Ancestral Diet Dishonesty ~ AHS14 Edition ~ Derectumfying Paleoism ~ Part II

In Part I, I discussed the first three of four talks at the recent Ancestral Health Symposium that were actually devoted to -- or supposed to be in some fashion -- "ancestral diets".  The IHC has a long history of co-opting select aspects of such dietary practices to fit the current interpretation of the hunter-gatherer-inspired way.  If the deluge of cookbooks from all corners are any indication, there will be no letting up soon of the trend to cauliflowpaleoize all "inferior" but nonetheless delicious and often cultural staple foods.   But now, in a most bizarre twist, we've reached the point where imposing "paleofied" versions of ancestral diets on these very peoples went off without a hitch, or seemingly any notice of the supreme irony of it all.

This assault on ancient humanity was culminated in a presentation by Gideon Mailer, PhD.  I took a screenshot of his title slide for visual impact here.  So that you won't need to clienlarge, the credo below the AHS peartichocock (I think it looks like a cross between an artichoke and a peacock) reads:  "the human ecological niche and modern health" .

When the AHS Program was first announced and I read the abstract for this talk, I knew folks were in for a load of garbage.  

How can a professor in the humanities - and not the sciences - raise awareness about ancestral health principles within a large public research institution? How can young college students - many from wheat/soy-growing economies - learn about ancestral health principles through the early-US history survey course? And why is Minnesota an ideal testing ground? The University of Minnesota system benefits from public-private partnerships between its scientific research and agricultural grain interests. Yet two prominent groups in the state - Scandinavian descendants and Native Americans - are particularly amenable to ancestral health principles. By studying early-American history (c.1400-1900) many of these and other groups might "Decolonize the Diet", moving away from grains, legumes, and a low-fat paradigm - a new and exciting project uniting the historical study of early America and contemporary health initiatives in the Great Lakes region.

Now, I realize that symposia organizers don't necessarily know the full content of each presentation, but AHS has always fancied itself to be modeled after academic conferences.    They went so far as to go back on their terms for speaking in 2013 in the name of this aspiration.**   Is the collective knowledge of the organizers and arbiters of content in this organization so lacking that not a one recognized off-the-bat how ridiculous the above sounds?   It doesn't say much for the name of their organization that their ideas about various "poster cultures" seem limited to that related by Gary Taubes in Good Calories, Bad Calories , and recently regurgitated by Nina Teicholz in The Big Fat Surprise.

Revisiting Teicholz/BFS and those amenable Native Americans:

Meanwhile, the Native Americans of the Southwest were observed between 1898 and 1905 by the physician-turned-anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička, who wrote up his observations in a 460-page report for the Smithsonian Institute. The Native Americans he visited were eating a diet of predominantly meat, mainly from buffalo, yet, as Hrdlička observed, they seemed to be spectacularly healthy and lived to a ripe old age. The incidence of centenarians among these Native Americans was, according to the 1900 US Census, 224 per million men and 254 per million women, compared to only 3 and 6 per million among men and women in the white population. Although Hrdlička noted that these numbers were probably not wholly accurate, he wrote that “no error could account for the extreme disproportion of centenarians observed.” Among the elderly he met of age ninety and up, “not one of these was either much demented or helpless.”

Hrdlička was further struck by the complete absence of chronic disease among the entire Indian population he saw. “Malignant diseases,” he wrote, “if they exist at all— that they do would be difficult to doubt— must be extremely rare .” He was told of “tumors” and saw several cases of the fibroid variety, but never came across a clear case of any other kind of tumor, nor any cancer. Hrdlička wrote that he saw only three cases of heart disease among more than two thousand Native Americans examined, and “not one pronounced instance” of atherosclerosis (buildup of plaque in the arteries). Varicose veins were rare. Nor did he observe cases of appendicitis, peritonitis , ulcer of the stomach, nor any “grave disease” of the liver. Although we cannot assume that meat eating was responsible for their good health and long life, it would be logical to conclude that a dependence on meat in no way impaired good health. {Kindle Locations 305-318}

This was one of the first transgressions of hers that I caught, and yet when I requested the page number in Hrdlicka's book on Twitter I was met with the usual it's in the book, buy it retort ... followed in short order with being called a troll and blocked.  Well, yes, in the citation stylings of her mentor and friend Gary Taubes, one can scan the notes to find the references.  Here ya go:

wrote up his observations in a 460-page report: Aleš Hrdlička, Physiological and Medical Observations among the Indians of Southwestern United States and Northern Mexico, Smithsonian Institution Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 34 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1908).

were eating a diet predominantly of meat: Joseph M. Marshall III, The Day the World Ended at Little Bighorn: A Lakota History (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).

“no error could account for”: Hrdlička, Physiological and Medical Observations, 40– 41.

“not one of these . . . demented or helpless”: Ibid., 158. {KL 6173-6179}

There is no ambiguity in the paragraph in her text attributing the purported buffalo-meat dominated diet of the Native Americans to Hrdlicka's observation.    If nothing else this is journalistic malfeasance, but to the point of this post, the degree of meat eating is the stuff of paleo-lore and the tales of Enig and Fallon (in the name of Weston A. Price).  (More here, anyone interested can read Hrdlicka's book for FREE on Google)

Surely Gideon Mailer PhD American History knows better?

Mailer's academic position is featured in his bio on the AHS site, and his talk is about a proposed college credit course to be given at that very institution, therefore I include his bio from his university as it provides a bit more information on his background.

Gideon Mailer came to the University of Minnesota system from the University of Cambridge, UK. From 2008-2012 he was an elected fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge, where he lectured and supervised in American and Atlantic history 1600-1865 and in the history of intellectual thought. Before his JRF at St. John’s, Cambridge, he took his PhD (2008, supervised by Betty Wood), MA, and BA (hons) (Double-First Class) from Cambridge. His publications include a book on the American revolutionary John Witherspoon and the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment on the American Revolution, as well as numerous articles on religion in Colonial America. He is currently working on a book considering moral philosophy and the question of American slavery from the Colonial period to the Civil War.

OK ... so there's nothing there that would even indicate an interest in, or special knowledge of the Minnesota area or the history thereof.  But one might presume that a historian would be interested in incorporating some historical facts and citations in their presentation, no?  Sorry.  You'll be disappointed, though he did have a few references on the slides that will be of interest later.  Whatever intellectual skills this man has in his field, he appears to have made little effort to apply them to his study of the history, in particular of diets, of the  Minnesota region.  Perhaps he, too, has only read the Marshall book?  (Note:  I have not, I'm not even sure if the book is accurately cited in TBFS.)  

A Summary of 

Teaching Early US History 

in the Home of Ancel Keys

I suppose before going on further I should encourage you to watch for yourself.  OK ... consider yourselves encouraged ;-)  I'll embed the video at the end.

The Dark Keys Legacy

The video begins with informing us that Mailer hails from the same hallowed halls strolled through by Charles Darwin himself.  Since then, apparently, he's migrated to the land of mostly shame -- Minnesota:

" ... home of Ancel Keys, progenitor of the failed lipid hypothesis, yada yada yada, the Seven Countries Study, we all know how bad that was ..."

Seriously folks, if at this point anyone reading this is still under the misapprehension that Ancel Benjamin Keys was a bad scientist, I am going to have to open up a throttling wing here at the Asylum.  You are either ignorant of the man's work, or an idiot.  There, I said it.  Seriously.  The man's scientific credentials stand on their own as it is.  But if you believe in "let food be thy medicine", or that "you should know your insert pet biomarker here, as it is the best indicator of your health", or even just that degenerating health and disease are not forgone conclusions of aging, Keys is your guy.  Sorry for your lots ... longer version here.

Keys' legacy in Minnesota and the university is a source of pride Gideon, not shame.  You are a disgrace to even imply otherwise.  And that holds even if every last shred of the diet-lipid-heart hypotheses were shown to be completely wrong -- which they are simply not.  Just so that it's not all Keys' work, Mailer throws in Alexander Fleming used antibiotics to fatten animals and even considering giving penicillin to babies.   Keys and Fleming are the "darker aspects" of the University's history where public health is concerned.  I think he mixed up his slides a bit as he cited as problematic the initiatives to promote grains at the university.

Ahhh but there's good!  Positive aspects are there and they can be taught in a US history course!

• Mayo Clinic:  Helped to pioneer ketogenic diets for treatment for epilepsy.  

"they don't always promote a high carb - low fat paradigm"

• Thousand Hills Cattle Company - grassfed beef
• And, of course, Nora Gedgaudas!  Seriously Gideon??

Let me get this straight.  An academic just cited Nora Gedgaudas, excuse me the "great and good Nora Gedgaudas",  as a positive aspect of public health research in the state of Minnesota.  Oh my, oh my.   I guess it was time for more illustrations because at this point Mailer puts up another caricature drawn by his partner ... this time of Robb Wolf.  What relevance this has to his talk escapes me, but here you go.  

I guess Mailer has an inside track to Robb, as readers here are aware of just how difficult it is to get Robb to talk about the actual diet implemented in the Reno911 program.  The only paleo diet trial that I'm aware of that may have included butter was conducted by Trexler as part of his studies at Ohio State.  All of the rest have been low saturated fat, limited added fats of olive and canola oil (yes, canola oil), don't include many eggs, and include lean meats only.  But along with this slide, Mailer claims that Wolf has been trying to bring ancestral principles into public communities.  Dairy is not paleo.  Dairy is not something I've seen mentioned in any of the literature I've read about the diets of various tribes of Native Americans.  Even the Masai don't eat butter and drink cream, they drink milk.    Oh well ...

Mailer returns to discussing how he can bring his misinformation campaign to the masses through the mouthpiece of his large public research institution.  Oh, he doesn't phrase it that way, he called it promoting ancestral health principles, but after listening to the entire talk, I think my description is far more apt.  Mailer briefly mentions the Scandinavians before moving on to how a survey of American history class open to all majors could further ancestral health principles.  I'll save that part for the end of this post.  

American Indian History @ U of Minnesota

As the talk progresses, Mailer speaks of promoting ancestral health principles through the study of American history.  A course, that would be open to bio majors and engineers and the like.    One would be hard pressed to imagine that American Indian (as is the preferred term of the tribes of that region apparently) history is not taught at UMinn.    There's a whole department it turns out:  University of Minnesota Department of American Indian Studies.  While this program seems to focus much more on language and such, this isn't just a bunch of white peeps sitting around discussing these peoples.  

The department's base of formally educated and institutionally trained academicians is being supplemented increasingly by community resource people, including traditional leaders, elders and American Indian artists, writers, film makers, and musicians. Incorporation of such contributors into the teaching program acknowledges unique cultural wisdom and skills that are not typically available in formal, western institutions, but that are nonetheless essential to an understanding of American Indian cultures.

While I don't find dietary lifestyle as a course per se, it would be difficult to imagine that the topic doesn't come up in the curriculum.  ... although I'm sure some British fan of Nora Gedgaudas and Robb Wolf is imminently more qualified to establish a course promoting their "ancestral ways" ... right?   One into which he hopes to incorporate up-to-date research from the clinical scientific literature ... You will have to color me totally jaded at this point, because after viewing this video, I'm truly at a loss of the purpose of this so-called ancestral health movement.  

Colonization & Shifting Timelines

At around the 7 minute mark, Mailer discusses the historical hypotheses surrounding the demise of indigenous populations in North America.  One prevailing thought was that of "biological exchange" whereby the Europeans brought with them pathogens to which the native populations had no immunity.   Whether or not this is correct, what relevance does this really have to the relatively modern day health plight of these communities?  I fail to see the relevance here.  

In all of the ancestral health community narratives, these populations were "sprightly", fit, lean, ripped, healthy up until the turn of the 20th century in many cases.  After all, Hrdlicka's observations were made in the very early 1900s.  Beverly Hungry Wolf, whose book is relied heavily upon by Enig & Fallon in Guts and Grease, also spoke of the late 1800s and turn of the century.   And let's also not forget Weston A. Price's own observations of both isolated vs. heavily impacted native American cultures, the healthy ones being those of the Pacific northwest.   Mailer himself puts 1900 as the end of the colonization, so while these tribes were clearly impacted by that point, these accounts and descriptions tend to be of traditional practices.

So my point being, although there may have been some contamination and/or displacement, it is not the cultures who had already suffered greatly at the hand of the white man that are being held up as pinnacles of ancestral health within the community.   It is the ones who largely escaped the impacts of colonization until relatively late in the game, that are.  And it is in those cultures where we've seen the relatively modern replacing of the traditional diet with the "white man" evils, which also happen to be white:  sugar and flour ... nevermind the refined fats.  

So Mailer launches into an account of the wars and how the Indians attacked livestock.

In terms of ancestral health, what is the relevance here?  So he could get in a Joel Salatan name drop??  He's back to infectious diseases which the Indians apparently knew were harbored by concentrated animals like cattle.  This on the heels of telling us that disease wasn't the major issue.  I guess he meant disease spread through humans?   He's also "all over the map" here as last I checked, New England borders the Atlantic.    I think we were a ways before CAFO beef at this point ...

But What of Ancestral Diets?

Mailer next makes a most amazing statement, accompanied by the slide shown.

"cattle gets in the way of traditional diets"

What was that again about the grass-fed beef company being the pride of Minnesota?  Remind me about where butter comes from?  Perhaps the paleos should repeat the above the next time they plop a wad of butter on their ribeye!  

He's again "all over the map" as the top reference is referring to the diets of the desert Southwest, but he does specify that he is talking all over what is now the United States.  Still, the gist is that the enclosures for domesticated cattle created physical barriers to hunting of fatty meats ... and of gathering.    I'll circle back to the fatty meats part in a bit, but what of this gathering?

Here Gideon gives yet another shout out to the "ancestral community" when he presents the above foods as what "some in the community" would call "safe starches".  I think it is time to banish the term "safe starches" from the nutritional lexicon.  It is a term invented and defined by Paul Jaminet based on rather dubious research and evidence.  Of the specific foods mentioned in the first source, tepary beans and mesquite pods would be classified as toxic legumes.  Legumes are widely considered "not paleo" by that dominating wing of the ancestral community.    Indeed, in his talk abstract, Gideon specifically mentions moving away from grains and legumes.   In the talk, however, with the above on the screen, he says that moving away from these foods the health and fertility of a population goes down.   Further, he specifically mentions acorns and tubers, which were part of the ancestral diet in the region, but unfortunately didn't make his slides.  Do you detect any awareness of this conflict in his demeanor?  I don't.

So as to the fatty meats, the next slide lists game and fish, in the case of fish, particularly more fatty cold water variety.  And there's a reason why.  He cites three references on these slides:

1.  R. Cowen.  Seeds of protection: ancestral menus may hold a message for diabetes-prone descendants.  (This article also cites research done in Austrailia by Janette Brand and colleagues - presumably before she became Jenny Brand-Miller of glycemic index fame.  This article is dated a bit later, but discusses several foods native to the Pima tribe).   LOCATION:  Southwest US

2.  Richard Daly.  Our Box Was Full: An Ethnography for the Delgamuukw Plaintiff.  I cannot find this online, but did find this book review.  This is about an historical land dispute case including claims over hunting and fishing grounds.  It wouldn't be expected to provide a huge amount of detail on amounts and methods, etc.   LOCATION:  Pacific Northwest, slightly inland British Columbia

3.  Beverly Hungry Wolf.  The Ways of My Grandmother.  This is excerpted quite a bit in the two WAPF links (here and here).   Hungry Wolf is Blackfoot which have a tribe in Montana and several in Canada where she is from.    LOCATION:  Alberta, Canada

What is emerging here is that even on just this northern continent alone, any attempt to define some "ancestral" diet would be futile.  I'm also going to point out something that has been a long running narrative in this community.  On the next slide, Mailer claims that the diet was High Fat.

First off, if dried fat was mixed with dried meat ... then as one might expect, the game meat was rather lean.  Taking special efforts to preserve this calorie source doesn't mean it was abundant, indeed it could indicate it was rather the more scarce.  There's still no mention of ANY dairy fat consumption.  Lastly, with the exception of brain and intestines, organ meats are NOT fatty.  Wild animals don't develop NAFLD fer cryin' out loud.  Go to any nutrition data base and scope out liver, kidney and heart.  It's not fatty even for the domesticated version.   But he gets this idea, apparently, from the WAPF-version of Prices' work, which we learn as he launches into the tangent of activator X, vitamin K2.    But this is Beverly Hungry Wolf's account!  What of even the Pacific Northwest?  The fatty acid profile of cold water fish and cold water mammals is vastly different from that in warmer and fresh waters, and vastly different from land mammals.   Which, incidentally he weaves into the hypothesis that colonization deprived these peoples of access to ooligan grease from fish eggs (his description).    Mailer kind of skips through the next slide where mention of caribou being too lean sometimes is mentioned, along with a seasonal hunting pattern where they avoided hunting lean spring animals.  What, then, did they eat in the spring??   How common were these old animals with their saturated fat back slab?   Why so eager to acknowledge seasonality of plants and yet presume fatty animals were available for the taking year round?  Mailer does acknowledge this seasonality later in the talk (alongside a cartoon of Mark Sisson), but the community never seems to pay much attention to this.  There is this notion that fatty wild animals were readily available in the winter, when we know that "rabbit starvation" was more than just a few days of nausea from protein excess "endured" by Vilhjalmur Stefansson in Bellevue hospital.

Starch!! (and Peer Review)

So Mailer does eventually make it back around to starches, wherein he references again the foods of the Pima in the Southwest and citing some research regarding the lower glycemic index of these foods.  The odd thing about this is that glycemic index has largely been a bust in the clinical research.  Sure, isolated doses of various foods elicit a different glucose and insulin response compared with white bread, but "modern" low-GI diets don't fair all that well.  And we are talking foods that are pariahs in the paleo community.  I just checked, and acorns are an omega six bomb (6 grams per 100 gram serving, roughly 20% fat from O6-PUFA) so we have an ancestral toxin cleanup needed on slide ## - you can count!   One can only hope that the MUFA saves the acorn from certain dismissal as it is deficient in prized saturates.   /sarcasm

Of course he must touch on resistant starch, which ... ahem ... legumes are again a good source of.  Too bad they're inferior and toxic foods for the human.

Rather than the cartoon on the left where Paul Jaminet is depicted giving the starches a thumbs up -- though Mailer does say Paul would probably not be happy with the corn, he would be happy with the rest.  Sorry, nope.  TOXIC!!

Finally Back in Minnesota!!

Mailer finally refers to some local ancestral foods, such as the "lower glycemic" wild rice in Minnesota.   I found this source that reports wild rice has a GI of  57 (compared with Google reporting 64 for white rice, and  55 for brown).  However safe starch is not about whole food, processing or glycemic index Gideon.  Brown rice is no good, and I can only imagine the horror of wild rice.  Judging from the cooking time, it likely has more of the stuff that contains phytates and other lurking toxic killers.  WAPF lists wild rice flour at about half the phytate content of brown rice, but its likely not whole rice used in the flour.   And besides, Mark Sisson thinks it's toxic too.

If you’re willing and able to figure out a way to soak and ferment wild rice while retaining all nutrients and minerals and discarding the antinutrients, it’s probably not such a bad option for a post-glycolitic workout carb.

I haven't read anything about soaking and fermenting on the various websites of tribes of this region.  Must not be a primal food I suppose.   Gideon brings back up the acorn for its resistant starch content.   Toxins toxins everywhere is all I keep thinking of though.   Whatever good about the type of starch, would be more than diminished by the O6-PUFA content.  Nevermind that acorn and venison were frequently stewed together, at least one reason for which was likely to complement the lean nature of the game meat.  But the gut biome .....    Before moving on, Mailer slips in that there is controversial literature demonstrating that maize had negatively impacted the health of Indians predating colonization.    They would make sure to discuss that in his history class!!  The whole thing against corn seems to be rooted in politics over subsidies, GMO and corn oil.  None of which have a darned thing to do with the fact that maize/corn is probably as close as you'll get to a near universally consumed food for those indigenous to this hemisphere.  

And Now We Can Hypothesize about Ketosis!

So the next slide launches into the hypothesis of seasonal ketosis.  This appears to be inserting another opportunity to name drop -- this time Ben Greenfield and his great keto Ironman "experiment".  

If there was ever ketosis going on in ancestral times, it was due to seasonal starvation or periods of famine due to droughts and such, not a bunch of cave men swigging fat soup to wash down their 80% fat meals of meat and marrow ... and certainly not one fueled by coconut oil.  Indeed it is only the Inuit and other extreme northern peoples who even appear to consume a VLC diet, and even they aren't ketotic due to the high protein content of their diets.    But as with Teicholz, we are led to believe that all of these more northern tribes lived in carbohydrate scarcity, at least in the winters.   But Jimmy Moore might be happy with such a course!  (Give me a break)  If these peoples were in ketosis it was to prevent lean mass and organ breakdown leading to organ failure and death ... not because they were long and slow moving fat burning machines like Ben!!

But this ketosis hypothesis is highly unlikely to hold up.   As the "Sioux Chef" mentions in the NPR article I linked to in Part I, preservation was the name of the game, seemingly during all seasons.  Part of the reason, perhaps, that grains and legumes WERE a part of just about every ancestral American diet is that they preserve so well.   But there is another major tribe in the Minnesota region, the Ojibwe.   It is one of the languages taught in the American Indian Studies curriculum at UMinn.    For all the talk of the "amenable" cultures of his adopted home, Gideon pays little attention to the ancestral health -- historical or otherwise -- of the two major tribes in the region (the other being the Sioux or Dakota).   In the end, I think this is because the actual diets of these tribes doesn't fit the paleo narrative despite being more hunter-y than some others.

Here are a couple of links:

Native American Food (this one covers more than just Minnesota, but also at the end contains many more links to specifics.

History of Minnesota Indians

The Most Evil of All -- Fructose!!!!!

Mailer's talk omitted the most favorite carbohydrate of all to the Ojibwe -- maple sugar!  It's not difficult to find accounts of this.  Perhaps rather than a Perfect Health Diet retreat, Jimmy can go to sugaring camp next year!!   

This PDF is aimed at children (and this one even more so), but:

In spring Ojibwe families gathered in a sugar bush, a forest with lots of maple trees. They needed to collect about 40 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup and even more to make maple sugar. They hollowed out a log and filled it with maple sap. They heated rocks in a fire, then dropped them into the trough to boil the sap. The sap had to boil for many hours until it thickened into syrup and eventually turned into a light brown sugar. Sugar was easier to keep and carry than syrup. One family might pack out hundreds of pounds of sugar from the sugar bush every spring.

For the Ojibwe, maple sugar could mean the difference between life and death. People sometimes went hungry in winter, and maple sugar—saved from the previous spring—provided calories and nutrients.

Maple sugar and syrup have been found to be “super foods” that fight disease.

Oh my!  LOOK at all those TOXIC starches!!

Think they ever consumed more than 25 grams of fructose per day?  (I note also from the first PDF, the rather impressive wild rice harvests.  This notion that grains and so-called pseudograins like amaranth and buckwheat would be too meager in size and require too much work to gather nutrition from is quite silly when you know some facts.)

True Decolonizing & Real Ancestral Diets

Mailer hands out several nods to Native Paleo during the talk, as if it is on par with so many other programs out there designed to revive, revert and educate regarding ancestral ways of these various peoples.  For starters, as Gideon seems to acknowledge on some level, we aren't talking about one people or one diet.  We aren't even talking about the same people, diets and customs in seemingly the same geographical region or climatic environment.  Mailer cites a Michigan State program alongside Native Paleo?  Seriously??  He's getting pressed for time so he skips over the Pima programs.  These programs are NOT promoting a "paleo" diet that eschews grains and legumes, and is highly prejudiced against any starch and/or sugar consumption.  Check out the Master Food list of the Decolonizing the Diet Project! 

I fail to see how adding faddish confusion to the nutritional status of indigenous peoples does anything to improve their current status.  They are certainly not guinea pigs to be used in some great paleo experiment!  Their ancestors ate grains and legumes.  Lots of them.  Along with squashes and melons and berries and fruits all of which vary by region.  They even ate some refined foods -- although basic ones -- like rendered animal fats and maple syrup/sugar.  It also seems that when you have research being conducted in Australia on native foods from another continent and side of the equator, something is a bit amiss there.   I think this quote that I screen capped and tweeted out the other day is apt to include here.

I also believe that the purported health of these peoples when impacted minimally by colonists is far better evidence of what a healthy human diet ought to consist of (or at least can consist of) than the mangled ideas of physics and history majors.

Decolonizing the Amenable Scandinavians?

Three guesses who this is, and the first two don't count!  When I first read the abstract for this talk it sounded off.  How can you talk about decolonizing and the relatively late-comer Scandinavian immigrants in the same sentence?   One needs look no further than Wikipedia for this general info.  We're talking the mid to late 1800's here, and if we're talking about ancestral diets, the Swedes were colonizers, and Johnny-come-lately ones at that.

The only reason to mention the Scandinavians is because of the Swedish LCHF craze as depicted by Andreas Eenfeldt there.  One more name to drop!  Heck if I were Cate Shanahan I'd be mighty  annoyed that my work in nutritionally coaching the Lakers to rousing success was overlooked!  Oh ... and there's that butter again, that I've been NOT hearing anything about in any account of an American Indian diet, anywhere.    Butter is not paleo Gideon.  Dairy is not a native food of American Indians.  Butter is dairy fat.  You don't have to be a scientist or know much at all about nutrition to know this!!

But here's the part I find insulting to my own heritage.  Just because single digit percentages of Swedes are adopting the diet is no reason to presume that several generations of descendants from that country would be any more likely to jump on the fad wagon, right?   If we're going to talk ancestry and evolution and bygone historical eras, the Scandinavian story is fascinating, mysterious and controversial.  I came across some really interesting stuff over a year ago when looking into "real ancestral diets".  Perhaps one of these days I get around to writing about it.

This much I do know -- it is a further disgrace to all involved that this talk ends with a Swedish fad diet doctor on the screen.  But it is somehow fitting that this talk ended as disgracefully as it began with the bashing of Ancel Keys.  The Ancestral Health Society has a long, long way to go if they ever hope to be taken seriously outside the cultish community who seem obsessed with ideas, whatever the heck that means in the end.   I'm ever the more convinced that if you can't be serious when the big commercial names are kept away (no Sisson, no Wolf, no Hartwigs/Whole9), perhaps the goal is not really serious in nature after all.

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** In prior years, speakers did not pay admission to the conference in addition to being invited to a speaker dinner.  This was again the deal in 2013 when talks were accepted, and upon which potential speakers accepted their invitations.   About a month after that an email informing speakers that they would be expected to pay their way to attend as well was sent out.  I have no knowledge of whether this new policy remained in place for 2014.

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