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I just got back from the 2012 Low-Carb Cruise, where I gave a very well received 45-minute talk called “Why Animal Fats Are Good For You,” in which I pointed out the important nutritional value of animal fat, but also pointed out the wide diversity of fat and carbohydrate intakes among populations free of heart disease. I concluded that we should simply “take the fear out of fat.” Rather than advocating specific levels of carbohydrate or animal fat, I suggested, we should select the mix of foods that works best for us, choosing these foods from a broad menu that compiles the many different smaller menus found in traditional diets associated with vibrant health.
The best part about the cruise was all of the phenomenal people I was able to meet and spend time with, and I’m very grateful to Jimmy Moore and the other organizers for putting the whole thing together and providing such an honor to little insignificant me by inviting me to be an important part of it. Thanks Jimmy!
I had one particular encounter with a delightful gentleman that is especially germane to this post. I’ll provide him with a respectful cloak of anonymity for now since the conversation was private, but in short he suggested that my analysis of randomized controlled trials substituting vegetable oil for animal fats and testing the effect of this substitution on heart disease incidence focused too much on old and thus necessarily outdated research at the expense of newer and better studies that could take into account all of the advances we’ve made in our understanding of physiology. This gentleman thus provided me with the perfect reminder to blog about the latest vegetable oil substitution trial published last month in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN) (1), which claimed to show that substitution of margarine and sunflower oil for butter lowers the amount of fat in the liver and may protect against heart disease by increasing the activity of the LDL receptor.
“Updated” is only better than “outdated” when new studies either provide revolutionary new discoveries or methodically fill in the gaps in our knowledge left open by older studies. When the latest studies address questions that had been rendered irrelevant decades earlier, however, we are left wondering why we should even bother reading them. As we will see below, when viewed in the context of existing knowledge, the new AJCN study should leave us scratching our heads and asking just one question: “So what?”
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I’ve written a lot about our good friend glutathione on this blog (here and here), and I’ll be writing about him quite a bit more in the future. When it comes to boosting glutathione status, a nutrient-dense diet rich in traditional foods is the best adjunct to dietary and lifestyle strategies aimed at increasing the metabolic rate, so this blog is a great place to explore the great goodness of this trusty little tripeptide of ours. In my last post, one reader expressed surprise that I listed protection against the toxicity of the amino acid cysteine as one of the functions of glutathione. This calls for a crash course that brings to mind each component of glutathione’s goodness so we can better understand how edible superheroes like raw milk, raw fruits and vegetables, bone broth, and liver work their biochemical magic. Continue reading →
Our valiant, cape-wearing, free radical-wrestling, toxicant-thwarting Raw Milk is back in town with his courageous army of raw food volunteers, and this time their mission is to get our good friend glutathione back in the bronchioles where this talented little tripeptide will make all things new, wiping away the wheeze and taking the anguish out of the asthma.
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One of the perennial topics of this blog is the synergy between vitamins A and D. A new Japanese study published last July in the journal Immunology Letters (1) provides further evidence of this synergy, this time suggesting the dynamic duo can courageously combat the most flagellant of our inner impulses, keeping our wayward neutrophils in check and barring them from wandering too far down the winding road that leads to autoimmunity.
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An estimated 50,000 mice worldwide are charting new territories of chubbiness as they chow down on the infamous, lard-based, high-fat rodent diet, “D12492.” As I reported a few days ago over at The Daily Lipid, it turns out these mice are chowing down on twice the amount of polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs) as Research Diets, the producer of D12492, has heretofore been reporting. In this post I’ll address a few questions that came up in the comments, like which fatty acids the PUFAs had displaced, and what we can expect from higher-quality, pastured lard.
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This past Thursday marked the one-year anniversary of The Curious Case of Campbell’s Rats, wherein we took a wild ride through over two decades of animal research in which Dr. T. Colin Campbell of China Study fame showed that dietary protein, whether it comes from animals or plants, protects against aflatoxin toxicity and the initiation of new precancerous lesions while simultaneously promoting the growth of precancerous lesions that have already formed. Most of these lessons promptly disappeared down the memory hole, so that the picture left to us in The China Study — where consuming animal protein is the leading cause of cancer while plant protein is benign — is radically different from the one Campbell had sketched onto the canvas of his many scientific papers.
Thursday also marked the release of Denise Minger’s review of Forks Over Knives, a new movie in which Campbell and his curious rats resurface once again. If you haven’t read this review, I’d recommend hopping over there and giving it a look. It might take a couple hours to get through, but the rigorous deconstruction of some of the pseudoscientific silliness in the movie, the positive and generous attitude she presents towards the intentions of the producers and stars of the film, and the dozen or two laugh-out-loud points all make the time spent well worth it.
Denise sleuthed out a few forgotten papers wherein researchers studied how dietary protein interacted with aflatoxin exposure in rhesus monkeys. The results suggested that low doses of aflatoxin were both more toxic and more carcinogenic to monkeys fed low-protein diets. High doses of aflatoxin, by contrast, would cause cancer in the monkeys gorging out on protein and just kill the others.
The model of aflatoxin-dosing used in these studies, discussed in more detail below, was much more realistic than the model used in most of Campbell’s studies, and thus the balance of the evidence suggests that adequate protein likely offers very powerful protection against cancer in someone who hasn’t already developed the disease.
In this post, I’d like to take advantage of a year of reflection to elaborate more precisely on how protein provides its protective effects — and the exciting news is that it involves our favorite tripeptide, known more formally as our good friend glutathione (which is pronounced like this: glute-uh-THIGH-own). The role of glutathione suggests we should emphasize adequate protein, nutrient-density, raw foods, and plenty of polyphenol-rich fruits and vegetables — not that we should eschew animal foods. These newly unearthed studies of rhesus monkeys provide a good opportunity to first revisit the curious question of dose as a prelude.
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As always, if the font is too small, you can enlarge it using the “control” and “plus” buttons.
In keeping with the spirit of the first part of this series in which I acknowledged that Masai society has always been in a dynamic state of transition, I’d like to offer a “glimpse” of the traditional Masai diet as it was recorded by the German military officer Moritz Merker at the turn of the twentieth century.
Merker’s extensive study reveals a people who herded cattle for a living, not simply to consume milk, meat, and blood, but to trade with neighboring tribes for a great variety of plant foods and other goods. Â It reveals a people who used hundreds of local plants for a great variety of purposes, and who regularly consumed wild honey.
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As always, if the font is too small you can use control and plus to enlarge it.
This is the third and final installment of “Part I” of this series. As in the last two installments, here we are continuing to simply obtain a “glimpse” of gender, sexuality, and spirituality in the Loita Masai as it existed in a particular village in the 1970s and 1980s.
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Note: As always, if the font is too small, you can enlarge it using the control and plus buttons.
This post is the second installment of “Part I” in this series. Here we are simply obtaining a glimpse of the life of the Loita Masai by examining a particular village as it existed in the 1970s and 1980s, focusing on the research of Melissa Llewelyn-Davies.  A more comprehensive view of Masai culture across time and geography lies in the future of this series.
The principal reason for laying this groundwork is so that I can show in future posts how Masai culture, history, and social organization impact their diet and health status, but I also hope that by offering a more three-dimensional account of the Masai I will help this group come to life for us, so that we see them as more than pawns in our arguments about nutrition.
We have seen so far that these Masai are monotheistic, believing in a singular and all-provident God, and that they believe the path to immortality for both men and women is paved with fertility and child-bearing. They therefore see anything that facilitates large families or the health and longevity of their descendants to be “wealth.” Since the goal of Masai society is to produce large families rather than to maximize personal fulfillment and material consumption, we should not confuse the Masai definition of “wealth” with our own.
Although the men do not treat the women and children as property to be traded on the market, Masai society is not egalitarian. It involves many divisions of ownership rights, authority, and labor according to age and sex. As such, it is very different from our own society.
Nevertheless, these divisions derive from what the Masai consider the natural and observable differences between youth and adults and between men and women. We can only understand these divisions and their impact on Masai men and women after first trying to understand them from the perspectives of the Masai themselves.
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