So I have now finished the book and have a few thoughts. I get the argument that is being made for traditional food, but feel that there are some obvious gaps
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The role of calorie restriction and intermittent fasting - again a modern term to describe the way things used to be. Food availability was not constant so we would not have had 3 meals a day and gone through periods of low calorie availability. This has a big part to play in longevity and overall health. Modern diets are too calorie dense, potentially even following the 4 pillars would still lead to over-eating, reducing the benefits seen from IF
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Over-reliance on animal products - Longevity research again shows that the longest lived people don’t eat a lot of animal protein. Many of the traditional tribes that are used in the book, like the Inuit, have relatively short life-spans when compared to populations with much lower animal consumption. Animal proteins are used in small amounts as flavor enhancers for bean/legume/vegetable based dishes.
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Milk in the un-refrigerated world - I a world with no refrigeration, if you don’t have a cow/goat/sheep/other milk producing mammal you don’t drink milk. Fermented dairy products would be the closets you could get as this woudl be the only way for them to last more than a few days. This woudl also be a luxury item, and not consumed on the vast quantities we see today.
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Carbs and insulin sensitivity - there is plenty of research to show that carbohydrates don’t lead to insulin sensitivity, lipid storage within cells play a much bigger role here. there needs to be wider system-thinking on this topic as cause and effect is not as obvious as everyone would like it to be, thus the easily contradictory positions found across different authors. If the underlying mechanism for insulin sensitivity is the lipid content of a cell, then low carb high fat is fine - very little insulin is produced, but so too is high carb low fat - cells remain sensitive to insulin as they don’t reach lipid saturation. High carb and high fat become the death trap.
My take-away’s from the book:
- Reaffirming the dangers of an overly processed diet - Vegetable oils and milk powder appear to be the industrial glue that holds packaged food together. all the hidden fat and sugar in processed food is there to make industrial processes easier, not for our personal benefit. Inflammation is real and takes a long time to get under control, a cost / benefit analysis should be done before heavy consumption of processed foods, i am with @chad on this one and may never go back to fried foods… there is no real benefit…
- A well rounded plant based diet is still going to be superior to a modern meat + dairy diet - given the epigenetic nature of food, if you meat and dairy didn’t live a long enjoyable life, you are most likely not getting any value from if, and would be far better off focusing on quality plant based proteins and fats, with small amounts of very high quality animal proteins to flavor and supplement. Eating meat for meats sake feels like a addict justifying another hit…
- I ❤️CARBS! (and so should you!) - Plants are generally low in fat, but will have enough to ensure our bodies get what they need - there is a minimum effective dose for Fat and Protein, more than this provides no additional benefits. Readers in this forum will not be in the coach-potato category, so carbs will fuel your lifestyles, as such, to ensure the fires keep burning and the hormones keep functioning effectively, fats and proteins need to be managed for the benefit of carb metabolism, following a plant based diet takes the thinking out of this for you, as plants don’t produce the high fat and protein ratios that will cause issues
If you are interested in nutrition, its a great book to add to the library, but it should probably not be the only one you read. There is diversity in thinking and new science coming out all the time. Read both sides of the nutritional arguments, I find the discourse fascinating.