Nutrition and Physical Regeneration

See also: Parts 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6
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Cardiovascular Risk Factors on Kitava, Part III: Insulin

The Kitava study continues to get more and more interesting in later publications. Dr. Lindeberg and his colleagues continued exploring disease markers in the Kitavans, perhaps because their blood lipid findings were not consistent with what one would expect to find in a modern Western population with a low prevalence of CVD.

In their next study, the researchers examined Kitavans' insulin levels compared to Swedish controls. This paper is short but very sweet. Young Kitavan men and women have a fasting serum insulin level considerably lower than their Swedish counterparts (KM 3.9 IU/mL; SM 5.7; KW 3.5; SW 6.2). Kitavan insulin is relatively stable with age, whereas Swedish insulin increases. In the 60-74 year old group, Kitavans have approximately half the fasting serum insulin of Swedes. One thing to keep in mind is that these are average numbers. There is some overlap between the Kitavan and Swedish numbers, with a few Kitavans above the Swedish mean.

In figure 2, they address the possibility that exercise is the reason for Kitavans' low insulin levels. Kitavans have an activity level comparable to a moderately active Swedish person. They divided the Swedes into three categories: low, medium, and high amounts of physical activity at work. The people in the "low" category had the highest insulin, followed by the "high" group and then the "medium" group. The differences were small, however, and Kitavans had far lower serum insulin, on average, than any of the three Swedish groups. These data show that exercise can not explain Kitavans' low insulin levels.

Read more…

See also -- Exposed: The Swine Flu Hoax
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"Scientific medicine has taken credit it does not deserve for some advances in health. Most people believe that victory over the infectious diseases of the last century came with the invention of immunizations. In fact, cholera, typhoid, tetanus, diphtheria and whooping cough, etc, were in decline before vaccines for them became available – the result of better methods of sanitation, sewage disposal, and distribution of food and water." ~ Dr. Andrew Weil, Health and Healing

A Canadian comedy troop did a very funny bit on flu shots a while ago. They listed the ingredients in the typical flu shot, as they put them in a blender. During the bit they also polled people "on the street" and asked them some pretty basic questions about flu shots. Most people couldn’t list the ingredients. The level of ignorance displayed made for great comedy. Funny stuff!

Which brings me to the question posed by this essay – why do people get those shots?

The Upside of Vaccinations – Dubious?

A good bit of freely-available information paints a rather cautionary and contrary-to-mainstream-orthodoxy picture of vaccinations. According to Vaccination Debate, a private website based in Australia, there is little, if any data-based support for the belief that vaccination is as important as it is often portrayed to be. This is evident when one examines the timing between the introduction of most vaccines and the decrease in death rates for the diseases they supposedly fight. While there are several examples of this phenomenon, I’ll only include a couple below; note that year is plotted on the X-axis.

I’m neither an epidemiologist nor an immunologist, but this data – even though taken from Australia – seems instructive on a number of levels. Notice when the vaccine was deployed. Contrast that with the slope of the curve. It seems pretty obvious that vaccination had little, if any, effect on death rate. Then again, that’s exactly what Dr. Weil says in the quote that heads this essay above. He’s far from alone; but wait, there’s more.

Read more…

See also: Vegetarians, Come Away From the Darkside
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Over at Our Natural Life, you will find an excellent interview with Lierre Keith, author of The Vegetarian Myth, a former 20 year ex-vegan who nearly destroyed her health with the vegan lifestyle and lived to tell about it.

She thoroughly debunks the myths that surround vegetarianism and veganism and does so within a worldview that still tenaciously holds on to the concerns that animate most ideological vegans and vegetarians.

Over the years I have argued that it is a mistake to equate vegetarianism with veganism nutritionally, since nutritionally speaking vegetarians of all flavors do consume animal products, and the qualitative difference is often enormous (though frequently that is not enough). Yet ideologically speaking vegetarians and vegans occupy the same universe, since many of them are vegetarians because they do not want to be involved in the slaughter of animals.

Keith helps put that myth to rest and forces the reader and listener to come face to face with the fact that no living being -- vegan or vegetarian -- sustains its life on this planet without another creature dying to maintain their sustenance.

All in all a job well done and I would encourage you to listen to the podcast and buy the book!

• Lierre Keith's website
• Dr. Michael Eades review
• Richard Nickoley's review

And remember, if you like this post then don't forget to Subscribe to Nutrition and Physical Regeneration.

For those of you still laboring under the idea that primates are herbivores, the video below should help open your eyes to the truth of the matter.

hat tip: Richard Nikoley

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See also: Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6
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Cardiovascular Risk Factors on Kitava, Part II: Blood Lipids

The findings in the previous post are all pretty much expected in a population that doesn't get heart disease. However, things started to get interesting when Lindeberg's group measured the Kitavans' serum lipids ("cholesterol"). Kitavan and Swedish total cholesterol is about the same in young men, around 174 mg/dL (4.5 mmol/L). It rises with age in older Swedish men but not Kitavans.

Doctors commonly refer to total cholesterol over 200 mg/dL (5.2 mmol/L) as "high", so Kitavan men are in the clear. On the other hand, Kitavan women should be dying of heart disease left and right with their high middle-age cholesterol of 247 mg/dL (6.4 mmol/L)! That's actually higher than the value for Swedish women of the same age, who are far more prone to heart disease than Kitavans.

Read more…

See also: Part 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6
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Cardiovascular Risk Factors on Kitava, Part I: Weight and Blood Pressure

The Kitavans are an isolated population free of cardiovascular disease and stroke, despite the fact that more than three quarters of them smoke cigarettes. They eat a carbohydrate-heavy, whole-foods diet that is uninfluenced by modern food habits and consists mostly of starchy root crops, fruit, vegetables, coconut and fish. Their intake of grains and processed foods is negligible.

Naturally, when Dr. Lindeberg's group discovered that Kitavans don't suffer from heart disease or stroke, they investigated further. In the second paper of the series, they analyzed the Kitavans' "cardiovascular risk factors" that sometimes associate with heart disease in Western populations, such as overweight, hypertension, elevated total cholesterol and other blood lipid markers.

Kitavans are lean. Adult male body mass index (BMI) starts out at 22, and diminishes with age. For comparison, Swedes begin at a BMI of 25 and stay that way. Both populations lose muscle mass with age, so Kitavans are staying lean while Swedes are gaining fat. The average American has a BMI of about 28, which is considered overweight and 2 points away from being obese.

Kitavans also have a low blood pressure that rises modestly with age. This is actually a bit surprising to me, since other non-industrial groups like the Kuna do not experience a rise in blood pressure with age. Compared with Swedes, Kitavans' blood pressure is considerably lower at all ages.

In the next post, I'll discuss the Kitavans' blood lipid numbers ("cholesterol"), which challenge current thinking about heart disease risk factors.
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See also: Part 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6

[This article originally appeared on Whole Health Source in August of 2008]

Dr. Stephan Guyenet received his Ph.D. in neurobiology from the University of Washington in 2009. His goal is to live well, and help others do the same. His passion is learning about and conveying time-tested strategies for achieving and maintaining health and well-being. Please visit his blog and if you find his work useful, donate so that he may continue to produce excellent material on matters of health and well being.

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See also: Part 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6
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There are very few cultures left on this planet that have not been affected by modern food habits. There are even fewer that have been studied thoroughly. The island of Kitava in Papua New Guinea is host to one such culture, and its inhabitants have many profound things to teach us about diet and health.

100 year old man from Kitava. He has never heard of spontaneous sudden death or symptoms suggestive of a stroke.

The Kitava study, a series of papers produced primarily by Dr. Staffan Lindeberg and his collaborators, offers a glimpse into the nutrition and health of an ancient society, using modern scientific methods. This study is one of the most complete and useful characterizations of the diet and health of a non-industrial society I have come across. It's also the study that created, and ultimately resolved, my cognitive dissonance over the health effects of carbohydrate.

From the photos I've seen, the Kitavans are beautiful people. They have the broad, attractive faces, smooth skin and excellent teeth typical of healthy non-industrial peoples.

Like the Kuna, Kitavans straddle the line between agricultural and hunter-gatherer lifestyles. They eat a diet primarily composed of tubers (yam, sweet potato, taro and cassava), fruit, vegetables, coconut and fish, in order of calories. This is typical of traditional Pacific island cultures, although the relative amounts differ.

Grains, refined sugar, vegetable oils and other processed foods are virtually nonexistent on Kitava. They get an estimated 69% of their calories from carbohydrate, 21% from fat (17%  which is saturated fat) and 10% from protein. Most of their fat intake is saturated because it comes from coconuts. They have an omega-6 : omega-3 ratio of approximately 1:2. Average caloric intake is 2,200 calories per day (9,200 kJ). By Western standards, their diet is high in carbohydrate, high in saturated fat, low in total fat, a bit low in protein and high in calories.

Now for a few relevant facts before we really start diving in:

Read more…

A hilarious send up on what is being put into your body whenever you receive a vaccine.

See also -- Exposed:The Swine Flu Hoax

If you like this post then don't forget to Subscribe to Nutrition and Physical Regeneration

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[Part 1 can be found here]

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The title of this blog and the complementary forum is Nutrition and Physical Regeneration. It alludes to the fact that just as poor nutrition can lead to degeneration (thus the title of Weston Price's book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration) conversely good nutrition can lead to regeneration of our health and lifestyle. However, it is the subtitle that tells the story:

Dedicated to the return of the superior health of our ancestors, by adopting traditional foods that nourished them throughout the ages, and disavowing the modern reliance on the "displacing foods of modern commerce."

The first installment of this article was published on my now defunct website, The War on Good Food. The home page gave a full explanation of this so that anyone reading my article would know exactly what I was talking about when I spoke of the War on Good Food.

Fast forward six years. You may have stumbled upon this blog and have no idea what I mean by the term. One blogger linked to my article under a post that is not in any way what I have in mind when I speak of the War on Good Food.

Since I didn't adequately define my terms in the first installment, it is easy to assume, without reading the rest of my site, that I might share the same ideas the connecting blogger has about good food. Yet I can assure you that when I speak of good food I am not referring to snack protein bars that you can purchase in your local health food store.

Therefore two questions need to be answered before going forward: what are traditional foods and what, as Dr. Price called them, are the displacing foods of modern commerce? Before answering, let me take you back in time to the description of The War on Good Food from my original website:

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As if a highly bureaucratic regulatory system was not already in place, 9/11 fueled renewed acceleration to eliminate freedom from the countryside. Every time a letter arrives in the mail from a federal or state agriculture department my heart jumps like I just got sent to the principal’s office.

And it doesn’t stop with agriculture bureaucrats. It includes all sorts of government agencies, from zoning, to taxing, to food inspectors. These agencies are the ultimate extension of a disconnected, Greco-Roman, Western, egocentric, compartmentalized, reductionist, fragmented, linear thought process.

ON-FARM PROCESSING

I want to dress my beef and pork on the farm where I’ve coddled and raised it. But zoning laws prohibit slaughterhouses on agricultural land. For crying out loud, what makes more holistic sense than to put abattoirs where the animals are? But no, in the wisdom of Western disconnected thinking, abattoirs are massive centralized facilities visited daily by a steady stream of tractor trailers and illegal alien workers.

But what about dressing a couple of animals a year in the backyard? How can that be compared to a ConAgra or Tyson facility? In the eyes of the government, the two are one and the same. Every T-bone steak has to be wrapped in a half-million dollar facility so that it can be sold to your neighbor. The fact that I can do it on my own farm more cleanly, more responsibly, more humanely, more efficiently, and in a more environmentally friendly manner doesn’t matter to the government agents who walk around with big badges on their jackets and wheelbarrow-sized regulations tucked under their arms.

Read more…

Nathan Birch over at Cracked.com wrote this humorous little ditty a couple of years ago:

Have you ever been left with the impression after a thorough poking, prodding and testicular cupping at the doctor's office that perhaps they don't always know what's best? The thought is usually pushed from your mind, after all these people had to go through years of school and thousands of dollars of their wealthy parents' money to get where they are! If you can't trust them about your health, who can you trust?

Here's the thing though, doctors have a long storied background of not knowing what the hell they're doing. History is filled with stories of hilarious medical ineptitude, and in all likeliness, today's medical practices will be similarly snorted at 100 years down the road. In other words, if you're looking to justify your medical phobia so you can rationalize not getting that ever-growing lump on your neck checked out, you're in the right place.

It would be really funny if it wasn't so tragic. According to some sources, today the medical profession still accounts for over 200,000 deaths per year. So Nathan is probably right that future generations will look back on many of our own barbaric medical practices with a chuckle, while unwittingly embracing their own. You can read Nathan's full post here. And check out the section on mercury. To think that today we still have ardent defenders of putting mercury in our teeth, one of the most toxic substances known to man.

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