Yes, you heard that correctly. Three ingredients, no grains, and it doesn't have that grainy mouth feel that you get from coconut flour "cheats".
So, want to find out how to make delicious paleo pancakes using a banana, an egg, and a handful of almonds? Read all about it here!
The South Beach Diet certainly isn't the gold standard for a healthy lifestyle change, but it does have some things going for it. A big one is that it eliminates all wheat, rye and barley during the first month, making it essentially gluten-free. Apparently, the diet's creator is now stepping forward to say publicly that many of the the health benefits associated with starting the diet are a result of eliminating foods containing gluten.
Tired of crashing in the middle of the morning when your blood sugar decides to head south? Here are a couple of wheat-free recipe suggestions for stick-to-your-ribs, Paleo-friendly breakfasts.
If you wanted a clear example of how desperately some scientists (and I’m using the term loosely) will cling to a beloved theory, you couldn’t do much better this:
A recent meta-analysis of salt-restriction studies that was published in both The Cochrane Review and the American Journal of Hypertension found that cutting back on salt is pretty much worthless. So naturally, the anti-salt hysterics had to jump in and torture the data to find some meaningless associations and try to save their reputations and careers.
You can read an abstract of the meta-analysis here, but for a plain-English version, I’d suggest reading an article published in the online version of Scientific American titled It’s Time to End the War on Salt. Here are some quotes:
This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.
I’d say labeling the evidence linking salt to heart disease as tenuous is being generous. Non-existent would be the more accurate term, unless you engage in some major cherry-picking. In real science, no consistency means no validity, and the associations between salt and heart disease or mortality aren’t even close to being consistent. If anything, the associations are all over the place.
So what ignited the fear of salt in the first place?
Worries escalated in the 1970s when Brookhaven National Laboratory’s Lewis Dahl claimed that he had “unequivocal” evidence that salt causes hypertension: he induced high blood pressure in rats by feeding them the human equivalent of 500 grams of sodium a day. (Today the average American consumes 3.4 grams of sodium, or 8.5 grams of salt, a day.)
Let’s see … some goofy scientist feeds rats the equivalent of 147 times as much salt as the average human consumes in a day, and the rats developed high blood pressure. Well, my goodness, let’s toss those salt shakers right now!
Last time I checked, most health authorities were still recommending we consume eight glasses of water per day. I wonder if it ever occurred to Dr. Dahl to force-feed rats the equivalent of 1,176 glasses of water per day and see how that affected their health. If he ran that experiment, I’m pretty sure he’d end up declaring water a health hazard. What kind of hopeless idiots could possibly be swayed by such a nonsense study?
In 1977 the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs released a report recommending that Americans cut their salt intake by 50 to 85 percent, based largely on Dahl’s work.
Ah yes, those idiots. The same idiots who helped kick off the anti-fat hysteria by seeking “consensus” instead of truth. George McGovern strikes again.
Scientific tools have become much more precise since then, but the correlation between salt intake and poor health has remained tenuous. Intersalt, a large study published in 1988, compared sodium intake with blood pressure in subjects from 52 international research centers and found no relationship between sodium intake and the prevalence of hypertension. In fact, the population that ate the most salt, about 14 grams a day, had a lower median blood pressure than the population that ate the least, about 7.2 grams a day.
Well, that’s just an observational study, so perhaps we’re not accounting for some confounding variables. Surely if we restricted salt in a controlled clinical setting, we’d see some real health benefits, eh?
In 2004 the Cochrane Collaboration, an international, independent, not-for-profit health care research organization funded in part by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, published a review of 11 salt-reduction trials. Over the long-term, low-salt diets, compared to normal diets, decreased systolic blood pressure (the top number in the blood pressure ratio) in healthy people by 1.1 millimeters of mercury (mmHg) and diastolic blood pressure (the bottom number) by 0.6 mmHg. That is like going from 120/80 to 119/79.
You may recall that some troll who claimed to hold a PhD in science once insisted in several comments that salt is indeed bad for us, and to prove his point he sent me a link to a clinical study in which researchers produced a “significant” reduction blood pressure by drastically restricting salt. As I explained in my Science For Smart People speech, “significant” simply means that statistically, the results weren’t likely to due to chance. The “significant” reduction in blood pressure reported in the study that the troll sent me amounted to around three points. In other words, meaningless … all the salt-restricted dieters got out of the deal was some really bland food.
Studies that have explored the direct relationship between salt and heart disease have not fared much better. Among them, a 2006 American Journal of Medicine study compared the reported daily sodium intakes of 78 million Americans to their risk of dying from heart disease over the course of 14 years. It found that the more sodium people ate, the less likely they were to die from heart disease.
And yet various government agencies around the world are telling people to restrict salt … to prevent heart disease, of course.
For every study that suggests that salt is unhealthy, another does not.
Bingo. No consistency, no scientific validity. Given an honest analysis of the science, we’d have to conclude that restricting salt is pointless from a public-health standpoint, except as advice given to the few people who are hyper-sensitive to salt.
Now … let’s suppose you’re the chairman of Consensus Action on Salt and Health – kind of a British version of CSPI, only focused specifically on attacking salt in the food supply. Now let’s further suppose stamping out salt in Britain isn’t a mission quite large enough for your ego, so you’re also the chairman of World Action on Salt and Health. (In my opinion, if you belong to more than one organization with Action on in its name, you’re probably a menace.) Finally, let’s suppose both of the organizations you chair depend on donations from people you’ve managed to scare witless about the terrors of salt.
Are you going let a pesky little thing like scientific evidence change your mind? Of course not. You’re going to get ahold of that data and (as Dr. Mike Eades would say) torture it until it says what you want to hear. Which is exactly what Dr. Graham McGregor (who I like to refer to as Action-Action Jackson since he’s the chair of two Action organizations) did after the Cochrane Collaboration issued its report.
In a response published in the Lancet, Dr. MacGregor and Dr. Feng He revealed how they concocted a brilliant method of getting around inconvenient facts like these:
As previously reported by heartwire, Taylor et al’s meta-analysis included seven randomized controlled trials of dietary salt reduction in normotensives (three studies), hypertensives (two studies), a mixed population (one study), and one trial of patients with heart failure.
At follow-up, relative risks for all-cause mortality and cardiovascular mortality for both normotensives and hypertensives were only mildly to moderately reduced, and not to a statistically significant degree. In congestive heart failure patients, salt restriction actually significantly increased all-cause death.
Those are the inconvenient facts. Now here’s how MacGregor and Feng He tried to fung foo all over them:
He and MacGregor, in their Comment, reanalyze the same data but combined the normotensives and hypertensives. They also omitted the heart-failure trial—a group of “very ill” patients taking large doses of diuretics in whom salt restrictions would seldom be recommended, MacGregor observed. In the combined patient analysis, they find a now statistically significant 20% reduction in cardiovascular events and a nonsignificant reduction in all-cause mortality.
Lovely. If clinical trials don’t tell you what you want to hear, mix and match the data, toss out some data if need be, and presto! – you’ve got yourself a “significant” result … well, if you’re talking about cardiovascular events, that is. If you’re talking about actual deaths, the results aren’t “significant.”
In layman’s terms, that means “the results are utterly @#$%ing worthless.” But not to Action-Action Jackson MacGregor:
“We’ve done this reanalysis, and we’ve got the evidence. In fact, all the evidence about salt is overwhelming. . . . It all shows that salt is a major factor bringing up our blood pressure.”
All the evidence, really? Like the clinical trials in which salt restriction changed blood pressure by a point or two at most? Like the big, expensive clinical study the anti-salt troll insisted I read, in which adopting a diet with almost no salt at all caused blood pressure to drop by a whopping three points? (And that trial was conducted by researchers who wanted salt restriction to work. They even tried to talk their way around the results in their conclusions.)
The only overwhelming evidence I see here is that some scientists are freakin’ liars.
While I was doing research on variations in gastric acidity, I came across an interesting paper: Diet, reflux and the development of squamous cell carcinoma of the esophagus in Africa. It's interesting that a lot of conventional dietary advice on digestion is based on studies done in Africa that found that African agrarian cultures eating low-fat high-fiber diets had low rates of common Western digestive issues like hemorrhoids and colon cancer. Unfortunately they forgot to mention that there are a host of similarly bad digestive issues that are MORE common in such cultures, such as sigmoid volvulus and squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) of the esophagus. The latter they have tried to blame on everything from pickled vegetables to malnutrition to alcohol, with none of those hypotheses holding up very well.
A promising villain is linoleic acid, AKA omega-6 fatty acids, well known for their harmful effects in the ancestral health/paleo/primal communities. The epidemic of SCC tracks the widespread adoption of linoleic acid-rich corn as a staple, not just in Africa, but in regions of Europe as well.
I bet you are wondering why Americans don't have SCC. I think there are two factors, one is that higher levels of fat in the diet are protective, but I think another is that it's possible that a precursor to it is heartburn, which is widely treated in the US with proton-pump inhibitors. Those have some seriously bad effects, but they might prevent some types of cancer. I think it's better to remove the cause, but if you are going to continue to eat garbage, a PPI might save your life.
Linoleic acid may be causing heartburn by increasing levels of prostaglandin E2 (PGE2). In animal models, high levels of linoleic acid, particularly in combination with low levels of other fatty acids, lead to elevated PGE2. Other micronutrient deficiencies, such as riboflavin deficiency, might make it worse. PGE2 then inhibits gastric acid production and reduces the tone of reduces of the pyloric and lower esophageal sphincters, causing heartburn. If you thought heartburn was a Western disease, consider that 60% of people in Transkei, South Africa suffer from it. Untreated heartburn exposes the esophagus to damage from the acid, in the long-term this can lead to the development of abnormal cancerous cells. Trypsin can possibly squelch the growth of such cells, but the paper notes that the South African diet is also rich in vegetables that are trypsin inhibitors, such as beans and pumpkin. They also eat the very very bad for you vegetable known as Black Nightshade, which is a pepsin inhibitor. And a lot of people smoke. A bad combination leading to a cancer epidemic.
Since I have gotten rid of my GERD, I've wondered and wondered how I did it. I started eating a high-fat nutrient-dense diet, which was low in grains and free of vegetable oils, but not completely gluten or grain free. So that ruled out a gluten allergy as a major culprit. Wheat tracks as a cause of SCC too, but rather than an allergy as work, it seems like a complex inflammatory process is at play. We need to look at omega-6 as one of the true causes of GERD. It's also a possible connection between omega-6 and skin issues via the gut-brain-skin axis.
“If you have to ask, you probably can’t afford it.” This little piece of wisdom comes in quite handy when buying high-end merchandise and dining in fancy restaurants whose menu lists -‘market price’ as the cost. Now, many of you have probably been in situations where you or someone with you did the unthinkable and actually asked. The result – rude looks, perhaps chuckles from those that may have overheard, and in the end no fancy diamond necklace or $1000 bottle of wine ends up getting bought. What does this have to do with Paleo?
Now that Paleo eating is becoming ‘cool’ everyone seems to have their own version and opinion of what is and isn’t allowed. You see it on paleo forums and blogs and hear it at the gym. If you are a working as a trainer or nutrition coach the emails and questions are never ending… “Is (insert food item here) paleo? Options include: soy milk, oatmeal, agave, honey, quinoa, vinegar, tamari, Italian dressing, canola oil, chocolate, wine, hard alcohol, potatoes, coffee, Splenda, coconut ice cream… These questions are asked over and over again until finally, someone, somewhere, in their very own version of paleo considers the item fair game. This makes the asker of the question happy and all is well; until… “Paleo stops working” for them. What’s next? The questions start again -usually with a new food victim this time.
This weeks Paleo Rodeo link round-up is now live at http://blog.modernpaleo.com/2011/07/paleo-rodeo-070.html . It includes a disturbing but thought provoking piece on why eating local, pasture-raised meat matters, which everyone should probably read, though no one will enjoy (contains graphic video of factory animal conditions). Not only do our meat choices have ethical repercussions... they have health repercussions as well. Paleo diet adherents understand better than most people the truth contained within the old chestnut, "You are what you eat". This article shows you exactly what it is that you are eating, and it's very frightening.
As summer descends upon the world, a young Primal eater’s fancy turns to playful frolicking in the sunshine. And when you’re frolicking, the last thing you want to do is slather a bunch of horrible-smelling, greasy, overpriced sunblock all over your body. It makes you slippery and imbues your countenance with a deathly pallor that is very unbecoming. If you could, you’d love to avoid the nasty practice altogether. You’d love to use more alternative methods. Methods that may not have the support of the medical community, but for which supportive research does exist. Seeing as how a common refrain throughout the newly Primal is that sunburns seem fewer and further between than ever before, I’m guessing that there’s something to it. Dietary? Supplementary?
I’ve noticed the same thing in myself and my family, so I got to wondering: what about going Primal, exactly, might be having this effect? And if something is protecting us from the sun, and it’s not just in everyone’s heads, what else can we do to bolster our natural sunblock? What can we recommend to friends and family who aren’t quite on board with the whole deal but still want protection from the sun? Let’s take a look at some potential supplements and dietary strategies. I’ll reference research as often as possible, but I’ll also draw on anecdotal experience, both personal and from the community at large.
Lycopene, that famous carotenoid found in tomatoes, has been shown in a recent in vivo RCT to protect humans against sun damage. Healthy women, aged 21-47, who ate 55 g of tomato paste containing 16 mg of lycopene every day for 12 weeks experienced significant protection against acute – and potentially long term – sun damage. Remember that cooked tomatoes, and tomato products like paste and sauce, offer far more bioavailable lycopene than raw tomatoes. If you’re counting, 55 grams of tomato paste is a hair over 3 tablespoons worth.
The super-antioxidant astaxanthin is found in algae, the organisms that eat it, and the organisms that eat those organisms (like salmon, shrimp, and pink flamingo – the pink/red color gives it away). It has been getting some attention as an “internal sunscreen.” Does it stack up? Well, here’s a study on isolated human skin cells, in which astaxanthin definitely protects against UVA damage. And here’s another study on isolated skin cells showing its protective effects. But those are limited. Does the effect persist in real life settings? In other words, does ingesting astaxanthin supplements or food that contains astaxanthin offer protection from UVA? This hairless mouse study suggests that it might; astaxanthin was more effective than even retinol. I’d say it looks promising, and I’m always interested in an excuse to dine on pink flamingo thigh.
A common anecdotal report is that supplementing vitamin D increases sun tolerance and protection against sun damage, and a recent study seems to confirm this. Various forms of the vitamin D prohormone offered various protections against UV damage in a mouse model: reduced sunburn, lowered incidence of tumor development. Huh, imagine that! Getting sun gives you vitamin D, which in turn protects you from too much sun. It’s funny how these things work out. Nature can be very elegant.
A recent study out of Australia found that adults with the highest serum concentrations of DHA and EPA had the least “cutaneous p53 expression.” What’s the significance of cutaneous p53 expression? When your skin is in danger of damage from the sun, p53 expression is upregulated to protect it, and high p53 immunoreactivity can lead to melanoma. The fact that high DHA/EPA meant low p53 immunoreactivity suggests that the omega-3s were protecting the skin. And although the study’s authors noted that high serum omega-6 content didn’t seem to correlate with high p53 activity, I think a likelier explanation is this: omega-6 is so prevalent in the modern Australian diet, that even “low” levels are still above the threshold for increased susceptibility to sunburn. Going higher than that threshold won’t make things any worse, and it won’t show up in the statistics. Drop that omega-6 intake to 2% of calories, though, while getting an equal amount of omega-3s? I bet you’d see some incredible UV-resistance.
This is slightly redundant in light of the last suggestion – after all, if you’re limiting PUFAs, you gotta eat some saturated fat – but I think it’s worth mentioning. I hear about people bumping up their saturated fat intake and improving their UV-resistance all over the place, and I’ve experienced the same thing myself, but I’d never seen it mentioned in the literature. Well, here’s a cool rodent study in which mice were either given a saturated fat-enriched diet or a PUFA-enriched diet. No word on the exact composition of the two diets. When both groups of mice were injected with melanoma cells, “the initiation time required for visible tumor growth in mice receiving the polyunsaturated fat diet was significantly less than that in mice receiving the saturated fat diet.” A higher-saturated fat diet was protective, while a higher-PUFA diet was not. If you’re gonna be out in the sun, better eat your butter, palm oil, and coconut oil, eh?
Tea, especially green tea, offers a complex arsenal of antioxidant compounds. How it works and what’s doing it isn’t fully understood, but it’s generally accepted that drinking green tea is a smart move and a mainstay of many healthy traditional cultures. Unsurprisingly, there’s also evidence that dietary green tea, specifically its polyphenols, inhibit the development of skin tumors by controlling inflammation and preventing DNA damage. Topical green tea extracts applied directly to the skin also offer photoprotection.
Proanthocyanidins, which can be found in wine and grape seeds, berries like blueberries and chokeberries, nuts like hazelnuts and pistachios, and certain niche grains like sorghum and barley, have been efficacious in preventing UV damage in hairless rodents. Whether it works for hairless apes remains to be seen, but drinking wine and eating berries sound like fine ideas regardless of their photoprotective efficacy. Actually, score one for the hairless apes who quaff wine: a recent study found that people who supplemented with grape seed extract (high in anthocyanidins) had a significantly lower risk of skin cancer. It sounds promising.
Resveratrol gets a lot of publicity for its possible anti-cancer, cardioprotective, and lifespan enhancing qualities, but it’s also gaining steam as a potential photoprotective agent. This study found that once incorporated into skin cells, resveratrol protected them from UV damage. Topical resveratrol seems viable, too, but I can imagine rubbing resveratrol into your sun-exposed skin would get expensive rather quickly.
Well, that’s what I came up with. I think the first four appear to be the most effective, but if you have a real problem with burning, it might be worth checking out all the strategies I mentioned. I’m also interested in what’s worked for you. Have you tried the above methods? Did they work? Fill us in and thanks for reading!
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