(Part 1 of 2)

Reprinted with permission from Chet Day's Health & Beyond.

In this far-ranging interview, the professionals at London's Rea Center -- one of the U.K.'s best-known alternative health centers -- reveal information that should shake the very foundations of those who have been advocating veganism. It should also shake up the traditional paleo nutritionists. In fact, this interview should shake up just about every health student because it offers information that most of us have never seen before. Health & Beyond questions are in bold type.

What has been the Rea Center experience with vegetarians?

This actually covers quite a variety of lifestyles. The link piece may be that many vegetarians actually do include some animal products in small quantities, without considering it abnormal. After all, the egg is basically an embryonic chicken! Some use milk from a variety of sources, some use butter, some use cheese, albeit with a synthetic rennet.

The history of vegetarianism around the world, for a host of reasons, some religious, is long and honorable. But I suspect that this type of diet is light years away from some you may be considering in the shape of a growing popular trend to "go vegetarian" in a search for a healthier nutritional lifestyle, or for moral reasons. Very often, there can be the assumption that all that is needed is to weed out the meat and fish, perhaps substitute some tofu or quorn, and, hey presto, a healthy vegetarian diet. The truth is, of course, not as simple and we see far too many vegetarians with health or weight difficulties attributable to an unbalanced diet with a surfeit of hydrogenated fats and sugar laden products.

Our knowledge of practice in the USA is limited. Here, there are many problems. The older generation of vegetarians from the 20s up to perhaps the late 70s were frequently labeled 'cranks' or 'nuts'. But their nutritional lifestyle did encompass a wide range of fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, nuts, seeds, with perhaps small amounts of milk and dairy products and eggs. Goat and ewe dairy produce does seem to be more easily assimilated than cow's milk, and in those days, cow's milk was not required to be heat treated. We might query the use of dairy and wheat products, but overall the older vegetarian diet was varied, fresh, spanned a complete spectrum of nutrients, and added up to a well balanced diet. There was little or no reliance on pre-processed foods, which were not generally available in the first place.

Today, 1/3 of British women cannot cook, have never learned, and have no wish to develop skills beyond the ability to read an instruction reading 'pierce two holes in film and microwave for x minutes at full power'. British men have never been prominent in the domestic kitchen arena. 40% of the UK diet is based on fats, a similar proportion may derive from sucrose based ingredients. There is high use still of salt, a culture based on additives and synthetics. A grim picture.

On the plus side, there does seem to be a slight but growing awareness that our nutritional affluence rides on the obscene abuse of sentient creatures in factory farming (although you might be amazed how many think that cows produce milk because that is what cows do - and it never impacts that a cow has to produce a calf to lactate!). And there is a growing sign of concern that our national diet is so bad that 'something' has to be done.

Turning towards a lesser reliance on meats or towards a vegetarian diet is becoming increasingly popular, but, for all the reasons above, it tends to be nutritionally flawed. And the available popular literature is not that good on the subject. Furthermore, it has not escaped the notice of the food industry that a huge new market is on the horizon and who better to fill this need - or indeed, why wait, let us create the need. So many of the pitfalls that exist in mainstream nutrition apply equally to vegetarianism, or to the demand for organic foodstuffs. All that glitters certainly is not gold.

Many of the processed vegetarian foods have been consistently criticized for high hydrogenated fat content, high salt content, or high sugar content. So, there are teething problems with the new generation of vegetarians, and there is a huge need for accurate information and education which mirrors the position in the non-vegetarian population.

At Rea, our collective view is that there are established vegetarian cultures around the world which promulgate balanced and healthy diets, despite some of our reservations on some of the elements, and many of these diets produce excellent health results compared to meat based diets. Where there are moral or religious reasons for following a vegetarian way of life, then, clearly, these reasons are to be respected, period. However, having said that, the history of man, nutritionally, is the history of an omnivore, and opportunist feeder.

The jaw structure, dentition, gastrointestinal structure, and fossil evidence of early man demonstrate this beyond argument. The latest research involving the new analytic techniques and DNA signature amplification suggest equally clearly that meat was not the central pillar of nutrition as the official history suggests, but played a relatively minor role in everyday diet. Fish would have been commoner and easier to obtain, and as man moved out along the shorelines shellfish would have been simple to collect. Eggs are seasonal in the wild, but again easy to steal. One reliable source puts meat at around 15% of the dietary intake in paleo times.

So, while we accept the arguments in favor of a largely vegetarian diet, and we have the greatest respect for the beliefs of those who follow a fully vegetarian lifestyle , of a balanced nature, all the evidence points to the desirability of including a small proportion of meat and fish in the diet, even if only on an occasional basis, which would mimic the mishaps of a failed hunt or the non-availability of predator 'leftovers' to scavenge, in paleo times.

What has been the Rea Center experience with strict vegans?

In view of your recent articles on the subject, there is little point in duplicating your concerns. We concur. A strict vegan diet is neither natural historically nor nutritionally balanced in too many instances, for long term usage. The only comments we have to add are twofold.

Firstly, there are communities who do follow a strict vegan diet, with no discernible health problems resulting. However, we feel that there is an unpassable gulf between the lifestyle of a Japanese monk, whose lifestyle is, necessarily, going to include a very rich inner world of meditation and prayer coupled with a well-ordered physical lifestyle, and that of an American or British urban dweller with all the handicaps of living in a polluted and stressful environment, with little or no facility to draw on the inner resources of the monk, in a secular and cynical world.

Secondly, there are a number of studies over the years which do indicate that one of the concerns about a vegan diet, that of B12 deficiency may be overstated in some individuals. It has been demonstrated that there is an ability to synthesize B12 in the body at a level which avoids deficiency problems. This may not be a generalized ability amongst all vegans so we merely make the observation.

What has been the Rea Center experience with those on high protein diets like the Atkins Diet?

If you will excuse the venom, we have a huge mistrust of this type of diet, and the people who promote high protein, very low carbohydrate diets. The biggest culprits are medically qualified. The Caduceus is the staff of Hermes the Messenger god of the Greeks. It has long been adopted as the symbol of the healing arts, including allopathic medical.

Our hardline view is this. Those who elect to carry the Caduceus have a duty of care to those they serve, as healers, which is a paramount obligation, should carry it with pride, and also, with a sense of humility, and endeavor to serve the healing arts with honor and integrity. Additionally, a healer has a duty of care towards him or herself, to attend to own needs and balance. A healer running on 'empty' is going to be of little use in the long term.

But those who hide behind the Caduceus to promote this type of diet are prostituting the symbol of healing and all it stands for. The diets are based on inaccuracy and mythology and a cynical manipulation of pathological processes without regard for the consequences.

The diets are available to all users, with no regard for the fact that the individual utilizing the method may have absolutely no knowledge of biochemistry or physiology and will follow the plan, trusting that it must be safe because it has been designed by a medical practitioner.

The Atkins diet first surfaced in the 70s and is now on its second incarnation. There are a number of broadly similar diets available. Here is the core problem. Ask a user what 'ketosis' is. In most cases, you will be told that it is something that makes the urine LTS test strips turn purple, therefore showing that the body is in ketosis, and the diet is working.

Probe deeper, and you might get some sort of quasi scientific explanation that the high protein diet forces the body to burn up its fat stores, thereby reducing weight.

Ketones are a group of compounds related to acetone, which is found in nail varnish remover, and some types of paint stripper. Ketosis is a pathological condition often found in inadequately controlled diabetes mellitis.

Ketosis results when glucose is not available as a source of energy, and, the body switches to use of fats. Fatty acids are produced and released into the bloodstream, then converted to ketones. When the ketone production level reaches what is known as ketone threshold, the state of ketosis results because the tissues are no longer able to cope. Some other underlying causal factors are excessive fasting and starvation.

The massive protein intake with little carbohydrate results in a build up of toxic products which have to be stored in the body, with a dangerous potential at cell level. In the pathology, the ketonic sequence includes 'fruity' breath (the smell of acetone), loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, headaches, abdominal pain, constipation, confusion, unconsciousness and death.

Can you conceive of a more abusive and disrespectful way to, deliberately, treat your body, and your health? Now maybe you can see why the venom for doctors who dishonor their profession by encouraging amateurs (dieters) with no medical knowledge to deliberately induce and manipulate a ketonic state in their own bodies, with no qualified supervision, to follow this 'safe' and certain road to weight loss.

The normal dietary lifestyle fails in many to achieve even the pathetic national RDAs for vitamins and minerals (this is the level which avoids deficiency symptoms, but certainly not the optimal level for well being. It represents the minimum level required). This type of diet is seriously deficient which is why there is a requirement for supplementation, which cannot be policed, and nor can the diet promoters ensure that the dieter does not fall victim to the sharks who proliferate in the over-the-counter supplement market, and purchase products which may be completely useless.

There is a lack of fiber in these diets which can create a level of constipation, which can allow the retention of toxic waste impacted in the colon, and which may require medical intervention, at the extreme level. Most will self-medicate with OTC products, little realizing that these laxatives further deplete the body levels of nutrients.

If you like, this diet is attempting to induce a state of pathology in the body for a totally non valid purpose - to trick it into using stored fats for purposes of slimming. A complete contrast to the law of similars used in homeopathy. In the short term, there may well be weight loss, but the price that can be paid is dangerously high, and the damage that can result may long outlive the end of the diet. Many abort the program because they simply do not feel well. And, as with any other spurious diet program, once the diet ends, the lost weight will creep back.

The irony is that the state of ketosis as a pathological process is often medically reversed by the gradual introduction of a nutritious diet. Were it not for the medical gravitas of the designers of this type of diet, they would lay themselves wide open to a charge of being charlatans.

Furthermore, these diets almost always manage to slip in a reference to historical respectability. The mighty hunter of our origins supplying the family with a bountiful supply of mammoth steaks. This is quite simply a myth, a lie, and the tablets of stone recording this macho history of the world should be towed out to sea and sunk.

Please, in a nutshell, summarize the dietary recommended by the Rea Center.

This isn't so easy to put in a nutshell, without some explanation and qualification. We don't have a lot of time for the main paleo fraternity who try to simulate a diet from a world gone forever, and a world that may never have existed, if man the mighty hunter is a myth. Many of the plant species are extinct as are many of the animal species of that era. There are huge differences between wild game animals and the modern domestic factory farmed food animal. Few would wish to live on game as a way of life today, and by its very nature, the supply is inadequate and costly.

Our approach takes the principles we believe to have been extant at the dawn of our species, those for which the species evolved, and those we believe ideal for us today because in evolutionary terms, our cells are identical to those of our ancestors of 100,000 years ago. This is too short a time span for any evolutionary changes to occur. The guidelines can be applied joyously today because we have resources our ancestors never had. We are not dependent on the vagaries of the weather or the seasons or the success of a hunt for an abundance of food every day of the year. However we behave disgracefully within this abundance.

Our ancestors had access to over 200 types of fruit and vegetables, on a seasonal basis.

Compare this to the meager number of varieties we choose to utilize today on a regular basis, let alone the nuts and seeds available now, as then.

I suppose, somewhat flippantly, that one way of describing the Rea approach is a new variant paleo nutrition. Because once you escort the mythological mighty hunter to the dustbin of history and bang the lid on him, and once you restore the women of the species to their place of evolutionary honor, stolen from them by a twist of fate, and a lack of analytical technology to permit the fossil remains to talk, what is left is a stunningly well balanced approach to nutrition, which is perfectly verifiable on a scientific basis. It served us well for 90,000 years until we started farming, and healthy eating has never been the same since. (Creationists, of course would disagree with this time frame, Dr. Mercola)

I believe most people are addicted to fast foods and food additives, both physically and psychologically, and that this may account for some of the failures to stay with a healthy eating program, even after going through a detox period that clears the body of the foreign substances. Comments?

We are not going to disagree with the thrust of the question, but, in our view, it goes much deeper. There is very little known about the long term synergistic interactions between the increasing number of powerful additives and enhancers, or how long residues remain in the body. As an illustration, there is an Australian research paper which shows that the use of a single tablet of aspirin can leave a trace residue, measurable six months later. Perfectionism is out of the question on planet earth, as is. If you look at Antarctica, it is still, metaphorically speaking, knee deep in DDT, a pesticide which hasn't been used in most of the world for decades, and which was never used there in the first place. Yet the residues are still as toxic, and create a problem for humans in the localized food chain.

But it isn't so simple. Yes, you can rear a baby with scrupulous exclusion of added sugar, and the child, and later the adult will almost certainly regard sweetened foods as unpalatable. However, we do not control what is added to our processed foods, without our knowledge, consent or approval. A lot of synthetic flavors, or natural flavors expanded with enhancers, can be so powerful that the natural food flavor becomes unacceptably bland in comparison to the average eater.

Those aspects aside, there is a bigger issue, and it is a psychological one, in some respects. We have moved closer to a position where the body is seen as a mechanical entity. Our psychological needs and functioning are disregarded. We have become divorced from ourselves and we have handed over, almost totally the responsibility for looking after our minds and bodies and well being to external experts and agencies. Something goes wrong, take the offending part to the doctor and it is the job of the physician to fix it, or else. And we never have time. Oh, you can guarantee that one will come up in session after session. "I haven't got time to eat a proper meal, I haven't got time to cook, I haven't got time other than to snatch a burger, I haven't got time..." Does not this say something about the way in which we hold ourselves in the highest esteem, and treat ourselves with the greatest love and respect?

Do you consider cold-pressed oils a healthier choice for the body than animal fats? Or do people need both?

This one we will treat on a simplistic level and avoid the need for a mountain of molecular structures and biochemical equations. If you look at the diet of early man, the food animals were wild and would have had a body fat level of 3-4% compared with the 30%+ of modern food animals. So, you might assume a very low fat diet. The reality is that a representative paleo diet had a fat content not far short of the American average of today. But the mix of fats and oils was radically different. You might wonder how this largish fat intake was achieved.

Well, if you look at the diet of modern hunter gatherers, you will notice something held in common with a number of predator animal species. There is a sort of nutritional hierarchy. You might expect that the prized part of the animal would be the lean muscle meat, whereas, in fact, it is the fatty tissues and the organ meat which are consumed first. So where successful, the hunters would contribute a fairly high fat intake to the meal, which was assimilated by the more rigorous lifestyle. It was active rather than sedentary, there were no shelters against the elements and there was no instantaneous heat at the touch of a button. The evidence suggests a high intake of fish oils, far higher than is common today, and patterns have changed again over the last century.

In Victorian times the consumption of fish was five times higher than it is today. Add to this the oils obtained seasonally from nuts and seeds and you have a fairly broad spectrum of fat intake, which was balanced for the needs of their lifestyle. Today, with our lifestyle, there is a need to reduce the proportion of animal fats, and it can be done via the paleo principles without the need to find game sources with a 4% body fat. We would do well to increase both the quantity and variety of fish we consume and it is high time that the mythology of healthy vegetable oil was overturned.

Cold pressed oils are a nutritional must have.

They contain large amounts of cis acids and comparatively few trans acids (the ones that cause arterial plaquing). However, unless labeled as cold pressed, the 'healthy' vegetable oil will have been heat extracted, and if transformed into a solid form, undergone a nickel catalyzed 'cracking' process, both processes altering the balance of acids in favor of the trans acids. Which is why hydrogenated butter substitutes are most certainly not a healthy alternative to butter. They have the same potential for nutritional mischief, and have no place in a healthy diet. It is, in fact, preferable to stick with butter and use it with respect, in moderation.

Your approach says to avoid dairy and yet Weston Price in his landmark Nutrition and Physical Degeneration found several cultures that thrived on unprocessed dairy. Comments?

There are cultures which have a reliance on unprocessed dairy, or did, until cola and burgers rode into town. The Hunza population of the Himalaya region is one. However, we suspect that if you investigate further, you will find that they used buffalo milk which is somewhat better assimilated than that of the domestic cow, and much of it was rendered into yogurt type foodstuffs, which causes partial bacterial digestion of the casein. Furthermore, again, you are looking at a particular culture in a particular context. The environment is quite harsh, the lifestyle is physically quite vigorous, and the structure of the society is very different to modern Western structures. You might call it quaint, unsophisticated or primitive but it is also rich in aspects where we are poverty stricken. The family system is extended, all generations have a contribution to make, and the elderly are valued and respected. Take it out of context and transport their nutrition to the US or to the UK, and the results might be vastly different.

None of which detracts from a curious set of anomalies. The use of milk can only extend back as far as the emergence of farming, 10,000 years ago. Before then, there simply was no access to milk possible. In one of the eBooks we invite readers to contemplate the comical and awesomely suicidal possibilities involved in attempting to steal from a wild buffalo.

Even at this point, milk seems to have been a low level convenience food. Certainly, up until the 1830's in the UK, cow's milk was never utilized as a staple. It didn't travel well, or far, by cart, and its storage life was strictly limited by the lack of preservation and refrigeration technology.

And it still leaves open intriguing questions. If you want to give a doctor or nurse a fit of the blushes, ask them to estimate the protein content of human mothers milk, the perfect baby food for baby humans, for a host of reasons. You'll get some amazing answers. Then quietly hand them a card on which you have inscribed the figure 4%, and duck. The fat content of human milk is perfectly balanced and distributed for a human child. It would be a totally crummy substitute for a calf, even were you able to collect enough buckets from willing donors. The protein found in human milk is lactalbumin which is easily digested, and for which we possess the specific enzyme systems needed.

Contrast this with cow's milk, the perfect baby food for baby cows. A different fat content and distribution, a huge protein content (30%ish) of casein, a protein humans digest poorly, and which some humans cannot digest at all because they lack the enzyme systems needed, e.g. the entire Chinese population. It is a crummy food for baby humans.

But the most intriguing aspect is this. No other animal species drinks mothers milk after weaning, under natural conditions. The human being is the only animal which sees fit to steal the baby food from another species and consume it throughout life. A curious state of affairs, is it not?

Go to Part Two