I work in the office of a small DC nonprofit. Sometimes the Executive Director brings Krispy Kreme donuts to the staff meeting on Monday mornings. Our vendors send us baskets with cookies, chocolates, or other sweets, so the lunch room is always a good place to forage for candy and other baked goods. And a few times a month — nearly every week — we pack ourselves around the long conference table at 3:00 PM for cake, to celebrate somebody’s birthday. We also do this whenever an employee leaves, or whenever there’s a new employee. We make jokes about how much we all love cake, as though the shared love of cake binds us together, like it’s our mascot, our totem.

There’s always something a little bit self-centered, a little bit rude, in the occasional, scrupulously healthy employee who refuses a piece of cake and watches everyone else eat theirs. Office folklore even tells of the one time, many years ago, when a health-conscious staffer requested vegetables and dip for her birthday rather than cake. That experiment was not repeated, and the staffer subsequently left for unrelated reasons. (You know, she wasn’t a good fit.)

In other words, my office is probably exactly like most offices. There’s no sinister plot to make us all diabetics. In our culture, as in nearly every culture around the world, carbohydrate-rich baked goods, sometimes but not always heavily sweetened, are given as gifts, baked and shared to mark special occasions and anniversaries. They are tokens of communion and celebration. They’re also a great social equalizer. Bread, in one form or another, is a staple everywhere, enjoyed by the poor as much as by the rich. Since the Neolithic revolution, meat-eating has been a rich man’s prerogative, but everyone, except in the depths of famine, has access at least to bread. It’s the symbolic quintessence of goodness, and for four decades it (along with pasta, cereal, etc.) has formed the massive base of the food pyramid.

The futurist in me senses this is all going to change. Nutritional research like that I’ve discussed in previous posts is giving major new legitimacy to the idea of the “Paleolithic Diet”: That the healthiest diet should be one that resembles the diet of people prior to the cultivation and refinement of grains — i.e., foods we evolved to eat over millions of years, and did eat until just a few thousand years ago. I think we’re on the cusp of what is likely to be a huge dietary paradigm shift in the coming decades. As nutritionists’ fat blinders get lifted and they start reexamining the evidence, more and more legitimate scientific fingers are going to be pointed at refined carbs as the source of many of our worst health problems.

This is very interesting for two reasons. First, do you have any idea how huge the grain industry is, and how much weight Big Agriculture and Big Sugar carry in Washington? A backlash against bread and sugar will mean more than just dirty looks at office cake time. The grain and sugar lobbies are going to fight back against the growing anti-carb movement in a huge way. The ensuing societal war will be bigger and bloodier than the fight against tobacco ever was. My prediction: In the next few years, there will be MORE (not fewer) studies implicating dietary fat, and these studies will be funded directly or indirectly by America’s wheat, corn, and sugar producers.

The second reason I think this dietary paradigm shift is so interesting is that there is an unspoken and very antidemocratic scandal concealed in it: Eating a low-carb diet is really expensive. Eating “whole grains” doesn’t cut it. We should be eating organic meat, fish, eggs, green vegetables and fruit. As a result, some very difficult choices lay ahead, in the coming decade, in the coming century, about what to put on our plates. Since we’ve begun avoiding most carbs, my girlfriend and I spend twice or three times what we used to on groceries. There’s just no getting around it, and the reasons go back to the reasons our environmentally pressured Neolithic forbears shifted to a grain-based diet in the first place: It is more “economical” (not factoring in the hidden, deferred health costs we are now becoming aware of) to cultivate and refine grains than it is to cultivate vegetable crops or to husband animals for their meat; grain-based foods are called “cheap calories” for a reason.

The bottom line is, only people who live in the Western world and who make enough money to shop at stores like Whole Foods can afford to eat well. Thus there is going to be a major cultural divergence when it comes to diet. Most humans will continue to subsist mainly on cheap calories, and to suffer the health problems such a diet entails. Even if the world overnight became completely educated about the nutritional disadvantages of refined carbs, the laws of economics and ecology all conspire to ensure that the majority of people will never remotely be able to afford to eat the diet our species is adapted to eat. We are destined to remain an unhealthy planet.

Even when we acknowledge the social and economic factors that lead to obesity (cheap, fattening food; huge portion sizes; marketing soda to kids; etc.), don’t we all still, ultimately, blame a person’s weight on their lack of self-control? A fat person just lacks willpower. The most compelling and novel part of Good Calories, Bad Calories (see previous post) is Gary Taubes’ radical reconsideration of the relationship between diet, exercise, and willpower. Basically, he takes the latter out of the picture: Appetite and exercise are governed by our metabolism, not our mind, he argues. A person with a dysregulated insulin system craves food and lacks energy, because essentially they are “famished”; more and more fuel is being stored away in fat cells, but it can’t be accessed and burned.

Taubes doesn’t mention it, but there’s an emerging body of very interesting psychological data on metabolic aspects of self-control and executive mental functions, which could complete the causal feedback loop when it comes to diet and exercise.

It has long been known that the forebrain — the seat of forethought, self-control, willpower, all the “human” aspects of our behavior — is one of the most energy-hungry parts of the body, consuming 25% of the body’s energy. That’s an astonishing amount. Research by psychologists Roy Baumeister and Matt Gailliot has refined this picture: It is now known that executive faculties like concentration and self-control depend specifically on blood glucose, the same fuel used by muscles, and that exerting concentration or control in one task depletes the ability to exert concentration or control in a subsequent task. Experimental subjects who exercised self-control in a task and who temporarily replenished their blood sugar with a sweetened drink were better able to master a temptation in a subsequent task than a control group of subjects who received a beverage with an artificial sweetener. A number of elegant recent studies have replicated this kind of finding, both for glucose and for glycogen, the form in which glucose is stored for future use. (Click here and here to read about this research.)

Superficially, it sounds like drinking sugar aids your self-control. In fact, though, any spike in blood sugar results in a sugar crash (and craving for more sugar) later. The larger takeaway point of this research is that a steady supply of glucose is necessary to power the muscles of self-control, concentration, all the higher mental functions that mark us as human beings. A Paleolithic diet ensures a constant, steady supply of blood glucose, whereas a Western, high-refined-carb diet causes wild swings in blood sugar throughout the day, and over time, a desensitizing of the hormonal homeostat that governs our intake and use of glucose fuel.

There is ample anecdotal evidence from those who have attempted a Paleolithic diet that mental clarity and energy increase when you eschew refined carbs. I originally tried giving up sugar and carbs to lose the fat around my midsection, but the effect I didn’t anticipate, and that became the main selling point for me, was increased mental focus and physical energy. I no longer needed strong coffee to get me through the day or long naps every afternoon.

Not enough large-scale research has been done on this “brain fog” effect of easily digested carbohydrates, but what if the Western diet is not only making us physically sick but also robbing us of the honed mental faculties that are our species birthright? Proponents of a Paleolithic diet liken the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to Paradise before the Fall. Myths of a primordial Eden and subsequent expulsion to a life of sickness and toil may reflect, in the idiom of mythology, a memory of the Neolithic revolution and the lifestyle and health sacrifices it entailed. But what if it’s more than a metaphor? What if all our error and folly, the tendency of our plans to fizzle or go awry, the tendency of our relationships and projects to fail or fall short, and the inability to master our temptations are rooted, at least partly, in the dysregulation of blood sugar?

There is no way to test such a hypothesis — that our lives are fucked up basically because our diet is sapping our cognitive potential — but the possibility that the way we eat has something to do with our inability to follow through with plans, our inability to control our emotions, our inability to be as smart and compassionate as we somehow think we should be is intriguing. At the very least, it will be important in coming decades to find out the size of the brain-fog effect.

One of the best books I read last year, Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories (hereafter, GCBC), is coming out in paperback next month. I’ll probably have to pick it up, because both of my hardback copies (!) are lent out to friends, and you know how that goes.

I can’t recommend this book enough. Despite the kind of dumb title, it’s not a diet book, but a piece of great investigative science journalism — as well as, in some ways, a history book. Specifically, it’s the history of how and why a particular meme — “fat is bad” — came to dominate nutritional thinking over the last half century. Taubes, a Science magazine reporter with a track record of debunking bad science and bad scientists, shows that it was personalities and politics, not sound science, that got the medical establishment and policymakers to scapegoat dietary fat. The evidence was never there, or was (and remains) extremely flawed: studies with inadequate controls, small sample sizes, often designed to find the thing the researchers were looking for. Yet when an idea becomes as widely touted and entrenched in the public consciousness as the “fat hypothesis,” it can have a snowball effect, biasing our perception and the direction of research thereafter. The meme stays in the picture.

If, like me, you grew up with the food pyramid, built on a broad base of grains and starches, it can be hard at first to wrap your head around Taubes’ conclusion that the real culprit in everything from heart disease to cancer is “wholesome” stuff like bread, pasta, cereal (and sugar) — not fat, not cholesterol, not salt. Atkins and South Beach and other “fad diets” have been vilifying refined carbs for decades, but they never get taken all that seriously. Even if you lose weight on those diets, replacing bagels and pasta with eggs, bacon, and steak is a recipe for a heart attack, runs the refrain. But study after study are showing that not to be the case. Evidence has been quietly accumulating for a long time that it’s carbs you need to cut out, and you can eat all the steak and eggs you want.

In retrospect it is easy to see why, as a meme, the fat hypotheses had such sticking power. It’s totally intuitive, for one thing: The fat you eat becomes the fat around your middle or butt. Why wouldn’t it? Taubes doesn’t spare the reader the complicated metabolic reasons why it doesn’t work that way (and it can make the book a bit of a slog at times): The main hormonal mediator between what you eat and what your body does with what you eat (for example, storing it as fat versus burning it for fuel) is insulin. Most people think of insulin as something that is just relevant for diabetics, but increasingly insulin resistance, the metabolic dysregulation characteristic of diabetes, is being seen as a model for numerous other health woes: obesity, heart disease, cancer, you name it. It just so happens that all these scourges coincided, in America and globally, with the expansion of insulin-spiking refined carbs in the diet (in bread, pasta, cereal, soft drinks, juices, etc.).

Try and persuade people of this, and you’ll see just how emotional people can get about their dietary beliefs. People look at you like you’re crazy if you defend fat and evil if you disparage bread — for all kinds of deep-rooted cultural reasons. Even once one accepts that one should cut out sugars and refined carbohydrates one still adds, under one’s breath or as an afterthought, “well, and eat low fat.” Probably because we’re so used to decades of austere, unrealistic, and even contradictory nutritional recommendations.

GCBC heralds a coming clarity in the field of nutrition. The dense science makes it slow-going at times, but it’s also the book’s greatest strength. With a wealth of evidence, it can’t be dismissed as another fad diet or crackpot opinion.

UPDATE (9/1/08):
My friend Josef Brandenburg, a DC personal trainer, has just published an excellent, easy-to-understand explanation of carbs, insulin, etc., and why it’s best to eat a low-carb diet. Read his article here.

… then I don’t wanna be right.

Over the past two days, a blogger who calls himself Stryde has done some pretty incredible sleuthing, using only Google and its Chinese equivalent, to get to the bottom of the Chinese gymnast age controversy. Read about it here. Basically, it is pretty much beyond doubt that He Kexing, who won gold on the uneven bars, is indeed 14 (and thus should have been ineligible, according to IOC rules), and that China is clumsily but unashamedly covering that fact up–pulling down the incriminating documents after searches turn them up. It’s a pretty inspiring bit of investigation. (It inspired me to order the book on Google hacking that Stryde recommends).

That said, I’m all for sports where girls have to lie about their ages.

Another projet tres passionant et educatif from ShowStudio: Click on “Les Interactives” here.