Speaking at Wise Traditions 2010

I'm happy to announce that I'll be presenting at the Weston A. Price foundation's 2010 Wise Traditions conference. The conference will be held in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, Nov 12-14. The theme is the politics of food.

Sally Fallon Morell has invited me to give a talk on the diet and health of Pacific islanders. The talk will be titled "Kakana Dina: Diet and Health in the Pacific Islands", and it will take place on Sunday, November 14th from 4:00 to 5:20 pm. In preparation for the talk, I've read eight books and countless journal articles. Although some of the material will be familiar to people who follow the blog, I will not be rehashing what I've already published. I have nearly an hour and a half to talk, so I'll be going into some depth on the natural history and traditional food habits of Pacific island populations. Not just macronutrient breakdowns... specific foods and traditional preparation methods.

Learn about the health of traditional Pacific island populations, and what has changed since Western contact. Learn about traditional cooking and fermentation techniques. See unpublished photos from the Kitava study, courtesy of Dr. Staffan Lindeberg. Learn about the nutritional and ceremonial role of mammals including pork... and the most gruesome food of all.

I hope to see you there!


Kitava photo courtesy of Dr. Staffan Lindeberg

Dogen Zenji on Nutritionism

Dogen Zenji was the man who brought the Soto lineage of Zen Buddhism to Japan. He was a prolific writer, and many of his texts are respected both inside and outside the Soto Zen community. Last week, my Zen group was discussing the Genjo Koan, one of his works that is frequently used as a chant. Here's an excerpt. It may seem cryptic but bear with me:
...when you sail out in a boat to the middle of an ocean where no land is in sight, and view the four directions, the ocean looks circular, and does not look any other way. But the ocean is neither round or square; its features are infinite in variety... It only look circular as far as you can see at that time. All things are like this.

Though there are many features in the dusty world and the world beyond conditions, you see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach. In order to learn the nature of the myriad things, you must know that although they may look round or square, the other features of oceans and mountains are infinite in variety; whole worlds are there. It is so not only around you, but also directly beneath your feet, or in a drop of water.

What Dogen meant, among other things, is that the world is much more complex than what our conscious minds can perceive or understand. It was true in the 13th century, and it's still true today, despite our greatly expanded understanding of the natural world.

We can apply this principle to nutrition. For example, what is red palm oil? Two hundred years ago, perhaps we only knew a few basic facts about it. It's a fat, it's red, it comes from an African palm fruit and it has a particular melting point and flavor. Then we learned about vitamins, so we knew it contained vitamin E, carotenes (provitamin A), and vitamin K. Then fatty acid composition, so we found out it's mostly palmitic and oleic acids. Now we know red palm oil contains an array of polyphenols, sterols, coenzyme Q10 and many other non-essential constituents. We don't know much about the biological effects of most of these substances, particularly in combination with one another.

Add to that the fact that every batch of red palm oil is different, due to strain, terroir, processing, storage, et cetera. We know what the concept "red palm oil" means, roughly, but the details are infinitely complex. Now feed it to a human, who is not only incredibly complex himself, but genetically and epigenetically unique. How can we possibly guess the outcome of this encounter based on the chemical composition of red palm oil? That's essentially what nutritionism attempts to do.

To be fair, nutritionism does work sometimes. For example, we can pretty well guess that a handful of wild almonds containing a lot of cyanide won't be healthy to eat, due at least in part to the cyanide. But outside extreme examples like this, we're in a gray zone that needs to be informed by empirical observation. In other words, what happens when the person in question actually eats the red palm oil? What happened when a large group of people in West Africa ate red palm oil for thousands of years? Those questions are the reason why I'm so interested in understanding the lives of healthy non-industrial cultures.

I'm not criticizing reductionist science or controlled experiments (which I perform myself); I just think they need to be kept in context. I believe they should be interpreted within the framework of more basic empirical observations*.

One of the most important aspects of scientific maturity is learning to accept and manage uncertainty and your own ignorance. Some things are more certain than others, but most aren't set in stone. I think Dogen would tell us to be wary of nutritionism, and other forms of overconfidence.


* Wikipedia's definition of empirical: "information gained by means of observation, experience, or experiment." As opposed to inferences made from experiments not directly related to the question at hand.

The China Study on Wheat

Denise Minger has just put up another great China Study post that's worth reading if you haven't already. Denise has been busy applying her statistics skills to the mountain of data the study collected. She noted in a previous post that wheat intake was strongly associated with coronary heart disease (CHD), the quintessential modern cardiovascular disease. I, and several other people, requested that she work her mathmagic to see if the association could be due to some other factor. For example, wheat is eaten mostly in the Northern regions of China, and CHD rates are generally higher at higher latitudes (vitamin D insufficiency?). This is true in Europe as well, and may be partly responsible for the purported benefits of the Mediterranean diet. You can mathematically determine if the association between wheat and CHD is simply due to the fact that wheat eaters live further North.

To make a long story short, nothing could explain the association except wheat itself, even latitude. Furthermore, she found a strong association between wheat intake and body mass index, typically a predictor of fat mass although we can't say that for sure. That finding echos a previous study in China where wheat eaters were more likely to be overweight than rice eaters (1, 2). Head over to Denise's post for the full story.

The China Study has major limitations built into its basic design, due to the fact that it was observational and pooled the blood samples of many individuals. Therefore, its findings can never prove anything, they can only suggest or be consistent with hypotheses. However, the study also has some unique advantages, such as a diversity of diets and regions, and the fact that people had presumably been eating a similar diet for a long time. I feel that Denise's efforts are really teasing out some useful information from the study that have been de-emphasized by other investigators.

There has been so little serious investigation into the health effects of wheat in the general population that I have to rely mostly on indirect evidence, such as the observation that the diseases of civilization tend to closely follow the introduction of white flour around the globe. Researchers studying celiac disease and other forms of gluten allergy, and the efforts of the paleolithic diet community in spreading that information (for example, Loren Cordain and Pedro Bastos), have been major contributors to understanding the health effects of wheat. Denise's analysis is one of the strongest pieces of evidence I've come by so far. One of these days, I'll post all of my references incriminating wheat. There are quite a few, although none of them is the smoking gun. I think there's enough indirect evidence that investigators should begin taking the idea seriously that wheat, particularly in the form of industrial flour products, may contribute to chronic disease in more than just a small subset of the population.