~~ from his blog ~~

On the flight from London to Rome I read an article on the immune system and cancer. It got me to thinking about the immune system and a whole lot of other health problems.

It’s sunrise in The Eternal City right now. I’ve been up early watching the dawn break over St. Peters, which is a couple of miles below the hotel. I figured everyone was getting tired of travel disaster stories, so I thought this would be a good time to sketch out my views on the inflammatory basis of heart disease.

If you read enough in the medical literature you will perceive a change in outlook on the underlying cause of many of the so-called diseases of civilization, especially heart disease. Most authors – mainly, I suspect, out of desire to keep their academic positions and reputation with their peers – throw a bone to the lipid hypothesis before admitting that it probably isn’t the only cause of coronary artery disease. Over the last decade or so the progression has been thus: elevated cholesterol causes heart disease – elevated cholesterol and maybe a little inflammation cause heart disease – elevated cholesterol and inflammation cause heart disease – inflammation along with elevated cholesterol cause heart disease – and now, among the more enlightened – inflammation causes heart disease. In my opinion, it probably is inflammation by itself that is the driving force behind the development and progression of most cardiovascular disease.

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/?p=804

I'm seeing a similar progression in the published reports of studies. Things like, "Some carbs may cause heart disease in women". Heh! They're getting there, by nudges.

Oh, by the way, the OP only excerpted a tiny fragment, his posting is very long and well worth reading.

Ah! This explains why intermittent fasting might be such a good thing:

It is indeed will worth reading.

Given my inherent stubborn nature, I had never paid any heed to the "low fat" or "eat frequently" schools of thought, even during anti-fat apogee days of the mid 80s and early 90s.

Hopefully, my refusal to adhere will turn out a blessing in disguise.

Excellent post and I think it might be right on the money in a lot of respects.

I can't say I'm thrilled with the concept that eating frequently is going to put you in a worse inflammatory state. I was hoping that simply eating the right kinds of foods (LC) would minimize inflammation. Now I have to worry about eating my snack of nuts at mid-morning? Crap, I'm back to fighting hunger for the betterment of my health. I guess a little hunger is worth it.

Here's an alternative viewpoint on eating causing inflammation. Eades points out that any food elicits a certain amount of immune response that is going to cause damage to normal tissues. I don't have a problem with this, but I do think a certain amount of this is not going to cause any great harm to our circulatory systems. Its like carcinogens, we are exposed to them all the time but there are mechanisms in place to effecetively combat such insults. I think there are probably similar mechanisms in place such that eating like our ancestors did, we are going to be maximally protected.

I think we all agree that Paleo man ate the equivalent of a LC diet. This much seems obvious when you consider the foods he had easy access to, as well as how well LC diets work for people's weight and general health. The question then becomes, how often did Paleo man eat? I personally think primitive man ate frequently and plentifully. Whenever he found a food source, he would sit down and have a good meal. And the cradle of civilization was a great place for man to find food, warm climates meant a generous and fairly constant supply of plant foods. Game animals were also plentiful. I don't think the idea that man only ate once a day, something like the Warrior diet, seems logical.

For this reason, I don't see that frequent meals is necessarily soemthing artificial to our systems. Our hunger is designed to tell us when we need more food, it is our adaptive mechanism to tell us to get busy and hunt/gather up some grub.

I do suppose our hunger mechanism might be altered/damaged, such that we are hungry more often than we used to be. It is possible that this was thrown off as early as the womb, where prenatal exposure to large swings of carbs could have put us on the wrong path. Being a feed-forward mechanism, this would be a tough thing to overcome as a group.

This is a straight question - no implicit criticism of your idea. How do you think frequent eating would work for a tribe as a whole, say 50 individuals? Do you think they roamed together during the day and ate when they found food together? Or split up and ate in separate small groups? I have always wondered about the traditional idea of the male hunting band setting off on the hunt then returning later with a kill, while the women confine themselves to gathering. It seems to miss some practicalities of life in the wild, such as the fact that gathering is dangerous when you are surrounded by predators, and women are physically weaker than men so less able to defend themselves.

I think that sticking together and performing most functions as a group, is probably a wise way to go for a small band of humans. The group comes across a tree laden with fruit, they spend time eating their fill.

Its easy to imagine a distribution of labor like you suggest, although our ideas are no doubt colored by our patriarchal society structure. I've sometimes wondered, if women were the gatherers maybe they ate more plant foods than the men. Obviously, when you are out picking berries you are going to eat some as you gather. One for me, one for the group. And when the men made a kill, first thing they might have done was cut off a select morsel for a snack. But it could be just the opposite, maybe the women did more of all the food procurement and the men were the guards. Or maybe they were just lazy, hehe. I think you find a variety of distributions of labor among hunter/gatherer peoples, that we might consider unfair or unusual.

I generally imagined a group of humans being somewhat smaller than 50 individuals, although I haven't exactly dwelt on this much. An alpha male and some few subordinates, a half-dozen females with one kid suckling and half as many (due to infant mortality) weaned but still underfoot, would seem average. That'd be maybe 15-20, a number that would be reasonably easily fed from a given food source, be it a lkarge animal or a large patch of berries.

Its all guessing I suppose. In the end, I tend to think the only real way to know how primitive man ate, is to try the different ways and whichever works best for human helath and wellbeing, that one is most likely to mimic the primitive ways.

Getting back to Eades' point. No great amount of inflammation was found in the arteries of the hunter/gatherer groups that were studied by people like Steffanson and Price. This means that simply eating food on a regular basis (which I assume these groups did) is not sufficient to cause inflammation. The high carbohydrate content of our diet, is what is causing the inflammation. And its only made worse by the fact that eating carbs, causes you to want to eat more carbs than you even "need" calorie-wise.

This has in fact been documented in literature by those who witnessed Native American tribes in pioneer days. Often in tribes that followed the herds for food, the men and women worked together with the men doing the killing and the women usually doing the butchering. The prize parts were enjoyed then and there (often the liver and the heart). Who got to partake was decided based on the custom of the tribe; some allotted this prize to the one who had made the kill and whomever they decided to share with, others to the higher ranking members of the tribe. Other tribes in other parts of the world probably worked on a similar system.



That was also observed in Native American tribes also. The gathering was usually delegated to the women and children. You forget that there is safety in numbers and most predators won't go after an entire group but prefer prey that is alone, young or sick/injured. Unless they were desperate, most predators would prefer to avoid a group of foragers even if they were women and children (do you really think that the mountain lion knows the difference between male and female humans? ) and I'd also wager that the women and children of those times could do a better job of defending themselves than most of us could today since that was their everyday reality; they were raised knowing the dangers around them and how to defend themselves.

I bet people weren't constantly noshing though. A lot of that eating is simply habit, even the hunger response is habit. You start to figure out that a lot of our eating is simply habit when you start to play with IF.

You don't need to get hungry between meals, just eat slightly larger meals.

No, I don't think they were noshing constantly, but I also think most ate on a more regular basis than we give them credit for and the literature does support that. Look at the cultures of Native Americans for clues. For instance, every tribe made baskets. What for? Carrying things, trade and...food storage.
Jerky and pemmican were standard fare when traveling or when other food was not available. Tribes that grew corn and beans were well-versed in storage methods. Those that were predominantly hunter-gathers smoked and dried meats.
To think that unless these people had 'fresh' food to eat that they didn't eat at all shows just how accustomed we have all become to not having to work for our food.

The practice of rejecting meat that isn't completely "fresh" appears to be largely an invention of our modern age of refrigeration, germ phobia, and poor food handling. The following quote is from Vilhjalmur Stefansson's "Adventures in Diet," published in 1935:


So it seems reasonable to assume that our hunter-gatherer ancestors might have snacked on a single kill for an entire day.

Nancy I have sort of the opposite experience. I eat one egg and one sausage patty for breakfast, and I get a little hungry at 10AM. When I eat two eggs and two sausages, I still get hungryat 10AM. I think maybe that either way my stomach is empty by this time, and this is contributing to my sense of being hungry. But no doubt about it, hunger and the perception of same is something complex and we might well have a very different perception as a result of our modern liefstyle. For example, it is thought that a fetus can become accustomed to carbohydrate in the womb, such that they are already "hooked" by the time they are born. This mechanism feeds forward to each successive generation.

I'm thinking that a good part of Paleo man's existence was sans baskets and fire, so he was even more likely to stay at a tree of ripe fruit or a fresh kill until the food source was exhausted. I just don't see where the situation would necessarily ever involve a single meal in a day as a routine.

That's hunger from habitual eating. Just don't eat, it'll go away. At least, that's been the experience from IF for lots of folks.

I don't know about training myself not to be hungry, seems like a losing proposition. I'll try and analyze the situation though in light of your suggestion. I've been trying to drink something first before eating, in the hopes that some of these hunger pangs are actually thrist that is being misinterpretted. But I get a little shaky and the stomach grumbles when I don't get my snack.

I think there is some evidence that a high protein/fat meal is processed through the stomach quickly, this may be why I get hungry after a couple of hours. It seems to be less prevalent afte the noon meal, possibly because I tend to eat a veggie then and the fiber might slow the emptying of the stomach.

You might just try putting the snack off by 15 minutes and slowly increasing the time. I've been reading someone's experiments into hypoglycemia and the best thing to do is to slowly make the body have to wait longer and longer. It seems to be better at really resolving the hypoglycemia than continually feeding. I don't know if I can find that again, it was back when I was having issues with hypoglycemia.

Fat is supposed to slow down digestion!