Geoff's Blog

I made the mistake of glancing at Dennis “High-Fat” Mangan’s blog recently, and saw his semi-endorsement of the Shangri-La Diet—which basically involves consuming canola (or light olive) oil, or sugar/fructose water, between meals, to spoil your appetite.

So I did a little Googling. First, health guru Jonny Bowden:

Fructose may indeed have a low glycemic index which seems to be why [Seth Roberts]—a non-nutritionist [and overall quack]—chose it as his sugar water of choice. But it is arguably the most damaging sugar in the world. It creates insulin resistance by another pathway, and it raises triglycerides more than any other sugar…. And canola oil, a very highly processed and crummy oil whose success is a triumph of marketing over science, is hardly the oil I’d choose to take the edge off my appetite.

Also:

In an interview on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Sunday Night program, nutritionist David Jenkins criticized the lack of scientific research validating the diet. In the same program, Roberts responded, saying that the results are there for all to see and that “there was no need for a big study to demonstrate the obvious.”

Yes, the cry of every quack on the face of the planet: “No need to test it, it’s obviously working already, never mind the possible confounding factors; nothing to see here!” (The low-fat proponent John McDougall cops the same plea, further absurdly claiming as evidence for the “set point” idea [which Roberts also relies on for his "theory"] the fact that underweight people gain weight on the same [vegan] diet of his as overweight people lose weight on. Of course, he is nowhere actually counting the calories that either group is consuming, there. And needless to say, he has the same impressive body of anecdotal evidence for short-term weight loss as do the Atkins-dieting types, like Mangan. And this was odd because, you know, the low-fat diet is having exactly the same effect, there, as the high-fat one which we’ve supposedly evolved to eat. Which, to a scientific mind, would suggest that, contra Atkins, the percentage of fat in the diet is not particularly closely related to the loss of weight.)

Further Troubles in Shangri-La:

[T]he scientific method exists for a reason: to root out poor hypotheses and to direct research towards those more likely to be fruitful. If Roberts were truly interested in investigating his approach, he should have subjected it to the dispassionate rigor of clinical study and peer review.

His hypothesis is clearly testable with a controlled trial by a careful scientist willing to be proven wrong if necessary. That hasn’t happened.

Any competent scientist should be embarrassed to have anything to do with Roberts. Mangan, however, cannot respect the good non-doctor enough, in submitting his own ideas on health for Roberts’ consideration.

Gary Taubes (debunked below) and Seth Roberts are provable quacks extraordinaire in their ideas on nutrition, and are precisely not the people whom anyone with half a clue would be turning to for support. Not unless you want to be instantly discredited on your own petard. Might as well be quoting Wilhelm Reich in support of your magical-thinking ideas. In Roberts’ case, that’s particularly obvious from the way he discovered his “diet” in the first place, as covered in Seth Roberts’ Shangri-La Diet in detail, where the bullshit/quackery meter is truly off the scale.

What will I do if someday Roberts and his ilk perform properly designed studies, which are independently reproduced, that show that he, Taubes, Atkins and Mangan are right?

Personally, I’d still follow a vegetarian diet, because I’ve tried doing it both ways and haven’t found it making any difference at all to my health or state of mind, and vegetarianism is markedly more earth-friendly (and moral) than is feeding grain to animals and then slaughtering them.

That really is the thing, for any thinking person: Even if eating a high-fat diet really was/is healthier than a vegetarian one, and even if you don’t care about the treatment of animals, your actions don’t ever stop with you, they always affect other people too. And we live on a planet with finite resources, so your environmental footprint does matter—all of which was covered, quite thoroughly, in John Robbins’ Diet for a New America, more than two decades ago.

It’s easy enough to ignore those moral issues—I manage it quite well myself, much of the time. But that doesn’t make them go away.

I truly doubt that those ideas have even crossed Mangan’s mind.

The other thing about Paleolithic diets and race-realism is that the same people who have no difficulty believing that Neolithic and more-recent cultures have selected for higher IQs and cognitive abilities (e.g., in whites and Ashkenazi Jews), are simultaneously blind to the fact that exactly the same selection effects could well have come into play for diet.

Lactose tolerance developed during exactly the same Neolithic period … and the very same tolerance is regularly pointed to as proof that our genes have changed since the Paleolithic era. Dairy products provide a valuable additional source of food, especially during hard times, to those who can metabolize them; the same could certainly have been true of grain. Hell, that’s potentially true for any food: We like barbequed meats precisely because our ancestors who salivated at the thought of eating small game that had been burned to death in forest fires had an additional source of food, compared to those who have the taste for that.

For anyone who wants to say that dietary needs cannot in principle have changed since the Paleolithic era, then our cognitive abilities (by race) can’t have changed either; and vice versa. Otherwise, the groups that switched to an agrarian diet sooner would have had more time to adapt to the cultural-selection pressures (for higher IQ) which arise from living in large cities, etc. (There actually are differences between races in the incidence of coeliac disease, re: tolerance for a gluten protein found in wheat, barley, and rye, though not in the simple order of agrarian cultivation of those. Still, those racial differences obviously came about from selection pressures related to the eating of grains, well after we moved “out of Africa.” In which case arguments about humans having supposedly evolved to eat high-fat, low-carbohydrate Paleolithic diets based on our evolutionary history are inherently flawed, just as surely as are the vegan arguments [from evolution] against drinking milk or eating dairy products.)

What high-fat race-realists like Mangan are doing is clinging to the half of the “we haven’t changed in 50,000 years” position that suits them (i.e., the high-fat, Paleolithic-like diet), while rejecting the other half that tells them things contrary to what they want to hear (re: IQ differences between races, which in the race-realist view have been produced by differences in the amount of time our respective lineages have been subjected to cultural-selection pressures—which only arose with our living in large cities, which only an agrarian economic base can support). Exactly the same is true of agnostic, who also contributes to GNXP; and as a valuable rule of thumb, if a person is willing to rewrite history and fact in favor of theory on one near-and-dear topic (see below), he’ll be prepared to do the same on other subjects, too.

They have the personal motivation to find genetic reasons for the cognitive differences between the races, and they have the motivation to find reasons in our evolutionary history for why it’s supposedly good to eat the large amounts of red meat which they want to eat anyway. But they have no motivation to wonder whether an agrarian diet could have exerted similar selection pressures on us as the domestication of animals did for lactose tolerance, where we would emerge from those pressures adapted more to a cereal-based diet than to a Paleolithic one.

Even if we entered the Neolithic era as a species/race not well-adapted for eating grains, how could thousands of years of consistently “forced” consumption of those not had a selective effect, of weeding out the people who didn’t thrive on that diet, and thus creating a species/race which was adapted to that diet? (It takes around six square miles of land to support a single hunter-gatherer. When your society transitions from hunter-gatherer to agriculture, and the population grows significantly in size, you can’t go back living on a Paleolithic diet, i.e., you are forced to eat a significant amount of grains from that point onward, or die of starvation.) In the wild, if the food supply changes over an extended period of time, you adapt or perish (i.e., the existing genes that allow the species to best utilize the available food supply are the ones that will spread through the population). It’s exactly the same thing when the change in food sources is human-caused, as it was beginning close to 10,000 years ago:

The Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, Egypt, and India were sites of the earliest planned sowing and harvesting of plants that had previously been gathered in the wild. Independent development of agriculture occurred in northern and southern China, Africa’s Sahel, New Guinea and several regions of the Americas. The eight so-called Neolithic founder crops of agriculture appear: first emmer wheat and einkorn wheat, then hulled barley, peas, lentils, bitter vetch, chick peas and flax.

By 7000 BC, small-scale agriculture reached Egypt. From at least 7000 BC the Indian subcontinent saw farming of wheat and barley, as attested by archaeological excavation at Mehrgarh in Balochistan. By 6000 BC, mid-scale farming was entrenched on the banks of the Nile.

Milk/cheese was a supplementary food source, while grain in agrarian communities was the basis of the diet, and thus was not merely an optional but was rather a “forced” food. But both paths have selection effects on the population, and depending on how vital the supplementary food source was for getting through periods of famine, the “forced” feeding could even have exerted its effects faster than the supplementary one.

I haven’t seen these selection-for-cereals ideas anywhere before; it’s just now that I’ve started thinking about them. But really, how could 10,000 years of a grain-based diet—with bread as the “staff of life”—and the adverse reactions to that which still persist in a few unfortunate individuals to this day, not have had an effect on what we’ve evolved to eat, to the point where nearly the only people alive today who should consider eating a Paleolithic diet are those whose societies never progressed to even simple horticulture?

If cereals are a primary, “staff of life” food source for your society, and your body can’t handle them, that’s a serious disadvantage to your survival and the propagation of your genes, isn’t it? So how on earth could a high-carb diet be a bad thing for us now, after all those aeons of selection effects, where the genes that are left in the (civilized) human genome are surely exactly the ones which support a cereal-based diet? And again, the same period of time was enough to produce a three-standard-deviation difference between the IQs of Ashkenazi Jews and sub-Saharan blacks … unless you say that that difference is all just cultural/environmental with no genetic component possible, in which case we all should be eating a high-fat diet, as our Paleolithic ancestors did. It’s a package deal.

Further consider: If the only (or primary) food that our species had been able to find for the past 10,000 years was bird vomit, we would have evolved to like the taste of that, and our stomach chemistry would have changed accordingly to be less acidic, simply because the ability to like and thrive on that “forced” food provides a huge survival advantage. (Those changes to human biochemistry would, in turn, have made it difficult or impossible for us to go back to eating the Paleolithic diet we used to eat, even though the latter was truly what we had evolved to eat prior to the move to an agricultural food base.) Conversely, people who couldn’t bring themselves to eat it, or who experienced adverse effects from that food, would have quite rapidly died out, taking the genes which gave rise to that dislike and adversity with them.

In that scenario, no one would be pushing the supposed virtues of a Paleolithic diet for today’s human beings: It wouldn’t matter a whit what our Paleolithic ancestors ate, simply because we had changed so much since then in response to our enforced diet. It’s only because we can still survive on a high-fat diet that we have these morons asserting that that’s what we should be eating, even in the “best of all possible dietary worlds.”

A lot has changed in the past 10,000 years … and not just in IQ. Mangan and his high-fat ilk try to claim that people who object to a high-fat, Paleolithic-like diet are showing their utter ignorance of the evolutionary history of our species. But predictably, he’s the one who hasn’t considered the full effects of our evolutionary history, beyond the Paleolithic era, and in fact can’t even manage to be logically consistently about that (vs. the agrarian/IQ issue).

I’ve also seen people complaining that if you ever eat large amounts of brown rice, you’ll feel bloated and gassy afterwards, etc. And of course, that gets presented as an argument against humans having evolved to eat (esp. unrefined) cereals and rice, and thus a point in favor of a high-fat diet. Except that I’ve personally eaten huge amounts of brown rice at various points in my life, and never once experienced those “universal” adverse effects.

But of course, “To a man with a steaknife, everything looks like a steak.” And when you’ve already decided on the theory, what need is there for evidence? You can just make that up as you go along. Like another high-fat proponent—the aforementioned “agnostic”—says:

[A]nimal products, especially good muscle and organ meat, are more expensive to produce than grain products. So, the elite have always been less reliant on empty carbs, and enjoyed more animal protein and fat, than the commoners. This is why the notion that elites used to be fat or even obese, while the commoners used to be thin, is nonsense. As a rule, they never have been. By consuming so much of their food in the form of non-fibrous carbohydrates, the commoners of the Middle Ages would not have looked very different from today’s Wal-Mart shoppers.

Because when reality and history don’t mesh with your pet theory … feel free to rewrite history to be whatever your theory says it should be.

To summarize: The push for asserting that humans evolved to eat a high-fat, Paleolithic-like diet is based on the idea that our genes haven’t changed since that pre-agrarian era. If that’s true, there can also be no genetically based cognitive/IQ differences between the races. Conversely, if cultural selection pressures have produced cognitive differences between the races, the corresponding social constraints can also have produced biological “cereal tolerance” differences; and that same process of adapting to a grain-based diet means that a Paleolithic diet is no longer the one that we’ve “evolved to eat.”

Further, in terms of evolution, there are many trade-offs where, in order to maximize one’s offspring before one dies, the body does things when you’re young that will come back to haunt you (and shorten your life) later. For example, men with higher testosterone levels are also at a greater risk of developing prostate cancer later in life, i.e., at a point where they historically weren’t likely to be reproducing anyway, so it makes no difference to their “selfish genes” whether the host is alive or not.

(It’s a bit different in today’s world, where “over the hill” guys like Donald Trump and Billy Joel can hoard $ and snag some Sweet Young Thang to shack up with. But historically, hunter-gatherers not only didn’t have that level of hierarchy, they didn’t have the market economies that allow for the accumulation of wealth, either.)

So … how old did people get in the Paleolithic era, hmmm? What was their life expectancy?

Upper Paleolithic	33 [At age 15: 39 (to age 54)]
Neolithic	20
Bronze Age	18
Classical Greece/Rome	20-30

Of course, those numbers include infant deaths, and so are artificially low, since people who reached puberty might live into their fifties; but even then, their life expectancy was only two-thirds of what ours is today in the developed world.

If early humans were dying before the long-term effects of their diet could kill them … there’d be no strongly detrimental effects of a meat-heavy diet on them. All that would matter was that their diet was good enough for them in the short term, even if the long-term effects of the same foods would eventually have offset the short-term gain.

Needless to say, the fact that our life expectancy is now into the seventies or beyond—both of my grandfathers, for example, lived well into their nineties—throws a bit of a monkey-wrench into the idea that we “evolved to eat a high-fat diet.” Because, while the Paleolithic diet may indeed have been “what we evolved to eat” before the discovery of agriculture, even then it will have had detrimental effects on the early human body. It’s just that the rest of their environment and lifestyle, and lack of scientific medicine, was killing them long before their high-fat diet could. Not so for us today, with heart attacks and colon cancer. Because it’s exactly when you get into your fifties or sixties that the meat you’ve eaten up to that point starts to kill you, just as it would have killed our Paleolithic ancestors, had they lived that long.

So a high-fat Paleolithic diet is exactly what you should be eating … if you don’t care about living past your mid-fifties. Heavy meat-eating was probably even necessary in order for us to get enough calories (and fatty acids) to initially develop our large brains in our ancestors’ hunter-gatherer days; but again, much has changed in the aeons since then:

“I disagree with those who say meat may have been only a marginal food for early humans,” said Milton. “I have come to believe that the incorporation of animal matter into the diet played an absolutely essential role in human evolution”….

Milton said that her theories do not reflect on today’s vegetarian diets, which can be completely adequate, given modern knowledge of nutrition.

“We know a lot about nutrition now and can design a very satisfactory vegetarian diet,” said Milton, a professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management.

But she added that the adequacy of a vegetarian diet depends either on modern scientific knowledge or on traditional food habits, developed over many generations, in which people have worked out a complete diet by putting different foods together.

As a rule of thumb, for all these issues where people claim that it’s difficult for vegetarians to get enough protein or omega fatty acids or whatever, John Robbins has already addressed all that in his books. It’s never as tough as the carnivores would like it to be (in justifying their own food choices, especially in the face of the long-term detrimental effects of a meat-heavy diet).

Still, thanks for the half-dozen click-throughs, D-Man. “Now I can afford to get that operation for me mum….”

Now, regarding Gary Taubes, consider The late Medieval shift away from carbs and toward meat. It’s touting Taubes’ infamous book Good Calories, Bad Calories, and the supposed benefits of a high-fat, low-carb, Atkins-like diet, first suggested by Taubes in his celebrated NYT article, What if It’s All a Big Fat Lie?

So I did a little Googling:

• Science, logic sorely lacking in pro-Atkins article
  

  A close look finds Taubes misquoting, misrepresenting, equivocating and running logical loop-the-loops to persuade us that Atkins had the answer, before finally revealing that he’s on the diet himself and doesn’t really care whether it shortens his life. Doubtless most readers are unaware of the CNN report in which scientists quoted by Taubes backed away from the concepts attributed to them….

  [Taubes] slams the establishment for vilifying “fats,” Taubes means “saturated fats,” but when he cites positive health effects of “fats” he cites studies on monounsaturated fats.

  Similarly, when he warns of the dangers of “high carb” intake, he means sugar, corn syrup, and some starches, not the fruits, beans, and whole grains that make up such a large part of a healthful, plant-based diet.

• Pritikin Doctors and Dietitians Challenge Gary Taubes’ Fat-Promoting Article, What If It’s All Been a Big Fat Lie? published July 7, 2002, In New York Times
  

  Mr. Taubes points out that sugars and other refined carbs like white bread and white rice cause spikes in blood sugar and surges in insulin, which, in turn, stimulate appetite, worsen cholesterol profiles, and decrease fat-burning, contributing to the fattening of America. Though the author mentions that there are different types of carbs, he seemingly pronounces all high-carb diets the same, infers that they are all ineffectual, and then makes the leap to high-fat diets as the answer.

  There is, however, another far healthier alternative: a low-fat diet that is rich, not in sugary, REFINED carbs, but in carbs of a different color—fiber-filled, nutrient-packed, straight-from-the-earth carbs like fruits, vegetables, beans, and whole grains such as oats, brown rice, and corn. These high-fiber carbs, known as unrefined carbs, cause no insulin overreaction. Unlike the low-fat, high-carb diets generically referred to by Mr. Taubes as causing an increase in triglyceride levels and other ills, low-fat, high-carb diets full of UNREFINED carbs have the most proven healthy effects of all diets.

• Big Fat Fake: The Atkins diet controversy and the sorry state of science journalism, by Michael Fumento, which includes a link to a rebuttal by Taubes. Fumento in turn responded to Taubes’ response.

Taubes also responded to the “debunkings of his debunking,” in an interview:

I think the better scientists in the obesity field never saw me as an advocate for Atkins. They read the article and took out of it what I put into it. It’s the more zealous journalists/advocates of the low-fat diet dogma—Sally Squires of The Washington Post, for instance, or Bonnie Liebman of the Center for Science in the Public Interest—more than any one who tried to spin the article into saying something that I couldn’t or wouldn’t want to defend.

Be that as it may, the most convincing evidence Taubes presents is from a study at the University of Cincinnati, led by Randy Seeley and David D’Alessio, where people on a high-fat diet lost twice the amount of weight as those on a low-fat one, while consuming the same number of calories per day. Neither Taubes nor Fumento actually say where that study was published, but this appears to be the follow-up study to it, from 2005:

The Role of Energy Expenditure in the Differential Weight Loss in Obese Women on Low-Fat and Low-Carbohydrate Diets. From which:

We have recently reported that obese women randomized to a low-carbohydrate diet lost more than twice as much weight as those following a low-fat diet over 6 months. The difference in weight loss was not explained by differences in energy intake because women on the two diets reported similar daily energy consumption. We hypothesized that chronic ingestion of a low-carbohydrate diet increases energy expenditure relative to a low-fat diet and that this accounts for the differential weight loss…. To study this question, 50 healthy, moderately obese (body mass index, 33.2 ± 0.28 kg/m2) women were randomized to 4 months of an ad libitum low-carbohydrate diet or an energy-restricted, low-fat diet…. The low-carbohydrate group lost more weight (9.79 ± 0.71 vs. 6.14 ± 0.91 kg; P < 0.05) and more body fat (6.20 ± 0.67 vs. 3.23 ± 0.67 kg; P < 0.05) than the low-fat group…. Estimates of physical activity were stable in the dieters during the study and did not differ between groups. These results confirm that short-term weight loss is greater in obese women on a low-carbohydrate diet than in those on a low-fat diet even when reported food intake is similar. The differential weight loss is not explained by differences in REE [resting energy expenditure], TEF [thermic effect of food], or physical activity and likely reflects underreporting of food consumption by the low-fat dieters.

(Of course, that study wasn’t available to Taubes when he was doing his earlier writing, in 2002-4. It was, however, available to him by the time he published his book, in January of 2007 … yet the only reference to Seeley’s work in that text is to the presumably-original 2003 study.)

Also, found this link to a study (from 1997) for the supposed negative effects of a low-fat diet on mood:

The effects on mood of reducing dietary fat while keeping the energy constant were examined in ten male and ten female healthy volunteers aged between 20 and 37 years. Each volunteer consumed a diet containing 41% energy as fat for 1 month. For the second month half of the subjects changed to a low-fat diet (25% energy from fat) and the remainder continued to eat the diet containing 41% energy from fat. Changes in mood and blood lipid concentrations were assessed before, during and at the end of the study. Profile of mood states (POMS) ratings of anger–hostility significantly increased in the intervention group after 1 month on the low-fat diet, while during the same period there was a slight decline in anger–hostility in the control subjects (group F 6.72; df 1,14; P = 0.021). Tension–anxiety ratings declined in the control group consuming the higher fat diet but did not change in the group consuming the low-fat diet (group F 6.34; df 1,14; P = 0.025). There was a decline in fasting concentrations of HDL-cholesterol after the low-fat diet and a small increase in subjects consuming the medium-fat diet (group F 4.96; df 1,12; P = 0.046), but no significant changes in concentrations of total serum cholesterol, LDL-cholesterol or triacylglycerol were observed. The results suggest that a change in dietary fat content from 41 to 25% energy may have adverse effects on mood. The alterations in mood appear to be unrelated to changes in fasting plasma cholesterol concentrations.

That study wasn’t randomized or double-blinded. (With all the low-fat foods today which, thanks to the judicious use of certain chemicals which pass through the body without being metabolized, taste just like high-fat foods, you could certainly incorporate the double-blind principle into such a study. At the very least, you would do it as a “random-crossover” study, where the “control” group would start with the low-fat diet, and then switch to high-fat. The way the study was actually done is just plain incompetent.) And the transition from a high-fat to a medium-fat diet (25% is not really low-fat; 20% would be low-fat) is effectively going “cold turkey” off of fatty/junk foods. Have you ever noticed a negative change in your mood, and increase in anger/irritability, when trying to kick a bad food habit, in favor of a healthier way of living? Do you really think that’s simply a product of the nutritional content of the healthier foods?

It’s almost like the study above was intentionally designed to test the withdrawal effects of going cold-turkey (and disingenuously present those as being the result of low fat), rather than of the amount of dietary fat per se. (Compare a study in which the subjects took heroin or cocaine for a month, then went off it for a month. Would the withdrawal symptoms experienced in the latter month be an inherent characteristic of a “low-cocaine” diet? Or would it just be telling you about the addictive nature of the substance? Well, then how about withdrawing from fatty foods or “sugar shock”?) Indeed, other studies, carried out over four months of low-fat diet rather than merely one, have found exactly the opposite effects on mood, measuring decreased depression, anger and sadness on a low (20%) fat diet.

Plus, you really need to distinguish between beneficial and harmful fats in such studies.

Not to mention that if you stop stuffing your face with garbage for awhile, you might even find that a “whole-wheat baguette with lean tuna, olive oil, and pepper” is actually quite tasty, while eating a “toasted blue-corn tortilla with a stack of pastrami or pepperoni, a heap of cole slaw, and melted cheese” is just going to make you feel sluggish and overdone afterwards. It just requires a bit of refinement in your palate, is all.

High-carb diets have also been blamed by the high-fat lobby for the reversal of the Flynn Effect in IQ scores:

When the ’60s cohort was in their 20s, it was the 1980s.

There was a huge dietary shift away from protein and fat, and toward carbohydrates, sometime during the 1970s. The prevalence of obesity, for instance, only shoots up in the late ’70s or early ’80s (from the NHANES data).

… blissfully ignoring all other possible confounding factors, including the fact that people lose weight as easily (or with as much difficulty) on a vegan diet as on a high-fat one; “nothing to see here….”

And this has not changed back since then.

Fat and cholesterol are crucial for learning and memory, so when people start relying more on potatoes, pasta, bread, and fruit juice, compared to bacon, eggs, cheese, and milk, we’d expect them to have somewhat lower vocabulary scores.

For example, the ’30s cohort ate less red meat than the ’40s or ’50s cohorts. I have a graph of red meat availability per capita at my blog (search “brody”), and there are two peaks: one in 1944, which looks anomalous, and another in 1971, which is the culmination of a steady increase, and preceding a steady decline.

I think the same thing accounts for the stalling / reversal of the Flynn Effect among the British. We’ve been eating a lot more empty carbs (especially sugar), and not enough fat and cholesterol, compared to the pre-anti-fat hysteria period.

That began in force sometime in the mid-1970s, with Senator McGovern telling us all to start pretending that we’re rabbits, birds, or cows, instead of human beings.

Yes, pretending that we’re human beings who want to live to retirement age, rather than dropping dead of a heart attack in our forties or fifties! Not to mention that when vegetarians cut out bacon (and other meats) from their diets, it is well-known that they tend to overdo it on eggs, cheese, and milk, in overcompensating for concerns about not getting enough protein. It’s a fair bet that carnivores would do exactly the same thing, if/when they were cutting back on red meat. Plus, as John Robbins has noted:

Vegetarians typically get plenty of protein. But there is another nutrient that can be an issue—Omega-3 fats. Getting enough of these essential fatty acids is crucial to optimum health, and in fact can be an issue for everyone today. In times past, animal products provided ample Omega-3 fats, but today people are eating meats, dairy products, and eggs that contain far fewer of these needed nutrients. You’d have to eat twenty of today’s supermarket eggs to get as much Omega-3s as are provided by a single egg from a free range chicken.

If you’re looking for a nutritional explanation of why the Flynn Effect has reversed in developed countries, that’s a more tenable one than the high-carb shift. (Not surprisingly, the above is the only place I’ve ever seen a dietary explanation of the reversal of that Effect.) Because if even the carnivore-food we’re eating has degraded so much that it might be affecting the average person’s cognitive processes, the problem isn’t that people aren’t eating enough animal products, it’s rather that we’ve “shat in our own nest,” in choosing hormone-forced quantity and low price over quality, in factory farms and the like.

That, too, will surely be lost on the high-fat race-realists, for whom organic farming and the like are simply mockery-worthy Stuff White People Like.

Robbins again:

Omega-3s are plentiful in flax seeds and in flax seed oil, in fatty fish such as salmon, herring, mackeral, and sardines, and can be found in lesser amounts in walnuts, hemp seeds, green leafy vegetables, and in canola oil.

“Green leafy vegetables”—you know, “rabbit food,” which us vegetarians eat particularly much of.

Plus, neither the research on the need for Omega-3 fats for brain health nor that on Omega-6s is conclusive. In particular, regarding the latter:

Adding more controversy to the n−6 fat issue is that the dietary requirement for linoleic acid (the key n−6 fatty acid), has been seriously questioned, because of a significant methodology error discovered by University of Toronto scientist Stephen Cunnane. Cunnane discovered that the seminal research used to determine the dietary requirement for linoleic acid was based on feeding animals linoleic acid-deficient diets, which were simultaneously deficient in n−3 fats. The n−3 deficiency was not taken into account. The n−6 oils added back systematically to correct the deficiency also contained trace amounts of n−3 fats. Therefore the researchers were inadvertently correcting the n−3 deficiency as well. Ultimately, it took more oil to correct both deficiencies. According to Cunnane, this error overestimates LA requirements by 5 to 15 times.

A fine example of professional incompetence on the part of “clinical laboratory scientists.”

Further, in spite of the misled concerns about vegetarians not getting enough Omega fats relative to meat-eaters, with that allegedly affecting their intelligence, there is actually a High IQ link to being vegetarian:

A Southampton University team found those who were vegetarian by 30 had recorded five IQ points more on average at the age of 10.

Researchers said it could explain why people with higher IQ were healthier as a vegetarian diet was linked to lower heart disease and obesity rates.

The study of 8,179 was reported in the British Medical Journal.

Twenty years after the IQ tests were carried out in 1970, 366 of the participants said they were vegetarian—although more than 100 reported eating either fish or chicken.

Men who were vegetarian had an IQ score of 106, compared with 101 for non-vegetarians; while female vegetarians averaged 104, compared with 99 for non-vegetarians.

While journalists have managed to accurately report the study in question there, they have exhibited a biased incompetence in their reporting of another recent study on bone density, under the highly misleading heading Big Risks to a Vegetarian Diet? A big downside to the green diet:

A joint Australian-Vietnamese study of links between the bones and diet of more than 2,700 people found that vegetarians [in four groups, combined: semivegetarian (which excludes meat, but not seafood, e.g., pescetarianism), ovolacto veg, lacto veg, and vegan] had bones five percent less dense than meat-eaters, said lead researcher Tuan Nguyen.

The issue was most pronounced in vegans, who excluded all animal products from their diet and whose bones were six percent weaker, Nguyen said.

There was “practically no difference” between the bones of meat-eaters and ovolactovegetarians, who excluded meat and seafood but ate eggs and dairy products, he said.

“The results suggest that vegetarian diets, particularly vegan diets, are associated with lower bone mineral density,” Nguyen wrote in the study, which was published Thursday in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

“But the magnitude of the association is clinically insignificant,” he added.

It’s not actually new research, being rather a meta-analysis of nine previous studies (out of 922 candidates) that met the authors’ criteria for inclusion.

The first problem is that meat eaters tend to be heavier, so they naturally have denser bones. You need to control for that.

The second, lesser problem with taking this study as definitive is that a mere two and a half months ago, in a different study, the same authors found no difference in bone density between carnivores and vegans:

A study comparing the bone health of 105 post-menopausal vegan Buddhist nuns and 105 non-vegetarian women, matched in every other physical respect, has produced a surprising result. Their bone density was identical.

The original news release for the more-recent study actually stated that “We found there was practically no difference between meat eaters and ovolactovegetarians…. While there is a difference between meat eaters and vegans, that difference is small.”

And whatever difference there is could surely be erased simply by taking a daily multivitamin, which we should all be doing anyway (and which I actually do, along with time-released iron, after being mildly anemic last summer—ah, the joys of aging).

(I have extracts from the study paper itself here.)

So overall, that is really a non-story … unless you choose to see the fact that (non-vegan) vegetarian bone density is essentially equal to that of meat-eaters, in spite of the latter’s higher average weight, as a confirmation of the fact that the “typical” vegetarian diet is actually better for your bones than is the typical meat-eating one.

There’s an additional, unacknowledged basis for the idea that eating meat produces healthier, stronger, manlier men: sympathetic-magical thinking. Even at a purely subconscious level of bias. Consider this, from Stigler, et al., Cultural Psychology (p. 215-6):

On reflection, “you are what you eat” seems like an eminently reasonable idea…. In the real world, mixture of entities (one version of what happens in ingestion) often gives rise to a product that shows properties of the constituents. Why shouldn’t one turn orange after eating a lot of oranges, or become a good swimmer after eating fish? It is only the knowledge of the process of digestion in modern developed cultures that makes this idea implausible….

It is possible that “you are what you eat” is a universal belief, present in all children, and stamped out of adults through a scientific education. Indeed, according to Keith Thomas (1983), in his survey of the development of attitudes to the natural world in 17th- to 19th-century England: “It was generally accepted that food affected the character.”

[We tested] whether there is an implicit, unacknowledged belief in “you are what you eat” among educated American adults…. Subjects (a few hundred undergraduate students) read a half-page vignette describing a hypothetical culture. There were two versions of the vignette (unknown to the subjects), which were identical except that in one case, the people were described as eating marine turtle, and hunting wild boar, but only for its tusk, whereas, in the opposite case, wild boar was eaten and marine turtle was hunted, but only for its shell. So the two vignettes differed with respect to what was eaten (and fabricated), and not in terms of other contact with the two animals in question. After reading the vignette, subjects were asked to rate male members of the culture on a number of personality scales, including good swimmer versus good runner, irritable versus good-natured, phlegmatic versus excitable, long-lived versus short-lived. Many of these traits had been selected to discriminate boar from turtle. We found that subjects reading the boar-eating vignette rated the people in this culture as more boar-like than those rating the turtle-eating culture. We obtained similar findings, with other subjects, using a contrast between an elephant-eating culture and a vegetarian culture that hunted elephants for their tusks.

I’d be surprised if that wasn’t half the motivation for the high-fat movement, the other half being just rationalizations for what they want to be true in terms of diet, and would be doing/eating anyway even if they couldn’t find a quack-scientific basis for it. (Compare the “mere correlation, not necessarily a causal relationship,” between meat consumption and heart disease. Meat eating is like carbon dioxide in the atmosphere: Just like you know that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, you also know that animal fat is a solid at body temperature, so it’s going to congeal in your arteries. I had a blood test once just a few hours after eating a big salad with lots of Italian dressing, and had to go back for a repeat of it, because the technician saw all of that oil floating on top of my blood sample, and flagged it as a possible health issue. The same thing happens with heated animal fats, except they don’t merely float around in your bloodstream, they actively congeal in it—and the more of that gunk you have in your arteries, the less blood can get to your brain and sexual organs. It would be the height of wishful thinking to imagine that that has no negative effect on your health; and you can’t “wish that away” any more than you can wish away the warming effects of carbon dioxide.)

Like the vegetarian journalist Hadley Freeman put it:

[P]ersonally, I have always suspected that I would have thicker hair and more energy if I wasn’t vegetarian. And be smarter. And more decisive. Ooh, and totally awesome on the dancefloor.

Even aside from any changes to the human genome over the past 10,000 years of a cereal-heavy diet, the simple fact that we’re living long enough these days for the food we’re eating to kill us, should be enough to justify a vegetarian diet. And as long as a vegetarian or even a vegan diet is properly balanced, it’s going to be better for you than any diet that Seth Roberts, Gary Taubes, or the late Dr. Atkins would encourage you to adopt.

P.S. It’s trivially easy to find lists of professional athletes, from basketball players, Olympians and weight-lifters to iron-man triathletes, who are vegetarian. These people are exerting themselves physically in ways which few of us could even imagine. And they’re doing it on a vegetarian diet.

It’s equally trivially easy to find lists of vegetarian and vegan rock stars, who could run sexual circles around the betas in the Steveosphere, the latter of whom imagine themselves to be “real men” for eating meat-heavy diets, incompetently mangling the basic facts to support their delusions.

For further reference: Is the Atkins Diet Really Healthy?

Also, from Out of the Box:

The main objection to Boyd Eaton’s proposal [of our species supposedly having evolved in the Stone Age to eat a high-fat Paleolithic diet] is that we have no reason to believe that palaeolithic people lived as long as we do. There is no selective advantage in humans continuing to live after they have bred and raised their young; in which case, palaeolithic people who survived into adulthood probably usually died around their 40s, with a few surviving to be elders and advisors to the family or tribe. Given this, relatively carnivorous diets high in fat, and extremely high in animal protein, evolved with physically very active populations who usually did not live long enough to suffer from chronic diseases.

Then, from Marion Nestle’s (1999) Animal v. plant foods in human diets and health: is the historical record unequivocal?

Eaton & Konner (1985) summarize the proportion of plant foods in the diets of hunter–gatherer groups as 500–800 g/kg in inland semi-tropical habitats, 500–900 g/kg in coastal areas, but less than 100 g/kg in the northern-most Arctic. Overall, these studies can be interpreted as providing substantial support for the predominance of plant foods in hunter–gatherer groups living in areas where plants could grow.

That’s from 50% to 90% of your diet (by weight) coming from plant sources, in the real Paleolithic diet. Conversely, there is obviously no single and identifiable “Paleolithic diet” that we’ve all evolved to eat, simply because not all hunter-gatherers ate the same foods.

From A brief review of the archaeological evidence for Palaeolithic and Neolithic subsistence:

The [argument] that the morphological changes in hominid crania can be explained by the increased consumption of animal foods through time, is strongly contested by researchers such as Nestle (1999) and Milton (1993, 2000). They argue, by analogy, that the majority of living primates
are largely vegetarian, and that we, as primates, are best adapted to a mainly vegetarian diet. Milton (1993) writes that mandible size decreased due to the increased consumption of energy-rich plant foods such as fruits, and not necessarily meat. The complex skills required to harvest these energy-rich plants would also result in a selection for more intelligent hominids, with resulting increased brain size through time. This alternative hypothesis highlights the inadequacy of the use of analogy with living primates as a means to understand hominid subsistence, as the same lines of evidence can be used to support two opposing views.

From Katharine Milton, in Ungar and Teaford’s (2002) Human Diet: Its Origin and Evolution (this piece is worth reading in its entirety):

[W]e do not know much about the range of foods Paleolithic hunter-gatherers consumed in almost any environment at any time, though it seems likely that periods of relative food abundance alternated with seasonal periods of low food availability in most cases….

[R]egardless of what Paleolithic hunter-gatherer societies were eating, there is little evidence to suggest that human nutritional requirements or human digestive physiology were significantly affected by such diets at any point in human evolution…. To date, we know of few adaptations to diet in the human species that would serve to differentiate humans from their closest living relatives, the great apes. Those identified are largely (though not exclusively) regulatory mutations such as lactase synthesis in adulthood, and the unique selective pressures favoring such diet-associated mutations in humans seem fairly well understood. Perhaps more significant, most or perhaps all such mutations appear to have arisen within the past twelve thousand years—that is, well after the advent of agriculture and animal domestication—and therefore are not associated with Paleolithic hunter-gatherers or their diets. (p. 113)

So once again, we’ve evolved to eat a whole-grain-based Neolithic diet, not a Paleolithic one (whatever the latter may be).

Observe further:

According to Alexander Ströhle, Maike Wolters and Andreas Hahn, with the Department of Food Science at the University of Hanover, the statement that the human genome evolved during the Pleistocene (a period from 1,808,000 to 11,550 years ago) rests on an inadequate, but popular gene-centered view of evolution….

They further question the notion that 10,000 years since the dawn of agriculture is a period not nearly sufficient to ensure an adequate adaptation to agrarian diets. Referring to [David Sloan] Wilson (1994), Ströhle et al. argue that “the number of generations that a species existed in the old environment was irrelevant, and that the response to the change of the environment of a species would depend on the hereditability of the traits, the intensity of selection and the number of generations that selection acts.” They state that if the diet of Neolithic agriculturalists had been in discordance with their physiology, then this would have created a selection pressure for evolutionary change and modern humans, such as Europeans, whose ancestors have subsisted on agrarian diets for 400–500 generations should be somehow adequately adapted to it. In response to this argument, Wolfgang Kopp states that “we have to take into account that death from atherosclerosis and cardiovascular disease (CVD) occurs later during life, as a rule after the reproduction phase. Even a high mortality from CVD after the reproduction phase will create little selection pressure. [But, of course, CVD need not be the only factor: even minor inefficiencies in grain metabolization like coeliac disease would get weeded out of the gene pool, over a long-enough time period.] Thus, it seems that a diet can be functional (it keeps us going) and dysfunctional (it causes health problems) at the same time.”

Of course, that was true not merely during the Neolithic, but even moreso during the Paleolithic. Hell, it’s still true today.

A better way of putting it is that Paleolithic human beings were able to “thrive” on their “Paleolithic diet” (again, whatever that may be, in all its variations) simply because the rest of their lifestyle was killing them (with infections and wars, etc.) before the meat they were eating could do that.

Beyond that, cardiovascular disease is characteristic of a meat-heavy diet, not a cereal-based one, so Kopp’s response (which, for $31.50 U.S., I have not read in context, and will not be perusing) would make more sense if he was speaking against the minimal selection effects of a Paleolithic diet (in relation to the shorter life expectancy of that era, being only two-thirds of what it is now, at puberty) rather than a Neolithic one (which had an even shorter life expectancy, but also surely less potential for CVD). Either way, CVD was surely a non-issue during both of those eras, owing to their short life expectancies, so why is he even bringing it up … except perhaps to obfuscate the issue?