Category: nutrition

Did Genghis Khan Read Weston Price?

Seth Roberts1 Comment

In Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (2004) by Jack Weatherford, I read this (p. 87):

Compared to the Jurched [Chinese] soldiers, the Mongols were much healthier and stronger. The Mongols consumed a steady diet of meat, milk, yogurt, and other dairy products, and they fought men who lived on gruel made from various grains. The grain diet of the peasant warriors stunted their bones, rotted their teeth, and left them weak and prone to disease. In contrast, the poorest Mongol soldier ate mostly protein, thereby giving him strong teeth and bones.

To tenderize meat a Mongol would put it under his saddle while riding. I was pleased to read this because I eat a lot of meat and yogurt (but not milk). The source of this information is unclear but it’s a surprisingly modern comparison. Good Calories Bad Calories (2007) by Gary Taubes says much the same thing (minus the yogurt — the part that most interests me). Weston Price wrote many similar passages comparing people eating traditional food (= Mongols) with people eating modern food circa 1930 (= Chinese). Long ago, grain was modern food.

Thanks to Tucker Max.

Does Bad Medicine Drive Out Good? The Case of Eczema

Seth Roberts6 Comments

In an article on weight regulation I read this:

One subject . . . developed symptoms possible related to EFA [essential fatty acid] deficiency (ie, mild eczema relieved by the addition of fat to the diet).

In other words, the subject — in a metabolic ward at Rockefeller University where everything he ate was supplied by the researchers — developed eczema when fed a zero-fat diet. When fat was added, the eczema disappeared. The researchers understood that not enough fat in your food can cause eczema. This research was done around 1960. The conclusion is supported by dozens of reports from people doing the Shangri-La Diet who said that when they started drinking oil their skin improved. Dry areas disappeared. I found the same thing myself. (And judging by the large fraction of people who have dry skin, a lot of people aren’t eating enough fat.)

The notion that eczema can be cured by eating more fat — perhaps high in omega-3 — could hardly be simpler. Around 1960, at least some doctors understood this (in a situation, I admit, where it was easy to understand). Yet here is how eczema is treated today, according to Bottom Line/Women’s Health (April 2009, p. 9):

Eczema (dry, itchy, swollen skin) usually is treated with topical anti-inflammatory cream twice daily during flare-ups. Patients who applied tacrolimus (Protopic) twice weekly to lesion-prone areas even when no lesions were visible went 142 days between flare-ups, on average . . . versus 15 days for placebo users. Tacrolimus can cause nausea and muscle pain and may increase skin cancer risk — ask your doctor about the pros and cons of preventative eczema treatment.

The information comes from a study done by Sakari Reitamo, a professor of dermatology at University of Helsinki, and others published recently in Allergy.

The surface things — the things that impress many readers — appear good: large sample, big difference between groups, peer-reviewed journal, good university. Yet once you know that eczema can be cured by eating more fat, the whole thing sounds Orwellian.

The Wisdom of Young Picky Eaters

Seth Roberts1 Comment

I’m sure that what we want to eat is a good guide to what we should eat, so long as you ask what our preferences would have led us to eat 100,000 years ago — before we killed off the woolly mammoths. (Curiously, I’ve never seen this obvious idea in any nutrition text.) A vast amount of trial and error is embodied in those preferences. Because we learn to like foods, our best guide to unlearned preferences may be what children want to eat.

The great essayist George Trow doesn’t quite get it, I’m afraid:

In the New History, the preferences of a child carried as much weight as the preferences of an adult, so the refining of preferences was subtracted from what it was necessary for a man to learn to do.

The Wisdom of the One-Year-Old Picky Eater. The Wisdom of the Five-Year-Old Picky Eater.

Relief for Ankylosing Spondylitis

Seth Roberts1 Comment

Ankylosing spondylitis is a kind of arthritis with puzzling symptoms all over the body. Its main symptom is back vertebrae fusing together; ankloysis is stiffening or fusion of a joint. To read Wikipedia you’d think it can only be treated with dangerous drugs that don’t work very well.

I recently learned from someone with the condition that it got much better after he cut out all refined carbohydrates, especially sugar, an idea he got from Dr. Bruce West. He describes his regimen as “avoid processed foods [= food with lots of additives], such as fast foods, and especially refined carbohydrates, such as high fructose corn syrup.” After he started this, he felt better in three days. He can eat fruit, but not bread or soft drinks or desserts. He’s never tried eating more fermented foods; he barely knew what they were.

Is the idea spreading? I asked. No, he said. Curious, in this day of forums and patient-centered websites.

More A reader noted that the same advice is given here.

The Nutritional Wisdom of Young Chicks

Seth Roberts1 Comment

After I wrote that young children may be picky eaters because they are offered unhealthy food, some readers disagreed. But here is another example:

I myself have been amazed to see hungry young chicks refuse to touch a purified diet until we added thiamin, which we discovered to have been accidentally omitted from a published formula.

From Kenneth Carpenter’s excellent Beriberi, White Rice, and Vitamin B (2000), p. 193. If young chicks can better judge the nutritional quality of food than nutrition professors, perhaps young children can, in some situations, better judge the nutritional quality of food than their parents. And rightly decide that food their parents think is healthy isn’t so healthy.

The wisdom of the one-year-old picky eater.

The Experts Speak: Nutrition

Seth Roberts7 Comments

I have nothing against a paleolithic diet, but I think its advocates, like many experts, are overconfident. It’s not easy to know which features of a diet that varies in 20 ways from modern diets are the crucial ones. I came across this while reading about paleolithic diets:

The general gist of eating like a caveman—namely, focusing on foods in their whole, natural state, is not going to get much argument. “It comes down to the advice your mother gave you,” says Leonard [William Leonard, chair of the anthropology department at Northwestern University]. “Eat a balanced diet and a diversity of foods.”

I beg to differ.

1. Whole, natural state. I find flaxseed oil very helpful. It supplies omega-3 missing from my diet, but presumably present in diets that contained lots of seafood or vegetation-fed meat. Flaxseed oil is not food in a whole and natural state.

2. Whole, natural state . I find fermented food very helpful. Bacteria break down food, making it less whole. Modern food of all sorts is unnaturally low in bacteria (due to refrigeration, food safety laws, shelf-life requirements, etc.), just as modern meat is unnaturally low in omega-3. Fermented food is unnaturally high in bacteria, correcting the deficit.

3. The advice your mother gave you. Traditional diets, yes, what your mom thinks, no. When I was growing up we ate margarine instead of butter — poor choice. We had skim milk, not whole milk — poor choice. The absence of butter and whole milk is, if Weston Price is right, why my teeth are slightly crooked. We ate almost no fermented food — very poor choice. (Which I suspect is why I had mild allergies.) We rarely ate fish — poor choice. And yet we didn’t have a TV — very good, very unusual choice. Even my mom, who thought for herself far more than most moms, had serious misconceptions about nutrition. Given the epidemic of childhood obesity, not to mention less visible increases in autism, allergies, and ADHD, I am very skeptical that the average kid’s mom knows what to eat.

4. Eat a balanced diet. Plenty of communities in excellent health eat diets that American experts would describe as not balanced at all — no fruit for example, or too much dairy. Eskimos and the Swiss in isolated villages studied by Weston Price are two examples. Price found that a wide range of diets, most violating one or more popular nutritional precepts, produced excellent health.

5. A diversity of foods. Several healthy communities studied by Price did not eat a wide range of foods. The human diet became a lot more diverse around the time of the “ broad-spectrum revolution” — broad-spectrum meaning wider range of food. Around that time human height decreased. Apparently the new, more diverse diet was less healthy than the old diet. An anthropology professor might know this.

The title of this post comes from the book The Experts Speak which is full of examples of how experts were wildly wrong.

What about Multivitamins?

Seth Roberts5 Comments

A recent large study concluded:

After a median follow-up of 8.0 and 7.9 years in the clinical trial and observational study cohorts, respectively, the Women’s Health Initiative study provided convincing evidence that multivitamin use has little or no influence on the risk of common cancers, CVD, or total mortality in postmenopausal women.

I think this supports what I’ve been saying. In this blog I’ve emphasized two deficiencies in the American diet:

  • Not enough omega-3
  • Not enough fermented food

Neither is reduced by a multivitamin pill. As far as I can tell, when either one is fixed with something resembling an optimal dose, there are easy-to-notice benefits. Before I started making these points, there were plenty of reasons to think these are major deficiencies. For example, the Aquatic Ape Hypothesis suggested that we might need more omega-3 than we usually get. The Umami Hypothesis suggested we need a lot more fermented food than we usually eat. In contrast, I can’t think of a single reason to think that Americans suffer from major vitamin deficiencies. I take a multivitamin pill but I’d stop long before I’d give up flaxseed oil or fermented foods.

The Wisdom of the Five-Year-Old Picky Eater

Seth Roberts16 Comments

Children are notoriously picky eaters. Could they be trying to tell us (adults) something? Such as how bad our diet is?

Alex Combs, a stay-at-home dad and equity trader who lives near Philadelphia, has a five-year-old son whom Alex describes as “a picky eater.”

His son will not eat rice, potatoes, and pasta. He will eat small amounts of meat.

Yet his son will eat pickles, balsamic vinegar, and old/stinky cheese (but not regular cheese).

This is a fair description of what I eat! No simple carbs, some meat, plenty of fermented foods. While lots of people advocate low-carb diets, only a few, including me, advocate large amounts of fermented food. His son’s counter-intuitive liking for such gourmet “adult” foods as pickles, balsamic vinegar, and old cheeses, all high in bacteria, puts the picky eating of children in a whole new light. They’re not picky — they’re smart.

History Repeating Itself: Fear of Bacteria

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In the late 1800s in the United States, babies started developing scurvy; there was a veritable plague. It turned out that the vast majority of victims were being fed milk that had been heat treated (as suggested by Pasteur) to control bacterial disease. Pasteurization was effective against bacteria, but it destroyed the Vitamin C.

From a history of nutrition. Now children are probably getting all sorts of immune disorders, such as hay fever, for the same core reason: fear of bacteria.