I’m frequently asked for a reading list or my favorite books regarding nutrition and health. One book tops that list: Protein Power: Lifeplan by Drs. Michael R. and Marry Dan Eades, MD. Like the precision of the Zone? It’s in there. Want to talk evolutionary biology and what humans evolved to eat? Covered. How about leaky gut syndrome, sunshine as an anti-tumor agent, sane antioxidant use, excessive blood iron levels… They cover it. They lay out a simple procedure to find how much protein you need each day, set a maximum carbohydrate level and if you are athletic, recommend you add additional mono-unsaturated fat to cover energy needs.

Anything they did not cover, they found someone else who did and they recommend that work wholeheartedly. It was the Eades’ site that alerted me to my second favorite book on nutrition and lifestyle: Lights Out! Sleep, Sugar and Survival.
The Eades have practiced bariatric medicine for years, often being the center of attacks from both the high carb vegetarian camp and our own clueless government. They have fought the good fight regarding the need to emulate the eating patterns of our ancestors if we are to achieve optimum health. Many people who may never know who these doctors owe the Eades a great debt. They have approached this practice of Evolutionary Medicine with confidence but with the humility of true lifelong learners. They always reserve the right to change their position on a given topic if clinical or experimental data warrants such a change. That says much about their character and a desire to put results above personal attachments and dogma. This month we have the great pleasure of sharing with you an interview with Dr. Michael R. Eades. We hope to bring you an interview with Dr. Mary Dan Eades in the near future.

Dr. Eades, please tell our readers about yourself. What is your athletic background? How did you get interested in medicine and how/when did you begin to integrate concepts of evolutionary biology into your practice?

I graduated from college with a degree in civil engineering. While in college I had begun teaching SCUBA diving and continued to do so during my first engineering job. A part of the training to be a SCUBA instructor involves learning a fair amount (or so I thought at the time) of diving medicine, which, in my case, was my first real exposure to medicine and the life sciences. I realized quickly that the biochemistry and physiology held my interest much more than had the engineering, so I began contemplating a switch of careers. Problem was that I didn’t have a number of the prerequisite courses for medical school. And I was also contemplating abandoning engineering and buying a dive boat in order to run diving charters and do commercial diving. I figured I could still work on my commercial diving ventures while I took the necessary course work, so I quit my job as an engineer, became (believe it or not) a fireman, a job that gave me a lot of time off, and went to the University of California at San Diego to take the pre-med courses I lacked. After finishing the coursework, I went back to engineering for a couple of years to undertake projects first in Alabama then in Arkansas. While in Arkansas I took the plunge and went to medical school.

After training, my wife (also a physician) and I opened up a small walk-in medical clinic in Little Rock. Within four years we had opened four clinics, employed about 50 doctors, and had one of the largest practices in Arkansas. During this same time period I began to gain weight. As I became heavier I decided that I had to make some effort to lose weight, so I went back to my old medical text books to see what I could learn about obesity. As I pored over my biochemistry text I noticed that insulin seemed to be involved in a lot more than simply blood sugar regulation. I soon realized, in fact, that insulin drove, among other things, the fat storage pathway. It occurred to me that I could probably lose weight if I could lower my insulin levels (which I assumed were elevated; at that time no one tested for it), so I asked myself the question: what makes insulin go down? I knew that carbohydrate consumption made it go up, so I figured that the opposite would drop it. I went on a low-carbohydrate diet and lost my excess weight fairly rapidly. During this time, a number of my patients who were overweight noticed my weight loss and asked me what diet I was following. Once I told them they asked if I would put them on such a diet. In due course my entire practice changed from primary care to taking care of patients for obesity.

In caring for these patients I noticed that their cholesterol levels fell, their triglyceride levels plummeted, their HDL levels went up, their blood sugars (if abnormal) stabilized, their blood pressure dropped, their GE reflux went away and they slept a whole lot better. I started tracking down the insulin pathways for all these processes and discovered that they, too, responded to insulin lowering. I searched out a lab that would do insulin levels on patients, began testing them, and discovered that most had elevated fasting insulin levels that normalized quickly on a low-carb diet. In 1992 my wife and I sold our chain of primary care clinics and she joined me in a practice devoted solely to caring for patients with Metabolic Syndrome. In 1996 we published Protein Power, which was a book describing the methods we had found to be so successful in our practice.

While doing the research for Protein Power I came across some anthropological literature about disorders such as heart disease and obesity found frequently in the mummies of ancient Egyptians. I thought all these were pretty much diseases of modern civilization, so I was surprised to learn that they were endemic several thousand years ago. This information kicked off my absorption in the evolutionary diet and the diseases that the modern change in diet has wrought. I became consumed with evolutionary medicine and paleopathology to an extent that seriously threatened our getting the manuscript for Protein Power delivered on time.

While I was deeply involved in all the research to put together my theories on insulin lowering and the evolutionary basis of disease I began playing baseball again. I joined an over-30 men’s baseball league that was populated with a number of excellent players, most of whom had played college and/or minor league baseball. In fact, during the Major League strike, our center fielder who was barely 30 got called up to Kansas City (where he had played in their farm club system) to play. I played first base and right field and at the age of 42 I won the league batting championship with an improbable average of .513, a record that that still stands. Other than that, my athletic career has been fairly undistinguished. I played high school and American Legion baseball and high school and one year of college football. Over the last few years I have taken up golf, which I find to be, strangely enough, the most demanding sport of all I’ve tried.


Many of our readers are coaches and trainers and are constantly facing a scenario of working with a type II diabetic or peri-diabetic. What are your basic guidelines for introducing a nutrition and exercise program? What have you found to be a safe rate of carbohydrate restriction in the type II diabetic? Do drugs such as Glucophage and Avandia increase the likelihood of an event of hypoglycemia or ketoacidosis?

In my medical experience I’ve found that with type II diabetics, the more carbohydrate restriction the better. We usually start diabetic patients on diets containing about 30 grams of available carbohydrate per day. When I first started treating diabetic patients with these low-carbohydrate diets I really pussy footed around with it. I would put these patients on the diet and wait to see what happened with their blood sugars. If they were on an oral hypoglycemic drug I found out in a hurry because their blood sugars cratered. After a couple of these experiences I began taking these patients completely off all oral meds when starting the diet. I watched them closely and would add a small amount of an oral agent back in if sugars didn’t respond, which wasn’t very often. Most patients, if they followed the program as they should, never had to go back on the meds. I went up this learning curve before the advent of Metformin (Glucophage). Once Metformin came along, it was the only medication I ever used in type II diabetics. To this day I have never used Avandia. I use Metformin only if I can’t get a patient’s blood sugar controlled with diet alone. I’ve never had a problem with ketoacidosis or with lactic acidosis with Metformin.


Do you advocate any specific pre or post workout nutrition? It is quite popular to ingest a large amount of carbohydrate post workout… do you like this practice?

Based on the reading I’ve done on the subject, which, admittedly, isn’t vast, it appears that growth hormone release is at the very least blunted with carbohydrate intake. Since one of the virtues of an intense workout is a little spurt of growth hormone, I don’t want to do anything to compromise that, so I like to avoid carbohydrates after workouts.


You recently posted a blog entry on the topic of intermittent fasting that proved to be enormously popular! What has brought you to the topic of IF? How have you integrated it into your clinical recommendations? Do you have any data points or case histories you can share with us?

I’ve been interested in anti-aging for quite a while and I read voraciously on the subject. As anyone knows who reads a lot in this field, caloric restriction is the only method that has actually been shown to substantially increase longevity. And as anyone knows who has tried to calorically restrict by cutting back food consumption by 30-40 percent per day, it’s pretty miserable. During my reading I came across an article by Mark Mattson showing that rats that were intermittently fasted had all the benefits of caloric restriction (and a few others, to boot) while consuming about the same number of calories as the ad libitum fed animals. Once I found this paper, the search was on for more. I found others, all of which showed pretty much the same thing. My wife and I started intermittent fasting just to see if it would be practical. We found that it was actually pretty easy to go all day without food and real easy on the eating days. Although we found it to be not too hard to go all day without eating, we found ourselves dreading the fasting days. We started experimenting around with various regimens and found that, for us, at least, starting the fast at 6 pm and not eating until the following day at 6 pm worked best for us. That gave us a solid 24 hours of fasting, yet let us eat at least a meal during every waking day. We did that for a while just to see if it worked on a practical basis. We still fast off and on here and there, and since undertaking our intermittent fasting exercises we almost never eat meals at regular times anymore and usually eat only twice per day.


What is your position on saturated fat? How much is enough? Is there a level that is too much? What about carbohydrate level in the diet?

My position on saturated fat is that it’s fine. I eat a lot of it. I’ve never understood the fear that people have of saturated fat because it’s a neutral fat. And it’s an invincible fat in cooking. Since it has no double bonds it can’t oxidize like unsaturated fats when exposed to heat and oxygen. I would much prefer to have anything I might eat that is fried fried in saturated fat rather than in the slurry of oxidized, rancid polyunsaturated vegetable fats that are all the rage. In my opinion people don’t eat enough saturated fat. Why not? Because they’ve been scared off by spurious reports in the medical literature seeming to show that saturated fats are a driving force behind the development of heart disease. Problem is, real papers show data proving this position doesn’t exist. The Framingham Study data, the same data used to derive the recommendations to limit saturated fat, show that the consumption of saturated fat, if anything, protects against heart disease. Some time in the future I predict that the medical profession will look at this anti-saturated fat paranoia the same way they now look upon the application of leeches.

As far as carbohydrate levels in the diet go, I like to keep them low. How low? At least lower than 100 grams or so per day. Why? Because I want my liver, not my pancreas, regulating my blood sugar level. Throughout most of our time on earth as a species humans have regulated their blood sugar with their livers, using their livers to produce blood sugar via gluconeogenesis at a slow steady rate that keeps blood sugar levels stable. The pancreas was poised to release insulin in an emergency to make sure blood sugar didn’t get too high if we stumbled into a honey tree or other rare source of easily absorbed sugar, which happened infrequently. Most of the time the food available to early man was low in usable carbohydrate, high in protein and fat, so the liver had to make sugar out of protein and a small part of the fat to keep the blood sugar level up. Certain cells in the body—primarily the cells of the central nervous system and the red blood cells—can use only glucose for fuel. These cells require about 200 grams of glucose per day, but about 60-70 grams of the glucose can be replaced by ketone bodies in the adapted individual (which, I’m sure, all of our ancient ancestors were) leaving about 130 grams that must be provided to keep these cells going, an amount the liver can easily produce. As long as dietary carb intake is kept below 100 grams per day, the liver has to produce the difference, and we can be sure that our blood sugar level stays under hepatic control. If we are eating the standard American diet containing 400 plus grams of carbohydrate, we shift from the precision control of blood sugar regulated by the liver to the blunt instrument control of the pancreas.


As you might have guessed from the introduction, I LOVE your book PPLP. In that book your exercise recommendations are spot-on in my opinion. Full body strength training, intervals, medicine balls… power! It was awesome! Then came SuperSlow… What happened? I’ll certainly contend that any exercise is better than none, but I have to say that for any health or performance parameter, and just FUN, your original recommendations were better. Let us know where you are on the exercise topic these days.

Ah yes, what happened? My literary agent read an article about slow motion training in Newsweek, went to try it out, became intrigued, and asked if we would collaborate with her trainer on a book. I knew nothing about this kind of strength training, met with the trainer, was skeptical of the claims, and went back to research it on my own.

What I discovered is that virtually all the benefit one gets from any kind of activity come from the increase in strength that activity brings about. I don’t care if it’s jogging, aerobics, cycling, or weight lifting; the health gains come because of the strength gains these activities engender. So, if it is the gain in strength that is so important, then I made the decision to determine what means brought about the greatest gains in strength. It turns out—according to my research—that resistance training brings about the greatest increases in strength in the shortest amount of time. I then asked the question: what is the most effective form of resistance training. In the studies I read, slow training to failure brought about the greatest strength gains in the shortest period of time with the least risk of injury. Once I had gone through this mental exercise and had actually done a few slow-motion workouts I decided to collaborate on the book, which we called Slow Burn.

The great appeal of this type of training to me is that it substitutes quality for quantity. I am one of those people who hate to exercise simply for the sake of exercising. I love spending hours in a batting cage hitting balls or hours on the driving range or I’ll gladly play 36 holes of golf per day, day after day. But I loathe going to the gym and ‘working out.’ Slow Burn holds the advantage for me that I can spend 20 minutes every five days or so and get the benefit of several hours of standard weight training. Granted, my workouts aren’t very much fun—they’re brutal, in fact, and I almost can’t do anything for an hour or two after. But I only spend 20 minutes a week.

If I tried to do regular gym workouts (which I have tried many times in the past) I would stick with it for a week or so, them time demands would intercede and I would bail out. Mainly because I hate working out. If it were something I enjoyed like I enjoy hitting golf balls on the range, I would make time for it, but since I despise it, it’s easy to rationalize that I don’t have the time. So 20 minutes of brutal slow-motion resistance training is perfect for me. I get the most bang for the workout buck I can get.

I tell people that if they love to spend time in the gym (and a lot of people do), by all means do it. But if they jog or aerobicize or whatever simply because they think they should and would much rather be doing something else, spend the 20 minutes every five days or so doing a Slow Burn workout and use the other couple of hours previously spent on what I consider pretty worthless exercise doing something they enjoy.