It was those malfunctioning genes of mine, again. Shortly after moving to Hawaii, I developed another musculoskeletal problem. But this one was different from all the others. This time no doctor, not even five different specialists, could tell me what it was. And it didn’t go away. A year after I developed the first unusual stinging pain around my right knee, I could no longer walk more than a few feet without getting feverish. It was unlike anything I’d ever heard of. I’d had exploratory surgery, injections, physical therapy, and I’d even seen a Hawaiian kahuna. But everything I tried seemed to make the problem worse. Just as I was giving up hope, my husband, Luke, came up with an idea: try studying nutrition. As an excellent chef and an aficionado of all things
relating to cuisine, he’d been impressed by the variety and flavors he encountered at the local Filipino buffets. Like many professional chefs I’ve spoken with since, he suspected there might be other opinions out there on what healthy food might actually be. Having fought his own battles against malnutrition while growing up on the wrong side of the tracks in a small town, he recognized that there were nutritional haves and have-nots, just as with everything else. And he suspected that my high-sugar, convenience-food diet put me in the have-not category and might even be impairing my ability to heal.
Sure, I thought, everyone has an opinion. I—on the other hand—
went to medical school. Hel-l-l-lo-o-o … I took a course on nu-tri-tion. I learned bi-o-chem-is-try. I already knew to eat low-fat, low-cholesterol and count my calories. What more did I need to know? The next day, Luke brought home a book. Had I not been literally immobilized, I may never have bothered opening Andrew Weil’s book Spontaneous Healing and started reading.
Medical school teaches us to believe that we’re living longer now, and so today’s diet must beat the diets of the past, hands down. This argument had me so convinced that I never considered questioning the dietary dogma I’d absorbed throughout my schooling. But we need to take into account the fact that today’s eighty-year-olds grew up on an entirely different, more natural diet. They were also the first generation to benefit from antibiotics, and many have been kept alive thanks only to technology. Today’s generation has yet to prove its longevity, but given that many forty-year-olds already have joint and cardiovascular problems that their parents didn’t get until much later in life (as I found in my practice), I don’t think we can assume they have the same life expectancy. And the millennium generation’s lifespan may be ten to twenty years shorter.11 I was going to get my first inkling of this reality very soon.
Once I cracked the book open, it didn’t take much reading to bump into something I’d never heard of before: omega-3 fatty acids. According to Weil, these are fats we need to eat, just like vitamins. These days, our diets are so deficient that we need to supplement. This blew my mind.
First of all, I’d thought fats were bad. Secondly, we were supposed to be eating better today than at any point in human history. Either he was off base, or my medical education had failed to provide some basic information. Like a kid who gets into the bathtub kicking and screaming and then doesn’t want to get out, I soon couldn’t get enough of these
“alternative” books. They gave me valuable new information—and hope that I might walk normally again.
In another publication, I came across an intriguing article entitled
“Guts and Grease: The Diet of Native Americans,” which suggested that Native Americans were healthier than their European counterparts because they ate the entire animal. Not just muscle, but all the “guts and grease.”
According to John (Fire) Lame Deer, the eating of guts had evolved into a contest. [He said] “In the old days we used to eat the guts of the buffalo, making a contest of it, two fellows getting hold of a long piece of intestines from opposite ends, starting chewing toward the middle, seeing who can get there first; that’s eating. Those buffalo guts, full of half-fermented, half-digested grass and herbs, you didn’t need any pills and vitamins when you swallowed those.”12
I liked the voice of authority this Native American assumed, as if he were drawing from a secret well of knowledge. I also liked that the article’s authors offered healthy people instead of statistics of lab simulations as evidence. At the time, the approach struck me as novel—
focusing on health rather than disease. Early European explorers Cabeza de Vaca, Francisco Vaquez de Coronado, and Lewis and Clark described Native Americans as superhuman warriors, able to run down buffalo on foot and, in battle, continue fighting after being shot through with arrows. Photographs taken two hundred years later, in the 1800s, capture the Native American’s imposing visage and broad, balanced bone structure. Presenting a people’s stamina and strength as evidence of a healthy diet seemed reasonable, and it rang true with my own clinical experience in Hawaii: the healthiest family members are, in many cases, the oldest, raised on foods vastly different from those being fed to their great-grandchildren. I began to doubt my presumption that today’s
definition of a healthy diet was nutritionally superior to diets of years past.
Still, the dietary program of Native Americans seemed bizarre.
Reading the passage about two grown men chewing their way through an animal’s unwashed, fat-encased intestine forever changed the way I remember the spaghetti scene from Lady and the Tramp. It also brought up some serious questions. For one thing, wouldn’t eating buffalo poo make the men ill? And isn’t animal fat supposed to be unhealthy? The first issue—eating unwashed intestine—was too much for me to tackle (though later I would). So I sank my teeth into the matter of the health effects of animal fat.
Two things I learned about nutrition in medical school were that saturated fat raises cholesterol levels, and that cholesterol is a known killer. Who was right, the American Medical Association—whose guidelines are used to teach medical students—or John (Fire) Lame Deer?
This was how I began to close the knowledge gap that years ago had derailed me from pursuing further studies of the fundamentals of disease. To determine the best dietary stance, I would look at all the necessary basic science data (on free radicals, fatty acid oxidation, eicosanoid signaling, gene regulation, and the famous Framingham studies), which, fortunately, I had the training to decipher. It took six months of research to get to the bottom of this one nutritional question, but I ultimately came to understand that the nutrition science I’d learned in medical school was full of contradictions and rested on assumptions proved false by researchers in other, related scientific fields. The available evidence failed to support the AMA’s position and overwhelmingly sided with that of John (Fire) Lame Deer.
HYGIEIA: GODDESS OF NUTRITION IN THE HIPPOCRATIC OATH
Hygieia’s Bowl. In Greek mythologic emblems, Hygieia is depicted holding a bowl, from which she feeds the serpent, a symbol of medical learning. In ancient Greece the philosophy of wellness was balanced by two complementary ideas. The female, Hygieia, the goddess of health, personified the first. Hygieia was all about building healthy bodies with sound nutrition from the start—
prenatally and throughout the formative years of childhood—and maintaining health for the rest of a person’s life. In other words, she embodied the most effective form of preventive medicine there is.
When that first line of defense failed, and people succumbed to infections or the inevitable accident, Aesculapius, the god of medicine, acted as a kind of Johnny-on-the-spot. He provided knowledge of healing surgical procedures and therapeutic potions.
The Hippocratic oath I took on graduation day invokes the wisdom of Aesculapius, Hygieia, and Panacea, the god of potions or cure-alls. But like hundreds of other fresh-faced M.D.s standing beside me in the lecture hall, hands raised, I had no idea who Hygieia was or what she stood for.
Over the last 3,000 years of civilization, the male aspect of medical science has taken over. Hygieia, which was once a highly scientific and advanced compendium of nutritional information, has been reduced to simplistic notions of cleanliness, like washing your hands and brushing your teeth. It’s time to bring Hygieia back.
This was a big deal. Contrary to the opinion of medical leaders today, saturated fat and cholesterol appeared to be beneficial nutrients.
(Chapter 8 explains how heart disease really develops.) Fifty years of removing foods containing these nutrients from our diets—foods like eggs, fresh cream, and liver—to replace them with low-fat or outright
artificial chemicals—like trans-fat-rich margarine (trans-fat is an unnatural fat known to cause health problems)—has starved our genes of the chemical information on which they depend. Simply cutting eggs and sausage (originally made with lactic acid starter culture instead of nitrates, and containing chunks of white cartilage) from our breakfasts to replace them with cold cereals would mean that generations of children have been fed fewer fats, B vitamins, and collagenous proteins than required for optimal growth.
Here’s why: the yolk of an egg is full of brain-building fats, including lecithin, phospholipids, and (only if from free-range chickens) essential fatty acids and vitamins A and D. Meanwhile, low-fat diets have been shown to reduce intelligence in animals.13
B vitamins play key roles in the development of every organ system, and women with vitamin B deficiencies give birth to children prone to developing weak bones, diabetes, and more.14, 15 Chunks of cartilage supply us with collagen and glycosaminoglycans, factors that help facilitate the growth of robust connective tissues, which would help to prevent later-life tendon and ligament problems—including shin splints!16
By righting the wrong assumptions that mushroomed from this one piece of nutritional misinformation, I had already gained a greater understanding of the root causes of disease than I’d thought possible. A single item of medical misinformation—that cholesterol-rich foods are dangerous—had drastically changed our eating habits and with that our access to nutrients. The effect on my personal physiology was to weaken my connective tissues, an epigenetic response that had already managed to change the course of my life in ways that I can’t begin to calculate.
After reading every old-fashioned cookbook I could get my hands on, and enough biochemistry to understand the essential character of traditional cuisine, I changed everything about the way I eat. For me, eating in closer accordance with historical human nutrition corrected some of my damaged epigenetic programming. I got fewer colds, less heartburn, improved my moods, lost my belly fat, had fewer headaches, and increased my mental energy. And eventually my swollen knee got
better.