I recently returned from AHS12 and a little side trip to visit family.
The conference was hosted at Harvard University through the Harvard Food
Law Society. Many thanks to all the organizers who made it happen. By
and large, it went smoothly.
The science as expected ranged from outstanding to mediocre, but I was
really encouraged by the presence and enthusiastic participation of a
number of quality researchers and clinicians. The basic concept of
ancestral health is something almost anyone can get behind: many of our
modern health problems are due to a mismatch between the modern
environment and what our bodies "expect". The basic idea is really just
common sense, but of course the devil is in the details when you start
trying to figure out what exactly our bodies expect, and how best to
give it to them. I think our perspective as a community is moving in
the right direction.Not surprisingly, the carbohydrate and insulin controversies loomed
large over the AHS once again. Several of the talks were aimed at
defending the carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis of obesity, and it was
clear that a subset of the low-carb community was reacting tothe writing myself and others have published on this subject in the last
year.
I don't feel the need to further explain why this idea doesn't
have much traction among obesity researchers (i.e. the idea that
elevated insulin due to carbohydrate consumption is the central cause of
common obesity), but those who are interested can read what I've
written about it previously. In particular, I periodically update the
key post "The Carbohydrate Hypothesis of Obesity: a Critical Examination",
and it now has a section addressing the most common arguments in favor
of the insulin hypothesis, so if you haven't read it in a while, have a
look.
The "safe starch debate" was kind of entertaining. There was a panel of
people basically debating whether or not starch can be part of a
healthy diet, moderated by Jimmy Moore (who I think did a good job).
The fact that this debate even took place is absurd—this is the kind of
thing that makes it so hard to get research funding to study the Paleo
diet. But in the end, thanks to Chris Kresser and Paul Jaminet, carbs
prevailed. One of the most surreal moments happened right after Kresser
brought up the Okinawans, the longest-lived culture and one of the
healthiest in the world, and cited a paper showing that their
traditional diet was ~85 percent carbohydrate, mostly from sweet
potatoes. Shanahan and Rosedale decided, based on thin air, that the
Okinawans actually didn’t eat much carbohydrate, and Shanahan even went
so far as to say “I don’t believe you”, even though Kresser was staring
right at the citation on his laptop! This is the kind of
head-in-the-sand approach to science that we need to move beyond in the
ancestral community. It was also amusing to watch Rosedale proclaim
that we should get over our obsession with the Kitavans, to scattered
applause. I suppose if there were a culture that was lean and healthy
eating cake for breakfast and driving from the house to the mailbox to
get the mail, I might want people to stop talking about it too.
Food reward also came up a few times in the talks. From a scientific
perspective, the discussions on food reward ranged from reasonable to
bizarre. On the reasonable side, Andreas Eenfeldt made an important
point that I've tried to convey on my blog at times. It's basically
this: if you think junk food is fattening (regardless of why), and you
think one of the reasons people eat junk food is that they're drawn to
it and they like it, then you believe food reward contributes to
obesity. For example, if soda weren't tempting and enjoyable to drink,
people wouldn't choose it over water. Regardless of whether you think
it's the excess calories, the sugar, or something else that's fattening
at that point, food reward is what got it to your lips.
On the head-scratching side, there was J. Stanton's talk. Stanton spent
about half his talk flailing around at my writing in a thinly veiled
manner. He even went so far as to label food reward the “naïve
hypothesis”. Yes, an entire field of full-time researchers is naïve;
good thing we have a fantasy novel author to point it out to us. He
seemed so focused on tearing down the food reward hypothesis that he
undermined his own ideas in the process. For example, he showed data on
trends in fast food spending and total away-from-home food spending
(which are data that I've presented on several occasions and which
Jeremy Landen and I introduced to the community), and attempted to argue
that they don't line up well enough with obesity trends to support a
connection. Besides being a rather imaginative interpretation of the
data (see graph below), particularly considering that obesity can take
many years to develop, this was counterproductive since one of his
central messages revolves around explaining why junk food isn’t
satiating and therefore leads to overeating and presumably fat gain. So
is it fattening, or not? And if it isn't, why should we care about how
satiating it is? I probably would have let the whole thing slide if he
hadn't repeated the absurd and hateful “moral failure” meme-- that the
food reward hypothesis implies that obese people are gluttons and
sloths. Haters gotta hate I guess...
It was really awesome to connect with people who my writing has helped.
In particular, I had several people come up to me and share food reward
fat loss experiences. Aravind Balasubramanian and Kamal Patel have
continued to lose fat since they started using the technique in the
summer of 2011, and Aravind in particular looks a lot leaner than he did
at AHS11. Aravind also explained how the concept has helped him in
other aspects of his life. I had another gentleman tell me how the
concept helped him lose fat and overcome overpowering food cravings. A
fourth gentleman explained that dietary changes he made based on my
writing have halted a serious form of inflammatory bowel disease that at
one point required the removal of part of his large intestine. Frankly
there are times when I wonder why I spend so much time sharing my work
for free, when I often get as much resistance as support for it, but
this kind of thing definitely helps. I receive very little compensation
for the work I do here, and in fact AHS12 cost me about $800 out of my
own pocket-- but I do get a few donations here and there from kind
folks.
My talk was titled "Digestive Health, Inflammation and the Metabolic
Syndrome", and it contained a fair amount of information I haven't
covered on the blog yet. I started off by stating that I wasn't going
to talk about carbs, which got a laugh. I'm sure many people were glad
for the break, and so was I. The talk went well and I think it was well
received. It will eventually be freely available online. The Q and A
was interesting too. Robert Lustig asked why I hadn’t mentioned
fructose. In retrospect, you can always think of better ways to answer a
question than you did when you were on the spot. My response was OK,
but I think I was a little bit more dismissive than I should have been.
Basically, it’s not that I think fructose is irrelevant to the
metabolic syndrome, it’s just that 1) it doesn’t strike me as central to
the main focus of the talk, and 2) it’s a complex issue that I didn’t
have time to get into. I could make a whole presentation or three just
about fructose.
Other talks I enjoyed were by Chris Kresser on iron overload, James
O’Keefe on the harms of excessive exercise (and the massive benefits of
moderate exercise), Maelan Fontes Villalba on antinutrients, Lynda
Frassetto on Paleo diets and blood glucose control, and Chris Masterjohn
on oxidative stress and carbohydrate intolerance. Chris Masterjohn in
particular hit it out of the ballpark—he was right on the cutting edge,
and he has a way of cutting through the BS without offending anyone.
Unfortunately I missed most of the talks I was interested in, for
various reasons, but they will all be freely available online thanks to
AHS and Harvard!
After the conference, I visited my parents in Virginia for a few days.
We had a nice relaxing time together. We gorged on tomatoes,
watermelon, and cherries from the garden, and swam in the river. We
also went foraging for pawpaws in the forest (see photo below of my dad
shaking a pawpaw tree). Pawpaws are one of
North America’s largest indigenous fruits, but most people have never
heard of them. They grow on smallish trees, have creamy orange-yellow
flesh, and taste like a cross between mango, banana and cantaloupe, with
a slightly astringent edge. If you live in the mid-Eastern or central
US, you may well have them in your neighborhood.
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