Why Age?

The Low-Carb Highway to Hell

December 8, 2011 – 7:52 pm | by admin

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I had an unsettling encounter today with someone purporting to help people lose weight and become healthier. It left me a little heated and I thought I’d wing my thoughts about it instead of the usual process of researching and constructing a post the way I usually do and have done over the years for articles in numerous national newspapers and magazines.

Ageing is often about gaining weight, sometimes too much, and the attendant ills from diabetes to high blood pressure, etc demand that we deal with this problem in an honest and effective way if we are to live the long, healthy lives we desire.

I’m often approached by people who want me to sign up as a pimp for their health products. I won’t do it because it conflicts with my message that your health is in your hands, not at the bottom of some bottle of pills pushed by a company with profit, not health in mind. In addition, I think it’s unethical to give people health advice and then turn around and sell them a product.

Something about this woman seemed different. Sincere and heartfelt even. I eschewed my normal screening questions and agreed to meet her to hear her pitch. She told me of her husband’s downward spiral into diabetes, amputation and death and her own unhealthy lifestyle as a chef that caused her to gain weight and lose control over her own health.

She had involved herself in some program, lost lots of weight and now wanted to get the weight-loss/healthy message out to others and I sounded like just the sort of person they needed to reach others and help them. Participants paid only five dollars to attend their get-togethers and it seemed to me to be a possible way to meet potential clients for my personal training. (Yes, potential ethical conflict but a guy’s gotta eat!)

When I saw her body size I should have been on alert.  She was a big woman, not that there’s anything wrong with that. We sat in a booth at a groovy bar and sipped lime and sodas. She spieled, I spieled. When I saw the corporate-looking program bag on the seat next to her my radar went up. When she began describing the high-protein, low-carbohydrate regime that had helped her lose so much weight I groaned inwardly. How could I get involved with a program that advocated nutritional irresponsibility masquerading as a health boost?

It was the word “ketosis” that got all alarm bells clanging. For those of you unfamiliar, ketone bodies(KBs) are produced from fat when not enough carbohydrate(complex sugar) is available to feed the brain, red blood cells and kidneys which require sugar to operate. KBs can accumulate to hazardous levels so the sugar-starving body switches to converting muscle (and/or dietary protein) to sugar to prevent the body sliding down a hellish path to ketone acidosis. You can’t keep raiding protein for sugar, so the body switches back to KBs, and so on.

Why doesn’t it just burn fat for energy when hungry? Well, fat cannot be converted to sugar under any circumstances for the poor old brain, red blood cells and kidneys so it converts fat into KBs for these essential bodily functions as a short-term stopgap. It would be wonderful if the body just burned it’s fat reserves in times of hunger but unfortunately it doesn’t work that way.

These processes have been arrived at after millions of years of evolution in extremely harsh environments. Don’t blame me. I just sat for week after week in more face-to-face nutrition lectures than a doctor receives in order to qualify as a personal trainer. I sat for 4 months in the State Reference Library, devouring and notating every nutrition biochemistry text there in order to bone up on the Krebs Cycle, nucleoneogenesis and lipid metabolism so I could refute with authority the crap that is peddled in my industry as weight-loss science. 

These bodily processes are near-miraculous and reflect the tough times our ancestors went through. Lent and other religious fasts last only 40 days because beyond that the body has exhausted these amazing starvation metabolic pathways and death is imminent.

To pretend that ketogenic diets are an efficient and healthy way to lose weight is sheer balderdash. KBs convert only about 10g of fat a day and it is excruciatingly hard to get the body to ride this highway to hell to any significant degree. I know, I’ve tried. I fell for this scam when I was a bodybuilder in the 1970s and followed the Atkins diet. For hungry week after week I would dip Ketostix into my urine and be so disappointed when they didn’t turn purple and believe me, I had iron will in those days.

Production of KBs, fat-burning and gluconeogenesis(conversion of protein to sugar) go on all the time when we skip meals and go hungry. The body shuttles back and forth on a continuum to keep you going. Mine is probably doing it now because I need to get this off my chest and haven’t had dinner yet.

The other thing to remember about starvation for weight-loss, and that’s what carbohydrate deprivation is, is that your body will interpret prolonged hunger as a sign of famine and shut your metabolism down somewhat in order to hang onto fat stores as a bulwark against the real famine to follow. Tiredness is also a natural consequence of food restriction. It doesn’t make sense to jump around when there is little food available. The appetite goes up as well, to compel you to get some grub, dammit! Another crazy feature of prolonged famine is a resurgence of manic energy; Bengali famine victims in the ghastly 1943 hunger could not sit still at times and roamed around incessantly. This is probably another starvation compulsion programmed in by evolution so the seriously-hungry could be afforded a last-ditch burst of energy for foraging.

Anyway, my point is that ketosis is part of a survival pathway and not a means of losing weight in a healthy and sustainable way. I found it hard to separate my emotions from my argument today and the woman I met sensed this, packing her bag, retrieving the self-help DVD she had wordlessly pushed across the table at me, and edging out of the booth.

We parted with no pretense that we would have anything to do with each other ever again and I went home with a riot of ideas and anguish in my head. It’s so unfair that people with little knowledge of how their bodies work but with a strong desire to lose weight are preyed upon by the unscrupulous or those who have fallen under their spell and continue to promulgate their charlatan message. Yes, doctors are paid to get on board this gravy train. Dr Atkins was a cardiologist but was morbidly obese at 115kg at his premature death. Modern purveyors of the same old low-carbohydrate message are shrewd and try to mask the dangers of this approach with a safety net of supplements and a cycling in and out of carbohydrate restriction but it’s the same old guff.

My girlfriend is a senior Triage nurse who treats elite athletes with acute renal failure, often because they have over-exercised on imbalanced diets and conditions of dehydration. Some lose their legs, most recover. Coupling protein overload with carbohydrate restriction sets kidneys up for failure. It is the kidneys that must process and excrete extra protein while lacking the carbohydrate fuel they require and the triple whammy is provided by the dehydration this nutritional imbalance creates.

Please! Follow the sensible guidelines provided by responsible Government authorities for weight-loss. Keep your diet balanced and healthy, just gradually cut down your food intake until the weight begins to come off. It’s a slow, long-term process, there are no quick fixes here. Expect to lose no more than half a kilo per week initially and expect that rate to slow as your Stone Age metabolism alerts to the impending famine.

I have dropped 4 kilos of merry holiday lard but it has taken me six months to so and I am a hard-training and active person now 55 years of age.

Thanks for your patience, bye now. I’m hungry!

Secrets of the Running People

October 12, 2011 – 5:55 pm | by admin

“Growing older is a dynamic cognitive, biological and cultural coauthoring of health rather than a hopeless unfolding of progressive pathology.” Mario Martinez Psy.Ed (Clinical psychologist)

There is a tribe who drink, smoke and take drugs yet grow into their old age with vigour and endurance.

They run double marathons several times a week and have no diabetes, heart disease or cancer.

They break most of modern science’s dietary rules but continue to flummox researchers who travel to their remote, forbidding region to study their traditional ways.

In 1993 a group of them competed in the insane, gruelling Leadville 100, a race run over rough trails in the Rocky Mountains and designed to test the very limits of human endurance. Competitors run for many hours well into the night to complete the 100-mile distance if possible. They must carry torches to light their way and many do not make it to the finish line. Members of this mysterious tribe placed first, second and fifth. The winner was 55 years old.

They are known to the outside world as the Tarahumara. They call themselves the “Raramuri”, or the Running People.

They have lived for over 600 years in Copper Canyon, an isolated and rugged part of the Sierra Madre range in Mexico’s Chihuahua region.  Their way of life has remained unchanged since they retreated here to escape the Spanish Conquistadors.

Why do they run so much? Men and women from early adolescence to old age run because, well because they run. It defines them as a people. Mass races over two days for more than 150 miles while kicking a wooden ball serve to cement social ties and are a reminder of the uniquely human practice of persistence hunting.

 For early humans chasing prey for many miles until it keeled over was an essential part of our hunter-gatherer lifestyle and the Tarahumara are still at it. Herbivores’ respiration is tied to their gait but humans can breathe out of step. We also sweat to cool ourselves and if you are prepared to run at a moderate pace for many miles you are likely to exhaust your prey who prefers to sprint and rest, sprint and rest. Australian Aborigines of the 19th Century were observed to chase kangaroo for up to 80 miles before they collapsed into stock fences, too exhausted to bound over to freedom.

Now don’t panic. I’m not advocating ultra running as a path to healthy longevity. In fact distance running, while good for fitness does not seem to lead to a longer life. The “Flying Finn”, Paavo Nurmi who won 9 gold medals and two silvers over three Olympic Games: 1920, 1924 and 1928 lived to a creditable but modest 76. Emil Zatopek, the great Czech who won three golds at the Helsinki Games of 1952, including the marathon - which he entered on a whim after winning the 5000 and 10,000 metres events and had never run before - lived to 78. Vladimir Kuts, the Russian strong man who won the 5000 metres at the 1956 Melbourne Games was felled by a heart attack at age 48.

Perhaps if Kuts had followed the Tarahumara diet he might have lived as long as Nurmi and Zatopek…or longer. There seems to be something protective about the diet of these traditional Indians that repairs the damage of their long runs and allows them mind-boggling stamina.

What do they eat? Like most pre-Conquest Indians of meso America they rely on the triumvirate of corn, beans and squash, and so much more. Most traditional peoples depend on key staples that combine to provide protein and all nutritional requirements despite being humble “uncivilized” foods. On its own corn is not enough to sustain health. The slave trade and large swathes of African populations found this out when they were forced to eat cornmeal and little else. Protein deficiency and the “disease of the mealies” or pellagra (B Vitamin deficiency) caused the malnutrition death of countless thousands.

But combine corn with its traditional partners squash and beans and you have a power-packed diet. The Tarahumara go so much further and eat a huge variety of mostly plant foods gathered from their region. These include chili peppers, wild greens and chia seeds. Remember your Chia pet? The Tarahumara carry a gourd of chia slurpee they regard as their energy drink that allows them to scamper up cliffs and outrun rabbits.

Most of their corn is consumed as pinole - ground toasted corn mixed with water that thickens to a gruel, prevents hunger and provides slow- release energy. Elsewhere on the Tarahumara shopping list are pine nuts, juniper berries, pecans, acorns, wild grapes and strawberries and yucca seed. Wild mint, agave hearts, prickly pear and mesquite pods ground to meal or infused in tea round out their diet. Fish, goat and mice are hunted to supplement this largely vegetarian fare.

Is it possible to reprise this way of eating in our modern society? Research by Dr Daphne Miller in her book “The Jungle Effect” focuses on traditional diets around the world. She analyses the conundrum that Tarahumara blood sugar levels are low despite a high carbohydrate diet. Corn is a medium to high GI food and the levels eaten by the Tarahumara should trigger an insulin response according to the mantra of this food classification system which, if you’d read my earlier posts, I think is bunk for non-diabetics. She emphasizes that their corn is minimally processed and fibre-rich, so if you are choosing corn products to add to your diet, don’t think corn chips, think coarse cornmeal. Whole beans added to salads and other dishes such as omelletes will also Tarahumara-ize your diet.

Lots of fruit and vegetables, some nuts and seeds and a balance of high-carbohydrate from good sources, protein garnered from grains and legumes and a low intake of fats and processed foods will do the rest. If this sounds familiar, it’s because this is the way many non-industrial peoples around the world eat and underscores the simple message I try to get across.

The tricky bit is to find wild plant foods in our city lifestyles. The easy bit is to avoid drinking large quantities of mescal and fruit wine which the Tarahumara are wont to do for days on end, even before a big race. Tesguino, or corn beer is low in alcohol and more like a sports drink and they consume a lot. Hallucinogenic drugs like peyote accompany drinking binges and may serve to bind tribal members or just provide an emotional outlet not provided by their reticent, non-confrontational mindset. Descriptions of runners at the start of a race sharing a cigarette of dark, homegrown tobacco jar with our concept of super-athletes as well.  

I guess the moral of the Tarahumara story is that natural foods go a long way to combating the strains of living and growing older. They do not enjoy a long lifespan. The average life expectancy is only 45 but that figure is likely to be diminished by a high infant mortality rate and the poverty that marginalizes them. We enjoy access to good medical care as a rule in modern societies and if we can harness the power of a traditional diet like that of the Tarahumara and enjoy at least moderate levels of exercise we can achieve a more dynamic older age than we can imagine

Protein, Schmotein!

January 10, 2010 – 1:42 pm | by admin

The protein message is everywhere in our modern consumer society. Humanity’s most sought-after nutrient (along with fat and salt) and most easily and cheaply obtained commodity in prosperous economies is the latest poster boy for health, weight-loss and eternal youth.

I’ve been around health and fitness circles for a long time and it’s striking how each epoch elevates a single nutrient, food group or supplement to superstar staus. When the Promised Land miraculous benefits fail to materialize, that star’s fortune declines and it is quietly shelved in favour of the new kid on the block. Only that new kid is usually not new but simply recycled. 

The 70s and 80s were characterised by Vitamania, in which Vitamin C and E were given primacy by no less a figure than one of that century’s most brilliant and lauded scientists, Linus Pauling. One of only two people to receive Nobel Prizes in two categories, Chemistry and Peace, (the other was Marie Curie for Chemistry and Physics) Pauling changed the nutrition landscape and introduced the role of vitamins as medicinal therapy with his advocacy of massive doses of C and E. The era of “Megavitamania” was born.

Pauling’s achievements in unravelling the structure of protein and his campaigning against atmospheric nuclear weapons testing were laudable but his personal brand of quackery known as “orthomolecular” medicine undermines his legacy.

His hypothesis that incredibly high doses (partly via injection) of Vitamin C prevented colds and cured cancer was shredded by the Mayo Clinic which could not reproduce his results in trials. His 1986 book “How To Live Longer And Feel Better” demonstrated his tenacity in promulgating his theory and led in part to our “more is better” mentality in supplementation today.

Further research continues on his work - it is not completely repudiated - and his death at 93 of prostate cancer following a struggle with renal disease since age 40 shows he did live longer but did not necessarily feel better along the way.

Concurrently, the 70s and 80s gave fibre and complex carbohydrates their moment in the sun. Almost every food item that could had added oat bran fibre and we were encouraged to eat lots of whole grains and legumes.

The 90s were the era of the phytonutrient. Antioxidants and other chemicals in plants designed to help them repel predation by insects and other animals, tolerate harsh sunlight, and myriad other functions came out from under the electron microscope and into public consciousness. The things that made plant foods taste bitter or distinctive or gave them aroma or colour turned out to be very good for us. And not just good for us - they could prevent disease and promote long life if you took enough of them in pill form. 

If you’ve been following my posts you’ll see that trial after trial has undermined the efficacy of antioxidants and other phytonutrients as medicine taken in isolated form. In the case of beta-carotene, the Vitamin A precursor we get from yellow vegetables in abundance, trials of it in pill form were shown to increase risk of lung cancer.

Oh well, back to the drawing board. Which nutrient that humans have a deep-seated hunger for reinforced by popular culture and psuedo-science could be dusted off and hustled into the limelight?

Protein, of course, and that brings us into the 2000s and beyond. Protein, from the Greek “proteios” or of primary importance is a nutrient we need to build every cell in our bodies, from muscles to hormones. Along with fat, it is something we cannot do without. Without carbohydrate the body can make it for limited periods by reconstituting protein from our tissues and organs but the reverse is impossible.

The Greeks knew this and made animal sacrifice the highest tribute to the gods they could make, apart from the occasional human sacrifice. While the fragrant smoke of roasting oxen wafted up to the heavens from a token shank the masses licked their lips in anticipation of a rare treat. Meat!

They probably only got to eat it, like many early societies, two or three times a year  but did very nicely the rest of the calendar on barley, beans, figs, olives, cheese and vegetables. Their legacy shows they were a vigorous people and not inhibited by a lack of protein.

Once unpopulated woods were titled to rulers, hunting by peasants to supplement their diets with animal protein  became poaching and a severely proscribed activity. We have hungered after flesh ever since and given meat and protein an exalted place in our psyche.

But wait a minute, is meat the only source of protein? Of course not. Plant foods are full of it. I’ve just checked my cupboard and read a few labels and the results are surprising. My oats give 12% protein, my walnuts 22% and even the mouldy white flour up the back I never use and must chuck out is 10%. A 100g piece of beef (like most flesh) is around 25%.

Where meat rules is in its content of all eight essential amino acids. There are 22 of these building blocks of protein but we only need eight of them - the body can synthesize the rest. All eight are supplied by animal foods (including eggs and dairy) but plant foods usually lack some of them. Humanity has solved that problem by combining complementary foods like rice and soybeans, wheat and chickpeas and so on. Whatever essential amino acid missing from one food staple is supplied by another.  In our society we are awash with food and no one is likely to suffer protein deficiency, even on a balanced vegetarian diet.

The supplement and diet industry will not rest, however and feed our protein hunger along with our paranoia. If we could just eat more protein, displacing carbohydrate we would be slimmer, more energetic and less prone to the vicissitudes of that demon insulin.

Furthermore, if we could stuff the cells with extra protein, in the form of powders and potions, miraculous metabolic alchemy would make us more beautiful and live longer.

It all sounds good but ignores the fact that we are a protein-rich society already and that too much is stored as fat and excreted by the kidneys after conversion to nitrogen and urea at some expense to our well being. Linus Pauling had to eat a low protein diet to manage his Bright’s Disease and spare his kidneys.

The reduction and isolation of foods to “protein” defies the balance intended by nature. If I hear another person call chicken or beef “protein” I’m going to flip my lid. If beef supplies 25% protein, then what is the other 75%? Fat, in the case of well-marbled cuts. Where does that leave foods that are relatively high in protein as well as carbohydrate, like grains and legumes? The chickpea and archaic forms of wheat like emmer gave civilisation a leg-up that rivalled the boost given to early human evolution by meat-eating. 

I’ve got a question for you - which is higher in protein - eggs or bread? Why, eggs, of course, I hear you say but think of it this way. Both eggs and bread are 10% protein. Admittedly the egg is complete in essential amino acids but a 60g egg supplies 6g of protein while two slices of bread (60g) also supply 6g of protein.

My advice to you is to poach two eggs, pop them onto two slices of toast and enjoy 18g of high quality and tasty protein that satisfies around 25% of your daily requirement. And while you’re at it, empty your pantry of protein shake powder and give your kidneys a break.

Like so many nutrients, protein is essential but does not act in miraculous ways when you eat too much of it, just as your car goes no faster or further on a full tank of gas than a tank half full. Ageing people tend to neglect their diet a bit and should certainly pay attention to their protein intake but shouldn’t be seduced by the supplement sales pitch. More is not necessarily better. 

Societies that make the transition from underdeveloped to developing become more prosperous and eat more animal foods, resulting in bigger, taller bodies but that’s because they didn’t have enough plant foods with complementary proteins in the first place.

Only bodybuilders, burn victims and others benefit from extra high protein diets. For a longer, healthier life, go eat an egg. And don’t forget the toast.

Detox Dilemna

December 9, 2009 – 3:23 pm | by admin

I was in the health food store the other day. I only ever go there to buy petroleum-free shampoo. I used to buy this great home-made olive oil soap there made by an old Greek lady in the neighbourhood in a copper boiler in her back yard but they don’t stock it any more.

I never buy any edible products or supplements or any of the myriad wacky cures they sell because I gave all that up years ago. It’s very liberating - and easier on the wallet - not to walk around in a state of angst that disease and decay might be developing as I neglect to consume the latest potion our billion-dollar alternative health industry decrees I should.

One young guy in the queue ahead of me was not so angst-free. As he wrestled a gigantic plastic tub of protein powder onto the counter he asked furtively: “Got anything for detox?”

The shop owner’s eyes brightened as she realised she had a bite on the line. “Oh yes, you can have a herbal detox or buy a complete kit.”

I looked the guy over and wondered why he felt he needed detoxing. He clearly worked out at the gym and looked great: modishly dressed in sporty casual clothes, and fashionably tattooed on his dumbbell-pumped biceps. Maybe he just stayed up too late on the internet at night reading about the toxins that riddled his liver. Or maybe he just partied too hard with his friends on the weekends and drank too much and hadn’t eaten properly since he left home.

It did occur to me that maybe his kidneys were struggling to excrete the overload of protein he was putting into himself. We have gone protein-mad as a society and seem to think that pumping extra into ourselves will give us better muscles and less bodyfat but don’t let me get started on that.

The very nice and earnest lady behind the counter was listing the herbs and their effects on organ function - how this or that bark or berry extract would help the liver expel toxins, and so on. Was I in a fluro-lit, air-conditioned modern shop in a shopping centre or in some back-alley bazaar in medieval Baghdad? I almost expected her to drag a live snake out from under the counter and slit its throat or drain its gall bladder into a goblet for him to drink.

By the recitation of the magical properties of the fifth ingredient the young guy’s eyes were glazing over and I was getting a bit antsy.

He finally cut the snake-oil pitch short with: “How much is the kit?” In other words, I don’t really want the spiel, I’m already converted, I just need to know how much.

“149 dollars.”

“Oh. Well I’ll just take this and maybe I’ll get the other later.”

He handed over a couple of 50-dollar bills and I didn’t see him get much change for his huge keg of milk powder.

Part of me wanted to argue with the lady about why he needed to spend so much money to detoxify his body when a bit more water, sleep and less night-clubbing would probably work just as well. Another part of me saw a nice person who really believed in the benefit of what she sold and had no compunction about parroting the sales pitch on the product without ever verifying its truth.

I’ve been wandering around ever since, thinking about our fear of our toxic bodies and talking to people about their experiences with cleaning them up with fasting, or this or that product.

We just love the idea that our digestive tract, major organs and blood are accumulating toxic waste products faster than our beleagured kidneys and liver can get rid of them, or that environmental pollutants are slowly building up in us from the food we eat, the air we breathe, or the water we drink.

No amount of scientific discussion about how our bodies work can allay this almost religious conviction. What we need is a really good purge and our energy, digestion, skin, and circulation will improve. If we could just rid ourselves of the undigested matter clinging to the walls of our bowel, the invisible poisons infusing our tissues, and the harmful minerals and parasites weighing us down we’d be smarter, slimmer and happier.

Wouldn’t we?

Hey, if it were true then that simple cure to so many of life’s complex and interdependent issues costing only $149 would be very good value.

Where we anti-agers get involved is with some of our declining body functions that tempt us towards a quick-fix epiphany. Sometimes digestion slows with age, but this is usually a natural part of ageing and can usually be improved with more fibre, diet and exercise. Gall stones are more common as we age but resorting to colonic enemas, herbal “flushes” and special teas are not the answer.

“Oh, but I went on a juice fast and felt great afterwards,” people say. They usually fess up that they felt like rubbish after one day and refuse to believe that their body’s famine-survival mechanisms kick in and scrounge around the body for fuel and eventually feed the brain, kidneys and red blood cells with alternate, self-cannabalistic sources.

Religious mystics and holy men fast to create light-headedness from low blood sugar and an out-of-body sensation that they attribute to connection with a higher force.

Ironically, on a fast our bodies’ superbly efficient detoxification systems - the liver and kidneys -are less able to function without adequate fuel and are more likely to let waste products accumulate. In the absence of carbohydrate, as any victim of the Atkins Diet can attest, the body converts fat to ketone bodies to fuel the brain. Carbohydrate is its only fuel under normal circumstances but it will burn these eventually toxic substitutes for a short time. Oh, and not in sufficient quantities to cause significant weight loss. Then it goes back to converting muscle to sugar to keep ketone bodies from producing acidosis which is very unpleasant and not at all good for you.

So fasting actually causes the build up of waste products you are trying to expel and robs you of lean muscle mass in the process. Nice!

By the way, this is not just me making this up. This is basic nutrition biochemistry. I wish more of us would actually find out how our bodies work and marvel at the fine-tuning of the astonishing processes that go on inside us. That would make us less vulnerable to the charlatanism of detox merchants.

But then life wouldn’t be black-and-white would it? No matter how much you bash someone around the head with scientific evidence, a creeping intuition inside them forces them to ignore it and look for a miracle cure for fatigue, pimples, or bout after bout of colds. After all, the doctor hasn’t helped, and Mary at work reckons brindleberry extract helped her lose stacks of weight and feel fabulous.

Never mind that natural chemicals in food are thousands of times more potent than many of the additives that go in them. Never mind that we live longer, healthier lives than ever before in human history and gorge at a cornucopia that has no precedent for safety, reliability and variety.

No, modern life is evil and is slowly infecting us with pernicious toxins and parasites. Our bowels are clogged with hardened faecal matter that clings to its walls and prevents absorption of nutrients. What we need is a few days off wheat and dairy to “rest” the system and a high-priced regimen of herbal tablets and potions to flush out nasties. It all sounds so good I wish it really worked like that.

Hey, you want parasites? Like the ones so many alternative therapies say we are riddled with and can only be expunged with their product? Go back to Saxon society in medieval England where communal latrines led to human infestation with giant worms that would protrude from softer body parts like the eye at the most inopportune moments before zipping back inside their host. Toxic minerals? Anyone that lived anywhere near primitive smelting operations in the Bronze Age was sure to have elevated levels of arsenic and other nasties.

As for vitamin deficiencies from sluggish, clogged digestions, forget going back in time. Just visit Guatamala or many other Third World countries where children go blind from Vitamin A deficiency because they live on a cup of white rice a day and eat no yellow vegetables. At all.

Any suspicions of problems with digestion, gall stones or organ malfunction should be properly investigated by a qualified doctor, especially as we get older. It’s tempting to believe the hype and go for a plausible-sounding herbal detox but the reality is that you are not toxic and a trip to the doctor should identify something amiss.

I know you know someone who has shelled out lots of money and plunged their feet into a detoxifying footbath with amazing results, but that rusty-looking water was not toxins leaching out but…rust. An old conjuror’s trick.

Yes that liver “flush” of vegetable oil and citrus juice did produce blobs of green and yellow blobs in the stool but that’s just bile-stained “soap”.

No autopsy or surgical procedure has ever found hardened faecal matter clinging to colon walls and the strange lumps you produce in toilet water after detox “cures” are just fibre “casts” .

Eat more fibre, drink more water and exercise more often to feel better. Your body is an amazing machine that works very well to process waste and doesn’t benefit by a tempting but illusory detoxification.      

Organic Old Age?

September 3, 2009 – 9:15 am | by admin

Are organic foods more nutritious than non-organic? The organic food industry, valued in Australia at over $600 million says they are. If they are right, we anti-agers should be eating exclusively organic because good nutrition is our primary tactic to improve our prospects of a healthy old age.

The organic food industry has been around for about 50 or so years, paralleling the rise of synthetic pesticides and fertilizers. It has taken decades but today few among us would doubt the mantra that organic foods are better for you in a purely nutritional sense. Images of contented cows grazing in serene pastures and vegetables growing on rustic farms reinforce the idea.

If you’ve read my earlier posts you’ll see that I’m something of an organics sceptic. My problem has been that there is no one certifying body covering organic food producers: we have to memorise a number of logos and body names. Many foods are simply labelled “organic” without any certification.

Then there’s the cost. If you try to consume the kilo per day of plant foods that healthy eating requires, you are going to have a hefty grocery bill if you go exclusively organic.

Don’t get me wrong, I am no fan of pesticides and herbicides (see “Why Don The Cloak Of Medea?” in earlier posts). Reducing the toll of petrochemicals on our body frees our liver to fulfil its metabolic and other functions unimpaired, and that’s good to help slow ageing.

I just have a problem with people and organisations telling me that organic foods are more nutritious than non-organic. Why? How is it that the level of vitamins, minerals and myriad phytochemicals in foods is reduced by the use of chemical fertilisers? My angst here is that regular foods, particularly plant foods are resultantly seen as nutritionally inferior and not really worth the effort. The vitamin industry trades heavily on this concept, maintaining that modern, industrially-produced food is nutritionally depleted and unable to supply adequate levels of nutrients.

Any conclusion, real or imagined that chips away at the foundation of a plant-food based diet is an obstacle to anti-ageing. Humble plant foods are the historical basis of human health and a vital contemporary tool in our anti-ageing kit.

An independent study funded by the British government‘s Food Standards Agency, published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and reported in the Sydney Morning Herald in July 2009 provides some interesting findings.

The study’s leader, nutritionist Alan Dangour was quoted as saying: “there’s no good evidence that consumption of organic food is beneficial to health based on the nutrient content.”

Cue herd of angry organic cows bellowing their protest: “we are contented, just look at these rolling green meadows we amble about in - of course our milk and meat is better for you!”

The study reviewed 50 years of research into nutrient levels in organic and non-organic plant and animal foods and its findings are a resounding negative for organic nutritional superiority. There was some variation in nitrogen (some non-organics higher) and phosphorous (some organics higher) but this was not considered nutritionally significant.

Few of us can afford to eat exclusively organic so the upside is that we have not suffered nutrient-wise by eating a mixture of both types. I think it’s important to support organic foods or they will disappear from shelves but I buy cheaper organics like tinned chickpeas.

Of course organic food tastes better and is better for you and the environment. By getting more satisfaction from eating putatively pesticide-free foods you may derive marginally more benefit from them as you send a resounding message to agri-corporations that you do not want to eat foods with high herbicide/pesticide residues.

However, along with the myth of vitamin-depleted food, the myth of the nutritional superiority of organic food over non-organic can be put to rest, pending further studies.

Buy organic when you can but rest assured your anti-ageing nutrition program will not suffer when you settle for non-organic.

Secret Concoctions of Supercentenarians

June 15, 2009 – 12:59 pm | by admin

I’ve been doing some research on the world’s oldest living persons and it has been an interesting journey. The person who holds this title is an international celebrity and its passing from one to another is a news item that never fails to capture interest. In January 2009, Maria de Jesus of Portugal died at 115 years of age after a brief reign at the top of the gerontological ladder. She was in good health, able to walk and raised six children. She spent much of her life working in the fields of her agricultural district.

Gertrude Baines, also 115 years of age, now holds the title. She was born in the US in 1894 and I don’t know how she feels about the media attention but I’m sure she, like most of the other centenarians (people over 100 years of age) interviewed, has her particular lifestyle habits she credits for her long lifespan.

Mariam Amash was an Arab Palestinian woman of Bedouin descent who occupied the top spot. Deservedly so, given her 120 years. According to her family she had 10 children and 250 great-grandchildren. A Muslim, she rose at 5am daily for prayers and then went on her daily walk. She made the pilgramage to Mecca five times and attributed her long life to her traditional high-vegetable diet.

Jeanne Calmet, a Frenchwomen, is the world’s oldest person on record and lived to an amazing 122 years. Her lifespan has not been surpassed. A new term has been created to describe people that live to 110 years or more: “supercentenarian”. There are numerous longevity lists that have varying degrees of eligibility. Many birth records cannot be substantiated so candidates make one list but not another, and the titleholders begin to resemble the dizzying maze of boxing champions accredited by the myriad pugilism organisations of today.

Shigechiyo Izumi died in 1986 at 120 years, just days short of Jeanne Calmet’s lifespan. He was a sugar cane farmer for a staggering 98 years and drank brown sugar shochu - an alcoholic beverage usually distilled from rice or barley. He took up smoking at age 70.

If you’ve read my previously posted article on the amazingly long lives of Okinawans (see articles) you’ll know this is a subject I am interested in. You should be too. I don’t know about you but I don’t really want to live as long as these inspirational people, I just want their enviable health for as long as I do live. Ageing is a process that happens to us all, we can only wish for it to be a kind one and not rob us of our good health and vigour along the way. We can all learn something from finding out common life-enhancing factors of long-lived people and benefit from them by applying them to our daily lives.

I started by looking at people by nationality. We know that Japan holds the record for average longevity; more than 28,000 people over 100 years of age live there. The average Japanese lifespan is enviable; 85.3 for women, 78.3 for men.

Clearly, being female is beneficial for long life; being a Japanese woman more so. This is great for them but what about the rest of us? Many of us lucky enough to live in countries with good public health and medical systems can share that with Japanese, and we can always adopt their traditional diet of rice, fish and vegetables.

Having lots of children is apparently no impediment, just look at the prolific Mariam Amash.

OK, where are we? Female, Japanese, fecund…this is not helping me. A list of the world’s verified oldest persons might provide further clues. Consulting it, I expected to see lots of representatives from traditional, non-industrialized countries but remembered that good health care infrastructure seems to a factor in Japanese longevity. What I didn’t expect to see were so many (over 50) of the people from the United States.

Japan, predictably had plenty of names and was next best represented with 18. France (including Algeria) and the UK were next with 8. Canada followed with 4, Italy, Portugal and Puerto Rico had 2 each. One person made it onto the list from Germany, Ecuador, Spain, Denmark, Romania, the Netherlands, Australia, and Cape Verde. This was getting confusing. Shouldn’t Americans, with their industrialized lifestyle, be poorly represented? at least I had learned one thing. Cape Verde was a nation…

Then it occured to me that when many of these Americans were born, much of that nation’s population lived not in the major cities but smaller towns and rural areas. Maybe the America of Norman Rockwell, apple orchards, cider and home-baked cornbread, bandstands and sack races at community picnics represented their apogee of health before the car, TV and fast food came along. After all, one of those long-lived Americans had met Thomas Edison.

Then the light went  one. The US has a huge population - more than twice that of Japan - and also has more precise record-keeping than any other nation: the US gave us the Gallup Poll, the Kinsey Report and census statistics that would make your head spin.

Not to take anything away from apple cider and cornbread, but figures on longevity would have to be compared to population to find a trend. The only trend I had detected so far apart from gender, diet and health care seemed to be family and community support and enjoyment of a daily tot of alcohol.

Then Dominica popped up on an un-verified list. This small, mountainous island in the Caribbean has a rate of centenarians per 10,00 of population that exceeds both the US and Japan. 128 year-old Elizabeth (Ma Pampo) Israel is one of 21 centenarians on Dominica that boost the per 10,000 figure to 3; the US and Japan rate only 2. (2005 figures). She is the daughter of slaves and therein lies the difficulty in verifying the birth dates of Dominica’s spritely elderly. Poor record-keeping and the confusion of name changes keep the island’s centenarians out of the record books, but Ma Pampo has no doubt about the source of her longevity. “Lots of dumplings and bush tea”, she told the BBC, adding that she worked hard on a plantation for most of her life.

A brief snapshot of this verdant island in the Lesser Antilles described wordlessly by Christopher Columbus crumpling a piece of paper and throwing it onto a table gives us clues to many of its residents’ long lives. Roads were not built there until the 1960s and its mostly rural people got about by long daily walks over steep terrain.

102 year-old Rudolph Edward Georges told the BBC about his life: growing his own food, and indulging in his “Sunday Special” - a concoction of beer, milk, eggs, sugar, lime and nutmeg. Like a disturbing number of centenarians, he divulged his secrets in between puffs of tobacco.

One of the illuminating things from my research was that Dominica’s centenarians, and those of most nations represented on the longevity list were born at a time in the late 19th century when they could enjoy many benefits of a pre-modern lifestyle but lived long enough into the post-WWII world to garner the benefits of modern public health, such as clean water, more hospitals and clinics as well as advances in medicine. They had the best of both worlds. Not that many of our champions needed the medicine. They had their own remedies.

108 year-old Dominican Violet Wilfreda Joseph started her day with a drink of coconut water with a drop of gin and a banana until her family pressured her to leave out the gin after her 100th birthday.

Dominican centenarian researcher Dr Noel Boaz’s findings lean more to diet and lifestyle than genetics. Forced to walk over rugged mountainous country for most of their lives, rural Dominicans ate a typical diet rich in tropical fruits and vegetables and foraged for natural herbs and medicines in the forest.

Sadly, that is changing. Younger Dominicans are now part of a global culture of fast food, car ownership and TV. Working the land is an unpopular job option compared to higher incomes working in the towns. I have no statistics to indicate their health is suffering or that in the long term Dominica will slip in the longevity ratings. I just hope those young people are still hiking into the forest for an occasional dip into their forbears’ medicine cabinet.

Conclusions?

It seems we may have reached a peak for long-lived persons. They were born and lived at a time that conferred the benefits of both the pre-industrial and industrial worlds. They worked hard and ate a more natural diet but came to enjoy better housing and sanitation. In 1837 the world’s oldest recorded person was 108 years. That advanced age does not entitle one to join the large ranks of supercentenarians today.

Many of today’s supercentenarians were very active in their youth, usually due to their working lives. Many drank alcohol (mostly in modest amounts) and plenty of them smoked. Perhaps they would have lived even longer had they not. Almost all espouse a healthy diet high in vegetables. Family and community contact is often cited, and most confess to a secret concoction, from sucking fish bones, to spiced beer, to bush tea, to coconut and gin.

We’ll let Jeanne Calmet, the grand record holder at 122 years have the last word. Though born to a bourgouis lifestyle in France, she was active in tennis, cycling, swimming and roller-skating in her younger days. At age 85 she took up fencing and was still riding her bicycle at 100. Her secret concoction was lots of olive oil poured on her food and rubbed into her body. Her diet included garlic, vegetables, chocolate, red wine and port. She regarded a sense of humour as her best ally against ageing. Oh yes, she smoked until she was 117.

It’s been an interesting and sometimes contradictory path through the lives and ages of long-lived peoples for me, and I hope for you too. Keep exercising, keep laughing, eat a healthy, pre-industrial diet, and enjoy a tipple. Smoking has killed hundreds of millions of people in the last century and will kill many more in the future. Perhaps those lucky supercentenarians had the fortunate genetic make-up to make it through the Russian Roulette  that smoking represents, so avoid that habit.

Find a concoction that concentrates beneficial compounds from nature and consume it daily. I whizz up herbs, walnuts, anchovies, chillies, capers, lemon rind and garlic into a paste, store it in a jar in the fridge and use it in almost everything I ccok. Maybe someone will ask me for the recipe in another 53 years.

Plantar Fasciitis - The Achilles Heel Of Ageing

May 25, 2009 – 7:41 pm | by admin

For me it was during a session of kickboxing. As I returned a foot to the floor after kicking the bag, I felt the sensation I came to know from my investigations as “stone bruise”. A perfect description for the acute pain that shot from my heel.

Maybe for you it began as you swung your legs out of bed to start the day and you had to hobble to the bathroom because you could not put weight on one heel. I assumed I had bruised my heel from pounding my naked feet on the floor over and over as I practised my kicks.

The trouble was, it didn’t get better despite laying off kicks in the gym. In fact, it got worse. At first the problem was no more than heel pain first thing in the morning that rapidly disappeared as I went about my personal training business. Then it became chronic, and I realised I had to do something about it. I’ve spent several months treating it and I’m happy to announce I have it on the run and want to share my experience with you and perhaps help you too.

Firstly, I did what most of us do in this information age. I googled “heel pain”, somehow knowing plantar fasciitis would pop up because my mother suffered it and I tend to reprise her ailments.

Now, heel pain points to other conditions as well, so ultimately one should seek medical advice but I figured I would tackle this on my own first. Ah, yes - there was plantar fasciitis in all its painful glory - affecting the middle-aged (me, and many of you), those with flat or excessively-arched feet (mine are pancakes), and those who spend a lot of time on their feet on hard surfaces (my feet ache just thinking about how long I spend on them).

The plantar fascia is the strong and tight tendon that runs from the heel to the balls and toes of the feet and supports our foot arches. When it becomes inflamed, due to degeneration of the fat pads of the feet as we age, excess wear and tear, biomechanical faults that lead to abnormal pronantion (rolling out of the foot) or possibly a combination of all three, the result is the same - heel pain.

Treatment? Here is the bit that really interested me, because I needed to get past this pain so I could get back to all the things that make life enjoyable for me. like kickboxing, dancing, and most of all, not hobbling around in pain most of the time.

I did not particularly want to spend lots of money or experience anything particularly invasive, both surgically or pharmaceutically so I ran down the list of treatments and put them in the “No way”, “I’ll try that”, and “Yes - that sounds good” categories:

No Way!

Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs - To me, these treat the symptom and don’t address the problem.

Corticosteroids - As above, especially as the disclaimer accompanying their use was - “Repeated steroid injections may result in rupture of the plantar fasciia.” Clearly not a desirable outcome.

Ultrasound - It is ineffective, apparently.

Prolotherapy - Even though the prestigious Mayo Clinic endorses this treatment, the injection of non-pharmaceutical and inactive material to treat pain and strengthen connective tissue did not appeal.

Extracorporeal shockwave therapy (ESWT) I just skimmed over the description of this one, knowing it was not for me. It inflames the area to increase the healing benefits of increased blood flow.

Local anaesthesia - Repeated injections can lead to (ouch, here it comes) pain, bleeding, neuritis and infection. No thanks.

Most of these treatments are for long term plantar fasciitis that has not responded to other procedures design to heal connective tissue. I have had plenty of injuries and fixed them over time with more homespun remedies like rest, stretching, icing and heat so surely these would help?

I’ll Try That

Ah, yes, good old R.I.C.E (Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation) popped up.

 Heel inserts. I’d had some custom-made through a chiropractor before - they cost $400 and broke down after several months but I spotted some off-the-shelf ones for a tenth of the price and gave them a go. It seems so many of us experience heel pain that there is a strong need for this product. Mine have arch support and, after several days of wear were quite comfortable.

Ice - My old friend. I always keep ice cubes in the freezer and often find myself dumping two trays of them into a hand towel and wrapping them around sore bits. This time I started a regular evening routine of wrapping the ice-filled towel around my ankle and balancing my heel over the iceberg, rocking and pressing. What relief! It’s usually recomended that you only ice for 15 to 20 minutes but I did it for hours, figuring the thicker skin under the heel could take it.

Heat - I have treated so many injuries with intermittent heat and ice that I used this technique for my sore heel. It’s usually only your dominant foot that develops the complaint. I find heat plasters very effective so took to wrapping one I cut to size under my heel and wore it all day, then reverted to ice at night.

The nice thing about the heat plaster is even if you discontinue it, your shoe insert will have absorbed the heating medium (capsicum oil in my case) and will provide residual comforting heat for days afterwards.

Yes, I’ll try that

One suggestion I found intriguing was to freeze a water bottle or paper cup of water and roll that under the foot and heel, providing icing and massage at the same time. I didn’t get a chance to try that because I spent 10 days in Thailand and took advantage of cheap massage to have foot massage one day, traditional Thai massage the next. The traditional is fantastic, the foot massage a disappointment - just a skin polish really.

When I got back I tried massaging the underside of my foot with my own hands, then remembered the rolling frozen water bottle (or frozen can of orange juice in another suggestion). I cast around for an object I could use to massage my own foot and heel and came up with a decorative glass egg made from ground beach glass that I had bought on a previous trip to - you guessed it - Thailand.

Bingo! By securing it in the folds of a towel and rocking, rolling and pressing my foot on it I gave myself the best foot massage I have ever had. By this stage my heel pain had improved quite a bit but recovery had plateaued. Egg massage gave me almost instant relief. It was painful at first, to find sore areas and press on them but the round shape of the egg allowed lots of possibilities. The broader cross section placed transverse across the heel and arch was ideal for rolling, placing it longitudinally was ideal for rocking, and using the pointier end was ideal for pressing.

It may be a coincidence that my plantar fasciitis was healing as I took the glass egg cure, but I don’t think so. Stone or pebble massage has a long tradition in various cultures. I had visions of Captain Cook having his debilitating sciatica being cured in one long 24-hour session by Tongan women who tapped, pounded and massaged his lower back and buttock area with river stones. He declared himself cured afterwards and never suffered from it again.

I consider myself cured but still wear my shoe inserts, and roll that blessed glass egg under my stockinged or bare foot as required. That’s usually after boxing, dancing or being on my feet for a long time. It’s good to be back on them with minimal discomfort.

Look around your home for a rounded object for self-treatment. It could be a golf ball, stone, or pebble. Put it in the freezer for a while, heat it in a pan of simmering water, or coat it in liniment and go to work. Study the anatomy of the foot and visualise the broad, fleshy insertion of your tendon as it meets the heel.

Don’t neglect the other non-invasive therapies but I really think this one is the breakthrough as it allows you to use the pressure you can tolerate on the areas you know need it most.

Good luck! 

Do Vitamins Cure Cancer?

May 12, 2009 – 7:59 pm | by admin

A lot of people take vitamins for general health, many take them periodically in large dosages to hasten recovery from a cold, and others take them as part of preventative or curative programs for cancer or heart disease.

Is this medicalisation of vitamins of any use?

A new study adds weight to the growing consensus amongst research doctors that vitamins are a waste of time and money, and in fact may be doing more harm than good.

It’s natural to embrace all possibilities when one is grappling with a disease like cancer but the use of vitamins to prevent it, let alone cure it, is a concept slowly joining the sanguine realms of faith healing and quack cures.

A big, long-term study of post-menopausal women by the Fred Hutchinson Research Center in Seattle, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in February 2009 sought to determine risk factors for cancer, heart disease and bone health.

161,808 women participated in the study over an eight year period. Because 41% of those women took multivitamins, it gave lead study author Dr Marian L. Newhouser the opportunity to contrast their results with the control group of women who did not take vitamins. If the 41% of women showed statistically significant lowered risks for cancer, then a conclusion could be drawn that vitamins reduce cancer risk.

Unfortunately they didn’t.

Those women were no more likely to avoid diagnosis of cancer, whether endometrial, colorectal, stomach, kidney, bladder, ovarian, lung or breast than those who didn’t take multivitamins. In fact, taking multivitamins did not help prevent heart attacks, strokes, or blood clots or reduce the risk of death from any cause during the study interval.

Studies like this keep piling up but the medicalising of vitamins continues to grow in the retail sector and the imagination of consumers.

Other studies have focused on popular supplements like selenium, beta-carotene and vitamins E, C, D,B6 and B12, probing their cancer-preventing qualities and have come up empty-handed.

Now this is perplexing, given that many other studies have shown that diets high in micronutrient-rich fruit and vegetables do in fact reduce cancer risk.

Dr Newhouser of the Fred Hutchinson study suspects that the absence in multivitamins of other bio-active compounds in foods, like anti-oxidants and a host of phytochemicals are the key to understanding why vitamins alone are of no apparent use in preventing cancer. These compounds help absorb vitamins and activate them in the body. They act synergistically with each other and a range of nutrients in a way far more complex than we are currently able to determine.

I don’t see the problem here.

If studies show vitamins taken on their own are of limited or no use to the body but are biologically active when consumed in the food that contains them, then bon appetit!

It’s actually very liberating to know that nature has us covered, and supplies us with all the nutrients we need in tasty packages. Giving up vitamins and eating more fruit, vegetables, grains, legumes, nuts and seeds will save us some money too. The Nutrition Business Journal estimates that of the $23 billion dollars Americans spend on nutrition supplements, one third of that was on vitamins.

The body needs 13 vitamins and 15 minerals to be healthy and functional and those requirements are easily supplied by filling your plate with fruit, vegetables and grains. It is very rare in prosperous societies to have a case of vitamin deficiency.

Special vitamin requirements, such as folic acid for expectant mothers and the vitamin K given to newborns to prevent bleeding will probably always have a place but the rest of us gain little or no benefit from multivitamins.

Even the elderly and ageing among us.

We have special needs and can be prone to undernutrition but this is more likely to come from declining eating habits. It’s more important for anti-agers to concentrate on healthy whole foods than on perusing vitamin bottles. Getting the appetite and digestion going with regular exercise is important too.

Another study indicates that vitamins may even be harmful to us.

Analysis in 2009 of a previous study looking at the effects of folic acid (Vitamin B9) and aspirin on prostate cancer brought up a disturbing finding. 843 men had taken one mg of folic acid daily - more than twice the amount recommended for men and for women not pregnant or nursing. Not only did the folic acid not reduce risk for prostate cancer, it increased risk by 163%.

Perhaps taking vitamins is not so benign after all. Another study found high dosages of beta-carotene promoted lung cancer in heavy smokers. 

Release yourself from the clutches of Vitamania and indulge in nature’s packaging instead. 

Keep Your Hands Off My Potatoes!

May 4, 2009 – 7:55 pm | by admin

When the Spanish brought the potato from Peru to Europe in 1570 it met with little fanfare. Whoever slipped that lumpy tuber into a pocket of his doublet did not know the value of the New World  novelty would be greater than all the silver and gold plundered from the Aztec and Inca empires. It would take two centuries for the “root of the wretched” to overcome the suspicion that surrounded it and take its place as Europe’s premier famine-proofing staple, population booster, and human fuel of the Industrial Revolution.

By contrast, the sweet potato gained instant acceptance and royal patronage. King and Queen Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain welcomed it into their court, Henry VIII gorged on sugary, spicy sweet potato pies, and when Sir John Falstaff in Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives Of Windsor” anticipates bedding two women at once, implores the sky to rain (sweet) potatoes.

Perhaps it was the sweet potato’s putative aphrodisiac qualities that created this culinary class distinction. It wasn’t until the ordinary potato’s French champion, Antoine Augustine Parmentier, convinced Louis XVI and Marie Antoinnette to wear its distinctive blue flower that it achieved some measure of social respectability.

The sweet potato was from the lush tropics of the Caribbean and Central America, not the arid, windswept Andean altiplano  of the ordinary potato. It’s taste suited the palate of Europe’s elite, high on the excitement of new flavours like chocolate, vanilla and sugar; its courts awash with marzipan, jellies and gingerbread.

European taxonomy tainted the potato by its consignment to the diabolic nightshade family. The solanaceae include the tomato, eggplant, capsicum, tobacco, mandrake, henbane and deadly nightshade. While the first four of this group found acceptance, the potato took a long time to throw off its image as, in the words of nineteenth century social theorist John Ruskin, a “scarcely innocent underground stem of a tribe set aside for evil.”

The potato plant was a savage-looking thing. The tuber, of grotesque appearance, had a strangely satanic underground growth habit and reproduced from a piece of itself. Surely the Devil’s magic.

By the time of Catherine the Great’s Russia, European pundits thought the potato corrupted the blood and promoted lust, peasants feared it would spread diseases like scrofula,tuberculosis and leprosy, and upper classes saw it as the food of livestock, the poor, the downtrodden and the lazy. After all, an acre planted with potatoes and manured needed little attention until harvest when it met the protein and energy needs of more than ten people for a year.

The potato is a low-cost, quickly-prepared food, requiring little fuel to convert it to a filling snack that can be eaten in its own packaging. It supplies all nutrients except Vitamins A and D and calcium, easily supplied by milk. One fresh potato contains about 30milligrams of Vitamin C and kept the Irish peasantry scurvy-free. If ever there was a food designed for human consumption it is the humble potato.

Yet, it is under attack again, in the guise of over zealous application of the Glycemic Index.

I dabbled in the GI last post, and follow up on its absurdly contradictory and complex irrelevance here, captured in the prism of its prime enemy, the ordinary potato.

If you’ve followed my articles you’ll see how I emphasize healthy diet as one of the pillars of anti-ageing. Keeping body fat levels to a healthy minimum is also an important strategy as we age, and many of us turn to the latest diet advice to achieve this. It’s my argument that foods have to be seen in a cultural and historical perspective as well. It seems today’s labs-eye view of foods consigns the potato to the dustbin it has taken centuries to crawl out of.

The same potato prejudice that is reflected in perjoratives like “couch potato”, “potato head”, and “sack of potatoes” underpins the GI’s modern appraisal of the spud, and goes further, warning of its disease-causing potential.

Eating lots of bread, rice and potatoes, all “high GI” foods can predispose one to diabetes, obesity and heart disease, according to GI experts.

To recap, the GI, originally intended to research carbohydrate foods for diabetics in 1980, measures the amount a food raises blood glucose over two hours against a standard of 50g of pure glucose or white bread. When glucose enters the blood, insulin follows to put that glucose away in cells for energy use. It’s the argument of the GI diet that too much insulin too soon is a dangerous precusor to disease.

Many studies show that when traditional foods are replaced by high-sugar, refined foods health deteriorates and I have no argument with that. To elevate the potato to the top of the GI hit parade, however is an absurdity that shows the whole approach to be faulty. Potatoes rate at 85, or 105, or 132, or whatever, depending on cooking times, crop variation and individual metabolic variation, while white, refined table sugar is a “moderate” GI food at 58 and presumably more healthy and less disease-preventing than the potato. How can this be true?

Worse still, the sweet potato retains its aristocratic aura and is an acceptably “moderate” G I food. Depending of course on which part of the world your sweet potato is from. GI values vary from 48 (Canada) to 78 (New Zealand).

White potato varieties show a large variation too, but most, like Russet (111) and Pontiac (85) are relegated to the no-no category.

Now this food phobia is just crazy and has to stop. Embrace the potato of all varieties for the low-fat, high-fibre nutritious package it is and always has been. At least for the 7000 years of its cultivation that we know about.

There is no evidence that the potato made anybody sick. Unless they ate green ones. Solanine is the toxic steroidal alkaloid potatoes produce when exposed to sunlight, probably to protect them against predation. It makes potatoes taste bitter, so who would eat them in that state?

The Incas operated a sort of proto-welfare state in which stone storehouses held food reserves for the population in times of famine. They chose to store chuno, or freeze-dried potato, prepared by letting moisture-rich potatoes freeze, then crushing them underfoot. They kept in a sealed room for ten years. Andean peoples were noted for their vigour at high altitudes and were neither fat nor diabetic.

When Arthur Young was sent from England to Ireland for an agricultural survey in 1770 he found the hard-working Irish labourer eating up to five or six kilos of potatoes a day, and little else, apart from some skim milk and perhaps some green vegetable. He found the Irish attractive, energetic and fertile and could not agree with his contemporaries that the potato was “unwholesome food.”

“I will not assert,” he said, “that potatoes are a better food than bread and cheese, but a bellyfull of one was much better than a half a bellyfull of the other.” Not only did he stick up for the potato, he implied that the Irish poor ate better than the English poor did.

My advice is to ignore the scaremongering of the GI and similar diets that warn people off time-proven plant foods forming the basis of a healthy anti-ageing diet.

It’s what goes on those potatoes that really makes the difference.

Avoid drenching potatoes in butter, oil or fat from roasting meat (yes, it tastes good). Eat as many potaoes as you like as long as you prepare them in the following way and make them part of a balanced meal. Their fibre and starch content will make it hard to eat too many.

Greg’s roast potatoes

Wash and chop potatoes (of any variety). Leave skins on for more nutrients and flavour. Spray lightly with olive oil and pop on a sheet of baking paper on a tray in a 200 degree oven for 45 minutes. Add golden, roasted chunks to salads and frittatas.

Greg’s “Smashed” potatoes

Wash and chop potatoes and add to boiling water. Allow two medium potatoes per person. Boil until tender (the skins will start to separate). Drain, add one teaspoon of chopped capers, one tablespoon of olive oil,  and one tablespoon of yoghurt per serve. Squeeze over the juice of half a lemon, add a couple of twists of black pepper and “smash” the potatoes with a large spoon as you blend the mixture.

Eat Less, Live Longer?

April 1, 2009 – 7:09 pm | by admin

Mary Crowell and Clive McCoy of Cornell University got the ball rolling on the link between dietary energy reduction and longer lifespan in 1934. They fed lab rats a severely calorie-reduced but otherwise nutritious regime and found their subjects lived up to twice normal lifespans.

Studies in 1986 by Walford and Weindruch shed light on possible parallels in humans. A small group of participants in a Washington University of St Louis project eating 10-25% less than the regular diet lowered their cholesterol, fasting blood glucose (used to predict diabetes) and blood pressure.

BMI went from an average of 24 to 19.5 over three to 15 years, though most BMI reduction took place in the first year of dieting. The most startling results were for blood tryglycerides (fats) which dropped  as low as the lowest 5% of Americans in their twenties.

No long-term studies of significant dietary reduction in humans have taken place because of our long lifespans, so it’s too early to know for sure if the longevity enhancement seen in fruit flies and roundworms applies to us. However, a 2002 Washington University study showed dietary restriction greatly improved blood pressure. Arteries harden with age and blood pressure normally climbs with advancing years but this group with a mean age of 55 got theirs back to a youthful level.

There may be something in caloric reduction for a longer, healthier lifespan but it’s a fine line. Go too far and negative consequences like anemia, muscle wasting, gallstones and depression may derail a potential fountain of youth (March 2007 Journal of American Medical Association). Reducing your energy intake to 20 or 25 less than your requirements while maintaining adequate nutrients is risky, and quite frankly, a grind. Who wants to live longer if it means living on less than 2000 calories a day?

It seems plenty do, though academic research seems mainly aimed at understanding the nature of human metabolism and longevity. The Salk Institute for Biological Sciences identified the gene responsible (PHA-H) for the trick of living longer while eating less in animals and expect similar results for humans in the future. 

At this stage, much of the debate is theoretical but (Mito)homesis leads the pack in explaining how energy-deprived rats live longer than their healthy counterparts on normal diets. Even obese rats put on calorie restriction live longer than normal rats, and calorie-restricted rats doing no exercise live longer than normally-fed rats that run on treadmills.

Where is the logic in this? It seems (Mito)homesis provides the best explanation in that calorie restriction creates a low-level biological stress that provokes a defense response via longevity genes.

It may be good old Darwinian medicine at work here. During famine, it’s likely that animals( small ones, anyway) avoid reproduction and upgrade their protective and repair mechanisms in order to outlive food shortages and to ensure reproductive capacity in the future.

Now this is all fine for yeast, rats, mice, fruit flies and chenorhabditis elegans (a 1 mm nematode) but it’s a big leap of faith to assume positive results in humans and adopt a semi-starvation regime. Muscle-wasting is not pleasant, and remember the heart is muscle.

Ray Walford, the prime 80s researcher in the field died of the disease calorie restriction is contra-indicated for - Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) - sometimes called Lou Gehrig’s disease after the New York Yankees star who was diagnosed with it in 1939 at the peak of his career and died of it two years later. ALS is a neurodegenerative disease that affects the motor neurons; nerve cells that control voluntary movement. Perhaps Walford had been a long-term practitioner of his own research, with tragic results.

Reducing food energy intake in order to reduce excess bodyfat can reap a variety of health rewards that may in fact lead to a longer life but once  a healthy weight is reached the risk of maintaining restricted calories for possible longevity improvement is just too great.

We need a wide variety and fair volume of foods to get all our required nutrients. Even weight-loss regimes that eliminate vital food groups like carbohydrates are potentially dangerous. Likewise, diets that vilify many healthy plant foods are of little use in the long term and may harm longevity.

I promised an overview of the GI Diet and will start with the American Diabetics Association’s view. They question the usefulness of GI for diabetics and reccomend the total amount and not the source of carbohydrate be given priority.

The Glycaemic Index(GI) goes something like this: Not all carbohydrate in all food acts alike when digested. Some is converted to glucose (blood sugar) more rapidly and a scale measuring the rate at which carbohydrate raises blood sugar compared to a mean of 50g of glucose is used. This gives foods a rating of one to 100. If a food raises blood glucose twice as high as 50g of glucose it ranks 100 on the GI, like potatoes. Not all potaoes - sweet potato, ironically rates lower than regular potatoes. Getting confused?

Ice Cream rates as a low GI food, probably because the fat in it delays glucose absorption. Ordinary table sugar rates moderately, almost smack bang in the middle at 55. The idea is to eliminate high GI foods in order to prevent a “rush” of insulin which may lead to declining insulin sensitivity and a pre-disposition to diabetes and overweight.

The GI ignores the real world and measures the effect of one food at a time, in standard amounts of carbohydrate. Remember, it’s how that food stacks up against 50g of glucose. Well, carrots are low in sugar and it would take several kilos of them to equate to 50g of glucose.

White rice is high GI, Basmati rice is not. Come on. The Glycaemic Index is complex and contradictory and not a realistic guide on how to eat. The sugar industry was an enthusiastic funder of early studies because white sugar performs well on the Index. Australian authorities and food companies are right behind GI as a means of attacking our obesity and diabetes problem but other countries aren’t so sure.

I don’t like reductivist science that scares people away from healthy, everyday foods like potatoes that have served humanity so well for so long. No potatoes, no Incas. The many varieties of “lumpers” eaten in huge quantities by the 18th and 19th century Irish made them the most energetic and sought-after labourers in the British Isles. An adult male ate 6 to 8 kilos a day (and little else) and their insulin and bodyfat levels were no doubt fine.

Professor Jenny Brand-Miller of Sydney University is a leading researcher, author and advocate of GI eating and was awarded the Clunies-Ross medal for services to Sugar, er Science and has based a succesful career on demonising one of humanity’s most nourishing foods. She and her colleagues have their knives out for potatoes; not to eat them but to destroy their reputation.

Eat a wide variety of plant foods regardless of how they rate against each other in the lab and the imaginations of reductivist scientists, and exercise and keep bodyfat levels down in order to live a longer healthy life.