Food and cooking items retrieved at a European Neolithic site: millstones, charred bread, grains and small apples, a clay cooking pot, and containers made of antlers and wood. Wikipedia: Neolithic

To me, the Paleo diet fails to adequately address the impact of evolution. The diet includes foods presumed to have been eaten by early hunter-gatherer humans, such as wild game, fruits, and vegetables. It excludes beans, grains, and all other farmed food, because, as a friend of mine put it, “that isn’t what we’re meant to eat.” But:

Agriculture Linked to DNA Changes in Ancient Europe, New York Times, Science, 23 November 2015

Now, in the first study of its kind, an international team of scientists has found that after agriculture arrived in Europe 8,500 years ago, people’s DNA underwent widespread changes, altering their height, digestion, immune system and skin color.

By studying living Europeans, scientists had already found evidence suggesting that their ancestors adapted to agriculture through natural selection. As tools to sequence DNA became more readily available, researchers even discovered some of the molecular underpinnings of these traits.

Maybe we’re meant to eat what we evolved to eat.

If the Paleo diet excludes grains because they are farmed, why doesn’t it also exclude farmed meats, poultry, fish, and eggs? Farmed fruit and vegetables? Farmed livestock and modern farmed produce are quite different from their ancient wild counterparts.

I’m reading this right now and I have my head in my hands. It’s so depressing.

Consumer Reports, Food Safety & Sustainability Center: From Crop To Table, Pesticide Use In Produce (pdf)

They just don’t see it. So many people don’t see it. Organic (or the latest form of this: ‘sustainable’) for the rich and conventional for everyone else is not the way to fix things. We have to fix everyone’s food, not create some esoteric “pure” food for the minority of people who have access to it. People in care homes, schools, hospitals, the elderly, the poor … these groups eat, by-and-large, conventional food. I would venture that most people eat, by-and-large, conventional food … because that’s what there is to eat!

Telling people they are going to get sick eating conventional food …

A 2015 study found that people who ate conventionally grown produce had high concentrations of organophosphate pesticide metabolites in their urine, and people who reported eating organic produce had significantly lower levels.

A 2006 study found that levels of two organophosphate pesticide metabolites in the urine of children fell to undetectable levels when the children were switched to an organic diet.

A 2010 study suggests that children with higher levels of organophosphate pesticide metabolites in their urine are more likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

… is like telling people who live in a city with a lot of air pollution that they are going to get sick and they should choose to breathe cleaner air. What’s their choice?

Right. Well, here are Consumer Reports’ tips on how to access organic food:

• Buy whole foods and process at home.
• Buy in bulk.
• Buy at a farm or farmer’s market.
• And the most ridiculous way they say to access organic? “Replace processed snack foods with organic fruits and vegetables.” Yes, just buy organic. Just breath that fresh non-polluted air.

These tips work for people who already have good access to organic. But I’ve written quite a bit about why they fail for many, especially for the most vulnerable who have the hardest time accessing organic foods. When you’re a single parent (or not) working two jobs (or not) you don’t have time to cook from scratch at home. Frail elderly don’t have the energy. When you take public transportation to a big grocery store, you can’t carry pounds of apples, oranges, and carrots home on the bus. There are few, if any, farms and farmers’ markets in low-income urban environments. And if someone else is feeding you, say you live in a nursing home, you really don’t have a choice.

If it’s so easy to eat organic food, why aren’t most people eating it?

We need to, bit by bit, use fewer chemicals in conventional food production. Less polluted air for everyone is better than clean air for a few and polluted air for everyone else.

Just amazing:
Tap dancing birds: the multimodal mutual courtship display of males and females in a socially monogamous songbird, Nature, 19 November 2015
Bird’s lightning ‘tap dance’ caught on camera, BBC, 19 November 2015

The dance is all the more remarkable, Prof Gahr explained, because of everything else the birds are doing during the display: they clutch a piece of nesting material in their beaks, tilt their heads upward, bob up and down and sing – all while keeping an eye on their partner. “It’s quite complicated, to do all that without falling from the perch – it’s very acrobatic,” he said.

Two things … They don’t just sing, they sing and dance at the same time. And they dance to make a sound, it’s musical. And both males and females do it. Wait, one more thing. That slowed-down singing is too creepy.

I wonder what else birds do that we’re not privy to. Do they sing at frequencies we can’t hear? Birds have something going on that we need to respect.

Here’s the trailer to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film, The Birds. I always thought that the caged lovebirds were the impetus for the attack, the fact that they were caged.

One Very Brainy Bird: Study Finds Pigeons Uncommonly Good At Distinguishing Cancerous From Normal Breast Tissue, University of Iowa, 18 November 2015

With some training and selective food reinforcement, pigeons performed as well as humans in categorizing digitized slides and mammograms of benign and malignant human breast tissue.

The pigeons performed virtually as well on images that they had never been shown before, indicating that they had, in an extremely narrow sense, learned pathology.

They got it right 85-90% of the time!

Here’s the study:

Pigeons (Columba livia) as Trainable Observers of Pathology and Radiology Breast Cancer Images, PLOS One, 18 November 2015

And some samples they showed the pigeons, at increasing magnifications. I can’t.

Although a pigeon’s brain is no bigger than the tip of an index finger, it turns out that the neural pathways involved, including the basal ganglia and cortical-striatal synapses, operate in ways very similar to those at work in the human brain.

“Research over the past 50 years has shown that pigeons can distinguish identities and emotional expressions on human faces, letters of the alphabet, misshapen pharmaceutical capsules, and even paintings by Monet vs. Picasso,” Wasserman says. “Their visual memory is equally impressive, with a proven recall of more than 1,800 images.”

Humans must look like lumbering fools to them.

I saw this chart floating around:

Before I offer my criticism, which is minor compared to the story this chart tells – that plants provide protein in amounts that easily satisfy the RDA or any other special needs – let me reiterate: You don’t have to eat animals to get enough protein.

Here’s the thing … it’s a bit misleading to list foods per 100 grams. For example, 100 grams of pumpkin seeds is about 3/4 of a cup and contains close to 10 grams of fat. That would be a lot to eat in a sitting, or even in a day. A couple tablespoons is ~18 grams and provides only about 4 grams of protein, nothing near that 32.97g. On the other hand, 3/4 cup of cooked kidney beans provides over 12 grams of protein and almost no fat. So even though kidney beans are low on this chart, they are, realistically, a better source of protein. A chart based on typical serving size would be more useful.

–Non Sequitur, Wiley Miller, 21 November 2015

Thanks, Marj!

Jane Plant, UK scientist and 6-time cancer survivor: “We have all been brought up with the idea that milk is good for you,” says Plant. “But there is evidence now that the growth factors and hormones it contains are not just risky for breast cancer, but also other hormone-related cancers, of the prostate, testicles and ovary.” … For those with cancer or at high risk of the disease, Plant advocates, among other things, cutting out all dairy — from cows, sheep, and goats, organic or not. “If you have active cancer, there are no half-measures here.”- Source

I can’t believe this article made it into a professional peer-reviewed journal, especially that “Future Directions” section I excerpted. It must be because it’s from Germany. The dairy lobbies here in the US would never allow something like this to be published. (123 references!)

Milk Consumption: Aggravating Factor Of Acne And Promoter Of Chronic Diseases Of Western Societies, Journal of the German Society of Dermatology, April 2009

It says … compounds in milk are very potent growth promoters. That’s good when we’re very young, but not so good when we get older. This growth promotion, or “milk-induced change of the IGF-1-axis” is at the heart of not just cancer but atherosclerosis, which leads to heart attack and stroke, and neurodegenerative diseases such as multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease:

Summary
Consumption of cow’s milk and cow’s milk protein result in changes of the hormonal axis of insulin, growth hormone and insulin-like growth factor-1(IGF-1) in humans. Milk consumption raises IGF-1 serum levels in the perinatal period, adolescence and adulthood. During puberty with the physiological onset of increased secretion of growth hormone, IGF-1 serum levels increase and are further enhanced by milk consumption. IGF-1 is a potent mitogen; after binding to its receptor in various tissues, it induces cell proliferation and inhibits apoptosis. Keratinocytes and sebocytes, as well as the androgen-synthesizing adrenals and gonads, are stimulated by IGF-1. The epidemic incidence of adolescent acne in Western milk-consuming societies can be explained by the increased insulin- and IGF-1-stimulation of sebaceous glands mediated by milk consumption. Acne can be regarded as a model for chronic Western diseases with pathologically increased IGF-1-stimulation. Many other organs, such as the thymus, bones, all glands, and vascular smooth muscle cells as well as neurons are subject to this abnormally increased hormonal stimulation. The milk-induced change of the IGF-1-axis most likely contributes to the development of fetal macrosomia, induction of atopy, accelerated linear growth, atherosclerosis, carcinogenesis and neurodegenerative diseases. Observations of molecular biology are supported by epidemiologic data and unmask milk consumption as a promoter of chronic diseases of Western societies.

The first few sentences in this next section are ominous. I can’t imagine reading them in JAMA or the New England Journal of Medicine. Is it time to reconsider the ingestion of any milk past infancy?

Future Directions
Our deeply-rooted beliefs about the wholesomeness of milk and dairy products should be re-considered under careful, scientific evaluation. We are just beginning to re-assess the biological effects of milk and dairy products as foodstuffs. Human beings are the only species on earth that from the beginning of the perinatal period into adulthood are subjected to external hormonal manipulation of IGF-1-dependent maturation and differentiation processes in various cell and organ systems. Milk developed over the course of mammalian evolution as a highly complex, biologically active carrier of signals which was intended only to be consumed during infancy. The consumption of cow’s milk [in humans] interferes with the sensitive endocrine regulatory network from the fetal period into old age.

It is time to look beyond milk as merely a positive stimulant of bone growth and instead to take all organ systems into account. Milk consumption during pregnancy, in particular, should be carefully evaluated; intrauterine changes in the regulatory axes can negatively impact later life, predisposing a person to chronic diseases. Persistent acne in adulthood, especially in PCOS, should be cause for assessing IGF-1 levels and should raise the possibility of an increased risk of cancer. Given the tumor promotor effect of IGF-1, patients with tumorous disease should restrict consumption of milk and milk protein. The same applies to patients with coronary heart disease and with a family history of neurodegenerative disease. Milk consumption has already been identified as an aggravating factor in the acne “epidemic” among adolescents, and preliminary successes have been reported with reduced milk consumption. It is even more important that excessive milk consumption can promote diseases commonly associated with a Western lifestyle. (Table 1).

Here’s their Table 1. This is what people risk by continuing to eat cheese, pizza, yogurt, milk. Look at how many organs are affected.

I stumbled upon this study this morning while looking around for articles on dairy protein.

Animal Foods, Protein, Calcium And Prostate Cancer Risk: The European Prospective Investigation Into Cancer And Nutrition, British Journal of Cancer, May 2008

We examined consumption of animal foods, protein and calcium in relation to risk of prostate cancer among 142 251 men in the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition. Associations were examined using Cox regression, stratified by recruitment centre and adjusted for height, weight, education, marital status and energy intake. After an average of 8.7 years of follow-up, there were 2727 incident cases of prostate cancer, of which 1131 were known to be localised and 541 advanced-stage disease.

Results: A high intake of dairy protein was associated with an increased risk [of prostate cancer], with a hazard ratio for the top versus the bottom fifth of intake of 1.22 (95% confidence interval (CI): 1.07–1.41, Ptrend=0.02). After calibration to allow for measurement error, we estimated that a 35-g day−1 increase in consumption of dairy protein was associated with an increase in the risk of prostate cancer of 32% (95% CI: 1–72%, Ptrend=0.04). Calcium from dairy products was also positively associated with risk, but not calcium from other foods.

The results support the hypothesis that a high intake of protein or calcium from dairy products may increase the risk for prostate cancer.

I write about this a lot, that dairy food increases the risk for prostate cancer. This is one of many studies. And I always end up asking … why isn’t this common knowledge?