Wednesday, February 24, 2010
More Controversy: Nuts, Dairy, Etc.
Nuts
As Meat Ball Magic pointed out, nuts have actually even more anti-nutritive phytic acid than grain and also really high in omega-6s. Be aware of that when you're munching on them. Again, my sense is that most people aren't going to stuff themselves with nuts the way they would with grain and grain products, but I know some of you might be downing entire bags of nuts in one sitting right now. I don't think it's anything to worry about because I find it hard to imagine anyone would eat a bag of nuts every single day. If you think about it, nuts took a lot of effort in hunter-gatherer life. We had to forage them, break through their shells, and often cook them to make them edible. The equivalent of a big bag of nuts was probably not that common. But I still think they're a good option to help break other addictions. They're also low-glycemic and not addictive in the same way as refined carbs.
Dairy
Weston Price and Sally Fallon differ from Paleo advocates on the issue of dairy. Many nomadic tribes thrive on dairy-heavy diets, but some scientific research shows that the primary protein in milk, casein, can cause a lot of the metabolic problems and inflammation that we attribute to other things like grains. Dairy also has lactose, which is sugar. The back of a yogurt container says it has 12-14g of sugar - that's mostly lactose. Lactose in yogurt can vary based on how long it has fermented, but most cheese for sure has very little lactose. Dairy is technically a Neolithic food because it wasn't possible until we domesticated animals. Strict Paleo adherents often abstain from dairy. Again, my sense is that it's what we do in aggregate that matters more, and if you don't feel you have sensitivity to dairy, cheese and yogurt can be powerfully satiating and very likely healthy.
Agave Nectar
Agave nectar has been billed as a healthy sweetener, with "no refined sugars." But it IS a refined sugar. That's like the Corn Refiners of America claiming that high-fructose corn syrup is "all-natural." Agave is mostly fructose... so how does it differ from HFCS? It doesn't really, in terms of health, and it may even be slightly worse. Fructose, although low-glycemic because it's mostly metabolized in the liver, has a net effect on blood sugar as bad if not worse than table sugar - at least sucrose is a disaccharide that has to be broken down, fructose is a monosaccharide that just goes straight in for the money. It is more damaging than almost any other sugar when used as a sweetener. The amount of fructose you would get from an apple is much less than the squirt of it you might be putting into your coffee, and fructose in most fruit is absorbed more slowly because of the fiber and other nutrients. Agave is sugar. Evaporated cane juice is sugar. High-fructose corn-syrup is sugar. And sorry to be a bummer, but honey and maple syrup are also sugars, and should be treated as such. There is, however, some research that suggest fructose increases fertility in men. Perhaps, the season when fruits were most available to our paleo ancestors was also mating season i.e. mid to late summer. But eating a lot of it in concentrated forms is very bad for you. Sugar in the form of whole, seasonal fruit is fine, but as soon as you refine or extract it from its source, it acquires some pretty nasty qualities. Still, if you need a tiny bit of honey or maple syrup to ween you off of candy and sweets, go for it, just do so sparingly.
Meat
Contrary to popular opinion, the body doesn't really have a hard time processing meat. Vegetable fiber has more of a chance of getting stuck undigested in your gut than steak. If you're feeling constipated, it's probably more due to your body adjusting to a change in the diet than because you've eaten too much meat. Not to be too graphic, but I have been pretty regular since I stopped eating grains, regardless of how much meat I eat relative to vegetables. In fact, some vegetables have had a more adverse effect on my gut. But that's just my own personal experience. As for acid-base balance, even though meat has a net acid load on the kidneys, the more important factor seems to be how much acid is caused by excess sugar in the blood. The Masai and the Inuit used to eat exclusively meat and animal fats, but they had almost no bone or dental diseases. Acid load on the kidneys causes tooth and bone decay as the body leeches alkaline minerals from those parts of the body to balance the pH. From what I gather, the single most important factor in acid-base balance is sugar.
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