permaculture

[Ben Martin Horst <ben.martinhorst@gmail.com>]

Toby --

I'm not familiar with Fuhrman and McDougall, but on its face the "nutrients
per calorie" framework would seem to make sense. I would caution, however,
that a number of vitamins and minerals are fat-soluble, meaning that the
human body isn't able to utilize them effectively without accompanying
lipids. Extra virgin olive oil may not, in and of itself, have much in the
way of macronutrients per calorie, but it (or other fats) may be critical
for the absorption of, for example, vitamins A, D, E, and K found in leafy
greens. I'd hardly call it and many other fats "junk food" (though
hydrogenated oil and canola, corn, and soy oils certainly fit the bill).

Also, not having the studies on meat that they cite, it's not possible for
me to evaluate them (except inasmuch as I generally trust your assessment
of the validity of a particular study), but I suspect that the majority
(probably the entirety) of these studies are examining meat that is
undifferentiated by quality. That is, since the vast majority of meat
consumed in the US comes from factory-farmed, grain-fed or -finished,
antibiotic-packed animals, that is what is being referenced. I'd have more
confidence in studies that examine long-term health impacts of exclusively
range-fed, organic meat.

For the past three years or so, I've been following the dietary advice of a
Nutritional Therapy Practitioner (NTP -- full disclosure: I'm married to
her), another dietary healing paradigm that focuses on nutrient-density (a
paradigm which, by the way, strikes me as permaculturish on several
levels). In a nutshell, NTPs tailor dietary recommendations to individuals,
supplementing where necessary to bring systems into balance, and tend to
view high-carb diets as generally more damaging than high-fat ones.
Personally, I'm consuming a lot of green veggies and vegetable ferments,
eggs, nuts, fish, meat (all pasture-fed and organic), and animal fats, some
dairy (mostly cultured), a little fruit, and very few grains, legumes, or
sugars of any sort.

I've never been a strict vegetarian, though a decade or so ago I would have
been eating primarily grains and beans -- items I hardly ever consume
today. One thing I've noticed when among people still following the
grains-and-beans dietary paradigm is that I eat much, much less than they
do to feel satisfied. I'm getting the nutrition I need with far fewer
calories, and I don't feel bloated and overstuffed every time I finish a
meal.  It's perhaps a little early for me to be much of a case study (I'm
only in my early 30s), but I'm still in significantly better shape than
much of my age cohort, and I'm hardly getting tons of exercise. I'm highly
curious to see how this experiment pans out in a couple of decades.

Anyway, I don't want to be too evangelistic, but for those interested in
working with a Nutritional Therapy Practitioner, a directory is available
here: http://nutritionaltherapy.com/ntp-referral-list/. I'm not an NTP
myself, and my experience with them is pretty much limited to my wife and a
few of her colleagues, but I've been impressed with their insights, rigor,
and attention to the human body as a dynamic ecosystem in its own right.

-Ben


On Sat, Oct 27, 2012 at 1:22 PM, Toby Hemenway 
<toby@patternliteracy.com>wrote:

> LL et al,
>
> Thanks for re-posting this. Getting nutrient-rich food is a challenge, as
> Michael writes, because 1) soil mineral content is hard to assess without
> testing; 2) we then need to test to see if those minerals are getting into
> our plants and 3) vegetables are generally not bred for maximum nutrient
> content, so it's hard to know which varieties are nutrient-rich. So, to get
> around these challenges, in addition to adding rock dusts, etc. to soils to
> up the mineral content, I've been recently converted to the diet
> philosophies of MD's like Joel Fuhrman and John McDougall, who have written
> books about a nutrient-rich diet. Their basic idea--and, duh, it was a
> lightbulb going off for me--is to eat large proportions of foods that have
> high nutrient to calorie ratios. That way, even if many vegetables don't
> have the highest nutrient content possible, you will still get plenty of
> nutrients (by nutrients, I mean minerals, amino acids, vitamins and
> co-factors, not calories from energy-rich carbon compounds).
>
> A huge proportion of the calories in typical diets--even health-conscious
> vegetarians--comes from low-nutrient foods like grains, dairy, oils, and
> fats. Those MDs have helped me understand that even supposedly healthy
> olive oil is complete junk food: tons of calories, no nutrients. Vegetables
> (meaning green and other colored plants, not grains and starches) have very
> few calories and lots of nutrients per 100 grams, while starches, oils,
> dairy, and meats have tons of calories but very few nutrients per 100
> grams. So even modest amounts of  low-nutrient food will fill us up,
> because it's calories that give you that full feeling. And that makes it
> hard to get large amounts of nutrients. Even "healthy" eaters have high
> cholesterol and blood pressure from their low-nutrient diets.
>
> But these MDs say we should look at foods based on nutrients per calorie,
> not nutrients per weight, so we can get lots of nutrients without gaining
> weight or getting that "oh, I can tell I just ate" full feeling that most
> of us think is normal after meals--which is not how a nutrient-rich meal
> will make you feel, I've finally learned. Some numbers:
>
> Nutrient per 100 calories       Broccoli     Steak    Romaine Lettuce
> Protein                                    11g              6g
>  7g
> Calcium                                   118mg      2mg         194mg
> Potassium                              507mg       74mg       1453mg
>
> and so on for all the minerals--meat is far less nutrient dense, and many
> veggies have more protein per calorie than meat. Grains are also fairly
> high in calories compared to nutrients, but much better than meat and
> dairy. And, what I didn't know before, is that we've been told vegetables
> don't have enough protein, but mother's milk is only 5% protein by weight,
> so if a fast-growing baby only  needs that little protein, an adult surely
> doesn't need more. We get far more protein than we need.
>
> So what these guys are saying is, eat huge quantities of colored veggies
> --a pound of kale is only about 100 calories--and then have a vegetable
> starch to fill up if you need to, and steer clear of oils, fats, sugars,
> and other totally empty foods. A diet in which most calories come from
> meat, dairy, oils, and even grains, has almost no chance of getting you
> enough nutrients. They also show conclusively that any more than 8oz or so
> of meat per week staggeringly increases the risk of all sorts of disease,
> which, being a confirmed carnivore, I don't like to see, but the facts are
> there in huge studies with good data.
>
> I don't know how well I'm communicating this--it seems more radical to me
> than this may look. There is a clinic near me in Santa Rosa where the MDs
> use this diet to treat live-in patients, and people show huge drops in
> obesity, diabetes, blood pressure and cholesterol, and get off lifetime
> meds they took for those problems.
>
> I can't do this justice here, but for more, there is
> http://www.drfuhrman.com and his book "Eat to Live" which I highly
> recommend
> http://www.drmcdougall.com
> and True North Health Center in Santa Rosa, CA at
> http://www.healthpromoting.com
>
> This seems a good strategy to get good nutrition until we get good data on
> nutrient-rich plant varieties.
>
> Been doing this diet, with gusto, for two months, so it's written with the
> zealousness of a convert--
>
> Toby
> http://patternliteracy.com