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Potatoes Provide Plenty of Protein!

Most diet-conscious people today think of potatoes as “a starch.” They think that if you are having potatoes for dinner, you still have to add “a protein” to your meal. Yet potatoes are an excellent source of protein. Scientists have known that since the 1920s because of an interesting experiment that was done in Poland in 1925 and published in 1928 in Biochemical Journal. Thanks to the Internet, you can read the original article for yourself.

The researchers knew that populations that subsisted on a diet based heavily on potatoes seemed to be healthy and remarkably free of scurvy, beriberi, and pellagra—diseases that were known to result from vitamin deficiency. Some earlier work had suggested that potatoes can provide enough protein for human nutrition, and this study was intended to confirm those results.

For 167 days, the researchers fed a healthy young man and a healthy young woman a diet whose only significant source of protein was potatoes. Besides potatoes, the subjects ate fat and salt and a few apples and pears. They could also have the occasional cup of black coffee or tea with sugar.

The subjects thrived on this limited diet. Their health remained good and their weight remained stable, except that the man started losing weight toward the end of the study as he got more serious with his athletic training. Nitrogen balance studies confirmed that they weren’t having any trouble with protein deficiency. Most surprisingly, they didn’t get bored with their monotonous diet! To show that these results weren’t some sort of fluke, look at what happened when someone from the Washington State Potato Commission ate nothing but potatoes for 60 days.

At the end of the article, the authors thanked Dr. Casimir Funk, who directed the experiment. Funk was a superstar in the history of nutrition. In 1912, he published a landmark article describing how he had isolated thiamine, the chemical that is responsible for preventing and curing the deficiency disease called beriberi. That same year, he wrote another landmark article, which suggested that several epidemic diseases were actually the result of a deficiency of some vital chemical that was needed in only tiny amounts. He guessed that, like thiamine, the other chemicals would be amines, so he coined the term “vitamines.” After it turned out that some of these vital chemicals aren’t amines, the “e” was dropped, and they became vitamins.

As this study showed, potatoes contain plenty of protein. So the next time that you think you need to add “a protein” to your meal, eat a potato!

Bill Clinton Eats Plants!

A few years ago, Dr. John McDougall wrote a controversial essay explaining that Bill Clinton was probably suffering from the side effects of his coronary bypass operation.

Fortunately, Bill Clinton eventually got the message about a healthy diet. To lose weight for his daughter’s wedding, Clinton joined the growing list of powerful people who have adopted a healthy, low-fat, plant-based diet. Evidently, he’s still sticking to his healthy diet. Good for him!

Photo by marctasman

How Congress Could Help Us Eat Better

Why do the people of the United States keep getting fatter and sicker? One reason is that our federal government is using our tax dollars to make bad food cheap, instead of making good food affordable. It doesn’t have to be that way. Congress could decide to stop subsidizing the production of meat, dairy products, and refined sugars and instead subsidize the production and distribution of healthy foods, especially fruits and vegetables. On July 28, 2011, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine issued a report explaining how Congress could go about doing that.

On a recent trip to Ohio, I saw the effects of our current agricultural subsidies personally. I saw field after field of corn and soybeans and alfalfa that were being grown to feed farm animals. I saw hardly any agricultural land dedicated to growing plant-based food for human beings to eat. I saw hundreds of fast food outlets, but only the occasional produce stand. So it should come as no surprise that more than a quarter of the adults in Ohio are obese.

Why I Don’t Take Fish Oil

I have never liked seafood. It smells bad to me. I’m so sensitive to that smell that I don’t even like sitting next to someone who is eating seafood. Even the idea of taking a fish oil capsule makes me queasy because I don’t want to end up tasting or smelling fish if I belch. So I was greatly relieved to discover that human beings don’t need to eat fish or take fish oil! The diseases that fish oil is supposed to help prevent are rare to nonexistent among people who eat a low-fat, plant-based diet. Also, a recent study showed that vegans (people who don’t eat any animal foods) had plenty of the long-chain omega 3 fatty acids in their bloodstream, even though they weren’t eating any of the long-chain omega 3 fatty acids and were eating relatively little of their precursor, alpha-linolenic acid. (For an explanation of the essential fatty acids, click here.)

Fish oil is fat from a fish. An oil is just a fat that is liquid at room temperature. The fat from fish tends to stay liquid at room temperature because it is rich in polyunsaturated fatty acids. (For an explanation of the different kinds of fats, click here. Fish oil contains a lot of omega 3 fatty acids, which are much less plentiful than omega 6 fatty acids in the standard American diet. Like humans, however, fish CANNOT make their own supply of omega 3 fatty acids. The omega 3 fatty acids in fish came from the plants at the bottom of their food chain.

Your body can make all the saturated and monounsaturated fatty acids that it needs. However, it can’t make omega 6 or omega 3 fatty acids. The only two fatty acids that are considered essential (which means that they have to be found ready-made in your food) in human nutrition are an omega 6 fatty acid called linoleic acid and an omega 3 fatty acid called alpha-linolenic acid. However, it’s extremely rare to find anyone with a real dietary deficiency of either one. It’s the sort of thing that happens only in tube-fed patients who are being fed fat fat-free solutions or being given an unbalanced fat supplement. Their needs for these essential fatty acids can be met by rubbing a small amount of vegetable oil on their skin.

Your body uses the omega 6 and omega 3 fatty acids as raw materials to make eicosanoids and leukotrienes, which are signaling molecules that play important roles in inflammation and immunity. These molecules also serve as messengers in the nervous system. Because the eicosanoids that are made from omega 6 fatty acids interact with the ones made from omega 3 fatty acids, it’s probably important to get a reasonable balance between these two kinds of fatty acid in the diet. The most sensible way to do this is to cut way back on fat consumption and eat lots of fresh vegetables. For an extra margin of safety, you can add a spoonful of ground flaxseed to your cereal in the morning. Flaxseed is a good source of alpha-linolenic acid.

The omega 3 fatty acid that is found in plants is alpha-linolenic acid. Like fish, human beings can lengthen the carbon chain of alpha-linolenic acid to produce other fatty acids that the human body needs: docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA). DHA is found in the cell membranes in the nervous system, including the retina of the eye. EPA is used to make some important eicosanoids that help to moderate the effects of the eicosanoids that are made from omega 6 fatty acids.

The Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences does not consider DHA or EPA to be essential nutrients, which means that those fatty acids don’t have to be found in your food. For a technical discussion of which fatty acids are essential and how much of each you need, see this report from the Food and Nutrition Board of the National Academy of Sciences: https://www.nap.edu/read/10490/chapter/10

Because of the complicated roles that the essential fatty acids and DHA and EPA play in the immune and nervous system, there’s been a lot of interest in using supplements of these fatty acids as drugs. As with any drug treatment, the decision of how and when to use these supplements should be based on clinical trials, whenever possible. Since most of the diseases that fish oil is being used to treat are rare in populations that eat a low-fat, plant-based diet, it makes sense to try correcting the diet before using fish oil supplements.

It is theoretically possible that some people, especially those who have trouble absorbing fat from their food or who have a rare metabolic disorder, might benefit from taking some form of fat supplement. However, many people refuse for various reasons to use fish products. Fortunately for those people, DHA and EPA supplements made from marine algae are available.

High-Fat Diet and Cigarette Smoking Cause Low Back Pain

Most people think that chronic low back pain is simply due to wear and tear on the muscles and cartilage of the spinal column. In reality, one of the major causes of low back pain is poor circulation to the structures of the intervertebral disks, as a result of atherosclerosis and/or cigarette smoking. That’s why low back pain is most common in the populations that also have high rates of heart attack!

Check out the review article I wrote about this subject for chiropractors. If you want to keep your back in good shape, start by keeping your arteries clean! If your total cholesterol is below 150 mg/dL, which is easy if you eat a low-fat, purely plant-based diet, your arteries become self-cleaning!

Cigarette smoking makes the problem worse because the nicotine causes the arteries to tighten up. It’s like putting your thumb over the end of a garden hose. It raises the pressure but decreases the flow.

Photo by sandiegopersonalinjuryattorney

Healthier and Better Looking Than a Suntan!

A healthy diet and a healthy circulatory system can give your face a healthy glow that looks better than a suntan. When you eat plenty of dark leafy green and dark yellow or orange vegetables, their colorful carotene pigments tend to build up in your skin. Not only do these natural antioxidants help to protect your skin from sun damage, they give you a golden glow that is more attractive than an ordinary suntan. The bright red color of oxygenated blood flowing through your skin also adds a healthy-looking rosy glow.

Scientists have found that a mild case of carotenosis actually makes a light-skinned person look healthier and more attractive. A scientific study found that this golden glow is more attractive than an ordinary suntan.

You can also get a slightly orange blush if you drink huge amounts of tomato juice, which contains the red pigment lycopene. Like carotenosis, this condition is harmless and will go away by itself.

A healthy circulatory system also gives your skin a healthy glow. As you’ve probably noticed, people who have anemia or a circulatory problem typically have an unattractive pale or blue-gray complexion. In someone with healthy circulation, the bright red color of oxygenated blood shines through the skin to produce a healthy glow. It’s all the more reason to eat a low-fat, high-fiber diet and get plenty of exercise!

The effects of carotene and blood circulation are more obvious in a light-skinned person. However, a healthy diet and exercise are no less important for the health and appearance of a dark-skinned person!

Don’t Buy the Snake Oil, Or the Butterfat!

I wrote this as a letter to the editor of Mother Earth News, which is a generally good publication that sometimes publishes bad dietary advice:

In The Fats You Need for a Healthy Diet (August/September 2011 of Mother Earth News), Oscar H. Will, III, provides dangerously misleading dietary advice. Saturated fat does not “do a body good.” You don’t need to get any saturated, monounsaturated, or trans fatty acids whatsoever from the diet. Only two fatty acids are essential, which means that they must come from the food. One is an omega-6 fatty acid called linoleic acid. The other is an omega-3 fatty acid called alpha-linolenic acid. However, the dietary requirement for these fatty acids is so small that you can find true cases of deficiency only in extreme situations, such as people who were being fed nothing but sugar intravenously. For those patients, the requirement for essential fatty acids could be met by rubbing a small amount of vegetable oil on the skin. Fat deficiency is practically nonexistent because even a diet based on low-fat grains and vegetables provides enough of the essential fatty acids

The usual problem is that the person is eating too much fat. Excess fat of any kind promotes obesity, atherosclerosis, diabetes, and other chronic diseases. The omega-3 fatty acids tend to have a blood-thinning effect, which offsets some of the effect of their contribution to atherosclerosis. An excess of the polyunsaturated fatty acids (omega-3 and omega-6) has been linked to an increased risk of cancer, possibly because of their effect on the immune system.

Even vegetarians and vegans often eat too much fat, and they tend to eat a disproportionately large amount of omega-6 relative to omega-3 fatty acids because of a large intake of nuts and oils. The obvious solution to this problem is to restrict the overall fat intake and add a small amount of ground flaxseed to the diet. Flaxseed is an excellent source of the relatively scarce omega-3 fatty acids.

Conjugated linolenic acid is found almost exclusively in foods of animal origin. Yet nutritional epidemiology studies show that those foods promote the sorts of diseases that the dairy industry is claiming that conjugated linolenic acid is supposed to help prevent.

Sources:

http://gorillaprotein.com/efa/
https://www.nap.edu/read/10490/chapter/10
http://www.drmcdougall.com/misc/2007nl/aug/oils.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9860369?dopt=Citation

The “Three Sides” Diet

Back when I worked at a company that had a cafeteria, I didn’t have to pack my lunch. I could put together a tasty, low-fat salad from the salad bar. If I felt like eating a hot meal, I could get a big plate of food from the “hot” portion of the cafeteria line. The “main dishes” usually included some sort of meat or dairy product, so I’d get the “side dishes” instead.

My usual lunch consisted of “three sides”: usually a starchy side dish such as rice plus two vegetables. I got a big plateful of tasty, zero-cholesterol, low-fat food, and I spent less than the people who ordered the main dish. I can find a satisfying meal at nearly any restaurant, just by ignoring the main dishes and ordering the side dishes instead.

Photo by mack reed (factoid)

Meat, But Not Sugar, Increased the Risk of Type 2 diabetes

Most of the people I talk to seem to think that they’d be healthier if they ate less carbohydrate. Most of them seem convinced that a high-carbohydrate diet makes people fat. They know that if you eat starch, it gets broken down into sugar. They know that when sugar flows into your bloodstream, your pancreas is supposed to release insulin to enable the sugar to enter your cells, where it can be burned for energy. That part’s true. However, they think that if you eat a lot of sugar or starch, you’ll somehow wear out your body’s ability to make or respond to insulin and thus you’ll end up diabetic. They couldn’t be more wrong. In reality, a high-carb, low-fat diet cures the most common type of diabetes.

If eating a starchy, low-fat diet made people fat and caused diabetes, then we’d see lots of fat, diabetic people in populations that eat a starchy, low-fat diet. We don’t. Instead, we see that the people of China and Japan, whose diet is based heavily on rice and vegetables, tend to be slim and remarkably free of diabetes and heart disease. We see the same thing in other populations that base their diets on other starchy staples. For example, the indigenous people of Peru eat a diet based heavily on potatoes. The Tarahumara of Mexico eat mainly corn and beans. The people in the New Guinea Highlands eat practically nothing but sweet potatoes. The story is the same wherever we look. In reality, the populations that eat low-fat, starchy, high-fiber diets are thin and healthy. The people who eat lots of fatty animal-based foods are the ones at risk for obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

If eating a lot of sugar caused diabetes, then the people who eat the most sugar would be more likely than the average person to develop diabetes. On the contrary, a study of nearly 40,000 women age 45 and older in the United States found that the women who were eating the most sugar were no more likely to get diabetes than the ones who were eating the least sugar [1]. The women who were most likely to get diabetes were the ones who were eating the most meat! [2]

Reference List

Janket SJ, Manson JE, Sesso H, Buring JE, Liu S. A prospective study of sugar intake and risk of type 2 diabetes in women. Diabetes Care 2003;26:1008–1015. http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/26/4/1008.long
Song Y, Manson JE, Buring JE, Liu S. A prospective study of red meat consumption and type 2 diabetes in middle-aged and elderly women: the women’s health study. Diabetes Care 2004;27:2108–2115. http://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/27/9/2108.long

For more information about diabetes, see my book Thin Diabetes, Fat Diabetes: Prevent Type 1, Cure Type 2.

Stop Worrying About Calcium Deficiency

The committee that put together the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2010 were trying to solve a nonexistent problem: calcium deficiency. Unfortunately, their suggested solution to this nonexistent problem would make some of our most serious real problems worse. If people follow these guidelines and eat more dairy foods, they will actually increase their risk for osteoporosis and several other common, serious health problems.

The human body is surprisingly good at maintaining calcium balance on a low-calcium diet. To find cases of true dietary deficiency of calcium, you have to look at people who were consuming extremely abnormal diets. Most cases involved babies who were being fed some bizarre substitute for breast milk. In reality, cases of rickets (soft bones) in children are nearly always due to a shortage of vitamin D, the sunshine vitamin.

When you think about it, most of the world’s large land animals manage to get enough calcium from their plant-based diet to grow an enormous skeleton. Nor does any species other than our own consume the milk of another species, or any milk at all after infancy. So why should we expect human beings to need dairy foods, or to need a calcium intake that can be achieved only through eating dairy foods or taking supplements? It makes no sense.

Scientists have known for decades that osteoporosis occurs mainly in countries where people eat a lot of dairy products and have a relatively high calcium intake. In fact, there’s reason to believe that eating too much animal protein and too much calcium actually causes osteoporosis.

The populations with a high risk for osteoporosis also have high rates of death from coronary artery disease. Fortunately, the same kind of diet that prevents heart attacks also helps to keep the bones strong. That means eating a low-fat, plant-based diet that includes plenty of fruits and vegetables.

It’s also important to get enough vitamin D. A few minutes of exposure to midday sun on the face and arms during the spring, summer, and fall should provide enough vitamin D for most light-skinned people in the United States. If you are dark-skinned, live in the far North, or have some other reason why you can’t go out in the sunshine, your doctor, physician assistant, or nurse practitioner can monitor your vitamin D levels and advise you about vitamin D supplements.