Kind of adds to "The curse of the mummies" chapter in "Protein Power" eh?

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009...in5687168.shtml

I met the gentleman who serves as the "informal Egyptian curator" for our local museum. The Egyptian display at the local museum is the gift of a wealthy patron who had a private collection, and passed it along upon his death.

After lengthy discussion, the curator gentleman remarked that the allegations of obese royalty and upper classes of Egypt were true. However, he went on to state that these findings are not widely known. So, he wasn't surprised at my story of having difficulty in confirming the obese Egyptian royalty stories by web searches for independent verification.

Rich people ate sugar which was much more expensive than meat. Further, salt does not have the capacity to cause hypertension in humans. At worse, salt could change blood pressure by about 5 points up or down. Eating meat, fat or lean, does not cause heart disease.


Ain't that the truth. Today, we eat sugar like it was food.

I wonder if the wealthy ate fruits and candys etc. and I remember going to a display of Ramses II and how thick legs were a display of power. It would be interesting to know what the diet actually was for those wealthy enough to be mummified and draw the interest of the archeologists.

More about the meat reference in the article. We eat lean meat. They ate fat meat. I don't know anybody, except myself and some other guy I met last week, who eats lots of animal fat and tells the butcher "Don't trim". Everybody else I know eats lean meats and happily trims away all the fat from the meat before cooking it thoroughly. With vegetable oils. If there was anything bad about animal fat, then it's all gone before it reaches our mouths. No, the fat that we eat today is vegetable but more specifically, it's made from grains, i.e. corn, soy, canola, etc. If there's fat to blame, then it's that fat, not the animal fat.

"Maybe it's in our nature to get atherosclerosis." What an idiot.

Isn't egypt famous for grain? In fact, aren't the primary grains used today developed from some previously inedible egyptian grass-grains?

Yes. Storing grain for seven years of famine is a famous Egyptian story.

The grain issue was what the Doctors Eades cited in protein power as an illustration of what excess carbohydrate intake would do. Among the things they cited were obesity of the Egyptian royalty.

Since the issue of health effects of high carbohydrate consumption was key to the Eades book, I tried to verify by web searches the chapter on the Egyptian mummies. I found many web references, but they were generally to the Eades book.

So, I was pleased when, by chance, I met the "Egyptian curator" and he verified the allegation of obese Egyptian royalty, adding that the information was not well known.

Our mummy collection (just 2) was given CAT scans and no mention was made of atherosclerosis. Other diseases were found. Oh, one of the mummies had a different sex than had been claimed. We have a small town mummy collection, after all. Probably the wrong information was passed along when the mummy was bought over 100 years ago.

Morbid obesity and hypersomnolence in several members of an ancient royal family. It's free full text online only a short letter but worth reading.

Dr Eades has discussed Obesity in ancient Egypt a couple of years ago

Not all mummies were rich, and indeed their teeth were worn down, and bones weak from all the "healthy grains"

I think I go with the grain as the cause of there cardiovascular disease problem

I wonder when someone will notice their non-agricultural contemporaries didn't have heart disease.

Certainly the difference in lifespan between agriculturalists and hunters was noted by 525 BC

there is this account by Herodotus on Cambyses
But when he came to the wine and asked about its making, he was vastly pleased with the drink, and asked further what food their king ate, and what was the greatest age to which a Persian lived. They told him their king ate bread, showing him how wheat grew; and said that the full age to which a man might hope to live was eighty years. Then, said the Ethiopian, it was no wonder that they lived so few years, if they ate dung; they would not even have been able to live that many unless they were refreshed by the drink--signifying to the Fish-eaters the wine--for in this, he said, the Persians excelled the Ethiopians.

The reference to dung is because the soil the wheat was grown in was fertilized with dung.

Actually the bit before that section "The King of the Ethiopians advises the King of the Persians to bring overwhelming odds to attack the long-lived Ethiopians when the Persians can draw a bow of this length as easily as I do; but until then, to thank the gods who do not incite the sons of the Ethiopians to add other land to their own.'" So speaking he unstrung the bow and gave it to the men who had come. "
implies the Meat eating Ethiopians reckoned they were stronger than the Bread eating Persians telling them they should only think about attacking the Ethiopians when they are strong enough to draw that bow as easily as they could.

The ancient Egyptians were heavy alcohol users, often drinking beer in place of water, from a young age. There was a standard daily ration of 4 litres of beer and wages were often paid with beer. Part of the reason for this was that available water was often undrinkable due to fecal contamination.


Alcohol is very toxic, especially in higher quantities.


One Japanese company in 2002 made ancient egyptian beer from a recipe found in a cave thinking it would yield a mild beer which is what some think the beer was like in ancient egypt - about 3% alcohol, which would still be a lot of alcohol if drank in quantity. They were surprised when it yielded a 10% alcohol beer, which is extremely strong, almost wine strength. This jives with the Greeks accounts who thought egyptian beer was as strong as wine and highly intoxicating.

http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/...-ancient-egypt/

Absolutely bizarre how he neglects to mention beer, an alcoholic beverage, as the other big staple in their diet.

Jenny addresses some of this on her blog today. Paleo people might not want to read it.

http://diabetesupdate.blogspot.com/