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Starvation Mode

By admin On October 27, 2015 · 98 Comments

Skip a meal and your body will begin to hold onto fat. We should eat frequently to keep our metabolism up (ugh-I said this all the time). The most important meal of the day is breakfast. I’m not getting all sciency today. I will ramble a bit. We’ll talk at a much higher level. There’s been a lot of reductionism in nutrition and metabolism and it is spreading fast. While the internet has provided unprecedented access to information, it’s also allowed a lot of science babble to infiltrate every subject and diet has to be the gold medal champion. Everyone eats so we all must be experts.

I hear of quantum physics and love from people that don’t know the schrodinger equation or a microcanonical ensemble exist. Their “frequencies resonate.” It’s widespread co-opting of science terminology to make things sound more well thought out and factual than they really are. In science, we celebrate the unknown. We don’t know how to define the emotional and it’s handled in the soft sciences. They see trends, but science looks for fundamental rules that govern how things work. 2 + 2 = 4 is a mathematical relationship and as amazing as may sound, it’s true whether here or on voyager spacecraft that’s left our solar system. If you have two marbles and your travel mate has 2 and put them in a bowl there will be 4. We have other scales and mathematical tricks that can make this equation an inequality, but in normal counting, it’s true and can be verified.

In 1996 Carl Sagan wrote a fantastic book, Demon-Haunted World. In it he warned (foreshadowed) a reality of the future:

” I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.”

He went on to say,

“We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

While that sounds all a bit cynical, I really am using it to give us a nudge. We need to be skeptical, but sifting and sorting through the blogs, diet books, media, and social discussions is a daunting task for even the best educated. There’s a saying that a specialist knows more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing. Conversely, a generalist knows less and less about more and more until they know nothing about everything. We all fit this to a degree in some aspect of our lives. Clearly the internet and media echo chamber has spoken on starvation mode and it’s doom and gloom if you don’t eat.

A Closer Look

Here is one example quote I found with a Google search that is quite interesting:

“Quite simply, your body goes into ‘starvation mode’. This mechanism, which is thought to have evolved as a defence against starvation, means the body becomes super efficient at making the most of the calories it does get from food and drink. The main way it does this is to protect its fat stores and instead use lean tissue or muscle to provide it with some of the calories it needs to keep functioning. This directly leads to a loss of muscle, which in turn lowers metabolic rate so that the body needs fewer calories to keep ticking over and weight loss slows down. Of course, this is the perfect solution if you’re in a famine situation. But if you’re trying to lose weight, it’s going to do little to help you shift those unwanted pounds.”

Let’s talk about basics. Fat is a storage organ. It is there for times of famine. The body constantly taps into this storage organ when we enter the fasted state (~4-6 hours after a meal). So here is what they are saying, in a nutshell – if you don’t eat the body holds onto the back up reserves. That’s backwards thinking. Further, it’s posited that the body will instead use lean tissue (from muscle/organs) and accelerate that loss – all to preserve our fat storage organ.

Reflect on that for a minute.

Why would the body hold onto this precious fat storage and instead cannibalize our vital organs and muscle tissue, because of food scarcity? How might that helped the evolutionary process? Seems to me that those who digested their heart or leg muscles before using fat reserves when there wasn’t any food wouldn’t have jumped into the gene pool with all the vigor as those of us that actually lived on our storage organ. Don’t you think? I’m imagining the number of people it took to build the pyramid stopping 3-6 times a day for a quick pick-me-up. Don’t you think they tossed them some water and said, “keep chiseling! pull the rope” and perhaps they ate some bread etc… a little later?

Now, the body absolutely has some adaptive changes to accommodate food reduction. There are metabolic shifts and changes in how we use fuel. I learned last year that even after 30 days of a VLCD followed by a medically supervised 14 distilled water fast I wasn’t deficient in anything. I don’t want to cloud the discussion with ketosis, fat adaption, etc… as it’s all somewhat tangential to the main point. Let’s for a minute put aside the debate over metabolism havoc. Let’s acknowledge we can’t explain everything and yet our bodies managed to get you right here staring at a screen from a single cell without help and perhaps in spite of what we swallowed. It’s remarkable.

When in the fasted state we use reserves. That’s why they are there. Fat and glycogen are long and short term (respectively) storage organs. You’ll be fine on the 4 hour flight without peanuts.

Magic Meals

Last year when I was coming home from the self-experiment, my daughter and I decided to stop in Vegas and visit with Penn & Teller. I have known them for over 20 years and we hung out after the show. I’ll leave the bigger story for Penn to tell in his spring 2016 book, but he called me later and asked for help. Maybe you’ve seen the news by now, but essentially he lost a little over 100 lbs, most of it in a three month period we worked together. He’s off 8 BP meds and in fact his medication is down to almost nothing now. You can listen to us discuss this on his Penn’s Sunday School podcast here or download it on iTunes.

He’s looking and feeling great. While the media likes to toss around “1000 kcal/day” diet (or gastric bypass), he has no idea how many calories were consumed. I don’t either and as I will be explaining there are much better ways to think about food energy conservation that are not only predictable, but also repeatable. Then there is the echo chamber – read this article and imagine that this otherwise well-educated physician makes all these WRONG diagnoses based on information in People Magazine. What physician or scientist uses People Magazine as a primary source and then does an analysis? This is how the echo chamber works. I’d challenge his notion that nutrients are somehow deficient because he was at a caloric deficit. I wonder how Dr Ayoob would explain the successful results of this 382 day water fast (and btw, he didn’t gain it back)?

Speaking of Fast…

Today happens to be the 5 year anniversary of my TEDMED talk that slipped me into this entire world of food. I had no idea this was coming and if it hadn’t been for Tim Ferriss urging, I wouldn’t even have a website. I didn’t do this for a business. It was an intellectual curiosity. My friend Tim Jenison had an amazing project I helped on back in 2009 that became the inspiration for my research. If you haven’t seen Tim’s Vermeer, it is a REALLY great documentary.

I was staying with him and beside the bed on a shelf were stacks of history and art books about Vermeer. Tim, as you will see, was obsessed with how this artist did these incredible paintings. Vermeer captured on canvas that which the eye can’t see. The movie tells the rest of the story and I have my tiny appearance with our 2am decision to start building walls for the room – look for the forklifts scene. After The 4 Hour Body came out there was a little backlash about the veracity of my work. Keep in mind, I did the cold stress work, because I was desperate to lose weight. It wasn’t a research project, but I did jot down notes as it’s habits for me. That was the seed that went into 4HB and you can read the rest elsewhere on this blog.

What puzzled me was still the Calorie and the apparent contradictions. I wasn’t buying the Good/Bad or even the “high fat/low carb” (or any variation thereof) dogma. I wanted to understand it. Well, I did as my budget would allow to dig into this project like Tim. Having a midlife crisis calorimeter in a lab adjacent to the kitchen is a great way to test anything you want about food. I learned a lot and especially that most of the older studies were easy to reproduce. I don’t think they are wrong, but I believe a lot of things we repeat, that I repeated, aren’t correct. You all know very well by now that I don’t think “protein, carbohydrate, or fat” serve us anymore as food groups/categories. We need a new paradigm.

Today is day 16 of a medically supervised 21 day water fast for my book. I feel fine and perfectly normal (as normal as I get). Hanging out with new and old friends here, reviewing 5 years of research and writing. I may have to go out to 24 days depending on how some tests turn out at the end (more in future blog or book). As I mentioned, I wasn’t deficient in anything last time at day 14 and I performed a midpoint blood panel (~$1500 each) to see how well that tracks my last fast. Of course I will do a blood panel at the end.

This time I am focused on “muscle loss” particularly urinary nitrogen. As we learned in Passing the Protein (part 1, part 2), urea is the metabolite of amino acid metabolism and so one can track loss by collecting 24 hour urine samples. We need the indispensable amino acids (~9 of 20 depending how one counts them – not 2 +2), the rest we make. It’s been 2 weeks of drinking water and peeing in a jug. This will supplement the dexa results from last year and give a more complete picture. If all else fails, I guess it’s training for the reality show, Naked and Afraid.

Take a look at my results above and what you’ll see, like last year, my metabolism is fine. It’s not crashed, but scaled with my mass and my fat burn is through the roof. Yes, as evolved, our body actually uses our fat STORAGE organ in times of no food. That’s not a difficult concept, but wow, is there a lot of confusion. I want to try to nudge this. I’d like to change the dialog.

Cool not Cold

I don’t want to sound opportunistic, but you may have read about the recent tragic death in a Las Vegas cryotherapy spa. It is a horrible loss to her family and they have my condolences. This is probably an isolated incident, but nonetheless it’s an opportunity for me to reiterate my position. As anyone that follows this blog for a while knows, I am an advocate of mild cold stress not extreme. One does not need to go to extremes to get the benefits of cold therapy. If you are new to the blog, use the tags at the side and you’ll be able to navigate to the many posts that discuss this. Mild cold stress begins in water temperatures below 80F (26C) and air temperatures below 60F (15.5C). There is no reason to go below 60F(15.5C) water or 32F (0C) air. Generally speaking one can get all the benefit they need from just a 10 degrees or so on the thermostat or to carry layers and use as needed.

Ideal temperatures are 75F (24C) water and 55F (13C) air. These are the most comfortable and are likely plenty to get the beneficial impacts. Remember the “reverse ski layering” strategy – take them along and wear as needed instead of leaving the house bundled and losing layers throughout the day. A quick walk from the office parking lot to the front door won’t likely result in hypothermia. It’s fall in the northern hemisphere and we are naturally adapting to the cooler temperatures. The photoperiod is also getting shorter. These are all biological cues that signal winter is coming (wow has that phrase changed meaning in 5 years). As we explain in the Metabolic Winter Hypothesis, the combination of sleep, dietary restriction and mild cold stress may have a synergistic effect with activation of the sirtuin genes – those that we have shown in animal models to increase healthspan/lifespan. Contrast showers can aid in this adaptation process and it’s helpful in sleep.

As well my close friend, Wim Hof, has been on many blogs lately and I don’t want this to sound contradictory to what Wim teaches. His main message is what our body is capable of doing with training and that he’s not a unique superhuman (I’m still impressed). In fact, when I visited him a few years ago in Amsterdam, he noticed one day that he wore a jacket on our walks to the grocery store and I had a t-shirt and gloves. In his warm laugh and great accent he said, “look at that. The iceman has a coat and you are in a t-shirt.” We opened the windows that evening and slept amazing. He was grateful for reminding him that he’d been locked up in the apartment. Wim is pushing science to go past the handed down dogma on extremes and human limits and he’s doing amazing work with the autonomic immune system. I don’t want this to be misunderstood.

Kickstarter- Our Broken Plate

In the next week I will be launching a kickstarter campaign for my book, Our Broken Plate (update: Campaign went live on November 1st and closes on December 13th). I’ve had a lot of requests over the years to write one and so it is now a “done deal.” I’ve had some discussions with publishers, but feel that I can be more true to my message if I at least write it first as a cohesive story. Honestly, they all want me to write a diet book and that may be way more successful, but I don’t want to write a diet book. My goal was to examine how our social relationship with food changed over the last two centuries. It’s been fascinating to pile my own shelves full of old books and especially be emerged in the the 19th century when all the fun happens. By 1920s we are on a trajectory to where we find ourselves today. It’s surprising that many scientists predicted, and even warned about this situation.

There are no villains. It’s not an evil government conspiracy as many of the recent books have put forth. There’s no greedy corporate America that is just trying to kill us all with genetically modified food. We don’t discuss big pharma or big farms. It’s not a “fat vs carb” or eat meat/don’t eat meat story. It’s not a textbook as we’ve already made food way too complicated. The book is more of a history-mystery with my self-experiments juxtaposed on some of the great science on metabolism and nutrition. I’m going to stretch it a bit in places with new explanations for old data. I find it ironic that many of the players of the late 19th century would be perfectly comfortable, and to some extent know more, in a discussion today about metabolism then as it plays out in the blogosphere. We’ve forgotten so much and this valuable data is lying fallow on university bookshelves and used book stores around the world. I’ve collected some of the best and for me holding that 170-200 year old book in my hands and reading it is incredible. I don’t think we are all broken as is so widely claimed. To me it’s our relationship with food that’s broken.

I plan to finish the book in the coming months and hope to have it published by April 2016. We’ll have a crowd-sourced cover design and many other activities. I’ve learned so much from the people here and on the various Facebook groups. The questions have been fantastic. Having worked now with over 100 people one on one has been a real eye opener. If there are any subjects that you’d like to see covered (the book is pretty far along at this point) please comment below. I may not be following up as closely as normal as there’s lots of testing to do and I have my kickstarter campaign staring me in the face.

I appreciate your support and thank you for hanging in here even when there were extended times I had nothing to say. Perhaps this research project will make up for it.

In addition to the kickstarter (there are a couple of high end rewards, but most are books) I’d like to immediately raise $5,000 to help defer the costs of the testing and travel associated with this test and as a jump start to the writing project. I appreciate your support! You can use this link or the one above near the goal donation meter.

As always I am grateful to all of the regular donors, emails, FaceBook friends, and commenters for allowing me to pursue this passionately for the last 6 years. It’s been such an unexpected adventure and there’s much more work to get done. I’m going to get back to my water now.

Pass the Protein (roots) – Part 2

By admin On March 6, 2012 · 41 Comments

After 4 months we are finally nearing the end of our dietary journey. We discussed the basic context of Macronutrients (protein, carbohydrate, and fat) as “fuel.” We learned that there is a group of Micronutrients – vitamins, minerals and phytochemicals that all constitute “service” or biological maintenance. We understand that fat has more energy density (2x) than protein or carbohydrate.

Our body uses primary fuel glucose/glycogen through the TCA or krebs cycle to obtain energy (brain biggest single user, followed closely by liver and muscle) and the body stores a glycogen (a special muscle protein with a carbohydrate shell) and fat (adipose tissue) for rainy day “reserves.”

If you are REALLY starving, or consume an excess, protein is (inefficiently) converted to be used in the sugar cycle through gluconeogenesis (creating new glucose from protein). The body protects protein a bit, because there’s no sense in digesting the muscle tissue when there is plenty of fat or glycogen around to tap into. Fat on the other hand goes through a different pathway from protein/carbohydrate to derive energy (beta oxidation), but after that are dumped into the same krebs cycle.

Proteins DO NOT = Flesh. There are many very important proteins from enzymes like insulin to blood proteins like hemoglobin, which are recycled and recreated every day. Proteins are macromolecules, unique sequences of amino acids that are defined by our genes. New proteins are created every second in your body and others are eliminated. Protein is NOT a food group that you need to “manage.”

You should now recognize that when we break down the bonds of a starch (a carbohydrate) into glucose (a simple sugar) it happens through an enzyme (e.g. amylase created by the AMY1 gene) and we don’t have the enzyme to break down fiber (cellulose). Remember that both starch and cellulose are long chains of glucose – only one is digestible by Humans. Termites and cows eat cellulose in wood and grass to obtain glucose. Similarly, agave and corn syrups are both high fructose (a 5 carbon sugar) syrups and one is squeezed from corn, the other from Agave plants. Fructose is fructose and I’m not a big fan of simple sugars of any kind as a main dietary source of energy.

We discussed fat as a storage container for energy and it’s necessary role in the diet. We touched on cholesterol – the bold blood biomarker advertised as an indicator of health – and its role as a basis for Vitamin D and all cell walls. We know that to lose weight we MUST go on a naturally high-fat diet (consuming our own).

Finally we figured out that proteins have a bit of an identity crisis in that they CAN be digested for energy, but what we actually need from them is the 10 essential (indispensable) amino acids that our body can’t synthesize. This causes the protein conundrum and is what sends everyone into a “pass the protein” muscle-head mindset. Ultimately our body needs energy and amino acids to repair or build muscle that has been biologically stressed from a workout. “Protein” does not have to be the source of both the energy and the amino acid. It’s only required for half of the 20 amino acids (the 10 essential/indispensable).

To be clear about our need for amino acids, I want to dig deep, to the very OTHER end of this dialog, because it will be far easier for you to let go and follow along. So please, set aside your bias and what you may believe about “protein” and let’s look at it from a very different perspective.

Roots

Roots - A California Redwood is a MASSIVE living organism full of "protein"

Let’s take a trip back to grammar school science class. The plants use chlorophyll and CO2 (carbon dioxide) along with energy from the sun for photosynthesis (photo – light + synthesis – putting together) . Plants make sugars – sugar cane? Fruits? Tubers/rice starches (poly sugar)? All from carbon dioxide and sunlight. When you see the giant redwoods in California we KNOW they didn’t eat anything at all to grow that big. they absorbed a little carbon dioxide (okay a LOT) from the air, sprinkled sunshine, and presto.

These are MASSIVE living organisms with complex biochemistry and structure. They are full of all sorts of regulatory proteins and cells. Trees create cellulose (remember – long chains of glucose with beta amylase bond) to reach enormous heights. How about all the chlorophyll protein in the leaves? More massive and more protein in one of these single trees than your biggest meat-head on Venice Beach – don’t you think? In fact, did you know scientist are devising new ways to classify trees based on Phylogenic analysis – looking at molecular structures of DNA, RNA and protein to group closely related organisms (like trees)?

Where do they get the protein?

Nitrogen Cycle: source - wiki commons

The roots. They form these amino acids (remember Nitrogen?) from the “fertilizer” we put on the ground around them. Farmers often refer to the fertilizer as nitrogen or nitrates and while there are a few more things they get, understand that the nitrogen is critical for both protein and DNA/RNA. They need these same building blocks, but can’t seem to get the “perfect protein” of an egg into their system.

Guess what – Plants can synthesize ALL 20 amino acids. A potato has every single amino acid. So does rice, but wait, aren’t these “carbs?” Not only that, you’ll remain in POSITIVE nitrogen balance even if that’s all you eat [Nitrogen Balance is a measure excreted excess nitrogen from protein not needed in urine/feces]. I’m not suggesting an all potato diet, but if this is true, how does that impact how you think about food?

Where do you get your protein?

Even venus flytraps and other carnivorous plants derive some of their nitrogen from fertilizer and ALL of their energy from the sun. They shun protein as a fuel.

The nitrogen cycle is well known and there’s no need to go into in in great detail, but just understand we can eat animals that eat plants or we can eat plants. We can get complete, sufficient compliment of the 10 amino acids that we don’t make either way. There’s no debate. Everything else is simply ideological arguments and I gave up politics when I retired from my government job. Everyone can debate it, but the science isn’t going to change.

Tie Me Dinosaur Down, Sport.

Herbivores eat plants (maybe not redwoods) and they get essential amino acids and energy from grasses, leaves, and even fruits. We are talking about some of the largest animals on the planet and even herbivore dinosaurs out numbered carnivorous dinosaurs. We have discussed that a “grass fed” cow that has “complete protein” (amino acid profile) and gets its protein from…grass. If we ingest the beef, we get the amino acids (synthesized by the plants) use some for repair and burn the rest. We don’t store amino acids, we just use them.

Potato - Vitamins, minerals and protein - OH MY! There are many foods with protein that we unwisely categorize by the dominant macronutrient (e.g. potato = carbohydrate). This is a mistake. source: http://www.potato2008.org/

I would have to say my “beef” with all the protein double-talk is that it’s not hard to understand. Why do we complicated it? Why don’t we talk about foods to eat instead of vilifying/praising the macronutrient de jour. I don’t want to convert anyone and I don’t want to be converted. I just want to understand a pattern of eating and how it fits in with basic caloric and nutrient needs.

This is really not difficult science and yet everyone pauses at a vegetarian or vegan diet with an incredulous question, “where do you get your protein?” By now, hopefully that is sounding pretty ridiculous to everyone. It’s not difficult to eat complete amino acid profiles or sufficient quantities. You don’t have to mix and match sources. The fact is that we are flooded with a massive excess of protein/amino acids every day and most of them are inefficiently burned as fuel putting loads on our other organs to screen, sift and sort.

This is NOT an appeal to get you to “switch” a diet. It’s simply a basis for a rational understanding of what you eat and why. It’s a foundation of information and review of things we know to be true so that you may then ask yourself a basic question: why would anyone educated to any advanced level be recommending or suggesting that “protein” is a necessary “something” you actually have to manage day to day?

This kind of thinking isn’t limited to protein pandering by diet gurus, physicians, and nutritionists. Remember, the sun once rose in the east and set in the west and that was PROOF that the sun revolved around the Earth – can’t you see it right there every day, you idiot? So democracy doesn’t win in science, at least not for long.

This protein argument is not much different and it’s most likely rooted in economy of agriculture, ideology, and cultural bias. I can’t believe how I have been attacked for just EXPERIMENTING with a vegan diet. It’s a “label” – oh, so you are a VEGAN? NO, I am not a vegan. No one should have to bow to such social labels, but we all know it happens on all sides of the debates.

I don’t want to engage in this debate of a pragmatic vegetarian (for health) vs an ideologic vegetarian (don’t eat animals), because it has all sorts of dimension, but none of the debate needs to be about protein, carbohydrates or fats. Food doesn’t need to be described that way and everyone seems to have an ideology that drives their view of the science, rather then letting the data speak for itself.

If you want to deal in ideologic vegetarian arguments, I heard the most persuasive argument against eating animals (carnism) in my life recently by Dr. Melanie Joy and she does make some good points. I wan’t persuaded for those reasons, but it was the most compelling argument I’ve heard to date. This is not my mission, but then again, I don’t see the difference between eating your house cat, a salmon or a cow in terms of basic food macronutrients. They would all provide fat/amino acids with a few fat soluble vitamins from a strictly scientific perspective. When you pause to think about it, other than fish and perhaps the seals eaten by Inuitsboost meat consumed is from herbivoires. Generally speaking, we don’t farm carnivores and I think for good reason. These are all available from plants as well. These are not mutually exclusive arguments.

Kathy Freston - The Veganist

I’m not advocating eating cats or avacados right now, just making a point. We all have some sort of ideology that is brought to the table to justify what we do and reject what we “believe” is wrong. Kathy Freston (the veganist) talks about “leaning into” a vegan diet in her new book, The Lean. Her husband eats meat. She does not, but she can tell you all sorts of reasons (like her personal ideology and ridding herself of life-long acne). She and I have discussed this and we both have to laugh, because her book or cause isn’t a discussion about protein.

On the other side of the table, there are many “Vegans” that parade unproven health benefits to disguise ideological arguments. That is no more correct than the USDA misrepresenting food calories (like fat) on labels using a ridiculous per weight reporting system combined with recommended daily values of nutrients described per calorie. Of the two issues (vegan health or food labels), the latter is probably more responsible for deleterious health of the world.

So, to everyone reading – I am openly experimenting (with good results) with a nutrient dense, calorically restricted diet and I have been working on limiting protein consumption and biosimilar macromolecules by eating a vegan diet. I get plenty of protein.

I needed to understand how to burn fat quickly and eventually it challenged everything I knew about food. I learned that when you cut down to a “naturally high-fat diet” of love handles, beer bellies and thunder thighs, it’s amazing how well it goes. Sprinkle a little micronutrient on there and get your game on. Adding thermal loading takes it to an entirely different level.

Got Milk?

Finally, how much amino acid (protein) do we need? I decided to do a little research to look at protein, carbohydrate and fats in various milks. I mean, would anyone argue that a growing baby isn’t best fed by its mother’s milk for at least some period of life? This is not by any means the final word, but it certainly might give us some clues; although sometimes I feel like I’m living in the nutritional equivalent of National Treasure. I found sources everywhere and put them into a giant spreadsheet so I could plot protein, lactose (carbohydrate), and fat.

I won’t do a lot of interpretation, but instead let you take a look. How do Human infants stack up to other species? We learned last year (BATgirl 1 & 2) that human infants are born with more fat and BAT than nearly any other species. We know that there are many factors in determining the “perfect food,” but one would think that good ole Mother Nature might get something right. So how does it look?

[Click to Enlarge]

Percent Protein in various species of animal milk © Ray Cronise

Percent Fat in various species of animal milk © Ray Cronise

I think right away you should recognize species of arctic or aquatic environments as having a lot of energy and “leaning” on fat (sorry Kathy, damn that’s a good term). Then there are the fast growers, like rats, that have enormously high protein requirements. I haven’t plotted some of the other things I have in the table like “time to sexual maturity” (do men ever get there?), but there is a lot to learn.

Also, I’m not suggesting that this is the holy grail of diets – you all know that I believe balancing protein, carbohydrates and fats is not only futile, but is exactly how we created this entire mess in the first place. I just want to point out a few obvious confused facts in the diet lore that abounds. Is goat milk REALLY a closer to Human milk than cow milk? I’ve heard that before. What species matches ours most closely and if we are to consume milk past weaning, why don’t we drink THAT? Am I sounding like an Ass? Wait, what about the fat?

Marketing is way ahead of knowledge and I too stayed in the dark for WAY too long.

We are basically starchivoires. It’s how we derived our calorie needs for millennium and it really helped us evolve this tremendously energy-hungry brain. Underground storage organs, Tubers, corms, rhizomes, and bulbs, are available year round in the areas where Humans are shown to evolve (my ancestors: maternal – Haplogroup J1b and Paternal – Haplogroup R1b1b2a1a2 as I had my genotype analyzed along the way). With that said, we can eat other things too and they may prove to be better in the long run, but starches are not “evil” and I’ve seen direct proof of diabetes reversal on a starch-based diet.

I think you’ll see the work of Dr Nathaniel Dominy move ahead of Dr. Loren Cordain in the future and yet both have something to important to contribute to evolutionary biology foundation. I have absolutely no doubt that meat has played a significant role in our evolutionary past and feel equally certain that excessive dairy consumption has been part of the energetic demise.

Many Paleo and Vegan proponents agree on the deleterious health effects of milk, but is it the protein, carbohydrate, or fat that’s the reason? What about other biomimetics (biosimilar compounds) in dairy (let’s lump cheese, yogurt, ice-cream in while we ware whipping) and what role do they play? Is it an immune response to whey are casein that is similar as the oh-so-popular evil wheat-gluten protein? We just aren’t sure and yet there are THOUSANDS of good, peer-reviewed papers on the negative effects of dairy consumption and none of it ends up on the “got milk” posters in the school cafeterias.

We know, for example, that bovine (cow) insulin is only different by three amino acids (out of 51) from human insulin. If you believe that human infants get very important enzymes and protective hormones from ingesting their mother’s breast milk, can you at the same time reject that you might be getting harmful ones by drinking the milk of another species decades after you would have been naturally weaned? What health impacts occur due to these biologically active compounds? What if we package it up as “solids” and feed it to our kids three times a day as cheese? Why is it so damn hard to walk away from eating it???

Did I mention how much I LOVE to eat cheese and yogurt? Well, I do and I still do even after not eating it regularly for nearly three years. I’m guilty, but I have that evolutionary big brain and I want to use it to inch my health along.

There are plenty of successful groups of people (like the inuits) that have moved into more energy demanding environments (like cold) and have been able to adapt the diet to eating higher levels of fat to make up energy deficits. The same is true of the original mediterranean studied in the late 50s (now the basis of the olive-oil craze). We can eat energy dense foods when we NEED the calories. Are they really more important?

I know that calories count. The discrepancy is in the counting and labeling.

I hope this has been informative. Again, the take home is that when we are trying to run a calorie deficit, don’t fall for all of the little tricks – you’ll have to get over the addiction to calories one way or another whether they originate as ingested carbohydrate or fat. No one knows for certain what the “real answer” will be, but I hope all of you feel a little more well-equiped and begin talking about FOOD not protein, carbohydrate or fats. What I’ve learned first hand through mild cold stress is that the Human body is amazingly adaptive. You can’t fool it easily and there’s no need to do it.

Note on comments – Let’s not diminish this to a vegan-paleo debate, nor talk about co-founding variables in the china study. What I am more interested in help is in the foundation of FOOD and food groups in lieu of protein, carbohydrate and fat. I want you to see that food is typically a mixture of two or all and that we end up in traps by the “majority macronutrient” classification scheme.

I will touch on the feed forward response, satiety and absorption next and then we’ll return to the regularly scheduled program on mild cold stress – already in progress. Thanks to EVERYONE for support (paypal) and acting so incredibly civilized. I think this blog is starting to take root over in the paleo and vegan worlds, let’s hope they all remain as respectful as everyone has here. I really appreciate it and apologize that we had to veer off mild cold stress for foundational material. It will be necessary information for the next step in thermal loading.

And last, but not least, having just spent a week with Wim Hof over at his home in Amsterdam planning our next chapter, take a few minutes to look at these hysterically funny commercials by Columbia Sportswear:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17Pc85ypazE

You can see them all at: Columbia Sportswear Omini Heat

and let’s NOT forget our very own Andrew Stemler at Crossfit London:

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Pass the Protein – Part 1

By admin On February 21, 2012 · 125 Comments

Can you pass the protein? I’ll have a little protein with that. I’m dragging a little, I think I need some protein. I’m really trying to bulk up, what are you eating for your protein?

Okay, I admit I was of the same mindset. I once recommended “one serving of protein and one serving of carbohydrate with every meal.” I lost 50 lbs on that advice and yet when challenged by a 11 year old girl with a simple question my “belief system” was stopped in it’s tracks. I took biochemistry in undergraduate and graduate school. I worked in the Biophysics Branch at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.

While there, I even participated in research on protein crystal growth. We wanted to grow these crystals in the quiescent environment of microgravity (weightlessness) to determine the 3D structure – a lock and key approach to the many complex biological systems sustaining life. Back then I studied the growth of hen egg-white lysozyme and also had my blood drawn weekly to extract hemoglobin to developed liquid-liquid chromatography techniques to resolve separation of from other model proteins like horseradish peroxidase and whale myoglobin.

My goal of telling you that is not to establish credibility or to boast. It’s for you to consider after we go through what should have been an obvious understanding to anyone that has studied biochemistry or protein chemistry in detail. It’s to demonstrate just how profoundly ignorant EVERYONE seems to be about this subject when it comes to food. I’m as guilty of it as anyone. It’s as if there is a mysterious wall put up and we all just blindly follow the common explanation in a trance marching one by one over a cliff.

I had all of the information and background necessary and could not answer the simple question from that 11 year old girl on the spot:

“if you’re eating beef for protein, where do cows get protein, because they eat grass?”

I honestly couldn’t completely answer the question. I left that day back in 2009 and headed to attend my first TEDMED conference. There I met some of the most amazing scientists from Nobel prize winning Biochemist, Kary Mullis, to Apple Co-Founder, Steve Wozniak. The list goes on and among that list was Cardiologist, Dr Dean Ornish and his wife, Anne. They’ve been involved in helping heart patients for years. His work has been featured and ridiculed, but it’s never been disproven. They run a successful practice in beautiful Sausalito California and were even named the 2012 top heart-healthy diet by U.S. News and World Report a few weeks ago.

TEDMED is about being vulnerable and asking questions. I’d been working on lowering my total cholesterol. It started at 240 and had come down to 220 with diet, exercise, and weight loss. I had a debate with a female, “rock-star” friend in late 2008 that convinced me to try Pescetarian (fish, dairy, and eggs only). This did result in a change in my cholesterol taking it from 220 to 209. My “protein” was reduced to dairy (mostly yogurt and occasional cheese) and Fish (mostly salmon) – no “red meat” and no chicken.

Dean was quite clear, “Ray, cut the dairy and limit the servings of fish until you reach your goal and then, if you want, you can add some fish back, but it’s not necessary. I would steer clear of the dairy.”

Crap, I LOVE yogurt. I LOVE cheese. I was drinking WHEY “protein supplements.” Additionally, I LOVE eggs, but stick to egg whites. You know, I like lamb with mint sauce, but I’m a scientist and quite frankly I had never even considered eliminating ALL animal products.

This brought me full circle to that question posed by this very bright 11 year old girl in California: where would I get my “protein?”

Bohemian like you..

Dean didnt say it, but I was thinking it. No, not the V-word. Eat vegan? AYFKM? How would I get my protein? Wow, do I need to mix up vegetable protein sources to get complete protein? I don’t want anyone to jump to conspiracy theories. I have mentioned I ate a completely vegan for fourteen months (for the record, a year after my 50 weight loss with using cold exposure) as a self-experiment and I can’t explain away the results:

My total cholesterol dropped to 135.

It was a self-test no different than the work on mild cold stress. I’m not here to simply “advocate veganism,” nor am I particularly motivated by pushing animal rights. I’ve hunted and I grew up with 200 head of cattle on our family farm. I am not a “reformed meat eater,” but a scientist that wants to understand the basic facts about nutrition. I am fascinated by what happens on a “plant-based diet” and I lived it completely for 14 months, so I do understand it – the difficulties, traveling, activist agendas, and ridicule. It was quite clear that I saw results with a plant-based diet that simply never happened when I was eating meat and dairy. Even my adult acne (mainly on my back and triceps) completely vanished.

Have I offended everyone yet?

My motivation is to understand why the explanation of the food I eat was clashing with what my text books taught, but most importantly this question from an 11 year old girl REALLY puzzled me. After all, some of the biggest animals, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, elephants, elk and even my own “protein” sources (cows, pigs, lambs and chickens), are all herbivores. Big fish eat little fish, but what do little fish eat?

I am driven by understanding the energy. We must follow the thermodynamics, because I don’t believe for one minute that the second law is wrong. To understand what I learned, I am going to have back up a little and help you learn, or refresh your memory, on the fundamentals of proteins in biochemistry. Let’s learn about proteins, but we’re not talking about Turkey or Tofu. We are going to discuss REAL protein not a classification for food.

Protein: it’s part of a complete breakfast.

Starch and Cellulose are made from the same building block, Glucose. They have a different saccharide bond that holds them together.

Remember when I outlined carbohydrates? Do you recall that starch (bake potato) and cellulose (e.g. wood fiber) are the same thing: long chains of glucose or sugar? When we digest starch we break it down into units of glucose. The same is true when termites eat wood. We discussed long and short chained fatty acids, which also get broken down.

The energy in ALL of these molecules are in the bonds that hold them together. For example, fiber doesn’t have calories, because you don’t have the enzyme to break the beta-linkage between the glucose. Bacteria in the rumen (a stomach) of a cow CAN do it. The bacteria get the energy from breaking down the fiber and then the cow absorbs the resulting glucose. A baby calf grows 600-800 lbs in a year on grass we can’t digest.

Protein is also made up of a fundamental unit called an amino acid (see figure). These amino acids are the building blocks of all proteins from the “meat” we eat to enzymes, specialized proteins like amylase and pepsin, we used to break down food into absorbable nutrients. Scientists call these large strings of amino acids or glucose (as in starch/fiber) macromolecules. Plants, fungus, animals and bacteria – all living things – depend on macromolecules. Even a non-living virus is composed of genetic material and a protein coat.

Proteins are repeating units of various amino acids (R varies). We can grow protein crystals and determine the 3D structures.

A single cell contains between 100,000 and 1,000,000 different kinds of molecules and a little over half of these are macromolecules such as protein, nucleic acids (RNA/DNA) and polysaccharides (carbohydrates)

For today, understand that protein is to an amino acid as Starch is to glucose (sugar). Our body doesn’t need starch or protein. Our body needs glucose and amino acids. We don’t bolt oyster protein onto our biceps after we slurp them down. Equally important is that pasta isn’t shoved into a marathon runner’s quads when he carb-loads before a race.

Digestion (we’ll study this further after finishing protein) breaks down these macromolecules from the plants and animals we ingest and it is the base units – the amino acids and sugars – that are then reassembled by our body into useful macromolecules. Protein is synthesize from amino acids in ribosomes of the cell cytoplasm and glycogen (remember it’s the animal version of “starch”) is manufactured primarily in the liver and muscle tissue from glucose in the blood.

Do you see the big picture here? We take in this complex food, with all the proteins, carbohydrates and fat contained within, and then it is completely broken down to its individual components (e.g. amino acids and glucose) during digestion. At that point your body creates the specific macromolecule it NEEDS (proteins and glycogen) from these little lego-blocks.

This is indisputable and yet our idea of eating “protein, carbs and fat” does not really capture this at all. What REALLY is happening at the most basic level is:

1) The body needs ENERGY (carbohydrate, fat or protein are all used) to keep warm, move, build tissue, activate the many biochemical reactions of life
2) The body needs NUTRIENTS (amino acids, vitamins, phytochemicals and minerals) for components/catalysts (lego blocks) to create the 50,000-500,000 macromolecules that form each cell in your body.

The confusion comes in because dieting, particularly weight loss, is about minimizing macronutrient energy consumption (fuel), while continuing to provide sufficient micronutrients (service) for repair and function. It’s further complicated by the fact that protein is both a source of amino acid nutrients AND can be used as a back up fuel.

Lego of protein to understand

The best thing you can do, and I am not splitting hairs here, is to substitute the words “amino acids” every time you say, I need “protein.” Chances are you don’t “need” it, but at least it will help remind you what your body really needs. You likely don’t crave it at all – it’s a myth. The body does not store amino acids – cells grab them from the blood stream all the time. Our body needs 20 different amino acids to build all proteins and half, the 10 nonessential amino acids, our body manufactures without the need to ingest. The other half, 10 indispensable or essential amino acids, we must ingest in our food. The truth is, whether a body builder or growing child, you don’t need “protein” at all. You need amino acids so that the body can synthesize or manufacture its OWN protein.

Plant cells are made up of proteins as well. There is nothing more “plantish” then chlorophyll (the green photosynthesis lifeblood of leaves) and each plant cell contains the complex organic molecule chlorophyll along with MANY proteins. Insulin is a protein. Milk casein is a protein. Wheat gluten is a protein. Amylase is a protein. Egg whites are about 10% protein (13 different kinds, balance is water). Some are allergic to bee venom proteins. We all react to protein neurotoxins in snake venom bites. If you are allergic to pollen, strawberries, shellfish or cats…your body is reacting to PROTEINS.

Our body NEEDS amino acids, but it is set up to DEFEND against foreign protein. The entire immune system is based on recognition of protein which cloak a virus, attacking and then eliminating identified invaders from the body. HIV is a particularly difficult virus because it’s protein coat goes through a change as new copies are produced – like trying to chase a criminal with a mug shot that changes after each crime. Autoimmune diseases is simply when our immune systems starts think “us” is “them.” It goes on a rant – attacking your own protein and destroying vital biological function.

Protein: useful in journal articles, useless for menus

The body and it’s ability to produce unimmaginably complex proteins that literally create life is astonishing and we all should know better than to trivialize it. Scientists all know that we don’t “need to manage protein” in our diet and yet I was guilty of the same psychobabble as the rest of them. It was a convenient way of categorizing food that has reached it’s limit. We don’t have to use this very imprecise word, protein, quoined in 1838. It even confuses physicians and most nutritionists. We all just want to know what to eat and yet our NEW government plate no longer says “meat,” because that is simply not true and so they have gone in reverse semantically and now say protein.

On the next post, I will delve more into protein and continue to give you a new way to think about it. The answers will be obvious. Until then, please take a look at this amazing video, originally produced by a world-renowned medical illustrator that happens follows this blog.

Hi-res narrated version here: Harvard Multimedia site.

Perhaps you too will see the astonishing beauty in the complexity of protein in all life. If you are familiar with cell biology, maybe you’ll even recognize some of the many chemical reactions that keep us alive. Make no mistake about it – no one that truly thinks about it would EVER ask: So, where are you getting your protein? Protein is ubiquitous in everything we eat. We’ll discuss more about amino acids, but keep in mind that proteins lay at the very heart of our immune system. The many chronic issues we face today could in fact be lurking in the massive quantities of foreign protein we are exposed to routinely.

Btw, I don’t want to debate vegan vs paleo vs slowcarb, etc… It’s boring and irrelevant and I have experimented with all of them. What I am interested in are questions comments about amino acids and hearing what you have to think about this explanation. There is a lot to…digest…so, after some time for discussion, I will post Part 2 and we’ll explore the various sources of amino acids and how that may have impacts on health.