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Paleo Magazine Radio: Berlin PaleoCon and the Globalization of Paleo

Posted by on August 28, 2015 1 comment

Note: The recipe for PHD Baby Food will be posted Monday.

I had the great pleasure of traveling to Germany in July for the first-ever German Paleo Convention, a fun event modeled on PaleoFX; a meeting of the German Paleo Medical Society; and an event at the world’s first PHD gourmet restaurant, Life! Restaurant for Body and Soul on the Konigsallee in Dusseldorf. (See The First PHD Gourmet Restaurant: Life! Restaurant.)

Soon after my return I was interviewed by Tony Federico of Paleo Magazine Radio, to discuss the globalization of Paleo and especially the growing interest in Europe. Our interview is now live: Paleo Going Global with Paul Jaminet – PMR #93.

Tony and I briefly discussed the Perfect Health Retreat. The October retreat (October 10-17) is almost sold out, so if you are interested in coming please contact us quickly. We’ve also scheduled next May’s retreat for April 30 to May 7, and are now accepting reservations. There will be a small price increase starting with the May 2016 retreat, but any reservations received by December 31 will receive 2015 prices.

To learn about the retreat, visit the web pages under the Perfect Health Retreat tab, starting here. To reserve a room or for more information, please contact Paul Jaminet at paul@perfecthealthretreat.com.

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Luke, the First Year

Posted by on August 27, 2015 50 comments

Today is Luke’s first birthday, and Katherine Morrison wants me to spill the beans:

Paul Jaminet, we know you’re so very busy with work and family but if you have a moment, we’d love a photo update of your sweet boy (or the whole family!) and an update about how things are going generally; how long it took for him to get have more organized circadian rhythyms; how and when he took to solids; what he’s eating now. If there’s anything else you’d like to share about your parenting journey, we’d love to hear that too.

That’s a lot of ground to cover. Here’s a little photo and video update, and a recipe for PHD baby food.

Luke’s growth

Here’s a photo of Luke at age 1 month:

Luke at age 1 month

You can see photos of Luke at age 3 months in my previous post about Luke’s baptism. Here’s one from February, age 6 months:

Luke Jaminet in his hat 2015-02-22

The hat was knitted by a guest at our October 2014 Perfect Health Retreat. (Thank you Deidre!).

Luke has gotten his teeth in earlier than the other babies he plays with. He started getting teeth at 4 months, had eight teeth by age eight months, and teeth 9 through 12 have sprouted up this August. Here’s a photo from the May Perfect Health Retreat, age 9 months, showing off his teeth:

Luke at May 2015 Perfect Health Retreat 07

Luke is lean and strong, athletic and venturesome, and quick to smile. He rarely crawls on hands and knees – he’ll occasionally crawl on one or two knees when on a very smooth soft surface, but much more often he bear crawls, keeping his knees off the ground. Recently, he’s begun walking. Here’s a video from last weekend, showing him walking, bear crawling, and babbling:

Luke’s circadian rhythms

We’ve had no problems here. He’s always slept very well and kept a regular schedule. When he was very young, he had a clear 4 hour cycle. At night he would sleep 3.5 hours, feed for half an hour, and go immediately back to sleep for another 3.5 hours. In the day he would be awake 3 hours and sleep 1 hour.

For some time now he’s been on a two-nap schedule. He sleeps at night from about 9:30 pm to 6:30 am. Sometimes he sleeps through the night, sometimes he gets up to feed once. In the day, he naps from about 10:30 am to 11:30 am and from 4 pm to 5 pm. He generally goes outdoors to play for an hour before each nap, then comes home, feeds, and falls asleep.

We didn’t do anything special except keep him on our own rhythms — including 12 hours of orange-red light at night and 12 hours of bright natural light in the day — and take him outdoors for 2 hours of sun, people watching, and activity each day, one hour in the morning and one in the afternoon.

Luke’s night waking seems to be driven almost entirely by hunger. A large feeding before bedtime, or better yet a meal rich in carbohydrate and glycine (from collagen), helps his sleep. We give him a soup with rice, fruit, and bone-and-joint stock before bed, flavored with a bit of coconut milk or egg yolks, vinegar, and drop of fish sauce.

Most other parents strike me as fearful of nature. Children are bundled up and shielded from the sun. We would take Luke out in a diaper and onesie, so he would get sun on arms and legs, carry him to get exercise ourselves, and let him crawl barefoot; the other babies would have layers of clothing, hats, and shoes, and be pushed in strollers with sunshields for further protection. In this aspect, we are much more ancestral in our parenting.

Luke’s food

Luke was exclusively breast fed through age 3 months, after which we started using formula. To make up for some of the deficits of formula, we supplemented it a bit:

  • To make up for the missing milk oligosaccharides, a form of fiber that is fermented by gut bacteria to produce short-chain fatty acids, we added a bit of vinegar to Luke’s formula.
  • To make up for the missing nucleotides, we added a drop of fish sauce.
  • To make up for missing cholesterol and other lipids, we added some egg yolk.

We tries to minimize egg protein in his food by puncturing the yolk sac and draining the insides into the milk, rather than adding the whole yolk to the milk.

At age 5 months or so, we introduced solid food in the form of chicken rice congee, but within a few weeks we developed a recipe that will be given in a followup post. We made up a PHD meal suitable for infants, pureed it with a blender, and mixed it into his milk. He soon came to love this “PHD milk” and started to refuse plain formula.

Luke has never had cheerios, rice puffs, or any of the other processed foods that pediatricians recommend. He eats our food or his “PHD milk”. White rice is our equivalent of cheerios.

At about age 6 months, we started sharing our food with him as we ate. Feeding him this way is a little slow and when he gets really hungry, “PHD milk” is always the best option.

We introduced new foods gradually, out of concern that he might react badly to something. For example, he tried avocado for the first time at his 7 month birthday. But so far, Luke has enjoyed every food we have given him, and there has been no sign of any sensitivity or adverse reaction. He loves chocolate – so much so that for a while he would root in the trash for old chocolate wrappers in the hope of finding chocolate inside – and is not very interested in cucumber, but has never refused to eat any food. His favorite everyday food is Daddy’s lunch, typically rice, meat, and vegetables drenched in egg yolks, coconut milk, vinegar, and fish sauce. After every meal, we give him fruit for dessert.

When he was just beginning to eat solid food on his own, I had a surprise. Sitting on the sofa working on my laptop, I gave him a banana to play with. He became very quiet and I didn’t pay attention to him for about ten minutes. Then I looked over. The whole banana was gone, but for a few shards of the peel, and Luke had brown banana peel fragments smeared over his face and clothes. He had eaten the whole banana, peel and all! He looked at me a little nervously, as if fearful he had done something wrong, then gave me a big smile.

Luke after eating whole banana 2015-04-09

That was in April, at age 7½ months.

Luke was very pleased when we first gave him beef fat – we gave him trimmed fat from a sirloin steak before giving him the meat. He loves to eat ribs and will gnaw the bones for quite a while:

Luke with a bone

He’s been out to restaurants several times. Here is his first taste of restaurant sushi – salmon roe and avocado with rice:

Luke sushi July 2015 03

We recently let him try dairy for the first time. Here he is having sampled yogurt:

Luke after first yogurt

Coming up next: our recipe for “PHD milk”. This is still the dominant food in Luke’s diet.

Melanie M. on the Perfect Health Retreat

Posted by on August 25, 2015 No comments

Melanie is a lovely young lady who didn’t want to record a video, but gave us a written testimonial. She wrote at the end of the retreat:

If this was simply a seaside vacation it would be well worth the price, but it also gives you the ability to become healthy again, no matter how severe your health problems, or how long you have been suffering from them. That is priceless.

There is a saying that “not all doctors are healers, and not all healers are doctors.” I think anyone who has been on this retreat will agree that our friend Paul is a healer in the true sense. It is going to be difficult for me to go home to my situation and do everything I now know I need to do to get healthy again, but I am going to do it.

This August, ten months later, I asked Melanie for an update. She wrote:

Sadly it turned out I was only able to do the diet off and on since coming home. My main difficulty has been in generating the extra effort it takes to care for myself while also being the caregiver for my grandfather, who has dementia and terminal cancer.

Recently my mom and I have been trying very hard again at the diet part of it, and have been successful for a full month now. When we are able to maintain the diet, we do notice a great improvement in mental fog, and we visibly lose inflammation in our faces (and in Mom’s ankles). My skin also clears up on PHD, and my mom has less digestive trouble, which I think is a sign that it could help cure her GERD over time. I am really happy with my brain function right now, I feel like my ADD symptoms are vastly improved, and I am dealing with stress much better lately. Remember the awful sciatic pain I had during the retreat? That pain is gone after doing PHD this past month. That is motivation to keep going for sure!

I have not lost weight yet, which is my own fault, but the longer I can keep doing PHD, the better my quality of life becomes, which is equally important.

Thank you, Melanie. I believe weight loss generally follows upon health improvements, so I suspect you’ll be losing weight soon.

We are taking reservations now for the next Perfect Health Retreat to be held October 10-17, 2015; and for the following retreat, April 30-May 7, 2016. Don’t miss this opportunity for a luxurious vacation combined with a week of learning that will pay a lifetime of dividends.

To learn about the retreat, visit the various web pages under the Perfect Health Retreat tab, starting here. To reserve a room or for more information, please contact Paul Jaminet at paul@perfecthealthretreat.com or Whitney Ross Gray at whitney@perfecthealthretreat.com.

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Are Bigger Muscles Better? Antioxidants and the Response to Exercise

Posted by on July 16, 2015 58 comments

We’re positive toward some dietary antioxidants:

  • Vitamin C is one of our supplement recommendations.
  • We also recommend higher-than-typical dietary intakes of zinc and copper, key ingredients of the antioxidant zinc-copper superoxide dismutase.
  • We recommend high intakes of extracellular matrix material in soups and stews. This is rich in glycine, a component of glutathione, a key antioxidant. N-acetylcysteine, which provides the other amino acid component of glutathione, is one of our therapeutic supplements.
  • Although we don’t normally recommend supplementing vitamin E, it is listed among our optional supplements, and we believe significant numbers of people might benefit from supplementing mixed tocotrienols.
  • Although we don’t recommend supplementing it, our book notes the importance of dietary intake of selenium, which is critical for an enzyme that recycles glutathione.

A fashionable contrary view has arisen: antioxidants not only don’t help, they can do harm by interfering with oxidative signaling pathways.

Adel Moussa, proprietor of Suppversity, has promulgated this view, especially the idea that antioxidants interfere with the response to exercise. In a post last week, “Bad News For Vitamin Fans – C + E Supplementation Blunts Increases in Total Lean Body and Leg Mass in Elderly Men After 12 Weeks of Std. Intense Strength Training,” he looked at a new study by Bjørnsen et al [1]. In the comments here, Spor asked me to address Adel’s post, and other readers expressed interest too.

The Bjørnsen Study: Muscle Size

In this new study, Bjørnsen and collaborators put a group of elderly men on a strength training regimen. Half the men were put on supplements – 1000 mg per day of vitamin C and 235 mg (350 IU) per day of the alpha-tocopherol form of vitamin E – and half on placebo. They then assessed the response to 12 weeks of exercise.

Both groups gained muscle mass, but the placebo group gained more. Total lean mass, and the thickness of the rectus femoris muscle (one of the quadriceps), increased more in the placebo than the antioxidant group. The lean mass increase averaged 3.9% in the placebo group, 1.4% in the antioxidant group. Here’s the plot of muscle thickness in the rectus femoris:

Bjornsen Fig 1

This muscle increased in thickness an average of 16.2% in the placebo group, 10.9% in the antioxidant group.

So far, so solid: it looks like muscle size will be larger if you don’t take antioxidants.

Adel concludes:

[Y]ou shouldn’t fall for … the bogus false promise that suffocating all the flames by using exorbitant amounts of antioxidants (and I am as this study shows talking about 10x the RDA not just 100x the RDA) would be good for you, let alone your training progress and muscle gains…. [Y]ou cannot recommend extra-vitamins for people who work out – specifically not the elderly.

I disagree.

The Trouble with Biomarkers

We have to use biomarkers to assess health, because the things we really care about – like how long we will live – cannot be determined on the time scales we need to make decisions in.

But no biomarker is a perfect assessment of health. There are always regimes in which a biomarker can look “better” but health can worsen.

Muscle size is no different. Other things being equal, more muscle is better than less muscle. But there are ways to increase muscle size that harm health. We have to look at the increase in muscle size in the placebo group and ask: was this good or bad?

The Bjørnsen Study: Strength

Fortunately, Bjørnsen and colleagues also reported another key biomarker: strength, as indicated by 1 rep maximum weight. Here is the data:

Bjornsen Fig 2

The exercises that utilize the rectus femoris muscle, the one that grew biggest in the placebo group, are the leg extension (b) and leg press (c). And here we see something interesting: in both cases, the antioxidant group increased their 1RM by more than the placebo group. Yes, the improvement was not statistically significant. But it was there. According to the text, on average, the antioxidant group increased their leg press 1RM by 18.7%, the placebo group by 15.8%.

So the antioxidant group gained more strength but less size than the placebo group. Which group was made healthier by the program?

I’ll put my money down on this: the smaller muscle that can exert more force is the healthier muscle. A gargantuan but weak muscle is an unhealthy muscle.

Large Muscle Size Can Be a Sign of Poor Health

To see that large muscles may be unhealthy, consider the health condition of cardiomegaly – an enlarged heart. When the heart tissue is dysfunctional and incapable of exerting as much strength as it should, the heart grows larger to compensate. People who have such an oversized but weak heart often die an early death.

We should consider whether something similar was going on in the placebo group of the Bjørnsen study. Their leg muscles grew larger to compensate for weakness. They needed more mass to accomplish less than the antioxidant group.

What causes cardiomegaly? One contributing factor is a deficiency of antioxidants. When antioxidants are deficient, oxidative stress generated during exertion leads to lipid peroxidation and tissue necrosis.

One of my favorite nutritional studies – I always show it at the Perfect Health Retreat to demonstrate the existence of multi-nutrient deficiency diseases, diseases that appear only when you are deficient in multiple nutrients at the same time – is a study by Kristina Hill and collaborators at Vanderbilt in 2001. [2] The running title is “Myopathy resulting from combined Se and E deficiency” and that summarizes it well. Guinea pigs were put on one of four diets – a control diet, the control diet but deficient in vitamin E, the control diet but deficient in selenium, or the control diet with both vitamin E and selenium removed.

Something interesting happened to the guinea pig muscles:

Bjornsen Fig 3

These are quadriceps muscles – the same muscle whose size was altered in the Bjørnsen study. Panel (D) shows a healthy muscle from the control group. The muscle fibers are long, straight, and parallel to one another. Panels (B) and (C), the low vitamin E and low selenium groups respectively, are mildly damaged but still functional. However, in panel (A), the group deprived of both selenium and vitamin E, the muscle fibers are severely damaged. This muscle cannot exert force.

In the group deprived of both selenium and vitamin E, the loss of strength continued until the guinea pigs could no longer stand or move. At that point they lost the ability to feed and began to die of starvation. This happened in as little as 30 days. Here was the survival curve:

Bjornsen Fig 4

The last guinea pig died after 55 days.

Why did this happen? The guinea pig muscles were damaged by lipid peroxidation leading to cell death. They didn’t have enough antioxidants.

Hill et al didn’t measure muscle thickness, but it wouldn’t surprise me if at 20 days the guinea pigs on their way to an early death had the thickest and most massive quadriceps.

Can Muscle Size Be Used as an Indicator of Overtraining?

If growth in muscle size may indicate muscle damage from either overtraining or antioxidant deficiencies, we might be able to use the response to exercise to assess nutrition or exercise load.

Let’s look again at the Bjørnsen study. If the cross-sectional area of a muscle is proportional to the square of muscle thickness, then we can get a measure of strength per unit cross-section by taking the ratio of leg press 1RM to the square of rectus femoris thickness. That is 1.187/1.109^2 = 0.965 in the antioxidant group, 1.158/1.162^2 = 0.857 in the placebo group. Per unit cross-section, the antioxidant group lost 3.5% in strength, the placebo group lost 14.3%.

It looks like both groups may have damaged their muscles; the antioxidant group just did much less damage. It appears both groups were overtraining relative to their nutritional status. Perhaps if nutrition were better, the response to exercise would have been better, and strength per unit cross-section would have increased. Maybe the missing nutrients included antioxidants, and taking even more antioxidants may have enabled this rigorous training regimen (designed “to stimulate as much muscle growth as possible”) to take place without any impairment of health.

Is Bodybuilding Safe?

If large size can be an indication of damage in muscle, then many techniques which cause muscular hypertrophy will be health-damaging. The healthiest strength gains might come with only small size gains, as the muscle becomes more efficient. It is only unhealthy muscle that becomes super large.

If so, then bodybuilders, who are judged on the size of their muscles, not their strength, will be tempted to use health-damaging and muscle-damaging techniques, like antioxidant deficiencies, to expand their muscle mass. Presumably the winning bodybuilders will be those who use all effective techniques to grow muscle, including the health-damaging ones. So we should expect champion bodybuilders to die young.

I have not seen statistical evidence, but anecdotal lore suggests that champion bodybuilders do, indeed, die young, often of heart diseases (indicating muscle damage). Here are two Youtube videos memorializing bodybuilders who died young:

Conclusion

If you want me to believe that antioxidants are bad, the Bjørnsen study is not going to do it. It looks to me that the elderly men who were in the antioxidant group were the lucky ones. The 1000 mg of vitamin C and 350 IU of vitamin E they were taking daily improved their response to exercise. Indeed, for all we know their antioxidant intake may have been less than optimal!

The elderly men who didn’t get the antioxidants should worry about their hearts. If their leg muscles became large but weak, their hearts may have also.

Everyone who works out should be aware: when it comes to muscles, bigger is not the same as better. The healthiest muscles are those in a wiry physique – modest size, but able to exert a lot of force.

Finally, a pitch for our upcoming October 10-17 Perfect Health Retreat. Our advice is sensible, comprehensive, and increasingly well supported by guest experience. If you want to learn how to optimize health for the rest of your life, and have a great time doing it, please come join us.

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References

[1] Bjørnsen T et al. Vitamin C and E supplementation blunts increases in total lean body mass in elderly men after strength training. Scand J Med Sci Sports. 2015 Jul 1. http://pmid.us/26129928.

[2] Hill KE et al. Combined selenium and vitamin E deficiency causes fatal myopathy in guinea pigs. J Nutr. 2001 Jun;131(6):1798-802. http://pmid.us/11385070.