Citations needed. Otherwise this is the random ravings of a crank on the Internet. (Which is fine...that's what the Internets are for, but I don't have to listen to them.)
Sure, some of the suggestions are valid, but other assertions just aren't backed by science.
He doesn't sound angry at all. I've read similar discussions. Most foods in the supermarket are manufactured and flash-baked, not baked or picked. This really works and you'll feel great. Avoiding grains, milk, and corn syrup (found in sodas and juices, hot dogs, and other places you wouldn't think of) as well as all manufactured foods is exactly the best way to go.
The problem is, this can get much more expensive. I'd love to be able to follow that for sustained periods of time. On the other hand, everything you eat that's not manufactured gives much more energy throughout the day. Who cares how much 'heat' a food generates in calories? What matters is what kind of energy you get from it.
"The problem is, this can get much more expensive."
No, the problem is there is no science here. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. Claiming that all grains are toxic when uncooked is an extraordinary claim.
As I said, I have no doubt that many of these claims are true. I also have no doubt that some are false. The author gives me no basis for knowing which is which. I happen to be a bit of a nutrition and health nut (vegetarian for 14 years, vegan occasionally, avoid processed foods generally), but I'm also a believer in science. The often ill-informed assertions of some random dude on the Internet are not going to convince me to eat like a cave man.
Mellow people can be crazy too. Though, whether he's crazy or not, there isn't a shred of evidence presented besides the picture of "tribal health" he paints.
I don't think he meant this to be a scientific paper, otherwise, as a physician, he could be liable for giving out medical advice. I can see how he would make this message appear informal. A lot of writing by nutritionists aimed at the general public is similarly informal and easy to understand.
I've read many stories and know that avoiding cereals, grains, and milk is a good idea for weight loss and sugar management.
I was able to google some sources. Note that pesticides may also introduce toxins. I'm with Steve Pavlina on trying things and seeing if they work. The advice seems to be true.
Like he said in the article, he doesn't mean toxic in the unsafe sense. He means toxic in terms of, it's not good for your body. He means it's not the natural way every species on earth has consumed this food for thousands of years.
That link is interesting but I can't find any evidence that it's true. How can I tell that he didn't just make up the story about cereal being bad? It seems like any easy experiment to reproduce -- just buy a rat and a box of corn flakes.
I assume she was still referring to Paul Stitt's book:
"In his book Fighting the Food Giants, Paul Stitt has tells us that the extrusion process used for these cereals destroys most of the nutrients in the grains."
(three paragraphs later, the rat study)
"Let me tell you about two studies which were not published. The first was described by Paul Stitt who wrote about an experiment conducted by a cereal company in which four sets of rats were given special diets... "
Since the book and study described by Paul are about cereal, and both paragraphs are near one another, I think the study is better described in that book. And since the study is attributed to a cereal company, that explains why it went unpublished.
Most of what he says seems pretty intuitive. Evolution takes a long time to work. It seems like it would take a while to adjust genetically from a diet that humans had had for almost a million years to one they'd had for only several thousand years.
I've seen claims like this a lot:
"There are races of people who are all slim, who are stronger and faster than us. They all have straight teeth and perfect eyesight. Arthritis, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, depression, schizophrenia and cancer are absolute rarities for them. These people are the last 84 tribes of hunter-gatherers in the world."
Is that actually true though? It seems like the sort of thing that should be easy to verify or disprove. Whether it's actually caused by diet would be harder to prove, but if these people really are free of all those health problems, that would be quite remarkable and should be studied more carefully.
There is a really good book out right now called "Healthy at 100" by John Robbins that speaks to this very subject. It looks at several cultures that tend to have a larger % of HEALTHY centenarians, such as the Okinawans and Hunzans. It looks at what they eat, how they live, etc. It is good because he acknowledges the self-reporting errors in such studies ("Yeah, dude, I'm 110 years old!") and the impact of physical activity and social bonds on longevity, etc.
John Robbins is biased (toward vegetarianism/veganism), but his bias is based on sound principles (science, self-experience, environmental impact, ethics, etc.) The book is not preachy or anything, though. His other books are also really good. Especially if you're interested in the food industry, animal cruelty, nutrition and disease, etc.
He's a very interesting guy. He walked away from the Baskin-Robbins fortune to live a simpler and healthier life after his dad and uncle (Robbins and Baskin, respectively) both died of heart disease from eating too much of their own product. His one room, self-built cabin with second-hand furniture was featured on "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" and it became one of their most requested shows, to everyone's surprise. He's a pretty inspiring guy.
Well, to some degree it may be true because if you are afflicted with something nasty, you die, quickly. That, and not living a sedentary lifestyle are two things that would leave the survivors pretty healthy.
It would be difficult to verify. Many cultures have great stigma associated with mental illness, and their people will go to great lengths to conceal it in their family. China is a prominent example.
A lot of these primitivists extolling stone age culture tribes praise their perfect health without mentioning the infanticide. Many (most?) stone-age technology tribes kill unhealthy infants. They have a definition of life that begins at age one. It would be impossible to isolate this effect from diet.
This article is spot-on. The major problem with this diet (where 'diet' is what one eats on an average day, not necessarilly as a weight-loss tool) is you'll have so much energy, and your body will be so happy, you'll want to be physically active. It will be very hard to stay on the computer.
One of my first successful start-ups was software that helps make sense of the 35,000+ medical studies that are published each year. (The software helps find design flaws, does cohort analysis, helps summarize results, etc.) During that experience, I became very interested in nutrition research as a hobby. I basically learned that things I grew up eating were unbelievably bad for me. (I grew up drinking milk, eating meals centered around meat, with lots of refined, fried and sugary ingredients. Good old Southern cooking and Standard American Diet.) I also learned that much of what we are taught ("Milk for strong bones") is complete bullshit when you actually read the studies. Milk is really for osteoporosis and breast cancer.
We sold that company, and I stopped seriously reading on the subject. Recently, illnesses in my family (cancer and autoimmune diseases) have caused me to get into the subject again to an even greater degree. I've also experimented with my own diet for the last several years and I've arrived at a very different conclusion than this fellow.
There are tons of people that have an almost religious agenda about pushing specific diets. They are usually well-intentioned...they just really want to believe they are right. They publish pseudo-scientific articles like this one that have just enough logic in them to seduce people into believing them. The media is also horrible about publishing sensational (but poorly analyzed) nutrition research. They flip-flop their headlines so much ("Coffee Can Cure X", then "Coffee Causes X Cancer") that people finally just give up on trying to understand nutrition and they just continue eating the crap that they have always eaten. Which is amazingly sad, because proper nutrition is really the best medicine on earth.
I LOOOOOOOVE steak and ice cream, but a vegetarian/vegan diet has been shown in almost every study to be a more healthful diet in every respect. And the studies that fail to show that are usually flawed and/or underwritten by industry trade groups. There is no "perfect diet" for everyone...there will always be corner cases. Some people with specific genetic predispositions SHOULD avoid grains altogether. Apart from gluten sensitivity, there is the issue of molecular mimicry and genetic autoimmune issues, etc.
Modern people are dying of heart disease, cancer and strokes, though. Those illnesses are linked to higher consumption of meat (Paleo-coronary, anyone?), dairy, sugar, cooking oil, and refined foods. We are NOT dying of starvation, hypothermia, or tooth loss - which were probably some of the more pressing concerns in the paleolithic era. We are also living 2-4 times longer than our ancestors, on average, so we have entirely different concerns.
This is really a fascinating area of research...I've noticed that tons of computer hackers are also very interested in nutrition and body/diet hacks.
> a vegetarian/vegan diet has been shown in almost every study to be a more healthful diet in every respect
Vegetarians have a higher death rate than meat eaters of the same socio-economic class at all ages.
Every study that looks at actual disease and death rates, and not assumed correlates like cholesterol, has found health benefits from high animal fat intake.
> heart disease, cancer and strokes, though. Those illnesses are linked to higher consumption of meat (Paleo-coronary, anyone?), dairy
Population studies show decreasing rates of heart disease and cancer with increased dairy and meat consumption. Look at post-war Europe and Japan.
I'm curious if you got these ideas from a certain organization that was started by a long-dead dentist? Your use of the phrase "assumed correlates like cholesterol" made me wonder. I guess you discount the Framingham study (or the few thousand follow-up studies that were published and peer-reviewed) that DO show a strong correlation between dietary cholesterol and heart disease?
I don't have time to post a few thousand citations that contradict your viewpoint right now, so I'll just start by mentioning the Cornell China Study:
The Cornell China Study is considered the most comprehensive study of health and nutrition ever conducted. It is a joint research program between Cornell, Oxford, and the Chinese Academy of Preventative Medicine. The data was from twenty plus years of research in 65 Chinese counties. It is often cited because of its size, scope, and the fact that there was such a wide range of diet data represented (high meat consumption populations on down to populations with little or no meat consumption, for example.) It found a strong correlation between increasing meat consumption and increasing disease and mortality. It is an interesting study. You should check it out.
American men eat a great deal more meat (10 to 20X in urban areas) than Chinese men, on average. American men also die of heart disease at almost 17 times the rate of Chinese men. This trend holds true, in the aggregate, no matter where or what time period you study. The countries with the highest meat and dairy consumption have the highest rates of cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Even in post-war Europe and Japan. Even accounting for genetic differences.
I don't want to come off as a TOTAL pompous ass, so I'll only cite more studies if you're actually interested or still want to argue with me. I spend between 15 and 20 hours researching nutrition each week, so it is a pet peeve of mine when I hear total BS passed off as truth. Like I said, proper nutrition is the best medicine on earth...even though eating properly is NOT necessarily simple, easy or fun. Wanting steaks and ice cream to be healthy does not make them so.
Yes, I have a problem with the source. I thought that might be your source based on your phrasing and the fact that there are so few that criticize Campbell's research.
I won't go out of my way to criticize the Weston A. Price Foundation, though. People can make up their own minds. I just find it funny that you question Campbell's motives, but not the motives of his critics.
Campbell has spent 50+ years as a scientist, largely funded by research grants from the National Institute of Health, and has arrived at the conclusion that diets low in animal products are healthier. Since a responsible nutrition researcher is likely to share and promote news that he believes to be both lifesaving and actionable, it is only natural that he would ally himself with other physicians that have also come to the same conclusion (Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine) to spread that message. PCRM is a great organization, in my opinion, and their membership is composed of some of the leading physicians in the area of nutrition, including the physicians that are the only ones to have successfully reversed advanced heart disease without medication.
The Weston A. Price Foundation claims it is 'unbiased', in contrast to the PCRM. That is bullshit. Follow the money to smell the bias. The Weston A. Price Foundation's membership is largely composed of family farmers, including ranchers and dairy farmers. Do you think they might be a bit biased on the subject? You will notice that the foundation's homepage at http://www.westonaprice.org/ currently has logos from eight companies that sponsor their conferences. What do we see? A meat company, a seafood company, a supplement company, a publishing company, etc. Yep, no bias there.
By the way, the link you give is for a review of the book "The China Study" by Campbell and his son, which is not the ACTUAL published China research study I was citing. Only a chapter of that book is devoted to the China research study.
Campbell wrote a rebuttal to the review you cite, which is reproduced at:
Masterjohn then wrote a rebuttal to that rebuttal...and then Campbell wrote a response to that. It's all very tiring, actually, because anyone can just look at the research studies in the aggregate and see who is right based on the science.
See also Art Devany's writing, at <http://www.arthurdevany.com/evolutionary_fitness/>. He sometimes (but not always) refers in his blog entries to recent supporting research for the 'paleolithic' diet ideal. There's a lot of similarity to 'low-carb' diets that have been popular.
Sure, some of the suggestions are valid, but other assertions just aren't backed by science.