Compare and contrast our robust, nose-to-tail meat-eating Paleolithic forebears with today's modern Paleo man, who drinks crystal-clear, reverse-osmosis-filtered, bottled spring water, wears five-toed Vibram shoes, wouldn't be caught dead eating grain-fed beef, totes his almond-flour-based snacks, and always carries his baggie of nuts to nosh on.
Whenever I see these guys (or gals), it always makes me think of these lines from a great Kinks song:
"'Cause he's oh so good, and he's oh so fine,
and he's oh so healthy in his body and his mind..."
It might seem that I'm knocking the Paleo diet movement, but I'm really not. I do think it is vital to know what our Paleolithic ancestors ate, because over the millennia of our development as modern humans, natural selection weeded out those of us who didn't do well on what was readily available then. So, in my view, it's pretty important to know what was available then and to try to eat that as much as possible. But I'm not sure that Paleo guy, as described above, is eating as his ancient predecessors did. Especially when it comes to nuts.
I would like to go over a few issues I have with nuts as a Paleolithic food in terms of energy expended versus obtained and the fatty acid composition. And I'll make a little detour to talk about our current obsession with grass-fed beef versus grain-fed beef.
A little biochemistry review
Before we go on, let's recall the post right before the last one. We discussed how the FADH2:NADH ratio can be a switch flipping on a little insulin resistance. If the FADH2:NAHD ratio gets above a certain threshold, reverse electron transport takes place through Complex I in the mitochondria and produces a bit of superoxide, which drives a little local insulin resistance.
This insulin resistance is good for you because it diverts the fuel away from being stored in the fat cells and keeps it out where it can be burned. It also maintains blood glucose levels, which reduce or prevent hunger.
The goal is to keep the FADH2 up so the FADH2:NAHD ratio stays above the switch point. The breakdown of saturated fats produces the most FADH2, so saturated fats are a good thing. Carbohydrates produce a small amount of FADH2, so they don't flip the switch. Because of the double bonds in PUFA, they act more like carbs, don't produce the levels of FADH2 saturated fats do, and so move directly into the fat cells to be stored instead of being used for fuel.
If you want to read more about the FADH2:NAHD ratio, take a look at Petro Dombromylskyj's Proton series in his Hyperlipid blog. He has done all the heavy lifting on this idea, and the more I read about it and cogitate on it, the more I'm convinced he is correct.
Now let's look at nuts.
What does it takes to make nuts edible?
Today most people purchase nuts from the store. Nuts come in cans and bags and bulk bins. Just about every kind imaginable and in all sorts of mixes.
When you get nuts like this, they provide a whole lot of calories for very little work. Which is why nuts are one of the big three foods I look at when patients don't lose or stop losing weight: nuts, nut butters and cheese. All provide a ton of calories without much carb, so carb counters can keep carbs down while consuming a prodigious number of calories.
If you're Paleolithic man out roaming the woods, nuts aren't quite as easily available.
Nuts are seasonal, so you wouldn't find them all year long. Granted, they can be stored, so a harvest of nuts could provide a portable source of food for lean times later on. But at what cost?
How many readers out there have actually picked and processed nuts? I can tell you, it ain't easy. And it's a lot of work for a fairly small reward. Unless, of course, you're talking mechanization. Then that's what you find in the bulk bins at Whole Foods.
But Paleolithic man didn't have the Whole Foods option.
When I was a kid, I picked (picked up, actually - the nuts were usually on the ground) bushels of walnuts, but a few other nuts as well.
Those who have never seen a walnut in the wild may not realize they come covered in a tough green husk that starts to turn black after the fallen nuts have lain on the ground for a while. I can tell you from experience that it is a bitch to get these husks off the actual nuts within. The green color of the husks gets all over your hands and it has a really pungent, chemical smell that takes time to get rid of. Pick walnuts off tree or the ground underneath, and you'll have green, smelly hands for a day or two.
The husks are extremely difficult to remove. When I was a kid and we picked walnuts on the farm, we would put them in burlap bags, throw the bags full of walnuts on the dirt road, and run over them with the pickup. Back and forth, back and forth. Over and over to breakdown and start to tear away the husks. Then we would take the nuts out of the burlap bags and remove the broken up husks by hand, a task I loathed. Not only did it take forever to do, but bits of husk always got under my fingernails and my green hands smelled like walnut husks for days.
Once we had stripped the husks off, the actual walnuts inside were kind of a slimy black color. We left them to dry, which took a day or so. They never looked like the walnuts in their shells shown below. Those are chemically processed.
Read entire article here.
I have been sitting after-noons under walnut trees, picking nuts, scratching of the green or withered husks, cracking the nuts in hand by taking two of them, and eating them all noon. Same for sitting sometimes the whole day in cherry trees and plum trees eating fruits from wild trees (that were maybe not wild before but planted). I spent so much time in earth and mud, observing and 'playing' with insects.