I've mentioned a pretty dramatic shift in the way that I eat, and now the time is right to go into all the explaining of that. But first... I thought I'd open with a fun little video that will make my life a little easier.
A lot of the concepts in there aren't new-- I've mentioned them here before, but now we'll get a little (wait for the caveman humor...) meat on the bones of the topic.
The Paleo diet-- I often like to start describing this as what I don't eat and then building it back up from there. SO... my list of Don't Eats:
- Dairy
- Grains
- Legumes
- Processed Foods
It's a short list, right? But that short list includes a lot of the typical American fare, so I'll break it out a little more. I don't eat bread, pasta, milk, yogurt, cereals, tofu, peanuts and beans. I don't eat things that start or end life in a box.
If you've known me over the past 20-something years you will recognize how very fundamental that shift is for me. When I took this challenge on in November, I did so knowing that my eating stood to be a lot healthier. In August I made the first fundamental shift in that-- I gave up being a vegetarian-- something I had been for most of my adult life. In November I took up the remainder of that shift-- away from all the grains and dairy I had lived on for most of my life. I was one of those vegetarians that described myself as a "dairy-tarian" or a "grain-atarian." I wasn't too big on green things much less things with mothers and faces. So this was a very big shift for me-- I was literally giving up everything I had spent 35 years eating.
Now what is in the Paleo diet.
- Naturally produced meat (grass fed cows, pastured chickens, wild-caught fish)
- Vegetables
- Fruit
- Nuts
- Fat (yep... it's not a bad word when its the right kind of fat.)
I've talked evolution before, and the video certainly spoke to it, but these are the kinds of things our bodies evolved to eat-- provided we, to put it in the words of Joel Salatin, "respect and honor the pigness of the pig" or any other living thing we take into our bodies. The meat I buy at the local supermarket bears no resemblance to the meat we all evolved to eat and as a result the nutritional content of that meat is radically different. When you hear the "dangers of eating red meat" it is most often tied to the effects of the production of our meat. By respecting and honoring the cowness of the cow and eating grassfed beef, those dangers seem to disappear. The same holds true for chicken and fish. If the chicken can live its life like it evolved to live it, it will grow up healthy and therefore make the people who evolved to eat it healthy. We'll talk more on this topic later-- remember, rabbit hole. We'll also talk more about fat, but in the meantime, let's talk about how this shift went and why I went this way.
For starters, I don't do anything without reading and learning alot. Before I took on the idea of the paleo shift, I had a lot of questions that needed answering. My biggest concern, as a woman in her 30s, was around removing dairy and whether I would be affecting my calcium stores at a time when I needed it most. And I was also concerned that there may be other vitamins I was going to be losing as well-- what would this mean to my overall well being? So I started to read.
If you look at the statistics for Osteoporosis, you'll see something kind of interesting. North America and Europe have the highest rates of osteoporosis in the world, with North America running right in there. When you look at consumption of dairy on a global scale you notice something similar-- Europe and North America account for the highest amounts of dairy consumption. Doesn't it seem strange that the people eating the most dairy are the ones that have the worst osteoporosis?!
As it turns out the typical western diet is highly acidic with all those grains going on. As a result, during digestion, the kidneys are recruited to help balance the acid/alkaline levels (remember that homeostasis thing I talked about). Calcium salt in the body is one of the best alkaline sources there are, so as the body acidifies, that calcium is recruited to restore the balance. Which basically means that even though we are taking in copious amounts of calcium, it's being used for other things than making bones stronger. Sure calcium does that but only when it's not being used first. Milk itself is ever-so-slightly acidic. If you think of 7.0 as acid/alkaline neutral and anything below 7 is acidic and above 7 is alkaline, milk is a 6.7, which is likely helped by the calcium content of it. But when the rest of the diet is highly acidic that calcium is always being used. The chief sources of alkaline are... vegetables! So the more vegetables you eat, the more alkaline your blood. The more alkaline your blood, the more your body can store additional alkaline agents like calcium and therefore the stronger your bones will get. But the typical western diet is so highly acidic that it actually leaches the calcium from your bones themselves and makes westerners among the most prone to osteoporosis.
And what about fiber? The supermarket shelves are loaded with grain-based products promoting themselves as "high fiber" like Fiber One cereal, breads, etc. And with the recent push for whole grains, everyone is eating whole wheat everything... whole wheat pasta to whole wheat pizza dough-- it is everywhere. So it turns out there are 2 kinds of fiber-- soluble and insoluble. Soluble fibers can break down, mix with water and help lower that bad LDL cholesterol that I told you a few days ago builds up in your arteries in case you spring a leak and keep your heart warm through the cold months of fall, winter and spring. Insoluble fibers, on the other hand, cannot be broken down, and provide bulk, but pass through the digestive system largely unprocessed. These are the things you eat to feel full, but because your body cannot break them down, they cannot pull nutrients out of them. Soluble fibers are found in things like vegetables, citrus fruits, oat and rye, strawberries, beans and peas, and apple pulp. Insoluble fiber is found in things like whole-wheat breads, wheat cereals, wheat bran, cabbage, beets, carrots, brussels sprouts, turnips, cauliflower, and apple skin. So while you are correct in the observation that both grains and vegetables cross those lines, adding in the acidification aspect makes things a little more clear. I can eat insoluble vegetables without upping my blood acidity-- I can get the calories and the bulk without the negative consequence. But I can't eat the grains and beans that are soluble without making my blood more acid. As a result, The veggies and fruits come out on top for fiber and the grains aren't giving me a net positive (yes, oats may help with the LDL cholesterol, but they offset the alkalinity).
I went into my Paleo shift in early November after requesting my doctor do a full blood panel on me. We recorded my cholesterol levels, my calcium levels, my triglycerides... all of that. My goal was a month or two of paleo, because it seemed awfully restrictive at first glance, and then we'd look at my blood results again and see how things shook out. My first week, I will confess, was awful. My first 3 days I felt openly hostile and the following few days I felt insatiable-- I wanted to eat everything around. Eventually things began to quiet and I got used to how to eat-- including how to eat without cooking all the time. It was definitely a lifestyle change for me-- I needed to figure out paleo convenience, which becomes a little more challenging. I'll get into more of that later, but eventually something unsual happened. I felt awesome. I felt better than I had ever felt before. And I stopped resisting the diet and feeling like I was being deprived and no longer craved grains and dairy. And then came Thanksgiving.
It's hard to hold Paleo over Thanksgiving, and truth be told, I gave myself the day as a cheat day with no cause for concern. The next 3 days, however, I felt awful-- I felt weak and heavy and bloated and just kinda bummed out. I don't think I ever appreciated the food-mood connection until post Thanksgiving. And since then I have not looked back. As for the blood work, I decided to wait until the one year mark to see how it all shakes out. In general, I live by the 80-20 rule and every now and again don't say no to a big piece of chocolate cake, but I gotta say, I've given myself a few outs that just lacked appeal when it all came down to it. I remember one night in particular when I was too tired to make dinner and gave myself permission to have some pizza. I really thought this would excite me, but it just didn't. And in the end, I went home and quickly cooked up a salmon filet and made a salad and was quite happy and content with myself. It was a day I never expected to see.
I am entering into my 7th month of this diet now, and I have to tell you, I will be eating this way for the rest of my life-- no question about it. I feel energized all the time. And dare I say it, I feel happier. I've gone from vegetarian to cave-dweller-- my diet could not be more night and day from where it was a year ago. It has given me lots of interesting thoughts on the topic of vegetarianism that I will share with you another day. I believe my diet has largely accounted for the dramatic shift in body composition I blogged about recently. I look and feel a lot better and for the first time in my life, I am developing muscles, which is not easy for a relative ectomorph. In a couple more months we will see what the blood work shows once and for all, but back to the very question that opened this chapter 2 blog... Am I Healthy?? The answer comes back a lot more firmly in the yes category with this new shift in eating.
Read more!
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Sleeping, Hormones and More of that Evolution Thingy
So my last entry introduced some of my thoughts on evolutionary eating. I have a lot more on that topic and promise to introduce more details, but I wanted to also dive in to the second prong of that change and it was around sleep.
When I was a kid, I had a nice early bedtime that I hated. In general, we'd go to bed around 8pm during the school year, and many nights I'd turn on my radio and hope for the luck of tuning in some radio station from Quebec so I could listen to French talk radio. If I couldn't tune that in, my fall back was always the Doctor Demento show that played every night on a local station outside Boston. I'd lie in the dark of my room and fall asleep to the radio I kept quiet enough that my parents never knew I was staying up late-- but it never worked, I'd always fall asleep anyway.
As an adult, sleep started to transition almost to a luxury-- I'd sleep when I could (and relish in it), but it could be traded for extra hours to get work done, hang out with friends, clean the house, or just plain stress out about daytime hours. Right around the point where I was getting ready to run the Boston Marathon I was at one of my most sleep deprived states in my 35 years. Work was crazy and most weekday nights my team was working until 1am and back at our desks at 7am. In the downtime, I'd try to untangle my brain but more and more often I had this sense of panic that bordered on paranoia. The sleep exhaustion was taking a toll on me I didn't know how to explain. Now I do.
Human bodies exist in a state of balance or an equilibrium we call "homeostasis." Our bodies, whether we are aware of it or not, are constantly playing this regulating game to keep us in this state of equilibrium. That game involves lots of hormones and biochemicals inside the body that respond to changes in environment. Probably the most familiar pair of these regulators are insulin and glucagon that regulate blood glucose. When blood has too much glucose floating around the hormone insulin springs into action and starts storing the excess glucose. When blood has too little glucose, the glucagon visits those same storage sites and pulls some glucose back out and puts it back into the blood. So these two hormones work in conjunction with each other to keep blood sugar in homeostasis. Follow? Cool.
Turns out there are a bunch of these hormone (or biochemical) pairs, that regulate a bunch of functions in similar ways. The ones that I started to really poke at were serotonin and melatonin. The reason I started really coming back to this one was an observation I had made-- the more tired I was, the more depressed and paranoid, right? Already told you that... not news. But the observation was that if these two hormones were in a homeostatic pair, maybe there was something to that biochemically-- I mean, the defacto treatment for depression and paranoia these days are called "selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)" that include brands like Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft. So if the drug companies were treating depression and paranoia by futzing with the balancing pair to the sleep hormone melatonin (and the natural supplement all the tired folks are buying at the local drugstore), maybe this really was something real. I dug deeper (remember we are in a rabbit hole).
What the heck is serotonin anyway, and why are people inhibiting its reuptake. Um, and what about the initial uptake-- why are we doing it a second time?! My head was swimming, so let's start from the top.
Serotonin comes from the gastrointestinal tract and its main role is to control things like appetite, mood and anger. But serotonin also plays a role in managing memory, aggression, sexual behavior, cardiovascular activity, respiratory activity, motor output, sensory and neuroendocrine function and perception.
Melatonin, on the other hand, is synthesized in the pineal gland of the brain and its job is to regulate the body's circadian rhythm, as well as do a few other fancy things like protect mitochondrial DNA. The protection mechanism of melatonin is often referred to as a "powerful antioxidant" when you try to buy it at the drugstore. (Antioxidants are what protect us against those "free radicals" that apparently come into our bodies and cause mutations. So protecting cellular DNA is good stuff.)
So now you are wondering the obvious-- what makes these two things related? What homeostatic balancing act goes on between these two things-- they seem so totally different from each other. The link is that serotonin eventually gets converted into melatonin. Both serotonin and melatonin (along with all the other hormones in the body) work with their respective "receptors." The receptor binds to the hormone and allows it to be expressed. In the example I talked about SSRIs, drugs like Paxil are introduced to prevent the serotonin from being bound to their receptors and therefore expressed. In essence, this leaves someone taking an SSRI awash in excess serotonin that is never able to be expressed.
There are a few reactions your body has to a high serotonin level-- most notably is an increase in cortisol and adrenaline. These two hormones are the basis of the "fight or flight" instinct. The more serotonin floats around, the higher your fight or flight chemicals. The way to prevent this reaction is to allow for the expression of serotonin that eventually leads to conversion to melatonin and allows for the expression of that circadian rhythm and sleep. An interesting side note here-- unmedicated depressed people often talk about wanting to sleep-- this is a side-effect of this very process-- the serotonin present in that mood-state is looking for conversion to melatonin via its receptors. In turn this conversion to melatonin and therefore natural sleep lessens the serotonin and makes the person, literally, happier.
So here I am prepping for the Boston Marathon. I am exhausted, literally. Which leaves me with a lot more serotonin than my body can convert. See, it takes about 2 hours of darkness before the body can start to produce melatonin, so when I was getting around 4-5 hours of sleep, I was really only getting some 2-3 hours of serotonin to melatonin conversion. By hanging out at my desk at the soft glow of my laptop, I was preventing that process from starting. Which in turn was allowing my serotonin to elevate over time, which was kicking on my cortisol and adrenaline responses and I was getting agitated and paranoid and depressed. Throw in the long runs on the weekend which naturally produce a stress-response of cortisol and adrenaline and things were looking kind of messy.
I needed to sleep.
Fast forward to now. I've been playing around lately with timing sleep. If you think about it, it really wasn't until recently that society as a whole stopped living life by the rise and fall of the sun. In essence, even if we wanted to, we couldn't affect that serotonin-melatonin game all that much-- it got dark at night whether we chose to give into it or not. We could sit by a candle or a camp fire, but we weren't able to bring day into night like we can today. At night, when the sun went down, that conversion just sort of happened and like it or not we all got sleepy and crashed and the next morning when the sun came up our serotonin was low, our cortisol was low, our adrenaline was low and we were ready for a new day.
Now I am totally simplifying all of this. I am calling this an introduction, because this stuff actually ties into the whole insulin-glucagon homeostasis game too, but we'll get there over time, I promise. The point of this post is to introduce the whole idea that evolutionarily we have a nightly reset switch-- when it gets dark, your body naturally wants to start that conversion process. It's why 8 year old me lying in the dark listening to Doctor Demento hoping my parents didn't realize I was still awake never stayed awake very long-- the darkness kicked all this stuff off and eventually I went to sleep. When I grew up, since I didn't just hang out all sneakily in the dark anymore and could keep the lights on, the sleep never came and the paranoia, anger, sadness, stress, what-have-you mounted. By re-establishing that lights-out when it got dark, I got, biochemically, happier and less stressed. Sure I was feeling more rested, but it wasn't about feeling rested, it was about that reset switch that my body had evolved to use finally being thrown. And yes, I still sneak my radio (or my ipod) into bed with me and listen a little while the whole darkness thing kicks off. One day maybe Doctor Demento will start streaming audio or podcasting or something so I can listen again and drift off to sleep singing songs about frontal lobotomies.
Read more!
When I was a kid, I had a nice early bedtime that I hated. In general, we'd go to bed around 8pm during the school year, and many nights I'd turn on my radio and hope for the luck of tuning in some radio station from Quebec so I could listen to French talk radio. If I couldn't tune that in, my fall back was always the Doctor Demento show that played every night on a local station outside Boston. I'd lie in the dark of my room and fall asleep to the radio I kept quiet enough that my parents never knew I was staying up late-- but it never worked, I'd always fall asleep anyway.
As an adult, sleep started to transition almost to a luxury-- I'd sleep when I could (and relish in it), but it could be traded for extra hours to get work done, hang out with friends, clean the house, or just plain stress out about daytime hours. Right around the point where I was getting ready to run the Boston Marathon I was at one of my most sleep deprived states in my 35 years. Work was crazy and most weekday nights my team was working until 1am and back at our desks at 7am. In the downtime, I'd try to untangle my brain but more and more often I had this sense of panic that bordered on paranoia. The sleep exhaustion was taking a toll on me I didn't know how to explain. Now I do.
Human bodies exist in a state of balance or an equilibrium we call "homeostasis." Our bodies, whether we are aware of it or not, are constantly playing this regulating game to keep us in this state of equilibrium. That game involves lots of hormones and biochemicals inside the body that respond to changes in environment. Probably the most familiar pair of these regulators are insulin and glucagon that regulate blood glucose. When blood has too much glucose floating around the hormone insulin springs into action and starts storing the excess glucose. When blood has too little glucose, the glucagon visits those same storage sites and pulls some glucose back out and puts it back into the blood. So these two hormones work in conjunction with each other to keep blood sugar in homeostasis. Follow? Cool.
Turns out there are a bunch of these hormone (or biochemical) pairs, that regulate a bunch of functions in similar ways. The ones that I started to really poke at were serotonin and melatonin. The reason I started really coming back to this one was an observation I had made-- the more tired I was, the more depressed and paranoid, right? Already told you that... not news. But the observation was that if these two hormones were in a homeostatic pair, maybe there was something to that biochemically-- I mean, the defacto treatment for depression and paranoia these days are called "selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs)" that include brands like Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft. So if the drug companies were treating depression and paranoia by futzing with the balancing pair to the sleep hormone melatonin (and the natural supplement all the tired folks are buying at the local drugstore), maybe this really was something real. I dug deeper (remember we are in a rabbit hole).
What the heck is serotonin anyway, and why are people inhibiting its reuptake. Um, and what about the initial uptake-- why are we doing it a second time?! My head was swimming, so let's start from the top.
Serotonin comes from the gastrointestinal tract and its main role is to control things like appetite, mood and anger. But serotonin also plays a role in managing memory, aggression, sexual behavior, cardiovascular activity, respiratory activity, motor output, sensory and neuroendocrine function and perception.
Melatonin, on the other hand, is synthesized in the pineal gland of the brain and its job is to regulate the body's circadian rhythm, as well as do a few other fancy things like protect mitochondrial DNA. The protection mechanism of melatonin is often referred to as a "powerful antioxidant" when you try to buy it at the drugstore. (Antioxidants are what protect us against those "free radicals" that apparently come into our bodies and cause mutations. So protecting cellular DNA is good stuff.)
So now you are wondering the obvious-- what makes these two things related? What homeostatic balancing act goes on between these two things-- they seem so totally different from each other. The link is that serotonin eventually gets converted into melatonin. Both serotonin and melatonin (along with all the other hormones in the body) work with their respective "receptors." The receptor binds to the hormone and allows it to be expressed. In the example I talked about SSRIs, drugs like Paxil are introduced to prevent the serotonin from being bound to their receptors and therefore expressed. In essence, this leaves someone taking an SSRI awash in excess serotonin that is never able to be expressed.
There are a few reactions your body has to a high serotonin level-- most notably is an increase in cortisol and adrenaline. These two hormones are the basis of the "fight or flight" instinct. The more serotonin floats around, the higher your fight or flight chemicals. The way to prevent this reaction is to allow for the expression of serotonin that eventually leads to conversion to melatonin and allows for the expression of that circadian rhythm and sleep. An interesting side note here-- unmedicated depressed people often talk about wanting to sleep-- this is a side-effect of this very process-- the serotonin present in that mood-state is looking for conversion to melatonin via its receptors. In turn this conversion to melatonin and therefore natural sleep lessens the serotonin and makes the person, literally, happier.
So here I am prepping for the Boston Marathon. I am exhausted, literally. Which leaves me with a lot more serotonin than my body can convert. See, it takes about 2 hours of darkness before the body can start to produce melatonin, so when I was getting around 4-5 hours of sleep, I was really only getting some 2-3 hours of serotonin to melatonin conversion. By hanging out at my desk at the soft glow of my laptop, I was preventing that process from starting. Which in turn was allowing my serotonin to elevate over time, which was kicking on my cortisol and adrenaline responses and I was getting agitated and paranoid and depressed. Throw in the long runs on the weekend which naturally produce a stress-response of cortisol and adrenaline and things were looking kind of messy.
I needed to sleep.
Fast forward to now. I've been playing around lately with timing sleep. If you think about it, it really wasn't until recently that society as a whole stopped living life by the rise and fall of the sun. In essence, even if we wanted to, we couldn't affect that serotonin-melatonin game all that much-- it got dark at night whether we chose to give into it or not. We could sit by a candle or a camp fire, but we weren't able to bring day into night like we can today. At night, when the sun went down, that conversion just sort of happened and like it or not we all got sleepy and crashed and the next morning when the sun came up our serotonin was low, our cortisol was low, our adrenaline was low and we were ready for a new day.
Now I am totally simplifying all of this. I am calling this an introduction, because this stuff actually ties into the whole insulin-glucagon homeostasis game too, but we'll get there over time, I promise. The point of this post is to introduce the whole idea that evolutionarily we have a nightly reset switch-- when it gets dark, your body naturally wants to start that conversion process. It's why 8 year old me lying in the dark listening to Doctor Demento hoping my parents didn't realize I was still awake never stayed awake very long-- the darkness kicked all this stuff off and eventually I went to sleep. When I grew up, since I didn't just hang out all sneakily in the dark anymore and could keep the lights on, the sleep never came and the paranoia, anger, sadness, stress, what-have-you mounted. By re-establishing that lights-out when it got dark, I got, biochemically, happier and less stressed. Sure I was feeling more rested, but it wasn't about feeling rested, it was about that reset switch that my body had evolved to use finally being thrown. And yes, I still sneak my radio (or my ipod) into bed with me and listen a little while the whole darkness thing kicks off. One day maybe Doctor Demento will start streaming audio or podcasting or something so I can listen again and drift off to sleep singing songs about frontal lobotomies.
Read more!
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