The Paleo Diet (13 page)

After high school graduation, Ann Woods left her home for a summer waitressing job in Alaska. She had a great time living away from her parents and partying with her friends, but the continual stream of on-the-job glazed doughnuts, burgers, and fries, along with evening treats of M&Ms and Baskin-Robbins ice cream, eventually caused her waistline to balloon. When she came back home to start college in the fall, her weight had jumped from 110 to 135 pounds. She was still not fat but was much heavier than she had ever been. After a bit of friendly razzing from her boyfriend, she managed to lose all the weight by adopting a near-vegetarian diet that emphasized grains, potatoes, lots of starch, and very little fat or meat. At the time, this seemed a prudent thing to do. After all, this type of diet was supposed to be the healthiest.

Ann also began to jog, an activity that soon blossomed into a lifetime interest in running and fitness. Her weight stabilized, and she became lean and fit. Her blood pressure and cholesterol levels were low, but after almost seven years of running, she noticed that her energy began to wane. She was continually tired and wanted nothing more than to sleep after long runs. Ann recovered from one running-related injury only to find herself injured again within weeks. Dark circles formed underneath her eyes, and she caught colds more frequently than ever. She finally discovered that she had iron-deficiency anemia caused by her “healthful” staples of oatmeal, brown rice, beans, pasta, and low-fat yogurt.

Ann discovered the Paleo dietary principles in
The Complete Book of Alternative Nutrition,
which featured my research. It made a lot of sense to her, and she gave it a try. She replaced her former vegetarian staples with lean meat, chicken, and seafood at almost every meal. Fruits and veggies were no problem—she had eaten a lot of these before her switch. Within a week, Ann noticed that her energy level was stable throughout the day. She no longer had late-afternoon slumps. Her stamina increased, and she was less tired after her runs. After three months on the diet she dropped 5 additional pounds to her present weight of 106, her stomach was now totally flat, and her muscle tone and strength were better than ever. On top of this, her iron-deficiency anemia disappeared, and the dark circles underneath her eyes vanished.

Melissa Diane Smith, a nutritionist and a health journalist based in Tucson, Arizona, is the coauthor of
Syndrome X: The Complete Nutritional Program to Prevent and Reverse Insulin Resistance
and is the author of
Going Against the Grain: How Reducing and Avoiding Grains Can Revitalize Your Health
. This is her story:

With the Paleo Diet, weight loss is a continuous, deliberate decline that occurs gradually, over a period of a few to many months. There are no quick fixes here—but then again, quick fixes don’t work. Most people who try such diets are unable to stick with them over the long haul.

You won’t feel hungry on this diet. Protein is a great satisfier. The low-carbohydrate content of the diet combined with its low glycemic load will normalize your insulin and blood sugar levels and will also help keep you from overeating. The weight that you will lose will stay off if you just stick to the diet—all the lean meats, fish, seafood, fresh fruits, and vegetables (except starchy vegetables) you can eat.

Isn’t it time to get started and give your body what it is genetically programmed to eat?

—Alfred North Whitehead

 

 

Metabolic syndrome diseases—the diseases of insulin resistance—are the main health problems of Western countries, affecting as many as half of all adults and children. There are four major metabolic syndrome diseases:

Gout and blood-clotting abnormalities are usually grouped with metabolic syndrome diseases, too, and so is obesity.

When people become insulin-resistant, the pancreas must secrete more insulin than normal to clear sugar (glucose) from the bloodstream. This creates a state in which the blood insulin level is elevated all the time.

Insulin is a major hormone that affects nearly every cell in the body. A chronically high blood-insulin level is thought to be the underlying culprit in all diseases of metabolic syndrome. But these are all complicated diseases, with many contributory factors.

Some scientists believe that high-saturated-fat diets make insulin metabolism less efficient. Others, including Dr. Gerald Reaven at Stanford University, believe that high-carbohydrate diets—both low- and high-glycemic foods—are to blame. Still others single out high-glycemic carbohydrates. However, the obvious has been ignored: Most people who develop obesity and diseases of insulin resistance do it with
mixtures
of high-fat and high-glycemic carbohydrates. Some examples of these bad food combinations: Baked potato and sour cream. Bread with butter. Eggs with toast and hash browns. Pizza with cheese. Ice cream, candies, cookies, chips. These and all of the other processed foods we eat contain both a high-fat component and high-glycemic carbohydrates.

With the Paleo Diet, it doesn’t matter which of these kinds of foods ultimately cause insulin resistance—because these unnatural food combinations aren’t part of the picture (except as Open Meal treats). Your meals won’t suffer—in fact, they’ll be richer, more varied, and more delicious than ever. Instead of fatty gourmet ice cream, treat yourself to a bowl of fresh blueberries or half a cantaloupe filled with diced strawberries and walnuts. Instead of fish sticks, how about peel-and-eat shrimp or a lean grilled steak? We’ll get to specific recipes and meal plans later in the book.

Jack Challem, known worldwide as the “Nutrition Reporter,” is a leading health journalist with more than twenty-five years of experience reporting on nutrition research. He is a contributing editor for
Let’s Live
and
Natural Health
magazines and the coauthor of a number of popular nutrition books.

High-glycemic carbohydrates cause an increase in your blood triglycerides and a decrease in your good HDL cholesterol. They also cause an increase in a special type of cholesterol in your bloodstream called “small-dense LDL cholesterol.” All of these changes in blood chemistry severely increase your risk of death from heart disease.

In recent years, small-dense LDL cholesterol has emerged as one of the most potent risks for atherosclerosis, the artery-clogging process. The study of atherosclerosis has become increasingly specific. First, we had cholesterol, then HDL and LDL (good and bad) cholesterol, and now a particularly bad kind of LDL cholesterol whose small, dense particles are ideal for artery blockage.

Even if you have normal total and LDL blood cholesterol levels, you still may be at risk for developing heart disease if your small-dense LDL cholesterol level is elevated.

Although low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets may reduce total and LDL cholesterol, they are useless in lowering small-dense LDL cholesterol. In fact, they make it worse. Dr. Darlene Dreon and colleagues at the University of California-Berkeley have shown repeatedly that high-carbohydrate diets increase small-dense LDL cholesterol particles in men, women, and children. High-glycemic foods increase our blood triglycerides, which make small-dense LDL cholesterol. When we lower triglycerides—by cutting out the starch and the high-glycemic carbohydrates—we automatically lower our small-dense LDL cholesterol.

The Paleo Diet improves insulin sensitivity in many ways. First, because it’s humanity’s original low-glycemic-carbohydrate, low-sugar diet, you won’t have to worry about triglycerides, HDL cholesterol, or small-dense LDL cholesterol. All of these blood values will rapidly normalize as your insulin level becomes reduced and stabilized.

The Paleo Diet’s high fiber, high protein, and omega 3 fat content all improve insulin sensitivity as well. Unlike starchy carbohydrates, protein causes only small changes in your blood levels of glucose and insulin. By itself, a single meal of pure fat doesn’t change these blood levels, either. The omega 3 fats that are integral to the Paleo Diet actually
improve
insulin metabolism and cause a rapid drop in blood triglycerides. The high fiber from nonstarchy vegetables and fruits found in the Paleo Diet slows the passage of carbohydrates through your intestines; this slows blood sugar rises and ultimately also improves insulin sensitivity.

It’s only recently that scientists have begun expanding the scope of insulin resistance. In research worldwide, this condition is being linked to many other chronic diseases and health problems. Scientists are exploring the role of insulin resistance in certain types of cancer, nearsightedness, polycystic ovary syndrome, and even acne—although in all of these, as in heart disease, many causative factors are believed to be involved. It is premature to establish a direct cause-and-effect relationship. But if these diseases ultimately do turn out to have insulin resistance as their underlying cause, you’ll be protected—because the Paleo Diet contains all of the dietary elements known to stop insulin resistance.

Over the last five years, scientists have discovered through a chain reaction of metabolic events that elevated levels of insulin in the bloodstream increase blood levels of a hormone called “insulinlike growth factor one” (IGF-1) and decrease another hormone called “insulinlike growth factor binding protein three” (IGFBP-3). The decrease in IGFBP-3 causes tissues to be less sensitive to one of the body’s natural chemical signals (retinoic acid) that normally limits tissue growth. In addition, IGF-1, a potent hormone in all tissues, is a major regulator of growth: Increased levels of IGF-1 encourage growth, and reduced levels slow growth. Children who are below normal height have low levels of IGF-1. When IGF-1 is injected into these children, they immediately start to grow taller. As you might expect, tall children have higher levels of IGF-1. Studies of growing children by Dr. William Wong and colleagues at the Children’s Nutrition Research Center in Houston found that girls who were taller and heavier and who matured earlier had higher blood levels of both insulin and IGF-1 and lower levels of IGFBP-3. Diets that cause insulin resistance—particularly, high-glycemic-carbohydrate diets—increase IGF-1 levels, lower IGFBP-3 levels, and decrease tissue sensitivity to retinoic acid. These hormonal changes, in turn, accelerate growth in developing children.

What does this have to do with adult health? It’s been found that IGF-1 is a powerful stimulator of cell division—growth—in
all
cells during
all
phases of life. In fact, scientists suspect that IGF-1 may be one of the primary promoters of all unregulated and tissue growth in the body. But IGFBP-3 prevents unregulated cell growth by causing cancer cells to die naturally through a process called “apoptosis.” Over the last decade, numerous scientific papers have shown a strong association between elevated levels of IGF-1, lowered levels of IGFBP-3, and breast cancer in premenopausal women, prostate cancer in men, and colorectal cancer in all adults. In animal models of many types of cancer, scientists can promote cancer by adding a key ingredient—IGF-1; conversely, adding IGFBP-3 slows cancer. Synthetic derivatives of the body’s natural retinoic acid powerfully inhibit the cancer process in cell cultures. So, the whole chain of hormonal events initiated by elevated blood levels of insulin tends to promote the cancer process.