2011-01-21 Loren Cordain PhD The Paleolithic Diet – Pros and Cons in the 21st Century
An Interview with Loren Cordain, PhD
January 21, 2011, By Kirkham R. Hamilton, PA-C
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KIRK HAMILTON: Hi, my name is Kirk Hamilton, your host of Staying Healthy Today, and our message is simple: To provide you credible, usable health information from interviews and educational resources to help you Stay and Be Well in the busy modern world. Please take a few moments before or after listening to this interview to browse through the Prescription2000.com website, the home of Staying Healthy Today Radio, for our free educational services.
Today's show topic is "Is the Paleolithic Diet the Optimal Diet in The 21st Century?" Our guest today is Dr. Loren Cordain, who received his PhD in health and physical education from the University of Utah in 1981. He has been a professor in the Department of Health and Exercise Science at Colorado State University since 1982. He is the best-selling author of The Paleo Diet, The Paleo Diet for Athletes, and The Dietary Cure for Acne.
Welcome Dr. Cordain. Thanks so much for being on the show today.
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Hi, Kirk. It's great to be here.
KIRK HAMILTON: You know I heard you speak at ACAM and obviously your books are very, very popular, and the topic is very popular and so I had some questions. I don't consider myself really the other side of the aisle though many people think of vegan as way different than what you are. But I don't perceive that as much. But I wanted to ask some questions about the Paleolithic diet and how it can be used in the modern day. And so first of all, when you say paleolithic diet are you saying the same thing as hunter-gatherer? Are those the same term?
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Well you know I think that in the popular vernacular it's kind of all melted into
one thing. It's the caveman diet, the Paleo diet, the paleolithic, the stone age diet. And obviously we simply
cannot eat the way in which our stone age ancestors ate, and you know precisely. And what we've tried to do is we've tried to emulate the nutritional characteristics of their diet with foods that are available in the supermarket. So we can get pretty close to the nutritional characteristics but I don't think a whole lot of your listeners would want to eat brains or gonads and all the other things. They ate the entire carcass of animals and we obviously - those types of wild animal foods are not available to most of us so we need to make do with the foods we can get in the supermarket. But we can get pretty close and so the nutritional requirements that we believe our stone age ancestors had we can get that within that ballpark with modern foods.
KIRK HAMILTON: And are those foods, and correct me if I'm wrong, meats, fruits, vegetables and some nuts and seeds in particular? Is that the basis?
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Pretty much. You know if you do your shopping in the outer aisles of the supermarket, you're 85% of the way there. So it's what most people would consider to be real foods or natural foods. Foods that spoil if you leave them out and you know foods that are living. So that's pretty much how our hunter-gatherer ancestors did it because they didn't have any storage, they didn't have any refrigeration. There was no processing, salt or preservatives. So they went out and they got fresh food on a pretty much daily basis and ate it as they plucked it.
KIRK HAMILTON: So out of those four or five foods, what is the percentage that makes the Paleo diet unique? I've heard you say, and correct me if I'm wrong, that 50%, 60% should be from animal foods? Is that correct? Of the calories?
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: We've done, Kirk, we've done analysis of 229 world's hunter- gatherers that we have data for and what it shows that whenever and wherever they could they would always eat more animal food than plant food. And there's a number of reasons for it. But that number translates to roughly 55 to 65% of the daily energy.
KIRK HAMILTON: As animal food.
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Yes.
KIRK HAMILTON: Well here's one of my premises, and it's this. That I think that whoever of us who are working in health should be encouraging a diet that hopefully prevents and reverses chronic disease, the diseases that are 75% of our healthcare budget, one. Two, it should be easily accessible. Three, it should do the least amount of damage to the environment. So in that light there's two questions. One is - are there hunter-gatherer populations that are living a very long time, functionally like the Blue Zone cultures that you hear about, 80, 90, 100 years of age, or are these hunter-gatherers just free of chronic disease but they die early so to speak?
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Well you know there's not a whole lot of hunter-gatherers left on the planet. Most of them are semi-Westernized and so the data that we have comes from groups that were collected in the 50s, 60s and 70s. And the type of information that you're asking for is what is referred to as life tables. And so it's not really appropriate to look at the average life span of a hunter-gatherer, because average doesn't tell us anything except for the average age of death. And that's what most people don't realize when you see your average life span is 25, well what are you talking about? Well you're talking about the average age of death. What's more important is to talk about the life span of the people that are living. And these are called life tables. And there's four life tables that I know of that exist in hunter-gatherer populations. And what we find is we find a distribution of all ages within that group. So yes the life, the average life span or the age of death may be fairly low. But the distribution of people living is similar to what we find in Western populations except that at the extremes there's a lot of death at childbirth and people don't make it much beyond their seventh or eighth decade. But the point is that those that do make it into old age, 60, 70s, and beyond, they don't exhibit any of the signs or symptoms of the health problems that we all have. They don't have high cholesterol, they're not overweight, they're not type 2 diabetes, they don't have osteoporosis, cancer is rare, heart disease is rare or nonexistent. So our point is that we need to take the best of their world and utilize it and leave the worst behind. And think about it. If you had to camp out for the rest of your lives, things that would take out hunter-gatherers, snake bites, accidents, you know hunting dangerous animals every day, is things we don't even think about. And so that's one reason why they're mortality rates were so high and their average life span was so low is because they died from things that we can't even imagine dying from.
KIRK HAMILTON: So is it your belief then that in the modern world you have access to creating a similar diet as the hunter-gatherer, but you also have the amenities of health care that might prevent those reasons for early death? So is it your belief that if people follow a modern hunter-gatherer diet with the modern amenities of being able to have good health care that you would live as long as let's say the Okinawan centenarians?
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Well you know I mean that's the hypothetical situation and we don't have any populations on the planet that are doing that now so until we do and you know that may - there's a young generation of people out there right now - the Paleo diet's become very very popular. It's really not a diet per se. It's actually a life style. And we have people that are in their 20s and 30s that I doubt are going to abandon this. Kind of like you know my generation of people that were doing the vegan thing back in the 60s. They're still doing it, those that are still alive. Many are having all kinds of health problems. But I suspect that in another thirty or forty years we will see exactly that kind of situation that you're asking for. And I suspect that that would be true. That this is the type of a diet that not only maximizes and optimizes health but it probably does the same for life span.
KIRK HAMILTON: Well see, well here's we have our friendly debate. So you have Blue Zone cultures, Sardinians in Italy, Okinawans in Okinawa and they eat grains. They eat - that's part of their diet. Now they also eat animal food. I'm the first one to admit that. Small amounts of animal food. But when you read their work, why do we go to a diet that has a theoretic longevity factor in it. Because we all want to prevent chronic disease and live functionally and healthy till the day we die, rectangularize the death curve it's called. So we already have models. If everybody does the Paleolithic diet which we don't know the end point, and, we'll get into the ecology thing, how are you going to feed 7 billion people 50 to 60% animal food without wreaking havoc on the environment? So I don't understand in my own view point - to me the models to look at would be the Blue Zone cultures. Study how they live, how they eat, how they socialize, and try and emulate those because they do have reduced chronic disease and they live a long time and they don't use a lot of health care resources. So that's the kind of confusing part I have with the Paleolithic approach. Is you know it helped us evolve, but does it help us in the 21st century 80, 90, 100 years of age because we have this huge population coming. So help me out with that.
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Well there's two, I think relevant points that you bring up and one is this, is this the diet that can feed 7 billion of us? Absolutely not. And I think that that's somewhat ironic, is that the diet that we are genetically adapted to, the diet that shaped the human genome, we are now - no longer most of the people on the planet can eat this diet. But having said that, what I can say is that in the United States and in Europe and in the Western world we're certainly not suffering from disease of under-consumption. We're suffering from disease of over-consumption. And most people in the United States that are the middle class or even moderate income can afford to eat in this manner and our healthcare costs for the diseases that are taking us out have become astronomical. So I think that in the long term, the additional monies that you spend for these types of foods particularly in the Western world where you can afford to pretty much eat anything you want it makes a lot of sense. For the remaining people in the world, it's an unfortunate situation that we're required to eat grains, we're required to eat legumes and those people rarely if ever get any meat in their diet and the epidemiology suggests that those folks don't live very well either. They have many, many health problems if you look at African countries and Asian countries where under-nourishment is rampant. So it's a different end of the spectrum. The other part of your question is well why shouldn't we eat in this Blue Zone manner is that I think that any time you try to second guess evolution, humans always end up on the short end of the stick. Is that there's a wisdom of evolution through natural selection about mechanisms that we are just barely beginning to understand. And so to take a human culture and say that that trumps the system in the process that all life on the planet evolved with, it really makes no sense.
KIRK HAMILTON: Well see this makes no sense to me. Hear me out. So one is we already have a success. A success is functional aging. That's what's going to keep our healthcare system and the world economies going. We've already seen those in the Blue Zones, number one. Number two, your Paleolithic diet has never been shown for longevity and that's what we're going to have whether we like it or not. We're either going to be -
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Well how can it? I mean that's my point, is how we can show it for longevity, so this concept has only been out for less than 20 years.
KIRK HAMILTON: Exactly my point. So my point is if we have lifestyles that have common themes that already work, why aren't we emulating them?
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Well how do we know they work? I mean I think that you can look at Okinawans, you can look at Japanese, you can look at many of these societies and one of the common characteristic is hypocaloric diet. I don't care what you eat, if you eat a hypocaloric diet you're gonna live longer. You're gonna reduce all kinds of health problems. And so this is one of the universal characteristics in the Blue Zone is that they're eating less calories. Once again, they have many health problems that you know show up in the curve. So my point is like for instance autoimmune disease. Okinawans aren't immune from this problem. Autoimmune disease is a devastating problem that afflicts between 5 to 8% of the population. And if you eat a diet that is characteristic of the Blue Zone, I can almost guarantee it's gonna make things worse.
KIRK HAMILTON: Well alright so let's be careful for a second here. Number one, there's a separation right now in Okinawa. They have the centenarians who lived the traditional way, who are living functionally and then they're gonna eventually die out at 80, 90, 100 years of age. And they also have an epidemic of our Western diseases in their children and grandchildren. There's a wonderful Sanjay Gupta CNN that I'll gladly send you - two YouTube's on that very topic where they're having epidemics because they're eating, not what your type of diet - your type of meat and vegetable diet. They're eating the fast-paced Western diet which has increased animal food, increased calories from fats and oils, increased refined carbohydrate, and this is the point I'd like to - that I think we're on common ground more than we're not. And you know when they set up the discussion at ACAM between you and Dr. Campbell who I've interviewed. It makes it sound like it's you know you're both on opposite ends of the spectrum. I think you can be healthy on both diets in my mind because one they're both nutrient dense diets. Now you used a term -
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Well I would disagree with you. First off, I would say if you think whole grains are nutrient dense, you need to go back and do your math because they're not.
KIRK HAMILTON: I know, but -
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: And we published a paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition which is the flagship nutritional journal in the world pointing out that whole grains end up if you look, depending on how you divide food groups, they either end up at the bottom or next to the bottom. So I think that that's -
KIRK HAMILTON: Hang on a second -
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: I think that that's a myth to say that whole grains are nutrient dense.
KIRK HAMILTON: Hang on a second. I didn't say the whole vegetarian diet was whole grains, so don't put me on that. I was going to say I reviewed your article in 2004 where you and Dr. O'Keefe made the term "breaditarian." And I will be the first one to admit anybody that eats a refined carbohydrate rich diet, or an unprocessed food diet whether they eat meat or whether they're a vegan they're gonna be sick. Okay. So I think we're on common ground there. Now -
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Well wait a minute. You're putting words in my mouth. Whether they eat meat or whether they eat refined grains, those two are not equivalent.
KIRK HAMILTON: No, no, no. What I'm saying - hang on a second - what I'm saying is if we - if anybody - if you have meat and refined carbohydrate and added fats and oils and sugars, the typical Western diet has a fair amount of animal food in it. And it also has all that other garbage which is not what you recommend. Okay. Yours is lean wild game, free range animals, you know fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds. What I'm saying is you use the term "breaditarian" in your article of you know junk food, people that eat plant food. I'm saying is if you eat very nutrient dense foods, fruits, vegetables, okay, and whole grains is part of that, I didn't say the whole thing, that is a nutrient dense diet. Okay.
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Well I would say that you're - no I would say that as soon as you put whole grains into the equation the diet if you're eating fresh fruits and vegetables and meats becomes less nutrient dense. And that is - that's math. Anybody can do it. You don't have to listen to me. You can have a computerized dietary analysis. Go ahead and put in 2200 calories and put in 1600 as fruits and veggies and you know 200 is meat or whatever you want, and then add in the grains and you will see that the overall nutrient density of your diet decreases and that's what decreases what we call in vitro. In vivo, it's actually even worse because whole grains contain anti-nutrients. They contain phytate. Phytic acid binds all the divalent ions so even on paper, even though your computerized dietary analysis says well it only decreases a little bit, in vivo the way the body handles things is that magnesium, iron, zinc, calcium, they all are not absorbed because they're bound to phytic acid.
KIRK HAMILTON: Okay.
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: So you need to understand the concept of anti-nutrients. And I think that's one of the problems that vegan, vegetarian people don't get is you haven't read the anti-nutrient literature.
KIRK HAMILTON: I've got you. I've got you.
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: So when you read the anti-nutrient literature, those things are not benign. They are - actually have characteristics that are harmful for us.
KIRK HAMILTON: We're talking to Dr. Loren Cordain, author of The Paleo Diet, The Paleo Diet for Athletes, and The Dietary Cure for Acne.
If grains were so evil, then every, and again I'm not talking about eating 90% of your diet as grains. Though there are some cultures that do.
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: I'm not talking about 90%. Let's look at the most recent data from Alessio Fasano's group at the University of Maryland. He just got a 45 million dollar grant. The largest grant in the history of the University of Maryland. He is the director of the Celiac Center at University of Maryland. The estimated percent of people with celiac disease in the US is 1%. The people with bad reactions to grain now amounts to 6 to 7% of the population. Nationwide that's 20 million people. So the notion that grains are a healthy food, particularly wheat, is absolutely contrary to what the most recent data is telling us. And if we want to get into the mechanisms, you know I don't know how sophisticated your audience are, but we can talk about the immunological mechanisms by which wheat causes problems in 20 million Americans.
KIRK HAMILTON: Okay. I gotcha. Alright. I take people off wheat. All right. But I have yet to see - maybe you can show me an epidemiologic study where they separate out whole grains and these people are less nutrient deprived or have more chronic disease. Let me put it that way.
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Well wait a minute. Let's talk about epidemiology. I'm a scientist at a division one research institute. And anybody who knows anything about science knows that epidemiology can never show cause and effect. It only shows relationships. There are three other procedures that scientists use to try to establish causality between diet and disease. And epidemiology can't do it. There's four different types of epidemiologic studies. The most powerful of which are prospective studies. You can spout epidemiology from now until tomorrow -
KIRK HAMILTON: Okay. Alright, hold on Dr. Cordain. All I would say to this is that number one is I haven't, I personally, have not seen a study where they separate out whole grains in a study and show increased risk to certain diseases. Now I am a very wheat - I take almost everybody off wheat and dairy as soon as they walk through the door because I've seen -
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Well good for you.
KIRK HAMILTON: I know, but you didn't give me a chance. I've seen that in 27 years of practice. You know there's things that happen. But again there're also cultures that live a long time that eat grains as part of their diet and so - and they live functionally. And that tells me something that they can't be all that evil. But let's move from there for a second because I want to get to another part that you said and I wanted to clarify this because I was a little confused on it.
So let's talk about the acid load of food. I think we might both agree we're on common ground that a more acidified diet leads to bone loss and some other things. Am I on the same page with you?
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Yep.
KIRK HAMILTON: Okay. And you said in your talk, and I know that grains are acid producers, but you made it sound like that they were the biggest acid producing things there and you never even mentioned meat in your ACAM study (talk).
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Well you know it's -
KIRK HAMILTON: And I just -
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: You know you can't just look at this uni-dimensionally. It's like it depends on the marker that you're using. If you're using acid based balance for bone mineral health, then you need to consider other factors. And when we look at meat, meat is very high in protein. And there's two things that meat does - is that it increases calcium absorption. And that's one of the problems with the early studies is that when we looked at acid based balance and we looked at meat, all we looked at was yes meat and protein increases calciuresis. Well it's kind of like looking at your bank account and only looking at how much money is coming in and not how much is going out. And when we finally got around to doing those studies in 2004 what we found is that yes indeed meat increases calciuresis because it's net acid producing, but it also increases calcium absorption. So that the net effect when we looked at both sides of the equation it actually increases calcium absorption, so it doesn't promote calcium loss. And secondly, meat elevates IgF-1. And IgF-1 promotes the growth of bone through osteocytes. So my point is that you know you can't look at it simplistically. You need to look at a bigger part of the picture. And what we've done now is that we have randomized controlled trials in women eating higher meat diets. Beth Dawson-Hughes and her group have shown that higher meat eaters have greater bone mineral density despite the net acid production. On the other hand, with grains we can't show that.
KIRK HAMILTON: So I understand what you're saying there because I was going to go over a list of foods in ranking order of acidity because that - you made that sweeping statement about grains being the most acid producing foods. You said that's one of the reasons we have this problem.
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Well you know I - I don't know where you got that. I mean I would go back to my scientific papers. Because you know it's difficult in a verbal presentation to get you know the detail where you want to be. So I would stand by what we say in our scientific articles but I don't know where you got that information.
KIRK HAMILTON: It was from the (your) ACAM lecture. But you know I'll go re-listen to it.
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Well you know we can rate. There's what's called the potential renal acid load of foods. And if you look at the potential renal acid load of foods, my colleague Tony Sebastian at the University of California in San Francisco has developed a system that I think is better than Remer and Manz. And so I would prefer using Sebastian's model than Remer and Manz's.
KIRK HAMILTON: Okay, because I - well that's what I sent you. It was a book out of another author, Amy Joy Lanou, who is probably on the other side of the aisle as you. She's a vegetarian. But she's written in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. She's a professor in nutrition. And she went through in her book, Building Better Bone Vitality, she lists the foods in 3.5 ounces and the acid load. And all I'm saying is that yeah grains are acidy, but meat are more acidy and -
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Well it's more important than that. We have to deal with IgF and we have to deal with both sides. If she's just looking at acid, that you can't look at. If bone mineral is the marker, that's an insufficient -
KIRK HAMILTON: I got it.
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Okay.
KIRK HAMILTON: Alright. I'm with you. So is there any studies that show the Paleo diet reversing severe atherosclerosis or is it - and I know you've probably had some anecdotal people go on meat and vegetables and -
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Well listen. You know, Kirk. First off you've got to understand that this concept, at least taken seriously, only dates back to 1985 to Boyd Eaton's classical paper in the New England Journal of Medicine. Scientists have only started to test this hypothesis in the last what two or three years. So we have four randomized control trials of this. Stefan Lindeberg at the University of Lund has done half of them. Lynda Fraseetto also at the University of California at San Francisco, is the only other - or the only American to have done one of these. And in all four of those cases every marker of cardiovascular health is improved. As a matter of fact it improved greater than the Mediterranean diet. So to date, particularly inflammatory markers, and that's one characteristic when you talk about Blue Zone is that you need to talk about the inflammatory markers of disease. You can't have cancer, you can't have atherosclerosis, you can't have heart disease and you can't have autoimmune disease without inflammation. So one of the goals of healthy diets that is just becoming apparent is we want to try to have a diet that is not pro-inflammatory.
KIRK HAMILTON: I totally agree with you but I - you're making it sound like you can't be a vegan and be on an anti-inflammatory diet. And that's the whole premise of Fleming's work, who is a cardiologist, Esselstyn, I mean -
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Well you know, let's look at the new data that's coming in. You know this - these ideas about vegetarianism and veganism have been around for 100 years or more. But the notion of what's really promoting health or promoting health and disease with diet we're only starting to get a handle on and this notion of inflammation is huge.
KIRK HAMILTON: I agree with you. I mean we're on the same page.
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: And so let me point out that in all likelihood high grain, high legume type diets are proinflammatory.
KIRK HAMILTON: That's not the case if it's a pure unrefined diet. Esselstyn has reversed atherosclerosis, Ornish has reversed atherosclerosis, and Ornish has done it in prostate cancer and I can tell you from clinically, I follow CRP (high sensitivity or hs-CRP) levels all the time and PSA levels.
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Well CRP isn't - you know I mean what you really need to look at, that's just a generalized marker of inflammation. That's kind of like doing surgery with a sledgehammer. What you need to look at, you need to look at specific inflammatory cytokines and those inflammatory cytokines and you need to look at the tissues that are generating them because it's a localized response so if you look at specific inflammatory cytokines it tells a different story than CRP.
KIRK HAMILTON: Okay. I've seen vegan diets and they're in the studies that reverse diabetes. The big killers that are going to kills us are heart disease, diabetes, obesity, okay. And I know you can do that with those diets. Unrefined non-bread, not breaditarian diets, which you so adequately talked about as you know as being junk food. So let's - I want to get, because I've got a couple of minutes left here and I thank you for your time. How are you - see if you're promoting this diet, again how are you going to feed the world on your diet? I don't understand it? When it's -
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: You know I've never said I'm gonna feed the world on my diet. You need to read my scientific papers. And I wrote a paper called "Cereal Grains: Humanity's Double-Edged Sword" (Simopoulos AP (ed): "Evolutionary Aspects of Nutrition and Health. Diet, Exercise, Genetics and Chronic Disease. World Rev Nutr Diet. Basel, Karger, 1999, vol 84, pp 19-73) and in the very first of the page, very first part of the paper, I said unfortunately we have walked down a road for which there is no return. And that's exactly what we've done when we decided to become agriculturists. We cannot feed 7 billion people on the planet on the diet that we are genetically adapted to and that's unfortunate. But once again my point is, is that your audience, the people in the United States right here are not suffering from diseases of under-consumption. They're all suffering from diseases of over-consumption. They're dying of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancer, pro-inflammatory diseases and those are direct result of the processed foods that are endemic in the Western world. There's a couple of approaches to healthy diet. The Paleo diet is one of them. Vegan vegetarian diet is better than the standard American diet. But over the long haul, over 20 or 30 or 40 years. These people end up with multiple health problems. And if you look at meta-analyses of vegan diets, if you know what a meta-analyses is. Is that it shows that they don't do any better from all cause mortality that people who eat the average American diet so the point is what - why should we do this?
KIRK HAMILTON: As a Seventh Day Adventist. I mean, they have --
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: That's right. My point is Seventh Day Adventists' overall mortality, if you look at the meta-analyses, American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 2003 show they don't do any better than anybody. They do a little bit better on heart disease, but other than that they die just as frequently from cancer and everything else that the rest of the population does.
KIRK HAMILTON: I don't know if that's quite the case but I -
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Email me and I'll send you the paper.
KIRK HAMILTON: I got it. I just watched the Blue Zone special on the Seventh Day Adventists okay. So again you can eat a junk food vegetarian diet just like you can eat a junk food meat and vegetable diet. That's for debate for another day.
So lastly you wrote a book on "the acne cure." Can you throw some light on that, of what you think causes acne and the best way to cure it.
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: Well we were actually the first research group in the world to reopen that question and to come up with the correct answer. We wrote a paper in the American Medical Association's flagship dermatology journal, the Archives of Dermatology, and what we did is we went down and we looked at the model of less Westernized people. We went down to the Ache hunter-gatherers in Paraguay. And what we found is - we followed them around. We did a longitudinal study with these folks. We followed them around for two years and we found that in the two year period, in a hundred people including about 20 adolescents, nobody had acne. Never developed a single zit. The other approach we took, we went down to an island off the coast of Papua, New Guinea, the Kitavan islanders. And we examined everybody in their little village of over 3000 people including over 300 teenagers and there wasn't a single acne in the entire population including adolescents. If you were to contrast the Western population in the US what you would find is that between 75 and 90% of all adolescents have acne. So when we found these just incredibly different numbers, we suspected then it had to be environmental. And so we kind of used that template, that evolutionary template. And we back- engineered the mechanism. And so once we had the mechanism back-engineered we published our results in a series of five or six papers and my colleague Neil Mann at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2008 published a paper in AJCN following pretty much what we had set to do except they didn't remove dairy from the diet. They had a low glycemic, high protein diet. And it was the first clinical study randomized control trial showing that acne symptoms improved. And I told Neil, I said listen that you would have probably had complete remission had you taken the dairy out of the diet. And the Harvard group, Walt Willett's group at Harvard School of Public Health, also their epidemiologic studies. And I don't hang my hat on any epidemiologic study, but they also support the notion that dairy products are pro acne. Mechanistically, we believe there's a couple of things going on there. One, high glycemic load carbohydrates set off an endocrine cascade that promote the molecular symptoms that cause acne, and dairy products do the same as well. They (dairy) also have a very high insulin response. That work comes out of our laboratory with a paradoxically low glycemic response, and there are hormones in milk that in some people get past the gut barrier and also promote acne.
KIRK HAMILTON: Well it's been a fast hour. I enjoyed it and I thank you for taking the time out of your busy day, Dr. Cordain. I really appreciate it.
DR. LOREN CORDAIN: You bet Kirk. Good luck to you and thanks for having me on your show.
KIRK HAMILTON: Okay. And I want to thank you, the audience, for listening to this edition of Staying Health Today Radio. And until next time, Stay and Be Well.
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