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In April of 2011, I posted a rebuttal of a Nature paper from Stanley Hazen’s group at the Cleveland Clinic arguing that choline from animal foods causes heart disease:
Does Dietary Choline Contribute to Heart Disease?
Their argument was that our intestinal bacterial convert choline to trimethylamine, which our livers then convert to trimethylamine oxide (TMAO), which causes atherosclerosis in mice, and thus, by extension, probably in humans. I pointed out that previous studies have shown that supplements with salts of free choline do in fact generate TMAO, but uncontaminated phosphatidylcholine, the main form of choline found in food, does not. Moreover, choline-rich foods like liver and eggs did not produce more TMAO than a control breakfast, but seafood, which is generally contaminated with some trimethylamine or TMAO, did.
In a new paper in Nature Medicine, these authors have expanded their argument to claim that the carnitine in red meat contributes to heart disease through the same pathway. Put on your seat belts, folks, and let’s take a look!
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I recently came across several papers published in The Veterinary Record in the 1960s documenting the efficacy and risks of injecting cows with a mega-dose of vitamin D just before calving to prevent “milk fever,” which isn’t a fever at all, but is a mix of clinical symptoms including weakness, loss of appetite, and in the extreme case heart failure. It results from low blood levels of calcium, which sometimes occur in the first few days of lactation, before the cow can adequately adjust its calcium balance to meet the new demands for this mineral. It may be a relatively recent disease resulting from the excessive demand for lactation placed on modern dairy cows. In this post, I will review these papers, which provide evidence that thyroid hormone and vitamin A protect against the harmful effects of the vitamin D injections.
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This is the sixth installment in a series of posts in which I am laying out the most salient points from my 2012 Real Food Summit talk, “Weston Price on Primitive Wisdom.” See these links for part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5. This post will cover Price’s support for what we could call “real food,” and why he considered alternative approaches to be based on the accumulation of knowledge at the expense of wisdom.
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This is the fifth installment in a series of posts in which I am laying out the most salient points from my 2012 Real Food Summit talk, “Weston Price on Primitive Wisdom.” See these links for part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4.
One of the major sections of my talk was on Price’s theory of primitive wisdom. Since this section was based on my June, 2011 blog post, “Understanding Weston Price on Primitive Wisdom — Ancient Doesn’t Cut It,” it makes little sense to write another post about it in this series. In brief, Price concluded that the groups he studied maintained good health not simply because they were limited to a more primitive environment and lacked industrial foods, but because they had accumulated wisdom about how to select important nutrient-dense foods and possessed the strength of character necessary to procure those foods even when doing so proved difficult. In this post, I’d like to focus on what Price found and concluded regarding wheat and other cereal grains.
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This is the fourth installment in a series of posts in which I am laying out the most salient points from my 2012 Real Food Summit talk, “Weston Price on Primitive Wisdom.” See these links for part 1, part 2, and part 3.
At the first annual Ancestral Health Symposium in 2011, I had the great honor of meeting “Paleo” contributor Loren Cordain. Dr. Cordain told me that he considered Weston Price “the grandfather of the Paleo movement,” and said the only thing Price lacked was an “evolutionary approach.” In fact Price did retrospectively offer an “evolutionary approach” in the 1945 edition of Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, which many would have missed if they read the free online version of the book, but this approach is very different from that generally invoked by the Paleo movement and is absent from the 1939 edition, where Price laid out the intentions behind his study design. In this post, I will explore these approaches.
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This is the third installment in a series of posts in which I will lay out the most salient points from my 2012 Real Food Summit talk, “Weston Price on Primitive Wisdom.” See these links for part 1 and part 2.
In this post, I’ll address the scope of Price’s work. Although his most rigorous findings were that tooth decay and dental deformities consistently showed dramatic increases with modernization when modernized subgroups of each “racial stock” were compared to their traditionally living counterparts, the full extent of Price’s work is broader than this.
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In my recent interview with Dr. Mercola, we discussed measuring vascular calcification with coronary CT scans. This technique offers valuable information, but also a large dose of radiation, so we agreed that we should be cautious about using them. Recent research suggests, in any case, that current imaging techniques are incapable of detecting the vast majority of calcification, including the most dangerous type. In this post, I’ll consider the possibility that in the future blood levels of a specific form of matrix Gla protein (MGP), a vitamin K-dependent protein I’ve discussed often in the past, could be used as a better and less invasive measure of cardiovascular calcification.
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This is the second installment in a series of posts in which I will lay out the most salient points from my 2012 Real Food Summit talk, “Weston Price on Primitive Wisdom.” In part one, I described Price’s “study design” as the observation of a series of “natural experiments” where he compared isolated and modernized subgroups of each of a series of “primitive racial stocks,” so he could evaluate the effect of modernization while controlling for hereditary, cultural, and geographic factors. In this post, I’d like to explain why comparing one “primitive racial stock” to another is a far less valuable and far more confounded approach, using apparent adaptations in vitamin D metabolism among the Inuit as an illustrative example.
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As I first wrote about back in 2007 in my article, “On the Trail of the Elusive X Factor,” matrix Gla protein (MGP) is a vitamin K-dependent protein that directly protects soft tissues from calcification and (whether directly or indirectly) helps mineralize bones and teeth. MGP is mostly made by cartilage cells and vascular smooth muscle cells. Most of the MGP in the blood probably comes from the blood vessel wall. Investigators are currently measuring blood levels of MGP in research studies, and in the foreseeable future MGP may become available to health care practitioners and patients as a marker for blood vessel vitamin K status.
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Last September I gave a two-part talk for Sean Croxton’s Real Food Summit over at Underground Wellness called “Weston Price on Primitive Wisdom,” which covered Price’s scientific approach, perspective, and conclusions. The talk was free for a few days, but listening to it now requires purchasing the entire conference for $99, a great deal well worth the money considering the price includes 27 talks and tons of free bonuses. Since many people can’t afford this, however, and since I got a lot of great feedback on the talk, I wanted to turn it into a series of blog posts that will cover the most important points.
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