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Connection, Consciousness, Wisdom

Deep Nutrition

Honestly I didn’t think I would read a book that would change my mind about the MINDDiet. Genius Foods modifies the MINDDiet. It can fit the framework. What’s tough is that many nutritionists and cognitive-optimizers have recommended ketosis for brain benefits. People disagree on proper carb intake. I have to say I’m amazed and thoroughly convinced by Deep Nutrition: Why Your Genes Need Traditional Food, Catherine Shanahan, M.D.

Dr. Shanahan argues we can separate traditional foods (indigenous diets) into four neat categories. We need to eat these as often as we can, preferably daily.

4 Pillars of the Human Diet

“Proved to be essential by virtue of their ubiquitousness.” They proved to be successful by the robust health of their followers.

Shanahan argues health and beauty come from the fabric of the universe. Beautiful people are beautiful because of their health and nutrition. Our genetics have rules for how to grow and develop that are naturally appealing, like the fibonacci sequence and fractals. Poor health and nutrition distort the natural processes and symmetry resulting in unattractive traits. Tough foods that require us to chew help shape developing mouths. Animals in the wild don’t need braces ever! We only need braces now largely because we eat softer foods from cooking. Our foods are now ultra-soft because they were designed that way.

We’re eating an unusual “astronaut” diet never seen in human history before! From babies drinking human designed formula to the packaged and preservative filled foods we eat from the grocery store, we have yet to see the full impact our diet has on health.

Antioxidant supplements can cause oxidative stress or do nothing to help if the chemical environment is not supportive of antioxidation. Vegetable oils must be removed from the diet.

We should cook meat on the bone, especially stews. Cook with skin and fat on. Nutrients are more bio-available after slow cooking. If something has natural foods and each bite packs powerful flavor, that’s where the nutrients are most free and absorbed by the body.

If there’s an excess of protein, sugar, vitamins, and minerals aside from calcium and phosphorous, part is stored in the liver until needed. “Liver is therefore the most outstanding meat which can be purchased.” However, mass-farmed animals likely have low nutrient density and don’t have much excess.

Plants have natural defenses because they don’t want to be eaten! Plants spend a great deal of energy thwarting grazers. To a lesser degree, even fruit has defenses. They don’t want to be grazed to extinction. Fermenting and sprouting counteracts these defenses. Simultaneously these practices help to preserve food naturally and safely. Cheese is fermented in a way where the microbiomes devour the sugar and leave nutrients behind.

Raw milk is very healthy. Pasteurized not better for an individual but for mass production. Milk is one of the few substances meant to actually nurture another creature.

One of the most important take aways from the book is the damage vegetable oil can do to your whole body, especially the brain. Chapter 8 is Brain Killer: Why Vegetable Oil Is Your Brain’s Worst Enemy

“I sincerely hope that you will come to understand why, if you care about your mental health, the single most important product to avoid is a staple so ubiquitous it goes largely unnoticed. I’m talking, of course, about vegetable oil,” page 163.

Vegetable oil is used as a preservative to keep food looking fresh. Think about it, bacteria and other life don’t want to eat this stuff, they stay away. Why are we eating something covered in a substance no other living thing wants to eat? Fat, lipids, are used in every area of our body. Damaged fatty acids like vegetable oils breakdown the integrity of our bodies. Pick up post packaged foods in the grocery store and you will find vegetable oils in many of the top 3 ingredients listed. Avoid any vegetable oil heavily processed by humans like canola oil, safflower oil, soybean oil, etc.

Chapter 11 Beyond Calories, Using Food as a Language to Achieve Ideal Body Weight. Calories in calories out ignores the information food sends to your body. Cells are communicating and understanding on a chemical level. Food as information!

“Our cells are extremely sensitive to the specific nature of the chemical messages we send them every time we eat. By altering the blends of nutrients (or toxins) in our food, we can actually control whether our cells function normally, or convert to fat, or turn cancerous. The nutrients and chemicals we consume in effect tell our cells what to do–when to divide, which protein to manufacture, and even what type of cell to become,” page 281.

Dr. Shanahan gives 4 steps

STEP 1: APPRECIATE WHAT FAT DOES FOR YOU

Body fat, or adipose tissue, “generates chemicals required for sexual development and reproduction, immune defense, blood clotting, circadian rhythm, and even mood and concentration.” An imbalance of fat tissue often causes problems related to these issues.

Chapter 7 covers fats in more detail. The author offers advice from lipid scientists and clears up common misconceptions from bad science and propaganda. The idea that high fat diets are bad for us and our hearts come from heavily processed and artificial fats like margarine. Additionally, high fat and high carb diets don’t work well together. We should be high carb low fat or high fat low carb due to the processing pathways in our bodies.

STEP 2: RID YOUR BODY OF INFLAMMATION

Inflammation is disruptive. It blocks and disrupts cellular signaling. “…pro-inflammatory foods trick individual cells into doing things that are dangerous for the body as a whole. The tendency for processed foods to cause inflammation is one big reason we have to go beyond the calorie content listed on a package to understand how the foods we eat will make us gain or lose weight.”

One of the most insidious problems in the modern diet is oxidated fat which alter every part of body using fat (every cell membrane!). “To successfully avoid eating oxidized fats, you must avoid all foods containing vegetable oils.” Saturated fats actually resist oxidation so much they can block inflammation from overgrowth. “Eating foods like butter, cream, and coconut oil can protect against some of the effects of oxidation and can actually help you lose weight.”

To avoid inflammation, keep total daily sugar intake under 100 grams.

“High fructose corn syrup can make it practically impossible for you to normalize your weigh.”

Sugar itself is pro-inflammatory. 100g or more of sugar a day traps carbs at your liver and converts to fat. “…there’s really no sugar that’s good for you.” A sugar coating on your cells is disruptive.

“Because carbohydrates in your food are converted into sugars, a diet high in pastas, breads, and so on is inherently pro-inflammatory as well. Worse, these starchy foods are so bereft of vitamins and other antioxidants that building a diet around them can make it hard for your body to control oxidation reactions once they start. This puts you deeper into a pro-inflammatory state,” page 286.

STEP 3: LEARN WHERE FAT COMES FROM – AND WHERE IT GOES

Fat cells come from stem cells and can be converted into other types of cells like fibrocytes.

“A metabolic process called transdifferentiation can make fat cells leave your adipose tissue and migrate to become new muscle, bone, and even brain cells. You can control stem cell growth by eating right and exercising, and that includes exercising your brain,” page 288.

Exercise works at least three ways

“Moderation, as a program for healthy eating, made perfect sense 200 years ago when crops were grown organically on healthy topsoil, and the worse chemical monstrosities of the food industry were yet to be invented.”

“Fat-making may seem like the body’s default reaction, but really it’s just the default reaction in periods of stress and nutrient deprivation. When the body gets all the real food, exercise and rest that it needs, the default reaction is to convert unwanted fat cells into something better. Which physiologic directive your body follows is ultimately up to you.

Some nutrient deficiencies and stress levels are so severe, however, that it becomes increasingly difficult to ship nutrients throughout the body effectively. If sugar and fatty acids can’t make the journey from wherever they were (usually your digestive system) into a proper fat-storage cell, then they end up lining your arteries, seeping into your tendons, and polluting your body. Now, instead of building fat, you just get sick,” page 294.

STEP 4: EXERCISE

“Concentration level influences how nerve and muscle cells respond, so whether for an intense run or just walking up the stairs, you’ll see more results if you focus on every motion – the swinging of your arms, your calves lifting your spine, your hip rotation.”

We should get both aerobic and anaerobic exercise, cardio and resistance training.

Chapter 13 covers the “human diet” in more detail. Each pillar is to be seen as a strategy which can be incorporated to many diets. The below lists are examples of the four strategies we should all incorporate.

  1. Meat on the bone
  1. Organ meat
  1. Fermented and sprouted foods

(Note: Those marked “LC” contain beneficial probiotics. Those not marked no longer contain living microbes.)

(If beer is in here, I assume red wine should be on the list too!)

  1. Fresh, raw food

“The people who experience long-term success are able to accomplish these three things: cut down on carbs; swap out toxic fats for healthy ones; and add back missing nutrients. That’s it.”

Daily habits

Macronutrient ratios

Carbs

“If you only exercise moderately – jogging, tennis, biking, swimming – but don’t make exercise a central part of your daily life, then you should consider 100 grams of daily carbohydrate intake to be your upper limit. Even so, most days you’re better off keeping daily carbohydrate totals between 30 and 70 grams, because every gram of carbohydrates you consume but don’t use to fuel intense activity (anaerobic exercise) must either get stored as fat or be burned as fuel.”

Most carbs should be eaten at dinner.

“If you’re an elite athlete who burns 600 calories or more calories a day doing intense exercises like sprinting or heavy lifting, those calories should come from an optimized balance of carb and fat.”

Protein

(Female/Male)

Minimum: 50/70g Maximum: 120/150g

Beyond the maximum range your body converts protein to carbs/fat. Certain elite athletes can use more protein than the maximum.

Fat

Recommended 60-85% of daily calories from healthy fat. This ratio is very different from the standard American diet which substitutes carbs for fat with 50% of daily calories going to carbs.

The author recommends following your appetite as a guide, but at first vegetable oils and high sugar intake can make your cravings “deranged.” The author recommends getting rid of habitual eating and paying attention to your body. Additionally, the best calorie calculators can be off by 30% or more based on variables such as genetics, age, activity, sleep, stress, and metabolic/hormonal health.

Supplement Recommendations

The author argues everyone should supplement because 1) we aren’t as physically active as our ancestors and 2) most soils are depleted in minerals resulting in less nutritious food.

Recommendations for everyone

Don’t eat red meat or liver

Don’t do dairy or bone-in fish or frequent bone stock:

Don’t do grass-fed dairy fat (cheese/butter/cream):

Vegetarians

Vegans, non-dairy consumers, and vegetarians

Weekly Shopping Planner

I’ve definitely struggled with meal planning. I’m used to a variety everyday, but a lack of planning leads to food going bad. The author offers a strategy for weekly meal planning.

(Only buy items you know someone will eat, don’t buy stuff nobody likes.)

Perishable veggies: Eat within 7 days (choose 4 to 6 of the following, most perishable on top.)

Perishable meats: 3-4 pounds per week per person, choose 2 to 3, double poundage for cuts that include bone

Freeze half of what you buy. If you shop Saturday, thaw 2nd half on Tuesday (day 3 of 7-day cycle)

Dairy Staples

Vegetable Staples and Preserves (Store 4-6 weeks)

(Store for months)

Fats/oils

Protein staples

Nuts/seeds/beans

Nuts: 6-16 ounces of at least 3 favorites

Store in fridge for better flavor, sprouted or raw better than roasted. Avoid vegetable oils. Roasted in peanut/coconut oil okay.

Seeds: 2-16 ounces

Canned or dried beans

Dried over canned as they can be sprouted.

Vinegars/sauces/condiments

Starchy staple foods

Beverages/treats/desserts

How much bone broth: you can drink bone broth everyday. Store-bought broths tend to be fairly weak and don’t even gelatinize in the fridge, so you can have a couple cups everyday. A reduced demi-glace sauce is intense both in taste and in nutrition, so just a couple tablespoons makes for a healthy dose.

The best vegan alternative to bone broth is kelp or algae, but this is unconfirmed.

Organ meat: 1-3 times per week depending on portion size

“There’s no substitute for the nutrient intensity packed into foods like liver, heart, kidneys, and bone marrow from grass-fed animals.”

“I advise this [drinking tea over soda] because studies done in the United States in 2014 and in Korea in 2016 showed, respectively, that a single soda per day can increase the calcium deposits in your arteries by 70% and your chance of having a heart attack by 30%.”

Fasting

“In general, our diets are less nutrient intense and more pro-inflammatory – both of these factors make us more fragile and less physiologically sound than our ancestors were. For these reasons, three or four days of fasting is probably the maximum amount of time that would benefit us before the downsides begin to outweigh the up.”

The simple way to get started

1) Eat a big colorful salad four days per week with a non-vegetable oil dressing.

2) Grass-fed dairy fat daily

Raw is better, where available.

3) Get bone stock.

Additionally you can get pho from a Vietnamese restaurant if they make it with real bones or fish head soup from a Filipino restaurant.

4) Eat organ meats at least once weekly.

Liver or liverwurst on crackers. If no organ meats, seafood 3 times weekly, preferably raw at least once - raw oysters, sashimi, ceviche, pickled herring. If not seafood, pasture-raised eggs 3 times weekly (cook sunny-side only so long that the yolk stays runny).

5) Eat probiotic-rich foods once a day.