Almost like an extension of Jared Diamond's The Worst Mistake. Manning challenges the notion that agriculture represented...
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Melissa McEwen
Hi! I originally started eating paleo because of stomach problems and I've stuck with it because it makes me feel great. I am also a co-organizer for NYC's Eating Paleo in NYC Meetup Group. I was recently featured in the New York Times in an article about caveman-style life in NYC.
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A fishy theory of thyroid problems
If you want to see some beautiful photos of traditional fish eating in a Gwich'in camp, look here, though keep in mind that at the time these pictures were taken, this tribe was eating modern foods.
Lately health blogger Matt Stone has been creating a bit of a controversy in paleo circles by blaming thyroid issues on low carbing. There is no question that many long term low carbers and paleo dieters suffer from thyroid issues . Why? Arctic cultures like the Inuit, Koyoukon, Yupik, Sami, and many others have a traditional diet that is very low in carbohydrates. Many people have written about how healthy they are despite following a diet that's not exactly the USDA food pyramid.
I think it's pretty clear that the problems people are having are not due to a lack of cornbread. What all the healthy arctic people had in common was that they consumed a wealth of marine foods ranging from seal liver to seaweed. Marine foods have nutrients all of us could benefit from. Traditional cultures not only ate fish, they ate whole fish: fish eyes, liver, and bones. This stuff is a hard sell to those of us who grew up eating the typical American diet, but it's definitely worth getting used to eating, as the arctic explorers did.
Arctic explorer and low carb idol Vilhjalmur Stefansson forced himself to like fish, as he recounts in his interesting book online:
Until I was twenty seven I had the belief about myself that I could not eat fish and felt certain that its taste was obnoxious to me. I thought it an interesting peculiarity and assumed that everyone else would think so and there were few things I told about so often as the fact that I was peculiar in that I could not eat fish. I think I might have lost the notion sooner if it had not formed such an excellent topic of conversation
I've said it many times: if your paleo or low carb diet is a bunch of ground meat and some chicken breasts, you probably need to rethink things. As far as the carb controversy, it's a rather old one. The Weston A. Price Foundation has been criticizing the paleo diet for not including traditional dairy and fermented grain/legume products. In his books food ecologist Gary Nabhan recounts how Native American tribes like the Pima never suffered from obesity on their traditional high carb diet. Born To Run recounts the impressive athletic fears of the corn-loving Tarahumara tribe. The yam eating Kitavans don't have too many problems either.
But the paleo diet is about more than just not being obese. Plenty of people follow it to heal from autoimmune conditions and damage from eating the Standard American Diet. Others follow it to improve athletic performance. The truth is that while traditional agrarian cultures didn't have type II diabetes epidemics, the healthiest bones that anthropologists have found were those of coastal foragers. As Dr. Kurt Harris says "tolerated is not optimal."
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Just so everyone knows, you
Just so everyone knows, you can absolutely be hypothyroid and have "normal" TSH. Most dr's do not give all the tests needed to establish where the problem lies.
I was told for years that my thyroid was normal until a holistic NP ordered about 7 tests (not the 2 or 3 typical tests) and it was revealed that my free T3 was low. I was not converting my T4 to T3 efficiently. Most dr.'s don't test free T3, yet this is the active form of thyroid hormone that our cells mostly use, so if it's low, you'll definitely have symptoms.
There are 6 other patterns of hypothyroid that manifest with normal TSH, including Hashimoto's which is, in reality, not actually a thyroid issue but an auto-immune disorder. Hashimoto's is notoriously under-diagnosed.
For those wanting to learn more, there is an absolutely excellent book called "Why do I still Have Thyroid Symptoms When My Lab Tests Are Normal?" by Datis Kharrazian. it goes into depth on the tests you need and how to interpret the test results.
Dr. Karrazian just did an excellent interview on One Radio network and there is a link on the main page of his site:
http://www.thyroidbook.com/
The Masai are lactose
The Masai are lactose intolerant they don't drink fresh milk, they curdle it before consumption so the lactose is consumed by bacteria.
Good post Melissa, as always.
Good post Melissa, as always. I just wanted to add that freshly killed meat has plenty of carbs in the form of muscle glycogen. So even a pure carnivore diet is not going to be ultra low carb if the meat is eaten right away. The glycogen goes away from muscle meat within 24 hours after the kill, organ meats will still have some carbs, especially the liver.
QUOTE: "I have/had all the
QUOTE:
"I have/had all the symptoms of hypothyroidism, yet my TSH level of 1.03 certainly does not indicate hypothyroidism."
Over millions of years, our bodies evolved to adapt to a wide range of conditions. Obviously, a body on a low-carb diet has different blood chemistry than a body on a high-carb diet.
As diet changes, the body adapts accordingly, and blood chemistry changes. It is a mistake to expect the new blood chemistry levels to stay close to the previous norms.
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So, basically you are saying
So, basically you are saying we can forget all lab values? You certainly do have a point to some degree, but I still think you are oversimplifying things here. Of course the amount of carbs will have influence on your blood chemistry, regarding triglycerides, maybe insulin to some degree and stuff like this. But the body is a very closely regulated system, one big homeostasis machine. So, I do admit that it might be possible that a low carbohydrate diet could make conventional thyroid measurements useless, but so far I do not see a reason to believe this. Is there any good indication or scientific basis that this is actually the case or are you just implying that lab values are useless?
Nevertheless, my point still stands. I've also taken Maca, which is a supplement that is working tremendously well for most people having thyroid issues (just take a look around thyroid-info.com and then tell me that Maca is not effective in most cases), yet, it did not do anything for me.
So, based on the fact that my TSH is fine and herbal supplementation did not do a thing for me, I see absolutely no reason to believe that I am hypothyroid.
Check your morning basal body
Check your morning basal body temp, if it is low, say 96-97.5F, chances are high that you might be hypothyroid and well worth getting the extended thyroid and adrenal test panels.
Hmm...I was eating a lot of
Hmm...I was eating a lot of fish oil, seaweed, kelp, and fermented cod liver oil and still ran into problems myself... Tests reveal that my thyroid hormone and iodine levels are all normal or good. On the other hand, mega-dosing on iodine per a naturopath's suggestion seems to be helping me. Sigh! Maybe it's the environmental bromides.
I haven't increased my carbs though, since every time I eat a bit of tuber, I do gain weight. Yeah, I've got issues...
Well, but you know what
Well, but you know what people like Schwarzbein (or Matt Stone) say about weight gain. Could also be a sign that your body is trying to heal. ;-)
But honestly, I don't even believe that this is the case with you. Depending on how much carbs you eat every day, your body might just not be adapted to it, yet. Felt like crap the first week I reintroduced carbs as well.
They may very well be right -
They may very well be right - it's just that I'm not ready to take it right now. But I am thinking about it as hard as I can! :-)
Thanks for the great comment!
Thanks for the great comment! I am am fairly medium-carb myself, as I eat yams and probably my diet is much closer to the Kitavans than the Inuit. I personally hope that the abundance fat soluble vitamins and lack of antinutrients is enough to make for a good diet. I would eat more meat, but it is expensive and frankly I don't really want to eat it all day.
The osteoporosis thing is pretty controversial. Another commenter took my assertion to task and said that the osteoporosis only started to be a problem with the introduction of Western foods and cited Keenleyside A. Skeletal evidence of health and disease in pre-contact Alaskan Eskimos and Aleuts. Am J Phys Anthropol. 1998 Sep;107(1):51-70. Either way, as a foodie, I'd prefer to eat more than meat.
Definitely whole fish is the way to go! Wish I liked it more, but I have experienced improved health eating whole fish, so it has been worth it.
Hi there, Nice post! But
Hi there,
Nice post! But there are a few things I'd like to comment on:
1: "Tolerated is not optimal":
Well, you certainly can't say anything against that statement, but especially when comparing the Kitavans and the Eskimos (which you didn't directly in this post, but many people like to do this) I'd certainly say that the Kitavan diet seems closer to "optimal" to me than the Eskimo diet. Of course I could be wrong on this, but from what I've figured the Kitavan's seemed to have less health problems than the Eskimos. Here's a quote from one of your own posts:
"In the long term, Inuit suffer from osteoporosis, probably because of excessive amounts of protein."
Now, I do realize that you in no way made that comparison, but I still wanted to get that out, as I really think there are a lot of people taking the Eskimos as role model even though I don't think they really are suited to be anything like that.
2)This is just a theory of mine, but when we talk about adding more seafood to the diet to prevent thyroid problems, I think one should also be consequent enough and recommend eating the whole fish. After all, what better way to support an organ than to eat it? That way you definitely would get all the nutrients that were necessary to keep that organ healthy.
3) The article about coastal foragers:
I don't really see how this article proves that the healthiest bones ever found were from coastal foragers. If I didn't overread anything it just states that the bones of hunter/gatherers in a certain area were much stronger than the bones of the humans who settled down to become involved in agriculture, which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. The reason for that probably is phytic-acid:
"Phytic acid is an anti-nutrient that's abundant in beans, grains and nuts. It can dramatically reduce the absorption of important minerals such as iron, calcium, magnesium and zinc, leading to deficiencies over time. It may be one of the main reasons human stature decreased after the adoption of agriculture, and it probably continues to contribute to short stature and health problems around the world."
source
So a hunter/gatherer diet how it os often understood currently with some nuts and seeds may in some ways even be more detrimental than a diet based on soaked grains. But as far as I'm concerned, you are fully aware of that, as one of your last posts about phytic acid shows.
The point I'm trying to make here, that there may very well be quite some variables in a healthy hunter/gatherer diet that we not yet know about. This is what makes me believe that the hunter/gatherer diet how it is currently advocated by many, is not necessarily the best diet for everyone. Which leads me directly to
4) Thyroid problems:
I really am suspicious that eating seafood alone will be enough to help prevent thyroid troubles. One of the main reasons why I believe this, is that I do not think that many people who seem to suffer from thyroid troubles on a low-carb diet actually are hypothyroid. This is certainly true for me. I have/had all the symptoms of hypothyroidism, yet my TSH level of 1.03 certainly does not indicate hypothyroidism. I know that is still might be possible that I actually am hypothyroid, but I doubt it. So far, I've seen great success with adding relatively large amounts of carbs back into my diet, even though this makes me kinda un-paleo for most people. This is what makes me question the whole "thyroid trouble" thing and leads me to believe that some people might just not do well on low-carb.
This is also ultimately what makes me believe that your article, while still making some very good points, might actually be misleading for some people in the same situation like me, which is exactly the reason why I wrote this comment: to present a slightly different view on the topic.
That's all (finally)!
Good night.
Matthias
Non-scientifically, I think
Non-scientifically, I think the Masai (herders, right?) probably get a lot of lactose from raw milk, but not a lot of fish. Could be wrong, as I haven't looked into it thoroughly and don't know what they obtain by trading with others, but I just thought I'd get it out there before I forgot...
The Masai are lactose
The Masai are lactose intolerant they don't drink fresh milk, they curdle it before consumption so the lactose is consumed by bacteria.
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