The Steak, Tomatoes, and Bourbon Diet
Dear Natural Health Solutions Reader,
My uncle Gordon, an eastern Oregon rancher who died in January at age 89 after a rip-roaring life, always told me that the foundation of a healthful diet was the “three basic food groups: steak, tomatoes, and bourbon.”
I did indeed observe him consume a good deal of rare steak, usually from his own cattle, and plenty of fresh tomatoes, and wash these down with a yeoman’s ration of Early Times.
While I wouldn’t endorse this as a complete diet (and he did branch out — the man loved all vegetables), the fact is that Gordon remained sharp, slender, and energetic until the end.
His lifelong smoking habit probably contributed to his death from pneumonia — if not for that, he would have been a great candidate to reach 100.
Notably, he never showed the smallest sign of compromised liver function. Yet this is always held out as the chief hazard of drinking.
The conventional wisdom is that there’s just one way to protect the liver from the ravages of alcohol: Don’t drink too much.
But what one seldom hears is this: Whether alcohol harms the liver appears to depend not just on the quantity consumed — or even genetics — but perhaps most heavily on what the drinker habitually eats.
Modern processed food is characterized by an abundance of linoleic acid. A highly polyunsaturated omega-6 fatty acid, it’s the chief component of cheap, ubiquitous corn and soybean oils, making up half of these by weight.
One of my favorite nutrition researchers, the brilliant Dr. Ray Peat, points out that high consumption of linoleic acid is, as he puts it, “essential for liver damage” when one drinks alcohol:
Both experimental and epidemiological studies have shown that dietary linoleic acid is required for the development of alcoholic liver damage. Animals fed tallow and ethanol [the type of alcohol in alcoholic beverages] had no liver injury, but even 0.7 percent or 2.5 percent linoleic acid with ethanol caused fatty liver, necrosis, and inflammation. Dietary cholesterol at a level of 2 percent was found to cause no harm, but omitting it entirely from the diet caused leakage of amino-transferase enzymes. This effect of the absence of cholesterol was very similar to the effects of the presence of linoleic acid with ethanol.
In other words, studies suggest that steak, which contains both tallow and cholesterol, is a protective food to eat when consuming ethanol.1,2
So Gordon had it exactly right. If one wants to drink some bourbon, or wine, beer, or any beverage containing ethanol, one should do it along with a diet that includes liver-protective saturated fat and/or cholesterol.
Conversely, a highly efficient and effective way to ruin one’s liver is imbibe booze in the midst of a diet rich in deep-fried foods, potato chips, or any of the cheap, highly processed junk foods that incorporate soybean oil (always listed as “vegetable oil” on labels).
So rest in peace, Gordon Lemley.
Devoted to his family, a hard worker (despite a childhood bout with polio that withered his leg), and perhaps the wittiest person I ever met, we all miss him immensely.
Tonight’s toast — and tomatoes from the farmer’s market and rare rib-eye — will be consumed in his honor.
Brad Lemley
Editor, Natural Health Solutions
Citations
1. Nanji, A. A., and S. W. French, “Dietary linoleic acid is required for development of experimentally induced alcoholic liver-injury,” Life Sciences 1989.
2. Laitinen, M., et al., “Effects of dietary cholesterol feeding on the membranes of liver cells and on the cholesterol metabolism in the rat,” Int. J. Bioch. 1982.
