Tue, Oct-23-07, 09:45
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Experimenter
Posts: 25,866
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Plan: DDF
Stats: 202/185.4/179
BF:
Progress: 72%
Location: San Diego, CA
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Did anyone get to the part discussing WHY vitamin deficiencies come about only when eating carbohydrates? That was interesting!
Heavily edited because there's too much text!
Quote:
"Because it is still common to assume that a meat-rich, plant-poor diet will result in nutritional deficiencies, it's worth pausing to investigate this issue. The assumption dates to the early decades of the twentieth century, the golden era of research on vitamins and vitamin-deficiency diseases, as one disease after another--scurvy, pellagra, beriberi, rickets, anemia--was found to be caused by a lack of essential vitamins and minerals.
...
it dictated that the only way to ensure that all the essential elements for health was to eat as many types of foods as possible, and nutritionists still hold by this logic today. "A safe rule of thumb," as it was recently described, "is that the more components there are in a dietary, the greater the probability of balanced intake."
This philosophy, however was based almost exclusively on studies of deficiency diseases, all of which were induced by diets high in refined carbohydrates and low in meat, fish, eggs, and dairy products.
... Text about various sailors getting sick on foods consisting of stuff like gruel sweetened with sugar, puddings, biscuits, barley, rice (causing scurvey). Pellagra associated with corn-rich diet, beriberi eating white rice instead of brown. Pelagra was cured by adding in fresh meat, milk and eggs.
"Nutritionists working with lab animals also found that they could induce deficiency diseases by feeding diets rich in refined grains and sugar. Guinea pigs were given scurvy in a series of laboratory experiments in the 1940s when they were fed diets of mostly crushed barley and chickpeas.
This research informed the conventional wisdom of the era that fresh meat, milk and eggs were what the Scottish nutritionist Rober McCarrison called "protective foods" (which is how they were known before Ancel Keys and his contemporaries established them as the fat-rich agents of coronary disease), but it also bolstered the logic that a "balanced" diet, with copious vegetables, fruits, and grains, was necessary for health. "
So the actual problems were caused by diets rich in grains and sugar but it was deduced by the fat-head experts that it an high meat diet would do the same. Yet animal foods contain all of the essential amino acids and 12 of 13 essential vitamins in large quantities.
"The 13th vitamin, vitamin C, has long been the point of contention. It is contained in animal foods in such small quantities that nutritionists have considered it insufficient and the question is whether this quantity is indeed sufficient for good health. ... [text about the discovery that scurvey can be cured by fruits] As a matter of logic, though, this doesn't necessarily imply that the lack of vit. C is caused by the lack of fresh fruits and vegetables. ...
"If the Inuit thrived in the harshest of environments without eating carbohydrates and whatever nutrients exist in fruits and vegetables, they, by definition, were consuming a balanced, healthy diet. If they did so solely because they had become evolutionarily adapted to such a diet, which was a typical rejoineder to Stefansson's argument, then how can you explain those traders and explorers, who lived happily and healthfully for years at a time on this diet?
[more history about nutritionists beliefs, the Steffanson experiment where he lived in a hospital for a year, under observation eating nothing but meat, and was fine, no vitamin deficiencies]
The really interesting part
Perhaps these carbohydrates block the absorption of vitamins?
"B-vitamins are depleted from the body by the consumption of carbohydrates. "There is an increased need for these vitamins when more carbohydrate in the diet is consumed,".
A similar argument can be made for Vitamin C. Type 2 diabetics have rougly 30% lower levels of vitamin C, which suggests that vitamin-C deficency might be another disorder of civilization. One explanation for these observations--described in 1997...-- is that high blood sugar and/or high levels of insulin work to increase the body's requirements for vitamin C.
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Last edited by Nancy LC : Tue, Oct-23-07 at 11:38.
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That worked really well until I made friends with the girl at the pizza parlor several doors down. Past that point, her pepperoni and my eclairs traded daily and I bet we both gained weight. 
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