I’ve not had time to write the magnum opus blog posts that the repuditation of the CIH really requires (and not much can be added to what Stephan has already written), so I thought this was a good opportunity to get the message outside of my own echo chamber by responding in detail to Jimmy’s inquiry. My response to him is pretty long, and I doubt if he will quote much of it, so I’ve reproduced the email response, with his inquiry broken into bits in italics and my responses afterward in roman.

Kurt, I've been getting a lot of questions this year from my "Livin' La Vida Low-Carb" blog readers about the concepts in Paul Jaminet's book "Perfect Health Diet."  He advocates for eating white potatoes and white rice as part of a low-carb eating plan.

I also have come to see most starchy plant organs as perfectly legitimate fuel sources. 

Low carb plans have helped people lose fat by reducing food reward from white flour and excess sugar and maybe linoleic acid. This is by accident as it happens that most of the "carbs" in our diet are coming in the form of manufactured and processed items that are simply not real food. Low carb does not work for most people via effects on blood sugar or insulin "locking away" fat. Insulin is necessary to store fat, but is not the main hormone regulating fat storage. That would be leptin.

My reading of the anthropology and ethnology literature, as well as my current understanding of biochemistry and metabolism, lead me to see the human metabolism as a multi-fuel stove, equally capable of burning either glucose or fatty acids at the cellular level depending on the organ, the task and the diet, and equally capable of depending on either animal fats or starches from plants as our dietary fuel source, depending on the biome (biological environment) we find ourselves born in or that we migrate to. 

We are a highly adaptable species. It is not plausible that carbohydrates as a class of macronutrient are toxic.

Diabetics need to avoid high carbohydrate intake the same way those with gall bladder disease need to avoid fat, but carbohydrates do not cause obesity or diabetes and fat consumption does not cause gall bladder disease (in fact low fat diets may contribute to gallstone formation via stasis) 

Here's a one-page explanation and illustration of Jaminet's program:http://perfecthealthdiet.com/?page_id=8

Several places in the book and on Jaminet's blog (http://perfecthealthdiet.com) he specifically warns against the danger of a very low-carb diet (defined as less than about 300-400 calories per day (~100 grams) from so-called "safe starches"--taro, plantains, yams, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, white rice and berries) because less than this leads to the risks, including:  1) "insufficient production of mucus in the digestive tract" leading to dysbiosis

I have not looked into that claim enough to comment in detail, but it seems plausible. 

 2) vitamin deficiencies (he particularly mentions Vitamin C and glutathione 

Yes I would agree with that. Whites and sweets are loaded with ascorbic acid.

on pages 253-254)In particular he emphasizes these calories need to come from "safe starches and berrries" and "don't count vegetables as as a carb source (because) they are a fiber (and therefore a fat) source" (page 45).

My list is white potatoes, sweet potatoes, white rice and bananas. If more exotic fare like plantains and taro is available to you, that is fine, too. Except for white rice, these are all whole food starch sources with good mineral and micronutrient content that have been eaten in good health for thousands of years in many environments by genetically diverse populations. Many of these plants have spread far from their biomes of origin and serve as staples for populations who have adopted them with success over just the past few thousand years.

These starchy plant organs or vegetables are like night and day compared to most cereal grains, particularly wheat. One can eat more than half of calories from these safe starches without the risk of disease from phytates and mineral deficiencies one would have from relying on grains.

White rice is kind of a special case. It lacks the nutrients of root vegetables and starchy fruits like plantain and banana, but is good in reasonable quantities as it is a very benign grain that is easy to digest and gluten free. 

I think consumption of quality animal products is the sine qua non of a healthy diet. 

Once you have that, then eating starchy plants is more important for nutrition than eating colorful leafy greens - the veggies that are high fiber and low starch. (Some green leafy vegetables are good sources of folate and along with some fruits are sources of flavonoids that may benefit you via hormesis.)

I view most non-starchy fruit with indifference. In reasonable quantities it is fine but it won't save your life either. I like citrus now and then myself, especially grapefruit. But better to rely on starchy vegetables for carbohydrate intake than fruit.

Primitive populations practicing horticulture or hunting and gathering do not eat a lot of big green salads with lots of variety, but they do eat healthy starchy plant organs with monotony on top of their foraged animal foods.

Eating a very low carb (VLC) diet for a period of time can be a good fat loss maneuver, acting via the effects of ketosis on appetite suppression. I also like to see people limit themselves to two or three meals a day with absolutely no snacking, and it may give benefits via hormesis for longer periods of fasting (24 hours or more) once in a while.

But a long term VLC ketogenic diet is not a good idea. It does not mimic the ancestral diet in general, even if some populations have tolerated it when they had to. There is no need for most people to do it to lose fat, as food reward effects are more powerful. I would advocate long term ketosis in those with neurodegenerative brains diseases like Alzheimer dementia and Parkinson disease, and a 10 day water fast followed by long term ketogenic diet is worth trying if you have cancer. 

But I would not recommend VLC ketosis as a long term way of life the way I would not recommend running a half marathon every day, or lifting weights to failure on a daily basis, or taking chemotherapy drugs when you don't have cancer. Ketosis probably stresses the body and works via hormesis. But the clean up and repair response cannot happen if there is no rest from it. 

A recent post he wrote for cancer patients revealed his recommendion of obtaining 400 to 600 glucose calories a day, mainly from these safe starches. He says it is important to avoid a glucose deficiency, since glycosylated proteins are the means of intercellular coordination, and defects in glycosylation are characteristic of the cancer phenotype.

My arguments are based more on ethnography and anthropology than some of Paul's theorizing, but I arrive at pretty much the same place that he does. I personally eat around 30% carbohydrate now and have not gained an ounce from when I ate 10-15% (and I have eaten as high as 40% for over a year also with zero fat gain) If anything I think even wider ranges of carbohydrate intake are healthy. 

One can probably eat well over 50% of calories from starchy plant organs as long as the animal foods you eat are of high quality and micronutrient content. 

Grass fed ruminants, pastured butter and eggs and wild caught cold water fish are the kernel of a healthy diet, but the fuel source can be larger than the kernel on a caloric basis if the kernel is high quality and consistent.

He notes, "You don’t want to aggravate this with a self-induced glucose deficiency." I'd like to write a blog post about this topic of "safe starches" to help my readers understand fact from fiction and will quote from your response.  THANK YOU! If you cannot assist me, then please let me know so I ask someone else to contribute.

I've given you plenty to quote from, Jimmy. Go for it!

Warnings may be in order.

I told Robb I was woefully under-read and had been out of the loop over the past few months, so he should be prepared for hearsay and rank speculation.

The interview was ex tempore and I had no knowledge of the questions beforehand. So there are a lot of verbal sidebars to make sure listeners know the context of some of my answers. These detours, when combined with some apparent digital gaps in the audio, make me sound as if I have ADD and aphasia at the same time, at least in some spots.

The interview is rather long at 1:45.

I've also updated my headshot. I hate it when people use ancient photos to represent themselves. There is a chiropractor in my town who often says hello at the grocery store, but I sometimes fail to recognize him as his photo in newspaper ads is from the Reagan administration.

Not really.

But I did just spend several hours doing a needed update. I think this is about version 3.0 since the original back-of-the-envelope diet I first put on the web in June 2009. That was a diet I had been using successfully clinically for more than two years.

The emphasis on animal products remains.

The emphasis on real whole foods - kill it or dig it up with a stick - remains and is enhanced.

Macro ratios had already been de-emphasized in v 2.0, but that has now been made even more explicit in the steps, and not just in the coda. 

Things which in my mind were "givens" but had been pointed out to me were not clearly emphasized have been made more explicit, like sleep and eating some offal.

I've deleted references to legumes other than avoiding soy and peanuts, as other legumes seem more and more benign to me.

It remains congruent with, and is perhaps now more so with other whole foods diets that I consider "Paleo 2.0" approaches, like that of Chris Kresser, Paul Jaminet, Chris Masterjohn (he won't force you to eat wheat) and J Stanton, and with more potatoes and less steak, Stephan Guyenet. 

I've not had a chance to do big blog posts about food reward yet. Those who might have seen some comments of mine elsewhere will see I find merit in the idea, but I don't know its ontological status yet.

Whether reducing food reward is restoring the EM2 or whether it is just a useful fat loss maneuver I am not sure. Either way, I think that is part of how diets like mine and maybe all diets may work, so I have emphasized that a bit more in the rank ordering.

There is also a notable but not strictly scientific bias I have used for this re-write.

It could fairly be called data mining or reverse engineering, but I've tried to write the steps such that most of the weight optimization failures that I know of would have not been following the new steps.

For example, I know of people who failed despite eating very low carb, but I cannot think of many that actually ate only twice a day with no snacks, never ate from a box, avoided restaurants and never ate ANY liquid calories, including milk and cream. So this has resulted in modifications that make my own current diet noncompliant in a few ways (I still add cream to my coffee), but I think these changes make it more universal.

This does seem to work well for many people, but nothing works for everyone.  If it optimizes your weight and health and you are satisfied, you can always break a few rules and see what you can still get away with.

I'll try to do a re-write of "how to lose weight" sometime soon and add more therapeutic tricks for when the whole foods low-NAD idea is not enough.

If you're bored and want some entertainment, there is a thread following this article on Atlantic Online.

The article, by Atlantic editor Megan McArdle, concerns whether grain consumption is responsible for Obesity. 

I was alerted to this by following a trackback, and found someone had referenced my post with the eviscerated bison as a rebuttal to these assertions by McArdle in the article:

A ribeye and an arugula salad with oilive oil and vinegar is almost as far from what our paleolithic ancestors ate as pasta primavera and an angel-food cake.  The meat our ancestors ate in the wild was not mostly fat-rich steak--game animals don't have that much body fat, and their muscles are a lot less tender. 

Yet it's only now that we're getting fat.  Which suggests to me that the cause is something other than the variation from our "natural", meat-rich diet.

A poster says:

Megan, 

I think you're working on old-paleo news (Cordain), not the newer stuff. Check out Kurt Harris's Archvore and his discussion of fats in wild animals.

Her response:

He acknowledges that even tucking the fat trimmings into his deerburger makes it only 25% fat by weight--or about standard for fatty chuck. The other cuts would be much leaner. Cows are bred to be basically huge sacks of fat and muscle; they would never survive in the wild because they require too much pasture, and they're super slow. I'm not making silly arguments about how game has no fat, but everyone I know who has butchered both western game (where there are no unnatural suburban gardens to live off), and even grass fed steers, has told me the same thing: the steers are clearly designed for eating, not survival.

My response:

You are perhaps missing some of the information. The point is that aboriginal peoples didn't eat supermarket cuts preferentially, so comparing the fat content of the center of a 20th or 21st century lean steak tells us nothing about how much fat aboriginal people, who could and did exploit the whole animal, ate. 

In fact, they exploited the fattiest parts of the animal preferentially, and the point of my posts is not that the steaks were fat in the center of the cut, but that that the center of a steak is not the relevant metric of what we evolved eating, any more than the fat in a skinless chicken breast would represent what hunter-gathers would get from a wild fowl.

And of course 25% fat by weight is about 60% fat by calories, due to the high energy density of long chain fatty acids. And that is wild deerburger with none of the omental or mesenteric or bone marrow or brain fat thrown in, which would elevate the fat calories in a whitetail to well over 60%.

My other examples, the hamburger made from grass fed lamb and steers, were over 30% fat by weight and therefore over 70% by calories, and this was artificially low as in the case of one steer, there was over 50lbs of suet left over, and none of the brains, marrow or mesenteric fat was counted. I know it was over 50lbs of extra fat because I had the container and I weighed it. This was a 100% grass finished organically raised steer.

The images of the bison on my website ( hardly "bred to be fat" given the recent history of domestication) and the anthropological data in "Imagining Head Smashed in" as well as other extensive data on hunting behavior before the modern fear of saturated fat, make it clear that animal fat was the most available and most exploited nutrient in game for most of hominin history.

The current preference for lean meats is a misguided cultural artifact of bad science and dietary superstition that is only about 50 years old.

McArdle:

Sort of. Without refrigeration (or in the case of plains tribes, much of any means of storage), aboriginals did not only slaughter meat when it was fattest and most succulent (and preservation techniques, for obvious reasons, frequently cut down on the fat content). We tend to confuse buying half-a-steer with what our ancestors did, but it's not true AFAIK. They ate fresh, deliciously fatty meat mostly in the fall on the farm and prairie, not all year round. 

Again, I am not arguing that our ancestors ate no fat! But that you cannot reason from what your deliciously fatty grass fed bison looks like in September, to what the Sioux ate the other 11 months out of the year. I've seen what the animals look like after a Wyoming winter, and they're pretty damn skinny unless someone's been bringing them fodder. Furry, yes, but they've used up a lot of their fat stores. In other places, it's the dry season instead of the cold season, but the effects are similar.

Harris:

Sorry, wrong again. Animals were butchered preferentially when fattest, and pemmican eaten in the depths of winter.

Pemmican is mostly fat. Here is a nutritional breakdown from US Wellness Meats, where they make it the old-fashioned way:

Est. Percent of Calories from:
Fat 78.8% Carbs 0.0%
Protein 20.0%

I know folks who make their own according to traditional recipes and the fat percentage is similar. Berries can be added for carbohydrate, but all pemmican was high in fat traditionally.

So native americans of the plains were definitely not on low fat diets for "11 months out of the year". They knew how to preserve game meat and they loaded it with fat. They were smart. You can stay alive indefinitely on 80/20 fat/protein (% by calories) but will die quickly on the reverse ratio due to protein toxicity


And even a western animal that looks skinny has plenty of fatty bits that are not steak. Like the tongue for instance. The lean meat meme is a modern cultural prejudice derived from the flawed diet/heart hypothesis. Aboriginals around the world ate as much fat as they could, and if the animals were always fat they always ate it. Think zebras in Africa.

McArdle:

Yes, of course animals were butchered preferentially when fattest, as they are in every society. And I know what's in pemmican. But they did not put up a year's supply of pemmican every September.

Harris:

They ate a lot of fat whenever they could - they certainly preserved fatty meat to eat for many months into the winter, which you initially denied. It is impossible to eat enough protein to live on without fat or carbohydrate and they certainly were not maintaining greenhouses or shopping at whole foods for carbohydrate in the winter. So they would not have survived at all without plenty of fat, unless you disagree with the metabolic fact that one cannot live on nothing but protein for months on end. Google "rabbit starvation".

McArdle:

You're refuting claims I haven't made--that people weren't eating fat. I'm saying that the idea that they had these hugely high fat diets year round isn't true. There were periods of high fat good eating, and periods of lean. But the year round, super awesome high fat meat diet is not how anyone ever lived outside of the Amazon. If you're refrigerating meat to eat later, you're already eating very different from your paleo ancestors.

Harris:

"The meat our ancestors ate in the wild was not mostly fat-rich steak--game animals don't have that much body fat, and their muscles are a lot less tender. We've selectively bred our domesticated animals for considerably more succulence than our ancestors enjoyed."

You made this claim implying that modern diets are richer in animal fats than what our ancestors ate when they ate animals. I am refuting it with what I have presented. You are claiming that our ancestors ate less fat when they ate animals. That is not true, no matter what you prefer to believe. 

I have no idea what a "year round super-awesome high fat diet is". I've eaten about 60% of calories as animal fats (about 25% saturated fat) and 20% as carbohydrate for the last 4 years and my BMI is 21.5 and waist is 30". Maybe that is what you mean.

I have claimed that ancestral peoples that hunted animals had access to plenty of fat and exploited it as much as they could. You've presented nothing but assertions that they could not have eaten much fat, and I have refuted them.

"game animals don't have much body fat" is factually completely incorrect, as I have shown, unless you think skeletal muscles are the only constituents of the animal's body. I think more than 60% fat by calories cannot reasonably said to be "not much fat" - 

An entire animal eaten head to tail would be at least 50% calories as fat no matter how "lean" the muscles are once you count mesentery, omentum, brains, marrow, subcutaneous fat and solid viscera. Every single cell in an animals body has fats in the cell membrane. 

Whether eating an animal killed at the end of winter, the fattest, the leanest, or the pemmican which is 80% fat, there was plenty of fat available and eaten year round. I know that is not what you want to believe because you have been taught to fear animal fats, but that is the truth.

The amazon? Not sure what that would have to do with anything.

And FWIW, I don't blame the obesity epidemic on carbohydrates in general. I blame it on wheat, sugar (including HFCS) and linoleic acid. Not potatoes..

But definitely not fat - consumption figures and the arguments I have just used all refute that animal fat or fatty steaks has anything to do with the obesity epidemic.

McArdle:

Sigh. No, I am not arguing that our ancestors were on the Dean Ornish diet. I claimed that people who think that they are eating a paleolithic diet by giving up bread and ordering half a steer are fooling themselves. A steer is not an animal that our ancestors would have had access to. It has been bred by us to be more tender, and to provide relatively more of desireable cuts from large muscle groups, and it is not just preferentially slaughtered when it is fattest, but only slaughtered when it is fattest. Our paleolithic ancestors did not eat as if every day were high summer. And they ate a lot more organ meat. You are "refuting" me by arguing that the hamburger in your fridge sure is high fat. I was arguing that what the "paleo" folks seem to argue is closer to nature is no more natural than a pound cake.

I happen to agree that the low-fat obsession seems, in retrospect, to have been fairly silly, and that sweeteners seem to be objectively worse for you. But a modern paleo, unless he's spending several months a year living entirely on beef jerky, rendered tallow, and dried berries, is not eating anything remotely close to a paleo diet. You *couldn't*--it's only legal to hunt when the animals are fattest.

Harris:

You're still perseverating on how much fat could or could not have been eaten. I think I've addressed that adequately and shown that you are wrong. The only reason it matters is that you claim animal fat content as being different from the ancestral on a "paleo" diet. The point is that saturated and animal fat are harmless and you can eat a lot of it or not very much and be healthy, and you cannot claim as evidence that ancestral populations could not have eaten the amount of animal fat in a modern fatty steak because it was not available to them. That I have refuted, you cannot make that argument because it is not true as indicated by all the actual evidence. 

You said:

"I was arguing that what the "paleo" folks seem to argue is closer to nature is no more natural than a pound cake."

Now that you've chosen to re-emphasize it, I will address this claim, which is even sillier than the one about fat.

A typical "paleo" meal, consisting of either a fat or lean steak, a green salad and a sweet potato, is not only healthy but is indeed closer to ancestral diets than pound cake. No because of what it contains, but because of what it does not contain. 

Processed white flour, a concentrated source of gluten and wheat germ agglutinin, sugar in the form of sucrose or high fructose corn syrup, and especially, industrial vegetable oils heavy in n-6 linoleic acid - such as corn, soy, canola, peanut, etc...

This last, linoleic acid, is required in the diet in tiny amounts, but in the modern diet is up to 15% of caloric intake, versus 3% in aboriginal diets and most human diets more than 100 years ago. And none of these agents was present in large amounts in diets 15,000 years ago. 

The paleolithic diet was not a single diet and was not constant, but it did have things that were consistently MISSING from it. 

Animal fat, whatever vegans may fantasize, is not one of the missing elements. Animal and saturated fats are not neolithic agents of disease.

And by the way, I am only bothering with this because I highly respect the Atlantic - I'm a subscriber - and I've enjoyed your own market liberal oriented writings therein. But this is a topic Iv'e been interested in as a Doctor for 4 years and I've more than a passing acquaintance with these issues.

read more here: 

http://www.archevore.com/

And it's too late, but you might enjoy this one in particular:

http://www.archevore.com/panu-...

There are some other good comments there by others.

But my favorites are the ones that say things like:  "A cursory review of the abstracts in Google Scholar indicates that this is an open question that is still being sorted out by the experts." How's that for an irrefutable argument? : ) 

Thanks to Allen Pierce and pfw for getting the glossary started.

Once on Richard Nikoley’s blog, he had a link to some piece of vegan propaganda that contained a video clip of pigs being slaughtered and hung up. I knew I could never be a vegan when the video, intended to disgust me, instead made me salivate involuntarily.

This picture is like that. It will only look “pretty” to those who are comfortable, if not intimate, with where food comes from.

This photo is courtesy of reader Tara, and illustrates the copious mesenteric (inside the belly) fat in a “lean” grass-fed buffalo. She has more such beautiful images at her website linked below.

Tribe of Five

Her comments are in italics, mine in roman.

I was a nutritionist, now evolved into an apprenticing farmer and butcher. I spent last fall on a 3000 acre native grassland prairie farm where we farmed and butchered meat. The farm had a small abattoir right on the premises so I was privy to some mini observational experiments. I was able to see the differences between neighbouring farmers grain fed beef animals with the wild meat of our farm (free roaming bison herds that never see humans except when we would pull up the truck from a few hundred metres away to 'harvest' an animal). We also did some custom cutting for local hunters.

One objection to my observations on lamb and steer carcasses is that domestic animals have been bred to gain weight (fat) for our consumption. Actually the opposite is true for factory pork, but I digress. Unlike cattle that are products of thousands of years of intense artificial selection, ranched bison are genetically little changed from the ones that thundered the northern plains just 150 years ago. Bison should be pretty representative of the fat content of wild ruminants that were consumed in archaic diets

It was not unusual for us to snack on the raw, grass-fed meat of the farm while we were cutting it. Anyone who thinks grass fed meat is unusually lean has simply not seen a properly finished animal. The custom meat cutting we did for outside farms was a different story. The meat was pale and sour smelling. The fat, while abundant intramuscularly was a different texture. We complained that it felt 'greasy' and 'slimy'. Anecdotal, I know, but I have often said that if I could just have people smell the difference between grass or grain fed beef carcasses, I wouldn't have to say another word.

I’ve not eaten much CAFO lamb. The grass finished lambs I eat have an intense flavor that is literally the best tasting food I have ever eaten. By far my favorite meat. It literally tastes like grass – a subtle, slightly astringent flavor. We lick the grease from our fingers.

 Unfortunately, here in Ontario, I have been unable to find a finished grass-fed animal, instead the meat is often pale pink, too low in fat, tough and weak in taste, a sure sign of an improperly finished animal.

You can see some of the pictures of what fat looks like from a grass fed, wild bison.

http://www.tribeoffive.com/2010/11/just-watch-animals.html 

This is about as close as you can get to the bison that used to roam these plains. Even in the winter, they are foraging. Check out the fat on that animal. If you wanted lean, you would be trimming all of that outside fat off. Thankfully, our customers were educated enough to ask for that fat to be rendered or mixed in with the ground. The grass fed bison, properly finished, were also bountifully endowed with deep, yellow fat.

I'm also a hunter. In fact, I have some venison bones in the stockpot right now.

I agree with you Kurt, our wild meat has plenty of fat in it. Although, we're finding it tougher to find wild game that doesn't have access to grain fields in our area. Next year, hubby and I are planning on going further up north where the animals aren't gorging on GMO soy like they are in our neck of the woods.

Thank you for adding these fascinating observations to our anecdotal but for me completely convincing evidence on the fat content of wild ruminants.

When I read in his 2010 version of the book that palmitate will cause atherosclerosis because it raises your "cholesterol", but you might not die as long as you do everything else right, I could not believe it. Every time Dr. Cordain has been identified as a lipophobe in the nutrition blogosphere, someone comes to his defense and says, "Oh, haven't you heard? He has reversed himself on the saturated fat issue."

Now it's not all saturated fats, just the palmitic acid that will kill you. You know, the palmitic acid your blood is coursing with during fasting or while you sleep. The storage fat.

That is not a reversal, just another ad hoc refinement of an ad-hoc hypothesis. The Bismarck will not sink, no matter how many torpedoes she takes. She must be foundered on a reef and just looks to be floating.

As far as I can tell, Dr. Cordain is still as saturophobic as any ACC member. Too bad.