The Real Paleo Diet

We evolved eating huge amounts of plants. It’s estimated that 200,000 years ago we got 600mg of vitamin C a day. That’s the amount of vitamin C found in 10 oranges. Every day we appear to have consumed the amount of vitamin E found in 2 cups of nuts, the amount of fiber found in 12 bowls of oatmeal, and the amount of calcium found in 5 cups of collard greens. They weren’t milking mammoths–that came from all the wild greens they foraged.

As I note in the above NutritionFacts.org video pick, we were exposed to such a quantity of whole healthy plant foods that we, as a species, lost our ability to make vitamin C. We still actually have the vitamin C gene in our DNA, but our bodies presumably just junked it because we were getting such massive daily doses that it wasn’t worth maintaining it. The problems occur when you take our evolutionary heritage, fine-tuned over the millennia, and plop it down into meat and potato chip country.

Advocates of the so-called Paleo diet are certainly right in railing against refined and processed junk, but may just use it as an excuse to eat loads of meat that bears little resemblance to flesh of prehistoric wild animals. The contaminant issue alone is compelling reason to eat as low as possible on the food chain. As I show in the video, the journal of the American Meat Science Association recently published a review cataloging the laundry list: arsenic, mercury, lead, cadmium, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, preservatives, and veterinary drugs such as antibiotic residues. Given what’s now in fish, for example, “it would be impossible to follow the Paleolithic diet while avoiding the risks associated with consuming mercury in amounts in excess of the suggested EPA threshold.”

The “paleo” diet patients I saw in my practice weren’t consuming weeds and eating in excess of 100 grams of fiber a day. They were eating burgers, not bugs. As concluded in a review I profile in the video, “Sufficient scientific evidence exists for public health policy to promote a plant-rich diet for health promotion.”

For those interested in digging deeper, there was an interesting Scientific American blog this summer entitled “Human Ancestors Were Nearly All Vegetarians” and there’s an in-depth video series on YouTube debunking the paleo diet fad. I wrote a whole book on the Atkins incarnation, Carbophobia, now available free online. I also have two videos on low carb diets: Atkins Diet: Trouble Keeping It Up and Plant-Based Atkins Diet.

In health,
Michael Greger, M.D.

PS: If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my videos for free by clicking here and watch my full 2012 presentation Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death.

Image credit: jarapet / Flickr

Related:
Poultry Paunch: Meat & Weight Gain
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Diet vs. Exercise: What’s More Important?

Read more: Diet & Nutrition, Eating for Health, Food, Health, Uncategorized, Videos, Dr. Michael Greger, NutritionFacts.org, Paleo Diet

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What Is It to Wash your Hands 300 Times a DAY?

For years, 40-year-old Julia Abdullah from Malaysia was obsessed with hygienic habits that have become pure ritual

The lady had periods when washing her hands up to 300 times a day, reports Leakarea.
This strange habit started 20 years ago, but gradually became an obsession for which Julia Abdullah stood in the shower for five hours a day, washing her hair 25 times a day and her hands about 300 times every 24 hours .

Julia Abdillah has spent most of her time washing her hands and hair

Freak hygienic existence lady working in a microbiological laboratory and often she had to work with urine culture negative and even blood samples from HIV-positive.
It was during that period; Julia began to spend more and more time in front of the sink because it had led to fears that she could be infected.

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A little later she began to doubt that she suffers from obsessive-compulsive disorder, but did not go for medical care to the appropriate authorities.
“I thought I could get rid of washing,” says Julia.
However, her condition only worsened. After some time, she lost her job because of her addiction.
Because of her obsession with personal hygiene, she couldn’t find a job for a long time and at one point had to search the neighborhood trash cans in order to feed.
“At one point my life is bombarded with too much misery that I could not take. I was angry so much that I stopped to bathe for three months,” said another battered woman.
Her obsession to hygiene, however, was far from healed.
“I turned to the association for mental illness in Singapore in 2009. At that time I was on the verge of suicide,” says another Julia.
The association helped the woman to return to normal life, but only a year later her condition deteriorated after Julia missed several consecutive visits to a psychologist who treated her.

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She begun to consume 2 bottles of shampoo and 21 soaps per day. From constant cleaning she was so tired that virtually had no opportunity to do anything else.
Fortunately for her, treating her psychologist received her intensive treatment lasting 22 consecutive days.
Julia Abdullah said today that once again firmly grasp the reins of their lives developing and even agreed to participate in a photo exhibition named “Picture My World”. The purpose of that is to make a fuss about a psychological disease basis is becoming more common in the modern world.

Source : dailyhealtharticles[dot]com

How Do Plant-Based Diets Fight Cancer?

Why do centenarians—those who live to be over a hundred years old—escape cancer? As you can see in my 3-min. NutritionFacts.org video IGF-1 as One-Stop Cancer Shop, as we get older our risk of getting and dying from cancer grows year by year until we hit about 85 or 90, and then cancer risk starts to drop. It seems that centenarians are endowed with a particular resistance to cancer. So what’s their secret?

Every day, 50 billion of our cells die, and every day, 50 billion new ones are born. There’s a balance. Otherwise your body would shrink or get too crowded. Sometimes we need grow, like when we’re a baby or for that growth spurt around puberty. Our cells don’t get larger when we grow up; they increase in number. A child’s hand may only be made up of about 50 billion cells and may have to add half trillion or so while growing up.

Once we’ve already grown up, though, we don’t want a lot of extra cells hanging around. We still need our cells to grow and divide, but out with the old and in with the new. We don’t want to be making more cells than we’re putting out to pasture. When you’re a kid, extra growth can be good; when you’re an adult, extra growth can mean a tumor.

How do our cells know when to tip the scale in favor of more dividing with less dying and when to come back into balance? A key signal is IGF-1, a growth hormone called insulin-like growth factor number one. IGF-1 levels go up when you’re a kid so you grow and then come back down when you’re done growing. Should your levels stay a bit too high as an adult, though, there’s a constant message sent to your cells to grow, grow, grow, divide, don’t die, keep going, keep growing. Not surprisingly, the more IGF-1 we have in our bloodstream, the higher our risk for many types of cancer.

When you’re a kid, growth is good, but too much growth when we’re all grown up can mean cancer. In my 90-second video, Cancer-Proofing Mutation, I describe Laron Syndrome, a type of dwarfism caused by congenital IGF-1 deficiency. Those affected don’t have that IGF-1 spurt in childhood so they grow up short-statured, but not having an excess of IGF-1 in their systems as an adult makes them nearly cancer-proof. This raises the question of whether one can achieve the best of both worlds by ensuring adequate IGF-1 levels during childhood and then suppressing excess growth promotion in adulthood. This can be done with a plant-based diet as I described in last week’s Care2 posts Cancer-Proofing Your Body and Treating an Enlarged Prostate With Diet, as well as in today’s video pick above.

Who is Pritikin? See Engineering a Cure. What’s the puzzle? See Ex Vivo Cancer Proliferation Bioassay. The binding protein findings I describe in the video may explain the findings in Is It the Diet, the Exercise, or Both?

For more on IGF-1, I’ve touched on it before in Dairy Hormonal Interference and Meat Hormones & Female Infertility.

In health,
Michael Greger, M.D.

PS: If you haven’t yet, you can subscribe to my videos for free by clicking here and watch my full 2012 presentation Uprooting the Leading Causes of Death.

Image credit: The Birkes / Flickr

Related:
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Read more: Food, Cancer, Diet & Nutrition, Eating for Health, Vegan, Vegetarian, Videos, Dr. Michael Greger, IGF-1, NutritionFacts.org

Source : care2[dot]com

There Will Be NO Bacon Shortage

Considering the rampant enthusiasm for all things bacon over the last 5 years, it is not surprising that the bacon-loving populace would go into a collective panic when hit with the news of an impending bacon shortage. The news came a few weeks ago in the form of a series of headlines originating from the UK such as, “Global Bacon Shortage ‘Unavoidable’.” But the story (as many stories tend to) got blown way out of proportion. It is not so much a bacon shortage as it is a bacon price hike on the horizon. Maybe the headlines should have read, “Bringing Home the Bacon is Going to Cost More” (not as punchy, I know).

The reason is not lack of pigs, or even the raising of standards and practices; it has to do with corn. The crippling drought that impacted the entirety of the global corn crop, not just the United States. Remember all of those widely circulated shots of withering stalks of corn in July and August – a time when corn should be growing tall and strong? Well the devastation did not just impact the price of your supermarket corn on the cob, the reverberations extended into nearly everything because of the ubiquity of all things corn and the corn-economy that drives modern agriculture. This includes everything from ethanol in your gas tank, to corn syrup in just about everything, to animal feed. The price of animal feed went way up, not just for pigs, but cows and chickens as well. This will lead to fewer animals to feast upon, but nothing close to a shortage. Essentially expect to spend anywhere from 10% to 30% more on that bit of bacon you may love so much.

Now I am in touch with the Care2 audience enough to know that many of you could care less about bacon, meaning that the thought of choking down the fatty flesh of a pig is utterly repugnant to you. But this story is less interesting in the feared result, and more interesting in what it reveals about our unyielding dependence upon the global corn crop. The reverberations from something like this past year’s drought are profound.

What are your thoughts on bacon price hikes and/or our dependency on corn? Do these sorts of things leave you worried and upset, or do you just shrug your shoulders and dole out a few more bucks for that bit of bacon?

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Read more: Blogs, Following Food, Food, bacon, bacon shortage, corn, drought, farmers, pork

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Tomato Sauce With Butter & Onion

I finally jumped on the foodie bandwagon and made this tomato sauce everyone has been raving about for the past couple years. First Deb, then Jaden, then Francis, then Elise — I figured there had to be something to it…

Our new addition does not make cooking easy but this recipe looked just simple enough to attempt between dealing with the two kids in the fuzzy haze of sleep deprivation.

The only change I made was to substitute the last tomatoes from our garden and the ones we received in our CSA pick-up this week for the canned San Marzano tomatoes that Marcella Hazan’s recipe calls for. I figure this can only help though I’m sure the San Marzanos are tasty, too.

Since I was using fresh tomatoes, I blanched them, cooled them in ice water and peeled them.

Then peeled and halved the onion, sliced the butter and combined it all in the pot. Simmered for 45 minutes, stirring regularly and crushing the tomatoes against the side of the pot.

Removed the onion, gave it a few licks with the old immersion blender and salted it to taste. I admit it went against the grain to use butter instead of olive oil but it makes the sauce so rich and smooth and, well, buttery, that I have no regrets at all. And I also questioned the removal of the onion but decided just to follow the recipe and was pleased with the end result – a delicate, rich, fresh tasting sauce.

Simple, delicious, comfort food. And a perfect way to use up some end-of-the-season tomatoes, too. Directions on the next page are for the canned tomatoes – but just blanch and peel if you’re using fresh ones.

Next: Get the recipe!

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Read more: All recipes, Basics, Blogs, Entrees, Food, Garden of Eating, Vegan, Vegetarian

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