This interview with renowned Paleolithic researcher Loren Cordain, PhD was posted on a blog called Me and My Diabetes.
LOREN CORDAIN
Grains are the seeds of a plant. They’re its reproductive material, and plants don’t make their reproductive material to give away for free to other animals. If they did they’d become extinct, and so the evolutionary strategy that many plants, particularly cereal grains have taken to prevent predation is to evolve toxic compounds so that the predator of the seeds can’t eat them, so that they can put their seeds in the soil where they’re meant to be to grow a new plant and not in the gut of an animal to feed it. We hear that whole grains are especially valuable because of their many vitamins and special nutrients.
Q: Why don’t you like the parts of the grain that make it a “whole grain?”
LOREN CORDAIN
If we look at the outside part of the seed, that’s the part that comes in contact with the environment and that’s the one that has the concentrated sources of anti-nutrients, so all these nasty things that we’re finding in grains that cause problems are concentrated in the outside portion of it. So that’s where the fiber is, is in the bran portion, and that’s where many of the anti-nutrients are. I had a friend whose knees ached when she ate whole grains, but they felt fine when she ate white French bread.
Q: Now, I’m not advocating white bread as a health treat, but why might it cause less problem for her achey knees than a whole grain bread?
LOREN CORDAIN
Whole grains are concentrated sources of anti-nutrients, more so than white bread. White bread certainly isn’t good because of high glycemic load. It also contains gliadin which is one of the elements that open up the gut, but lectins do too, and lectins are more concentrated in the outside layer of wheat berries. People think grains are a good source of fiber and actually they’re not. Fruits and vegetables contain orders of magnitude, at least vegetables do, contain an order of magnitude greater amount of fiber per calorie than grains. There’s no human requirement for grains. That’s the problem with the USDA recommendations. They think we’re hardwired as a species to eat grains. You can get by just fine and meet every single nutrient requirement that humans have without eating grains. And grains are absolutely poor sources of vitamins and minerals compared to fruits and vegetables and meat and fish.
Q: When you state the obvious, anyone can do that. Get a computerized dietary analysis program and put in the eight whole grains and then put in the 20 most commonly consumed fruits and the 20 most commonly consumed vegetables and look at the nutrient density. The nutrient density is much greater in fruits and vegetables than it is in grains. So why are we putting grains at the base of our food pyramid and telling people that they have to eat them? There’s absolutely no nutrient in grains that we can’t get elsewhere. Many nutritionists argue that we need to eat grains for the fiber, in order to avoid constipation. Do you agree?
LOREN CORDAIN
You do need bulk and what we call prebiotics, which is fiber, but there are basically 2 types of fiber, soluble and non-soluble. And grains, except for oats, contain mainly non-soluble fiber. Fruits and vegetables contain soluble fiber which tends to be therapeutic because it slightly lowers cholesterol and benefits some other blood parameters. But even more, it provides soluble fiber which is an environment for healthy bacteria to live in our gut, and so what we’re finding now is that probiotics along with prebiotics, help us to have a healthy flora of bacteria in our gut, and when we have a healthy flora of bacteria in our gut, it tends to prevent leaky gut, and it tends to prevent chronic low level inflammation that occurs when our gut is colonized with gram negative bacteria more than gram positive bacteria. In contrast, if you eat an average low reside western diet, high glycemic load diet, it tends to promote flora that is not therapeutic.
Q: Once somebody has full fledged diabetes or they’re on the way to that, while they could have eaten a paleolithic diet before that might have helped prevent their diabetes, they may not be able to have as many carbohydrates as a paleo-diet tends to have. Are you comfortable when people tend to modify a paleo diet so they eat more fats and they eat fewer fruits and starchy vegetables?
LOREN CORDAIN
There are two types of diabetes. The most common type in the US is Type 2 diabetes, and that’s the type that is essentially a lifestyle issue. People with obesity, people that are insulin resistant, develop Type 2 diabetes, and that can be cured. It’s not an incurable disease, and so by losing weight and changing diet and reducing carbohydrate in their diet, these people can end up becoming non diabetic, and coming into complete remission with their disease. The other type of diabetes is Type 1 diabetes which is an autoimmune disease in which the immune system attacks the beta cells that produce insulin in the pancreas and destroys those beta cells. The thinking has always been there’s no such thing as remission from Type 1 diabetes because once the Beta Cells in the pancreas are destroyed, then you have to inject insulin for the rest of your life. What we have found now, surprisingly in the last three or four years, we have had two or three anecdotal cases of people with physician diagnosed Type 1 diabetes, who were insulin brittle, so they were injecting themselves with insulin, we have at least three cases that I’m aware of where they have actually come into complete remission, and myself, I was the biggest skeptic of all. I said you can’t come out of the disease, but we heard these people did, and so they stopped injecting insulin, and there are certain blood parameters you can measure to determine whether or not someone still has the disease, and so I’m working on this with a colleague here in our department, and another immunologist outside the U-S, and we think what’s going on is that the immune system all but destroys most of the beta cells in the pancreas, but there are what are called stem cells, and a few stem cells are left that can become beta cells, and if you can stop the immune assault on the beta cells, on the body’s own tissues, if you can completely stop it, then those stem cells might be able to regenerate beta cells, sufficiently to restore pancreatic function.
Q: There is a woman who is advertising on the web right now about her twin boys, who she put on a what I believe she describes as a plant-based diet, where they were both diagnosed as Type 1 diabetics, and now they don’t take any medications.
LOREN CORDAIN
That doesn’t make a lot of sense to me because the only way you can eat a plant-based diet is by eating grains and legumes, and those are two factors that can irritate the gut. Hundreds of scientific papers show that legumes and grains increase intestinal permeability, and they do it through the mechanisms we talked about earlier, through lectins and saponins, and what are called thaumatin-like proteins, so I would say that vegetarian or vegan diets would be one of the worst ways a person with autoimmune disease could go. I recommend not doing that.
Q: You have mentioned several blood-carried protein markers that indicate when someone is not digesting foods completely, making the proteins in those foods “leak” into the bloodstream, where they can trigger inflammation. Those could be a powerful way to figure out whether someone is eating foods that lead their own gut to be leaky. That could be helpful for people with arthritis, MS, autism . . . a huge list of ailments. It would be fun, wouldn’t it, to get all these markers together and have experts look at them and comment on the same thing.
LOREN CORDAIN
There’s a biological template that allows scientists to look into the future, and it’s called the evolutionary template, and if you don’t use it, it’s like playing soccer, running uphill on a soccer field, against a team that’s running downhill. And any nutritionist or biologist or physician that doesn’t use the evolutionary template to help guide them to the correct decision is inevitably going to to end up with the wrong answer. And that’s part of the problem with the governmental recommendations right now by the USDA is that we’re not putting the evolutionary template over the problem of diet and health.I’m kind of in an odd role here in what I do research wise. I’ve pushed pieces around on a chess board. We’re kind of a think tank here and me and my graduate students I work with around the world, we’re not bench scientists per se. We don’t do the cooking, we invent the recipes. Or rather, we suggest the recipes, and some scientists are interested in our ideas and testing them, but many scientists many bench scientists are very close to a very narrow idea and that’s what they pursue. They don’t look at the big picture, and I have the luxury of looking at the big picture.
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