The Amish

[Joshua Katz]

So, I visited an Amish marketplace in Pennsylvania last week. As a
side note, this was a fantastic place to do paleo/primal shopping.
All the meat was grown on small farms, organically, and they had great
pit-smoked barbecue - very fatty. The dairy case included cheese and
butter from raw milk from grassfed cows, and they also sold raw milk
from goats (I know dairy isn't paleo, but I consider raw dairy to be
'almost paleo.') There was also a good selection of vegetables, and
the prices on everything were great.

Yet, something is bothering me. Looking into it, I found that the
Amish have low rates of diabetes, heart disease, and other diseases of
civilization. At first, of course, you want to say this makes sense
to us, they eat lots of fat, in particular saturated fat - more
evidence for us! Looking around, though, I saw these slim, tough
looking folks take their breaks from work. Most would sit down with a
stuffed-dough type item, which were very oily and full of meat, but
also made from wheat flour. Many were eating sour-cream donuts, or
fudge. Yet they look healthy, capable of doing hard labor, and
certainly not fat.

So what am I getting at? Well, what if the health problems we talk
about - obesity, diabetes, heart disease - are caused by a combination
of the products of refinement (say, white flour and refined sugar, and
in particular HFCS) together with additives and such? Our methods
would still have great results, since we incidentally cut all those
things out, but we would be cutting things out which we don't need to
- and which might contain some nutrients that would help us.

Now, why would additives and such be such problems? I hear more and
more today about auto-immune diseases. Wouldn't additives and
artificial ingredients contribute to this? Loading up the body with
unfamiliar chemicals seems like a surefire way to have the immune
system reacting all the time. Add to this the typical 50-1 ration of
omega6 to omega3 on the SAD, and why not say that the diseases of
civilization all have autoimmune components? Maybe toxins build up in
fatty tissue, and the body can't drop the fat, for fear of releasing
the toxins? Maybe weight is just a function of health, and not the
other way around - a well-functioning body will carry the right amount
of bodyfat?

At the same time, the right amount, for health reasons, might not be
what we wish to carry for appearance reasons. It seems unlikely that
our bodies would naturally tend towards "full-on shredded" appearance,
so we'd need to manipulate our diets more carefully, using ketosis, if
we want to get to that level. Similarly, this would say nothing about
fat-loss, just about the proper diet for a healthy person. Maybe we
do need to go extreme and induce ketosis in order to get the initial
fat-loss, then could eat like the Amish afterwards? Or maybe I'm off
base entirely.

I'd also point out that, in my experience (maybe someone can correct
me if this is stupid) ketosis is great! It seems to induce a type of
euphoria, which I'm told is the release of endorphins because the body
assumes that the presence of ketones signals impending death from
starvation. When I ran for office (as a Libertarian) I'd eat very
strictly low-carb for a week ahead of public appearances, and still do
before important speeches at work or whatever, for that feeling of
euphoria.

[Toban Wiebe]

Yes, there are many people who eat plenty of the neolithic agents of disease but don't get the diseases. We all probably know a few. I think genetics has a lot to do with susceptibility, especially with gluten and lactose. As for fructose, if the person exercises enough they can burn it off before it causes harm. I'm not really sure about seed oils. Bottom line: genetic variance probably explains why some people can stay healthy with a lifestyle that gives others disease. Exercise probably explains why groups like the Amish remain healthy, and furthermore they probably aren't chronically chowing down on sugar.

I value my health too much to gamble with the neolithic agents. So I stick to evolutionarily proven foods.