Eat like a werewolf

I'm sure that by now all of you have heard of the "Paleo Diet," that claims that the path to better health comes from eating like a cave man (or woman, as the case may be) -- consuming only foods that would have been eaten by our distant ancestors living on the African savanna.  The "Paleo Diet," therefore, includes grass-fed meat (cow is okay if you can't find gazelle), eggs, fish, root vegetables, fruits, nuts, and mushrooms.  Not included are dairy products (being that domestication of cattle and goats was post-cave-man), potatoes, salt, sugar, and refined oils.

Despite gaining some traction, especially amongst athletes and bodybuilders, the "Paleo Diet" has been looked upon with a wry eye by actual dieticians.  A survey of experts in the field, sponsored by CNN, placed the "Paleo Diet" as dead last in terms of support from peer-reviewed research and efficacy at promoting healthy weight loss.

But the "Paleo Diet" will sound like quantum physics, technical-science-wise, as compared to the latest diet to take the world of poorly-educated woo-woos by storm:

The "Werewolf Diet."

I wish I were making this up.  I also wish, for different reasons, that it was what it sounded like -- that people who sign up find themselves, once a month, sprouting fur and fangs and running around naked and eating unsuspecting hikers.  That, at least, would be entertaining.

[Image from Weird Tales (November 1941) is in the Public Domain]

But no such luck.  The Werewolf Diet, however, does resemble being an actual werewolf in that (1) what you get to eat is tied to the phases of the Moon, (2) it more or less ruins your health, and (3) it completely fucks up any chance at a normal social life.

The site "Moon Connection" describes the whole thing in great detail, but they make a big point of their stuff being copyrighted material, so I'll just summarize so that you get the gist:

You have two choices, the "basic plan" or the "extended plan."  On the "basic plan," you fast for 24 hours, either on the full Moon or the new Moon.  You can, they say, "lose up to six pounds of water weight" by doing this, but why this is a good thing isn't clear.

The "extended plan," though, is more interesting.  With the "extended plan," you fast during the full Moon, then eat a fairly normal diet during the waning part of the Moon cycle (with the addition of drinking eight glasses of water a day to "flush out toxins").  On the new Moon, you should fast again, only consuming dandelion tea or green tea (more toxin flushing).  During the waxing part of the Moon cycle, you must be "disciplined" to fight your "food cravings," and avoid overeating.  "Thickeners," such as sugar and fats, should be avoided completely, and you can't eat anything after 6 PM because that's when the Moon's light "becomes more visible."

Then you hit the full Moon and it all starts over again.

Well, let me just say that this ranks right up there with "downloadable medicines" as one of the dumbest things I have ever read.  We have the whole "flushing toxins" bullshit -- as if your kidneys and liver aren't capable of dealing with endogenous toxic compounds, having evolved for millions of years to do just that.  We're told, as if it's some sort of revelation, that our "food cravings will increase" after we've been consuming nothing but green tea for 24 hours.  Then we are informed that the Moon's gravitational pull has an effect on us, because we're 60% water -- implying that contrary to what Isaac Newton said, the gravitational pull an object experiences depends not on its mass but on what it's made of.  Or that your bloodstream experiences high tide, or something, I dunno.  And also, the gravitational pull the Moon exerts upon you somehow depends on the phase it's in, because, apparently, the amount of light reflecting from the Moon's surface mysteriously alters its mass.

I mean, I'm not a dietician, but really.  And fortunately, there are dieticians who agree.  Keri Gans, a professional dietician and author of The Small Change Diet, said in an interview, "This diet makes me laugh.  I don’t know if it’s the name or that people will actually believe it.  Either way, it is nothing but another fad diet encouraging restriction.  Restriction of food will of course lead to weight loss, but at what cost to the rest of your body?  If only celebrities, once and for all, would start touting a diet plan that makes sense and is based on science."

Yes.  If only.  But unfortunately, fewer people have heard of Gans, and (evidently) the scientific method, than have heard of Madonna and Demi Moore, who swear by the Werewolf Diet.  Not that Moore, especially, is some kind of pinnacle of rationality; she is a devotee of Philip Berg's "Kabbalah Centre," which preaches that "99% of reality cannot be accessed by the senses."

Nor, apparently, by logic and reason.

Interestingly enough, as I'm writing this it's just past the new Moon, so we're all supposed to be subsisting on dandelion tea.  To which I answer: the hell you say.  I'm off to get some bacon and eggs.  Detoxify that, buddy.

**************************************

I've loved Neil de Grasse Tyson's brilliant podcast StarTalk for some time.  Tyson's ability to take complex and abstruse theories from astrophysics and make them accessible to the layperson is legendary, as is his animation and sense of humor.

If you've enjoyed it as well, this week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is a must-read.  In Cosmic Queries: StarTalk's Guide to Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going, Tyson teams up with science writer James Trefil to consider some of the deepest questions there are -- how life on Earth originated, whether it's likely there's life on other planets, whether any life that's out there might be expected to be intelligent, and what the study of physics tells us about the nature of matter, time, and energy.

Just released three months ago, Cosmic Queries will give you the absolute cutting edge of science -- where the questions stand right now.  In a fast-moving scientific world, where books that are five years old are often out-of-date, this fascinating analysis will catch you up to where the scientists stand today, and give you a vision into where we might be headed.  If you're a science aficionado, you need to read this book.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

One man's meat

A couple of days ago, my son and I were chatting, and he asked me if I'd ever heard about the concept of "high meat."

I told him I hadn't.  "High meat," he explained, is when people take the probiotic movement one step further, and eat meat and fish that have deliberately been left out until they are thoroughly spoiled.

It is an occupational hazard of writing here at Skeptophilia that occasionally someone will tell me about some damnfool claim, and it turns out they made it up just to see if I'll believe it.  The problem is, having written for seven years about the depths of nonsense to which the human mind can sink, it's hard for me to dismiss any claim out of hand.

After all, any species that can come up with downloadable medicines and homeopathic water is clearly capable of idiocy far beyond anything I could conceive of.

But I figured I'd hedge my bets, especially since my son has a reputation for being a bit of a wiseass at times.  (Can't imagine where he got that from.)  I said, "This is a joke, right?"

He assured me that it wasn't.  So I did some research.  And sure enough: there are back-to-nature types who are so back to nature that they want to recapture what it was like to be a hyena eating carrion in the hot sun of the African savanna.

Don't believe me?  Take a look at this article from the New Yorker by Burkhard Bilger, wherein he visits people who have various takes on the probiotic idea, finally ending up in the home of Steve Torma of Asheville, North Carolina, who has pushed the whole thing to the ultimate.  Torma makes his own "high meat" by letting raw meat or fish decompose in jars.  Then he eats it.  Bilger writes:

Torma ducked into the back of the house and returned with a swing-top jar in his hands. Inside lay a piece of organic beef, badly spoiled.  It was afloat in an ochre-colored puddle of its own decay, the muscle and slime indistinguishable, like a slug.

Even Torma seemed to recognize that it wasn't a very appealing diet.  "The first couple of bites," Torma said, "can be rough going."

There are a variety of other sites where I found out way more about this practice than I ever wanted to know.  The site Local Harvest has directions for preparing "high meat," attributing any resistance we might have to eating said decomposed glop to "prior conditioning."  The Raw Paleo Diet Forum goes into considerable detail about consuming "high meat," and says that if you end up with explosive diarrhea after eating it, not to worry because it's just your body "purging itself of toxins."

Okay, let's see.  Where do I begin?

Cooking, and food preservation strategies in general, caught on primarily because the people who used them were less likely to die of food poisoning.  There are a lot of bacteria out there that would be very happy to make you violently ill -- E. coli, Listeria, Cryptosporidium, and Salmonella come to mind -- and since decomposition happens because of the digestion of organic matter by bacteria, if you eat decomposed food, you are approximately 1,582,614 times more likely to get bacterial food poisoning than the rest of us.

And the symptoms you get are not from the body "purging itself of toxins."  What it is doing is attempting to purge itself of the pathogenic bacteria you were stupid enough to consume.

Consider, too, that we are evolved (not "conditioned") to avoid rotten stuff.  Decomposing meat contains two chemicals -- tetramethylenediamine and pentamethylenediamine -- that are so foul-smelling that their more common names are "putrescine" and "cadaverine," respectively.  Our noses are early-warning systems, giving us valuable information that is essential to our survival.

Including, for example, "Don't eat something that smells like a putrescent cadaver, you fucking moron."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It's not that the whole probiotic thing is a bad idea.  Some fermented food -- pickles, sauerkraut, and kimchi, for example -- are fermented with specific strains of bacteria to produce particular flavors and odors.  These bacteria are also chosen on the basis of (1) tasting reasonably good, and (2) not killing you.  (Many of these bacteria are part of a healthy intestinal flora, which has been shown to protect you from diseases like ulcerative colitis and irritable bowel syndrome.)

Eating things that have rotted with your ordinary, garden-variety bacteria, however, is a good way to spend the next few days on a first-name basis with your toilet.  There's a reason we have strict sterilization protocols for food, such as cooking, canning of vegetables, and pasteurization of milk.  It reduces the likelihood of the Bad Guys getting into your digestive tract.  Consider the FDA's stance on pasteurization: "Raw milk is inherently dangerous," their guidelines on dairy safety state.  "It should not be consumed by anyone at any time for any purpose."

So that's unequivocal.

But if you want to try out life as a vulture, have at it.  Me, I'm gonna stick with "low meat," medium-rare, with a large glass of red wine, which not only tastes great but is much less likely to give me horrible bacterial infections.  Call me particular, but I'm just kind of finicky that way.

Eat like a werewolf

I'm sure that by now all of you have heard of the "Paleo Diet," that claims that the path to better health comes from eating like a cave man (or woman, as the case may be) -- consuming only foods that would have been eaten by our distant ancestors living on the African savanna.  The "Paleo Diet," therefore, includes grass-fed meat (cow is okay if you can't find gazelle), eggs, fish, root vegetables, fruits, nuts, and mushrooms.  Not included are dairy products (being that domestication of cattle and goats was post-cave-man), potatoes, salt, sugar, and refined oils.

Despite gaining some traction, especially amongst athletes and bodybuilders, the "Paleo Diet" has been looked upon with a wry eye by actual dieticians.  A survey of experts in the field, sponsored by CNN, placed the "Paleo Diet" as dead last in terms of support from peer-reviewed research and efficacy at promoting healthy weight loss.

But the "Paleo Diet" will sound like quantum physics, technical-science-wise, as compared to the latest diet to take the world of poorly-educated woo-woos by storm:

The "Werewolf Diet."

I wish I were making this up.  I also wish, for different reasons, that it was what it sounded like -- that people who sign up find themselves, once a month, sprouting fur and fangs and running around naked and eating unsuspecting hikers.  That, at least, would be entertaining.

[image courtesy of Rodrigo Ferrarezi and the Wikimedia Commons]

But no such luck.  The Werewolf Diet, however, does resemble being an actual werewolf in that (1) what you get to eat is tied to the phases of the moon, (2) it more or less ruins your health, and (3) it completely fucks up any chance at a normal social life.

The site "Moon Connection" describes the whole thing in great detail, but they make a big point of their stuff being copyrighted material, so I'll just summarize so that you get the gist:

You have two choices, the "basic plan" or the "extended plan."  On the "basic plan," you fast for 24 hours, either on the full moon or the new moon.  You can, they say, "lose up to six pounds of water weight" by doing this, but why this is a good thing isn't clear.

The "extended plan," though, is more interesting.  With the "extended plan," you fast during the full moon, then eat a fairly normal diet during the waning part of the moon cycle (with the addition of drinking eight glasses of water a day to "flush out toxins").  On the new moon, you should fast again, only consuming dandelion tea or green tea (more toxin flushing).  During the waxing part of the moon cycle, you must be "disciplined" to fight your "food cravings," and avoid overeating.  "Thickeners," such as sugar and fats, should be avoided completely, and you can't eat anything after 6 PM because that's when the moon's light "becomes more visible."

Then you hit the full moon and it all starts over again.

Well, let me just say that this ranks right up there with "downloadable medicines" as one of the dumbest things I have ever read.  We have the whole "flushing toxins" bullshit -- as if your kidneys and liver aren't capable of dealing with endogenous toxic compounds, having evolved for millions of years to do just that.  We're told, as if it's some sort of revelation, that our "food cravings will increase" after we've been consuming nothing but green tea for 24 hours.  Then we are informed that the moon's gravitational pull has an effect on us, because we're 60% water -- implying that your bloodstream experiences high tide, or something.  But contrary to anything Newton would have had to say about the matter, the gravitational pull the moon exerts upon you somehow depends on the phase it's in, because, apparently, the amount of light reflecting from the moon's surface mysteriously alters its mass.

I mean, I'm not a dietician, but really.  And fortunately, there are dieticians who agree.  Keri Gans, a professional dietician and author of The Small Change Diet, said in an interview, "This diet makes me laugh. I don’t know if it’s the name or that people will actually believe it.  Either way, it is nothing but another fad diet encouraging restriction.  Restriction of food will of course lead to weight loss, but at what cost to the rest of your body?  If only celebrities, once and for all, would start touting a diet plan that makes sense and is based on science."

Yes.  If only.  But unfortunately, fewer people have heard of Gans, and (evidently) the scientific method, than have heard of Madonna and Demi Moore, who swear by the Werewolf Diet.  Not that Moore, especially, is some kind of pinnacle of rationality; she is a devotee of Philip Berg's "Kabbalah Centre," which preaches that "99% of reality cannot be accessed by the senses."

Nor, apparently, by logic and reason.

Interestingly enough, today is a new moon, meaning that today we're all supposed to be subsisting on dandelion tea.  To which I answer: the hell you say.  I'm off to get some bacon and eggs.  Detoxify that, buddy.