Come the Apocalypse, how do you rate your chances of survival, assuming you made it through the worst? This is the scenario: there’s nothing man-made left on Earth – just you, some other hapless survivors and the natural environment. How are your basic human skills? You might want to think about honing them now, because you’ll need to be able to hunt (for skins as well as food), forage, build a shelter, light a fire and find drinking water. Good luck with all that.

Our forebears spent millions of years evolving these skills, and the absurdity is that most of us now can do none of the things that these so-called primitive hunter-gatherers excelled at. If they hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here today. We’re the primitive ones now: personally, some light foraging is all I would be able to offer my survival group, perhaps with a few short talks on nutrition for round-the-fire entertainment. We can operate machinery we don’t really understand and pass IT exams, but we have no idea how to be the human animals that we are.

These are the existential matters I’ve taken to ruminating on recently, what with rising food prices, peak oil, climate change and other looming disasters of our own making. I’ve come to the conclusion that self-sufficiency may well be the only way forward.

I’m not long back from Italy, where we have a house. It’s in a beautiful mountainous region; very rural, and very traditional. It is well known that Italians love food and love talking about food and how to cook it. In our village, which is fairly typical, the people are attuned to the seasons and the land and have impressive foraging and horticultural skills. If it grows and is edible, they know about it and they will find some creative way to incorporate it into their diet.

Our house is a converted water mill, over 500 years old. It still houses the original grinding stones, and the beams are huge chestnut trunks. We have chestnut trees in our garden and they are rightly protected by law. The sweet chestnut (not to be confused with the inedible horse chestnut) is, or was, hugely important to the region. In fact the castagna ensured the survival of the people on the land for thousands of years, being the staple crop. Planting chestnut trees is an act of selfless consideration – they bear no fruit for at least 15 years, and it takes around 50 years before they produce a decent harvest.

Chestnuts are not cultivated; they fall to the ground when they are ready and are available to foragers. Edible, free and versatile, the chestnut can be eaten raw, roasted or baked. It is also nutritious: unusually for a nut it contains significant amounts of vitamin C, as well as potassium, calcium and folate. On the downside, they are low in fat and protein, but they have lots of fibre and a relatively low glycaemic value of around 54.

The most common chestnut product is flour; hence the preponderance of once-working mills such as ours in this region of Tuscany. Thankfully there are still a few working mills and chestnut flour is available in local shops. This is beautiful flour. Other than drying and grinding, the chestnuts undergo no refinement. The flour is ideal for coeliacs or anyone avoiding gluten and can be used to make pasta and pancakes, or polenta. Because it is slightly sweet, it lends itself well to desserts. Chestnut cake is a favourite in the area, and is known as castagnaccio. There are variations on the basic recipe, but I found this very good one, requiring no sugar but containing some other excellent ingredients such as pine nuts. See:

http://www.italyum.com/Bakery/poor-man-s-chestnut-cake-castagnaccio.html#.UXUz2IKfLWI

Chestnut flour can be bought on-line, so no need to travel too far too find it. I’ll be buying some chestnut flour on my next Italian trip. If it is still available – the locals were telling us that last autumn the chestnut trees failed to produce any chestnuts at all. Not one. The chestnut tree has been hit by a blight caused by the fungus Cryphonectria parasitica (C. parasitica) They had never known anything like it, and although they no longer depend on the chestnut for their survival, they were truly saddened by this loss. Imagine if this occurred at a time when the castagna was all people had to eat, I said to a neighbour, Luigi. His laughing face turned dark. Fame, he said. Hunger.

Italians have long memories when it comes to hardship which is why they revere food, and the land that produces it. That is also why, in rural areas, there are always so many festivals dedicated to the harvest of single crops. In October, when the chestnut harvest begins, you’ll find people celebrating the festa della castagna. I really hope there is one this year.

Chestnuts photo: nuchylee/freedigitalphotos.net

If you are partial to a cooked breakfast but worried about recent reports that it’ll kill you, don’t be. A cooked breakfast is one of the highlights of my weekend, definitely worth getting out of bed for, and so far I’ve survived. A regular diet of brassicas might have something to do with that.

This weekend was no exception and – since you ask – I had my usual: two slices of bacon, three chipolata sausages, an egg and some garlicky mushrooms with herbs, all cooked in extra virgin olive oil. This protein rich fest usually sees me through to the evening, with perhaps just some fruit in the afternoon. However, if I am to believe a recently published report, I am dicing with death.

 This report, a study by the European Prospective Investigation in Cancer and Nutrition (EPIC), found an association between processed meat consumption and risk of death (and there’s nowt as processed as bacon and sausage). The EPIC study was based on the diet questionnaires of over half a million people across ten European countries. It was found that the people most likely to die, as well as eating a lot processed meat, were also more likely to smoke, be overweight, eat fewer fruits and vegetables and exercise less and drink more than people who did not eat a lot of processed meat. They also tended to be older. Now, even though the researchers partially adjusted for all these confounding factors, they could not do so entirely because to eliminate everyone with bad habits and prone to ageing would have excluded virtually everyone.

Look at all those glucosinolates

It is the preservatives used in processed meats which are thought to be the main perpetrators of this food felony. These preservatives – nitrates – are a prime suspect in cancer, especially colon cancer. However, even though colon cancer is on the increase, there is nothing new about meat preservation. Even in Medieval times salt would be mixed with saltpetre (sodium or potassium nitrate) to cure pork. Some sausages also contain nitrites, but these are the cheaper ones: premium, high-meat content sausages usually contain no preservatives at all, and naturellement that is my sausage of choice. I do love bacon though, despite the nites.

 I’ll hazard a guess that many people who love a fry-up, smoke, drink excessively and generally slob about inactively do not fill up on brassicas every day. This is where they are going wrong. The brassica family, which includes broccoli, sprouts, cauliflower, cabbage and kale, are a source of glucosinolates, chemicals which are metabolised in the gut to form isothiocyanates and indole-3-carbinol. These chemicals are associated with a reduced risk of developing cancer. Indole-3-carbinol promotes the metabolism and breakdown of oestrogen in the liver. For this reason it is thought that it may be effective as a preventative measure against breast cancer. Indeed, studies have established that a high consumption of these brassicas leads to a decreased risk of developing other cancers too, relating to the lung, stomach, colon and rectum. (Johnson 2002).

 Most days of the week I eat at least one generous portion of leafy greens and brassica vegetables. For that reason I am not remotely concerned about this study – which, by the way, found no association between fresh red meat and risk of death, but as that finding has no shock value it didn’t make any headlines.

Reference

Johnson, I.T. (2002) Glucosinolates in the human diet. Bio availability and implications for health. Phytochemistry Reviews, 1:183-188.

Romanesco cauliflower photo: James Barker/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Fluoride occurs naturally in water and strengthens bones and teeth. Who’d be mad enough to object to adding more of it to the water supply?

Fluoride, the thirteenth most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, is found naturally in rocks, soil, water and air. Our main exposure to fluoride is from drinking water. Fluoride may occur naturally, and be good for bones and teeth, but the act of adding fluoride to water – fluoridation – has long been a contentious issue. Only some areas of the UK have fluoridated water and it is up to each local health authority to decide whether or not to impose fluoridation of the water supply. Fluoridation is carried out because it is believed that fluoride can prevent tooth decay and help strengthen bones.

So what’s so contentious about fluoridation if it occurs naturally in water and strengthens teeth and bones? Well, a lot of people do object, and for a number of reasons.

First, there is the objection to being medicated, without consent. That’s the sort of thing that gets right up some people’s noses, however well-meaning the intent. Second, there is the issue of fluorosis. High levels (that is, concentrations over 1.5mg/litre) are known to cause dental fluorosis, skeletal fluorosis, bone fractures, lower birth rates, kidney stones, impaired thyroid function and reduced intellectual capacity in children.

There is a third, not insignificant objection. It’s not naturally-occuring fluoride that is added to water – instead, disodium hexafluorosilicate and fluorosilicic acid are the two permitted chemical compounds used to increase the fluoride content of drinking water in the UK, by to up to 1mg per litre.

Fluorosilicic acid – classified as a hazardous waste product – is a by-product of the phosphate fertiliser industry, and this, according to the campaigning organisation the Fluoride Action Network is what is used to fluoridate water in the UK. It is also added to dental products such as toothpaste and mouth washes. Fluoridated dental products are a significant source of fluoride intake, and it is estimated that children swallow around 0.50 – 0.75mg per day. Fluorosilicic acid is considered highly toxic wherever it is found, except, mysteriously, when it is added to drinking water. It is a highly corrosive acid and according to the Fluoride Action Network there are no available studies on the safety of this toxin in water.

In the UK, the government and the British Medical Association are big advocates of water fluoridation.According to the BMA, fluoridation of water by up to 1mg per litre, the amount more or less found naturally in water, would reduce dental ‘inequalities’ in the UK. Poor children have the worst diets, so if we put fluoride in everyone’s drinking water that would make us all dentally equal.

This is where it gets interesting. The argument in favour of fluoridation is based on just one review alone of available studies, published in 2000 in the British Medical Journal. The aim of this review was to determine whether or not fluoridation improved the level of decayed, missing and filled teeth in children.According to the British Medical Association this review “… concluded that the best available evidence supports the beneficial effect of water fluoridation on dental caries. It also found some evidence that it can help reduce inequalities in dental health across social classes in 5 to 12 year olds.”

Because this review is so frequently cited by those in favour of fluoridation, I thought it would be appropriate to have a proper read of it. I’m glad I did, because what it actually says is that, of the 214 studies reviewed, all were of ‘low to moderate’ quality. Not one of them was considered of high quality. In other words, they weren’t very good studies. Indeed they were described as lacking appropriate design and analysis, but they were used because there was nothing better available. Many were conducted in the 1940s and 1950s and even those that were carried out after that time were described as lacking any adequate tool for analysis. What they gleaned from these poor studies was that “Overall, reductions in the incidence of caries were found, but they were smaller than previously reported.”So, the evidence for artificially fluoridating water is based on poor, outdated studies with underwhelming results. Hardly scientific, and hardly what we would expect of scientists charged with informing policy we are supposed to swallow.

And Venice … but it’s natural.

References

McDonagh M.S, Whiting P.F., Wilson, P.M. et al (2000) Systematic review of water fluoridation. British Medical Journal, 321:855.

British Medical Association. Fluoridation of water. www.bma.org.uk Accessed June 2011.

Look out, everyone – we’re about to be deluged by a tidal wave of old people. According to a House of Lords report published last week, the UK is “woefully underprepared” for this ageing population explosion. Moving like a slowly advancing army, old people equipped with an assortment of mobility aids are spreading across the horizon, with longevity and long-term care in their sights.

There have been plenty of warnings of this impending threat to our welfare reserves in the press recently. Or, more positively, of what the Lords committee describes as “the gift of longer life”. The gift that keeps on giving, unfortunately for the NHS and pension funds.The Office for National Statistics predicts a 50 per cent rise in the number of over 65s and a doubling of over 85s between now and 2030. Furthermore, according to the marvelously optimistic ONS, twenty year-olds today are twice as likely as their parents to reach the age of 100 – and three times more likely than their grandparents.

Whilst such a sunny outlook is usually welcome, in this case it is blindingly unrealistic. I’m not disputing the fact that people are currently enjoying longer life and we have more over 80s than ever. But these are the war generation, people who were brought up in an era when ready-meals and microwaves were barely a glint in the eye of the food giants. These are the people brought up on simple home cooking and regular physical activity.

The same cannot be said for much of the post-war generations. Swivel round and take a look at the opposite horizon. There’s another tidal wave looming, and it’s even bigger than the first. It is made up of children, adolescents and young people born in the late 1970s onwards, and they are wobbling slowly towards us, not waving their sticks but cramming their fat fingers into packets of heavily salted or sugared snacks.

Other predictions may be more reliable. It is projected that by 2020, 41% of men and 36% of women aged 20-65 will be obese. Obese people do not go on to celebrate their 100th birthdays. They do not go on to enjoy a long and happy retirement. Instead, they go on to develop heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer. Since 1996 the number of people diagnosed with type 2 diabetes has doubled. By 2025 it is estimated that 5 million will be affected. Cancer incidence rates in Great Britain have risen by 22% in men and by 42% in women since the mid-1970s. Even so, the biggest killer in the UK remains coronary heart disease.

Despite the joy and optimism of the House of Lords and the Office for National Statistics, I predict an entirely different, dystopian future, unless we get a grip. A future of obese, chronically sick people lucky to make it past their 60s. No “gift of longer life” for these victims of a society in which the food industry is self-regulating and leans heavily on any government that might contemplate legislative control, and has successfully seduced generations into a diet of junk food, in the same way that an unregulated tobacco industry once seduced so many into an equally destructive addiction of a different nature.

Anyone who thinks that the NHS can prolong the lives of such chronically ill people is seriously deluded. Apart from the fact that it will not be able to cope with the oncoming burden in terms of sheer numbers, it simply does not possess the miracle cures required to prolong the lives of the junk food generations. Expecting the NHS to keep sick people alive and well for lengthy periods of time is like expecting the police to eliminate all crime and keep us all safe. Damage limitation is limited; we have to look after our own health as best we can, and lock our doors at night.

Top Photo: Suat Eman/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Hospital food is as bad as ever, despite the government spending over £54 million on 21 initiatives since 1992 to improve standards. That’s the news we heard last week from the Campaign for Better Hospital Food, as it despaired of the “meetings, speeches and gimmicks” that had achieved nothing.

We’ve all been there, either as a patient or as an anguished visitor, watching a loved one’s crushed expression on peeling back the lid of some wretched concoction masquerading as a meal. I predict that absolutely nothing will change (other than the mobilisation of yet another celebrity chef to lead yet another doomed campaign to drive up standards). Nothing, that is, until two things happen. First, the government needs to learn from those who know how to do quality institutional catering without breaking the budget, and second, it needs the backbone to introduce compulsory standards.

This is not hospital food

If you want to know how to do really good food in an institution, despite these challenges, have a word with the armed forces. They excel in this field. In 2009 myself and co-author Barbara MacDonald published Nutrition in Institutions, in which we describe the provision of food in schools, hospitals, care homes, prisons and the armed forces. Researching all five was an eye-opener, and none more so than the armed forces.

The provision of food in the armed forces is considered a matter of paramount importance, which is why catering is an integral part of the forces, provided by its own members, rather than by an-outsourced service. Standards are in place and these are monitored and met. Food is valued not only as a source of fuel but also for its role in building morale. Providing good food is also a matter of pride, and being naturally competitive, the forces organise various culinary competitions to ensure that creativity and standards are constantly driven upwards.

Even prisons have made sterling efforts to improve the food they provide. Should you ever find yourself in choky, you might be pleasantly surprised by the standard of prison food. Mandatory food standards are in place, thanks to the 1990 prison riots in Strangeways which triggered protests and disturbances in prisons throughout the country. A report into the riots found that the poor quality food was the most common complain from prisoners. By and large standards are now met.

Nor is this. But why not?

So surely the time has come for efforts to finally focus on hospitals. What we learned from our research for Nutrition in Institutions was that food was at its best where there were stringent, well monitored standards in place. The worst service is where there are no compulsory standards, and the service is out-sourced to the cheapest bidder. All too frequently, catering staff, especially those who are not employed in-house, are poorly paid and poorly trained. There is, in some establishments, a small but growing trend towards bringing the catering service back in-house, after having previously out-sourced contracts to private commercial companies. In-house catering, just like the old days when Cook was in charge of the kitchen, can also be more economical: in the long term it is cheaper to buy in raw ingredients and pay someone to cook them than leave the whole service to an outside organisation.

The armed forces were quick to understand the provision of food as being crucial to the smooth running of the military machine and constitute the only institution to consistently value the link between diet and health and performance. But it is clear that, without standards and genuine government commitment, those who are most vulnerable and unable to stand up for themselves (quite literally), or riot on rooftops, are those most likely to receive the poorest quality food service.

Photos: Top: nuttakit, middle: marcus, bottom: Dino de Luca/www.FreeDigitalPhoto.net

Yogurt can be a great speedy breakfast, if it is live (bio) and sugar-free. It is made by the bacterial fermentation of milk. Live yogurt contains lactic acid bacteria which populate your gut and do no end of good, from strengthening immunity to improving bowel function and reducing the risk of colon cancer. By creating an acid environment in the gut, lactic acid bacteria – L. acidophilus – inhibit pathogens and prevent them from flourishing. If you’re dairy intolerant you may find that you can tolerate live yogurt. That is because the lactic acid bacteria in yogurt pre-digest the lactose (milk sugar). The protein in yogurt is also partially digested by bacterial fermentation, so if you are sensitive to the protein content rather than the lactose, again you may find that you can tolerate yogurt without developing any symptoms. Yogurt drinks on the other hand are a watered down, sugary derivative sold in multiples of dinky pots at exorbitant prices. I personally don’t see the point of them, other than their obvious convenience factor. Yes, they contain friendly bacteria, but so does yogurt in its original and much cheaper form. They also contain lashings of sugar, which to my mind negates any benefits the product had to start with.

Someone tell her

The medical establishment has finally turned its gaze to sugary soft drinks in its efforts to halt the tide of obesity that is threatening to overwhelm us. The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, which represents Britain’s 220,000 doctors, is demanding that the government impose a 20% tax on the cost of sugary drinks. With one in four adults in England classified as obese, and that figure predicted to rise to 55% by 2050, there isn’t much time left for action.

These drinks have rightly been singled out for public vilification. ‘Soft’ sounds innocuous enough, but it belies the true nature of these baby-faced beverages. It is well established that sugar-sweetened soft drinks are associated with tooth decay. That is just the start of it: they have also been shown, in numerous large studies, to be associated with weight gain, type two diabetes and heart disease. There can be no doubting the significant contribution that sugary soft drinks make to the obesity epidemic. They have a unique characteristic: despite all the sugar and calories they contain, soft drinks have very little impact on appetite. So no matter how much you drink you will not feel any more full, or want to eat any less. What you will have, without having actually eaten anything, is high circulating glucose and insulin. Primed for obesity, there’s only one place all that glucose is heading, and that’s straight to your fat cells. High circulating glucose – followed by insulin – can lead not only to obesity but also to inflammation, insulin resistance and ultimately metabolic syndrome. All this between meals.

Switching to a ‘lite’ version of your favourite pop, sweetened with artificial chemicals, seems like a neat solution that does not require sacrificing your sweet fix. One of the perceived benefits of a sugar-free drink is that it won’t affect blood sugar levels, so must be good for diabetics and weight watchers. However, studies have, paradoxically, put paid to this theory. One study of 14 men with type two diabetes who were given a variety of different meals at different times, including high sugar, high fat, low carbohydrate, and aspartame sweetened meals, found, ‘contrary to all expectations’, that the aspartame meal induced a similar rise in glucose and insulin levels as the sugary meals.

It beats me that anyone would choose to imbibe something whose cloying brassiness so traumatises the taste-buds and makes the stomach wince. But there are plenty of people who do, and who show no signs of cutting back. The British Soft Drinks Association reported that in 2011 the market continued to grow, despite the economic climate, and that 14,685 million litres of the stuff was consumed. The government has no appetite for regulating a powerful and, what’s more, lucrative business. Nor has the Food Standards Agency, ostensibly working on behalf of the consumer but in reality enjoying a cosy relationship with the food industry, which it is reluctant to police. This much has been made clear from the current horse meat scandal. Will the government heed the call from Britain’s GPs to take any action at all? Fat chance.

References

Malik, V.S., Popkin, B.M., Bray, G.A. et al (2010) Sugar-sweetened beverages, obesity, type 2 diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular disease risk. Circulation, 121:1356-1364.

Malik, V.S., Schulze, M.B. & Hu, F.B. (2006) Intake of sugar-sweetened beverages and weight gain: a systematic review. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 84(2):274-288.

Ferland, A., Brassard, P. & Poirier, P. (2007) Is aspartame really safer in reducing the risk of hypoglycemia during exercise in patients with type 2 diabetes? Diabetes Care, 30(7)e59.

Photo: Ambro/www.FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Catch that ray …

 As we approach the end of January, your reserves of vitamin D levels are rapidly diminishing. Anyone overwintering on this planet on a northern latitude of 37º or higher will have ceased making vitamin D in the skin some time around November 2012, and won’t recommence doing so until late spring 2013. The further north you are, the slimmer your chances of having adequate supplies of vitamin D. If you live in London, you are on a latitude of 51º; in Birmingham 52º, Belfast 54º and Edinburgh … 55º. You need help. We all do: a study of 45 year-old British adults found 60% to be vitamin D deficient – with that figure rising to 90% during winter and spring.

This vitamin – which is really more a hormone – is made in the skin on exposure to solar ultraviolet B and with the help of cholesterol, but only during the summer months. Although we associate vitamin D with calcium absorption from the gut, receptor sites for this vitamin are found throughout the body – in the brain, heart, skin, prostate, breast, in T and B lymphocytes, and in testes and ovaries. That explains why vitamin D is now known to be important not only for bone health but for the health of the immune system, as it forms a significant part of our defence against cancer. Adequate levels of vitamin D help prevent unregulated cell growth, especially in certain cancers such as those of the breast, prostate and colon. There is also growing and compelling evidence that vitamin D deficiency is associated with various autoimmune diseases, including type 1 diabetes and multiple sclerosis. Vitamin D is involved in the development and functioning of the nervous system, and there are receptors for this nutrient in the brain – so it is not surprising that deficiency is associated with seasonal affective disorder (SAD) and depression.

Alternatively …..

Everyone is at risk, some more than others, and not just those of us occupying the more northerly latitudes. If you have dark skin, are elderly or obese you should seriously consider supplementation. Melanin in skin inhibits absorption of UVB. The elderly have decreased presence of skin 7-dehydrocholesterol, required to make vitamin D in the presence of sunlight. Body fat has been shown in numerous studies to inhibit the release of stored vitamin D into the circulation. A low fat diet will guarantee poor absorption, as vitamin D is fat soluble. If you’ve got Crohn’s disease or coeliac’s disease you are also likely to have poor absorption. And if you’re vegetarian or vegan in addition to any of the above, without supplementation I wouldn’t fancy your chances.

No sun, no salmon? Crack an egg or two.

That’s because there are some dietary sources that can help see us through the winter. Salmon is one of the richest sources – if it is wild. Fresh wild salmon has around 600-1000iu of vitamin D3 per 3.5oz, whereas farmed salmon only around 100-250iu. Mackerel, tuna and cod liver oil are also good sources. Eggs also contain vitamin D, though not as much as fish. Some foods are fortified, such as margarine and cereals, neither of which I would recommend. Sun, salmon and in many cases supplementation are you best options.

References

Hyppönen, E. & Power, C. (2007) Hypovitaminosis D in British adults at age 45y: nationwide cohort study of dietary and lifestyle predictors. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 85(3):860-868.

Lagunova, Z. et al (2009) The dependency of vitamin D status on body mass index, gender, age and season. Anticancer Research, 29(9):3713-3720.

Zgaga, L. et al (2011) Diet, environmental factors and lifestyle underlie the high prevalence of vitamin D deficiency in healthy adults in Scotland, and supplementation reduces the proportion that are severely deficient. Journal of Nutrition, 141(8):1535-1542.

Sharma, S. et al (2011) Vitamin D deficiency and disease risk among aboriginal Arctic populations, Nutrition Reviews, 69(8):468-475.

Zhang, R., & Naughton, D.P. (2010) Vitamin D in health and disease: Current perspectives. Nutrition Journal, 9(65)

If you’ve been cutting down on the carbs because you want to lose weight, you’ve been doing yourself a favour in more ways than one. Excessive carbohydrates, especially of the high glycaemic index type, are not just strongly linked to obesity but also tumour growth.

The link between dietary carbohydrate and cancer has been observed since the 1920s. It comes as no surprise when you consider that most malignant cells depend on glucose, a very simple form of carbohydrate, for their energy supply. They are unable to use fatty acids or ketone bodies, derived from fat and protein. High blood sugar – hyperglycaemia – therefore makes more energy available to tumour cells. Evidence continues to accumulate that by restricting carbohydrate intake it is possible to suppress or delay the development of cancer or slow down the proliferation of existing cancer cells.

It’s not just the glucose aspect of carbohydrate that links with cancer. There’s also the insulin. Eating carbs stimulates the production of insulin and insulin-like growth factor. Insulin is a tumour growth factor, and the more carbohydrate you eat, especially high GI carbohydrate, the more insulin is released. Furthermore, hyperglycaemia stimulates the production of inflammatory chemicals called cytokines, chemicals involved in the progression of cancer.

All this may explain why type 2 diabetes, a blood sugar disorder, is associated with increased risk of cancer of the liver, pancreas, colon, endometrium, kidney and breast. As I discuss in a previous post, there is a strong association between breast cancer and insulin.

The scientific evidence that has so far accumulated suggests that a low carb diet may play an important role in cancer prevention and even treatment. It also ties in with the fact that populations that consume a low carbohydrate diet – modern day hunter-gatherers, for example – experience very low levels of cancer.

Of course the causes of cancer are complex and multi factorial and not simply confined to carbohydrates and insulin. But consuming a diet based primarily on carbohydrates, especially high GI carbohydrates, topped up regularly with savoury or sugary snacks, is to my mind way too risky.

References

Klement, R.J. & Kämmerer, U. (2011) Is there a role for carbohydrate restriction in the treatment and prevention of cancer? Nutrition & Metabolism, 8:75.

Stattin, P., Björ, O., Ferrari, P. et al (2007) Prospective study of hyperglycemia and cancer risk. Diabetes Care, 30(3):561-567.

Braun, S., Bitton-Worms, K. & LeRoith, D. (2011) The link between the metabolic syndrome and cancer. International Journal of Biological Sciences, 7(7):1003-1015.

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

It’s the eternal question. Are people in the UK and elsewhere in the developed world obese because they are lazy lard-arses who eat too much? No, as it turns out. We burn just as many calories on a daily basis as lean hunter-gatherers.

With over 26% of adults in England obese, and around 55% predicted to be obese by 2030, we have a serious health problem on our hands. In order to solve a problem, you’ve got to understand what created it.

There is a population in the Lake Eyasi region of Northern Tanzania, East Africa, who can help us with this. The Hadza are one of the very few hunter-gatherer societies still in existence, though of the 1000 or so Hazda left, only about 300-400 still live as foragers. Their lifestyle is remarkably similar to that of Stone-Age, or Palaeolithic foragers, hunting on foot using bows and sticks and without the use of modern tools. The men hunt and the women gather. Their diet consists mainly of meat, root vegetables, berries, baobab fruit and honey. Baboon meat is a a particular favourite. In an article published in National Geographic in 2009, Michael Finkel describes his experiences when he stayed with a group of hunter-gatherer Hadza people, and went hunting baboon with the men at night. Finkel describes how the Hadza go for the fat first, with the paw pads being the most coveted part of the beast. The head is also a prized food, with the cheeks, eyeballs neck meat and forehead skin all going into the fire for a quick cook first before eating. You’re not going to waste any part of a beast you’ve risked your life to bring home.

As you might expect, the Hadza are lean; no obesity crisis there. However, they eat well enough – they are surrounded by food, they just have to get it and prepare it themselves. So you might assume that the secret to their leanness lies in all the energy they expend all day, out hunting and gathering. You’d be wrong. After measuring walking distance, resting metabolic rate and total daily energy expenditure of male and female Hadza adults, over 11 days, researchers found that the average total daily energy expenditure and metabolic rate of traditional Hadzas hunter gatherers/foragers was no different than that of your average westerner. In fact the difference between these two extreme populations was found to be ‘indistinguishable’. Yet the average BMI of the Hazda male was found to be 20.2. Women averaged in at 20.4.

These findings challenge our thinking that it is the sedentary western lifestyle that leads to obesity. The Hazda, not being agriculturists, have a great deal of leisure time, which would explain our similar levels of energy expenditure. No need to toil the earth, mend fences and tractors or tend to animals. The land, and the animals, look after themselves. So if the clue to our alarming rates of obesity does not lie in lifestyle, or metabolism, we need to look closer at diet.

It is well established that modern humans – Homo sapiens – who emerged from Africa 100-50,000 years ago are genetically adapted to the diets of our Palaeolithic ancestors. We have simply not had time to adapt anatomically to the recent introduction of foods such as cereals grains, refined sugar and oils which are now staples of the modern diet. The Hazda eat only natural wholefoods because that is all that is available to them. The answer to the obesity crisis is surely self-evident.

References

Pontzer, H., Raichlen, D.A., Wood, B.M. Et al (2012) Hunter-gatherer energetics and human obesity. PloS ONE 7(7):e40503.

Finkel, M. (2009) The Hazda. National Geographic, December 09.

Image courtesy of Tom Curtis / FreeDigitalPhotos.net