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The other problem with this diet is that we don't know if it was really healthy. It is unclear what the life expectancy was in the distant past and what killed the people when they died. While I guess cancer and heart disease was not a problem back then, its largely because there were many other things that ended life back then like predation, illness, injury, etc. Without data on health or cause of death, it is difficult to measure the effectiveness of any diet program.

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While we don't know what they ate, I suspect that it was much harder for them to eat poorly than it is for us today. No corn syrup, "enriched" white flours, sugars, corn fed (ie fatty) hormone injected beef, etc. Every meal involved a workout (you had to find it, pick it or chase it to eat it). Couches, TVs, computers, the internet or desk jobs had not yet been invented. Of course, neither had bicycles or good hygiene, so the distant past was no picnic.

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I have a wild idea, rather than guessing what people ate in the distant past, why don't you look and emulate the eating and exercise habits of healthy people today? Those people are easy to identify, they just flew past you on the road. Watch them and see how many sticks of butter, or 16 oz steaks they eat in a day.

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So, before you cram that Krispy Kreme into your pie-hole, ask yourself, "What would Lance do?"

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Here’s Johnny
Johnny Weir is the best male figure skater in the United States—and the most outrageous. This is the fitness routine that got him to the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin.



Johnny Weir could win Olympic figure-skating gold this week. He might get a medal for most quotable athlete, too. Nicknamed “Tinkerbell,” the 21-year-old from the Skating Club of New York is known for his Balenciaga-bag habit, his giant fur stoles, and his arch commentary—he recently described one of his costumes as “Care Bear on acid” and his attitude to travel as “princessy.” Weir does, however, have a serious side: the fitness routine that’s allowed him to overcome devastating knee and ankle injuries. Here’s his daily regimen.

The Workout

CARDIO
Ice time.
Five days a week, Weir hits his training rink in Delaware for 75 minutes in the morning and two hours and fifteen minutes in the afternoon, without breaks.
Kill drills.
While blasting Madonna—“I’m really loving ‘Sorry’ from her new CD,” he says—Weir speed-skates across the rink and attempts a triple jump at each end. He fits fifteen jumps into one minute; a typical performance has eight jumps in four. “I need music that gets me angry,” he says.

STRENGTH AND AGILITY
Standing roll-ups.
Off the ice, Weir is guided by his trainer, Carolanne Leone. To warm up, he tucks his chin to his chest and “rolls” his body forward, then back up, articulating every vertebra in his spine.
Bosu-ball push-ups.
Leone sets a weighted body bar across the flat bottom of this half-sphere, then Weir does ten to twenty push-ups. The ball’s instability makes balancing difficult.
Death squats.
Weir stands on the spherical side of the Bosu with a body ball pressed against the wall behind him and another between his knees. He holds a medicine ball outstretched and balances a rubber orange cone on his head, then does ten slow squats. This keeps his body strictly aligned and requires him to stabilize himself using his “core” (deep abdominal muscles). “With the new judging system,” says Weir, “the spins are very difficult. You need a strong core to pull yourself into crazy positions.”
Bosu-ball toss.
“It’s all about looking cute when you’re working out,” claims Weir. Wearing his customized Nikes—they say dirrty, in homage to his idol Christina Aguilera—Weir stands on top of the Bosu. He uses his core to stabilize himself as he tosses the medicine ball back and forth to Leone.

PILATES
The Reformer.
Leone puts Weir through a full routine on this apparatus with a moving “carriage.” Weir’s favorite part is the ab-killer “the hundreds.” Lying down with arms and legs extended into a V, he contracts his abs and waves his arms downward as he inhales and exhales for five counts, ten times.
Pilates plyometrics.
To work on the power bursts he needs for triple axels, Weir lays on the Reformer and pushes backward off a springboard. The key is to explode, then stay suspended as long as possible before landing softly. “I’m naturally very long-limbed and stretchy,” says Weir. “There are acrobatic things that we do just because it looks pretty, but it’s hard work.”
The chair lift.
Weir gets into a push-up position in front of the Wunda Chair, a Pilates apparatus; his toes press down on its tightly spring-loaded foot bar. Weir forces the bar down, then shifts his weight to his shoulders and core, which “lifts” the bar upward. Remaining stable requires immense effort.

DIET
Extra-low-cal.
“I don’t eat as much as an athlete should,” says Weir. “I just don’t like it.” Breakfast is coffee and vitamins. Lunch is fruit nectar. When he eats dinner, it’s steak and salad. Weir treats himself to Zone bars during competition and—once a year—angel-food cake with strawberries and heavy whipped cream. “I love black caviar, but it has to be from Astrakhan,” says Weir. “I drink Vitamin Water nonstop—I should have an IV.”

SLEEP
Six hours, minimum.
“I’m an insomniac,” says Weir. “Ambien is my best friend.”

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Vegetarianism: What the Science Tells Us

By Sally Fallon and Mary G Enig, PhD

Health writers may denigrate animal foods with insouciance but, in fact, the scientific literature offers very little in the way of long-term studies on the value of a vegetarian diet. Dr. Russell Smith, a statistician, analyzed the existing studies on vegetariansim1 and discovered that while there have been ample investigations which show, quite unsurprisingly, that vegetarian diets significantly decrease blood cholesterol levels, studies evaluating the effects of vegetarian diets on mortalities continue to be few in number. In fact, Smith speculated that the available data from the many existing prospective studies are being shelved because they reveal no benefits of vegetarianism. For example, mortality statistics are strangely absent from the Tromso Heart Study in Norway which showed that vegetarians had slightly lower blood cholesterol levels than nonvegetarians.2

In a review of some 3,000 articles in the scientific literature, Smith found only two that compared mortality data for vegetarians and nonvegetarians. One was a 1978 study of Seventh Day Adventists (SDAs). Two very poor analyses of the data were published in 1984, one by H. A. Kahn and one by D. A. Snowden.3 The publication by Kahn rather arbitrarily threw out most of the data and considered only subjects who indicated very infrequent or very frequent consumption of the various foods. They then computed "odds ratios" which showed that mortality increased as meat or poultry consumption increased (but not for cheese, eggs, milk or fat attached to meat.)

When Smith analyzed total mortality rates from the study as a function of the frequencies of consuming cheese, meat, milk, eggs and fat attached to meat, he found that the total death rate decreased as the frequencies of consuming cheese, eggs, meat and milk increased. He called the Kahn publication "yet another example of negative results which are massaged and misinterpreted to support the politically correct assertions that vegetarians live longer lives."

The analysis by Snowden published mortality data for coronary heart disease (CHD), rather than total mortality data, for the 21-year SDA study. Since he did not eliminate the intermediate frequencies of consumption data on meat, but did so with eggs, cheese and milk, this represents further evidence that both Kahn and Snowden based their results on arbitrary, after-the-fact analysis and not on pre-planned analyses contingent on the design of their questionnaire. Snowden computed relative risk ratios and concluded that CHD mortality increased as meat consumption increased. However, the rates of increase were trivial at 0.04 percent and 0.01 percent respectively for males and females. Snowden, like Kahn, also found no relationship between frequency of consumption of eggs, cheese and milk and CHD mortality "risk."

Citing the SDA study, other writers have claimed that nonvegetarians have higher all-cause mortality rates than vegetarians4 and that, "There seems little doubt that SDA men at least experience less total heart disease than do others. . ."5 The overpowering motivation to show that a diet low in animal products protects against CHD (and other diseases) is no better exemplified than in the SDA study and its subsequent analysis. While Kahn and Snowden both used the term "substantial" to describe the effects of meat consumption on mortalities, it is more obvious that "trivial" is the appropriate descriptor. It is also interesting that throughout their analyses, they brushed aside their totally negative findings on foods which have much greater quantities of fat, saturated fat and cholesterol.

The second study was published by Burr and Sweetnam in 1982.6 It was shown that annual CHD death rate among vegetarians was only 0.01 percent lower than that of nonvegetarians, yet the authors indicated that the difference was "substantial."

The table below presents the annual death rates for vegetarians and nonvegetarians which Smith derived from the raw data in the seven-year Burr and Sweetnam study. As can be seen, the "marked" difference between vegetarian and nonvegetarian men in Ischemic Heart Disease (IHD) was only .11 percent. The difference in all-cause death rate was in the opposite direction, a fact that Burr and Sweetnam failed to mention. Moreover, the IHD and all-cause death rates among females were actually slightly greater for heart disease and substantially greater for all causes in vegetarians than in nonvegetarians.

Annual Death Rates of
Vegetarians and Nonvegetarians

IHD
All-Cause
Male vegetarians .22% .93%
Male nonvegetarians .33% .88%
Female vegetarians .14% .86%
Female nonvegetarians .10% .54%

These results are absolutely not supportive of the proposition that vegetarianism protects against either heart disease or all-cause mortalities. In fact, they indicate that vegetarianism is more dangerous for women than for men.

The claim that vegetarians have lower rates of cancer compared to nonvegetarians has been squarely contradicted by a 1994 study comparing vegetarians with the general population.7 Researchers found that although vegetarian Seventh Day Adventists have the same or slightly lower cancer rates for some sites, for example 91 percent instead of 100 percent for breast cancer, the rates for numerous other cancers are much higher than the general US population standard, especially cancers of the reproductive tract. SDA females had more Hodgkins disease (131 percent), more brain cancer (118 percent), more malignant melanoma (171 percent), more uterine cancer (191 percent), more cervical cancer (180 percent) and more ovarian cancer (129 percent) on average.

About the Authors

Mary G. Enig, PhD is the author of Know Your Fats: The Complete Primer for Understanding the Nutrition of Fats, Oils, and Cholesterol, Bethesda Press, May 2000. Order your copy here: www.enig.com/trans.html.

Sally Fallon is the author of Nourishing Traditions: The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats, and Eat Fat, Lose Fat (both with Mary G. Enig, PhD), as well as of numerous articles on the subject of diet and health. She is President of the Weston A. Price Foundation and founder of A Campaign for Real Milk. She is the mother of four healthy children raised on whole foods including butter, cream, eggs and meat.

References

1. Russell L Smith, Diet, Blood Cholesterol and Coronary Heart Disease: A Critical Review of the Literature, Vol 2, Vector Enterprises, November 1991. The author was a statistician who subjected the many studies on coronary heart disease to appropriate rigorous statistical analysis.
2. V Fonnebo, "The Tromso Heart Study: diet, religion and risk factor for coronary heart disease," American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1988, 48:739
3. H A Kahn et al, "Association between reported diet and all-cause mortality," American Journal of Epidemiology, 1984, 119:775; D A Snowden et al, "Meat consumption and fatal ischemic heart disease," Preventive Medicine, 1984, 13:490
4. J T Dwyer, "Health aspects of vegetarian diets," American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1988, 48:712
5. G E Fraser, "Determinants of ischemic heart disease in Seventh-Day Adventists: a review," American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1988, 48:833
6. M L Burr and P M Sweetnam, "Vegetarianism, dietary fiber and mortality," American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1982, 36:873
7. P F Mills, et al, "Cancer incidence among California Seventh-Day Adventists, 1976-1982," American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1994, Vol 59 (Supplement), Pages 1136S-1142S.

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You know, its interesting that every time someone has an intelligent counter to your assertion, the best you can do is google up a random report that you don't fully understand yourself. Then when someone with a response grounded in science finds the flaw in your fishing expedition, you sheepishly cry about medical community conspiracies.

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Even if someone who has actually experienced cardio problems and has sucessfully solved them through specific means, then they must be some kind of mutant and should be ignored. This is called selective science.

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You only choose the findings that fit your agenda.

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In fact, its the patients consuming too much saturated fat that end up getting the bypass operations.

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I suspect is difficult to find many patients that have been following a low carb diet for five years. Most people can't even get to a goal weight, let alone stay on it for five years. Atkins' bankruptcy last year and the sharp decline in the public desire for low carb foods pretty much supports that.

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