11 – Vitamin K | nutrients we’re deficient in

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Episode Transcript

This is the Eat Ancestral podcast number 11. Vitamin K deficiency is an emerging problem. Do you know where to get your Vitamin K? The only acute symptoms of vitamin K deficiency is uncontrolled bleeding or haemorrhage. And this is actually where vitamin K derives its name from K; for Koagulation in German, spelled with a K, not a C, like in English. Now, this is not a very helpful symptom, because if you are bleeding uncontrollably, at that point, it's probably a bit late to start thinking about your Vitamin K status. So that's why we're here today; to get ahead of things. Fortunately for us, there are many chronic diseases that are associated with Vitamin K deficiency, which I will describe as we get along in this episode. But also, we can identify some groups who are most at risk, why that might be the case, and what foods we can eat, or perhaps not eat in order to get adequate vitamin K and prevent a potential deficiency, or at least mitigate our risk. But first, let's learn more about why Vitamin K is so important. And what are some of the consequences of Vitamin K deficiency. So what is so important about vitamin K? Well, it plays a key role in many physiological operations in the neurological system, the musculoskeletal system, cardiovascular system, the immune system, and in liver and kidney and pancreatic function, just to name a few things. And furthermore, Vitamin K also supports our mitochondrial function, aids in the cellular generation of ATP (which is energy) and has antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties as well. So that's a lot of important things that Vitamin K is involved in. And so a lack of vitamin K will decrease our health span and quality of life in multiple ways. So what are some of the specific consequences of a vitamin K deficiency? Well, the first one on my list here is something we've already touched on, in that vitamin K deficiency will impair our blood clotting ability, which leads to uncontrolled bleeding. Definitely not a good thing. Vitamin K deficiency will also impair bone health and may lead to osteoporosis. Vitamin K deficiency will impair our immune function, and it's also implicated in development of cancer. Deficiency in Vitamin K will also impair brain function and is implicated in the development of Alzheimer's. Vitamin K deficiency also contributes to arterial calcification. So the calcification of our arteries which you may have heard of, this is something that leads to cardiovascular disease. And furthermore, Vitamin K deficiency will also impair our liver, kidney and pancreas from functioning optimally, and they're very important organs. To go along with the rest of these consequences. I think this is well worth our time to consider. And effectively what this boils down to is vitamin K deficiency equals compromised health. Seriously compromised health. So remember, a single micronutrient deficiency quickly becomes a significant problem. And the damage is not localised, the damage is felt all throughout the system. So the groups who are most at risk of developing a vitamin K deficiency are firstly, infants. Secondly, vegetarians and vegans. Third, people with compromised gut health. And fourth, people who do not consume fermented foods. So let's talk about these groups one at a time, starting with infants. So how are infants at risk of developing a Vitamin K deficiency? Well, apparently infants are so deficient in Vitamin K that it has become standard medical practice to administer prophylactic (preventative) Vitamin K injections shortly after we're born. Now this is done to prevent vitamin K deficiency bleeding, which is a life threatening condition, as we touched on a couple of times. Vitamin K is integral in our blood clotting ability. So it's pretty frightening to think that babies are being born so deficient in vitamin K that they can often die from haemorrhage. And so they are being given prophylactic vitamin K injections to prevent that. So what's the reason for this? Why are these babies so deficient in vitamin K? Well, as we touched on in the previous episode with regards to iron, there's a low placental transfer of vitamin K during pregnancy and then a low transfer of vitamin K in in the mother's breast milk. And this makes sense; as with other nutrient deficiencies, if the mother is deficient in vitamin K or whatever nutrient, then the newborn will be, too. But what's the root cause of this? Why are mothers so deficient in vitamin K? This leads us on to the next section here why and how vegetarians and vegans are at risk of developing a vitamin K deficiency. Plant foods are poorly bioavailable sources of many critical nutrients like iron, B vitamins, vitamin A, etc. And Vitamin K is no different. There are two main types of Vitamin K, Vitamin K1, also also called phylloquinones, which is made by plants and then vitamin K2, which is called menaquinone, and it's made by bacteria. Surprise, surprise, Vitamin K2 is the most valuable type for humans. K1, when it's absorbed is sent straight to the liver, where it's used as a building block to help manufacture clotting factors. Whereas K2 is used throughout the body and is integral to various organ systems and physiological functions. So where do we find vitamin K2? Again, not much of a surprise here; animal meat, fat and raw egg yolks. Vitamin K, remember, is one of the four fat soluble vitamins. So it makes sense. It's in animal fat. Fermented foods, like raw dairy are also a great source of vitamin K2. And funnily enough, the microbes in our gut are manufacturing vitamin K2 for us. And this is very interesting with regards to gut health, as we will touch on in the next section. If your gut health is not optimal, then you might not be producing / manufacturing... or it's not you, it's the microbes... but vitamin K2, will not be produced as much as it potentially could be. Anyway, back to why and how vegetarians and vegans are at risk of developing a vitamin K deficiency. Well, it's not just the the self-proclaimed vegetarians and vegans, this actually implicates many more of us than just that. And this is because over the last 100 years, our modern nutrition guidelines have been shifting further towards recommending a pseudo vegetarian diet, which is practically devoid of the above listed foods and their critical nutrients. So our grain and plant based diets are not doing us a great service here with regards to getting adequate vitamin K along with other nutrients. So anyone in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, etc, will be particularly affected by this. And at least people from France and Spain and some other countries in the old world have had the sense to never stop eating animal fats, and fermented foods. So let's touch on how people with compromised gut health are at risk of developing vitamin K deficiency. Optimal gut health (function), as you know, is really important for many things like the production and absorption of nutrients. So in other words, if we have a healthy gut, we will absorb more of the nutrients in our food. And if we have a healthy gut, our resident microbes will manufacture vitamin K2, among other nutrients, for us. So in the event of gut dis-ease, dysfunction, or dysbiosis, these capabilities are left compromised. And this is very relevant, I think, because gut issues are much more common than most people realise. We've already touched on our modern diets that are rich in seed oils and grains and lots of plant foods that we call vegetables, drugs, like antibiotics and non steroidal anti inflammatories, like ibuprofen, and then modern chemicals, pesticides, like glyphosate, which which are pervasive in the environment, these are all known to disrupt the gut in a variety of ways. And there is a much longer list that I could point to here that we are all exposed to. So gut status is relevant for all nutrients, not just vitamin K, and you'd do well to consider if you could improve your gut health in some way. So let's talk lastly about how people who do not consume fermented foods are at risk of developing Vitamin K deficiency. As we've seen, plant foods contain the less valuable type of vitamin K; K1. For humans, the more valuable type is K2, which is made by bacteria, not plants. And as we've seen, if we have a healthy, optimally-functioning gut, some of our resident microbes will manufacture some vitamin K two for us, which we hopefully will absorb. The only problem here is that the amount of Vitamin K to produced in our gut by these resident microbes is not sufficient to meet our physiological needs. So that means we need to obtain a certain amount of Vitamin K to from our diet. As we've talked about eating animal fat is one really good way of achieving this. But another way is to eat traditionally prepared foods. And in this case, it means fermented foods are a great source of vitamin K2. So these are things like raw dairy, like yoghurt, kefir, or cheese, fermented meats, like saucisson, fermented pickles. Remember, cucumbers are fruit; much less problematic than vegetables. There are a couple of other plant based sources here we can talk about Natto, which is traditionally eaten in Japan. This is made from soybeans, this is very high in vitamin K2 and sauerkraut, which is made from cabbage. This is another plant source of vitamin K2. However, it's not the plants Remember, it's the microbes who are producing the K2, and I think these sources are less preferable for other issues, fibre, digestive enzyme inhibitors, nutrient absorption inhibitors, and many other plant defence chemicals that disrupt our gut health. So my preference is to stick with the animal foods, things like raw dairy, and then fermented meats. And as we touched on earlier, animal fat in general, contain good quantities of vitamin K2. And we don't really have any reason to eat fermented soybeans, or sauerkraut unless we really want to, which I would caution against, especially in high amounts. Anyway, let's move along and do a quick recap, almost done here for the day. So vitamin K deficiency is an emerging problem. The groups who are most at risk of deficiency include infants, vegetarians and vegans. And as we talked about this implicates most people who have been following the dietary guidelines over the past 100 years. And we're basically all eating a pseudo vegetarian diet at this point, unless you're making a point not to. People with compromised gut health are also at risk of developing a vitamin K deficiency. And then people who do not consume fermented foods are also at risk. Remember, Vitamin K2 made by bacteria, is more valuable to human physiology than K1, which is made by plants. Interestingly, something I didn't touch on earlier, I'm sorry, but the recommended daily intake of vitamin K2 is not known, because it has never been assessed. And the differences between K1 and K2 have never been considered in official nutrition guidelines. So just think about that for a second. That's why they're not so useful. Vitamin K2 is found in animal foods, meat, fat, and egg yolks. And fermented foods, like raw dairy are also an excellent source of vitamin K2. So there you have it, that is my breakdown here on vitamin K2, as part of this mini series on nutrients that we are deficient in. I hope you found some value out of that. And if you have, then please share with someone you know. And any feedback, suggestions queries, get in touch. You can check the show notes for all of those details and some references if you're interested in reading some of these papers that I've got this information from. Anyway, that's it for me today. My name is Ben, this has been the Eat Ancestral podcast and we have been talking about Vitamin K and other nutrients that we are deficient in. Take care, I'll talk with you soon.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

10 — Iron | nutrients we’re deficient in

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Episode Transcript

This is the Eat Ancestral podcast number 10. Iron deficiency is the most common micronutrient deficiency. It affects billions of people worldwide. Are you one of them? Well, you might ask, how would I even know? Here are a few common symptoms of iron deficiency. This is by no means an exhaustive list. But here are the most common ones; very pale skin, cold hands and feet, fatigue and shortness of breath, dizziness, lightheadedness, or headaches. If you're worried about your iron status after hearing that, then you might easily be able to get a blood test to verify, but you should also keep listening to learn who is most at risk, why that is the case and what foods we can eat or not eat in order to prevent iron deficiency. But first, let's learn a bit more about why iron is so important to our physiology and what are some of the consequences of iron deficiency? Okay, so iron is essential to human health. I have a quote here from a paper by Bailey et al. from 2015. Check the show notes for the references if you're interested. "Iron is a mineral that is an essential component of haemoglobin myoglobin, enzymes and cytochromes and is necessary for oxygen transport, and cellular respiration. Iron is also critical for optimal growth, and cognitive function". So iron is super important, and a deficiency will compromise our quality of life and health span in a variety of ways. Okay, so how does an iron deficiency compromise our physiology? And what are some of the outcomes here that might affect us during our lifetime? Well, the first one on my list is related to the quote that I just referenced with regards to iron being an essential component of our red blood cells. And our red blood cells are what are responsible for transporting oxygen around the body and delivering it to our tissues and organs. And so a deficiency in iron will impair this function and lead to something called anaemia, which no doubt you have heard of. This is a big problem actually in the world, so we're going to talk more about anaemia very soon. Iron deficiency also impairs our physical and cognitive development and function. Iron deficiency also impairs our immune system and our endocrine system. So if you're interested in having a robust immune system, and healthy levels of hormones, then you're going to want to pay attention to this. So what does this mean in terms of health outcomes during our lifetime? Well, some downstream effects from nutrient deficiencies like an iron deficiency include things like disability, increased susceptibility to sickness and chronic disease, decreased work capacity and earning potential and a lowering of our socioeconomic status. So these are some of the higher level problems or outcomes that we can expect, and that we see as a result of nutrient deficiencies. And at the top of the paper that I referenced earlier by Bailey et al., they had a quote here that I found quite striking, that reads "Like poverty, under nutrition and nutrient deficiencies often occur as part of an intergenerational cycle." So that's how problematic this can become. If our children are born into a life where they are nutrient deficient, or their parents suffer from sickness, disease and inability to work. And you grew up in a family with a low socioeconomic status, it can be really hard to dig yourself out of that hole. And so what is seen most of the time is that these deficiencies, and these outcomes don't just affect the individual in question, they are actually passed along through the generations. So that's something to consider there. As we talked about previously, with regards to vitamin D, which is another common nutrient deficiency, a single micronutrient deficiency will eventually snowball and lead to many significant problems. Okay, so let's talk about who is most at risk of developing an iron deficiency. I think this is important because along with tracking your symptoms and potentially getting a blood test, just knowing if you're a part of a group, who are going to be predisposed to an iron or nutrient deficiency, I think is really helpful. Because you can triangulate, and and just be aware, like what is your risk profile as with anything, I think it's very helpful. So the following groups are most at risk of iron deficiency, women, children, vegetarians and vegans, and people with compromised gut health. So just and we're going to break down the reasons why that is the case and how you might go about mitigating this risk as we get along in this episode, but I wanted to read out another quote, because I think it really is worth your time to consider just the the scale of our iron deficiency problem. So this is a quote by from a paper by Ning and Zeller from 2019 that reads "The World Health Organisation estimated worldwide prevalence of anaemia to be 42% in children 29% in non pregnant women, and 38% in pregnant women in 2011. In 2013, iron deficiency was identified as the predominant cause of anaemia among the 1.93 billion anaemic people (27% of the world's population) globally, making iron deficiency anaemia, a major global health issue." Why is nobody talking about this? This is not just a problem in poor developing countries. The irony here is that globally, we are overfed with calories been undernourished, with nutrients, because our food is so low quality, that calories are not coming along with the nutrients, people eating lots of grains and this kind of thing. And as we'll discover later on in this episode, this is not a great strategy if you're interested in getting all of your micronutrients. And the other problem is that we've given people the idea that they can just take this synthetic multivitamin, and it's going to solve that problem. And guess what; it doesn't. Nor does this other program, which they call fortification, which is basically taking a food like grains, which has, which does not contain the requisite micronutrients that we need, and adding synthetic, often poorly bioavailable sources of these nutrients to those foods, so that people can continue eating grains. Whereas a better strategy might just be to eat the foods that actually contain the nutrients we need, and then you don't have to inject them into those foods. Furthermore, and very interestingly, almost 100 years ago, in 1934, the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology was actually awarded to three doctors who discovered, or rediscovered more accurately, a cure for anaemia. And it's a type of food, a food item that until the modern era had been a central part of the human diet for millions of years. So in light of this, how is it acceptable that 40% of children and pregnant women and 30% of other women in general, are so deficient in iron that they are suffering from a preventable disease called anaemia? Again, we've known about how to cure this for almost 100 years. Why is this still a problem? Anyway, moving on, let's talk about how women and children are at risk of iron deficiency and why that is often the case. So women of reproductive age lose blood every single month, which depletes iron stores. As we talked about, iron being an integral component of our red blood cells. So a loss of blood means a loss of nutrients like iron, pregnant and nursing mothers will require more iron than usual, obviously, for themselves and their own physiological operations, but also for for that of their growing baby. So to build and nourish, their growing baby, pregnant and nursing mothers will need more nutrients than usual. Young children are often deficient in iron simply because their mother was deficient and there was a low transfer of iron across the placenta and/or via the breast milk. And children are also obviously not in control of their food choices. This comes down to parents and their school and this kind of thing. And because of the way our nutrition guidelines are set up, many parents and schools seem to think it's a good idea to to not eat meat. At least once a week, so, Meatless Monday, vegetarian meals, this kind of thing. And this will lead us on to our next section. So why is that a problem? Why are vegetarians and vegans at risk of iron deficiency? So, first of all plant foods as you know, or should know at this point, plant foods are very poorly bioavailable sources of many nutrients, and iron is no different. So all this means bioavailable is that these nutrients are not as valuable, let's say to our physiology, and the body might have to alter them to manufacture a more appropriate type of whatever nutrient it is before it can be used in normal physiological operations. And so it is no different here I have a quote by Pawlak & Bell from 2017 that reads "The most readily absorbed type of iron is heme iron, which comes from meat, poultry, and fish. Therefore, since these foods are not consumed by vegetarians, except for semi and pesco vegetarians, vegetarians consume the less absorbable non heme iron. Furthermore, plant foods contain several iron absorption inhibitors. They include phenolic compounds, oxalates, and phytates. Food especially rich in the above listed iron absorption inhibitors include grains, especially whole grains, beans and nuts, many vegetables including spinach, and parsley, but also spices and condiments, such as oregono, cinnamon, tea, coffee, red wine, and cocoa." So, we have previously discussed the importance of understanding how plants defend themselves against predation. This is by manufacturing chemicals and distributing these chemicals throughout their roots, stems, leaves and seeds. And we modern humans love to call these parts of the plant 'vegetables'. But that is not their intended purpose. And it's because of these chemical defences that many plant foods seem to easily impair our digestion, block absorption of many nutrients like iron, and effectively compromise our gut health in a variety of ways. And this is because humans don't have the anatomy to deal with high amounts of these chemicals. We are not specialist herbivores. We are omnivores. We are built, designed, perfectly suited to digesting and assimilating the nutrients from animal foods, like meat and organs. We are not built and designed to consume lots and lots of plants. So that is why vegetarians and vegans are at risk of developing an iron deficiency. And this leads us on to the next section, which is how people with compromised gut health are at risk of also developing an iron deficiency. And I didn't realise how big of a problem this was until I did the research for this episode. But gastrointestinal loss of iron, so loss of iron via the gut, is actually a major cause of iron deficiency. And one of the one of the symptoms here one of the ways you might notice that you're losing blood via your gut is in your stool. So if you're pooing blood, that is definitely not a good thing, you should look into it. And it might just be a loss of iron, or it could be something more serious, but effectively if our gut health is compromised our nutrient stores likely are too. So some gut related conditions that will negatively negatively impact our ion status include things like inflammatory bowel disease, celiac, gastric bypass, gastritis, ulcers, h pylori infection, GERD, or acid reflux. And anyone who has been treated with antibiotics, or proton pump inhibitors. And anyone who's eating processed food, there's a lot of stuff in our personal care products, in our food, in our pharmaceuticals, that is going to mess with our gut health. And the fact of the matter is that a lot of people in the modern world, especially those of us who live in urban environments, we really don't have healthy guts. And healthy just means optimally functioning. And so there's normal gut function is really important, obviously, for many things like nutrient absorption, and the microbes in our gut will also manufacture vitamins for us and neurotransmitters for us. So we should pay much more attention to our gut status. As Hippocrates said a couple of thousand years ago, all disease begins in the gut. I don't know if all disease begins in the gut, but a hell of a lot of it seems to start there. So you should learn more about your gut health and how to optimise it with diet and lifestyle measures. I'll include a couple of links in the show notes with regards to that. Okay, so let's recap what we've learned today. And then I want to share some very specific examples of the foods that we should be eating in order to prevent iron deficiency. And also I want to share the Nobel Prize winning food item that was shown almost 100 years ago, to be an effective and quick cure of anaemia. So first of all, iron deficiency affects billions of people worldwide. You should find out if you're one of them. Common symptoms of iron deficiency include very pale skin, fatigue, cold hands and feet, headaches and dizziness. In children, iron deficiency impairs normal growth and development. In adults, iron deficiency impairs physical and cognitive function leads to anaemia, impairs the immune system and disrupts normal hormone function as well. People most at risk of iron deficiency, children, women, especially pregnant and nursing mothers, vegetarians, and especially vegans, and also those of us with compromised gut health, which is more people than would like to think it is. So to prevent iron deficiency, we must eat higher quality foods that 1) are rich sources of bioavailable iron, and 2) will support our gut health. So this means eating more animal foods like beef and lamb, and less plant foods, which will actually give you more of a chance of absorbing the nutrients that these foods contain. And the Nobel Prize winning food item that cures anaemia? It's called–it's an organ meat–it's called liver, the most nutrient rich food source for humans on the planet, and you should get some liver in your life. Figure it out. I don't know what to tell you. It doesn't taste great, but it's packed full of nutrients. And I know you've eaten things like broccoli in the past because you thought they were good for you. So we don't always eat things that taste awesome. But hey, that's the trade off we make. And if you're not willing to make that trade off, then I don't know what to tell you. Anyway, that is it for me today. This has been the Eat Ancestral podcast. My name is Ben and we have been talking about iron and the nutrients that we are deficient in. Take care. I'll talk with you soon.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

9 — Sunlight & Vitamin D

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Episode Transcript

This is the Eat Ancestral podcast number nine. So I spend a lot of my time thinking about and talking about food. I think it's one of the most important things to get right, if you're wanting to live a healthy, functional life and avoid chronic disease, and a lot of preventable issues. But one of the things that we don't talk often enough about are other inputs that might be just as important as our nutrition. I think maybe nutrition has the edge, let's say, but I think these other things are also super important. And if we don't get them, then things certainly will not be optimised. One of those things is sunlight. I think it's a it's an essential input that our physiology is expecting. And I think if we don't get enough of it, then a lot of things will go wrong. People know about the vitamin D-sunlight connection, but vitamin D, even though that would be enough of a reason to get sunlight, as it's involved in pretty much all of our most critical biological functions, Vitamin D is only a fraction of the benefit of sun exposure. So today, I wanted to sit down, or I'm actually standing at my desk here, and talk about the benefits of sunlight and safe sun exposure. I grew up in Queensland, Australia, it's pretty hot there. My ancestors, recent ancestors, are from the Netherlands, and Scotland. So as you can imagine, there's a bit of a mismatch between my biology and the environment, I have red hair, and fair skin and freckles. And growing up in Australia, under the hot sun, it was a bit of a challenge, you know. We also like to spend a lot of time outside. So really, your options are quite limited; wear sun cream, like put it everywhere, even on your feet, basically. Haha. And, and then, you know, wear these big wide brimmed hats, you know, wear a rashguard when you go swimming, this kind of thing. These were our options; it was sun cream, or stay out of the sun or wear, you know, clothing that would help to protect you from the sun while you're swimming or whatever. And you know, it worked reasonably well. I don't think I got too many bad sunburns. My mum, when she was younger, had a melanoma on the back of a leg, which was a bit worrying. And so along with that, and my own experience, just not feeling very tolerant of the sun, and couple that with the public healthcare messaging, which was all about slip, slop, slap, and not not going out in the sun during the middle of the day. This all created in my mind, and I think has created for wider society, a bit of fear around sun exposure. And we think that if you are getting a tan that that's uncool and irresponsible, and if you're not wearing sun cream, and you're not covering up and you're not, you know, avoiding the sun during the middle of the day, then that you're gonna suffer in the future, you're gonna get skin cancer, you're going to have, you're going to have problems. And I just don't think it's that simple. And I don't think that messaging is very helpful. And I don't think it's very helpful because we know that sunlight is essential to many life forms. And it seems very, very important for our own physiology, for our own human biology to function optimally. And vitamin D is a good example here of the essentiality, the necessity of sunlight; it is our best source of vitamin D. And it's really hard to get enough vitamin D in our food, especially if you're not eating animal foods, animal fats, where you get these fat soluble vitamins in small amounts. But even if you are, the best place to get vitamin D is from the sun. If you're not getting sunlight, you're probably not getting adequate amounts of vitamin D, among other things. But if we don't get enough vitamin D alone, then all of our most critical functions won't happen. Vitamin D is so important. It's involved in so many different things. We think that almost every cell in our body has vitamin D receptors. And we know that it's involved in the regulation of a couple of thousand genes. Okay, so that seems pretty important. And that's just one benefit. That's one example of one benefit of sun exposure. And so I think we can say with a lot of confidence that sunlight is essential to human health, and vitality. And if we don't get enough of it, then a lot of things will go wrong. Now, on the flip side, we also know that overexposure to sunlight can result in skin burns, tissue damage, DNA damage, and possibly long term complications with things like skin cancers. So I guess where we have come to then is to realise that we can't avoid the sun completely. And we can't get too much of it. We need to find a little bit of balance; we need to find our individual tolerance and go from there. So I have a paper here from Baggarly et al., from 2015. And it's called Sunlight and Vitamin D: Necessary for Public Health. I thought they did a really good job of summarising some of the main points here and offering some interpretation. And I just wanted to go through a bit of their introduction just to give you a third party perspective. And then I will jump in and talk about some of the benefits and try and break it down and make it more digestible. So the introduction to this paper kicks off by saying; "The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer recommends avoiding outdoor activities at midday, wearing clothing to cover the whole body and daily use of sunscreen on usually exposed skin. The American Cancer Society advocates Slip Slop, Slap and Wrap, to make sure skin is covered in clothing or sunscreen and to avoid exposure to the sun between 10am and 4pm. The US Surgeon General has issued a call to action focused on reducing ultraviolet exposure, whether from indoor UV or from the sun. Though these recommendations all focused on reduction of skin cancer are accompanied by brief acknowledgement of the importance of vitamin D for health, they persist in urging avoidance of the sun at the precise times when vitamin D can be synthesised in the skin, the hours between 10am and 3pm, and suggest that all necessary vitamin D can be obtained through food and dietary supplements." So that's interesting. So we're all focused on reducing skin cancer. As we can agree that is a good objective to have. However, in doing so, we have created a situation where we recommended that people avoid the sun during the precise hours where the body is able to leverage sunlight to manufacture vitamin D, which is involved in many important physiological processes. They're also suggesting by doing so that all necessary vitamin D can be obtained through food and dietary supplements. Listen, anyone who's telling you that you need supplements in order to get adequate nutrients.... unless those supplements are food, like organ supplements, then they're probably full of shit, I think you should be able to get pretty much all your nutrients from food. One major exception here is vitamin D, because our best source of vitamin D is not our food. You can find small amounts of it in animal foods, and it might help you get through the winter. But at the end of the day, our best source of vitamin D is from sunlight. So if we're not getting sunlight, we're not getting it during the hours, in which our body can actually synthesise vitamin D from it, then we're gonna run into problems. And these recommendations therefore, are a bit out of whack. They're a bit myopic. We're focusing on one thing and saying that, in order to prevent skin cancer, we should avoid the sun especially during these hours. But then when you pick that apart a little bit more you realise that, oh, okay, so if we avoid the sun during the middle of the day, we're definitely not getting enough vitamin D. And then we're going to have all these other problems. So it kind of makes sense, but it's a bit short sighted. So back to the paper here. "These recommendations are understandable from the viewpoint of preventing the 3.5 million new cases of and 2000 deaths from nonmelanoma skin cancer in the United States each year. But they neglect the fact that we have a long cultural history of appreciation of the sun, and use of UV radiation for healing purposes. Moreover, they neglect that we have evolved with physiological adaptations to help protect the skin from the sun when we are mindful of exposure and do not burn. They neglect the fact that increased sun exposure based on latitude has been associated with protection from several different types of cancer, Type 1 diabetes, multiple sclerosis, and other diseases. They also neglect the fact that exposure to the sun induces beneficial physiological changes beyond the production of vitamin D." So we know that vitamin D is critical to our most critical biological functions, if we don't get enough vitamin D, our gut health, our reproductive health, our metabolic health, our musculoskeletal health, our neurological health, our immune function, none of it will work as it should. And that is just a fraction of the benefit of sunlight. So I think, as I pointed out here, we've been a little myopic, in suggesting that we should avoid the sun, especially during those times. And that there's more here, there's more to this story than meets the eye. So let's stick with the vitamin D theme for just a little longer. I think it's really interesting to almost use vitamin D as a gauge for how much sunlight we might consider appropriate for our biology. And a bit further down in this paper, the authors are doing a bit of a cost-benefit analysis here. And they say that of the 30 leading causes of death in the United States in 2010, 19 were linked to low vitamin D status, including various forms of cardiovascular disease, various cancers, diabetes mellitus (that's Type 2 diabetes), Alzheimer's disease, and then falls and fractures in the elderly. And they said, if we were able to get vitamin D levels above a certain point, we would see massive reductions in deaths and massive savings in health care costs. And that raising vitamin D levels alone would be one of the most efficient and most cost effective ways of reducing the burden of disease across a wide range of diseases, and for increasing life expectancy, as well. And that a lot of the reason for this widespread vitamin D deficiency are these messages that we're receiving from the from the health authorities who are promoting avoidance of sun exposure and covering the skin with clothing and sunscreen, etc. The authors go on to talk about vitamin D and how how important it is for optimal health. And I thought this would be worth reading out because it does encapsulate a lot of these ideas with regards to vitamin D and why would be so important so foundational to human health and well being. And so I'm gonna read this section out from the paper. It says "In common with many other micronutrients, Vitamin D is a necessary but not sufficient factor for key cell biologic processes. That is, it is an enabler, it must be present for those processes to occur, but it does not itself stimulate or cause them. In brief, low vitamin D status does not so much cause disease or dysfunction, as it impairs cellular response to both internal and external signals. It is now recognised that essentially every tissue and cell in the body has vitamin D receptors. Furthermore, most cells also have the capability of converting 25 hydroxy vitamin D to its active form 1,25 dihydroxy vitamin D, and most of our daily vitamin D consumption occurs in this way. This conversion in the cell allows for allows each tissue to use vitamin D added as it is needed. It also follows that in the absence of vitamin D, none of our bodily systems can work at their optimal potential. Thus, it becomes clear that low vitamin D status would inevitably be involved in In a wide range of dysfunctions and diseases." So the next thing that the researchers go on to discuss is the issue of how much vitamin D is necessary for optimal health. And something they point out here, which I thought was quite interesting was that we need to consider our desired end-points. Because if our goal is just to avoid known diseases like tuberculosis and rickets, then we might undershoot the amount of vitamin D that is optimal. I don't know about you, but I am not interested in just getting by in life. I don't want to be anywhere near rickets. I don't want my immune system to be compromised. I want to optimise everything. So these researchers are speaking my language. Two of the ways that they are approximating optimal vitamin D status in humans is firstly by looking at two African tribes, the Maasai, and then the Hadza, who live in East Africa, where humans are thought to have originated and have daily sun exposure approximating that of early humans. And what they found is that these groups have an average 25 seram, 25 hydroxy vitamin D status of 46 ng/mL, If you're not living in America, this means 112 nmol/L. And I think that's really helpful because that can indicate to us how much on a daily basis we might need to be getting in order to gain that long term vitamin D status. And later on in the paper, the second way they've sort of tried to approximate the optimal level of vitamin D levels of vitamin D for humans, is by looking at pregnancy and childhood and growth and development. And what they are suggesting is that humans need about 6000 IU's of vitamin D per day, for normal physiologic functions, and pregnant mothers, nursing mothers might need a bit more, because if the mother doesn't have enough vitamin D herself, then it might not be passed on in adequate amounts to the foetus or to the child through breast milk. So these quite quite important parts of life. And we know that nutrient deficiencies during these critical times of growth and development, result in a wide range of a wide range of dysfunction, and diseases. And so I think this is a pretty interesting way of figuring this out. Because if you get roughly 6000 IU's of vitamin D per day, eventually, over the long term, if you put in the work day after day and get your daily sun exposure, then you will end up with a vitamin D concentration, which is on par with, or something similar to, these groups of humans who are approximating the lifestyle and sun exposure of our early human ancestors. So I think that's an interesting way of figuring out how much vitamin D might be necessary / might be optimal for humans. And that's what I'm personally shooting for, is somewhere in between 100 to 120 nmol/L, which is, you know, 40 to 50 ng/mL in the American lingo. And yeah, that roughly boils down to, I don't know, 4 or 5 or 6000 IU's of vitamin D per day, which I think makes it quite practical for us, because at the end of the day, it's not that long to be outside in the sun. You know, it could be, depending on your skin type, it could be 30 minutes, could be 45, 60 minutes. And, again, that makes it very practical for us in terms of our daily behaviours, and I think that's pretty easily obtainable for most people. Okay, so the benefits of sunlight obviously extend far beyond that of just vitamin D. And I wanted to go through a few examples of those now. So the first thing to understand is a little bit about sunlight. And you might find the graphic, the visual guide that I've put together, helpful here. And if you go to the show notes, you can hit a link, that'll take you straight to it. But basically, sunlight is composed of multiple wavelengths of light, it is not one entity. Now, these wavelengths as a group, we call the spectrum of solar radiation. And it starts with ultraviolet light wavelengths on the left, all the way over to infrared on the right. Only some of these wavelengths are visible to human eyes. So we can't actually see ultraviolet, like bees can, for example, and we can't see infrared either, but we can see the blue, the green and the reds in the middle. And it's interesting to note this because each of these wavelengths has unique effects on our physiology, so they don't all do the same things. And even though we can't see them, that doesn't mean it's not happening. So what are some of these physiological responses? First of all, UVA exposure triggers the release of nitric oxide, which triggers vasodilation, which improves blood flow and significantly lowers our blood pressure. So this is really important. Blood flow, the dilation of our blood vessels and the lowering of our blood pressure. High blood pressure, hypertension, is one of the biggest risk factors for cardiovascular disease specifically, but it's also involved in a lot of other dysfunction. And it's one of our biggest issues in the modern world is high blood pressure, especially in young males. So UVA also triggers melanin production, which is an increase in skin pigmentation. This is the tan that I was referencing earlier. And it also triggers the thickening of our skin. So it causes thickening of the stratum corneum, which is the outermost layer of our skin. So this increased skin thickness, and melanin, is this type of built in sun protection. And this response protects our skin from burning, and protects our deeper tissues from DNA damage. So that's quite cool. And yeah, the body has ways of protecting itself, we just need to know about them and to sort of encourage that to happen in a safe manner. Okay, so moving on from UVA, up next up we have UVB. And UVB is what actually is triggering vitamin D synthesis in our skin. And by the way, Vitamin D is more like a steroid hormone than a vitamin. And as you know, most of us are deficient in it. And this has system wide implications, right... gut health and immune function, brain health, bone health, our muscle health, reproductive health, it is critical. And so we all need to be making sure we get enough of that. I think this is a good moment to introduce the idea you might be already aware of this, that UVB is not available year round. So in the winter, depending on where you live, you might not be getting exposed to UVB. So you need to be aware of this and perhaps lean more on your dietary sources of vitamin D, or potentially even some supplements during that time of year. So for example, if you live in Northern Europe or North America, there's a period of time for about three months of the year through the winter, where UVB will not be in the atmosphere, meaning that you will not be able to synthesise vitamin D during those times. Another effect of UVB exposure is the triggering of beta-endorphin release, which is an opioid peptide that promotes relaxation, feelings of well being and helps out with our immune function as well. Moving on from the ultraviolet wavelengths. Next up we have blue light, which helps to regulate our melatonin production. And this is sensed through the photoreceptors in our eyes. So light signals received through the eyes helped to regulate melatonin production. And melatonin plays a key role in our circadian rhythms, which are our internal body clocks, and this has a lot of implications for things like sleep quality, recovery from exercise, hormone balance, immune function. Melatonin is colloquially known as, or popularly known as the sleep hormone. But it does a lot more than that. But one of the most important things we can do with regards to melatonin, and blue light is to get outside in the morning as early as possible after waking up and get some light in our eyes. Don't wear sunnies as soon as you walk out the door, otherwise, you won't be getting this signalling. And I, I forget who it was, but years and years ago, I remember one of my mentors said something about how a good night's sleep starts in the morning. And if you do this, and you get outside, and you get exposed to light, early in the morning, especially in the eyes and on the skin, this will really help you out with your sleep quality and a bunch of other things as well. So moving on from blue light, we're moving into the red and infrared part of the spectrum now. So red and infrared wavelengths had been found to relieve pain, reduce inflammation, and to promote wound healing. That is also very fascinating. You might have seen these red light devices that are on the market these days, these devices are leveraging these particular wavelengths, these red, these deep red and infrared way wavelengths. And there's a lot of impressive research behind this. But basically, you can get these effects from the sun, you do not need these fancy devices. But they can be used specifically in very interesting and helpful ways. So a couple of last minute ones here, sunlight triggers serotonin production, helps with our mood, and psychological health, and also is involved in the production of melatonin, as well. And last one here, sunlight enhances our energy production via the mitochondria. So some of these wavelengths can actually penetrate down into our deeper tissues and interact with our mitochondria, and enable our mitochondria to produce more ATP than they otherwise would have. So ATP is the energy currency of the body. And who'd have thought, sunlight helps you enhance ATP production. So I guess there are many more examples we could look at. And I bet there's a bunch more that we don't even know about yet. But I think at this point, the question is, what else do you need to know? Like sunlight is clearly essential for humans, in many ways is clearly very beneficial. I think that's why it feels so damn good to get out in the sunlight. Obviously, our job now is just to get the right amount. And so we must be careful, like with many things in life not to over indulge, we need to remember that excess sun exposure can cause skin skin burns, lead to tissue damage, DNA damage, and potentially skin cancer. So we obviously need to be mindful of our individual tolerance, and to practice safe or non burning sun exposure. And if you want to try and optimise your sun exposure, or you're typically someone who has spent a lot of time indoors and you have a lighter complexion than you, you're going to want to ease your way into it. Too much too soon, is a recipe for a sunburn. But you should be confident knowing that over time with intentional strategic exposure to sunlight, your body will adapt in many different ways, and it will benefit in many different ways. And I think the early morning sun is a great opportunity. It's much less intense than during the middle of the day. The evening sunlight is also similar in that way. But just remember the best time to get vitamin D from the UVB is during the middle of the day. So we should probably be getting a bit of both. Okay to wrap things up, I wanted to go back to the paper very briefly and read out their conclusion, or part of their conclusion here. They say; "The full solar spectrum is essential to optimal health and well being. Humans are physiologically adapted to produce vitamin D in response to sun exposure, specifically, UVB radiation, other regions of the spectrum seem to confer benefit as well. Though some vitamin D comes from our diet, and more recently from supplements, we should not ignore the natural capacity that we possess to produce our own. We are of the opinion that moderate sun exposure (less than the time required to burn, to the arms, shoulders, trunk, and legs) should be sought rather than avoided. Once that limited time has been achieved, se agree that covering the skin or seeking shade may be appropriate. The benefits of such exposure go beyond production of vitamin D, and include other physiological responses to sunlight still inadequately explored, including the release of nitric oxide, production of beta endorphin and regulation of circadian rhythms, all important components of lifelong health and wellbeing. The current policy of sun avoidance is creating probable harm for the general population." Okay, well there you have it. I hope you have found that valuable. Please let me know. if you have any suggestions, or feedback, I’d be happy to hear from you. If you would like to get in touch, if you want to work together, if you need some support, you can check out my Services page on my website, or just shoot me an email. There’ll be links in the show notes for those. Anyway, that’s enough for me today. My name is Ben, this has been the Eat Ancestral podcast, and we have been talking about sunlight. Take care, i’ll talk with you soon.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

8 — Plant Foods; Friend or Foe

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Episode Transcript

This is the Eat Ancestral Podcast, number eight. "Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better."  – Albert Einstein A lot of people, these days, seems like a majority, depending on where you live, seem to think or at least sympathetic with this idea that we all need to significantly reduce our meat and animal food consumption. And that we should basically replace all of that with more plants. And fungi too, but they don't usually get a mention. They are normally lumped in with the vegetables of the world. But anyway, the less animal foods you eat, and the more plants and mushroom vegetables that you eat, the better off you'll be. Better for you, better for me, better for the planet, better for your karma. Sounds like a win-win for everyone, and everything involved. Well, as we talked about in Episode Two, we know that the nutritional claim has no basis. In fact, humans have been eating animal foods, animal meat, fat, organs, and blood, for well over 2 million years. We evolved into humans because of them. That's not going to end well for the koala, because it has a dependency on that food source. It's a biological imperative that it gets that food. And in humans, we see that if we take animal foods out of the diet, our health tends to decline. We develop nutrient deficiencies, which leads to big problems; gut issues, fertility issues, the most common. And this should be a big red flag, especially reproduction. Making babies is one of our primary functions. And if we can't do that, or if we don't care about that, and we don't care about the quality of our offspring, then we've completely lost the plot. But anyway, not only is this plant based agenda being painted as a more nutritious way to eat, it's also apparently the only sustainable and ethical way to feed yourself. We'll be unpacking the sustainability topic soon. I have a lot to share on that. But for today, let's just put it aside. Today I wanted to talk mainly about something that is quite relevant in a nutritional sense, but also has a lot to teach us on the ethical front. And all of this seems to be stuck in the, in the minds of the collective. First there was said that meat encouraged masturbation, which is obviously a bad thing. Then it was said to cause violence. Then it became all about health and longevity. Then it became about how cows and meat eaters have almost single handedly created a climate disaster. And now apparently people think that we've evolved past this kind of beastial behaviour anyway. So oat milk, kale and fake soy meat burgers are apparently your future. What people don't know is that these ideas that have percolated through society in the last few decades, are not actually grounded in science. They're built on a foundation of religious ideals, and an overreliance on epidemiology. Both of which are obviously problematic when you're trying to be objective. ideology is not science and association does not equal causation. The history of our nutrition guidelines is actually a pretty interesting tale. And I will be putting something together on that in the future. But anyway, not only do animal foods have this bad reputation to deal with, plant foods are supposedly all good. Nothing but nutrients. They make the oxygen we breathe, they feed us, they keep us healthy. And they obviously don't mind that we use them as medicine. Or that we rely on them as food. They're our friends. They're on our side, right? Well, is this true? Again. It's funny, I never even considered this until I was in my mid 20s. I always considered vegetables, and other plant foods as de facto healthy. But the things I've learned in the last few years have really made me reconsider these beliefs that society had given me, programmed into me. And it's completely changed the way that I structure my diet, and completely change the way I feel and how healthy I am. And when I sat down to think about this topic, and how to approach it, I think that the thing that made me shift my perspective on this, most of all, was stepping outside of my human centric worldview, and considering all of this from the perspective of a plant. Considering a plant's eye view of the world. And I know that might sound a bit odd. But please bear with me, I have something of a thought experiment to share. And I think it's a part of the story that is ultimately really important to our understanding of the nutritional and ethical ramifications of our food choices. And it can also help us understand our place as humans as animals within our ecosystem, something that is, especially in the urban environments, lacking. Anyway, enough of a preamble, let's jump in and talk about this thought experiment. So we're going to try and empathise with a plant. So do what you need to do to get comfy, maybe close your eyes. And just try and visualise this or put yourself in in the position of a plant. So pretend as though you're a plant, whatever that means. You're sitting there or standing, whatever the right verb is for what they do, you're in a forest or a garden, you can pick the landscape. And let's say that you've been a plant for a few years by now, so you're pretty good at it. And anyway, so imagine you're there just minding your own plant business. You've got your roots deep in the ground, looking for water and nutrients. Your leaves are capturing the sunlight, which with the help of C02, you can turn into plant food. And you've got some pretty flowers blooming from the ends of your green branches that you're hoping some bee might be attracted to. If you're a fruit tree, you might have some fruit just starting to ripen. This fruit contains seeds, your plant babies. Obviously, you also as a plant, want a nice big family of plants. And so that's what the seeds are therefore to further your species lineage. As is the goal with all organisms. Anyway, all is well in plant world, until one day, some loud, lumbering herbivore comes along and they start eating you; pretty flowers, your green leaves, your fruit, everything it can. Well, let's run through some options. You can't scream, or pull your roots up and run away like some and from Lord of the Rings. You can clobber the animal over the head with a good combination, like that tree from Harry Potter. So what can you do? Are you simply defenceless, doomed to be eaten without consequence? Again, I realise this might sound a bit silly but hang in there. For me this was a bit of a revelation. Maybe you've thought about this before, I don't know. But this is definitely not something that's usually considered in the world of nutrition or in these edgy, progressive conversations about the ethical and moral complications of our food choices. I think it'd be helpful to actually take a step back for a second and look at some history. Look at the co-evolution between plants and animals on planet Earth. And just FYI, some of these ideas relevant to fungi as well, which predate both plants and animals. But today, we're just going to speak to co-evolution of plants and animals specifically. So animals and plants have been coexisting on our planet Earth for hundreds of millions of years. About 800 million years in total, or about 500 million years since we came out of the oceans onto dry land. Obviously, the size of those numbers are too large for us to even contemplate. But it's obviously an extremely lengthy period of time. Anyway, at some point, long ago, animals started treating plants as food. And at first the plants were relatively defenceless, but it did not stay that way. So let's take a look at what happened. I have a paper here called Animal-Plant Warfare and Secondary Metabolite Evolution. And I thought reading an abstract, or some of the abstract and some of the conclusion could be quite helpful. So it says quote; "In recent years, the concept of an animal-plant warfare emerged, which focused on the co-evolution between plants and herbivores. As a reaction to herbivory, plants developed mechanical defences, such as thorns and hard shells, which paved the way for adaptive animal physiques. Plants evolved further defence systems by producing chemicals that exert toxic effects on the animals that ingest them. As a result of this selective pressure, animals developed special enzymes, eg. Cytochrome P450 monooxygenases (CYP 450), that metabolise xenobiotic phytochemicals. As a next step in the evolutionary competition between plants and animals, plants evolved to produce non toxic pro drugs, which become toxic only after ingestion by animals through metabolization by enzymes such as CYP450. Because these sequestered evolutionary developments call to mind an arms race, the term animal-plant warfare has been coined. The co-evolutionary adaptation process among higher organisms, termed animal-plant warfare has resulted in a huge array of bioactive chemical compounds in plants. Because the primary function of these phytochemicals is defence against predators, it comes as no surprise that many of them are toxic to humans.". Plants then evolved further defence systems. They gained the ability to defend themselves by producing chemicals that they embedded in their tissues; in their roots, in their leaves, in their stems, and especially in their seeds, their plant babies. Just to make this more relevant to us humans, a small handful of red, or dry kidney beans, sorry, will put you in the hospital, or potentially even kill you. So that's how serious this is. So where animals have immune systems and can defend themselves with their physicality–with their horns or teeth, or by running away–plants don't have immune systems, and they have limited mobility. Remember, you're rooted to the spot. So they had to figure out something else. And they evolved several ways of defending themselves chemically, by manufacturing toxic compounds and embedding these in their tissues.This is something like their immune system. And so this is where it gets really interesting. Once the plants realised that animals have evolved ways of detoxifying their defence chemicals, the plants mounted yet another attack. They produced chemicals that would only become toxic after passing through an animal's detoxification systems. That is mind-blowing. That is a Trojan horse. So all these plants, they might not scream or cry when we eat them, they don't make pottery, they don't write poetry, but clearly, they're not as stupid as they have been made out to be. It seems like plants, not humans, the true masters of biochemistry. Because tens of thousands of these plant defence chemicals have been discovered at this point, and they clearly help plants defend themselves against fungi, insects and animal predators. And here's the thing. Apparently, we modern humans, with our predilection for plant based diets, consume a lot of these plant pesticides in our vegetables, grains, seeds, nuts, beans, legumes... all of these foods contain plant pesticides. Now some of these plant pesticides might be relatively harmless to humans. Like herbs in small amounts, which contain chemicals that for an insect might mean acute neurotoxicity or death. But for us, the risk is much lower, again, depending on how much we eat, and perhaps with the trade off, because it makes our food taste better. And you know, what's funny is that for years, I thought that by buying the expensive organic produce, that I was avoiding pesticides. But apparently pound-for- pound when compared to the consumption of synthetic pesticide residues, which are sprayed on and found on all conventional crops, natural plant pesticides actually account for 99% of all of the pesticides that we modern humans ingest. 99%. That's saying something because there's a hell of a lot of synthetic pesticides on our food, and in in our food. And I imagine the synthetic pesticides are much worse for humans. more potent pound for pound, but still, the point is that all of the plant foods in the supermarket, all of the plant foods at the farmers market, it's packed with plant defence chemicals. It's packed with pesticides that the plant itself made. So we've established that plants contain toxic chemicals that are designed to ward off animal predation. These chemicals are potent and can exert seriously harmful effects in humans. And if we choose to eat plants, it is a choice, we will rely on our detoxification systems and organs like the liver and the kidney and these CYP450 enzymes, to detoxify these compounds to neutralise them, and to escort them from the body as soon as possible. Just like how when we drink alcohol, or when we walk down a busy street and inhale a load of secondhand cigarette smoke or car engine fumes, a similar set of these detoxification processes are turned on. Our bodies really want to get rid of all of that as soon as possible. So plant foods thus exist on a toxicity spectrum. And most plants are inedible, completely inedible to humans, because they are very, very high on this toxicity spectrum. Just think about going for a walk in the park or the forest. We don't look at the grass or any old tree, or mushroom for that matter that we come across as food. We know deep down, it's not human food. Other animals might be able to eat it, but we do not. Our anatomy is not specialised towards plant eating. And while the plants that humans have cultivated, domesticated, these, these plant foods at the supermarket, while they tend to be a bit lower on this toxicity spectrum, they still contain lots of these defence chemicals. Again, we see the nutrition does not boil down to calories and macros. It goes much deeper than that. And when it comes to eating plants, there's clearly a risk- reward calculation to make. More plant foods is definitely not better, it doesn't mean you're going to be healthier. Actually, this point seems pretty clear that the opposite is more true. And if you're eating plants seeds, beans, legumes, you're literally eating a plant's baby. Besides, if we all exclusively ate plants, we would quickly develop nutrient deficiencies that have serious consequences. It poses a massive risk to our own health. It burdens our public health care systems and risks the health of our future generations. Just like taking those leaves away from the koala, it's inviting our own extinction. So this brings us to a discussion around tolerance. Humans are omnivores, we can theoretically tolerate a certain amount of these defence chemicals. But again, we're not specialist plant eaters. So we need to be careful. Humans have a physiological limitation at the species level. And then we need to consider our individual tolerance, which has a lot to do with our current state of health, and our ancestry. So in particular; gut health and immune function, and effectively the total amount of stress or stress load, allostatic load, that we are placing on our organs, like our liver and kidney, to clean up all of these environmental toxins. Things like coffee, chocolate, alcohol, environmental pollutants, like plastics and heavy metals, and all sorts of other chemicals. This all burdens our detoxification systems. And just like a kitchen sink, that is filling up with water faster than it can drain away, a backlog of problems in the body is going to create a compounding series of future problems. And I can't count the amount of people I've met in the last few years who are dealing with some kind of issue, usually gut-related, who reach out for help. But then, upon hearing the proposed solution, basically refuse to stop eating their favourite plant foods, even just temporarily. They just can't let go of the idea that the plants could ever be the problem and that they aren't as healthy as they've always been told, or that you might possibly eat them in excess. And it's sad because I'm trying to help and their chronic issues will never be resolved. They'll only get worse. Until it hurts so much, that you're actually willing to shelve your beliefs, to be a bit more open-minded and engage in some scientific thinking, it's not going to go away. Being told to avoid your vegetables literally makes no sense if you've been diligently following the mainstream nutrition advice for the last several decades. But there it is, waiting for those who are desperate enough to try. I think it was Carl Jung who once said, "What you most want to find, will be found in the place you least want to look". I don't know if that rings true for you, but for me, it certainly does. And it's not just the peanut allergy sufferers and the coeliacs who need to care about this. This certainly affects all of us. And I wanted to go into a few details about what some of these plant chemicals are called and what they can do in humans. So let's get into that now. Basically, a high level introduction here is that these defence chemicals, these plant pesticides, can cause gastrointestinal distress, they can impair our digestion, and compromise our ability to absorb nutrients from our foods. So let's start with inhibiting digestion. Not to get too deep into biochemistry, but basically humans break down food with the help of enzymes. So we have an amylase enzyme for carbohydrates, a lipase enzyme for fats, proteases, for proteins, etc. And so, just like it sounds, these enzyme inhibitors inhibit normal digestive processes. If the food can't be broken down, the nutrients won't be absorbed. And you're not going to be getting the nutrition from your food. It will just be sent out the other end. Moving on, some of these compounds can prevent absorption of nutrients. So even when they are broken down, we struggled to absorb them. Why is that? Well, some plant compounds bind to minerals or chelate to minerals, which inhibits their absorption. These are things like phytic acid in grains, like oats. Oxalates, in spinach, tumeric, and almonds. And both of these, phytic acid and oxalates, can bind to minerals like zinc, and magnesium and phosphorus and selenium and calcium, which ultimately significantly decreases the amount of these nutrients that your body will be able to absorb. So we call this rickets, or osteopenia, osteoporosis. So something to consider; what we pair our foods with. Oxalates also problematic in other ways. They seem to be able to lodge themselves in our tissues like our joints, bones, our skin, and our thyroid and breast tissues. Excess oxalates are also implicated in the formation of kidney stones and kidney disease, especially in people who have a condition called  oxalosis, or hyperoxaluria, which is characterised by having an excess of oxalates in your urine. So humans, unlike plants ,have no physiological use for oxalates. They're a waste product. And the body can only get rid of so much of this stuff every day. So a green kale smoothie like I used to drink back in the day thinking I was being healthy, might contain 10 times the amount of this ,these oxalates ,that my body can feasibly excrete in any given day. Remember, whether it's alcohol, heavy metals, or oxalates, a backlog of these problems to deal with, for your kidneys and your liver and other organ systems to detoxify and get rid of, this is not a good thing. Anyway, enough about oxalates. Moving along, some compounds can cause leaky gut, otherwise known as intestinal permeability. This is a big, big problem. Some compounds like lectins and gluten, you might have heard of, trick our gut lining into opening up. And this is not supposed to happen. This allows undigested food particles, bacteria, potentially viruses, through the gut wall and into the body. Again, this is not supposed to happen, it creates an inflammatory response, and effectively an overactive immune system. And if you don't stop supplying the problem, then you could have a chronic, chronically overactive immune system. The good news is that when we remove these foods, things tend to settle down, the body can actually repair itself in a lot of ways. We just need to stop supplying the problem. And conversely, supply the nutrients that we need; the building blocks of our tissues and hormones and growth factors and endogenous antioxidants, which means animal foods. Last section here, these plant defence chemicals can contribute to endocrine issues. So there are compounds in legumes, for example, and the brassica family of vegetables, which interfere with thyroid function. Compounds from beans, like soybeans, contain xenoestrogens, which interfere with reproductive hormone balance. Maybe this is why babies don't like eating broccoli. They haven't yet been brainwashed into believing the hype. They're just following their instincts. Anyway, the point is the plants have a lot of ways to discourage us from eating them and to cause us issues, yet we persist, we continue to think that great. Well, not me not anymore, and hopefully not you either, after hearing all of that. Just to recap, these plant pesticides can inhibit normal digestion, impair nutrient absorption cause gastrointestinal distress, cause leaky gut, creating inflammation and dysregulating our immune system, can overload our detoxification capacity and accumulate in our tissues and contribute to the formation of kidney stones and other issues. And they can even interfere with thyroid function and reproductive hormone function. I do think that some plant foods must have, do have, redeeming qualities. And let me tell you that in my experience, a carnivore diet can get a little boring. Especially with all the options we have these days, especially if you want to be social And life is too short to miss out on all plant foods. Plus, I've played around with long term low carb/keto diets and at the end of the day, while they are very beneficial and even therapeutic in a lot of ways, I think there is some benefit in eating some whole food carbohydrates, like maybe some seasonal fruit, or honey. And this is why, as I tried to outline in Episode Two, First Principles of Human Nutrition, I think that we should consider eating plants and fungi for variety and pleasure. Not because they're especially nutritious, or because it's more ethical or sustainable, just because we want to indulge our senses. And the good news is that I think we can actually eliminate a lot of the risk if we are smart about it. So this means choosing our plant foods carefully, not over indulging in them, and learning about traditional methods of food preparation that help to render these foods safer to eat, and more nutritious. Fruit being the only, the only part of the plant that the plant actually wants an animal to eat, as long as it's properly ripe. And we're careful not to eat the seeds, and perhaps even the skin. Basically, what tools do we have to mitigate these plant toxins? And as it turns out, food preparation has a significant impact here. And if people are interested, I might put together a deeper look into all of that in the future. But effectively, this means learning about cooking and soaking and fermentation. It means removing the skin and the seeds. These are some of the basic things we can do. Even though we take things like cooking totally for granted these days, it was at one point in time, a major technological invention. And it can really help us out in a lot of ways when it comes to plant foods. The problem is that all of these methods combined don't completely eliminate the risks. There's no free lunch. And this is especially true for those of us who are actually dealing with gut and autoimmune conditions. And again, just like a lot of people are nutrient deficient without knowing it, it would be safer to assume that you have some degree of gut dysfunction, gut dysbiosis, going on. You might not have an autoimmune disease. But don't assume that you're so robust, and healthy that you can ignore all of this. If you want a visual representation of how I think about all of this, how I structure my diet, and that of my clients, you can download my version of the food pyramid. In its current form, there will probably be some future changes. But overall, I don't think much will change. And I've tried to rank foods by tolerance, digestibility and preparation time, or the amount of preparation methods you would need to employ to make it worth, to make the juice worth the squeeze. Okay, so that's it for me today. I hope you've found some value in that. Please let me know if you have any advice or feedback or you need coaching or support. There will be a link in the show notes that will take you to my website, you can get in touch with me there. If you'd like to support the show, I don't have any sponsors. I don't have any social media. I think there's too much censorship going on on those platforms these days. And that ultimately, it's just as poisonous as some of these plant chemicals. And alternatively, you can buy me a coffee. There'll be a link in the show notes. Please don't buy too many–coffee has plant chemicals too. Anyway, that's enough for me today. Thank you very much for listening. And thank you to all farmers and food producers out there, doing things the hard way, the right way. Looking after the animals, looking after the environment, putting nutrients back into the soil, and ultimately feeding the rest of us, giving us the freedom to live our lives without going hungry or needing to go hunting or foraging ourselves. I think we take that for granted. But just want to say thanks. Anyway, that's enough for me today. My name is Ben. This has been the Eat Ancestral podcast and we have been talking about whether plants are our friends or our foes. But I do think this gives us a deeper understanding. And as it turns out, plants do have ways of defending themselves, and they're more capable than we give them credit for. Plants don't seem like they want to be eaten. So we need to be careful not to exceed our current capacity to deal with these things. We need to figure out our tolerance. Otherwise, regardless of how good our intentions are, this might ultimately cause a lot of harm. And I think this is highly relevant given how common nutrient deficiencies are in the modern world. I think at this point, it's a good assumption to make that you yourself are deficient in a variety of things. You're not bulletproof. You need micronutrients. And apparently, in the modern world, we're definitely not getting enough of them. So what's interesting here as well, is that while the nutritional label that comes along with some foods might indicate, you know, X amount of whatever mineral is in this food, if it comes from a plant, or you're pairing animal foods with plant foods, you're probably not absorbing all of that. And so if you're counting on getting those micronutrients, and you're adding them up, and you're thinking, wow, I got so much of this mineral, that's great. Well, again, you're probably not absorbing all of it. And just to point out, we don't have these problems with animal foods. And I'm not trying to bash plants or tell you to never eat them again. It just seems like most people aren't aware of this. We're too busy counting calories, macros and talking about all its supposed health benefits of our favourite plant superfoods. So I'm just trying to balance out the scale here. You can find that in the show notes. I'll put a link in there. Take care. I'll talk with you soon. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

7 — Progessive Decline of Modern Civilisation | Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

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Episode Transcript

This is the Eat Ancestral Podcast number 7.  "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society". –Jiddu Krisnamurti. If you were born in the latter half of the 20th century, or the beginning of the 21st, you have grown up in a world where chronic disease and ill-health is a very normal and well accepted part of life. Growing up in this environment has skewed our perspective of what health even means, or might look like. We are surrounded by people suffering from various conditions. Obesity, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, osteoporosis, arthritis, neurological diseases, autoimmune diseases, gastrointestinal diseases, kidney disease, liver disease... At this point, the list is effectively endless, and I could literally go on for hours. Most of us try not to pay much attention to this kind of thing. That there's nothing to really be done about it. And that at the end of the day, it's someone else's problem anyway. But this is our reality. And we seem to be struggling to find good solutions. Despite the fact that we have cutting edge medical technologies, and powerful pharmaceuticals, specialists for every disease and each part of the human body. We are studying diseases harder than ever, throwing money at the problem, thinking eventually that will fix it. Apparently, we even think it's okay to guilt people into into donating money to charities. Because one day, the posters say, you're going to need us. The language we use is akin to warfare. For cancer, for example, we say we are 'fighting' against it. And that one day, we will eliminate it for good. We will 'conquer' cancer. I'm not so sure about that. Unless our strategy changes, it seems like most of our efforts will be in vain, like they are today. My uncle died from cancer. Our last minute therapies didn't do shit. Except maybe just to give the family a false sense of hope. It was too late. That's the thing. Despite our technological prowess, the majority of us will suffer from at least one of these debilitating conditions in our lifetime. And many of us will die from the complications that arise from dealing with multiple conditions at the same time, what's called comorbidities. Our family and friends will be forced to watch all of this. And one day, it'll be their turn, unless we do something about it. I don't mean to sound so negative. I'm actually quite optimistic about the future. But for now, this is our reality. It's life in the modern world. There is no point trying to sugarcoat it. And it serves nobody to stick our heads in the sand, or stuff our fingers in our ears. If we can't talk about these things, we'll never identify the problem. And if we don't manage to define the problem, we'll never come up with solutions.  From my perspective, the questions very few people seem to be asking, firstly, should we accept this disease-filled reality as normal? And secondly, has it always been this way for human beings? These might seem like odd questions. Surely the people at the top of the medical establishments are on top of things, and have asked these questions. Surely we're doing much better than at early human ancestors, right? A common thing to do is the point at our life expectancy. And to say we're living older than any humans in recorded history, which is true. Our advancements in Western medicine have also saved countless generations of people from nasty infectious diseases. Many others have benefited from life-saving, emergency-room operations. And I think these are quite good points for the most part. We've certainly come a long way from the days of the Black Plague. And our surgical expertise is certainly not to be scoffed at. But here's where our successes kind of end, and things begin to unravel. See, modern humans do certainly enjoy a long life expectancy, relative to other humans who lived in the past couple thousand years of recorded history. And our antibiotics are extremely effective at murdering microorganisms, which in the short term protects us from some kinds of diseases. In doing so, we've fostered antibiotic resistance and created superbugs, which is rather terrifying, but perhaps another topic for another day. The main thing I wanted to point out here is that while we do lead long lives, many of our later years will be interrupted. We will need doctors, hospital visits, we'll feel the crude side effects from the litany of prescription meds that we're going to need to maintain our function. And we'll have a front-row seat to our own debilitating physical and cognitive decline. Our friends and family will be burdened by the psychological trauma that goes along with watching all of that. And at some point, we'll probably need full time caregivers. So the suffering and the responsibility isn't even restricted to the individual in question. And I wonder if that is a life well lived? Is that normal? Well, if that's what our perception of normal is, then I guess so. But should we consider all of that to be normal? I hope I'm making some sense here. Look, put it this way. Let's say you live to 80. Congratulations, you were lucky not to die earlier, like most people in recorded history. But while you might have lived to 80, and maybe even outlived most of your peers, that doesn't mean you lived well, or were healthy. Again, regular doctor visits, prescription meds, joint replacements, losing all your muscle mass and bone mineral density, and going senile, really don't seem like good outcomes to me. And contrary to what most people believe, this is not a guaranteed fate for humans. This is not what has to happen when you get old. And in another context, 80 might not even qualify as that old. Living well implies functioning well. And being free from suffering comes along with that. Functioning well relies on you maintaining your health throughout your lifespan. If you maintain function, thus health, you won't suffer as much disease and ill health. I don't think these are controversial statements. So to get to the point here, while we modern humans do certainly enjoy a long lifespan, thanks to our life extending technologies, we have a we have a rather short health span. This distinction is not a trivial one. People conflate health with longevity all the time. Obviously, they are interrelated in some way, but they're not the same thing. That's why we have different words to describe them. Our healthspan is typically shorter, in our case much shorter, than our lifespan. The end of our health span, meaning the beginning of our decline in health and function, which effectively signals the end of our usefulness as a member of society, and the start of us becoming more of a burden, is not usually a quick process. Thanks to our life extension tools, were able to cling on to consciousness for many years. Throughout that time, were likely to put up with all sorts of chronic issues until we finally die, often in pain, or high on painkillers, and always with our family and friends watching, powerless to stop it. My grandma lived until she was well into her 90s she had a pretty good innings as they say where I grew up. But towards the end, she had to endure many years of her life with debilitating diseases like arthritis. Since I can remember, she could barely use her hands they were so twisted. Her feet were no better off. She walked around very carefully, never for very long or far. Eventually I would push her around in a wheelchair. At the same time, she also had type-2 diabetes. And each day, she would need to prick her fingers to check her blood sugar's because her body was no longer doing that so well. I remember watching her inject insulin into her belly, where she had bruises from all of the needles. Towards the end, she even had a gangrenous big toe amputated. It's all a bit morbid isn't it? But this was my reality. And I have to be grateful. and realise that things are probably a lot worse for someone else's grandma. At least it was just a big toe and not a leg.  So, getting back to this health span concept, we're now seeing infants with the shortest health-spans in recorded history. Humans now being born into a life of disease, with their health already severely compromised from the start. Gestational diabetes is just one example here. And it's now extremely commonplace. In the UK, one of the most advanced, developed countries in the world, roughly one in every eight pregnant women will develop gestational diabetes. In Australia, my home country, it's closer to one in six women. This is obviously not a good start to life for the little one. And it's not good for the mother either. Imagine, before you even come out of the womb, you are compromised. And that's to put it mildly. So while you might try and say that what happened to my grandma is to be expected, something that happens to most people's grandmas, that all of it is just a part of the ageing process, would you call diabetes in infants 'normal'? By the way, I don't believe chronic diseases like arthritis and debilitating physical and cognitive decline are hard-wired features of the ageing process in humans either. Going back to the quote that I read out at the beginning of this episode, the only reason we think this is all normal, is because we are so well-adjusted to it. We've become desensitised to it. We think that's just how life goes. And why wouldn't we? We don't have any better examples around us of what another world might look like. For every three adults you meet in Australia, two of them will be overweight or obese. And in children, it's one in four. Being fat is not some aesthetic quality. It's a red flag–the beginnings of serious malfunction and disease. This is referred to as metabolic syndrome in the literature. The mainstream media, meanwhile, is using euphemisms to make people feel better, and encouraging them to be plus size, seemingly oblivious to the consequences. So being overweight or obese has now been normalised. Getting headaches is apparently normal too. Seasonal allergies–which means being allergic to Nature–are now normal. Fertility issues in men and women are now normal. Mental illness, now extremely commonplace. And chronic disease, which is the umbrella term for the endless list of diseases that plagues our modern world is the most insidious of these normalcies. Because it doesn't appear overnight. It's the slow creep of disease that builds up over a lifetime, while we pretend that everything's 'normal'. But is this all really normal for humans? Is this what has to happen? I don't buy it. And I wonder how much longer we're going to keep blaming our genetic inheritance or putting it down to 'bad luck'. Ignorance is bliss until it smacks you in the face later in life. I really don't like the stick-your- head-in-the-sand-and-pretend-everything-is-okay approach. I'd rather die like Steve Irwin did.  So, to summarise a little bit here, and to turn the corner on this episode, chronic degenerative diseases run rampant in the modern, civilised world. And those of us who are alive today have never known a time where that was not the case. And that is what makes this book that we're covering so important and insightful. The author, Weston A Price, lived in a time where chronic disease was much less prevalent than it is today. Gestational diabetes, for example, wasn't a thing back in the early 1900s. Being obese, wasn't normal either until well into the latter half of the century. However, Mr. Price and his peers recognised that the chronic disease situation was just beginning to get going. In chapter two of his book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, Price references some statistics from the Department of Public Health in New York City, stating that between 1907 and 1936, heart disease increased by 60%, and cancer increased by 90%. Just to point out these are relative increases in incidence. But the point is, things weren't heading in the right direction. He considered this 'a cause for great alarm', particularly since it was taking place in spite of the advance that was being made in modern science along many other lines of investigation. And he wasn't the only one. Price quotes another doctor, a man called Alexis Carrel, and he gives us a good sense of what it was like to live back in the early 1900s, and what these people, who were paying attention, were thinking about. He said, "Medicine is far from having decreased human sufferings as much as it endeavours to make us believe. Indeed, the number of deaths from infectious diseases has greatly diminished. But we still must die in a much larger proportion from degenerative diseases. In spite of the triumphs of medical science, the problem of disease is far from solved. Modern man is delicate. The organism seems to have become more susceptible to degenerative diseases". The organism seems to have become more susceptible to degenerative diseases... How? Why? Where did this come from? Do we absolutely need to rely on medication to maintain our health and function? Is there no other way? So our author and guide Weston A Price was a dentist. His area of expertise was oral health. And so at this point of the discussion, let's turn to his area of expertise. This is a crucial point to understand before we unpack the remaining chapters. Oral health represents a key metric, or point of comparison, that he will use over and over again throughout his book in order to compare groups of humans and to gauge the influence of their, let's call them lifestyle variables, on their health and function, and overall outcomes. So in the early 1900s tooth decay was no small matter. The following exerpt describes the situation well. "Dental caries or tooth decay is recognised as affecting more individuals throughout the so called civilised world today than any other affection In the United States, England and Europe. examinations of highly-modernised groups consisting of several million individuals, reveal the fact that from 85 to 100% of the individuals in various communities are suffering from this affection. As a contributing factor to absence from school among children, it leads all other affections. From the standpoint of injury to health. It has been estimated by many to be the most serious contributing factor through its involvement of other organs of the body." So, a couple of things here. Firstly, tooth decay is much better controlled today, but still actually a very common disease. In Australia and England, roughly one in three people will experience tooth decay. In the United States, this figure is closer to 50% of the population. And secondly, it's extremely important to note that oral health and tooth decay are not some aesthetic quality. It gives us great insight into our overall health. Form implies function. And form, meaning physical development of the head, jaw teeth, nasal passages, etc, is not so random. It is governed by the same laws of growth and development as the rest of the human body. Growth and development, and the maintenance of bodily function, is influenced by many factors in our environment, like our eating habits. We'll come back to this later. But for now, just keep it in mind. Form implies function. It's not just some aesthetic quality, without consequence or explanation. So one in three people in the UK and Australia have tooth decay. And it's closer to one and two in the United States. So is this an acceptable level of disease? And has this always been the case for human beings? You'd be forgiven for assuming that we have the best oral health out of all the humans that have ever lived. We have toothbrushes, 24 hour toothpastes, neon coloured mouth washes that come 'recommended by dentists', and even fluoridated water. How could it get any better, you might ask?  "Students of history have continually commented upon the superior teeth of the so called savages, including the human types that have preceded our modernised groups. While dental caries has been found occasionally in several animal species through the recent geologic ages, the teeth of the human species have been comparatively free from dental caries. Primitive human beings have been freer from the disease then has contemporary animal life. This absence of tooth decay among primitive races has been so striking a characteristic of humankind, that many commentators have referred to it as a strikingly modern disease." The interesting thing about teeth, is it that they are bones. And as you know, bones can be preserved for a very long time. Human skulls, from all over the world, thus offer some very interesting clues here, in terms of examining changes in physical development between ourselves and that of our ancient human ancestors. This is some of the best, clear-cut science we have access to. So it seems that contrary to popular mythology, early humans, hunter-gatherers, so called primitive, savages, did not often die from tooth decay, nor have poor oral health. Nowhere near the level of modern humans anyway. And this was known in the scientific community and the literature well over 100 years ago. So if we take all of this is true, that ancient humans did not suffer from chronic diseases like tooth decay, then this changes the game. This changes our perception of what normal means.  If you weren't aware that oral health and physical form can be used as a gauge for a person's overall health, which again, implicates their environment and a long list of lifestyle related factors, you might consider these differences between early and modern humans uninteresting or irrelevant. But if you do understand that, and you are a student of history, like our author Western A Price was, and you were living at a time where 85 to 100% of people in some of the communities around you, in the most developed, technologically-advanced civilizations were suffering from rampant tooth decay, you'd probably be quite alarmed. Price quotes a prominent anthropologist, Dr. Ernest A Hooton from Harvard University, who seemed to be well aware of the scale of the problem if nothing were to change. "I firmly believe that the health of humanity is at stake. And that unless steps are taken to discover preventatives of tooth infection, and correctives of dental deformation, the course of human evolution will lead downward, to extinction. The facts that we must face are in brief, that human teeth and the human mouth have become possibly under the influence of civilization, the foci of infections that undermine the entire bodily health of the species, and that degenerative tendencies in evolution have manifested themselves in modern man to such an extent that our jaws are too small for the teeth which they are supposed to accommodate. And that, as a consequence, these teeth erupt so irregularly, that their fundamental efficiency is often entirely or nearly destroyed. Our jaws are too small for the teeth which they are supposed to accommodate. Why do our teeth no longer fit our jaws? Why would evolution suddenly do something like that? Is the best solution we have just to accept this as normal, and to resort to brute force methods like fitting young people with braces and painfully strong arm their teeth back into some kind of momentary realignment? And why are our teeth decaying at a faster rate than those of our early, toothbrush-less and toothpaste-less, savage ancestors? Weston A Price tried to figure out why, firstly, by studying disease and diseased individuals. This is what we call 'pathogenesis'. It's the dominant medical model in the West. Studying the origins of disease, the word coming from the Greek 'pathos' meaning disease, 'genesis' the origins of. It's an attempt to understand, and reverse-engineer health through the study of disease. But just like we're still struggling to understand cancer, and effective ways to treat it today, over 100 years ago, Weston Price couldn't understand how to create healthy teeth by studying diseased ones. "In my search for the cause of degeneration of the human face and the dental organs, I have been unable to find an approach to the problem through the study of affected individuals and diseased tissues. In my two volume work... I reviewed at length the researchers that I had conducted to throw light on this problem. The evidence seemed to indicate clearly that the forces that were at work were not to be found in the diseased tissues, but that the undesirable conditions were the result of the absence of something rather than of the presence of something. This strongly indicated the need for finding groups of individuals so physically perfect, that they could be used as controls. In order to discover them, I determined to search out primitive racial stocks that were free from the degenerative processes with which we are concerned, in order to note what they have that we do not have. These field investigations have taken me to many parts of the world through a series of years. The following chapters review the studies made of primitive groups, first, when still protected by their isolation, and second, when in contact with modern civilization." The forces that were at work were not to be found in the diseased tissues... the undesirable conditions were the result of the absence of something rather of the presence of something. So pathogenesis, studying the origins of disease, didn't yield any answers to Weston A Price, except maybe to confirm that that was not the best way to understand health, or to create it. Studying health, what is called in the literature salutogenesis, again from the Greek, is a fundamentally different approach. And that's what Weston tried to do next. But he couldn't even find groups of modernised humans that were suitable to study. Most of the people he was surrounded by in the United States had poor development and lacked high immunity to tooth decay. And that's when his plan, to travel the world and look for groups of isolated humans with perfect teeth and jaws, came together. If and once he found them, his intention was to use them as control groups, and to work to understand what they had that Western civilizations did not have. And if you're curious what this might have been, then you'll want to keep your eyes peeled for the next episode, where we'll pick up the trail in the heart of the Swiss Alps in Europe. Are healthy teeth, functional Jaws, and immunity to chronic diseases, simply a result of brushing harder for longer, and using the right brand of toothpaste? Dr. Hooton the Harvard anthropologist, didn't think so. I want to leave you with a bit of a teaser, the rest of his quote we touched on earlier. "Let us go to the ignorant savage, consider his way of eating and be wise. Let us cease pretending that toothbrushes and toothpaste any more important than shoe brushes and shoe polish. It is store food, which has given us store teeth." And on that note, this has been the Eat Ancestral Podcast. We've been talking about the Progressive Decline of Modern Civilization. My name is Ben. If you'd like to get in touch, check the show notes for a link–you can find me there. Until next time, go easy on that store food, and take care. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

6 — True Cost & Fair Price of Food

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Episode Transcript

This is the Eat Ancestral Podcast number 6. So, one of the things that bugs me the most about people these days, and something I hear quite often is that it's too expensive to eat healthy foods. Now, I think there's a way for us to work our way through this problem and come out the other side. I think it starts with us talking about how we've become very habituated to paying cheaply for our food and even to seek it out, and to make a lot of our purchasing decisions based on the shelf price. But I think this kind of behaviour comes at a rather high price, notably to our personal health, to public healthcare systems and to the health of our ecosystem. So one of the first things to ask ourselves here is; does the shelf price, the price you pay at the checkout reflect the total and true cost of that item? Now, when it comes to cheap 'food', the short answer to that is no, it is not being paid for at the checkout. If we borrow a concept here from economics, something called an externality refers to the downstream consequences, and costs of a product that are not captured by the shelf price. So a good example, here are cigarettes, which were once very cheap, for the consumer at the checkout. However, once governments began to understand the enormous burden, health and economic burden, that cigarettes caused, they began imposing heavy taxes in order to try and capture some of the longer term costs, or what in economics is referred to as a negative externality, which was caused by the production and consumption. So another way of thinking about this is that you, as a taxpayer, are funding or subsidising other people's poor health behaviours. And the true cost of cigarette use from decades ago, is still being absorbed by taxpayers, who fund public health care systems today. Now, it's not just a problem for our generation, future generations will also have the same claim. And we're seeing similar initiatives today for things like carbon and sugar, to help curb behaviour and to hopefully pay for some of the downstream consequences of climate change and things like diabetes and obesity, chronic disease at- large. Anyway, the moral of the story here is that just like cigarettes, the total cost of a bottle of, for example, Coca-Cola, or a 'meal' at McDonald's, is not being captured by the company or the consumer at the checkout. Ultimately, it's taxpayers and Nature, who will foot the bill. So what a lot of people will say to that is like; "yes, yes, I understand, but isn't it expensive, on my wallet, on my personal bank account, to eat healthy, to eat high quality foods?" Now, the answer here is not so simple. It depends on a lot of things, but not necessarily. So for context, I'll use myself as an example here. I currently live in London, England–it's not the cheapest place to live, to say the least. We get most of our groceries and household items from a store called Farmdrop, i'll put the link in the show notes, which is an online store dedicated to working with small scale food producers and to provide ethical, sustainable, high-quality options to consumers. Now, on the surface, it's not 'cheap', as the prices are much higher than most supermarkets. This is partly because the farmers get a fair price. The employees have paid a living wage. They're not leveraging economies of scale. And so the prices reflect more appropriate costs for the production and distribution of high-quality food. But even then, I don't think the food is that expensive. Now, again, expensive is a relative term dictated by our budget and our perceptions, things like our buying history, the market price, our understanding of food quality, and thus the value we place on it. But I'll try and bring this down to more absolute terms. Here's a common irony I've come across; people decrying these 'extortionate' prices of services like Farmdrop, but then they're seemingly happy to turn around and pay more elsewhere, even for stuff that is so low quality, that we don't even consider it real food. So i've got a case study here for us to run through: the price of quality food versus fast food. And if you want to see some extra details, the mathematics, to check my numbers, again, check the show notes. I'll skip a few of them for the sake of this audio. But to give you a rundown here on Farmdrop, beef mince ranges from £10 to £15 per kilo. If we take their dry-aged, free-range beef mince, which sounds rather fancy, at £10.50 a kilo, a kilo will give us four servings, so you're going to pay £2.70 per generous portion, or serving of beef mince. Now, let's say we're not carnivores, let's say we add serving a butter, organic carrots, organic broccoli and some pesticide-free potatoes to our plate. If you tally it up, beef mince + broccoli + carrot, potatoes, broccoli, equals a total cost of £4.53 per home cooked meal. So less than five pounds, organic, local, sustainable, and all that. I don't think that's too bad. The only catch here is that you have to cook it yourself. But in terms of the price, quite reasonable. Now, if your priorities lie elsewhere, and you 'don't have time' to cook, then you could order something 'cheap' instead. Now at the local McDonald's, a Quarter Pounder Deluxe meal, which comes with a burger, fries and soft drink will set you back £5.39. And remember, you're lazy and you don't have time, so this doesn't include the delivery fee. £4.53 for the home cooked meal, £5.39 for the McDonald's, it seems like home cooked meals can actually work out to be more cost effective than buying pre made foods, even some of the worst and very cheap kinds. And recall that the total cost of the home cooked meal is actually being captured by the shelf price and thus paid for by the customer, which is unlike the fast 'food' option, which has a lot of externalities, the downstream costs and health consequences associated with the production and consumption. So corporations like McDonald's are leaving many of these costs to the taxpayer, healthcare systems and our ecosystem to absorb. But anyway, back to the objective budget side of things. Good food is not necessarily that expensive. It costs what it should cost, I think five pounds for a meal is quite reasonable. And I'm very happy to pay that. Now if you're happy to pay extra for pre-prepared meals, that's fine. But please don't moan about how 'expensive' or 'extortionate' it is to buy quality whole foods–it's simply not true. Our priorities more than our budgets tend to dictate our perceptions around the true cost, value and what is a fair price for food. So I think all told, coming to the end of this one here today, quality food is actually much cheaper than highly-processed, 'cheap' food. And if you're so savvy with your food sourcing and willing to cook at home, you can keep your food budget within reason. If you're not a good cook right now then that's okay make some time to upskill your cooking and food preparation. This will give you a lot more options in life. And it also gives you complete oversight over what ingredients go into your meals. Even fancy restaurants are putting cheap rancid seed oils into your food. Just something to note. So anyway, quality food costs less in many many ways, especially if we consider the long- term implications. nature will be less burdened by our waste products and ignorance. Healthcare systems will be less burdened with another patient, and families will be less burdened with the psychological trauma of losing loved ones to preventable diseases. What is the cost of that, I ask? So these are some of the hidden costs that do not factor into most shelf prices of cheaply available 'food'. Now, you know. So I hope you got some value out of that. My name is Ben, you've been listening to the Eat Ancestral Podcast and we have been talking about the true cost of our food choices. Until next time, take care. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

5 — Ancestral 'Superfoods' that Optimise Reproductive and Immune Health

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Episode Transcript

This is the Eat Ancestral Podcast number 5. Out of all the foods that humans have eaten throughout our history, some have been particularly sought-after. These ancestral 'superfoods', if you like, offer unmatched nutritional, and sometimes medicinal, support for humans. Now, the ones I've chosen to talk about here today, are particularly useful for optimising our reproductive and immune health, which is something, two areas that are lacking in modern society. So, the interesting thing about these foods is that while they were discovered by our ancestors, they've also been confirmed by modern scientific analysis. So that should interest you. I think we can consider these as true superfoods. There's a lot of you know, people are calling broccoli a superfood. I don't agree. As you're likely aware, the most digestible, satiating and nutritious foods for humans are actually animal foods. And among these foods, there are some 'superfoods' that are on another level. Here's a brief summary of them. Organ meats like liver and bone marrow, sea foods like fish eggs, and bee foods like honey. Let's unpack each group. First off the organ meats. So most people eat muscle meats, (breasts, leg, rump, etc.) and muscle meat is undeniably delicious, extremely nutritious, especially compared to broccoli, and should form an integral part of your human diet. However, pound-for-pound muscle meat cannot compete with the nutritional profile of organ meats. The organs like liver, heart, kidney, bone marrow, etc. are somewhat of a stockpile of hard-to-find nutrients. And out of all the organ meats, liver is king of the jungle. It's particularly nutrient-rich, and yeah, usually tops the pound-for-pound rankings. Oysters are not far behind, by the way, but another topic for another day. So bone marrow is not only a rich source of vitamins and minerals, but it also contains stem cells. That's where a lot of the body's cells are made. And so you might find that interesting. Your dog might not be able to talk about the science, but they sure do know perhaps why it's good for them. Now, interestingly, in 1934, the Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology was awarded to three doctors who discovered that eating liver quickly reverses and cures anaemia. Which is seemingly still a common problem these days... people are not eating their animal foods. So before 'liver therapy', as they called it, was discovered, pernicious anaemia was often fatal. And as it turns out, liver contains rich amounts of very bioavailable, very absorbable, usable nutrients for humans. To run through a few of them now, we have the entire suite of B vitamins, we have the critically important fat soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K, which most people are deficient in. and a hefty dose of minerals, heme iron, magnesium, potassium, copper, etc, all of which are critical to human health and vitality. So liver is not alone here. Organ meats deliver this kind of foundational nutritional support that human physiology needs in order for us to thrive and be at our best. And if you get some in your diet regularly, and you know, wait. If you get some in your diet regularly and continue to eat that way, you should really, at some point, feel your body work better. That's how nutrient dense they are. They're also really really filling. You know, a small piece of liver delivers a lot of bang for your buck. So something to think about get some paté in. Okay, so, next on our list here sea foods. I want to relay an anecdote from one of my favourite books, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, a Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and their Effects, by a man called Weston Price. He went to the High Andes in South America, and found that the Native Indians who lived there were apt to travel hundreds of miles on foot to the coast in order to get their hands on sea foods, and in particular, fish eggs were prized possessions. Dr. Price, reported that the people of the Andes considered fish eggs to be essential for female reproductive health in particular. Now, modern scientific analysis confirms their ancestral wisdom. But if you think about it, fish eggs, which is also called roe or caviar, is packed with all the ingredients that are needed to support newborn life–that is their function. So it is not surprising that they help confer benefit to the reproductive system of humans. And if we look at the nutrient breakdown here, we find that fish eggs are extremely high in things like omega three fats, choline, fat-soluble vitamins, and these are indeed essential for reproductive health. These nutrients are required in substantial amounts before, during and after pregnancy in order to provide the building blocks, optimal nourishment to the mother and her growing baby. So it's not surprising after all, that this food has been long sought-after, by not only the people of the Andes, but many other cultures, for their health-promoting and healthy-baby-making qualities. So try and get in some fish eggs if you can.  Next up: bee foods. So bees make many many interesting things, but today our focus is on honey, which holds very special significance in human history. Honey is the most ancient sweetener that we know of, and has been used since time immemorial. First of all, real honey, to draw a line in sand here, real honey means that it's raw and unprocessed, which means that it's maintained its biological complexity, and it contains hundreds of components. The beneficial qualities of real honey are destroyed by modern processing techniques such as pasteurisation, something to be aware of one of. One of the last remaining hunter-gatherer tribes in the world that we know of, The Hodza, who live in modern day Tanzania, consider honey their favourite food, which is interesting. Holy Books like the Bible and Quran, explicitly encourage the consumption of honey. And if we look at other cultures, like the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Chinese, Greeks, and Romans, they all used honey topically for wound healing, and internally for diseases of the gut. Now modern scientific analysis again can help us understand why they had these suspicions. And we see that honey, real honey exhibits potent antibacterial, antiviral and antifungal effects against a range of common pathogens. Honey is also a rich source of probiotics, prebiotics, and digestive enzymes. And it is also protective of gut health, including the oral biome, which is not something we can say about most sweeteners–being good for your mouth. It also shows promising anti-inflammatory and anti-allergy effects. So it seems like honey is much more than just a sweetener or folk remedy. It is both food and medicine. So there you have it, liver, bone marrow, fish, eggs, honey. These are some of the traditional superfoods that have been highly-prized amongst human cultures. Made by Mother Nature, discovered by your ancestors and confirmed with the help of modern scientific analysis. Now, just a word of caution here: in the modern world, finding quality sources, not just of food but of information, is the hard part. So take your time and source your superfoods wisely. Eat some liver, leave the broccoli for a herbivore. Alright, that's it for me today. I hope you've got some value out of that. Please let me know. Until the next one. Take care 

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4 — Traditional Methods of Food Preparation

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Episode Transcript

This is the Eat Ancestral Podcast number four. Today I wanted to talk about some traditional methods of food preparation. Seems like few cultures now prepare food as it should be, as it ought to be. And since the Industrial Revolution, it seems like the collective knowledge base on the topic has largely eroded. But this is critical information for us to remember. Because in order to render our food safer to eat, more digestible, more nutritious, we need to prepare it properly, like our ancestors did. There are a handful of food preparation methods that we could talk about. I'm going to speak of three today. They are soaking, fermenting, and cooking. And while you don't necessarily need to employ these for some foods, like fruits and honey, which are best eaten raw, many foods are not best eaten raw and will cause humans problems if we try. Now cooking is a pretty well known quantity. microwaving does not count by the way. Another topic for another day. But soaking and fermenting are not so much well known, so that's what I'll mainly be speaking about today, the importance of soaking in fermentation. So some foods like grains that are destined to become bread, for example, should be prepared using a combination of all three of those; soaking, fermenting and then cooking, in order to minimise the risk and maximise the reward. Most people when they make bread and most companies will skip the first two stages and just go straight for the cooking process. But, you know soaking and fermentation, they might seem complicated or that they require too much effort. But it's mostly a question of planning and patience and understanding the value of doing so rather than it is hard labour without any additional gain. So as noted food corporations tend to skip as many of these time intensive stages as possible, as they significantly increase production times and thus reduce profit margins. And why bother really if your consumers don't know any better? The advantages, however, are numerous. So let's talk about those now. Proper food preparation enables humans to render foods safer to eat, improve digestibility and reduce damage to the gastrointestinal tract, which is quite delicate. It also allows us to extract more energy and nutrients from some foods, it can allow for long term storage of surplus food and increase our enjoyment of food. So all of those things I think are good things. Let's take let's take a look at a few notable examples here of traditionally-prepared foods.  First one, olives, which are an example of soaking. Eaten straight from the tree olives are actually toxic to humans, so don't try that one at home. Oives require the step of soaking or brining for at least a month before turning into edible, nutritious human food. Now, olives are fruit. Fruits do not contain as many problematic plant compounds that are found in lots of vegetables and seeds and beans and legumes and grains, many of which require more extensive preparation than olives do. So after soaking and brining, olives don't require any further preparation, which makes them one of the simplest plant foods to prepare, and once prepared, pretty nutritious and well tolerated by most of us. They are also easily stored for a long time. So that's an example of soaking.  Next one up is an example of fermentation. A very well known and revered cheese, called Parmigiano Reggiano. I hope I pronounced that well; I don't speak Italian, i'm sorry. But anyway, excess milk, which usually sours within days can be turned into cheese with the help of fermentation. And now we can't pasteurise it because that will kill all of the enzymes and microorganisms that will enable the fermentation. So, classic Parmesan Reggiano is actually made from raw milk, as are many cheeses, most cheeses, especially the traditionally-made ones, and it enables the fermentation process. So if we follow this correctly, some cheeses can then be stored safely for many years, even without refrigeration, that's pretty cool. So, cheese making is a kind of ancient food technology that enables us a way to preserve food that would otherwise go off. Instead, we can save it for times of food scarcity, like the winter. It's also a method for transforming one food (milk) into another (cheese), which fundamentally changes the flavours, nutritional profiles and culinary uses. Also quite cool. And it's also a way of improving the digestibility. So, fermented, raw, milk aged cheese's tend to be better tolerated amongst humans. This is partly because the lactose which is the milk sugar is broken down and gobbled up over time by the microorganisms and is no longer there after a certain amount of time. So people who are lactose intolerant can actually eat some dairy products without having any GI issues. So that's an example of fermentation; cheese.  Okay, one last example here, which is an example of soaking, fermenting, and cooking is sourdough. So in the modern era, most bread is made rapidly by combining flour and water, and then adding yeast. We let it rise for a little while and voilà, you've got something that looks like bread but is fundamentally different to the stuff your ancestors ate. The bread that French culture considers standard is what we call sourdough. And sourdough just designates that the bread has been made traditionally, which is a lengthy process could take a couple of days to make a loaf of sourdough, including various stages of soaking and fermentation before finally being cooked. Now the soaking and fermenting of grains before cooking them, improves the flavour digestibility nutrient availability and reduces damage to the gut. So most people are familiar with the issues surrounding the plant protein we call gluten. But gluten is just one of many, many plant compounds that cause digestive issues in humans, especially if we don't prepare them properly and we're not aware of them. So sourdough may look and even function similar to the white supermarket bread you probably grew up eating like me, but it's not the same thing. It's not even close. So that is an example of soaking, fermenting and cooking all in one; sourdough.  Now, this is a good point to point out that a lot of ready-made, supermarket, factory 'food' is problematic because it's not usually prepared by using these traditional means or at least as extensively. So from the 1950s roughly, we've outsourced much of the work of our home cooking and food preparation to corporations. And it was supposed to 'save us time' and to help you know 'free women from the kitchen' and these kinds of things. Maybe it did just that but in leaving our nutritional fate in their hands, we've caused ourselves many other problems and the overconsumption of these poor quality, addictive, nutrient deficient 'foods' that haven't been prepared probably has led to a lot of chronic disease, gut issues and nutritional deficiencies. So corperations skip any unnecessary or impractical steps. You say bye bye to fermentation. They also use the cheapest ingredients possible, so bye bye to food quality, and safety. They also hire food scientists and engineers to actually build flavour and texture combinations that literally create physiological addiction in their consumers and sort of circumvent the appetite and satiety mechanisms in the brain, the neuroregulation of appetite. So they're pretty nasty things. I bet they are hoping that you don't read the label where you'll find all the additives and other nasty shit that you can't pronounce and probably won't ever find in a home pantry. Anyway, all this to say don't leave your food preparation, and thus your health, in the hands of a corporation. Their objectives are not aligned with yours. They want profit, not necessarily, you know to help you on your health journey. And just think that the ultra processed junk made by food conglomerates, serves basically only as calories and fake mouth pleasure and furthers disease progression, so yeah, don't eat that stuff. That's pretty much it for me, I think. The last thing I want to say is that we really need to regain an understanding of, and respect for, the art and science of food preparation. It's not all about sterile calories and macros. You know, if you learn to incorporate some of these traditional methods into your home cooking repertoire, or at least source foods from smaller scale producers who are preparing them using these traditional means, you'll find that you will probably improve your gut health, you'll increase your nutritional intake, you'll feel better, you'll help ensure your long-term health status. And you will also be a part of a group of humans who are protecting preserving and passing along these ancient food technologies that are sorely missed in the modern world, and at risk of being forgotten about by most people. So I think that's pretty important. Okay, so that's it for me today. This has been Traditional Methods of Food Preparation. I'm Ben. I hope you got some value out of that. And I'll see you in the next one. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

3 — A Working Definition of ‘Food’

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Episode Transcript

This is the Eat Ancestral podcast number three. So today I thought we should talk a bit about what is considered 'food', in our perspective. We don't really have a working definition of 'food' in our modern society. There's no clear demarcation line in the sand between what is actually real nutritious food, and the processed rubbish that you get in most supermarkets. And I think, if you want to build robust health and vitality, it's one of the most essential concepts that we could follow is to just eat real food. And so, by and large, what that means is that we eat stuff that's from the land or the ocean. It's not from the factories of Nestlé or Kellogg, for example. And this is because proper nutrition comes from animals, plants and fungi, but mainly animals, as we talked about in the previous episode, that have been cared for whilst alive, and then minimally processed, but again, properly prepared, en route to your plate. Whereas from labs and factories, we get lifeless calories that have been fortified with a sprinkling of synthetic vitamins and minerals. So real food is much more sophisticated, and of much higher quality than factory food. Let's take honey as an example here. I think it is useful to use examples that we're all familiar with. So honey is made by bees. Bees have been perfecting their recipe for honey, and the other things they make like propolis, and royal jelly and pollen for around 125 million years. So each of these foods contains hundreds of components, many of which are yet to be identified by modern science. And humans, clever though we may be simply cannot reproduce substitutes for such biologically complex foods, like honey and human breast milk, for example, in our labs, and factories. Think about the timeline on this: 125 million years is a long, long time. Kellogg's cornflakes have only been around for 100 years, if that. So while bees are over there making incredibly complex and sophisticated things like honey, which actually has profound nutritional and medicinal qualities, if we don't pasteurise it, corporations run by modern humans, are putting toxic ingredients into your food. And then, pretending that it's food in the first place, and then promoting it, and the synthetic vitamins and minerals and whatever else they added as a "healthy option" for you and your children. And they tend to take a lot of the nutrition out in the refining and processing. So they have to inject it back in, they have to fortify it. And at that point, it's not really food. It's more like a 'food-like substance' as one of my favourite authors, Michael Pollan likes to say. And I think it's the height of ignorance to think that we could create or recreate deep nutrition in factories. As you now know food made by Mother Nature is infinitely complex, and packaging up macros and adding a sprinkling of zinc or whatever, simply isn't good enough. So for our purposes here with this project, at Eat Ancestral, and for the stuff that you eat to be considered food, we think it needs to offer more than calories, synthetic vitamins and cheap mouth pleasure. The words that are written on most food packaging are also cheap. And building robust, healthy chronic-disease-free-humans requires a much deeper understanding of nutrition than what modern food packaging laws would allow for, or what corporations would have you believe. It's much more complicated than that. But, to simplify things here, all you need to know to get started, however, is that eating real food is key. It is the best disease-protecting, immune-boosting, performance-enhancing body-fat reducing diet you'll ever find It's a matter of prioritising quality over quantity. And if you understand how to prepare and cook all his real food, life will get even better for you. But that is another topic for another day. I hope you've found this useful. My name is Ben, you've been listening to the Eat Ancestral podcast. I'll see you in the next one. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

2 — First Principles of Human Nutrition

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Episode Transcript

This is the Eat Ancestral podcast number two.  So it seems like humans, by and large, have forgotten what to eat. Especially modern humans living in the more 'developed' and technologically-advanced civilizations on Earth right now. There's a lot of bickering that goes on over the finer details. We've got carnivores, we've got vegans. and everything in between. The modern nutrition guidelines are as clear as mud. And most people can't make heads nor tails of the situation. And so I think that's the price we've paid for prioritising the minutiae over some more fundamental truths on the topic. And that's what I'm here to offer you today are some first principles of human nutrition. What we should be eating and why. And I've tried to strip back as much of the unnecessary details as possible, and really hone in on a higher-level, strategy-level perspective on human nutrition, so hopefully, this simplifies things for you. I think the best place to start is to just talk about how humans have a lot in common. You know, we've been given this very progressive idea these days, that we're all unique snowflakes, and what works for one person does not work for another. And to a certain extent, that's true. There's a lot of individuality here. But at the end of the day, humans as a species, we are not so different you and I. We share a common history, a common biology, physiology, anatomy, anthropology, and more. And from these areas of hard scientific inquiry, I think we can construct some nutritional first principles that apply across the board, to all humans, regardless of our race, or ethnicity, or ideology, or location, or physical activity, or whatever. That's the point of something like foundations or first principles. And if we can't agree on these principles, and if we don't understand these ideas, then I don't think we'll agree on or understand anything. So this is the place to start, we have a lot in common. We are all homo sapiens. And we should be able to figure out what our species is more suited to eating.  Okay, so first principle on my list here of nutritional first principles. Humans are omnivores. So homo sapiens, that's you, and our earlier hominid ancestors have consumed a mixed diet for millions and millions of years. This means that we can safely consume a lot of foods from each of the plant, animal and fungi kingdoms. However, we must remember that all of our food options are certainly not equal. Some foods are going to be of high quality, so rich in energy and nutrients, and only minimal preparation is necessary. Other foods are going to be of lower quality and can be mildly indigestible, or even lethal, particularly if you don't know how to prepare them. So there's a spectrum here, low quality to high quality foods. And we have to be aware of how to prepare things. Fortunately, for us ancestors have done a lot of the heavy lifting here, and documented food preparation methods long ago. Unfortunately, most modern humans, and the corporations to whom we've outsourced a lot of our food preparation to, have completely forgotten the need for them. Or, in the case of corporations, straight up ignored them because they don't add to the bottom line. But anyway, the moral of the story here is that humans are omnivores. We can eat a bit of everything, if we do it, right. Okay, let's go one layer deeper. So humans are omnivores, but our anatomy would indicate that we have a specialisation. So number two on our list of first principles is that humans need animal foods. I know that's not a popular idea these days. And this is probably a parting of the ways for some people. I wish you luck. Enjoy the broccoli. But if we look at our specialisation, our anatomical specialisation, it seems to be favoured towards eating animal foods, especially meat. Now anthropologists will tell us that humans have evolved away from the diet and lifestyle of our gorilla, and chimpanzee cousins, who live in the trees and mostly plants and fungi, and towards a lifestyle of hunting large game animals, which brought with it a diet rich in animal foods. There's a good argument here, to suggest that this departure from the trees is what made us human, and is what gave us a bigger brain. So something to consider there. And as our species has spent, now, millions of years depending on a high intake of animal foods, our physiology has evolved to expect them and actually to need little else. And if we take a look at it, in animal foods, we find all of the nutrients the human physiology needs in order to thrive. But the same cannot be said for plants and fungi, which is why this principle is written the way it is. It seems like we need animal foods. But we don't necessarily need plants and fungi. You can be a healthy carnivore. Whether or not you can be a healthy plant based person is still up for debate, I guess. But we don't really have much evidence for that. Many human cultures have followed animal based diets. Our extremely modern culture seems to be trying to go the other way. But, you know, there are many examples here: the Inuit, and the Eskimo. Sorry, the Inuit or the Eskimo. I don't know what name they prefer. And the North American Indians have both been observed to live long, robust, healthy lives, maintain good reproduction, and most importantly, in something Western civilization has not managed to do, remain free of chronic disease. Yet they almost exclusively, have been observed to eat meat. There's another group called the Hadza, who live in modern day Tanzania, one of the last remaining hunterer-gatherer tribes on the planet. They prefer animal foods, and they barely eat vegetables. So we have some good examples of, not just studies, but actual people, generations of people who have lived on these diets and seem to be doing a hell of a lot better than us. And it might seem strange, but we've just been sold a lot of untruths about meat over the last 50-100 years. When we take a look at it, pound for pound animal foods like red meat are much more satiating and nutrient rich, and the nutrients are more usable, or absorbable by the body, by the human body compared to plants and fungi. So there's a lot here to unpack. But basically, when you keep all of this in mind, it seems that, like most of our human ancestors did, the majority of our daily energy and nutrient requirements should come from animal foods. Again, this is the way our much healthier ancestors ate for an extremely long time and our physiology, our anatomy seems to be well adapted to it. Another way of thinking about it is that your body expects you to behave this way. So a couple of side notes here, I know these questions will come so i'm going to pre-empt them. Saturated fat and cholesterol, you might be wondering, what about those? Well, turns out they are essential nutrients. If you look at human breast milk, which is unequivocally agreed on as the gold standard for human nutrition, it is a rich source of both saturated fat and cholesterol. So that should tell you all you need to know. Your own mother's biology is not trying to kill you. This notion stems from the Lipid hypothesis or the Diet-Heart hypothesis, which was popularised in the 1950s and 60s by some wanker in the United States, and it was nothing more than a hypothesis. It ignored cultures like the French, who eat loads of saturated fat, and tried to put together something that sort of made conceptual sense. Fat clogs the arteries, like fat clogs a drain pipe. But yeah, you're not a you're not a drain pipe. So yeah, it turns out swapping out butter for margerine and vegetable oils, just dug the modern disease hole even deeper. So I wouldn't worry about those saturated fat and cholesterol turned out to be health foods. Side note number two, if you get your animal foods from the right sources, and you spend enough money on them, and they're of high enough quality, it's far more ethical and sustainable, than your plant-based buddies have probably been telling you. More on that later.  Okay, number three, on our list of first principles of human nutrition. Humans enjoy eating plants and fungi. So while we don't absolutely need the plants and fungi, eating only animal foods does seem kind of boring. And all about you, but I've tried this. And to me, it seems like it's just nice to have variety. We're only here for a certain amount of time. There's something about novel tastes and textures. Nothing wrong with a bit of mouth pleasure. And as well, if you think about this in an evolutionary sense, if you've ever been hunting, you'll know that some times you come back empty handed, which means you got to find something else to eat. So maybe you'll pick some fruit, or dig up some tubers, or whatever else, climb a tree, steal some honey from the bees, whatever it is. So while we don't absolutely need to eat plants and fungi to survive, to thrive, seems like a lot of us enjoy them. So let's talk a little bit about your options when it comes to plants and fungi. Fruit seems well-tolerated, is evolutionarily consistent, and when it's in season, it's delicious. Just note the many modern fruits are much sweeter than those our ancestors ate. And that we have this almost unnatural access to certain fruits at certain times of the year due to modern supply chains. So I would suggest that if you are, for example, living in North America or Northern Europe, and you're eating bananas in the dead of winter, that that is perhaps not consistent with what our ancestors experienced. And so perhaps not such a great idea. Moving on, fungi seem to get on reasonably well with humans. The culinary varieties of mushrooms add great flavours to dishes, especially when paired with meat, ironically. Others are medicinal or psychedelic and some mushrooms are deadly. So choose them wisely. In terms of vegetables, they offer us a an easy way to diversify our diets, but be aware that they can become problematic if we overeat them. You know, maybe don't eat potatoes at every meal, especially if you're not strength training and you know, actually deserving of them. So another thing to note here with vegetables, and this is the case with grains, seeds, nuts, legumes, beans, many foods from the plant and fungi kingdoms. They can cause digestive issues if we don't prepare them properly. So this is important because chronic damage to the gut leads to things like autoimmune disease. So we need to be quite careful here. We can leverage some ancestral food preparation methods like fermentation, for example, think about something like sourdough bread here, to reduce the risk of digestive upset and improve the nutritional profile. But it doesn't completely eliminate these problems. At the end of the day, there's no free lunch. Plants and fungi, like animals don't necessarily want to end up on your dinner plate. They have their own ways of dealing with predation. They might not have fangs and claws and things, but they have their own defence weapons–they have chemicals. And giving you a bellyache is just the beginning. So for humans, it seems that plants and fungi are of lower quality food, they are lower quality food options. They require more preparation, they lack the energy and nutrients that animal foods offer. And the things that they've been touted to be essential for, like plant fibre, doesn't actually seem essential at all. Again, refer to actual humans, not just epidemiology, and data, actual humans who have lived for countless generations on diets devoid of these things don't seem to exhibit nowhere near the same level of things like colon cancer, which they are touted to prevent in the Western world so it doesn't seem very essential to me. And unbeknownst to most people, there are many foods for the microorganisms living in your gut. So just be aware, plant fibre, perhaps not so essential, after all. Anyway, moral the story here with this principle is that humans enjoy eating plants and fungi, and usually well prepared and well tolerated plants and fungi. on an individual basis. Eat them for pleasure and variety, but don't become plant based. That usually doesn't end well.  Alright, last principle on our list here number four is that humans do not fare well with modern highly processed foods. So thus far, the food we have been talking about is the kind that comes from the land or the ocean. It does not come from factories. From factories, we get something that my one of my favourite authors Michael Pollan likes to describe as 'food-like substances'. These modern factory foods are one of the primary causes of the global ill health that we are dealing with today. And that's because they are hyper-palatable, meaning that they hijack your appetite and satiety mechanisms in the brain. They are highly processed, stripped of a lot of nutrients, they're often highly toxic, with the inclusion of things like trans fats and vegetable oils, and additives and preservatives and all sorts of shit. And they are simply devoid of any complex biological structure that you will find in real food made by Mother Nature. So I would advise you to avoid avoid them at all costs.  Okay, that's it for us today. Here's a quick summary of the first principles of human nutrition. Number one, humans are omnivores. We can eat a bit of everything if we do it right. Number two, humans need animal foods. In animal foods, we find all of the nutrients that we need in order to thrive. But the same is not true for plants and fungi. Number three, humans can enjoy a variety of plants and fungi, if tolerated and prepared properly. Number four, humans do not fare well on modern, highly processed food like substances. If you adopt these principles, I think you'll discover a much more enjoyable and reliable way to eat in order to build robust health and well-being. It's also a much simpler way to think about food, so that you can leave all the bickering over the minutiae behind you, and just to follow in your ancestors' footsteps. So I hope that was useful, please let me know. Until next time, my name is Ben. And this has been the Eat Ancestral podcast. Take care. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

1 — North American Indians | Nutrition and Physical Degeneration

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This is the Eat Ancestral podcast number one.  Quote: "The rigorous winters reach 70 degrees below zero. This precludes the possibility of maintaining dairy animals, or growing seed, cereals or fruits. The diet of these Indians is almost entirely limited to the wild animals of the chase. This made a study of them exceedingly important. The wisdom of these people regarding Nature's laws, and their skill in adapting themselves to the rigorous climate, and very limited variety of foods, and these often very hard to obtain, have developed a skill in the art of living comfortably with rugged Nature that has been approached by few other tribes in the world. The sense of honour among these tribes is so strong that practically all cabins, temporarily unoccupied due to the absence of the Indians on their hunting trip, were entirely unprotected by locks, and the valuables belonging to the Indians were left in plain sight. The people were remarkably hospitable, and where they had not been taken advantage of, were very kind. Many of the women had never seen a white woman until they saw Mrs. Price. Their knowledge of woodcraft as expressed in skill and building their cabins so that they would be kept comfortably warm and protected from the sub-zero weather was remarkable. Their planning ahead for storing provisions and firewood strongly emphasised their community spirit. When an Indian and his family moved to a campsite on a lake or river, they always girdled a few more trees than they would use for firewood, so that there would be a plentiful supply of dry standing timber for future visitors to the camp. They lived in a country in which grizzly bears were common. Their pelts were highly prized, and they captured many of them with baited pitfalls. Their knowledge of the use of different organs and tissues of the animals for providing a defence against certain of the affections of the body, which we speak of as degenerative diseases, was surprising. When I asked an old indian, through an interpreter, why the Indians did not get scurvy. He replied promptly, that that was a white man's disease. I asked whether it was possible for the Indians to get scurvy. He replied that it was, but said that the Indians know how to prevent it, and the white man does not. When asked why he did not tell the white man how, his reply was that the white man knew too much to ask the Indian anything. I then asked him if he would tell me. He said he would if the chief said he might. He went to see the chief and returned in about an hour, saying that the chief said he could tell me because I was a friend of the Indians, and had come to tell the Indians not to eat the food in the white man's store. He took me by the hand and led me to a log where we both sat down. He then described how, when the Indian kills a moose, he opens it up and at the back of the moose just above the kidney, there are what he described as two small balls and the fat. These he said, the Indian would take and cut up into as many pieces as they were little and big Indians in the family, and each one would eat his piece. They would eat also the walls of the second stomach. By eating these parts of the animal, the Indians would keep free from scurvy, which is due to the lack of vitamin C. The Indians were getting vitamin C, from the adrenal glands and organs. Modern science has very recently discovered that the adrenal glands are the richest sources of vitamin C in all animal or plant tissues. Wherever the Indians were living on their native diet, chiefly moose and caribou meat, their physical development was superb. At the point of modernization, including the use of foods of modern commerce, the health problem of the Indian is very different. These modernised children are dying of tuberculosis, which seldom kills the primitives." And that is an excerpt from a book entitled, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration: a Comparison of Primitive and Modern Diets and their Effects, by Mr. Weston A Price. Now, this book fascinates me for a lot of reasons. Mostly in a nutritional sense. That is the main topic. And it seems like these isolated Indians just ate meat, fish, vegetables, grains, even fruit. Maybe they got their hands on some berries in the summer, but who really knows. But yeah, effectively for most of the year. They had three options: moose, caribou, or grizzly bear. Now, in following his diet and lifestyle, were told that they kept remarkably healthy and had superb physiques. And were immune to certain kinds of infectious disease, like tuberculosis. They didn't seem to suffer from any kind of chronic disease either. Until that is, they began to rely on the foods in the white man's store. At point of contact with modern civilization, and the foods of modern commerce, the health of the Native American Indian, and their ancient populations, rapidly declined. So how can we make sense of this? We developed nations are supposed to be on the cutting edge of things like science and medicine, and obviously nutrition is a big part of that. And very little of this information would seem to fit our paradigm. Think about the foods the Indians ate almost exclusively. Moose, caribou, grizzly bear–it's meat, it's red meat. Contrast that with the mainstream thoughts of today, where most people think meat causes cancer, that saturated fats are going to clog your arteries. Oh, and did you know you're also now ruining the planet? These ideas, these stories we've been telling ourselves about nutrition, and nowadays, even sustainability and ethics, seem to fly in the face of that which indigenous cultures have practised since antiquity. The North American Indians were apparently so robust and healthy, that they could live comfortably in extremely harsh conditions. I don't know about you, but negative 50 degrees celsius seems pretty damn cold. They also built their own houses with their own bare hands. We can safely assume they didn't have power tools. They looked after their own. They were socially- organised. And they didn't steal from each other. Oh, yeah, and they also hunted grizzly bears without modern weapons. So it seems pretty clear that this group of humans knew how to thrive despite the harsh conditions. And if they hadn't been able to they wouldn't have been there. They'd have died out or moved on. But they were there. And apparently they did have all they needed. So maybe we might learn something from them. After all, it seems like they also knew all the medical condition scurvy, and how to cure it before the white man in the area did. They didn't know that something called vitamin C prevented scurvy. But this is just the Western name we invented to describe it. They sure did know what foods prevented it and where to get them from. And funnily enough, they weren't fruits or vegetables. Remember, they didn't have any of those. No, the foods that the Indians ate in order to prevent scurvy were organ meats...animal foods, which, as we're told, are some of the richest sources in all animal or plant tissues. Now I know this might seem a bit strange and out of place. It's odd when new information clashes with the things we think we know. I myself grew up thinking that we needed absolutely needed to eat fruits and vegetables. In order to get important nutrients, uniquely important nutrients like vitamin C, and fibre, and these kinds of things. But the thing I've learned since going down this nutrition rabbit hole is that the mainstream story is not the whole story. It's not even close. Our modern nutrition guidelines are in conflict with human history at large. They don't account for observations like that of the Native American Indian, and their ancestral diets. These kinds of observations, like finding healthy people who eat a diet high in animal foods, don't fit the modern paradigm so the information is largely ignored, or written off as being 'unscientific' or 'not supported by the evidence base' or something like that. We also like to undermine the intelligence of these groups by labelling indigenous has primitive, and by calling them savages. Anyone who questions the mainstream narrative risks, their reputation, being ridiculed by their peers, and then conveniently ostracised. But the thing is, this isn't science. That's the antithesis of science. It's group-think. And it's sad to see how it dominates modern day conversations around health and nutrition. There should be no room for this black and white, binary viewpoint. Remember that the white man's mistake was to think that he knew too much to ask the Indian anything. And this was not just true in North America. By the way, this book was written back in the 1930s is quite old, but also seemingly ahead of its time. In my view, it's one of the best books on nutrition that was ever written. And that's why I'm here to share it. Now, at this point, you might jump in and say, hang on, this is only one group in one place in the world. It's anecdotal. It's observational. How is this relevant to the rest of us? Well, that's the thing. This book doesn't just cover one North American Indian tribe. It tells the story of people from all over the world. Mr. Weston A price, who came from a small town in Ontario, Canada, travelled the world for years back in the 1930s, when travel was not so easy, by the way, searching for groups of humans, healthy humans, that he could study. Because all the people that he was surrounded by, in western civilization, were not that healthy. He went looking for humans who had not been modernised, who weren't eating the foods of modern commerce. Humans who were still living as their ancestors had done for hundreds or thousands of years before. He was looking for control groups. And that's what makes this book so damn interesting. As we'll see Dr. Price found what he was looking for. And if you follow along with me, we'll visit the Swiss from the heart of the Alps in Europe, the Gaelics from the Hebrides, which are islands off the coast of Scotland. The Eskimo, also called the Inuit, from North America, African peoples from the Massai in modern-day Tanzania, all the way up to the Arab cultures in the Middle East. Melanesians, Torres Strait Islanders, Australian Aborigines. The Polynesians: Samoans, Tongans, Taihitans, the New Zealand Maori, and the Peruvian Indians of South America, the people of the Andes, descendants of the Inca. Now, despite their geographical differences, Dr. Price found a clear pattern, a common thread that linked all of these people together. Now, this book doesn't have all the answers when it comes to nutrition. But if you think of health and well being a nutrition as I do–as one big puzzle–this book is so important because it's like finding one of the corner pieces. And I am excited to share some more of these stories with you. So that's it for me today. I hope you found this insightful, please let me know. And I look forward to speaking to you in the next one. 

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

Eat Ancestral Trailer

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Episode Transcript

Hello, welcome to the Eat Ancestral Podcast. My name is Ben. For the past 10 years or so, I have been on a quest to fully understand nutrition, human physiology, and more recently, the transfer of health between generations, and basically, how all of this fits into the larger ecosystem of health and wellbeing. In this podcast, we’ll be going deep into a range of related topics. A primary focus will be understanding the nutritional inputs needed to build healthy, robust humans, To help us do that, we’ll be talking a lot about the differences between ancestral diets (meaning what humans ate throughout most of their evolution) and contrasting that with the modern nutritional guidelines you find printed on cereal boxes today. We’ll unpack the profound impact of these food choices on our ancient biological systems, how this regulates our genetic expression, influences body composition and cognitive function, to name but a few, and how all of that, in large part, will come to dictates our immunity—or susceptibility—to sickness and chronic disease. We’ll also be touching on food sourcing and traditional food preparation methods, including sustainability and ethical considerations, and how these are intimately connected to our nutritional ideals. Effectively, I want to offer a better strategy for how to think about food, and go about feeding ourselves, while still enjoying life, and not destroying our own health, that of future generations, or that of the planet in the process. It’s a not a small task, but I think we can manage it. Nothing I have to offer is truly new or groundbreaking, except my own way of piecing together the puzzle and explaining things. I stand on the shoulders of giants. The goal here is to offer knowledge, tools and methods that have stood the test of time, and this will hopefully reduce suffering in the world, and empower fellow humans to lead better lives. Again, my name is Ben and this is the Eat Ancestral Podcast. I look forward to sharing all of this with you over the coming episodes.