Only babies should drink milk?

The whole only babies eat milk is clever play on words but has no bearing in reality. It's not a nature based argument. If you would visit our farm and stay a spell, you would find that the "baby" calves will nurse as long as their mother will let them, which is often well past their fist year. Translated to human years, well into their "adolescence."

What stops nursing is not magical transformation into an adult, but the arrival of a more needy member of the herd, another calf.

Some people cannot digest milk

I don't disagree that some people just cannot handle milk, just like some people cannot handle a high fat diet, or wheat, but does this mean that every human on the planet should stop drinking milk? This is what many food purists like the Paleo diet folks want us to believe.

The Paleo philosophy basically eliminates any food except what our hunter-gatherer ancestors could find. This includes all dairy, all grains, and legumes. Essentially, all foods that were developed as civilizations shifted toward the agrarian.

The Masai culture is a milk based culture

There are cultures who have relied on milk for thousands of years. For example, the traditional Masai culture of nomadic cattle herders is not what we would consider an agrarian culture, yet their diet consists largely of a mixture of cow’s blood and milk. Don't you think 5,000 years or so of living like that is enough to work out the kinks? Should the Masai give up milk?

Innovations in food technology create the culture

Food innovations, created huge leaps forward in civilization. If the choice is bread made from grain stored during the proverbial seven fat years, or starvation during the seven lean years, I know what I would choose.

Plentiful cheap food is a headache

That's the other interesting anthropological aspect to this whole "what to eat" debate. Until post WWII America, you pretty much ate what you could get your hands on. It's amazing the confusion cheap and plentiful food has created.

That doesn't mean we should keep all foods around, but if I can handle drinking raw milk, or the occasional sourdough bread slathered with grass fed butter with no adverse effects, I'm not going to stop for the benefit of of keeping a philosophy "pure."

Eliminate a food only because it’s bad for you

I believe in eliminating a food only because it actually causes damage for an individual and not because of some theoretical threat to human health as a whole. Nature and human nature is too vast and too varied to create simple rules. We need some flexibility in our thinking and generosity in our spirit.

The danger of tunnel thinking

It's dogmatic tunnel thinking that got us in this nutritional mess in the first place when our government decided we should all eat a low-fat high carb diet. One nutritional size does not fit all. Once we become dogmatic, whether, low-fat, low carb, Paleo, vegan, whatever, we will always do harm to others by insisting everybody follow our path. Remember one person's food is another's poison, or n=1.

Just to be clear, this is NOT and anti-Paleo post. I think Paleo is wonderful and might be the best starting place for figuring out how to nourish your particular metabolism. In fact I'm considering adopting it as the nutritional foundation for my acupuncture practice instead of simply low carb. So you don't have to defend Paleo, but feel free if you wish. ;)

Last week I was in my local grocery store and side by side in the fish display was wild caught sockeye salmon and Atlantic farm raised “salmon.” The difference in the color and texture, and I assume nutrition, was so striking I had to buy both so I could get them home to take this picture.

The pale and pasty color of the farm raised fish was particularly alarming. The lack of color and poor texture of the farm raised fish are indications that the nutritional quality and density is inferior.

Farm raised salmon was a breakthrough in sustainable fishing technology. These salmon are raised in huge salt water “ containment farms.” Because the fish are not free to roam about and catch their own food, they are fed. Unfortunately, as the old saying goes, garbage in, garbage out.

Modern food growers measure output in terms of volume, not quality, and their profitability depends on keeping costs low. Fish are not particularly picky eaters, so they will eat just about anything. As long as the fish weighs enough at harvest, the farmer is happy. Of course the salmon comes out looking like a pale imitation of its wild cousin, so the farmers are allowed by the FDA to add a little food coloring so the difference is not quite as stark.

The point of this rant is food t’ain’t what it used to be. Today’s food is often a pale shadow of the nutrient dense, life sustaining goods our grandparents were raised on, the problem isn’t just isolated to salmon.

Think about all the food we eat that comes from confined animals, beef, pork, turkey, chicken, eggs, and dairy for starters. For you vegans who are shouting, “I told you so,” right about now, fruits and veggies aren’t much better, but that’s a different rant.

Not too long ago, food used to be part of the local economy. There weren’t any leviathan meat packing ships sailing from Australia. There weren’t any massive feed lots in Texas. There weren’t any mega-swine farms in South Carolina.

Milk came from small farms and was gently pasteurized at 140 degrees which kills most of the bacteria the government is so worried about, but does not destroy many of the enzymes that aid in digestion.

Think about this. If milk is this undigestible disease producing substance, how do babies (of all species) with their weak and immature digestive systems manage to survive? Babies survive because milk, as Mother Nature intended, contains the enzymes needed for digestion. It’s the modern production of milk that’s the problem, not the milk itself. This holds true for so many foods today.

At this point, I must declare a bias. Because of the tireless work of my wife and in-laws on our 30 acre farm, in many ways I live old fashioned pastoral life. The American dream at the time of the Civil War, was “Five acres and a mule.” I’m living that dream, large! We have a small herd of American Milking Devons for beef and milk, a flock of chickens for fresh eggs, and a huge vegetable garden which keeps us supplied all year.

We know what our animals eat. We know the condition of our soil. We know the how pests are controlled in our garden. We see and taste the difference between an egg that was laid a few hours ago and the store bought organic egg that was laid by a confined hen and refrigerated for a week or more.

We cannot turn back the hands of time, but we must continue to push forward by insisting that food we eat is high quality. This means spending extra money on groceries if you can. Join a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm. Try out the different farmers at your local farmers’ markets. See who grows the most nutritious food. Nature has made that easy, the best food is also the tastiest. Spend the few extra bucks to buy the wild salmon instead of the farm raised.

Change will come from the bottom up, one dollar at a time. Remember, food companies are chasing your dollar, and like a hungry dog, will follow you wherever you lead it.

Just because this is my first sauerkraut doesn’t mean it’s not my best. LOL!

According to a new study published by the American Physiological Society, patients undergoing surgery that shrinks the stomach and bypasses half of the small intestine, cannot handle fat digestion as well so their brain send signals to avoid eating fat. Like that’s a good thing?

Good grief! Don’t these doctors know you need to eat fat to stay healthy? The amount of fat needed varies from person to person, but we all need some. How are these people going to stay healthy over many years if all they want to eat are crackers and they cannot stomach healthy foods like avocados, salmon, pasture butter and grass fed beef?

Fats, including saturated fats, are critical to physical and mental health. For starters, without fat we cannot absorb the lipophylic vitamins D, A, E and K.

These researchers don’t have any idea that a surgically induced, long-term aversion to fat might be a problem. In fact, they think it’s so great they want to bottle it and sell it.

...”non-surgical therapies could be developed that mimic these mechanisms to offer safe and effective weight loss.

On an even more disturbing note, we can see the lack of introspection that leads iatrogenic illness (illness caused by medical examination or treatment) blinding the authors of this study. It doesn’t even occur to them that one of the reasons some of the patients who have poor outcomes might be malnutrition from lack of consumption of fat.

Of course, the researches might just be blind because they are studying rats and numbers collated from questionnaires. Lab researchers never have to sit and listen to the laundry list of complaints bypass patients have. Complaints caused by the “miracle” of aversion to fatty foods and the resulting trouble consuming enough calories and nutrients to stay healthy.

I have several patients who have had gastric surgery of one kind or another. The surgery can lead to dramatic changes, but it also comes with challenges that need to be faced head on. If you are struggling with life after bypass, I suggest you contact my friend Katie Jay at The National Association of Weight Loss Surgery. She offers wonderful support for people who are working to make their surgery a long term success.

The study is entitled “Gastric Bypass Reduces Fat Intake and Preference.” It appears in the Articles in Press section of the American Journal of Physiology – Regulatory, Integrative, and Comparative Physiology, published by the American Physiological Society.

The milk you buy in the store is no longer milk. It’s a highly processed and manufactured food. I didn’t know this until my father-in-law started milking his American Milking Devon cows and I got to drink real raw milk. The difference is not just the taste, but the nutrient, microbial, and enzyme content.

The stuff you get in the store is basically powdered milk. Yuck, right?

What got me thinking about raw milk again was a post by Jimmy Moore about what happens to his blood sugar after drinking various things. (Jimmy Moore is one of the most important sources for health information of the web. If you are not familiar with him I highly recommend you spend a few minutes checking out his blog.)

Two of the drinks he tested were 2% “milk” and raw milk. Look at the difference and how unstable his blood sugar become when he drinks what most of us consider milk. I’ll tell what that means after you look at the graphs.





You can see that the 2% “milk causes a dip in the blood sugar and then a fairly steep rise. While you can’t draw any broad conclusions based on just one person’s results, you can see that drinking 2% could actually cause you to get hungry because your blood sugar drops.

By comparison, the raw milk barely budges the blood sugar at all. Now theoretically, the only difference between raw milk and 2% is that the 2% has some of the fat taken out. Clearly, there is more to the story than that. Bottom line, raw milk is food. 2% “milk” is, well, I’m not sure what it is.

The April/May/June issue of Scientific American Mind has a brief review of a study out of Columbia University. The sub-head of the article is "Lowering blood sugar levels may thwart forgetfulness."

This maybe a reason why we crave carbs after an upsetting experience. Comfort foods raise our blood sugar and impair memory creation.

This mechanism also plays a role in memory degradation as we age. Of course the researcher immediately jumps on the exercise band wagon as the answer to insulin resistance. Me? I'll just keep my carbs low.

Senior moments, those pesky instances of not so total recall—forgetting where we left our keys or what we did last weekend—are a subtle but significant part of the aging process. Another effect of growing old: rising blood sugar levels, which typically take off in our late 30s or early 40s as our bodies become less adept at metabolizing glucose in the bloodstream. Now a study has linked these rising levels with momentary forgetfulness, pinpointing exactly where in the brain the aging process acts—a finding that could help the elderly ward off memory lapses.The nature of senior moments led scientists to believe they stem from disruptions in the hippocampus—an area that, among other roles, acts as the brain’s “save” button, allowing us to retain new information. Using functional MRI, researchers looked at the effects of increased blood glucose in the hippocampus of 181 subjects aged 65 or older with no history of dementia. They found that elevated levels impaired function of a section of the hippocampus called the dentate gyrus, which is a “hotspot” of age-related impairment, according to study author Scott Small, a neurologist at Columbia University.Blood glucose is not alone in selectively affecting dentate gyrus performance. A 2007 study co-authored by Small shows that exercise improves its function in both mice and humans. The newer research, he points out, suggests that these positive effects may actually result from the influence of regular exercise on the body’s ability to break down glucose.Psychiatrist Mony de Leon of New York University explains that the new study “may be showing a very funda­mental aging process that might have some reversibility built into it.” If you correct the glucose intolerance, he says, you may be able to forget about forgetfulness.

The ancient Chinese acupuncturists say, "Eat breakfast like a Queen, lunch like a princess, and dinner like a pauper." Most people have heard a variation of this advice and know that breakfast is supposed to be the most important meal of the day, but they ask me, "I'm just not hungry in the morning. What should I do?" What I'm going to teach you today is why lack of hunger in the morning is a symptom of too little sleep and why you want to fix that.

Does your alarm clock wake you from the dead?
The problem with lack of sleep is that your body does not have enough time manage your hormones, especially melatonin. Among it's other jobs, melatonin is a master hormone that coordinates other hormones. When you go to bed too late, your melatonin levels peak right when they should be fading away, right about when the hated alarm goes off.

When your melatonin peak is shifted into the morning hours, the hormone controlling your appetite, leptin, is also high. (High levels of leptin at night keep you from waking up and raiding the fridge.) The elevated melatonin and leptin prevent hunger in the morning and explain why that lack of hunger is a serious sign that you are sleep deprived. Elevated morning melatonin also changes the timing of your natural cortisol spike which is your body's natural alarm clock. We are forced to replace our natural alarm clock with the much hated clock radio. Ugh!

Its all downhill from there!
So you drag yourself out of bed, forcing your body to wake up when it is just should be getting into deep sleep. You skip breakfast and sleep walk through the first part of the day. Because your cortisol levels are low, you cannot effectively deal with the stress of the day and your time perception gets warped and before you know it, the day has passed and you have accomplished little. Sound familiar?

The 5-element acupuncture body clock
The ancient Chinese understood the effects of these hormone waves. Even though they could not measure the hormones with blood tests, they could see the effects when normal sleep patterns were disturbed. They called this the Law of Midday/Midnight. If your internal body clock is off, not only do you have no hunger in the morning, but acupuncturists go on to say if your energy is not balanced, at 3:00 p.m. (bladder meridian time) you will crave sweets, get sleepy, irritable and stupid. Not exactly a recipe for success.

There are special 5-element acupuncture points to re-set your body clock called horary points. They help balance your energy through the day and help your hormones return to normal daylight patterns. So if you are feeling the effects of sleep deprivation, you will want to go to bed earlier and call for an acupuncture appointment!

Saturated fat is a marker for disease in the body, not because we eat saturated fat, but because the liver converts excess carbohydrates to saturated fats. The error logic is to assume that eating the same is harmful.

Here are a bunch of snippets from the Weston Price Foundation. They have abbreviated citations, but it should give you a start if you are inclined.

Myth: Heart disease in America is caused by consumption of cholesterol and saturated fat from animal products.

Truth: During the period of rapid increase in heart disease (1920-1960), American consumption of animal fats declined but consumption of hydrogenated and industrially processed vegetable fats increased dramatically. (USDA-HNI)

Myth: Saturated fat clogs arteries.

Truth: The fatty acids found in artery clogs are mostly unsaturated (74%) of which 41% are polyunsaturated. (Lancet 1994 344:1195)

Myth: Vegetarianism is healthy.

Truth: The annual all-cause death rate of vegetarian men is slightly more than that of non-vegetarian men (.93% vs .89%); the annual death rate of vegetarian women is significantly more than that of non-vegetarian women (.86% vs .54%) (Am J Clin Nutr 1982 36:873)

Myth: Vitamin B12 can be obtained from certain plant sources such as blue-green algae and soy products.

Truth: Vitamin B12 is not absorbed from plant sources. Modern soy products increase the body's need for B12. (Soybeans: Chemistry & Technology Vol 1 1972)

Myth: For good health, serum cholesterol should be less than 180 mg/dl.

Truth: The all-cause death rate is higher in individuals with cholesterol levels lower than 180 mg/dl. (Circulation 1992 86:3:1026-1029)

Myth: Animal fats cause cancer and heart disease.

Truth: Animal fats contain many nutrients that protect against cancer and heart disease; elevated rates of cancer and heart disease are associated with consumption of large amounts of vegetable oils. (Fed Proc July 1978 37:2215)

Myth: Children benefit from a low-fat diet.

Truth: Children on low-fat diets suffer from growth problems, failure to thrive & learning disabilities. (Food Chem News 10/3/94)

Myth: A low-fat diet will make you "feel better . . . and increase your joy of living."

Truth: Low-fat diets are associated with increased rates of depression, psychological problems, fatigue, violence and suicide. (Lancet 3/21/92 v339)

Myth: To avoid heart disease, we should use margarine instead of butter.

Truth: Margarine eaters have twice the rate of heart disease as butter eaters. (Nutrition Week 3/22/91 21:12)

Myth: Americans do not consume enough essential fatty acids.

Truth: Americans consume far too much of one kind of EFA (omega-6 EFAs found in most polyunsaturated vegetable oils) but not enough of another kind of EFA (omega-3 EFAs found in fish, fish oils, eggs from properly fed chickens, dark green vegetables and herbs, and oils from certain seeds such as flax and chia, nuts such as walnuts and in small amounts in all whole grains.) (Am J Clin Nutr 1991 54:438-63)

Myth: A vegetarian diet will protect you against atherosclerosis.

Truth: The International Atherosclerosis Project found that vegetarians had just as much atherosclerosis as meat eaters. (Lab Invest 1968 18:498)

Myth: Low-fat diets prevent breast cancer.

Truth: A recent study found that women on very low-fat diets (less than 20%) had the same rate of breast cancer as women who consumed large amounts of fat. (NEJM 2/8/96)

Myth: The "cave man diet" was low in fat.

Truth: Throughout the world, primitive peoples sought out and consumed fat from fish and shellfish, water fowl, sea mammals, land birds, insects, reptiles, rodents, bears, dogs, pigs, cattle, sheep, goats, game, eggs, nuts and milk products. (Abrams, Food & Evolution 1987)

Myth: Coconut oil causes heart disease.

Truth: When coconut oil was fed as 7% of energy to patients recovering from heart attacks, the patients had greater improvement compared to untreated controls, and no difference compared to patents treated with corn or safflower oils. Populations that consume coconut oil have low rates of heart disease. Coconut oil may also be one of the most useful oils to prevent heart disease because of its antiviral and antimicrobial characteristics. (JAMA 1967 202:1119-1123; Am J Clin Nutr 1981 34:1552)

Myth: Saturated fats inhibit production of anti-inflammatory prostaglandins.

Truth: Saturated fats actually improve the production of all prostaglandins by facilitating the conversion of essential fatty acids. (Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation Journal 20:3)

Myth: Arachidonic acid in foods like liver, butter and egg yolks causes production of "bad" inflammatory prostaglandins.

Truth: Series 2 prostaglandins that the body makes from arachidonic acid both encourage and inhibit inflammation under appropriate circumstances. Arachidonic acid is vital for the function of the brain and nervous system. (Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation Journal 20:3)

Myth: Beef causes colon cancer

Truth: Argentina, with higher beef consumption, has lower rates of colon cancer than the US. Mormons have lower rates of colon cancer than vegetarian Seventh Day Adventists (Cancer Res 35:3513 1975)

© 1999 Weston A. Price Foundation All Rights Reserved.

Follow along with a little back story, before I get to my point. Ancient Chinese acupuncturists developed a theory of healthy eating based on five flavors, salty, sour, bitter, sweet, pungent. They believed these five flavors, found in foods created the right balance of energy to lead a long, healthy life.

When I was earning my Master's Degree at the Tai Sophia Institute (http://www.tai.edu), we had many discussions about the flavors, and would always get hung up on "pungent." What exactly does that mean? This is what the dictionary says: pungent |ˈpənjənt| adjective --having a sharply strong taste or smell : the pungent smell of frying onions.

In class, we left the discussion with the understanding that pungent meant spicy. I'd love to say that I wasn't satisfied with the answer and spent the next 20 years researching what the Chinese meant by pungent, but that would be a lie. Truth is, back then I didn't much concern myself with nutrition. As the saying goes, "That was then, this is now."

That's the back story, the point is there is a developing base of research showing that fats are critical to our immune system. The interesting thing is, the ancient Chinese say that the "pungent" flavor strengthens "wei qi" which is the protective energy of the body, guarding us from pathogens during the day, and nourishing our internal organs at night.

Take for example, this article from U.S. News and World Report. THURSDAY, Oct. 30 (HealthDay News) -- Virgin coconut oil, added to antibiotic therapy, may help relieve the symptoms of community-acquired pneumonia in kids faster than antibiotic therapy alone, a new study finds. Children who received coconut oil therapy along with antibiotics had fewer crackles (a wheezing sound in the lungs), a shorter time with an elevated respiratory rate and fever, better oxygen saturation in the blood, and shorter hospital stays, according to the study.

I wouldn't be surprised if lard or tallow accomplished the same thing if researchers would have the courage, and funding, to do such a study. The same cannot be said of polyunsaturated fats however. Those are the supposedly superior vegetable oils. Excess consumption of polyunsaturated oils has been shown to contribute to a large number of disease conditions including increased cancer and heart disease; immune system dysfunction; damage to the liver, reproductive organs and lungs; digestive disorders; depressed learning ability; impaired growth; and weight gain.

So to tie this up in a nice little bow, I believe the translation from the ancient acupuncture texts has been influenced by the low fat folks. I believe pungent is the taste of fat in foods and is an essential component of any healthy diet.