fat

 One thing I will miss in NYC are the fantastic restaurants. I particularly applaud the trend of restaurants that go whole hog and use real bone stocks and animal fat in their dishes. Obviously, these restaurants are pretty vegetarian-unfriendly and have been a little controversial. 

Unvegetarian, unapologetic animal eater restaurants

The Momofuku restaurants were instrumental in jumpstarting the pork belly and rich broth trends. There are several restaurants in the group (and one in Sydney and Toronto now). There are plenty of vegetables on the menu, but often they are drenched in delicious pork fat. One of the best dishes is chanterelles with bone marrow, a luxurious and fatty combination, but only available seasonally. The various traditional Southern Hams make an excellent appetizing and the offal dishes are not to be missed. 

I think Salt & Fat, which is in my neighborhood in Queens, is a little inspired by Momofuku and also be Williamsburg's excellent Traif. Their appetizer is bacon-fat popcorn, which is amazing. I recommend the yellowtail tartare, the delicious ribs with homemade BBQ sauce, the incredibly rich salads with all kinds of animal fat bits, and the hearty oxtail terrine. 

I'm mentioned Takashi like a zillion times, but that's because it's a temple of delicious meat and they do offal so well that it's the perfect place to try crazy things. I LOVE the sweet breads. They seem kind of scary at first, but they melt in your mouth. The liver is also not to be missed. I don't usually like liver that much, but their liver is marinated so perfectly that it's delicious raw. I've never had anything I disliked on the menu and I think I've eaten almost everything on it. 

I really like Fatty Cue because they use lots of delicious animal fats with dashes of fish sauce for flavor. The dishes are salty, fatty, tangy, and spicy. I particularly recommend the coriander bacon.

Because it's Brooklyn, they actually probably have some real vegetarian dishes at Palo Santo, but the chef here cooks everything else with real house-made animal fats and stocks. The cuisine spans many countries in Latin America and uses ingredients from many local farms. 

Vegetarian Restaurants I actually eat at: 

Saravanaa Bhavan is one of my favorite places for Indian food. I love idlis, which are steamed fermented rice/lentil cakes served with a spicy soup called sambar.

Rockin Raw makes an excellent raw-vegan cinnamon roll that's gluten, soy, and nut-free. When I crave a sweet treat, I go here.

Occasionally I get a weird craving for falafel. Organic Avenue's raw falafel is oil-free and gluten-free. To me, it tastes as good as the real thing.

Bacon Branzino @ Salt & Fat

Chole Island (Creative Commons)

Yesterday I read an interesting paper in Human Brain Evolution: The Influence of Freshwater and Marine Food Resources. I have some issues with this book, which is a collection of papers, but there is some great information. One of the interesting chapters is Lessons from Shore-Based Hunter-Gatherer Diets in East Africa. Some of it is available as this paper Milk in the island of Chole [Tanzania] is high in lauric, myristic, arachidonic and docosahexaenoic acids, and low in linoleic acid reconstructed diet of infants born to our ancestors living in tropical coastal regions.

Chole is an island in Tanzania, home to a population that is a mixture of various peoples from the African inlands, the legacy of the Arab slave trade. The paper describes their diet as being coconut, marine fish (which they boil), vegetables, fruits (oranges, mango, and banana), and an occasional flying fox. I do not believe this description is completely accurate. The researchers were looking for a culture that eats close to the "paleolithic diet" as described by Cordain: lean meat, fruits, and vegetables. Unfortunately, this culture does not exist, which leads to the bizarre paradox of using cultures that eat either high-carb, high-fat, or both to bolster the idea that this diet is the best for humans. Later in the paper they use this hypothesis and the data from the people of Chole, to estimate a paleo diet that is nothing like the diet of the people of Chole. They published a separate paper on this, which Don at Primal Wisdom has blogged about. I am more skeptical than Don, as I don't believe the diet we evolved on would be close to the upper limit of the % calories of protein that is the estimate for the max capacity of the liver to convert excess nitrogen to urea (35%)*.  Their estimated ratios are suspiciously close to the zone diet...

I'm not a fan of the method of deciding what is healthy and then trying to fit the ancestral evidence into it, which seems to be their main method. They repeatedly say that staple carbohydrates weren't part of Paleolithic diets, only citing Cordain, who has no evidence for this. I notice they don't hawk low-fat much explicitly, despite their estimated paleolithic diets, since they are working with data from people eating high-fat. But I digress, because I really just wanted to talk about breast milk here and their breast milk data is great. They have data from the people of Chole, three groups of fish-eating controls (Kerewe, Nyakius, and Nyiramba), four groups from the inland (Hadza- who are foragers, Maasai, Songo, and Iraqiw), plus they presented historical data from Dar Es Salaam and several Western countries. 

Here we can see the people from Chole very high amounts of two particular saturated fatty acids: lauric and myristic. The Kerewe have similar levels of myristic and the people of Dar es Salaam have similar levels of lauric. Chole and Dar es Salaam are located in a costal region where palm and coconut trees are abundant. Other places where coconut is eaten frequently like Dominica and Surinam, also had high levels of lauric acid. What about myristic? The authors explain that the Kerewe do not consume coconut, but have a high carbohydrate intake from ugali (a corn/wheat porridge) and muhoho (cassava). They do not explain why other cultures eating a high-carbohydrate diet don't have similar levels or why the levels in the Chole are so high. 

Despite it not being mentioned in the paper, the Chole do eat plenty of carbohydrates (though in what amounts remains to be studied). This book mentions that they grow potatoes, corn, millet, squash, cassava, and rice. This ethnography on storytelling also mentions these crops. Here is a woman in New Scientist, pounding rice: 

Did their culture change all the sudden? Why aren't the authors mentioning these foods? Out of the blue they say that "carbohydrates cause the highest increase in total cholesterol/HDL cholesterol (Mensink et al., 2003), suggesting an atherosclerosis-promoting effect of the carbohydrate-rich diet of Kerewe." I can't find any evidence that the Kerewe suffer from this condition and considering how similar their diet is to the Kitavans, I suspect that they don't have it. 

Apparently you can get lauric and myristic acid from coconut, but there is evidence that carbohydrate-rich diets raise the milk content of medium chain fatty acids as well by de novo synthesis from glucose. I will have to look at the papers cited, but perhaps this mechanism is suppressed somehow in people with excessive linoleic acid in their diets, which would explain why the people of Palestine have low levels, for example. The authors not that in their data set, lauric acid correlates inversely with linoleic acid and positively with DHA and AA. 

As for why this carb to medium chain fatty acid mechanism exists, we get no speculation, but another citation to Cordain for the idea that carbohydrate-rich diets were not part of our dietary habits.

No matter how they got there, medium chain fatty acids in breastmilk seem to be beneficial.  They are easily absorbable as energy (especially since babies are in ketosis no matter what their mother's diet is), and they have antiviral and antimicrobial properties. 

When were coconuts introduced into the human diet? The fact that much of the Paleolithic coastline is underwater and decomposition tends to be rapid in hot humid climates means the fossil evidence is scant. But a silicified coconut fruit was found in the Chinchilla sands in Southern Queensland from 2 million years ago, which suggests that they were widely dispersed even then, since the current origin of the coconut based on genetic studies seems to be East Africa (where humans may have evolved into our modern form) or the American West coast. 

The breastmilk of Chole is very low in linoleic acid and pretty high in DHA, though not as high as in the Kerewe. This is not surprising considered their diet, which is rich in seafood.

How much exogenous DHA is needed for infants for optimum brain and eye development is currently under debate. The authors of this book believe that the DHA needs in infants require the mother to consume seafood, or at least large amounts of DHA-rich organs like brain (though insects also are a source of DHA too). I'm not sure this is true myself, but would be curious to see the Hadza (inland foragers) compared to the people of Chole.

Hilariously, the breast milk of Chole VIOLATES formula recommendations of the Commission Directive of 1991 (I hope the recent ones have been revised), which recommend that lauric and myristic fatty acids be no more than 15%. 90% of Chole samples violate this recommendation. They also are too high in Arachidonic acid, which has a bad rap, but it is important for infant brain development and there is evidence its negative effects only occur when omega-3 is low. There is also evidence that infants cannot create enough of the needed AA from precursors. 

The unfortunate fact is that often guidelines for synthetic substitutes like formulas are based on "normal" women. And considering the health of the normal people in the US, normal might be a bad thing. This paper points out that current data is taken from populations with high levels of degenerative diseases of civilization. According to nutritionism-ists like Marion Nestle, you need a bunch of studies to show DHA is needed in formula. Studies aren't the be-all and end-all, particularly if they are based on populations that are not living optimally. If I were forced to use formula, I'd rather have it be based on the breastmilk of a healthy population than wait decades for a bunch of studies and continue basing it on a bad dataset. 

While I disagree with some assertions in this paper, as they seem to be bent by preconceived notions about macronutrients and the Paleolithic, it is very interesting and points to the need for more studies on populations like that on Chole before vegetable oil is introduced. 

*I am working on a different post on this issue. 

 Last year I met a girl who was trying the paleo diet and complaining she "felt weird" and her stomach hurt. I asked her what she was eating and it turns out she was eating 5 tablespoons of coconut oil for breakfast! I told her that wasn't food, that it was an ingredient you can use to make foods or a supplement and that maybe she should try eating food. Later she said she felt better. 

I guess there is some impression among certain people that because I and others don't think fat is *bad* that you should drown yourself in it. As far as I'm concerned it's a far cry from a certain Paleo cookbook that advocates trimming fat off of GRASS FED meat, throwing away the fat that is leftover from cooking grass-fed meat,  and avoiding grass-fed "fatty cuts" like shanks to eating a pound of bacon for breakfast with a side of heavy-cream flavored coconut milk. Let's be honest: I don't eat that way. I cook with tallow that I save from the whole goats and lambs I buy, I certainly don't ever throw away any "fatty" cut, and sometimes I use some ghee, bacon, butter, or coconut milk as ingredients. I go through a pound of bacon a month, mostly because of my boyfriend, and maybe a can of coconut milk every two weeks and a pack of Pasture Butter a month. I never make any "paleo" desserts anymore and I don't eat very much dairy unless it's well-fermented and raw. Heavy cream makes my digestive system into sludge. I do eat some grains: I find my stomach is happiest when I include some rice in my diet every few days or so. 

I suspect someone who is more athletic or who doesn't have IBS might tolerate more fat. But this is my personal "sweet spot." I do have experience doing almost-vegan paleo: starches, veggies, fruits, no added fats, and only shellfish as protein. Perhaps it could be perfected, but I found that my keratosis really was itchy and red. I also felt more depressed and had bloating. If I tried it again I would probably use some coconut milk with carrot juice or something in an attempt to get vitamin A, but maybe my body isn't suited for it because of my genetics and health problems. Maybe it's also different for people in different life-stages. I'm a woman of reproductive age, so it's possible my need for certain vitamins is higher. 

I also would note that food sensitivities don't care about the paleolithic. It's very possible to be allergic or sensitive to a host of "paleo" foods from types of meat, to nuts, to eggs, to shellfish. I am personally quite sensitive to vegetables like broccoli, onions, and cauliflower. Honestly, they do a number on my stomach worse than any grain. I think people get caught up in the "paleo" paradigm thinking that because we evolved with foods like it, it must be good. But modern food sensitivities don't discriminate. I find that interestingly my stomach feels much better if I get starch from regular potatoes rather than sweet potatoes. The latter is considered "more paleo" though that stems from botanical ignorance. 

Either way, I don't really follow an orthodox "paleo" diet either, though I do use what I learn about the paleolithic to think about what I eat. I think there is tons of room for experimentation, particularly as the evidence for starch consumption in the paleolithic becomes stronger and stronger.

I don't think there is much room for combining "paleo" with various religious philosophies and I'm a little dismayed that Chinese medicine has somehow crept in and become tolerated. I think if I blogged about how I use Christianity to tell me what to eat I'd get about a million angry comments. Remember, the mechanisms behind Chinese medicine are scientifically implausible and even if a few tiny studies show that Chinese medicine works, it's not because of supernatural forces like conveniently undetectable "energy fields" operating outside of the forces of biology, chemistry, and physics. I know plenty of people who follow a "paleo" diet that is compatible with their religion, such as kosher or halal folks, but they don't claim that their diet is somehow better because of it or that it explains their diet's success. 

There has got to be a scientific explanation or I'm just not buying it...

Addendum:

It seems that some people were upset with the idea that I was attacking alternative medicine in the last post. No, I was attacking scientifically implausible theories of food being integrated by the ancestral food community. It's because people don't want to believe there are both unverifiable supernatural beliefs AND beliefs worth investigating to find out whether or not they have some natural basis or benefit.

Acupuncture, for example, is a system worth investigating because of the possibility that the ancient literature refers to real physiological processes, as Chris Kessler points out, and not energy fields (scientists have looked for these energy fields and NOT found them).

The idea that some Chinese roommates once told me that going to bed with my hair wet would cause demonic possession leading to pneumonia made me wonder if perhaps people in rural China did get sick from chills, but otherwise it is a supernatural belief.

Likewise, I am a huge fan of traditional Chinese foods, but when my waitress at my favorite restaurant in Flushing tells me I eat too much fatty "Yang" food and will get acne and clog my blood (that would be awesome since I have a mild form of hemophilia) I think it's worth investigating, but most of the time Chinese traditional food beliefs have been investigated, they have found to be incorrect or vast simplifications. I'm impressed at the latter, but I won't be basing my food choices on whether or not foods are "Yin" or "Yang." I suspect these beliefs have very little to do with Taoism anyway, as they were probably added on as Taoism blended with local folk religions.

Some of these folk beliefs lead to some absurdly unhealthy behaviors. I know Thai people who believe it's good to wash down beef, which is a "hot" food, with Coke, which is a "cold" food. And Chinese people who follow their fried chicken with heavily sugared red date tea because it's "Yin" and replenishes their "Qi." Since these beliefs are not based on real concepts, they are particularly vulnerable to industrialization. 

Religions/folk beliefs and food: worth investigating and important tools for believers, but not always scientific. 
 

Physical Anthropologist John D. Speth wrote a fantastic book called  The Paleoanthropology and Archaeology of Big-Game Hunting: Protein, Fat, or Politics? It's kind of a crime that it's not more widely available. It sells for $134 on Amazon, which is totally lame. If you are a student though you can probably get it for free. For my institution Springerlink had a free ebook download! I don't have time to do it justice right now, but there is a great chapter I just wanted to mention. It's about the high-fat African game animals, which are disproportionately represented in many sites tied to paleolithic hunting. 

This is an opportune moment to take another brief detour into the realm of archaeology, this time to look at views about the hunting capabilities of hominins who occupied sub-Saharan Africa between about 300,000 years ago and roughly 40,000 years ago, give or take a few millennia. For those not too familiar with
archaeology, in Africa this period of the Paleolithic is known as the Middle Stone Age (MSA). During more or less the same period of time, Europe and western Asia were inhabited by Neanderthals, and in these more northerly latitudes of the Old World the comparable part of the archaeological record is referred to as the Middle Paleolithic (MP). Richard Klein has written extensively about the hunting strategies of MSA peoples, focusing particularly on the faunal record from two well-preserved and widely known cave sites located east of Cape Town along South Africa’s Indian Ocean coast – Klasies River Mouth and Die Kelders.

Klein has argued for many years that MSA hominins lacked not only the technological know-how of the people who followed them during the ensuing Later Stone Age (LSA), but they also lacked the cognitive wherewithal. Interestingly, eland remains in these caves are central to his line of thinking, and hence the reason for this detour. And, as I have been doing throughout the book, I will let Klein speak for himself.

 In contrast to the other ungulates, the eland in MSA sites include a large proportion of primeage adults, and the age profile has a catastrophic shape…. The most likely explanation is that MSA people had learned that, unlike most other large African bovids, eland can be easily driven, without much personal risk. An eland herd caught in the right position could be forced over a cliff or into a trap…. However, MSA people could not have driven eland herds to their death very often or the species would have become extinct, since its reproductive vitality would have been sapped by the continuing loss of a large proportion of the available prime adults. Not only did the eland survive, but there is no evidence that it became less numerous during the long MSA time span… 

Thus, MSA people were probably not very successful at hunting eland, and this makes it especially interesting that eland is the most abundant ungulate in the MSA faunas. The clear implication is that MSA people must have been even less successful at hunting other species that are less common in the sites but were more common in the environment. In short, MSA impact on the large mammal fauna was negligible. By extension, it may be argued that LSA peoples, in whose sites eland and other species are represented more in proportion to their live abundance, probably took a higher proportion of game overall. In short, LSA people were almost certainly more proficient hunters. Klein (1987:36–37)

I think this argument needs to be turned on its head. Judging by the many quotes from historic accounts that I have already presented, all of which extol the virtues of the eland as the “game-of-game” in a land of fat-poor animals, the eland is precisely the animal that one should target if the animal is available and the hunters possess the means. If anything the abundance of prime-adult elands in MSA sites is testimony to just how good, and successful, they were as hunters, not evidence of their impoverished cognitive capacity. It is the LSA hunters that should be the focus of interest here. Why were they (as it would seem) compelled to concentrate more on the far leaner and smaller game, the prey that explorer after explorer considered inferior food, especially when they were short of adequate sources of carbohydrates or alternative means of acquiring fat? It seems far more likely that the hunters of the LSA were under some level of stress, either because they managed to overhunt the elands, or perhaps because environmental changes reduced the numbers of elands. All of this remains speculative, of course, but I think the one conclusion we can safely draw from this is that the presence or absence of eland in archaeological sites tells us nothing about innate cognitive capacities.

Incidentally, the abundance of prime adults, evidence that led Klein to postulate that MSA hunters may have driven groups of eland over cliffs or into traps (the “catastrophic” age profile that Klein refers too – that is, an age structure that resembles what one would observe in a living population) need not imply mass kills. Since the faunal assemblages are aggregates or palimpsests of countless individual hunting episodes, the abundance of adult animals in their prime is what one might expect if hunters often deliberately sought out animals that were at their peak in condition, but also now and then killed whatever eland came within their sights, regardless of age. It would be interesting to know what proportion of the adult eland at Klasies and Die Kelders were males….

Hmm, possible dissertation topic? What's so important about eland? Why would hunters target them?

An 18th century Swedish naturalist quoted in the book gives some clues:

This animal [“Cape-elk” or eland] has a great deal of fat, especially about the heart: from an old male which we gave chase to and shot, we got such a quantity of fine and tender fat, as we could with difficulty get into a box that would hold about ten pounds of butter. As at the commencement of our journey homewards through the desert, the hounds we had with us had unluckily devoured our stock of butter, a farmer, who still accompanied us, showed us how to prepare the fat from about the heart of the elk, and to use it for dressing victuals with and for eating on bread in the same manner as is generally practised with goose-grease and hogs-lard. The taste of it also was very similar to these, and to the full as good; and, indeed, if I may be supposed to have been able to form any judgment of the matter at a time when we were so sharp set, and in absolute want of any thing else of the kind, it was rather better. The breast is likewise extremely fat, and is always looked upon as a great delicacy. The flesh is universally of a finer grain, more juicy and better tasted than that of the hart-beest. Sparrman (1785:207–208)

Speth has great information on early food containers where hunter-gatherers may have stored things like fat or boiled bone grease. Pottery may date back as far as 200,000 years, but it's also possible to store and cook with liquids in skins and other containers that would not be present in the record. He also takes down the common use of the San (bushman) as Paleolithic proxies. 

I'll post more about this book soon. I've been very busy with school, but luckily this is what I study so I have ample fodder for posts now. I feel very bad for people who don't have access to this things.

It's possible they will take old books that are outdated and try to push their own rather narrow conclusions. Altough you don't need to have research journal access to find that Boyd Eaton thinks his own conclusions were wrong (though Konnor is still holding out):

Meanwhile, paleo eating continues to evolve. In 1985, Eaton and Konnor allowed foods like skim milk and whole-wheat bread. Konnor still thinks that was the right call, and believes his original concerns about fat were prudent. “You can’t just go to the supermarket and buy meat loaded with fat and say you’re doing the Paleolithic diet. You’re not.” Animals of 10,000 ago, Konnor says, were less fatty—so we must compensate by eating leaner meats, and less. Eaton has gone the other way. He says he had failed to consider the contribution of non-muscle meat like brain and fat depots, and thus underestimated the amount of fat we need. “It makes me feel stupid!”

In full discloser, I don't think there is enough evidence either way to draw a conclusion about fat in the paleolithic and we are dependent on modern nutritional science to elucidate whether or not fat is healthy (or types of fat). I also am a big fan of the idea that evolution of human being is on-going and didn't freeze in lower-paleolithic Africa. I personally cycle low and high-fat, but do best on high-fat (I lose my period on low-fat, for example).