East West Healing on Blogtalk Radio

Hey, it's that time again.  Join me and Josh and Jeanne Rubin from http://www.eastwesthealing.com/ at 4pm Eastern time this afternoon for a continuation of our first conversation a few weeks back.  I hope to bring up some of the general myths about insulin resistance and related topics...

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Traditional Diets

This week is shaping up to look like diet week, where we examine a handful of popular diets or concepts in greater depth. In a sense, much of it will be review for the long-time followers. My hope is that it will get the attention of the people that are following some of these diets, being told that they are the best thing since sliced, gluten-free bread, and suffering some of the common and easily-identifiable consequences of being on such diets. We start with the broad concept of “traditional diets…”

Old habits die hard. One that I’ve found hard to kill, and still see others referencing with far too much enthusiasm, is the ol’ tradition-o-philia. Perhaps it was my own over-reliance on traditional diets as a tether in arguments, perhaps it is something else. But, I must say, this traditional diet concept is very limiting, misleading, overly worshipped, and in many ways foolish. So I propose a new rule – stop talking about traditional diets.

Seriously, if I hear “Masai” or “Kitavan” one more time I might scream. Or at least run to the nearest McDonald’s.

While it’s always of great interest that there were many traditional peoples that had excellent markers of good physical development such as great teeth and skull formation, and that these excellent indicators eroded with the sudden introduction of refined foods like white sugar and white flour, the past really needs to be left behind.

Anyone tried the Masai diet? I did - or at least I came pretty close eating only milk for nearly a month. It sucked ass, I had extreme allergies to everything and severe chest pain after only 27 days – plus it was not fun. I’d much rather eat whatever the heck I want out of convenience and go to the dentist for repairs than do that for life. “Oh, but it was the quality of the milk!” Perhaps, but that was about the best quality any reasonable person could find or afford without buying their own cow and farm. In today’s society, nothing about that is really functional even if it did give you some magical health like the Masai who, even with great health, don’t exactly live to be 100 years old. So it’s rather pointless to imitate.

How about the Kitavans? Who is going to wake up to a breakfast of boiled yams, a lunch of fruit, and a dinner of more yams, greens, and a little fish… maybe some coconut thrown in here and there – 365 days per year for the rest of their lives? Chirp, chirp, chirp.

When discussing traditional diets, the word “irrelevant” sneaks in with ever-increasing volume.

There are so many other variables as well. For example, one argument that I recently came across in the book Deep Nutrition (ironically about traditional diets mostly), goes something like this…

A mother smoking during pregnancy is known to increase the risk of asthma in the child. The author’s logic goes something like this…

1) Mother is breathing in a bunch of toxic chemicals, convincing the body that the world the baby is about to come into is full of pollutants.

2) Initiates the pulling of a set of epigenetic and hormonal levers that prepares the baby for the world the body thinks it’s about to enter into.

3) Baby is born with a hypervigilant response to airborne material for heightened protection against airborne threats.

Of course, this is just one example. I think most mothers in the modern world, just because of the nature of the modern world, are under a lot of stress and inflammation. Compounding this is the fact that the cells and tissues of modern humans are overloaded with the building blocks for inflammation – Linoleic acid and Arachidonic acid.

But what I’m saying is that a baby with that heredity is fundamentally very different from someone living in a traditional society. That person has very unique dietary and lifestyle requirements, all of which should be geared up to minimize stress and the production of inflammation. That person cannot go and run a billion miles like such and such tribe, or eat a lot of overtly inflammatory foods like French fries. He or she certainly can’t go on a standard low-carb diet, which requires much greater demand from the stress system.

Taking a deeper look down this same hole, the human genome literally undergoes massive changes in response to diet, trying to prepare the infant for the world it is entering into. Traditional peoples were in synch with their environment, eating the same general diet generation after generation. Even if they did eat a diet that was stressful such as the diet of the Eskimo, it was consistent enough and with enough regularity and nutritional excellence for them to adjust their epigenome to the diet. Modern humans trying to mimic this diet without having the proper hereditary blueprint for it (something one can only acquire by having Eskimos as parents), yields disaster.  It's very plausible that any drastic departure in diet from what your parents ate could backfire and make your health worse, not better. 

This brings up a couple more important points. For starters, the Eskimo, while they had great teeth and no signs of heart disease, still aged rapidly. I’m not talking died young because they starved to death or got bitten by polar bears, but aged rapidly (reported as looking a lot older than they were and dying of natural causes at very young ages – typically 60’s and 70’s). Harsh climate, low sunlight over the winter, a diet lacking carbohydrate, high in polyunsaturated fat – this will age ya quickly. No one should be infatuated with this diet.

Secondly, traditional diets the world over were generally VERY specific. Nowadays you have people saying, “oh, the Eskimos didn’t eat carbohydrates, so it’s safe to do the Atkins diet.” The Eskimo boiled whole fish, which contains thyroid hormone. They ate copious amounts of rotten fish, potentially full of short-chain fats that a normal low-carb dieter wouldn’t get. They subdivided the adrenal glands of animals amongst tribe members to get adequate vitamin C. Their diet was seasonal, synchronizing their diet with the current environmental demands. They relied in large part upon intuition when eating. They didn’t starve themselves when hungry after a long day because eating extra food wasn’t on their diet plan. These are all very specific things that people don’t take into account when they just decide to eat nothing but ribeye from Wal-Mart for a few years. And a misstep on any one of those important factors can be the difference between health and destruction. Traditional diets are simply too area and tribe specific and restrictive to be mimicked in today’s world.

Restraint and restriction is another important and underappreciated aspect of trying to eat a traditional diet – whatever that is. The human brain and emotions are extremely complex and powerful, potentially having more of an influence over one’s health status than the quality of their diet in many cases. Trying to eat a strict diet when you are surrounded by tempting other options is not something traditional peoples had to deal with. The food they had was all they knew, so as long as supplies were adequate, they knew not deprivation. But the feeling of deprivation or wanting something and not providing it to your body are powerful triggers of physiological changes within your body – namely catapulting your body into a hibernatory, low metabolic state.

Of course, we shouldn’t discredit all elements of traditional food eating. I think the main lessons that can be gathered and banked on are that they ate the whole animal, ate whole foods, never ate a vegan diet, and ate foods with a high nutritional value in terms of vitamins and minerals. These are great fundamentals. However, complexity still remains. Eating the whole animal is something that is impractical for some, many lack the skills, abilities, knowledge, and equipment to “cook the whole animal,” many can’t conveniently acquire whole animals, and many see the brains and liver and eyes and such as yucky. Trying to force down unpalatable food is a health liability as far as I’m concerned, and studies have indicated that eating something that’s not enjoyable reduces mineral absorption from that meal.

Traditional peoples, while they had excellent health, were still not some magical pinnacle of human health and longevity. They should not be worshipped as if they lived to be 700 years old. They didn’t. Many aged just as quickly as we do. Many aged much faster. With modern science we can see precisely what type of diet and lifestyle (and most importantly, mindset) accelerates aging and which kind slows the aging process. Jack LaLanne probably had a higher degree of functional longevity than almost any traditional tribe member. Don Gorske will outlive most Eskimos eating only Big Macs, parfaits, and Coca Cola, presumably because “he’s lovin’ it.”

But just because a traditional tribe ate something does not mean that a certain food gets an out-of-jail-free card. Hey, many of them ate shellfish. So shellfish are healthy. Oops, sorry you had an anaphylactic reaction and died eating that healthy food.

We are in a new frontier of human society and it calls for great flexibility with our eating, and a better understanding of the straightforward relationships between food and our physiology. The world is so unique in the history of our species that trying to match an old diet with a new lifestyle and a truly new physiology (hyperinflammatory) is no guarantee, and may create a mighty mismatch. As I’m sure many of you will see if you’ve attended some kind of traditional nutrition conference, the health status of the attendees on a generic “traditional” diet doesn’t appear to be any different than that of the mainstream public. It is not a panacea. It does not appear to be worth the grandiose effort of trying to eat a mythological “perfect diet” built around an unintelligent hodge podge of what traditional peoples around the world ate to go with their specific lifestyle, environment, and epigenetic blueprint.

Speaking of blueprints, like the line uttered by Chong Li at Frank Dux in the movie Bloodsport, I looketh in the direction of Sisson, pointing, and say, “You are next.”  We will have some fun with 80-10-10 raw vegan as well. 



One word summary of traditional diets... IRRELEVANT!

If you’d like some ammunition to make fun of me, read my FREE EBOOK where I am annoyingly fixated on traditional diets and say "Masai" and "Kitavan" about 20 times each.  

Sucrose vs. Starch and Fat

When originally developing RRARF, a diet and lifestyle program specifically for raising cellular metabolic activity and addressing other factors involved in health and body composition, it seemed abundantly clear that starch was a superior carbohydrate staple than fruit, juice, and sugar.

You can read about the program in THIS FREE EBOOK.

This provision seemed important, as I was suggesting eating beyond the instinctual appetite or point of satiety. Studies show, with no real ambiguity, that when you instruct human beings to eat as much food as they like on a diet that is high in starch and fiber and low in sugar and refined carbohydrates lacking fiber, that appetite decreases spontaneously and there is a loss of body fat.

This was something I was, and still am, very interested in. What I hoped to show people was that it wasn’t that you were carrying too much body fat and presumably overeating for your metabolic rate and activity levels because you were a lazy ass or a glutton, but because certain foods (like sweets) stimulate a greater rise of calorie consumption. This is true. They do.

But of course, with any dietary recommendations built on one or a handful of compelling reasons, there are unexpected consequences as well. I believe one of those consequences is that substituting starch for all simple sugars can lower the natural desire to engage in physical activity. This could very well be due to decreased palatability and therefore lower calorie intake. Creatures like the sloth, gorilla, and panda for example are far less physically active than their biological cousins precisely because their food is less palatable, it is less calorie dense which is true of most whole foods diets, and yields lower total calorie intake. Slothism ain’t what we’re after.

I also thought that sugar and sweets should be avoided because they are addictive. I’ve been addicted to “sugar” before, but it was always in high-fat foods (candy bars, chocolate, doughnuts, ice cream, brownies) and was always in a reduced metabolic state or following a restricted diet that I experienced this addiction. Now, not so much. After eating a very high sugar diet for going on a couple of months now, I don’t find it the least bit addictive. Several times in the past couple of weeks I’ve found myself having only a couple of bites of things like pie and ice cream and having no urge to keep eating them. This is definitely new.

Looking deeper into the science of addiction it becomes abundantly clear that there are dozens of factors involved in addiction in terms of how foods interact with the dopaminergic system (pleasure or reward center in the brain), and a sweet taste is only one of them. In my experience though, eating to the point where it is no longer pleasurable completely eliminates one’s susceptibility to food addiction.

More importantly, asking someone to eat a no sugar diet is unreasonable and unrealistic. I’ve found that eating disordered people will do and eat anything if someone tells them it is healthy. Eating feces, drinking your own urine, eating rotten meat, eating only raw food, eating vegan diets, and what I find to be totally unfathomable – eating salads, are all common recommendations that hardcore orthorexics are doing in the name of health.

But normal people actually look at eating a diet they don’t like, and living a life they don’t like, and freaking out all their friends and family members with their weirdness, and otherwise becoming a health hermit (HH) as undesirable, wacky, and dumb. I call these people smart. Here is an example of someone who is not smart (if I had to choose one video as the funniest I've ever seen, this would probably be it)…



Anyway, I can’t get over some of the interesting details observed in THIS STUDY. The study was pointed out by frequent 180 commenter Jannis in his interesting article written back in February. READ IT HERE. Yes, I was just as surprised as many of you when I learned that Jannis had a wiener, perhaps because when you read the name “Jannis” like an English-speaking redneck it sounds like Janice, a woman’s name.

A glance through these materials will have you pondering over some very important details. Details like…

1) A high-sugar diet vs. a high-fat or high-starch diet caused subjects to eat more when eating to appetite.

2) This caused muscle gain but no fat gain whatsoever, whereas starch eaters ate far less food, lost muscle mass and fat, and hated their diets in comparison.

3) The high-sugar eaters reported much greater satisfaction with their diets, and even felt they were high in fat even though they weren’t eating much fat at all.

4) The high-sugar eaters had a much higher energy expenditure, meaning that, without instruction to exercise more, they exercised more anyway.

5) When sugar consumption rises, fat intake naturally falls and vice versa, leading one to ask whether it’s better to eat a high-sugar or high-fat diet (a diet that isn’t one or the other is generally not palatable enough for someone with free will to follow long-term). Eat more fruit and drink more juice? Or eat more butter, cream, and ribeye? Anyone who has closely monitored their exercise performance and recovery will have that question answered very clearly. By the same token, I think most who monitor their dental health will note the opposite, so there’s certainly not a clear cut answer.

What I find most intriguing is that on the high-sugar diet there was an increase in lactic acid and catecholamines (adrenaline and noradrenaline). While Jannis viewed this as cataclysmic, and taken out of context I can see why, it is extraordinarily interesting that higher lactic acid production seems to yield a greater production of growth hormone. At least this is something promoted in the bodybuilding world with textbook truism.

If there was indeed an increase in growth hormone – and I have seen in places that sucrose increases growth hormone (so does glucose), it would explain a lot. Normally I think of the increase in catecholamines breaking down muscle tissue and blunting appetite for example, as you might see with taking amphetamines. But the subjects actually ate more and gained lean mass with no fat gain. Smells like growth hormone to me.

While there are endless interesting things about growth hormone (improves skin elasticity, removes age spots, makes people look younger, reverses gray hair, reduces abdominal fat, increases muscle mass and strength, increases libido and sexual performance), one very interesting aspect seems to be that in the short-term growth hormone causes high blood sugars and hyperinsulinemia. This really threw researchers for a loop. But lo and behold, over the long-term the increases in lean mass and reduction in body fat induced by growth hormone actually seem to improve glucose clearance and insulin sensitivity (which is a good reminder to anyone and everyone that studies, most of which show short-term effects, are very dangerous if one is trying to build solid conclusions from them… as are short-term changes in response to new diet and lifestyle habits as so many have been eager to point out lately as if I didn’t understand that as well as, or better than, any human being on earth).

But I can’t help, considering my own experiences with high sugar diets (the first one I ever did totally eliminated all my gray hair for example, which didn’t start coming back in again for 6-7 years), thinking that sugar may have some advantages here. It’s certainly hard to make everyone who follows my work suffer with anxiety over omitting many of their favorite foods over it. In a perfect world that sugar would probably come from freshly-juiced sugarcane, what one person has written to me and called the ultimate food.  But there are of course many ways of scrutinizing this as well.  Ice cream could win votes too by some lines of thinking (higher calorie density, therefore greater calorie consumption, therefore greater energy level, mood, heat production, etc.). 

No this is not just another bandwagon, but a serious re-examination of important details that many people have overlooked. More to come, including a post soon about my own personal changes noticed with adding a substantial quantity of sugar – mostly in the form of fruit and juice, to my diet.

Gabapentin Improves Outcome in Alcoholism

Molecular Model of GABA

Improving abstinence rates in alcoholism continues to be a goal of treatment research. Several novel drug treatment strategies in alcoholism have targeted the neurotransmitter gamma-aminobutryic acid or GABA. GABA is the major inhibitor neurotransmitter in the brain.  Alcohol has effects through the GABA receptor.  Alcohol withdrawal is typically treated with the sedative drug class of benzodiazepines known to have effects on GABA receptors.  There are two main types of CNS GABA receptors GABA(A) and GABA(B).

Here is summary of drugs known to have effects through GABA and the GABA receptor:
GABA analogues: gabapentin, pregabalin
GABA(A) agonists (activators): alcohol, benzodiazepines, barbiturates,carisoprodol (SOMA), propofol, kava, valerian
GABA (A) antagonists (inhibitors):  flumazenil
GABA(B) agonists: baclofen
GABA(B) antagonists:phaclofen
GABA reuptake inhibitors (activators): tiagabine

Naltrexone (an opioid receptor antagonist) has an FDA indication for alcohol dependence in the United States.  However, a significant number of patients taking naltrexone for alcohol dependence do relapse, so successful augmentation strategies are necessary. A recent randomized clinical has been published online at the American Journal of Psychiatry looking at augmentation of naltrexone with gabapentin in alcohol dependence.  Here are the key elements of the study design:

Molecular Model of Gabapentin

Inclusion criteria: DSM-IV alcohol dependence, consuming 5 or more drinks per day (4 for women), able to enter study with a minimum of 4 days of abstinence
Exclusion criteria: current suicidal or homicidal ideation, no drug dependence, use of illicit drugs in last 30 days, positive urine drug screen, psychotropic or anticonvulsant drug use, medical problems including elevated liver enzymes
Random drug assignments: placebo, naltrexone 50 mg, naltrexone 50 mg plus gabapentin up to 1200 mg daily

The study found that the combined medication group was less likely to relapse to at least one heavy drinking day through six weeks (33% vs about 50% for both placebo and naltrexone alone).  Biomarkers of drinking also favored the combined group suggesting validity to the self-reported drinking history finding.  Interestingly, the combined gabapentin/naltrexone group reported the fewest complaints about sleep during the study.  Sleep complaints correlated with number of heavy drinking days. Additionally, gabapentin augmentation appeared to also be most beneficial in subjects with a history of alcohol withdrawal.

Gabapentin was withdrawn after six weeks and the drinking outcome improvement in the combined group waned in the ensuing 10 weeks of follow up.   This suggests that longer term treatment with gabapentin may be necessary to sustain the original superior reponse.

Although, this study is not large enough to change practice guidelines the results are encouraging and need replication.  Gabapentin is currently available (and in generic form) and approved for the treatment of seizures. If confirmed effective in alcoholism gabapentin could provide clinicians with another safe medication option.

Molecular Model of GABA From Creative Commons file--source Wikipedia author Ben Mills
Molecular Model of Gabapentin From Creative Commons file--source Wikipedia, author Fvasconellos

Anton RF, Myrick H, Wright TM, Latham PK, Baros AM, Waid LR, & Randall PK (2011). Gabapentin Combined With Naltrexone for the Treatment of Alcohol Dependence. The American journal of psychiatry PMID: 21454917

Fertility Diet

Just a quick video I filmed a while back laying out the basics for those searching around the internet, wading through all kinds of quacky and wacky ineffective dogma, and looking for some of the most basic and effective information on how to insure a healthy pregnancy.  While each case is highly specific, the simple information laid out in THIS FREE EBOOK makes for an excellent pre-pregnancy diet and lifestyle plan - not just for those struggling to get pregnant, but for those who want to insure that mom and dad have the most outstanding metabolic health they can obtain before forging a fresh lil' zygote.  Some solutions are very complex, but in a world awash in anorexic behavior in the name of health (45% of Americans report being on a diet on any given day), some solutions are very, very, VERY simple.  Eat The Food! 

Anxiety as a Gut Feeling: Understanding Interoception

Marcus Paulus presented the April 2011 Warren Neuroscience Frontiers in Neuroscience Lecture.  The presentation was titled: Interoception and Anxiety.

Interoception is the summation of a variety of bodily perceptions that make up the integrated sense of our own physiological state.  Perceptions included in interoception include: pain, temperature, tickle, sensual touch, stomach discomfort to due acidity, air hunger and muscle tension.  Here are my notes from Dr. Paulus' presentation and his research manuscript on this topic area.

• Anxiety proneness is a trait that can be measured and is associated with high risk of later development of an anxiety disorder
• Anxiety proneness linked to increased activation of the dorsal amygdala and the anterior insula in brain fMRI tasks such as the Emotion Face Assessment task of Hariri
• Patients with anxiety also show insular hyperactivation in anticipation of negative cues
• Benzodiazepines like Valium reduce activation of the insula as well as the amygdala in response to angry faces

• There is growing awareness the brain insular cortex plays a key role in interoception--receiving signals from the body and integrating these signals with emotional response and regulation (see a previous post summarizing the function of the insula and possible roles in clinical neuroscience disorders)
• The insula also connects to a central pathway important in anxiety involving the anterior cingulate cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex--these areas provide input to the insula for planning and acting in the face of

• Key properties of the interoception include the signals from internal organs including the lungs, heart, gastrointestinal tract and genitourinary systems
• Many of these signals provide awareness of body and help promote homeostasis
• These signals also are involved in our sense of self and the passing of time

• A new area of understanding is the important role of personal beliefs in emotional processing--personal beliefs may modulate interoception and the perception of emotional cues
• A belief that a situation or cue is more dangerous than it really is, i.e. I will embarrass myself at the party, can modulate how emotion is processed, and can amplify a anxious response to the situation

Future research in the area of interoception and anxiety will target:

• Genetic influences on interoception
• How cognitive interventions may influence dysfunctional beliefs related to anxiety
• How interoception may help with more biological classification of types of anxiety
• Can people be trained to up or down regulate the insular cortex to reduce anxiety?
• How treatments for anxiety effect the elements of interoception

Brain Tutor iPad Screenshot of Insular Cortex in Green Courtesy of Author

Paulus MP, & Stein MB (2010). Interoception in anxiety and depression. Brain structure & function, 214 (5-6), 451-63 PMID: 20490545

The Importance of Metabolism

Here's a great and interesting article by Jessica Alden that precedes a concise summary of the importance of metabolism in disease prevention and elimination that I wrote especially for her new website.  It's a great introductory article for many of you folks that are new to 180DegreeHealth and found THE FREE EBOOK to be overwhelmingly large and/or confusing.  Read the article by clicking

HERE