What was making the ancient egyptians fat? The architect Hemiunu’s statue suggests
he was overweight with a serious case of man boobs. National Geographic reported that King Tut
had large deposits of fat on his hips and breast-like fat clumps on his chest. And the mummy of Hatshepsut was very fat,
and probably had diabetes. It was found as early as 1911 that Egyptian
mummies had heart disease. In fact more than half of 43 middle aged mummies
examined had heart disease. What was making them so sick? We’ll get to that story, but first we need
to connect a few dots. Imagine you’re going on a date with someone
you’re really into. You’ve arrived at the restaurant 10 minutes
early because you need to use the bathroom. After some time, unfortunately you lose your
battle with constipation, you leave the toilet defeated, and off you go to greet your date
bloated and gassy. Now imagine this uncomfortableness being a
common occurrence for 10 years straight except it’s far worse. Your gut is inflamed to the point that you
have open wounds and polyps on the lining of your intestines. You get stomach pain and cramps, diarrhea,
there’s blood in your stool and you’re often drained tired. This is a disease called ulcerative colitis,
which a 71year old man from was suffering through. His health was pretty bad, he was also taking
insulin and pills for his diabetes and high blood pressure. What’s interesting about this man is the
unconventional diet he used to actually put both his ulcerative colitis and diabetes into
remission, which by the way are both diseases thought to not have a cure. What’s also interesting is why his endocrinologist
recommended he stop that oddly magical diet and do a different one. I learned about this man after interviewing
Doctor Paul Mason of Sydney Australia on Skype. "…the guidelines by and large do not reflect
evidence-based science - they're distorted facts, they're not based on science and following
them does not lead to optimal health." Dr. Mason shared several surprising and somewhat
controversial points, but this 71 year old man’s story happens to back up each of those
points. So, let’s look at the new diet that drastically
improved the man’s health, and we’ll look at how it came to be that a medical professional
- his endocrinologist would recommend that he go back on the type of diet that probably
made him sick in the first place. So, the 71 year old man’s new diet had plenty
of saturated fat, yet his endocrinologist recommended he stop that and eat a diet low
in saturated fat. You’ve probably heard a lot about saturated
fat by now, but let’s look at the logic and history that led to health professionals
making this recommendation "At the time, the logic was based on a flawed
hypothesis supported by junk science. And that was what we call the diet heart hypothesis
- it was by a guy called Ancel Keys, he was a physiologist and an epidemiologist and he
had the hypothesis that serum cholesterol and saturated fat were causally related to
heart disease and this was based on some experimental data for instance what happens if you feed
rabbits which are herbivorous a high saturated fat diet so clearly this has no relevance
for humans at all. And its based on an epidemiological study
which has now been well and truly debunked called the Seven Countries Study where he
basically cherry picked data from some countries that he liked the results of." Before Ancel Keys released the Seven Countries
Study, he first presented a graph in 1953 showing data from six countries found the
more fat a group of people ate, the more heart disease they had. It made for a very convincing chart. However, just four years later in April 1957,
Biostatistics PhD Jacob Yerushalmy and Medical Doctor Herman Hilleboe presented a strikingly
different chart using the same pool of data that Ancel Keys was using. Their chart showed that the more fat people
ate, the less heart disease there was. How could that be? Well, Ancel Keys didn’t have data for only
6 or 7 countries, there was data for 22 countries. When you look at the data for all 22 countries,
there’s no convincing relationship between fat and heart disease. Regardless, four years later, a 1961 issue
of Time Magazine featured Ancel Keys and explained to the public that eating saturated fat raises
your cholesterol and this causes heart disease. At the end of the article it says Keys’
cholesterol was 209. That’s funny because President Dwight Eisenhower
had a much lower cholesterol of only 165 when he had his heart attack in 1955. A couple years later, in a 1987 New York times
article competing for real estate with a women’s summer suit ad, Famous Heart Surgeon Dr. Michael
DeBakey said that his 30 years of experience with over 15,000 patients led him to conclude
that high cholesterol was not the cause of heart disease. "So if we were to take saturated fat for instance,
there's been more than 10 systematic reviews and meta analyses which is where we actually
compile all the data together looking at saturated fat and polyunsaturated fat and on balance,
they find in favor of saturated fat. Higher saturated fat consumption is not associated
with worse health.” Another change that helped the 71 year old
man fix his health was a drastic reduction in carbs. His endocrinologist on the other hand after
seeing his excellent lab results, recommended instead he eat more carbs like whole grains
as well as fruit and vegetables. This high carb recommendation starts at least
as early as 1977 when Dietary Goals for the United States was released to the public thanks
to George McGovern. These goals, driven by the idea that fat and
cholesterol cause heart disease, recommended reducing saturated fat to just 10% of the
diet and raising carbohydrates to 60% of the diet. However, there was plenty of opposition to
this at the time. "And I have pleaded in my report and will
plead again orally here for more research on the problem before we make announcements
to the american public." "I said to the professor that I was working
with - you know, this is not right - animal fat is not causing this and this is not what
the data says." "You know, there were imminent scientists
at the time saying this is nonsense, there is no good scientific evidence that either
fat or cholesterol y'know is at the root of heart disease." Back in the early 80’s Luise Light was the
leader of a group of top-level nutritionists specifically hired by the USDA to develop
an eating guide. After pouring through all kinds of nutrition
data with her team, Luise’s guide recommended at most 3-4 servings of grains per day. Not long after submitting the report, she
was shocked to see that they made some drastic revisions like increasing the grains from
3-4 to 6- 11 servings a day. As she wrote in her book, Luise told her boss,
the agency director that these changes would be “disastrous,” and would mean unleashing
obesity and diabetes upon Americans. Despite her objections they decided to stick
with their version. What was the reason they gave her? Well, it had nothing to do with health - they
said that jacking up the grain recommendation would cut costs for the food stamp program. Fruits and vegetables were expensive. Grains were cheap. Despite Luise’s protests, In 1991, the food
pyramid was released, recommending 6 to 11 servings of grains every day. Even before this though, the original high
carb recommendation from 1977 was taking its toll on people’s health. If you look at the obesity trends, people
started to get fat pretty much right when George McGovern issued his report recommending
low fat high carbohydrate diets. We replaced steak and pork chops for pasta,
butter with margarine, eggs and bacon for cereal with skim milk and grandma’s all
butter cookies for Snackwell’s low fat cookies. And, we became fatter than ever. "Are there any consequences, you know, domino
effects of this idea that you should not eat saturated fat, you shouldn't eat- you should
cut the fat off your steaks, you shouldn't have full fat yogurt, you need to have skim
milk... what are the down stream effects of that?" "Well I mean we only have three main sources
of macronutrients. Which is y'know carbohydrate, protein, and
fat. And, you can only eat so much protein. ...and
you cut out the fat in the diet, then that really leaves only one thing - that means
you have to increase your carbohydrate intake. And, what most people don't realize is that
carbohydrates are literally molecules of sugar joined together. Even the complex carbohydrates, you know the
brown rice, the sweet potatoes, the whole meal bread. They are literally chains of glucose - sugar
molecules joined together. And when you ingest them, they get absorbed
into your circulation - you end up with what we call elevated blood sugar levels. And long term and high levels of carbohydrate
consumption, we know are causally associated with a condition called insulin resistance
which eventually leads to diabetes. And what's the problem in diabetes? Well everybody knows, right? It's having excess glucose - this particular
type of sugar in the bloodstream. And, when we eat more carbohydrate, we put
more sugar in the bloodstream - that sugar's gotta come from somewhere, right? So, if I explain this to most of my patients,
they'll often look at me and say so why don't I stop eating carbohydrate? And you know what? That is the solution, it's really that simple,
this is treating diabetes 101. And yet this concept that carbohydrates are
made of glucose, they cause a rise in our blood sugar, therefore they're not good for
us is beyond the grasp of most doctors." Going back to the fat and sick egyptian mummies
- what did they eat? Well, as Dr. Michael Eades explains, a modern
nutritionist would say the ancient egyptian diet was just fantastic. The basic ancient egyptian diet had some plant
oils, they also fished and ate some fowl and had the occasional serving of red meat, but
the diet was mostly carbohydrates, primarily bread. They also had fruits, vegetables and honey. As explained in a paper in the Journal of
Egyptian Archaeology, “The most important food of the egyptians was bread.” In fact the Egyptians were nicknamed Artophagoi
which means eaters of bread. You can find several figurines depicting people
grinding wheat, as well as art depicting people harvesting wheat or preparing bread. Egyptians with their bread based diet were
essentially following the 1991 USDA food pyramid. Some people have argued that well it was only
the rich who could afford to be mummified or have statues made of their fat selves made
and only the rich could afford to buy and eat many saturated fat containing animal foods
…so that’s why the mummies hard heart disease. However, scientists have a really interesting
way to determine what ancient people ate called stable isotope analysis. By looking at how much of an isotope of Nitrogen
called Nitrogen 15 is in the bones of a person or animal, and then comparing that to the
Nitrogen 15 content of plants in that area, they can tell whether an animal or person’s
diet had more meat or more plants in it. Dr. Eades explains that this kind of stable
isotope analysis found that the egyptians got only 29 to 19% of their protein from animal
sources - not only was most of their protein coming from plants, but their diet as a whole
was mostly grains and plants, which means very little saturated fat. The researchers described it as being close
to a lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet. And, as this paper explains, there was a surprising
lack of difference in the stable isotope composition between social classes, meaning everyone,
rich or poor, was eating a generally high carb low saturated fat diet. "I remember when I was planning on doing a
low carb diet, a couple of people were saying you can't just cut a whole food group out,
you can't just not eat pasta, not eat bread... you need carbohydrates. Is that true - do we, is there a biological
requirement for dietary carbohydrate?" "So I will say right now and I'll say it explicitly. There is no need for dietary carbohydrate. In other words, the theoretical minimum consumption
of carbohydrate that is consistent with good health is zero. Now this doesn't mean that some tissues in
our body don't need to use carbohydrate - they don't need to use glucose - which is a carbohydrate. But it means we don't need to eat it because
if our body needs it, it can make it. It can make it from certain amino acids, it
can make it from the glycerol backbone which forms the triglyceride type of fat, so we
do not need to eat carbohydrate - the notion that we need at least 130 grams of carbohydrates
a day to support or neurological function is based on nothing but junk science. So, I will again say we do not need to eat
dietary carbohydrate, it is not an essential nutrient." That might be shocking to hear that the requirement
for dietary carbohydrate is zero. Yet, again this 71yo man’s case proves the
point: his diet had virtually zero carbohydrates. His diet was in fact an all meat diet - no
carbs, no grains, no fruits, not even vegetables. I know that for some of you, saying an all
meat diet cured this man’s diabetes and ulcerative colitis might sound like I just
said you could cure eczema and baldness by eating Elmer’s glue. But bare with me for a moment and let’s
look at it in terms of what he’s not eating. As Dr. Paul Mason explained, not eating carbohydrate
would be good for lowering his blood sugar which would improve his insulin resistance
and improve his diabetes. In fact, the endocrinologist even acknowledged
in the report that the reason he wouldn’t need his diabetes medication metformin is
because the reduction of carbs improved his blood sugar. But this man had a painful, constipating bowel
condition, yet we all know fiber is good for our bowels, it’s good for pooping. Yet, this man's new, no fiber diet healed
his bowel condition. "Well, on the topic of carbohydrates, what
about fiber? Isn't that a carbohydrate that's good for
you? It's good for you digestion?" "Well I mean technically yes, well, yes it
is a carbohydrate, but no it's actually not that good for you and that's gonna surprise
a lot of people. So the definition of fiber is that it's an
indigestible carbohydrate. Indigestible as far as your body goes - it
can't be absorbed or broken down by your body and there's a lot of myths surrounding fiber. It only comes from plant foods and it's often
thought that it can treat constipation which is the most common belief around it and it
would surprise a lot of people to know that there's an absolute paucity of studies that
support that. To my knowledge, there's been no randomized
controlled studies on the effects of fiber on the symptoms of constipation and I say
that very precisely - so the symptoms of constipation means things that bother people like pain
and bloating and bleeding - so there has been some evidence that shows that fiber can increase
the bulk of your stool, there have been some studies that show that having fiber can actually
increase, will reduce the transit time, meaning things transit through your intestinal tract
a little bit quicker, but when we actually have a look at the symptoms that patients
come and ask me about - they say Doc, I've got bloating, it hurts, I've got pain. You know, I have some bleeding, can you help
me? There's been no evidence at all that demonstrates
that fiber is beneficial. In fact, when we have a look at the best available
evidence on this, there was an experimental study which was performed in 2012 and subjects
with constipation found that complete elimination of dietary fiber - that is an intake of zero
grams of dietary fiber, led to complete improvement in all the symptoms of constipation in 41
patients. So, this is, this is absolutely staggering. So, the statistical significance of this study
were through the roof and these people were compared to people on various other levels
of fiber intake - high fiber, moderate fiber and low fiber diets and you could see a clear
dose response relationship between the symptoms of fiber, the symptoms of constipation and
the amount of fiber intake. And when you think about it logically, so
what is constipation? Effectively constipation is trouble passing
fecal matter. You're trying to pass something through a
small hole. So is it really logical that making that something
bigger is going to make it easier to pass through a small hole? When you think about it, that's like adding
more cars to a traffic jam and expecting the cars to clear, it just defies logic." Now, many people can handle tons of fiber
in their diet, but some people just can’t process fiber as well, and in fact we shouldn’t
expect high fiber to be the norm for humans. If you dig into our evolutionary past, you’ll
see that our gut shrank significantly around the time that we got these huge brains. The brain is a very energy expensive organ,
so we needed to make things more efficient. To achieve this efficiency, the gut shrank. And the idea is that this happened as we began
hunting animals for nutrient dense meat and energy dense fat. More calories and more nutrients in a smaller
package means we can sacrifice all that gut real estate and use resources on building
a huge brain. The reason gorillas have these gigantic bloated
bellies is because they are packing their guts with difficult to digest fiber all day. Gorillas have a huge colon that is specifically
for fermenting fiber to produce short chain fatty acids. These fatty acids are an energy source. In this way, a lowland gorilla will get 30-60%
of their energy needs just by fermenting fiber in their big colon. The human digestive tract shrunk so much that
the human colon on the other hand can only provide at best 2-9% of our energy needs from
fermenting fiber. "I guess this raises another important point
- we've often put plants up on a pedestal as being uniquely nutritious and uniquely
healthy and yet when they do contain things like oxalates and phytates and tannins and
things that actually impair nutrient absorption - they're literally called 'antinutrients'
and they can cause these other problems within the body and so we have a look at wheat based
products and we know that gluten actually increases what we call intestinal permeability
in everybody. Now people with celiac disease are more susceptible
to the side effects because of the degree of intestinal permeability they already start
with, but everybody is vulnerable to these." Now I realize how blasphemous it sounds to
question the greatness of plants. But oddly enough this 71 year old man went
on a diet that had literally no plants and his health dramatically improved. In contrast many people do fine with tons
of plants, look at vegan triathlete rich roll for example. He seems to be doing pretty well. But plants do have substances in them that
not everyone can handle. You wouldn’t give wheat bread to a celiac
patient, you wouldn’t give a peanut to someone with a peanut allergy. Some people are very sensitive to something
called oxalates - a compound found in many plant foods for example leafy greens. Sally Norton had been struggling with chronic
pain, fatigue and other mysterious symptoms for 30 years since the age of 12. She finally went on a low oxalate diet - simply
cutting out unsuspecting plant foods like spinach and almonds finally resolved these
terrible problems she had been struggling with for decades. Oxalate poisoning is actual something farmers
have to deal with. They need to prevent their herds from eating
too many oxalate containing plants. The animals can develop issues as serious
as kidney failure from this. Humans are told the brassica Kale is a superfood,
but ranchers caring for a herd of grazing animals are told to beware of the health risks
of Kale. The point is to say we shouldn’t expect
all people to perfectly be able to handle all plants. "When we actually have a look at a lot of
the nutrients in plant foods, we have to look at biological value, so if we take iron for
instance, we get heme iron from animal foods and we get non-heme iron from plant based
foods like spinach. But there's really no comparison in terms
of how effective they are able to be utilized by the body. So, non-heme iron in spinach is very difficult
for our body to actually assimilate and to deal with and we see this across the board
- we have vitamin A, that comes in different forms and the form of vitamin A we have from
animal foods is so much more biologically useful than what we get from plant foods." We’re often told this or that fruit or vegetable
is chock full of this or that nutrient - leafy greens have folate and calcium, carrots have
choline, avocados have vitamin B6, beans have iron, nuts have zinc, mushrooms have riboflavin. That’s great, but an egg yolk has all of
those. Sometimes the vitamins in plants aren’t
what we think they are. For example, people think carrots have vitamin
A because the beta carotene in carrots is converted in the human body into vitamin A. so take a look at my Mom’s blood test. Her beta carotene level is sky high where
her Vitamin A is actually in the low range. What’s going on? Well, again beta carotene in plants isn’t
vitamin A. How well you convert that beta carotene into actual Vitamin A depends on
your genes. Some people say carrots are a good source
of vitamin A, but at least when it comes to my Mom and probably myself, carrots are not
a good source of vitamin A. "But we've got in our head that plant based
foods are more nutrient dense and essentially more nutritious than other foods and if we
don't have a side of vegetables or fruit on our plate then we must be missing out. The simple fact is that's not the case - animal
foods are more nutrient dense than plant based foods." By the way, aside from those other nutrients
I already mentioned an egg yolk has, an egg yolk also has Vitamin A. and I mean actual
vitamin A, it doesn't need to be converted. Not to mention egg yolks also have vitamin
D, and E, and Thiamin and B12 and Pantothenic acid and Betaine and phosphorus and selenium. Oh wait but we’re not supposed to eat eggs,
especially not egg yolks, because of the cholesterol. So, to recap, this man went on an all meat
diet - that is, high saturated fat, no carbs, no vegetable diet. This strange diet mysteriously healed his
diabetes, ulcerative colitis and high blood pressure. Despite the drastic health improvements though,
his endocrinologist recommended he go back on a high carb reduced fat diet with plenty
of fruits and vegetables and limit his red meat consumption. Essentially the endocrinologist's recommendation
was to do the opposite of the diet that solved his health problems. Fruits and vegetables are perfectly fine for
most people, but it was surprising to me that the endocrinologist didn’t at least investigate
why the new low carb high fat high protein diet was so effective and instead gave the
same high carb low fat diet advice that people have heard since the 1970’s. This wave of bad advice and closed mindedness
seems seems to stem entirely from Ancel Keys diet heart hypothesis - the idea that saturated
fat causes heart attacks. This poorly supported idea is still taught
as fact to doctors today. "You were saying that essentially the foundational
teaching that people are given when they are on their path to become a medical doctor,
they're taught this, right? That the diet heart hypothesis is correct
and this is what causes heart disease?" "This is accepted as fact. Certainly it was when I was in medical school. And I was actually provided with some of the
curriculum notes from a local university here a couple years ago and I was quite surprised
to see that the lipid heart hypothesis was still going strong and so unless things have
changed in the last few years and I'm almost certain they have not, then that would be
the status quo today. Here's the problem - if you start to understand
the root biochem, the root cause biochemistry of all this - you then have to understand
that saturated fats are not dangerous for our health and then the whole house of cards
falls down. I think in a way, this situation we're in
with such atrocious dietary guidelines would never have occurred if doctors had a better
understanding of biochemistry."
What I've learned is a fantastic resource. He was honestly key into convincing me to read up and explore keto.
I highly recommend reading the book "The Big Fat Surprise" by Nina Teicholz.
It goes into great details about the origins of this complete bullocks diet heart hypothesis and shows once again that humanity has been misled by a few pricks who were basically on top of some leading associations (AHA, NHLBI) at that time. They simply wouldn't admit that they're wrong and to not jeopardise their scientific careers, they held on to a false belief to their public even though the outcomes of various clinical trials were against them. Real picture book cunts.
Such an insightful read.
(When referring to carbohydrates in 2012). "This is at the base of the food pyramid? Hint: Pyramids are tombs" By Nora Gedgaudas
I guess the flair kind of spoils it :P
I see What I’ve Learned, I like.
Bread and beer my friends, bread and beer..
So the pyramid people were the original followers of our food pyramid?
Slave feed, which travels up to those on top.
I can't recall specifically, but may have read about this in Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. ISBN-13: 978-0813044897 & ISBN-10: 0813044898