Search Results for: rice

Around the Web; Controversies Over Rice, Meat, and Warmth Edition

Posted by on April 21, 2012 47 comments

[1] Success Stories: Thanks so much to everyone who reports their results on the blog. Here are a few recent reports:

Matt, an amateur bodybuilder, reports success on PHD: “I’m getting leaner and my muscles are developing better. What’s really surprising is that my calorie intake is higher and I’m losing fat mass!!”

Robin reports that rice cured her constipation.

Karin reports that the ketogenic variant of our diet has cured migraines and other problems:

I’ve been on the keto diet for nearly a month and it is the best thing that has happened to me. I’m migraine free and medication free. My mood is incredibly stable, I fall asleep quickly and stay asleep all night, I have lots of energy, I can concentrate for hours on end, etc. I’ve lost weight also, a much loved side effect. Thank you for writing this!

Brian reports rapid progress against his diabetes.

Jeanie Graham Campbell on Facebook: “My husband is doing fabulously on the PHD…. I felt great. Once I get down to where I want to be (another 7 or so pounds), I’ll be rockin’ the PHD!!!”

Meanwhile, it’s not exactly a testimonial, but I want it known that “Super Newell” Wright can run down young criminals and retrieve stolen computers while carrying a 50 pound suitcase.

[2] Music to Read By: Levon Helm, drummer and singer for The Band, passed away last week. Here they were at Woodstock:

Here’s Levon singing “The Last Waltz”:

And one more for the road:

[3] Interesting posts since our last Around the Web:

Toxoplasma infection is a major cause of birth defects. Treatment of pregnant mothers improves the health of their babies.

Laura Schoenfeld reviews the people of PaleoFX – and the real stars.

Via Dr. Jay Wortman, two attempts to explain why Asian rice eaters are thin on 70% carb diets: Peter Attia and Andreas Eenfeldt offer three and six reasons respectively. I half-agree with half their reasons, but the comments on Dr. Eenfeldt’s post held the most interest. Is Robert Lustig the new Ancel Keys?

Paleo for Powerlifters discusses the benefits of rice consumption.

Paleo has become too limiting for Richard Nikoley. Jack Kruse is also progressing beyond Paleo: in his talk at TEDx Nashville (video not yet online) he reported self-injecting with MRSA. If you find Jack’s posts too long, you’re in luck: one of his fans is putting Jack’s best lines up on Twitter.

“Only Dave Asprey would come back from a Cloud Computing conference with frostbite.” A Paleo conference is the place for that … Keith Norris had a nice post on cold exposure, and Kamal Patel (in comments) reminds us, “What killed the dinosaurs?” Elsewhere, Kamal makes a case for Fire Perspirogenesis.

Melissa McEwen recorded a podcast, and it’s got “nude” in the title. It’s got “sauna” too, so maybe there’s something about Fire Perspirogenesis.

Pal Jabekk quotes Tristram Shandy.

Mark Sisson discusses 5 common nutrient deficiencies. Adam Bornstein of Livestrong.com references Mark, Martin Berkhan, and Brad Pilon in explaining why he has taken up intermittent fasting.

Red wine turns materials into superconductors. (Via Instapundit) Might be a good beverage to consume while earthing.

Dr Briffa thinks earthing may work. I actually bought an earthing mat and put it under my keyboard so that my hands rest on it as I work, but haven’t noticed any effect.

Jimmy Moore has started experimenting with carbohydrates. He tried half a sweet potato per day, mashed with 3 tbsp butter and 1 tbsp honey or stevia, and found that his blood sugar was under control, but he gained a bit of weight.

Scroll down to read how CarbSane imagines the safe starches panel at AHS 2012 will go.

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times discusses a growing sense among scientists that science itself is getting dysfunctional.

That paper on plant microRNAs affecting gene expression in the liver is being questioned. No surprise there.

Don’t tell Ray Peat: Women who drink two cups of sugary soda per day are 37% less likely to become pregnant than women who drink two cups of tea a day. And a New Zealand woman died of a Coca-Cola overdose.

Don Matesz poses the “panda paradox”: Pandas didn’t evolve to eat bamboo but can survive on it. The inference, I guess, is that humans didn’t evolve to eat vegan but we might survive on it.

Via J Stanton, green tea may inhibit hepatitis C virus infection.

Matt Metzgar: what does chocolate have to tell us about food reward theory?

Wired wonders: if there are probiotic viruses, maybe we don’t want antiviral drugs.

Cogito Ergo Edo discusses the Leptin Marketing Miracle.

In the comments, André Risnes offered a corollary to Ewald’s hypothesis.

New Zealand confronts Marmageddon.

Via Newmark’s Door, why do children wet their beds? Constipation! Try giving them magnesium.

Is bee colony collapse disorder due to a corn pesticide in the high-fructose corn syrup that bee farmers have been giving their bees?

Chris Kresser discuss how stress upsets your gut. Chris has a terrific series on salt: this post has the meat of the matter.

Walter Willett defends that red meat study. But Prof Dr Andro says red meat is good for rats. Michael Greger reports that muscle meat is only about 10% of fast food chain burgers; the rest is “waste and by-products including connective tissue, nerve tissue, cartilage, bone, and in a quarter of the samples, Sarcocystis parasites.”

In our book we emphasized that, after processing by the digestive tract, all mammals eat high fat diets. Miki Ben Dor follows this line of thought in his analysis of the diet of chimpanzees.

Dr BG is back! With a major demything.

Jim Stogdill of O’Reilly Radar has started the Perfect Health Diet. Fit Element has had good results:

From my personal experience over the last few weeks adding back more of the safe starches have given me better energy than just eating vegetables alone as the only carb intake in a day. I’m no longer suffering from tremendous DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) and the recovery is quicker. I have lots of energy to do daily tasks and be quite active otherwise. And not to mention that I sleep so much better! Even more muscle definition is coming along in difficult areas such as thighs.

Yoni Freedhoff has the secrets to a happy marriage.

Via Tyler Cowen, the US government is stifling a breakthrough innovation: Tacocopters.

[4] In honor of our friends at Psychology Today:

[5] A culinary color wheel: From Nicole Kosek Caulfield, via Shari Bambino:

[6] Not the weekly video: Rocky’s speech to his son in kinetic typography:

Via Tony Federico. Original speech here.

[7] Shou-Ching’s Photo Art:

[8] Weekly video: The Great Bell Chant:

The Great Bell Chant (The End of Suffering) from R Smittenaar on Vimeo.

Red Meat and White Rice, Oh My!

Posted by on March 25, 2012 118 comments

This started as a note for an Around the Web, but has grown … so it will stand on its own.

The Red Meat Study

The Paleosphere has been abuzz about the red meat study from the Harvard School of Public Health. I don’t have much to say about it because the claimed effect is small and, at first glance, not enough data was presented to critique their analysis. There are plenty of confounding issues: (1) We know pork has problems that beef and lamb do not (see The Trouble With Pork, Part 3: Pathogens and earlier posts in that series), but all three meats were lumped together in a “red meat” category. (2) As Chris Masterjohn has pointed out, the data consisted of food frequency questionnaires given to health professionals, and most respondents understated their red meat consumption. Those who reported high meat consumption were “rebels” who smoked, drank, and did not exercise. (3) The analysis included multivariate adjustment for many factors, which can have large effects on assessed risk. Study authors can easily bias the results substantially in whatever direction they prefer. I’ve discussed that problem in The Case of the Killer Vitamins.

So it’s hard to judge the merits of the red meat study. However, another study from HSPH researchers came out at the same time that was outright misleading.

The White Rice and Diabetes Study

This study re-analyzed four studies from four countries – China, Japan, Australia, and the United States – to see how the incidence of diabetes diagnosis related to white rice consumption within each country.

Here was the main data:

The key thing to notice is that the y-axis of this plot is NOT incidence of type 2 diabetes. It is relative risk within each country for type 2 diabetes.

I looked up diabetes incidence and rice consumption in these four countries. Here is the scatter plot:

Here is the complete FAO database of 86 countries, with a linear fit to the data:

UPDATE: O Primitivo has data for 162 countries and a better chart. Here it is – click to enlarge:

If anything, diabetes incidence goes down as rice consumption increases. Countries with the highest white rice consumption, such as Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Bangladesh, have very low rates of diabetes. The outlier with 20% diabetes prevalence is the United Arab Emirates.

A plausible story is this:

  1. Something entirely unrelated to white rice causes metabolic syndrome. Possibly, the something which causes metabolic syndrome is dietary and is displaced from the diet by rice consumption, thus countries with higher rice consumption have lower incidence of metabolic syndrome.
  2. Diabetes is diagnosed as a fasting glucose that exceeds a fixed threshold of 126 mg/dl. In those with impaired glucose regulation from metabolic syndrome, higher carb intakes will tend to lead to higher levels of fasting blood glucose. (Note: this is true for carb intakes above about 40% of energy. On low-carb diets, higher carb intakes tend to lead to lower fasting blood glucose due to increased insulin sensitivity. However, nearly everyone in these countries eats more than 40% carb.) Thus, of two people with identical health, the one eating more carbs will show higher average blood glucose levels.
  3. Therefore, the fraction of those diagnosed as diabetic (as opposed to pre-diabetic) will increase as their carb consumption increases.
  4. In China and Japan, but not in the US and Australia, white rice consumption is a marker of carb consumption. So the fraction of those with metabolic syndrome diagnosed as diabetic will increase with white rice consumption in China and Japan, but will be uncorrelated with white rice consumption in the US and Australia.

Thus, diabetes incidence may be lower in China and Japan (due to lower incidence of metabolic syndrome on Asian diets), but higher among Chinese and Japanese eating the most rice (due to higher rates of diagnosis on the blood sugar criterion). This explains all of the data and is biologically sound.

What did the HSPH researchers conclude?

Higher consumption of white rice is associated with a significantly increased risk of type 2 diabetes, especially in Asian (Chinese and Japanese) populations.

No: Internationally, higher consumption of white rice is associated with a significantly reduced risk of type 2 diabetes, and the Chinese and Japanese experience is consistent with that. Carb consumption is associated with a higher rate of diabetes diagnosis within populations at otherwise similar risk for diabetes. White rice consumption is correlated to carb consumption especially strongly in Asian (Chinese and Japanese) populations.

Food Reward and “Eat Less, Move More” in Diabetes

Of course, the study authors knew that diabetes incidence is lower in countries that eat more white rice. How do they reconcile this with their claim that white rice increases diabetes risk?

The recent transition in nutrition characterised by dramatically decreased physical activity levels and much improved security and variety of food has led to increased prevalence of obesity and insulin resistance in Asian countries. Although rice has been a staple food in Asian populations for thousands of years, this transition may render Asian populations more susceptible to the adverse effects of high intakes of white rice …

In other words, rice-eating countries have higher physical activity and more boring food – just look at the notoriously tasteless cuisines of Thailand, China, and Japan – and their inability to eat high quantities of food has hitherto protected Thais, Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and Indonesians from diabetes.

However, once those rice eaters become office workers and learn how to spice their rice with more varied flavors, the deadly nature of rice may be revealed.

Stephan Guyenet writes that “Food Reward [is] Approaching a Scientific Consensus.” It certainly seems so; it is emerging as a catch-all explanation for everything, a perspective that can be trotted out in a few concluding sentences to reconcile a hypothesis (white rice causes diabetes) with data that contradict it.

Conclusion

To me, the HSPH white rice study doesn’t look like science. It looks like gaming of the grant process – generating surprising and disturbing results that seem to warrant further study, even if the researchers themselves know the results are most likely false.

Consensus or no – and consensus in science isn’t necessarily a sign of truth (hat tip: FrankG) – the food reward perspective seems to me an incomplete explanation for what is going on. It puts a lot of weight on a transition from highly palatable (Thai, Japanese, Chinese) food to “hyperpalatable” (American, junk) food as an explanation for obesity and diabetes. It seems to me that the lack of nutrients and abundance of toxins in the junk food may be just as important as its “hyperpalatability.” It’s the inability of the junk food to satisfy that is the problem, not its palatability.

I’m glad that the food reward perspective may start being tested against Asian experiences. That may shed a lot of light on these issues.

Is Shou-Ching to blame for our rice habit?

Posted by on June 23, 2011 140 comments

I thought I’d interrupt the lipid series to talk about the place of rice in our diet. This is also an opportunity to explain to those who haven’t read the book the logic underlying our diet.

The occasion: Cliff at PaleoHacks questioned our endorsement of white rice:

White rice is touted to be basically pure starch by Paul Jaminet on the basis that Asian people eat it so it must be healthy right?

Not exactly. Cliff goes on to express concern about phytate toxicity and low nutrient density. Rose (in the comments) was concerned about beriberi (thiamin deficiency disease).

There were a lot of great replies, especially Melissa McEwen’s. (Melissa found some statistics on the fraction of phytate destroyed by cooking, and improved Wikipedia’s data on phytic acid content of foods.) I got a laugh out of John Naruwan’s answer (which he intended to be humorous):

My theory on Jaminet’s apparent love of white rice is his Chinese wife. My own wife is Chinese (well, Taiwanese). When I explain that maybe white rice is not so good for optimal health, I get the speech about Chinese people eating rice for thousands of years, blah blah blah. Bottom line: you try telling a Chinese person that rice is anything less than good for you and you happen to be that person’s husband, well, basically you’ll be sleeping on the sofa for a week.

In fact Shou-Ching is as interested in good health as I am. She often makes the point that in traditional Chinese cooking rice was eaten more as a palate cleanser than as a staple calorie source. We like white rice, but if evidence showed it to be unhealthy we’d be equally quick to stop eating it.

And, John – Shou-Ching is so nice, when she gets mad at me she goes out and sleeps on the sofa!

The Logic Behind Our Diet

Although we consider our diet to be a “Paleo” and “Pacific Islander” diet (by the way – read Jamie Scott’s report from Vanuatu if you haven’t already!), we did not construct the diet according to the syllogism, “People (from the Paleolithic, or East Asia, or any other place or time) ate this way, and were healthy, so we should eat that way too.”

Rather, our approach is more reductionist and centered around nutrients and toxins. Our diet aims to simultaneously achieve two ends:

  • Obtain enough of every nutrient to be fully nourished. It shouldn’t be possible to improve health by adding further nutrients.
  • Eat so as to minimize the diet’s toxicity, by eating very little of any one toxin. Since “the dose makes the poison,” tiny quantities of diverse food toxins can be tolerated, but no one toxin should be abundant in the diet.

A third principle is that meals should be tasty and delicious. We believe our innate taste preferences evolved to help us be healthy, and therefore pleasurable meals are healthful meals. (This was our sticking point with Stephan Guyenet’s interpretation of food reward: see Thoughts on Obesity Inspired by Stephan, June 2, 2011.) Apart from healthfulness, however, we consider tastiness of food to be a positive value in its own right. Luckily we believe the most healthful diet is also the tastiest!

The Place of Rice in Our Diet

Any food which is low in toxins can be included in our diet. Low toxicity is the key, because a missing nutrient can be obtained from other foods – or from a multivitamin or supplement. But there are usually no antidotes to a toxic food.

Rice is very low in toxicity. Most rice toxins reside in the bran, so milled white rice is already low in toxins. The great majority of white rice toxins are destroyed in cooking.

As a result, cooked white rice is almost toxin free. Cliff worried about phytic acid, but the amounts in cooked white rice are small – lower than almost all other seeds, nuts, grains, and legumes, and about one-twentieth the level found in such foods as sesame seeds, Brazilnuts, and pinto beans, as Wikipedia (and Melissa) have pointed out.

Phytic acid is also not all that dangerous. It is a mineral chelator, which leads to minerals being excreted rather than absorbed. The primary risk is that it will induce a mineral deficiency. Because phytic acid preferentially binds iron, which can be dangerous, some advocate its supplementation.

We don’t agree with that, but we don’t consider the small amount of phytic acid in rice to be dangerous, especially given that we recommend a mineral-rich diet and supplementation with both a multivitamin and specific key minerals.

Optimize Diet, Not Foods

Nutrient density of an individual food is not an overriding concern. Only the diet needs to be optimized – not individual foods. It’s OK to eat a food that is low in nutrient density if other nutrient-rich foods make up for it.

Our diet derives only about 20% of calories from carbs. Even for rice lovers, rice is unlikely to provide more than half that, or 10% of energy. If rice is half as nutrient dense as alternative “Paleo” starches, it diminishes nutrient intake by only 5%. That’s easy enough to make up by eating more vegetables, liver, and eggs – or by taking a multivitamin.

Many Paleo dieters speak of “cheat” foods, as if it was somehow immoral, or a violation of the diet, to eat them. There are no “cheat foods” on our diet.

For instance, we’ll often eat strawberries with whipped cream sweetened with rice syrup. This is low in nutrients, but also low in toxins. It would not do as the primary food of the day, but as a dessert or snack it is quite healthy.

Glucose is a Nutrient

This is a point many low-carb dieters seem to forget. Macronutrients are nutrients too.

The body needs glucose. Glycoproteins and polysaccharide molecules like glycosaminoglycans are important structural components of the body; certain cell types rely on glucose for energy; and the immune system relies on glucose for generation of reactive oxygen species to kill pathogens.

If no carbs are eaten, the body has to generate glucose from protein. Glucose production may be insufficient or suboptimal. That was the point of our Zero-Carb Dangers series.

Of course, in excess glucose could become a toxin. But the same can be said for protein and polyunsaturated fats. We don’t exclude meat or salmon from the diet because they can be over-eaten. One shouldn’t exclude rice either.

Conclusion

A healthy diet should contain a diversity of foods. This will reduce the diet’s toxicity, improve micronutrient ratios, and increase meal pleasurability.

Rice should not provide a large share of dietary calories – probably not more than 10% – but there is no reason to reject it merely because it is a grain. True, it comes from a bad family. But it’s the good child. Don’t hold its relatives against it.

Rice Noodle Lasagna

Posted by on December 19, 2010 31 comments

Probably everyone knows how to make lasagna, but as it’s one of our favorite foods we thought we’d post a recipe. Lasagna makes a healthy meal if it’s made with rice, not wheat, noodles.

The key to great lasagna is the sauce. Today we started with 80% ground beef and let the fat from the beef act as our oil.

Once it’s brown we add onions,

Shiitake mushrooms:

Spinach and sauce:

The finished sauce looks like this:

We get a long, flat pre-cooked rice noodle that looks like this:

But any rice noodle will do, it doesn’t need to make a solid layer. Asian groceries will have several varieties of rice noodle.

In a ceramic casserole dish, put a layer of sauce in the bottom, then a layer of noodles:

Add ricotta and mozzarella cheese on top of the noodles, and then start again with sauce:

When it’s ready, bake it for 40 minutes or so at 325 degrees Fahrenheit. We lost track of time and overcooked it a bit, it came out looking like this:

It still tasted great!