Excerpts from Protein Power and other books
by Michael R. Eades, M.D. and Mary D. Eades, M.D.
Insulin and its counterbalancing partner, glucagon, are the master hormones controlling human metabolism. The word insulin may immediately call up a mental association with diabetes, and the connection is a valid one. Controlling blood sugar is definitely insulin's most important job in the human body.
Many people - especially those with heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, elevated cholesterol, or obesity in their families - have inherited a tendency for the insulin sensors on the cells to malfunction with age, illness, stress, or assault by years of high sugar and starch consumption. As these sensors become sluggish, the condition of insulin resistance develops. Because it's crucial to get the sugar out of the blood and into the cells, the pancreas will compensate by making more and more insulin to force the sluggish sensors to respond. Thus begins a vicious cycle of requiring ever more insulin to keep the system going. Finally, some people become so resistant to insulin that the amount necessary to make the sensors respond and clear the sugar' from the blood is more than their pancreas can make; that person becomes an adult diabetic.
Excess insulin stimulates a wide variety of other metabolic systems: it encourages the kidneys to retain salt and fluid; it stimulates the production of cholesterol by the liver; it fuels an increase in triglyceride production; it thickens the muscular portion of the artery walls, increasing the risk for high blood pressure; and it sends a strong message to the fat cells to store incoming sugar and fat.
Insulin's actions are countered by the second metabolic hormone, glucagon. Glucagon sends signals to the kidneys to release excess salt and fluid, to the liver to slow down the production of cholesterol and triglycerides, to the artery wall to relax and drop blood pressure, and to the fat cells to release stored fat to be burned for energy. When insulin levels in the blood are high, however, they so overwhelm system that they suppress glucagon's actions.
Since food is what mainly controls the production of these two hormones, we have been able to create a nutritional structure that maximizes the release of glucagon and minimizes the release of insulin, creating a closer balance between these two hormones. Under these conditions the actions of glucagon predominate, allowing the metabolism to heal and the malfunctioning sensors to regain their sensitivity. Once this healing occurs, the metabolic disturbances that insulin resistance caused improve or disappear. If elevated, your cholesterol and triglycerides return to normal, your blood pressure returns to normal, blood sugar stabilizes and you can effectively lose excess stored body fat.
All these benefits accrue not by treating the symptoms - the blood pressure, cholesterol problem, overweight, or diabetes - but the root cause, chronically elevated insulin and insulin resistance. There are no medications yet to treat this disorder - the right diet is the only remedy, but it works extremely well.
The papyrus records tell us that the early Egyptians sat down to dine on a diet consisting primarily of bread, cereals, fresh fruit and vegetables, some fish and poultry, almost no red meat, olive oil instead of lard, and goat's milk for drinking and to make into cheese - a veritable nutritionist's nirvana. Except for papyrus, the Egyptians could have obtained their entire diet from the shelves of any health food store in America.
With such a bounty available, rich in all the foods believed to promote health and almost devoid of saturated fat and cholesterol, it would seem that the ancient Egyptians should have lived forever or at least should have lived long, health lives and died of old age in their beds. But did they? Let's look at the archaeological evidence....
Modern nutritional wisdom would predict that the diet of the ancient Egyptians - high in complex carbohydrates, low in fat, no refined sugar, almost no red meat - should have brought health, fitness and longevity to the Egyptians of old. But, it didn't.
Translations of the ancient Egyptian papyrus writings and modern examination of their mummified remains by pathologists tell us quite a different tale. The evidence speaks of a people afflicted with rotten teeth and severe atherosclerosis, suffering from elevated blood pressure and dying in their thirties with heart attacks. And contrary to the paintings of the willowy svelte figures in pleated linen that adorned their tombed walls, the large skin folds of the mummies tell us that their ancient low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet left them obese as well.
The Egyptians are not the only people whose health suffered because of a diet consisting mainly of complex carbohydrates. An anthropologist examining skeletal remains of early man can tell immediately whether the bones and teeth belonged to a hunter-gatherer (mainly protein eater) or a farmer (mainly carbohydrate eater) simply by their condition. The hunters grew tall, with strong, well-formed bones and sound teeth, and the remains of the farmers usually show skeletal signs of malnutrition, stunted growth, and tooth decay.
For 700,000 years humans ate a diet of mainly meat, fat, nuts, and berries. Eight thousand years ago we learned to farm, and as our consumption of grains increased, our health declined. Genetic evolutionary changes take a minimum of 1,000 generations - or another 8,000 to 10,000 years to adapt.
Our metabolic machinery was designed to cope with an unpredictable food supply. We had to store food away for the lean times ahead. The hormone insulin did this for us. Unfortunately a diet heavy in carbohydrates also sends our insulin levels soaring and our body interprets this as a need to store calories, to make cholesterol, and to conserve water - all important to our survival way back then.
Some of us inherit this conservation ability - a thrifty gene - in great measure. People who have this trait gain weight easily and have a more difficult time losing their excess, and the current nutritional low-fat, high carbohydrate prescription leads to overweight and weight-related health problems even more quickly among them.
Anthropologists have known for decades that the health of humanity took a turn for the worse when our ancestors abandoned their hunter-gatherer means of subsistence in favor of the farm somewhere between eight-thousand and ten-thousand years ago. The fossil record leaves little doubt that compared to their farming successors, the hunters were more robust, had greater bone density, decreased infant mortality, a longer life span, a lower incidence of infectious diseases and iron-deficiency anemia, fewer enamel defects, and little or no tooth decay.
Humans have followed a Paleolithic diet for a few million years and a "modern" agricultural diet for only a few thousand years. The not too gentle forces of natural selection have spent millennia shaping and molding our evolving line, weeding out those offshoots and mutations that didn't thrive on the available fare, reinforcing those traits that improved our survival, until we emerged as modern humans some 100,000 years or so ago. Since our modern form and physiology today is the same as that of these 100,000-year-old ancestors, it stands to reason that we should function best on the diet they - and we, their descendants - were designed to eat, not necessarily the "prudent" diet recommended by modern nutritionists, which is often composed primarily of foods that weren't even in existence for the vast majority of our time on earth. It is by turning to the vast amount of anthropological data that we can determine what our ancestors ate for the three to four million years that we have been recognizable as humans.
In anthropological research if you follow the trail of meat consumption, you'll find the history of our earliest ancestors, because there is no real debate among anthropologists about early man's history as a meat eater and his evolution into a skilled hunter; the only debate is about when this hunting ability became fully developed.
Upon the discovery of the first fossils of our earliest upright ancestors, anthropologists postulated that these creatures, the australopithecines, and those that followed until the advent of agriculture were "bloodthirsty, savage" hunters. As archaeologists developed more technologically sophisticated means of analyzing their collections of bones and tools, thinking drifted from the idea of early man as hunter to that of early man as scavenger. Gone was the notion of groups of skilled hunters stalking, bringing down, and butchering large herbivores; in its place was the vision of groups of hominids coming upon the kills of large carnivores and stripping the remaining bits of flesh from the carcasses and using primitive tools to pummel and break into the cavities of the long bones and skulls to get at the marrow and brains within. The mainstream archaeological and anthropological view posits that this scavenging lifestyle predominated until the last 100,000 years or so, coinciding with the arrival on the scene of anatomically modern humans. But, thanks to recent findings, this view is changing - and changing in almost flashback fashion to the ideas of the earlier anthropologists. Our ancestors from a long, long way back indeed appear to have been skilled hunters.
New excavations in Boxgrove, England, and Atapuerca, Spain, reveal that hominids as far back as five-hundred-thousand or more years ago were exquisitely skilled hunters. Archaeologists at Boxgrove found evidence of numerous kill and/or butcher sites of extinct horses, rhinoceroses, bear, giant deer, and red deer - all large mammals requiring a great deal of skill and fortitude to bring down with primitive implements. Researchers know these animals were hunted and not just found and scavenged, not only because of the arrangement of bones at the butcher site, but through microscopic evidence as well. When analyzed under a microscope, the bones of scavenged carcasses typically show the cut marks from the tools of the scavengers lying over the tooth marks of the carnivores that actually made the kill, indicating that the scavenging came later. At Boxwood, archaeologists found just the opposite. The cut marks from the flint tools on the bones show evidence that tendons and ligaments were severed to remove muscles from the bones. The cut marks compare to those produced by today's butchers using modern tools. In the words of Michael Pitts and Mark Roberts, two of the primary excavators at Boxgrove, "every animal for which there is any evidence of interference by the hominids has been carefully, almost delicately, butchered for the express purpose of consuming the meat."
Further evidence of hunting comes from several actual wooden spears found throughout Europe that have proven to be the oldest wooden objects of known use found anywhere in the world. Archaeologists have dated an almost sixteen-inch-long spear tip carved of yew wood found in 1911 in Clacton, England, to be somewhere between 360,000 and 420,000 years old. Another spear, also made of yew, that is almost eight feet long and dated to 120,000 years old was found amid the ribs of an extinct elephant in Lehringen, Germany, in 1948. A few years ago excavators in a coal mine near Schöninger, Germany, found three spruce wood spears shaped like modern javelins, the longest of which measured over seven feet, that proved to be 300,000 to 400,000 years old. And at one of the butcher sites at Boxgrove, excavators actually found a fossilized horse scapula that shows what appears to be a spear wound.
The excavation at Boxgrove provided archaeologists with another surprise. It had long been thought that such stone tools as arrowheads and hand axes, once fashioned, were carried around by their makers and used as needed, much as we do today with modern hunting knives and other camp tools. Researchers who have practiced making prehistoric tools and arrowheads from flint - flintknapping, as it's called - found the task tedious, difficult, and fraught with the constant risk that one wrong strike could destroy the tool in the making. As a result, the thinking was that the effort put into making quality stone tools was so great that the makers would surely value them and keep them as long as they could. Amazingly, it appears from the meticulous examination of these ancient sites that these hominid hunters were so adept at making flint tools for butchery that they knocked them off on the spot, used them to skillfully dismember their prey, and left them at the site rather than carry them around. And these weren't just crude flint chips; these were some of the finest flint hand axes ever found. Modern attempts to reproduce the quality of these tools have usually fallen far short of the mark. Obviously these ancient hominids were skilled enough to whip out a flawlessly made butchering tool at a moment's notice, a fact that implies a lifetime of hunting, butchering, and meat consumption.
We know from these European sites that hominids were actively hunting and eating meat as far back as 500,000 years ago, but what about before that? The earliest stone tools date to around 2.6 million years ago and have been found in association with extinct animals' bones from the same period. Some of these have cut marks with overlying carnivore teeth marks, indicating hunting, while others have carnivore teeth marks with overlying cut marks, implying scavenging. The most probable conclusion is that protohumans back at least 2.6 million years ago - a time corresponding to the appearance of the genus Homo - were engaged in the consumption of meat by either scavenging or hunting activities and probably a combination of the two.
Prior to 2.6 million years ago the human line was represented by australopithecines, which have been believed to be primarily fleshy fruit eaters. So, it was thought, the human line developed the taste for meat sometime between the plant-eating australopithecines and the appearance of Homo, but even that time frame has now been pushed back. Anthropologists Matt Sponheimer and Julia Lee-Thorp from Rutgers University and the University of Cape Town, respectively, performed an ingenious analysis on the remains of four three-million-year-old Australopithecus africanus specimens found in a cave in South Africa. Bones of this age are always fossilized, thus preventing researchers from extracting living material from them for analysis, but not so for the tooth enamel; tooth enamel persists relatively unchanged through the millenia and lends itself to testing for organic content. Whatever is incorporated into the developing enamel stays there - in this case for three million years. By testing for variations in the carbon atoms making up the tooth enamel researchers can determine what the owner of the tooth ate because different food sources contain specific carbon isotopes. When Sponheimer and Lee-Thorp analyzed the australopithecine enamel for the content of carbon-13, a heavy isotope typically found in grasses and in the flesh of grass-eating animals, they found plentiful amounts, indicating that these hominids ate either a fair amount of grass or grass-eating animals or both. Analysis of the surfaces of the teeth, however, didn't show the specific scratches that are the telltale signs of grass eaters, leading the researchers to conclude that australopithecines at least as far back as three million years ate meat.
We have evidence tracking back three million years for meat eating by our ancestors and at least a 500,000-year history of skillful hunting. In terms of generations this means that we modern humans are the result of 150,000 generations of meat eating, 25,000 generations of skilled hunting, but only a mere 400 to 500 generations of agriculture. Since geneticists calculate that it takes at least 2,000 generations for even minimal changes to be manifest, it should be apparent that eons of meat eating forged our physiology and metabolism to respond optimally on a diet containing significant amounts of meat. A low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet, the real fad diet in evolutionary terms, limits the consumption of the meat we were designed by nature to eat and replaces it with starchy foods that our bodies haven't had the time to adapt to. It's no wonder the low-fat diet wasn't what it was cracked up to be. It's far too new for our bodies to know what to do with.
Not only was meat a principal source of nutrition for developing man, it actually was the driving force allowing us to develop our large brains. For years anthropologists argued that we humans got our large brains because we had to develop them to learn hunting strategies to capture and kill game much larger, faster, and meaner than ourselves. Anthropologists Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler turned that idea on its head in a brilliant paper postulating that we were able to develop our large brains not to learn to hunt but because the fruits of our hunting - nutrient-dense meat - allowed us to decrease the size of our digestive tracts. The more nutrient dense the food, the less digestion it needs to extract the nutrients, and consequently the smaller the digestive tract required. (The human digestive tract, while longer than true carnivores, is the shortest of any of the primates.)
Is meat really that nutritionally dense? Let's take a look at a few examples of meat compared to plant foods and see. First, let's look at protein. Protein is the only true essential macronutrient. Fat is also essential, but you can go a lot longer without fat than you can without protein. (Carbohydrates, the third macronutrient, are totally unessential to human health.) So, if you are trying to get protein you could eat 8 ounces of elk meat, a small amount by Paleolithic standards, and get about 65 grams of it. Or you could eat almost 13 heads of lettuce to get the same amount. Or 56 bananas or 261 apples or even 33 slices of bread. If you're trying to get methionine, an essential amino acid that the body uses to make glutathione, its major antioxidant, you could eat the same 8 ounces of elk, or you could eat any of the following: 22 heads of lettuce, 127 bananas, 550 apples, or 46 slices of bread. In almost any nutrient category you want to look at, meat is going to come out a winner because of its incredible nutritional richness that doesn't require much digestive activity to get to.
But What If I'm a Vegetarian?
A larger percentage of our patients than you might imagine are vegetarian to some degree. With some modifications, the Protein Power LifePlan works fine for vegetarians, but before we start patients on the vegetarian version we always inquire as to their rationale for following such a diet. If they are vegetarians because they believe it a more healthy way to eat, we disabuse them of that notion quickly. If, on the other hand, they are vegetarians for ideological reasons, we have no quarrel with that and we help them modify our program to solve their health problems within the limits of their ideology. We do, however, encourage them to read a fascinating little book entitled The Covenant of the Wild that goes a long way toward removing many of the inhibitions that some people have about using animals for food.
The overwhelming mass of scientific evidence supports the notion that for most of our time on earth, humans and their pre-human ancestors have eaten meat. By all reputable scientific accounts, we've been hunting and gathering (with heavy reliance on the hunting) for the better part of three million years. Eons of natural selection and human development molded our metabolic machinery to succeed on this ancient dietary scheme that appears to have included about 65 percent foods of animal origin and about 35 percent foods of plant origin. Only about ten thousand years ago (at most) did we settle down to cultivate grains and begin to include them as food in our diets. The metabolic changes necessary for humans to adapt to this dietary change - in short, to be able to use these "new" foods well - would reasonably take a few thousand generations (or about forty thousand or fifty thousand years). We're simply not there yet - and won't be anytime soon.
Turning to the use of grains allowed humans to settle in large cooperative groups necessary to build great civilizations, but at a price to the individual members of the group. While we can subsist on grain-based diets, we don't as a species thrive on them; the fossil record shows that after the adoption of agriculture human health, stature, and longevity went into sharp decline. In the last century in the Western world, thanks to a general increase in dietary protein, we've begun to recover our stature, but because of our continued heavy reliance on cereal grains, metabolic health still lags. We're riddled as a society with epidemics of diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, and obesity, all of which we inherited when our ancient ancestors abandoned their successful hunting-and-gathering lifestyle in favor of the addictive lure of grains (components of which indeed do stimulate the narcotic centers of the human brain).
In our medical/nutritional practice, we care for people with all components of this epidemic of modern diseases. To restore their health, we advocate a return to the basic nutritional principles of our ancestral hunting-gathering lifestyle by prescribing a diet of nutrient-dense foods - meat, fish, and poultry, rich in protein and good-quality essential fats; fruits, berries, and vegetables, rich in antioxidants and cancer-fighting substances - and limiting what early humans never knew existed - grains, refined sugars, and other concentrated starches.
