Category: animal fat

Assorted Links

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Thanks to Vic Sarjoo, Anne Weiss, and Marian Lizzi.

Science in Action: Mysterious Mental Improvement (part 2)

Seth Roberts12 Comments

Yesterday I blogged about a sudden improvement in how fast I could do arithmetic. The improvement was much larger than normal variation and happened after I did four things that I rarely did. In chronological order:

1. Ate about 30 g of butter.

2. Stood on a cobblestone mat (for 5 minutes, which was all I could bear).

3. Stood during the test.

4. Walked for 10 minutes just before the test.

To find out which mattered, I did them again in the same order and at the same times of day, but with tests before and after each one. If performance suddenly improved after one of them, then I’d know.

Here’s what actually happened.

The last six points are the relevant results. The first of the six points (627 msec) was before everything. The second (613 msec) was after butter but before the cobblestones. The third (630 msec) was after the cobblestones but before standing. The fourth (610 msec) and fifth (603 msec) were while standing but before walking. The final one (581 msec) was while standing after walking.

I was surprised and pleased how closely the first and last scores repeated the earlier difference. The first score was close to the previous baseline; the last score was close to the previous outlier. A big improvement seems to be under my control.

Before doing these tests, my best guess about what caused the improvement was the walking. But the scores were improving before the walking so that’s unlikely. Perhaps the walking was one of several factors that helped. The data suggest, if anything, a shocking conclusion: butter made my brain work better. An alternative, less consistent with Occam’s razor, is that butter, standing, and walking all produced smaller improvements, which together added up to the big improvement. The cobblestones produced a short-lived decrement.

That pork fat improved my sleep obviously supports the butter interpretation. I should be less surprised than anyone else, but still . . . Last week I noticed something else that supports the butter explanation. At a restaurant with a friend, the waiter brought bread and olive oil. I asked for butter. I spread all of it on a piece of bread, then asked for more butter, and spread all of that on another piece of bread. (About 30 g butter total.) It was the first time I’d eaten a large amount of butter at a meal. An hour or so later, I felt unusually good, some combination of calm and warmth. I never noticed this after eating pork fat, but butter may be to pork fat as hamburger is to steak: Easier to digest. The pork fat is within cell walls; the butter fat isn’t.

The Need for Animal Fat

Seth Roberts6 Comments

If you read Good Calories Bad Calories you may remember that the Arctic anthropologist Vilhjamur Steffanson spent a year on an all-meat diet, with no ill effects. (In an earlier post about Steffanson, I stressed the fermented food that the Eskimos ate.) You may not know that animal fat was crucial for his health during that year, which began with a brief attempt to eat lean meat (meaning meat without fat):

On February 26, 1968, [Stefansson] was admitted to the ward and on February 28, started on the meat diet. At our request he began eating lean meat only, although he had previously noted, in the North, that very lean meat sometimes produced digestive disturbances. On the 3rd day nausea and diarrhea developed. When fat meat was added to the diet, a full recovery was made in 2 days.

During the year, he got about 80% of his calories from fat.

Via Inhuman Experiment.

Animal Fat, Sleep, and the Ketogenic Diet

Seth Roberts7 Comments

Kathy Tucker draws my attention to a recent article about the ketogenic diet, which is essentially a very-high-animal-fat diet, used to treat childhood epilepsy. I’ve blogged about the ketogenic diet (here, here, and here) but that was before I was on a similar diet. Kids on the diet didn’t develop high cholesterol (“very few children actually end up with cholesterol or lipid problems on the diet”). I slept better when I ate more animal fat, which suggests that animal fat makes the brain work better overall. The success of the ketogenic diet supports that idea. My results suggest that it is the animal fat, not the other fat, that makes the diet effective.

That many kids with epilepsy get better when put on the ketogenic diet can be seen as a canary-in-the-coal-mine phenomenon. Canaries are more sensitive to bad air than miners; children with ketogenic-responsive epilepsy are more sensitive to lack of animal fat than the rest of us. That lesson was lost on me when I first learned about the diet and its success. The broader lesson is that almost any disease has something to teach us about what the best environment is.

How Bad is Animal Fat?

Seth Roberts15 Comments

After learning that animal fat improved my sleep, I happily ate much more of it. I wasn’t worried that it made something else worse (e.g., heart disease). I believe that all parts of our bodies have been shaped by evolution to work well on the same diet, just as all electric appliances are designed to work well on the same house current.

A to-be-published meta-analysis in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition supports my view that animal fat is nowhere as bad as we’ve been told a thousand times. It says:

During 5—23 y of follow-up of 347,747 subjects, . . . intake of [more] saturated fat was not associated with an increased risk of CHD [coronary heart disease], stroke, or CVD [cardiovascular disease]. The pooled relative risk estimates that compared extreme quantiles of saturated fat intake were 1.07 (95% CI: 0.96, 1.19; P = 0.22) for CHD, 0.81 (95% CI: 0.62, 1.05; P = 0.11) for stroke, and 1.00 (95% CI: 0.89, 1.11; P = 0.95) for CVD.

Emphasis added. One aspect of the results suggested that studies that found an positive association (more fat, more disease) were more likely to be published than those that didn’t find an association or found a negative association. Which means these numbers may underestimate the good effects.

Thanks to Steve Hansen and Michael Pope.

“The 11 Best Foods You Aren’t Eating”

Seth Roberts25 Comments

There isn’t one fermented food on a list of “the 11 best foods you aren’t eating” compiled by Tara Parker-Pope, author of the world’s most visible health blog. Nor do any of the listed foods contain animal fat. One of them (sardines) is high in omega-3, so the list gets a D instead of an F. Fermented foods and animal fat (in sufficient quantity) have easily-noticed benefits, in contrast to every food on the list. Parker-Pope and the nutritionist she consulted (Jenny Bowden) have large gaps in their understanding of nutrition.

The Unwisdom of John Mackey

Seth Roberts12 Comments

John Mackey is the founder of Whole Foods, a business I greatly respect. But he’s not always right.

“You only love animal fat because you’re used to it,” he said. “You’re addicted.”

(From a profile of Mackey in The New Yorker.) I discovered that animal fat improved my sleep when I overcame my (learned) repulsion and ate a lot more than usual.I think it’s obvious that fat tastes good for unlearned reasons. For reasons not based on experience. (Babies like fat. Animals similar to us, who have never eaten fast food, like fat.) Mackey’s comment is an example of a larger disregard of this. Professional nutritionists, including nutrition professors, have ignored the general point that our food preferences must somehow be good for us. I’m not saying all fat must be good for us — just the fat we ate when our liking of fat evolved. The idea that evolution would shape us to like and eat a food component that’s bad for us makes no sense.

James Michener Anticipates Me

Seth Roberts9 Comments

In James Michener’s Poland (1983), a Polish peasant in a concentration camp tries to survive by thinking about food (p. 532 of the paperback):

He then transferred his imagination to a supper served at the wedding of a well-to-do farmer, where huge platters of sauerkraut, sausage, boiled pork and pickles had been provided, one to each of six tables, and he had helped himself piggishly, moving from one to the other so as not to reveal his gluttony. Â He recalled this particular feast for two reasons: as a peasant, he knew that the acid bite of the pickled kraut was good for him, all peasants knew that and it was one reason why they survived so long; and he could see in the rich fat of the meats the strength that came from them.

Later he thinks about animal fat:

He imagined himself luxuriating with platters of butter, or grease, or pork drippings, or oil that rich people bought from Spain, or the golden globules at the edge of a roast, or plain lard.

According to Wikipedia, Poland was based on “extensive study of Poland’s history and culture.” Thanks to Nadav Manham.

Sometimes Black Really Is White

Seth Roberts6 Comments

Jenny Holzer, the artist, says, “ I get up about four times a night and go back to sleep, or not.” I suspect she’s not eating enough animal fat. At my local Beijing supermarket yesterday, I asked a butcher to cut the meat off a piece of pork fat. Reverse trimming. At the moment, I think about 180 g of animal fat/day is a good dose. I’m much less concerned about amount of meat. Another instance, I thought to myself, where I want the opposite of everyone else. But that’s far more true in America than here. In China but not America, I can buy pork belly at any supermarket; in China but not America, there is vast selection of pickles and yogurt at any supermarket.