What Is A Paradox? French, Atkins, and Inuit
par·a·dox: ‘noun
1. a statement or proposition that seems self-contradictory or absurd but in reality expresses a possible truth.
2. a self-contradictory and false proposition.
3. any person, thing, or situation exhibiting an apparently contradictory nature.
4. an opinion or statement contrary to commonly accepted opinion.
Last week, I was at a work function in which we were examining some industry data that showed red wine consumption vs white wine consumption over the past 2 decades. On this particular graph was a data point for the year 1992 with the text “French Paradox,” followed by a marked upturn in the red wine line with little movement in the white wine graph. I don’t recall the exact number, but suffice it to say that the 2007 number is several multiples of the 1992 number.
I tell you that story to tell you this one. One lady had not heard of the French Paradox, so I explained it as, “the nonsense notion that it’s the red wine that protects the French from disease due to their high-fat diet.” One girl asked, “And why is it nonsense?” in a humorous way. I replied, “We can go there if you want, but this isn’t really the place.” Anywho, we moved on with the discussion of wine and the beverage industry as a whole. But let’s discuss the French Paradox.
What Is A Paradox?
If we were in Logic class, a paradox would break the theorem of “If A, then B”. Let’s make up an example: “All motorized vehicles have four wheels” (i.e., If “is a motorized vehicle,” then “has four wheels”). So when we come across a motorcycle, we have a paradox. Now, one of two things has to be done to resolve this paradox:
- Revise our premises
- Reexamine the new data to see if we measured the data point incorrectly
Essentially, a paradox is only a paradox in light of the premises that it seemingly contradicts. But a paradox cannot exist without a resolution. So using the above example, perhaps we counted the wheels on the vehicle wrong and it actually has four wheels (funny angle of viewing maybe?). The paradox is resolved and the data fits the theorem. Or perhaps we need to revise our theorem. Maybe we need to accept that there are two-wheeled vehicles out there. Anyway, I think you get the picture. Let’s put it in dietary terms.
Dietary Paradoxes
Off the top of my head, I can think of three so-called paradoxes:
- The French Paradox
- The Atkins Paradox
- The Inuit Paradox
Each of these can be boiled down to this proposition: “This group eats lots of animal fats, yet remains healthy (or regains health). How can that be?” What are the premises in those two simple sentences? I see two major ones:
- Eating lots of fat is bad for your health, especially animal and/or saturated fat.
- The French/Inuit/Atkins-dieters eat lots of animal and/or saturated fats.
So how do we resolve this seeming paradox? First, maybe we’ve miscalculated the amount of fat in the diets of these groups. Perhaps we took a bad sample of data and the Inuit really don’t eat a diet of 95% animal fat and protein. Maybe the French really don’t eat cheese, foie gras, and other fatty foods constantly. And perhaps we’ve miscategorized the Atkins Diet as “nothing but butter and bacon.” There’s one solution.
The other solution, and one that no one in the mainstream seems willing to accept, is that our first premise is wrong. Perhaps lots of animal/saturated fats aren’t in fact bad for health. If that premise proves to be incorrect, the paradox is resolved.
Solving The Riddle By Going Against Occam’s Razor
But those that create these paradoxes in the mainstream refuse to accept that the basis of their paradox could be wrong. Instead, they add even more premises, which must then also be true to resolve the paradox. William of Ockham would not be pleased. His principle, known as Ockham’s Razor, roughly translates as: “entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.” That basically says, “Don’t add unnecessary elements.”
So here’s the mainstream resolution of the French Paradox: their red wine consumption protects them from heart disease that would otherwise be caused by all of the fat. Now someone has to set out to prove that red wine is heart-protective against the effects of too much animal fat. But there’s another premise inherent in that statement about red wine. They also have to prove not only that red wine is protective for the heart, but also that the French consume it in the proper quantity. Too much alcohol is detrimental to heart health.
And how to resolve the Inuit Paradox? Why, they must be genetically capable of eating that much fat without clogging their arteries and dying. Now someone has to prove that the Inuit are in fact that much different from everyone else (for whom a low-fat diet is presumed to be best) that their bodies process fat differently. Of course, the mainstream resolves the Atkins Paradox by refusing to accept it and appealing to popular wisdom (“I know what the data says, but there’s no way that’s healthy”). I guess if you can’t do enough mental gymnastics to disprove it, you can just stick your head in the sand.
Backing Up The Train
It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupí©ry, Wind, sand and stars, 1939
I propose that the paradoxes be resolved in a different way. Rather than adding new premises that only serve to complicate the matter, let’s look at the two existing premises. I think there’s no doubt that through all of the studies on the French Diet, the Inuit Diet, and the Atkins Diet, it has been proven that these groups eat a good bit of animal fats and don’t shy away from saturated fats. So let’s look at the first premise. What if (work with me here, this is going to be a very crazy idea) saturated fats aren’t bad for you?
Yes, I know, mind-blowing huh? I’d argue that the data supports saturated fats being good for you far more than the unsaturated media darlings. I’d argue that humans have eaten, and thrived on, diets high in animal fats for hundreds of millenia longer than they’ve eaten low-fat diets.
So What’s My Point?
No major point here other than to say that these “paradoxes” are only paradoxes based on the premises that they’re built upon. When a data point fails to fit the formula, we either have to remeasure the data point, discount it as an outlier, or revise our formula, either by changing the original premises or adding new ones. Unfortunately, such a dietary empire has been built on the premise that animal fats (along with non-animal-based saturated fats like coconut and palm) are unhealthful that people absolutely refuse to revisit that first premise. Instead, they concoct all manner of nonsensical ways to explain away the data.
Frankly, to my mind, there’s no paradox. It doesn’t blow my mind that groups that eat loads of fat don’t necessarily get fat and don’t die of heart disease. As I’ve shown before, my diet is 60% or more fat. Yet somehow I maintain a low body fat percentage and rarely get sick. Am I yet another paradox? (Wouldn’t that be fun…a media report of “The Modern Forager Paradox”) If I’m a paradox, so is Mark Sisson. And so are the majority of people on the CrossFit and Performance Menu forums with their high-fat diets.
I think the paradox is that a highly intelligent human being can continue sticking with the standard party line that animal products and saturated fats are killers in light of all of the emerging evidence. I’d couch that theorem in the following way:
- Humans are highly intelligent creatures.
- Highly intelligent creatures face the facts as they prove to be true.
- The facts show that high-fat diets can be healthful.
- Humans accept that high-fat diets are one option for maintaining health.
From that, it seems that when facts emerge showing the standard party line to be wrong, humans would face those facts and revise their beliefs. I leave you to decide which of my premises is incorrect.
What are your thoughts on the matter?
About Scott
Scott Kustes loves to cook and loves to eat. He started Real Food University to help you get maximum enjoyment out of the meals that you eat. To find out more about how he has rebelled against the fast food culture and counting calories or carbs, join the Real Food Revolution.
24 Reader Comments
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Wow…this is a great post. And I’m not nutrition expert, so I’m not going to comment on a lot, except for the fact that there’s no way that modern science knows half of how the body and food interact. It’s never as simple as A+B=C. And, exercise (and lack thereof) plays a big part in how food is absorbed and used in the body.
And since there’s a different study coming out everyday that contridicts everything we know, I try to eat what comes from the ground. Mother Nature knows her ish.
I have no problem with a high fat diet. In fact, I think most carbs are processed crap that should never be eaten. I just object to the people who use the Atkins diet as an excuse to eat “bacon and butter”, avoid vegetables and do no exercise. It’s an unhealthy extreme.
I like Mark’s primal blueprint because it’s not that extreme plus it removes the processed protein junk alongside the processed carb junk.
Gal
another great post, compleatly agree, however i think a diet high or even moderate in damaged fats is not good (ie overly heated pufa’s, powdered fats, processed fats, even pasteaurized fats), i would say the fats in meat, eggs, cold pressed fats & nuts, olives etc is the way to go, burnt meat or meat deep fried in old corn oil is not a good thing.
Nice post. I’ve always thought the term ‘paradox’ to describe something that debunks misguided conventional wisdom sounded like a pretty good excuse to keep on thinking (and eating) in the misguided conventional way. I get disheartened by the refusal of institutions to re-evaluate said conventional wisdom based on the evidence, but then I console myself with some butter…
Debs
Food Is Love
“a paradox cannot exist without a resolution”
What about Russell’s Antinomy?
“I’d argue that humans have eaten, and thrived on, diets high in animal fats for hundreds of millenia longer than they’ve eaten low-fat diets”
I don’t disagree with your position, but the above isn’t a valid argument because no one is saying that eating lots of fat won’t allow you to survive long enough to reproduce. People are talking about extending quality of life into old age and decreasing deaths from heart attacks. Humans don’t need to live past the age of 30 to continue to thrive as a species.
I think the big factor in health is simply how much you eat. If you’re eating 5000 calories a day you’ll get fat, no matter what you’re eating.
There are a lot of data pointing in the direction that sat fat is unhealthy, the problem is they aren’t good data. Mostly epidemiological associations and studies using animals that aren’t adapted to a meat-rich diet. It’s easy to be misled if you aren’t able to prioritize strong data over weak data. The fact that there are plenty of people out there, like the three groups you mentioned, that are healthy while eating plenty of sat fat, pretty much trumps. It doesn’t get more empirical than that.
Oh yeah, then there’s the fact that our own livers make saturated fat out of carbohydrate… maybe they’re trying to kill us.
Well said! Perhaps this should instead be called La Verite Francaise (The French Truth). Have you read about the Masai?
See:
http://bjsm.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/bjsm.2007.044966v1
Hey Scott,
I guess if there is one of the statements that could be incorrect it’s “Highly intelligent creatures face the facts as they prove to be true”
Perhaps “Highly intelligent creatures see the facts as they want them to be true” would be a more accurate statement. I would offer the idea that in fact we broadly have two distinct types of intelligent creature contributing to this – the ‘fact’ consumers (regular folks) and the ‘fact’ producers (scientists/establishment), with each group being differently motivated and a feedback loop between them generating an ongoing misunderstanding of fundamental underlying principles – check out the viscious cycle diagram in my latest post to see what I mean:
The Professor Diet: Eat as Much Junk as you Like
Methuselah
Pay Now Live Later
Simply put: most of the saturated fat we eat comes from animals that are raised on carbohydrate diets. The fattest feedlot livestock are even fed a processed corn and soy diet just like our obese human friends.
When was the last time you saw a fat predator that ate nothing but fatty carb grazers?
So obvious…
Maybe the researchers biased in favor of low fat diets should focus on the “American” paradox.
I am strongly against the use of statins to reduce cholesterol, It can be done much more safely using magnesium, water, and exercise. I would highly suggest any one worried about this topic to check out this article Magnesium and Walking Will Always be Superior to Lipitor
My brother is also a “paradox.” Cycling is his passion, he has 3 bikes one of which is in his basement that he uses during our cold, snowy winters. On weekends, he cycles over 200 km’s and times himself.
Before embarking on an almost all meat/egg with some leafy green veggies diet, he was putting on weight even with all the cycling as he aged (he’ll be 50 this fall). His bloodwork put him at risk for heart disease and he was 60 pounds overweight.
3 years later, he’s still cycling, has dropped 60 pounds and his bloodwork is almost perfect, getting better every year. What does the dietician at his work tell him? “You are a paradox and you should be eating more fiber and vegetables and fruits.” Nevermind that he’s much healthier and has a heart health age of 44. The blinders cannot come off at any cost. My brother must be a freak of nature eating all that fat and meat. NOT.
60 in 3 and JC, you’ll get no arguments from me about either. I urge people to eat non-processed foods, plenty of vegetables, etc. The Atkins Diet on low-carb food products is little better than a low-fat diet on low-fat food products.
James, there’s always a joker huh?
Billy, that is true. All a diet requires for propagation is to get a human to the age of procreation, which is around mid-teens. However, the data shows that not only do hunter-gatherers not all die at 35, those that live into old age thrive much more successfully than do the elderly of civilization. Here’s a post on Paleolithic longevity. A low life expectancy at birth is more a result of traumatic deaths at a young age (think gored by a lion) and infant mortality than a result of actual early death of most of the population. It’s also entirely possible to eat the right number of calories yet be exquisitely unhealthy.
Stephan, that liver sure is a bastage, isn’t it? Trying to kill us with all that saturated fat. That’s why we should all make sure to drink enough to put our livers out of commission. (That’s a joke people.)
Eric, I’ve seen lots of discussion of the Masai lately. Good stuff. Of course, they’re protected by all of their walking, right? I guess that’s the Masai Paradox. Anything for the mainstream to explain away reality.
Methuselah, nailed it. Our large frontal lobe allows us to create reality as we see fit. Or as a marketer sees fit. Nice post on your blog.
Anna, it’s not really an American Paradox though is it? Americans eat garbage and get fat and unhealthy. I see nothing paradoxical.
Kateryna, that’s another interesting case study. Matches with all of the people that spend hours upon hours in the gym, yet never drop a pound because of their diet.
Cheers
Scott
It’s really amazing and mind-boggling the way that various “health information producers” and such seem to be able to crank out such contradictory studies and not have the least bit of guilt about it. They put the blinders on and believe the lie, or else just cynically figure that if the money is in a particular point of view, that’s the way they go. There are those out there that say that a high fat diet causes insulin resistance and that the answer is a high carb, extremely low fat diet, despite the fact that carbs convert to fat quite easily.
See: http://www.rice.edu/~jenky/sports/Insulin.athlete.html
http://www.jbc.org/cgi/content/abstract/273/40/26157
http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/saturated-fat/changing-dietary-trends-and-the-obesity-epidemic/
http://www.healingdaily.com/detoxification-diet/insulin.htm
[...] “What is a paradox?” [...]
Just posted the follow up to the post I linked to above, for anyone who is interested…
The Professor Diet Part Two: Healthy Junk Food
Following science’s efforts and our own desires to their logical conclusion could take us to a place of paradoxical experience, where it’s possible to eat something that looks and tastes like a slice of chocolate cake, but digests like grass-fed beef and vegetables.
I’d be really interested in comments on the mechanisms I propose could make this happen and what people think about the dilemma this could present for people who enjoy exercise self-discpline to eat a healthy diet….
Methuselah
Pay Now Live Later
Nice blog Scott. I’ll be honest and admit that up until reading your blog I was under the mainstream belief that saturated fats were bad and unsaturated fats were good and never even thought to challenge this way of thinking. However, I look forward to reading more of your blog as you make some very interesting points.
Scott,
I’m guessing you’re familiar with Mike OD’s post some time back about sumo wrestlers and their diet/eating patterns. Although it had an IF focus, one of the things that came out of it is that they don’t seem to suffer many of the ills associated with a high insulin producing diet. There are a few very plausible theories to explain this (something about subcutaneous fat that was well above my level) but it seems to me to kind of fit the model of a paradox you describe. I also thought I heard about the oldest person in world recently dying after smoking her entire life. Don’t get me wrong here–I agree with what you posted here and buy into all of Cordain’s research I just sometimes get a little confused/frustrated trying to sort through things to find the right answer. Do I dismiss these seeming paradoxes? Do I accept the explanations provided? Am I then falling prey to the same hubris that the low fat high carb experts are subject to when they accept alternate explanations? Again this isn’t intended as an attack at all, but man do I get lost in this stuff.
[...] Here’s Scott Kustes at Modern Forager on this subject: So What’s My Point? No major point here other than to say that these “paradoxes†are only paradoxes based on the premises that their built upon. When a data point fails to fit the formula, we either have to remeasure the data point, discount it as an outlier, or revise our formula, either by changing the original premises or adding new ones. Unfortunately, such a dietary empire has been built on the premise that animal fats (along with non-animal-based saturated fats like coconut and palm) are unhealthful that people absolutely refuse to revisit that first premise. Instead, they concoct all manner of nonsensical ways to explain away the data. [...]
There is not one stitch of empirical evidence for anything you’ve said, one way or the other. Simply pointing to paradoxes, true or apparent, does not prove or dismiss anything. You are offering a circular conversation with no conclusion.
You wrote, “When a data point fails to fit the formula, we either have to remeasure the data point, discount it as an outlier, or revise our formula, either by changing the original premises or adding new ones. ” Many of us who actually do research (as opposed to those who don’t but talk about it as if they do), include the data point, as it would be somewhat unethical to simply and arbitrarily dismiss it out of convenience. Instead, we mention the anomolous point as a possible outlier, and offer the proviso in our conclusion as such.
How many publications in this area do you actually have?
Finnegan, no empirical evidence to what? I only showed that the explanations of all of these supposed paradoxes are made up with and have…well, no empirical evidence. I think you missed the point that these supposed “paradoxes” are not actually anything other than people failing to see reality. One data point is an outlier and should be included….many data points are not all outliers…it means the formula is flawed and you don’t get to just make up your own explanation for them. You have to say “Oops, we missed something, perhaps we should try again.” Instead, researchers seem to go “Oh look at all of those data points that don’t fit….it must be the red wine.” Yeah, right….
Cheers
Scott
In the case of Atkins and the Inuits I think the answer is quite simple and not paradoxical at all. Our bodies prefer using carbs for fuel. If carbs are present then the body will try to avoid burning fats and then the lipids must go somewhere, which is unfortunately into adipose tissue and also the walls of blood vessels.
If a body is deprived of carbs then the body switches next to burning fat. At that point what was essentially a discarded product is now a source of energy. The body has “switched gears” and is undergoing whatever chemical/biological changes needed to burn the different fuel. I would guess that these changes cause fat deposits to ‘dissolve’ easier when cells request more fuel.
I’m not sure about the French diet.