Without doubt, a primary benefit of the paleo diet is the elimination of grains (which contain inflammatory protein--gluten--and plant-defense toxins called lectins).

The high (good) fat aspect of the paleo diet also plays a big role in increasing HDL and lowering triglycerides. These good fats including animal fats, saturated fats (mistaken painted as bad-guy fats), omega-3's, omega-9's (like olive oil and avocado oil), while greatly reducing the inflammatory processed omega-6 oils (corn and soy oil, among numerous others).

The paleo diet also rules out any processed form of fructose:
http://www.thorne.com/altmedrev/.fulltext/10/4/294.pdf

i have eliminated wheat and all grains as you have suggested and my lipid profile from recent NMR has improved: HDL jumped from 40to 54; LDLC of 94 up from 93, and Trg dropped to 20 from 37 and large HDL-P increased from 3.3 to 14.8, particle number dropped from1795 to 1305, but they still remain all small particles.  LDL particle size unchanged at 19.7. So some good things from elimination of wheat and grains, but no change in particle size.  At 5'6" male and 145lbs, hard to lose weight.  Any suggestions on how to change particle size and lower number of particles further? diet is meat fish eggs poultry, whey powder, hard cheese, greek 2% yogurt and fruit and veggies, some red wine and dark(85%+ chocolate)  Vitamin D3 measures at 38(25oh). with family history, doc wants 20 mg Lipitor.  Excellent post in both cases. Perhpas Paleo not work for all, although Eades would say i should add more sat fat to diet

I love reading in more and more places that saturated fats are not evil!

The word is getting out, and one of these days, dietary researchers won't have to apologize about their results or come up with elaborate strategies to make sure that they can't be perceived as saying that saturated fat might be (gasp!) good for you.

Remember the Okinawans.  Previous generations of Okinawans are among the longest lived people on the planet.  Pork, fish, non-starchy vegetables (cooked in lard), and a little bit of rice make up almost all of their diet.

Dr. Davis, it wasn't that long ago that you were very cautious about fats and saturated fats, but I've seen a substantial shift in your comments over the past several months.  I salute your resolve to really understand what is good for our hearts and then going beyond that by doing your best to communicate what you've learned back to everyone who will listen/read.

This is the first time I have seen someone call out Gluten as the component of wheat that causes inflammation response.  Good to know as it is often a primary source of protein for vegetarians.

I don't see the fructose argument though.  This is a simple sugar that is broken down to glucose in the digestive tract like any other sugar eaten; according to high-school human biology......

Dr Davis,

Do low carb eaters need to be concerned about the aging effects of oxoaldehydes such as methylglyoxal?

I read recently that the concentration of such compounds increases during ketosis and that they are much more reactive than glucose, readily forming protein cross links which age the body.

-- Tom

Some people may be wondering how it was that eating wheat and other high fibre grains caused humans to become weaker, shorter and fatter.

This paper http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6299329 Reduced plasma half-life of radio-labelled 25-hydroxyvitamin D3 in subjects receiving a high-fibre diet.
unearthed by Stephan at Whole Health Source, provides one possible explanation as it shows a high-fibre diet reduces the half-life of 25(OH)D3 thus speeding up vitamin d deficiency.

Yes!  I thoroughly enjoyed Dr. Eades commentary on that study.  Although I do wish that study authors wouldn't obsess so much over saturated fat.

Steven from http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/ also did a bang up review.  His blog is also quite fantastic.  He did a series on Tokelau Island migrant studies that was very interesting.  They are a people that eat quite a lot of saturated fat, from coconut, and yet had virtually no heart disease.

I cut out wheat a long time ago but haven't had blood work recently.  If cholesterol has nothing to do with heart disease, why worry about it?  Why eliminate saturated fats if they're not contributing to atherosclerosis?

kevin

The wheat connection is interesting, it's far and away the worst grain for spiking my glucose levels, even wheat bran will do it.

My athlete cousin is already showing signs of the familial insulin resistance in her thirties and while she stuffs her body with far more carbs than I do she has noticed a marked improvement from avoiding wheat.

The horrible irony is that a diabetic colleague diagnosed my diabetes over twenty years ago and a friend who knew my diet suggested I might be wheat intolerant. My doctor wrote that I had "fanciful notions" and hypochondria. Now here I am. Meanwhile the GP died "unexpectedly" which was ironic

I wonder if wheat has always been this (comparatively) toxic or if it's the modern strains specifically. Originally it was a transgenic cross, kind of natural GM, with far more chromosomes than is good for it, but has been majorly tweaked over the years to provide current yields

It's odd to me how often folks state that there's no proof that saturated fat intake causes heart disease. I know the standard arguments, I've read Good Calories, Bad Calories and many of the websites dedicated to disproving the lipid hypothetesis.

But the fact is, there are quite a few studies that demonstrate that saturated fat intake IS associated with higher incidence of heart disease (not just cholesterol profiles).

A few examples:
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/337/21/1491

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/337/21/1491

http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/70/6/1001

The majority of the studies I've seen on low carbohydrate, high fat diets have all been pretty short-term and didn't actually measure heart disease. They just measured cholesterol and, occasionally, inflammation.

To Anonymous's question about fructose.  It's very important that you understand the metabolic pathway for fructose.

Fructose is carried by the blood from your gut directly to your liver.  Once detected, your liver stops everything else and converts fructose to triglycerides.  It does this because fructose is a highly reactive sugar and is treated as a dangerous substance by your body.  Triglycerides aren't nearly as bad (but if you've been reading this blog, you know that they're pretty bad, too).  

Most of the triglycerides are released into the blood (where they represent the wrong side of the HDL/triglycerides heart health ratio), while some small fraction remain trapped in the liver tissues.  If you keep hitting your liver with triglycerides (via fructose), and live long enough, those triglycerides get stored in the liver and you'll end up with fatty liver disease.

Fructose is all sorts of bad news for your health.  Sucrose, HFCS, honey, cane solids, corn syrup solids, etc: all contain significant quantities of fructose, and over time, all pose a risk to your heart, your liver, and via insulin resistance and glycation reactions, your entire body.

I am new to trying to understand the most healthy diet and just finished reading Dr. Eades book (who does not eschew whole grains in his meal plans).  I am reminded of Michael Pollan's comments that preface his book - 'In Defense of Food' in which he claims there is much ideology with regard to diet and nutrition.  

I understand many people have strong opinions, but I am hoping someone can provide insight into this website that includes whole wheat as one of the most important foods in our diet -- http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=141.

I am not asking this to be controversial, but would genuinely like to hear some factual counterpoints.

This is great news for the paleolithic community: the British Medical Association has just recognised the importance of paleolithic diets in this recent report (see pages 5/6): http://www.bma.org.uk/health_promotion_ethics/child_health/earlylifenutrition.jsp

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health

I have read your article Michael Eades on the Paleolithic diet' good article The diet consists of an inflexible meal plan. The diet does not allow forsubstitutions or deviations

Welcome to visit-

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This is the first time I have seen someone call out Gluten as the component of wheat that causes inflammation response. Good to know as it is often a primary source of protein for vegetarians.

Margarine and Phytosterolemia

Stephan Wholehealthfoodsource also has a recent interesting blog on this topic.

The more I read about processed foods, the more I stick to whole foods. I was part of the trans fat experiment. I am not willing to take part in the sterol test.

Most medical blogs, though useful, give us a "Choose your guru" kind of model. This post exemplifies an approach that can be summarised as: "Here's what I think, and why; you can follow my recommendations, or you can do your own research; and what's more I'll give you some pointers to get you started." Great stuff. Thank you.

On the issue of plant sterols, the standard argumentation appears to be: "Cholesterol is bad. Anything that displaces cholesterol must be good. We're not interested in what the substances displacing cholesterol might be doing." Unfortunately, the argument is usually tacit; otherwise, it would be immediately obvious how misguided this line of thought is.

Here they go again.  They try to solve a non-existant problem and just make things worse.

There's big $$$$$$ in cholesterol and this is all about $$$$$, not health.

I rarely shop in regular supermarkets anymore (farm subscription for veggies, meat bought in bulk for the freezer, eggs from a local individual, fish from a fish market, freshly roasted coffee from a local coffee place, etc.).  What little else I need comes from quirky Trader Joe's (dark chocolate!), the fish market, farmer's markets, a small natural foods store, or mail order.  

When I do need to go into one of the many huge supermarkets near me, not being a regular shopper there, I never know where anything is, so I have to ramble a bit around the aisles before I find what I'm looking for (and I almost always can grab a hand basket, instead of a trolley cart).  

It's almost like being on another planet!  There's always so many new products (most of them I hesitate to even call food).   It's really a shock to the senses now to see how much stuff supermarkets sell that I wouldn't even pick up to read the label, let alone put in a cart or want to taste.  I'm not even tempted by 99% of the tasting samples handed out by the sweet senior ladies in at Costco anymore (only thing I remember tasting at Costco in at least 6 mos was the Kerrygold  Irish cheese, because I know their cows have pasture access and it's real food).

What's really shocking to me is how large some sections of the markets have become in recent years.  While Americans got larger, so did some sections of the supermarket (hint - good idea to limit the consumption of products from those areas).  Meat and seafood counters have shrunk, though.  Produce areas seem to be about the same size as always (but more of it is pre-prepped and RTE in packaging.

But the chilled juice section is h-u-g-e!  And no, I don't think there is a Florida orange grove behind the cases.  Come on, how much juice do people need?  Juice glasses used to be teeny tiny, for a good reason.  To me it looks like a long wall stocked full of sugar water.  Avoiding that section will put a nice dent in the grocery expenses.

The yogurt case is also e-n-o-r-m-o-u-s!   Your 115 yo Bulgarian "grandmother" wouldn't know what to make of all these "pseudo-yogurts"!  Chock full of every possible variety, but very little fit to eat.  The only yogurts I'll look at are made with plain whole milk, without added gums, emulsifiers, or non-fat milk solids, and live cultures (I mostly buy yogurt now and then to refresh my starter culture at home).  I can flavor them at home if needed.   The sterols are showing up in processed yogurts, too, along with patented new strains of probiotic cultures (I'll stick to my old fashioned, but time-proven homemade lacto-cultured veggies and yogurt instead).

I found the same "cooler spread" in the butter & "spread" section.  The spread options were just grotesque sounding.  Actually, the butter options weren't much better, as many were blended with other ingredients to increase spreadability, reduce calories or cholesterol/saturated fat, etc.  A few plain butters were enhanced with "butter flavor" - say what?  And on no package could it be determined if the butter came from cows that were naturally fed on pasture or on grain in confined pens.

Are sterols the same as plant stanol esters, as in Benecol (http://www.benecol.co.uk/new/light-nutrition-information.htm)?

Is beta-sitosterol, found in anti-BPH supplements in the amount of about 500 mg., okay?

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Joannah

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One of your articles cited concludes:

"However, the role of dietary plant sterols in the development of atherosclerotic plaque is not known."

Basically, there is no evidence that adsorption of sterols into serum did anything negative here. The presence of sterols is not a smoking gun.

I take your warning as a caution, but I am not sure I believe you any more than the opposite side of this story, and yet I am by example proof that sterols have reduced my bad cholesterol levels.

By the way, the Promise Active Supershots actually have 2 GRAMS of sterols, not 400 mg as you stated. Also, that product is being taken off the market at the end of August 2009 due to lack of market response (so I am told by Unilever).

This study, piled on top of the worrisome literature that precede it, are enough for me: No more tin cans (which are lined with BPA), no more hard plastics labeled with recycling code #7 or #3, no more polycarbonate water bottles (the hard ones, often brightly colored). Microwaveable-safe may also mean human-unsafe, as highlighted by this damning assurance from the Tupperware people that BPA is not a health hazard.