[Highly speculative, and rather near the fringes of my expertise].
I’ve previously mentioned that medical studies on mice may have produced poor results due to the use of unnatural environments (cold stress, and the lack of burrow-like protection from predators).
Now I notice that standard rodent food has suspiciously high methionine levels.
I’ve mentioned Blue Zones approvingly several times on this blog (here, here, and here).
Alas, there are reasons to doubt that they’re unusually healthy. The paper Supercentenarians and the oldest-old are concentrated into regions with no birth certificates and short lifespans makes a decent case that they’re mostly just areas where ages have been overstated. There are some relatively unhelpful arguments about who’s right on Andrew Gelman’s blog and on Bluezones.com.
As a consequence, I’m slightly decreasing my opinion of some foods that I was encouraged to eat by the Blue Zone memes: whole grains, beans, olive oil, and sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes still seem likely to be quite healthy compared to the average American food, but I’m now uncertain whether they’re better or worse than the average paleo food (I previously considered them one of the best foods available). The rest of those foods seem no worse than the average American food, but I’m less optimistic about the safety of the average American food than I previously was.
I’ve also become less confident in the safety of a diet with less than 10% of calories from protein (Blue Zone Okinawans in 1949 got 9% of calories from protein), but I’d already decided not to pursue a low protein diet.
I’ve slightly decreased my opinion of Steven Gundry and Valter Longo
H/T William Eden.
Book review: The Good Gut: Taking Control of Your Weight, Your Mood, and Your Long-term Health, by Justin Sonnenburg and Erica Sonnenburg.
I had hoped this book would help me improve my gut health. Alas, their advice is of limited value, mostly focusing on changes that I’d already adopted based on other types of nutritional ideas, such as eating more fiber from diverse sources. That limited value is probably due mostly to the shortage of useful research on this subject, rather than to any failing of the authors. Research on these topics seems hard due to the complexity of the microbiome, and the large variation between people.
The book convinced me to eat more kimchi, and left me wondering whether to try consuming more bacteria in pill form.
The book repeats warnings that I’d read elsewhere about the dangers of antibiotics, and the problems that arise from having an insufficiently diverse microbiome, such as autoimmune diseases.
I have been placing heavy emphasis on fiber in my nutritional strategies, while having a gut feeling that the concept of fiber left something to be desired. The book pointed me to an alternative concept: microbiota accessible carbohydrates (MACs), which mostly means carbs that aren’t absorbed by the small intestine. A diverse set of MACs feeds a diverse set of microbiota, which at least correlates with good health.
Alas, it seems impossible to reliably measure MACs by analyzing food in isolation – different people’s small intestines absorb different substances. There are also complications such as erythritol, which is mostly absorbed in the small intestine (and is then removed without doing much), but about 10% of which ends up feeding microbiota in the colon. So I’m still stuck with estimating my MAC consumption via the standard fiber estimates, and taking care to get it from diverse sources.
The Sonnenburgs explain that food preparation affects absorption. Flour is absorbed faster than less-processed grain, and the meaning of “flour” has changed over the past century or so, from something that was ground coarsely and eaten soon after, to something that is ground very fine, and stays on a shelf long enough to go rancid if it is whole-grain flour. That nudged me toward a more nuanced position on grains. The “grains are not food” rule was a simple way to improve my diet, but there are clearly big differences between the best whole grains and the worst grain-derived products.
It also helps me understand how grains, as typically used, gradually morphed into mostly being junk food without an easy way to detect the worst effects. More sophisticated machines to grind the grains led to a texture that was more quickly absorbed, leaving less for microbiota. The switch away from whole grain flour was likely, in part, a gradual adaptation to a system where the flour was ground at an increasingly distance from the home, and became more likely to go rancid if the germ wasn’t discarded.
The book has a section on how infants get a microbiome, which explains why it’s really hard to find or create a good substitute for human milk.
The Sonnenburgs have unusual heuristics about when they wash their hands, designed to reduce pathogens while welcoming good bacteria. They avoid washing after gardening or petting the family dog, but are careful to wash after going to places where they could get germs from many other people – malls, petting zoos, etc.
I’m discouraged by the news that microbiome treatments such as Fecal Microbiota Transplantation (FMT) may be regulated as drugs. It seems like regulations should be modeled somewhat more closely on food, or blood transfusion, regulation. Like food, FMT should have broader goals than just combating specific diseases, should provide diverse inputs, and should bear some resemblance to what naturally enters our bodies. Like blood transfusions, FMT should be reasonably safe unless there’s something unusual about the donor.
The book’s advice overlaps a lot with paleo-like advice to go back to how our ancestors ate, played, etc., with a rather balanced approach to borrowing from our grandparents’ lifestyle versus borrowing from hunter-gatherer lifestyles. The book is solid, often at the expense of being exciting.
Most fruits have been genetically engineered (via selective breeding, not via the methods that people have been complaining about) to have more sugar relative to fiber than wild fruit. So I seek fruits that have been neglected by agriculture and have nutrient levels that are more like the fruit that our ancestors ate … hmm, I’m probably oversimplifying dangerously there. I suspect there are a number of wild fruits that aren’t especially nutritious, but my heuristic of getting more wild-caught fruit is at least slightly healthier than eating exclusively factory-farmed fruit.
I’m currently trying to get a paleo level of fiber using the heuristics that good food should have at least 25% of its carbs as fiber, and more than 50g of fiber per 2000 calories.
Saskatoon berries (sometimes known as serviceberry, shadberry, or juneberry) are my favorite fruit.
I’ve seen some highly conflicting reports about their nutritional value, but the most reliable-looking version says 140 grams of fiber per 2000 calories (32% of total carbs). The most convenient way to get saskatoon berries is in pie filling that has too much added sugar, but still has around 67g of fiber per 2000 calories.
I recommend adding generous amounts of nutmeg and cinnamon, and a few walnuts, and eating without any further preparation.
Baobab fruit has about 320g of fiber per 2000 calories (64% of carbs come from fiber!). I find the taste to be slightly less pleasant than that of a typical fruit, so I mostly use baobab powder as somewhere in between food and medicine, and also eat various baobab bites from nuts.com (alas, those contain fruit juice that dilutes their nutritional value a lot).
The Hadza get 7-15% of calories from baobab, and get little western disease.
Fruits that are less healthy, but have interesting taste:
Freeze dried durian
Freeze dried mangosteen
Freeze dried dragonfruit
A fruit that breaks my category system:
Avocados have a well rounded set of nutrients, and Trader Joe’s Avocado’s Number Guacamole is almost pure avocado, and more convenient than whole avocados.
Taro root:
if you shop at a grocery store that caters to asian customers, you should be able to buy taro roots that weigh several pounds, for a dollar a pound. It has more nutrition per pound (or dollar) than most other starchy roots, although not as much nutrition per calorie as sweet potatoes (I presume you already know that sweet potatoes are a good source of nutrition).
I just slice off a piece, microwave it, and add salt/potassium chloride. I find it especially valuable for feeling full/getting plenty of fiber on days when I’m doing protein fasts, as it’s unusually low in protein.
Nomato sauce:
is made primarily from carrots and beets. It’s mainly a tomato sauce substitute for those who are allergic to tomato. It’s likely a bit healthier than tomato sauce, but if you’re currently satisfied with tomato sauce, then nomato sauce is likely not tasty enough to get you to switch (but it’s fairly close to being that tasty). I use it for paleo-friendly versions of pizza (crust: shredded carrot, egg, olive oil, and various flours) and spaghetti (with sweet potato noodles).
I use a variety of flours in baking that are generally healthier than grain-based flours:
Baru nuts:
interesting, and backed by some trendy sounding hype. I don’t know whether there’s any reason to prefer them to other nuts. I eat a modest amount, for variety.
I’ve moderated my anti-grain stance a bit, and now cook millet occasionally. It’s got the nutritional features of a whole grain, and tastes more like a refined grain.
Popped sorghum:
like popcorn, but with more fiber and other nutrients.
Lupin:
yet another legume, that isn’t particularly remarkable compared to familiar legumes. It’s a bit like a lima bean or soybean. Brami sells a lightly fermented version that’s a bit more convenient than a typical bean, and fermenting likely adds some nutritional value.
For canned beans, I recommend Eden Foods, since they’re soaked overnight and pressure cooked, eliminating some possibly harmful lectins.
Milked Almonds:
like almond milk, but with a higher nut to water ratio, and minus the vitamins/minerals that get added to almond milk in order to make its nutritional profile more infant-oriented.
Not whole foods, but likely still fairly healthy:
Pegan thin bars, chocolate lava:
Each of these bars has a whopping 26 g of fiber. It probably a good omega-6/omega-3 ratio, but I can’t find good evidence about that – it uses de-fatted Sacha Inchi seeds, which have a great percentage of omega-3 in any fat that remains, but I don’t see any info about whether the de-fatting leaves much fat compared to the poorer sunflower oil that they add.
Perfect Keto Bars – fiber, and plenty of collagen from grass-fed cows:
if you get most of you protein from animals, you likely have a poor glycine to methionine ratio. If you eat lots of milk or eggs (Mealsquares?), that ratio is even more likely to be poor. It only takes a little collagen to fix that ratio. (The Pegan thin bars also have a good glycine to methionine ratio).
Swerve or pure erythritol:
fairly natural ways to sweeten foods while adding almost no digestible calories. It’s hard to know whether these are as safe as not using sweeteners. They taste fairly similar to regular sugar, maybe cause mild digestive problems in some people, and work in some but not all baked goods.
Potassium chloride:
Most people should be getting more potassium relative to sodium (with important exceptions for people who take some trendy(?) drugs). Regulations restrict many convenient ways to do this, but it’s pretty easy to replace table salt with potassium chloride salt.
Green mussel pills:
if you want something healthier than a vegan diet without causing animals to suffer, but don’t like oysters, green mussel pills seem convenient.
Liver pills (from grass fed beef):
a relatively natural way to get some B12, B2 (riboflavin) and folate.
Wink Frozen Deserts:
taste a bit like ice cream, but have almost no calories. They’re mostly water, with some inulin and pea protein.
I bought a scale that weighs food to the nearest gram for my alternate day calorie restriction diet, and that has been better than measuring by volume for a variety of cooking tasks.
Finally, one food that I likely won’t get around to trying: Hákarl (aka rotten shark). It apparently takes months to make it non-poisonous. How did someone have the patience to discover that process?
Book review: The Longevity Diet: Discover the New Science Behind Stem Cell Activation and Regeneration to Slow Aging, Fight Disease, and Optimize Weight, by Valter Longo.
Longo is a moderately competent researcher whose ideas about nutrition and fasting are mostly heading in the right general direction, but many of his details look suspicious.
He convinced me to become more serious about occasional, longer fasts, but I probably won’t use his products.
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New food delivery services are springing up like weeds.
I’m primarily interested now in a substitute for restaurants. As I currently use restaurants, they provide variety in my food, but aren’t particularly convenient or healthy. Restaurant delivery services have been improving, but the user interfaces for ordering still seem clumsy and primitive (few restaurants seem to care enough to interface well with delivery services, and even fewer restaurants have both healthy food and adequate nutritional labeling).
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Book review: Tripping over the Truth: the Return of the Metabolic Theory of Cancer Illuminates a New and Hopeful Path to a Cure, by Travis Christofferson.
This book is mostly a history of cancer research, focusing on competing grand theories, and the treatments suggested by the author’s preferred theory. That’s a simple theory where the prime cause of cancer is a switch to fermentation (known as the metabolic theory, or the Warburg hypothesis).
He describes in detail two promising treatments that were inspired by this theory: a drug based on 3-bromopyruvate (3BP), and a ketogenic diet.
Book(?) review: Microbial Burden: A Major Cause Of Aging And Age-Related Disease, by Michael Lustgarten.
This minibook has highly variable quality.
Lustgarten demonstrates clear associations between microbes and aging. That’s hardly newsworthy.
He’s much less clear when he switches to talking about causality. He says microbes are the root cause of aging, and occasionally provides weak evidence to support that.
I still have plenty of reason to suspect that much of those associations are due to frailty and declining immune systems, which let microbes take over more. Lustgarten doesn’t make the kind of argument that would convince me that the microbe –> senility causal path is more important than the senility –> microbe causal path.
He has a decent amount of practical advice that is likely to be quite healthy even if he’s wrong about the root cause of aging, including: eat lots of leaves, green peppers, mushrooms, and use low pH soap.
One confusing recommendation is to limit our protein intake to moderate levels.
He provides a nice graph of mortality as a function of
He also notes that methionine restriction has significant evidence behind it, and methionine restriction requires restricting protein, especially animal proteins.
Yet I see some suggestions that protein (methionine) restriction is likely only helpful in people with kidney disease.
My impression is that high BUN mostly indicates poor health when it’s caused by kidney problems, and doesn’t provide much reason for reducing protein consumption, and least in people with healthy kidneys.
Lustgarten has since blogged about evidence (see the 7/11/2018 update) that higher protein intake helps reduce his homocysteine.
I have also noticed a (noisy) negative correlation between my protein consumption and my homocysteine levels. But that might be due to riboflavin – when I reduce my protein intake, I also reduce my riboflavin intake, since crickets are an important source of riboflavin for me. So I want to do more research into dietary protein before deciding to reduce it.
The book is too quick to dive into technical references, with limited descriptions of why they’re relevant. In many cases, I decided they provided only marginal support to his important points.
Read his blog before deciding whether to read the minibook. The blog focuses more on quantified-self-style reporting, and less on promoting a grand theory.
[Warning: this post contains lots of guesses based on weak evidence. I’d be surprised if I got more than 80% of it right.]
I’ve long acted as if a good diet is fairly important, and I’ve gathered lots of relevant evidence. But until recently I classified that evidence into many small topics related to specific nutrients and health problems, and never organized those ideas into an overall assessment of how important a good diet is.
Comments by Jim Babcock prompted me to investigate a broader overview.
This post will mainly focus on evaluating the importance of nutrition for adults in wealthy nations, then will summarize my guesses about how to achieve a good diet.
This post discusses changes I made to my health in response to Bredesen’s The End of Alzheimer’s, with a much smaller influence from Gundry, and some changes that were incidental to Robert experimenting with the SCD diet.