In nutrition ecology – in which the rules apply to humans – researchers have put forth a number of models that govern why a primate would pursue a certain diet. It could range from 1) energy maximization (eat all you can when you can); 2) nitrogen (protein) maximization; 3) avoidance of certain toxic plants; 4) to limit fiber intake (too much bulk equals not enough macro- and micronutrients) and 5) nutrient balancing. Of these, researchers who study humans and nonhuman primates tend to focus on the models of maximizing daily energy intake while trying to maintain a balance at the same time. This two-pronged strategy is the basis of optimal foraging theory, which states that we must replace what calories we expend when acquiring new ones. Unless energy intake is counterbalanced with energy expenditure, then ones booty gets bigger.

Until 2004, primate researchers assumed fruit eaters were energy maximisers – that is, they would aim to maximize their daily energy intake. However, the detailed dietary studies in the Bolivian rainforest found that across all age groups and sexes, spider monkeys aim for a target amount of protein, regardless of how few or many calories from carbohydrates and fats they consumed in the process. In other words, the daily protein intake remained remarkably stable throughout the study period, but the overall calories from carbohydrates and fats fluctuated significantly. This meant the nutritional strategy was a daily protein target not a balancing of macronutrients and a maximizing of caloric intake. The potential implications of this study for understanding the modern obesity epidemic among humans are profound.

Amazingly, this protein leverage hypothesis – as it has been dubbed – is not confined to spider monkeys. It has been demonstrated in numerous other species including pigs, rodents, birds, fish and even insects. But what about humans? That answer came in a study published in 2011. Researchers from Australia and New Zealand measured the protein, overall energy intake and hunger levels in a 4-day study among 22 lean subjects. In short, the researchers found that by diluting the dietary protein across meals with carbohydrates and fats promoted overconsumption. In other words, the test subjects would keep eating until they reached a target protein intake.

This would all be very academic if it weren’t for the fact that overconsumption of energy-dense foods is in large part to blame for sky rocketing obesity in just about every corner of the planet. It’s also interesting to note that according to the most recent The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey conducted in the U.S., a drop in the percent of dietary protein across 1971 to 2006 was associated with an increase in total energy. Also note that stacks and stacks of peer-reviewed research has demonstrated that diets high(er) in protein are known to be more satiating an lead to longer, and more sustained weight loss.

The findings among the spider monkeys has the potential for “understanding the evolutionary and ecological origins of human susceptibility to obesity.” Since we share a common ancestor with spider monkeys, humans are likely predisposed to a protein target and in the case of our modern food supply of highly processed carbs and novel fats (e.g., concentrated vegetable oils), overconsumption to achieve protein levels is highly plausible evolutionary mechanism contributing to obesity.

Since protein is the primary source of dietary nitrogen, which is needed for growth, why its regulated and targeted levels are required is seemingly straightforward. During our more preindustrial life, over consuming low-GI carbs and well-balanced fats from high protein but lean meats during the regulatory search for protein was not a problem. In other words, the “costs of eating either excesses or deficits of carbohydrates and fats on a given day to ensure ingesting the target amount of protein were small in relation to the costs of failing to meet the protein intake target.” Furthermore, unlike unutilized fats and carbs, which can be stored and drawn upon when needed during periods of negative energy balance, no such buffer exists for protein. This suggests that the evolutionary drive to keep eating until a target level of protein is met somewhat out of perceived control. (Note anyone persons daily or weekly protein target will vary across gender, age, physical activity levels, muscle mass, pregnancy etc.)

Average protein consumption in the U.S. hovers around 15% of total energy consumed. The National Institute of Medicine – whose reports heavily influence the USDA’s dietary guidelines for Americans – suggests a range of 10-35% for protein as a percentage of energy intake. At 15%, the average American is on the low end. Analysis of modern-day and historical hunter gatherer groups around the world suggest a protein intake on the upper limits of that suggested by the lab coats over at the National Institute of Medicine.

Endless studies of supermarket prices and the correlation with the energy density of foods consistently demonstrate that the best bang for your buck comes from highly processed carbohydrates and sugary foods and fats but not in protein (on average). Therefore, food prices – especially for those living on a tight budget – can create a bias towards less and less protein (that’s unless you are down with eating beans every night).

It’s tantalizing to consider how the relative costs of macronutrients (protein, fat, carbs) and our embedded protein regulation interact with the human desire for salts, sugars, and our responses to display packages, busy lifestyles, built environments and so forth. A new field of study? I call first shot on dubbing it Future Primitive. A degree in Future Primitive has got to be more interesting and more useful than pumping out yet another student with a default degree in psychology!

It is clear that environmental and economic change in our recent past has opened the door to obesity. However, we cannot divorce our strategies for dealing with obesity and associated disease from our biology. By combining biological and economic factors in our understanding of consumption patterns we may improve health outcomes. However, current dietary guidelines and the backgrounds of the scientists and health officials who put them together seldom involve expertise in the biological and evolutionary realities of the population that seek to inform. And this says nothing of the influence of the special interest groups that seek to nudge those guidelines in favorable directions. It’s also sobering to consider that the very agency in the U.S. tasked with cobbling together dietary guidelines for Americans – the United States Department of Agriculture – is actually and agency whose purpose is to, well, promote agriculture. Seems like a bit of a misalignment.

In our more distant past, access to protein and non protein sources of energy was dictated by environmental constraints (deserts versus near sea for example) and access to technologies (think nets, bows, spears) to acquire and process those foods. In other words, the playing field was leveled and humans lived in symbiosis with the landscape and its resources. Everyone had more or less equal access. Fast forward to today, and the costs of protein and non protein energy is heavily influenced by ecological differences in the cost of producing those foods, issues of shelf life, costs of refrigeration and transport and so on. Your economic status then dictates your access to this new nutritional landscape. Unless we figure out ways to produce protein from animal sources in a more economical way – that also reduces the devastating environment affects of animal production in the process – and promote the consumption of plant-based protein sources, we are unlikely to curb the obesity epidemic in a meaningful way. This all assumes, of course, that the protein leverage theory plays any role in all of this.

It may be time governments to shift farm policy and handouts to those farmers delivering protein sources. If the costs of protein where subsidized – and the environment impact could be dealt with – then we might have a strategy. In the meantime, at Naked Pizza we have created a crust with a little more protein – due to our mix of 10 seeds and grains. Might add a little chicken to your next Superbiotic and give a wink to the spider monkeys next time you are at the zoo. Peace out friend.

Jeff Leach, Co-founder of Naked Pizza.

Felton, AM, et al. 2009 Nutritional ecology of wild primates. Funct. Ecol. 23:70-78. Felton, AM, et al. 2009 Protein content of diets dictates the daily energy intake of a free-ranging primate. Behav. Ecol. 20: 685-690. Gosby AK, Conigrave AD, Lau NS, Iglesias MA, Hall RM, et al. (2011) Testing Protein Leverage in Lean Humans: A Randomised Controlled Experimental Study. PLoS ONE 6(10): e25929

This wasn’t an episode of Survivor or new twist on Biggest Loser. It took place over 30 years ago and those dirt roads stretched north out of Derby, in the northern Kimberly region of Western Australia, and the ten participants were full-blood diabetic Aborigines. In this relatively short reversal from urban life, the participants transitioned from breadavores and pastavores to true omnivores. They reverted back to the diet that selected the Paleolithic genome that they (we) all carry today. They had gone on a low-GI diet.

From Janet Jackson to Larry the Cable Guy, people everywhere are achieving and maintaining better health by paying attention to dietary strategies based on some basic and inescapable biological realities buried deep in our ancient genome. For 99.9% of the time that the genus Homo has been around (2.5M yrs), our carbohydrate intake was – on average – lower than the 250 to 400g per day consumed in modern diets (that translates into 1,000 to 1,600 calories a day). But more importantly than quantity, is the change in the quality of carbohydrates we are consuming today compared to our ancestors. And the glycemic index (GI) is a handy way to measure that quality.

The GI is a ranking of carbohydrates on a scale from 0 to 100 according to the extent to which they raise blood sugar levels after eating. Foods with a high GI are those which are rapidly digested and absorbed and result in marked fluctuations in blood sugar levels. Low-GI foods, by virtue of their slow digestion and absorption, produce gradual rises in blood sugar and insulin levels, and have proven benefits for health. Low GI diets have been shown to improve both glucose and lipid levels in people with diabetes (type 1 and type 2). They have benefits for weight control because they help control appetite and delay hunger. Low GI diets also reduce insulin levels and insulin resistance. Any farmer or rancher who raises chickens, goats, pigs, or cattle, will tell you if you want to fatten an animal before slaughter, just feed them high-GI foods (like corn) or put the hormone insulin directly in the feed.

For seven weeks, the overweight and diabetic Aborigines subsisted on a diet of turtles, kangaroo, birds, fish, crocodiles, figs, yabbies (look that one up!), yams, various vegetables, bush honey and so forth. In order of energy contribution at a macronutrient level, the diet was dominated by protein, followed by fat, then carbohydrate. Though they were “living off the land” and digging yams and walking around a lot, the researchers accompanying them were actually amazed at the low level of physical activity.

Contrast this diet with the urban setting before setting out on this little walk about. Back home the main dietary components were flour, sugar, rice, carbonated sugary drinks, booze, powdered milk, cheap fatty meats, potatoes, onions, and small amounts of fruits and veggies. Unlike the protein>fat>carb diet in the bush, the urban diet went carb>fat>protein. The latter should sound familiar, as carbohydrate intake in affluent countries average 50%. And thanks to decades of bad science and misinformation on the evils of fat, government recommendations on carbohydrates range as high as 65%.

Since our Aboriginal group was living a hunter-gatherer existence, they did not have access to agricultural goods like wheat, corn, etc. This is exactly how all humans lived for the last 99.9% of human history (no agriculture). This meant that the carbohydrate (plants) we did consume – and that was consumed by our wayward travelers in the outback – was minimally processed. Processing can mean a lot of things that can range from the temperature and cooking methods (grilling, steaming) to the amount of mechanical processing (e.g., grinding, milling).

The minimally processed diet consumed in the outback meant that what carbohydrate that was eaten, was slowly digested and slowly absorbed into the blood stream and elicited a slow and limited insulin response (i.e., good quality carbs). Tests conducted before, during and after the 7 weeks in the outback, revealed marked improvement in how the individuals utilized and cleared glucose from the bloodstream and importantly, improved insulin sensitivity.

The improved insulin sensitivity is perhaps the most interesting result after the 7 weeks in the bush and the least understood evolutionary mechanism involved in how a low-GI works (note that decreased insulin sensitivity is associated with central obesity, abnormal cholesterol levels, high blood pressure – a cascade of problems known as the metabolic syndrome). As glucose is absorbed into the blood stream from consuming carbs, the pancreas excretes appropriate amounts of insulin, which in turn trigger organs and muscle to absorb the glucose. An insulin resistant person will not be able to absorb that glucose and insulin efficiently and thus it keeps circulating, unused, in the blood. And this is when the problems occur.

Though this may come as a shocker, the metabolic reality of our Paleolithic physiology is that we in no way need up to 65% of our energy to come from carbohydrates – as recommended by the USDA – not even close to that amount. Over the last 2.5M years humans have become steadily more carnivorous and what carbohydrate we did consume were unusable due to the large amount of fiber. It was not until very recently – circa 5-12,000 years ago – with the advent of agriculture, did humans consume energy dense and starchy foods with consistency. However, much of these energy dense cereals were coarsely ground or eaten in whole or cracked forms with large intact portions of fiber. These grains were slowly digested and slowly absorbed (i.e., low-GI). Our Paleolithic genome coped well with the high(er) carbohydrate but low-GI diet. But this was about to change.

The industrial revolution in the 17th century marked the era of the high-GI diet with the introduction of steel roller mills that produced finely ground flours with the fiber easily removed. These finely ground flours were easily gelatinized during cooking and thus increased their digestion and absorption. We in affect began mainlining glucose. And the rest is history.

Once our “modern” Aborigines returned their “ancient” genome to the low-carb and low-GI landscape on which it was selected, everything began to normalize. This low-GI reality means humans are innately insulin resistant. That is, a scarcity of usable carbohydrate, rather than food energy, and a high protein diet over the course of human evolution led to a positive selection of insulin resistance as a survival advantage. What glucose that was available in our ancient veins was used thriftily by our muscles and organs and redirected during pregnancy for fetal growth, resulting in greater survival of offspring. Hence why we are here today. So any diet that includes a significant amount of usable carbohydrates (e.g., pasta, white bread, sugary sodas), will only increase resistance of an already insulin resistant body. However, this does not mean that a heavy vegetarian diet reliant on large amounts and diversity of veggies will do the same – as a significant part of that diet would be unusable (high fiber).

Our modern diet has us awash in insulin and its myriad of metabolic problems ranging from weight gain, diabetes, blood pressure, heart disease, and more. Add to this the Angry Bird Era we have entered – at 500 million downloads and counting, it’s estimated that 200,000 inactive years have been collectively wasted by gamers on this game alone – our lifestyle has gave rise to an unprecedented body composition characterized by reduction in healthy years later in our life cycle. Disease comes earlier.

So we would do well to pay a little more attention to the basics of human biology. At Naked Pizza we realize that pizza should not be consumed everyday. But as an industry, we have the responsibility to make sure that food does no harm. For us, that meant designing a pizza crust that reduced the amount of highly processed white flour and added back in a diversity of seeds and grains. It also meant not using sugar in our dough mix. This results in a great tasting low-GI pizza (our GI report from the University of Toronto can be found on our nutrition page). If you want to reduce the GI of your next Naked Pizza even further, add a few toppings – as a mixed meal over say, a cheese pizza, will take longer to digest and absorb.

Jeff Leach, co-founder of Naked Pizza.

It may come as shock, but fruits offer very little in the way of nutrition that’s not already provided by veggies. Of the 13 vitamins, fruits are good for one – vitamin C (green bell peppers are actually a better source than oranges). As far as minerals go, potassium is the only one fruit really offers. But we have that covered as it’s found in water. In addition, there’s a reason researchers refer to fructose from fruit as the “fattening carbohydrate,” as the body metabolizes it differently than glucose, in that it passes through the liver and more often than not stored as fat.

It’s not that I dislike fruit, I don’t. I just think these juicy and portable morsels of goodness are dragging down the more important veggies. Maybe it’s the alphabetic fate of F(ruit) before V(eggies), but as the wingman to fruits our consumption of veggies has been flat for nearly forty years according to the USDA’s Economic Research Service.

According to lab coats and economists over at the USDA, the average American – whatever that is – is getting about 100 +/- calories a day, each from fruits and veggies. Which is about the same as a handful of French fries from a burger joint. Unfortunately, a whopping 47% of the veggie consumption in the U.S. in 2011 was from potatoes (think chips and fries). Bleak.

It’s also useful to remember that the marketing campaign to eat more fruits and veggies came out of a U.S. National Cancer Institute meeting over 20 years ago – a meeting that included lots of fruit farmers (or is it growers?). At the time, some flimsy data suggested that increased fruit and veggie consumption would fend off cancer(s). However, a handful of massive multi-decade studies involving hundreds of thousand of people on multiple continents published recently (read about a few here and here) suggest the relationship between increased fruit and veggie consumption and decreased cancer risk is tenuous to non existent. Oops.

There is no doubt a basketful of fruit and veggies is better than a handful of Goldfish crackers and a fried shrimp Po’ Boy sandwich, but what we need is to eat more veggies – a lot more. Aside from the full spectrum of vitamins and minerals they supply, their overall fiber content provides a rich and diverse nutrient base for the trillions of microbes living deep in our gut. And as emerging data is revealing, restoring balance in our intestinal microflora may prove a more useful strategy than trying to exercise our way out of our national epidemic of obesity and surging chronic disease (you can read more about that here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here – I could go on, but you get the idea).

Based on a 1,000-calorie serving, nonstarchy veggies deliver a whopping 185 grams of fiber – compared to 41 for fruit. Interestingly, whole grains provide very little even though most consumers would assume the opposite. This was the case in a recent online poll I conducted on twitter. Though very unscientific, when I asked the question “Per 1,000 calories, which of the following provides the most fiber?,” 54% selected whole grains, while only 34% selected vegetables – the remaining 12% chose fruits. While a testament to the spending and marketing prowess of the grain lobby, it’s not had the best outcome on public health as the food industry continues to benefit from consumer confusion on whole grain versus whole-wheat products.

CLICK TO ENLARGE: Based on 3 most consumed refined cereals, 8 popular whole grains cereals, 20 popular fresh fruits and 20 popular nonstarchy veggies.

In either case, I honestly believe we would consume more fruits if the fruit lobby spent more time and resources positioning fruit as the “best” dessert choice – trying to nudge aside ice cream and cheesecake a bit. On a recent trip to Istanbul, I was pleasantly surprised that at every dinner I attended an assortment of sliced fruits were the only desserts offered – how nice.

If we can move fruits to their rightful place – as the “best” dessert option – and as an occasional and very portable snack, then we have a shot at a veggie surge.

Jeff

This past summer Michelle Obama, book-ended by Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack and surgeon general Dr. Regina Benjamin, unveiled the government’s latest effort to get Americans to make healthier choices. Out was the much-loathed Food Pyramid and in was the snazzy MyPlate with its visual portioning. Fruits and veggies got half the plate.

Though much of the media yawned, health professionals in general agreed the new visual direction of a plate was an improvement and acknowledged that the accompanying Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which are mandated by Congress to be updated every five years, were also an improvement.

At the unveiling of the new MyPlate, the First Lady proclaimed if the filled plate looks like the symbol, with lots of fruits and vegetables, “then we’re good, it’s as simple as that.” But we are not good. And for the three decades the government has been handing down dietary recommendations, we have been getting sicker, wider, and more medicated. And even though the 5-A-Day message has been promoted endlessly, our national consumption of fruits and veggies has been flat to almost non-existent for nearly four decades.

By any measure, dietary advice handed down by the USDA (and Department of Health and Human Services) has not been as effective as hoped, and by some measures, actually harmful. The decade’s long push to lower fat consumption, a recommendation that was never based on sound evidence, resulted in a devastating increase in processed carbohydrates and likely played a causal role in the increase of metabolic disease and its handmaiden, obesity.

Government-sponsored dietary advice matters as 32 million school lunches are formulated on these recommendations, not to mention a dizzying number of federal food programs ranging from the military to prisons.

So what are we to do? History tells us the strategy isn’t working no matter how big of a piece we carve out for fruits and veggies on MyPlate, and continuing to think we will get a different outcome is, well, by Albert Einstein’s definition, insanity. A good place to (re)start, aside from moving the responsibility of developing these guidelines out from under the USDA whose mission is to promote agriculture by the way, would be to bring the guidelines in line with extraordinary advances in genomics, microbiology and medicine that are unwinding in front of our eyes.

The current dietary advice ignores the biological fact that 90% of the cells in the human body are not even human; they are microbial. Yet, we design dietary advice that completely ignores the symbiotic and sometimes pathogenic relationship we evolved with these evolutionary hitchhikers. Though our bodies are covered in microbial life, the far reaches of our gut harbors trillions of members who have become so important to our health and well-being they are collectively referred to as the “forgotten organ.”

The diversity of this forgotten organ, known as the microbiome, rivals the most diverse ecosystems on earth. Our inner ecoystem. Advances in genomic research in the last decade has made it possible to unravel just how important maintaining balance, or symbiosis, with our microbiome is. Changes in the composition of the microbiome, or even single members, are now known to play a role in ailments as diverse as obesity, diabetes, cancer, atherosclerosis, inflammatory bowel disease, and a great many neurological disorders. Further, tiny viruses that embed themselves inside members of our microbiome may play a part in a great many more diseases of humanity.

A great many factors including genetics, age, sex, and diet influence the microbiome. However, of these, diet is the easiest to influence. Astonishingly, researchers have determined that the entire human population can be grouped into roughly three groups based on the composition of their microbiome – this, in spite of age, weight, sex or nationality.

BioPlate

The science to better health is staring us in the face, we just need to pay attention. The prestigious journal Science picked the microbiome as one of the breakthrough’s of 2011, acknowledging the literally hundreds of scientific articles published on the subject in the last year alone. This is disheartening when you consider that the USDA’s 95 page 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans and the Institute of Medicine’s accompanying 1,375 page report on dietary reference intakes did not mention the word microbiome once. Not once.

The time is now. We need the First Lady to drag her vegetable cart over to the NIH-funded Human Microbiome Project, a $160M undertaking that is unraveling the correlation between changes in the human microbiome and human health, and ask for a briefing. We can no longer allow industry, single ingredients, or special interests dictate the future health of humanity. Not to sound cavalier, but nutrition and disease is this generation’s civil rights movement, let’s start treating it accordingly.

Jeff Leach, co-founder Naked Pizza

In short, GMO is a laboratory process of taking genes from one species and inserting them into another in an attempt to obtain a desired trait or characteristic – or simply turning on or off existing genes. And yes, this is different than grafting trees or breeding animals that farmers have been doing for eons. The difference, of course, is farmers are not trying to cross a tomato with a chicken – but the lab coats have been pulling off similar genetic tricks for some time and with increasing frequency.

People who are concerned with genetically altered “things” are most concerned about food – more specifically the seeds used to grow those foods. The vast majority of the soybean and a big chunk of the corn in the U.S. are grown with GMO seeds (seeds patented and sold by the easy-to-hate Monsanto folks). While eyebrows raise when the discussion turns to genetically altered animals, like in the case of pigs that have been tinkered with to better digest phosphorus and thus reduce environmental impact associated with pig poo, tinkering with good old wholesome grains, potatoes, papaya, squash, and tomatoes concern a great many more people and governments.

At issue is gene transfer. For example, since Atlantic salmon only feed during spring and summer, researchers modified the genetic makeup of the fish by adding a growth hormone regulating gene from E. coli plus some mouse DNA. The genetic gymnastics enables the fish to eat year-around and presto, a fish that grows and reaches market faster. The big and legitimate question on everyone’s mind is what would happen if one of these Frankenfish got loose and mated with a wild salmon. Would this in some way adversely affect wild salmon populations?

If “horizontal gene transfer” were to take place, between say a genetically modified plant like corn or our salmon, might the gene gone wild have an adverse affect on the person who consumes it? That is, will this novel genetic material worm its way into our own genetic material and do something unexpected? The honest truth is we don’t know for sure. Therefore many think we must ban GMO crops and animals both modified and fed modified crops until we do know. The scientists on the GMO is okay side of the fence, and it includes bus loads of researchers who don’t work for seed companies, say that while horizontal gene transfer should be studied, it is unlikely to be an issue as its probably been very common throughout mammalian evolution.

While turning genes off and on is common in genetic research, using genes from bacteria for certain outcomes is more relevant to GMO discussions. So when we talk about GMO foods, we are – for the most part – talking about genes that have been harvested from bacteria and inserted into the target microorganism (say corn seed) to achieve a preferred trait or outcome. With most GMO corn, the donor organism is a harmless soil bacterium (Bacillus thuringiensis) and a gene that produces a protein that is highly effective at killing caterpillars. Harvest that gene from the bacteria and splice it into corn seed DNA and bam, dead caterpillars and higher crop yields.

Sense the issue surrounding the safety and efficacy of GMO is centered on bacteria – and whether or not we can uptake these novel genes into our own genome – an astonishing finding in Japan surrounding sushi consumption is worth considering.

Reporting in the journal Nature, researchers studying how ocean bacteria break down marine algae (seaweed) discovered that a certain strain of bacteria (Zobellia galactanivorans) produce special enzymes that break down carbohydrates in seaweed into packages the bacteria could utilize as an energy source. It seems that when humans started inhabiting the island of Japan some 40,000 years ago, they began ingesting this marine microbe on slivers of seaweed and in the process introduced the special carbohydrate-reducing enzymes to bacteria that lived in their own guts.

Interestingly, since none of the normal (commensal) bacteria in the ancestral Japanese gut bacteria contained the genes to produce the special enzymes needed to break down the seaweed – and thus release it’s nutrient value – bacteria in the Japanese gut simply borrowed genes from the marine bacteria hitch-hiking on each mouthful of seaweed. Since the Japanese, then and now, consume sushi wrapped in seaweed, the evolutionary pressure to keep the horizontal gene transfer going persisted.

When the researchers tested for the presence of this special enzyme in the gut microbiome (collective genomes of all the bacteria in the human gut) of 13 Japanese volunteers, it was present in every person. Astonishingly, the enzymes were also found in gut bugs of newborns that had obviously never eaten sushi. This suggests that bacteria containing these special genes were transferred vertically from mother to child during birth. When the researchers tested 18 folks living in the U.S., they could find no evidence for the special seaweed-eating genes.

The clear-cut horizontal gene transfer of seaweed-eating genes from marine bacteria to human gut bacteria is more or less what the GMO proponents fear the most. In the case of the Japanese, whose ancient and modern diet include significant amounts of seaweed in soups, garnishments, and wrap for sushi, the gene transfer was facilitated and maintained by evolutionary forces. That is, the human gut microbiome with its trillions of inhabitants did not possess the genes to produce the special seaweed-degrading enzymes, so it simply borrowed them from marine bacteria – and then proceeded to pass them down through generations. In other words, there was a benefit to do so – in this case, maximizing calories from seaweed.

Equally important is the fact that Western populations do not possess these genes within their gut microbiomes. Why? Even though westerners have eaten seaweed throughout history, it has not been important enough in Western diet for the bacterial genes from the seaweed-eaters to take hold and persist. In other words, there was no benefit to the host. And for modern Western populations, even less so given that the seaweed that is wrapped around most modern sushi has been heated, and therefore all the marine microbes terminated from the heat.

The horizontal gene transfer from marine bacteria to human microbiome was a first for science – but likely not the last. This example eloquently demonstrates the important role of the gut microbiome in our evolutionary success as a species and clearly demonstrates that gene transfer likely only takes hold if the host genome or microbiome perceives a benefit.

As we continue to scrub the microbes from our daily lives – through antibiotics, wet wipes, and hyper-sterilized, cooked, and cleaned food supply – what important gene transfer events are we wiping away?

*Note: all of the seeds and grains in our Ancestral Blend are grown with nonGMO seeds.

Dubbed the INTERHEART study, researchers have been tracking the daily activity level of 25,000 people across 52 nations since 1999 and have discovered that the risk of heart attack can be neutralized with the mildest of physical activity.

According to the study, “people who do 30 minutes of activity per week in their leisure time could reduce their heart attack risk by 21%. Those who do 210 minutes of activity per week can reduce the risk by over 44% and those who pursued activity for 60-180 minutes per week could reduce their risk by 40%.” Take home message: small steps every week can make a difference.

The study was unique in that it tracked work and leisure physical activity. Participants were asked if they owned a car, walked or biked to work, used escalators and elevators, and whether they owned a computer and other time-sink gadgets that might promote sedentary behavior. Seems we are also possessed by our possessions as researchers found a correlation – after controlling for sex, age, gender, etc – between the number of gadgets someone owns and their risk to heart disease. Damn you Steve Jobs!

In summary, the INTERHEART study provides a simple solution to reducing risk to heart disease: “Ideally, we should adopt the example set by the Danish and commute by bike.”

There I was, with a camera in one hand and wiping the tears from my eyes with other. It was delivery day – I was going to be a dad. Like an eerie scene from a B-rated alien movie, out popped his little head from an amazingly small incision in my then wife’s lower stomach. The flash from my camera filled the room – this was the happiest day of my life.

Since that day over 11 years ago, my ‘then wife’ and I had another beautiful child, also through cesarean delivery. I had not given much thought to the fact that both my children entered this world through a small incision rather than the birth canal until a few months ago, when the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics released its update on births in the US.

Since my first child was born, the rate of c-section deliveries appear to have been rising at a steady clip, jumping over 40 percent since 1996. In 2004, 29.1 percent of all children born in the US were delivered through c-section – that’s nearly 1.2 million incisions. The reasons for the increase are complicated, but have a lot to do with medical malpractice associated with vaginal deliveries, parental preference, health of the mother and or the unborn child, and just plain old convenience.

In the days following the release of the CDC report, I scoured the media outlets that picked up the story to see if anyone mentioned an interesting and potentially alarming consequence of the rise c-sections. I was looking for the mention of words human biology, bacteria, mammals, and the new nine-letter curse word of 2005 – evolution. Nary a mention from a single report – not one.

As a right of passage – a vaginal right of passage that is – the delivery of a fetus through the vaginal canal of the mother completes one of the most important cycles in the evolutionary history of humans. From an evolutionary point of view, our sudden adoption of c-sections as an increasingly preferred mode of child delivery, may be tinkering with some very important processes that took millions of years to develop. Let me explain.

In what famed British ‘Darwinist’ Richard Dawkins calls an evolutionary stable strategy, humans have evolved a symbiotic relationship with a particular and complex set of bacteria in our intestinal system – a.k.a. the gut. The 500 or so species of bacteria, whose numbers are measured in the trillions, occupy every inch of our gut – with most of them living in an ecological niche they literally carved for themselves in our colon. As the evolutionary stable strategy suggests, the presence of these few hundred species, among all the tens of thousands of species of bacteria found in the air, water, and soil throughout the world, that theoretically have access to our “open” intestinal ecosystem (think mouth to anus), is not random. This means our established intestinal ecosystem is composed of a set of bacteria that can live in nutritional and physiological harmony with us. Importantly, current members make it their evolutionary determined job to keep out new members – i.e., pathogens that seek to do us harm.

The intestine of the unborn fetus in the mother’s womb is sterile – devoid of any bacteria at all. However, during vaginal delivery the newborn comes in contact with bacteria-rich vaginal and fecal matter of the mother. These bacteria quickly invade and populate the newborn child. Saving of umbilical cords and the creepy ritual of eating the mother’s placenta aside, this cycle links the co-evolution of intestinal “microflora” of the mother to child, and may represent a more significant bond for those who understand it exist. This evolutionary bacterial right of passage has been and continues to be critical to the success of our species – and all mammals for that matter.

A child born through c-section essentially skips this critical evolutionary process. Though a c-section baby does receive bacteria from the mother, it’s not the diverse and dense “base population” that it would have received from the vaginal fluids and fecal matter via a traditional birth. In either birthing method, the baby is subject to all the bacteria in the room – that even means the weird looking rubber-gloved fellow in the corner – who appears to be assisting the delivery staff in some way. But who can be sure.

Once this truly amazing and scary ritual of child birth is completed, the newborn is typically cleaned, shown to the mother for short period, and then whisked off to some warm place to spend some quality time with other new members of our species. The mother usually settles in for some much needed rest and the new father anxiously paces the corridors mumbling to his self all the things his is going to change or do better in his life. Seems some things are timeless.

But the next 24 for 48 hours pose another critical evolutionary step for mother and child – breast feeding. Like all other mammals – and that includes are tree swinging cousins – the secretion and release of fluid from breasts (mammae) is the sole nourishment or food for the newborn child. Yet, over 30 percent of new mother’s do not breast feed in the hospital. It is often the case that some mother’s never get their milk, others have problems getting the newborn to suckle, and others are just not interested.

At six months of age, the number of baby’s receiving breast milk drops to around 31 percent, and at 12 months it drops further to 17 percent. The number of baby’s receiving some level of breast milk at 24 months hardly makes a blip on the radar.

C-sections and short-term breast feeding have no precedence in our evolutionary past. Before insurance companies and organized medicine, all children entered this world via the birth canal and participated in the time honored cycle of transfer of bacteria from mother to child. Like our tree swinging cousins and a few of the modern forager groups that still follow traditional lifeways today, breast feeding by the mother or other women in the group (wet nursing) continued for 24 to 36 months, sometimes longer.

Breast feeding newborns, like the evolutionary process of vaginal birth, is about bacteria. The breast milk of a human mother, like other mammalian mothers, is species-specific, having been adapted over eons to deliver specific and sufficient nutrition to guarantee proper growth, health, and immunity development. Researchers have long known that breast fed babies possess an intestinal flora that is measurably different than formula-fed infants. Of specific interest is a group of bacteria known as bifidobacterium. Some of you may immediately recognize the name, as they are often added to dairy-based foods such as yoghurts – often advertised as “live cultures” on the packaging. These are probiotics.

Studies have shown that at one month of age, both breast-fed and formula-fed infants possess bifidobacterium but population densities in bottle-fed infants is one-tenth that of breast-fed infants. The presence of a healthy and robust population of bifidobacterium throughout the first year or two of life contributes significantly to the child’s resistance to infection and overall development of defense systems – not to mention the physical development of the intestinal system in general. Aside from the substances secreted by these specific bacteria that are known inhibit the growth of pathogenic bacteria, they also work to make the intestinal environment of the infant more acidic, creating an additional barrier against invading pathogens. In short, breast-fed babies are sick less, are less fussy, have fewer and shorter duration of bouts of diarrhea, and have more frequent – and softer – bowel movements.

The dominance of health-giving bifidobacterium in breast-fed babies is due the presence of special carbohydrates in mother’s milk known as oligosacchrides. These special carbohydrates are virtually absent in cow’s milk. From a physiological point, these special carbohydrates escape digestion and absorption in the small intestine of the infant, and thus reach the colon intact – where they serve as food for, among other bacteria, the all important bifidobacterium. As the bacteria thrive on this “food” from mother’s milk, they grow in number and absorb water, resulting in more regular and soft bowel movements. It’s important to know that the bulk of infant feces are made up of live and kicking bacteria. Look next time if you don’t believe me!

Baby formula manufacturers are catching on and creating products that contain these special carbohydrates – which are known as prebiotics (remember, prebiotics are food for bacteria and bacteria are called probiotics). While it’s virtually impossible to mimic the exact composition of mother’s milk, it is possible to mimic some of the physiological effects – specifically targeting the growth of select bacteria through the delivery of oligosacchrides.

In the dozens of doctor visits my ‘then wife’ and I made during pregnancy, and through two births, never once did the doctor or any other person involved tell us what I just told you. In all of the “how to be a new parent” and “how to take care of your new baby” books we read, not one detailed reference to the critical passing of mother’s microflora to the child via the birth canal or the importance of feeding bifidobacterium, was ever provided.

In many cases, c-sections are absolutely necessary and should be performed. But a 40 percent increase in just the last ten years? This makes no sense. As a father of two, I am acutely aware of the physical and emotional toll that breast feeding has on an active mother – the little creature literally sucks the life right out of you. Face it we live in a very different world than our not-so-distant ancestors occupied. Things are hard, but in different ways.

It’s important that expecting parents understand some of the basic evolutionary processes of bringing a new member of our species into the world. A few snips and stitches, followed by only by a small number of sips, ain’t going to cut it. The physical, nutritional, and metabolic features that make us uniquely human have been shaped by millions of years of evolution.

The debate in this country over evolution should not preclude health practitioners from understanding the basics of evolutionary biology. While we are culturally and socially modern, driving around in hybrid cars and arguing about stupid things, we are literally and biologically ancient hunter-gatherers. Ignoring our evolutionary past and its role in modern medicine and health, not just in birthing but for all ailments and diseases of modern civilization, is nothing short of medical malpractice.

Ignoring and tinkering with nature has consequences, it always does.

Advances in molecular techniques reveal that our modern lifestyle of overuse of antibiotics, hyper-sterile living conditions, and changing dietary habits are escalating an imbalance with our naturally selected and evolved relationship with the microbes that live on and within our bodies. The discordance often manifests as disease. Other factors including age and genetics may also influence our microbial diversity, but diet is the easiest to modify and presents the simplest route for therapeutic intervention to improve microbial diversity and thus balance within our inner ecosystem.

Recent studies (cited below) reveal that our collective gut microbial communities (microbial repertoire) of thousands of species and trillions of members group into predominant variants, or “enterotypes,” dominated by Bacteroides, Prevotella, and Ruminococcus. While the basis for the enterotype clustering is unknown, and appears independent of nationality, sex, age, or body mass index, hints that diet may play a casual role in the partitioning is emerging. Groups that consume a Western diet high in animal protein, fat, and processed carbohydrates tend to be dominated by taxa typical of the Bacteroides enterotype, whereas groups that consume less processed diets higher in fiber and low in animal protein are dominated by the Prevotella enterotype.

The grouping or partitioning is elegantly demonstrated in a study we recently blogged about that compared European school children, who eat a typical Western diet high in animal protein and fat, low in fiber, and whatever else European kids eat, to children living in a traditional village in Burkina Faso (west Africa), who eat minimally processed high-carb diet (grains) low in animal protein and thus animal fat, and high in fiber. The European guts (i.e., stool samples) were dominated by taxa typical of Bacteroides enterotype, whereas the kids from the rural African village was dominated by Prevotella enterotype. The European children also harbored a higher pathogen load, despoite the fact the African kids general water supply was less than ideal. Similar results were recently found in controlled feeding studies in the US where stool samples were collected and characterized from individuals who consumed diets that more or less mimicked the African-European study. In short, we are our enterotypes!

It will be important now to determine if higher incidence of disease is associated with one enterotype over another (and the lab coats are working away on this in studies throughout the world – and early indications suggest this to be the case). However, while there are a smattering of studies looking at less Westernized groups, in order to remove the noise of our modern lifestyle, they are limited in number and scope. The importance of sampling and preserving microbial diversity from traditional groups in regions where the effects of globalization on diet and lifestyle are less profound will be important in determining if interventions may allow modulation of an individual’s enterotype to improve health. But these opportunities are fast disappearing.

At Naked Pizza we decided to throw our hat in the ring and contribute to this emerging and fascinating science that suggests that its possible to link long-term dietary patterns to gut microbial enterotypes that can then be tied to disease susceptibility – or the lack of – by launching a modest effort we call the GLOBAL MICROBIAL BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION INITIATIVE (click here to follow along on Facebook). From a business perspective we have been trying to do our part in the fast food sector for years with our pizza crust of 10 seeds and grains fortified with special prebiotic fiber and heat resistant probiotics, and opining about the virtues of stimulating good for you bacteria on the pages of this blog, but now its time to roll our sleeves up and apply our biological/evolutionary perspective and knowledge of ancestral and traditional food practices to the conversation.

In a world of double tall skinny soy vanilla lattes, wet wipes, and a meal opportunity on every corner, we can scarcely imagine the preindustrial lifestyle that selected for the genome we carry today and the symbiotic relationship we share with the microbes on and in our bodies. The tens of trillions of microbes aren’t just hitchhikers; they interact intimately with the immune system, and are so integral to our health that some scientists have deemed them the “forgotten organ.” As scientist unravel the complex relationship between “us and them,” it’s becoming clear that our modern diet of novel fats, highly processed carbohydrates (think Bacteroides enterotype), and zealous use of antibacterials and antibiotics is impacting our “inner ecosystem” resulting in an imbalance and thus disease. This microbial cleansing making us sick.

Our first project under our new initiative is a collaborative effort with microbiologist from the Universities of Puerto Rico and Colorado (Boulder) and researchers from the Howard Huges Medical Institute. We spent a week this past November visiting bushmen villages in Botswana and Namibia collecting stool samples from groups living varying degree of dependence on store-bought vs. hunted and foraged foods. On one extreme, we had bushmen villages that were heavily dependent on highly processed flour, sugary drinks, pasta, and booze, and on the other end of the spectrum we had bushmen still hunting and gathering a significant portion of their diet.

We will share with you are preliminary results in early 2012.

Wu GD et al.. Linking long-term dietary patterns with gut microbial enterotypes. Science 2011 Oct 7;334(6052):105-8. Arumugam M et al. Enterotypes of the human gut microbiome. Nature. 2011 May 12;473(7346):174-80

While we’re certainly known to have a rub every now and then with the USDA (okay, authority in general) it would be hard to argue with the recently passed Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act. Ditto for the USDA’s new proposed standards for school lunch which are based on the recommendations of the Institute of Medicine (IOM). While in general, we’d rather see folks surrender to the time-honored lessons of nature and two fingers or so of common sense, we support the idea of putting emphasis on a greater diversity of veggies and whole grains.

But the sanity train derailed this week when Congress chose to undo these mostly sound nutritional recommendations in favor of some light thinking and heavy influence. First the potato lobby, err, Congress has decided to put french fries back on the menu via a nutritional “reclassification.” Then our esteemed members of the legislative branch decided to classify pizza as a vegetable in school lunches, arguing that two tablespoons of tomato paste justifies the definition. And just in time—those jokes about ketchup getting the veggie nod under Ronnie were getting ripe.

Congress also got pizza back on the plate by thin-slicing the definition of whole grains (talk about playing with your food) and undercutting USDA standards proposing that it would take at least a half-cup of tomato paste to be considered a vegetable, replacing it with the aforementioned two tablespoons. Then again, once you have to start “defining” vegetables, it’s all Charlie Sheensville.

You’d need at least four slices to get to a half-cup, but that’d blow the calorie guidelines. Okay, those were just dumb to begin with, and wait, before you try to spit out that little present you just threw up in your mouth, don’t forget that this is for a government-funded school lunch program.

As you might guess, more than a few people got their knickers in a knot, like the retired military Generals of Mission: Readiness. The old brass got together because they are concerned about childhood obesity and how it will impact America’s battle readiness. Amy Dawson Taggart, the organization’s director, called the actions of Congress “a national disgrace.”

No surprise, the White House and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack are spitting mad, saying through their spokesperson, “While it’s unfortunate that some members of Congress continue to put special interests ahead of the health of America’s children, USDA remains committed to practical, science-based standards for school meals.” Take that, Congress.

Naked sees this as another sorry symptom of a society, both complicit and turned upside down by a tsunami of blather—ranging from science to policy to hucksterism to corporate irresponsibility—that has effectively removed us from the lessons of nature and biology, replacing a hard-wired nutritional blueprint with a diet our bodies no longer recognize as food. The good news is that, despite all of this, we’ve remained painfully close to a solution. Even better, sometimes it can taste like pizza (just not the other kind).

We fully get the irony of a pizza company condemning the tacit support of consumption of said pizza (all boats and obesity levels rise?) but no friendo, not like this and not the kind of pizza made from a single, highly processed grain, loaded with sugar or high fructose corn syrup and other freaky chemicals. If we’re going to make a dent in the universe it will be because, together, we regained consciousness and paused long enough to hear the wisdom of the ancients and share an honest pizza.

You may argue that the government shouldn’t be telling schools what to serve, and you may be right. We’d love to hear your opinion on our Facebook page, Twitter feed or for the painfully shy, email us at info@nakedpizza.biz; let’s engage.

The human gut is the dynamic and ever-changing home to trillions and trillions of good, bad and benign bacteria, fungi and other microscopic things. Though tropical rain forests hog all the press with their thousands of lush species of plants and colorful animals per square kilometer, the human gut actually harbors a greater diversity—making the “inner” ecosystem of the human body one of the most diverse ecosystem in the world.

The promise behind probiotics and its popular delivery mechanism, yogurt, is that if consumed on a frequent basis the strains of bifidus and lactobacilli in the product will “restore” balance to your unbalanced gut so that you can achieve optimal health and well-being and look great in your new Lululemon outfit.

Many popular yogurts claim billions of cultures per serving. That is, lots of good-for-you bugs. To put that in to perspective, you could squeeze 5 billion gut bugs on to the tip of pen. Doesn’t seem so impressive now. Seems even less impressive when you consider that 50-70% of your last bowel movement was actually bacteria. In other words, your colon is a bioreactor growing gazillions of bacteria on a daily basis and passing them with each visit to the bathroom.

It’s hard to think that delivering a pen head’s worth of a limited number of species down the pipe could impact our densely populated ecosystem of thousands of species and strains of resident microflora. That same naïve thinking suggests you could influence the ecological balance of a tropical rainforest by planting a few tiny flowers at the base of a massive vine-choked tree reaching into a canopy that is home to thousands of species. Just not happening.

The idea that a pen head’s worth of a limited number of species administered on a regular basis might have a meaningful and lasting impact on our “inner” ecosystem was recently put to the test by a team of researchers at the Center for Genome Sciences and Systems Biology at Washington University in St. Louis. In their study, they monitored the effects of consuming a popular yogurt on the gut bugs (aka microbiome) of seven adult female identical twin pairs. The researchers found that after repeatedly sampling the gut microbiomes of the twins over a four-month period of eating the yogurt that the species and gene content of their guts remained stable and were “not appreciably perturbed by consuming the yogurt.” A parallel study with mice fed the same yogurt—but in tiny mice servings—yielded the same results.

While we are not dissing the mountains of great research on the health benefits of probiotics, an ecological perspective on the “real” impact on our crazy diverse “inner” ecosystems should make you ask if there is a better way. Nurturing your existing “inner” ecosystem, rather than attempting to supplement, may be a better strategy. To feed your ecosystem, you need to consume a diversity of plants on a regular basis as they contain the undigested substrates (think dietary fiber) that your gut bugs need. Eat more probiotic-laden fermented foods when you can and lay off the antibiotics when not completely necessary. The friendly fire is wrecking your ecosystem.

Even though this data does not measure actual consumption, that’s done by the good folks over at the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys, the data is alarming.

According to the economists at the ERS, the “average” American (all age groups) consumed 2,594 calories in 2009. As the graph below illustrates, 619 (24%) of those calories came from flour and cereal products (wheat, rice corn, etc.), 596 (23%) from added fats, oil, and dairy fats (butter, margarine, lard, salad and cooking oils, half and half, etc), and so on. Perhaps most striking is the so few calories in the average American diet that are derived from vegetables and fruit.

A mere 87 (3%) calories a day for fruits and 118 (5%) calories from vegetables. We all know that many fruits and veggies are predominately water, but 87 calories from fruits?! Really? If my math is correct – and to put it into perspective – 87 calories of fruit is equivalent to 8-9 McDonald’s French fries.

Of the veggies consumed, a whopping 47% were potatoes (e.g., chips, french fries). Other movers in the veggie category included carrots, onions, beans, legumes, cucumbers, and sweet corn – but all were in the single digits.

Below is a graph plotting the caloric consumption for each of our categories over the past 40 years (calories plotted on left axis). Despite the never-ending messaging to consume more fruits and veggies from every nutritional corner on earth, and the government’s “eat 5 servings of fruits and vegetables” initiatives (think 5 A Day program, which is now 5-9 servings a day), fruit and vegetable consumption has remained more or less flat. However, we have seen a steady rise – and even some striking spikes – in other categories.

Interestingly, the government-sponsored 5 A Day program, which was founded in 1991 by the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health, was farmed out a few years ago to the Produce for Better Health Foundation, which relies on support from private industry to get out their Fruits & Veggies More Matters message.

As calculated by the ERS researchers, the average daily calories from fruits and veggies above translate into 0.9 servings a day of fruit and 1.7 servings a day for vegetables, for a total of 2.6 servings a day. Even doubling that number to reach the minimum recommended 5 servings a day, something that has not been possible in nearly 40 years, would also mean doubling production. Doubling, much less tripling produce production in the U.S., is much harder than it sounds and likely means more imports – something that freaks out the food safety folks given the soaring land prices in the U.S. (i.e., all the good arable land is taken up with existing crops, cows or pavement).

This is why the launch of the USDA’s new MyPlate, and Harvard’s dueling Healthy Eating Plate, are not likely to get average Americans to consume more fruits and veggies. The messaging is the same, so the results will not be any better (history is our guide here). To honestly increase produce consumption to reasonable levels – what ever that is – will require significant policy initiatives/changes from the top down. We will need to go beyond a poorly funded MyPlate program and overhaul the system fencerow to fencerow and all the way to the grocery isle and classrooms of America. That means farm subsidies, looking at predatory marketing by food companies, addressing social inequalities from WIC to grocery stores in disadvantaged neighborhoods, better planned communities, and dare I say, teaching underlying biological principles of human evolution and genetics that are selected for our current nutritional needs.

Unfeigned biologically-driven education + policy is what will move the needle.

The hygiene hypothesis suggests that the increase in autoimmune diseases during the past few decades is at least partially attributable to the lack of exposure to microorganisms that once covered our food and us. As nature’s blanket, the microorganisms associated with the dirt that once covered every aspect of our pre-industrial day guaranteed a time-honored co-evolutionary process that established “normal” background levels of immunoregulation and kept our bodies from overreacting to foreign bodies. A growing body of research suggests that by re-introducing some of the “old friends” from the mud and water of our natural world would blunt the aggressive immune responses that result in such chronic diseases as type 1-diabetes, IBD, multiple sclerosis and a host of allergic disorders.

While comforting to the germaphobe public, the little-too-shiny produce and triple washed and bagged leafy greens in our local grocery isle may in fact be causing more harm than good – depending on your point of view. On the one hand, food-borne pathogens are a concern. But there is no disputing that we have the safest food supply in world. The more relevant issue with food-borne illness may not be sloppy farmers or poor early detection systems, but our own body’s diminished ability to fend off pathogens due to our westernized diet. The flipside, of course, is the near removal of nature’s blanket of soil and immune boosting microorganisms from the food supply.

As humans evolve, so too have our diseases. There is little doubt that many of the diseases of our modern lifestyle are imbalances with the microbial world. Maybe it’s time we talked more about human ecology when we speak of the broader environment and ecological concerns of our day. As the leading cause of morbidity among women and the second leading cause of chronic illness in the U.S., autoimmune disease affects some 50 million people at an annual cost that exceeds $100 billion.

As we move deeper into a “post-modern” era of squeaky-clean food, overuse of antibiotics, sterile delivery rooms, and hand sanitizer at every turn, maybe it’s time we hugged our local Farmer’s Market a little tighter. They may represent our only connection with some “old friends” we cannot afford to ignore.

Jeff Leach, co-founder of Naked Pizza and father of two.

*Please click here for a list of 452 articles discussing the Hygiene Hypothesis (PubMed).

Billed as no ordinary weeklong survival course, Cody’s Desert Drifter is designed to “strip you of everything you thought you needed in the wilderness.” And in my case, that also meant missing the fine print on the course paperwork I filled out to join this wandering band that would have allowed me a small bag of GORP (granola, oats, raisins, and peanuts) to tide me over as we chased crickets and rabbits for food in northern Arizona. Hunger set in early for me.

As hungry as I was in those first days of calorie burning hikes in extreme temperatures and rough terrain, and an all night march in near freezing temps (shivering burns a large amount of calories), I was faintly comforted by the knowledge that the progressive effects of heat and hypothermia were more likely to kill me than my hunger pangs. With no blankets and a strict “no fire” rule in those first few days, I was left to snippets of communal body heat when we kind of slept and what nourishment I could forage from a landscape that moved quickly under our feet. We were a tribe of nine, drifting now, and the do more with less mantra of the Aboriginal Living Skills School, founded by our barefooted leader, began to sink in.

After 48 hours of one extreme survival scenario after another and no sleep, I really began appreciating fine print as my body sucked energy stored from my adipose tissue (aka body fat) and began sipping my strategic energy reserves of glycogen from my liver. My system was struggling to feed my brain and its ability to execute the simplest of cognitive tasks – like putting one foot in front of the other, and completing Cody’s primitive skills modules, which also required the dual survival skill of channeling my ancestors with one side of my starved brain and calling up my genetically coded ability to complete fine motor skills with the other. Just another day in the life of our ancient genome, but a rude awakening to a system accustomed to quick energy inputs from a modern nutritional landscape dotted with Chipotle’s and 24-hour Circle K’s.

The course was designed to beat you down, and beat you down it did. But the one thing that helped me through those first few days – and the remainder of the weeklong survival course for that matter – was my understanding of the ancient bioreactor deep in my gut. Nearly five feet in length, the human colon and its trillions of resident bacteria have the ability to generate calories from almost any plant matter no matter how nutrient-poor that matter may be.

Like the fermentation that takes place in the various stomach chambers of cows, goats etc., the gut bacteria breaks down undigested plant material through various processes and produce byproducts such as short chain fatty acids, which are then absorbed into the body and utilized by the muscles and organs as energy. Depending on the type of undigested plant material (e.g., resistant starch, cellulose, hemicelluloses, inulin, pectins [aka dietary fiber]), the gut bacteria can convert 1 gram of plant matter into as much as 1 to 1.5 calories. Not bad when you consider the straight-up digestible carbohydrates available, say, in a slice of bread, converts as 1 gram ingested to 4 calories. In other words, bacteria are the reason horses, cows, deer and similar critters can extract enough calories from blades of grass.

So throughout those first few days I literally grazed as we whisked along, grabbing handfuls of green grass, wild flowers, not so tasty berries, and anything that I could choke down. These handfuls of green matter were broken down by my commensal bacteria and turned into calories. Though it was difficult to calculate, I probably generated 300-400 much-needed calories a day from my new trail diet (but likely burned 6-10,000 calories a day). In order to generate even a modest 1,500 to 2,000 calories from the trail diet, I would have had to literally chew all day, and probably locate more energy dense plants (e.g., root foods) that also contained some straight up carbohydrates and starches. We did eventually eat our way into some nutritious stands of cattails – once Cody allowed us the comfort of fire days into the Desert Drifting to cook them.As with other plant eaters, our early ancestors relied on gut bioreactors to extract calories from otherwise undigested foods. While our colons make up a smaller percentage of our overall gut system today, our ancestors relied on the colonic bioreactor to generate calories from twigs, leaves, flowering plant parts and so on – similar to our tree swinging cousins. But as the quality of our diet improved – through technology and ultimately the advent of fire – the requirement of our bioreactor decreased and therefore its overall size. Even though our colons and their bioreactor function remain a significant part of our gut systems, our modern diet hardly delivers the fermentation products down the pipe as it once did – as I experienced during my week of foraging across the landscape. And there-in lies possibly the biggest unappreciated health crisis facing our modern society today.

With a reduction in the consumption of undigested plant parts – to say nothing of the reduction in diversity of plants – we have literally stopped using the calorie-generating bioreactors handed down to us by our ancestors, and in the process created an imbalance in our microbiota that evolved within our gut ecosystem. By not receiving a steady supply and diversity of plant parts (again, fiber), the bacteria living in our guts cannot do their evolutionary job and fight off invading pathogens by increasing acidity, and therefore compete for nutrients and niches in order to flourish along the colonic wall.

The existence of residential microbiota is ancient, providing evidence of the co-evolution of bacteria and animals. In the case of humans, we are endowed with a “specific” set of bacteria at birth and our life history pushes and pulls that balance on a daily basis. Though there is poorly defined variation among human populations, there exists a genome-specific set of players that are significantly influenced by diet.

Rapid changes in diet in our post-modern era are predictably producing different diseases. In short, changes in human ecology equals changes in our microbiota. Add to this the astonishing increases in Caesarean sections that limit perinatal transfer of maternal microflora, which is further confounded by the replacement of mother’s milks with formula – which creates an imbalance in natural, indigenous flora.

Advances in molecular and genomic techniques confirm the role of infection in an increasing number of acute and chronic diseases, made more likely by diet and lifestyle-induced imbalance. Disease was heavy on my mind as I drug my weakened body from one cattle tank to another to scoop stagnant, muddied and often dead animal-laden water. But unlike my GORP-eating fine-print-reading colleagues, my steady but limited diet of grass blades and flowers meant my microbiota was bolstered for anything that may have slipped past the iodine drops.

While the biggest threat I faced was diarrhea from bad water, I wouldn’t have experienced the impact for a day – or even longer – as I wouldn’t have experienced any symptoms at the time of consumption. In fact, the connection between “dirty” water and diarrhea was not made until the 1800s. This same delay from infection to symptom is what delayed acceptance of infectious causation of other vector-borne diseases such as malaria – transmitted by mosquitoes.

But what if many of the chronic diseases plaguing us today, like heart disease, breast cancer, colon cancer, diabetes and Alzheimer’s, all in fact could be ascribed to infectious causation? What if these terrible diseases had a more acute phase, would we then recognize them as the result of infection? Is the lag time between infection and manifestation that characterizes a particular chronic disease shifting our medical attention away from the obvious? I think medical professionals who ignore infectious causation of many of the big chronic killers today will look as myopic to medical historians in 20-30 years from now as the researchers who dismissed infectious causation for pneumonia, chicken pox, and diarrhea did not that long ago.

As we rounded out our desert drifter week we did finally get to enjoy some freshly gathered crawfish from the Verde River along with some crispy grasshoppers roasted on a stick. This was made all the more enjoyable by the fact that I, and everything I ate, was covered in dirt teaming with natural microorganisms that my ancestors had long ago forged a symbiotic relationship with. Dirt is good. Cody, you the man. I never felt so alive. Peace.

Modern technology has condensed some of our ancient nutritional landscape into tightly spaced plastic bins and bowls sitting atop crunchy ice. A tidy landscape of such nutrition would have made the toughest of our ancestors weep. And what do most of us do upon stepping up to this diverse bounty? Flinch! And begin filling a clamshell container with piles of a single leafy green and maybe a pinch of this and that.

Over the last few months I have stalked the salad bar — I know, creepy — at my local grocery store and witnessed firsthand well-intentioned folks filling their salad container with water-laden leafy greens and not much else. If we channeled our ancestors for just a moment, we would fill this finite container with less leafy greens and a spoonful of every plant you can stand to eat. If it’s ten plants, then ten it is. If it’s fifteen, then even better.

Building a better salad means diversity. No single plant contains everything you nutritionally need; it’s the combination of physical (think fiber) and chemical (vitamins and minerals) diversity that is more in line with the edible landscape that selected the nutritional requirements of our modern genome.

A greater diversity of plants in your container will likely reduce the water percentage by weight — making you feel fuller, longer. The diversity of this mixed meal will slow down digestion and absorption, also contributing to feeling fuller for longer.

Importantly, each plant at your local salad bar contains a different physio-chemical structure of dietary fiber. With each bite of this diversity, you will more naturally stimulate the growth of good-for-you bacteria living deep in the self-contained ecosystem known as your gut. Yes, good for-you-bacteria break down and grow on dietary fiber — and the more diverse, the better. So try this next time you fill a container at your local grocery store and see how you feel.

And remember, nothing in nutrition makes sense unless in the light of evolution, friendos. Don’t flinch.

As Bittman and so many others suggest, investing in the problem now may save us trillions downstream. Seems simple enough. But the trillion-dollar question is, of course, where best to spend our energy and resources if such an effort was “really and honestly” undertaken by government and industry. Bittman and others obviously and rightly argue that altering lifestyle choices is the best and most affordable means to attenuate the problem. But the combat-diet-related-diseases-by-changing-my-diet drumbeat at the behest of the food police predictably makes the general public flinch. And too often behavioral modification, when served up government style, misses the point all together – such as the notion that posting calorie info on menu boards in 20% of the eateries in America will actually have a meaningful impact (click here for our two-cents on posting caloric info).

It’s simple enough to continue morally shouting from the rafters that disease prevention through lifestyle modification is a better long-term strategy than treatment of disease and costs through legislatively mandated improvement of the bureaucracy of the health care delivery system from bed pans to pill companies. Until we come to the realization that mind-jarring paradigm shifts are needed to honestly and cost effectively address the issues, insurance companies will continue dancing on our graves.

The first big shift will need to be the role of government in research priorities. In our current system, our tax dollars go towards funding profitable treatments for private companies, rather than investing in research that makes people healthier and cheaper. If the long-term outlook of rising costs are as dire as they appear, it would make sense, at least on the research investment side of the equation, to aggressively treat illness in the short term so as to make the overall investment more profitable in the long term. In other words, it should be the role of government to fund good things that are not profitable as it should be obvious that private business is poorly suited to address such things as prevention given the inherent conflict of interest — whether its stated or not. Said differently, funded research that makes people healthy cheaply, instead of making people healthy profitably, reveals that prevention rather than treatment should be the desire of government.

If we are going put some of our eggs in the prevention basket, then we will need a massive investment in education, as our current understanding of what a healthier lifestyle looks like is colored by myths, half truths, and the interests of the same free market entities we so like beating up on the treatment side. It’s not much of a stretch to suggest that we are poorly equipped as a nation of people, when it comes to truly understanding our own biological past and the role of diet in our health and well-being, may in fact be a bigger hurdle than the more headline-grabbing rants against the health care system and government meddling. This is unfortunately well-illustrated in a recent Facebook poll we conducted asking the question, “Do we have millions of diabetics in America because we don’t eat organic foods?”

Even though there is zero connection between diabetes and organically grown foods, 26% of the 517 respondents think that there is and a full 21% are not sure. (Click here for our take on organic foods and the science). In other words, 46% of the respondents think organic foods do or “might” have some causal role in diabetes. The fact that a nutritional fetish such as organic and similar fantasies has replaced reason in our understanding of what causes disease, and thus how to exercise meaningful lifestyle prevention, positions us as the proverbial sitting duck. A cynical person may think this is where they want us — in the cross hairs. Either way, that is where we are — uninformed about biological sciences and evolutionary processes. A nutritional opiate for the masses. Stupidity.

It’s not enough to create nanny states and industries that suggest we should just prevent by changing our lifestyle. We must first agree on how we define health and well-being, and then initiate sweeping reform and begin re-educating our nation about the biological realities that underpin our unique species. Fortunately, many of the most interesting and useful answers are coded in our genes and our evolutionary past if we are brave enough to look there.

In this video, you can see the difference between a Naked Pizza dough ball and a traditional highly processed dough ball found at most pizza stores.

Naked Pizza dough is made with 10 different seeds and grains, heat resistant probiotics, agave prebiotics and no added sugar. You can see and taste the difference.

On top of our dough, we add an all natural sauce made with tomatoes and spices. We also use natural partially skim mozzarella that melts in your mouth.

A little over a year and half ago, I had never heard of Twitter and aghast, did not even have a Facebook page. But times are a-changin’ and we are not in Kansas anymore. In the blink of a digital eye, skeptics become advocates, purchases become conversations, retail brands are morphing into publishers, and the social contagion that is Charlie Sheen has infected us all. Tiger blood for two, please!

When we started this little pizza adventure five years ago, we set about to create the world’s healthiest pizza skinned in a business model that would scale. We needed scale if we ever hoped to achieve any kind of cultural influence – a voice, a seat at the big kids table. For scale, we chose the John Deere tractor of QSR – carry out and delivery pizza. As for that world’s healthiest pizza idea, we channeled the nutritional alchemists of our ancestors to create a great tasting pizza that more closely resembles whole foods our genome would recognize as food.

Our argument has never been that a healthier pizza is going to save the day, but rather that every “new” business should and can have a social strategy – a strategy that positively impacts someone or something along the continuum. A benefit. If you don’t, then maybe you don’t have a business. That fragile balance that exists between profitability and social conscience is often where most of the do-gooders pull up short and never become the force for good they hoped to be.

Our thought process has been that as long as we execute on the disciplined business end of the arrangement – operations, operations, operations – coupled with a social consciousness and some science under the hood, customers will see a benefit. Combine this with cool technology and something we call Cha-Ching 2.0. – purchases can now immediately be turned into conversations. At a minimum we would have a business that makes money and possibly a new business meme all together.

In a business that has traditionally relied upon mass media, door hangers and the operational promise that “if you order from us, you can plan the next 30 minutes of you life,” turning a product into a conversation is not an obvious business model. But the reality of social commerce really hit home after launching our first international location in Dubai on January 17.

After spending some time evaluating the Dubai market prior to launching, we decided to highlight other aspects of our business over the health attributes of our product. The “healthier” positioning of our product offering is not necessarily front and center in the U.S. market either, but it does represent a common thread in our conversations. For our Dubai debut, we elected to differentiate on our service and operations. This meant great tasting pizza delivered hot and fast by a guy wearing a cool jump suit. Additionally, we altered our name slightly for cultural reasons, which initiated some interesting and ongoing conversations.

By highlighting our operations in a new country over the more obvious healthier profile, this gave us a bit of a clean slate and a Petri dish to watch our brand unfold into what customers say it is – not what we say it is per se. The launch of our first international location has been all the more interesting given our franchisee for the region (who, by the way, will open six stores in Dubai this year). Months before the store opened, the franchisee set up a local Facebook and Twitter account and started talking about the brand.

Even though we did not have a pizza to sell, we started a conversation with future customers. These ran from “Coming Soon” to “Check out the guy running the plumbing in our soon to be open store” to “Did you know our pizza is made with 10 different seeds and grains?” and so forth. As trivial as it appears, it opened a forum with future customers and, importantly, allowed them to ask questions about the brand and see how we might behave, more or less. It revealed that we were different – just a little bit off, a little bit funky, and all about trying to make a difference. It was real.

By the time we opened the doors on January 17, locally we had about 1,000 Facebook fans/likes and 1,200 Twitter followers. In the weeks following the opening, we were taken aback by the volume of online conversations about the brand. Below is a quick summary of a couple of hundred tweets following the opening listed in order of frequency.

28% Promotional, 23% Product, 17% Service, 16% Other, 9% Image, 5% Health, 2% Negative

Amongst the couple of hundred tweets, 28% were promotional in nature – i.e., customers and non-customers suggesting (unsolicited) that others check us out and so forth. A full 23% of the comments were about the great tasting product and 17% about the service. The latter one is interesting when coupled with the 9% mentioning image. Collectively, service and image accounted for 26% of the comments. In other words, fast delivery and cool delivery drivers. Striking were the so few comments about the health aspects of our pizza. As mentioned, we did not dial up the health conversation during our launch, but it is very present in our communications across various digital and physical platforms.

It is clear that certain categories and products will naturally be part of a social conversation but carry out and delivery pizza has not been one of them. In the world of Cha-Ching 2.0, our relationship with a customer does not end with a transaction at the cash register – quite the opposite. It does not end until they share that activity with their friends via social media. According to an Econsultancy survey, 90% of purchases have some sort of social influence.

In the case of Dubai, nearly 50% of the conversation is about product, service, and image. Add into this general promotion and health comments, and a whopping 82% of the conversation is about benefit. Simply put, consumers want to share if there’s a benefit and don’t mind being identified with that brand. And it’s the influence among those friends and secondary relationships that is the sweet spot – the Holy Grail. Becoming part of the their identity drives repetitive purchases.

From Day One, we have supported this conversation with fast delivery (average order delivered in 23 minutes), transparency of operations and product via short videos posted online, blog posts about our perspective on health, and so forth. In other words, we haven’t used social networks as a broadcast medium just to pound out specials and deals, but rather as a multi-channel to engage our customers in a conversation. We have morphed from a retail brand into a publisher and woven ourselves into the fabric of the conversation. While we cannot stop the negative comments, our active engagement and brand ethos increase the likelihood of a good set of informed conversations if we do what we say and make it right when we don’t.

I continue to be amazed at how our actions and behavior as a pizza company can affect people we have never met or that have never heard of our brand. The idea that social influence does not end with the people you know should take your breath away if you are building a brand. More importantly, if you are not creating a benefit then the relationships will not be meaningful and you only succeed in watering down whatever connections you worked so hard to establish.

Dubai has been an eye opener for us in demonstrating that we can plus up an aspect of our business and watch it drive and shape a good portion of the conversation around our brand. This lends some credence to the idea that even though marketers may have lost control of their brands online (that your brand is what customers say it is and not what you say it is,) what you do and how you choose to engage does matter. Now that we have firmly established a conversation around our operations in Dubai, it will be interesting to see how the conversations shifts, if at all, as we slowly dial in additional conversation around our healthier offering and our two-cents on the plough-to-plate conversation around food. We hope it provides additional validation on their decision to align with our brand, further deepening the relationship.

Will our industry be able to wobble board and door hang its way into the future? Probably not. We believe embedding our business ideals into the communities we serve and connecting with them halfway, on their terms, is the only way forward. We are starting to view the prescribed delivery area around our stores and clusters of stores as social biomes: complex and dynamic social and biotic communities characterized by knowable digital platforms maintained under a given set of economic and geographical realities. To be a successful participant, we will need to keep an ear to the ground, as the relationship is mostly in their hands. That said, rather than viewing the house at the corner as static, a place to send direct mail or to hang a menu, it really is a node with possibly 2.5 Facebook accounts on the inside, a few email addresses, and a handful of Twitter and Foursquare accounts. BEWARE: influencers live here, so behave.

As customers increasingly text, tweet and post their way in and out of their communities’ social biome, it’s clear social influence and the medium that delivers it have become so intertwined in our daily ability to interact and function as a species, that we have become a true biological and digital super-organism. It’s not so far fetched to think that biological scientists will soon refer to our social biomes or digital clouds as an extended phenotype, much like the spider’s web and the bird’s nest have become extensions of those biological organisms adaptability and ultimate survival. No longer limited or defined by biological processes, we have transcended into a larger community and are witnessing nothing less than evolution itself.

I’ll have that tiger blood now – think I’m gonna need it.

In this video, we visit the Edible Schoolyard NOLA located in New Orleans, Louisiana. After taking in the impressive scope of this elementary school undertaking (wonderful in its execution) Jeff Leach talks about the various sources of dietary advice we get and the importance of considering advice from our ancestors.

Thank you Samuel J. Green Charter School and the Edible Schoolyard NOLA for letting us shoot in your beautiful garden. esynola.org

In this video, Jeff Leach talks about what he’d consider the healthiest item in the produce section vs. public patterns of consumption.

Thanks to Robért Fresh Market for letting us film at their Carrolton/Claiborne location!

A trip to the salad bar helps fulfill a desire to eat healthier and contributes to a healthier lifestyle. To really benefit from a salad, following some simple advice can make all the difference.

In this video, Jeff visits a New Orleans grocery store(Thanks, Robért Fresh Market!) to show how to build a perfect salad.

In this video, Jeff talks about how we fill our shopping baskets. Today’s baskets look much different than those of our ancestors.

Thanks to Robért Fresh Market for letting us film in their awesome grocery store!

In this video, Jeff talks about the healthiness to be found in the stems of the asparagus plant. The fiber promotes metabolic functions deep in your colon by fostering healthy bacterial fermentation processes.

Thanks to the Edible Schoolyard of New Orleans for letting us film in your beautiful garden! esynola.org

In this video, Jeff Leach talks about how people used to intake a significant portion of healthy bacteria by consuming soil and dust.

Fast forward. Tucked away on page 455 of the massive health care reform act signed into law by President Obama in early 2010, is a provision requiring that restaurant chains with more than 20 units post calorie counts on print, display, and drive thru menus (law also requires the same for vending machines). Restaurants have til March of 2011 to comply. At the time the law passed earlier this year, the National Center for Health Statistics pegged obesity rates in America just north of 33%.

As with the nutritional labeling law passed two decades earlier, health professional and consumer groups applaud the new menu labeling law as a victory for consumer rights and a new arrow in our quiver of tools to fight obesity and disease in America. Motivated by a growing body of scientific evidence linking dietary habits with obesity and chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and some types of cancer, a growing number of states, such as New York, got out ahead of the new law having already required similar calorie disclosures for years (those rules will be superceded by the new federal law).

Given that obesity rates in America have doubled since federal law required nutritional labels in the grocery isle, its reasonable to ask: Do labeling regulations help consumers choose more healthful diets? Referencing the initial food labeling law passed in 1990, the Calorie Counts report prepared by the FDA’s Obesity Working Group in 2004 notes that “Despite reports of a positive correlation between label use and certain positive dietary characteristics, the trend toward obesity has accelerated over the past decade.” The more than doubling of obesity rates in America since 1990 does not imply labeling regulations have not been ineffective in stemming obesity. That said, what exactly has been the effect of mandatory nutrition labels on obesity in America?

Surprisingly, despite being of considerable public policy interest and a lower lumbar on the backbone of preventive population-level intervention strategies advocated by health professionals/groups and the U.S. government, there has been very little empirical evidence on the subject. According to researchers at the Economic Research Service of the USDA, even though a few studies have looked at aspects of labeling laws “none has studied its effect on obesity.”

The fact the government is requiring by law that calories be displayed on menu boards, even though the impact on public health has not been empirically demonstrated after 20 years of food labeling in the grocery store, is both ridiculous and completely sensible. The lack of government-sponsored scientific and empirical study of what is clearly a broadly implemented and relied upon public health strategy for reducing obesity in America, is made more disheartening when you consider the NIH’s funding of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) over the last few years. As the name implies, this pet institute sponsored by Senator Harkin has poured over $1 billion of your tax dollars into funding alternative strategies for improved public health. One of my favorite studies funded by NCCAM is the “Polysomnography in Homeopathic Remedy Effects.” One would think that the implied broad sweeping impact of nutritional labeling would receive at least the same amount of funding attention as “sleep medicine.”

Advocates of the menu labeling law point to a limited number of studies such as the “Starbucks Study” as proof of its potential impact on public health. Stanford researchers found that calorie posting at a New York City Starbucks led to a 6% reduction in calories per transaction, from 247 to 232 average calories per transaction. To put that in perspective, that 15 less calories per transaction is the equivalent of eating one less large french frie a day. The Stanford researchers were eager to point out in their conclusions that calorie posting would actually increase Starbucks revenue.

As a business that promotes better tasting and better for you fast food, Naked Pizza is expected to support without question labeling laws. Right? While we will comply with the law in 2011 as we pass the 20-store mark that mandates compliance, we are not convinced the law will make a difference and in fact, the real question we are asking is will it do more harm than good? Are well-intended population-wide strategies to improve environmental contexts for healthful eating such as nutritional labeling actually having an unintended consequence as evidenced by our soaring obesity rates over the last 20 years as we have become obsessed with calorie counting with the aid of nutrition labels? In public health policy you either have to believe evidence that can be tested and verified will lead to a better understanding of reality or you don’t. In the absence of any empirical evidence that nutritional labeling improves or harms public health, all we have is the anecdotal evidence. At face value the news is not good.

In addition, the new menu labeling law is further concerning when you consider it only applies to those restaurants with 20 or more units – ie, chain restaurants. According to our friends over at the Nations Restaurant Association, this means the new law only affects 20%, or 200,000 of the nearly one million eateries in America. So 80% of the places we eat will not be required no calorie information will provided to the consumer. For an important public initiative that key researchers in the field said needed to happen to increase awareness about the calorie content of typically fast-food meals, 20% of the places we eat appears to be good enough.

The move forward on menu labeling despite no scientific consensus on nutrition labeling in general will only guarantee continued fouling of our nutritional nest and worse, delay any meaningful discussion on improving health and well-being. With each new perceived victory by public health officials and health groups, such as the hard fought battle over implementing calorie postings, the public and those same health officials will often stand down just a tad and rest on its victories after expending so much precious energy and political capital – and precious time passes. With each new nutritional red herring that comes down the pipe every few years, we continue to turn a deaf ear to our biological bodies and the understanding how health grows and prospers. Human biology is ancient poetry that only says what it means. If we listened, then we would know that our bodies treat 500 calories of ice cream differently than it does, say, 500 calories of broccoli or that same 500 calories of broccoli raw or steamed. Counting calories is, from an evolutionary and biological perspective, meaningless. If we stopped trying to escape our biological reality we would know that our bodies cannot tell the difference between dieting and starving and compensates accordingly by reducing energy output and actually driving hunger to almost unbearable levels – hence why reams and reams of scientific research shows that dieting does not work for most of us. Or that we can’t exercise our way out of this problem. We at our way into this problem, we will need to eat our way out.

Doing it the biological or natural way has the potential to change the way we think about food and public health initiatives to make us healthier and less sick. Until we to decide to start paying more attention to the blue print laid before us in our biological past, we might practice what the Okinawans in Japan call Hara Hachi Bu, which roughly translates into eat until you are 80% full. With the greatest life expectancy of any population on earth and the highest percentage of folks over 100 years of age, wisdom of the Okinawan’s might be worth applying.

Repeat after me: modern human beings are genetically adapted to the environment in which our ancestors survived and which conditioned our genetic makeup. Translation: the ancient genomes we carry with us today make us ill equipped to deal with the rapid changes in technology and culture that has shaped – and continues to shape – our modern nutritional landscape. When this happens, discordance occurs and we get sick. Sometimes it manifests acutely, such as in the case of diarrhea, but more often than not chronically, as with the case of autoimmune diseases, some cancers, heart disease, diabetes, and so on.

As the rallying cry it’s your lifestyle stupid puts points on the board with the American public, diet is finally assuming its dominant role over other variables such as ethnicity, climate and geography in shaping when and why we get sick. What we eat, and what we eat eats, does matter after all. It matters because we are mammals – just like the other ones – just a little better dressed. But no less dependant on an ancient genome that got us here. And Ya gotta dance with the one that brung ya, as they say.

Every so often the scientific community publishes a well-designed study that so elegantly captures this discordance dance between our ancient genome and the modern food supply that we nibble on, that it should be mandatory reading for anyone who can, well, read.

Writing in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Italian researchers studied 15 or so healthy children from a rural village in the African country of Burkina Faso, and the same number of children from an urban area of Florence, Italy. In short, the researchers wanted to know if the bacteria in the stools from these children varied between Africa and Italy and what role diet may play in any differences. And what they found has far reaching implications for global health.

Though we do not completely understand how the foods we eat impact the microbial ecology of the human gut, we do know that the diverse complexity of the trillions of microbes in our guts do protect us against invading pathogens, modulate the development of our gastrointestinal system and educate the immune system.

Collectively known as our microbiome, the bacteria in our guts are considered an “essential” organ – i.e., life would be impossible without them and we get sick when 1) diversity goes down and 2) certain genus and species of bacteria dominate the ecological wonderland that is the human gut.

Ranging in age one to six, researchers found by looking at the bacteria in the stool samples of children from the rural village of Burkina Faso in Africa had fewer of the bacteria that cause common tummy aches and diarrhea, such as Shigella and Escherichia, the E. coli bug, than did the kids from Italy. This finding is particularly surprising as the African children often drank water polluted with such bacteria in their rural village. While the African children ate a diet consisting mainly of cereals (millet grain, sorghum), pulses (e.g., black-eyed peas) and vegetables grown, gathered and harvested locally, their Italian counterparts consumed much higher amounts of meat, fat, highly processed carbohydrates and sugar. Said differently, even though the African children lived a lifestyle more like our ancient ancestors following the agriculture revolution over 10,000 years ago, they carried with them a much healthier balance of good bacteria compared to children living in an environment typical of the developed world.

When the researchers looked at the overall diversity of bacteria between the two groups, they found much greater diversity of bacterial species in the African children. This is important, as a reduction in microbial “richness” is one of the undesirable effects of globalization and eating of high processed, generic and uncontaminated foods. By contaminated, I mean the African children are exposed to a large variety of environmental microbes throughout their day – from the way they play (outside) to how foods are collected, prepared and consumed. In the developed world, our produce is often triple-washed and bagged for “cleanliness” where in the undeveloped world it’s often pulled from the ground and consumed – attached microbial-rich soil and all.

Interestingly, the African children also carried with them the genus Prevotella and Xylanibacter, which contain a special set of genes that are particularly good at fermenting dietary fiber. The researchers were astonished to find these bacteria missing from the European children. The bacteria, which essentially live off the high fiber diet of the African children, produce more short-chain fatty acids, which have been proven to protect against gut inflammation. Increased production of short-chain fatty acid in the guts of the African children could also help prevent the establishment of some potentially pathogenic microbes causing diarrhea and other ailments, as seen by the fact that these pathogens were underrepresented in the African children than in the European children. By the way, the African kids’ diet contained nearly twice as much dietary fiber.

Perhaps one of the more interesting outcomes of the study came when the researchers compared the intestinal microbes amongst the youngest study members – aged 2 years or less. In Burkina Faso, children are breast-fed on average 2 years, compared to only 1 year for the Europeans. Even though bacterial diversity existed among the groups, as discussed above, the microbial diversity was much similar between the two groups, while breast milk was the dominant diet. Once weaned, diet seems to have played a bigger role than sanitation, ethnicity, hygiene, geography and climate.

It is now widely appreciated that humans did not evolve as a single species, but rather that humans and the microbiomes (gut bugs) associated with us have co-evolved making us a super organism. We are intertwined, we are one

as a “super-organism”, and our evolution as a species and the evolution of our associated microbiomes have always been intertwined. The vital role that our microbiome is playing in shaping our health and overall immune system is, thankfully, becoming widely appreciated. As the environmental differences between the African and European children eloquently demonstrate, diet plays a dominant role in protecting children from pathogens and potential gastrointestinal diseases.

The idea that natural selection has left us dependant on the symbiotic relationship between microbe is not only likely, but unavoidable. If we continue to deplete our microbiome by effectively starving it through a reduction in diversity and quantity of nutrients such as dietary fiber, society will pay a heavy price. The down-stream effects may be manifesting themselves is some terrifying places ranging from the microbial role in heart disease, some cancers, insulin resistance and even autism.

The depletion of our microbial diversity via our modern diet and lifestyle does not suppose a single cause for modern disease. Indeed, evidence is incontrovertible that many diseases are connected with genetic and other factors, as well as environmental “triggers”, which initiate pathogenisis. The reduction in microbiome diversity does, however, suggest that changes in the microbiome may be responsible for the epidemic nature (ie., increase incidence) of the disease. Failure to distinguish the difference is far reaching.

It’s important to continue to remind ourselves that our immune system and nutritional needs did not evolve in isolation from our microbiome. Though it’s difficult to sort out the potential downside to our reduced diversity in gut bugs, it’s surprisingly simple to restore the balance of nature and nutrients for those of us suffering from any depletion. The idea of intentionally introducing microorganisms into the human body may seem, at first glance, repulsive. But this is already being done on a daily basis via probiotics (live microorganisms) in a dizzying array of products such as yogurts, breads, cheeses – and even pizza! Further strategies should include a diverse diet of nutrients that also deliver a quantity of dietary fiber to our waiting microbiome.

We cannot escape the biology imposed by our evolution. We ate our way into this problem, we can eat our way out. livNAKED friends and think before you bite – a lot of organisms are counting on it.

In the blink of an eye, organic vs. nonorganic has taken center stage in our national discussion on healthy eating, pushing aside, for the moment, any responsible discussion of the evidence in exchange for quick thirty-second sound bites amongst friends and neighbors and by the press. The fact that an unexamined axiom can elevate a bit player in our health and well being to what is approaching an out-of-control fetish simply takes my breath away. An organic sticker affixed to our daily goods demands no footnote. Discussion is preempted.

Could it be that consumers flock to this ideology because of its simplicity rather than its inherent ability to actually improve health and well being? Perception, after all, is reality. Could it really be that simple – conventional food is bad, organic good? Check the box and go on with my day.

In focusing on organic vs conventionally grown foods at the expense of more important factors affecting human health, we are wasting valuable time,  a boat load of money and mountains of good intentions that could very well make a real difference. Do we really believe that the 23 million diagnosed diabetics and 57 million pre-diabetics in the U.S. are so because they don’t eat organic? Or that increasing our consumption of organic foods would wipe away the horrifying fact that 81 million people suffer from one or more forms of cardiovascular disease or reduce the nearly forty-percent of New York City youngsters that are overweight?

This should not be taken as some attack on the sacred cow of organic – we applaud our brothers and sisters doing their organic thing and trying to make the world a better place. Rather, it’s an attempt to draw attention to what is clearly a more complex problem and explore nutritional and business strategies that will get us all to a better place. This is why the idea of Naked Pizza is worth pursuing and the reason we spent the last few years developing and bringing our concept to market.

After spending the first three years developing our crust and business model in a tiny little Petri dish of a store in New Orleans, we launched our franchise company on September 15, 2009. On that day we had a new 5,000 square foot office in CBD of New Orleans, one phone line, no desks, no employees to speak of, no franchise documents, training manuals, no model store design – and the list goes on. What we did have was a set of investors who believed in us, customers that had supported us over the years, several hard years of research and strategic planning under our belt, a fantastic tasting crust and a North Star of a mission and purpose to guide us.

A few Saturdays ago, we celebrated the grand opening of our first franchise store in Miami – the first of several hundred currently under development across the U.S. It’s difficult to describe in words the emotions that surged through our team as we cut that first ribbon. We had done it – we had placed our foot firmly on the ground and taken the first step in what will no doubt be a difficult journey. We did it because we had to. We did it because the wrecking ball that is the fast food landscape of America is slowly undercutting the very biological processes that make us human, turning us into commodities soaked in insulin. We had opened the world’s healthiest pizza joint and it was not organic.

The health drawdown and sustainability of our current nutritional landscape in America are not difficult concepts to wrap your head around. It’s clearly not the arithmetic that’s the problem – it’s the psychology – which is equally simple addition, one-part ignorance, one part entitlement and one part denial. And the food industry – from plow to plate – trade upon this quicksand of fundamental ignorance lubricated by superficial knowledge that has reduced the eloquent biological processes of human nutrition into bickering over low fat vs. low carb vs. organic vs. conventional foods.

In starting this journey over four years ago, we set out to create a great tasting pizza that brought to bear all that science and evolutionary thinking had to offer at a price we could afford. But just as important, we needed a business model that would scale if we were ever going to achieve influence with our mission, and it’s the scale part of the equation that is too often overlooked in our collective desire to move the health needle in America. For the business model, we chose the most successful one available – carry out and delivery, no dining. We liken this to a Briggs and Stratton engine that starts each time you pull the cord. We hacked this model and skinned it with a cool, engaging brand and offered up a product that is more helpful than hurtful. By choosing this model we also entered the hyper-disciplined world of an 8-10 minute delivery area and an operational promise that if you ordered from us, you could plan the next 30 minutes of your life. This is gonna be hard.

At the core, Naked Pizza is science-based – from our operations to our dough balls. In our early discussions the decision on whether to “go organic” with our ingredients and brand positioning boiled to some very simple questions. First, do organics offer a nutritional benefit to our customers beyond that they are? achieved with conventionally grown foods and secondly, does an organic business model allow us to achieve a price point we can scale beyond a niche consumer base, all within the disciplined model of a limited number of rooftops in a tightly defined delivery radius? Since traditional organic agriculture forbids the use of synthetic fertilizers and synthetic pesticides, yields are lower per planted acre and thus prices are on average, higher. The math was simple for us: if organics only feed 2% of the world’s population, what percentage of the households in our tightly defined delivery area(s) eat organic and what percentage of those would swallow the higher price point on a frequent enough basis to justify our existence in the neighborhoods of America? I know its Byzantine and boring, but no matter how we sliced it, we could not figure out how to scale the niche of organic with our model and as far as we are aware, nor has anyone else.

But more important to us than the mathematics of delivery areas and economics of cost of goods, was the science of the health benefits associated with a diet of organic vs conventionally grown foods. I have found that the health benefits of organic foods is not a concept that’s well understood by folks who talk about it the most, and those people and groups who are in a position to understand the science are near silent. The human health benefits of organic foods is festooned with so many misconceptions that it’s difficult to know where to begin. So, I will cut to the chase and point to two recently published analysis that summarize 1) the nutritional quality of organic foods and 2) the human health benefits associated.

In a 2009 study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, researchers from various research institutes throughout the UK systematically culled through and reviewed 52,471 articles relating to nutritional quality of organic and conventionally grown foods published over the last 50 years. From this massive set of peer-reviewed papers, they identified 162 studies (137 on crops and 25 livestock products) relevant to the question at hand and of those, 55 were of satisfactory quality to be considered in the pooled, or meta-analysis. They looked at 1,149 comparisons among nutrients such as vitamin C, potassium, calcium, and so forth. In short, do organic foods pack a bigger nutrient punch? The researchers concluded the following:

“On the basis of a systematic review of studies of satisfactory quality, there is no evidence of a difference in nutrient quality between organically and conventionally produced food stuffs. The small differences in nutrient content detected are biologically plausible and mostly relate to differences in production methods.”

Oops.

In a follow-up article this past July, the same researchers published an article in the same journal, but this time they poured over 98,727 peer-reviewed articles looking for any measurable health benefits of organic foods as a result of controlled clinical and other scientific studies. There were so few relevant studies (n=12) the researchers stated “no quantitative meta-analysis was justified” and concluded that:

“From a systematic review of the currently available published literature, evidence is lacking for nutrition-related health effects that result from the consumption of organically produced foodstuffs.”

Oops, again.

When faced with the human nutritional realities above, organic defenders often shrug and then quickly retreat to the safety blanket of “organic foods are cleaner and purer alternatives to chemically intensive practices of conventional agriculture.” True. But fertilizers today are much safer than their pre-1970 counterparts that so much of the conversation feeds off. However, scientists are beginning to challenge the line between organic and conventional growing methods. Foremost among them is Bruce Ames, a molecular biologist, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Center at the University of California at Berkeley. Ames clearly does not think synthetic chemicals are innocuous, but likes to point out the often over looked fact that “99.9 percent of the toxic chemicals we’re exposed to are completely natural.” This is not a trivial detail. Ames is pointing to the simple fact that when we consume the average plant – organic or not – we “consume about 50 toxic chemicals” as natural pesticides occurring both within and on the food surface.  Yes, it is true that most plants do not want to be eaten and have therefore natural defenses.

Ames goes a step further to say “because synthetic pesticides better increase the supply of cancer-fighting fruits and vegetables (better yields per acre farmed and thus lower prices), pesticides lower the cancer rate.” As dramatic as that statement sounds, his point is simple: the “benefits that accrue from eating a steady diet of fruits and vegetables far outweigh the determents of consuming trace amounts of mildly toxic pesticides” sprayed on them or that naturally occur within.

The tit for tat that takes place between applying or not applying synthetic fertilizers would be more productive if we did maintain a healthy skepticism but based it on accurate scientific information rather than ideological presuppositions or fear. For example, when Craig Sams, the president of Whole Earth Foods in London says “Organic food excludes pesticides” he is not really telling the truth – or at least not the whole story. Organic farming has perpetuated the idea that nature, rather than the farmer, is in charge between the fences. No matter how pure the operation may seem, this is simply not accurate when you consider organic farmers apply natural chemicals and biocides as well – which are equally as destructive if not applied in the same judicious manner in which modern synthetic sources are applied.

For example, sodium nitrate, which is exclusively mined in South Africa and shipped to the U.S., is an approved organic favorite for folks growing winter veggies in dry soils. It enhances soil nitrogen. In addition to the environmental costs of the mining, sodium nitrate pollutes ground water. Recent work suggests that perchloride, which leaches from sodium nitrate, interferes with iodine uptake in the human thyroid gland and is serious enough that the EPA “added perchloride to the Contaminant Candidate List.”

Organic farmers are also allowed to use sulfur, copper, zinc oxide and copper sulfate as natural fungicides. As a result, “Sulfur is said to cause more worker injuries in California than any other agricultural input,” according to geographer Julie Guthman. And the EPA’s own studies classify copper sulfate as a Class I toxin: “highly toxic.” And the zinc oxide used by many organic farmers to kill rodents in grain crops has been recognized by the World Health Organization as having “high mammalian toxicity” – killing not only rats, but prairie dogs and squirrels. And as pointed out by the editors of Garden Alive Catalog, “there is a misconception among many gardeners that organophsophates and other synthetic ‘chemical’ insecticides are dangerous, while botanical and mineral insecticides are not. This is not necessarily true.”

It’s clear that taking one side or another on the debate of organic versus conventionally grown foods is a bit insincere, as the line fades from clear to blurry depending on your perspective and the facts you chose to consider or ignore. However, as the nutritional studies cited above clearly indicate, it’s probably time we soberly accept the fact that organic foods are no better or worse in our fight to attenuate human disease than conventionally grown sources. The issues aren’t with organic foods per se, the problem is the model is getting pushed too far. An organic Oreo cookie is still an Oreo cookie, after all. And yes, it’s true there are some items that seem to attract more than their share of pesticides, a group of plants the Environmental Working Group has labeled the dirty dozen. Celery, peaches, strawberries and apples are among the worst. But no need for me to download the iPhone App to keep track, we don’t sell peaches – we sell pizza.

Organics’ inflated status as a magic bullet has dumbed down the conversation to the point that anyone who seeks a less ideological alternative is labeled as an unethical eater. This is unfortunate. At Naked Pizza, we have chosen a different route – one that allows our business model a fighting chance in this highly competitive sector and a perspective on health that focuses on modern science with an eye towards our evolutionary past.

Our product offering is all-natural. It’s simple: no additives, preservatives or freaky chemicals of any kind in our dough, sauce, cheese and toppings. This means no bleached or bromated flours and no dough stabilizers. It means no artificial citric acid in our sauce or growth hormones in our cheese. We also have no added sugar, HFCS and use no trans-fatty acids. We ousted the olive oil in our dough for canola oil, which has a better fatty acid profile. We brought together 10 seeds and grains into an Ancestral Blend^TM that also includes heat resistant probiotics and a special soluble fiber from the fabled agave plant that is clinically proven to selectively stimulate the growth of good for you bacteria. These ingredients were brought together for their taste profile and “real” health benefits for our customers, not because they represent some flavor of the day health claim. In our dough mix we strive for diversity of nutrients and a healthy dose and diversity of dietary fiber to promote a healthy balance of intestinal bacteria (which is supported by our symbiotic blend of probiotics and prebiotics).

The reality is this: everyone that peddles pizza for a living is the nutritional equivalent of an arms dealer. I don’t care if you sell delivery pizza or gourmet pizza baked in a wood stove and served on elegant dishes set atop a white table cloth, our product hurts people. It hurts people because pizza has traditionally been a highly processed carbohydrate that is immediately digested and absorbed which results in over production of insulin from the pancreas. It hurts people because grains have not been on the menu for 99.5% of human history and represent something completely unfamiliar to our genome. It’s not the grains per se that are bad, it’s how we present them to our gastrointestinal tract in their highly processed form. That crappy feeling most people have after eating a pizza is insulin dumping into our system. So what can we do?

What we can do as an industry is cut back on the amount of high gluten flour and include a few other grains and seeds. This will slow down the digestion and absorption and reduce the amount of insulin in the system to a slower, more manageable drip. This is the area where we can do the most good. Focusing on salt and fat reduction in cheese and toppings – as science and history have proven – will not result in any meaningful progress. At Naked Pizza we take this a step further with our emphasis on improving the health and well being of the microbiome, which is to say the intestinal microflora of our customers with our diversity of fibers and addition of probiotics. This is our shtick – how we define a healthy pizza. An organic high gluten flour is just as bad as a conventionally grown one – pure, white and deadly. Though we do not focus on calorie and fat content, ours is a tad lower because of our formulations. But most important of all, ours is a product and brand that is about starting a conversation. It’s an honest place on the landscape where we are trying hard to do the best job we possibly can.

To differentiate in the McMonocrop of highly processed foods today, we must engage. We need a totally different psychological narrative – a new way forward – built on the foundation of sound science, not eco or nutrition washing. We need the country to stop bashing fast food, though we get what we deserve at the moment. We need to stop hanging our hopes on single ingredient strategies like sodium reduction, low fat or calorie postings on menu boards. Important? Maybe. Game changers in moving the health needle in this country? Not even close. Game over friendos – we lost. The health of the country is in free fall and we all better step up to the plate.

Whether you’re eat or don’t eat organic foods, it’s our sincere hope that you do not take this blog post as anything but a passionate call to arms for an industry that may have some bumpy times ahead. You may not agree with us on everything (or anything), for us Naked Pizza represents our civil disobedience – our tactic – organized around a business model of carry out and delivery that we can count on each and every day when we click on the lights.  Will it work, will we be able to defy all odds and roll out hundreds, possibly a thousand stores over the coming years? Who knows – hopefully we don’t it screw up.

If we’ve heard it once, we’ve heard it a thousand times: consuming fatty foods will make you fat and a diet high in saturated fat “will” cause heart disease. So in other words, avoid fat. Seems like sage advice. Only one problem, mounting evidence continues to reveal that three decades of follow-a-low-fat-diet advice is not suitable for heart disease prevention after all, and, even worse, reducing fat in one’s diet by default means more carbs, which, as in the case for much of America, means increased consumption of highly processed carbs. (See our post First Rule of Dietary Recommendations? First, do no harm).

The low-fat craze got rolling in the early 1980s when nutritionists, doctors, and the not-so far behind marketing departments at major food companies, started parroting the newly released 1980 dietary guidelines (think food pyramid) that “recommended reduced intake of all fats.” Even though sound science in the late 1970s and early 1980s suggested that following a low-fat diet might not be a good idea, it was ignored and to this day eat less fat dominates popular thinking. (See our recent post on Whole Foods promotion of a low-fat diet).

In the current issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Danish researchers compared the association of saturated fat and carbohydrate consumption with heart disease risk among a staggering 53,644 men and women. The study is not only unique for its size, but the length of the 12 yr long follow up. This study sought to address the $64,000 Question: does the diet-heart paradigm that high intake of saturated fat and cholesterol increase the risk of atherosclerosis and heart disease? Said differently, is a fatty diet going to kill me? As with recently published meta-analysis and large pooled analysis of dozens of smaller studies — you can read a few here and here — the Danish researchers showed that saturated fat intake was not associated with increased risk of heart disease. However, they did find an increased risk of heart disease with increased consumption of high-GI-value carbohydrates – i.e., highly processed carbohydrates.

You don’t need to be a nutritionist or public health official to know the health of the country is in free fall. So the sooner we begin replacing as much of the highly processed carbohydrates in our diet with minimally processed ones, the better off we will be. As for which ones to choose, a good rule of thumb would be the whiter the bread the sooner you will be dead. This overall idea has much to do with our strategy at NakedPizza. Our Ancestral Blend of 12 seeds, grains and so on translates into slower digestion and absorption (think lower glycemic index).

It’s imperative that the food industry play a role in shifting the diet-heart paradigm away from restricting fat intake and toward reduced consumption of highly refined carbohydrates. Moreover, maybe its time we wake up and smell the bacon and maybe eat a little of it too.

Think before you bite friendos. Peace out.

It is said the earthly flavor of tequila can be traced to the sweat of the jimadores who cultivate and harvest under the harsh Mexican sun the ancient blue agave from which this popular spirit is distilled. This “man-agave symbiosis” has a deep history and with the fusion of Old World technologies has influenced the trajectory of both human society and this domesticated succulent in the Jaliscan highlands for nearly 500 years.

Travel any direction out of the city of Guadalajara in western Mexico and you will soon see fields tinted a peculiar color of blue signaling you are in agave country. Among these rolling fields agave-culture has emerged; a blend of plant husbandry techniques, instruction in ecology, and ritual observances intended to nurture the growth of this noble plant. But before tequila flowed out of the rich, volcanic Mexican earth into tiny glasses around the world, agave was a caloric gift and supplier of raw material for clothing, basketry and footwear for our ancient ancestors. Before Cuervo and Sauza, agave had membership in a special grouping of plants that had much to do with our success as a species.

Through specially evolved photosynthetic processes for maximizing light-gain during the day and water-conserving strategies at night, species of agave store a special carbohydrate known as fructan. Present in varying quantities in some 36,000 plants around the world – such as artichokes, onions, bananas – fructan carbohydrates, unlike starch found in such foods as potatoes, cannot be digested in the human stomach and small intestine so therefore “move along” to the large colon where they serve as a nutrient base for the trillions of micro flora in one of the earths most diverse ecosystems: the human colon.

Naked Pizza Co-founder, Randy, holds up a 25 lb section of agave while the jimadores harvest additional agave heads (penas) in the background. Note the white "paste" of the agave is pure, prebiotic fructan. Note also these agaves are being harvested from soils built up by eons of alluvial and volcanic activity. The high ash and mineral content of the soil create ideal growing conditions for agave. Still active today, the Colima volcano can be seen in the distance.

Agaves inability to be digested by gastric enzymes technically make it a dietary fiber, and its functional role as a nutrient base for the micro inhabitants in the ecological wonderland of the human gut make agave a prebiotic fiber – a kind of super fiber that selectively stimulates the growth of “good bacteria.” And its agaves special prebiotic fiber that has scientist and nutritionist around the world thinking its time we (re)introduced agave back into the human diet to improve microbial balance in our decidedly out of balance guts.

Agaves emergence as a prebiotic fiber in the food world is the reason we recently traveled to the small town of Usmajac, located about 100 km south of Guadalajara. In this tiny agricultural zone, the Corona Orozco family produce a premium tequila under the brand Penacho Azteca at a state of the art facility recently built to meet increased global demand for this ancient spirit. But as you approach the facility along a bumpy dirt road, you are immediately struck by two things: First, the distinct smell that large volumes of tequila must lie just behind the high, rustic brick wall enclosing the distillery and secondly, a recent construction that has extended the fortress wall another couple of hundred meters. But unlike the rustic brick wall, this new extension is plastered smooth and painted white. You can’t help but notice that the only openings in the massive brick wall is marked by very Spanish-looking wrought iron gates, while the two openings in the more modern wall is a solid, elegant and flat aluminum gate. The look and the lines of the gate are very much what you would expect in a high-end, modern kitchen.

It does not take you long to figure out that the two different walls, and their very different entrances, are a visual metaphor between the old and new uses of agave and how they are processed at this facility. Through the Spanish gates you enter a grassy courtyard surrounded by massive brick buildings housing fermentation vats, oak barrels and bottling lines. These are the tools and techniques of the ancient art tequila making. But through the smooth, aluminum gate some 100 meters away you enter a large open space with a very modern, L-shaped building with more smart looking aluminum doors. Here, the Corona Orozco family, along with Dr. Gustavo Bustillo, a chemist and food technologist, have erected a multi-million dollar processing facility to render naturally, the prebiotic fiber from the ancient agave. A tour of the rendering facility also reveals one of the most, if not the most, well-equipped laboratories for carbohydrate analysis of any lab in all of Mexico outside a major university.

As agaves are harvested in the fields and brought to the facility, some are steamed in large autoclaves for 16 hours to break down the fructans into simple (short chain) sugars so they can be fermented and ultimately distilled into tequila, while others skip the cooking process and move along a system of belts and rollers that literally squeeze the prebiotic juices from the more fibrous parts of the plant. By skipping the cooking, the fructan structure is kept in tact in its long chain form and its this longer form that is not digestible by our gastric enzymes thus making these juices a dietary fiber. Once the prebiotic juice is rendered it moves from the old plant along a stainless pipe over to the more modern, prebiotic facility where it undergoes several mechanical, non chemical processes, before its spray dried into a powder that is bagged and ready for use in every Naked Pizza.

Project Agave from NakedPizza on Vimeo.

Feeding your gut bugs may provide relief from celiac disease.

Walk down the isle of your local grocery store and you’re likely to encounter more than a handful of “gluten-free” offerings ranging from cookies, breads, beer, pastas, and even pet food. It’s safe to say that gluten intolerance, or the idea that gluten-free is better, is trending.

Though this trend is not the good kind, new research reveals dietary inputs that improve the balance of good to bad gut bacteria may offer some relief for those suffering from this wicked disease.

First some basics: According to the National Institutes of Health, celiac disease affects several million people in the U.S. alone, with many more going undiagnosed. It causes damage to the small intestine and interferes with absorption of nutrients from food. People who have celiac disease cannot tolerate gluten, a protein in wheat, rye, and barley. When people with celiac disease eat foods or use products containing gluten, their immune system responds by damaging or destroying villi – the tiny, fingerlike protrusions lining the small intestine. Without healthy villi, nutrients cannot be absorbed properly, leading to malnutrition, no matter how much food one eats and furthermore, it can be downright painful. Most of us know at least one person that has moved away from foods containing gluten.

New research just published in the May 2010 issue of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology reveals differing intestinal bacteria in celiac patients could influence inflammation to varying degrees and that dietary changes that include probiotics and/or prebiotics (found in some foods and each and every slice of NakedPizza) may help alleviate the severity of celiac disease for some patients.

According to the research, elevated levels of certain less-than-desirable bacteria such as some bacteroides and strains of E. coli trigger inflammation, and since celiac disease is a chronic inflammatory disorder of the small intestine — a place where lots of bacteria live — more inflammation is exactly what you want to avoid. In science speak, these not-so-good gram-negative bacteria induce higher secretion of Th1-type proinflammatory cytokines, that is, more painful inflammation. On the flip side, health giving bifidobacterium did not cause the same elevation in proinflammatory cytokines. So, if you suffer from celiac disease you want a bacterial population that has less of these bad bugs and more of the good ones.

According to Louis Montaner, D.V.M., M.Sc., D.Phil. Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Leukocyte Biology, “For people with celiac disease, this opens a line of research into new therapies that may be as accessible as a grocer’s shelf.” Translation: eat foods that stimulate the growth of healthy bifidobacterium. Just so happens that each and every slice of NakedPizza — both our traditional and “gluten-free” crusts — contain special prebiotic fiber that is clinically proven to stimulate the growth of bifidobacterium.

Eat well my friends.

The average American consumes about 15 grams a day of dietary fiber, which is approximately half of what the government and nutrition experts recommend. The reasons for the shortfall are many but most point to the obvious: as a society we have all but removed whole plants from our diet and thus dietary fiber in the process. The solution: eat more plants and by default the fiber in your diet will increase as well. Sounds simple enough.

While we could fill page after page on this blog about why Americans eat fewer and fewer plants, very little has been mentioned about the reduced fiber content of the plants that dominate the American food supply over those that punctuated the nutritional landscape upon which our current genome and dietary needs were selected.

Below is an interesting glimpse into what may be a significant contributor to our chronic low intake of dietary fiber. The graph presents the grams of fiber per 100 grams (approx 3 ounces: dry weight) of the dominant vegetables and fruits eaten by Americans, modern day Australian Aborigines, Hadza Foragers of Tanzania, and prehistoric hunter-gatherers of the Lower Pecos region of west Texas and Northern Mexico. In other words, if you take the top 20 plants eaten by Americans (see list below), the fiber in 100 grams of edible material accounts for 10.7% by weight. As you see from the lists below, Americans consume a limited diversity of plants (note the are >300,000 edible plants in the world). By contrast, Australian Aborigines consume 100’s of different species of plant in a given year. Strikingly, the fiber content of the top consumed plants among aborigines is nearly twice as high (20.95%) as those consumed by Americans. This number is even higher among popular plants consumed among modern-day foragers in Tanzania, and almost equally as high from archaeological evidence from prehistoric populations in the Lower Pecos region of west Texas and northern Mexico.

Though we are all trying to consume more fiber, our most popular plants offer very little natural fiber making it more difficult to achieve optimal intake to maintain good health and well-being. If government programs and nutritional advice supported the consumption of plants with higher fiber content — such as legumes and beans, for example — we might reach more optimal intakes. We’re just sayin. LivNAKED friendos.

Top 10 Veggies Eaten by Americans: Potatoes, Tomatoes, Head lettuce, Romaine & leaf lettuce, Onions, Carrots, Cabbage, Sweet corn, Celery, Snap beans (Note these 10 account for 82% of all vegetables eaten in America. Note USDA data used for this article classifies tomato as a veggie even though it’s a fruit)

Top Fruits Eaten by Americans: Apples, Bananas, Grapes, Strawberries, Oranges, Watermelon, Pears, Peaches, Cantaloup, Pineapple (*Note these 10 fruits account for 60% of all fruits eaten in America) .

Aside from its obvious contribution to many a wild night on Bourbon Street, this amazing plant has been feeding our ancestors for tens of thousands of years, and continues to do so today. The plants are typically harvested between 8 and 12 years of age and their heads are then cooked in large ovens for 48-72 hours. Agaves contain a special carbohydrate known as inulin (rather than starch like you find in a potato). Because of its special chemical and physical structure, inulin is not digested in the human body and is therefore classified as a dietary fiber (yes, technically dietary fiber is anything “you” can’t use, more on this in a second). However, by cooking the 100-200 pound agave heads for extended periods of time, the inulin is broken down through a process known as hydrolysis, effectively reducing the once indigestible inulin into short chain sugars (same process you experience when caramelizing onions). Once broken down, you can either eat the mash as a significant energy source or take it to the next step and distill into alcohol (click here for a little video, all the action starts around 2:00 min).

The “pre-” fermented agave heads are often processed into Agave Nectar, which you can buy in your local Whole Foods to pour on your pancakes. Interestingly, the cooking process does not usually reduce the inulin to pure sugar — in fact, upwards of 80% of the Agave Nectar in the grocery store is actually liquid fiber — but enough of the inulin has been reduced to sugars to give it that sweet taste that we love.

Due to overproduction of Agave plants throughout grow areas in Mexico in the late 90’s, due mainly to fluctuating global demand of tequila (I’m doing my part to keep global production up!), growers started looking for other uses of the inulin outside of distilling alcohol. Agave nectar syrup was one use and another was as a prebiotic dietary fiber. Because of its special chemical structure, agave inulin is not digested in small intestine of humans and therefore travels the entire 30′ length of the small intestine and ends up in the colon. Once in the colon, our handy dandy little microbial friends break it down and turn the byproducts into all kinds of wonderful and healthful things for us. Because the agave inulin “selectively” grows beneficial bacteria in our bodies, like bifidobacterium and lactobacillus (think yogurt), it’s known as a prebiotic fiber (ie, the worlds healthiest fiber).

As many of you know, we have been incorporating prebiotic fiber in our pizza dough from Day 1. To date, we have been using prebiotic fiber from chicory roots grown in Europe. Like prebiotic fiber from chicory roots, the manufacturers in Mexico have figured out through a natural process to turn the organic Agave nectar into a granulated, powdered form which makes it easy to incorporate into our flour mix. We have been testing the product with our flour blenders at Bay State Milling and are entering into final stages of testing. We anticipate rolling out the new flour mix within 45-60 days.

In the next 30 – 60 days, team NakedPizza will be traveling to Guadalajara in the Mexican state of Jalisco to film the production process. This footage will be incorporated into a mini-documentary on the functional aspects of our pizza that will be available through streaming video in our stores throughout the U.S. and online. Our expertise on functional foods and emphasis on healthful product development is key to our promise to you, our customers, to do all we can to make a difference. We will keep pushing the envelope. livNAKED friendos.

Whole Foods’ new nutritional ratings system ignores 2.4 million years of human history. Oops.

First off, we love us some Whole Foods (WF). They get it, and in a big way. Plus their stores are really cool and smell nice. But, in case you missed it, WF just launched (or is in process of launching) a new nutrition rating system called ANDI (Aggregate Nutrient Density Index) based on the work of author Joel Fuhrman. So far, so good.

A quick review of the ANDI page reveals a thoughtful effort to help consumers eat better. However, the “Low Fat” portion of ANDI got our attention. According to ANDI, your diet should be low in fat and you should “get your healthy fats from plant sources, such as nuts and avocados.” In other words, your primary source of fatty acids/lipids (aka fat) should be from plants. While we get why WF takes this position, the ANDI system conveniently ignores 2.4 million years of human evolution, hundreds of peer-reviewed articles on fatty acids, and major paradigm shifts under way in the nutrition, medical, and genomic sciences. Again, we love us some WF, but this is a classic example of political vegetarianism vs evolutionary biology. Somewhere betwixt the twain the truth will be found. But first, our perspective.

By analyzing ancient human and animal remains, studying the diets of modern hunter-gatherers, and comparing nutrient compositions of wild and domesticated plant and animal foods, evolutionary biologists have gained insights into ancestral human diets. Although dietary patterns varied by latitude, season, weather, culture, and other variables, all ancestral diets shared key features. Food sources were limited to unprocessed plants foraged, and unprocessed land and marine animals hunted from the proximate environment. Hunted animals consumed only natural foods from local environments. Until recently, human diets consisted of combinations of wild animal carcasses (including brains, bone marrow, and organs), shellfish, fish, fruits, leafy vegetables, mushrooms, insects, larvae, nuts, and seasonal honey and eggs. These diets provided balance in critical metabolic processes, favored health, and allowed our ancestors to thrive, reproduce, and pass their genes to subsequent generations.

It is clear from modern medical research that dietary lipid intake exert important influence upon human health and the expression of chronic disease. Therefore, it is likely that human dietary lipid requirements are genetically determined, and that the evolutionary, nutritional selective pressures that have acted upon the ancestral human lineage over the past 2.4 million years may provide important insight into optimal, present day, lipid intakes. Substantial evidence from archaeological deposits reveal that consumption of animal tissues play a prominent (often dominant) role in diet of our ancestors. Consequently, fats derived from wild game animals almost always represented the primary lipid source in pre-agricultural human diets.

Neither fish nor fowl became common dietary constituents until about 15,000 years ago — limited mainly due to technology — so the main nutritional adaptation over the most of humanities 2.4 million year existence was the tissues of mammals that were either scavenged or hunted. Archaeological and ethnographic data indicate that our ancestors consumed not just muscle tissue, but also certain fatty portions of the carcass including brain, marrow and depot fat. Consequently, the lipid composition of these wild ruminant tissues provide insight into the qualitative range of dietary lipids that ancestral humans typically encountered and may be useful in determination of present day dietary lipid recommendations for the prevention and treatment of chronic disease.

So any new nutrition rating system (e.g., ANDI) that honestly wants to improve human health should develop rating systems that consider the lipid composition of mammal tissues most likely consumed by our ancestors in order to provide some evolutionary glimpse into dietary lipid profiles that modern humans are physiologically adapted to and create rating systems that most likely resembles fats we are genetically selected for.

LIVNAKED friendos. Think before you bite.

Have you ever stared at one of those glossy photographs in National Geographic of the small birds riding on the head and back of a massive hippo partially submerged in some far away African pond and thought to your self, “that’s got to be annoying.” Why doesn’t it shake them off? Why not submerge? Maybe, after dunking over and over only to have the birds return, has the hippo has simply given in to his avian hitchhikers, annoying as they seem?

The African jacana bird is said to spend an average of five hours each day riding on the back of wading hippos, pecking at and ingesting flies, parasites, ticks, detritus and dead skin. Perched upon this floating buffet, the birds also feed upon the many small fish that can gather around the submerged hippo. Seems the fish feed on the same parasites, ticks, dead skin, and algae as do the birds. You would think the never ending pecking and nibbling would finally get to the hippo, and it does, often resulting in thrashing about in the water and fights with nearby hippo neighbors. But for much of the time, the hippo goes about daily water activities with pecking birds and nibbling fish in constant tow and just puts up with their intrusions. Stay with me, there is a point.

Researchers have observed that the hippo-bird-fish relationship may in fact be a symbiotic one, in that everyone benefits at some level, even the host. The hippo gets the ticks, parasites, dead skin, and flies efficiently removed on a dependable schedule, and the birds and fish benefit through nutrients derived from the regular cleansing. Interestingly, different species of fish have been observed targeting specific body parts of the hippo. Members of the carp family are known to be the main cleaner, mowing along the large surface of the hippos hide, removing everything indiscriminately. Species of cichlids prefer cleaning duties in the tail area, while other species clean between the many cracks in the soles of the hippo’s feet. While far from a passive recipient of these cleaning services, hippos have been observed splaying their toes and spreading their legs, affording easier access for the attendant fish. Being opportunists, hippos are known to visit places around the pond where large groups of fish are known to congregate, in effect pulling into “full service” cleaning stations. Life is good.

The health and nutritional dance played out on ponds throughout Africa between the hippo, its avian passengers, and the visiting nibbling fish has been going on for as long as hippos have been around — which is a long time. But is it necessary? Could the hippos do without the birds pecking them on the head throughout the day? Sure. But is the hippo healthier and better off with the parasites and ticks removed? Most likely, yes. The important point to take away from the pond hippo is the adaptability of the species involved — each is enhancing its “lifestyle” through its relationship to the other. Such relationships in nature are often referred to as “commensal” – the Latin roots of which mean “at table together.”

The symbiotic and beneficial arrangements between the hippo and his pond neighbors are not unique in nature — quite the opposite in fact. All around us, from the crustaceous barnacles and white lice that attach themselves to the underside of gray whales, to the spiders in our houses, powerful adaptive forces are forever driving these often necessary and sometimes odd relationships in nature. Many of these host-passenger relationships — though not all of them — can provide profound benefits to one or more of the participants, resulting in improved health/lifestyle and thus, better survivability. The hippo-bird-fish relationship may have already become so intertwined that subtle changes in this relationship may have negative health effects upon one or all partners. For example, if the hippo, for whatever reason, decides to spend more time on the shore and out of the water in the future, will that affect the species of fish that have come to depend on the submerged bounty to meet their nutrient needs? How will the hippo’s newfound terrestrial life affect the fishing success of the birds that enjoyed the ready access to fish as it sat perched on its multifunctional buffet-hunting stand? Will the parasites and ticks, not being removed on a regular schedule by the birds and fish, have a negative affect on the health of the newly land-based hippo, as they accumulate in number? It’s hard to know but easy to guess.

But what we can say with some certainty, is that if the symbiotic relationship between these pond dwellers has gone on sufficiently long enough to have physiologically conditioned the health and nutrient requirements of one of the participants, then we can expect some negative impact to its health, well-being and ultimately its survivability if the action of one or more participant is removed or goes awol. Take our nibbling fish for example. Lets say a particular species, one that has evolved on a diet over eons that has always included significant nutrients garnered from specific algae growing on the under bellies of the pond hippo, is suddenly denied that food item with its specific nutrient profile that the fish has physiologically and metabolically become accustomed to. In other words, it has become a necessary part of the fish’s daily nutrient requirements and its overall health. Can the fish just do without and go about searching for replacement nutrients throughout the pond to make up the difference? Maybe. But if the nutrient profile of the hippo-algae contributed a significant portion of that particular species of fish’s diet, and the nutrient profile of that particular algae is not mimicked well in other resources in the pond available to the fish, then the fish has got a major problem on his hands/gills. Simply replacing hippo-algae with some run-of-the-pond low-grade algae might not do the trick. This would be like putting diesel in a car that runs on unleaded fuel — it stops.

Throughout our evolutionary march to mammalian dominance, humans have maintained a similar symbiotic relationship with an unlikely cast of characters. Though many people would be hard pressed to name any one of them, they are with us every minute of every day and have been from the moment we entered this world.

It was in our early knuckle-walking days that we nurtured our symbiotic relationship with some evolutionary hitchhikers that would evolve and survive with us to this day, becoming so intertwined with our health and well-being that any affect on them, has an affect on us. You see, humans are host to a vast and complex community of microorganisms that have carved an ecological niche inside our bodies, on our skin, in our hair, under our nails, in our mouths, in our noses and, most relevantly, occupying every length of our gastrointestinal system (gut). At this very moment — as you read this post — there are literally trillions of these gut microbes feeding on portions of your most recent meals. Like other living organisms, they live, multiply, and die based on access to quantities of sufficient quality food items, with variety being a plus. Well over 1,000 species of bacteria are present in a healthy human adult, with the vast majority living in the colon. In the stomach, acid keeps the bacteria at a relatively puny thousands of inhabitants. The small intestine has a quick transport time through its several metres in length, with the quick wash-through allowing “only” millions of bacteria to persist. At 1.5 m (5 ft) in length, the adult human colon contains at any given time about 1/4 kg (little over half a pound) of bacteria reaching 100,000,000,000,000 in total. This represents about 90-95% of all the cells in our body. Taken literally then, we are 20 times more microbe than mammalian. The typical adult has more bacteria in their colon than has ever been people living on Earth and ever will live on this planet. We also excrete our own weight in fecal bacteria each year — try measuring it if you don’t believe us! If we live to about 75 years or higher then we should have excreted the equivalent weight of 12 elephants in feces (African or Indian who knows?) and that’s a lot of hippos too. So who says humans aren’t full of s***?

The bacteria maintain their numbers and diversity in our colons based on the food they receive (i.e. mainly the food we, as the host, give them). This arrives in the colon as a number of substances, but in general, as dietary residues that escape digestion and absorption further up the line in the stomach and small intestine. The vast majority of these “non-digested” foods are known as dietary fiber. Yes, fiber is not food for us, but food for the bacteria.

Though a great number of species are present at any given time, over 99% of the billions of bacteria in our colon are represented by just a few genera —  a group or family of bacteria that are related and called one group name e.g. for that well known bacterium E. coli, E. stands for Escherichia and is the genus name whereas coli is the species within that genus. We know that the vast majority of the bacteria found in the human gut are harmless, many are benign, and some are actually quite beneficial. Disease causing bacteria (pathogens) always are present in very small numbers, but they hog the press, giving bacteria their, vastly undeserved, negative public image. Their development is suppressed by the joined activity of the other intestinal bacteria, helped by the natural resistance of the host. It is only when the latter is weak or severely challenged that harmful bacteria can develop and can cause disease. If you shop in the local grocery store, you have no doubt become familiar with two groups (genera) of these good guys: Bifidobacterium or ‘bifidobacteria’ and Lactobacillus or lactobacilli. If you eat yogurt (e.g. live-, bio-, bifidus, active, etc.), you may immediately recognize these names, as they have become very popular additives in a range of dairy products, as probiotics.

Most folks are taken aback when learning that gut microbes — or bacteria — have invaded our bodies in such large numbers and even more surprised when they find out that many of these bacteria play an important role in our health. How can this be? As youngsters we can remember our mothers saying “don’t touch that, you’ll get germs. Put it down.” Seems some things are timeless. The message was simple: bacteria are bad and they will make you sick. Get rid of them. This is nonsense however. Our lives would be impossible, or decidedly uncomfortable, without them.

At NakedPizza we have developed an Ancestral Blend^TM of flours to deliver the diversity of “non-digested” foods our health-giving bacteria need in each and every slice of our pizza. Recognizing that humans are superorganisms made up of one human genome and trillions of bacterial ones is the first step to realizing optimal health and well-being. Continuing to ignore this basic biological fact will not result in any significant improvement in population health. Think friendos. livNAKED.

As you know, the concept behind NakedPizza is pretty simple (although a lot of people try to make it complicated and read all kinds of things into our odyssey). We A) make a great tasting pizza out of a diverse blend of real, whole, natural grains, seeds, beans, meats, veggies, and B) build a business model that trojan-horses the popularity of pizza ($30B industry!!!) in order to get that great pizza to millions of people. Oh, and C), change the world with the crazy idea that fast food (a great concept) doesn’t have to be bad for you.

It’s an honest proposition. The NakedPizza you eat is nutritionally right on. And best of all, it tastes like…pizza!!! Really good pizza If you want to know why it’s so good, we’ll happily tell you in, ahem, intimate detail. If not, no worries, it tastes like…pizza!!! The “good for you” part is on the house.

NakedPizza is revolutionary in a “right under your nose” kind of way, retro even: eat like your ancestors (in Geico parlance, so easy a caveman could do it).

The benefits are pretty straight forward too. The food tastes good (like…food!). You feel better. And you are doing the kinds of things that ward off disease (you live better). Unless we’re missing something, no abstraction there.

We’d be the first to tell you to check our math: Michael Pollan’s is a voice worth listening to. We like him. His simple take on food will help you make decisions every day (unless you don’t eat everyday), be you in a restaurant, in your kitchen, or scarfing NakedPizza. His books are reviewed in this New York Times piece.

The following excerpt gets at part of what we’re about (this is the LIVNAKED Blog after all) and the perils of the modern diet (eating unlike your ancestors):

“Two fundamental facts provide the impetus Americans and other Westerners need to make dietary changes.” One, as Mr. Pollan points out, is that populations who rely on the so-called Western diet — lots of processed foods, meat, added fat, sugar and refined grains — “invariably suffer from high rates of the so-called Western diseases: obesity, Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer.” Indeed, 4 of the top 10 killers of Americans are linked to this diet.

As people in Asian and Mediterranean countries have become more Westernized (affluent, citified, and exposed to the fast foods exported from the United States), they have become increasingly prone to the same afflictions.

The second fact is that people who consume traditional diets, free of the ersatz foods that line our supermarket shelves, experience these diseases at much lower rates. And those who, for reasons of ill health or dietary philosophy, have abandoned Western eating habits often experience a rapid and significant improvement in their health indicators.

I will add a third reason: our economy cannot afford to continue to patch up the millions of people who each year develop a diet-related ailment, and our planetary resources simply cannot sustain our eating style and continue to support its ever-growing population.

Read the whole story: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/health/02brod.html?em

Overpaid, over-sized men, barely out of their teens spawning the most exalted highs, the bluest blues, billions in economic impact, and, in certain locales, cross dressing. A front page story in today’s Times-Picayune (I date myself, it’s also on nola.com) claims Saints euphoria as a lubricant for improved race relations. A more sober voice weighs in that if we like it (racial harmony), then we should fully comprehend that after the Super Bowl, we need to commit to extraordinary hard work to continue it. Fair enough (note to new mayor: we like it).

In the context of everything the city has endured, demonstrated, and learned in the last 4+ years, and with this Saints-City Symbiosis as the ultimate punctuation (exclamation!) mark, Tulane’s Richard Campanella observes that New Orleanians have become metaphors for something positive, something from which the rest of the nation can benefit…”

He goes on to write, “It’s no coincidence that, while the ‘Who Dat’ dates back decades, the phrase ‘Who Dat Nation’ appears to be mostly a post-Katrina phenomenon. Why? Because the cheerful defiance of adversity has universal human appeal. The Who Dat Nation defies four decades of franchise frustration, four decades of municipal decline, and, most significantly, four recent years of bad memories.  ‘Who Dat Nation’ ap offers an alternative to the use of New Orleans as a metaphor for despair. To those who dismiss sports as a trivial and illusionary distraction, consider the civic narratives at work here: Unity. Resilience.

Optimism.

Pretty powerful stuff.”

Dunno. A dream or something more? You know what you feel. Right here. Right now. Don’t you?

Speaking of powerful, one more time ain’t too much. Saint-Vikings highlights (the throat-lumping Rocky-themed one is second — golden) courtesy WWL radio.

Denise Gass at Trumpet tipped us off on an iPhone app that allows you to livestream the State of the Union. You can even submit a question to the Pres. and vote on others at YouTube.com/CitizenTube . As cool as this is, in the attention squeeze of Tiger’s infidelity, American Idol, and, here in New Orleans, the obsession with all things Saints/Super Bowl (ironically, we’re approaching the finish line of a mayor’s race), does access and transparency contribute to better citizenship and engagement? Is it true transparency or crafted propaganda? Bottom line — we have pretty good tools, but will we use them? At NakedPizza, we spend a lot of time working through this as our business model is entirely based on a sense of advocacy around the food supply, policy, fast food, and health. And candidly, we are frequently torn about how much is too much. I mean we understand that first we have to offer you a good pizza, but man, there’s so much we want to talk to you about. So much. For now, we’re listening because we not so dense as to not grasp that it’s about what BOTH of us want to talk about. Interesting. Find out more about the State of the Union iPhone app: (Read about it on the White House blog: http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/01/25/state-union-20)

In case you missed it, New York City’s health department wants restaurants and packaged food makers to reduce the amount of sodium in packaged and restaurant food by 25% over five years to reduce heart attacks and stroke. But are NY health officials missing the point?

Salt, the only rock we eat, has been one of the world’s most sought-after commodities. From keeping meat from spoiling, to financing of wars, to the establishment of trade routes and cities, salt courses through our veins and our history like no other substance on earth. But most physicians and health officials don’t care for it much — not for its ability to improve the taste of many foods or that it’s necessary for a properly functioning body, but because we eat too much of it and it causes hypertension (aka high blood pressure). At least we are told.

Hypertension is technically defined as a systolic blood pressure higher than 140 and a diastolic blood pressure higher than 90 — the old 140 over 90. Blood pressure is basically the force of blood exerted on the blood vessel walls. The systolic pressure is the peak pressure during contracting of the heart and diastolic is the pressure exerted during the relaxed phase. Oh, our beating hearts.

Snake oil salesman and physicians started measuring blood pressure nearly 100 years ago. Why? Because they could. It was easy to do, and it provided concerned Doc’s a quick “quantitative measure” of how we were doing. More importantly, high blood pressure soon became a risk factor for other diseases. Those with high blood pressure were more likely to be obese and or diabetic. And conveniently, if you were obese or diabetic, you had a pretty good chance of having high blood pressure. Nearly 80 percent of your risk for heart disease is said to be a result of being diabetic and suffering from hypertension. In other words, high blood pressure is not a good thing and should be avoided — and thus reduced — at all costs.

Interestingly, folks with “abnormally” elevated levels of insulin in their blood are more likely to be hypertensive, leading to the inclusion of hypertension in the spectrum of abnormalities collectively known as the metabolic syndrome (or Syndrome X Diseases). If you are obese, you are “more than likely” to have high blood pressure, and folks with high blood pressure are “likely” to be obese. In addition, the higher your blood pressure, so go your levels of cholesterol and triglycerides, and so your risk of diabetes and heart disease.

Despite the associations between obesity, heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, and high levels of cholesterol and triglycerides, public health officials blame salt. That’s like saying you’re an alcoholic because your drink too much. Something else is going on.

The salt-hypertension hypothesis is what many would call a biological plausibility — seems to make sense, so that must be it (see our recent posting on vitamin C deficiency and scurvy for similarly flawed logic). When we consume salt, our body retains that salt and more water at the same time. This increases the “pressure” in our blood vessels. Under “normal” intakes of salt (whatever that is), our kidneys will respond to the excess and excrete the salt in our urine, along with the additional water as well. It is thought that a “chronic” intake of salt disrupts this process in some way and thus we are “chronically” hypertensive.

Decades of pondering the obese-hypertensive-diabetes-heart disease-high cholesterol-and-triglycerides connection in clinical trial after clinical trial has resulted in what many have described as “inconclusive and contradictory” results with regards to the role of salt. Sure, you can get a spike in blood pressure if you slam back a large dose of salt, but that does not explain chronic hypertension. Systematic reviews of the evidence — whether you are a believer or not — demonstrate that if you have elevated blood pressure, say 40 mm Hg over healthy levels, cutting your salt intake by half will only result in a 4 to 5 mm Hg drop (i.e., not much).

It’s often said that high blood pressure is a natural part of aging and explains elevated levels as we clip along into our golden years. But as the British physician Cyril Donnison noted in the 1938 Civilization and Disease, societies eating traditional diets low in westernized fare of highly processed carbohydrates (sugar, refined grains, etc), consistently had lower blood pressure than the more “affluent” folks consuming more processed diets, regardless of the salt content. For example, Kenyan nomads in their sixties “had an average systolic blood pressure forty points lower than that of European men of the same age.” Similar patterns have been documented all over the world and as each of these traditional societies embraced the westernized diet of highly processed foods, their blood pressure — and weight, and risk of disease — went up.

Very little attention has been paid to the nutrition-related aspects of blood pressure. When was the last time your doctor said that processed carbs in the form of sugars and refined grains “may” play a role in your hypertension and that salt is a minor player? The laboratory evidence that salt raises blood pressure does not explain why blood pressure is raised in a given population in the first place. Until we come to the grips with the terrible connection between processed carbohydrates and elevated levels of insulin that are “almost always” associated with Syndrome X disease — including hypertension — we will only continue to suffer, both in our health and in the taste of our food.

livNAKED friends. liv smart – think before you bite.

As you already know the digestive system supplies energy and nutrients to the rest of the body. The brain is particularly choosy about its type of fuel, it really only likes glucose from starches and sugars. This does not, however, mean that large intakes of chocolate chip cookies will boost your brain capacity. In fact it is quite the reverse. Too much sugar or refined carbohydrates (think pizza from the “other” guys) can deprive your brain of glucose as high intakes trigger insulin which removes glucose out of the blood, stores it as fat and puts your brain into an energy crisis.

Maintaining gut health is vital in the management of your mood. A healthy digestive system can process and absorb more nutrients and energy. Under stress, brain energy takes priority over the needs of the gut, putting it into temporary shut down. Good gut bacteria can provide the gut with energy by processing remaining food components missed by the digestive process (think dietary fiber). This leaves the rest of the body with more available energy while still making sure the gut stays in operation. Certain good gut bacteria such as Bifodobacteria also assist in modulating lipid metabolism, stabilizing cholesterol and insulin levels. The Bifidobacteria thrives off specific prebiotics, nutritional components found mainly in vegetables, fruit, and every slice of NakedPizza.

Live well friends.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

Pathogens are everywhere. We are all familiar with the cold viruses that give us sniffles, coughs, and aches, and with more frightening pathogens that cause diseases such as AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, killing millions of people each year. But pathogens affect much more than our own health. Farmers struggle with fungi that attack their crops, forest service personnel worry about endangered species and the impact of epidemics on fragile plant communities, and tourists are increasingly finding their favorite snorkeling destinations devastated by coral bleaching diseases. Yet wiping out harmful pathogens is an unrealistic goal, and many other pathogens play positive roles in ecosystems from recycling nutrients to increasing biological diversity. In other words, pathogens are embedded within ecological systems including the eco wonderland known as the human body.

Infectious diseases involve interactions between at least two species, the pathogen and the host species it infects and many pathogens are transmitted from host to host by at least one species of vector, such as mosquito. Understanding the dynamics of any particular disease system, then, involves understanding the often, complex system of interactions among the organisms most directly involved in disease transmission. This said, an ecological view would seem a natural ally (perspective) to health specialists attempting to prevent or alleviate human suffering from disease. Yet, for all its glory, the modern medical system all but ignores an ecological perspective on disease and outright dismisses in many cases the role of evolutionary ecology, even though it underpins nearly all of human biology and thus the key to optimal health and well-being. The need to integrate these disciplines along with the role of the food supply in heath and disease is the reason we launched NakedPizza and the reason we believe the fast food industry can be a force of good in the world rather than a hazard.

The ecological management of disease among humans can be grouped into macro and micro perspectives. For example, more than 75% of emerging human pathogens are zoonotic (i.e., transmitted to humans from other animals). An unfortunate example of this is E. coli 0157:H7, the potentially fatal pathogen associated with tainted beef and produce that originates via an imbalance between feed sources and overuse of antibiotics among feedlot cattle. By changing the natural ecology of cows — from range fed to corn fed — we have tinkered with the ecological complexity and transmission of this specific pathogen by providing an ecological niche that it can exploit among the overcrowded feed lots that dot the landscape. In addition, climate change has been associated with an increase in the frequency, distribution, and severity of many infectious diseases worldwide, demonstrating ecological impacts on pathogen dynamics.

The ability of ecological approaches to inform disease prevention and management is nicely demonstrated by the number of Lyme disease cases that can be predicted almost two years in advance simply by monitoring annual acorn production. As another example, planting a diversity of rice strains rather than a monoculture has been shown to increase yields and reduce rates of infection with fungal rice blast in China.

As our species plows forward we are clearly changing the macro ecology of the world in ways that are creating opportunities for pathogens in a world that previously functioned in a state of nested equilibrium, more or less. In our post-modern world, we continue to evolve, but so do our diseases. Some diseases that were once rare have become common, others have disappeared, and new varieties have emerged. Though virtually unknown among our ancestors, today we suffer from heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, cancer, autism, Alzheimer’s, asthma, and irritable bowels. All of these diseases have emerged in the wake of important transformations between human societies and their natural, nutritional, social, and created environments. From this ecological perspective a reasonable hypothesis to explain the appearance and disappearance of disease is that changes in human and nutritional ecology result in changes in the microbes that populate our bodies and that diseases succeed and fail in response to humanity’s advances.

Any honest attempt to alleviate suffering among human populations will require (re)establishing our symbiotic relationship with the microbes who rule our world, the food that nourishes them and us, and the marriage of ecology and disease biology. We think we can make a difference. Join us friendo and believe.

In 2006 we learned that a fresh salad could kill us. Once only linked to meat and dairy, deadly strains of E. coli were making almost weekly appearances on the evening news as one outbreak after another sent the leafy green produce industry into free fall and the American consumer running for cover.

In the wake of E. coli 0157:H7 outbreaks associated with spinach and other produce, the new democratically-controlled Congress will be dusting off the Food Safety Act initially proposed in 2005, to assure the American public that the government is working hard to substantially reduce future food-borne outbreaks.

But will the proposed legislation make a difference? Can more government oversight in the form of additional regulations and more inspectors honestly protect us from future food-borne outbreaks? The answer is, unfortunately, probably not.

No amount of government oversight will ever completely remove the threat of pathogens in our food supply. According to Professor Glenn Gibson, a gut microbiologist specialist at the University of Reading, “there are too many contamination variables from plough to plate.” Not to mention that the bad bugs have us out numbered.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says we should wash our produce, cook it when we can, and throw out wilted, discolored and otherwise unhealthy looking produce. But is there more we as consumers can be doing to protect ourselves and our families from these often deadly pathogens? Said differently, where do we draw the line between personal responsibility and the role of government and industry in protecting our guts from these pathogens?

As a society, we have come to accept, actually expect, that “the government” is responsible for keeping germs out of our food. It is the government, after all – thanks to very successful oversight of the industry – that has made meat products safer. However, the reality is that much of our success in fighting deadly pathogens hitching a ride on our steaks and hamburgers has been the nearly universal practice of thoroughly cooking meat in our homes. In other words, personal responsibility is a biological imperative when it comes to protecting our health.

The well-intended legislation being proposed will probably fall short of anything meaningful, as its patrons most certainly fail to understand the basic evolutionary rules of the germ warfare raging in the American gut and the bigger challenges facing the populace in this biological arms race.

As executives of the produce industry hit hardest by the illness and deaths attributed to strains of E. coli in 2006 brace for a possible onslaught of new regulations and additional inspectors trudging about their fields and packaging plants, they need only look out to the fields beyond their office windows to see a better solution to what ails them and the American public.

Among the lush greens, yellows, and reds of the American produce landscape, lies a simple but critical component to our evolutionary success as a species and the best defense we have ever had — or will likely ever have — against reducing our risk from E. coli and the assortment of pathogens that seek to do us harm on the biological battle field that is us.

The simple defense to be found amid these fields is good old dietary fiber, and this is where the personal responsibility comes into play.

As you read this, there are trillions of tiny microbes (including billions of harmless strains of E. coli) living throughout your continuous gastrointestinal tract, from mouth to anus. These tiny evolutionary hitchhikers have been with you every minute of every day from the moment you entered this world and will be so until you die. And then they will eat you. But that’s the good news.

The bad news is our so-called modern diet of highly processed fiber-poor grains, in addition to added sugars and fats, is literally starving our “friendly” bacteria and putting us at increased risk. The friendly bacteria in our bodies are the first line of defense against invading pathogens, such as harmful E. coli. Like any good soldier they require nutrients to fight the good fight and dietary fiber is an important part of that nutrient base.

Simply stated: Fiber is not food for us, it’s food for bacteria that live in our gut.

Our not-so-distant ancestors regularly consumed between and often more than 50 and 100 grams of dietary fiber from diverse sources every day. This is the nutritional reality upon which our modern genome was selected and the symbiotic relationship which the trillions of bacteria in our system evolved to depend upon.

However, the average American today consumes about 12 to 15 grams of fiber a day — roughly half of what the government recommends and only a fraction of what our gut bugs need in order to resist infection and disease caused by a steady stream of pathogenic bacteria and viruses that enter our gut every day.

While a cleaner and safer food supply has allowed our species to maintain mammalian dominance, we must not lose sight of the delicate nutritional requirements of our friendly gut bugs and the indispensable role they play in our tenuous existence on this microbe-dominated planet.

The health implications of our staggering drop in consumption of dietary fiber has opened the door to E. coli 0157:H7 and its band of pathogenic brothers who make millions of people sick every year, sending hundreds of thousands to the emergency room with diarrhea, bloody diarrhea, intestinal cramping, and fever, and sending an increasing number of us to the morgue.

The important symbiotic relationship we share with our friendly microbes and their role in our natural resistance to infection should be taking center stage in the upcoming Congressional hearings on how to best protect “the people” from the inevitable food-borne pathogens associated with produce, and specifically, how to deal with this monster E. coli 0157:H7.

The recent outbreaks have understandably made the American public skittish not only about spinach and other produce tainted with E. coli 0157:H7, but about produce in general. This may pave the way for an additional decrease of fiber in the American diet, resulting in poorer gut health and reduced ability to resist infectious agents.

The media attention given to E. coli 0157:H7 has once again raised the awareness of deadly pathogens in our environment. This may be an opportunity, though tragic in its realization, for industry and the government to highlight the importance of increasing fiber intake via fruits and vegetables. Current government health messages to do so have had little success. Maybe it’s time to change the message.

For E. coli 0157:H7 specifically, stimulating the growth of a group of healthy bacteria in the human gut known as bifidobacterium through the consumption of special prebiotic dietary fibers known as oligosaccharides, found in plants such as onions, leeks, garlic, chicory, and artichokes, can fortify our natural resistance.

Many will recognize the name bifidobacterium and lactobacillus as they are often added to yoghurts as probiotics. In fact, you would be hard pressed to find a yogurt that does not contain prebiotic cultures. The idea behind probiotics is to replenish your bodies supply of healthy bacteria. However, its important to remember that the prebiotic strains already exist in your gut, just feed them more dietary fiber and they will grow. And if you specifically eat more prebiotic dietary fiber, you can “selectively” stimulate the growth of bifidobacterium to boost your natural resistance to pathogens such as deadly strains of E. coli.

Bifidobacteria exert powerful effects against pathogens through competition for colonization sites and nutrients in the gut, acid excretion, and antimicrobial substances. If properly fed and stimulated, these bacteria will do their evolutionary job and make life a living hell for invading pathogens.

Interestingly, bifidobacterium dominate the gut of breast fed babies, but are known to decrease significantly as people get older. This may explain that even though a number of age groups were sickened during the 2006 outbreaks, two out of three of the deaths were elderly women. The third was a 2 year old boy. A similar pattern was seen in a deadly outbreak in Scotland in 1986 that affected hundreds and killed 20. All deaths were among the elderly.

At a time when researcher have finally acknowledge that >20% of all cancers (e.g., cervical cancer, some stomach cancers, liver cancer) are caused by infection — up from zero just a few decades ago — and with hints that infection may play a causal role in such big time killers as breast cancer and atherosclerosis, it may be time to start asking who or what opened the pathogens door.

Ignorance of evolutionary biology and the nutritional landscape upon which humans and our microbes evolved should not preclude lawmakers and industry from exploring the role of dietary fiber in reducing our casualties in this evolutionary arms race. Continuing to ignore this simple and easy-to-implement strategy will only result in further human suffering.

That box of magically delicious, grrrrreat! frosted cocoa fiber antioxidant beta-blocker omega 3-6-9 (what comes after 9?) puff loops you just put into your basket was likely many years in the making.

Every day, at companies with big, friendly sounding names like General Mills, Kellogg, and Nestle are thousands of folks in white lab coats backed by billions-with-a-B! of dollars in research, spinning petri dishes and flicking their Bunsen burners in the name of nutrition.  And they are way ahead of you.  Sometimes the stuff they poke, burn, boil and prod comes from Iowa, other times it was delivered via a barefoot guy from the Assurini, Tapirajé, Kaiapó, Kapirapé, Rikbaktsa or Bororo tribe who paddled it down the Amazon in a dugout canoe.  Years, sometime decades, before you wheel into aisle 6, they’ve been working on your breakfast cereal.

Sitting on their shoulder are phalanxes of earnest folks, clip-boards at the ready, from FDA and the like.  Pinned to their wall no doubt is the latest federally-mandated food pyramid in all of its compromised, lobbied and negotiated-reality glory (I’m already out of my depth here, but this one – the Pyramid – we’ll get back around to, trust me).

The intentions of these scientists and nutritionists are, save for the random thumb-sucking/child porn-collecting/kitten-murderer in the lot (hey, every office has one), very likely noble.  Is this ingredient or food friend or foe?  Can it be be added to our existing product without altering the taste profile or losing its potency through processing?  What’s the costs and complexity associated with the supply and processing?

Then comes the big question: Will it sell?

Enter Don Draper.

It’s a cha-cha-cha of marketing, science, policy, business, and ethics that brings us back to the supermarket aisle or the counter of our favorite fast feeder.  The push-pull-glide of it all is fascinating and truly hiding in plain sight.  Don and the marketing guys have been shaping opinions for decades with jingles and buzz words.  It used to be fairly straight forward with the search for a “unique selling proposition” to differentiate a commodity like oats (Raise your hand if you old enough to remember Quaker selling oatmeal based on the clearly beneficial claim of it being “shot from cannons?”  Okay, trick question, you’d have to be dead, but it’s true). But the sophistication of customer research coupled with the command of mass media tipped the balance in such a way that myriad elements in the supply chain that impact profitability could now be manipulated.  So the question, “will it sell?” turns into the dictate, “this is what sells” and makes its way upstream.

Uh oh.

Gaming the market is nothing new and seems relatively innocent.  I mean, it’s not like they’re lacing cyanide into your Manwich (are they?).  But wait. Marketing guys and accountants and a growing army of sharpies lobbying for subsidies influence the things you put into your body, directly impacting your health.  For instance, work down stream from the Beef Industry’s unmitigated lobbying for corn subsidies (cheap feed that quickly fattens cattle while creating a need for a cocktail of antibiotics as corn is not a cow’s natural food).  Cheap corn creates all sorts of opportunities explaining the ubiquitous nature of high-fructose corn syrup which most agree has left its sticky finger prints all over the explosion of obesity, Type 2 diabetes, etc., creating an epidemic of human suffering and, not-so-by-the-way, exponential, unsustainable increases in healthcare.  That’s not the half of it.

I know – freaks me out too.

The point is, there are some slick forces at work in the food industry and they’ve had a good run, but the good news is that the tables are turning and maybe faster than slow.  It started in safe places in things like yogurt and on the bread aisle.   We’ve watched the choices of loaf bread multiply like taco trucks after an unprecedented-man-made-disaster-created-by-the-failure-of-federally-guaranteed/maintained-levees – from white Bunny Bread to a smattering of brown (Roman Meal) to a deluge of whole wheat and multi-grain options.  Sure it can be flat out paralyzing to choose a loaf for little Jenny’s PB&J, but at least now you can wander out of the highly-refined white bread desert.

Thanks to more readily and qualified access to nutritional information and to one another (mostly digitally enabled), we’re not so seduced by Draper and his Brylcreamed smirk.  Armed with better information and more control of the marketplace, we can now puncture the hype and more importantly, flag the dangers.   This has been led, not surprisingly, by women, who not only keep the checkbook, but who clue into science and actively discuss health within their network.

So marketing still figures – heavily. Now though, because there is so much daylight and so much ability to immediately vote with feet, wallets, and twitter, marketing has new obligations: service, utility, intelligence, sustainability and benevolence.  The tension will remain, but its a much healthier and more constructive detente.  Think carrots and sticks helping to nudge all that talent toward the design of information and processing it into useful, digestible chunks and iterative steps.  Balance substance and style with social benefit and true innovation.  Everyday, juiced by engaged markets and the crushing reality of being led off the cliff into a global recession by the corruption of capitalism, more businesses and people are coming to the conclusion that it’s never okay to hold your nose while you do your work.

It’s different.

Case in point, The Nutrition Business Journal just published it’s list of the key trends affecting the nutrition sector in 2010 (note that both probiotics and more importantly prebiotics — found in NakedPizza’s crust, along with a dozen whole grains and seeds — are discussed).  Back when it was perfectly acceptable to fire innocent oats from a cannon it’s unlikely anyone would have talked about nutrition trends, much less seen a published report about them.  Today, it beams its way around the globe to be discussed and debated, poked and prodded by folks in lab coats but also bus drivers and mortgage bankers. Sure, the lab coats and marketers have a head start but the process, information, and impacts, for good or bad, are more transparent.

So now we know more, sooner, with greater say in the process.  More control over our bodies, our health, and the well-being of ourselves and that of the people who we love and who depend on us.  Classic rights and responsibility.

Now that you know, now that you can, what will you do?

Hunger makes you active. The key switch player in this is a transcription factor called Foxa2 (I know, its a mouthful, but pay attention). Transcription factors are proteins that make sure other genes are activated and converted into proteins. Foxa2 is found in the liver where it influences fat burning, and also in two important neuron populations in the hypothalamus — the region of the brain (back of the head) that controls the daily rhythm, sleep, intake of food, and sexual behavior. The control element for Foxa2 activity is insulin, in both the liver and the hypothalamus.

When you ingest food, the beta cells in the pancreas release insulin which blocks Foxa2. When fasting or lacking food (think life among your ancestors), there is a lack of insulin and thus Foxa2 is active. In the brain, Foxa2 assists the formation of two proteins, MCH and orexin. These two brain messenger substances trigger different behavior patterns, the intake of food and spontaneous movement. If mammals are hungry, they are more alert and physically active. In short, they hunt and look for food. According to Stoffel, “If you watch a cat or a dog before feeding it, you can see this very clearly.”

The researchers also discovered that in obese mice the Foxa2 is permanently active, regardless of whether the animals are fasting or full. This may explain a well-known but until now unaccountable phenomenon: the lack of movement in obese people and animals. (Apologies to the keepers of the Christian moral tradition of sloth).

For Stoffel, the study clearly shows that, “The body needs fasting periods to stay healthy.” He therefore doesn’t think much of eating many little meals spread out over the day, but believes it is better to eat less frequently but well, and leave room in between to get hungry. After all, because insulin is released during every meal, thus suppressing Foxa2, the motivation to do physical exercise and burn sugar and fat visibly decreases. All of which is consistent with the “patchiness” of the food supply on the ancient landscape that selected our genome.

The African jacana bird is said to spend an average of five hours each day riding on the back of wading hippos – pecking at and ingesting flies, parasites, ticks, detritus and dead skin. Perched upon this floating buffet, the birds also feed upon the many small fish that can gather around the submerged hippo. Seems the fish feed on the same parasites, ticks, dead skin, and algae as do the birds. You would think the never ending pecking and nibbling would finally get to the hippo – and it does – often resulting in thrashing about in the water and fights with nearby hippo neighbours. But for much of the time, the hippo goes about daily water activities with pecking birds and nibbling fish in constant tow and just puts up with their intrusions. Stay with us, there is a point.

Researchers have observed that the hippo-bird-fish relationship may in fact be a symbiotic one, in that everyone benefits at some level – even the host. The hippo gets the ticks, parasites, dead skin, and flies efficiently removed on a dependable schedule, and the birds and fish benefit through nutrients derived from the regular cleansing. Interestingly, different species of fish have been observed targeting specific body parts of the hippo. Members of the carp family are known to be the main cleaner, mowing along the large surface of the hippos hide, removing everything indiscriminately. Species of cichlids prefer cleaning duties in the tail area, while other species clean between the many cracks in the soles of the hippo’s feet. While far from a passive recipient of these cleaning services, hippos have been observed splaying their toes and spreading their legs, affording easier access for the attendant fish. Being opportunists, hippos are known to visit places around the pond where large groups of fish are known to congregate, in effect pulling into “full service” cleaning stations. Life is good.

The health and nutritional dance played out on ponds throughout Africa between the hippo, its avian passengers, and the visiting nibbling fish has been going on for as long as hippos have been around – which is a long time. But is it necessary? Could the hippos do without the birds pecking them on the head throughout the day? Sure. But is the hippo healthier and better off with the parasites and ticks removed? Most likely, yes. The important point to take away from the pond hippo is the adaptability of the species involved – each enhancing its “lifestyle” through its relationship to the other. Such relationships in nature are often referred to as commensal – its Latin roots meaning “at table together.”

The symbiotic and beneficial arrangements between the hippo and his pond neighbours are not unique in nature – quite the opposite in fact. All around us, from the crustaceous barnacles and white lice that attach themselves to the underside of gray whales, to the spiders in our houses, powerful adaptive forces are forever driving these often necessary and sometimes odd relationships in nature. Many of these host-passenger relationships – though not all of them – can provide profound benefits to one or more of the participants, resulting in improved health/lifestyle and thus, better survivability. The hippo-bird-fish relationship may have already become so intertwined that subtle changes in this relationship may have negative health effects upon one or all partners. For example, if the hippo, for whatever reason, decides to spend more time on the shore and out of the water in the future, will that affect the species of fish that have come to depend on the submerged bounty to meet their nutrient needs? How will the hippo’s newfound terrestrial life affect the fishing success of the birds that enjoyed the ready access to fish as it sat perched on its multifunctional buffet-hunting stand? Will the parasites and ticks, not being removed on a regular schedule by the birds and fish, have a negative affect on the health of the newly land-based hippo, as they accumulate in number? It’s hard to know but easy to guess.

But what we can say with some certainty, is that if the symbiotic relationship between these pond dwellers has gone on sufficiently long enough to have physiologically conditioned the health and nutrient requirements of one of the participants, then we can expect some negative impact to its health, well-being and ultimately, its survivability if the action of one or more participant is removed or goes awol. Take our nibbling fish for example. Lets say a particular species, one that has evolved on a diet over eons that has always included significant nutrients garnered from specific algae growing on the under bellies of the pond hippo, is suddenly denied that food item with its specific nutrient profile that the fish has physiologically and metabolically become accustomed to. In other words, it has become a necessary part of the fish’s daily nutrient requirements and its overall health. Can the fish just do with out – and go about searching for replacement nutrients throughout the pond to make up the difference? Maybe. But if the nutrient profile of the hippo-algae contributed a significant portion of that particular species of fish’s diet, and the nutrient profile of that particular algae is not mimicked well in other resources in the pond available to the fish, then the fish has got a major problem on his hands/gills. Simply replacing hippo-algae with some run-of-the-pond low-grade algae might not do the trick. This would be like putting diesel in a car that runs on unleaded fuel – it stops.

Throughout our evolutionary march to mammalian dominance, humans have maintained a similar symbiotic relationship with an unlikely cast of characters. Though many people would be hard pressed to name any one of them, they are with us every minute of every day and it have been from the moment we entered this world.

We Are Not Alone – In Fact, We Are Well Outnumbered

Between 5 and 7 million years ago, a small group of primates stepped from the protective shadows of the tropical forest onto the open park-like settings of Africa and began a remarkable journey. The successes and failures of these early pioneers has been painstakingly reconstructed by paleoanthropologists and neatly filtered into the all-familiar and ever evolving “Family Tree.” From this, we can easily see the branches of early humanity as it pulsed into new forms, into uncharted lands, and only too often, into dead ends. From these earliest of evolutionary experiments, emerged modern humans. At over 6 billion strong, modern Homo sapiens sapiens stands as the ultimate expression of the success of those tentative steps by our earliest ancestors onto the open savannah. But we did not by any means do it alone and neither are we now.

It was in our early knuckle-walking days that we nurtured our symbiotic relationship with some evolutionary hitchhikers that would evolve and survive with us to this day – becoming so intertwined with our health and well-being that any affect on them, has an affect on us. You see, humans are host to a vast and complex community of microorganisms that have carved an ecological niche inside our bodies, on our skin, in our hair, under our nails, in our mouths, in our noses and, most relevantly, occupying every length of our gastrointestinal system (gut). At this very moment there are literally trillions of these gut microbes feeding on portions of your most recent meals. Like other living organisms, they live, multiply, and die based on access to quantities of sufficient quality food items – with variety being a plus. Well over 1,000 species of bacteria are present in a healthy human adult, with the vast majority living in the colon. In the stomach, acid keeps the bacteria at a relatively puny thousands of inhabitants. The small intestine has a quick transport time through its several metres in length, with the quick wash-through allowing “only” millions of bacteria to persist. At 1.5 m (5 ft) in length, the adult human colon contains at any given time about 1/4 kg (little over half a pound) of bacteria reaching 100,000,000,000,000 in total. This represents about 90-95% of all the cells in our body. Taken literally then, we are 20 times more microbe than mammalian. The typical adult has more bacteria in their colon than has ever been people living on Earth and ever will live on this Planet. We also excrete our own weight in faecal bacteria each year – try measuring it if you don’t believe us! If we live to about 75 years or higher then we should have excreted the equivalent weight of 12 elephants in faeces (African or Indian who knows?) and that’s a lot of hippos too. So who says humans aren’t full of s***?

Few people are aware that a significant portion of the stools (feces) we excrete on a daily basis are made up of these bacteria. In general, most of your daily stool is water – give or take – while the solids portion of the stool is about 65% bacteria, 20% undigested food items (fiber), and various other substances. That’s worth stating again: as much as 65% of your daily stool sample is comprised, not of undigested food items, but of bacteria. Most adults eating a Western-style diet will pass about 100 to 200 grams of stool a day, though this can vary greatly depending on gender, diet, menstrual cycles, mood, age and so forth. In some non-westernized countries, where high-fiber diets rule the day, it’s not uncommon for an adult to pass up to 300 to 400 grams of stool a day over multiple “sessions” and completed crossword puzzles.

The bacteria maintain their numbers and diversity in our colons based on the food they receive – i.e. mainly the food we, as the host, give them. This arrives in the colon as a number of substances, but in general, as dietary residues that escape digestion and absorption further up the line in the stomach and small intestine. We will return to this very important point in a moment.

Though a great number of species are present at any given time, over 99% of the billions of bacteria in our colon are represented by just a few genera (this means a group or family of bacteria that are related and called one group name e.g. for that well known bacterium E. coli, E. stands for Escherichia and is the genus name whereas coli is the species within that genus). We know that the vast majority of the bacteria found in the human gut are harmless, many are benign, and some are actually quite beneficial. Disease causing bacteria (pathogens) always are present in very small numbers, but they hog the press, giving bacteria their, vastly undeserved, negative public image. Their development is suppressed by the joined activity of the other intestinal bacteria, helped by the natural resistance of the host. It is only when the latter is weak or severely challenged, that harmful bacteria can develop and can cause disease. Throughout this book you will become very familiar with two groups (genera) of these good guys: Bifidobacterium or ‘bifidobacteria’ and Lactobacillus or lactobacilli. If you eat yoghurt (e.g. live-, bio-, bifidus, active, etc.), you may immediately recognize these names, as they have become very popular additives in a range of dairy products – as probiotics. Next time you are near the refrigerator or in the grocery store, check the label of some yoghurt products – the presence of “live cultures” is often prominently displayed. Don’t give too much thought as to where they came from in the first place though . . . . .

The idea of adding live strains of these healthful bacteria to your food comes from the observation of Elie Metchnikoff (1845-1916) a century ago that certain Bulgarian populations who consumed large amounts of fermented milk (yoghurt) generally had a better health condition than their counterparts who did not have access to the fermented milk. They also lived longer and happier than most. This took Metchnikoff away from his early observations that the colon was the site of ‘autotoxicity’ towards a more discerning health image, i.e. there were populations in there doing a great job for the host health, but they needed help.

Lactobacilli are present in very high numbers in fermented milk products. The human intestine however does all together not contain that many lactobacilli. Our intestines contain easily 1,000 times more bifidobacteria – and are very numerous in the gut human breast fed children. As much as 90% of the bacteria in the stools of breast-fed infant are bifidobacteria, with a much smaller amount seen in formula-fed infants. This is because components (glycoproteins) of human milk are able to stimulate them. High counts of bifidobacteria typically are associated with a good healthy condition. This is how bifidobacteria also entered into the picture of health food and almost certainly help explain the ‘breast is best’ argument. You will see later that bifidobacteria are powerful inhibitors of pathogens and this matches up with the lower infection rates of breast fed infants. Both lactobacilli and bifidobacteria can be grown in bioreactors on an industrial scale and added to the food (the probiotic concept). This aims to fortify the indigenous goodies that are lost after breast feeding finishes. Historically, probiotics in human use goes back centuries and was propelled by scientific observations that human and animal faeces contained ‘protective’ ingredients. These were the lactobacilli and bifidobacteria therein. Manufactures isolate them from such sources and use them as fortification in foods or to produce foods themselves – mainly fermented dairy products. Given the source of these strains, it is easy to understand how it is said that anything is usable or even saleable! Seriously, the concept is extremely worthwhile, the products taste good and some (not all) of them work. The peer reviewed scientific literature reports over 80 human trials that give a positive result in a variety of conditions ranging from gut problems like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), travelers diarrhoea to cancers and genitor-urinary tract infections.

So, probiotics are successful and enjoy better scientific and media credibility than ever before. They are economically valuable too (several billion dollars worth are sold each year). Can things be even better however and what is the catch? Well, there are some issues that probiotic manufacturers need to get to grips with. The strains should be viable in the product, not alter the sensory quality of the food, be pure and maintain viability during bulk growth. This happens in only about half of the products sold in the US and UK daily and it is time that legislation moved towards routing out these less robust suppliers and removing their inefficient products – a crucial area of public health is being compromised otherwise. Some probiotic products are completely sterile – a major achievement in today’s food manufacture procedures! On the contrary, many good products do exist where suppliers exert the degree of rigor and quality control that is imperative. Having overcome that, the strains need to be strong enough to survive transit throughout the harsh conditions of the gastrointestinal tract. Again, some products do better than others. Technology such as microencapsulation has helped in some cases.

It is clear however ‘improving’ the composition of the intestinal bacteria can significantly contribute to good health. Everyone gets a gut problem sometime. If you are lucky it is an acute condition like gastroenteritis (a.k.a. food poisoning, gut ache, tummy rot, Montesuma’s revenge, Dehli belly, etc) whereby short term pathogens disturb the ecosystem and are usually transmitted in contaminated food or water. If you are unlucky a serious long term condition like IBS, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) or colorectal cancer may arise – not to mention the systemic effects that the gut can exert. Few pharmaceuticals exist for these conditions and the approach is to attempt to repress rather than treat symptoms through an anti-inflammatory approach – with surgery too often being the resort taken. Can diet help? Well – yes: we are surrounded by a wealth of antioxidants, vitamins, nutraceuticals, functional foods, glucosinolates, carotenoids, lipid reducers and fibres. More on this later.

A major driver is modifying the composition of the intestinal flora in such a way that numbers of bifidobacteria or lactobacilli selectively are increased. Probiotics do so, but have drawbacks. However, the approach has too many positive medical and life quality implications not to proceed, e.g. microflora modulation is associated with increased resistance to invading pathogens (reduced risk for diarrhoea), increased absorption of calcium and magnesium (suppressing risk factors for osteoporosis), general stimulation of immune function (better protection against infection), reduced cholesterol and serum triglycerides (suppressing risk factors for cardiovascular disease), improvement of symptoms associated with IBS, counteraction of fat mass development, and increased bowel function (less constipation, ah yes!). Besides adding bacteria, there exist dietary means to selectively increase the beneficial bacteria that already are present in the colon, i.e. to selectively stimulate positive bacteria that already found a niche in the existing intestinal bacterial ecosystem. This can be done by feeding those bacteria selectively by means of ‘prebiotic’ food ingredients. This important and fast moving nutritional concept will be described in more detail further. Suffice to say that the concept is only a decade old but has attracted huge scientific, consumer and commercial interest worldwide.

Most folks are taken back when learning that gut microbes – or bacteria – have invaded our bodies in such large numbers and even more surprised when they find out that many of these bacteria play an important role in our health. How can this be? As youngsters we can remember our mothers saying “don’t touch that, you’ll get germs – put it down.” Seems some things are timeless. The message was simple – bacteria are bad and they will make you sick. Get rid of them. This is nonsense however. Our lives would be impossible, or decidedly uncomfortable, without them.

As a society, we are basically worried by bacteria. This phobia dates from a time where people did not have notion of the concept of hygiene – and today exists because of a febrile world where germ warfare is an issue. Death toll due to bad hygiene was very high and introduction of some basic rules of thumb was sufficient to reduce various infections and plagues in recent history. To get this message across to the general public, it had to be generalized to ‘bacteria are bad for you’. With the invention of antibiotics this general message was even strengthened. It was sufficient to kill bacteria in order to heal rapidly from various (infectious) diseases.  Today a lot more is known on the bacteria surrounding us. Public awareness is much more accessible and is also susceptible for more nuanced messages. A recent panel of independent experts organized as the Nonprescription Drugs Advisory Panel to the Food and Drug Administration concluded that “no significant difference in infections in households using antibacterial products and [than] those with regular soap and water.” The chairman of the panel, distinguished medical researcher Dr. Alastair Wood of Vanderbilt Medical School, went a step further and stated that “he saw no reason to purchase antibacterial products.”

The point here is not that antibacterial soap and gel companies are bad. They are not – but don’t be trapped into relaxing hygiene practice. Neither, was mom wrong. It is simply that not all bacteria in our environment are harmful – the vast majority in fact are not. In most cases where there is an interaction between bacteria and the human body at all, this interaction is benign. It is only some rare exceptions that are harmful, and during evolution the human body has developed various defense mechanisms against them.

Monkey See Monkey Do

Humans and other non human primates such as chimpanzees and gorillas are descended from a common plant-eating ancestor that once lived in the tropical forests of central Africa millions of years ago. Within these lush green regions, our earliest ancestors, like modern-day primates, lived on a diet of roots, leaves, fruits, bark, seeds, insects, and flowers – consuming very little or no meat. In other words, they foraged and ate what they found. Aside from the seasonal availability of high-energy dense fruits, with their significant concentrations of readably digested and absorbed sugars, the day-to-day diet was dominated by low-energy dense bulky plants, with lots of fiber. Diet of these early pre-humans was dominated by plants that provided the basics of fat, protein, carbohydrates and a vast array of essential vitamins and minerals extracted during digestion in the stomach and small intestine. However, a large portion of this bulky plant-based diet was not easily broken down by stomach acids or digestive enzymes of the small intestine, and therefore moved along to the colon for fermentation (by the bacteria therein). As mentioned above, the small intestine typically does not contain many bacteria (about 5 million could crowd onto a teaspoon – nothing compared to the colon!) In the colon the number of bacteria that could occupy just one fifth of a teaspoon is 1,000,000,000,000.

Indeed, any of the food items reaching the colon (the last compartment in the gastrointestinal system) meant they were not digested and absorbed in the small intestine, hence the term nondigestible. The vast majority of the food items that we consume are digested in the small intestine. The intestine itself but also the pancreas secretes digestive enzymes. Enzymes are tools that degrade food ingredients (proteins, carbohydrates, fats, . . .) into their composing units, which on their turn can be absorbed into the body – i.e., into the blood stream, in order to be converted into energy and building blocks of the body. Some ingredients that we consume however escape digestion because the enzymes that we secrete are not able to degrade them. These are the ‘non digestible’ food ingredients and they comprise about 100-200 grams entering the colon each day.  Nondigestible carbohydrates are represented by a complex set of compounds, but can conveniently be grouped under the category of fiber – or what your grandmother called “roughage.” The roughage would be the stringy and fibrous portions of the plants that give it shape and form. This is also known as insoluble fiber or, within scientific and nutritional circles, as non starch polysaccharides. The insoluble in insoluble fiber refers to the lack of dispersion of these compounds in water – i.e., none or very little. Just sits there – like a stick in a dish of water. But holding those fibers together, like cellular cement, are the soluble fibers. These are of the “non stringy” kind. In those same scientific circles, these are referred to as resistant starch, pectins, guar gum, and some oligosaccharides that are not digested due to their particular molecular construction, which cannot be attacked by our digestive enzymes. Soluble, if you haven’t guessed it, is the opposite of insoluble. When you drop these soluble fibers in a dish of water they disperse, mix with the water and become viscous and jelly-like (a.k.a. jell-forming). Like sugar and starch, soluble and insoluble fibers are carbohydrates. Not wanting to get bogged down in technical jargon, we will simply refer to all soluble and insoluble fibers as fiber for the time being and move on.

It is with this dietary fiber that has escaped digestion and absorption in the small intestine that our evolutionary hitchhikers earned their keep – and earn they did.

Due to the low-energy density of this bulky high fiber diet, our earliest ancestors had to eat lots of roots, leaves, flowers, bark, fruits, seeds and so forth to get enough fat, protein and carbohydrate to meet daily energy needs – often spending a large portion of their day just simply eating. This was primarily a function of the high water content of the available food the overall low density of fat, protein, and “digestible” carbohydrates. Imagine spending a couple of days in the woods or forest near your home and having to eat enough of the leaves, flowers, twigs and grass to get enough nutrients to keep going. During this back to nature adventure you would need to ingest large amounts of these items, spending much of your wilderness experience just eating. Consuming such a diet of leaves and bark all day, meant that a significant portion of the daily intake would be of the nondigestible fiber, and thus would end up in the colon for microbial fermentation. Time for our evolutionary hitchhikers to go to work.

Once in the colon, these meal parts – again, mainly nondigestible carbohydrates and fibers from the bulky plant-based diet – were rapidly fermented by the vast colony of bacteria living in our colon. The bacterial metabolic diversity in the colon is so to speak ‘omnipotent’. Considered as an organ (yes, you heard it here first, an organ!), it can eat or digest just about any kind of organic molecule. When bacteria ferment substrates they can develop and grow in numbers. As the bacteria grow in number, residual products called short chain fatty acids are produced through the fermentation. And here is the important part of this process and why evolutionary forces selected for the existence and maintenance of this metabolically active ecosystem of bacteria in the gut of our earliest ancestors. Energy.

As a byproduct of the fermentation process, like smoke generated from an open campfire, energy-rich, short-chain fatty acids were produced – along with a range of gases. The short-chain fatty acids, which are known by names like acetate, propionate, butyrate, are then easily absorbed into the bloodstream of the host and supplied a significant portion of the daily energy needs of our early ancestors. Using modern primates as a model, our earliest ancestors may have received between “30 to 50% of daily caloric needs” from the short-chain fatty acids generated by our evolutionary hitchhikers in the colon. This is astonishing when you consider that the gut bacteria generated that energy from food components that actually escaped our own digestive processes in the upper intestinal tract. they give us more than the birds give the hippos. As the undigested food came down the pipe every day, gut bacteria would efficiently go about their work extracting nutrient value (energy) from otherwise useless food items. That is, once the food had passed through the stomach and small intestine, it had been stripped of all of its nutrient value, and our early ancestors like us today, had no physiological mechanism for extracting any additional energy from the food – so down it went to the colon. For their service – which allowed our earliest ancestors to extract enough energy from the low-energy dense plant material of the rain forest to survive and multiply – gut bacteria were provided with a constant source of food (fermentable carbon sources) allowing them to maintain and proliferate in a safe and warm environment. Good for them, good for us. So important was this relationship to the health and nutritional status of our earliest ancestors living all those millions of years ago, that it is doubtful we would be here today in our current physical and cultural form were it not for our microscopic friends. Certainly, we would have shorter and much less comfortable lives.

As our early ancestors moved from the rain forest and open park settings to new environments, along went the gut bacteria. Over the next few million years, as our early ancestors evolved new forms and habits familiar to us today, they did it on an ever changing nutritional landscape that soon included higher-energy dense plant foods and ultimately greater and greater quantities of energy-dense animal protein and fat. This higher-energy dense diet meant that our early ancestors did not need to chew all day, they thus were free to spend more time on other activities – such as development of technologies like stone tools, ultimately fire, and so forth. During this period our brain size doubled, then tripled – reaching its modern size about 200,000 years ago. This time period marks the appearance of the first anatomically modern humans in the fossil record, pretty much looking as we do today. Interestingly, our gut proportions changed through this evolutionary period as well.

Since our newly evolving diet included more energy-dense foods – meaning more calories were being extracted and absorbed in the small intestine – the overall amount of nondigestible carbohydrates (fiber) reaching our colons became reduced. This in turn resulted in less energy needing to be generated in the colon by the bacterial co-workers. All of this resulted in an evolutionary reduction in the size of our colon – the fermentation factory – and a commensurate increase in the size of the small intestine. By volume, our current colon is more than half the size of the plant chomping-primates still living in those same rain forests we evolved from, whereas our small intestines – which reflect our higher-energy diet – are on average twice as long.

As humans underwent physical and nutritional evolution, gut bacteria evolved along with us – possibly quicker. Changes in our physical, physiological, and metabolic features were conditioned over millions of years of slow environmental change. This meant that changes in our diet as conditioned by regional climate variation and ultimately early technologies, never out-paced the ability of our intestinal bacteria to keep up and adapt – always standing ready to ferment and extract energy – for us and them – from anything sent down the pipe. In fact, the mere presence of the bacteria in our intestinal tract allowed us “flexibility” in our knack to adapt to shifts in diet, as brought about by changes in food availability and variation in new and ever-changing environments. Though our colon reduced in size, and thus marked a decrease in the total amount of low-energy dense undigestible foods in our diet, it did not decrease the importance and contribution of our evolutionary hitchhikers to overall health. In fact, the extraordinary chronological length of the relationship, with all the ups and downs that go with the evolutionary process, all but guarantees their seminal role in our metabolic and physiological health and well-being. Researchers are starting to learn just how important these tiny bacteria are, and always have been, to our overall health.

Evolutionary microbiologist Lora V. Hooper recently commented in the Annual Reviews of Nutrition that “Over our evolutionary history, components of the intestine’s microbiota [gut bacteria] have endured a stringent selection to become “master physiological chemists”: i.e., they have had to develop chemical strategies for regulating nutrient processing in ways that benefit themselves and us.” In a separate paper she further comments that “Recent results indicate that indigenous bacteria play a crucial inductive role in gut development during early postnatal life.” In other words, the gut bacteria that we have carried with us all these millions of years – and that have adapted to our ever-changing diet and accompanying physiological changes and demographic expansion – have become more than just a passive and convenient mechanism for extracting energy from undigested foods that reach our colons. They are now part of us in a very intimate and interactive way.

As we will soon see, the rapid pace at which humans accumulated technology and an ability to manipulate and control the nutritional landscape may have recently tinkered just enough with the good for them, good for us relationship with our evolutionary hitchhikers to be affecting our current overall health and well-being in not such good ways.

The Hippo Has Left the Water

Once our early ancestors stepped down from the tropical forest canopy 5 to 7 million years ago, it was not until about 2 million years ago that the first member of our genus Homo appeared in the fossil record – Homo erectus (a.k.a. Homo ergaster, best known for the near-complete skeleton of the Turkana Boy discovered in 1984 by Kimoya Kimeu and Richard Leakey). Up until the appearance of ‘erectus,’ our earliest ancestors were grouped under a mixed bag of characters known as Australopithecus and the more recently discovered Ardipithecus. The famed skeleton Lucy, discovered by Donald Johanson and colleagues in the Afar region of Ethiopia, was a three and half foot Australopithecus afarensis that lived over three million years ago.

For much of the 2 million year period of human (Homo) evolution, humans consumed a diet dominated by plants and animals that were foraged from the natural environment – wild plants, wild animals. It has been only within the last 10,000 to 5,000 years that cultivated grains and domesticated animals have been a measurable part of human diet. So, for over 99% of human history (last 2 million years of Homo) we were hunter-gatherers living on a diverse range of plants and animals (and varying amounts of fish). Given the quantity and diversity of plants in our diet over much of this 2 million year period, a steady flow of nondigestible food items were continually delivered down the digestive tract to the colon for fermentation. During this long period of time both host or at least intestinal tissue and the microbiota living in it have specialised so as to be optimally adapted to one another. This evolutionary stable strategy, as famed British Darwinist Richard Dawkins calls this process, resulted in a particular and complex set of bacteria or intestinal ecosystem. This interaction provided nutrients for the bacteria to grow and maintain their ecological niche in our colons. They would in turn provide energy from these otherwise unusable food materials. But this is not all that happened. As it is clear now that the intestinal bacteria co-evolved with their human hosts, some other evolutionary more important aspects than ‘you feed me I feed you’ mechanisms became established – and just as well. As mentioned, the intestinal bacterial ecosystem as we know it today is composed of well over 1.000 different species of bacteria (and these are just the ones that can be cultured in a laboratory). It is evident that it does not concern a random set of bacteria. No. The set of bacteria in this ecosystem are part of the results of the functioning of the evolutionary stable strategy. As the intestine is in direct contact with the external environment, all existing bacteria living in water, air, soil theoretically have physical access to our intestinal ecosystem. Hundreds not millions existing species however succeeded to find a niche in the colonic environment. This means that the established ecosystem is composed of a set of bacteria that can live in harmony (nutritional, ecological . . . ). All who are present are part of the club because for some reason they benefit from the others and the others benefit from them. A need to survive without oxygen probably ruled out the majority of others. Importantly, current members make it their evolutionary determined job to keep out new members. Together, then they set up a barrier preventing colonization by other bacteria (colonization resistance – more on this later). They do so by taking away food more efficiently than non adapted new-comers, by producing short-chain fatty acids that the new-comers do not like or even resist, by producing signalling molecules that genetically make life of newcomers impossible. But there is more.

During evolution there must have been combinations of intestinal microbes that were not beneficial for the host, our early ancestor in this case. Bacterial populations that even were harmful to the host (allowing the presence of high numbers of pathogens) resulted in the less ‘good’ development or even early death of the latter. Hominids having bad combinations of intestinal flora disappeared. With time – we are talking 100’s of millions of years as it is clear that even the ancestors of the hominids, having an intestine, also had an intestinal ecosystem of some kind – an intestinal flora allowing good viability and even good quality of life of the host established. Yes, dinosaurs had intestinal bacteria well.

A very important complementary part to this observation is that this microflora is in harmony not only within the bacterial ecosystem, but necessarily also with the host. Both have co-evoluted. The mechanism which the human intestine comes in first contact with intestinal flora is at the basis for this. The intestine of a fetus in the mother’s womb is sterile. It does not contain any microbiota at all. It does not have an intestinal ecosystem until the newborn comes in contact with vaginal and faecal matter from the mother. This cycle links the co-evolution of intestinal flora and host. As a direct consequence it can be stated that there is such a thing as a ‘good flora’. It is the flora that approaches the equilibrium flora that established according to the principles of the evolutionary stable strategy just described.

Such ecosystem co-evolution with the host took a long time to optimize. Changes in these patterns have occurred and still are occurring, but at a very slow pace. These changes have always been and will continue to be triggered by diet.

But as the early seeds of agriculture began to take hold about 10,000 years ago in what archaeologists call the Fertile Crescent – in today what is modern Iraq – significant changes in human diet were looming large on the nutritionally horizon with the coming of the Agricultural Revolution. Loren Cordain of Colorado State University refers to the grains of the Agriculture Revolution as “Humanity’s Double-Edged Sword.” In essence, he argues that while on the one hand agricultural grains – wheat, maize, rice, barley – gave us a reliable and abundant source of carbohydrate which to grow civilizations and nurture social and technological advances, on the other hand, the rapid increase of nutrient poor grains in diet marked a downturn in human nutrition that continues to this day. And he’s right.

Many Neolithic people who adopted agriculture throughout the world showed marked decrease in overall stature, poorer bone and dental health, shorter lifespan, and vitamin and mineral deficiencies. As more and more daily calories came from cultivated plants, we moved further and further away from our hunter-gatherer lifestyle and its diverse and nutrient-rich diet. This meant less greens, seeds, tubers, roots, nuts, fruits, berries, stalks, shoots, flowers, and pollen in the diet, to a reliance on a small number of cultivated grains. As the technology of farming and grain processing progressed over the millennia, the grains became more and more refined – with the end result being less and less undigested material reaching the colon as the outer bran or seed coat was removed (fiber) and the increasingly smaller size of the starchy particles were more readably digested in the small intestine. Not looking so good for the gut bacteria then.

The processing was initially accomplished by simply placing the grains on large flat stones and grinding them down with smaller hand-held stones. Though ground into smaller particle sizes, this early ‘flour’ still contained a significant portion of the ‘whole’ grain as the entire ground seed was consumed. This simple technology dominated the first few thousand of years of agricultural grain processing and examples of these early grind stones litter archaeological records throughout the world. As populations grew, the smaller grain processing systems were replaced by rotary stone mills around 1500 – 1000 B.C. throughout much of the Mediterranean region. With the advent of the stone mills came the popular use of sieves to separate the outer bran and seed coat from the purer starchy endosperm of the inside of the seed. In other words, the outer seed coating was isolated and discarded, much like peeling an orange and tossing the peel. The purer flour (more white-like, less brown) was coveted by the rich and ruling class, while the less pure flour – what we know today as brownish-looking whole grain flour – was associated with lower social class. With the introduction of the steel roller mills in the late 1800s, coupled with the widespread use of new fine silk sieves, true pure white flour was now available to the masses. Bakers and cooks were thrilled. We had arrived but had we considered the gut hitchhikers?

In the Blink of an Eye

In just 10,000 short years – and much shorter for many regions of the world – humans went from hunter-gatherers foraging about the landscape consuming a diverse diet of plants and animals to a world dependant on a handful of agricultural grains. With the dizzying number of products today made of these reliable, palatable, and relatively low-cost grains, it’s no wonder that two-thirds of the worlds caloric and protein intake is met with highly processed grain-based products. But, for over 99% of human history and nutrition, we never ate them. Zip. Zero. It is even doubtful those first Neolithic farmers would even recognize modern processed foods as foods at all. Nowadays, almost all food is processed in some way – how does a South African apple arrive “fresh” in a US supermarket?

Agricultural grains in and of themselves are not bad however. They are after all, just plants – and grass seeds at that. But it’s what we modern humans have done to them – processing them down to a mere nutrient-shadow of their former selves – and to the extent they have come to dominate modern diet at the expense of diverse vegetables and fruits, that makes their role in human health controversial. And dominate they do. On the medical front, highly processed grains have been fingered in the rapid rise and fall in blood-glucose and insulin levels following their ingestion, which in turn has been linked to a number of medical problems plaguing modern populations such as type 2 diabetes, obesity, and some aspects of heart disease – just to name a few. Just as a bad, a significant portion of these processed grains end up in snack-like foods that are notoriously rich in sugar and fat.

Even with the recent whole grain movement sweeping America, triggered in no small part by the mountains of scientific evidence pointing to the health benefits of increased whole grains and the release of the 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans and a snazzy, revamped US Food Pyramid (www.mypyramid.gov) recommending more whole grains over highly processed ones, the public is not changing its eating behaviour. In 1900, whole grain foods made up 36% of the daily calories for Americans. In 1970 this figure dropped to 15% and current levels are that Americans get about 1% of daily caloric needs from whole grain products. These whole grain foods were replaced by highly processed ones. Brown was out, white was in. Nutritional researcher Julie Miller Jones of the College of St. Paul Catherine and colleagues report that “Twenty percent of adults and forty percent of teens and children in a 2001 telephone survey reported that they never eat whole-grain bread [emphasis added].” The data are clear – whole grains are not on the consumer radar, though American consumers are literally swimming in a sea of highly processed grain products. Similarly, the messages about 5 (or even 8 now) good sized portions of fruit and vegetable are required daily are known, the advice is not used. In England records show that only 8% of the population ingest such a quantity. Presumably, the other 92% don’t care or don’t have time. They need a Trojan horse approach to nutrition and the gut bacteria are just waiting to help – see later (Note: we are not advocating any quick fix or replacement for a balanced healthy diet – whatever that is – just opening up options which for several reasons are needed).

The global dominance of nutrient- and fiber-poor processed grain products has been a double-whammy for our evolutionary hitchhikers. The processing of these perfectly nutritious and healthy seeds has removed the vast majority of the nutrients and even worse, the undigested portions (bran and germ [fiber]) that once reached our colons. The increase of processed grains in the diet has also meant that nutrient- and fiber-rich vegetables and fruits have assumed a minor role in diet. The decreasing role of nutrient- and fiber-rich fruits and vegetables in the diet has not been helped by the fact that they have become expensive. According to the US Department of Agriculture, during a period from 1985 to 2000 fresh fruits and vegetables increased in price by a whopping 120%. During this same period, sugary soft drinks increased by only 20% and fats and oils increased by about 30%. It’s no wonder the average American “derives almost 40% of daily energy (calories) from added sugars and fats.” These are a cheap and pervasive source of calories.

The reduction in fresh fruits and vegetables in our modern diets, and thus a reduction in the amount of nondigestible food items reaching our colons and the bacteria that have come to depend on them, and the increase in the consumption of fiber-poor processed grains, may be a function of economics and less about real choice. It simply costs more to eat healthy. And eating healthy means a diverse diet of vegetables and fruits and a reduced consumption of highly processed grain products and sugary /fat foods. It does little to have well-minded policy makers in the US recommend that we should eat 9 to 13 servings a day of fresh vegetables and fruit, when the “average low-income family can only spend an estimated $4 per person a day on food.” Put another way, a single father of three faced with the daily decision of feeding a family on a fixed budget would clearly like to have a platter of steamed, fresh vegetables with every dinner, but when you can buy three boxes of highly processed macaroni and cheese for just $1, the choice is already made. The socioeconomic factors affecting the amount of non digestible fiber reaching our colon are profound.

In the most recent 1% of human existence, an evolutionary blink of the eye, we have gone from a diet that once included 100, 200, and up to 400 grams a day of non digestible fiber – food items that escaped digestion and absorption in the small intestine and reached the colon for fermentation – to a diet that on average that might contain 5 to 50 grams of this material – maybe a little more for some of us. The average American adult is said to consume less than 15 to 20 grams of fiber a day. This low intake is similar throughout Europe. The outlook for our evolutionary hitchhikers is starting to look grim and we are not helping them to help us.

Throughout our history, changes in diet were subtle, although punctuated at times, and occurred over large spans of chronological time. Changes in diet moved at a glacial pace, nothing like the rapid development and acquisition of agricultural grains and the reduction of vegetables and fruit in the diet of our recent past. Lightning fast. This rapid change has no precedence in our evolutionary past and biologically speaking our bodies cannot adapt at this speed. The rapid advances in processing technology within the last 200 years that gave us fiber-free pure white flour coupled with the across-the-board reduction in vegetable and fruit consumption and increase of energy from sugar and fats, is wreaking havoc on our evolutionary hitchhikers.

Just when you thought it could not get any worse for our evolutionary hitchhiking friends, along come antibiotics. Hailed as a “magic bullet” for what ails you, antibiotics such as penicillin and tetracycline, revolutionized the treatment of infectious disease throughout the world. As the name implies, these are bacteria killers – and kill they do. Each and every year in America alone, doctors and health practitioners issue 150 million prescriptions for antibiotics to fight invading pathogens that seek to do us harm.  Most of us have taken an antibiotic at one time or another, or given them to our children, but have you ever had a doctor who prescribed them say to you “Oh, by the way, these antibiotics I am prescribing to you today may, in addition to killing the pathogenic bacteria that are making you sick, are likely wipe out a majority of the other bacteria in your body as well – the good ones, along with the benign ones.”  I doubt many of us have ever been provided with this small bit of critical information! Similarly, how many viral problems are “treated” with antibiotics – a complete waste of time and expense as they do not work.

But that is exactly what they do – kill indiscriminately most if not all of the good, the bad, and the benign. The simple fact is that there is no such thing as a truly selective antibiotic. Of course, antimicrobials have made crucial in roads into reducing the risk and symptoms of a plethora of disease but the friendly fire of this germ warfare between antibiotics and invading pathogens can potentially devastating affects on the population and health of our gut bacteria, requiring repopulation and growth. Their indiscriminate use (including on some farms where yield outweighs ecology) has not helped either. The next logical question you may be wondering is how you would go about repopulating the bacteria in ones colon? Aside from the negative impact and alteration of our resident bacteria, something is happening to the invading pathogens that are being targeted by antibiotics. They are, and have been, getting frighteningly wise to the ways of the exterminator.

So widespread is the use of ‘biocides’ (they are even spraying antibiotics on our food while it’s still in the field!) that bacteria have started to develop resistance. Just as the word implies, they are morphing into new strains and mutations that are out smarting the antibiotics, basically armor proof and unaffected by the antibiotics. When one considers the diverse hostile environments that bacteria can adapt to and grow in (volcanoes, ocean bed, deserts, high salt lakes, Mars . . .), its no wonder they can outsmart the antibiotics. These emerging mutant resistant super bugs have recently provoked the World Health Organization to acknowledge a global health crisis is looming if more care is not given to limited and more targeted use of antibiotics in the treatment of infection. These warnings are hardly new. In a 1945 interview in the New York Times, the British bacteriologist Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, warned that the misuse of penicillin (read overuse) could lead to mutant forms that could resist the intended affects of the drug. Let’s hope it’s not too late.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

Let us summarize where we are so far. Our early knuckle-dragging ancestors lived on a plant-based diet of leaves, roots, stalks, seeds, fruit, flowers and so forth. Similar to what non human primates living in tropical Africa are eating now. This bulky diet was high in non digestible carbohydrates (both soluble along with the particular oligosaccharides and insoluble fiber) and was of little use in the small intestine, so was sent quickly to the colon where waiting bacteria – billions of them – would quickly go about the task of breaking these materials down creating energy-rich, short-chain fatty acids and some gases (anti-social but necessary) in the process. These short-chain fatty acids were easily absorbed from the colon and used as energy by a number of organs including the liver, skeletal muscle, and brain. This cozy arrangement worked well for both parties: our early ancestors were able to extract much energy from otherwise nutritionally useless plant material and the bacteria received a steady flow of nutrients to live and thrive on, and a protected and warm place to live to boot.

Things went along fine for the next few million years as our early ancestors evolved into more human-like forms – the first being Homo erectus about 2 million years ago. As we evolved tool use, finally mastered fire, broadened our diet, and became more and more socially complex, the bacteria evolved right along with us. Our movements on the landscape and changes in our nutritional profile were slow, often occurring of hundreds of thousands of years. Never abrupt. Then about 10,000 years ago we started trading in our hunter-gatherer lifestyle for farm tools. Initially, this transition would not have been a significant shock to the food supply (non digestible carbohydrates) to the bacteria in our colons and our health, but it sounded the toll for what was about to come: finely ground flour and settled towns, villages, and cities. As population grew and more and more people came to depend on the annual harvest, they hunted and gathered less and less. This meant a decrease in the diversity of plants in our diet and a reduction in the amount of non digestible carbohydrates being sent down the pipe to our colons to the ever-awaiting bacteria. These were necessary changes largely – socially and ecologically.

It is thought that a particular group of non digestible carbohydrates called the prebiotic oligosaccharides (prebiotics) played a central role in this. They are particular in the group of the soluble dietary fibre. Just like them they are not digested, and hence are completely available for fermentation by intestinal bacteria. But there is one particular aspect to it that completely distinguishes them from the fibre fraction : they are fermented in a selective way. It was shown that they promote the growth of certain groups of bacteria that themselves outcompete other bacteria. It was observed that the bacteria whose growth is promoted .. fit with a set of bacteria related to the evolutionary stable strategy- established flora. The bacteria whose growth is selectively promoted are associated with good health and are the probiotics already present therein. So, what we are doing here is fortifying the ecosystem, by targeting its beneficial inhabitants, rather than adding new ones to them. As such, prebiotics when added to our modern highly processed western type diet offer means to approach a diet with which we and our intestinal flora have co-emerged.

The rapid movement of fiber to the front of the nutritional line is being driven by a number of market and scientific forces, including important changes in how we define health and well being. For decades now, dietary fat has been the nutritional whipping boy, blamed for everything from obesity to heart disease and everything in between. A steady flow of clinical research, however, is showing us that not all fats are bad and that fat may not make us fat or even cause heart disease. As research mounts and marketing departments in food companies take notice, “low fat” as a lead health claim on many of our favorite products will slowly fade – or at least the font will get smaller. Though “fewer calories” will remain the titan of health claims for marketers, it, too, will be knocked down the what-makes-us-healthy ladder a notch or two.

The nutritional shuffling of key health claims in the grocery isle is part of a larger shift driven by ongoing scientific research behind the scenes that is repositioning fiber as a key nutrient to preventing disease – but not for reasons that most people think.

Much of what we have been taught about the health benefits of fiber – and much of what we read in popular diet books – is based on research from the 1970s through the early 1990s: fiber is nature’s broom, bulks the diet so we feel fuller, “moves things along” as they say, and so on. These mechanical aspects of the benefits of fiber then lead into the claims that fiber reduces your risk of heart disease, diabetes, some cancers, and if you eat judicious amounts, help you maintain a healthy weight…all true.

However, advances in medical science and our understanding of human biology has researchers rethinking the role of fiber in human health, moving it beyond a nutrient that once made the public and scientists alike yawn, to one that is front and center in some of the most exciting research into human health and disease. With all science, it will take years to trickle down to the general public. However, as the ever more frequent “eat more fiber” labels in your local grocery store reveal, food marketers are getting out in front of this fiber revolution as they are following the science and medical research very closely – always looking for an edge.

To understand the reemerging role of fiber in achieving optimal health and preventing or relief from diseases as diverse as cancer, heart disease, irritable bowel disease, obesity, osteoporosis, diabetes, and autism, we need to go back in time just far enough to remove the cultural noise of our so-called “modern society” to see the simple biological rules of nature that scientists are realizing form the foundation of human health.

Us, once upon a time

It’s a cool, damp morning. A young mother tosses back and forth on the ground of her family hut, experiencing familiar cramping indicating that her second child will soon be born. With contractions easing for the moment, she steps into the morning sun to tend a small fire and the morning needs of her family. After everyone has been taken care of, she unceremoniously slips out of her village of 20 or so huts scattered along the shore of the shallow lake and into the green trees and shrubs that mark the edge of her village.

With contractions coming closer together and shortened breath she squats and grasps the slender, but sturdy trunk of a tree for balance. Gritting her teeth and sweating profusely, she does not make a sound, not wanting to draw attention to her location. With a push the baby’s head appears, the face turned towards her rectum. All is going well. The pressure of the baby moving through the birth canal has forced the passing of several small bowel movements. With one final push the baby falls to the ground, the mother slightly breaking the fall with her one free hand. After catching her breath, she reaches down and turns over her new baby, who has landed face down in the dirt, excrement, and fluids from the birth. Everything went perfectly. It’s a girl.

In the sterile womb, the fetus was completely protected from the world she was about to enter – but not for long. While passing through the birth canal, this newest member of our species received the time-honored mouthful of lactobacillus bacteria from her mother in the same way that she had received them from her mother; the first of many inoculations from the microbial-dominated world she was about to enter. Once she is freed from the birth canal and gasping for air, millions of natures’ tiny little microbes clinging to the dust particles in the air fill her mouth and nostrils, and once she officially makes landfall on this earth, she is welcomed to the biosphere by billions of additional soil microbes as her moist body quickly sops up the parched soil and its microbial residents. This also includes a healthy dose of bacteria in the mother’s feces the baby landed on, as nearly 50 percent or more (dry weight) of her mother’s fecal matter is made up of bacteria that originated from the diverse ecosystem of her mother’s gut.

Within moments of birth, the child begins to nurse, thus receiving additional sources of bacteria, or at least their byproducts. In the weeks leading up to birth, microbes started appearing around the nipples of the swollen breasts. These bifidobacterium grew deep in the oxygen-poor chambers of the milk ducts during late pregnancy and moved to the surface as the first invisible drops of colostrum (first milk or immune milk) began appearing. While all bifidobacterium are anaerobic, meaning they are unable to survive in air, they live just long enough on or near the surface to secrete lactic acid and other antibiotic chemicals that help clear, in a “nature’s wet-wipe” sort of way, the soon-to-be suckled nipple of potentially nasty microbes such as Staphylococcus aureus.

Once the newborn begins to suckle, the lactic acid deposited on the nipple by the sacrificed bifidobacterium from the milk ducts meet up with the lactobacillus acquired from the mother’s birth canal in the mouth of the child. Together, they help select the hundreds of bacterial species that will soon inhabit the mouth of the child over the coming days and months. The growing colony of oral bacteria is further bolstered by the nursing infant as she probes her mother’s mouth with wandering fingers, returning the moist results to her own.

As mother and child rest under the small tree, shaded from the sun that has now risen to its late morning position overhead, they have successfully survived not just the complications of child birth through an ancient ritual that seems almost unimaginable to us today, but have completed a set of initial biological imperatives that have given the child a reasonable chance of living a healthy, long life. Without the evolutionary passing of microbes from mother to child our species would not resemble anything like us today. In fact, without them the baby would die within days.

This vaginal birth on the dirt floor of natures’ delivery room assures some organic control of the species of bacteria that will soon inhabit the baby’s body. In this natural setting, a first-come first-gets-to-stay rule applies. During the first few days, these bacteria will begin to populate every imaginable part of the baby – from her skin, hair, nasal passages, fluids around her eyes, vagina, and most importantly, her gastrointestinal tract, from mouth to anus. While this invisible alien invasion of microbes may appear horrifying, it’s all part of a fine-tuned, organic relationship that humans have worked out deep in our evolutionary past with the microbial world. Within a few weeks, there will be more microbial cells in her tiny body than human cells. According to nature’s plan, she will be more microbe than mammal.

As mother and child spend the next few hours getting know one another, the suckling baby enters the next phase in her development as a super-organism – a human hybrid of trillions of microbial genomes to her one.

Food for us and them

Previously germ free, her tiny gut is rapidly colonized by the initial inoculation of microbes from mother and nature. In the early hours and days following birth, different species of bacteria will compete for their place along the wall of her intestines, forming tightly held colonies called microfilms. But like the baby herself, they will soon need nutrients to survive and grow.

Almost immediately after being scooped into her mother’s arms, she begins to suckle. While nearly 90 percent of breast milk is water, the remaining 10 percent of solids is rich in life-giving protein, fat, vitamins, lactose, and some minerals – all the baby needs for normal growth and development. But for all its nutritional wonder, these are all more or less nutrients for the baby – quickly digested and absorbed in the upper intestines. What about nutrients for her new microbial hitchhikers, the vast majority of which have settled in the far reaches of her intestinal tract in the colon?

In order for nutrients to reach the very end of the intestinal tract and be available for the bacteria, they must escape digestion and absorption in the upper intestine. In other words, the baby’s gut is designed to capture and utilize as much of the nutrients passing through her stomach and small intestine as possible and it pays to be stingy, digesting and absorbing as much as possible. But some foods, due either to their physical or molecular structure, cannot be digested and absorbed, so move along the line to the colon. These undigested fractions of foods are known as fiber. And fiber, once it reaches the colon, is broken down and utilized by the resident bacteria for maintenance and growth. Simply stated: fiber is food for bacteria, and mother’s milk is loaded with it.

For our newborn girl, that first swallow of mother’s milk contained special oligosacchrides. “Oligo-,” derived from the Greek oligos, means “a few” and “sacchride” is of course sugar. Because of a special chemical structure, oligosacchrides cannot be digested and absorbed in the upper intestines, and are therefore not utilized by the baby for nutrition. Passed along the pipeline, these fibers end up in the colon, where billions – soon to be trillions – of bacteria break them down with special enzymes and utilize them as an energy source. Roughly translated, our newborn baby will consume between 5 to 10 grams a day of the special oligosacchride fiber, depending on how much she feeds.

So, through some ingenious human biology, breast milk not only delivers the necessary nutrient package for the development and growth of our newborn girl, but also provides the necessary fiber for the growth and maintenance of the trillions of bacteria that make up the other half of her human hybrid. This symbiotic relationship between host (baby girl) and bacteria is often referred to as commensal, literally meaning “at the table together.” The steady flow of fiber from the first sip of breast milk will result in the rapid growth of bifidobacterium within her developing gut. You may recognize this group of bacteria if you eat yogurt, as they are often added as probiotics to many popular foods. As the bifidobacterium grow in numbers, they will nudge out or suppress the growth of less desirable species.

The symbiotic relationship our newborn baby develops with her “first encounter” bacteria in the coming days and months will play a critical role in the development of her immune system and the actual development of the gut. What she does or does not do with and for her human hybrid over the coming weeks, months, and first years of her life will strongly influence her ability to fight infection and disease throughout life. But first, its time for the proud mother to introduce the village’s newest member to its hundred or so members and the thousands of species of bacteria that call it home as well.

A bugs life

As mother and baby settle into a weekly routine in the first few months, the day-to-day care of the new baby is mostly that of the mother, with some wet-nursing assistance from other young mothers. During those days when the new baby is not strapped to her mother’s back on gathering forays to dig for roots and tubers, or to gather berries, greens, and spear fish from the shallow waters of the lake, the baby is fussed-over by an aging grandmother whose main concern seems to be limiting the number of times the brother lifts and then drops the new baby while exploring the small village.

With each new encounter, the baby is exposed to the diversity of bacteria on and within the village and its inhabitants. Throughout her entire day, the baby ingests a steady stream of microbes as her curious fingers probe every corner of the village, from its dirt and rocks, to its people and pets, to the foreign objects her curious brother tries to get her to chew in a never ending “let’s see if my baby sister will eat this” game. And with each new encounter, her well-fed intestinal bacteria, which are by now dominated by bifidobacterium and other lactic acid bacteria, sort through the billions, often trillions, of foreign bacteria flowing through her system every day.

A majority of these foreign invaders are harmless and will pass through her system. Ever vigilant and protective of the warm, nutrient-rich environment deep within our new baby’s gut, her commensal bacteria continuously engage the mass of invaders as they move through her intestines down to the colon, looking for pathogens that might be interested in setting up shop and causing some harm. Through chemical communications between each other and the cells of her delicate intestinal wall, her commensal bacteria lower the pH (more acidic) of the intestinal environment, making life a little more difficult for invaders. Through sheer numbers, her natural defenders outcompete invaders for food and attachment sites on the wall of the intestines. As long as the pathogens stay in the center of the intestines (the lumen) and cannot attach to the delicate wall, they stand a pretty good chance of being swept from the system with any one of numerous bowel movements per day. If the acidic environment and the lack of nutrients and fleshy real estate aren’t enough of a deterrent, her commensal bacteria also excrete antimicrobial substances that make life a living hell for the invaders. This invisible germ warfare is played out every minute of every day from the moment she is born and will continue for the rest of her life. If her human hybrid is well nourished and functioning, she will remain happy and healthy.

Throughout the first year of life, much of her development as a human is hard-wired in her genes. However, because of the long history developed between her ancestors and the ancestors of the commensal bacteria in her gut, not everything is genetically preordained and aspects of her intestinal development require direct interaction with her microbial friends. In fact, so intertwined is our relationship with these microbial friends that they are collectively considered a metabolic organ, meaning an impact on them will have a direct impact on health and well-being in the same way impacting any other organ, such as the liver, heart, or pancreas will have undesired effects.

When you realize humans are biological organisms, like our microbial friends, trying to survive and thrive in an ever-changing and dynamic environment, it’s not hard to imagine that forming symbiotic relationships with other organisms is a successful strategy for survival. Even though our newborn girl was born with a complete immune system and gut, it is small and underdeveloped. Through some clever chemical signals, the commensal bacteria that attached to the wall of her intestines during the first few days following birth work with her immune system to develop some key systems that will teach her body to fight off unwanted pathogens, how and when to react to other invaders, and to develop the delicate mucosal layer lining the inside of her gastrointestinal tract. It is not an understatement to suggest she would not achieve the wonders of a fully functioning human body without experiencing this host-microbial interaction early in her development. However, as she moves from mother’s milk and the nutrients it provides to her human hybrid to regular food, she will have to continue her end of the bargain in this symbiotic relationship.

Species gone wild

About halfway between her first and second birthday, our fast growing baby girl starts dabbling in soft foods. While full weaning is still one to two years away, she’s slowly introduced to soft cakes of mashed foods of plants, animal meat, and fish, all gathered and hunted within the valley her family settled near the lakeshore. She will begin accompanying her mother on more and more foraging trips, sampling and tasting all the gathered berries, nuts, roots, tubers, insects, fruits, and leafy greens along the way. Everything she will eat will be minimally processed – raw in many cases – and as with everything else in her life up until this point, literally covered in dust, dirt and microbes. Even if prewashed in the shallow waters of the lakeshore, nature’s microbes will be clinging tightly to the leaves, skins, and roots of everything she eats.

While the slow weaning process has started to reduce the amount of important nutrients (fiber) to the commensal microbes in her gut, her gut bugs have hardly missed a meal as she starts consuming an increasing amount of fiber-rich plants. Like the fiber-like oligosacharides in breast milk, oligosacchrides are present in thousands of plants in nature. Onions, for example, contain large amounts of oligosacchrides. But in nature, fiber is as diverse as the plants they come from. While the physical and chemical diversity of plants and fiber in her valley is impressive, the fiber across all these plants share one basic characteristic: they cannot be broken down and digested in the stomach and small intestine, so they end up in the colon where waiting bacteria break them down to extract energy not only for themselves, but much-needed energy (calories) for their human host.

Like so many in her valley, our growing little human hybrid enjoys a rich diversity of plants and animals in her diet – foraged and hunted from a nutritional landscape that literally changed at a glacial pace. Though her valley will someday cultivate seeds and raise animals, these hallmarks of modern civilization are generations in the future. Archaeological research around the world suggests that she consumed an extraordinary diversity and quantity of plants and therefore maintained a well-fed population of commensal bacteria. One such glimpse into the diet of our ancient human hybrid ancestors can be found along the shores of the Sea of Galilee in modern-day Israel.

At this location, archaeologists have uncovered a remarkably well-preserved collection of plant remains from the archaeological site of Ohalo II. Buried in the oxygen-poor sediments for 23,000 years, a window into our nutritional past reveals a broad-spectrum diet that yielded a collection of >90,000 plant remains representing small grass seeds, cereals (emmer wheat, barley), acorns, almonds, raspberries, grapes, wild figs, pistachios, and various other fruits and berries. A stunning 142 different species of plants was identified, revealing the rich diversity of fiber sources that was consumed by the site inhabitants.

An ethnographic example of the diversity of plants and fiber consumed by pre-agricultural societies such as the one our baby girl was born into comes from Australia. Early travelers and missionaries in Australia noted in detailed records that Aborigines ate some 300 different species of fruit, 150 varieties of roots and tubers, and a dizzying number of nuts, seeds, and vegetables. A recent analysis by researchers at the University of Sydney of over 800 of these plant foods suggest the fiber intake was estimated between 80 to 130 grams a day – possibly more – depending on the contribution of plants to daily energy needs. Today, the average American consumes around 15 grams a day, from a very limited number of plants.

As time swept over her valley, our baby girl would become a mother herself, passing microbes to her offspring as her mother did with her. Carrying in their guts the key to our success as a species, our ancestors handed down to us one of the greatest symbiotic relationships the natural world has ever nurtured. As foraging gave way to the rise of domesticated crops and creation of massive politically controlled civilizations steeped in culture that punctuated the landscape, we slowly changed the rules between us and them. Today we find ourselves in a modern medical and nutritional world that seems hell bent on extracting ourselves from the natural world from which we, and our microbial friends, came. The culture and technology that pushes humanity forward has evolved so rapidly, that our genome and the delicate balance within our human hybrid cannot keep up or adapt. So freakish is our modern food supply, our commensal microbes barely recognize or realize the food for them in our daily meals.

This article is about our discordance between nature’s plan for the health and well being of not just us, but our entire human hybrid. We don’t need another diet book about us, we need a plan for “all” of us. This blog is about “repositioning” and “reclaiming” fibers’ role in human health. It’s about what fiber is: food for our human hybrid. Continuing to neglect the health and nutritional requirements of our entire human hybrid will only assure our inflamed and leaky guts will continue to play an active role in the major diseases of our time – if not cause most of them directly.

To see where we have gotten off track and how we can restore balance and optimal health for our entire human hybrid, we need to visit another delivery room. But this time, circa 2009.

livNAKED friends. Please tell others.

As an anthropologist, I’ve had the opportunity to peer into our nutritional past at the bits and pieces of meals and lifeways left by our ancient ancestors. Fortunately, they were messy.

In ideal preservation contexts we often see evidence for daily intake of diverse species of plants that provided 75, 100, and up to 150 grams of fiber a day. This is similar to fiber intake noted among many healthy, rural Asian people today, or what we saw 75 years ago in places like South Africa, Uganda, and other far away non-westernized regions. But in the US today, depending on gender, age, and activity level, our government recommends we only eat 25 to 38 grams a day – give or take. Based on this guidance, Americans promptly consume about half of that.

The important physiological role of fiber in human health lies in its ability to stimulate the growth and health of the trillions of good bacteria that live permanently in our colons. These evolutionary hitch-hikers have evolved a special symbiotic relationship with humans over eons and have become so intertwined in our health and well-being they are considered an organ. Importantly, these healthy bacteria require fiber to live.

Our diminishing dietary intake of fiber is literally starving our colonic bacteria, inhibiting their ability to defend us against invading pathogens that make millions of people sick, many of whom will die. A healthy and well-fed population of colonic bacteria increases mineral absorption (think calcium), has positive affects on biomarkers of colon cancer, reduces symptoms of IBS, and reduces the risk to coronary heart disease by modulating bad cholesterol. And the list goes on.

We cannot simply go from a species that evolved on a diet of nutrient-rich fibrous plants, to one that eats almost no fiber. The current US guidelines for fiber intake are – from an evolutionary perspective – in actuality, low fiber recommendations that represent nothing more than the efforts of lobbyists who represent industries that have an interest in seeing the “number of servings” for their “food groups” maintained or increased.

To understand the decreasing role of fiber in the American diet, we need not look farther than farm subsidies. Aside from boosting profits within the industry, these subsidies result in low-cost commodities – especially grains – which end up as highly processed (read: no fiber) ingredients in many popular foods. This is one of the reasons you can buy five boxes of macaroni and cheese – which supplies nearly 6,000 nutrient-poor calories – for $1. Further, the average American derives nearly 40 percent of daily caloric needs from heavily subsidized added sugars and fats/oils.

Though the government says we should eat more fiber-rich fruits and vegetables, these categories historically receive very few subsidies. This is why fresh fruits and vegetables increased a whopping 120 percent in price from 1985 to 2000, while grain, fats/oil, and sugar-laden products increased far less. With an ever-increasing number of Americans barely making ends meet, choices for “what’s for dinner” have already been economically predetermined, and fiber-rich foods can barely be seen on the plate.

As anthropologists of the future look back upon our society, what will they see? Unless we stem the tide of unbalanced agricultural subsidies and honestly address the gaps in nutrition education among consumers, I’m afraid we will be judged on a never-ending sea of oversized caskets below a surface littered with empty prescription bottles and crumbling Food Pyramids built by congressional pharaohs run amok.

livNAKED friends.

It works like this: the plants sit in a netted bucket full of rocks with just enough room for their roots to grow down into the covered container.  The container itself is filled with clean water, beneficial bacteria, and a special mixture of nutrients – all bubbling together to deliver the plants exactly what they need to grow!

Normally, a plant is forced to spend incredible amounts of energy developing massive root systems in its constant search for water and food.  Hydroponic gardening puts everything within easy reach for the plant, which means it can devote all of its energy growing its top half.  In our case, this means we can provide fresh cut Basil for everyone, any time of year, with very limited maintenance.  You’ll also notice that our plants smell and taste better because they’re never stressed, and thus, never stop producing their essential oils.  We also don’t have to use pesticides or other chemical sprays since our system is soilless and in a controlled environment.

We’re convinced at NAKEDpizza that the only way out of our flawed food system is to completely rethink the relationship between ourselves and the plants that sustain us.  As cities expand outward and gobble up arable land, new ways to farm and utilize the urban environment will have to be developed.  We see hydroponics as a sound technology that can provide some of those answers.  Now, would you like to add some Store Grown Basil to those Breadstixx?

We had never heard of Evan Ratliff until we got a cryptic redeye email titled “Missing Wired Magazine Writer Evan Ratliff is Coming to Naked Pizza On Tuesday or Wednesday – Part of a $5,000 Contest.” Now normally, this would have been filed with the other emails letting us know that some Sultan/Chief/King/General’s daughter needed help dispersing fifty million dollars to us as long as we forked over our banking and routing information, but this one came from Jeff Reifman over at Newscloud.  Legitimate?  We had no idea.  But if we caught him, the press would be nice as we are in the process of announcing the national roll out of our franchise business.

By 7 AM (Tuesday, Sept 8), team naked was researching and kicking around emails and by 8 AM we were fully planning our strategy!  We made contact with Jeff Reifman at Newscloud and he explained he had reliable information (http://blog.newscloud.com/2009/09/how-we-caught-evan-ratliff.html) that Evan had arrived in New Orleans by Amtrak the night before and had begun following Nakedpizza on Twitter using an “unkown/non public/secret” twitter handle.  It made sense.  Evan has Celiac’s Disease and we’re the only place in town that serves gluten-free pizzas.  After discussing with newscloud folks (a flurry of emails and phone calls) we all were pretty confident he was bound to show up, but we couldn’t take the chance that someone else would get to him first.

Evan was also following the Old New Orleans Rum Company as of Tuesday, which gives facility tours at 11am and 2pm on weekdays.  Turns out, newscloud also notified the rum company that Evan was in town and may stop as evidenced by the twitter follow. Would he go on a tour before getting a pizza for lunch?  The only prudent thing to do was to scope it out, so we sent Brock on a sting operation to make sure that we nabbed him before he went in.  Reports were coming in from Twitter claiming that Evan had recently shaved his head, so Brock was on the lookout for bald.  Brock staked out a position around 10:30 but the only people in sight were distillery employees.  When he started peeking around the office, the girl behind the counter sheepishly asked if he was the guy from Wired magazine (Brock also has a shaved head).  He played it off wonderfully and she apologized.  Ah!  This confirmed that Nakedpizza wasn’t the only ones on the hunt.  We had competition – time to double our efforts.

Using an IP address that newscloud had traced to Evan in New Orleans, we were able to verify that Evan had logged onto our website at 11:17 PM the night before through our statcounter. Importantly, he had also accessed our “gluten-free” info page. We started to feel the net tightening.

Meanwhile, Jeff had camped out in the nakedpizza store and was prepping the staff on what to look for.  We knew that Evan was around 5’11” with blue eyes, so we primed to “fluke” anyone and everyone who met that description and ordered a gluten free pizza, pickup or delivery.  Hours rolled by and nothing. Status reports rolled in from Newscloud and Twitter.  The waiting game was driving us a bit crazy.  Evan was so close to the end of his mission we couldn’t tell if he would be cocky or cautious.  Perhaps he would hide out in his hotel room, or disappear for a few days on Bourbon Street.  Would his article play better if he were caught or if he made it?  We obsessed over every angle ad nauseam.

We also knew that Wired had made the Evan hunt a little more complex by providing him a series of challenges that would provoke him into public places.  He wasn’t obligated to do them, but he received extra money at the end if he pulled them off.  One of the challenges required him to get a picture from a 50+ story building.  After doing some research, team naked knew that the Place St. Charles and One Shell Square were the only two buildings that he could use, but we didn’t have the personnel to scope out every entrance and exit.  We did still have to sell pizzas after all!  That plan was out.

Evan’s other challenge was to attend a book reading.  After searching, we could only find two book readings going on in the city: Tom Piazza at 2727 Prytania St. at the Garden District Book Shop at 5:30 and another a few miles away at another location at 7:00 PM.  If we were going to nab him outside of the pizza place, this seemed like our best bet.

Jeff and Brock headed over to the signing and camped out in the coffee shop next door – also waiting on a third team member (Robbie) to show and help with the hunt. All of the entrances and exits were covered.  It was back to the waiting game.  It’s easy to see why so many of those CIA/FBI guys get spotted; they’re the ones who are standing around with nothing to do, giving everyone the stare down.  The book signing started promptly at 5:30 and Evan was still a no-show – it was 5:48 PM.  Damn!  Jeff sent Brock a text to see if he was ready to roll to the other book signing.

As they stood outside waiting, a skinny guy on an old beat-up green bicycle pulled up to the corner.  He made eye contact with Jeff and Brock, hopped off his bicycle and started to walk by.  Jeff looked at Brock and said; “now that guy looks like a local (i.e., fucked up bike).”  As the skinny guy took a few steps past, Jeff straightened up from leaning on the building and called to him.

“Hey, you wouldn’t happen to know a guy named Fluke, would you?”  The bicyclist stopped dead on hearing the password.

“Maybe.”

Jeff and Brock walked over and asked for a picture.  Evan Ratliff was no longer vanished.

We’ve seen it played a dozen times on the evening news. A wrongly accused man stands on the steps of the courthouse trying his best to forgive the jury, the judge, and a throng of lawyers who persecuted and imprisoned him for a brutal crime he did not commit. A search for his DNA, collected at the crime scene, in a genetics database maintained by the Department of Justice shows that the crime scene DNA does not match his. Instead, the DNA evidence implicates an inmate doing time in another state for a parole violation. Confronted with the DNA evidence, the parole violator confesses to the cold case murder, setting an innocent man free.

DNA-based appeals and related genetic evidence in general have revolutionized our legal system. More accurate than eyewitness testimony or the very cool fiber, fingerprint, and blood-splatter analyses depicted on CSI: Miami, DNA evidence provides conclusive proof of who was at a crime scene or somewhere else, miles away. Also because of this science, we will not have to build more tombs to unknown soldiers, wonder who our father may be, or guess about our susceptibility to some genetic disease.

DNA analysis works because each individual’s DNA is unique. More interestingly, our DNA carries the vestiges of evolutionary changes as varied as hair color, stature, and gut physiology. As geneticist Sean Carroll points out, “DNA contains, therefore, the ultimate forensic record of evolution.”

But this is the rub. Jurors and judges use DNA evidence to determine guilt or innocence, and in some cases, life or death, of thousands of citizens—all of which is universally supported by public opinion and considered sound science. But this same population— about half of us—doubts or outright denies the reality of evolutionary biology, indicating we are far more comfortable with DNA’s applications than with its implications. It’s this irony of public perception and understanding, coupled with the restaurant industry’s near total disregard for any honest responsibility for the health of the nation, which drives us at NAKEDpizza on our quest for a new forward.

The idea that evolution is the basis of human biology and helps explain why we are vulnerable to disease is scarcely mentioned in modern medicine and nutrition. If evolutionary biology were a more important part of modern medicine, common medical problems such as cough, nausea, vomiting, low-grade fever, fatigue, and anxiety would be correctly viewed not as problems to be eliminated, but rather as the body’s attempts to remedy a problem. A truly informed perspective would consider that if fever, cough, and diarrhea are effective defenses against disease, couldn’t blocking these defenses make people sicker? But where’s the money in that.

Much mainstream nutrition advice comes from nutrition and dietary experts who are card-carrying members of the The American Dietetic Association (ADA), the world’s largest organization of food and nutrition professionals. From the ADA website,

ADA is committed to improving the nation’s health and advancing the profession of dietetics through research, education and advocacy.

This is a massive organization that publishes a number of journals and newsletters and convenes professional, food, and nutrition expos each year to publicize marching orders for its 70,000 plus members—a.k.a. Registered Dietitians. To say this group has an impact on the nutrition and dietary strategies of Americans would be an understatement. The ADA also does an excellent job of providing its members with tools, especially “timely, science-based food and nutrition information you can trust.” One way they do this is through Position Papers that “explain the Association’s stance on issues that affect the nutritional status of the public.”

These position papers address the ADA’s take on things like vegetarian diets, nutrition and aging, fiber intake, obesity and weight prevention, vitamin requirements, and so on. In all, there are about 39 position papers. A quick search for the words “evolution” and “evolutionary biology” in the body of the text in all 39 position papers yields “0” hits. While there are definitely some nutrition experts who consider their clients and customers as mammals with an evolutionary past, the business or industry of dietary advice does not see things quite the same way.

The same vision persists within the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services—the keepers of the U.S Food Pyramid. In a press release distributed last October, the government announced they had selected “13 nationally recognized experts to serve on the 2010 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. The Committee members are made up of prominent medical and scientific researchers from universities and scientific institutions across America that are leaders in their field.” Interestingly, not a single evolutionary biologist or anyone with any training or publishing record in the principles of evolutionary sciences are among the 13 experts who are going to tell us what to eat—and why. They were, however, able to squeeze in a couple of experts to help us with behavioral changes.

It is this lack of evolutionary perspective that allows the ADA and other groups to embrace a vegetarian diet as “appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.” While people choose vegetarian diets for a number of reasons—for moral grounds, for example—we should take the time to realize that the recommendations and validations of such a diet ignore the fact that meat played a significant role in human evolution and thus genetically shaped our physiology. The evidence for meat consumption is overwhelming in the archaeological record and is recorded in the chemistry of our ancestors’ bones and teeth, dating back to the dawn of humanity.

We are not closing our eyes to the potential health benefits of a meatless diet, nor to the moral, social, and environmental issues that shape one’s food choices; our logic also applies to dietary regimes that dismiss plants—for example, the Atkins Diet. Throughout human evolution, our nutritional landscape included large amounts of consumed plants. Period.

It is along the continuum of these two dietary extremes—all plants versus only a few—that most of us find no evolutionary foundations for either extreme to dictate our current nutritional needs.

When we started NAKEDpizza in late 2006, it was called World’s Healthiest Pizza, but not because we were pizza fanatics, and not because we had a burning desire to be in the quick service restaurant sector. Rather, we saw the pizza industry as an opportunity to 1) make an unhealthy and popular fast food healthier and more nutritious in a truly meaningful way; 2) make a better tasting pizza and; 3) demonstrate that a tastier and healthier pizza was a viable business concept. More importantly, by combining biological and nutritional science to create a new kind of pizza, and by considering the social and environmental dimensions of business, we could demonstrate a new conceptual framework that had the potential to create a way forward for the fast food industry.

As an industry, fast food is punctuated by a history of successes and achievement, but also plagued by paradoxes, shortcomings, and challenges that require increasing acts of marketing desperation. These desperate acts often result in short-cuts and compromises that have, and will continue to, undermine the health of the very customers the industry depends on. We are fast approaching the day when the current, dominant business model in the fast food industry of “you give me money, I give you taco” will be replaced by one of equity and the realization that the business of food is interlinked with social, cultural, environmental, political, and economic disciplines.

Most of all, the business of food should be in principle and practice a biological, environmental, and social science undertaking. It is simply too important to be less. With per capita spending on healthcare in this country already the highest in the world (more than $7,000 per person), we need a new strategy. This new, broad, integrated structure brings recent advances and progressive work into the realm of fast food by providing an opportunity for honest impact and renewal. This plan is appropriate for the twenty-first century.

At NAKEDpizza we are truly concerned with personal and population health, and also with the health of the living world of which we are a part. In part 2 of Pizza evolutus, we will lay out for you how we created the world’s healthiest pizza within this conceptual framework.