I like this jimhenson guy.
I'm sure it's been mentioned somewhere in this thread, but just in case... jim, have you considered that it's hard to find studies indicating that grains are unhealthy simply because no one has done them? You know how it works, studies need funding, and the money isn't there to research the dangers of grains. All the big money in America is tied together, and a lot of it is held by companies that make an enormous profit off of grains.
Anyway, what mainly determines my stance on these things aren't studies, but rather arguments. If someone can put together a good, solid line of reasoning that makes sense to me, and if I can't put together (or find) a more compelling counter argument, then that's generally enough for me. When it comes to nutrition theory, the likes of Mark Sisson, Robb Wolf, etc, have done that (and continue to consistently).
I agree with you though that grains aren't as unhealthy as this community often makes them out to be (excluding those with allergies of course). I'm of the opinion that, as long as you get what you need from your diet, throwing some grains in there isn't going to cause problems for most people. Hell, even Mark said he enjoys some oatmeal on very rare occasions. I think grains have the most potential to cause problems, so that might be a good reason to avoid them, but that's a personal judgement call.
It's kinda like the 20% concept. Most people who know me consider me a "health nut", and I ALWAYS get comments if someone sees me out drinking a beer, or enjoying some pizza at a superbowl party or whatever. I always have to explain that one of the great benefits of eating healthy 95% of the time is that I don't have to worry about those few occasions when I don't. They're just too infrequent to matter. As long as you eat a diet based on primal foods, I'm sure you can throw some grains into the mix and it won't matter for the same reason. The real danger is a diet based on grains (hi food pyramid!).
If glucose consumption is unhealthy and unnatural then why do we have internal organs and cells that must use glucose derived fuel sources? Wouldn't we have evolved to rely solely on FFA and ketone based fuel sources?
I had a look at one site and showed 9 principles of longevity, only two were diet related and mentioned having a plant bias and limiting overall intake.
I saw Okinawans mentioned and it is known that the original diet information was flawed and they really did like their pork & lard.
Do I have to buy the book to get any serious information on the foundations of this philosophy?
Sounds primal, with some legumes thrown in.The people inhabiting Blue Zones share common lifestyle characteristics that contribute to their longevity. The ven diagram at the right highlights the following six shared characteristics among among the Okinawa, Sardinia, and Loma Linda Blue Zones:
Family – Family is put ahead of other concerns.
No smoking – Smoking is not found in large quantities.
Plant-based diet – Except for the Sardinian diet, the majority of food consumed is derived from plants.
Constant moderate physical activity – Moderate physical activity is an inseparable part of life.
Social engagement – People of all ages are socially active and integrated into their communities.
Legumes – Legumes are commonly consumed.
Since the publication of the book, Bluezones.com has expanded on these characteristics, making what they call the Power 9:
Just move – Active lifestyles, more than heavy exercise, is what leads most to longevity
Purposeful outlook — Have clarity about your role in life.
Down shift on stress — Blue zone cultures all have their own ways of shedding stress in life.
Eat to 80% full — Stop your meals when you are 80% full rather than totally full.
Plant slant — Meat is more of a condiment than a staple in most Blue Zones.
Wine @ 5 — Moderate drinking has positive benefits.
Belong to a community — Belonging to a faith-based community extends one's life in general.
Loved ones first — Focusing on family in life and keeping family members close to home will improve one's life.
Right Tribe — Having a social circle that promotes healthy lifestyles is important to maintaining a healthy lifestyle yourself.
+1, ciep. An observation of mine is that the blue zones also often fall in mountainous regions with excellent air quality.
These folks move around a lot not for just for the purpose of moving around - but for social interaction. And a stunning environment is surely another motivator.
F 5 ft 3. HW: 196 lbs. Primal SW (May 2011): 182 lbs (42% BF)... W June '12: 160 lbs (29% BF) (UK size 12, US size 8). GW: ~24% BF - have ditched the scales til I fit into a pair of UK size 10 bootcut jeans. Currently aligning towards 'The Perfect Health Diet' having swapped some fat for potatoes.
Eating primal is not a diet, it is a way of life.
Don't forget to play!
^ Point being? If I had a nickel for every hypothesis...
I can't say if anyone posted this yet, and this isn't a clinical study. But this was published in Discover Magazine, May 1987, pp. 64-66, it is basically about grains, and modern agriculture, and it is written by Jared Diamond from UCLA Medical School. It's titled
"The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race" the link to it is The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race and just incase that link goes bad, and because this is so worth reading, I'm going to post the text here also.
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
PS, this is a long read, and I'm only posting half, but it is well, well worth it, especially when it comes to condemning modern agricultural practices like wheat/soy/rice/corn/etc. Enjoy!
By Jared Diamond
University of California at Los Angeles Medical School
To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn't the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren't specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.
At first, the evidence against this revisionist interpretation will strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. We're better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. Just count our advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We get our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape?
For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. It's a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view) no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution spread until today it's nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive.
From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, to ask "Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture?" is silly. Of course they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work. Planted crops yield far more tons per acre than roots and berries. Just imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly grazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. How many milliseconds do you think it would take them to appreciate the advantages of agriculture?
The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far as to credit agriculture with the remarkable flowering of art that has taken place over the past few thousand years. Since crops can be stored, and since it takes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build the Parthenon and compose the B-minor Mass.
While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it's hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here's one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn't emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"
While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen's average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It's almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the 1840s.
So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren't nasty and brutish, even though farmes have pushed them into some of the world's worst real estate. But modern hunter-gatherer societies that have rubbed shoulders with farming societies for thousands of years don't tell us about conditions before the agricultural revolution. The progressivist view is really making a claim about the distant past: that the lives of primitive people improved when they switched from gathering to farming. Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage dumps.
How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and thereby directly test the progressivist view? That question has become answerable only in recent years, in part through the newly emerging techniques of paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples.
In some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almost as much material to study as a pathologist today. For example, archaeologists in the Chilean deserts found well preserved mummies whose medical conditions at time of death could be determined by autopsy (Discover, October). And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in dry caves in Nevada remain sufficiently well preserved to be examined for hookworm and other parasites.
Usually the only human remains available for study are skeletons, but they permit a surprising number of deductions. To begin with, a skeleton reveals its owner's sex, weight, and approximate age. In the few cases where there are many skeletons, one can construct mortality tables like the ones life insurance companies use to calculate expected life span and risk of death at any given age. Paleopathologists can also calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people of different ages, examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases.
One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5' 9'' for men, 5' 5'' for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5' 3'' for men, 5' for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.
Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced by a bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."
... This is half the article, follow the link above for the rest. -Duceswild557