The Trouble with Rice

An interesting article from the NYT on metal absorption in rice:

• "...it's not just arsenic and cadmium, which are present in soil both as naturally occurring elements and as industrial byproducts. Recent studies have shown that rice is custom-built to pull a number of metals from the soil, among them mercury and even tungsten. The findings have led to a new push by scientists and growers to make the grain less susceptible to metal contamination.The highest levels often occur in brown rice, because elements like arsenic accumulate in bran and husk, which are polished off in the processing of white rice. The Department of Agriculture estimates that on average arsenic levels are 10 times as high in rice bran as in polished rice."

Diversify you food sources (and eat food that does this! )

Fed Up

A calorie is a calorie but calories are only one way we can slice the nutrition-pie. Isocaloric diets are not isometabolic. Your body is not a bomb calorimeter.  Fed Up looks in to this:

"He has studied the effects that different foods have on weight gain and said that it is true that 100 calories of fat, protein and carbohydrates are the same in a thermodynamic sense, in that they release the same amount of energy when exposed to a Bunsen burner in a lab. But in a complex organism like a human being, he said, these foods influence satiety, metabolic rate, brain activity, blood sugar and the hormones that store fat in very different ways.

Studies also show that calories from different foods are not absorbed the same. When people eat high-fiber foods like nuts and some vegetables, for example, only about three-quarters of the calories they contain are absorbed. The rest are excreted from the body unused. So the calories listed on their labels are not what the body is actually getting."

The Dubious War on Saturated Fat

The paleospere can pat itself on the back for a job well done in bringing real food back in to fashion - and specifically for yhe rehabilitation of saturated fat, the prodigal son of nutrition.

This WSJ article suggests a victory of sorts is close,

"Saturated fat does not cause heart disease"—or so concluded a big study published in March in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine. How could this be? The very cornerstone of dietary advice for generations has been that the saturated fats in butter, cheese and red meat should be avoided because they clog our arteries. For many diet-conscious Americans, it is simply second nature to opt for chicken over sirloin, canola oil over butter.

The new study's conclusion shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with modern nutritional science, however. The fact is, there has never been solid evidence for the idea that these fats cause disease. We only believe this to be the case because nutrition policy has been derailed over the past half-century by a mixture of personal ambition, bad science, politics and bias."

I hope Paleo doesn't blow it by demonising another macronutrient!  :)

Lions, Bones & Diet

This healthy diet and lifestyle stuff IS complicated when we try to formalise it in to a set of prescriptive guidelines. We lose the overall view and context whilst unnecessarily complicating things as we try to structure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Imagine trying to describe the act of throwing a dart in to a dartboard using the language of mathematics (such as a programmer might be inclined to do to control a robot arm to perform this task).  Sure we would describe vectors, trajectories,  torque and so forth, but I assure you the best dart players alive don't use this approach - and would beat the robot every time. For the given effort, humans will beat robots for a long time to come.

So it is with diet and exercise.  We were chiselled by the forces of evolution to exploit a broad biological niche.  But we stray from those forces at our own peril.

Of course this is most apparent when we move a (non human) wild animal in to a domesticated environment. This is truly novel, animals such as big cats having even less time to adapt to to the industrial age than humans. The damage is often subtle, extensive and pervasive:

"It is pretty striking," says Luke Hunter, president of Panthera, a wild cat conservation organization based in New York. "There is a surprisingly high mortality rate of lions in captivity, a lot of which has gone unexplained," he says. This study is a starting point to understanding it, Hunter says, but cautions that more work needs to be done to link the bone malformations seen in the skull collections to neurological disorders.

"The foramen magnum is one of these most important holes in mammalian body," he says. "You can imagine if it were occluded or narrowed – which Saragusty and his colleagues are seeing – that could very well have consequences."

What aspect of growing up in a zoo could cause these malformations? Some have suggested they are linked to a lack of vitamin A, although many zoos add supplements of this to lions' diets.

Another possibility has to do with how lion cubs are fed in zoos. On the savannah, they eat entire carcasses including muscle, organs and everything apart from the largest bones. The act of crunching down on hard bone, says Hunter, builds up muscles that pull and stretch a cub's developing skull in ways that zoo diets don't. He says some of the better zoos will throw in whole donkey or cow legs, but the practice isn't common."

Deindustialise your diet, activity and sleep patterns.

Dark Skies

It's very easy to see the importance of species appropriate diets for all other animals except ourselves.

The same goes for dark skies and appropriate light exposure over each and every 24 hour period.

If you're in any doubt about the latter then read this.

Tricks of the Trade

Nature on real food and obesity:

"As long as the animal eats the foods that it evolved to consume, this balance is maintained. The trouble comes when it eats a diet with a disproportionate quantity of a particular macronutrient, either because of a lack of appropriate foods in the environment or because its appetite control systems have been fooled or subverted."

Nothing new here, but good to see 'common sense' go mainstream.

The problem with highly processed food is that its familiarity makes it appear harmless.

How the Immune System Works

Excellent post on the topic above!