Excerpt from the transcript of a talk given by the late Dr Barry Durrant-Peatfield at one of TPA's Annual Conferences several years ago.
I'm posting this here because we've recently had a few questions/posts about extreme diets such as the carnivor diet.
Personally, I think what Dr Peatfield says here makes much more sense than anything else.
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We’re not designed to eat as we do today; we were evolved to eat differently.
Before some 10,000 years ago, when the rot started with agriculture, we were hunter-gatherers. Our food was mostly meat and fish, with, for a treat, fruits and some vegetables. On feast days, someone would shin up a tree and raid a bees nest for honey. Our insides are designed for this.
With a small caecum, a large intestine there mostly for water re-absorption, we were poorly able to process vegetables and fruits, and so subsisted on our favourite diet of those times, meat, especially fatty meat, organ meats, fish, eggs when we could get them, insects and grubs. We can digest meat fine in our small intestine; we have bile to deal with fat – but we can deal with only a limited amount of vegetable matter. So: we had our protein, we’ve had our fat; what about carbohydrates? Well, we didn’t get much at all – fruit and veg which we picked or rooted from the soil, and the aforementioned honey.
We didn’t get fat; our teeth didn’t rot, we kept our eyesight and we didn’t get heart attacks, rarely cancer if at all, and so long as we didn’t fall off a cliff, get eaten, or drowned, we lived out our natural lives, with the minimum of degenerative illness. None of this happened until carbohydrates started to take over our diet; most particularly, during the agrarian revolution. We became farmers and evolved ways of growing wheat and other crops. And so began our love affair with carbohydrates. The amount we eat spirals steadily, urged by a dotty nutritional industry which tells us that this is what we must have if we are to be healthy. Instead of a few percent, the amount recommended, and what we eat may be more like 60% or 70%.
What do we do with this extra carbohydrate we are not designed for? These sugars and starches turn into glucose – more than we need by far – and the pancreas has to make more insulin to drive away the build up of glucose which rapidly becomes toxic to the health of tissues (ie arteries) by making it enter the cells of the body. The cells don’t need all this – so it gets turned into fat. The extra insulin doesn’t do tissues any good either. Eventually the pancreas overloads, and may start becoming exhausted; and the tissues become less sensitive to insulin. The build up of glucose and insulin in the blood; the increased conversion of glucose makes us fat, and causes syndrome X (you may have heard of) or the metabolic syndrome – which is one step below Type II diabetes.
It’s the carbohydrate that does the damage; it’s what we eat most of; it’s what we are told to eat. And it’s killing us. It’s the one great big bee in the bonnet doctors and far too many nutritionists have. We need, we must have – more carbohydrates. If only we ate more, and exercised, had our ‘5 portions’ we would get well.
We wouldn’t, and we don’t. Some p****** in government said it, there is no proof of it anyway, there is no papers on it.
Our great enemies are cereals of all kinds, bread, sugar, cakes, biscuits, manufactured foods of all kinds, together with the leavening of vegetable oils, hydrogenated fats, trans fats, so called fat free foods (which make up for fat by adding carbohydrate), pop drinks, too much fruit (fruit sugar, fructose, is especially hard on our insulin production) and most prepared foods.
To survive, to not get ill, and this applies to all who are reading this, we simply have to get back to basics. We are designed for meat and fats; our insides cannot cope with too much vegetable and fruit. People live on vegetables and fruit but they are struggling even if they don’t know it – we don’t have herbivore intestines. Don’t go for lean meat – we need the fat. Don’t go for skimmed milk – the goodness has been lost. Full cream, jersey milk – unhomogenised – or cream should be preferred. Eggs are a great food – going to work on an egg was a great idea – now frowned upon by politically correct doctors and nutritionists, because of cholesterol in the yolk. Organ meats, eg liver, are especially desirable”.
What then? Organic.
Go for a ratio of 10-15% carbohydrates; protein up to a quarter; fats, the remainder 60-70%.
And not to forget daily exercise, to utilise all that has been consumed.
Dr Peatfield's book was the first one I bought on the subject of the thyroid (in 2013). I found it very helpful and it really got me started in understanding some of what might be going on with my own health.
I'm not familiar with that book so will def give it a read. I am currently reading 'why isn't my brain working' by Datis Kharrazian which someone here recommended. Fantastic book! I'm reading from cover to cover, annotating as I go. Everything in here chimes with my experiences, bringing together the research I've done over the past decade. It all makes so much sense! I recently did a mind map of all my 'ailments', effects, causes, research etc, and instead of finding my thyroid issues as the 'root cause' or common denominator of all my problems, it became clear that 'inflammation' was the root cause. Now this may not sound revolutionary, but it does shift the focus. That's not to say we don't need to optimise thyroid levels - we do -, but in order to address brain, gut, organ, skin problems, we need to address inflammation. Maintaining stable blood glucose levels, removing foods to which we are intoletant (gluten especially), healing the gut, minimising external stressors. Its fascinating stuff.
Yes, t'was me and am always banging on about chronic inflammation on this forum to the extent that all should be aiming to reduce thyroid antibodies 😁, which many members seem to just accept because they 'simply mop up the mess'🤷♀️.
Never mind they are the result of an immune attack on own self and send out further inflammatory signals encouraging other inflammatory/autoimmune conditions.
Many members simply can not raise iron, can not tolerate thyroid meds, can not lose weight, and accumulate condition after condition, etc, and when you read books by Datis Kharrizian, Isabella Wentz, etc, it is indicated the chronic inflammation is undoubtedly a vey large contributory factor. `However, many still fail to realise that thyroid antibodies signify/are unwanted and damaging inflammation ☹️.
Yes, nothing, everything 🤷♀️. We each have our own genetic weak spots, and tonight mine is gin! 🤣.
Seriously, I have thought about this for a long time as had weird things 'wrong' with me as a child and was the only one who could play a tune with her tummy. Not wind but it just made strange noises when I sucked my belly in and out. And then when older and after seeing numerous 'practitioners,' one said he had never seen someone so 'alkaline ' in his life.
I could never eat any form of vinegar until aged 50, when I supplemented betaine + pepsin and suddenly an awful lot righted.
Any inflammatory response causes the damaged cells to release chemicals, some which are helpful and some damaging dependant upon our present state of health and toxic load, and genetic makeup to deal with everything. Therefore, something like detrimental mould in one person is easily excreted and no problem in another, etc.
Whereas autoimmune inflammation is never wanted and usually progressive unless stringent measures are taken to dampen that immune response such as those advocated by many on the forum, eg gluten free, optimised Vit D, etc.
He was a lovely human being and he wrote the truth in the above extract. Apart from being a Maverick regarding thyroid diagnosis and treatment, you can easily see how he was made out to be pub enemy no 1 from big pharma and big ag brain washed zombies in power (e.g. the BMA)
Totally agree, RedApple in regards to too many carbs, too much vegetables and fruit for a lot of us.
Too much sugar has become part of our modern culture. Cane sugar for ordinary people in Western Europe was too expensive in the 1500s but becoming commonplace by the 1700s. Before the introduction of processed cane sugar, Australian traditional aborigines didn’t even have honey after the age of approx. 14 years, it was for children only.
I‘ve always believed in eating real meat with real fat, and eating real eggs (eggs dismissed some time ago as a source of too much cholesterol bhf.org.uk/what-we-do/news-.... [Yet, sadly, I suffer gut problems from milk-fat and forced to have the skim, hoping this’ll eventually change from being on thyroid medi.]
Re caveman times: Had a quick look on caveman lifespans compared to us nowadays. I know there’s a number of different types (Denisovan, Homo Erectus amongst them, but checked Homo sapiens (black and originating from Africa), and neanderthalensis (Neanderthals -white and never been in Africa):
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neand... “Neanderthals lived in a high-stress environment with high trauma rates, and about 80% died before the age of 40.” -Perhaps, like you said, if they survived their environment, they would have lived a bit longer.
And homo sapiens discovermagazine.com/the-sc... “…starting about 30,000 years ago at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic, the average [homo sapiens] lifespan began to push past 30 years”. They, too, may have lived longer without the environmental dangers.
Whereas our environment nowadays with stable food supply, medications, operations, comparatively less physical danger has a lot of us living longer: bbc.com/future/article/2018... “Over the last few decades, life expectancy has increased dramatically around the globe. The average person born in 1960, the earliest year the United Nations began keeping global data, could expect to live to 52.5 years [* incorrect, it was71 years of age]. Today, the average is 72. In the UK, where records have been kept longer, this trend is even greater. In 1841, a baby girl was expected to live to just 42 years of age, a boy to 40. In 2016, a baby girl could expect to reach 83; a boy, 79.”
-However, I haven’t seen any survey on the “quality” of this extended lifespan we have nowadays. So many of us live half-lives existing on medication or not having medication (hypothyroidism has been associated with a longer life-span provided you don’t end up in a coma).
But, yeah, RedApple, totally am with you on all the processed carbs and manufactured foods; modern society is rotten with it and dying from it.
And if our ancestors hadn’t started eating meat, we wouldn’t have developed our comparatively large brains.
Like you say, RedApple, “we don’t have herbivore intestines”.
Edit: Further checking of the article statement, "The average person born in 1960, the earliest year the United Nations began keeping global data, could expect to live to 52.5 years of age" -link showed it was previously *71years, and from 2021 it was 81 years
RedApple didn't say it, and if she has typed it here it is because they are Dr Peatfields words. He was a great thyroid doctor and revered by many on the forum 😊.
Radd. I took RedApple 's post, particularly from, "Personally, I think what Dr Peatfield says here makes much more sense than anything else", as implicitly agreeing.
I was very fortunate to consult with Dr Barry Peatfield.
He was a 'true doctor' i.e. very interested in resolving any clinical symptoms the person was having. He was also sympathetic and kind to people who had travelled from anywhere in UK who were still struggling to restore their health.
He was visited by many suffering people for whom the GPs didn't seem to have a clue of clinical symptoms of a dysfunction thyroid gland and for whom levothyroxine wasn't resolving symptoms.
On the days his 'Office' was open, there were plenty of people in the surgery.
I am sure this book is as good and enlightening as the other books by Dr. P that I´ve read!
It´s a bit confusing as so many low carb "gurus" tell us to fill half the plate with vegetables. So, even if you cut out carbs like pasta and bread, we are still told to eat a lot of vegetables, especially low glycemic vegetables such as kale, spinach, cabbage, etc. But if our bodies are not designed to digest large amounts of vegetables, is it a good idea to cut back on vegetables also?
in reply to
I've always thought that's why cabbage was/is made into sauerkraut; the process breaks down cabbage enough for our stomach and bodies.
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