Dr. Michael Eades - 'Paleopathology and the Origins of the Low-carb Diet'

[Music] [Music] okay well we're gonna try to have some fun with this I've got to go fast because Gerber keeps me on a tight leash because I went over one time so I got to really be careful and I ran through this this morning and it went a little long so I've got to ratchet up the speed anyway our our wives as we know them is under assault right now not just from the coronavirus but from this kind of I have no financial interest as my disclosure it's under attack by these new plant-based people now these are the old low fat people that we've kind of beaten into submission and now they've come back as plant-based so it's the same team different uniforms and they're back with you know old ways encouraging you to eat plants I don't know how many of you saw this idiotic movie that game-changers a terrible movie is filled with distortions but encouraging people to go on a plant-based diet and you know those I don't mind because you know they're out to make a buck and it is America but what I really hate is when the press picks up on it in subtle ways now here's an article that was in the in the Wall Street Journal just a couple of weeks ago about the difficulty of getting a good low carb read and on this the back page of the article there's this line bread has been a foundational food in the Western world for thousands of years and so this idea is getting implanted that that wheat based and plant-based products are a part of our heritage just this last week in The Wall Street Journal we actually know what we should eat well what do we know what we know is according to this article before the 20th century remember that before the 20th century humans knew what the little or no junk not much existed animal products and moderation far less was available and relatively unprocessed plant foods and abundance okay and here again know what there is no one best diet good diets can be lower high in fat or carbohydrates as long as they're made up of wholesome foods and mostly fast so I mean same team different uniform and and this stuff is absolutely false you know I just did a quick run this is a meat market in New York back in 1878 look at all the meat this is the Smithfield market in London back in 1850 this is right in the middle of London London at that time had a about a million people they put a one and a half million sheep through this thing every year they put about 250 thousand cattle and god only knows how many you know chicks and ducks and geese were out there scurrying around if you look there's the Smithfield market inside I mean it was a huge huge thing so we had plenty of meat before the 20th century and here's what I did and you can do this to go on Google 19th century menus and look at what was on the menu back in the 1800s look at this one on the left it's nothing but meat look at the one on the right when you blow it up nothing but meat when you read that you look at this other one over the left there's some stuff and you know and they had mainly root vegetables because there was no refrigeration then and you could dry meat and hang it but you couldn't keep fresh produce fresh so people had potatoes mainly and they had turnips and they had carrots but they mainly had meat look at this is the menu from the Titanic fillet of brill a gal Largent tulle chicken corned beef grilled mutton chops salmon mayonnaise potted shrimp or Weejun anchovy south steering's plain as smoked sardines roast beef on and on and on and on it was meat so this is total BS that before the 20th century that we didn't have very much meat in the diet but that's just the kind of things they do and as I say I don't mind the movie in old ways because they're trying to make a buck but I hate when journalists do it you know this makes me think of my favorite quote from my favorite you know social commentator Hunter s Thompson about the journalism business and he said it's kind of a cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of journalism industry a long plastic hallways where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs and I always remember that when I see these articles so anyway we're gonna we're gonna go on from there off I'll forget about this I had a company put this together for me because this whole thing is having a impact and what you see is this blue line this is the trend over the last year and you can see that the keto diet is kind of in a little bit of decline and you can see at the bottom those are carnivore and low-carb and you can see the plant-based the green ones starting to come up so all this propaganda is starting to have some effect so this is a quote this is a part of the sentence from an absolutely awful awful awful article and it's the only thing in this article that was correct but I like the way they summarized it our physiology should be optimized to the diet that we've experienced during our evolutionary past in other words we will do best now on the diet that we basically evolved to eat and so it's important to try to find out what that diet is now these guys said it okay but this guy said it even better this is a guy named Blake Donaldson who was an old crusty doctor in New York City and he was educated before World War one and back in the 40s he ran into vilhelm our Stephane s'en the arctic explorer who famously went on this all meat diet and Bellevue for a couple of years and Stephane s'en told him about the benefits of an all meat diet and so Donaldson started putting his patients on it and if you went to his office and you had arthritis you went on an all meat diet if you had heart disease you went on all meat diet if you had they don't even know what high cholesterol was then and I'm sure if they did he would have put you on an all-night if you wanted to lose weight you went on a homing diet and it's really a fascinating book because it talks about his experiences but I love this quote during the millions of years that our ancestors lived by hunting every weakling who could not maintain perfect health on fresh fat meat and water was bred out and that's true we're gonna see some of this breeding out as we go along and I gotta warn you though because this is really an interesting book to read but if you are woke avoid it like the plague because it's written in another era and you will run screaming from the room now mark Nathan Cohen who's a famous anthropologist says the field of medicine often appears naive about the full range of human biological experience basic conclusion about human health even about what's normal on the comparative lean narrow experience of contemporary Western society on what he's looking about there or random control trials like the public health collaboration and the UK put together an excellent organization and every time they find and they've done this over the last couple of decades low carb diets and low fat diets that go head to head and and randomized control trials they've tabulated these things and as you can see below the low-carb diet is pretty much crushed them but anyway that's what Cowan is talking about with the narrow focus of modern medicine because there's a huge amount of other data out there that the doctors don't really understand but anthropologists do and anthropologists have seen what's happened they can immediately identify if they see a set of remains they can say those are hunter-gatherers or those are agriculturalists because of sort of the devolution and health and so that's what we're going to talk about a little bit now how do we determine the diet of early man here are a bunch of ways and this isn't even totally conclusive but we're going to go over a few of these we're going to look at some anthropological studies stable isotope analysis and Markey illogical finding some soft tissue analysis radiographic studies pelean Palio pathological findings and some jaw morphology so let's get started before we look at these things I want to get show you what I think is one of the great thought experiments of all time this is a woman named Leslie Aiello and she submitted this paper to current anthropology I was talking to her about this a few years ago she submitted this paper and had a hell of a time getting it published and now it's ended up being years later the most cited paper in that entire journal but it's the expensive tissue hypothesis and what the expensive tissue hypothesis is ehlo and wheeler based on the work of Max Kleiber who was this kind of quirky physiologist who was from Switzerland but spent the last you know 20 25 years of his life at the University of california-davis and what Kleiber worked on he wrote this book called the fire of life that you can get for about 250 bucks if you wanted but what Kleiber worked on was he knew that there had to be some relationships some equation that related size to metabolic rate and so that's what he worked on and he tabulated if you read it stuff I mean horses and elephants and cows and dogs and god only knows why and came up with this line and this is an actual graph that's in the publication of physiological reviews in 1947 which was a good year because it was the year of my birth but this was in there and you can see the difference between medical journals now I mean that was the thing that was in the journal that's all hand written up but this line is kind of called climbers line or it's the the line of metabolic constraints and almost everything falls on that line I mean there are a couple of things that note I think there's some kind of a shrew and a bat somewhere they don't but virtually every mammal falls on that line and what that line tells you if you go up on the y-axis if you go over on the x-axis you can look at body weight and go up and you hit that line and it'll go over and it'll tell you what the metabolic rate is and so that establishes metabolic rate and so if you want to go back in time and say okay what was the minute Baalak rate of one of our proto ancestors a hominid you can say okay it weighed 40 kilograms you can tell what its metabolic weight is because it's constrained by that line the is showing that human males and females fit on the clobber line as well now what you can do is if if you have sort of an unknown mammal and you want to figure out what its metabolic rate is you can if you know what its weight is you know what its metabolic rate is then you pretty much know what the metabolic rates of livers and guts and kidneys and hearts and muscles are so you can calculate some unknown metabolic rate and so if you take a 65 kilogram mammal and put it on there this is basically what you're gonna see this is what it looks like but it doesn't hold this way for humans yet humans as you saw on the last slide are constrained by this line but if you look at humans what you have is a great big brain and a reduced size gut and so the that's that's her definition of the expensive tissue hypothesis the brain is very expensive tissue metabolically it's used up a ton of calories in fact the mass specific metabolic rate is 9 times higher than the rate of the body as a whole just for brain and if you look at the brain mass and primates versus us you can see we're way over to the far right and the rest of the primates are strung out over there meaning that we have much bigger brains they generally chew up a lot bigger part of our metabolic rate and so what does this mean it means based on climbers constraints we had to get smaller guts somehow to support this brain and here again you can see the brain growth over time from you know ancient hamid is the australopithecines right up to the modern day it's increased almost exponentially and at the same time our guts have gone down in size now you can see right here on these pictures on the left is a chimpanzee the middle is a human the Wrights an australopithecine if you sort of extrapolate out from the rib cage because the rib cage kind of sits on the abdomen you can see how these things have large abdomens and humans don't have large abdomens in fact if you look that's an Australopithecus scene on the right and human on the left you can see the volume of the gut on the australopithecine if you look at the volume of the gun in the human it's much smaller even though the human is much larger here's a gorilla here's a chimpanzee you can see the the big guts on both of them here's a true hunter-gatherer this is a photo from a guy named Arnie who he guard who was a norwegian physician who back in the 30s went into the deepest darkest greenland looking to see if he could find a real hunter-gatherer unsullied by the Western diet the answer is he couldn't but he got pretty close because he found some that hadn't been westernized very much and he took pictures of them checked their eyesight checked their cholesterol check their ketones checked everything and wrote this really nice monograph that's about that thick that makes for incredibly interesting reading but he took pictures of them and so this is a male I think this guy's 26 or 27 years old who is a hunter-gatherers that's a true hunter together and you can see the abdomen of a hunter-gatherer versus a griller a chimpanzee now why did they have such big guts well they eat a lot of plants and and this is the amount of plants you would have to eat to get 65% of a 3,000 calorie diet you'd have to eat 10 pounds of carrots ft 26 pounds of celery and remember these plants have Albin Luther Burbank eyes they're all hybrid plants designed to have a lot of nutritional density if you go out in the woods and scrounge up a crabapple it's this little gnarly thing you'd have to eat 20 of them to get the same calories that you'd get in an apple a regular you know Washington Delicious apple and so if you look at these old melons these old other vegetables these plant foods I mean there are fibrous there you'd have to eat a ton of them so they had to have these big bellies to be supported to support themselves on a plant-based diet and what they used to say until Leslie Aiello came along with her hypothesis about this was that people grew their brains because they had to have more complex foraging strategies they had to learn where this stuff was they had to learn what plants were poisoned which weren't if they hunted game they had to learn where it was they had learned how to track it they had to learn how to prevent getting killed by the game that they were tracking and what she said is no not really because they started eating meat and when they ate meat that allowed their gut size to decrease which allowed for the encephalization that gave them room because remember they're constrained by that climate line so they ate meat to get the big brain size and so as as I always like to say we didn't evolve to eat meat we evolved because we ate meat now if our brain sizes was small back then how did we get meat well we scavenged it and there's a cut and that's interesting because chimpanzees don't scavenge they have absolutely no interest in dead carcasses even though chimpanzees do eat meat but humans took to it with a relish and you can tell all that from the butcher marks and all this stuff that's a whole whole different discussion but humans scavenged and they their couple of ways to scavenge you can do active scavenging and you can do passive scavenging active scavenging is when you go out and you run off a lot and from its kill or a bunch of lions from their kill or hyenas from their kill and then you go ahead and take it and it doesn't do a lot for your life expectancy especially if you're a little high so passive scavenging you wait until they get finished and then you go in and you take what's left which strangely strangely enough it's a lotta lines like the wildebeest and they like the Zebras and this lady named Breanna Tobin R went out and for one of her research projects in Africa she went out after lion kills and quantified how much meat was left over and what it turns out is there's a whole lot so if you look at these after the Lions have their I say it the lion's share of the food what's you seeing white is what's left over in it there's one two three Lions it's a lot of stuff left and if it's seven to eight lions are still a lot of stuff left you get up to the ten or twelve there's not much in the white as you know pretty big chunks of meat and the flesh scraps she defines as a piece of meat about the size of your hand so if you go in and look at what that means she also looked at this in aggregate and this is what the aggregate of carcass that's left after a kill what they contained and this is broken down into body parts of the carcass but in general you can see the white stuff and that's what's left over and when she took in and analyzed that she found out in a wildebeest kill that there were 220 calories on average that could be scavenged which is enough for four Big Macs in terms of calories if it's a zebra carcass you know you're out in the eleven Big Mac area and their kills all over the place and so she was able to harvest a lot of calories in a day so our earliest ancestors could scavenge this meat reduce their gut size and increase their brain and ultimately become us now let's switch gears a little bit in going to stable isotope analysis and I'm gonna really zip through part of this because I've got a thing on my website that I'll tell you about later how you can get but you know elements have different atomic masses you got carbon-12 which is one we always think of carbon you've got carbon 13 which is a little bit heavier it's got an extra Neutron and those are both stable isotopes they don't change over time they remain the same and your bones take these things up and bone even thousands and thousands of years later could be analyzed and compared the 13 to the 12 and and get a ratio that's very useful in determining what the individual being studied 8 carbon-14 is useless because it does decay and that's what we use for carbon aging nitrogen 14 your standard-issue nitrogen and nitrogen 15 or what we use to see what protein intake was so you know you run this through the mass spec the figures compared to a standard and the difference is called a relative content or delta 13 c or delta 14 in this measure in parts per thousand and it's called per mil so you'd say it has a you know it has a delta 13 carbonate value of -5 mil and what can we tell from all this well we know because plants and water pick up and use the 13 and 14 years of the fork I mean they're 13 carbons a little heavier than the 12 so it makes a difference in terms of how some things use it so water plants use it differently than terrestrial plants so you can tell by looking at the carbon 13 if it's a higher carbon 13 that means it's a higher a diet higher and seafood and over time that got larger because when our ancestors hunted there is two decimation then they turn to mussels and fish and things like that and if they live on the coasts of course you're on rivers and they ate a lot more fish too as you can tell by that now that the in 15 ratio tells the carnivorous story because plants contain a fairly constant in 15 when herbivores eat the plants they concentrate this in 15 and they run it up about three to five percent in their collagen and it goes up by trophic level and so if a collagen sample contains let's say greater than 5% than the local flora you know that it's an herbivore now this is the kind of a trophic chart and it shows as it goes up the food chain all this nitrogen concentrates and I should have put an antelope or something and instead of the cow to keep with the African theme but anyway I guess they have there but you've got a cow this herbivore it's gonna concentrate from the plants that eats the baboon is a an omnivore and they you know they pull down antelope and all kinds of stuff over there along with eating a lot of plants they're gonna concentrate it if the lion eats a baboon or eats account it's gonna concentrate it and so as you go up the list you can see as you go up the trophic levels and you can determine what this animal ate now what did in the end Earth alls eat and this is pretty picked a couple of papers but that it's pretty common everywhere I mean there are a lot of papers out there and they all show pretty much the same thing Neanderthals here here the herbivores here are the carnivores that's a wolf and an arctic fox and here are the Neanderthals they eat a little bit more they were a little bit higher than the wolf and the Fox which implies that they may have eaten some of the carnivores to concentrate it even further that they're super carnivores if you look at early modern humans it says twelve thousand years ago you see essentially the same thing here come the you know here come the herbivores a wild horse in an Oregon a deer here comes an arctic fox a carnivore and then here come the humans look at this they really are super carnivores so they ate the arctic fox and other carnivores and they ate the herbivores so that's what stable isotope analysis will tell you and these are done all the time and they show that really humans were hunters who knows what this is how many people know what this is looks like something that's you know fake and that's about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle and that's what it looks like up close and that's called a glyptodont and these glyptodont were all over the place in northern South America and Central American southern North America back in the day an early man completely hunted him to extinction and not only they have - GLIP tit on - extinction they hunted these fearsome things these giant woolly rhinoceros if you ever go to the Museum of the science of Natural History in New York their rooms the size of this room filled with skeletons of these things that have been hunted to extinction now this is a you know a pre fearsome beast and people vegetarians always say well you know humans I mean they're wimps have they got to be vegetarians they don't have big canines they're not strong they're not fast they can't see that well but our weapon is our brain we can out think these things with the little tiny heads and we know how to make Spears we know how to kill it a distance so it's our brain it's what makes us a predator not our physical stature so anyway these things were hunted to extinction and I want to again switch gears because I love this study and this is a study done by a lady from the Smithsonian back in the 80s and she looked at two different populations and about the same area with two different means of subsistence and what makes this study interesting is that both of these groups were non nomadic now these were farmers and and they were you know there were skeletons they were hunter gatherers and farmers and they were non nomadic and that's important because one of the arguments that people who are foreign agricultural based diet because clearly everybody knows that health went to hell in a handbasket when agriculture came along so they always say yeah but the problem is not to die this is because in agricultural areas people all live cheek-by-jowl and they got diseases and they got sick hunter-gatherers without running free they didn't get all these diseases so you would think that they would be more healthy well in this case these were both in fixed locations the they lived in the hunters lived in Western Kentucky about well now about five thousand years ago and the farmers lived in Eastern Kentucky and 1500 AD and there's where they live the hunters the farmers lived up and sort of north eastern Kentucky the hunters lived on a river on the Green River down and sort of the middle western part of Kentucky and the they were both pre-contact there's no evidence that the farmers had any contact and probably the same genetic material so these are two groups separated by time and by diet and if you'll if you look at the diet of the hunters and this is right out of the article I did and this is not my you know writing the hunter-gatherer I should put quotation mark 8 a low carbohydrate diet composed of Russell River mussel snails deer black bears mammals blah blah blah you can read that they mainly a meat-based diet and they had a few wild grapes a currents blackberries sunflowers and hickory nuts and these of course are all going to be in season I hang out with a bunch of CrossFit guy and I love this saying because the CrossFit thing is off the couch and off the carbs so these guys were off the couch and they were off the carbs because life was not easy back then whether you were a hunter-gatherer in agriculturalists so they were all off the couch so let's see what the the agricultural estate they ate a low protein high carbohydrate diet again this is from the article composed primarily of corns bean and pumpkin they also gathered wild plants and had the occasional when they could get it deer turkey turtles fish we're on the menu now and then when you go through the article and you see what they ate it really wasn't a lot of meat and it was mainly all these these vegetables and it got me thinking that maybe there is some truth to time travel and maybe just maybe Dean Ornish went back in time and had a talk with them and they ate his diet because this is pretty much his diet and so let's see what happened when they ate it and they were off the couch but definitely not off the carbs so we can look at the skeletal remains and see what happens okay this is parodic hi raasta dosis on the top and crib or Battaglia on the bottom these are these are pathological findings or paleo pathological findings of severe iron deficiency anemia and it's commonly found on people switched agrarian societies and in this case 50% of the children under five year old and this farming community had this and this is extremely painful I can't imagine what these kids went through with this if you look at these this is the enamel hypoplasia these lateral lines you see on the teeth those are indicated indicative of really severe nutritional stress and you even see those in people today that have had severe nutritional distress and I don't mean going to dare to without the food it doesn't mean that a few intermittently fast you're gonna get an animal hypoplasia I'm talking about severe nutritional deficiency and this was vastly more prevalent among the farmers this is another way to look at diet this is Harris lines you can see those horizontal lines in the bones that you know the radiographs of the bone and those indicated brief periods of nutritional stress and strangely if those are more common in the hunters and which implies that they had brief periods of nutritional stress but not these long lasting ones because if you're a hunter and the game scares you can range out and find more if you're a farmer and your crops go to ground you're pretty much screwed tooth decay rampant in the farmers absolutely rampant an average of seven carries seven cavities per sample a lot of tooth loss and even children average under one per sample in the hunters and some they have so the hunters had tooth loss in old age they obviously use their teeth as tools a lot more than the farmers did and you can see right here in the circle a tooth abscess and look at that I mean that's a big puss pocket that's eroded the bone of the jaw this had to be horrific painful and people back then had these all the time so it's something you would want to avoid also there's a disease with the periosteal inflammation you can see this kind of ratty looking stuff around the bone or I'm doing it down there you can see this right you look at stuff around the bone and that's an inflammation infection probably frupa Nimal might be yaws it was common in this with 13 times more common in the farmers than in the hunter-gatherers and other findings they had life expectancy lower among the farmers infant mortality higher in farmers more farmer children infected than hunters remember they weaned him on this mashed up corn and the conclusion of the author's overall agricultural hardened villagers were clearly less healthy than the Indian dolars who lived by hunting and gathering so I'm going to zip through this because I don't want to run out of time and this is just about you know strip mute ends that's a really nasty looking mouth it's kind of interesting because these people were 15,000 years ago living in a cave in Morocco and they basically ate aprons and this was before the days of sugar so this proves I mean this this whole mouth could be a library of dental pathology you know you see abscess you see cavities you see tooth avulsions you split teeth and it's awful most of the people that lived there had this from eating these acres and there was no sugar because this was 15 years 15 thousand years ago so I love this quote from Jared Diamond because it says the adoption of Agriculture is supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered now I want to get into this because this is kind of fun this is this is kind of our human lineage if you look down here along the bottom and this is this changes all the time I mean it's whatever is in fashion with the anthropologist at the time but this is the latest kind of schematic I got it it starts out with Australopithecus afarensis way over on the left and that's loose do you remember when Lucy was excavated years ago a book about it by Donald Johansson and he goes to Africanness and have listener gastrin on to erectus on on up to us and when I put these skulls then I kind of tried to put them there relative sizes and if you go along this line there's more and more and more meat-eating as you go down the line and you see this character up in the top ok he's an interesting guy that's estriol Pittacus robustus and it really puzzled anthropologists for a long time they couldn't figure out what the heck was going on with this because when they analyzed it instead of having these features that the more grass aisle things did it seemed to be going in a different direction but not completely in a different direction and if you look at a skull of a robustus and you look over here and you see that the teeth you know the upper palate and you compare it to well you can see these these giant molars if you compare it to a one of its predecessors an Australopithecus seen I think that's an F for instance you see and I've blown that up because the air for instance were a little smaller but you can see the size of the molars their comparatively these were huge molars these guys had and you see on the one on the left it's more of a box shape and that's a more primitive characteristic as we've evolved from basically the Apes you look at ape jaws they're just like this they're kind of flat across the front and sideways as we've evolved it's become more rounded and you can see over here and this guy's he's more rounded too so they say well wait that's more modern yet he's got this big ridge on top of the skull he's got heavier eyebrows they carbon-dated it and sure enough it was younger and they couldn't figure out because this thing was going in the opposite direction and when you comparing this drawing on the right to the left is the more grass I'll astral of Pittacus and on the right is robustus the guy you see there and the africanus is down below you can see how much more grass eyelet is this other one so how all these primitive features and yet it was younger and they couldn't figure out what was going on and they finally realized that you know it had this big muscle that came down through here through the zygomatic arch attached to this monstrous Johnny's big teeth because it was a plant-eater it ate seeds and at a twigs and it ain't nuts and it ate this coarse fibrous vegetable vegetable plant matter it was a plant-based diet and so what happened was robustus they wondered about it it ended up with an evolutionary dead end and this is our plant-based man he died out so when vegetarians tell us that we ought to be on a plant-based diet remember us leviticus robustus he tried it and it didn't work out well ok now this this book is not a very good book but it was a it was a turning point in my life and I was laying in bed one night at about 1994-95 at Little Rock Arkansas with my lovely wife snoozing next to me and I was getting some reading in this was in the early stages of writing protein power and right there on page 107 the sentence popped out about because they were it was a chapter about doing autopsies on mummies Egyptian mummies and is that blood vessel disease was common in them contrary to assumptions that it rises from urban stress and a modern high-fat diet and I set up and bent I was electrified I said what because I remembered back from earlier reading that Egyptians were basically an ancient Egyptian basically on a wheat based diet and I thought what and so I flipped to the back of the book and there were two or three pages worth of references and I couldn't wait till the next day to rush to the medical I ran again this was before the days you could just download them like you can't now you had to actually go to the library and so it's all fired up to get up the next day and take these and go to the library and start pulling papers on this which is kind of a comment period on how pathetically boring my life is that that would fire me up so much but anyway I did and that started me down this rabbit hole on the ancient Egyptian diet and what happened to these people on a diet that you know it's kind of every nutritionists Nirvana and the you know the Egyptian diet was completely and totally wrapped up in wheat they had I went to an exhibit in the Louvre a few years ago and they had all these little figurines of people making bread and I took a million pictures almost od'd on these because they made so many of them in ancient Egypt because bread making was such an important thing so you're gonna see somebody you'll probably OD on them too but the anyway the ancient Egyptian diet involved a lot of bread making it was the absolute staple of the diet it was coarse ground whole wheat bread and it was Emmer wheat and you hear people all the time not only this current week.i Emmer wheat and okay great well the Egyptians a timur tweak and we'll see what happened to them and the coarse ground whole wheat bread when they ground it they they sprinkle sand in it as they grounded because that made it grind more easily and there were actually and then they tried to sift the sound the sand out but they were never successful and we will see the results of that in a sec but the the there were even ads back then saying you know by Joe's bread it has less sand because you know the sand and the bread was a common thing and it really ground down their teeth and we'll see that here in a minute I told you you're gonna OD on these little figurines so the most important food of the Egyptians are bread obviously and the fondness was so well known that they were called our tofu Goya which means eaters of bread and the military was rationed four pounds of bread a day so this is you know whole wheat stone ground stone ground whole wheat bread and they eat other stuff they had these elaborate Nets set up where they captured migratory wealth fowl on the Nile they had some animals you know some animals that they used as beasts of burden and to do their ploughing to plow at the plant their wheat and they actually used pigs to stop the seeds in the ground but they didn't really eat these animals because they were too valuable to eat and they fished but mainly they ain't wheat and their whole economy was based around wheat and this is the basic diet of the basic ancient Egyptian diet bread fruits vegetables honey olive oil flax seed oil safflower oil sesame oil fish water fowl an occasional red meat well does that make you think up here he comes again time travelling to ancient Egypt this time and he's he's looking fondly on this die because that's about exactly the Ornish diet and this is the diet nutritionists would put us on to prevent a prevent our getting heart disease obesity diabetes all the diseases of civilization I state to see Dean go okay when you when you look at Egyptians it's interesting on their hieroglyphics on their drawings they all look thin and spelt and those are idealized just if you looked at a Better Homes and Gardens today everybody would look like they were stick-thin but their statuary shows a different picture and this is what the statuary looks like and all the guys look the same they got gynecomastia they got big breasts they've got boobs and they've got bellies and the and the breasts are probably from the phytoestrogens and all the wheat to the-- because they all have it and it's really interesting to see that there you go on the guy boobs and bellies more so than than the women boobs and bellies now that's a female through here I'm just for for comparison now this kinda look at this guy this guy took this picture in a museum in Berlin look at this guy's belly in boobs I mean he's proud of him he's got him stuck out there that assembling may mean you got a lot more wheat than anybody else but it's incredible that that's you know what the ancient Egyptians looked like and they all had the same when you see the statue of all got bellies and they've all got breasts all the men do now the paleo pathology is basically the study of ancient remains pathologically and strangely enough this picture was taken back in the nineteenth century and if you had lived in the eighteen hundreds and gone to Egypt you could have purchased a mummy they had them for sale out on the street and a lot of people did buy him and bring him home I always wonder how many people have a mummy in their attic that they don't know about it isn't a box somewhere because there were thousands and thousands and thousands of these sold and it's estimated that there is many mummies as there are people living alive in Egypt today because of so many years of mummification and they used these to make paper the evening for all kinds of stuff but that and they were everywhere and this guy Sir Mark Armand Ruffer who was an Englishman with the French name was an English pathologist and microbiologist and he happened to be in Cairo at the time this was pre-world War one unfortunately he was killed during World War one a short ship he was coming back on God before beat torpedo but he did autopsies really the first autopsies on mummies and what he saw stunned him because they had heart disease and he actually drew the pictures they didn't have you know microphotographs since he had to draw it see I guess you had to be an artist too if you're a pathologist but he have one high in the microscope and one out in the paper I guess and draw these things pretty good drawings showing heart disease and mummies and he autopsies a lot of mummies and found the same thing it was pretty pervasive and he says I cannot therefore at present give any reason why arterial disease should have been so prevalent in ancient Egypt I think however it's interesting to find that it was common in the 3,000 years ago I presented the same anatomical characteristics as it does now and he thought that heart disease was caused by stress and he thought well they probably live done stressed life so why would they have had heart disease and here's the Ebers papyrus a famous egyptian medical document that that says it's from 1550 BC that says if thou examine examine its demand for illness and his Karndean he has pains in his arms and his breast and in one side of his cardia it is death threatening him I mean that could be right out of Harrison's textbook of medicine today obviously the Egyptians were no strangers to heart attacks here's a picture that's difficult to see I tried to reproduce as best I can but it's supposedly from a paper in 1959 the earliest record of sudden death probably due to the heart disease and on the top you can see the people trying to comfort the wife and down below you see the guy laid out and whether that's that or not I don't know but that's an engraving an Egyptian and gravy so maybe it was a common occurrence now this is headship suit who was a famous famous Egyptian ruler queen back in 1500 BC and she has just been identified relatively relatively recently within the last few years because they had a missing tooth that they know was hers and they had a mummy that they thought was hers and the tooth fitted perfectly so they put it all together so it was much in the news a few years ago but kept Shep's suit ended up she was in a pretty bad way when she died she had severe dental disease you can see how her teeth are ground down that's a common finding you can see abscess you can see cavities when they unearth for mummy she had rolls of fat all under there so she was obese she probably had diabetes she had bone cancer which was really rare in antiquity which probably killed her and there is her statue and I'm sure that that was when she was younger but these are kind of typical findings when you look at these mummies in any detail they have horrible horrible diseases of civilization they have bad tooth disease again you can see the ground down teeth if you look here this is a kid's mouth you can start to see on those on your left side that they're starting to get ground down even as kids and I think that tooth loss was was postmortem so that's not the kid there you get a good picture of what their teeth look like ground down yeah I mean it's just really a common thing and there again you can see bad dental disease it's just pervasive in in these mummies and their again grand that you can actually see some enamel hypoplasia and the one on the left and in the old days they used to autopsy mummies all the time which is what I was reading about when I got that book that sent me down this pathway but now they they check them they scan them and this is later I lived in 1530 BC she was a lady-in-waiting to another wealthy Egyptian woman and she was in her mid to late 30s and she already had calcium deposits had and carotid subclavian at calcium deposit in the left coronary right corner this is a female and pre menopausal female as she had calcium all over the place and look in the hid look at the bad teeth the ground down teeth and now when you look at the prevalence of our trio sclerosis and mummies you find that under 30 years about 15 percent have it when they're under 30 years old and they get to 32 39 they get up to pushing 40 when they're 40 to 49 years they get up to 55 percent so over half of them had arterial sclerosis and in 50 years probably the ones that had it had died off by them because the Egyptians didn't have a really great life expectancy and this is a paper that I love to hate because it just shows the rank stupidity of a lot of people and this is about atherosclerosis and diet in ancient Egypt a post hoc analysis person that wrote that said the vast bibliography associated with the examination of Egyptian mummies provides overwhelming evidence that etheral was seen in a variety of vascular beds true it says clear evidence of bastard calcification increased incidence of coronary heart disease absolutely true and then this statement the explanation for these frequent pathological findings almost certainly resides in a diet rich in saturated fat that was confined of the elite while most of the population was vegetarian and it says their unequivocal evidence to show that Atlas Krause is a disease of ancient times induced by diet and that the epidemic of atherosclerosis which began in the 20th century is nothing more than history of revisiting us so the little logical construction here is we know saturated fat cousins her disease we know Egyptians had heart disease therefore Egyptians ate saturated fat and they try to couch it in terms of it was the wealthy people the commoners that had all vegetarians that they didn't have heart disease well I decided it hadn't occurred to me till I read that paper but I looked up see if there were any stable isotope analyses the ancient Egyptian died and sure enough there was and what it says is that using isotope ratios the contribution of animal protein was 29% now this is not twenty nine percent protein this is twenty nine percent of all the protein they ate remember wheats got a lot of protein it's got gluten in it so they had protein from the wheat they had protein from anything else they ate that had protein in it but twenty nine percent of that so less than a third was from me they said okay let's say that we're biased let's run it up to 50 percent of their protein was meat protein when you compare that with a lower than the average value of 64 percent characterizing modern of neveress Europeans you realize that they didn't need a very high protein diet or animal protein diet and the top paragraph says it's corresponding to an oval lacto-vegetarian diet which is about right and then it also said that a surprising observation was the lack of difference between the isotopic composition of remains of different social classes didn't matter if they were rich or poor was all the same because it was the Egyptian diet and they all ate it the wealthy people may have eaten more of it but they all ate the same wheat based diet so getting back our physiology should be optimized to the diet that we've experienced during our evolutionary past I think that's really important and this is a statement that tells it all if you can find out what we ate in the past which is basically a low carbohydrate higher meat diet that should tell us what we need to be eating now and it kind of proven out if you look at the metabolic constraints the Kleiber line if you look at the stable isotope analysis if you look at the 100 vs. farmer data this hunter versus farmer days all over the place I just showed one study because I liked it because they were not nomadic if you look at the ancient Egyptian data if you look at the modern RCTs it all says the same thing cut the carbs so if you guys if you want more information about all this you can go to protein power comm /l seed in 2020 I got a video on there about isotope analysis I got all the papers that I talked about here plus I got a whole bunch of papers you can pull down in PDF so that is in and I'm only two minutes over thank you very much [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Low Carb Down Under

Views: 274,812

Rating: 4.8470306 out of 5

Keywords: Low Carb Down Under, LCDU, www.lowcarbdownunder.com.au, Low Carb Denver 2020, #LowCarbDenver, #LCD2020, Mike Eades, Protein Power, Mary Dan Eades, Paleopathology, Carnivore, Vegetarian, Meat Based Diet, Evolution, Gut Size, Low Carbohydrate, LCHF, Ketogenic Diet, Ancient Egypt, Anthropology

Id: bY2v6AnEyuU

Length: 47min 15sec (2835 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/dem0n0cracy]

Such a great presentation. I saw it live.

[u/TheEvocatus]

Thank you for sharing this. I don’t imagine I would have found Dr. Eades or Low Carb Down Under. Cheers

[u/ninap63]

Great presentation!!

[u/TomJCharles]

Wait...you mean ancient people weren't eating 5 cans of Chef Boyardee per day? I call bullshit.

Naw, but seriously...most people need to eat a lot less carb and a lot more protein.