Changing Mindsets

What’s the difference between dirt and soil? Well, dirt is the stuff we wash out of our clothes. Soil is the loose surface layer of the earth’s crust in which plant roots develop. Quoting Ralph Inge, “All of nature is a conjugation of the verb ‘to eat.’” And, ultimately, the soil eats us all. We must learn to value our soil. All life is tied to the thin layer of topsoil covering the land. Soil chemistry determines whether civilization can be supported or not. Some civilizations apparently became extinct because they did not understand the importance of their soils. Lierre Keith, in her book “The Vegetarian Myth,” refers to topsoil as “fossil soil” to emphasize the fact that this precious resource takes millennia to form. According to the U. S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, it takes 500 years to form an inch of topsoil. And like fossil fuel, we’re using it up at an unsustainable rate. According to the USDA, one-third of U.S. agricultural land is eroding faster than the sustainable rate. The “sustainable rate” is the acceptable rate of soil loss. There are no figures for the proportion on U.S. agricultural land where top soil is increasing. Perennial pastures improve soil structure and fertility and decrease erosion losses. Pastures build topsoil!

Take an apple and imagine that it represents the earth. Now cut it into quarters and discard three of them, since three quarters of the earth’s surface is covered by water. Now cut the remaining quarter in half. One of these sections represents desert, swamps, mountains, and the Arctic and Antarctic regions, so discard it. Slice the remaining section lengthwise into four equal parts. Now you have four 1/32nd sections of the apple. Discard three of them, as they represent areas of the world which have rocky soil too poor for any type of food production, are too wet for food production, or are urban areas. Carefully peel the remaining section. This small bit of peel represents all the soil which humans depend on for food production (Wyoming Agriculture in the Classroom, 2008).

But wait a minute! What about the grasslands which occupy 40% of the earth’s land surface (World Resources Institute)? “Crop production” and “food production” are NOT synonymous. This is the flawed mindset that agriculture means crop production and that farming means cropping. This mindset assumes that pasture-based livestock systems are less productive than cropping systems, and that pasture-based systems are less productive than confinement systems. These assumptions usually compare single-species pasture-based livestock systems on less productive soils with crop production on highly productive soils. Rarely are integrated, multiple species grazing systems considered, nor are these two philosophies compared on soils of equal productivity. The irony here is that this country’s most productive soils developed under the Midwest’s tall grass prairie. And the prairie was well managed by the Native Americans. But wait! Didn’t the Native Americans “live lightly on the land?” Once again, we’re confronted with a badly flawed worldview.

“When Lewis and Clark headed west … they were exploring not a wilderness but a vast pasture managed by and for Native Americans” (Lott, 2002).

Images of woodlands, unsullied by human presence, and of the Great Plains (or Prairie, in Canada) with its huge herds of bison (Bison bison) may come to mind when we think about pre-European North America. But this popular image of pre-Columbian North America as a pristine paradise is incorrect. When Europeans first arrived in North America, they found anything but a primeval landscape. Instead, they encountered a land significantly altered by humans through the use of fire, sophisticated agricultural techniques, mining, and road and mound building (Mann, 2006).

“At the time of Columbus the Western Hemisphere had been thoroughly painted with the human brush. Agriculture occurred in as much as two-thirds of what is now the continental United States, with large swathes of the Southwest terraced and irrigated. Among the maize fields in the Midwest and Southeast, mounds by the thousand stippled the land. The forests of the eastern seaboard had been peeled back from the coasts, which were now lined with farms. Salmon nets stretched across almost every ocean-bound stream in the Northwest. And almost everywhere there was Indian fire.” (Mann, 2006)

From fire created and maintained prairies and managed forests, to earthworks and settlements, the American landscape by the time of European contact had already endured thousands of years of modification by large Native American populations. The pristine wilderness view, to a large extent, is the invention of 19th-century romantic and primitivist writers like Henry David Thoreau and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Denevan, 1992). The reality is that the impact of native peoples was nearly ubiquitous, even in areas with comparatively sparse Indian populations. Many scholars now believe there were more than 90 million inhabitants of the New World when Christopher Columbus first set sail for the Indies (Denevan, 1996).

The climate responsible for the eastward extension of the tall grass prairies disappeared thousands of years ago, but manmade fires preserved it in areas such as southern Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and parts of Ohio by halting the process of ecological succession which would have resulted in these areas becoming dominated by trees as the natural climax vegetation (Williams, 1989). Further east, forest management with fire produced an environment that benefited wildlife and humans. The effectiveness of these practices is demonstrated by the observations that bison (Bison bison) once roamed along the east coast from New York to Georgia (Mann, 2006) and that elk (Cervus canadensis) have been observed in every continental state except Florida (Manning, 1997). “When Lewis and Clark headed west … they were exploring not a wilderness but a vast pasture managed by and for Native Americans” (Lott, 2002).

Bison grazing in the Tallgrass Prairie Nature Preserve, Osage County, Oklahoma

The popular misconception of pre-European North America as a “wilderness” reflects a lack of understanding of pre-Columbian North American conditions and practices, and a modern environmentalist ethic (Mann, 2006). “The post-Columbian abundance of bison,” was largely due to “Eurasian diseases that decreased [Indian] hunting,” according to Valerius Geist, a bison researcher at the University of Calgary (Geist, 1998). The huge herds of bison that were described by early European settlers were a symptom of the destruction of the human-animal-environment system that the Native Americans had operated for centuries before European contact, rather than an example of the “natural”, undisturbed grassland-wildlife system. Thus, the massive, thundering herds were pathological, something that the land had not seen before and was unlikely to see again (Geist, 1998, Mann, 2006). The prehistoric human imprint on the North American landscape was masked by the decimation of Native American populations as a result of exposure to Old World diseases, for which they had no immunities.

Charles C. Mann, in his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, writes:

“When the newcomers [European settlers] moved west, they were preceded by a wave of disease and then a wave of ecological disturbance. The former crested with fearsome rapidity; the latter sometimes took more than a century to tamp down, and it was followed by many aftershocks. “The virgin forest was not encountered in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” wrote historian Stephen Pyne, “it was invented in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.” Far from destroying pristine wilderness, that is, Europeans bloodily created it.

“By 1800 the hemisphere was thick with artificial wilderness. If “forest primeval” means woodland unsullied by the human presence, Denevan has written, there was much more of it in the nineteenth century than in the seventeenth.

“The product of demographic calamity, the newly created wilderness was indeed beautiful. But it was built on Indian graves and every bit as much a ruin as the temples of the Maya.”

Despite the horrible pestilences of the 15th through 18th centuries, the physical health and condition of the plains-dwelling Native Americans were far more robust than those of their contemporary Europeans in the 19th century. Explorers who first contacted the Kiowa and other bison-dependent nations documented that the diet of these people was almost exclusively meat-based. Observations made during the 1830s recorded that it was rare to find a male of the Cheyenne tribe less than six feet (183 cm) tall, while among the Osage people in the Kansas area few were less than six feet tall, and some were seven feet (213 cm) tall (Catlin, 1844). In addition, there was no evidence of the chronic diseases already observed in European populations (Taubes, 2008).

The European settlers suffered from their own flawed mindsets. They referred to the Great Plains as the Great American Desert, because of its lack of trees. This reflected the European farming mindset typical of the 18th and 19th centuries (Manning, 2007). They failed to recognize the value of grassland and its true potential, as well as its unique requirements. Governmental policies and the settlers’ farming practices were ill-suited to the Great Plains. Areas of natural grassland, the result of an interaction between climate, topology, soil, plant, grazing animals, and man-made fire, were plowed out for crop production. The topsoil, our nation’s greatest natural resource, was no longer protected (and increased) by a protective layer of an adapted perennial plant community. When the next drought occurred, as they periodically do in that region, the catastrophe known as then dust bowl began. Top soil was lost at a phenomenal rate. By 1934, The Yearbook of Agriculture announced that “100 million acres have lost all or most of their topsoil, another 125 million acres are about to and 35 million acres cannot grow crops of any kind.”

"The ultimate meaning of the dust storms of the 1930s was that America as a whole, not just the plains, was badly out of balance with its natural environment. Unbounded optimism about the future, careless disregard of nature’s limits and uncertainties, uncritical faith in Providence, devotion to self-aggrandizement - all these were national as well as regional characteristics." Robert Worster

I recently attended the 11th Annual Oregon State University Extension Small Farms Conference. There were many young people among the six hundred people attending. I find this exciting and encouraging, since the average age of this nations farmers, a steady decreasing group, has been increasing for many years. The future of agriculture in this country depends upon young people taking up the calling of producing food for those who don’t. I learned a lot and met a number of interesting folks. It is critical, I believe, that these young farmers understand that grass farming is the agricultural model for the 21st century.

Breaking Prairie Sod, Camrose, Alberta, 1900
from this website 

"The Last of the Virgin Sod"

by Rudolph Ruste

We broke today on the homestead

The last of the virgin sod,

And a haunting feeling oppressed me

That we’d marred a work of God.

A fragrance rose from the furrow,

A fragrance both fresh and old:

It was fresh with the dew of morning,

Yet aged with time untold.

The creak of leather and clevis,

The rip of the coulter blade,

And we wreck what God with the labor

Of a million years had made.

I thought, while laying the last land,

Of the tropical sun and rains,

Of the jungles, glaciers and oceans

Which had helped to make these plains.

Of monsters, horrid and fearful,

Which reigned in the land we plow,

And it seemed to me so presumptuous

Of man to claim it now.

So when, today on the homestead,

We finished the virgin sod,

Is it strange I almost regretted

To have marred that work of God?

References

Catlin, G. 1844. Letters and Notes on the Manners, Customs, and Conditions of the North American Indians, London. Republished in 1973 by Dover Publications, Inc. New York, NY.

Denevan, W.M. 1996. Carl Sauer and Native American Population Size. Geographical Review 86:385-97.

Denevan, W.M. 1992. The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 82:369-85.

Geist, V. 1998. Buffalo Nation: History and Legend of the North American Bison. Stillwater, MN: Voyager Press.

Keith, Lierre. 2009. The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability. Crescent City, CA: Flashpoint Press.

Lott, D.F. 2002. American Bison: A Natural History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Mann, Charles C. 2006. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New York: Vintage.

Manning, Richard. 1997. Grassland: The History, Biology, Politics and Promise of the American Prairie. New York: Penguin.

Pyne, S. 1982. Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Stanturf, J. 2009. Use of Fire by Native Americans.The Southern Forest Resource Assessment Summary Report. Southern Research Station, USDA Forest Service.http://www.srs.fs.fed.us/sustain/report/fire/fire-06.htm. Retrieved 25 January, 2011.

Taubes, Gary. 2008. Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease. New York: Anchor Books.

USGS. 2006. Regional Trends of Biological Resources – Grasslands.Prairie Past and Present. Fig. 2. http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/habitat/grlands/pastpres.htm. Retrieved 27 January, 2011.

Williams, G. W. 2002. “Are There Any ‘Natural’ Plant Communities?” in Wilderness and Political Ecology: Aboriginal Influences and the Original State of Nature, in C. E. Kay and R. T. Simmons, eds. Salt Lake City, UP: University of Utah Press. 2002, 179-214.

Williams, M. 1989. Americans and Their Forests: A Historical Geography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

World Resources Institute. “Grassland extent and change.” Washington, DC http://www.wri.org/publication/content/8269. Retrieved 15 March, 2011.

Wyoming Agriculture in the Classroom. 2008. “The Earth as an Apple: Wyoming Science, Social Studies, & Mathematics.” http://www.wyomingagclassroom.org/. Retieved 15 March, 2011.



Protein - A Closer Look

Once upon a time I ate mostly fruit, did a bunch of those “cleanse” things where I mostly ate nothing but raw fruits and vegetables for five or so days, and otherwise rarely ate meat. I had a little fish or cheese here and there and that was about it. It was during this time that I underwent the most dramatic health improvements I’ve ever undergone – much of which I attributed to an extended siesta from my 15-year long obsession with exercise and living in the tropics soaking up sun and breathing clean air.

The health improvements were a disappearance of seasonal allergies that never returned, and a dramatic decrease in back pain that had plagued me since high school, going to several doctors only to be handed pain pills and no real solution, or getting a chiropractic adjustment that gave me about two days worth of relief at $70 a “pop.”

But the diet component quickly turned on me. Unbeknownst to me because I really didn’t pay attention to stuff like that back then (what I’d give to return to that!), I lost quite a bit of lean muscle mass. With this came some pronounced blood sugar dysregulation, and wild emotional swings from eating a fruit-heavy diet in this starved, low metabolic state. Plus I added in a bunch of nuts of course. Gotta get those healthy fats that I had been reading so much about at the time!

You can read about how undereating and consuming excessive nuts and seeds can impair glucose metabolism in THIS FREE EBOOK.

But the diet and lifestyle did work some magic. This I can’t deny. My father came to visit me for example and was really shocked at how much my appearance had changed. My skin was perfectly clear. My eyes were shiny. I had no body odor. Bowels were perfect and lost their “don’t go in there for at least a half hour” quality. My hair looked like something out of a shampoo commercial.

But I soon ditched the diet after being exposed to a lot of the Weston A. Pricey materials and officially beginning my “health exploration.” I gravitated naturally to something that medicated my poor glucose metabolism – a low to moderate carb diet. Although I stank to high heaven, and lost a little bit of that “glow,” I gained muscle mass, got lean, had an incredibly stable mood for the first time in years, lost all my sugar cravings, and thought I had stumbled upon the great secret to all things health – filing my prior experiences into the dustbin.

But when that honeymoon was over as many of my health problems came back with a vengeance with some new bonuses tacked on, I was left scrambling trying to figure out where exactly to go next. At first I discovered that carbs were the medicine I needed after the low-carb stint. Within days of eating more carbohydrates some of my problems were improved or had vanished altogether. With increasing my calorie intake my glucose metabolism became outstanding as my metabolism came up.

My dietary freedoms increased. I could even eat sugary things and not have pimples, crazy mood swings, and wheezing attacks like I had had anytime I ate something like that on a low-carb diet. Some real healing seemed to have occurred, and my digestion. Wow. Up there with Kobayashi. My mood – as solid as it had ever been.

But still, one thing I lacked was great energy. That and I was still plagued with inflammation despite following a low omega 6 diet for a year solid. I had pain in the joints, my back pain was always up there, and I just didn’t feel as spunky and energetic as I really knew I should.

Anyway, this really came to a head after doing a few months of Scott Abel’s MET training. Yeah, it worked like a charm, but I developed lots of physical pain and would often feel ill and wiped out after a workout. I had a lot of hangover-type mornings and scratchy throats. My nostrils seemed pretty plugged at night. You know, little things like that. From the beginning of the training I tried hard to really carb up, but eating a high carbohydrate diet by most people’s standards didn’t save me.

So I tried a week with upping the protein and bringing the carbs back to a more moderate level, thinking that maybe I wasn’t recovering well due to insufficient protein intake. After all, I was consuming far less than most bodybuilders. Maybe they really knew something that I was missing out on.

Instantly my body odor turned horrendous, I felt extremely aggravated, I lost my appetite, my sleep went to all hell, I became wheezy and hypersensitive, and I experienced all of the negatives I felt on a low-carbohydrate diet. And, by the end of a week, I sustained a back injury doing an exercise that hadn’t bothered me for the several months I had been doing it.

It was this experience combined with digging deeper and deeper into the work of Ray Peat, reading Kilmer McCully’s Homocysteine Revolution, and several other factors that triggered a little light bulb in my head. That light bulb was that there was something about meat in particular, especially the chicken and lean turkey breast I had dove into during my brief high-protein incident, that was causing an inflammatory hyper-adrenal reaction akin to breaking down my own muscle tissue under stress (when I get really nervous or sick I experience many of the same symptoms, including phenomenal body odor).

So that is a little back story for you. Too much probably. Here’s where I’m headed with this…

Certain amino acids such as methionine, cysteine, and tryptophan have an inherent tendency to induce inflammation and are anti-thyroid. Generally speaking these amino acids are much more prevalent in animal-source protein. In the past I did not know the specifics. I just thought an excess of all protein was anti-thyroid as this theme was repeated in many things I’ve read over the years. Here’s from Broda Barnes, probably the keenest observer of how the metabolism was impacted by dietary changes of any medical doctor…

“…it has been clearly established that a high protein diet lowers the metabolic rate, [therefore] symptoms of hypothyroidism will be aggravated… Hypoglycemia may be controlled on the high protein diet, but the other symptoms of thyroid deficiency which usually accompany hypoglycemia are aggravated.”


“…when the diet was changed so that it was low in fat but high in protein and with enough carbohydrate to prevent diarrhea, symptoms of hypothyroidism appeared. Cholesterol level in the blood became elevated and in order to keep it within normal range, four additional grains of thyroid daily were needed. Apparently, a diet high in protein requires additional thyroid for its metabolism.”

Not that I put too much stock in anything written by Bernarr MacFadden (he did have VERY extensive experience with using food and lifestyle modification to rehabilitate people from various health disorders), but clearly you can see this theme repeated in Vitality Supreme…

“It is thought by some authorities that the thyroid gland has to do with the control of the excretion of the waste products from nitrogenous foods, for it has been found that a meat diet or a high-proteid diet is extremely harmful in disorders of this organ. It has been found that dogs fed on meat after the thyroid gland has been removed invariably die in a few days, but that they can be kept alive for a long time if fed on a diet very low in proteids.”

Protein has really been championed by the diet industry. A book I read earlier this year by Stuart McRobert and Bradley Cailor catalogs some of the secrets of people who have lost weight and kept it off for more than a couple of years. The theme, other than exercising twice daily, was eating 30 to 60% of dietary calories as protein. Wow, sounds fabulous. I think there are ways to improve upon this formula! Protein is hailed mostly on the following grounds…

-The more protein one eats, the lower the appetite (hypothyroidism?)
-On a very low calorie diet, if you eat lots of protein you will lose less muscle mass (lower metabolic rate?)
-A lot of the calories consumed from protein are wasted during digestion, yielding less usable calories (also assisting you in slowing down metabolic rate).

Well, that all sounds real. And it all sounds fun. But it doesn’t sound real fun.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, these amino acids congregate in animal-source protein. But what’s fascinating about all this is that muscle meat and organ meats are where these amino acids congregate. But muscle and organs only supply half of the protein in an animal. The other half is bound up in cartilage, connective tissues, skin, tendons, bone – that kinda stuff. And this type of protein contains no methionine, cysteine, or tryptophan at all. Cooked down to a gelatinous state this stuff is called, well, gelatin. What did ya think?

I envision that Ray Peat actually has a swimming pool in his back yard full of gelatin. In the winter it freezes solid and only melts down to a liquid, swimmable state on a warm Oregon day, which pleases Ray because it’s all Mr. Wizard. Reading his works and looking at his artwork (shown left) you can tell he’s a pretty kinky bastard too. I have no doubt that a lot of Jello was harmed when he was a professor specializing in female hormones and painting nude women. Gelatin-rich marshmallows? You know it took six people to hold him back during the filming of the Stay Puft marshmallow man scene in Ghostbusters. “I need glycine-rich gelatin in me!” Ray shouted from under the dogpile of peace officers restraining him.

Sorry, my meds are wearing off.

But I certainly thought it interesting when traveling in Hanoi in North Vietnam, and I made jokes about it for years…

That at every restaurant and in every bowl was a bunch of broth with a duck or chicken’s foot sticking out of it. “Don’t they eat the breast, or wings, or legs? I don’t remember seeing any. I mean, why just the frickin’ chickin’ feet?”

This is a theme in many cultures. The broth and bone and cartilage and all that “junk” is adored. And it certainly brings me full circle back to my culinary career working at the high echelons of French cuisine, boiling cauldrons full of veal bones and knuckles to make sure that each portion of tender muscle meat could be accompanied by a gelatin-rich sauce.

And so the theory goes, that by gravitating more and more to the tender cuts of meat, turning our noses up at skin, no longer cooking meat on the bone or stewing bony gristle like oxtail (even though it’s flavor is beyond spectacular – especially when done in the style shown below), we create a huge imbalance between the excitatory and inflammatory amino acids in muscle meat and the inhibitory amino acids concentrated in gelatin, like glycine and proline.



While dairy proteins or beef and such are considered to be more “balanced,” the greater solution to this problem probably lies beyond just gravitating towards those types of protein sources. We’re just getting into this. Stay tuned for more background info, including the coming nerdfest on Kilmer McCully, methionine, the methylation cycle, and homocysteinuria (all things I know everyone was just dying to read about!!!).

What I’m really saying is, me and Ray are gonna go for a swim in his back yard, and the water’s fine. Come on in! Clothing optional! We’ll roast marshmallows after! Charles de Mar is coming and he’s gonna snort Jello! It’s gonna be insane!

Listen to an interview with Ray and Josh and Jeanne Rubin live today at 2pm Pacific Standard Time HERE

Adrenal Fatigue

Oh man I'm feelin' it!  No not adrenal fatigue.  IT!  Like, my mojo is flowing and I've undergone several major breakthroughs in my understanding of late.  The first has been that sugar (as opposed to starch) is probably your friend, not your enemy.  An even bigger breakthrough for me perhaps has been developing a much deeper understanding of amino acids and why muscle meat, poultry in particular, has consistently been throwing my body into an inflammatory and hyper-stressed tailspin despite my religious adherence to a low omega 6 diet (and always has, but I never could come up with a logical reason for why that might be).  We'll discuss this later in the week.  It's beyond fascinating and the health impacts for me have been instantaneous.

Anyway, adrenal fatigue has been an ongoing item of discussion at 180 for a long time.  Just a couple days ago Hawaii Girl was asking about potassium in fruits and orange juice and wondering if this was the true "no-no" that James L. Wilson, author of Adrenal Fatigue, claims it is for adrenal fatigue suffererers.  But other than what is laid out in my FREE EBOOK, which tells people to rest up, get plenty of sleep, avoid endurance exercise, and eat lots of food at the first sign of hunger throughout each and every day - we really haven't addressed the topic.  My specialty has been knowing what causes it, not necessarily how to recover from it other than stopping all the crap that caused it and putting a rabbit's foot on your keychain.  

But I've been very pleased to find the Rubin's of East West Healing lately, who I believe are breaking beyond the adrenal testing and supplementation model of dealing with the disorder.  And they are doing it primarily by following the ideas of Ray Peat - high meal frequency, sucrose-rich foods combined with proteins having a low-inflammatory amino acid profile (eggs, cheese, gelatin), and of course a high ratio of saturated to unsaturated fat to keep from interfering with glucose clearance.

Anyway, I can't wait to dive into this into the near future.  I am scheduled to be on Josh and Jeanne's blogtalk radio show on the 22nd later this month in which we'll get to talk about some of this stuff two on one, and really dive into the practical of what really does work for getting people unstuck in their battles against sputtering adrenal glands.  Here's a great video by Josh done on Friday explaining where he's coming from on the topic of adrenal fatigue and why he's talking so loud.  Josh is taking some courageous steps towards not only rethinking adrenal fatigue, but RE-SPELLING adrenal fatigue!!!

Blackstrap Molasses - Sweet Superfood

While many of you read in many of my eBooks including THIS FREE EBOOK where I bark about the dangers of excess fructose consumption, I've had no choice lately but to file the general idea away into the minutiae department.  I'm glad too.  One of my primary objectives is to provide health information that involves increasing dietary freedoms and decreasing dietary restrictions.  Well, I can't say for sure 100%, but it appears that one of the major dietary restrictions I've been imposing on people over the years has just bitten the dust.
It just seems like a shame to keep people away from what seems to me to be some of the most nutritious, enjoyable, and biologically appropriate foods on earth for a human - like delicious ripe fruits, the ultimate fast food.   

I think the negatives of fructose consumption can be attributed almost entirely to a handful of factors that have nothing to do with fructose.  Such as...

1) In a low metabolic state, you convert more of the fructose you eat to fat.  The body doesn't want glucose hanging out stimulating the metabolism if it can help it.  So it packages it into fat at a higher rate for storage - this also increases the amount of triglyceride in the blood which interferes with insulin's function (insulin resistance).  But this isn't fructose's fault.  In a high metabolic state this simply could not be a significant problem, as you would manufacture less fat in the liver and burn those fatty acids at such a high rate they would not accumulate in the blood.

2) On a high-PUFA diet, eating lots of fructose seems to cause fatty liver - just like consuming excess alcohol does.  But on a diet low in PUFA with and emphasis on saturated fats with ample nutrients (such as plenty of choline as Chris Masterjohn wrote about a few months ago), fructose and potentially alcohol too can be consumed in much larger quantities without causing this adverse effect.  Many believe that metabolic syndrome starts with hepatic insulin resistance caused by fat accumulation in the liver, but high-PUFA intakes and low-nutrient intakes are more likely to be the causative factors, not poor fructose found in fresh fruit.   

3) When performing exercise and using up a lot of liver and muscle glycogen, the sugars found in fruit and in the sucrose in molasses are the optimal carbohydrates for refueling this lost glycogen.  I don't think there's anything better for exercise performance and recovery than sugars - something my recent switch from mostly starches to mostly sugars has proven to me in short order. 

This is just a short list of things that make fructose potentially problematic when it otherwise shouldn't be.  Others could include high stress levels, lack of sleep, low-carbohydrate intake, and other factors that impair our ability to manage fructose properly.

And keep in mind too, with things like uric acid (Richard Johnson, one of the world's leading anti-fructose crusaders vilifies fructose almost solely because of its impact on uric acid levels), a comparison of fructose in fruit and fructose in refined sugar have shown THE EXACT OPPOSITE EFFECT on uric acid levels.  Refining is always going to be a much bigger problem than any type of carbohydrate molecule in and of itself. 

Note, it is probably best when starting out in a low metabolic state and attempting to overfeed with little to no exercise as part of the 180 RRARF PROGRAM, to still generally favor starches over simple sugars because the body cannot convert starch to fat nearly as efficiently.  However, a practice such as what I'll be discussing in a few weeks after I've built up a little more confidence about it - eating lots of fruit first thing in the morning all by itself, may still be a great tool during recovery.  In the morning the body is most receptive to storing carbohydrate and least likely to convert it to fat in the liver.  So potentially RRARF could be even better with this practice thrown in with it.  It remains to be seen.

Anyway, that's the quick and dirty on why molasses, a food high in sucrose, is probably a wonderful item to include in your diet - particularly if it's matched up well with some glucose-burning exercise (high intensity), and you are still taking strides towards protecting your metabolism such as avoiding extreme diets, calorie restriction, too much stress, sleep deprivation, and so forth. 

Although I would still generally prefer whole, fresh fruit as a sugar source from a comprehensive health perspective, there is actually something quite poetic about molasses.  Many of us have incurred massive nutrient debts over our lifetime and the lifetimes that have come before it due to the widespread consumption of massive amounts of refined sugar without the vital nutrients that come packaged with it for its proper utilization.  Blackstrap molasses however is the perfect antidote to that, concentrating the nutrients but not the sugars - providing a surplus of nutrients needed to metabolize sugar and ounce-for-ounce more minerals than perhaps any other food. 

The bottle shown in the following videos for example, if the label is accurate, contains 6 days worth of magnesium in only a half day's worth of calories.  Calcium levels are off the charts.  It is rich in potassium and many B vitamins as well.  In the comments of the last post a couple of people mentioned feeling better after adding molasses into their diets including one fine lad who had a bunch of hair sprout on the top of his head where it had thinned previously.  Pretty cool stuff.  That was "Rocket" I believe.  Feel free to refer to molasses as "Rocket Sauce" if you need to. 

Anyway, here are a couple ways you can use molasses.  Make sure it is blackstrap, the kind full of minerals and thicker'n tar.  If you have limited time and can only watch one video make it the 2nd one.  I was in a pretty good mood today.  The first was filmed almost two months ago, and is a breakfast that I would now call "low-carb." 

Buster Martin - Fukitol Spokesman

One of the objectives for this year was to really make a point to steer folks away from their obsessive focus on diet, and to remember that this is their one chance to live life.  While I'm sure some will watch the following video and assume that Buster's parents must have eaten grassfed beef liver by the truckload and others will note that Buster doesn't mention eating any fructose, or dairy products, or PUFA and a bunch of other blah, blah, blah - please try to get more from Buster than that. 

Buster likes certain things in life, and he "doesn't let anything interfere with ME."  It's just another reminder that health information and your diet and health practices are to play a supporting role for living life "how you like it," not take over to the point where you forget what having fun is like.  There's certainly a distinct possiblity that Buster possesses some health and longevity secrets much more powerful than Jack LaLanne and his "if it tastes good spit it out" slogan and other facets of health fanaticism that don't sit well with me.

Ladies and gentleman, I present to you who is perhaps the fittest and most vibrant living centenarian on the planet, and Troy's (Half Navajo) new personal hero...

 

Roasted Sweet Potato and Anaheim Pepper with Chili-Lime Dressing





I love that this colorful creation offers a nice compliment between raw & cooked food. It is an extremely easy and nourishing meal. I started with sweet potato and anaheim pepper.  I roasted them in the oven together for 45 minutes.  Then I added organic frozen corn,  salt-free organic red beans, raw pumpkin seeds and my own fat-free Chili-Lime Dressing.  I placed the salad on a big bed of organic baby spinach. 

No additional dressing is needed for the spinach because the salad is bursting with so much flavor.  Absolutely delicious and very satisfying.  I highly recommend this yummy dish. Try to buy your ingredients organic whenever possible. Read below for all the health benefits of this amazing salads ingredients.

Sweet potatoes are packed with massive amounts of vitamin A, a nutrient considered critical in maintaining proper eye health. One sweet potato contains nearly eight times an adult's daily need of this important vitamin, and, because the vitamin is fat-soluble rather than water-soluble, the body can store it for later use. So many Americans are deficient in this important vitamin that the sweet potato might be seen as a critical health food for our inadequate diets.

Pumpkin seeds are a natural source of beneficial carbohydrates, amino acids and unsaturated fatty acids. They contain most of the B vitamins, along with C, D, E, and K. They also have the minerals calcium, potassium, niacin, and phosphorous. They are very high in potassium, and have good amounts of beta carotene and vitamin C.

Black beans are a very good source of cholesterol-lowering fiber, as are most other legumes. In addition to lowering cholesterol, black beans' high fiber content prevents blood sugar levels from rising too rapidly after a meal, making these beans an especially good choice for individuals with diabetes, insulin resistance or hypoglycemia. When combined with whole grains such as brown rice, black beans provide virtually fat-free high quality protein. Black beans are a good source of manganese, protein, magnesium, thiamine (vitamin B1), phosphorus and iron.

Corn is a wonderful whole grain food that is a good source of vitamin B1, Vitamin B5, folate, fiber, vitamin C, Phosphorous, Manganese and a nutrient called beta-cryptoxanthin. Beta-cryptoxanthin is a strong antioxidant and prevents the free radicals that can damage your cells and DNA. In addition to preventing birth defects, Folate can also help to lower your risk of heart attack, stroke and peripheral vascular disease. It has been estimated that consumption of 100% of the daily value of folate would, by itself, reduce the number of heart attacks suffered by Americans each year by 10%. Folate-rich diets are also associated with a reduced risk of colon cancer. Corn is also a good source of Thiamine which is a nutrient essential to good brain cell health and mental function. The brain uses Thiamine to make a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine which is essential for good memory. In addition, maintaining healthy acetylcholine levels may help to reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease.

Spinach nutrition is amazing. The calcium content in spinach and the other dark leafy greens strengthens bones. The A and C vitamins in spinach plus the fiber, folic acid, magnesium and other nutrients help control cancer, especially colon, lung and breast cancers. Folate also lowers the blood levels of something called homocysteine, a protein that damages arteries. So spinach also helps protect against heart disease. The flavonoids in spinach help protect against age related memory loss. Spinach's secret weapon, lutein, makes it one of the best foods in the world to prevent cataracts, as well as age related macular degeneration, the leading cause of preventable blindness in the elderly. Foods rich in lutein are also thought to help prevent cancer.As you can see, the health benefits of spinach are numerous. The vitamins and calcium in spinach, combined with the overall nutritional value of spinach, make this vegetable and its dark leafy green cousins top picks for healthy food choices.

  The capsaicin in peppers is known to inhibit a neuropeptide, Substance P, that is the key brain pain transmitter.They are a wonderful source of vitamin K, which promote proper blood clotting and helps protect cells from oxidative damage.The amount of the carotenoid called lycopene, makes peppers a good candidate for the prevention of cancers in the bladder, prostate, cervix and pancreas. The capsaicin in peppers is also known to decrease cholesterol, boost immunity, and reduce the amount of bacteria in the stomach that can lead to ulcers. The capsaicin in peppers is known to increase the body temperature and heat production, along with increasing the oxygen consumption which means the body burns more calories in the 20 minutes after consuming peppers. Peppers are an excellent source of vitamins A and C along with fiber, making them immunity boosters. They are also known to reduce the inflammation found in arthritis and asthma.

Roasted Sweet Potato and Anaheim Pepper with Chili-Lime Dressing

Printable Recipe

Serves 2

1 large sweet potato (cubed)

1 large anaheim pepper (sliced in chunks)

1 tsp. olive oil

1 cup fresh or frozen corn

1 cup unsalted red beans (drained & rinsed)

1/4 cup raw pumpkin seeds

Chili-Lime Dressing:

1 1/2 Tbsp. fresh lime juice

1/4 cup apple cider vinegar

2 Tbsp. water

1 medjool date (don't forget to take pit out)

1 tsp. chili powder

1/2 tsp. garlic powder

1/2 tsp. oregano

1/2 tsp. salt

1/2 tsp. black pepper

1/8 tsp. cayenne pepper

1.) Heat oven to 375 degrees. Coat sweet potato chunks and anaheim chili with 1 tsp. olive oil.  Place mixture in roasting pan and cook for 45 minutes.

2.) Remove from oven and add frozen or fresh corn, red beans and pumpkin seeds. Mix well. 

3.) Make dressing by placing all ingredients in personal size blender and blend well.  Add dressing to sweet potato mixture.

4.)  Serve by placing large handfuls of baby spinach on 2 plates and divide mixture evenly on top of the spinach.

5.)  Enjoy this delicious and healthful meal.

Alzheimer's: Challenges in the Newly Diagnosed

Alois Alzheimer

Memory loss is a cardinal feature in the presentation and diagnosis of new patients with Alzheimer’s disease(AD).  However, the accompanying neurological and psychiatric problems seen in this population can be significant challenges.  Spalletta and colleagues have recently published a comprehensive assessment of the prevalence and types of problems families and clinicians face. 

Between 2003 and 2005, five Italian outpatient memory clinics studied a series of 1015 patients newly diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.  The subjects received a comprehensive assessment that including psychiatric, neurological and behavioral domains.  Men with newly diagnosed AD were contrasted with women newly diagnosed with AD to see if there were any specific gender effects in the findings.   Of interest, despite the new (recent) diagnosis, 40% of men and 47% of women already met criteria for severe dementia.  The authors note that there is significant variability in the timing of presentation for specialty evaluation and assessment.  Some find their way quickly, some only after dementia has progressed to a significant level.

The research team used a structured behavioral inventory called the Neuropsychiatric Inventory (NPI).  A factor analysis of the NPI showed 5 key factors that could be rated as absent, mild or clinically significant.  Here are the factors and prevalence rates in the sample for each of the domains men (women), (*-indicates statistical difference between men and women):

• Psychosis--8% (9%)
• Affective (Depression)--23% (32%)
• Mania- 2% (6%)*
• Psychomotor (agitation/irritability/aberrant motor behavior)—12% (11%)
• Apathy-37% (39%)
• At least one of the five syndromes—56% (61%)

The authors then examined how the prevalence for these neuropsychiatric problems correlated with the severity of dementia.  They found that severity increased four of the problem domains with most severe dementia raising risk from 70% for apathy to raising risk 420% for psychomotor problems.  Of note, depressive symptoms did not increase with severity of dementia. 

The authors note their study highlights the importance of assessing for apathy in this population.  The make it the most prevalent of the neuropsychiatric syndromes in the newly diagnosed with AD.   Apathy has been linked to neuropathological involvement in the medial frontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex in AD.

The authors note that their findings support looking for clusters of individual symptoms that make up these key five domains.  It would be helpful for future intervention studies (i.e. pharmacological/behavioral studies) to examine response over these domains.   We are seeing some recent clinical trials break out response of specific behavioral domains for drugs targeting AD.  A recent open label naturalistic study of the drug rivastigmine found apathy measures were more likely to improve than worsen over a 6 to 12 month follow up period.

Wikipedia Commons photo of Dr. Alois Alzheimer, Bavarian physician instrumental in describing the clinical features of dementia and discovering the histological brain changes characteristic of the illness.  Image estimated to be from about 1915 and is in the public domain due to expiration of any copyright.

Spalletta G, Musicco M, Padovani A, Rozzini L, Perri R, Fadda L, Canonico V, Trequattrini A, Pettenati C, Caltagirone C, & Palmer K (2010). Neuropsychiatric symptoms and syndromes in a large cohort of newly diagnosed, untreated patients with Alzheimer disease. The American journal of geriatric psychiatry : official journal of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry, 18 (11), 1026-35 PMID: 20808086


Gauthier S, Juby A, Dalziel W, Réhel B, Schecter R, & EXPLORE investigators (2010). Effects of rivastigmine on common symptomatology of Alzheimer's disease (EXPLORE). Current medical research and opinion, 26 (5), 1149-60 PMID: 20230208