• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 272 0

at Hahnemann University in Pennsylvania, had the rare opportunity to perform autopsies on a number of Eskimo mummies that had been frozen in Alaska’s permafrost for hundreds of years. The first mummy was that of a fifty-three-year-old woman whose body washed out of the frozen banks of Saint Lawrence Island in October 1972. Radiocarbon dating indicated that she had died in 400 A.D. from a landslide that had completely buried her. Dr. Zimmerman’s autopsy revealed moderate atherosclerosis in the arteries supplying her heart but no evidence of a heart attack. The second frozen mummy was also a female, forty to forty-five years of age, who had also been engulfed in an ice-and-mud-slide in 1520 A.D. near Barrow, Alaska. Similarly, the autopsy showed atherosclerotic plaques lining the arteries of her heart.

From my prior studies of worldwide hunter-gatherers, we know that these Eskimo women had a diet that consisted almost entirely (97 percent) of wild animal foods, including whales, walruses, seals, salmon, muskoxen, and caribou. Because they lived so far north (63 to 71 degrees north latitude), plant foods simply were unavailable; consequently, their carbohydrate intake was virtually zero. Yet they still developed atherosclerosis. Perhaps Drs. Brown and Goldstein were right, after all: high dietary intakes of saturated fats do promote atherosclerosis. Despite these facts, the best archaeological and medical evidence shows that Eskimos living and eating in their traditional ways rarely or never died from heart attacks or strokes.

So, now we have the facts we need to come to closure with the saturated fat-heart disease issue. Dietary saturated fats from excessive consumption of processed fatty meats and feedlot-produced meats increase our blood cholesterol concentrations, but unless our immune systems are chronically inflamed, atherosclerosis likely will not kill us from either heart attacks or strokes.

The new advice I can give you is this: If you are faithful to the basic principles of the Paleo Diet, consumption of fatty meats will probably have a minimal outcome on your health and wellbeing—as it did for our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Consumption of fatty meats and organs had survival value in an earlier time when humans didn’t eat grains, legumes, dairy products, refined sugars, and salty processed foods, the foods that produce chronic low-level inflammation in our bodies through a variety of physiological mechanisms. I will explain this in more depth in my next book, Living the Paleo Diet.

Disease-Fighting Fruits and Vegetables

A big problem with low-carbohydrate weight-loss diets is what they do to health-promoting fruits and vegetables—they nearly eliminate them. Because of a technicality—a blanket restriction on all types of carbohydrates, even beneficial ones, to between 30 and 100 grams per day—fruits and veggies are largely off-limits. This is a mistake. Fruits and vegetables—with their antioxidants, phytochemicals, and fiber—are some of our most powerful allies in the war against heart disease, cancer, and osteoporosis. Yet just one papaya (59 grams of carbohydrate) would blow the daily limit for two of the most popular low-carbohydrate diets. Eating an orange, an apple, and a cup of broccoli and carrots (73 grams of carbohydrate) —just a drop in the bucket to hunter-gatherers, whose diets were rich in fruits and vegetables—would wreck all but the most liberal low-carbohydrate diets.

Humanity’s original carbohydrate sources—the foods we survived on for millions of years—didn’t come from starchy grains and potatoes, which have high glycemic indices that can rapidly cause blood sugar to spike. Instead, they came from wild fruits and vegetables with low glycemic indices that produced minimal, gradual rises in blood sugar. These are the carbohydrates that you’ll be eating on the Paleo Diet. These nonstarchy carbohydrates normalize your blood glucose and insulin levels, promote weight loss, and make you feel energized all day long.

The Osteoporosis Connection

One of the greatest—and least recognized