Free The Animal

I’ll bet some of you already know where I’m going. There’s so much nonsense out there virtually every day that it would be tough for you not to know.
So, alright, I’ve seen a barrage of emails and other communique over the last couple of days. What should I begin with, how saturated fat stimulates hunger [...]

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The single biggest problem with what are called “observational studies” is that you generally can’t be certain about which variable or combination of variables is responsible for the positive or negative effects you’re observing. This was recently illustrated by a couple of dumb studies. The second of those links is especially egregious, implicating red meat, a staple of humans and their ancestors going back 2.5 million years while the modern grains, sugars and vegetable oils that have been in the diet only recently are given a pass. Stephan at Whole Health Source came up with a keen observation the other day in this regard. In other words, the reason observational studies in affluent nations haven’t been able to get to the bottom of dental/orthodontic problems and chronic disease is that everyone in their study population is doing the same thing! There isn’t enough variability in the diets and lifestyles of modern populations to be able to determine what’s causing the problem. So we study the genetics of problems that are not genetic in origin, and overestimate genetic contributions because we’re studying populations whose diet and lifestyle are homogeneous. It’s a wild goose chase. Here’s another way to look at it,…

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I get lots of interesting questions. For instance, the other day I was in the 40F deg. cold plunge at San Jose Athletic Club — a mere 5-minute walk from the loft — and while coming up on the minute mark and my intended time to get out, another guy got in and asked if I hadn’t lost quite a bit of weight. I ended up staying in and chatting for over five minutes about things Primal, Paleo, and “Ev-Revolutionary,” not feeling a bit cold. But the questions were remarkable, in that he could see the transformation in front of his very eyes — which meant he also had no reason to doubt my performance gains in the gym either (and he could just go ask my trainer, Mike, anyway). But I guess they had to come… Fasting? Doesn’t that “harm your metabolism?” Answer by question: does it harm the metabolisms of wild animals if they don’t always get their kill?… “Skipping” breakfast? Don’t you have to “fuel” the body for the day? Answer by question: are you saying that I should eat when I’m not hungry, and, do you observe wild animals eating that way?… “Only” two meals per…

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In anticipation of this Thursday’s release of Jimmy Moore’s interview of Loren Cordain, which I’ll blog about after I listen to it, I had a tidbit to report from Cordain’s free newsletter, which I subscribe to. The latest issue (v5, #16) is The Impact of Saturated Fat on Health. For those new to all this, Loren Cordain wrote The Paleo Diet, a book that when I last wrote about it, I lamented not being able to toss my ebook reader across the room. I have a love/hate thing going with Cordain. I love the principles, i.e., the fact of our evolution, how long agriculture has been a part of that, and how such facts inform our logic as to what things we ought to eat and not eat for optimal health, lean bodies, and taking years off your look. I hate his ideas regarding saturated fat, and unfortunately suspect that he takes this position out of convenience and then uses silly science to justify it. Here, from the latest newsletter: The estimation of saturated fats from animal sources is more complex because hunter-gatherers typically ate the entire edible carcass,10-11 necessitating the calculation of the total edible carcass saturated fatty acid…

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So, Rashmi Sinha, PhD; Amanda J. Cross, PhD; Barry I. Graubard, PhD; Michael F. Leitzmann, MD, DrPH; and Arthur Schatzkin, MD, DrPH all set out to prove that eating red meat kills you, and — surprise! surprise! — they got the result they were looking for in the first place. Now, I have not looked at this in detail, mostly because it’s the same formula I see all the time. In this case, they get a half million old people, give them a questionnaire on their eating habits over the past 12 months (relying upon their memories), then they see who croaks and who doesn’t over the next ten years — ten years riddled with general, increasingly hysterical propaganda about cutting fat, avoiding meat, eating more grains and vegetable oils — not to mention an explosion of high-sugar, highly processed, vegetable oil and grain ladden packaged foods — many of them criminally labeled and advertised as “healthy” or “heart healthy;” and the assumption in the study, of course, is that the subjects continued to eat as they had eaten (or, rather, how they recalled from memory how they had eaten). It’s utter crap, and here’s their bias on display going…

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