I just finished reading Lierre Keith’s new book, Vegetarianism is Moronic, and I’m speechless. It’s passionate, brilliant, and amazingly well written—a must-read.

Well okay, that’s not the real title. It’s what I would have called it. But Keith is far more sympathetic to the dietary philosophy she is addressing, because she spent most of her life embracing it. The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability is, to me, a perfect followup to Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, which I waxed ecstatic about a couple years ago. Such a powerfully as well as sympathetically stated case against all the arguments underlying vegetarianism is long, long overdue.

Keith, a former, very committed vegan, takes the reader through her own long journey and ultimate disillusionments, considering carefully the full range of initially compelling reasons why idealistic people, especially young women, become seduced by the vegetarian lifestyle: the desire to not kill, the desire to be better to the planet, and the belief that eating only vegetables is the best thing for the human body. She beautifully chronicles her own acceptance of these arguments and how, in the end, all of them fell apart—along with her body, which was devastated by this lifestyle. Women who have drunk or are in danger of drinking the kool-aid of vegetarian thinking should be captured and forced to read this book.

The symbolism and psychology behind vegetarianism has always interested me. A huge force behind the modern vegetarian movement was feminism. Vegetarianism became popular when women became empowered. After the hippies died out, the major demographic duped into eating only vegetables was women. Don’t deny it: Most of the vegetarians you know are women.

The reason for this link between womanhood and vegetarian ideals is simple: In our society, as in most if not all societies around the world, vegetables (and by extension grains) are symbolically linked to femininity, and meat to masculinity. There’s the obvious male/hunting, female/gathering thing. It’s not a myth. Anthropology pretty much bears out this division of labor for most societies. Even in a modern, urban world, stereotypes of food gathering break along the same gender lines: Men hunt or ranch; women (and sort of “metro” men) garden and shop (when they aren’t doing yoga, which is the most ineffectual martial art after Tai Chi—but that’s another post).

It was no accident that the idea of putting lots of veggies on our plates came to dominate nutritional thinking exactly when women were struggling for equality, during the sixties and seventies. Vegetables were empowered along with women: The same way women took back the night, vegetables took over our plates. Suddenly, coincidentally or not so coincidentally, meat started to be viewed by nutritionists as unhealthy.

I grew up during this period, in a household dominated by the belief in vegetables. We weren’t vegetarian, and my mother was a little too old to be a “feminist” per se, but she gardened heavily and made my dad and I eat lots of really boring and tasteless vegetables–squash, tough fibrous beans, more squash, sweet potatoes, and so on—because they were good for us.

I’m not denying that some vegetables are good for you, and a healthy diet makes a place for them, and always has. But the symbolic nature of food sometimes trumps nutritional reality, and during the period I grew up—the period of female empowerment—the reputation of meat eroded right along with male self-esteem, and that wasn’t a good thing. The problem was, the basic rationale for vegetarianism had nothing to do with nutrition. It had to do with changing our symbolic constitution. Even today, vegetarians are not eating vegetables. They are eating symbols of all things moral and peaceful and wholesome and nonviolent and loving toward the planet.

Don’t underestimate the symbolic power of food. Among the other food insults I endured during the seventies was wheat bran. Every morning we had to stir a tablespoon or so of bran in water until it dissolved and drink it down. LOL. I just made a joke there, but you probably didn’t get it. Bran doesn’t dissolve. We had to stir vigorously to get the brown flakes suspended in the water, then chug it down fast before it could settle to the bottom. It always made a big lump in our throats. Sometimes I choked.

Bran tastes like sawdust, because that’s basically what it is. I suppose it cleansed our bowels, scouring them bright shiny healthy pink. I saw my colon in live action once, during a colonoscopy; it was like a big twisty cavern, and besides the amazing paleolithic artwork, its walls were indeed nice and clean and pink. But the main benefit of all that bran was symbolic: Bran was a way of getting trees into our bodies. Trees, those symbols of ecology and purity and all things good and wholesome and peaceful and feminine. Things to be hugged and not shot. Getting lots of fiber in your diet is really the ultimate form of tree hugging.

(Yeah, I know bran is not actually wood. But you know what I mean.)

The fact is, any nutritional argument for vegetarianism has been shown to be baseless. Research studies supposedly supporting it, such as The China Study, have been blown out of the water—the authors fudged their interpretations of the data and were card-carrying members of PETA. They were bad scientists because they were biased. If you don’t believe me, just do a bit of research. And I’ve already written about the physical and mental advantages of a Paleolithic diet (i.e., high-protein and fat, no grains), so I won’t repeat.

And lest you think that vegetarianism saves animal lives, guess again. Keith devotes a section of her book to how how cultivation of plants and grains kills animals, kills whole species, and kills ecosystems.

But the one argument for vegetarianism that always seemed persuasive to me was that meat eating is unsustainable and basically unfair. The argument is that you can yield more calories by cultivating vegetables, and better yet grains, from an acre of land than by pasturing livestock on it, and thus meat eating is ecologically irresponsible in a world full of hunger. It’s the whole Francis Moore Lappe Diet for a Small Planet idea, which progressives embraced during the seventies.

I always assumed Lappe was right, and so resigned myself to the possibility that the human dietary optimum might not be optimal for an overpopulated planet. Nutrition vs. ecology could, I figured, present us with a choice as insoluble as the fiber my mom made us drink. But the great thing about Keith’s book is that she shoots the nonsustainability argument out of the water too. This was the eye-opener for me. She makes a persuasive case that our diet of refined grains and factory farmed vegetables is as destructive and unsustainable in planetary terms as it is for our bodies, and that pasturing animals on grasses is the best remedy for both (an argument that dovetails well with that of Michael Pollan in The Omnivore’s Dilemma). Factory farming of grain is horribly destructive to the environment; just think of all the petroleum and chemicals it floods the environment with–creating for instance a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey. I’m still not 100% convinced that pasturage and the whole food movement could sustain the world’s population, but Keith makes a strong case, and provides a much needed corrective to Lappe. I’d say this argument is the most important and unique contribution her book makes to current debates about diet.

There’s a reason that the walls of my perfectly healthy colon are covered with ancient paintings having hunting themes: hunters with bows and arrows chasing herds of bison and woolly mammoths, shamans dressed in the skins of animals, just like the fingerpainted images that come alive in the flickering torchlight in the caves at Lascaux, France. Humans evolved to eat animal protein and fat. Meat and fat are good for you. If you want to be healthy and happy and not beset by inflammatory bowel disease, vitamin deficiencies, acne, and tooth decay, you should eat meat and fat. And if you want to do a favor for the planet, you should stop eating grains. However much vegetarians want it to be true that their diet is making them pure and healthy, all it gives them is gas and bad skin, and in the long run makes them fat and diabetic (from all the grains, rice, and potatoes they eat instead of meat).

You know this—you just haven’t admitted or acknowledged it to yourself. Consider this post (and The Vegetarian Myth) an intervention. I’m not against feminism, obviously. But sorry, gals. A diet based solely on veggies and grains is bad for your bodies, and it’s bad for Mother Earth.

I never intended this blog to be about food and nutrition, but somehow it’s around this that I feel the strongest urge to share my thoughts. Lately on two occasions I have gotten into fierce arguments (under the influence of alcohol, admittedly) with people reciting the standard dietary philosophy of “eat low-calorie, low-fat, low red meat, etc.” I try to indulge them nicely and then explain how science is now learning that this health dogma is false, etc., and try to educate them that they should only be avoiding refined carbohydrates. But — shockingly! – they stick to their guns and get really emotional. And then I get emotional, and then somewhere along the line I pass out from the alcohol (a refined carbohydrate).

I’m really interested in how passionate people get about food — whatever their choices, whatever their basis for their choices. There’s no more fundamental existential choice in our lives than our eating habits, I’m discovering — it really is true that we are what we eat. One’s dietary philosophy really is like one’s religion, and I think in this day and age not talking about diet should be right up there with not talking about God and not talking about politics as rules for polite conversation in mixed company.

Ray Kurzweil and other techno-enthusiasts wax ecstatic over the coming “singularity” that will liberate humans from the limits of the physical body. Within a couple decades, through nanotechnology, we’ll be able to re-tool ourselves on the molecular/cellular level; ultimately, we’ll be able to upload our brains into machines and theoretically live forever. By “we,” I of course mean “they” — the tanned super-rich. One imagines future humanity ruled by an overclass of centuries-old Silicon Valley billionaires, orbiting the earth in laser-defended satellites, occasionally destroying a city or other “surface settlement” to scare the mortals into submission.

For now, it’s still on the drawing board. But in the distant past — 10,000 years ago, give or take — a singularity really did occur, a horizon beyond which human destiny was utterly and irreversibly altered. This was the transition to settled agriculture and the shift to a grain-based diet. The Neolithic Revolution is typically seen as a great advance, allowing people to settle down, create all the good things like cities and wealth and laws and writing and so on. But like biological evolution, social evolution isn’t ever simply a story of progress toward some ideal; it is adaptation to meet changing pressures and challenges.

The shift to cultivating grains didn’t happen because people finally figured out how to farm and thought it would be nice to stop being nomads; it happened because populations began to put too much pressure on the available resources. Resource scarcity drives technological innovation (think: overconsumption of oil–>rising gas prices–>demand for more fuel-efficient vehicles–>the Prius). Basically, beginning around 10,000 to 8,000 BC, migratory band-level societies living in the fertile equatorial and sub-equatorial areas all over the world started running out of resources, so they turned to the cultivation of grain. Put very simply, you can get more calories out of an acre of land by cultivating grain on it than you can by hunting and foraging on it. This principle “enabled” people to settle down, although in fact the life they settled down to was one of toil, and arguably worse in many ways than the migratory lifestyle they had given up.

Cultivating and storing grain crops meant the rise of central political authorities, and ultimately the rise of the city-state, with its huge divide between the rich ruling elite, the barely subsisting farmers laboring to produce the surplus needed to ensure year-round survival, and (often) slaves captured in war. Because the settled lifestyle was the beginning of warfare too. And we’re now learning that there was another big cost to the transition to an agricultural way of life: The so-called “diseases of civilization.” Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, autoimmune diseases, as well as nuisances like tooth decay and acne can largely be traced to a diet based on “cheap” calories.

In my previous post I mused about how the world would never be able to support everyone returning to a Paleolithic diet that averted these health problems. All the bad or non-nutritive foods in the typical diet — refined carbohydrates, starches, factory-raised meat and poultry and dairy, etc. — are an effect of the global economic pressure to feed a higher population density than ever existed in the past. Even if new technological advances could theoretically enable high-quality, chemical-free meat and vegetables to be produced in factories, economics dictates that most of the world’s people will be induced by profit-motivated food producers to eat lower-quality food that sustains them but isn’t optimal for their health.

The inefficiency of a protein-rich diet — i.e., the fact that you can get more calories from scarce land by consuming grain grown on it than from feeding that grain to meat or dairy cattle, let alone pasturing those animals — has been part of the ecological argument against meat-eating for decades. (I’m thinking of books like Francis Moore Lappe’s Diet For A Small Planet, which was big when I was in college.) Yes, you can feed more people on the planet by giving up meat – for exactly the reasons I outlined as the basis for the Neolithic revolution — but when you see that the Neolithic lifestyle goes against what the human body is evolutionarily adapted for (i.e., a diet high in animal products), you see what a conundrum we face. The intersection of mainstream nutritional thinking with the ecological movement, and what this means for our society ever accepting (let alone embracing) anything like a Paleolithic diet, is fascinating to me.

As it now stands, “nutritionally sound” does not equal, and cannot equal, “ecologically sound.” That’s the hard reality. The solution of artificial, vat-grown meat, already being developed and encouraged by animal-rights organizations like PETA, may one day solve certain ethical issues of animal consumption; but even discounting the enormous R&D costs, the resources needed to mass-produce meat in vats are bound to be expensive — so, again, only affluent animal lovers, and the immortal super-rich in their space stations, will be able to afford to be clean-conscience carnivores.

What kind of compromise do we strike, as individuals and as a species? I wonder if the only answer is to nano-retool our bodies to better utilize refined carbohydrates. Maybe that’s the real solution.

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.