The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [225]
2. Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, are occasional meat-eaters, and humans produce the enzyme elastase, which serves to break down connective tissue for digestion.
There are, on both sides of the fence, avid debates of evolutionary biology and conflicting data points, but the argument-settling experience for me was empirical:
3. In the course of researching and interviewing for this book, I encountered dozens of former vegan women and would-be mothers who had miscarriage after miscarriage until they reintroduced animal products into their diets, after which they were able to become pregnant in a matter of weeks.
Based on the above and my own experiments, I’ve concluded that some form of animal product is necessary for proper hormone production. This could be due to the longer-chain fatty acids, saturated fat, cholesterol, fat-soluble vitamins, or (more likely) a combination of interdependent elements, some of which we haven’t even identified. It’s also possible that common vegetarian staples cause the problems, whether soy or gluten. Either way, it’s significant that boys born with hypospadias, the opening of the urethra on the underside of the penis rather than at the tip, are five times more likely to have vegetarian vs. omnivore mothers. Dr. Richard Sharpe, director of the Medical Research Centre for Reproductive Biology in Edinburgh, Scotland, echoes my conclusion about soy:
“I’ve seen numerous studies showing what soy does to female animals. Until I have reassurance that it doesn’t have this effect on humans, I will not give soy to my children.”
Food is complex and humans are overconfident.
Consider the antioxidants we’ve identified thus far in garden-variety thyme, as listed by Michael Pollan in a New York Times Magazine article:
4-Terpineol, alanine, anethole, apigenin, ascorbic acid, beta carotene, caffeic acid, camphene, carvacrol, chlorogenic acid, chrysoeriol, eriodictyol, eugenol, ferulic acid, gallic acid, gamma-terpinene isochlorogenic acid, isoeugenol, isothymonin, kaempferol, labiatic acid, lauric acid, linalyl acetate, luteolin, methionine, myrcene, myristic acid, naringenin, oleanolic acid, p-coumoric acid, p-hydroxy-benzoic acid, palmitic acid, rosmarinic acid, selenium, tannin, thymol, tryptophan, ursolic acid, vanillic acid.
And that’s just thyme.
So we must have it all figured out, right? My vote: not a chance. Pollan offered the list to make the same point:
It’s also important to remind ourselves that what reductive science can manage to perceive well enough to isolate and study is subject to change, and that we have a tendency to assume that what we can see is all there is to see. When William Prout isolated the big three macronutrients, scientists figured they now understood food and what the body needs from it; when the vitamins were isolated a few decades later, scientists thought, O.K., now we really understand food and what the body needs to be healthy; today it’s the polyphenols and carotenoids that seem all-important. But who knows what the hell else is going on deep in the soul of a carrot?
Never forget:
1. We can only determine deficiencies for things we’ve isolated.
2. Taking those isolated nutrients outside of whole foods can produce side effects we cannot predict.
Scurvy was a mysterious problem for thousands of years. Only in 1932 did scientists isolate vitamin C and determine that the two were related.
Much later, when beta-carotene became popular in the media as a miracle molecule, we took a more proactive approach and began to supplement. Better safe than sorry, right? Unfortunately, as we found out, taking supplemental beta-carotene by itself can cause problems. It can block the absorption of other beneficial carotenoids and increase the risk of prostate cancer and intracerebral