Free the Animal

The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution

I've been reading The 10,000 Year Explosion over the last several weeks, nearing completion. It's been a while since I found a book so interesting and compelling. In contrast, though Taubes' Good Calories Bad Calories is a watershed science of nutrition book that has yet to see the popularity it deserves and, I believe, will receive in time -- I was already a "convert." So while I leaned a lot of specifics, nothing was particularly surprising.

This is not the case for the former. In fact, it has and is challenging some things that I, and I believe the "Paleo community" in general, hold dear. On the other hand, I was already going to some of these places. For example, I don't think it's primarily about the carbohydrate load, anymore (within reason: two Big Gulps per day and an order of Crispy Cremes is not what I mean). In fact, I have been pondering a name for my own particular approach to diet, exercise, and intermittent fasting, and I always come back to: The Ancestral Life. Why? Because what you can tolerate and what makes you at your best is not determined by the fact that you're an H. Sapiens, with a particular genome, but rather, party to one eventual group or another that left Africa 60,000 years ago, branched off, experienced great survival success in wildly different environments, and it's all written in your genes. So: where did you come from, say, in the last 50,000 years?

A personal case in point: I am of NW and Central Euro (Germanic) descent, my wife of American and South-Central American Indian (specifically: Mexican). Consequently, they lived for thousands of years in relative isolation, not mixing genes with tradesmen, travelers, or immigrants from other far distant regions (as Euros, Asians, and Middle Easterners -- broadly speaking -- did), and genetically adapting to different foods and environments. It has only been hundreds of years that their genome has become reacquainted with the descendants of their ultimate ancestors, the first being Spaniards. This is anecdotal, but my wife does not seem to be responding to the leaning nature of my high-fat diet, as I do -- in fact she has put on some weight. There may be other things at work, including the ass-kicking workouts, and I'll eventually sort it all out, but what it is not is formulaic, as though we're all cut from the same genome.

I rather like to do a few substantive book reviews whilst I'm reading something worthy, rather than a general wrap up upon conclusion. So, this may just be the the first of a couple or more hits & run of what may be more -- maybe not -- substantive partial reviews. If you saw my Facebook and Tweet updates earlier, then you saw that I was spending my first afternoon of the year at the pool, scooping up Vit D. This is the book I was reading, and so began to think of some passages I clipped some days back.

First, I must back up to 1993, 16 years ago. I picked up a book by James Dale Davidson entitled The Great Reckoning: Protecting Yourself in the Coming Depression. Lest you think that he was so insightful as to predict what may be happening now, that's not it. In fact, in terms of investment advice, he missed by a million miles. But the book was still vastly interesting. It looked at all of modern history from a geo-political standpoint, i.e., how things like the stirrup (mobilize an armored army on horseback), gunpowder and assorted other things changed the world and set up a sort of ebb & flow, a push-pull between centralized or distributed control of violence (that which largely runs the modern world). Of everything I read, there was a single brief passage that so resonated with me that I have recounted it in paraphrase dozens and dozens of times in writing and in conversations over the last 16 years. It was about the invention of government, of the modern State.

It goes something like this. Before agriculture, people hunted, gathered, and migrated -- probably often following herds of animals. They only "owned" what they could carry, which wasn't a lot. Consequently: little to nothing owned, so nothing to bother to steal. Populations were small, averaging 30 members. Along comes agriculture and, suddenly, people have to stick around to tend to fields, they begin to accumulate wealth, as they don't have to pick up and move all the time. It's not a great leap to imagine that some preferred to remain hunter-gatherers, but with a new prey: other humans.

So, they systematically raid settlements of other humans who have stores of grains, livestock, and other valuable things they have acquired or fashioned. But there's an inherent problem: disorganization among thieves. What happens if, after a four-day trek to loot the village you "visited" six months ago, you find that they have just been hit a few days prior by another "enterprising" band of thieves and there's nothing left worth stealing? Moreover, you're smart: you want to milk them, not kill them. You have a "long-term view."

What. Do. You. Do?

There's only one logical solution. You protect them from future marauders, but at a price (for you and your friends). This, my friends, is the ancient root of government: a protection racket by non-productive thieves for the benefit of themselves and other thieves.

Isn't it great to see that some things just don't change, even in 10,000 years?

OK, let's fast forward to a clip in The 10,000 Year Explosion that I recently read.

The sedentary lifestyle of farming allowed a vast elaboration of material culture. Food, shelter, and artifacts no longer had to be portable. Births could be spaced closer together, since mothers didn't have to continually carry small children. Food was now storable, unlike the typical products of foraging, and storable food could be stolen. For the first time, humans could begin to accumulate wealth. This allowed for nonproductive elites, which had been impossible among hunter-gatherers. We emphasize that these elites were not formed in response to some societal need: They took over because they could.

Combined with sedentism, these developments eventually led to the birth of governments, which limited local violence. Presumably, governments did this because it let them extract more resources from their subjects, the same reason that farmers castrate bulls. Since societies were generally Malthusian, with population growth limited by decreasing agriculture production per person at higher human density, limits on interpersonal violence ultimately led to a situation in which a higher fraction of the population died of infectious disease or starvation.

[Emphasis added]

So, here you have the root of my decade-plus-long personal impatience with voters and voting.

I don't "vote" for thieves; neither do I lobby them or send them letters. As a matter of fact: I would rather that the full and complete consequences of their thievery bear full fruit, rather than persist in generation after generation of public delusion about who they are and what they're about. And I'm happy to take my chances with the obvious potential global pain that would cause.

Look Paleo guys and gals: you did it for grains, legumes, vegetable oils, refined concentrated sugars and their highly processed derivatives. Why do you stop there? Government is an even newer "innovation" than agriculture. It is far more toxic, if you ask me.

[/soapbox]

Alright, here's a final interesting passage. Heretofore, everything I've read (including the foregoing mentioned Reckoning) sees modern history in terms of cultural change and technological innovation, as though human evolution stopped with the advent of agriculture rather than continued or, as 10,000 Year sets out to show, actually accelerated.

Over time, if our argument is correct, farming peoples should have become better adapted to their agricultural diets in many ways, and we might expect that some of the skeletal signs of physiological stress would have gradually decreased. Although such genetic adaptation clearly occurred, cultural changes that improved health must have occurred as well. For example, the adoption of new crops and new methods of food preparation would have improved the nutritional quality of the average peasant's diet. Of course, some of those new methods (polishing rice) and new crops (sugarcane)-actually made things worse. Adaptive change is slow and blind, but it is also sure and steady. Cultural change is less reliable.

But cultural change is important. Although many traditional archaeologists and anthropologists will probably see us as biological imperialists out to explain everything that ever happened with our pet genetic theories, we firmly believe that cultural change-new ideas, new techniques, new forms of social organization-were powerful influences on the historical process. We're simply saying that the complete historical analyst must consider genetic change as well as social, cultural, and political change. Once a list of battles and kings seemed plenty good enough, but life keeps getting more complicated.

[emphasis added]

Well, I don't know how long it will take for average people to become super tolerant to grains -- much less to the point that they're nutritionally superior to, say, a big fat steak, but I'll take my steak. You all can do your part for the collective genome, if you like, but I'll take my big fat steak, 90% saturated fat coconut oil, my butter, ghee, lard, fatty fish, and my high-fat meat & fish sauces.

It Takes a Genome

"How a Clash Between Our Genes and Modern Life Is Making Us Sick."

Freshly downloaded to my Kindle 2. Here's some of the descriptions and endorsements.

~~~

Human beings have astonishing genetic vulnerabilities. More than half of us will die from complex diseases that trace directly to those vulnerabilities, and the modern world we’ve created places us at unprecedented risk from them. In It Takes a Genome, Greg Gibson posits a revolutionary new hypothesis: Our genome is out of equilibrium, both with itself and its environment. Simply put, our genes aren’t coping well with modern culture. Our bodies were never designed to subsist on fat and sugary foods [Note: I take that to mean processed foods, not natural fats. -ed]; our immune systems weren’t designed for today’s clean, bland environments; our minds weren’t designed to process hard-edged, artificial electronic inputs from dawn ‘til midnight. And that’s why so many of us suffer from chronic diseases that barely touched our ancestors.

Gibson begins by revealing the stunningly complex ways in which multiple genes cooperate and interact to shape our bodies and influence our behaviors. Then, drawing on the very latest science, he explains the genetic “mismatches” that increasingly lead to cancer, diabetes, inflammatory and infectious diseases, AIDS, depression, and senility. He concludes with a look at the probable genetic variations in human psychology, sharing the evidence that traits like introversion and agreeableness are grounded in equally complex genetic interactions.

It Takes A Genome demolishes yesterday’s stale debates over “nature vs. nurture,” introducing a new view that is far more intriguing, and far closer to the truth.

• See how broken genes cause cancer -- Meet the body’s “genetic repairmen”–and understand what happens when they fail

• The growing price of the modern lifestyle -- Why one-third of all Westerners have obesity, Type 2 diabetes, or other signs of “metabolic syndrome”

• The Alzheimer’s generation -- Why some of us are predisposed to dementia

• What’s really normal: the deepest lessons of the human genome -- The remarkable diversity of physical and emotional “normality”

“A compelling, witty, and reader-friendly explanation of how our genes, fashioned for living in the Stone Age, are not so well-suited to life in the Modern Age.”
— Sean B. Carroll, author of The Making of the Fittest and Remarkable Creatures

“It’s taken thirty years, but we finally have in Greg Gibson’s It Takes a Genome what is truly a biologist’s response to the single-gene focus of Richard Dawkin’s early classic The Selfish Gene. And what a response it is! In Gibson’s world, we see a genome as an integrated whole, making sense only when the constituent parts, the genes, are considered in their full genomic and environmental context. It is an engaging, fascinating, accessible, and ultimately deeply satisfying perspective that will enrich the way we all think about ourselves and how we got to be the way we are.”
— David B. Goldstein, Professor of Molecular Genetics, Duke University

“Gibson has captured the delicate balance between the excitement of the genomic revolution and the frustration that so much is yet to be learned about the genomics of disease. This book is an ideal guide through the complexities of recent environmental change and how this non-genetic process has interacted with human genomic variation to produce today’s landscape of important chronic diseases.”
— Marc Feldman, Professor of Biology, Stanford University

“Gibson deftly synthesizes the new science linking genome variation and human health, debunking entrenched views about the causes and evolution of disease and arguing convincingly for a more comprehensive view. An important book and a great read.”
— David P. Mindell, Dean of Science, California Academy of Sciences

“Geneticist Gibson is a natural teacher. He brings a welcome balance to his descriptions of the roles of genes, the environment, and chance in the major human diseases.”
— Bruce Weir, Chair and Professor of Biostatistics, University of Washington

~~~

I can't wait to dig into it. That makes about five books at one time, now.

The Worst Thing About eBooks

Big ebook fan for a while, now. I got the Sony a few years back, upgraded to the newer 505 model, but ultimately didn't like having to use the computer and software interface to buy books (plus, Sony refuses to make a Mac version of it, and since my never-to-look-back switchover, I hated having use Windows, even on my cherished MacBook Pro). So, a few months ago I got the Kindle, and just last week, the new Kindle 2. Big hardware improvement.

However, there is a drawback, which gets to the point of this post: you can no longer throw a book across the room, which is what I wanted to do last night -- yet again -- in my love / hate relationship with Loren Cordain's book, The Paleo Diet.

What I do love about it is the fundamentals, the principles: evolutionary biology, and pretty solid research into what foods our Paleolithic ancestors would have eaten, and hence, what we would be most genetically adapted to eating ourselves. What I hate about it is how, when politically convenient, Cordain seems perfectly willing to violate his principles. Skinless white meat chicken, lean meats only, trim the fat, lose the salt, hold the butter, ditch the lard, fear animal fat in general...but, but, go right ahead and wash all that "heart healthy lean leal lean lean lean lean lean lean lean lean lean lean lean lean lean lean lean lean lean lean lean lean (it's got to be the most frequently occurring word in the entire book) meat with a diet soda. 

Many other examples abound, but here's the one that had me in fits last night. He goes on for page after page with valid information on the necessity of a proper ratio of omega fats (6/3) and finally gives us the rundown.

Best: Flaxseed oil is, hands down, the best oil for you. It contains a very low omega 6 to omega 3 ratio of 0.24. The next best bet is canola oil, with a ratio of 2.0, followed by mustard seed oil, with a ratio of 2.6. [...]

When you add one of these four oils to any food or dish-even by rubbing it on meat before you cook it-you'll help lower your overall dietary omega 6 to omega 3 ratio to a healthful level (the cutoff point is about 3; anything lower than 3 is good). Also, flaxseed oil is composed mainly of polyunsaturated fats (66 percent of the total fats), which will help lower your blood cholesterol. Canola and mustard seed oils, in which the primary fats are monounsaturated, lower cholesterol, too.

Better: Walnut oil is not quite as healthful (its omega 6 to omega 3 value is 5.1), but it's still a good fat, because it contains mainly cholesterol-lowering polyunsaturated fats (63.3 percent).

Good: Olive oil-the staple of the Mediterranean diet-is deliciously flavorful, and it contains high levels of healthful, cholesterol-lowering monounsaturated fats. However, its omega 6 to omega 3 fat ratio is marginal, at about 13 to 1. The same is true of avocado oil. However, if you love these oils, don't worry. You can still use them, and if you want to improve their omega 3 levels, you can blend them with either canola or flaxseed oil.

Setting aside all the irrelevant, unimportant, "cholesterol-lowering" PC hoopla crapola gobbledygook, got it? Take the oil squeezed out of clearly Paleo food sources like olives and California apples (avocados) and improve them with canola and ("the very best oil") flaxseed -- processed frankenoils, as many of us call them.

Cordain is cherry picking, and that's very clear to me; and I think he's doing it to make The Paleo Diet PC. It 'aint. A Paleo diet is bloody and fatty, and that's just the facts.

Now, if that wasn't bad enough, can you guess what is the very worst fat on his list [Correction: I hadn't turned the page and he did have a lot of worse ones, if his numbering arrangement corresponds to bad to worse]? Coconut, the very plentiful tropical staple that grows like weeds and has been nourishing tropical peoples for eons. The Tokelauns traditionally got about 50% of their total energy intake From. Saturated. Fat. Hint: they were studied, and no, not dropping like flies from coronary artery disease. In science, that's called falsification. Cordain needs to go back to the drawing board, to very square one: his protestations regarding saturated fat are false, and to the extent that he does not specifically and thoroughly address the Tokelauans (and others), he's being dishonest.

Here's another clue. He dismisses coconut oil in a slimy way, by implying it has a huge 6/3 ratio, which is true. That's because it has no omega three, so the ratio is "infinite." However, coconut only has 1.8% polyunsaturates to begin with, so though there is no n-3, the n-6 can be dismissed as virtually trace.

I had not posted this short book review by Sally Fallon of The Weston A. Price Foundation before, as I considered it a bit inflammatory, particularly not having read the book myself. However, I have no reservations about linking it now. I recommend reading it for a good laugh.

All that said, there's many parts of Cordain's work that is very valid, very heroic; and there's no doubt he has helped a lot of people. I will try to focus most of the energies I expend on his behalf towards the positive.

Good Books Page

I've created a static page that I can edit over time with worthwhile books about food, diet, cooking, exercise, and intermittent fasting. It's quite spare in terms of design, so it can only improve over time.

Thanks to Lisbon, Portugal reader Richard Carvalho for kindly compiling this for me.

Good Calories, Bad Calories

After a period of reading another couple of books, I have just picked back up on Gary Taubes' Good Calories, Bad Calories once again over the last couple of days.

You know what? This is an amazing work on general grounds. Taubes is a consummate and meticulous advocate of the scientific method; i.e., you first form a hypothesis and then do your honest, dead level best to refute it. To the extent you fail time after time, the hypothesis gets stronger and stronger because you are systematically eliminating everything that can be speculated to count against it. It's the only valid way to do science. You can't "confirm" a hypothesis in the sense of coming up with conditions under which it holds, for no matter if it holds under a million such conditions, you need but one to obliterate it.

The depth and research into this book is amazing. No wonder it took five years to write. In a nutshell, you have the Ancel Keyes fat-cholesterol-heart hypothesis that just won't die, which is itself based upon his flawed Seven Countries Study. From the Wikipedia article:

These studies found strong associations between the CVD rate of a population and average serum cholesterol and per capita intake of saturated fatty acids. Then, as now, critics have rightfully pointed out that this "strong association" vanishes when data from other countries are added to the mix and there have been allegations that Keys "cherry picked" the data to support his hypothesis.

I might have to eventually go and create a table to keep track of it all, but since then, there is study after study after study, and not for the purpose of attempting to falsify the flawed, cherry-picked study, but rather to "confirm" it. And how do they attempt to do that? By designing other flawed studies with multiple factor variation, i.e., so that a failure to confirm can be attributed to ambiguity. Even then, they have not been able to confirm anything. Those studies that fail to find any correlation between fat, cholesterol, heart disease, cancer, and so on are "disappointing." Those that show higher fat consumption correlated to lower heart disease and cancer (such studies exist) are dismissed. They may show up in a journal, but never get reported in the mainstream. If by chance they do, they are attacked vigorously by the "medical" establishment. Over and over.

Anyway, that's my report after only getting about a third of the way through. But I do agree with one blogger who wrote that Taubes ought to take on anthropogenic global warming next. Principally, it is the exact same thing going on.

180 Degree Errors

Have you ever stopped to consider that it's often easier to be completely wrong than just a little wrong? Consider this; when you're trying to get somewhere in the car, is it more likely that you miss your destination by a few hundred yards, or that you "turned right instead of left," or found yourself "going in the opposite direction?"

Now, how does that apply to science? The more common way to describe a 180 degree error in science is a "cause & effect reversal." Let me give you an example of a cause/effect reversal that almost everyone takes for granted:

"Clean your plate, so you can grow up to be big and strong."

What child hasn't heard that admonition, and what mother, father, or grandparent hasn't uttered it? But in the sense it implies that eating more causes children to grow, it's completely false. In fact, the reverse is true. As children, we don't eat more so we can cause ourselves to grow bigger than we already are. We grow bigger than we are, and the effect is that we eat more in order to sustain our larger base metabolism. Growth hormone causes growth. Food is just the raw material.

The reason this error is so easy to make is because it's self evident that if we don't eat at all, we'll starve and die, and in fact, malnutrition can cause stunted growth. But that's because the minimum necessary raw materials aren't present. Let's draw an analogy in the form of building a skyscraper. If you don't have the minimum amount of concrete and steel, then the building is not going to be built to its full height. But what if you pile up two times the amount of concrete and steel required to build to plan? Is that going to cause it to be built, or built bigger than plan, or faster? No, you need the "growth hormone" to build it: construction workers. They use the raw material, build with it, which creates the demand for additional raw material; but it is the act of building that is the cause for the increased demand for "feeding."

My last post on diet prompted some comments to that post that lead me to think that perhaps I wasn't clear enough in how I described Gary Taubes' alternate hypothesis: that it's not simply the fact of excess calories of any sort that makes people fat, but rather, they are turning on a fat-accumulation hormone that tips a balance, such that fat begins to act much like a tumor (that's my analogy, so I don't know he'd agree). He did invoke the analogy to growing children in his lecture I linked, so that's where I got that. How do they turn on that fat accumulation? Bad calories; i.e., too many carbohydrates. While I haven't read his new book, yet, I wonder if the carbohydrate issue isn't more of an absolute quantity rather than a percentage. You often see conventional diet books talking of cab intake as a function of total calories, like 40% of calories from carbs while the low-carb diets typically express an absolute limit, like 60 grams per day.

I think the tumor analogy is an interesting one, at least in the way I understand Taubes at present. What do you often hear expressed about tumors, short of outright removing them? Well, sometimes they're "small," such that the risk of surgery isn't called for. So, you try to keep them small. Why? Well, because when they're small their effect is minimal. They aren't cannibalizing good tissue sufficiently to cause a large effect. How about shrinking a tumor? Same thing. And what happens when a tumor gets to be of sufficient size? Does it not then become a self-sustaining cannibalistic parasite, sacrificing healthy bodily tissue for its own sake in a positive-feedback mechanism, such that the bigger it gets, the bigger and more parasitic its influence on the rest of the body until eventually its pathological selfishness kills the very host that feeds it?

How would things change in the diet community if we accepted what Taubes demonstrates was universally known prior to WWII? He shows that it was well known that high carbs stimulates insulin, that insulin stores fat, that lean and fat tissue eventually become insulin resistant -- such that it's easier to store than pull out of storage.  Then, could the fat eventually become so tumor-like that it causes hormonal secretions that stimulate hunger, thus feeding themselves, getting bigger, setting in motion the same sort of positive feedback mechanism?

What if we thought of extreme carbohydrate restriction for fat people not as a diet, per se, but as a way to starve and shrink a tumor? And intermittent fasting?

It can't just be that a calorie is a calorie. Otherwise, Atkins could not have put heart patients on 5,000 calories per day of high fat and protein, with no carbs, and see them lose fat weight. Nor does the calorie is a calorie hypothesis explain how in around 1900, the Pima Indians (other examples abound, too), existing on federal sugar and flour, could have produced a high percentage of 300+ pound obese women whose children suffered malnourishment. In other words, the women, even though eating less than is required to sustain a healthy child, nonetheless kept putting on the fat.

So I think we have a 180 degree error and Taubes is right: hyper caloric intake, in itself, does not cause us to be fat. Hyper insulin causes us to be fat, and that issues forth a whole cascade of problems (effects), one of which is hyper caloric intake. Repeat. And the effect of that cause is that very nearly everyone in the diet and nutrition establishment has been [conveniently] fooled.

Fasting, Diet, Carbohydrates, Cause & Effect

The principle hypothesis, generally accepted, is that obesity is caused by eating more calories than are expended, the excess being stored as fat. Reduce intake, increase output, or both, and fat comes off. It's a tidy equation. Overeating causes obesity.

Suppose you come up with a competing hypothesis that says that over or under eating, and/or low or high energy output are caused by the accumulation of fat, i.e., a hypothesis that at first glance seems more complicated, but is actually -- Occam's Razor style -- simpler. What if, for whatever reason, a body simply accumulates fat, and overeating and sedentary behavior are in response to it? Can you see how that's simpler?

So then the question becomes: what causes fat accumulation, which then sets off what in some ways is a positive feedback mechanism, including behaviors that are widely seen as causal rather than effects?

Well I'm no expert at this, but Gary Taubes has spent the last several years pouring over studies going back as far as the 1800s. Rather than rehash it, I've got links for you accumulated from Chris at Conditioning Research.

• Big Fat Lie; Telegraph
• The Scientist and the Stairmaster; New York Magazine
• Interview with Gary Taubes; November 30, 2007; by Seth Roberts
• The Quality of Calories: What Makes Us Fat and Why Nobody Seems to Care; Lecture, UC Berkeley

The lecture is by far the most compelling, I think. Much of what he demonstrates seems to contradict the conventional hypothesis and his "anarchy of fat" hypothesis seems to fit better. It really seems to come right back to Atkins. I had tried that diet several times going back as far as 1991, but could never stay on it. I always lost weight, always felt good, but would eventually give in to very strong cravings for bread and other high-carbohydrate foods. Then I thought walking 3+ miles per day would help. In five years and over 5,000 miles, I put on another 25 pounds. Walking increased output, which made me hungrier, and my finely tuned fat-storing machine, my anarchistic fat, was all too happy to gobble up those calories as even more fat.

The workouts over the last nine months -- eventually combined with a more evolutionary approach to eating -- got the ball rolling, but the fat loss was very slow. That's fine, but it would have taken about two years had progress remained steady. In less than a month, I have lost more fat than in the previous eight months combined, and with no change in my exercise schedule of two intense 30-minute sessions per week to build muscle.

The big change began with the fasting. The first two fasts (right before the Holiday break) lost me about a pound. The next two, first week of January, about two pounds. But then I began to notice something really interesting and profound: my appetite began to change. I've lost all appetite for fruit and I just pick at vegetables a bit. I like nuts and blueberries, I'll eat a salad but it seems what I'm feeding is the desire for crunch more than anything. What do I crave? Meat (the fattier the better), eggs, cheese. Here was my dinner, Saturday night.

A 20oz T-bone. By the time I got three bites into it, I had no interest in the salad. I finished off the entire thing with ease, and though I didn't feel full, I only cared to pick at the salad (I went for the avocado and radishes).

In other words, I find myself eating more of an Atkins style quite by accident, unexpectedly: as a style I crave rather than forcing it on myself.

It leads me to a simple question. In an evolutionary context, where does everything begin? My answer: hunger. Before we ever ate a bite, we were hungry, and over two million years of primitive existence, we were hungry and that was the primary motivator of everything. And, so, what did we desire to eat, above all, when hungry and we had a choice? For me personally, I know the answer to that and the signal is clear as a bell. And I don't think our primitive ancestors tossed away the strip of fat, either. I don't think so, because for more than 40 years of trimming it off, I now find myself eating every tiny bit of the fat, enjoying it immensely. And I crave that fat far more than that salad, and that surprises me. I suspect that we have the capacity to eat other things because meat sources weren't always around, just as other primarily carnivorous animals will graze on grass (like bears) when their primary food isn't present.

Anyway, in the last four fasts over two weeks, I've lost 8 pounds. Now that I'm eating mostly meat, fat, and eggs (a little veggies too), the fat is falling off me at a rate of four pounds per week. Here's a typical breakfast, though this was last week and I'm now skipping the apple and adding more bacon, and it's usually three eggs now.

The bacon goes straight from the pan to the plate so it's plenty greasy, then the eggs are fried in the bacon grease as well. Most satisfying.

I'm not going to be foolish, though. Another 20 pounds, which will come off quickly, and I'll schedule a physical and have the blood work done. I suspect it will be fine and much better than the last time. I feel just fabulous, am sleeping better and longer than since I was a teenager, and I turn 47 tomorrow.

These are my personal experiences and results -- certainly not advice for anyone. But if you've struggled with being a gluttonous fat slob like me for the last two decades, it might be worth a serious look.

Fasting Blog

Well, who doesn't, anymore? Have a blog, that is. Brad Pilon, author of Eat Stop Eat, does. I discovered this by checking my referrers, today. See the PS at the bottom of this post.

I had a wonderful moussaka at Thea Mediterranean last evening, with stuffed calamari for starters, and a nice salad of mixed greens, red onion and tomato. Two glasses of scotch whiskey and a nice red out of Lodi, of all places. I like to think of moussaka as Greek lasagna, only with sliced eggplant for the pasta and lamb instead of ground beef. They make it wonderfully moist, which is essential. Dry moussaka is lousy, just like dry lasagna. Lite breakfast this morning, being sure to allow at least 12 hours to elapse from when I last ate anything (two jumbo eggs, scrambled; four slices of bacon, fried; a small helping of full-fat cottage cheese; and a small apple). Lunch was a large bowl of leftover chicken and vegetables in a white-wine creamy citrus sauce I made up the other day. Now I go 30 hours with nothing but water and coffee, polished off with a very strenuous workout tomorrow afternoon.

My point? Given that to lose fat, you have no choice but to go into caloric deficit sufficient to go in the red about 3,500 calories for each pound of fat you're going to lose, and to do that in the short, medium, and long term if you wish to keep it off, wouldn't it just be simpler to just not eat -- rather than agonize over unsatisfying meals of stuff you really don't want to eat? Fasting: it's work hard, play hard applied to dieting. Besides that, the GH response from fasting (and particularly combined with a workout) ensures that you'll lose no lean tissue. In fact, you can even grow muscle while fasting. Think about why we might have evolved that way.

Fasting Update

I'd been meaning to follow up on this post. I had recommended two online books on fasting, Fast-5 and Eat Stop Eat. What I didn't mention is that the first of those is a free download and takes about an hour to read. The second is a purchase for download and while I get no benefit, the second work is I think far more complete in terms of the nutritional science behind fasting; and I like the recommended program far better.

The author, Brad Pilon, is a lifelong "health nut," studying clinical nutrition journals from the age of 16. Went on to college and degreed in nutrition. And then:

Immediately following graduation, and with a surprising mix of good luck and great timing, I was hired to be a Research Analyst at one of the world’s leading supplement companies.

Fast forward to June of 2006. I had just spent the last six years of my life working in one of the most secretive industries in the world. During this time, I had been entrusted with protecting some of the most confidential information in the entire industry. I was the person responsible for the inner dealings of our Research & Development Department. Unfortunately, this was part of the problem.

Part of my job was to review bodybuilding and fitness magazines. I was constantly reading about the ‘latest and greatest’ diet method. After years of reading magazine after magazine, I didn’t know what to believe anymore. Each month, it seemed like the newest diet methods contradicted the diet methods that were in last month’s magazines. It felt like the weight loss industry was full of nothing but misinformation.

He quit and went to work studying to write this book. It's short, and the reason it's short is very simple: because losing fat weight is very simple. After hundreds of books and articles in magazines and medical journals, he could only state two facts with certainty:

1) Prolonged caloric restriction is the only proven nutritional method of weight loss. And...

2) Human beings (nutritionally speaking) can only be in one of the following states: fed or fasted.

He ultimately came to the conclusion that many have come to or sense: that most of the books and articles are marketing, and much of the research is financed by food and supplement companies in order to legitimize their marketing claims. In short, it's very much politicized because what companies can and can't say, and what they need to back them up (ultimately: only money; not real, fully-integrated and honest facts) is ultimately a political matter. So, the punchline?

...the research on weight loss had become so skewed with politics that it has turned into the world’s most ironic oxymoron. After all, the research was trying to uncover the completely backwards idea; ‘what should we eat to lose weight?!’.

That's right. When you unpack and unravel everything, it is all fundamentally premised on the same lie: that you must eat, drink, or "take" something in order to lose [fat] weight, and that what you eat, drink, or "take" is more fundamentally about quality (which is better?) than about quantity. And even when quantity is spoken of -- which it is, except for the worst of the charlatans -- it takes a backseat position, rather than the front & center position where it should.

And why? Well, because you can't build a multi billion-dollar "weight-loss" industry on: "don't eat anything." "Just don't eat, until you really have to." So if you're really serious about getting back to the body and feeling that evolution designed, get Brad's book.

...And just a quick word about fitness and fasting from a personal perspective. I began with the weights last May, 07. I built lots of muscle, but was still eating way too much, and too much food with concentrated carbohydrate that we were never designed for. I still lost a lot of fat (net weight loss of about 7 lbs, after adding about 10 of lean). Then around October I finally began to get a bit more serious about quality, so I've pretty much cut out everything but whole foods: meats, vegetables, nuts, fruits. I keep starchy vegetables like potatoes to a minimum, as well as beans and grain-like "vegetables," such as corn. I began to loose more weight, had better workouts, better meals, better sleep and generally felt better and better.

Then I found what I consider to be the very last piece to the puzzle, which, I really believe is and should be the foundation to the whole thing: intermittent fasting. I have not felt so alive, alert, and slept to well, so long, since I was a kid. Beware: it takes getting used to. I dove right in with a 30-hr fast my first time, and I ended it with an intense workout. You may not want to do that, but it's my favorite way to fast. I go 24 to 30 hours with nothing except water & coffee, and then hit the gym. My workouts have never been so intense, and my trainer has taken to asking me: "so, is this your hunt?" And yep, I think that's precisely the mindset or feeling you develop.

But here's how the loop closes: when you break fast, it's a wonderful experience. You'll probably pig out and over indulge the first time or two, but then you might find, as I have, that my break fast meal is a normal portion and that my appetite, on average, is far more subdued than it used to be.

Here's a few ideas for those who may not want to do full-blown fasts, but might want to incorporate one of the principles: i.e., #2: being fed or fasted. I have virtually eliminated any intake between meals. Eating anything but just a few calories will release insulin and stop all usage of fat stores until you get back into a fasted state, which takes hours. On the days when I'm not doing a big fast (24-30 hours; which I do twice per week), I make sure that I have at least a period of 12-15 hours where I eat nothing, i.e., from after dinner until first meal of the next day. So, say I finish dinner at 7p.m., I won't eat a thing until at least 7a.m., but more likely somewhere between 9 and 11. In this way, I have naturally come to where I can really only eat two meals per day.

In other words, I look at it differently. Each day has my fed period and fasted period, and if it is to be something other than 50/50, then the advantage will go to the fasted state.

Have fun out there. I'd have never thought that I could get used to, or even perversely enjoy hunger, but I have and just seeing myself starting to get off medication for chronic heartburn I've suffered from since I was a teenager leads me to believe I'm on the right track.

Intermittent Fasting

I don't think I've written about this, but I've been looking into something called Intermittent Fasting (IF) as a companion to Evolutionary Fitness (EV). What Art discusses in that first link is using IF as a normal part of fitness in order to achieve a more randomized energy intake and consumption pattern; not weight or fat loss, which is my primary interest for the time being. I've still got somewhere between 20 to 30 lbs. of fat to loose, and that's after already losing about 20.

I've conducted two 30-hr fasts so far, in both cases lunch being the final meal until dinner the following day, two hours after a strenuous weight-lifting workout. Interestingly, the toughest part of the fast was the first evening when my body was expecting dinner. The first fast, I actually went to bed early just in hopes of escaping the excruciating, almost nauseating hunger, which in itself ought to be a clue that your body needs a bit of whipping into shape. In both fasts I got to sleep quickly, slept wonderfully, and woke up refreshed and not hungry at all. The hunger returned mid-morning but was quite subdued and I found it no problem to put in a workout and then wait an additional hour or so before dinner. Over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, it has only been the last 10,000 years where some people have had the opportunity to never be truly hungry. In short, we are designed to go significant periods of time without intake, and even to expend significant energy (like a hunt, a chase) prior to being able to eat. Wild animals exist in this fashion.

Here's a couple of things I can recommend to anyone interested in such an approach: The Fast-5 Diet and Eat Stop Eat. If you're the kind of person who has never had any problem with getting fatter as you get older, but are also the kind of person who doesn't usually eat 3-squares per day, well you just might have a clue into why that is for you, and perhaps reassurance that all the scolding you get from people isn't based in reality.