Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Food & Life Fat mummies
Posted by Cliff Bostock @cliffbostock on Wed, Sep 5, 2007 at 4:12 PM
Low carbs, high protein? High carbs, low protein? The controversy continues to rage about which is the healthier diet. Now, Michael R. Eades, author of Protein Power, has reached back 3,500 years to argue that a high-carb diet is unhealthy.
The proof, he writes, is in the obese mummy of Queen Hatshepsut, long lost but positively identified last month. The queen, like most ancient Egyptians, ate a very high-carb diet. Writes Eades:
Were the nutritionists of today right about their ideas of the ideal diet, the ancient Egyptians should have had abundant health. But they didn’t. In fact, they suffered pretty miserable health. Many had heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and obesity - all the same disorders that we experience today in the ‘civilized’ Western world. Diseases that Paleolithic man, our really ancient ancestors, appeared to escape.According to the New York Times, Hatshepsut’s mummy is that of an obese, diabetic 50 year old woman with bad teeth. All the conditions that nutritionists today would have us believe would be prevented by Hatshepsut’s diet. It certainly didn’t work for her. And she is not a special case - most Egyptian mummies show the same disorders, especially the bad teeth. The skeletal remains of Paleolithic man, who consumed a meat-based diet, showed strong, perfect teeth. Bad teeth are the hallmark of carbohydrate consumption.
Read the entire blog piece by Eades here. (Photo from the People's Daily Online.)
Comments (2)
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Eades is right in a sense- a carb did cause a lot of the dental damage to ancient Egyptians. Bread, a staple in their diet, was made from wheat ground with stones. Bits of the stones would get into the bread and eventually wear their teeth down, making them more susceptible to bacteria, cavaties, and other dental problems. Cute argument, though!
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LMAO Bits of stone wore their teeth down?! Ha ha ha ha ha! Ahem... ok... now, let me just say that that is the most ridiculous claim I've ever heard and is utterly unsupported by science. The exact same decay is seen in cultures that simply cooked and ate the grains whole.
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