Loren Cordain on AGE contents in foods

[Joy2012]

I am reading  Loren Cordain’s latest book, THE PALEO ANSWER, published in 2012. Here is part of his table on AGE contents in foods (KU per 100 grams):

Apple (AGE content is 13)
Avocado (1577)
Banana (9)
Cantaloupe (20)
Dates (60)
Carrots (10)
Celery (43)
Cucumber (31)
Olives (1670)
Onion (36)
Tomato (23)
Grilled vegetables (broccoli, carrots, celery) (226)
Raw beef (707)
Roast beef (6071)
Broiled beef steak (7479)
Raw pork chop (1188)
Pan fried pork chop (4752)
Raw lamb (826)
Broiled lamb leg (1218)
Raw chicken breast (769)
Chicken breast boiled with lemon (1123)
Deep fried chicken breast (9722)
Raw trout (783)
Raw shrimp (1003)
Salmon poached for 7 minutes (1801)
Poached eggs (90)
Scrambled eggs (med. low heat) (97)
Omelet (olive oil, low heat) (339)
Butter (23340)
Parmesan cheese (16900)
Philadelphia cream cheese (10883)
Brie cheese (5597)
Mozzarella cheese (1677)
Raw cashews (2723)
Raw pumpkin seeds (1853)
Raw sunflower seeds (2510)
Broiled beef frankfurter (11270)
Mayonnaise (9400)
Potato chips (2883)
Extra virgin olive oil (10040)
Vinegar (40)

What do you think of this AGE information? It appears raw fruit/vegetables are far better than raw beef/lamb/chicken/pork. And even poached/scrambled eggs are far better than raw animal flesh. Cooked animal flesh is horrible of course.

Granted, when we eat raw fruit, we often eat 20 times more than raw beef, quantity-wise. But still, 2000 grams of fruit still has far less AGE than 100 grams of raw beef. (I feel so disappointed. I have learned to love raw beef…)

Cordain does not think domesticated produce is much worse than wild produce. He does say wild is better, but not to a great degree. He says “feel free to eat as much fresh (domesticated) fruit as you like” unless you have a weight problem or diseases.

Now Tyler is right about dairy products from the AGE-point-of-view. On the other hand, the dairy on Cordain’s table appears to be the cooked version.

I am surprised that extra virgin olive oil is bad too.

[aLptHW4k4y]

This has a lot more foods covered, and is the source of Loren Cordain I think:

http://marshfieldceliac.weebly.com/uploads/2/5/5/7/2557865/ada_ages_in_food_reduction1.pdf

[Joy2012]

This has a lot more foods covered, and is the source of Loren Cordain I think:

http://marshfieldceliac.weebly.com/uploads/2/5/5/7/2557865/ada_ages_in_food_reduction1.pdf

Maybe not.

In the study of your link,  100g of Fried Egg has 2,749 KU of AGE.  That is VERY different from Cordain's table.


Does anyone has the information on the AGE content of coconut oil?

[aLptHW4k4y]

The paper above has info on coconut cream and milk.

I'm not sure how's it VERY different regarding the eggs:

"Egg, scrambled, pan, med-low, olive oil, 2 min" (paper) = "Scrambled eggs (med. low heat)" (your table) = 97

[Joy2012]

aLptHW4k4y, thank you. I did not see the whole table.

So milk/yogurt has minimal AGE, while cheese is really bad. Coconut cream is bad too.

Ways of cooking make a world of difference in the AGE contents of foods.

But the problem is: both raw produce and lightly cooked produce are  far better than raw animal flesh if we only consider AGE.

So the question is: how important is AGE to health?

[TylerDurden]

It's been pointed out that AGE-levels are quite high in raw animal foods coming from animals raised on very unhealthy, grainfed diets. Basically, AGEs are heavily involved in inflammation - while cooking causes inflammation, so does feeding your animals on very unhealthy diets. 

[CarnivorousApe]

AGE is definitely important for publishing industry. At last Cordain has something else to write about. It seems similar to cholesterol - initially it was considered bad, that it turned out there are two types and if eating paleo style you don't have to worry about it.

[Joy2012]

I find this AGE table presents me with lots of problems that are against common sense. For example:

(1)   Raw beef (100g) has 707 KU AGE ; while corned brisket beef (deli meat) has only 199
(2)   Salad dressing, Italian, lite (Diet Source, Novartis Nutr Corp)  has 0 AGE
(3)   Fresh tuna baked for 25 minutes has 919 KU AGE; Canned chunk light tuna w/ water  has 452 AGE. Doesn't canned fish go through high-heat cooking?
(4)   Soy burger, Boca Burger, microwaved, 1.5 min (BOCA Foods Co)  has 67 KU AGE; while raw tofu has 788 AGE.
(5)   Bread, white, Italian, center (Freihoffer’s, Bimbo Bakeries, Horsham, PA) has 23 KU AGE; Dinner roll (inside) has 23 KU AGE.
(6)   Puffed wheat (breakfast cereal) has 17 KU AGE .
(7)   Rice, Uncle Ben’s white, cooked, 35 min (Mars, Inc, Houston, TX) has 9 KU AGE.        White sugar and aspartame have 0 AGE. Coke has 2.8 AGE. Coffee has 1.6 AGE.

Does that mean processed cooked rice,  lite Italian salad dressing,  puffed wheat, white Italian bread, sugar, aspartame, coke, coffee, and dinner roll are good for health as they produce few AGE?


Tyler, your defense for grass-fed animal food provides me with some comfort.

[CarnivorousApe]

Does that mean processed cooked rice,  lite Italian salad dressing,  puffed wheat, white Italian bread, sugar, aspartame, coke, coffee, and dinner roll are good for health as they produce few AGE?

People eating this stuff don't have to worry about their AGE because they die young

[Joy2012]

People eating this stuff don't have to worry about their AGE because they die young

That's funny...
But I feel genuinely confused. What about all those chemicals/antinutrients/toxins in these foods, which turn out to contain few AGE?

[TylerDurden]

Look, AGEs are naturally produced in tiny amounts in all animals, even humans, regardless of diet. The levels of AGEs will be much higher in raw meats from animals intensively-farmed, not just because of the unhealthy diet but because of farming conditions which cause increased stress and physical injuries etc. AGEs in cooked animal foods will be even higher as cooking really ups the amounts. True, plant foods, when cooked, tend to produce fewer AGEs(and fewer HCAs, NSAs and PAHs). The catch is that plant foods are not complete foods, so lack key nutrients such as coenzyme q10 or they have  nutrients in forms which humans can't properly absorb(such as vitamin b12 levels in algae). Also, animal foods have much higher nutrient levels in general than plant foods. As regards toxins, cooking vegetables does reduce some of the antinutrients, but other plant foods like grains still have plenty of antunutrients left over after cooking, and cause other problems in the long-term, unrelated to the toxin-load, since we are not genetically adapted to eating them.

[aLptHW4k4y]

Does that mean processed cooked rice,  lite Italian salad dressing,  puffed wheat, white Italian bread, sugar, aspartame, coke, coffee, and dinner roll are good for health as they produce few AGE?

They don't produce, they contain little AGE products.
Does that make them healthier? There are millions of other factors besides AGE products, you have to take it all into account. I don't think the current science can tell you if they are better or worse, until we discover every little molecule, nutrient, hormone, and put it all down in a model that is extremely close to reality.

[Rawr]

This is the exact reason why I don't care what "science says" or "proves".

(Even if there was no direct incentive for the scientist to "rig the science" or outright falsify the results - which usually IS THERE in "these days" of the last century or two.)

Science measures 1 thing and ignores (or isn't even ABLE to measure) a million other things.



Does plastics have any AGEs?... I guess NOT! Why don't we eat plastic then?



Science is great when we build new things like buildings/cars/electronics from the stuff we already know, but in "optimizing" natural living things it always fails...

And EVEN THOSE man-made things based on science have a lot of unintentional negative consequences to our life.

Unfortunately they're usually "too good of a bussiness opportunity" for the people that produce them to care about those consequences - as long as it doesn't affect them. But that's a natural consequence of individualistic "private property" society that we've evolved to.

[Dorothy]

All these new buzz words have to be taken with a grain of salt because over time more and more new important things to consider in your diet pop up. I remember the first time I heard about anti-oxidants, the first time I heard the word enzyme, then enzyme inhibitors, not long ago anti-nutrients and now AGEs -- tomorrow it will be something else.

The best you can do is to say, well, cooking seems to increase these, seems to decrease those and this food has this or that - so let me experiment and see how it makes me feel.

The idea with paleo is that before the agricultural revolution no one knew any of these words and evolved eating raw foods and seemed to do ok - the species at least survived - and there are lots of folks here who feel tremendously better eating foods that aren't cooked.

AGEs, enzymes, anti-nutrients - whatever - all good when trying to figure out why you feel so much better and explain it to someone else - but not so good if they make you obsessed.

Greens and soaked nuts make me feel great and others not so great here. No one is going to be able to convince me that I should stopped picking weeds and greens out in my garden and eating them no matter what new fancy word they use to tell me why I shouldn't. I will listen and take it under advisement - but I trust my body more than any other person because really - nobody has the whole scientific picture - far from it.

Letting a dietary element or discovery open your mind and guide experimentation can create increased health, giving it too much power however over your choices I'm not sure is such a good idea. Food and health is simply too complex to be reduced to just one or even ten elements.

[Joy2012]

Thanks to all who help me gain a proper perspective on AGE.

I do regret that I ate tons of cream and cheese (very high in AGE)  in the past few months, although they were truly raw dairy from pastured cows.   Maybe this is the reason that I have not seen improvement in my health since I started RP diet early this year.

[CarnivorousApe]

Thanks to all who help me gain a proper perspective on AGE.

I do regret that I ate tons of cream and cheese (very high in AGE)  in the past few months, although they were truly raw dairy from pastured cows.   Maybe this is the reason that I have not seen improvement in my health since I started RP diet early this year.

Hopefully you also drank a lot of coke, coffee and ate puffed wheat to compensate for AGE damage

[Dorothy]

Hopefully you also drank a lot of coke, coffee and ate puffed wheat to compensate for AGE damage

LOL CarnivorousApe. Right to the point there.

But Joy - seriously - think about Apes point. You aren't convinced that the only reason you might have felt not as good from the cream and cheese was because they are high in AGE do you? Dairy also has lots of other things in it that might not have agreed with you. Dairy in general can even mess up some folks that can eat an otherwise pretty bad diet and be ok without the dairy. Dairy does some people lots of good and some people lots of bad - AGEs or no AGEs. I can eat raw dairy every day and feel good but feed me consistently coffee or coke (or some other low AGE foods) and I'd be really messed up (and have been ).

[TylerDurden]

I think the tables only showed the AGE-levels for pasteurised grainfed dairy, not for raw, grassfed dairy.

[Joy2012]

I really did not feel bad at all when I ate dairy, so I kept eating it.  Actually I was kind of addicted to gruyere cheese.   But I feel confused that I have not seen any health improvement after 3 months on strict high-quality RP diet (raw dairy is at least allowed in Primal diet).    So I think maybe dairy is the offender...After all eating dairy is controversial in the RP diet community.  I guess the way to find out is to cut out dairy for a couple of months...

[gc]

Forgive me for perhaps being dense, but after 2 pages of comments I don't know what AGE is. AGE on google isn't going to return much in the way of meaningful results.

[TylerDurden]

Forgive me for perhaps being dense, but after 2 pages of comments I don't know what AGE is. AGE on google isn't going to return much in the way of meaningful results.

AGEs= Advanced Glycation End-Products.

[Dorothy]

I really did not feel bad at all when I ate dairy, so I kept eating it.  Actually I was kind of addicted to gruyere cheese.   But I feel confused that I have not seen any health improvement after 3 months on strict high-quality RP diet (raw dairy is at least allowed in Primal diet).    So I think maybe dairy is the offender...After all eating dairy is controversial in the RP diet community.  I guess the way to find out is to cut out dairy for a couple of months...

Yeah - that's the only way anyone ever knows about dairy whether paleo or not. The standard for testing sensitivities is to not eat a food at all for awhile (I suggest 3 months) and then what you do is eat a lot of it - have a dairy meal. As long as you are eating dairy every day you won't be able to tell if it is making you feel bad or causing the problems that you want improved or not.

Guyere is truly a tasty cheese.

[TylerDurden]

Avoid raw veggie-juice as well. Bear also in mind that while some experience benefits immediately, some others take a lot longer(up to 2 or 3 years) to heal really complicated health-problems.

[gc]

AGEs= Advanced Glycation End-Products.

Ah, OK. Now research can be done.

[PaleoPhil]

I really did not feel bad at all when I ate dairy, so I kept eating it.  Actually I was kind of addicted to gruyere cheese.   But I feel confused that I have not seen any health improvement after 3 months on strict high-quality RP diet (raw dairy is at least allowed in Primal diet).    So I think maybe dairy is the offender...After all eating dairy is controversial in the RP diet community.  I guess the way to find out is to cut out dairy for a couple of months...

This is the first case of lack of improvement on RP after 3 months or more I can recall (some people have quit within days or weeks, but that's too short a period to learn much from), and such negative reports can be just as educational as success stories, so I'm interested in what your top ten, say, staple foods in addition to raw cream and cheese were during those 3 months. Thanks.