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Speaker touts systemic, ocular health benefits of Paleolithic diet
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DENVER – Eating like our hunter-gatherer ancestors can help optimize health and minimize disease, according to a speaker here at the Ocular Nutrition Society.
Data on 229 hunter-gatherer societies showed that 26% to 35% of their diet was made up of plant foods, and more than half came from animal foods, Loren Cordain, PhD, told attendees at this meeting held prior to the American Academy of Optometry. Today, refined sugars, grains, vegetable oils and dairy make up 71% of the energy in the U.S. food supply.
“This adversely affects the heart and will adversely affect the eyes,” Cordain said.
The introduction of wheat, barley, dairy, wine and beer, salt and sucrose have drastically changed our diet and impacted our physiology and health, he said.
“A symphony orchestra plays together,” Cordain said. “All of these units work simultaneously and, depending on your genotype, they promote disease in genetically susceptible individuals. How it manifests itself is genetically determined. It gets us sometimes sooner, sometimes later.”
Cordain said that high glycemic-load carbohydrates promote diseases of insulin resistance.
“Metabolic syndrome includes type 2 diabetes, hypertension, coronary heart disease, dyslipidemia, obesity and gout,” he said. “Our group has extended it to acne, myopia (myopia also has environmental triggers more than just near work) and epithelial cancers.”Cordain noted that refined sugars and oils are neutral and do not contribute one way or the other, “but we eat so much of these it tends to displace fruits and vegetables.”
When grains are refined, the nutrient density of vitamins and minerals is reduced, he said.
“We realized that by milling grains it removed vitamins, so after World War II we started adding B1, B2 and B3,” Cordain said. “We fully deplete folate and add in not folate, but folic acid. In the last 3 months we’ve discovered that folic acid is metabolized differently by the liver than folate and builds up pools of folic acid and promotes epithelial cancers.
“Men with higher levels of folic acid have higher rates of prostate cancer,” he said. “This may turn out to be one of the biggest blunders in modern health – introducing folic acid.”
Cordain said that dairy products comprise 10% of the typical U.S. diet.
“On paper, dairy products appear to be healthy, with a low glycemic index,” he said. “However, work from our lab found that dairy products have a high insulin response similar to eating white bread or cookies. This is bad.”
Added salt is another big problem, Cordain said.
“We get about 10 g a day, and most comes in processed foods,” he said. “The #1 source of salt in the U.S. diet is bread.”
Twenty percent of calories in the U.S. diet come from refined sugars, Cordain said, but consumption is decreasing.
“Prior to 1970, most sugar came from sucrose,” he said. “High-fructose corn syrup can be made cheaply and is 50% sweeter than sucrose. This was completely a financial decision, and one of the worst decisions ever made was to put this in our food supply.
“Many nutritionists believe this increase in high fructose parallels the obesity epidemic,” he continued. “Fructose is handled differently in the liver. It allows for uncontrolled synthesis of free fatty acids. Diseases linked with refined sugars are … what diseases aren’t linked?”
Cordain said vegetable oils comprise about 18% of the calories in the U.S. diet. Since 1909, vegetable oil consumption has increased 500%.
“Vegetable oils are high in linoleic acid, which is pro-inflammatory, which promotes cardiovascular disease, etc.,” Cordain said. “This is still contentious in the nutrition community. I think it’s something we shouldn’t be eating. You can’t have ocular disease or heart disease without inflammation.”
Cordain concluded: “Humans don’t have a grain requirement or dairy requirement. We can have a much healthier diet when we eliminate those two. I suggest people eat fresh fruits and veggies, nuts and seeds, fish and seafood, grass-produced meats and olive oils.”
Disclosures: Cordain is the author of five popular bestselling books including