News
Top blogs
Podcast
Topics
Events“Butter and cheese saved my son”
June 17 2014 by Dr. Andreas Eenfeldt, MD![Dr. Andreas Eenfeldt, MD]()
in Epilepsy
in Epilepsy 
Another happy ending about a dietary intervention as a treatment for epilepsy:
Previously
“The verdict was medication for at least 10 years”
I know of no such fear in the medical community, but I question why anyone would feed grain to a human child when there are so many safer sources of carbohydrate and/or starch.
And yes, being a physician myself, i can assure you that many (nearly all) physicians and dietitians are convinced people completely cutting carbs are doomed. Even this "ketogenic diet with pita bread" seems to scare the physician enough that he has mom weight everything and supplement her child.
The other problem with physicians is that even if they have the theory, it does not make them chefs. The first anti-epileptic diets were worse than non palatable. We all know a ketogenic diet can be incredibly tasty.
As far as grain are concerned, they could be dropped completely. The glycemic index of wheat is much to high. And I don't see why the kid should be fed starchy vegetables. The glycemic index and glycemic load of leafy non starchy vegetables is so low that even a large plate does not interfere with ketosis. And I'd probably add to this kid's diet coconut oil, the best source of medium chain triglycerides, a fantastic source of ketone bodies for the brain (think of its effect in Alzheimer).
Finally, it would be much easier if the whole family ate the same diet. Parents would naturally lose weight, cardiovascular risk would go down the drain and meal time would be so much easier for the family. Just a thought.
But just like Galina said: at least the diet works.
Did you notice every product had the "Sainsburys" name prominently turned to the camera ? That was also a bottle of orange juice (at best) or orange soda (at worst) at the back, and he most certainly wouldn't be consuming *that* !!
LOL ! The Daily Mail !! Gutter journalism at its best :))
But YAY for the little boy.
@François,
May be "Neurologists are the least resistant physicians to a ketogenic diet" because they know how damaging for health their other remedies are like anty-seizure medications and SSRIs, and realize that a ketogenic diet pales when compared with other staff . I also think that vegetable sources of starch would be better than pita for the boy's health. May be boys's doctor thought that the exact amount of pita would be easier to calculate for the family? At the end of the day he had only one purpose for the diet - to stop seizures.
(not much space in the forest to sow barley, I suppose)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDJjG8dQTtY
A while ago on his blog WHS in several very interesting posts "Beyond Ötzi: European Evolutionary History and its Relevance to Diet." Stephan Guyenet argued that hunter-gatherers genes were replaced to a significant degree by the genes of agriculturalists and the " Otzi represents a halfway point in the evolutionary process that transformed Paleolithic humans into modern humans."
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2012/04/beyond-otzi-european-ev...
On the blog-post he gives the link to the paper "Complete mitochondrial genomes reveal neolithic expansion into Europe.
Fu Q1, Rudan P, Pääbo S, Krause J." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22427842
On the graphic illustration of the statistic it is easy to see that Eastern Europe has the least amount of the people with agricultural genes .
Further, where is the evidence of replacement. For example, which gene did the gene on chromosome 2 for lactase persistence supposedly replace? Does the addition of that gene mean those who have it can no longer go without milk? Or for people with more than 2 copies of the gene for amylase to handle starch better, which genes did the extra copies replace? It seems more likely the DNA strand just added copies without replacing anything. So there seems to be confirmation bias in the inference that a set of agriculturalist genes "replaced" a hunter-gatherer set of genes (as SG seems to want to imply one cannot go back to hunter-gatherer diet). It would seem mal-adaptive to lose genes for metabolic flexibility and be able to survive an agricultural crop failure or crop-destroying enemy raid and having to live on LCHF until the next harvest. Famines have been common in agriculturalist societies through to recent times, so keto-adaptation would be evolutionarily adaptive and likely to have been conserved for the great majority of people. I would expect just as one with an added lactase gene can choose whether to drink milk or not, so it goes with the other agriculturalist foods.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGe_Jz_2NzY
I recall attending a seminar several years ago, where speaker documented that animal brains were eaten by early humans regularly (can not find the name of the speaker in my records)
Straight of the press
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306987714001522
" ... evidence of a distinct hominin scavenging strategy – one
that included a strong focus on acquiring and exploiting fatty,
nutrient-rich, energy-dense within-head food resources (e.g., brain
matter, mandibular nerve and marrow, etc.) "
"The record of medium-sized bovids is slightly more complex.
Within each assemblage, there is clear evidence that hominins
acquired the postcranial remains of at least some medium-sized
individuals relatively early in their resource lives (i.e., with at least
some adhering flesh), perhaps mirroring, to some extent, the
record of their involvement with smaller-sized bovids [Table S1].
The disproportionate abundance of medium-sized heads, howev-
er, likely reflects a separate but complementary foraging activity,
one specifically focused on scavenging these remains for their
internal food resources (e.g., brain tissues) [17,63,84]. This latter
portion of the record may represent the earliest archaeological
evidence of a distinct hominin scavenging strategy."