Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food (23 page)

Bad prostaglandins depress:

•
Immune system (cancer)

•
Bone building (osteoporosis)

Fatty Acids and the Ancestral Diet

Earlier in this chapter, we touched on this subject with the Eskimo. The Eskimo diet is overbalanced in favor of the omega-3 oils, the opposite to that of the western diet. This causes overproduction of compounds that abnormally
reduce
blood platelet stickiness and blood clotting, which explains the Eskimo’s unstoppable nosebleeds and immunity to heart disease.

However, most people in the West have the opposite problem: they have sticky blood liable to clot when it is not supposed to. This phenomenon can lull Western surgeons into a false sense of security—they find that bleeding is easily controlled. Steven Gundry, medical director of the International Heart Institute, in Palm Springs, relates how American surgeons could not understand the difficulty that Japanese surgeons had in controlling bleeding under the surgeon’s knife.
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Belatedly, they realized that this is the normal condition for healthy people: the Japanese, with their diet rich in oily fish, have the omega-3/omega-6 balance about right.

How does this fit in with what we know about essential fatty acids in our ancestral diet? The vegetation was indeed rich in these fatty acids. In turn, the creatures such as antelope that ate the vegetation, and the animals (such as lions) that ate the antelope, were all rich in these fatty acids. Even more remarkable, the omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids were present in a ratio of around 1 to 1. In fact, we should not be surprised that these fatty acids are
essential
—our bodies never had to learn how to make them, just like our bodies have lost the ability to make vitamin C because it was always present in our diets of fruits and plants. Carnivores, such as lions, cheetahs, and cats do not eat fruits and plants and so their bodies make their own vitamin C. In contrast, carnivores are dependent on a wider range of fatty acids in their diet.
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Companion animal researcher Michael G Hayek points out that cats, for example, cannot transform alpha-linolenic acid (usually from plants) into another essential compound, arachidonic acid (AA).
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Cats get a wide range of necessary fatty acids from their prey, such as arachidonic acid (AA), gamma-linoleic acid (GLA), and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA). Plants do not have them. This is another sign that hunted meat could not have formed a significant part of the human diet, otherwise, as with cats, our bodies would have lost the ability to make these fatty acids.

A large number of favorable factors must come together for humans to have evolved as they did. Humans are peculiar because of their large brains, so one of those factors must have been an abundant supply of brain-building material. Two polyunsaturated fats, arachidonic acid and DHA (docosahexaenoic acid), make up the bulk of brain and central nervous system tissue. C. Leigh Broadhurst, a nutrition scientist, and others have wondered where early humans got these fats in the diet, since they are not abundant in the ordinary savanna landscape.
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However, these fats
are
abundant in fish and shellfish. Humans evolved in an area, the African Rift Valley, that was endowed with lakes and streams. Humans of that time freely consumed shellfish, fish, wading birds, and ducks and their eggs. Leigh Broadhurst calculates that the quantities consumed did not have to be large—just 6% to 12% of calories.
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Fatty Acids in the Body

There are dozens of fatty acids, most of which are either neutral or harmful to health. Saturated myristic acid and palmitic acid are aggressive to arteries. They are particularly found in butter, cream, cheese, beef, pork, and lamb. Palmitic acid is also the chief component of palm oil, which is used in processed foods. However, the body converts another saturated fat, stearic acid (particularly found in cocoa butter), into oleic acid (as found in olive oil). Oleic acid, which dominates the family of monounsaturated fats, is neutral on the body. Olive oil is “good” because it does no harm.

When it comes to consuming fats and oils, we have to realize that in nature they come as a cocktail of many varieties. For example, the chief components of pork fat are the saturated fats palmitic acid (24%), stearic acid (13%), and myristic acid (2%); the monounsaturated fats oleic acid (41%) and hexadecenoic acid (2%); and the polyunsaturated omega-6 fat linoleic acid (4%). In other words, it is mainly composed of fats that are innocuous—just the palmitic and the myristic acids, totaling 26%, are harmful. However, that is enough for damage to be done.

Fatty acids are present in our bloodstream bound up into a compound called a triglyceride. A triglyceride is composed of a molecule of glycerol to which three fatty acids are attached. When we eat a triglyceride molecule, digestive enzymes split it apart into its component fatty acids (plus the glycerol). These components pass through the gut wall into the bloodstream, where the body reconstructs the fatty acids into a
different
triglyceride.

Depending on the fatty acid’s position (1, 2, or 3) on the original molecule, it is more or less “bioavailable.”
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In human biochemistry, fats in position 2 are very easily absorbed, while the others in positions 1 and 3 are not. Pork fat finds 66% of its worst fatty acids in position 2, which is why pork fat is so much more harmful than a simple analysis of its saturated fat content would suggest. The same is true for butter and cream. On the other hand, cocoa butter, which contains 60% saturated fat, finds 95% of it parked harmlessly in positions 1 and 3.
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Harmless monounsaturated fats occupy 85% of position 2, from where fatty acids are easily absorbed. That is why cocoa is far less cholesterolemic than a simple examination of its saturated fat content would suggest..

Calcium in the gut also combines readily with fatty acids to form insoluble compounds that cannot be absorbed into the body. This is the fate of much of the calcium in milk—it is locked up with the milk fats and both are passed out in the stools. In cheeses, researcher Serge Renaud has shown that this appears to be the mechanism where unhealthy saturated fats are shown the back door.
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This seems to be one part of the explanation for the French Paradox: most of the “bad” cheese fats are not absorbed into the body

Humans in our ancient homeland did not find much fat in their diet, so they never developed a mechanism for knowing when they had eaten enough. Because some fats are essential, we have a well-developed mechanism to keep eating them for as long as supplies last. However, our bodies do not know how to discriminate between what is essential (and beneficial) and what is nonessential (and often harmful), and we pay the price. Fatty foods taste good and trigger the approval mechanism in the brain, which gives us that feeling of comfort.

We’ve seen that humans are adapted to a low-fat diet, but what fat there is should be of two particular kinds, omega-3 and omega-6. Moreover, these two types of fat should be consumed in the ratio of about 1 to 1. In recent years, our pattern of fat consumption has changed dramatically, with the arrival of omega-6 vegetable oils on the market. Their dominance over omega-3 is responsible, at least in part, for the rapid increase in a range of diseases.

Salt/Potassium Ratio

The Savanna Model diet is low in sodium and rich in potassium. Sodium, of course, is the active component of salt. Potassium is an element mainly found in plant foods, chiefly fruit. The evolutionary nutritionist Boyd Eaton estimates that the typical consumption in Pleistocene times was about 1 grams of sodium to 5 grams of potassium.
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Consequently, this ratio is important for the proper functioning of our biochemistry, particularly at the cellular level. Today, the average American has reversed this ratio and consumes 6 grams of sodium to 2.5 grams of potassium—and it matters!

Medical researcher Louis Tobin shows that salt damages arteries even if blood pressure is not raised.
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We tend to think of our arteries as being like inert plastic plumbing; in reality, they are living tissue and act on, and react to, what is passing through them. High salt levels irritate and scar the arteries, making it one more factor in the development of atherosclerosis.

High sodium levels also affect the way calcium is mobilized by the body. Canadian researchers have shown that over-consumption of salt drains calcium out of the bones.
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Other studies confirm that potassium and sodium imbalances destroy bone building.
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This is just one more example of how today’s dietary practices are greasing the slippery slope toward osteoporosis.

As with fats, salt is a compound that our brains tell us to eat while the going is good. That is because in our evolutionary past salt was never abundant and it was impossible to overconsume it. It is only in recent times that salt has passed from being a rare luxury to an all-pervading flavor enhancer. In the quantities that we consume today, salt is one of the many factors undermining our health. Salt is yet another food where we have defeated nature’s discipline of natural scarcity, so we should be exercising self-discipline to reinstate scarcity in our diets.

Acid/Alkali Balance

Acids are compounds that taste sour and eat away at metals. Examples are the citric acid in lemons, acetic acid in vinegar, and sulfuric acid in car batteries. Alkalis (also known as “bases”) are the opposite; in a way, they are the antidote to acids. For example, the stomach contains hydrochloric acid, which sometimes causes indigestion; the antidote is an alkali (or “antacid”), such as sodium bicarbonate and magnesium hydroxide. When acid and alkali cancel each other out, the result is neutrality—the blood is neither acid nor alkaline.

All foods, once digested and absorbed into the bloodstream, will cause the blood to be either more acidic or more alkaline. Clinical researcher Anthony Sebastian confirms that nature designed human biochemistry to work on a broadly neutral diet.
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This is not like a cat, for example, which functions best on an acid diet, nor like a horse, which prefers an alkaline diet. In humans, the body is constantly juggling to restore a neutral balance.

What are alkali-forming foods? They are ones that have a predominance of the metallic elements potassium, sodium, iron, and calcium—chiefly fruit, salads, and non-starchy vegetables. This demands an explanation, because many of these foods, notably fruit,
taste
acid but are, nevertheless, alkalizing in effect. For example, grapefruit, although acid to the taste, is strongly alkalizing. The answer to this paradox lies in what happens after the digestive system has broken down the acid into its parts.

The acid taste of many fruits is due to the presence of organic acids, such as citric acid and malic acid. This acid stays intact through the mouth, the stomach, and into the intestine. Up to this point, the effect on the digestive process and lining is acidic. But in the intestine, the organic acid passes through the intestinal wall into the bloodstream. Here, it is broken down into two parts: carbonic acid, which is blown out of the body through the lungs in the form of carbon dioxide, and the alkaline portion, which is left behind to alkalize the body.

What are acid-forming foods? Not foods that taste acid, but rather the ones that after digestion and metabolism have the effect of acidifying the body. They are foods that contain sulfur, phosphorus, and chlorine—found chiefly in proteins like meat, fish, eggs, and cheese. For example, bland roast chicken is one of the most acidifying foods around. Starches like bread, flour, pasta, and cereals are also acid forming.

The body compensates for an acid diet by drawing down reserves of calcium, sodium, and potassium to neutralize the acid and excreting the waste through the kidneys. The average person eating a Western diet has chronically acidified his body, disrupting many biochemical mechanisms. For example, an acid diet irritates the kidneys into abnormally leaking calcium into the urine. This phenomenon, known as protein-induced calciuria, is a major mechanism for bone demineralization. Considering the epidemic proportion of osteoporosis in this country, it is a vital fact that too few people know. This knowledge also explains how, on a high-meat, highly acidic diet, the Eskimo suffers from osteoporosis even though he has a high calcium intake.

The Eskimo’s high-meat diet provides protein in excess of the body’s requirements. The body cannot tolerate excess protein in the bloodstream, so it immediately mobilizes the kidneys to get rid of it. In turn, the kidneys have to extract more water from the bloodstream to provide the necessary fluid for flushing the waste proteins out in the urine. This has two consequences. This extra urination leads to dehydration and abnormal feelings of thirst—the reason why Eskimos were driven to downing vast quantities of water on their high-meat diets. Second, nature did not design the kidneys to work like this on a continuous basis. Waste protein cells and calcium-bearing cells crystallize into hard nodules. These are the kidney stones that block kidney ducts and cause immense pain.

Many other organs, including the pancreas, lymphatic system, thyroid, intestines, and liver are either dependant on or responsible for a neutral environment. They are put under abnormal stress and can fail if they continually have to compensate for an unrelenting acid diet.