Mon, 31 Dec 2007
If Michelangelo Did David Today
[/health/paleo_diet] 0 comments permalink
Tue, 26 Sep 2006
More on Net Acid Load
If you remember from my post a few weeks ago on
Paleo Diet Distinctives, one aspect of this diet is the
reduced acid load on the kidneys. The past couple of days I
have been having an e-mail discussion with health journalist
Bill Sardi (thanks to Bill for always being available to
share his knowledge and discuss things). I had asked Bill
about his
blog entry on alternative medicine where he
briefly criticizes the concept of diet and PH. After some
discussion, I realized that there was some ambiguity here
and we were kind of talking past one another. There are some
groups who think that you should focus your diet on foods which
are alkaline PH. They might suggest things like testing the
PH of your saliva for example. Well this is not the same thing
that Paleolithic Diet researchers like Dr. Cordain are talking
about. What they are doing is measuring the PH of urine in
order to understand what the kidneys are doing in response to
certain foods. For example, fruits would have an acidic PH
in and of themselves but when digested and metabolized, they
present an alkaline load to the kidneys. In fact, fruits and
vegetables are the only foods which do this. What Cordain and
other paleolithic diet researchers are claiming is that modern diets
are loaded with grains and processed foods as well as lots of
sodium and all of these present an acidic load to the kidneys.
In order to respond to this low grade (and chronic) acidosis, our
kidneys must use minerals to balance out this load and keep
our blood PH in it's normal range. This is accomplished by leaching
calcium out of our bones since this calcium is the most readily available
mineral to use. And so we have one of the diet paradoxes
of the west where people take gobs of calcium supplements and still
experience bone density decline and osteoporosis.
We were also discussing whether or not blood PH can actually change. Thanks to my blogging friend Michael for explaining this a little better to me. Our respiratory system and kidneys are in fact responsible for keeping our blood in it's narrow PH range. However, there are conditions when the PH can be outside of this range under disease conditions. Michael mentioned emphysema where a person would have problems exhaling carbon dioxide and this would result in chronic acidosis. Of course this is not a healthy state but the person does not immediately die due to this acidosis (if I understand this correctly).
Doing a google search on "net acid load" will show quite a few interesting documents (including some of Cordain's pages as well as some scientists who he references). But one new one that turned up is a Dr. Susan Brown who has a web site with many interesting documents and her line of thinking appears to be parallel to the paleo diet guys. For example, This PDF document explains the importance of balancing the PH load to the kidneys in a somewhat non-technical way. But there appears to be many other useful resources at Dr. Brown's site.
So what about the bone density issue with cyclists? Well, I'm still not taking calcium supplements. I really think that the whole idea of inadequate calcium intake is being promoted to a degree by the dairy industry. There are problems with excessive calcium supplementation. Things like calcification of arteries and heart valves which are not being discussed. I am focusing on eating lots of fruits and vegetables. A salad with every dinner. Spinach with lunch. Raisins as a mid morning snack (and raisins for other times). If you look at the table of PH loads at Cordons site, you see that raisins and spinach have the highest alkaline loads. But also, keep eating those fruits and veggies as much as you can. Potassium also appears to be related to alkaline loading so eating bananas and cantaloupe (for energy food while working out or after) which are high in potassium is a good idea as well.
[/health/paleo_diet] 2 comments permalink
Paleo Diet Web Site
Just discovered this good
informational resource based on
Dr. Cordain's material and related to his book, "The
Paleo Diet." This can be useful to share with
friends who ask you questions about the diet.
There have also been several good testimonies at
the
Training Bible web forum recently from people who
have reduced their cholesterol count and improved
their endurance capabilities using the diet (slightly
modified for endurance athletes).
[/health/paleo_diet] 0 comments permalink
De Vany on Strength Training
Art De Vany is an Economist turned paleo nutritionist who has a
very interesting blog (thanks to Scott for pointing it out to me
some time ago). De Vany has mentioned Dr. Cordain in the past and
has some very useful thoughts on exercise. His
most recent entry discusses dead lifting and the ability of
Amerindians to lift twice their body weight even though they did not train
specifically to do this. The thought here is that nutrition plays a role in
strength capabilities along with doing the types of things that
a hunter gatherer would do to stimulate strength development.
I like a lot of what De Vany says although when he gets off into
evolutionary psychology, he tends to be a little wacky in my opinion.
[/health/paleo_diet] 0 comments permalink
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