Staying Healthy

[Anonymous]

"Not as much as is lost to grow one human!"

No argument there, but were not talking here about fattening humans up for the table. ;}

Or, maybe we should be…?

[Brian UL]

"No, that's what the intro said. The full paper goes into great detail analysing the *actual* composition of what these people *actually* ate. It wasn't nearly as high in fat, and especially not saturated fats, as you seem to think is healthful or traditional."

one paper that I can not read is not enough to tell me that everything that is known about native and traditional diets is wrong. Prices research says otherwise and so do many others like Steffensen. And its not whether there were primitive societies that ate high carb low fat but the fact that there are societies that eat high saturated fat low carb (starches and grains) with organ meats and vegetables who are exceptionally healthy tall and strong. Thats enough to prove that those diets are healthy for me.

[Andrew Lush]

Lynn you sure write a lot. I reckon you must be our most prolific (and prolix) poster.

Every thread has long and multiple posts from you.

Given that this thread was originally about staying healthy, here's my tip:

Spend more time actually backpacking. It's far healthier than writing about backpacking.

[Miguel Arboleda]

The fact that people get worked up about the topic of how we can stay healthy shows just how confused and desperate we are for a definitive answer. Perhaps it's just not possible in this age when information comes down like an avalanche on us.

But, dang it all, can we for once not get into one of these black and white diatribes and try to stay on the original topic? Staying healthy IS an important topic, especially for those of us who backpack and use our bodies. It would be nice to get a good, solid, basic idea of what we should do to stay healthy.

I've always found it ironic that we know more about how to keep our pets healthy than we do about keeping ourselves healthy. And yet the needs are not all that different. Or maybe it's that we just don't want to be honest with ourselves and accept that the kinds of restricted diets and emphasis on exercise that we insist on for our pets ARE not easy to enforce on ourselves, and how much temptation is actually running our daily decisions.

[Brian UL]

A lot of this is my fault, I am opinionated and argumentative and many of my ideas seem to go against the grain.

It is sad that there is so much conflicting info for something so important to us.

[Lynn Tramper]

"It is sad that there is so much conflicting info for something so important to us."

Ah. That's the nature of the internet. There is soooo much *popular science* (ie not peer reviewed and not particularly scientific) that ANYONE can google and get an avalanche of info that is difficult to process. I'm not even sure if we are discussing "gatherer-hunter" societies (such as the Inuit who got ~30% of their calories from Glygogen or "modern cattle raising societies"(such as the Maasai who get a great deal of their calories from lactose sugars, and even more at slaughter from glyogen). All I can add at this point is that I just realised I spend 12 out of every 24 hours fasting, every day of my life (overnight) and my liver etc…seems quite happy with that. Some life extension studies indicate that we are better off fasting for 36 hours and then feasting for twelve hours (ie eat all you want for one day and then eat nothing on alternate days). All I know FOR SURE is that I don't want life extension if it means I can't enjoy the occasional beer and pizza night with my friends.

It would also help the discussion a lot if Brian would (or could) read and understand that paper that I posted re: the nature of nutrient composition in huner-gatherer sociaties. Well, dreams are free as they say. Every educated person dreams of an informed debate…But I suspect by the time I log back on to this thread in two days time that it will have been moved to chaff where it rightly belongs.

[Lynn Tramper]

"Given that this thread was originally about staying healthy, here's my tip:

Spend more time actually backpacking. It's far healthier than writing about backpacking."

Amen. I can't wait for the spring, except I love snowboarding, so an early, cold and snowy winter like we're experiencing is a blessing for folks who have interests outside of backpacking. Ahhh, the fun of recreation in an era where you don't have to hunt, or feed and coax your prey into a sense of security. Hunted prey (and modern cattle shipped to slauterhouses) are a bit low in glycogen for my tastes. Was that too Prolix????

[Andrew Lush]

>> Was that too Prolix????

Yep.

[Brian UL]

"It would also help the discussion a lot if Brian would (or could) read and understand that paper that I posted re: the nature of nutrient composition in huner-gatherer sociaties."

Lynn, your arguments are too academic when Im making a simple point: Eat real whole foods- fatty meat, veggies, and whole grains. There is already a lot of info on the diets of primitive ( hunter gather-herder small scale farming ect.) societies and this is just one paper that I cant read. Ya, I say a high fat diet is healthy and I recognize that a high carb diet can be too as long as those are not refined grains and you have some good fat in the diet as well. Though it may not work for everyone.
We are going a little in circles. My argument was more about defending a diet high in saturated fat and cholesterol which most people today wrongly consider unhealthy and I was backing up my claim by giving examples of societies who eat foods that would be considered extremely unhealthy by mainstream society including most doctors and yet they are the picture of health.

I also enjoy pizza and ice cream ( though stevia sweetened I bet would be just as good) and beer is liquid bread- a good source of carbs.

[Lynn Tramper]

Well yeah, it's one paper you can't read, but I'm willing to email it to you if you want. It is a paper that looked at something like 219 different 'modern' primitive pre-agricultural societies to examine what they actually eat, and on the whole it is NOT high fat, and it is even more NOT high in saturated fats (BTW, the Maasai are not pre-agricultural, they are cattle and dairy farmers, and are considered to represent modern human diets as opposed to tradtioanl paleolithic diets). That being the case, I agree that a diet high in sat fats can also be healthful, and that the only real problem with western diets is their insisitence on maintaining diets both high in refined carbohydrates and saturated fats. I think we can agree on most of this. Where I can't agree is on the absolute need for a diet high in saturated fats and low in carbs to be optimally healthy. The overwhelming evidence suggest that humans are extremely adaptive to a broad range of diets high in natural, unprocessed and organic foods, provided adeqaute fat and protein intake. To be specific, I was a strict vegan for 25 years (strict as in no sugars, no refined grains, plenty of legumes, pulses, fungus etc..), and on my 45th birthday entered, and won, best of show in a national bodybuilding competition. As an *educated* vegan I absolutely thrived. It started out as a personal experiment to see if vegans could actually be healthy (there were so many dreadful looking vegans wandering around at the time that I had my doubts). But I brought cutting edge nutritional science to my experiment, and truly could not have been healthier. But I also acknowledge that traditional hunter-gatherers would not have been able to pick and choose their non-animal foods as I can. So, yeah, I don't live like my ancestors, but at 50 I still have perfect health as measured by any medical or sporting standard. So I basically dis-agree that a diet high in saturated fats is *essential* to good health. Both from personal experience and from peer-reviewed scientific literature. On all other points I fear we are more in agreement than dis-agreement!

BTW, the real threat to our supply of healthy meat is biodiesel. Now THAT is an evil piece of environmetally friendly marketing…!

[Anonymous]

"BTW, the real threat to our supply of healthy meat is biodiesel. Now THAT is an evil piece of environmetally friendly marketing…!"

Andrew's gonna strangle me, but could you elaborate, Lynn, on the connection between biodiesel and "healthy" meat?

[Brian UL]

Lynn,
If its possible to send that through the PM I wouldn't mind seeing it.
When I say traditional or primitive Im using the terms in the broadest sense possible to mean pre-industrial just to clear that up.
that leads me to somthing I realized as I ate dinner tonight. We are using the terms "high" and "low" -very subjective terms. I was eating and I thought about what I ate this week -wild sockeye, scrambled eggs, steak -each with a big helping of spinach-broccoli, kale as well as brown rice, bread, nuts,and other grains. Now I imagine this would be considered a high fat diet if I told this to a GP or dietitian and thats why I call it a high fat diet.
On the other hand I couldn't help but wonder if an archeologist who found my food scraps in the future would characterize it in the same way? After all I do not count my calories and never broke it down into info that could be graphed. Usually the helpings of veggies and grains are bigger than the meat since meats are fatty they are more satiating and thus you don't always tend to eat as much in proportion. Just thought it was an interesting twist on our discussion.
just wondering what kind of fats do you eat in your diet?
I know a lot of people use coconut oil (palm oil and avocados too)to get some saturated fats if they are vegan or can't get/afford pastured meats. Im assuming you use legume/grain combos to get complete proteins?

[Lynn Tramper]

I don't know if I can PM the paper, I'll give it a try. It really only covers pre-agricultural diets though (so no dairy).

I got a lot of sat fats from nuts, avocados and coconut as you surmised. I didn't bother with mixing my grains and legumes as it has been shown that, as long as you get all the essential amino acids at some point each day, they don't have to be eaten together.

I would not call your diet paticularly high in fat compared to someone on, for instance, a ketogenic diet (70% fat). And certainly not high in sat fats. Then again, it depends a lot on the source of your food. Eggs are low in saturated fats, as is salmon, and pasture fed beef would also be lower in sat fat than grain fed. Ditto organ meats. So maybe what you are calling a diet *high* in saturated fats is really what I would call moderate (which leads us back to all things in moderation ;) I would call pork sausages, bacon, cream and fried chicken with the skin on "high" in saturated fats, and these were the sorts of foods that were originally promoted as "all you can eat" foods to people on an Atkin's style diet.

[Lynn Tramper]

Brian, I just found a summary opinion on that paper I mentioned earlier.

"I bumped into a fascinating paper today by Dr. Loren Cordain titled "Plant-Animal Subsistence Ratios and Macronutrient Estimations in Worldwide Hunter-Gatherer Diets." Published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the paper estimates the food sources and macronutrient intakes of historical hunter-gatherers based on data from 229 different groups. Based on the available data, these groups did not suffer from the diseases of civilization. This is typical of hunter-gatherers.

Initial data came from the massive Ethnographic Atlas by Dr. George P. Murdock, and was analyzed further by Cordain and his collaborators. Cordain is a professor at Colorado State University, and a longtime proponent of paleolithic diets for health. He has written extensively about the detrimental effects of grains and other modern foods. Here's his website.

The researchers broke food down into three categories: hunted animal foods, fished animal foods and gathered foods. "Gathered foods" are primarily plants, but include some animal foods as well:
Although in the present analysis we assumed that gathering would only include plant foods, Murdock indicated that gathering activities could also include the collection of small land fauna (insects, invertebrates, small mammals, amphibians, and reptiles); therefore, the compiled data may overestimate the relative contribution of gathered plant foods in the average hunter-gatherer diet.

There are a number of striking things about the data once you sum them up. First of all, diet composition varied widely. Many groups were almost totally carnivorous, with 46 getting over 85% of their calories from hunted foods. However, not a single group out of 229 was vegetarian or vegan. No group got less than 15% of their calories from hunted foods, and only 2 of 229 groups ate 76-85% of their calories from gathered foods (don't forget, "gathered foods" also includes small animals/insects). On average, the hunter-gatherer groups analyzed got about 70% of their calories from hunted foods. I think this makes a very strong case that meat-heavy omnivory is our preferred ecological niche. However, it also shows that we can thrive on a plant-rich diet containing modest amounts of quality animal foods.

The paper also discusses the nature of the plant foods hunter-gatherers ate. Although they ate a wide variety of plants occasionally, more typically they relied on a small number of staple foods with a high energy density. There's a table in the paper that lists the most commonly eaten plant foods. "Vegetables" are notably underrepresented. The most commonly eaten plant foods are fruit, underground storage organs (tubers, roots, corms, bulbs), nuts and other seeds. Leaves and other low-calorie plant parts were used much less frequently.

The paper also gets into the macronutrient composition of hunter-gatherer diets. He writes that…the most plausible… percentages of total energy from the macronutrients would be 19-35% for protein, 22-40% for carbohydrate, and 28-58% for fat.
He derives these numbers from projections based on the average composition of plant foods, and the whole-body composition of representative animal foods (includes organs, marrow, blood etc., which they typically ate). However, as he notes in his paper, humans can't tolerate more than about 35% of calories from protein before developing "rabbit starvation". Therefore, carnivorous groups must have been getting at least 65% of their calories from fat, and probably more in many cases. This agrees with data from the Inuit, who typically ate roughly 80% of their calories in the form of fat.

I was very impressed by the paper overall. I think it presents a good, simple model for eating well: eat whole foods that are similar to those that hunter-gatherers would have eaten, including at least 20% of calories from high-quality animal sources. Organs are mandatory, vegetables are not. Sorry, Grandma."

[Huzefa @ Blue Bolt Gear]

"eat whole foods that are similar to those that hunter-gatherers would have eaten, including at least 20% of calories from high-quality animal sources."

Right on!

Really enjoyed the thread.

[Alex Gilman]

In order to prepare my lungs for mountaineering I simulate high altitude training by smoking no less than 3 packs a day.

I try to keep my heart in shape with a lot of resistance training I do this by eating a diet high in fat ultimately restricting blood flow and providing resistance.

Also not a bad idea is to give your liver a run for its money 2 or 3 times a week by putting away a bottle or two of Scotch.

[Author]

Posts