ‘polyunsaturated fat is bad’ because, based on our current classification system, there are exceptions to every rule. Kurt Harris, author of the PaNu blog, has written a comprehensive piece describing each category of dietary fat while proposing another, perhaps clearer, labeling system. Read his informative article here.