HOW NOT TO DIE Michael Greger MD

[Malintent]

We have color vision which must be used for something fitness important. So I'm conditionally saying "go for the multicolored things."

It's selected for to distinguish between berries and leaves... to find them. More an argument suffering form the naturalistic fallacy that supports vegetarianism.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

We have color vision which must be used for something fitness important. So I'm conditionally saying "go for the multicolored things."

It's selected for to distinguish between berries and leaves... to find them. More an argument suffering form the naturalistic fallacy that supports vegetarianism.

Natural selection hasn't selected for any particular diet in the sense we think about different diets today. That said, there are much higher nutrients contained in foods with color as opposed to foods without color. It's the difference between a white potato and a blue potato, or the difference between iceberg lettuce and red leaf lettuce.

Both foods will get you to reproductive age, and natural selection has certainly selected for that. But today we take that for granted. It's a pretty sure bet our distant ancestors didn't consciously concern themselves with health in the sense we think about it today. They were just concerned with staying alive.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Meat, on the other hand, is delicious, available all year round, provides all the nutrition you need, is very easily digestible, and isn't really all that different to the meat our ancestors would have eaten.

Unless you are supplementing, how do strictly meat eaters get their vitamin C today? Someone told me - I think it was you - that they are strictly meat eaters. Traditional societies like Inuit had amounts of Vitamin C adequate for proper health in the raw meats they consumed regularly. How would a meat eater do it today?

 

[EricK]

Meat, on the other hand, is delicious, available all year round, provides all the nutrition you need, is very easily digestible, and isn't really all that different to the meat our ancestors would have eaten.

Unless you are supplementing, how do strictly meat eaters get their vitamin C today? Someone told me - I think it was you - that they are strictly meat eaters. Traditional societies like Inuit had amounts of Vitamin C adequate for proper health in the raw meats they consumed regularly. How would a meat eater do it today?

Two things are going on here:
Firstly, eating meat bypasses much of the need for vitamin C. eg From https://autoimmunethyroid.wordpress.com/2006/09/04/why-meat-prevents-scurvy/:

Vitamin C is required to form collagen in the body, and it does this – despite being described everywhere as an antioxidant – by oxidation. Vitamin C’s role in collagen formation is to transfer a hydroxyl group to the amino acids lysine and proline. Meat, however, already contains appreciable quantities of hydroxylysine and hydroxyproline, bypassing some of the requirement for vitamin C. In other words, your vitamin C requirement is dependent upon how much meat you do not eat.

Secondly, glucose interferes with vitamin C uptake as explained by eg Gary Taubes in "Why we Get Fat":

The vitamin-C molecule is similar in configuration to glucose and other sugars in the body… It is shuttled from the bloodstream into the cells by the same insulin-dependent transport system used by glucose… Glucose and vitamin C compete in this cellular-uptake process, like strangers trying to flag down the same taxicab simultaneously. Because glucose is greatly favored in the contest, the uptake of vitamin C by cells is “globally inhibited” when blood-sugar levels are elevated… In effect, glucose regulates how much vitamin C is taken up by the cells, according to the University of Massachusetts nutritionist John Cunningham. If we increase blood-sugar levels, the cellular uptake of vitamin C-will drop accordingly… Glucose also impairs the re-absorption of vitamin C by the kidney, and so, the higher the blood sugar, the more vitamin-C will be lost in the urine. Infusing insulin into experimental subjects has been shown to cause a “marked fall” in vitamin-C levels in the circulation.

i.e. if you are not eating sufficient quantities of meat, and presumably, therefore, eating a fair amount of sugars and starches which get turned to glucose, you will also need to supplement that diet with Vitamin C (or at least ensure that the carbohydrates you eat contain sufficient Vitamin C).

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Unless you are supplementing, how do strictly meat eaters get their vitamin C today? Someone told me - I think it was you - that they are strictly meat eaters. Traditional societies like Inuit had amounts of Vitamin C adequate for proper health in the raw meats they consumed regularly. How would a meat eater do it today?

Two things are going on here:
Firstly, eating meat bypasses much of the need for vitamin C. eg From https://autoimmunethyroid.wordpress.com/2006/09/04/why-meat-prevents-scurvy/:

Vitamin C is required to form collagen in the body, and it does this – despite being described everywhere as an antioxidant – by oxidation. Vitamin C’s role in collagen formation is to transfer a hydroxyl group to the amino acids lysine and proline. Meat, however, already contains appreciable quantities of hydroxylysine and hydroxyproline, bypassing some of the requirement for vitamin C. In other words, your vitamin C requirement is dependent upon how much meat you do not eat.

Secondly, glucose interferes with vitamin C uptake as explained by eg Gary Taubes in "Why we Get Fat":

The vitamin-C molecule is similar in configuration to glucose and other sugars in the body… It is shuttled from the bloodstream into the cells by the same insulin-dependent transport system used by glucose… Glucose and vitamin C compete in this cellular-uptake process, like strangers trying to flag down the same taxicab simultaneously. Because glucose is greatly favored in the contest, the uptake of vitamin C by cells is “globally inhibited” when blood-sugar levels are elevated… In effect, glucose regulates how much vitamin C is taken up by the cells, according to the University of Massachusetts nutritionist John Cunningham. If we increase blood-sugar levels, the cellular uptake of vitamin C-will drop accordingly… Glucose also impairs the re-absorption of vitamin C by the kidney, and so, the higher the blood sugar, the more vitamin-C will be lost in the urine. Infusing insulin into experimental subjects has been shown to cause a “marked fall” in vitamin-C levels in the circulation.

i.e. if you are not eating sufficient quantities of meat, and presumably, therefore, eating a fair amount of sugars and starches which get turned to glucose, you will also need to supplement that diet with Vitamin C (or at least ensure that the carbohydrates you eat contain sufficient Vitamin C).

I hear you basically saying that someone who eats only meat will not develop scurvy because that person doesn't have the same need for vitamin C as someone who consumes non-meat. Vitamin C is only needed if you consume non-meat.

Do you think today's meat will keep you healthy and long lived? Do you think you're eating the same meat as traditional Inuit, for example, fresh off the land - or sea?

 

[EricK]

I hear you basically saying that someone who eats only meat will not develop scurvy because that person doesn't have the same need for vitamin C as someone who consumes non-meat. Vitamin C is only needed if you consume non-meat.

Yes. And it is empirically true, whether or not the explanations I quoted are correct.

Do you think today's meat will keep you healthy and long lived?

It is keeping me healthy - whether it will keep me long-lived remains to be seen, but I'm guessing so. I think it quite likely that long-term good health just consists of a lot of consecutive periods of short-term good health! Or to look at it another way - if it were causing some long-term damage then the people who have been doing it for years would likely have experienced some symptoms.

Do you think you're eating the same meat as traditional Inuit, for example, fresh off the land - or sea?

I think it is close enough in all important aspects.

 

[Peez]

I don't know much about nutrition, but this quote from the Wikipedia article on Inuit diet might be relevant:

Vitamin C is obtained through sources such as caribou liver, kelp, whale skin, and seal brain; because these foods are typically eaten raw or frozen, the vitamin C they contain, which would be destroyed by cooking, is instead preserved.

I am not sure that cooking destroys all vitamin C, but I have read that cooking does tend to degrade this molecules.

Peez