Author: Joseph

One of my viewers, “Unnatural Vegan” (UV) discussed my video What made the Ancient Egyptians Fat and Sick? on their channel. UV’s response video gained quite a bit of interest, amassing over 60,000 views, so I thought I would comment on it. She gets into a lot of topics that are quite interesting for me, so it’s been fun writing this response and rehashing old videos where I covered these before.

“Do your own research!”

I addressed this video a while back in a kind of lazy way, almost as lazily as saying “Do your own research!” (I referred everyone to look at Dr. Michael Eades’ talk on the subject)

I was having a chat with a friend recently and he was asking me how to deal with the fact that there are so many people pushing one view that goes against another, but they both have sound logic and cite scientific studies. So when people say Do your own research! it’s a cop out in my opinion.

My rule of thumb is: pay attention who is willing to dig the deepest and welcome the most nuance. For example, who is asking and answering the most why-s, what-s, where did that idea come from-s. (And of course relies less on things like ad hominem logic or emoting, as in “As evidence of the incredulous nature of this point, observe my flabbergasted expression.“) Unfortunately, the most thorough argument doesn’t always make the most compelling argument.

So, people who say “Do your own research” either (a) don’t understand the topic well enough to actually explain it themselves, (b) they lack enough correctness to sufficiently explain themselves, or (c) they’re too lazy. (However, they would prefer to spin themselves as “busy.”)

If you are one of the few people who watched my video, watched the “debunking” of my video and then went a step further and are now here reading the debunking of the debunking, then I applaud you.

1. (00:00) Squiggly Lines

The video opens with Unnatural Vegan being flabbergasted that I would draw squiggly lines on a graph. Worry not, these squiggly lines in my video were not used to draw conclusions and were only for comic effect. Had I said something like “As this squiggly line indicates…[yada yada] …proving my point that…” –this indeed would be concerning. 

Anyone who watches my channel will know I’m not trying to be PBS Frontline. I use things like Simpsons clips to make the video entertaining …they’re not there to support my claims. 

At this point I would like to point out that Unnatural Vegan provides absolutely no evidence that my video directly resulted in her brain being broken, nor does she discuss the nature of the brain injury (not even distinguishing between skull fracture or neural tissue damage) , making this claim even more difficult to verify.

2. (1:07-5:45) – Ancient Egyptian Diet 

I presented a study titled Diet of ancient Egyptians inferred from stable isotope analysis[1] which explains that analysis of the hair of Ancient Egyptians indicated they surely got less than 50% of their protein from animals, but more likely around only 19 to 29% of their protein was from animals.

Quote from the paper: “This proportion is similar to that of 32% observed in present-day ovo-lacto-vegetarians and lower than the average of 64% of present-day omnivores.”

Then of course a common reasoning for why we found heart disease in ancient Egyptian mummies is: Mummies had heart disease because they were the ones who could afford to be mummified and therefore could afford to eat loads of animal foods and give themselves heart disease.

To address this, I reference another stable isotope analysis study[2] that says “A rather surprising observation is the lack of differences between isotopic composition of remains of different social classes…”

In response to this study, Unnatural Vegan says around 2:47 that “there’s not a big difference between beef fed on grains and grains themselves …a peasant who’s eating mostly grain and consuming smaller amounts of different meats like meats that royalty aren’t eating could look very similar in terms of nitrogen ratio compared to a pharaoh who’s eating almost exclusively beef. As explained in the study he references.”

(1) No, this is not explained in the study. The study doesn’t say anything along the lines of ‘there is little difference between a bread scarfing peasant and a beef gorging Pharaoh.’ In fact, it would be quite odd if this study said you can’t use stable isotopes to understand the amount of plant versus animal foods in the diet …considering one of the aims of the study was “to determine the amount of plant versus animal food in the diet.”

Yes, there will be a different between the beef and what the cow was eating. The Nitrogen-15 and Carbon-13 content will be different for the cow and what the cow ate. As explained in a study titled Stable Isotope Ratios as Biomarkers for Health Research[3] the Carbon 13 in the animal will be 1% higher than the animal’s food, and the Nitrogen 15 will be 3 to 4% higher than the animal’s food.

(2) What the study does say, as she shows on screen at 3:13, is: “This does not necessarily mean that no dietary differences existed between the very poor classes and wealthy people but, if they existed, they are not detectable by isotopic analyses.”

This sounds like the authors are being good scientists and admitting it’s possible their methods or samples may not have been perfect. They’re saying it’s possible that there are differences undetectable by isotope analysis, not that isotope analysis is not useful for understanding diet. As explained in the introduction of the study, one point of the study was to understand “whether diets could be related to social classes.” If they knew for certain that you couldn’t determine the difference between a grain eating peasant and a beef eating pharaoh with stable isotope analysis, why would they conduct the study?

The Worn down Teeth of the Egyptians

First, let’s take a look at Ancient Egyptian Teeth. In an article in a 1972 issue of the Journal of Egyptian Archeology[4], F. Filce Leek was trying to get to the bottom of a puzzling observation on ancient Egyptian skulls: They had terrible teeth. However, it wasn’t necessarily that they all had cavities, but that their teeth were terribly worn down. Even to the point that some people had already worn their teeth down to the dental pulp by early adulthood. 

Leek wrote that since bread was such a staple in the ancient Egyptian diet, they would start investigating there. Here he cites a paragraph from the book Food in Egypt that says “The most important food of the Egyptians was bread… …The fondness of Egyptians for bread was so well known that they were nicknamed ‘artophagoi’ , or ‘eaters of bread’; it was the food par excellence, and the word was and has remained synonymous with food in this country.”

Leek wrote: “Several pieces of bread were found by Howard Carter during his excavation of the tomb of Tut’ankhamūn(King Tut), placed there for sustenance of the resurrected King.” Carter even found a model of a hand-mill for grinding grain in the tomb. 

Since bread was so important to apparently all classes of people in ancient Egypt, maybe the bread itself would hold some clues to what was happening to the Egyptians’ teeth. Since they had actual samples of ancient bread, they conducted a radiological examination of the bread and found clear “presence of inorganic particles in many of the specimens.” They found bits of minerals in the bread. More specifically, sand. 

“The principle source, quite understandably, is from contamination with wind-blown desert sand.” Leek explained that the grain and resulting bread could be contaminated with sand at essentially every stage of the bread making process. He wrote that numerous statements from ancient papyri support this claim, with a typical one being ‘… I will repay in the month of Pauni of the present third year, in wheat that is new, pure, unadulterated, free from earth and barley and sifted.’

Leek wrote: “It became quite evident that the abrasive particles found in these samples of bread would more than account for all the attrition to be seen in ancient Egyptian skulls, so much so that further investigation was clearly unwarranted.”

Long story short: Bread was a huge staple of the ancient Egyptian diet, and Egyptians ate so much of this sandy bread that it ground their teeth down. 

Dr. Michael Eade’s talk titled ‘Paleopathology and the Origins of the Low-carb Diet’ is what lead me to this concept and Leek’s paper I just discussed above, as well as some of the concepts discussed in my video that Unnatural Vegan went on to respond to. Dr. Eade’s talk is really intriguing and he’s a great presenter – I recommend giving it a watch. In the talk, Eades was explaining that the bread makers would attempt to sift as much sand out of their bread as possible, but were never entirely successful. What made me laugh was when he said: “There were even ads back then saying buy Joe’s bread, it has less sand.”

Too Poor to afford Cavities

So one of the points regarding heart disease found in Egyptian mummies goes something like ‘Only the rich could afford to eat meat and saturated fats, and because only the rich could afford to go through the mummification process, what we’re seeing is a bunch of rich people who gorged on saturated fat and meat and got heart disease because of it.’ 

From the lens of the ol’ 1991 “eat low fat and high carb to save your heart” advice, indeed this would be difficult to understand. She’s following the food pyramid, …yet had heart disease.

So… they reason: “It’s possible that, as a royal, Ahmose-Meryet-Amon ate more meat, butter and cheese than the average Egyptian.”

In my video, I suggested evidence points to the mummies who got heart disease eating a high carb diet. Well, if we’re not too confident in stable isotopes, maybe we can look at the teeth. So the question becomes: Did the rich people who could afford the embalming process have worn teeth as well?

Well, as already discussed above, Leek’s study of 4800 ancient Egyptian teeth found that 90% of them had evidence of tooth wear.[5] But let’s look at another source, this paper titled Dental status of three Egyptian mummies.[6]
The first mummy they looked was the “best model of the embalming techniques.” (I wonder how much he paid for that.) As for teeth wear: “All teeth had marked wear of the incisal edges and occlusal surfaces. This finding is commonly encountered in Egyptian mummies …and most likely results from wear to the enamel due to chewing hard foods… or to the presence in flour of siliceous residues from grinding stones.”

They even wrote that the the pulp of the incisors rotted either from trauma to the incisor or “intense incisal wear.” Sounds like people who could afford to be mummified were eating a lot of sandy bread.  

Here’s an interesting bit regarding Mummy #2: “An uncommon finding, indicative of the subject’s relative wealth, was the presence of dental caries(cavities) on the distal aspect of tooth #15 and the mesial aspect of tooth#16, with pulp cavity involvement, most probably a result of the availability of sweet and starchy foods for the wealthier classes.”

So, if royalty had more cavities than the commoners, wouldn’t that mean they ate even more carbs than the commoners?

Cavities do seem to have been prevalent with the rich in ancient Egypt. As explained in Dentists, Dentistry and Dental Diseases in Ancient Egypt,[7] around 2,100 years ago, a young wealthy man from Thebes dying from a sinus infection caused by a mouthful of cavities and other tooth ailments.

That same paper explains how royal mummies’ teeth were so bad that they had to have had brass and wood carved artificial ones.[7]

A 2016 article from the The Times of Israel discusses a 2,200 year old mummified priest going on display in Jerusalem. The author writes that “He still has most of his teeth, but suffered from cavities and receding gums, as well as osteoporosis. Like people nowadays, he indulged in too many carbs and spent too much time indoors.“

Another paper 2015 paper says this isn’t rare: “caries decay of the teeth of Egyptian aristocrats is a frequent observation, effect of a copious consumption of processed carbohydrates.”[10]

Comparing individuals from the periods Old Kingdom(OK)(2686〜2181 BC) and Ptolemaic(PP)(305〜30 BC), this paper from 2014 says: “The observed higher frequency of carious lesions in the PP sample could indicate that the individuals’ diet was richer in sugars and starches, the source of the latter being bread and cereals.[8]

Now you being the astute reader, are saying ‘I see where you’re going with this, but did these Ptolemaic mummies even have heart disease?’ The answer would be “Yes.” Not just the Ptolemaic mummies either. A 2011 paper specifically looking at mummies from different time periods says: “Definite or probable atherosclerosis was present in mummies who lived during virtually every era of ancient Egypt represented in this study, a time span of >2,000 years. Conclusions: Atherosclerosis is commonplace in mummified ancient Egyptians.“[9]

Not just Bad Teeth, Bad bones

So, we’ve got decent evidence that mummies who had heart disease also ate a bunch of carbs. Remember that earlier point Unnatural Vegan wanted to refute, that the poor and the rich were both eating high carb diets? Here’s another quote from the 2014 paper:

“…only marginal differences in the prevalence rates of porotic hyperostosis observed between the OK élite population and PP lower status individuals from Saqqara-West could suggest that there were no major differences in the diet consumed by different social classes, or that foods of animal origin consumed predominantly by the wealthier in the Old Kingdom became more available to the commoners in the Ptolemaic Period.”[8]

So what’s porotic hyperostosis?

Essentially, it’s a pathology that affects the skull and causes the bone to become spongy or porous. The reason the authors from that earlier study are discussing this as an indicator of animal food intake is because porotic hyperostosis is a sign of anemia, which is typically due to an iron deficient diet.

Iron deficiency being the cause is widely accepted, although non-diet factors like infectious diseases and blood loss are suspected to play a role[12]. Megaloblastic anemia is also thought to be a cause, and this is caused by a deficiency in vitamin B12 (which Egyptians would need to have gotten from animal products) or folate (comes from liver, meat or leafy greens). [14]

If the rich are experiencing as much porotic hyperostosis as the poor, this would suggest that the rich are not eating all that much meat. This 2015 study looking at a Royal Cemetery complex in upper Egypt found that 77% of those in the Royal tomb had some level of porosis.[11] Considering the most bioavailable form of iron – heme iron, which comes from meat, they shouldn’t be experiencing iron deficiency if they had been eating gobs of meat.

Wait, wait. We’re “doing our own research,” remember? What if these bone defects are caused by blood loss from schistosomiasis and hookworm, as suggested in the above 2015 study?[11] Well, shouldn’t we expect eating plenty of meat to ameliorate that? I think most people are familiar with the fact that if you need to recoup blood, you should eat some meat. The university of Utah “prescribes”beef liver for women after blood loss during childbirth.[15] In a 2019 study looking at Inuit and levels of Caribou consumption, it explains that blood loss is a possible to contributor to inuit anemia, and more than half of those in the study were affected with H. Pylori (also understood to contribute to anemia[16]). Unsurprisingly, those eating the most caribou experienced the least anemia.[17]

So what’s left? Since Ancient Egyptians weren’t instagramming their food we can’t say exactly what they ate. We can’t say for certain that they didn’t eat tons of cheese and butter.

So, in an agricultural society that led to even to the rich experiencing bone porosis from anemia, in a diet dominated by enough bread to grind their teeth down, and enough starchy/sweet carbs to riddle their mouths with enough cavities, was it some saturated fat rich cheese and butter that caused their health issues?

Did I miss something?

(This ends the discussion of Unnatural Vegan’s video. The rest of it was basically justifying that yes saturated fat is bad and meat is bad – topics I’ve covered before so I’ll leave that.)

To be honest, I do think I sacrificed some nuance for the sake of the watchability of the video. Dr. Paul Saladino discussed this on his podcast – See here from 42:35.

He says: “I do not believe carbohydrates cause metabolic dysfunction and diabetes. …I believe it’s a long process initially sparked with seed oils in the diet.”

I think this is a good a point. In the video I should have clarified that “benign” carbohydrates by themselves (that is, just glucose) probably won’t cause diabetes. (For example in my Fructose video I paint Glucose as relatively benign compared to Fructose, based on Dr. Robert Lustig’s work.)

Dr. Saladino specifically points to seed oils being the problem (as he explains, Egyptians did have seed oils in that time.) I would agree, and add that excessive fructose or perhaps excessive gluten could also be factors in diet causing diabetes. The Egyptians would have had access to all three. See the following videos for more. (Dr. Knobbe’s presentation is highly recommended.)

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Saladino also says that it’s more likely nutrient deficiencies leading to dental issues rather than simply the addition of carbs in the diet. Particularly the lack of fat soluble vitamins being the source of dental issues.

This is indeed well established in Weston Price’s Nutrition and Physical degeneration – highly recommended for anyone interested in the origins of modern diseases. (On that note, another avenue to explore is whether a lack of choline[18] could have helped Egyptians get their diabetes.)

Only one thing from my personal experience is that: Both my brother and I have found that when we get back into carbs, we get tooth pain and our gums get sensitive, even though we get plenty of fat soluble vitamins in our diet. I realize anecdotes are a very low form of evidence (even though I have a whole two anecdotes), but this has been a point of curiosity for me.

I agree with Dr. Saladino that there’s more to the story.

So, is my video bunk because I don’t understand how stable isotope analysis works? No.
Was it actually the saturated fat and butter that caused the Ancient Egyptians health problems? Highly unlikely.

[Pardon the lazy citation format. All numbers above are hyperlinked to the source research]
1 – Diet of ancient Egyptians inferred from stable isotope systematics
2 – An isotopic palaeoenvironmental study of human skeletal remains from the Nile Valley
3 – Stable Isotope Ratios as Biomarkers for Health Research
4 – Teeth and Bread in Ancient Egypt
5 – Dental Health and Disease in Ancient Egypt
6 – Dental status of three Egyptian mummies
7 – Dentists, Dentistry and Dental Diseases in Ancient Egypt
8 – A study of social stratification and physical health in an ancient Egyptian population of Saqqara.
9 – Atherosclerosis in Ancient Egyptian Mummies: The Horus Study
10 – Tutankhamun’s Dentition: The Pharaoh and his Teeth
11 – Variation in porotic hyperostosis in the Royal Cemetery complex at Abydos, Upper Egypt: a social interpretation
12 – The causes of porotic hyperostosis and cribra orbitalia: a reappraisal of the iron-deficiency-anemia hypothesis
14 – Megaloblastic Anemia
15 – After Blood Loss During Childbirth
16 – Helicobacter pylori and iron deficiency anemia: guilty as charged?
17 – Potential impact of restricted caribou (Rangifer tarandus) consumption on anemia prevalence among Inuit adults in northern Canada
18 – Choline, Its Potential Role in Nonalcoholic Fatty Liver Disease, and the Case for Human and Bacterial Genes

This is the transcript for my video of the same title published on July 27th, 2020

What was making ancient egyptians fat? The architect Hemiunu’s statue suggests he was overweight with a serious case of man boobs. National Geographic reported that King Tut had large deposits of fat on his hips and breast-like fat clumps on his chest. And the mummy of Hatshepsut was very fat, and probably had diabetes. It was found as early as 1911 that Egyptian mummies had heart disease.[R] In fact more than half of 43 middle aged mummies examined had heart disease.  What was making them so sick?
We’ll get to that story, but first we need to connect a few dots. 

Imagine you’re going on a date with someone you’re really into. You’ve arrived at the restaurant 10 minutes early because you need to use the bathroom. After some time, unfortunately you lose your battle with constipation, you leave the toilet defeated, and off you go to greet your date bloated and gassy.

Now imagine this uncomfortableness being a common occurrence for 10 years straight except it’s far worse. Your gut is inflamed to the point that you have open wounds and polyps on the lining of your intestines. You get stomach pain and cramps, diarrhea, there’s blood in your stool and you’re often drained tired.
This is a disease called ulcerative colitis, which a 71year old man from was suffering through. His health was pretty bad, he was also taking insulin and pills for his diabetes and high blood pressure. 

What’s interesting about this man is the unconventional diet he used to actually put both his ulcerative colitis and diabetes into remission, which by the way are both diseases thought to not have a cure. What’s also interesting is why his endocrinologist recommended he stop that oddly magical diet and do a different one. 

 I learned about this man after interviewing Doctor Paul Mason of Sydney Australia on Skype. 
“…the guidelines by and large do not reflect evidence-based science – they’re distorted facts, they’re not based on science and following them does not lead to optimal health.” -Mason
 

Dr. Mason shared several surprising and somewhat controversial points, but this 71 year old man’s story happens to back up each of those points.
So, let’s look at the new diet that drastically improved the man’s health, and we’ll look at how it came to be that a medical professional – his endocrinologist would recommend that he go back on the type of diet that probably made him sick in the first place.

So, the 71 year old man’s new diet had plenty of saturated fat, yet his endocrinologist recommended he stop that and eat a diet low in saturated fat. You’ve probably heard a lot about saturated fat by now, but let’s look at the logic and history that led to health professionals making this recommendation

“At the time, the logic was based on a flawed hypothesis supported by junk science. And that was what we call the diet heart hypothesis – it was by a guy called Ancel Keys, he was a physiologist and an epidemiologist and he had the hypothesis that serum cholesterol and saturated fat were causally related to heart disease and this was based on some experimental data for instance what happens if you feed rabbits which are herbivorous a high saturated fat diet so clearly this has no relevance for humans at all. And its based on an epidemiological study which has now been well and truly debunked called the Seven Countries Study where he basically cherry picked data from some countries that he liked the results of.” – Mason

Before Ancel Keys released the Seven Countries Study, he first presented a graph in 1953 showing data from six countries found the more fat a group of people ate, the more heart disease they had. It made for a very convincing chart.[R]

However, just four years later in April 1957, Biostatistics PhD Jacob Yerushalmy and Medical Doctor Herman Hilleboe presented a strikingly different chart using the same pool of data that Ancel Keys was using.[R] 

Their chart showed that the more fat people ate, the less heart disease there was. How could that be?
Well, Ancel Keys didn’t have data for only 6 or 7 countries, there was data for 22 countries. When you look at the data for all 22 countries, there’s no convincing relationship between fat and heart disease. 

Regardless, four years later, a 1961 issue of Time Magazine featured Ancel Keys and explained to the public that eating saturated fat raises your cholesterol and this causes heart disease. At the end of the article it says Keys’ cholesterol was 209. 

That’s funny because President Dwight Eisenhower had a much lower cholesterol of only 165 when he had his heart attack in 1955.

A couple years later, in a 1987 New York times article competing for real estate with a women’s summer suit ad, Famous Heart Surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey said that his 30 years of experience with over 15,000 patients led him to conclude that high cholesterol was not the cause of heart disease.

“So if we were to take saturated fat for instance, there’s been more than 10 systematic reviews and meta analyses which is where we actually compile all the data together looking at saturated fat and polyunsaturated fat and on balance, they find in favor of saturated fat. Higher saturated fat consumption is not associated with worse health.” – Mason

Another change that helped the 71 year old man fix his health was a drastic reduction in carbs. His endocrinologist on the other hand after seeing his excellent lab results, recommended instead he eat more carbs like whole grains as well as fruit and vegetables.  

This high carb recommendation starts at least as early as 1977 when Dietary Goals for the United States was released to the public thanks to George McGovern.[R, R2] These goals, driven by the idea that fat and cholesterol cause heart disease, recommended reducing saturated fat to just 10% of the diet and raising carbohydrates to 60% of the diet. However, there was plenty of opposition to this at the time. 

“And I have pleaded in my report and will plead again orally here for more research on the problem before we make announcements to the american public.” – Dr. Robert Olson

“I said to the professor that I was working with – you know, this is not right – animal fat is not causing this and this is not what the data says.” -Biochemist Mary Enig PhD

“You know, there were imminent scientists at the time saying this is nonsense, there is no good scientific evidence that either fat or cholesterol y’know is at the root of heart disease.” -Dr. Mary Dan Eades

Back in the early 80’s[S] Luise Light was the leader of a group of top-level nutritionists specifically hired by the USDA to develop an eating guide. After pouring through all kinds of nutrition data with her team, Luise’s guide recommended at most 3-4 servings of grains per day. Not long after submitting the report, she was shocked to see that they made some drastic revisions like increasing the grains from 3-4 to 6- 11 servings a day.[What to Eat, Luis Light, M.S., Ed.D.] 

As she wrote in her book[S], Luise told her boss, the agency director that these changes would be “disastrous,” and would mean unleashing obesity and diabetes upon Americans. Despite her objections they decided to stick with their version. What was the reason they gave her? Well, it had nothing to do with health – they said that jacking up the grain recommendation would cut costs for the food stamp program. Fruits and vegetables were expensive. Grains were cheap. 

Despite Luise’s protests, In 1991, the food pyramid was released, recommending 6 to 11 servings of grains every day. Even before this though, the original high carb recommendation from 1977 was taking its toll on people’s health. 

If you look at the obesity trends, people started to get fat pretty much right when George McGovern issued his report recommending low fat high carbohydrate diets. We replaced steak and pork chops for pasta, butter with margarine, eggs and bacon for cereal with skim milk and grandma’s all butter cookies for Snackwell’s low fat cookies. And, we became fatter than ever.

“Are there any consequences, you know, domino effects of this idea that you should not eat saturated fat, you shouldn’t eat- you should cut the fat off your steaks, you shouldn’t have full fat yogurt, you need to have skim milk… what are the down stream effects of that?” -Joseph to Mason

“Well I mean we only have three main sources of macronutrients. Which is y’know carbohydrate, protein, and fat. And, you can only eat so much protein. …and you cut out the fat in the diet, then that really leaves only one thing – that means you have to increase your carbohydrate intake. And, what most people don’t realize is that carbohydrates are literally molecules of sugar joined together. Even the complex carbohydrates, you know the brown rice, the sweet potatoes, the whole meal bread. They are literally chains of glucose – sugar molecules joined together. And when you ingest them, they get absorbed into your circulation – you end up with what we call elevated blood sugar levels. And long term and high levels of carbohydrate consumption, we know are causally associated with a condition called insulin resistance which eventually leads to diabetes. And what’s the problem in diabetes? Well everybody knows, right? It’s having excess glucose – this particular type of sugar in the bloodstream. And, when we eat more carbohydrate, we put more sugar in the bloodstream – that sugar’s gotta come from somewhere, right? So, if I explain this to most of my patients, they’ll often look at me and say so why don’t I stop eating carbohydrate? And you know what? That is the solution, it’s really that simple, this is treating diabetes 101. And yet this concept that carbohydrates are made of glucose, they cause a rise in our blood sugar, therefore they’re not good for us is beyond the grasp of most doctors.” -Mason

Going back to the fat and sick egyptian mummies – what did they eat? Well, as Dr. Michael Eades explains, a modern nutritionist would say the ancient egyptian diet was just fantastic. 

The basic ancient egyptian diet had some plant oils, they also fished and ate some fowl and had the occasional serving of red meat, but the diet was mostly carbohydrates, primarily bread. They also had fruits, vegetables and honey. As explained in a paper in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, “The most important food of the egyptians was bread.” In fact the Egyptians were nicknamed Artophagoi which means eaters of bread.[R] 

You can find several figurines depicting people grinding wheat, as well as art depicting people harvesting wheat or preparing bread. Egyptians with their bread based diet were essentially following the 1991 USDA food pyramid.
Some people have argued that well it was only the rich who could afford to be mummified or have statues made of their fat selves made and only the rich could afford to buy and eat many saturated fat containing animal foods …so that’s why the mummies hard heart disease.

However, scientists have a really interesting way to determine what ancient people ate called stable isotope analysis. By looking at how much of an isotope of Nitrogen called Nitrogen 15 is in the bones of a person or animal, and then comparing that to the Nitrogen 15 content of plants in that area, they can tell whether an animal or person’s diet had more meat or more plants in it. 
Dr. Eades explains that this kind of stable isotope analysis found that the egyptians got only 29 to 19% of their protein from animal sources – not only was most of their protein coming from plants, but their diet as a whole was mostly grains and plants, which means very little saturated fat. The researchers described it as being close to a lacto-ovo-vegetarian diet.[R] And, as this paper explains, there was a surprising lack of difference in the stable isotope composition between social classes, meaning everyone, rich or poor, was eating a generally high carb low saturated fat diet.[R] 

“I remember when I was planning on doing a low carb diet, a couple of people were saying you can’t just cut a whole food group out, you can’t just not eat pasta, not eat bread… you need carbohydrates. Is that true – do we, is there a biological requirement for dietary carbohydrate?” -Joseph to Mason
“So I will say right now and I’ll say it explicitly. There is no need for dietary carbohydrate. In other words, the theoretical minimum consumption of carbohydrate that is consistent with good health is zero. Now this doesn’t mean that some tissues in our body don’t need to use carbohydrate – they don’t need to use glucose – which is a carbohydrate. But it means we don’t need to eat it because if our body needs it, it can make it. It can make it from certain amino acids, it can make it from the glycerol backbone which forms the triglyceride type of fat, so we do not need to eat carbohydrate – the notion that we need at least 130 grams of carbohydrates a day to support or neurological function is based on nothing but junk science. So, I will again say we do not need to eat dietary carbohydrate, it is not an essential nutrient.” -Mason

That might be shocking to hear that the requirement for dietary carbohydrate is zero. Yet, again this 71yo man’s case proves the point: his diet had virtually zero carbohydrates. His diet was in fact an all meat diet – no carbs, no grains, no fruits, not even vegetables. I know that for some of you, saying an all meat diet cured this man’s diabetes and ulcerative colitis might sound like I just said you could cure eczema and baldness by eating Elmer’s glue. 

But bare with me for a moment and let’s look at it in terms of what he’s not eating. As Dr. Paul Mason explained, not eating carbohydrate would be good for lowering his blood sugar which would improve his insulin resistance and improve his diabetes. In fact, the endocrinologist even acknowledged in the report that the reason he wouldn’t need his diabetes medication metformin is because the reduction of carbs improved his blood sugar. 

But this man had a painful, constipating bowel condition, yet we all know fiber is good  for our bowels, it’s good for pooping. Yet, this man’s new, no fiber diet healed his bowel condition.

“Well, on the topic of carbohydrates, what about fiber, isn’t that a carbohydrate that’s good for you – it’s good for your digestion…?” – Joseph to Mason

“Well, technically yes, Well yes it is a carbohydrate but no it’s actually not that good for you and that’s going to surprise a lot of people. So the definition of fiber is that it’s an indigestible carbohydrate – indigestible as far as your body goes, it can’t be absorbed or broken down by your body. And there’s a lot of myths surrounding fiber… It only comes from plant foods, and it’s often thought that it can prevent and treat constipation which is the most common belief around it and it would surprise a lot of people to know that there’s an absolute parcity of studies that actually support that. So, to my knowledge, there’s been no randomized controlled studies on the effects of fiber on the symptoms on constipation. And I say that very precisely – so the symptoms of constipation means things that bother people – things like pain and bloating and bleeding. So, there has been some evidence that shows that having fiber can actually increase the bulk of your stool. There have been some studies that show that having fiber can actually increase – well, reduce the transit time, meaning things transit through the intestinal tract a little bit quicker. But when you have a look at the symptoms that patients come and ask me about – they say:‘doc I’ve bloating – it hurts. I’ve got pain.’ Y’know,‘I have some bleeding, can you help me?’ There’s been no evidence at all that demonstrates that fiber is beneficial. In fact, when we have a look at the best available evidence on this – there was an experimental study that was performed in 2012 and subjects with constipation found that complete elimination of dietary fiber – that is, an intake of 0 grams of dietary fiber led to complete improvement in all the symptoms of constipation in 41 patients. So, this is absolutely staggering. The statistical significance of this study was through the roof. And, these people were compared to people on various other levels of fiber intake from high fiber to moderate fiber and low fiber diets and you could see a clear dose response relationship between the symptoms of constipation and the amount of fiber intake. And when you think about it logically, so, what is constipation? So effectively constipation is trouble passing fecal matter. You’re trying to pass something through a small hole. So, is it really logical that making that something bigger is going to make it easier to pass through a small hole? When you think about it, that’s like adding more cars to a traffic jam and expecting the traffic to suddenly clear… it just defies logic.” -Mason

Many people can handle tons of fiber in their diet,  but some people just can’t process fiber as well, and in fact we shouldn’t expect high fiber to be the norm for humans. 

If you dig into our evolutionary past, you’ll see that our gut shrank significantly around the time that we got these huge brains.[R] The brain is a very energy expensive organ, so we needed to make things more efficient. To achieve this efficiency, the gut shrank. And the idea is that this happened as began hunting animals for nutrient dense meat and energy dense fat. More calories and more nutrients in a smaller package means we can sacrifice all that gut real estate and use resources on building a huge brain. 

The reason gorillas for example have these gigantic bloated bellies is because they are packing their guts with difficult to digest fiber all day. Gorillas have a huge colon that is specifically for fermenting fiber to produce short chain fatty acids. These fatty acids are an energy source. In this way, a lowland gorilla will get 30-60% of their energy needs just by fermenting fiber in their big colon. The human digestive tract shrunk so much that the small human colon on the other hand can only provide at best 2-9% of our energy needs from fermenting fiber.[R]

“I guess this raises another important point – we’ve often put plants up on a pedestal as being uniquely nutritious and uniquely healthy and yet they do contain things like oxalates, and phytates and tannins that actually impair nutrient absorption – they’re literally called antinutrients and they can cause these other problems within the body, so y’know, we have a look at wheat based products and we know that gluten actually increases what we call intestinal permeability in everybody. Now, people with celiac disease are more susceptible to the side effects because of the degree of intestinal permeability that they already start with, but everybody is vulnerable to these.” – Mason

Now I realize how blasphemous it sounds to question the greatness of plants. But oddly enough this 71 year old man went on a diet that had literally no plants and his health dramatically improved. In contrast many people do fine with tons of plants, look at vegan triathlete rich roll for example. He seems to be doing pretty well. But plants do have substances in them that not everyone can handle. You wouldn’t give wheat bread to a celiac patient, you wouldn’t give a peanut to someone with a peanut allergy. Some people are very sensitize to oxalates – a compound found in many plant foods for example leafy greens. Sally Norton had been struggling with chronic pain, fatigue and other mysterious symptoms for 30 years since the age of 12. She finally went on a low oxalate diet – simply cutting out unsuspecting plant foods like spinach and almonds finally resolved these terrible problems she had been struggling with for decades. 

Oxalate poisoning is actual something farmers have to deal with[R]. They have to prevent their herds from eating too many oxalate containing plants. The animals can develop issues as serious as kidney failure from this. 
Humans are told the brassica Kale is a superfood, but ranchers caring for a herd of grazing animals are told to beware of the health risks of Kale.[R]
Now personally, I find that I get a little queasy every time I eat too much spinach, but I suspect I’m not as sensitive to oxalates as certain people. The point is to say we shouldn’t expect all people to perfectly be able to  handle all plants. 

“When we actually have a look at a lot of the nutrients in plant foods, we have to have a look at biological value. So if we take iron for instance, we get heme iron from animal foods and we get non heme iron from plant based foods like spinach but there’s really no comparison in terms of how effective they are – able to be utilized by the body. So non-heme iron in spinach is very difficult for our body to actually assimilate and to deal with. And we see this across the board – we have vitamin A, that comes in different forms and the form of vitamin A we have from animal foods is so much more biologically useful than what we get from plant foods.” -Mason

Then, we’re often told this or that fruit or vegetable is chock full of this or that nutrient – leafy greens have folate and calcium, carrots have choline, avocados have vitamin B6, beans have iron, nuts have zinc, mushrooms have riboflavin. That’s great, but an egg yolk has all of those. 

Sometimes the vitamins in plants aren’t what we think they are. For example, people think carrots have vitamin A because they refer to the beta carotene in carrots as vitamin A, but the reality is that that beta carotene needs to be converted in the human body into vitamin A. So, take a look at my Mom’s blood test. 

Her beta carotene level is very high where her Vitamin A is actually in the low range. What’s going on? Well, again beta carotene in plants isn’t vitamin A. How well you convert that beta carotene into actual Vitamin A depends on your genes. Some people say carrots are a good source of vitamin A, but at least when it comes to my Mom and probably myself, carrots are not a good source of vitamin A. 

“We’ve got in our head that plant based foods are more nutrient dense and essentially more nutritious than other foods and if we don’t have a side of vegetables or fruit on our plate, then we must be missing out. The simple fact is that is not the case. Animal foods are more nutrient dense than plant based foods…”-Mason

By the way, aside from those other nutrients I already mentioned, an egg yolk also has Vitamin A, I mean actual vitamin A. It doesn’t need to be converted.
Not to mention egg yolks also have vitamin D, and E, and Thiamin and B12 and Pantothenic acid and Betaine and phosphorus and selenium. Oh wait but we’re not supposed to eat eggs, especially not egg yolks because of cholesterol…
So, to recap, this man went on an all meat, that is- high saturated fat, no carb, no vegetable diet. This strange diet mysteriously healed his diabetes, ulcerative colitis and high blood pressure. Despite the drastic health improvements though, his endocrinologist recommended he go back on a high carb reduced fat diet and limit his red meat consumption. Essentially the recommendation was to do the opposite of the diet that solved his health problems. Fruits and vegetables are perfectly fine for most people, but it was surprising to me that the endocrinologist didn’t at least investigate why the new low carb high fat high protein diet was so effective and instead gave him the same high carb low fat diet advice that people have heard since the 1970’s.

This wave of bad advice and close mindedness seems to stem entirely from Ancel Keys diet heart hypothesis – the idea that saturated fat causes heart attacks. This poorly supported idea is still taught as fact to doctors today. 
“You were saying that essentially the foundational teaching that people are given when they are on their path to become a medical doctor – they are taught this right, that the diet heart hypothesis is correct and this is what causes heart disease?” -Joseph

“This is accepted as fact. Certainly it was when I was in medical school and I was actually provided with some of the curriculum notes from a local university here a couple of years ago, and I was quite surprised to see the lipid heart hypothesis still going strong, so unless things have changed in the last 2 years and I am almost certain that they have not – then that would be the status quo today. 
Here’s the problem: If you start to understand the root biochem, the root cause biochemistry of all of this, you then have to understand that saturated fats are not dangerous for our health and then the whole house of cards falls down. I think in a way, this – the situation we’re in with such atrocious dietary guidelines could never have occurred if doctors had a better understanding of biochemistry.” – Mason

To understand the injustice that has been done to exercise, let’s pretend we’re back in 1995 and Nintendo is advertising the Nintendo 64. When marketing, they talk solely about the technical aspects of the machine and how it has a 93.7 megahertz processor compared to the Super Nintendo’s measly 3.56 megahertz processor. The N64 flops and the entire marketing team is fired since they failed to promote any relevant information like the actual nature of the new games or even that an entire D was added, making the games 3D instead of 2D. 

Of course in reality, the Nintendo 64 did quite well. This hypothetical marketing strategy is just a parallel to the poor marketing strategy for exercise.  The sales points of exercise up until now were that it’s good for the heart and it will make you lose weight. First off, while these are good benefits, they’re not nearly as compelling as the other benefits of exercise. “Good for the heart” is a vague notion that’s encouraging only if you happen to be older and worried about a heart attack. Then, data is showing that exercise isn’t even that effective for losing weight. A review of exercise intervention studies published in 2001 by Queen’s University in Canada found that after 20 weeks, “the amount of exercise energy expenditure had no correlation with weight loss“

I’m not saying that exercise doesn’t affect your body. The right kind of exercise increases muscle mass and improves your insulin sensitivity, setting you up to have a healthier body composition. However, if you begin exercising without managing other factors like diet, you may be very discouraged by poor weight loss results.

Pediatric Endocrinologist Dr. Robert Lustig said at UCSF Osher Mini Medical School for the Public in 2013:
“Does exercise work? So, here are studies of exercise – as you can see when compared with no treatment, exercise resulted in very small weight loss across the board. Exercise does not cause weight loss. What does exercise do? It causes muscle gain. Muscle have mitochondria, mitochondria burn energy. So, exercise is the single best thing you can do for yourself, but if you think it’s gonna show up on the scale, think again.” 

In a September 2016 issue of TIME magazine, Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky said that “If there were a drug that could do for human health everything that exercise can, it would likely be the most valuable pharmaceutical ever developed.”

To understand what makes exercise  so great, we need to understand how it affects the brain. First off, what is the brain for? Some may say “we have brains to think! To create art and to come up with creative solutions to complex problems!” but Neuroscientist Daniel Wolpert argues that is not the case.

As Daniel Wolpert said in his TED talk:
 “ We have a brain for one reason and one reason only and that’s to produce adaptable and complex movement. There is no other reason to have a brain.” 

 To illustrate this, Daniel uses the example of a sea squirt. Early in its life, the sea squirt has a nervous system. It will use this nervous system to move around and find a suitable rock to attach itself to, then it will spend the rest of its life there. At that point, movement is no longer a necessity for survival, so the very first thing the sea squirt does is it digests its brain for energy. 

A more relatable example is the Koala. The Koala has adapted its digestive system to derive all the energy it needs from eucalyptus leaves. It really doesn’t need to move that much as it can just sit in the tree, eat, and watch the world go by. Earlier in the Koala’s evolution, it used to have a much bigger brain. However, once its diet became less diverse and required less movement to survive, its brain shrunk. Less movement meant less brain was necessary. From an evolutionary perspective, it’s the same as not wasting your money on a 4000 dollar laptop if all you need to do is run some simple software like your web browser and email client. 

What research on exercise is suggesting, and a better understanding of neurochemical mechanisms is proving, is that there is a very powerful connection between the brain and movement. A big brain is necessary to facilitate complex movements, and executing such movements and getting your heart rate up bolsters your  brain power. 

Exercise  has been shown to help people learn much more efficiently, better deal with stress, and drastically reduce anxiety. It improves mood to the point of lifting people people out of depression, and it strengthens focus to the point that some ADHD patients elect to throw out their prescriptions. And that’s not even the full list. 
 
The California Department of Education has consistently shown that students with higher fitness scores have higher test scores. Former President Ma of Taiwan increased the occurrence of Physical Education in schools nationwide from twice a week to three times a week for this reason. The minister of education, science and technology in South Korea extended the school day by 1 hour to add more time for PE and sports. This decision was made after reading Dr. John Ratey’s book “SPARK” which is all about the brain benefits of exercising.

The reason the Taiwanese and South Korean school systems don’t just have students study for another hour is because exercise actually primes the brain to learn faster. A 2007 study showed that subjects who did high intensity exercise beforehand could learn vocabulary words 20% faster than those who remained sedentary.

The key to this phenomenon is a protein called Brain Derived Neurotrophic Factor, or BDNF for short. In order to learn something, the brain actually needs to grow and modify its cellular infrastructure to allow neurons to fire more easily. Researchers found that “if they sprinkled BDNF onto neurons in a petri dish, the cells automatically sprouted new branches, producing the same structural growth required for learning.” This impressive result had John Ratey nickname BDNF the “Miracle-Gro for the brain.”

“BDNF improves the function of neurons, encourages their growth, and strengthens and protects them against the natural process of cell death. …BDNF is a crucial biological link between thought, emotions and movement.”

A 2013 study in the journal of sports science and medicine showed that just 20 to 40 minutes of aerobic exercise increased BDNF in the blood by 32%. Rather than stocking up on coffee before you sit down to study, you might want to try jogging around the block instead. 

One way to understand why exercise would trigger your brain to initiate “learning mode” like this is to think of your body as the world’s most intricate “IF THEN” system. Your body has triggers for almost every physiological process. For example, IF cold THEN shiver. IF hot THEN sweat. Most of your body’s physiological expressions can’t be induced just by force of will, certain triggers must be present. [“Alexa, increase my testosterone by 50%.” “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” ] By understanding which physiological triggers influence which physiological expressions, we can start getting our brains to do what we want. 

The reason exercise is a key trigger for all kinds of positive effects in the brain, particularly learning, is because movement signals to the brain that something important is happening. Maybe not in modern times, but originally, when we were moving, it was for the sake of survival. You move to escape a predator, to forage for food, to hunt, et cetera. While moving, it’s in your best interest to learn the lay of the land so you don’t get lost and can locate forageable food again. You had better remember how an attacking animal moves and what path was most efficient to escape so you can prevent yourself from becoming a carcass next time. When you’re loafing around, you’re not convincing your brain that learning is necessary. From your brain’s perspective, being sedentary means you’re safe, nothing important is happening, and it’s time to rest.

When you think of Arnold Schwarzenegger, you might not associate him with intelligence. You might say he talks funny, and that his success only comes from him being a novelty when musclebound guys were rare. However, no matter how much attention your arms get you, you’ll need a lot of motivation, learning capacity, and focus to become a bodybuilder, businessman, actor, investor, and politician. By the way it wasn’t his physique that made him rich, he became a millionaire through real estate before he even began acting. Oh and all this while he was speaking in his second language. 

There’s a good chance that Arnold can thank his fitness for such an impressive display of focus and motivation. We owe our motivations and entire ‘will to live’ to the brain’s reward center. With almost any activity we choose to do, we do it because we expect some sort of reward. We strive for success in life because we expect the reward of fulfillment, we eat candy bars for the rewarding taste and we do taxes for the reward of not getting audited by the IRS. Without reward, our brains don’t have much reason to do anything.

An anti-obesity drug called Rimonabant was a tragic example of this. Rimonabant is an endocannabinoid antagonist- it’s an “anti-marijuana” medicine, which also means it’s “anti-munchies” medicine. It gets you to stop eating by inhibiting the sense of reward from food, and unfortunately everything else. 20 percent of users experienced serious depression and there were several suicides. Kill the reward system and you just might want to kill yourself.  

Dopamine is a key player in the reward center. Dopamine is all about motivation and attention, and is responsible for that feeling of satisfaction when we accomplish something. It makes you want to do things, and reassures you that that thing was worth doing. 

So if your dopamine is not working properly, you can find it hard to get things done, because you’re not getting enough fulfillment to justify doing them. One of the ways the ADHD drug adderall works is by mimicking the action of dopamine in the reward center of the brain. Adderall users can get so focused on mundane tasks and blast through their to-do lists because everything becomes interesting. But you don’t have to go the pharmacy to get your reward center going. Studies show that exercise boosts motivation by increasing dopamine storage and triggering the creation of dopamine receptors in the reward center. Exercise won’t have you staying up all night in a studying frenzy like adderall, but it will give you more willpower and focus to do those little things that don’t usually feel rewarding.

Aside from its positive effects on dopamine, exercise also elevates levels of norepinephrine and serotonin. When these three neurotransmitters are in deficit, people become depressed. 

In a 1999 study, James Blumenthal compared exercise to the anti-depressant Zoloft in a 16 week trial. They found that just thirty minutes of jogging, three times a week was just as effective as Zoloft. But that’s only looking at depression. A 2006 study of over 19,000 Dutch twins and their families showed that exercisers were  less depressed, less anxious, more socially outgoing and less neurotic. I guess it wasn’t hyperbole when Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky said that if exercise were a drug, it would be the most valuable one ever developed.

The last point about exercise and the brain has to do with stress. Let’s take a look at the original stress scenario: You’re chilling out eating berries or whatever and then you see a tiger advancing towards you. Your fight or flight response switches on, the pituitary gland secretes adrenocorticotropic hormone, cortisol is released, your heart rate shoots up, your digestion turns off and you really start moving. You will exert an immense amount of effort, after a couple minutes you will come to rest, then your physiological processes will calm down, and your cortisol will quickly drop and stay down for the rest of the day. 

This is another example of the body’s IF THEN sequencing: IF See tiger, THEN jack up cortisol. After that, it becomes: IF You have exerted sufficient effort THEN lower cortisol levels. Unfortunately for most people they activate the first part of this a lot, but they don’t activate the second part. Which means for most of the day, you’re sitting around with a bunch of cortisol in your system.

We’ve heard that stress makes you fat, and indeed it does. Research shows that cortisol specifically increases the accumulation visceral fat, which is linked to cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome. But there’s a much more important area affected by stress. Brain imaging has shown that people with frequently high cortisol levels degrade their brain tissue much faster than normal. As cortisol rises, electrical signals in your hippocampus deteriorate. The hippocampus is associated with learning, memories, and of course stress control. However, by exercising in the morning, you can dial down your cortisol levels and keep them down the rest of the day. Frequent exercise allows your body to become much better at reacting to stress.

I mentioned that exercise is as good as medication for treating some issues, but exercise isn’t just for correcting  health. Even if you are confident that you feel great, have good focus, and you are happy with your ability to learn new things, you could still improve all of these areas.

If you’ve replaced say your headphones recently, you probably were satisfied with the ones you had… until you tried better ones and thought “Whoa! I could have been hearing in high quality this whole time!” Then those new headphones become your new standard. If you later put on your old headphones, you think “God these sound like crap.” Starting an exercise routine feels like putting on those new headphones. 

When someone mentions they don’t have time for 20 minutes of exercise in the morning, it reminds me of one of my favorite Brian Regan skits about eyeglasses:

“How can instantly improved vision not be at the top of your to do list? ‘Ah I’ll see tomorrow. I don’t- I don’t have time! I don’t have time. To see clearly. No. ” 
Sometime about two years ago, I was dissatisfied with my productivity and thought I had a touch of ADHD, so I got a prescription for modafinil. Modafinil has been compared to the magical productivity pill NZT in the movie “limitless”. Some users said colors look brighter and that they instantly felt “switched on.” For me, not so much. There was never a particularly striking contrast in how I felt on modafinil, just at some point during the day, I would look back and think “Wow I really got a lot done today.” I stopped taking modafinil after just a few weeks of trying it as I didn’t like the idea of relying on something for productivity. Now that I’ve finally made a habit of consistently exercising first thing every morning, I have a lot of those moments where I look back and say “Wow I really got a lot done.” But, any time I skip the exercise, it feels like I’ve put my shitty old headphones back on.