 My name is Hamilton Staples, and I have the great pleasure today of introducing Kate Shanahan. Dr. Shanahan is a family physician practicing in the Napa Valley. She's also worked with the LA Lakers, and recently she has partnered with Mark Sisson to create the Primal Advantage. The title of her talk today is The Four Pillars of World Cuisine. Updating our definition of the original human diet. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Kate Shanahan. Thanks for coming. I'm very excited to be here among all the smart people of Berkeley because I'm actually here to ask for your help if you if you want to join in in changing the way we talk about the paleo diet in order to make it more popular and more effective. Here's why. Here we have a fresh garden pea pod. Is this a paleo food? No, because it's a legume, and legumes have lectins and phytates, so they're not paleo. These are almonds. They contain lectins and phytates, and they are paleo. All nuts and seeds contain lectins and phytates. This is milk. Is this paleo? Well, no, not really, because it's dairy. Dairy's not paleo. Caveman didn't milk cows. This is ghee. Ghee is made from milk, and it is paleo. This is a white potato. White potatoes are members of the deadly nightshade family. They're not paleo. Also, when the nightshade family are sweet peppers, every other kind of pepper, eggplants, tomatoes, and cayenne pepper. This is broccoli. Is this paleo? Of course, because it's something a caveman could have eaten, provided that he were born after the 6th century BC when intensive selective breeding brought it into existence. So what I just did was highlight a few troubling inconsistencies in the way that we, the rules that we have used to define whether food is on the paleo list or not. And I would like to suggest that if we ever want to be taken seriously by mainstream America, we need to do something about these inconsistencies because they can make it look like we don't have our act together science-wise. And that's a problem because our nutritional advice opposes what most mainstream Americans believe in, and we base our opposition on our supposedly superior ability to interpret nutrition science. So I have a solution. What we've been doing is talking about lists. And this whole movement is not about lists and approved foods or not approved foods. It's about a strategy, the strategy of eating like our ancestors. So what we should do is identify a single strategy that is consistent with everything we all believe in and with all of our advice. And focus on that. So I've done that. Here it is. I call it the primal directive because I'm a Star Trek fan. And this very well may be the original human strategy. The lapel is not working. Is this working? It is now. Oh, I'll keep my head still. So speak into this one then. Okay. Sorry. The original human strategy around food. Get as much nutrient from the environment as possible and as much variety as possible while avoiding foods that are toxic to you. Very simple. So we're after nutrients, so we want to limit empty calories. We want to choose nutrient-intense foods. We want to get a variety of them, paying attention to seasonality. All this is actually the way a good chef would talk about food. It's the same strategy a caveman could have followed as well. But unlike a list, a list tends to be kind of restricting and confining and sometimes fear-provoking. Sorry, I don't know what's going on with the sound. But a strategy is empowering and it enables you to make different choices on your own with some guidance as your circumstances and your environment change. And by the way, if anybody thinks this strategy needs changing or updating, talk about it with me. If it does need changing, I will change it. Now you might say, well, we already have strategies. Eat like a caveman. That's a strategy. And avoid certain foods because they contain toxins. That's a strategy. And you'd be right. They are. But these strategies are not serving us as well right now as they could. We can eat like a caveman these days because it's not practical or possible. Those foods don't exist anymore. And our advice on toxins is inconsistent because we tell people to avoid some foods because they contain toxins. Meanwhile, other foods with the very same toxins are okay. So we need a simple strategy that can guide people no matter where they live. And we need to place the discussions around strategy first and foremost in our discussions in order to shift the focus away from food lists. Our discussions on lists have already gotten us a little bit of negative press. This is Dr. Christina Warner. She has a PhD from Harvard and she works at the Zurich Center for Evolutionary Medicine. She is a smart gal and she's somebody I would like to see joining our movement. But right now she seems to think the paleo diet is a bit of a joke or at least not very science-based. Because in her TED Talk, Debunking the Paleo Diet, she points out that the idea of eating broccoli and apricots and carrots and cauliflower, olive oil, lettuce and so on to reproduce a paleo-era diet is not very plausible. It's not accurate because none of those foods existed in the paleo era. If anyone seen this, I know when I was watching it I felt like frustrated because it felt like she was nitpicking us to death. And indeed she is nitpicking because she never once attacks us at the core of our beliefs which is that the strategy of eating like our ancestors is a good one. And in fact she seems to agree with that as she concludes. We have a lot to learn from our ancestors. So why is it such a great strategy? Well it's pretty ingenious. In that it's ingeniously simple. So simple a child could understand it. Or caveman. So this is a graph of the rising rates of obesity over the last 100-something years. On the left we have there's barely a tiny little blip of obesity making the statistics. In 1900 somewhere around 1950 it had gotten pretty significant 10% and then it really took off. To now adult obesity is somewhere around 40% of the population. And you can take any graph of any chronic disease and you'll see a very similar pattern here with the time and incidence rates rising. So the idea of our movement is gee it looks like we're not doing so good right now. Right here this is kind of sucky we're going in the wrong direction. Why don't we just kind of pay attention to whatever it was people were doing back here around 1900. And find out as much as we can about that so that we can copy it as accurately as possible. And that sounds like a good idea to me and I mean to me it seems like an obviously good idea. But as obvious as it seems there's actually no other diet philosophy or diet movement out there that's doing anything of the sort. Meaning that our movement this ancestral health movement is the only dietary movement that really has any chance of truly understanding what an ancestral or healthy human diet really was. And doing something about this accelerating rates of disease in my opinion. And so how is this connected what do we know wow that's a different image. It's kind of cool that's DNA spinning there. So there's a cool science called epigenetics. It's a branch of genetics that is showing that there's a pretty profound relationship between the foods we eat and the function of our DNA. And in essence it's saying that our DNA has all kinds of expectations on what nutrients it's going to get. And if we fail to meet those expectations in our diet then we develop epigenetic stress and we get sick. And this explains for example the classic example is vitamin C our ancestors got a lot of vitamin C the gene for it essentially got turned off. So now we need to eat vitamin C and these there's all kinds of these sorts of necessities littered throughout our entire genome. So instead of finding out what each one is one at a time it just makes a lot of sense to just reproduce whatever it was people were doing consistently there for a long time. So that we meet all of those expectations. But the fact that we haven't for generations now has created a kind of epigenetic stress and we're finding that this is not just about us anymore. It's about our future generations because epigenetic researchers are finding that children now are born with genetic they're genetically different than their parents because the DNA has changed has mutated. And this is a disaster. So no other dietary movement has any chance of doing anything about that either. So it's urgent to get back to eating the way our ancestors used to in as much detail as possible. So we need a little more information here. How do we fill in some of these sub strategies that give us the details that will tell us on a day to day basis what to do. Well one way is we can take a look at places in the world where people are still doing very much as they had for thousands of years. And just imagine if you were to wake up here. This is Northern Africa and you had yourself a spear and all the skills that you would need as an individual to to live in that environment. Even as an individual there's with all those skills there's still one thing that you would really need in order to be able to survive. There's one thing more than anything else that you out there by yourself will hope to see coming across that horizon. Can anyone guess what that might be? Another person exactly because our culture does more for us than just increase the manpower. It increases over time our accumulated knowledge and wisdom if you want to call it of how to survive. So if you were to be lucky enough to run into some people here. This is one of the very common strategies you would see throughout North Africa because North Africa is primarily grassy Savannah. And a long ago people discovered that if we hunted animals and killed them and ate them outright we had more work to do we'd have to go hunt down another animal. But a great strategy is to sort of use a renewable resource of dairy and they also use blood. And so it's been a very successful strategy this strategy of dairy and it's not something that you could do unless you ran into another group of people who were doing it. Because of the you know the animals had to be domesticated and there's lots of other skills and knowledge and know how and what to do with the extra. So this is a very successful strategy it may not be the original human strategy hunting and gathering but it's been extraordinarily successful. And you know it's successful because when you go here to places like this you see that the elderly people are active. Where women are fertile their children are smart and strong and their babies are fat and happy. So we need to collect as much of this kind of data as we can to understand more details about the primal sub strategies that people have used so that we can copy them. So the idea that I had in writing our book deep nutrition was to look for as many strategies as I could to see if there were patterns. Because if there was a sub strategy that emerged over and over and indeed if it was present everywhere then that strongly suggests it's an essential sub strategy. So what my husband and I did in writing the book was we we utilize the fact that we have at our disposal another kind of window into the past that we can all use to better understand what people used to do. And that is traditional culinary practice. So we scoured spent thousands of hours between two of us scouring old cookbooks anthropological books around food ways that's the how people survived how people fed themselves. This clinic is where I used to work in Hawaii and I spoke with dozens and dozens of my elderly patients who grew up in a self sufficient Hawaii with no electricity and had to do everything themselves. And travel shows are also another really fun entertaining way of learning from other cultures. So what we found were that these four sub strategies appeared everywhere and they are key to our ability to get as much nutrition as possible from the environment in as much variety as possible while avoiding toxins. They all work in synergy to keep us healthy but each has specific benefits. Fresh food gives you antioxidants better than anything else. And so by fresh because because heating heating food cooking food destroys nutrients. And fresh vegetables in particular now are sort of an antioxidant antidote to the fact that we cook much of our meat protein and protein products and our other foods. So we those cooking also doesn't just destroy nutrition. It also creates toxins and we need more help from the antioxidant department to deal with that. And if we don't get enough then we develop inflammatory diseases particularly heart disease blood clots arthritis in the joints. Another universal sub strategy was the use of fermentation and sprouting to preserve extra food for later and to use nature to get us access easier access to some of these plant foods that are that are difficult to get like seeds particularly. So fermentation of course now we've got several lectures here that are going to go into the benefits of probiotics. So I don't think I need to go into that detail but it was used basically because people didn't have refrigerators and how are they going to preserve like if they catch you know 100 fish running up a river. What are they going to do we don't want to go to waste you can't dry it all you don't always have enough smoke or enough enough wood around to make smoke meat as they call it in Hawaii. So you have to find some other strategy and it turns out fermentation was a great strategy. And the sprouting actually neutralizes a lot of the anti nutrients that are put that nature has in the seed in order to keep the seed from being eaten or being going rotten. So those anti nutrients have a function to help preserve the dormant state and then when you sprout it you naturally neutralize a lot of them and you also reduce the carbohydrate content and increase nutrient content because the nutrients get converted from carb to more nutrients. So and the third strategy is meat on the bone. This means meat when you cook your meat you want to make sure to use skin as much as the fat is there naturally and bone particularly the skin and the bone deliver nutrients called glycosaminoglycans which actually act as growth factors for all of our collagenous tissues. And without them we develop more problems with our collagen. We have thinning skin we get arthritis again in the joints and we can get aneurysms in the blood vessels which are where blood vessels actually develop weak patches and will bleed and kill people. And then finally the most intense and I'm not going to say delicious because I'd be probably lying. The third strategy is to utilize all of the nutrients packed into organ meats. And so each organ and an animal's bodies is actually sort of a storage depot for a different variety a unique profile of nutrients. And these are some of the most nutrient intense things we can eat liver or kidneys other organs that you know very few people in this country have this skills anymore to produce on their own. And without them we get lots of vitamin and mineral deficiency diseases particularly affecting the nerve tissue and bone marrow. And so this is a brief summary of key human dietary sub strategies from the beginning to now. So I don't know exactly where all the four pillars were introduced but it must have been a long time ago because they are now present all over the globe. But our health problem started right there where we severed our ties to tradition. We gave up on all that knowledge and we introduced two things the shopping and the snacking. So these are the shopping strategy was instead of producing your own food you rely on somebody else to do it. And so it's unknown quality and it tends to be much higher in starch because starch sits on a shelf easy to transport. It's easy to grow not hard to do very conducive to monoculture cropping. And we've introduced foods that are actually processed themselves so that they're no longer edible molecules anymore. So that have lots of trans fats and you know stuff our body just totally doesn't have any use for and is bad for us. So in our book the final the final part of this here is avoiding foods that are toxic to you. And in our book Deep Nutrition we talk about only two toxins these these two foods that are very high in carbohydrate and sugar and have the ability to affect our blood sugar level and the 20 hormones that our body needs to regulate blood sugar and keep it in a healthy healthy zone. Which is ideally between 75 and 85 while we're fasted and not very many of my patients are there. You know by the time somebody makes it to 25 35 in this country they already are showing early signs of insulin resistance. And then the vegetable oils which are does anybody not know what they are. Good you guys are brilliant. RBD stands for refined bleached deodorized. So these are flavorless cooking oils that are super duper cheap and you're going to get them almost in all restaurants unfortunately. So these two together can comprise somewhere between 50 and 80 percent of the average Americans caloric intake so they are not at all insignificant. And it's that's important to me because if we're going to make a claim that somebody needs to avoid a given food that is that is going to have a profound effect on their emotional relationship with that food possibly forever depending how much they listen to us. They're either going to feel really good for avoiding it even though they're eating other stuff that's not not good for them. This is what happened with a low fat. Right. It's low fat. It must be good for me. Or they're going to feel really bad because they really like like doing it. And they're going to remember your voice in their head and I said oh you shouldn't eat that thing. So it requires that's why we're very cautious. We do not tell people in our books don't eat gluten. We do not tell people in our books don't have white potatoes because that is something that is a more personal thing. These the two toxins that we talk about are bad for everyone and you really have to be very scientific when you're going to take something out of your diet. If you know if you find or when you're going to tell somebody to take something out of their diet that you have to do what's called an elimination diet. That is the gold standard for identifying whether or not you have a problem with a given food or food compound. And I see a lot of people not doing that and just jumping to the conclusion that they need to get gluten out of their diet. And then when they go out to eat somewhere and they have this terrible reaction they assume well somebody somehow snuck gluten into my bacon and hash browns. That must have been it because I know I know I have a terrible reaction to gluten because whenever I have bacon and hash browns which by the way don't have any business having any gluten in there. I have a major problem. So we need to be more scientific I think about having people stay away from these things and help them out with that but help them not see not lose sight of the forest for the trees. And the forest I think right now is being a little bit ignored the particularly the vegetable oils but I do see a lot of people eating way more fruit than healthy. And I would just want to give you a short little story about Fruit Loops to give you an example of how how hard it is for people to take the message that they should cut something out of their diet. Seriously especially when it's going against something they believe in. So one of my favorite Lakers love Fruit Loops not going to say his name give him a pseudonym jumpy G will call him to protect his identity. And I told him you know I didn't think that was the healthiest way to start his breakfast. And he was so upset about the fact that we took the Fruit Loops off of the the table and the little room everybody's together and put it up on the shelf where it wasn't like go ahead have Fruit Loops. We wanted to try to make it just a little bit like why don't you try some of this other good stuff we're making for you. And he complained about that to everyone on the team and it was a perfect timing to because they were doing very badly. So like just the fact that I had never made my case to him that sugar wasn't healthy. He didn't really get the backstory but he knew that I was telling him something that was opposite of what he'd heard and you know from the TV shows and all the other sports nutritionists. So he he just turned off to the entire pro nutrition program that we've created for the rest of that year. So it's we have to be very careful when we're telling somebody to avoid foods because we just have to respect that it's quite an invasion of their personal thought process around food. And you know we really need to make sure we have our ducks in a row science wise when it's going up against the nutritional mainstream. And so now I have a test here. This is ordinary brown bread. Can you it's not gluten free by any means it's not even sprouted. Can anyone imagine any circumstance in which eating ordinary bread is going to be fulfilling the primal directive of getting as much nutrient as possible and as much variety as possible while avoiding toxins. I'll give go. Yes. What would what circumstance. Yes. Oh yes. Well no very good. Good for you. Fine. Exactly. Well if you are in for example prison right because if you have no other choice and you're going to starve to death this is fulfilling the primal directive. And in fact Eddie is a comedian made a very funny skit about this which I just want to share with you. You know because cake or death that's a pretty easy question. Anyone can answer that cake or death. Cake please. Cake. Thanks very much. Very nice. Your cake or death cake for me too please. Give him cake to run out of cake at this rate. That's all. So thank you so much. I'm sorry I went over a little bit but if anybody has any questions I'll be here because I'm not planning on eating lunch. Thank you very much.