Category Archives: Diets - Page 18

Are the Boston Red Sox Malnourished?

Posted by on October 11, 2010 45 comments

Last Thursday’s post was mainly concerned with Abby’s bone injury that refused to heal. I noted that four nutrients – vitamins C, D, and K2, and magnesium – were essential for bone health, and that deficiencies could have contributed both to Abby’s injury and her slow healing.

Today’s post is about another group of people who frequently break their bones and don’t heal well:  the Boston Red Sox.

Injury-Prone Sox

Those who follow baseball may know that a promising 2010 Red Sox season was sabotaged by a rash of broken bones:

  • Centerfielder Jacoby Ellsbury missed 144 games with hairline fractures in four ribs; they failed to heal properly and re-fractured months after the initial injury.
  • Second baseman Dustin Pedroia missed all but two games after breaking his foot June 25.
  • Catcher Victor Martinez missed a month with a broken thumb.
  • Backup catcher Jason Varitek played just five games after breaking his foot on July 2.

There were muscle and joint injuries too, but let’s stick to bones.

Is it possible the Red Sox players are suffering from micronutrient deficiencies?

The Red Sox Hire a Dietitian

A few years ago the Red Sox hired a professional dietitian to advise their players: Tara Mardigan of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

Ms Mardigan is a lovely woman, a marathoner and former gymnast, with a charming personality that shines through in radio interviews. She obtained her position with the Red Sox after meeting Red Sox president Larry Lucchino at a charity breakfast.

But what is her diet advice, and which players are taking it? I found a hint about the latter question in an interview in the student newspaper at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science, where Ms Mardigan studied:

I stopped working full-time at Dana-Farber to accommodate working with the Red Sox, and luckily they have a great relationship with the team so I was able to reduce my hours.  I also work with the Red Sox’s minor league teams, the Lowell Spinners, Pawtucket Red Sox, and Portland Sea Dogs. This is where I really make changes.  I work with young guys who are interesting in learning about how nutrition can improve their performance.  They are hungry to get to the big leagues. It’s great to see them move up into the major league, and then become someone like Jacoby Ellsbury (Left Field/Center Field) who is now well-versed in nutrition.

Uh oh! Jacoby Ellsbury, who managed only 18 games in 2010, whose bones break on incidental contact and whose hairline fractures won’t heal in six months, is the dietitian’s prize pupil?

The Dietitian Advises Avoiding Supplements

The Friedman School interview didn’t tell us much about Ms. Mardigan’s dietary recommendations, other than that she opposes most nutritional supplements:

I try to get them to choose food before supplements, and only supplements when necessary. Athletes are vulnerable and think [supplements] are well made and well regulated, and they are shocked when they find out they are not.

Those who have read our book know that we have a chapter titled “Why Moderns are Malnourished” which explains why modern agriculturally-produced foods and treated water don’t provide enough micronutrients, and why supplements are needed to optimize health.

Among the micronutrients for which supplementation is most needed are vitamin K2 and magnesium – two crucial nutrients for bone health.

What Is Her Diet Advice?

To get an idea of what diet she might be recommending, I looked at the Dana-Farber nutrition team web site, and was surprised to see this graphic illustration of their “Optimal Diet plan for cancer survivors”:

Yikes! No fats, and no mention of healthy plant foods like starchy tubers. A quarter of the diet is toxic grains and the protein may be derived from toxic legumes. It looks like roughly 70% of calories come from carbs and 25% from protein.

Later in the page they suggest such omega-6-rich oils as soybean oil, canola oil, flaxseed oil, wheat germ oil, and walnuts – all eliminated on the Perfect Health Diet.

It seems Ms Mardigan has recommended a similar diet to the Red Sox. From the Dana-Farber site:

On staff with the club since January 2006, she attends most home games to meet with players and make sure grilled chicken, steamed vegetables, and other healthful options are available in the team dining room.

Vegetables and lean protein, just like the Dana Farber diet. Another clue from this interview:

“My diet is very restricted right now, but Tara has been wonderful at helping me figure out what I can eat, like certain thick-skinned fruits and soy products,” says Anne Forgit, a leukemia patient and recent bone marrow transplant recipient.

Soy products. As readers of our book know, this is a highly toxic food.

Ms Mardigan does have a personal home page. The only clues I found there to her diet advice reside on her “Resources” page, where she recommends Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food and  Dr. Walter Willett’s Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy. Pollan is a journalism professor who has made a career attacking industrial agriculture, and has likened the Atkins diet to an eating disorder. He seems to avoid specific diet advice, but it looks like he favors grains and omega-6-rich plant fats over animal fats. Dr. Willett is mentioned in our book, where we object to his opposition to coconut oil and saturated fat. He is a promoter of polyunsaturated fat and whole grain consumption.

If this is what Ms Mardigan is recommending to the Red Sox, it’s no wonder their bones are breaking:

  • Grains are toxic to bones. Wheat, oats, and other grains induce rickets, a softening of the bones that leads to frequent fractures. (This is discussed extensively in our book, and has been known since Mellanby’s original experimental investigations into rickets in dogs [1].)
  • Omega-6 polyunsaturated fats reduce bone mineral density. [2]

The Missing Nutrients

So the Red Sox players are being recommended a diet that is highly toxic to bones. But what about the key bone nutrients?  Are they lacking in those as well?

The answer is almost certainly yes. The fat-soluble nutrients are critical to bone remodeling, and it seems the Red Sox diet is completely lacking in vitamin K2.  Plant sources of vitamin K1 aren’t sufficient for bones, and animal sources of K2 seem to be excluded from the Red Sox diet.

Bone fracture rates are very strongly dependent on vitamin K2 levels. Most people are deficient, and supplementation with K2 reduces risk of vertebral fractures by 60%, hip fractures by 77%, and non-vertebral fractures by a remarkable 81%. [3]

If that happens on ordinary diets, the reduction in fracture rates would probably be even more remarkable on a K2-empty diet like the one that has been recommended to the Red Sox.

Conclusion

If a biomedical scientist were asked to contrive a diet that maximized the likelihood of bone fractures, the advice would be:

  1. Eat lots of grains to induce rickets.
  2. Eat vegetable oils and non-tropical fatty plants to reduce bone mineral density.
  3. Avoid animal and dairy fats to deprive the body of fat-soluble vitamins needed for bone mineralization, such as vitamin K2.
  4. Do not take nutritional supplements, in order to maintain a deficiency of bone nutrients.

It seems that this is precisely the advice that is being given to the Red Sox and their minor league players.

This year’s broken bones cost the Red Sox a chance at a World Series. The player who followed this diet advice most rigorously, Jacoby Ellsbury, lost a full season to bone fractures, and his injury history could cost him millions when he becomes a free agent next year.

As a lifelong Red Sox fan, I beseech the team to reconsider their diet advice.

References

[1] Mellanby E. (March 15 1919) An experimental investigation on rickets. The Lancet 193(4985):407-412. Reprinted in Nutrition. 1989 Mar-Apr; 5(2): 81-6; discussion 87. http://pmid.us/2520279.

[2] Watkins BA et al. Dietary ratio of n-6/n-3 PUFAs and docosahexaenoic acid: actions on bone mineral and serum biomarkers in ovariectomized rats. J Nutr Biochem. 2006 Apr;17(4):282-9. http://pmid.us/16102959. Watkins BA et al. Dietary ratio of (n-6)/(n-3) polyunsaturated fatty acids alters the fatty acid composition of bone compartments and biomarkers of bone formation in rats. J Nutr. 2000 Sep;130(9):2274-84. http://pmid.us/10958824.

[3] Cockayne S et al. Vitamin K and the prevention of fractures: systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Arch Intern Med. 2006 Jun 26;166(12):1256-61. http://pmid.us/16801507.

Wheat and Obesity: More from the China Study

Posted by on September 4, 2010 40 comments

Obesity seems to have the same cause the world over, in both humans and lab animals: It results from food toxicity compounded by malnourishment.

The most important food toxins are cereal grains (especially wheat), omega-6-rich vegetable oils, and fructose from sugar and corn syrup.

The United States government in its wisdom chose to give agricultural subsidies to wheat, corn, and soybeans, thus reducing the price of the most toxic food crops. The natural result was to make Americans the fattest people in the world, as this chart comparing body-mass index (BMI) in 30 countries attests (from http://diabetescure101.com/BMI.htm, via Matthew Yglesias):

Look at the two low-obesity countries at the left of the chart: Japan and Korea are the only two Asian countries in the sample. What are they doing right?

Well, everything:

  • Their staple starch is rice, not wheat. Rice is the only non-toxic cereal grain and one of our “safe starches.”
  • They consume far less vegetable oils than Americans.
  • They consume far less sugar than Americans.

With a minimally toxic diet, it’s almost impossible to become obese.

Of the three main toxins, which is the most important single factor in causing obesity?

An interesting place to look for an answer is the China Study. Since some regions of China traditionally eat wheat and others rice, the China Study is especially effective at distinguishing the obesity-promoting effects of wheat toxins. The China Study compiled massive epidemiological data by region, including correlations between wheat and rice consumption and body weight and body-mass index (BMI).

Denise Minger, who is fast making herself the world’s leading interpreter of the China Study, has continued her analysis of the raw data. Denise points out that in China, wheat eaters are “fatter with fewer calories”:

In both China Study I and II, wheat is the strongest positive predictor of body weight (r = 0.65, p<0.001) out of any diet variable. And it’s not just because wheat eaters are taller, either, because wheat consumption also strongly correlates with body mass index (r = 0.58, p<0.001). 

Here is the data in pictures:

Denise goes on to point out that the correlation of BMI with wheat intake is 56%, with calorie intake only 13%.

It seems the evidence is consistent.  It’s not eating more calories that makes a person fat. It’s overdosing on toxins – especially wheat toxins.

Migraine Sufferers Should Try a Ketogenic Diet

Posted by on September 2, 2010 113 comments

Anyone with an impairment of brain or neurological function – whether mental illness, depression, seizures, brain cancer, headaches, neuropathy, brain infections, or any other neurological condition – should try a ketogenic diet to see if it improves the condition.

 “Ketogenic” means that the diet causes the liver to manufacture ketones. Ketones are small water-soluble compounds that are metabolized like fats. Unlike fats, they do not need carnitine transport to reach mitochondria. They can be used for energy by every mitochondria-containing human cell type. This makes them one of the most disease-resistant sources of dietary energy. There are few things that can go wrong with ketone metabolism.

Ketogenic diets have several major benefits for neurological conditions:

  • They relieve neuronal starvation from cognitive hypoglycemia of any cause.
  • They stimulate the innate immune response against intracellular pathogens, helping to heal brain infections.

Recent work has identified a third benefit from ketogenic diets: They eliminate an excess of glutamate. In a carbon isotope study, feeding the ketone beta-hydroxybutyrate in place of glucose caused less glutamate to be formed in the brain:

The amount of (13)C incorporation and cellular content was lower for glutamate and higher for aspartate in the presence of [2,4-(13)C]beta-hydroxybutyrate as opposed to [1,6-(13)C]glucose. [1]

This is important because excessive brain glutamate is “excitotoxic” and kills neurons. Glutamate excitotoxicity causes damage in a host of conditions including

spinal cord injury, stroke, traumatic brain injury and neurodegenerative diseases of the central nervous system (CNS) such as multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson’s disease, alcoholism or alcohol withdrawal and Huntington’s disease. [2]

Other diseases in which damage from glutamate excitotoxicity is important include epilepsy, schizophrenia and various mood and anxiety disorders.

Migraines and Glutamate

My sister’s husband gets frequent migraines, so I keep an eye out for papers about migraines. A new paper in Nature Genetics finds that people with common migraine tend to have a mutation in a regulatory sequence for genes that control glutamate abundance. [3]

People with the mutation are prone to glutamate excitotoxicity:

[A] DNA variation found between the PGCP and MTDH/AEG-1 genes on chromosome 8 appears to be associated with increased susceptibility to common migraine. The variant appears to alter the activity of MTDH/AEG-1 in cells, which regulates the activity of the EAAT2 gene: the EAAT2 protein is responsible for clearing glutamate from brain synapses in the brain….

“Although we knew that the EAAT2 gene has a crucial role to play in neurological processes in human and potentially in the development of migraine, until now, no genetic link has been identified to suggest that glutamate accumulation in the brain could play a role in common migraine,” says co-senior author of the study Professor Christian Kubisch of University of Ulm, Germany (previously at the University of Cologne where he conducted his research for this study.) “This research opens the door for new studies to look in depth at the biology of the disease and how this alteration in particular may exert its effect.” [4]

If glutamate excitotoxicity causes migraines, then it’s likely that migraine sufferers would benefit from a ketogenic diet.

How Do You Eat a Ketogenic Diet?

The safest and healthiest way to eat a ketogenic diet is by:

  • Restricting carbohydrate consumption to 200 calories per day from “safe starches” like rice, taro, and sweet potatoes.  70 grams of cooked white rice, 150 grams of taro, and 300 grams of sweet potato are an appropriate daily ration.
  • Eating massive amounts of coconut oil. The short-chain fats in coconut oil are the most “ketogenic” of foods, i.e. the most readily turned into ketone bodies. 6 to 8 fluid ounces (12 to 14 tablespoons) per day of coconut oil is an appropriate daily ration.

Supplements with vitamin C and selenium should also be increased on a ketogenic diet.

Conclusion

Research on ketogenic diets as a therapy has focused on epilepsy for decades, with some recent interest in using these diets as a therapy for brain cancer. But really, they are likely to be helpful against nearly all brain and neurological conditions, and probably all solid tumor cancers and many infectious diseases as well.

Rather than waiting for the glacial progress of modern biomedical research, which needs decades to assemble sufficient evidence to get an application for funding for a clinical trial past skeptical reviewers, anyone with a brain or neurological condition should simply experiment with a ketogenic diet themselves to see if it helps. Odds are it will.

References

[1] Lund TM et al. Availability of neurotransmitter glutamate is diminished when beta-hydroxybutyrate replaces glucose in cultured neurons. J Neurochem. 2009 Jul;110(1):80-91. http://pmid.us/19457063.

[2] Wikipedia, “Excitotoxicity,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excitotoxicity.

[3] International Headache Genetics Consortium et al. Genome-wide association study of migraine implicates a common susceptibility variant on 8q22.1. Nat Genet. 2010 Aug 29. [Epub ahead of print] http://pmid.us/20802479.

[4] “First Genetic Link to Common Migraine Exposed,” Physorg.com, Aug. 29, 2010, http://www.physorg.com/news202139760.html.

The China Study: More Evidence for the Perfect Health Diet

Posted by on August 3, 2010 10 comments

I previously noted that data from the China Study reported by Denise Minger were highly supportive of the Perfect Health Diet. In particular, the China Study supported our claims that:

  1. Animal protein is healthier than plant protein.
  2. Dairy fats are good, but dairy proteins can be problematic.
  3. Grains are bad – especially wheat – but rice is OK.
  4. Calories should come predominantly from fat.

Now, Stan the Heretic has done more work in the raw China Study data and shows charts that support the Perfect Health Diet and similar diets such as Jan Kwasniewski’s Optimal Diet.

What the Perfect Health Diet and the Optimal Diet have in common is that around 65-70% of calories come from fats, not carbs or protein. (The Optimal Diet is a bit higher in protein than carbs, the Perfect Health Diet a bit higher in carbs than protein, but the two are close.) By the standard of both diets, popular diets all over the world have too much carbs and (arguably) too much protein, not enough fats.

So we would expect to see that in China, people who eat more fat have better health, while people who eat fewer carbs or less protein have better health. And that’s exactly what Stan reports.

His charts show that:

  1. Cardiovascular mortality trends down as fat increases, but trends up as carb or protein intake increases.
  2. Cancer mortality trends down as fat increases, but trends up as carb or protein intake increases.

Go to Stan’s site to see the charts!