I wrote the following bit while immobilized for a sprained ankle. And I did it without looking in a single book even once. Please forgive any factual errors, I’ll clean it up for the book, which is coming to this website, in parts, shortly.
Session I
The Evolution of Women
We’ve all probably heard of the paleolithic cro magna spear throwing hunters all busy running across African plains. Please understand, that is all way long after the evolution of women.
Life on earth appeared about 3.8 billion years ago. After the Devonian and Jurassic periods was the Mesozoic Era lasting about 185 million years and ended 65 million years ago. Mesozoic means “middle life” for the midway era between Palaeozoic (ancient life) and our own Cenozoic (recent life) eras. (This part I looked up in a book actually)
From the first simple forms in the sea, life gradually moved onto the land, and into the sky. Reptiles, animals with backbones, have hard shelled eggs, and are cold blooded (their body temperatures mirror their surroundings). In the Mesozoic Era, mammals, insects, and fish were living alongside the predominantly reptilian species. Fish were around 300 million years before reptiles ever returned to the water.
To me, its the mammals who are most curious.
Imagine a group like chimpanzees who for some reason chose to leave the trees and go back to living in the water. The ground would have been unsafe probably, maybe because cats learned to climb. Either way, a group like chimps spent enough generations in the water to lose the body hair while maintaining the locks on the top, curiously easy for floating children to clutch and also providing sun cover. The body hair we carry is evidence of our aquatic roots: it grows the way water flows.
So what would make women leave the safety of the trees? I think it was the large cats. Either way, at some point, some group (that probably looked like chimps) left the trees for the water. They lost most of the body hair and probably developed some understandings of how to beat those cats through a now shell fish based diet and a simultaneously growing sense of community.
Most likely, the women most able to survive in the water were the ones with the least body hair, and most able to stand just off shore where the cats couldn’t reach and the sharks didn’t venture while eating raw fish and sea weed.
Eventually, if only to stave off the boredom, the stone age began.
The stone age lasted at least 100 000 generations. (NOTE: We’ve had less than 1000 since). My speculations as to the beginning of the stone age was the awareness of humanity’s ability to work together (community) to use fire to scare off the lions. Why the new understandings? Probably their brains were getting the omega - 3 fish oils and they developed an ability to utilize ecosapentanoic acid in the synapses for improved neurological transmissions.
Whatever the case, if progress is defined as the world being different at the time of one’s death compared to the time of one’s birth, then the stone age saw three notable points of progress. Humanity learned how to catch fire, then they learned how to keep fire, then they learned how to start fire. This took at least 100 000 generations. And again, just for emphasis, since the end of the stone age, we have had less than 1000 generations.
During the stone age, a curiously aggressive gene seems to have developed somewhere maybe in Africa. It was characteristic of the cro magna (long thin body style - Randy Johnson esque) and with it they destroyed the neandruthuls (short squat, Kirby Puckett like) and the neandruthul matriarchial social structures were overpowered by patriarchy. But so much had happened already before that.
Welfare was created in rock caves as deals between moms when their kids’ father were off hunting and fighting. If one didn’t come back, the other agreed to step to the plate and share in the survival.
After the advent of welfare, men decided to move back to the woman village either because they killed all the wild animals or they suddenly became able to farm instead. Maybe something changed terrestrially (pole switch?) because in about four different parts of the world, agriculture started simultaneoulsy, all about 6000 BC. For whatever reason, at some point, probably then, men moved into the women village and somewhere maybe first in east Africa, some men decided that they wanted control. Eventually realizing their role in procreation, and through using the image of mother earth and father God, men claimed superiority and thus developed a very powerful tool.
Session II
Mideval Europe - the present
Imagine Kings and vassals in southern France, about 1400 AD. Imagine there is now a group of people who are getting paid to do things other than subsistence farming. Imagine them grouping together under the agreement that if a king or lord tries to tax us in any region, we all agree that we will not work in that region. The origin of a strike. The origin of a guild.
If the masons had guilds, how long before a banker’s guild? What happened to the banker’s guild? I suspect they didn’t just go away. What is fiat currency, and who get to make it? Can I? Can you?
Fast forward to 1920. Through the use of the “Nutritional Education Board”, the meat, dairy, and egg councils got together and decided to donate nutritional information to the schools featuring colour glossy pyramids. We all loved our mothers and trusted our teachers, and so, when our teachers say protein builds muscles, and they have colour glossy charts, how could this not be true?
Muscles, like all cells, are 80% water, with the balance being oil, carbs, and proteins; proteins being about 2% of the total. If we want muscle cells, would you think that you should take in nutrients that most closely resemble the structures of the cell you want to build?
The Canada Food Guide, the FDA, and Arnold Schwartznegger all agree that our diets should be 20 - 30% oil, 2- 8% protein, and the balance in long chain carbohydrates, a ratio that generally replicates cell structure, yet does NOT remotely resemble the pretty pyramids we were fed in grade school.
If we all eat 30% of our calories as protein, what happens to the profits of the milk industry?
Thus began the Protein Myth.
Okay. Diet. (And disease).
I should really go get the books and make sure this is right but they are upstairs and the stairs are really dangerous with crutches so what i will guarantee is that of the following concepts, it is all at least half right. Unfortunately I don’t know which half; a problem strangely true for all study in medicine. No one really has a clue. We are left to speculate on a wide variety of variables. From a lack of better ideas, I’ve decided to limit my assessments of facts to my best understanding of history, other (similar) species, and cross-over/cohort studies.
The first notable (clinical) connection between diet and disease was published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition in 1972. Called the Framingham study, it was correlated that people on low fibre diets had higher levels of cancer, and as a cohort study (50 000 people, ten years). No longer speculation, nutrition had hit the non subjective world of clinical research and the preliminary findings of that study were a huge rationale in Nixon’s War on Cancer, which at the time featured cancer probability for men already over 20%. Thirty years of war on cancer and rates are now up to 43%.
That’s right. More than 2 out of 5 male readers on this thread are statistically projected to develop cancer. So how to prevent? Eating the right foods and doing the right things. But what is the right food? Off went the medical researchers for the magic bullet of anti cancer foods and pills. (hint: gratefully there seems to be one, and its described below. But first, more background.)
In March of 1985, the New England Journal of Medicine published the Zuphten Study. It found over 10 years and 20 000 men a 50% reduction in heart disease based on the amount of fish in the diet. This was four years after the 1981 Jerusalem Study (monounsaturated vs. polyunsaturated oils) but still this was a global mind blower. At about the same time that the medical research budgets were starting to boost post doctoral student’s salaries for focused research through electron microscopes and now becoming affordable nuclear magnetic resonance. The graduate schools were already changing rapidly in 1972 and the Pfizers of the world were (financially) driving the bus.
Either way, medical research on nutrition began in a very recent past. Since 1972 we’ve seen the development of a behemoth drug industry, but also the beginnings of clinical research on prevention (though not really paying anyone’s bills) and more recent still is focused research on whole foods diets. Check out Walter Willett at Harvard and Joan Sabate at Berkeley for the real leaders of this field. Penny Kris Etherton is another outstanding author and she is a true giant among men.
Anyway, the other worthy place to look is at history. But I want to start with other species first.
Looking at the elephant and the giraffe and the hippo and the horse and the cow and all giant mammals, the one thing they most obviously have in common is they all eat grass.
Chimpanzees are herbivores, they spend 60% of the their day eating leaves. They’ll eat a critter if they can catch it, or termites if they can find them, but for the most part, chimpanzees are herbivores.
A few characteristic similarities between the elephants, chimps, and other large herbivores is a pocketed digestive tract designed to store and ferment long carbohydrates. Our colon is nearly identical in features to the other herbivores on the planet. And as all herbivores have the ability to move their jaws from side to side, and all herbivores have back teeth feature a grinding surface seemingly for nuts and seeds, and as we have all these things, so we too are herbivores. Please read this one again. Its a big key to understanding what you’re reading this for. All the evidence you need for understanding what you should be eating can be found by simply looking at your teeth, then seeing which other animals have teeth like yours, then eating what they eat. Really.
All carnivores have no ability to move their jaw from side to side. All carnivores create their own vitamin C, and all carnivores have claws combined with the ability to run. Ever try catching a chicken? Forget about it. Because you are not a carnivore.
Omnivores (bears, racoons et al) all have claws and none move their jaw from side to side.
Large plant eaters most likely developed after the meat eaters as their digestive systems are massively more complex than the straight blow hole concept of a carnivore.
But I digress. This is about human nutrition (and disease).
Imagine meat in the pocketed channels of an herbivore. Since a cow has 92% similar DNA to humans (a chimp is about 98% similar to humans in DNA) imagine the body trying to figure out what to do with cooked meat. It knows it doesn’t ferment, it knows that the proteins are very similar to itself, and so it sticks it in the pocket of the intestine. Unfortunately, meat doesn’t ferment, it rots.
So now there is a flow of rotting meat into the blood stream. Hmmmmm.
John Wayne died with 60 pounds of undigested red meat in his colon. John Candy had over 100.
Generally it takes about 5 days for cooked meat to clear the system. If you eat meat more than once every five days, what do you think is going on? 43% chance of getting cancer boys. What do you really think it is from? Where was that food pyramid from?
And you girls with your hormone laden dairy. Breast cancer you say? Not one giant animal on the planet drinks cows milk, yet they all have perfect bones. Calcium comes from green leavy vegetables. Despite what your mother or teacher really believed, excess protein pulls all the +2 cations from the body for pH balance to flush amino acids (ACIDS) so calcium, magnesium, copper2, iron2, zinc, and iron are pulled by milk. Not the other way around.
Baantu women in Africa have on average 9 kids and never lose a tooth. the Hundzas, Todas, and Yucatan Indians, and the Baantus, all feature women who can ride bicycles after the age of 90. What do they all have in common, these groups from all corners of the world? High life expectancy (average 90+), incredible mobility all the while, no cancer, no osteoporosis, no arterial plaque, and a low protein all vegetable diet.
The Inuit have the lowest life expectancy on the planet (under 30 years) and also the highest protein intake. And they ALL have osteoporosis.
Its all about the amount of protein you eat.
Check out Diet for A New America by John Robbins. He’s the dude who walked away from the Baskin Robbins fortune and got a standing ovation from the United Nations Assembly.
Session III basic bio-chemistry.
This will be fun.
Okay. Imagine a box full of textbooks. They line up all nice and pretty and they’re easy to pack. Now imagine mixing in a bag of baseballs (which also stack pretty nicely by themselves) and then mixing the box. The volume needed to pack baseballs with textbooks is way higher than the volume required to pack each alone. Even though the number of units is the same, the volume changes a ton.
Okay. now imagine a three legged guy cut off at the waist. A saturated fat has three long legs, chains of carbons all linked together with all three legs the same. All 18 carbons long, and all completely straight, like a textbook, is a standard animal fat. Solid at room temperature, they pack really nicely.
Now imagine the right leg with a knee. Imagine the section below the knee to hang out about 30 degrees. The lower the knee, the less the lower section can stick out. If the knee is after the 12th carbon of an 18 carbon chain, only the bottom 6 can hang out.
A mono unsaturated oil (olive oil) has one outside leg with one knee after the ninth carbon bent 30 degrees out.
An omega 6 poly unsaturated oil has two knees after the sixth carbon with one knee right after the other (conjugated). In reality, two carbons after the sixth hang out 30 degrees, then the next ten carbons hang out another 30 degrees, or about 60 degrees from the other two legs.
An omega 3 poly unsaturated oil has two (conjugated) knees after the third carbon, each knee bending it 30 degrees out each. so 12 carbons hang out about 60 degrees. This is way less stable than any of the others so far.
The textbook has the cover bent a third of the book all bent and hanging out.
I’m almost done with the background. Hang in there. They say it’ll pay off.
Cell walls are made of oils. And cell needs to maintain a different salt level than blood. To be able to keep salt and water from mixing, a cell needs to build a water barrier, and of course, it uses oils to do it: like a pool membrane. A cell will line oils up shoulder to shoulder and makes two layers together with the legs all sticking inwards and the belt like head sticking out like a shield. Every cell has these two layers all around as a membrane from the surrounding. Every animal cell is made of oils all organized like textbooks, shoulder to shoulder, and two layers, one facing in and the other facing out. Plant cells have a carbohydrate layer too, but not us. We just use oil.
Interestingly enough, this same style of membrane surrounds the nucleus and the mitocondria and all that other inner cellular goodness. All those biology things all have a membrane wall and all the walls are all two layers of oils all laid out shoulder to shoulder with their tails in and heads out.
So where is the protein? We’re almost there.
But first, omega oils. The n-3 oils with that long leg all hanging out are a bit fragile compared to the packed up textbook. Sometimes, when they get to the cell in one piece, they can become part of the wall and open it a bit to open special doors for nutrient flow. The higher the unsaturation of the oil to the cell wall the more likely it is to acting like a baseball to the textbooks, the more fragile it is, and the more often it is going to need to be replaced. The body doesn’t build n-3 oils. We only get them from our diet. And probably because in our rightful diet, they’re plentiful and abundant and our bodies wouldn’t need to know how remotely.
World Health Organization recommends a 5:1 ratio of n-6 to n-3. Canada recommends 4:1 and Japan just switched to 2:1. Clearly, a low level of thrombosis (gel like blood) is directly connected to the RATIO of the two essential fatty acids. Not to the total values, but to the ratio of the two. Evidence shows that our paleolithic ancestors were near 2:1. www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/79/3/523-a Follow Simopolous. Literally, she wrote the book.
n-6 oils don’t go rancid like n-3’s. Food manufacturers pulled n-3 oils from their products 100 years ago. Kraft, Nabisco, Kellogg’s, none of them can use n-3 oils and leave their products on the shelf. Doesn’t work. Free radicals everywhere.
So mostly in North America 50:1 is common and basically everyone is over 10:1.
What happens when we close the gap towards 2:1? Our blood moves from a gel to something with viscosity like salt water. Also, when we have balanced and sufficient levels of n-3 oils, here is the kicker, our bodies build these really long molecules called DHA (fish oils are EPA and seem basically the same) and these are the neurotransmitters in the brain. These long molecules built out of omega - 3’s are the key to smooth brain function, to the clinical world, it is starting to seem. Our bodies are able to make them, but only when we have sufficient levels of n-3 building blocks available. And to that, mom’s who take omega oils during pregnancy have kids with on average a 10 point higher IQ. But I don’t have a quote for that one. I can footnote everything else though.
The real key to nutrition I think is a developing field called food synergy. Its based on how molecules like sterols interact with things like omega 3’s. So next up, sterols, sterolins, ecosanoids and other fun unpronouncible words.
Session IV - A whole foods diet.
What is fascinating to me is that if I took a strawberry from california and fed it to my kid, with a locally grown strawberry, I understand my kid would prefer the one grown here. But if we took those very same two strawberries to a kid in San Diego, that kid would prefer the one from Cali. So I understand.
It seems that our bodies have requirements that change according to latitude. We in Northern Canada seem to need a different diet than people in Ecuador, and not surprisingly, we seem to have higher needs for the locally available stuff. Its as though the plants here know what I need, and they are good enough to provide it. Although I have found no clinical evidence for this, I must say, and its based mostly on personal experimentation combined with understandings from Chinese medicine. Check a book called the Web that Has No Weaver. Ted Kaptan or something. I don’t have it here so I can’t be sure how to spell his last name.
Okay. So phytochemicals. Our cell walls are massively more complex than simple packings of oils. At the very least, some of these oils come with different groups attached to the hip above the bent leg. Some of the groups are proteins, others are phophates, but ALL these “impurities” are pulled when oil is refined. Clear oils have these units removed. All of them. Remember what you learned about white sugar and white flour? You’re about to learn the same thing about clear oils. Or, you probably just did.
So now the body is using these crazy pieces into the cell walls along with the oils. Now there are proteins in there, there are huge oils with large functional groups, and cells are ideally able to move units through the walls selectively. Food in, waste out, all that kind of thing. But refined oils don’t get us there. Neither do cooked animal proteins. We seem to need the really complex things we find in simple raw foods, and it seems our bodies are best able to deal with sources picked fresh, eaten raw, and from the environment where we live.
I think we’re really looking for the small molecules which co exist with things like vitamin C. If 99.6% of all the antioxidants in an apple are NOT vitamin C, how valuable is vitamin C without all the other stuff? Can our bodies use the omega oils without the surrounding sterols and ecosanoids? I have no idea. I’m pretty sure that Centrum doesn’t have any idea either. Or if they do, they’ll never publish anything that say their products suck, and since they control the publications through their grants to schools, we’ll probably never know either. Unless someone else can finance cohort studies. Like the government, but that’s probably as likely as UpJohn getting into organics.
What little preliminary research is available does show that adding sterols (the plant version of cholesterol) another victim of the refining process, when we add sterols to our diet, we have the ability to flush 43 - 68% more cholesterol in that same meal. So if you have unrefined vegetable oils with your steak, your body can dump an extra half of the cholesterol that it would have previously dumped without the presence of the sterols. Sterol extracts (Moducare is the company who makes the best) have astounding results for people with nuclear cholesterol levels. Every naturopathic doctor carries it everywhere. Greens+ is another pool of these phytochemicals, its crazy expensive though.
I’m trying to get to the protein thing. The plug on our bodies when we overload our kidneys.
Not one western disease can be cured by more of anything. The cure for every western disease is always less. I’m going to lean on the Chinese model of the yin yang concept because I can’t think of a better one. So Chinese yin can be summarized by quiet and internal, low and vulnerable. Chinese yang is commonly headstrong, over the top, power, loud, agressiveness stuff.
Yang kidney fire is what we in the west cannot describe.
The notion of metabolism to the Chinese is the cultivation of jing through a belly cauldron. Through breathing cycles, using that low belly air that tuba players need, we can generate an internal fire inside ourselves which if alone outside in the winter, could be sufficient to melt the snow around us indefinitely. Jing energy is like an essence, its a life force which goes up and down based on our body usage. Yoga stimulates jing certainly. Walking in the forest. Breathing patterns. Tai Chi. This is all for jing, not yin or yang.
Though jing is neither cultivated by either yin or yang energy, when the two are most balanced and in harmony we can best cultivate jing, or essence: our human life force. It is through jing energy that some think we become closest to God. I personally think eating very low on the food chain is another means to this end. But that is my own two bits. Although I understand Chinese sages were all completely vegan, although I’ve personally never read anything stating that conclusively.
So the kidney fire. When we eat sugars and proteins (milk and cereal, steak sandwich, eggs and toast) we flare our kidneys like fire. Its not metabolism, its not the triple burner, its certainly not jing, but its kinda tricky to tell the difference.
To digest protein rich foods, we need a very acidic stomach pH. Carbohydrates require a much higher pH, like 5 - 7 stuff. John Matson’s Eating Alive is clearly the pinnacle work on this subject. Again, I lent it out and I don’t have it either. But what a killer read. Its totally written to everybody’s mom. and he’ll take your phone calls too. He’s in Vancouver. When we eat pure proteins, we get really acidic stomach fluids. Heartburn, ulcers, this stuff happens from acids. So we add the carbs to cool the fire.
However, when we mix carbs and proteins, our bodies cannot digest either one. I learned this first hand on the construction crews. After lunch all the meat eaters were laying around with no drive. I was jumping around and ready to go. I had tons of energy. They were useless for hours. I’ve since started providing lunch because then afterwards I can drive them like a rented mule and they can respond. Everyone wins.
So the problem with the protein - sugar spiral is beyond the zero energy problem, our bodies need to flush the excess proteins (chains of amino acids). The sugars are easy enough to burn, like adding kindling to the stove, it flairs quickly and they’re gone. So after the sugars are flared the body can go acidic and burn up the proteins. Which makes everyone start working again about 2:30, two hours after trying to convert these starches to ATP through the Krebs cycle and well after the piles of insulin are cranked out to meet the overload of combine foods (wheat, oats, barley, corn, rice…) that we crave from the hot proteins.
The excess protein is a problem for the triple burner. It kills the cauldron.
The triple burner is pretty hard to describe. It involves all the internal organs, but its none of the organs. Its the liver, pancreas, and lungs, or the liver, spleen lungs, but the key is that it is the foundational part of the whole cycle. According to the Chinese, blood moves from the heart to the lungs to the stomach to the liver to the kidneys, to the spleen to the pancreas and then back up to the heart. Or some combination like that at least.
The problem is that excess protein must be broken down into the individual amino acids then pH balanced with cations (like calcium and magnesium) before it can be flushed. And when the kidney is totally plugged with excess protein, the blood cannot flow to it or past it and all cycles are quenched or incumbered at least in some way. This most definitely includes that very delicate triple burner.
And finally here is the problem. When the blood cannot flow through the kidneys, the triple burner doesn’t work and instead we get the yang kidney fire where it starts to burn this protein in a process made famous by Atkins called ketosis, which feels like the triple burner, but is in fact a toxic shock response to the smothering protein blanket.
So to release the pressure (of the excess protein) on the kidney and then cultivate the jing energy through tai chi and yoga while not sitting in a chair but being squat down in the soil (in barefeet so as to uptake the minerals which the body needs to flush the protein) is the cure for nearly every western disease, especially the prostate and colon issues.
You want viagra au natural? Pick fresh spinach from your garden while you wander around in bare feet. You won’t be able to turn it off.
Seasonal diets and food transitions
I didn’t know anything about seasonal diets until last year in fact. In the winter I had been taking vitamin D pills for cabin fever. Then I tried this last twelve months on a seasonal diet.
Its funny how many people come over here and look in my fridge these days. I think everybody who has been here in the last six months has opened the fridge within five minutes and just looked inside. Simon closed the door after about three seconds and said, “Dude it looks like a barn in there. It your power went out, nothing would happen.”
For the last year I’ve been living on root vegetables and saurkraut, fermented radishes and kim chi, and I can feed the whole neighbourhood for about $2 all day. Kids came over this winter and would eat five bowls of soup in a row each, and every one of them. Cabbage and parsnip soup? No kidding. I still can’t believe it myself.
All winter I kept a pot of soup boiling on the stove (although the crock pot at the shop is way better, and I’d prefer the wood stove we had on the abandoned farm). After a couple days the first head of cabbage turns to a mush and becomes this sweet broth which has a stellar consistency. I’d add a bit of chili powder and salt and pepper too. Before lunch we’d chop potatoes or carrots or whatever and throw them in. I figured out how to time it so the potatoes would be soft and the carrots would be still a bit crunchy.
To that bland soup I added the fermented stuff, and the kids would generally go without. They liked it dead bland, and I prefered to change it up with miso or fermented spicy radishes and it was bold and inventive everytime. Sometimes we’d add lentils but then the soup would stick to the bottom. Oils in the pot were a bummer too because everything emulsified and looked like cream soup, but didn’t have a very good belly feel. Oils seemed to change the soup in a rather unpopular way.
So it was just root vegetables, cabbages, and now I understand that if I dried the beet greens last fall, they would have been perfect in there.
Spring has come to the tundra, and we’re getting fresh spinach at the market. I got a bag of asparagus too, so I’ve been grazing on the stuff since Saturday last, about five days ago.
I for sure noticed a real transition. I had picked up some spinach a month ago, greenhouse stuff, but I only ate a little bit because my body temperature dropped like a rock and it sucked. So I went back to the saurkraut and the body temperature went right back up.
Over the last couple days I’ve started eating spinach and the asparagus. For the first part of this week, I was in a real transition. Didn’t know what to do. Being laid up by the bum ankle had me bouncing off the walls and I was losing my mind, and my body temperature dropped again.
Now I’m a couple days into it, and my body has equalized to the spring greens. My energy level is off the charts, conveniently I’ve found something into which I can channel some of this energy, but I am ready to run a shovel for a week straight.
Soon will be strawberries then blueberries and the peaches again. Last summer I ate about ten cases of peaches while I was painting my house. My new neighbour to the north looked at me one day and said, “You have an unbelieveable amount of energy.”
I’ve also discovered that if I eat enough wheat products I need to nap all day. So to turn off the gas I can just grab bread products and I’m on the couch for the rest of the day.
Oh. and the other thing is that I guess the illiocial valve is between the large intestine and the small intestine or something. Matson covers it. The key to the whole seasonal diet is that when the sodium (summer fruits) and potassium (winter vegetables) balance is affected, the valve is somehow responsible for triggering vitamin D production, and based on the ratio our vitamin D production can change 1000 fold. So on potatoes I make 1000 times more vitamin D than I do while eating oranges, regardless of latitude, I think.
And as a true test, next winter, if you’re in the north, try going five days without the jungle fruits. Then eat an orange. You will experience cabin fever like you cannot ever recall.
I can’t believe I got that all out. I think I’m done for the day. I don’t really have much more to add either. I think that’s pretty much all I got.
This stuff has been the focus of my efforts for about ten years. I’m curious how other people’s interests parallel this stuff.
I sure like this website.