Paleolithic stands for the old Stone Age and the old Stone Age began with the invention of stone tools and that happened about two and a half million years ago and it lasted up until the beginnings of the Agricultural Revolution which was ten thousand years ago and during that period all humans were hunter-gatherers and the food that they consumed was the food that they could forage hunt gather or fish.
It was fresh food there were no processed foods or any foods that came about with the Neolithic and the Industrial Revolution so what we try to do with the contemporary Paleo diet is to try to mimic the food groups that our ancestral hunter-gatherers consumed and with modern foods that you can they’re available at the supermarket the only real caveat to that is the only exception is that I think it’s better if people can get grasped reduced meats beef free-ranging chicken and so forth so those are superior to the meat that has been produced in a grain produced in a feedlot so that’s pretty much the basis of the diet and if you look at the food groups that our Stone Age ancestors didn’t consume they didn’t eat cereal grains except as starvation foods.
Occasionally they certainly weren’t staples they didn’t consume dairy products because had domesticated cows and all of the processed foods that we eat now come from four major food groups cereal grains dairy products vegetable oils and refined sugars and salt and if you put those all together you can call it a doughnut or a cookie a pizza you can call it anything you want but it’s the same four ingredients that are used in all sorts of processed foods.
Americans and Europeans consume roughly 70% of their calories as those four food types and so what we try to do is eliminate or severely reduce those foods and focus on real living foods like fresh fruits fresh vegetables nuts and seeds and as I mentioned grass produced meats seafood and fish or the foundation this diet so I find it fascinating you write in your book the Paleo answer I mean this is based on evolution right and which is probably the most powerful idea in biology.
Some people have said that nothing in biology makes any sense except in the light of evolution but even so, that’s not what we base our nutritional guidelines on today official guidelines don’t really care about evolution at all well I think you’re right I think that nutrition is a very young discipline and then it doesn’t have an organisational template like if you look at cosmology is how the universe formed and we know that the orienting paradigm is the big bang theory and so in nutrition is applied biology and so the most fundamental of all ideas in all of biology and indeed nothing in biology makes sense except under the light of evolution so that statement should be extended to nutrition is that nothing in nutrition makes sense except under the light of evolution.
Unfortunately, the nutritional community is either unaware of this or they haven’t bought into it yet but evolution through natural selection won’t go away is the most powerful idea humans have ever created to help us understand biology and so eventually it will become the de-facto guiding template for nutrition I’m 61 years old and I should live so long to see that occur but I would predict that in 2030 years or so the USDA guidelines will no longer be based on fallible human ideas.
We call the MyPlate or the food pyramid it will be based on these kinds of ideas and so the evolutionary basis for nutrition really didn’t get going until 1985 with Boyd Eaton’s famous paper New England Journal so what are we 35 years down the road and in another 35 years hopefully it’ll be fully integrated into nutrition so well at least have the information and I predict it this concept will be refined it certainly should be refined as more randomised controlled trials are done in as we understand our biologists and our metabolism in a better manner but the basic concept will never leave us is that our genome was shaped by this ancestral environment the stone ageing environment and we are literally Stone Agers.
Living in the space age now we have you know some genetic adaptations that have occurred since the Agricultural Revolution but genomic sweeps of populations from around the planet suggest that in the past 60,000 years were pretty much like we were sixty thousand years ago just as we left Africa there are certain parts of our immune system that have changed fairly dramatically adult lactase persistence and some hemoglobinopathies come to mind but for the most part, our basic biology is no different than humans that were living sixty thousand years ago right like you said we’re stone Age’s living in the space age what kind of health implications does that have well if you look at the health issues that impact westernised people Europeans.
Americans people from all over the planet that now have embraced this Western culture of processed foods and supermarkets and so forth and have abandoned their traditional foods and activity patterns we see very characteristic diseases not the least of which is the metabolic syndrome so obesity the metabolic syndrome and diseases of civilisation for instance acne runs rampant in Europe Oh virtually all teenagers ultimately get it the same way in America we know that acne doesn’t exist in traditional cultures of consuming non-processed type foods that don’t eat sugar and refined flours and vegetable oils.
What has you so that’s fascinating that could mean that if we ate lived like our ancestors there would be no acne well I think so I think that we now have you know I’m a scientist in a division-one research institution so part of my job is to write scientific papers to write grants and to review scientific papers for other scientific journals and so I’m privy to much of the dermatology literature that has to do with diet nappy because the article that I wrote in the archives of dermatology in 2002 really opened up the diet acne debate after 30 years of being shut down and so we just reviewed a paper from a South Korean group showing that high protein low carb low glycemic load diets improve acne symptoms and they measured a number of end markers of inflammation in this and then whatever is used to kind of identify some of the inflammatory markers that we see with skin diseases like acne.
And so they all improved so we now have I believe three or four randomised control trials and this information once again will not go away is that because of the internet now everybody can talk to everybody so you can go online and have access to me instantaneously across the planet and I to you so secrets are no longer kept through scientific journals is that the information flows very very rapidly because of the Internet and I think that this whole idea of dieting acne is burgeoning.
Again I’m at the end of my career but young people young dermatologists who don’t know the dogma of previous years that diet quote-unquote had nothing to do with acne will now see the good science they’ll see the mechanisms behind it and the upshot of it is that we will now how are all turning and even young adults who have acne that isn’t necessarily pharmaceutically based right and I mean acne is a big problem obviously for a lot of people but paleo diets could help with a lot of other diseases that might be even bigger problems in society today such as that’s right and rest and the skin is just one organ and the skin is an external manifestation so we see what’s going on with the organ by looking at it on the outside so it’s very obvious that there’s a disease.
But disease most frequently doesn’t manifest itself externally disease manifests itself internally and so the diseases that are prevalent throughout the Western world hypertension in the United States if you reach your sixth decade seventy-five per cent of all Americans in their six-decade or hypertensive we don’t see an age-related increase in blood pressure in groups particularly of Indians called the yanomam Brazil there a society that doesn’t eat salt they don’t eat processed foods and they eat a lot of fresh fruit and so they have very high potassium intake very low sodium intake blood pressure stays normal throughout their lives and what we consider.
Normal 120 over 80 systolic over diastolic pressure is would be considered elevated in their society so their normal blood pressure is roughly 100 over 70 and that’s probably the real norm for humans is that 120 over 80 even though we consider that normal in the Western world probably isn’t because of we know that high glycemic load carbohydrates and salt both tend to work in tandem to elevate blood pressure so in your opinion who would benefit the most from a paleo diet. Today well if we look at the health care cost in the United States we spend more money on health care than we spend on the war in Iraq and Iran in everything else and I don’t know how it works in European countries but certainly, the government has to subsidise health care costs in one form or another and we’re not spending billions we’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars on these endemic diseases that were run rampant in the Western world I mentioned the metabolic syndrome so dis lipedema high blood cholesterol high triglycerides hypertension type ii diabetes.
Obesity we also believe that the epithelial cell cancers breast colon and prostate are diet-related and work that we have done examining the historical literature suggest that and again the literature spotty because to go back in time you don’t get good epidemiology studies like what we have now we can go into populations and really nail it.
We can get hundreds of thousands of people with well-defined measurements but to go back to 1890 and to try to extract that information and populations is difficult but the available evidence before hunter-gatherers in westernising suggest that epithelial cell cancers basically didn’t exist in those populations epithelial cell cancers meaning epithelial cells are cells that line the inside or the outside of organs so like with breast cancer where cancer occurs is in the milk duct and what lines the milk duct are epithelial cells and those are the cells that become cancerous in males prostate cancer we get their cells that line the duct that comes from out of the prostate gland and so those epithelial cells are the cells that develop cancer same way with colon cancer epithelial cells line the colon.
One of the reasons why we think that these cancers are so prevalent is these cells epithelial cells are very rapidly turning over cells so they are constantly sloughing off and turning over and they have a very short half-life and there are certain hormones that influence epithelial cells and one of them is is called IGF-1 and another one’s called IGF binding protein 3 and so if you eat the typical Western diet it tends to elevate IGF-1 and suppress IGF binding protein 3 and the balance of those two hormones seems to have adverse effects for people with epithelial cell cancers so large epidemiologic studies suggest that high glycemic load carbohydrates are a risk for those cancers now there’s certainly probably other elements involved.
We know that Omega 3 and Omega 6 fats also influence cancer cell growth and so the typical Western diet has excessive little lactic acid from vegetable oil and that’s an omega-6 fatty acid and we don’t get very much long-chain omega-3 fatty acids these are the helpful and fatty acids that are found in fatty fish like salmon and mackerel and sardines and so forth so multiple elements in the Western diet work synergistically to promote cancer also high salt diet tends to promote cancer in rat models so if you can take a rat model of various different cancers and you can put a group on a very high salt diet and then you can take another group and put them on a low salt high potassium diet and what we find is that the low salt high potassium has a lower incidence of cancers so multiple elements work together it’s kind of like a symphony orchestra playing is that we unconsciously eat these processed foods and don’t even realise what we’re doing right.
I read your book your new book the Paleo answer you wrote another book called a new diet was it eight years ago something that book was I started writing it in 2000 and it hit the bookstores in December of 2001 January 2002 so it’s been out roughly a decade, yeah but now you’ve updated it a little bit perhaps and I have a few questions from after reading this book that I find really interesting and the first one is there’s been a lot of debate recently on the internet.
In other places if paleo diets were low carb necessarily or if paleo has nothing to do with low carb what’s your opinion well we’ve actually done the analysis so we’ve looked at the two there are 229 hunter-gatherer societies that have been studied historically and reported in the scientific literature and so we’ve compiled that data we’ve also compiled data in the 13 quantitative studies and what we found is that if we look at the plant to animal subsistence ratio we find that whenever and wherever it was possible hunter-gatherers always preferred animal food to plant food and so they clearly preferred fatty animals to animals that were lean so and they did what was called selective butchery where they they actually ate the fattest part of the carcass of ate the marrow of ate the brains they ate the fat around the kidneys they actually even ate the fat behind the eyes a retro-orbital fat the mesenteric fat they ate everything that was fat and sometimes they abandoned part of the carcass if they had sufficient other foods.
The bottom line is is that paleo diets if I had to characterise it would have always been lower in carbohydrates than the typical Western diet and our calculations show typical Western diet we’re looking at about a little over 50% of the calories from carbohydrate he’s 52 or something and paleo diets there was a range that we’ve calculated roughly 20 and at the outside high maybe 35 to 40 percent but they got all of their carbohydrates from fruits and vegetables and if you were to go to the supermarket right now and I say Andreas the only carbohydrate you can get is in that outside aisle of fruits and vegetables unless you chose yams and sweet potatoes you have great difficulty in getting your carbs much beyond 25 percent of total calories simply because the volume of food that’s required to get more than 25 percent of calories is very difficult when you eat foods like celery and tomatoes and apples and oranges and so forth you have to eat a ton of these foods and your stomach volume is is limited so it’s it’s difficult to achieve that kind of a caloric intake on on fruits and vegetables.
If you stick to true paleo Paleolithic food groups you would basically have to eat some sort of low carb diet pretty much I know of some endurance athletes who are probably eating a moderate carb diet but it’s a low glycemic load diet because they obtain their carbohydrates from low glycemic index carbohydrates like yams and sweet potatoes and if you over I mean you can theoretically like if you start juicing fruits and vegetables and carrots and so forth then using modern mechanical means you can certainly get it up to high. I don’t recommend that particularly for people that are obese or have a metabolic syndrome symptom is that they should be very careful with fruit and fruit juices if you’re an endurance athlete you need to replenish glycogen stores in your muscles so that’s a little bit different story. We’ve kind of addressed that in my second book the Paleo diet for athletes.
Those folks are much more insulin sensitive than people with metabolic syndrome or obesity. It doesn’t seem to have nearly the problem when they stop training then it can become problematic so that’s also an interesting subject I think that the connection between carbohydrates in the diet hyperinsulinemia and metabolic syndrome obesity that those kinds of disorders what’s your take on that well it’s very difficult to produce obesity or insulin resistance or the metabolic syndrome unless you consume processed food. So you got to eat sugar you gotta eat refined flour and if you mix that up with vegetable oil and salt you can call it a cookie or cake or whatever you want to call it a doughnut or you know candy fudge you name it.
We’ve invented all of these processed foods but the problem is is that we are artificially putting two components two macronutrients together that are not found in real foods so we’re taking sugar or sweet we’re combining it with fat and so that combination of sugar and sweet and fat doesn’t occur in any natural food I defy anybody that listens to this broadcast or this production to tell me a single food that is both high in fat and high in carbohydrate nuts aren’t okay nuts are very low in carbohydrate too high in fat avocados the same thing they’re high in fat but they’re low in carbohydrates so there’s no naturally occurring food that has combination and that combination is absolutely deadly.
We heard from Jeff Bullock yesterday’s talk and he is one of the experts and he said that you know saturated fat by itself probably is not problematic because we can oxidize it and it doesn’t produce atherosclerosis but saturated fat is combined with a high carbohydrate diet is deadly and that’s why we have this epidemic of cardiovascular disease in the Western world is because that’s how we take our saturated fat we take it along with a high carbohydrate diet that’s also a subject you devote to a chapter to the question about saturated fats in the diet and you write that you sort of changed your view a little bit I mean most people have I guess in the last decade or last well there’s been so much there’s been.
Much new information has come out in the mechanisms that underlie atherosclerosis so I think that you know you can’t throw out some of the early pioneers the people that identified the LDL receptor that’s still good science we know that saturated fats down-regulate the LDL receptor but that’s a tiny part of atherosclerosis and so in the decades since I wrote the book and remember the science that I was looking at when I first wrote that book was 30 years ago okay so that was the best science and we’ve come to a long way and so we understand this much much better my first book the Paleo diet I wrote in 2002 I revised it in 2010 when it reflects the new information about saturated fat I’ve reversed my position on this it’s been almost seven or eight years and I’m still being kind of brought to the friends like oh he’s the guy that doesn’t support saturated fat that’s completely untrue I wrote a paper a scientific book chapter in the year 2005.
That’s seven years ago and I said that it’s outrageously and what we did is we analysed the diets of hunter-gatherers for specifically saturated fats there’s absolutely no way in the world you can get below ten per cent of your calories from saturated fat yet those are the guidelines, in fact, most of the hunter-gatherer societies the majority we’re consuming higher than 15% so the recommendations to reduce saturated fat to reduce cardiovascular disease only hold true is if you’re eating a high carb diet but a high carb diet all by itself is also problematic so a high carb low-fat diet still is atherogenic so to my way of thinking is that the government recommendations are flawed and they’re not based upon the best science and.
In the last two years, we’ve got some three powerful meta-analyses that have combined all of the epidemiologic studies and all of the randomised control trials and the conclusion of these the largest studies that have ever been done on saturated fat would suggest that it has a very minimal effect on the development of cardiovascular disease but if that if you’ve got somebody back in Sweden who’s eating Donuts and consuming bacon and eggs for breakfast he’s in a world of hurt so he says the saturated fats, okay and he continues to eat the doughnut which song should they quit first well you know the answer to that, of course, they ought to get rid of the doughnuts the high glycemic load of course.
I find it interesting you official guidelines say you should reduce the saturated fat to ten per cent or maybe even below 7 per cent and you say 15 per cent is perhaps normal for yeah we did that we did the analysis and it depends on you know there wasn’t a single hunter-gatherer diet they ate a variety of foods and their plant-animal subsistence ratio change throughout the year sometimes they ate a lot of plant foods sometimes they had a lot of animal foods but they never would have ever consumed less than 10 per cent of their calories as saturated fats only under perhaps starvation conditions when they couldn’t get any animal foods but for the most part the human genome was conditioned by a high saturated fat intake and if your readers want to find that out and they can go to my website the paleo calm and they can download that book chapter on the saturated fats and get all the details.
If you believe in the theory of evolution and you try to eat a paleo diet you should probably not be afraid of saturated fat though I think under the context of the Paleo diet saturated fat really has a minimal effect on either cancer or heart disease okay so I have another subject that I find really interesting and you write about you write quite a long chapter on vegetarianism the vegetarians vegans yeah and the health impact of of eating a vegetarian diet you say the vegetarian diets are clearly a nightmare right in your book why well you know people should read the chapter it’s it’s it’s a difficult concept to explain in five minutes or less because there’s so many problems with a vegetarian lifestyle or vegetarian diet the first thing that I point out is is one is that if you look at the evolutionary record if you look at hunter-gatherers there’s no vegan or vegetarian hunter-gatherers and the reason for it is because natural selection would have weeded out that behaviour because the behaviour of eating only plant foods and not eating animal foods is lethal.
It’ll eventually kill you and it produces disease and so reproduction into adulthood then is going to be impaired so people that don’t eat meat won’t reproduce so that if it’s a genetic thing that’s causing the behaviour that’ll be a problem so that’s why hunter-gatherers don’t do it because it’s a lethal behavioural adaptation the second major factor is most well perhaps fifty to sixty per cent of people who become vegans or vegetarians do so because they think they’re improving their health alright so they think that they’ll escape cancer and heart disease and type 2 diabetes and everything else that kills us in the Western world well until 1999 no scientists ever got around to looking at mortality in vegetarians/vegans and so a fellow from England by the name of Dr Ki: finally got around, to do that any publishes results, the: American, Journal: of; Clinical: Nutrition: examined: I: think? Was: like: 28,000: vegan: vegetarians: and: overall: mortality: didn’t: differ: from: all? Causes; combined? From the average hamburger eater in society, so they didn’t escape heart disease, they didn’t escape cancer and the same thing, so this study was replicated again in 2009.
These are called meta-analyses and what scientists do is anybody can cherry-pick a study? If you want, if you’re vegetarian, you can cherry-pick a single study and say look this supports my cause or, if I’m a non-vegetarian, I can cherry-pick another study and say: look this supports my cause, so we’ve kind of gotten over that and in the last decade what We do now is we employ what is called meta-analyses and we can use statistical procedures to bring together all the studies that have ever been done on the topic and that’s what we’ve done with vegan vegetarians and mentioned the most comprehensive one was published in 2009 By Kees group once again, and it was even a larger sample – it is close to 40,000 and there was slight evidence that they may have. A certain group may have done just. A little bit. Better with cardiovascular disease but the whole, group compared, to the whole of society didn’t and.
If you, adopt a vegetarian or vegan diet to become, healthier it’s not going to happen. And part of the reason is that there are so many nutrient deficiencies you’re going to develop if you stop eating as much as well. The first thing you’re going to develop – and this happens almost overnight – is zinc. Okay. Now, if you measure zinc in plasma, so if you draw blood and you measure it in plasma, you can’t get a very good handle on it, because zinc doesn’t buy in plasma proteins very well where zinc occurs is intracellularly, and so the way you have to Measure zinc, is you have to scrape cells from your mouth, the inside of your mouth? You can scrape them open and then break open those cells, and then you can measure zinc.
The studies that have actually measured intracellular zinc, put people on a vegan diet where they don’t eat any animal products within seven or eight days. They start to become zinc deficient. So so and then what happens? What happens when you think deficient well, zinc is involved in all kinds of intracellular mechanisms involving immunity, people that become if you get an upper respiratory sickness. What does the physician tell you to do? Take some zinc lozenges, you know rub zinc in your nostrils or whatever. So zinc is involved in many immunological functions.
It’s also involved in healing so type 2 diabetics develop sores in their lower extremities that don’t heal very well at all. So there are all kinds of strategies to try to get these things to heal because Circulations is so poor. One of the strategies that are used is to rub zinc oxide on their wounds because zinc oxide directly stimulates the healing process. Zinc is involved in anti-inflammatory mechanisms as well, so inflammation drives cardiovascular disease, cancer and autoimmunity, and so, if you have an impaired or a compromised, zinc status, you’re promoting chronic low-level inflammation, so zinc happens right off the bat iron.
It takes a little bit longer. There’S a storage form of iron called ferritin and the only way to accurately measure blood stores of ferret of iron or the body stores of iron is to measure ferritin and there’s only a single study that has examined ferritin after you put people on a Vegan, vegetarian type, diet and part of the problem is, the study was done in wen and women lose blood through their menstrual cycle on a monthly basis. So unless you compensate for that, you can’t interpret the results. So all other studies in men that have gone on short-term studies show that serum ferritin levels start to plummet after a couple of weeks. So iron is involved in all sorts of mechanisms that involve cognition health well-being in the third world were around the third world, but non-industrialised countries where people don’t have access.
I have a lot of money to be able to purchase animal products. Iron deficiency is a huge, huge problem and in young developing children it adversely impacts cognitive development, so it lowers the IQ and so people that think they’re doing their children a favour by putting them on a vegan. A vegetarian diet is actually probably doing them when life’s biggest services by not giving them the opportunity to have mental development during these critical years, so zinc and iron long-chain omega-3 fatty acids. If you eat a plant-based diet, there are no long-chain, omega-3 fatty acids in any plant food.
So unless you supplement you’re going to immediately become deficient in long-chain, omega-3 fatty acids and unless somebody has been living in a telephone, booth or someplace that you can’t see what’s going on the Western world, virtually all kinds of chronic diseases improve with long-chain Omega-3 fatty acids, the list goes on iodine deficiency is very common in vegan vegetarians, there’s an amino acid called taurine, that’s only found in animal products and vague and vegetarians become deficient and taurine, and we know that touring influences process called platelet aggregation, which is a clotting Process that goes along with cardiovascular disease, so it makes things worse and you know I’m getting old and tired, so I can’t think of that the entire laundry list, so you read my book – that’s enough nutrients anyway, so yeah vegetarians and b6. Vitamin b6 is another word.
Your view they basically all get nutritional deficiencies, yeah yeah, if you, if you decide to do that, and you don’t supplement or you don’t eat – oh and the biggest one, of course, is vitamin b12 yeah yeah and that that’s huge, cumin yeah so b12 is is responsible For getting rid of a toxic calm intermediary compound in our bloodstreams called homocysteine. We used to think that home Assisting just caused irritated the cells lining the arteries, the endothelial cells, and so we now know that homocysteine adversely affects all cells.
Bones reproductive cells testes over everything when homocysteine is high adversely affects it. So the best way to elevate homocysteine is to go on a vegan vegetarian diet and that’s bad okay. You even let’s say that you say that you did eating vegetarian food is a very unnatural way of eating and you could be normal. So I have to ask you what do vegans say to you? What do they? Well, you know, eating is a highly-charged politically behaviorally induced behaviour that we all have to do pretty much on a daily basis, so there’s more to eating than just the science of what it does to our health and well-being.
So many vegans consume vegetarian diets because they think it’s going to make them healthier. Well, I’ll, just read chapter four and the 200 or so references that I provided and you can see that it doesn’t. But some people do it for religious reasons, and you know for ecological environmental reasons. You know and that’s their choice. I don’t you know, I’m not trying to preach a force. My viewpoint on people that do it for that. But what I would say is that the data simply doesn’t support, doing it for health reasons right so moving on from vegetarians. So next question and dairy products, why are they bad for us? In your view? Okay, just yet the short version, the short version.
Well, I guess the biggest reason is that 65 % of the people on the planet don’t have the enzyme to break down the sugar in milk, so the sugar is called lactose and we have an enzyme called lactase and in most people on the planet after Weaning lactase loses its activity and they can’t drink milk, so that ought to tell us something is that when 65 % of the people on the planet can drink milk without gastric ups, that we’ve got, we’ve got a problem. No other mammal on the planet consumes the milk of another species half at any time in their lifespan, and milk is a is not just this white substance. That’S high in calcium milk is a potent endocrine stimulator that has evolved through millions of years of mammalian evolution to have a therapeutic and growth-inducing effect on the young of a mammal, and so that’s what it’s supposed to do is supposed to make the animal grow. Very very rapidly give it immunity and give it a boost in life to get started, and so what we’re doing is we’re taking, and milk is just an absolute chock, full of hormones and bioactive peptides.
So these things do get past the gut barrier and they cause adverse health effects. So we know that in type 1, diabetes and children that milk is a suspect factor because they develop antibodies to bovine insulin. So there’s insulin in cow’s milk and it survives pasteurization and it survives the market in the whole process. So the fact that we have antigens being form antibodies being formed against bovine insulin means that bovine insulin is interacting with our immune system. So it’s getting past the gut barrier and t-cells and b-cells then are these. Are parts of the immune system are eliciting a reaction to this foreign antigen and epidemiologic studies suggest it does not just type 1 diabetes than other autoimmune diseases, including multiple sclerosis, are associated with milk consumption. Recently, there’s a paper that came from a group in Scandinavia from your part of the world, Christian Hoppy’s group and what they did is.
They said, eight-year-old boys. They got 24 eight-year-old boys and they fed them protein either as milk. So all their protein came as milk or as meat, and they did it for a seven-week period and then they crossed them over and during the period in which they were consuming milk, they all became insulin, resistant and so insulin. Resistant is the preliminary step behind the development of obesity in the metabolic syndrome, so that study needs to be replicated and in a well-controlled group of adults. It hasn’t been done yet, but when that study is done, that will have implications that will resonate throughout the world yeah. I guess so. There’S plenty of reasons to believe that maybe dairy products are better to be avoided, but a lot of people like them.
So I would like to ask: do you have any tips? What kind of dairy products are the worst and what might be less bad? Well, the adverse effects seem to come from milk proteins, particularly the way for action in milk. Lactose is probably not a very good sugar to eat either because after we hydrolyze it after we break it down in our gut, we produce glucose and galactose, and humans don’t normally eat galactose and galactose. We know we can do is senile cataracts and animal models very rapidly by fed and Maja lactose or galactose diet. So there’s you know, we don’t have experimental evidence in humans and probably will never do those experiments because it takes so long to develop senile cataracts. But I suspect that a high milk diet throughout life tends to predispose people for senile cataracts. It’s also the epidemiology Mia logic, studies also implicated in prostate cancer in men and breast and ovarian cancer and women.
So it’s a nasty substance. It’S designed to cause growth in calves and it causes growth in humans. It stimulates growth. We know that if you drink milk, it elevates a hormone called IGF-1 and elevations in IGF-1. We’Ve has been through this before they’re caused by the high glycemic load. Carbohydrates are also caused by milk, so pour yourself a bowl of Kellogg’s cornflakes with milk in the morning and consuming that with some fruit juice is perhaps one of the absolute worst breakfast is. You could ever do and a very common one at a very common one, because it’s easy to put together. It’S quick and it tastes good. I guess moving on to their product that I enjoy butter, that’s fairly low in lactose, fairly low in milk, proteins yeah.
I would that be more. I would say that the only dairy product that I would advocate and it obviously it’s not paleo, but it contains. No none of the proteins very very few of the whey proteins and a fatty acid profile. We used to worry about it because it contains so much palmitic acid, but you know, we’ve been through that story before is that saturated fats are probably not problematic in the face of low carbohydrate diets, so the butter would be almost okay, not almost it would be. Okay, Wow, a lot of people are happy now yeah watch it well. You know, and I think Jeff Volek also made. The statement is that it high-fat foods help with satiety, okay, so we go on a low carb or a high carb low-fat diet. People are hungry all the time because they’re not eating protein and they’re, not eating fat and protein and fat are more satiating than carbohydrates, particularly high glycemic load carbs.
So moving on, we only have a few moments, but I would like to talk briefly about a big subject: called leaky gut yeah. Could you just summarize what that’s about a decade ago I wrote a paper we published in the British Journal of nutrition, in which we implicated leaky gut in autoimmunity, and that was a decade before its time and for scientists at a Division, one research institution to make That statement it was almost blasphemy, so I really had to go out on the limb because at the time it just seemed like quote-unquote junk science?
If you go on MEDLINE now, there are tens of thousands of papers dealing with leaky gut and it’s become a real issue, and we know that chronic low-level inflammation drives heart disease, cancer and autoimmunity, and so the $ 64,000 question is: where does chronic low-level Inflammation come from if you’re a physician and somebody comes to you and they’ve got pyuria or gum disease. Well, you better be very worried not just about their gum but their heart, and so we know that gum disease is a risk factor for heart disease. Why is that is because it produces chronic systemic low-level inflammation, but we have a much larger interface besides our mouth and that’s our gut? We have about two square football fields or soccer fields.
We have that’s how much area we have in our gut. That’S exposed to the outside world because, even though our gut runs in the middle of our body, it’s in theory outside our body and so there’s a huge floral load of bacteria and viruses and pathogens is also commercial bacteria that are found in the gut. So there are good and bad bacteria and when we end up with a leaky gut the bad bacteria, these are gram-negative bacteria. They contain a substance in their cell wall called lipopolysaccharide or LPS, and lipopolysaccharide immediately causes the immune system to become inflamed. It’S like there’s. No other response, it’s like turning on a light, switch, there’s, no if-then or most biological systems.
We have multiple negative feedback mechanisms that say well, I’m going to get fired up here, I’m not going when LPS gets into our body boom. It’S like pouring gasoline on the fire and so LPS is, is very much pro-inflammatory and that we have cells lining our gut called dendritic cells, and so that’s in macrophages. These are the first lines of defence, and so they bind this LPS and they have a specific receptor called a toll-like receptor, the toll-like receptor for and so when LPS binds toll-like receptor for it up-regulates, or it increases the synthesis of pro-inflammatory, cytokines, TNF-alpha, il-6 and so Forth and this, if you have a leaky gut chronically over your entire lifetime, then you’ve got this chronic low-level inflammation systemic inflammation going on and the typical Western diet produces a leaky gut through a variety of mechanisms. High glycemic load carbohydrates seem to cause leaky gut.
So sugar and white flour, wheat causes a leaky gut in many people. Beans, potatoes, even green tomatoes, have a substance that induces leaky gut a fully ripe red tomato. Probably is okay, but green tomatoes contain a substance called alpha. Toma teen that promote leaky gut alcohol causes the leaky gut birth control pills, cause leaky gut. If you take antacids, they contain a substance called aluminium, hydroxide or alum. That increases as you got. If you like hot spicy foods, they cause a leaky gut, but they contain substances called capsaicin. So Chili Peppers also cause a leaky gut heals very very rapidly. So if you have a leaky gut at the beginning of the morning probably by afternoon, and if you don’t continue eating these foods, it can heal itself up.
So it if you get these foods out of the diet, like with the Paleo diet, you’re in good shape. Yeah, I find this a fascinating subject and you link this leaky gut to all kinds of autoimmune disease. We think so. We think that and not just dust Eliseo Fasano is a group. Although my paper was the seminal paper in the scientific literature dating back to 2002 vasanas group, who are the premier celiac people in the world, they’ve also, I think, by about 2005, they came up with a very eloquent mechanism whereby weak causes leaky gut, but yeah.
It’S a fascinating theory, but you write to them still. You write in your book that there are no scientific studies to date performed regarding the Paleo diet and leaky gut. That’S right. We need to do those studies and you know, as I mentioned the very first Paleo diet paper with boy Dean’s in 1985. So here we are, you know 15 25, 30 years later, and it’s now being taken seriously. I mean I’m involved as a consultant in a group that is testing Paleo diet in an NIH ro1 grant a large group people over a two-year period. So hopefully this kind of information will start coming out yeah.
So a lot more research to be done, but and if someone wants to start today, what’s the most important thing, would you say if you want to move from a Western diet to something more healthy, Payard like what’s the most important one to three things? Well, you know in the United States the way supermarkets are set up is that the real food is in the outside aisles, and they do that deliberately so that you have to walk through the inner aisles where all the processed foods are to get to the real Food, so I would say your first step is to make your food choices primarily in the outer aisles and stay away from the inside aisles. That’S the number one that would think that would be a very easy starting point, so get yourself fruit and vegetables and meat and fish and you’re in good shape and throw and stay away from the bread, aisle and the canned foods and that kind of stuff.
A very good and clear explanation of the paleo diet.