Go to http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2001/03/12/magazine/CAREY12.htm
for the full story, including a nice photo.
Dori Zook
Denver, CO
Don't blame the fats and red meat
Carbohydrates, say the Protein Couple, make Americans fat.
When I was a high school wrestler, I starved myself to make weight. On
weekends, as a reward, I'd cook up a heaping plate of
Grappler's Goulash.
Want the recipe?
Fry three pounds of ground beef in a skillet. Pour off grease. Add a
quarter pound of chipped beef for seasoning. Cover with American cheese.
Sprinkle liberally with salt and monosodium glutamate (Accent). Douse with
ketchup.
The other day, I described this artery-clogging concoction to Mary Dan
Eades. Her reaction?
"It's a lot better for you than a whole lot of other things."
Like what?
"A plate of pasta, for one. Or, if you'd eaten a loaf of bread with it. Now
that would have been bad."
Eades and her husband, Michael, are both physicians and adjunct professors
in the department of health and exercise science at Colorado State
University. In Boulder, at the Colorado Center for Metabolic Medicine, which
they founded, they practice bariatric medicine, helping people lose weight.
Many of their patients have heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure,
elevated cholesterol, and other cardiac risk factors.
Their standard prescription: Cut out the carbs. Eat meat (especially red
meat), eggs, bacon and other foods rich in protein and fat.
Holy coronary thrombosis! This is exactly the opposite of everything
advocated by the American Heart Association. It turns the USDA's "food
pyramid" upside down. ("It's a feed-lot pyramid," snipes Michael. "It's the
same diet farmers use to fatten pigs and cows for slaughter.")
It's enough to give Dean Ornish a heart attack. He's the cardiologist who's
been preaching that the route to a healthy ticker is to avoid red meat and
cut dietary fat to a level so meager you might as well be a vegetarian.
Michael and Mary Dan Eades (I'll call them the "Protein Couple") make their
case in two books, Protein Power (a best-seller) and the recently published
The Protein Power Lifeplan. The other day, I chatted with them on the phone.
What they had to say was subversive, provocative and persuasive.
Not that I needed persuading. I'm a confirmed carnivore from way back. My
grandfather is partly to blame. At age 13, when I became interested in
bodybuilding and nutrition, he began feeding me propaganda, such as
anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson's controversial book, The Fat of the
Land. Stefansson became sold on meat after studying the diets of Eskimos
and American Indians. One of their staples: pemmican, a kind of primitive
"power bar" consisting of beef jerky and fat. (My grandfather, by the way,
practiced what he preached, eating bacon and eggs for breakfast and thick
steaks for dinner. Lean and muscular all his life, he died at age 96.)
The thrust of the Protein Couple's argument: The human animal was designed
to eat meat. Our eyes are in front because we were hunter-gatherers. Our
front teeth - those sharp incisors and pointed canines - were made to tear
flesh. Unlike most herbivores, we have a single stomach. The human GI tract
can absorb virtually every nutrient in meat, and Vitamin B12, which is
essential to human health, is
found only in foods of animal origin.
The problem with the American diet is not too much meat, protein and fat,
contends the Protein Couple. The problem is too much sugar, starch and
carbohydrate.
"High carboyhydrate staples such as bread, corn and potatoes turn to sugar
in thebloodstream," Michael explained. "The more sugar in your blood, the
more elevated your insulin. Excess insulin can lead to obesity, diabetes and
high cholesterol."
Insulin is not a villain. You need it to survive. Insulin becomes a problem
when you have either too little or too much. It's the hormone that signals
the body to store fat and make cholesterol. (Of the cholesterol in your
blood, only about 15 to 20 percent comes from your diet, the Protein Couple
points out; your body, primarily the liver, makes the rest.
Michael Eades came by this knowledge empirically. For most of his life, he
was thin. In his early 30s, while working hard as a family practitioner, he
began gaining weight, ballooning from 185 to 220 pounds plus. He tried fad
diets and did the yo-yo thing. Then he went back to his medical textbooks,
reacquainting himself with biochemistry and metabolic physiology. The big
epiphany: the pivotal role of insulin in creating fat.
Michael radically changed his diet, eating eggs and sausage for breakfast,
bacon double cheeseburgers (sans bun) for lunch, meat and salad for dinner.
Result: His weight, total cholesterol and triglycerides dropped, while his
HDL (good cholesterol) and lean body mass climbed. Without any special
exercise, he became more muscular (fat, especially cholesterol, is required
to produce sex hormones such as testosterone).
Today, at 53, Eades carries 190 pounds on a 6-foot-2 frame. His broader
chest and shoulders require a size-46 suit jacket, up from size 42.
What the Protein Couple is hawking is nothing new; it's actually very old.
They call it "paleolithic nutrition." The basic idea: For more than two
million years, the human diet consisted of meat, leafy green vegetables,
fruits, nuts and berries (an excellent source of anti-oxidants). Things
began falling apart with the Agricultural Revolution. Examination of
mummified remains shows that once ancient Egyptians switched to a
grain-based diet, they became vulnerable to such "diseases of civilization"
as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, arteriosclerosis and tooth decay.
Is the Protein Couple right? Personally, I think they're onto something (I'm
a big Spam eater and my body fat is below 10 percent). Certainly, there's no
denying this: Over the last 20 years, as low-fat, high-carb diets have
become the rage, obesity and diabetes have soared.
As Michael Eades told me: "It's carbohydrates, not fat, that is making us
fat."
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