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- Herausgeber: Hammersmith Health Books
- Kategorie: Ratgeber
- Sprache: Englisch
Sarah Myhill and Craig Robinson's new book brings together all the guidance offered across their many other publications to show why a paleo-ketogenic diet is evolutionarily correct, and therefore the healthiest option, and how it can be practised affordably, easily and sustainably so that chronic 'diseases of civilisation' can be prevented or reversed. Discover how to prevent 'the upper fermenting gut' – the cause of the current epidemic of oesophageal cancer and other digestive problems. Find out how to clear out chronic infections and toxins and what to expect while doing so. Pick and choose from a selection of delicious low-carb whole-food recipes that will provide a high level of nutrients in the right balance. Just do it!
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Dedication
SM: To my lovely patients, who have been willing guinea pigs and most forgiving when my suggestions have not worked. However, in doing so, they have pushed forward the frontiers of Ecological Medicine.
CR: For Judith whom I have met once. On 15th March 1993, I walked out of Moorgate Place, my place of work, turned the corner into Copthall Avenue, and collapsed. This was the beginning of my ME and yes, it started on the Ides of March. I could not move my legs, I was confused, I had deafening tinnitus, I had all-over pain. The world was spinning. For around two hours, fellow City workers walked around me, even stepped over me, suspecting drunkenness or maybe that I was some kind of unusual, suited tramp. Then, this woman, about the same age as me at the time, 30 or so, stopped and bent down and sat on the pavement next to me. She listened to me. And believed me. She called a cab, got in the cab with me and got me to Paddington. She paid the cab. She then helped me, all wobbly, to get to a bench at the station. I had lost my season ticket, and much else in the confusion of the fall. She bought me a ticket for Oxford, and also a coffee, with lots of sugar, as I recall, and a croissant – not very PK, Judith! She waited with me until my train arrived, and made sure I got to a seat, and then I asked her who she was, and she gave me her business card, Judith….. I lost that business card in my confused state on the way home, and I have never been able to thank her. So, this is for you, Judith, thank you, and if you’re out there and read this, I owe you a coffee.
Contents
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce their delicious recipes:
Carolyn ChesshireMoira CreakJason O’SullivanDee MarshallChristina MacleodPhilippa SherwoodMim ElkanMichelle McCullagh (and also for her wonderful illustrations)Sue McCullaghWendy CresswellAngie JonesRosemary SegrottDr Shideh PuriaAbout the Authors
Dr Sarah Myhillmb bs qualified in medicine (with Honours) from Middlesex Hospital Medical School in 1981 and has since focused tirelessly on identifying and treating the underlying causes of health problems, especially the ‘diseases of civilisation’ with which we are beset in the West. She has worked in the NHS and independent practice and for 17 years was the Honorary Secretary of the British Society for Ecological Medicine, which focuses on the causes of disease and treating through diet, supplements and avoiding toxic stress. She helps to run and lectures at the Society’s training courses and also lectures regularly on organophosphate poisoning, the problems of silicone, and chronic fatigue syndrome. Visit her website at www.drmyhill.co.uk
Craig Robinsonma took a first in Mathematics at Oxford University in 1985. He then joined Price Waterhouse and qualified as a Chartered Accountant in 1988, after which he worked as a lecturer in the private sector, and also in the City of London, primarily in Financial Sector Regulation roles. Craig first met Sarah in 2001, as a patient for the treatment of his ME, and since then they have developed a professional working relationship, where he helps with the maintenance of www.drmyhill.co.uk, the moderating of Dr Myhill’s Facebook groups and other ad hoc projects, as well as with the editing and writing of her books.
Stylistic note: Use of the first person singular in this book refers to me, Dr Sarah Myhill. One can assume that the medicine and biochemistry are mine, as edited by Craig Robinson and that the classical and mathematical references are Craig’s.
Preface
Four decades of practical Naturopathic/Functional/Ecological medicine have taught me that the single most important intervention to prevent and treat disease is diet. Hardly surprising – we consume kilograms of food daily which, depending on content, has the potential to kill or cure. So what to eat?
With any such difficult question I always return to evolutionary principles. What is it that has allowed humans to survive the vicissitudes of a harsh and hostile world? How is it that Homo sapiens had the physical and mental strength not just to survive but to prevail over other species? To achieve such requires abundant energy and raw materials and the primary source of both is food. That diet which brought such evolutionary success is the paleo-ketogenic diet and is defined by those foods consumed for some hundreds of thousands of years and to which our body and brain have adapted so efficiently.
With modern securities of food supply, absence of predators, warmth and social safety, Humans should be the fittest and most able mammals on Earth? Not so – Westerners (and all those on a standard Western diet) are suffering epidemics of fatigue and obesity, degenerative disease and progressive pathology. Life expectancy is falling, we have more disabled people than ever and the intelligence of our children is declining. Why so? The single most important reason is again diet.
What went wrong? We now have access to a secure and better quality of food than ever before. The big issue is that we Westerners are addicts. Our lives are driven by addiction – from caffeine, nicotine and alcohol to smart phones and computer games. But the most overlooked, convenient, cheap but pernicious addiction is to sugar, fruit sugar, refined carbohydrates and starches. These foods are killing us.xiv
Addictions seem wonderful because in the immediate short term they mask those deeply unpleasant symptoms of stress. In Lancashire chip shops, the chip butty emerged; in Ireland it was the sugar sandwich; and in Scotland, the deep-fried Mars Bar. These carbohydrate hits provided cheap, instant relief from fatigue, depression and anxiety. But this is ephemeral – you cannot have an upper without a downer. Such a downer could be alleviated by a further carbohydrate snack. Thus an addiction is born. Carbohydrates are consumed not for calorie needs but for symptom relief. The most stressed people become the fattest and the sickest.
The paleo-ketogenic diet is non-addictive. It further avoids evolutionary newcomers such as dairy products and gluten grains. It is the starting point to prevent and treat all disease. I spend more time talking about food and cooking than all other subjects put together. Hence our first PK Cookbook came into being. However, I soon found that just supplying a cookbook was not enough. I had also to deliver the intellectual imperatives to do the diet; the nitty gritty of calories, proteins, fats, fibres and ketones; together with anticipating the problems of the metabolic hinterland and diet, die-off and detox reactions. Readers were also clamouring for more examples of delicious recipes.
All who make this journey have a bumpy ride; some do not succeed at the first attempt; we all relapse on occasion. This book, Paleo-Ketogenic: The Why and the How, is born out of the experiences of hundreds of patients and their hundreds of questions, to deliver the most frictionless and painless route to success.
You must do a PK diet. Just do it.
Part I
The Why
Chapter 1
Why we should all be eating a paleo-ketogenic (PK) diet
We should all be eating a paleo-ketogenic (PK) diet because this has been established by thousands of years of Evolution. This diet is also the starting point to prevent and treat all Western disease.
Let Medicine be thy food and food be thy medicine
Hippocrates, c. 460 – c. 370 BC
Humans evolved over two and half million years eating a paleo-ketogenic diet. This 4is the diet which best suits our bowels, bodies and brains*. If we wish to live to our full potential in terms of quality and quantity of life, this is the diet naturally selected, by survival of the fittest, throughout Evolution.
Evolution is only really interested in getting us to childbearing age. Once Richard Dawkins’s ‘selfish gene’1 has been passed on to the next generation, we are effectively on the evolutionary scrap heap. This means the survival strategies that get us to child-bearing age may be different from those that apply in older age. We should all be eating the PK diet all the time, but as we age, our bowels, bodies and brains work less efficiently and so the imperative to stick with this diet increases. Younger people can get away with less correct diets and this leads many to believe that their present diet is ‘OK’ because ‘that is what I have always eaten’.
Primitive man gained huge evolutionary advantage through being able to run on two fuels – fats and carbohydrates. Indeed, we can eat a greater variety of foods than any other mammal (bar perhaps the pig – I love pigs!). This ‘metabolic flexibility’ plus the First Agricultural Revolution†, around 10,000 BC, meant that more people survived, the land could support more of us and so more achieved child-bearing age than ever before.
The human population of Earth sky-rocketed with this ‘dual fuel effect’. However, what gets us to child-bearing age is not necessarily good for optimum health and longevity. And the health of all, especially our precious children, is fast declining.
They [Young People] have exalted notions, because they have not been humbled by life or learned its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things – and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones. Their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning – all their mistakes are in the direction of doing things excessively and vehemently. They overdo everything – they love too much, hate too much, and the same with everything else.
Aristotle, 384 – 322 BC
5Or, to quote Oscar Wilde: ‘Youth is wasted on the young’.
Why ketogenic?
A ketogenic diet is healthy because it is low in carbohydrates (starches and sugars). Carbohydrates are great foods but they are horribly addictive and cause metabolic syndrome (also known as ‘insulin resistance’ and ‘pre-diabetes’ – see below). In the past, metabolic syndrome was an essential tool to allow primitive man to survive the winter: when the autumn windfall came, the carbohydrate craving was switched on as our forebears feasted on the natural and delicious harvests of grains, root vegetables, pulses and fruit. This made them fat (food storage and winter insulation) and lethargic (energy conservation) – ideal for getting through winter on a restricted diet.
Most of the time, we should be fuelling our body with a few sugars (from carbohydrates and proteins) and lots of short chain fatty acids (from fat and fibre). If sugar is available, our body always uses this first – this is because we can only store small amounts of this fuel as glycogen. Fat is so important because we can store vast amounts of this fuel (as fat) for winter survival. Evolution does not like us dipping into precious survival foods without good reason.
Fuelling our body with excess carbohydrate leads to the forerunner of diabetes – namely, metabolic syndrome (characterised by high carbohydrate ‘junk food’ diets, leading to obesity, high blood pressure, arterial damage and degenerative disease). With time, metabolic syndrome disables and kills. Years of carbohydrate-based diets and metabolic syndrome dump us prematurely on the evolutionary scrap heap.
Carbohydrates and disease
A high-carbohydrate diet overwhelms the ability of the liver to deal with it and this switches on the hormonal response which inhibits the burning of fat as fuel – this hormonal response is primarily the release of insulin (insulin lays down fat) but also mild hypothyroidism can result. Of course, in our evolutionary past, when the autumn feast of ripe fruit etc came to an end, because it ran out or rotted, ‘primitive’ Homo sapiens switched back into the normal fat-burning mode that we call ketosis.
On the other hand, we modern Western humans live in a state of permanent autumn 6because we can; the ‘autumn feast’ is permanently available in our supermarkets. We power our bodies with addictive high-carbohydrate foods that are constantly, conveniently and cheaply available. We are in constant metabolic syndrome with all the short-term (fat and fatigue) and long-term (heart disease, cancer and dementia) problems associated with that (see our book Prevent and Cure Diabetes for more details).
To every thing there is a season…
Ecclesiastes 3, King James V version, The Bible
High-carbohydrate diets mean that our glycogen sponge – which I will explain next – is constantly saturated. And therein lies the rub. It is not sugar per se that is the problem; it is too much sugar. How come?
The glycogen sponge
On eating, foods are digested and absorbed so there is a tsunami of products of digestion pouring into the portal vein, the blood drainage system from the gut that goes straight to the liver. The contents of the portal vein include a mixed soup of goodies and baddies. The liver does an amazing job to detoxify the baddies and store the goodies. Indeed, if this toxic soup bypassed the liver, we would rapidly fall into dementia and unconsciousness. This is precisely what happens in liver failure.
All carbohydrates are absorbed as sugars and these are a mixed blessing – yes, they are a useful raw material for the synthesis of DNA, RNA, ATP (the energy molecule) and to detoxify via the process of glucuronidation. Some sugar can also be used as fuel. On the other hand, too much sugar spilling over into the systemic (whole-body) bloodstream is damaging; it is sticky stuff and sticks to arteries (arteriosclerosis), feeds cancer cells, feeds infections and drives dementia and degenerative disease.
The primary control of blood sugar is carried out by the ‘glycogen sponge’ of the liver and muscle cells. Think of these as pantries where sugar can be temporarily stored as it floods in after a meal, then is slowly released according to demand. Returning to the analogy of a tsunami, engineers use their own form of a glycogen sponge for when flooding occurs. They build diversion canals to move water away from areas where it is accumulating and then store such ‘excess’ water in temporary holding ponds, thus averting damage to life, limb and property. 7
No problem at all, but if we overwhelm our glycogen-sponge pantry, if the holding ponds cannot accommodate the sugar tsunami, then the sugar will spill into the bloodstream and that triggers a host of hormonal responses which we call metabolic syndrome. In our analogy, the temporary holding ponds become full and so flood, thus causing the very damage they were intended to avert.
The key to consuming carbs is to make sure we never overwhelm our glycogen sponges. We can do that simply by measuring ketones (see Chapter 4).
The fermenting upper gut
The human gut is almost unique in the mammal world. The upper gut (oesophagus, stomach and small intestine) is a sterile carnivorous gut (like a dog’s) designed for digesting protein and fat. The lower gut is a fermenting vegetarian gut designed to utilise fibre (like a horse, except humans cannot ferment that very tough fibre, cellulose). This allows humans to deal with many different foods and in part explains our success as a species. This system works perfectly until we overwhelm our ability to deal with sugars and starches. Bacteria and yeasts can then colonise the hitherto sterile upper gut and start fermenting. This creates nasty symptoms and pathology. Why?
Foods are fermented to toxins such as ethyl, propyl and butyl alcohols, D lactate, ammonia compounds, hydrogen, hydrogen sulphide and much else. This fermentation is otherwise known as the ‘auto-brewery syndrome’. All these nasties have the potential to poison us, and this includes causing foggy brain. I just need a glass of wine to appreciate that fact!Colonies of microbes – bacteria and fungi – build up and are then further colonised by viruses (so-called bacteriophages). Fermenting microbes produce bacterial endotoxins, fungal mycotoxins and viral particles.These toxins spill over into the portal vein and so to the liver. The liver uses up much energy and raw materials to deal with these toxins. This is debilitating.The gases generated by upper gut fermentation cause burping and bloating. They may distend the gut, and this is painful.Microbes move into the lining of the gut and this low-grade inflammation results in a ‘leaky gut’. This means that acid cannot be concentrated in the stomach because it leaks out as fast as it is secreted in. Acid is an essential part of digestion because:8a) it is necessary to start the digestion of protein
b) it is necessary for the absorption of minerals
c) it sterilises the upper gut and protects us from infections
d) it determines gut emptying: a non-acid stomach does not empty correctly and this drives reflux, oesophagitis, heartburn and hiatus hernia.
Fermentation of fibre by friendly microbes should take place in the colon, the lower gut/large intestine. The gases which result and make you fart are hydrogen and methane. These farts are odourless. Put a match to them and they will explode …not that I recommend this for diagnostic purposes! If your farts are offensive, then that is because you have overwhelmed your digestion upstream and proteins are being fermented in your colon – rotting meat stinks. Short gut transit time will have a similar effect. Professor Glenn Gibson, a food microbiologist from the University of Reading, divides people into ‘inflammables’ and ‘smellies’ – the inflammables (hydrogen and methane) have normal gut fermentation and the smellies (hydrogen sulphide) do not.2 This is a risk factor for bowel cancer among many other problems that we will look at next.
The common carbohydrate-driven medical problems
Accelerated ageing
Degeneration, diabetes and dementia, coronaries and cancer are all driven by carbohydrates. There is much more detail in our comprehensive book Ecological Medicine but we list the key problems here as essential to why we should all be eating a PK diet. 9
Accelerated immune suppression
There is no need to die in a pandemic… provided you are not overwhelming your body with sugars. Not only is the PK diet highly protective against the above diseases of Westerners, but it is also highly protective against infection. Throughout evolution, populations have been controlled by infectious disease, with cholera estimated to have killed a third of all humans who ever existed and the Black Death responsible for killing a third of the population of Europe during the 14th Century.‡ With our modern CV19 pandemic, death rates are more than doubled in those with diabetes and tripled in the obese. We know there will be other pandemics to come which may well be more lethal than the current one. Those people clever enough to work out that the PK diet is the one we should be doing and who are disciplined enough to hold it in place will be the survivors of this plague. Natural selection and the survival of the fittest will prevail. Perhaps this provides you with the extra incentive to act now!
Why paleo? No dairy
Many passages and quotations from bygone days extol the virtues of dairy products, especially milk. Exodus 33.3 talks of the ‘land flowing with milk and honey’ as a promised land. Lady Macbeth fears that her husband is too full of the ‘milk of human kindness’, again placing ‘milk’ as a positive notion in our psyche. So, the belief that dairy products are healthy for us is very entrenched in our culture. It is well then to pause and consider this ‘received wisdom’ and the actual facts.
We do not receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves.
Marcel Proust, 10 July 1871 – 18 November 1922, French novelist, critic and essayist.
10However, before we do this, let us not forget Cleopatra, who had other uses for milk. It is often quoted, with much historical evidence, that Cleopatra bathed in sour donkey’s milk to improve the look of her skin. The logic goes that when milk sours, lactose is converted by bacteria into lactic acid and this in turn causes the surface layer of the skin to peel off, leaving new, smoother, blemish-free skin underneath. Indeed, lactic acid is an example of an alpha hydroxy acid and such acids are used in modern-day cosmetics for ‘wrinkle-free skin’, so this story is plausible. However, this is an early example of symptom suppression – I prefer more natural and sustainable methods for obtaining healthy skin – please see our book Ecological Medicine.
There is also a less well recognised purpose for which Cleopatra utilised milk; the great Queen is remembered as what we may call a toxicologist these days – she first started administering her poisons in wine but when that method became too well known and suspected, she turned to milk as her preferred medium of delivery. Cleopatra was very methodical. She conducted many experiments and tested different poisons to see their effects, lethality and dosage that would be needed to cause death, along with the amount of suffering caused by the various toxins. These experiments were carried out on men (her chosen target!) and often Marc Antony was forced to witness them, perhaps as a warning? So, with that in mind, let us return to why it is that dairy products, even when not mixed with Cleopatra’s poisons, are so dangerous to us.
Why dairy products are so dangerous to health
Dairy products from the cow, goat and sheep have created numerous health problems in Westerners because: they are major allergens for many; they cause food intolerance in many others; they contain growth promoters that are a risk for cancer in everybody; and they are also a risk factor for autoimmunity, heart disease and osteoporosis in us all. Read on.
Dairy products are major allergens
Dairy products cause allergy reactions in, I estimate, at least 20% of the UK population. Charles Darwin suffered ill-health for 40 years but was cured when he stopped consuming dairy products. The allergen (milk protein – casein) remains the same throughout life but the target organ changes. Newborn babies may suffer projectile vomiting due to the pyloric stenosis triggered by milk protein. Even if Mum is breastfeeding, this tough protein will 11get into her breastmilk if she is consuming it. Three-month colic is typical of dairy allergy. However, the target organ then changes – next we see toddler diarrhoea. The tot may grow out of this problem but then becomes catarrhal, with snotty nose, snoring, cough and recurrent upper respiratory tract infections, including otitis media, tonsillitis, sinusitis and bronchitis. Asthma may be diagnosed.
Later on in life, dairy allergy manifests with sleep apnoea, migraine, irritable bowel syndrome, depression and arthritis. I get a painful hip if I eat dairy products; as a child I was told I had ‘growing pains’ – what a joke! Indeed, I used to chat away with the late Dr Honor Anthony, Consultant Allergist. She maintained that nearly all cases of arthritis were caused by allergy. At the time I dismissed this notion; I now know she was absolutely spot on!
If arthritis is not from allergy to foods, then it probably results from allergy to microbes spilling over into the bloodstream from the fermenting gut. This is called ‘bacterial translocation’.2, 3
The link between forms of arthritis and microbes is also well documented.4, 5
In the long term, chronic undiagnosed allergy often results in fatigue. I see many patients with chronic fatigue syndrome and myalgic encephalitis (CFS/ME). A particularly common progression is the undiagnosed dairy-allergic child picking up recurrent infections, especially tonsillitis, then getting glandular fever and switching into a post-viral chronic fatigue syndrome. (See our book Diagnosis and Treatment of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and Myalgic Encephalitis – it’s mitochondria not hypochondria).
Dairy products cause lactose intolerance
Lactose intolerance results when one lacks the enzyme to digest milk sugar (lactose). It occurs in 5% of Northern Europeans and 90% of Africans and Asians. If lactose cannot be digested, it gets fermented in the gut by microbes to produce some, or all, of the symptoms of upper fermenting gut, such as bloating, pain, reflux, nausea, indigestion and diarrhoea (again, see our book Ecological Medicine). Many cultures, such as those in the Near and Far East, do not traditionally drink fresh milk or use cream for this reason. They can only eat fermented milks or ghee.§
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Dairy products are growth promoters
Milk has evolved over millions of years as the perfect nutrition for the mammalian baby. Mammalian babies need to grow and become fit and strong very quickly so that they can escape predators. This would be especially true of the ancestors of our modern cows, goats and sheep. Once born there was little their mothers could do to protect them from predators. Within a few hours of birth, they had to keep up with the herd. Milk was and still is full of growth promoters. Those calves, kids and lambs grew very quickly.
Human children fed dairy products also grow quickly. It is entirely natural that they suckle human breast milk but entirely unnatural that they consume the milk of other mammals. When challenged by the question, ‘Are dairy products not natural foods’, longstanding advocate of paleo diets, Dr Lorain Cordain, replied: ‘Have you ever tried milking a wild bison?’
We now have a generation of youngsters who are taller and fatter than ever before, partly because they are consuming dairy products. Carbohydrates in the form of sugar and refined starches further have their effect on height and weight. Being tall and fat are both known risk factors for getting cancer. Indeed, the first positive nutritional step for preventing and treating cancer is to cut out all dairy products, sugars and carbohydrates. The Million Women Study concluded that: ‘Cancer incidence increases with increasing adult height for most cancer sites. The relation between height and total cancer RR [relative risk] is similar in different populations.’7
We all produce about 10,000 DNA mutations every second. Some will be early cancers. The immune system is well able to identify these rogue cells and kill them off before they cause problems, but, if they grow too quickly, driven by dairy products and carbohydrates, they overwhelm the immune system’s ability to cope with them and so tumours develop. As we age the imperative to avoid all dairy products increases.
Dairy products increase the risk of autoimmunity
We are seeing epidemics of autoimmunity, with one in 20 of the population currently affected. Of particular concern is the rise in type 1 diabetes in children. The three known major risk factors for this are vaccination, vitamin D deficiency and consumption of dairy products. The mechanism of this is probably due to circulating antibodies against cow’s milk protein which then cross-react with the self – in the case of type 1 diabetes, with the Islets of Langerhan in the pancreas which are our insulin factories. There are numerous studies linking the consumption of dairy products with type 1 diabetes. One by Gerstein 13(1994), concluded that: ‘Early cow’s milk exposure may be an important determinant of subsequent type 1 diabetes and may increase the risk approximately 1.5 times.’8
A Finnish study of 690 type 1 diabetic children was more direct in its conclusion: ‘This is the first observational study to show that early introduction of dairy products is independently associated with an increased risk of IDDM. Adjustment for mother’s education and age, child’s birth order, or birth weight did not affect the results.’9
Dairy products increase the risk of osteoporosis
When I suggest people stop consuming dairy the immediate riposte is, ‘What about my calcium?’ and ‘Will I not get osteoporosis?’. In fact, calcium is a side issue. There is plenty of calcium (and more important than calcium is magnesium) in PK foods. However, two greater issues are: (1) How well is calcium (and magnesium) absorbed? And (2) Where is it deposited?
Vitamin D is the key. Vitamin D greatly enhances the absorption of calcium (and magnesium) but, as importantly, stimulates its deposition in bone. We should all take at least 5000 iu of vitamin D daily.
Indeed, magnesium is more important than calcium in the prevention and treatment of osteoporosis. The proportion of calcium to magnesium in dairy products is 10:1 but our physiological requirements are 2:1. Since calcium and magnesium compete for absorption, dairy products induce a magnesium deficiency. It may be that this is part of the mechanism by which dairy products increase the risk of osteoporosis.10
Dairy products are a risk factor for heart disease
A good friend and colleague, Dr David Freed, produced a paper called ‘The Cow and the Coronary’. It concluded that the non-fat aspects of milk strongly correlated with deaths from heart disease. Milk factor antibodies bind to platelets, resulting in sticky blood: ‘We suggest that non-fat aspects of milk, particularly the Ca/Mg ratio, lactose and MFGM antigens, have specific coronary atherogenic effects, both biochemical and immunological, and the simultaneous attack from these three directions may explain why this foodstuff has such a strong effect.’1114
Conclusion
Given all the risks above, the conclusion must be not to eat dairy products. However, butter may be okay. If you suffer no symptoms or diseases and are otherwise completely well, then I do permit just this one dairy product. Dairy fat is the safest part of dairy products. Better than butter is ghee as it is pure fat –to make it, butter has been warmed so the dangerous cow’s milk protein has floated to the top and has been scraped off as a white scum leaving clear yellow pure fat behind.
Why paleo? No gluten grains
Cooks and gourmets love gluten because its stickiness allows them to make breads and biscuits, cakes and cookies, pastries, pastas and pies, but this adhesive is also toxic. Gluten is a major allergen and risk factor for autoimmunity. I know of two patients whose autoimmune thyrotoxicosis is clearly triggered by gluten.
Worse, many grains contain toxic lectins. Lectins are ‘plant antibiotics’ – substances evolved to make that plant as toxic as possible to prevent it being eaten to death.
Another consideration is pesticide-related toxicity. Many modern grains are genetically modified, not for reasons of good nutrition but so that they are more tolerant of pesticides. In consequence, these grains carry a high pesticide burden. One of the most toxic is glyphosate which chemically is an organophosphate (OP). OPs are known carcinogens and mutagens (drive cell mutation) and also inhibit our energy-producing mitochondria; this explains the severe fatigue of ‘sheep dip flu’, Gulf War syndrome and aerotoxic syndrome (see our book Diagnosis and Treatment of Chronic Faitgue Syndrome and Myalgic Encephalitis). Glyphosate is particularly toxic to the kidneys.
At a recent conference I attended, the consensus was that gluten grains and corn are unsafe for human consumption and should be reserved for animal feed only. Poor animals. And poor us when we eat those animals.
The starting point to prevent all disease
The PK diet is the starting point to prevent all disease, from cancer and coronaries to chronic fatigue and Covid19. 15
I had to work in the field of ecological medicine for four decades, see over 20,000 patients and write several books with Craig, to convince myself that paleo-ketogenic was the diet we should all be eating. Since I do not ask my patients to do anything that I do not do myself, I started this diet and I have to say that this was with a with a great sense of bereavement. Was I going to miss all those foods I loved and had become used to eating? However, having established myself on this diet I now know that this is what I shall be eating for the rest of my life.
As I get older, and perhaps wiser, I find myself spending more and more time discussing diet. This is the starting point for treating absolutely everything. However, it is also the most difficult thing I ask my patients to do. If I give my patients a list of interventions they need to make, they tend to cherry-pick, choosing the easy things first. This has usually meant that diet is the last thing to be tackled.
Diet is the first thing we could and should be doing to restore health. The upside of this is that diet is something we can all do – the treatment is in your shopping baskets and kitchens. You don’t need any physicians, pills or potions. Dietary changes are empowering – they allow us to take back control of our health. However, dietary changes are also the most difficult for all the reasons that we detail in our earlier book, Prevent and Cure Diabetes: addiction, habit and convenience.¶ The job of this current book is to try to make these dietary changes much easier.
My job is to get patients well as quickly as possible. I used to try to be nice and pussy-foot about, trying dairy-free diets, gluten-free diets, low-carbohydrate diets or whatever. These days I am much nastier as I cruelly say ‘My job is to get you well, not to entertain you’. I now start off with the toughest diet in order to get my patients well as quickly as possible. Once recovered, they can then, as I call it, ‘do a deal with the devil’. Of course, one can get away with some foods on the occasional treat basis so long as one is consciously aware of what one is doing and is determined to get back on the wagon straight after.
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Sometimes, you must be cruel to be kind
Old English Proverb
