Conflicting Information

[drwilson5]

Hello, This is my first post and I wasn't sure what exact topic I should have posted this under. First off, I am a huge fan and have had much success with the Whole30 program, so please do not mistake this as an attempt to troll the program. My career as a graduate student will occasionally lead me across a paper that challenges the fundamentals of the program and I wanted to share one with the forum to get an outside opinion. I was just wondering if anyone else had read or heard anything about this and had a scientific opinion.

 

http://www.pnas.org/content/100/21/12045.short

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/3346666/Mystery-of-the-meat-eaters-molecule.html

 

Thanks!

[ultrarunnergirl]

I'm no expert on the subject, but it's interesting that they use chimpanzees as an example in the article. Both humans and chimpanzees eat meat, so this would seem to fly in the face of the conclusions of the study.

 

Chimpanzees do not seem to suffer from heart disease, cancers, rheumatoid arthritis or bronchial asthma - common conditions in humans. Nor do they get sick from the human malaria parasite, which uses sialic acid to latch on to our blood cells.

[drwilson5]

But that is what I think is so interesting about the design of the study and the conclusions. Both humans and chimps consume meat, but only humans seem to have an inflammatory response to the variation of the sugar found in other mammal tissues because we have an antibody specific to it. I certainly won't be forgoing meat anytime soon, but I think this is definitely interesting.

[praxisproject]

This is actually mostly theory. We do lack a gene that other primates have but aside from speculation, there is no hard data on this actually occurring in the population, nor that it's a bad thing. Injecting foreign genes into a body isn't really all that smart as an inflammation test, most foreign bodies are treated this way. Genes on their own are never a full picture, they don't take into account epigenetics or environmental factors.

 

Chimps most certainly DO suffer from heart disease, it's absolutely not absent from primates, in fact it's prevalent through all primates.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2933140/

 

Tobacco is also a known cause of heart disease and it contains no animal genes.

 

As a side note, heart disease is relatively unknown in animals who produce their own vitamin c internally (primates do not and can't store vitamin c for long inside the body). This has long been a fascination of scientists, but with the true root cause still unknown, most treatments and prevention are for end stage symptoms.

 

What I actually find of most interest in that paper is that is does matter what you eat. Stuff not in the human body can be found in it if you eat it and not just pesticides and heavy metals.