Protein
Protein
We live in a time when meat is abundant and vast tracts of wilderness and rainforest are rapidly being converted into ranches. Indeed, for decades we were encouraged by food industry lobbyists to eat meat three times a day, that is, until the advent of Dr Keys and the ‘lipid hypothesis.’ This great urban myth, fostered by pharmaceutical industry lobbyists and the participating health care industry, put an end to guilt-free meat consumption with dire warnings that saturated fat and cholesterol were ‘villains’ responsible for the early demise of legions of sedentary urban people.1–3
No distinction was made between a diet consisting largely of junkfood and one of traditional wholefoods, something Keys actually insisted on when he promoted the largely vegetarian traditional Mediterranean diet.4 Fatty meat, eggs, butter and whole-milk were rigorously discouraged and a new very profitable low-fat diet industry born, with the result that urban health steadily deteriorated. A new epidemic of metabolic diseases was soon upon us, something we are still struggling with today, making drugs suitable for their management best-sellers (statins, metformin, glipizide, β-blockers, Calcium channel blockers). Ironically, margarine, a factory-fat with the worst profile of any fat for heart disease, is one of the great commercial success stories of this era.5
Nevertheless, protein and its associated nutrients (fats, fibre, minerals, vitamins, enzymes) is necessary for all aspects of growth, maintenance and the repair of the body. Insufficient protein may present us with symptoms such as an underactive digestive system, poor immunity and slow wound healing, or even fragile skin, hair and nails. Dieters as well as the elderly are particularly at risk of malnutrition. Malnutrition is severe dietary restriction that causes disease, whereas the lesser form of calorie restriction is actually beneficial if maintained at around 10%. Such sustained, minimal restriction is associated with health and longevity provided that the rest of the diet is comprised of nutrient-dense wholefoods and not just low-fat supermarket alternatives.6
Adequate protein can of course come from vegetables as it mostly did in the traditional diets of the Mediterranean region, South America and Japan. My Greek neighbours told me that when living in the village as children they only ate goat or sheep meat once a month, relying instead on beans, chickpeas and lentils. This is consistent with the traditional diet of the people of Okinawa who ate pork only on festival days, their protein otherwise coming from soy, fish and vegetables. The Hunza ate mostly grains, vegetables and fruit supplemented with a little milk, butter and goat meat on feast days,7 while the diet of some Aboriginal tribes in Central Australia consisted of up to 80% wattle seed and other legumes.8
Even so, the diet of the largely hunter-gatherer Aboriginals usually contained a lot of meat and fat. Snakes, goannas, small mammals and marsupials were all thrown straight onto the coals of a fire where they were left long enough to cook the flesh, but not too long so that the valuable fats were lost in the fire. Larger animals such as kangaroo were first cleaned, and in some parts of Australia, the stomach was stuffed with blood and fat in order to make a kind of blood-pudding, to be roasted alongside the kangaroo in the fire.9
The preservation of the blood and fat by the Aboriginals is at odds with the current advice to eat kangaroo because it supports a lean-meat diet. While the fat content of kangaroo is relatively low, the whole diet nevertheless contained a considerable amount of saturated fat as well as cholesterol, and plants like purslane and various nuts, seeds, legumes and fish provided additional polyunsaturated fats such as omega-3 and omega-6. The Aboriginals also prized the fat of possums, emus and dugong, keenly observing nature so that they could tell the best time to hunt certain animals in order to get this rich source of energy, rejecting animals that were lean because the calorie intake was too low to support the effort of hunting. The reason fat is so highly prized is that it contains twice the calories per gram than carbohydrate. Birds, grubs, moths, nuts and eggs were also rich in fat but the total diet could be as low as 13% in fat in some regions of Australia.10
Tribes located around the coast also had access to certain shellfish, fish, turtles and other marine animals which were unavailable to desert dwellers.11 Despite this, the diet was generally limited, often obtained from arid areas of the continent but nevertheless adequate to support ‘superb bodies, and maintain them in excellent health’, according to Dr Weston Price who toured Australia in 1930s. On this tour he also visited Aboriginal missions including Cape Bedford, Cowall Creek and Lockhart River and found the inhabitants to be suffering from malnutrition and rampant tooth decay. The people living in these missions were provided with processed foods by the Government and their health had regressed to the same state as that of the whites governing them. Dr Price comments that he had seldom seen white people in such a poor state of health anywhere in the world as he found them along the east coast of Australia.12
If you are blood type O then you are actually better suited to eating a lot of meat protein, as in the Paleo diet, and relatively unsuited to carbs and grains, which suit type A (the agrarian Mediterranean diet). Carbohydrate intolerance shows with symptom of fermentation, bloating and gas, something we usually tackle with a FODMAPs diet rather than by taking a simple blood type test. We can’t change our ancient constitution to suit industry, and reverting to a pre-industrial age diet rather than a regime of pharmaceutical drugs can often miraculously restore health.13
Nevertheless, eating too much meat presents several potential problems: firstly, the diet is acidifying in nature, especially if meat is eaten together with refined carbohydrates such as chips, bread and sugary deserts, foods that replace alkaline vegetables; secondly, meat contains the fatty acid arachidonic acid which is pro-inflammatory, and if eaten in large quantities along with other inflammatory foods, such as refined carbohydrates and margarine, encourages chronic low-level degenerative disease processes; thirdly, a diet high in protein puts extra load on the kidneys which have to remove the acid wastes. Lastly, raw or poorly cooked meat such as pork and beef can carry parasites such as liver fluke, tapeworm and round worms.
We also have lab-grown meat to consider, which may be a diet revolution for the affluent urban dweller of the future but is currently out of reach for billions of poor people. These people would do better to rely on the tank-farmed algae spirulina for their staple protein, as they have long done on soy. The algae spirulina has in fact been cultivated since the time of the Aztecs and provides a cheap, ecologically sound form of agriculture capable of averting future famine, something the beef industry cannot offer with its poor cost-benefit ratio. Spirulina is in fact a rich source of complete protein at about 50%, with many other nutrients including minerals, vitamins and essential fats, a dietary supplement even capable of supporting travel in the space age.
References:
1. Astrup A, Bertram HC, Bonjour J-P, et al. WHO draft guidelines on dietary saturated and trans fatty acids: time for a new approach? BMJ 2019;366:l4137.
2. Werko L. End of the road for the diet-heart theory? Scand Cardiovasc J 2008;42:250–5.
3. Ravnskov U. The Cholesterol Myths: Exposing The Fallacy That Saturated Fat And Cholesterol Cause Heart Disease. Washington, DC: New Trends; 2000.
4. Keys A. Mediterranean diet and public health: personal reflections. Am J Clin Nutr 1995;61:1321S-1323S.
5. Micha R, Mozaffarian D. Trans fatty acids: effects on cardiometabolic health and implications for policy. Prostaglandins Leukot Essent Fatty Acids 2008;79:147–52.
6. Li Y, Daniel M, Tollefsbol TO. Epigenetic regulation of caloric restriction in aging. BMC Med 2011;9:98.
7. McCarrison R. Studies in deficiency disease. London: Frowde, Hodder & Stoughton; 1921.
8. Lister. Acacia in Australia: Ethnobotany and Potential Food Crop. Progress in new crops. ASHS Press 1996;Oct.
9. Isaacs J. Bush Food, Aboriginal Food And Herbal Medicine. Weldon; 1987.
10. O’Dea K. Marked improvement in carbohydrate and lipid metabolism in diabetic Australian aborigines after temporary reversion to traditional lifestyle. Diabetes 1984;33:596–603.
11. Low T. Wild Food Plants Of Australia. Angus & Robertson; 1991.
12. Price W. Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. 6th ed. US: Price-Pottenger Foundation; 2000.
13. D’Adamo P. Live Right For Your Type. Penguin Books; 2002.