Is your diet New Age, or Stone Age?
Caveman eating is the rage! The pages of fitness and fashion magazines are splashed with fantastic images of people in great condition. They are often recommending bread free and low carb diets like Paleo, Ducan and Banting. These diets are simple to follow, often referring to more natural ways of eating. In an age of retro chique, many of us connect more easily to simpler times – a more mechanical universe that we understood and trusted. Most of us no longer comprehend the gadgets and technologies on which our livelihoods depend. We do not know who owns our social media, and do not know what is in the foods we eat. What may have started as droplets of individual dissonance have become mighty rivers flowing through developed societies. They flow with discontent with industrialization, and they flow with the desire to achieve individual potential in terms of health, performance and aesthetics.
The confluence of these mighty rivers is the spawning ground of popular diets. Usually simplified paradigms harking to a bygone era, contradicting mainstream nutritional teachings. They shun modern processed foods, and are philosophically opposed to the fetters and institutions of industrialization.
These stances are easily justified. Industrialized societies the world over are being crippled by the high costs of fighting non-contagious diseases – also referred to as diseases of lifestyle. This huge burden of cost and misery resides largely in three diseases – Diabetes, Stroke and Cardio Vascular Disease.
The American Heart Association (AHA) statistics indicate that more than half of their population either have Diabetes or have signs of its early stages called Glucose Intolerance.
Similarly, the factors contributing to Cardio Vascular Disease (CVD) prominently feature Poor Diet, and specifically Bad Blood Sugar Control. According to the AHA, the main contributor to CVD risk is High Blood Pressure.While there may be many causes of High Blood Pressure, by far the most common type is idiopathic. This means of unknown cause.
There are however an increasing number of epidemiological and ecological studies showing a link between carbohydrate and alcohol intake, and increased blood pressure.
And so there is medical scientific evidence that Diabetes, CVD and High Blood Pressure are all linked to a greater or lesser extent to our high carbohydrate diets. These high carbohydrate diets are recommended by all governments. One may reasonably assume that it would be in the interests of both the medical establishment, and their governments to revise their dietary guidelines. The situation is to the contrary with the Establishment digging in around established dogma, and the lower carb paradigms are in the domain of anti establishment movements.
“The public are actually the big losers in this stand off” says nutrition expert Rael Koping. Indeed, many people claim to be confused by the apparent split in medical opinion and different ‘diet rules’. This is all the more confusing as all of the diets are based on the same medical research, which is freely available in the public domain. How can it be that such different sounding songs are being sung off the same proverbial hymn sheet? “The challenge starts out in simplifying complex medical research into easily explainable lay language” says Koping. “There is a necessary omission of detail. The ‘cave man’ model has proven very popular and very accessible as with no medical knowledge, it is easy to imagine how our ancestors may have lived. In this age of instant gratification, it does not take much intellectual investment to grasp the key principles”.
Having a simple philosophy may be seen as a good thing, until one understands that the mechanism through which these diseases manifest is still poorly understood. In medical terms, these mechanisms are clustered in the term ‘Metabolic Syndrome’ (explained in this podcast ). ‘Syndrome’ refers to a group of signs and symptoms which are linked to a disease, but the link is not understood. “These gaps in knowledge are not publically admitted by either side” says Koping. Instead of bogging readers down in complex jargon, challenging food categories are excluded. Processed foods, admittedly the likely source of most of our excess carbohydrates, are dismissed as the products of an evil capitalist conspiracy. “There are a number of unintended consequences to such stances” opines Koping. There is a natural continuum that sets the low carb devotee on a path away from processed foods toward the ideal of Organic Foods, Free Range produce, home cooking, and Low Carbon Footprint food consumption. – this makes the diet somewhat elitist and a costly way to eat.
In his article titled Can your Low Carb Diet make you Dumb?, Koping expands on examples where Banting followers may be unnecessarily restrictive in their food choices in achieving their results. “Low Carb needs to be taken out of the Low Carb Food Movement” he says. “The movement’s revolutionary nature and anti establishment stance prevent it from being adapted to industrialized societies. Taking a big step back, the world’s urban populations are facing a disease pandemic. The answer to this cannot possibly be for these masses to revert to a caveman civilization, or even the world that our grandparents knew. Modern answers will emerge from modern technologies. This will happen when the lower carb ideal, with a more moderate level of restriction, is embraced by the mainstream.”