Coronavirus

[bkp_duke]

True in that we don’t act/live like carnivores anymore, but we have the worst obesity, diabetes, cancer rates, mental illness, etc. in the history of man-kind now. Meat consumption is also at all time lows now in the history of mankind. Coincidence?

Obesity and heart disease and cancer kill many more people than Covid ever will...and having poor physical health makes Covid much deadlier...my gosh, look at all the overweight kids, what a travesty for modern day mainstream health/medical advice —> “eat your veggies, low fat foods, and exercise”

...we need to wake up to the fact that the real historic epidemic going on (obesity/diabetes/metabolic-syndrome) is not because of eating red meat since we keep being told to eat less and less than ever before yet get worse and worse...the health problems (including making Covid more deadly than it otherwise should be) is precisely because of the lack of red meat in our diets...we are being told to eat the opposite way that our bodies were designed to eat for millions of years of evolution. We hunted large mammals in tribes up until 10-20k years ago...our bodies cannot evolve to have plant-based diets in 10-20k years

Look up Dr. Weston Price
Weston Price - Wikipedia

You can think I’m nuts, but do your own research on this stuff from both sides (just like it’s important to hear both sides of TSLA bull vs. bear arguments/research), experiment eating on both sides even (like try driving a an ICE car and then a Tesla to compare experiences)...the difference here is that its not your investment accounts, it’s literally your life that depends on how thorough you can be in this nutrition/health research. I did and I am the healthiest I’ve ever been now at 41 (in as good shape as I was at 21 as a personal trainer) And got a CAC score of 0 to be sure and my blood pressure is perfect now too + many more benefits (E.g. imagine very rarely needing to use toilet paper, that’s how nature intended that function to work)

Goodluck as we all have our own journey on this front

Red meat has nothing at all to do with diabetes (and I'm an endocrinologist - this is 100% up my alley).

Diabetes (Type 2) in the US results from a MASSIVE food oversupply, and a MASSIVE reduction in exercise in our country. Red meat isn't something when I had conversations with my patients that they were ever told to avoid, or increase consumption of.

You REALLY want the culprit - look into Fructose. Our bodies metabolize Fructose very differently than we do other natural sugars, and it greatly promotes the liver to convert it into fat (again, more so that other sugars like glucose).

Because our diets are filled with processed foods, that contain a lot of High Fructose Corn Syrup (to make them taste better - Fructose is much sweeter than other sugars), we are gaining weight at an alarming rate.

Getting 1 hour of exercise a day and eliminating excess sugar (especially Fructose) from our diets would cut the rate of diabetes in this country by 60-75%.

 

[jerry33]

We don’t know this. For example the inuits eat mainly fish and thrive, Maasai warriors eat mainly cow milk, cow blood and lamb meat and thrive.

I recommend this story about a missionary who got stranded with inuits. He and his crew ate only fish until they got rescued, meanwhile some of their chronic illnesses dissappeared. When they got back home, scientists refused to believe that you could thrive on only fish, so he did an experiment to prove it by letting people observe him eating only fish for a year. Here is his text from 1926:
Stefansson 1 - Eskimos Prove An All-Meat Diet Provides Excellent Health.

Are you sure that it isn't because Eskimos have had that diet for many thousands of years (around ten IIRC), that those who were less able to adapt are no longer in the Eskimo gene pool?

 

[bkp_duke]

We don’t know this. For example the inuits eat mainly fish and thrive, Maasai warriors eat mainly cow milk, cow blood and lamb meat and thrive.

I recommend this story about a missionary who got stranded with inuits. He and his crew ate only fish until they got rescued, meanwhile some of their chronic illnesses dissappeared. When they got back home, scientists refused to believe that you could thrive on only fish, so he did an experiment to prove it by letting people observe him eating only fish for a year. Here is his text from 1926:
Stefansson 1 - Eskimos Prove An All-Meat Diet Provides Excellent Health.

According to wikipedia, the latest science don’t even show that LDL is bad:
Cholesterol - Wikipedia
Although there is a link between cholesterol and atherosclerosis as discussed above,[97] a 2014 meta-analysis concluded there is insufficient evidence to support the recommendation of high consumption of polyunsaturated fatty acids and low consumption of total saturated fats for cardiovascular health.[98] A 2016 review concluded there was either no link between LDL and mortality or that lower LDL was linked to a higher mortality risk, especially in older adults.[99]

Your talking to a Doctor, an Endocrinologist, trained with a Ph.D. in metabolism.

In a nutshell, you are wrong.

People with hypercholesterolemia (a mutation that causes their bodies to over-produce cholesterol) have more than a 10-fold death rate from heart attacks and strokes due to the cholesterol accumulation in their blood vessels. This includes super-fit athletes with the condition, although exercise does help reduce their changes of dying.


Also, you really don't understand metabolism if you think a fish diet is bad for you. It's loaded with UNsaturated fats, which our bodies metabolize much better than SATURATED fats (i.e. mostly in processed foods).

I wasn't even talking about LDL, which is not a fat in and of itself, but a molecule used by the body to shuttle fats around (it is true you consume more fats you have more LDL in your system, but LDL itself is NOT directly a fat molecule). Please do your homework before you start spouting off false information.

 

[heltok]

Are you sure that it isn't because Eskimos have had that diet for many thousands of years (around ten IIRC), that those who were less able to adapt are no longer in the Eskimo gene pool?

Stefansson and his crew were westerners who got stranded there and they seemed to thrive there so likely it is not the genes. Imo read the article!

 

[JRP3]

For example the inuits eat mainly fish and thrive

They don't, it's a myth. New Study Explodes the 'Eskimo Myth'

 

[heltok]

Your talking to a Doctor, an Endocrinologist, trained with a Ph.D. in metabolism.

In a nutshell, you are wrong.

People with hypercholesterolemia (a mutation that causes their bodies to over-produce cholesterol) have more than a 10-fold death rate from heart attacks and strokes due to the cholesterol accumulation in their blood vessels. This includes super-fit athletes with the condition, although exercise does help reduce their changes of dying.


Also, you really don't understand metabolism if you think a fish diet is bad for you. It's loaded with UNsaturated fats, which our bodies metabolize much better than SATURATED fats (i.e. mostly in processed foods).

I wasn't even talking about LDL, which is not a fat in and of itself, but a molecule used by the body to shuttle fats around (it is true you consume more fats you have more LDL in your system, but LDL itself is NOT directly a fat molecule). Please do your homework before you start spouting off false information.

If you are gonna say that I am wrong, at least specify what I said that was wrong. I think you are making a straw man of what I said. I never claimed that a fish diet is bad!?

They don't, it's a myth. New Study Explodes the 'Eskimo Myth'

Can you quote the part that says that they dont mainly eat fish? Because I couldn’t find it in the text.

I will quote wikipedia:
Inuit cuisine - Wikipedia

Traditional Inuit diets derive approximately 50% of their calories from fat, 30–35% from protein and 15–20% of their caloriesfrom carbohydrates, largely in the form of glycogen from the raw meat they consumed.[24][25]

EDIT, also let’s not derail this thread... Sorry for OT...

 

[bkp_duke]

Stefansson and his crew were westerners who got stranded there and they seemed to thrive there so likely it is not the genes. Imo read the article!

You are completely ignoring the fact that they were probably CALORIE RESTRICTED. I.e. there were not in a situation like most western countries today where there is CALORIE OVERSUPPLY.

Caloric restriction, in and of itself, has been shown to prolong life - you want to live longer, reduce your calorie intake. I causes the body to activate the sirtuin pathway to extend life (i.e. a survival response):
Calorie restriction and sirtuins revisited.


Conversely, because we have evolved to be SUPER EFFICIENT calorie machines and conserve all energy possible (i.e. to survive times of famine), we can get fat and die on just about any energy source you cause us to eat. SOME energy sources do it faster than others, but if you are taking in 20% more calories than you need, you WILL get fat. You WILL get metabolic syndrome.

If you study the molecular pathways of metabolism, we are designed to store every spare calorie we can get.
- Fat - we store this directly if there is excess. Just shuttle it around on LDL and related molecules.
- Sugar - we use what we need, and the rest we strip the OH off of, convert it into 2-carbon acyl groups, and then stack those into fat molecules
- Protein - we use what we need, and the rest we strip the Nitrogen and OH off, convert into 2-carbon acyl groups, and then stack those into fat molecules.


You want to lose weight, simply burn more calories than you consume, have a balanced diet so that you don't run out of any one nutrient group, and AVOID processed foods (which not only are high in calories, but promote inflammation of our blood vessels).

 

[bkp_duke]

If you are gonna say that I am wrong, at least specify what I said that was wrong. I think you are making a straw man of what I said. I never claimed that a fish diet is bad!?

EDIT, also let’s not derail this thread... Sorry for OT...

No, I did point out exactly why you were wrong. It wasn't a straw man argument. It was listed out EXACTLY why.

 

[heltok]

No, I did point out exactly why you were wrong. It wasn't a straw man argument. It was listed out EXACTLY why.

I am sorry but I still don’t understand where I am wrong. Your reply seems orthogonal to the quoted text.

You are completely ignoring the fact that they were probably CALORIE RESTRICTED. I.e. there were not in a situation like most western countries today where there is CALORIE OVERSUPPLY.

Caloric restriction, in and of itself, has been shown to prolong life - you want to live longer, reduce your calorie intake. I causes the body to activate the sirtuin pathway to extend life (i.e. a survival response):
Calorie restriction and sirtuins revisited.


Conversely, because we have evolved to be SUPER EFFICIENT calorie machines and conserve all energy possible (i.e. to survive times of famine), we can get fat and die on just about any energy source you cause us to eat. SOME energy sources do it faster than others, but if you are taking in 20% more calories than you need, you WILL get fat. You WILL get metabolic syndrome.

If you study the molecular pathways of metabolism, we are designed to store every spare calorie we can get.
- Fat - we store this directly if there is excess. Just shuttle it around on LDL and related molecules.
- Sugar - we use what we need, and the rest we strip the OH off of, convert it into 2-carbon acyl groups, and then stack those into fat molecules
- Protein - we use what we need, and the rest we strip the Nitrogen and OH off, convert into 2-carbon acyl groups, and then stack those into fat molecules.


You want to lose weight, simply burn more calories than you consume, have a balanced diet so that you don't run out of any one nutrient group, and AVOID processed foods (which not only are high in calories, but promote inflammation of our blood vessels).

I agree, so I am not sure where I am wrong. Clearly we don’t communicate well so let’s end this discussion...

 

[TSLAopt]

Stefansson and his crew were westerners who got stranded there and they seemed to thrive there so likely it is not the genes. Imo read the article!

we can lead horses to water but can’t make them drink...similar feeling here to 5-10 years ago trying to convince people to consider Tesla as the future when they’d all laugh at us...except for a few open minded people...often those who test drove Teslas. Luckily us believers benefited with great wealth...in this argument we are benefiting with great health...

We will just have to agree to disagree with these folks...hardest to get through to classically trained doctors as Dr Jason Fung outlines in many of his interviews, just as it was hardest to get through to most classically trained portfolio managers about TSLA and why so many of them shorted it.

 

[bkp_duke]

I am sorry but I still don’t understand where I am wrong. Your reply seems orthogonal to the quoted text.



I agree, so I am not sure where I am wrong. Clearly we don’t communicate well so let’s end this discussion...

Your original post (falsely) attributes Inuit health with the constituents of their diet.

I'm trying to tell you that it's not just the constituents (fish is a lean meat with unsaturated fats - healthy), but more importantly it was the CALORIES they took in. Most likely they were eating a lot less than they were in their home were food was far more plentiful. Most likely they were also expending many more calories to gather that food, than they were in the past.

That's my point: it's not just WHAT you eat, but also HOW MUCH.

 

[jerry33]

You are completely ignoring the fact that they were probably CALORIE RESTRICTED. I.e. there were not in a situation like most western countries today where there is CALORIE OVERSUPPLY.

Caloric restriction, in and of itself, has been shown to prolong life - you want to live longer, reduce your calorie intake. I causes the body to activate the sirtuin pathway to extend life (i.e. a survival response):
Calorie restriction and sirtuins revisited.


Conversely, because we have evolved to be SUPER EFFICIENT calorie machines and conserve all energy possible (i.e. to survive times of famine), we can get fat and die on just about any energy source you cause us to eat. SOME energy sources do it faster than others, but if you are taking in 20% more calories than you need, you WILL get fat. You WILL get metabolic syndrome.

If you study the molecular pathways of metabolism, we are designed to store every spare calorie we can get.
- Fat - we store this directly if there is excess. Just shuttle it around on LDL and related molecules.
- Sugar - we use what we need, and the rest we strip the OH off of, convert it into 2-carbon acyl groups, and then stack those into fat molecules
- Protein - we use what we need, and the rest we strip the Nitrogen and OH off, convert into 2-carbon acyl groups, and then stack those into fat molecules.


You want to lose weight, simply burn more calories than you consume, have a balanced diet so that you don't run out of any one nutrient group, and AVOID processed foods (which not only are high in calories, but promote inflammation of our blood vessels).

This has actually worked for me. The additional "secret" is to not worry about how long it takes. All the quick diets typically just lose water weight and it goes back on almost immediately. The slower you lose fat, the longer it takes to put it back on.

Anecdote: Many years ago I did randonneur riding. Many of the people in the club were on a vegetarian diet. I tried it and found that I felt much better after a ten or twelve hour ride than I had before. So I kept up that part. However, sedentary life and long working hours and 7x24 on-call for twenty plus years put on a lot of extra weight because half my meals were restaurant meals and many others were prepared food. Three years ago I could see that my days working were numbered (and my bank balance--although that's improved tremendously with TSLA), so we did a kitchen remodel and including things that would make cooking and baking easier. After two years of virtually no restaurant food (maybe three per year), and making everything I could make from scratch, waist size went down from 54 to 46. A year ago I purchased a WaterRower and use it mostly five times a week, sometimes four, for about an hour each time. I also ditched the lawn service and mow the lawn with either a sythe or manual push mower. Waist size is now 42, so I have a ways to go, but I am no longer in the BMI obese category.

 

[dfwatt]

we can lead horses to water but can’t make them drink...similar feeling here to 5-10 years ago trying to convince people to consider Tesla as the future when they’d all laugh at us...except for a few open minded people...often those who test drove Teslas. Luckily us believers benefited with great wealth...in this argument we are benefiting with great health...

We will just have to agree to disagree with these folks...hardest to get through to classically trained doctors as Dr Jason Fung outlines in many of his interviews, just as it was hardest to get through to most classically trained portfolio managers about TSLA and why so many of them shorted it.

You're suggesting that getting people to eat lots and lots of red meat is the same class of advice as getting people to do sustainable energy and give up fossil fuels? You've got to be kidding! You are aware (or maybe you're not aware), but you should be aware that red meat contributes significantly to greenhouse gases? Somewhere around ballpark 15% of greenhouse gas emissions come from livestock.

 

[bkp_duke]

This has actually worked for me. The additional "secret" is to not worry about how long it takes. All the quick diets typically just lose water weight and it goes back on almost immediately. The slower you lose fat, the longer it takes to put it back on.

Anecdote: Many years ago I did randonneur riding. Many of the people in the club were on a vegetarian diet. I tried it and found that I felt much better after a ten or twelve hour ride than I had before. So I kept up that part. However, sedentary life and long working hours and 7x24 on-call for twenty plus years put on a lot of extra weight because half my meals were restaurant meals and many others were prepared food. Three years ago I could see that my days working were numbered (and my bank balance--although that's improved tremendously with TSLA), so we did a kitchen remodel and including things that would make cooking and baking easier. After two years of virtually no restaurant food (maybe three per year), and making everything I could make from scratch, waist size went down from 54 to 46. A year ago I purchased a WaterRower and use it mostly five times a week, sometimes four, for about an hour each time. I also ditched the lawn service and mow the lawn with either a sythe or manual push mower. Waist size is now 42, so I have a ways to go, but I am no longer in the BMI obese category.

Congrats on the weight loss and health improvement.

I'll never forget one professor I had in medical school, he was a no BS kind of guy. One day during lectures, he bottom lined things for us:
"Listen, if you really want to lose weight, just learn to get off your ass. It's as simple as that."


More power to you on the vegetarian diet. I gave it a serious try in medical school when I dated a vegetarian. About 3 weeks into it, I gave it up when I woke up in a cold sweat dreaming of BBQ ribs.

 

[jerry33]

I'll never forget one professor I had in medical school, he was a no BS kind of guy. One day during lectures, he bottom lined things for us:
"Listen, if you really want to lose weight, just learn to get off your ass. It's as simple as that."


More power to you on the vegetarian diet. I gave it a serious try in medical school when I dated a vegetarian. About 3 weeks into it, I gave it up when I woke up in a cold sweat dreaming of BBQ ribs.

It wasn't that hard for me, first because I couldn't afford it. Later, a couple of times in a former career I had to visit processing plants. Never thought about eating meat again.

 

[dfwatt]

They don't, it's a myth. New Study Explodes the 'Eskimo Myth'

That piece unfortunately quotes the fish oil studies that showed negative results in relationship to coronary artery disease. I was an editor on a number of those studies and that piece unfortunately quotes the fish oil studies that showed negative results in relationship to coronary artery disease. Fish oil studies I can say have been all over the board in terms of results, mostly due to methodological reasons and a fair percentage of them being biologically and mechanistically misinformed and frankly unsophisticated. I was an editor on a number of those studies for the journal that I do editing for, and many of them were simply bad studies.

In terms of recurrent mistakes a number of those studies did not look at Omega 6 vs omega-3 consumption which is the most immediately relevant dietary variable, they often times did no indexing of serum levels of those critical fats, no indexing of cytokines or prostaglandins which emerge from the omega-6 pathway, and which are competitively inhibited by the omega-3 pathway, and many of the studies used fairly modest doses of actual omega-3 fats, and did not pay attention to EPA DHA ratio. Long story short. Most of those studies are junk. The better done studies that used fish oil preparations with significantly more EPA and DHA (at least 2 to 1) and particularly those that restricted our traditionally high omega-6 consumption such that they could show that the omega-3/omega-6 ratio actually was constructively changed by the intervention have shown health benefits specifically in relationship to inflammatory markers, serum cytokine levels, and conditions where there's lots of reasons to believe that systemic inflammation is a factor such as depression. As for the Intuit tribes showing coronary artery disease, the incidence of that went up very significantly as they began to be progressively exposed to Western diet patterns and processed food. The piece does not clarify that at all. So that's a piece I would not quote.

 

[JRP3]

Can you quote the part that says that they dont mainly eat fish? Because I couldn’t find it in the text.

The myth is that they thrived, which was obviously the topic of that article. Since you missed it:

In fact, data collected over many decades showed that coronary artery disease is common in Greenland's Inuit population. Heart disease is as frequent -- or even more so -- among native northern populations as it is for other populations. Strokes are particularly common, and life expectancy overall was found to be about a decade shorter among native populations.

 

[JRP3]

As for the Intuit tribes showing coronary artery disease, the incidence of that went up very significantly as they began to be progressively exposed to Western diet patterns and processed food. The piece does not clarify that at all. So that's a piece I would not quote.

Fair enough. Here's another. “The Eskimo Myth” | NutritionFacts.org

In fact, going back more than a thousand years, we have frozen Eskimo mummies with atherosclerosis. From 500 years ago, a woman in her early 40s had atherosclerosis in her aorta and coronary arteries. And these aren’t just isolated cases. The totality of evidence from actual clinical investigations, autopsies, and imaging techniques is that they have the same plague of coronary artery disease that non-Eskimo populations have, and the Eskimo actually have twice the fatal stroke rate and don’t live particularly long.

 

[dfwatt]

Just curious, with all of your knowledge and expertise in the field of medicine/health, do you also believe red meat, saturated fat, and high cholesterol is bad for you?

While I agree with you that saturated fat has been vilified, I do not agree that the evidence from hunter-gatherer tribes supports eating red meat in large amounts. First of all, you seem unaware of the enormous evidence that the red meat that we are eating is very different from bison and other large game that our ancestors hunted. First of all it is raised on corn and other grains, instead of its native grass, is obese, and often times demonstrates a kind of diabetic like physiology because of its altered diet. The Omega-6 / Omega-3 ratio in the meat and in the fat has been very substantially altered both by the dietary changes and by the introduction of antibiotics to fatten up the animal. This means that it bares only a distant relationship to the game that we used to hunt and consume significant quantities of as hunter-gatherers. And I won't even get into the issue of what the large-scale introduction of antibiotics into livestock has done to the creation of resistant lines of bacteria and 'superbugs'.

More troubling, your post reflects the kind of simple-minded dietary memes that simply are not scientifically supported. They tend to focus on single factors when the evidence is pretty compelling that it's not single factors, it's a huge number of dietary alterations, and those large and multi factorial dietary alterations are combined with other lifestyle alterations to yield a staggeringly complex and multi dimensional change in how we are living. From the standpoint of our still mostly Hunter gather genome we are living in an alien environment. The idea that the sum total of those massive alterations including our lack of exercise, our poor sleep, and our widespread social isolation can be dismissed and a single factor promoted (the notion that these things are happening because of a lack of red meat!) simply defies logic. We all want single Factor explanations for these complex diseases. But that's not really what the science shows. And your argument completely falls apart around the simple fact that red meat consumption has not really gone down that much. In fact in some areas of the country it may be increasing.

This chart comes from a book chapter on the biology of aging and it's implications for understanding the diseases of aging in a medical textbook.

And unfortunately, it offers you very little hope for improving your health by doing nothing other than eating a lot of red meat. It does make clear that processed carbohydrates, particularly sugars, along with a host of other dietary changes not from a "carnivore diet" as you phrase it but from a Paleolithic diet that was heavy in fruits and vegetables, high in fiber, and contained significant quantities for a lot of hunter-gatherers of fish and Seafood.

 

[dfwatt]

Fair enough. Here's another. “The Eskimo Myth” | NutritionFacts.org

It's disturbing that in the first couple of minutes I can see things that are clearly counterfactual. While several predator fish species such a shark, tuna, and swordfish are Mercury concentrators, Mercury does not exist in virtually any commercially and responsibly prepared fish oil preparation because it is not derived from those species and because it is produced by a distillation process that pretty much eliminates any heavy metals. This has been extensively tested by outfits like consumer labs and verified. So there is no mercury in fish oil. That's another myth. As for some Intuit tribes having coronary artery disease, we don't have very good statistics on that and the fact that's some mummies might show that does not prove incidence. The original work on this done by Eaton and Eaton in the 80s does not mention significant incidence of coronary artery disease in those tribes, and specifically mentions that they did not have much obesity or type 2 diabetes relative to Western societies. But I'll see what I can find. It's entirely possible they had more coronary artery disease then some other hunter-gatherer groups that ate more plants. But that doesn't really change the argument. Coronary artery disease is multifactorial and it is not explained by animal fat alone. Particularly not by saturated fat which is neutral on the inflammatory equation, unlike omega-6 and Omega-3 which are not neutral.