Free the Animal

Wise Words from Primal Wisdom

It was a weekend too busy for blogging, with a couple of home projects, getting started and well into Mark's book, The Primal Blueprint (so far: I think it's going to be the 'go to' book), and a little cooking.

There's quite a number of interesting comments on my last post that figured largely on the subject of cholesterol. I think it's important to understand that we are all different and aren't necessarily going to have the same lipid numbers even on largely the same diets. I see lots of signs that people are stressing out about it. They are feeling great, have dropped a ton of weight, the one big sign they are on the right track is the typical huge drop of triglycerides, but then they go and worry and beat themselves up because total cholesterol went up, and/or they are not getting the numbers they want in LDL or HDL. Some have gone on to get NMR LipoProfile testing done and are not happy about their particle size and mix.

So, with that in mind, let me paste here some wise words from reader and commenter Don Matesz, who also blogs at Primal Wisdom.

Let's not forget that Dr. Ravnskov has pointed out that people with higher cholesterol live the longest.

http://westonaprice.org/moderndiseases/benefits_cholest.html

And as Mary Enig says, a total blood lipoprotein count between 200 and 240 is normal, not a disease process. 

http://westonaprice.org/knowyourfats/fats_phony.html

In any population, all measurable characteristics vary within a normal range in a Bell Curve fashion. Just as some people are shorter than average and some taller than average, some have smaller and some have larger feet, and some have lower and some have higher total lipoproteins. Thus, "high" cholesterol is not by itself indicative of a disease process any more than above average height indicates a disease process.

I have read that taller people have, in general, a lower life expectancy than shorter people (don't have the reference). Assuming this is true, it would not give warrant for height reduction surgery for taller than average people. Similarly, even if it could be demonstrated that people with lower total lipoprotein counts did live longer, that would not give warrant to subject individuals with "above average" total lipoprotein counts to artificial cholesterol reduction.

This gets back to the whole issue of reductionism. Tim's doctor thinks a blood cholesterol of 226 is a disease process. He completely ignores the context (patient) in which this occurs. Rather than evaluating the patient, he reduces the patient to a lab number. He wants to treat the cholesterol, not the patient.

We would be wise to keep all of this in mind.

Unbridled Reductionism vs. Common Sense

I get lots of interesting questions. For instance, the other day I was in the 40F deg. cold plunge at San Jose Athletic Club -- a mere 5-minute walk from the loft -- and while coming up on the minute mark and my intended time to get out, another guy got in and asked if I hadn't lost quite a bit of weight.

I ended up staying in and chatting for over five minutes about things Primal, Paleo, and "Ev-Revolutionary," not feeling a bit cold.

But the questions were remarkable, in that he could see the transformation in front of his very eyes -- which meant he also had no reason to doubt my performance gains in the gym either (and he could just go ask my trainer, Mike, anyway). But I guess they had to come...

Fasting? Doesn't that "harm your metabolism?"
Answer by question: does it harm the metabolisms of wild animals if they don't always get their kill?...

"Skipping" breakfast? Don't you have to "fuel" the body for the day?
Answer by question: are you saying that I should eat when I'm not hungry, and, do you observe wild animals eating that way?... 

"Only" two meals per day, usually? Don't you need to keep your "nitrogen balance" up so that you don't waste lean tissue?
Answer by question: do wild animals save up their kills and forages in order to divide into six annoying little meals per day?...

No cardio? Don't you have to get your heart rate up into the "fat burning zone?"
Answer by question: do you see wild animals on treadmills or in any way behaving as though they would have the remotest use for one?

Of course, this could go on and on, but hopefully you see the underlying principle at work. Principles save time, folks, because once you see them vindicated over and over, you can gradually raise the bar, over time, such that the burden of proof becomes greater, and you can dismiss out of hand propositions that clearly violate the principle.

I do this a lot, lately. There's so much out there now that is the product of unbridled reductionism in the service of bias confirmation; i.e., The Conventional Wisdom. So, for example, we can easily understand from an almost obvious, self-evident (a priori) point of view that it would be entirely logical for nature to have evolved very complex pathways in many species, including humans, that provide for essential nourishment from the body's own tissues when needed. Everyone talks about "fat burning," but the body can also burn lean tissue (for protein), and even bone (for calcium and perhaps other essential minerals).

But now, since we've been subjected to the conventional "wisdom" for decades that fat is the greatest nutritional evil, everyone is obsessed about "burning fat," "preserving lean tissue," and even, now, preserving bones from leaching minerals. Of course, no one seems to stop to ponder why they aren't afraid of releasing all that arterycloggingsaturatedfat into their bloodstream when they get into the "fat burning range."

So what happens? Reductionism happens, which, on its face is a worthwhile endeavor: "an approach to understand the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things" (Wikipedia) That's a good method generally, but then there's the unbridled sort of reductionism where a complex, integrated, and logical view of a system is set aside while sweeping cautions are leveled against perfectly normal behavior that we observe in nature all the time, like not getting three squares per day, not eating when hungry, not eating every two - three waking hours, and not running on treadmills or in circles.

Here's an example that's a little different from the above, which focuses primarily on fat burning and an obsessive fear with metabolizing even the slightest gram of lean body mass. I received this very respectful question in email from a reader.

I'd like to preface this by stating that I'm very grateful for the information that people like you and Mark Sisson freely provide to those who are trying to live and eat in a healthy, natural manner.

My question is concerning the fact that Vitamin K2 protects against osteoporosis. You stated that things like animal fats and lean meats are good sources of K2. Since K2 protects against osteoporosis, then it's logical to say that increased meat consumption would preclude bone breakdown; however, I have also read other literature stating that a high protein diet -- such as a diet high in meat content -- would also cause the blood pH to be in a persistent, subclinically acidotic state. The thinking is that this would cause leeching of calcium from the bones, which leads to calciuria and decreased bone mineral density.

I'm thinking that there is a gap in knowledge with respect to the latter point, but can you explain the logical disconnect between the two?

Well I must say that reader Sun hit the nail on the head: logical disconnect. Now, without knowing anything else, does it make any sense that one pathway to good health is also the pathway to decline? I touched on this in my Vitamin K2 entry the other day:

So we're in a sort of bizarre estoppel situation, where they're now finding important nutritional benefits for preventing and reversing heart disease, and these super nutrients are found primarily in the things we've been told will give us heart disease. A perfect storm of modern ignorance.

And digging through the medical literature can become even more confusing, and these are just things I got today, only one of which I explicitly searched for:

Maybe vitamin K increases bone mineral density (BMD) in some people.

Or, maybe it doesn't.

Or, maybe vitamin D is also critical, synergistic.

Or, maybe what's really important is the actual end fracture risk, not bone density, implying the logical, that BD is not the only factor in fractures.

It's enough to make your head spin. Now, here's one I specifically went searching for, but really, only as a means of showing you that the fundamental logic, the Paleo Principle, is sound. Of course, eating meat in abundance is great and essential for your bones, just as one would think from merely looking around and observing nature.

Nutrition plays a major role in the development and maintenance of bone structures resistant to usual mechanical loadings. In addition to calcium in the presence of an adequate vitamin D supply, proteins represent a key nutrient for bone health, and thereby in the prevention of osteoporosis. In sharp opposition to experimental and clinical evidence, it has been alleged that proteins, particularly those from animal sources, might be deleterious for bone health by inducing chronic metabolic acidosis which in turn would be responsible for increased calciuria and accelerated mineral dissolution. This claim is based on an hypothesis that artificially assembles various notions, including in vitro observations on the physical-chemical property of apatite crystal, short term human studies on the calciuric response to increased protein intakes, as well as retrospective inter-ethnic comparisons on the prevalence of hip fractures. The main purpose of this review is to analyze the evidence that refutes a relation of causality between the elements of this putative patho-physiological "cascade" that purports that animal proteins are causally associated with an increased incidence of osteoporotic fractures. In contrast, many experimental and clinical published data concur to indicate that low protein intake negatively affects bone health. Thus, selective deficiency in dietary proteins causes marked deterioration in bone mass, micro architecture and strength, the hallmark of osteoporosis. In the elderly, low protein intakes are often observed in patients with hip fracture. In these patients intervention study after orthopedic management demonstrates that protein supplementation as given in the form of casein, attenuates post-fracture bone loss, increases muscles strength, reduces medical complications and hospital stay. In agreement with both experimental and clinical intervention studies, large prospective epidemiologic observations indicate that relatively high protein intakes, including those from animal sources are associated with increased bone mineral mass and reduced incidence of osteoporotic fractures. As to the increased calciuria that can be observed in response to an augmentation in either animal or vegetal proteins it can be explained by a stimulation of the intestinal calcium absorption. Dietary proteins also enhance IGF-1, a factor that exerts positive activity on skeletal development and bone formation. Consequently, dietary proteins are as essential as calcium and vitamin D for bone health and osteoporosis prevention. Furthermore, there is no consistent evidence for superiority of vegetal over animal proteins on calcium metabolism, bone loss prevention and risk reduction of fragility fractures.

Now, did you catch the unbridled reductionism in the above? "This claim is based on an hypothesis that artificially assembles various notions, including in vitro observations on the physical-chemical property of apatite crystal, short term human studies on the calciuric response to increased protein intakes, as well as retrospective inter-ethnic comparisons on the prevalence of hip fractures."

It's all so unnecessary.

Vitamin D and Soap

I've had this one hanging around for days and since I'm on a roll just now, and just got a question about D, here goes. I'm not going to dig up the many past posts, but you can find most of them here, or simply search vitamin d to the right.

The short version is that vitamin D is crucial for a host of processes and modern life has come to the point of shielding humans from receiving the vitamin as nature and evolution intended. The things we already know about are clothing, shelter, working indoors and sunscreen that keep us from the D we need. But here's another: soap. Yep, all you clean freaks: you're washing your vitamin D off before it gets absorbed.

It was an interesting discovery for me, as it has been a very long time since I've put soap to anything but hair, face, armpits and groin. I never use lotions or creams and I have wonderfully soft skin. Maybe that's one reason for my high levels of D, along with supplementation, of course (now 4k IU per day instead of 6, since I get sun about 4 times per week).

So, here's Dr. Mercola to explain, with a video and a write up.

I must say that I disagree with his hierarchy of the most preferred way to get D. I think you need to get tested and that your 25-hydroxy vitamin D levels ought to be above 60 ng/ml. Unless you're living at a low latitude, I don't see how you're going to get that from sun exposure, at least year round. Tanning panels or beds are very expensive, and they strike me as rather like the treadmill in terms of eventual boring drudgery and something that ends up sitting in your house just taking up space. Supplementation is inexpensive, takes no time, is safe, and in the gelcap form is proven to get levels of D where they ought to be.

"It's What They Do"

Indeed. We have a thing or to to learn, I think.

For all the mothers out there -- even leopards who mother (a verb!) the offspring of a kill. My wife, Beatrice, distributed this via email this morning. She's an amazing doggie "mom."

Can animal behavior in some respects inform human behavior? Look at this blog's title and you'll see what I think.

Cold, Wet, Hungry, and Running For Your Life

So, did any of you come up with some tweaks after yesterday's read? I've receive one email with some good ideas.

That was really a good refresher for me, but I'm not going to tell you what I did yet. The reason is that I still have 9 hours to go on my 30-hr fast, a workout early this afternoon, followed by a "secret" technique, and I'm already down 5 full pounds from where I was when I began the fast.

I want to see where I end up. Then I'll post.

Erwan Le Corre & MoveNat - Reprise

I was delighted yesterday to receive an email from Erwan, alerting me to the fact that he and his methods have been featured in a substantial article in Men's Health Magazine. I first blogged about Erwan a couple of months back. Before linking up the article, here's a bit of review. When the video comes up, absolutely do click on the "HD" button for a way better experience.

Now, here's the link to the magazine article.

When Zuqueto finally steps back, thick fists on his hips, chest heaving in fatigue and frustration, the man hops down from the pole. His name is Erwan Le Corre, a 37-year-old Frenchman who may rank as one of the most all-around physically fit men on the planet. His last name sounds exactly like the French phrase for "the body" -- le corps -- and his appearance lives up to the advance billing: If he grew out his sun-bleached hair and traded the board shorts for a loincloth, he'd be a perfect twin for Tarzan. Le Corre isn't just strong and fast and explosive and nimble; he's an athlete whose opponents are everything he sees and whose arena is anywhere he happens to be standing.

Enjoy. I certainly did.

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.

Is It The Meat, or Cooking The Meat?

This sounds plausible enough, right?

Humans became human, as it were, with the emergence 1.8m years ago of a species called Homo erectus. This had a skeleton much like modern man’s—a big, brain-filled skull and a narrow pelvis and rib cage, which imply a small abdomen and thus a small gut. Hitherto, the explanation for this shift from the smaller skulls and wider pelvises of man’s apelike ancestors has been a shift from a vegetable-based diet to a meat-based one. Meat has more calories than plant matter, the theory went. A smaller gut could therefore support a larger brain.

So far, so good? Well, via a commenter on Art's private blog who called attention to this article in The Economist, maybe not. What's Cooking? - The evolutionary role of cookery. And, so...

Dr Wrangham disagrees. When you do the sums, he argues, raw meat is still insufficient to bridge the gap. He points out that even modern “raw foodists”, members of a town-dwelling, back-to-nature social movement, struggle to maintain their weight—and they have access to animals and plants that have been bred for the table. Pre-agricultural man confined to raw food would have starved.

Start cooking, however, and things change radically. Cooking alters food in three important ways. It breaks starch molecules into more digestible fragments. It “denatures” protein molecules, so that their amino-acid chains unfold and digestive enzymes can attack them more easily. And heat physically softens food. That makes it easier to digest, so even though the stuff is no more calorific, the body uses fewer calories dealing with it.

In support of his thesis, Dr Wrangham, who is an anthropologist, has ransacked other fields and come up with an impressive array of material. Cooking increases the share of food digested in the stomach and small intestine, where it can be absorbed, from 50% to 95% according to work done on people fitted for medical reasons with collection bags at the ends of their small intestines.

Wow, not such good news for the vegan raw foodists. Not only is the diet designed for large, fermenting guts (and tiny brains), which is bad enough, but now they must also contend with the likelihood that they're getting from 5-50% less nutrition from what they eat than if it were cooked. Then take away the high nutrition of meat and animal fat and it's a recipe for a long-term disaster; and I just don't see how anyone could conclude otherwise. This is why a Palo-like diet with plenty of all such nutritious food (cooked, normally) is super nutritious.

And, there's yet another twist to the story.

Another telling experiment, conducted on rats, did not rely on cooking. Rather the experimenters ground up food pellets and then recompacted them to make them softer. Rats fed on the softer pellets weighed 30% more after 26 weeks than those fed the same weight of standard pellets. The difference was because of the lower cost of digestion. Indeed, Dr Wrangham suspects the main cause of the modern epidemic of obesity is not overeating (which the evidence suggests—in America, at least—is a myth) but the rise of processed foods.

Gratifying to see someone thinking independently, rather than the same old saw that you eat to much and don't exercise enough. The one bugaboo, however, would be the advent of fire. In the article, Dr. Wrangham concedes that the evidence is not conclusive, and thus, there are those all over the map, from 200,000 years all the way back to the advent of Homo erectus 1.8 million years ago.

But it's an interesting hypothesis, that's it's not the meat that evolved us as it did, but the ability to cook; meaning, that our existence is potentially the effect of a technological innovation 1.8 million years ago rather than merely "dumb" stumbling upon or scavenging new food sources.

"Darwin, Evolution and the Paleo Life"

This is a must read from Keith Norris at Theory to Practice.

Detractors of the Paleo lifestyle are wont to fly the flag of speedy/swift evolution as evidence of the supposed incongruence of the Paleo way vis-à-vis modern man’s interaction within his present-day environment.

I'm not going to give too much away, cause I want you to go read it over there. I'll just add that I blogged on rapid evolution a few weeks back. Finally, the thing about rapid evolution is that we're talking changes over thousands of years vs. tens, hundreds of thousands, and millions.

Rapid Evolution

Here's an interesting article in ScienceMode about how humans are still evolving, more rapidly than ever, and with increasing differences tied to the separateness of continents.

Humans Evolving Faster, Different 2000 Years Later, Scientists Say

Think about it, particularly in light of recent reports that seem to add confidence to the theory that modern humans are the result of migration "Out of Aftrica" 50,000 years ago (replacing Neanderthal in Europe and Homo Erectus in Asia), rather than Multiregional evolution resulting from Homo Erectus migration from Africa 1-2 million years ago with evolution into Homo Sapiens occurring independently (more here).

Back to the original article cited, with some excerpts.

The study looked for genetic evidence of natural selection – the evolution of favorable gene mutations – during the past 80,000 years by analyzing DNA from 270 individuals in the International HapMap Project, an effort to identify variations in human genes that cause disease and can serve as targets for new medicines.

The new study looked specifically at genetic variations called “single nucleotide polymorphisms,” or SNPs (pronounced “snips”) which are single-point mutations in chromosomes that are spreading through a significant proportion of the population. [...]

Over time, chromosomes randomly break and recombine to create new versions or variants of the chromosome. “If a favorable mutation appears, then the number of copies of that chromosome will increase rapidly” in the population because people with the mutation are more likely to survive and reproduce, Harpending says.

“And if it increases rapidly, it becomes common in the population in a short time,” he adds.

The researchers took advantage of that to determine if genes on chromosomes had evolved recently. Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, with each parent providing one copy of each of the 23. If the same chromosome from numerous people has a segment with an identical pattern of SNPs, that indicates that segment of the chromosome has not broken up and recombined recently.

That means a gene on that segment of chromosome must have evolved recently and fast; if it had evolved long ago, the chromosome would have broken and recombined.

Harpending and colleagues used a computer to scan the data for chromosome segments that had identical SNP patterns and thus had not broken and recombined, meaning they evolved recently. They also calculated how recently the genes evolved.

A key finding: 7 percent of human genes are undergoing rapid, recent evolution.

Essentially, what it boils down to is that with massively increased population comes a huge increase in the speed of evolution, which makes intuitive sense. If you observe genetic mutations of bacteria in some culture, the rate of mutation and hence the rate of beneficial mutation that gets passed on, resulting in evolution of the bacteria, is going to be directly proportional to the size of the colony -- the more bacteria, the more chances for mutation, natural selection, evolution; repeat.

The implications for diet are clear. What is the single most important change in human civilization leading to massively increasing population growth? Agriculture. So, on the one hand, we are evolving to perhaps eventually handle grains and other processed food oddities. However, we're certainly not there yet and it will probably take some thousands -- though probably not tens of thousands -- of years to fully adapt. For example, most of European decent have already adapted to handle milk & dairy while most of Asian ancestry have not (they don't produce lactase).

But Harpending believes the speedup in human evolution “is a temporary state of affairs because of our new environments since the dispersal of modern humans 40,000 years ago and especially since the invention of agriculture 12,000 years ago. That changed our diet and changed our social systems. If you suddenly take hunter-gatherers and give them a diet of corn, they frequently get diabetes. We’re still adapting to that. Several new genes we see spreading through the population are involved with helping us prosper with high-carbohydrate diet.”

Of course, this raises the question of whether you want to be part of the evolution going forward, i.e. "do your part for the human race," or do you want to live in accordance with the genetic makeup you already have, which implies a Paleo-like diet of meat, natural fats, vegetables, fruits and nuts to the exclusion of grains, refined vegetable oils, and processed foods?

I know what path I'm taking.

(HT: Art's private blog)

Genes Do The Heavy Lifting

My brother Dave emailed today asking if I knew anything about Dr. Jeff Life (cool last name, eh?) and Cenegenics?

I haven't.

But I know gene expression when I see it.

Take a click on that picture and watch the linked-to video to better see the ripped and buffed Dr. Jeff''s picks from age 57, and what he looks like now, at age 69. Twenty year olds could easily covet that bod. Amazing. Good for you, doc.

They don't give a lot of info, and I'm a bit unimpressed by the "find a physician" tack (as if hunter-gatherers needed physicians to express their genetic programming), so I don't have any idea of what consists their diet and exercise regimen. But they've got to be doing most of it right.

Diet: pre-agricultural, i.e., dump the grains, heavy carbs, and certainly all the stinky shit (that's a metaphor, to include the sweet smelling-stinky shit) they put in boxes and bottles.

Exercise: Brief, intense. All in, when you do it. An hour per week (2x30m) is sufficient.

Simulating scarcity: Hunter Gatherers didn't have grocery stores, for millions of years. Hunger is primal and motivational. Get intimate with it. Intermittent fasting.

Dr. Life is no aberration. See Clarence Bass at 70.

A hot body is your genetic birthright. All you have to do is create the circumstances under which your genes do what they evolved to do. They want  to make you a winner. Let them.

Evolutionary Nutrition

I came across a great post from Robb Wolf of CrossFit NorCal. If you live anywhere near Chico, CA, this is definitely the place you want to be working out and training. The thing about Robb is that not only is he running quite a show out there in terms of physical conditioning, but he's a biochemist as well. He knows his nutrition.

You might have noticed that the nutrition approach we recommend at CrossFit NorCal is a bit...oh, shall I say, contrarian? Where the USDA, AMA and the rest of the Government sponsored entities recommend grains and legumes as the base of the diet, we recommend lean meat, fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds.

That’s crazy, right? aren’t we going to die from heart disease and cancer if we eat meat? How will we ever get fiber if we don’t eat grains!? I mean, fruit and veggies...what have they got to offer?! I’m being fecetious here, I hope you get that. I do understand our recommendations fly in the face of what we are told to eat from nearly every source you can find...what’s the deal? Well...the deal is, our nutritional approach, a diet the attempts to emulate that of our paleolithic ancestors, is without a doubt the best route to optimized performance and health. Big claim? Yep, but easy to back up. Folks start with us, tweak their food, then look, feel and perform better. Every measurable bio-marker such as cholesterol, triglycerides or blood pressure improve...depression resolves. It just works, because this is the way we are wired to eat. But hey, what the hell do I know? I’m just the crazy guy in the shed telling people to do weird stuff like sleep more, take fish oil and increase their protein intake. How could I possibly be right about this?

And here's the critical point he makes:

A Paleo diet, calorie per calorie, beats any other diet you can compare it to. Here is a nice look at this in a paper from Loren Cordain. If you notice, the basic diet presented here looks like taking a nutritional supplement. Now, if you are ambitious, you can take ANY of those listed Paleo foods, Lean meats, nuts, seeds, fruits and veggeis and compare them to the same calorie content of grains, legumes or dairy (non- fortified...just the way nature made them!) and you will decrease the relative nutritional content of the diet. Don’t believe me? You can actually do this experiment with the USDA Nutrient Database. So before you start waxing eloquent about how “nutritious whole grains are” give this a shot...build a diet the way our government recommends you do it via the food pyramid, then compare that to Paleo foods.

I make this point all the time. Beyond all the harping about crappy processed vegetable oils, the sugar crack house, and grain-fed fatties, a Paleo-like diet is simply more nutritionally dense than any other -- by leaps and bounds. (Aside: how come everyone knows and understands that livestock are fattened for slaughter by feeding them grains, but then are completely dumbfounded when it's suggested that grains are how you fatten humans, too?)

Here's the funny scene of woeful stupidity and ignorance on display. You want to see it? Just start having them substitute fruit or tomato slices -- even cottage cheese -- for BOTH your hash brown AND toast that go along with your eggs and breakfast meat of choice. Watch the looks of disbelief from the servers, some of whom even insist in asking me if I'm sure.

This is how brainwashed and laughably idiotic it has become.

Anyway, the next section of Robb's lengthy post deals with athletic performance gains documented on a Paleo diet, and how it's becoming more accepted by coaches and athletes as a means of improving.

Then he gets to his third and final point.

The Paleo diet describes our past, shines a light on our current situation, and provides predictive value for our future. The Nutritional “Sciences” are anything but. In theory they are a subset of Biology. The basic tenant of biology is evolution via natural selection...yet this fact absolutely buggars those in the nutritional sciences.

He then quotes Cordain in offering some explanation as to why everything you are told by the nutritional health "authorities" is wrong, dangerous, and will likely kill you, disable you, and/or make you miserable downing tons of pills every day. I'm not joking. "Nutritionists" are outright killing and maiming people with their "eat more whole grains" mantra.

In mature and well-developed scientific disciplines there are universal paradigms that guide scientists to fruitful end points as they design their experiments and hypotheses. For instance, in cosmology (the study of the universe) the guiding paradigm is the “Big Bang” concept showing that the universe began with an enormous explosion and has been expanding ever since. In geology, the “Continental Drift” model established that all of the current continents at one time formed a continuous landmass that eventually drifted apart to form the present-day continents. These central concepts are not theories for each discipline, but rather are indisputable facts that serve as orientation points for all other inquiry within each discipline. Scientists do not know everything about the nature of the universe, but it is absolutely unquestionable that it has been and is expanding. This central knowledge then serves as a guiding template that allows scientists to make much more accurate and informed hypotheses about factors yet to be discovered.

The study of human nutrition remains an immature science because it lacks a universally acknowledged unifying paradigm (11). Without an overarching and guiding template, it is not surprising that there is such seeming chaos, disagreement and confusion in the discipline. The renowned Russian geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900-1975) said, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution” (12). Indeed, nothing in nutrition seems to make sense because most nutritionists have little or no formal training in evolutionary theory, much less human evolution. Nutritionists face the same problem as anyone who is not using an evolutionary model to evaluate biology: fragmented information and no coherent way to interpret the data. All human nutritional requirements like those of all living organisms are ultimately genetically determined. Most nutritionists are aware of this basic concept; what they have little appreciation for is the process (natural selection) which uniquely shaped our species’ nutritional requirements. By carefully examining the ancient environment under which our genome arose, it is possible to gain insight into our present day nutritional requirements and the range of foods and diets to which we are genetically adapted via natural selection (13-16). This insight can then be employed as a template to organize and make sense out of experimental and epidemiological studies of human biology and nutrition (11).

This is why a little guy like me (as well as plenty of guys like Robb, Art, Cordain, Eades, Taubes) are RIGHT and the entire weight of the worldwide "nutritional" establishment is WRONG. We are operating from a GENERAL GUIDING PRINCIPLE: human evolution by means of natural selection.

It's why everything makes perfect sense: we always stay on track and can't lose our way because we have a guiding light. It's why there are no more "paradoxes" (there never were; they were always wrong). It's why this is so simple. It's why food is fun and luxurious, again.

The ignorant-obstinate buffoons that comprise the world's nutritional "authorities" are killing, maiming and unnecessarily enslaving people to a lifetime of pill popping to artificially manage problems caused by their Frankendiets in the first place. And they are doing it with impunity.

Mind-Body Dichotomies -- The Evolutionary Approach

I alluded to this back when I announced the new name of this blog. You're welcome to review that, but here's the gist of the particular reference, from two sources: Wikipedia and Objectivism Wiki. The most concise way I can describe it is the notion of either "body and mind," for the more secular among us, or "body and soul" for the most religious / spiritual. In essence, the idea seems to either call for "balance," such as in eastern mysticisms, to a more mind-centric philosophy at the expense of bodily urges, to a near complete rejection of the body ("pleasures of the flesh") in some religious philosophies.

Why is this important?

First, I reject them all on the basis of evolutionary biology. My approach is materialist (every thing is composed of matter or "material"), with a caveat: we either have free will, or our belief in our own free will is sufficient to be tantamount to free will (i.e., the determinism of our own biology is so complex that we can't as yet begin to comprehend or unravel it, so it is, to us, free will). Another way to think of it is that values seem to transcend the sort of programming one would have to imagine us having if every act was a mere consequence of complex chemical reactions. We all have a vastly different set of values and we all, in various ways, seek to gain and keep them.

Back to why this is important. Virtually everything around you is based in some way upon the notion that this dichotomy exists. So, it's important from the standpoint of optimal health. How arrogant am I, eh; everybody is wrong? Well, the Paleo and EvFit guys get a lot right, most even, but then I see some advocating this governmental program over that, this regulation and that one, this politician over that one, this public policy over another, or some spiritualism or religion as superior to another.

So how does it play out?

When you divorce mind and body, or body and "soul," it's essentially a divide and conquer strategy. Soon enough, you have every sort of "authority" claiming dominion over this "common" mind or soul. How? They dictate the values. So, whether it's the local city counsel, D.C., Brussels, or the Vatican, sure enough there will be someone to tell you how, if you don't hold a certain set of values, your thinking is off, you're a derelict or criminal, or your soul is in jeopardy.

Folks: you evolved over millions of years to account for the values and behaviors of about 25-30 people and that's what you're hardwired for. Certainly, since many of our neural pathways are established in response to sensory input (environment) in the first few years of life, there's wiggle room -- just like you could take a wolf pup, hold it 24/7, and establish neural pathways accustomed to the smell, sight, and movements of humans. But then again, that wolf would not be existing even remotely close to the sensory stimuli, diet, and activity that would fully express its genes for optimum health and wolf-well-being.

Where this is going is that Freeing the Animal is not only about diet and exercise, but about mental well-being, happiness, tranquility and harmony as well. Of course, we can't ever "go back," nor would I want to. I just want to do the best I can to model and simulate a whole health, and much of that involves how you come to regard much of the modern world.

So what can you do?

I'd suggest establishing for yourself a simple hierarchy, just like you do for food, where you can assign things a relative position according to how well it reflects or harmonizes with our evolutionary heritage. So, for example, you've got wild game and foraged roots, plants and berries on the one extreme (fully consistent) and grains, refined sugar, vegetable oils, fast food, baby food and formula, and processed foods on the extreme other (slow-acting poison). In the middle, you have dairy, and maybe a little higher up, nuts of various sorts and wines. A little higher: fruits. Below dairy, you've got things like potatoes, beer, spirits and so forth. You see you could go on and on, and really, working that out over time and refining it can be fun, and you'll learn a lot.

How about various institutions? On the extreme end of evolutionarily inharmonious, I've got government (without meaningless distinctions over what kind). For starters, it's a lot more than 25-30 people, I have zero control or influence, and the notion that people in Washington D.C. can dictate a large percentage of my values and fine or lock me up for not at least going through the motions of holding them is foreign to your genes and by consequence, your thinking.

"Thinking is as biologic as is digestion." - Weston Price

And before you dismiss that, think about this: how well do you think when drunk, stoned, or are experiencing chronic pain. Have personal problems ever made you sick to your stomach? We are fully integrated. You cannot separate biology from the mind.

On the other end, you've got the family unit. Absolutely harmonious with evolution in every way -- beautifully so. I quoted Weston Price, above, and should you ever have the opportunity to read "The Fountainhead" of nutritional wisdom, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, you'll take note of his descriptions of harmonious family life, and in particular, the superbly well-mannered children, none of thousands of whom he ever witnessed being subjected to any sort of corporal punishment.

Also near the top of harmonious I'd place small and medium sized businesses -- those that don't rely on the government to carve out special laws for them or set up barriers to entry such that only the very biggest can play. Why? Simple: because I can take 'em or leave 'em. It's no more complicated than that. They don't try to force values on me. Rather, they strive to meet my standards of values in exchange for trade.

I might place some forms of religion in the middle. While I don't think any of them qualify as fully harmonious, I do understand that small bands of religious people seem to fare quite well. The larger, more hierarchical and authoritarian, the father away from nature.

How about financial markets? To me, financial markets are like a huge vat of snakes, 99.99% harmless -- fun even, for some. You may go a whole lifetime without encountering that .01%. You may not. My point is that we are not even close to being designed to properly assess the risks inherent in financial markets (source: The Oz Report).

Conclusion

Now, that's all a quick exercise, much off the top of my head, and I don't expect anyone to come up with the same answers I do. Perhaps I've missed something, and there's certainly a lot of other elements in society to evaluate. It's really about the process of evaluation and the need to do so -- to become your own authority -- that makes this important. Also, probably more important is the relative position to which you assign things rather than the absolute position.

And how this conditions your values and actions going forward is up to you. You know, I've just got to have a big juicy burger (w/ bun, toasted!) and fries about every couple of months, always will. And I'm not completely adverse to getting plastered, now and then. It's not a race, but a life way. Just having clarity about what in your environment makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint, what doesn't, and what's of various shadings in-between is the first step in conditioning yourself to live as harmoniously as you can with your own biological reality.

Evolving to Eat New Stuff

As I wrote previously, you don't have to believe in evolution. It's not the belief or confidence in it that helps you out, anyway. What makes the difference is acting as though it were true, along with hypothesizing or educated guessing what was probably true for us, over eons, then simulating and modeling a life to capture those advantages for yourself.

It's worked for me and plenty of others, has generally been a blast and natural, and most importantly, affords us a life way going forward that can remain a blast, and natural. This is the essential beauty of it. I think diets would be a lot more effective for a lot more people if they could honestly look forward to living that way for the rest of their lives. Can you imagine living on the Dean Ornish chubby-face diet, for life?

But, in order to really capture the advantages and become your own authority, you do need to at least understand what it is that the theory of evolution postulates. And here's something along those lines. Carl Zimmer takes a look at the 20-year (and running) experiment by biologist Richard Lenski. The notion of evolution, most simply, says that every now and then a genetic mutation produces a benefit rather than a detriment, and that over huge swaths of time, these add up. Detrimental mutations (most of them are) just run their course, but beneficial ones give an organism an edge, either in competition for existing food sources, competition for mates, or -- and probably most powerful of all -- ushering in entirely new food sources. The latter is the subject of the article.

More but: you can actually see this work, provided you can use organisms that reproduce fast enough. For Lenski, that involved using E. coli bacteria, with which he's been able to run through 44,000 generations. Counting human generations as 30 years in length, this is roughly equivalent to 1.3 million years of human evolution.

Lenski started off with a single microbe. It divided a few times into identical clones, from which Lenski started 12 colonies. He kept each of these 12 lines in its own flask. Each day he and his colleagues provided the bacteria with a little glucose, which was gobbled up by the afternoon. The next morning, the scientists took a small sample from each flask and put it in a new one with fresh glucose. And on and on and on, for 20 years and running.

Based on what scientists already knew about evolution, Lenski expected that the bacteria would experience natural selection in their new environment. In each generation, some of the microbes would mutate. Most of the mutations would be harmful, killing the bacteria or making them grow more slowly. Others would be beneficial allowing them to breed faster in their new environment. They would gradually dominate the population, only to be replaced when a new mutation arose to produce an even fitter sort of microbe.

Lenski used a simple but elegant method to find out if this would happen. He froze some of the original bacteria in each line, and then froze bacteria every 500 generations. Whenever he was so inclined, he could go back into this fossil record and thaw out some bacteria, bringing them back to life. By putting the newest bacteria in his lines in a flask along with their ancestors, for example, he could compare how well the bacteria had adapted to the environment he had created.

Today, those bacteria breed 75% faster than their ancestors. That's not all.

Out of the blue, their bacteria had abandoned Lenski's glucose-only diet and had evolved a new way to eat.

At about 31,000 generations, some E. coli evolved to eat citrate in addition to glucose, giving them a huge edge. You can read the article for all the details, because that's not really my principal point.

...in generation 31,500, they made up 0.5% of the population. Their population rose to 19% in the next 1000 generations, but then they nearly vanished at generation 33,000. But in the next 120 generations or so, the citrate-eaters went berserk, coming to dominate the population.

This rise and fall and rise suggests that the evolution of citrate-eating was not a one-mutation affair. The first mutation (or mutations) allowed the bacteria to eat citrate, but they were outcompeted by some glucose-eating mutants that still had the upper hand. Only after they mutated further did their citrate-eating become a recipe for success.

You may think this a stretch, but that sounds a lot to me like the advent of human agriculture, only with a twist. Now, human technology is not "evolution," but a consciously guided by-product of it. It's not natural selection.

Looking around, tens of millions of people are on a path to destruction. If we were still evolving naturally, i.e., with no means of controlling or altering our environment except to move to someplace else, then we might expect to either adapt on large scale to eating grains, or they would so debilitate us that grain eaters would eventually go extinct, as did two lines of hominid vegetarians. Instead -- and thankfully so I should add -- we strive to overcome the issue in a deliberate, medical way. That link right above is both frightening and amazing. We're clearly now engineering our own evolution, for better or worse.

But you don't need to risk all that.

Brain Fuel

Chris Highcock emailed this interesting bit of info the other day and I'm just now getting to it. The brain seems to be able to shift to lactate for fuel during strenuous exercise (info: lactate).

Purely speculating, but this may be why some people who get headaches while fasting (low glucose levels) can make them go away with a bit of iron pumping. Also; it suggests, once again, that most exercise experts -- those who counsel you to feed before, after, and often -- just have no serious clue about complex energy pathways naturally selected for over millions of years. 

The evolutionary life way is so much smarter.

From an evolutionary perspective, the result of this study is a no-brainer. Imagine what could have or did happen to all of the organisms that lost their wits along with their glucose when running from predators. They were obviously a light snack for the animals able to use lactate.

As another example of this sort of modern ignorance, anyone recall the fasting and blood glucose experiment performed by myself and others a while back, where our glucose levels increased markedly during exercise and remained elevated for some time, even though fasted for many hours? It's along the same lines as those unnecessarily obsessed (i.e., otherwise healthy people) with hypoglycemia during any sort of strenuous exercise. I've been doing most of my workouts fasted for many months, sometimes as much as 30 hours or more. It's my preferred way to work out and some of the really fabulous results I've obtained in huge strength increases (100-200% in many cases) with only an hour of training per week suggests to me that -- go figure -- our genes are best expressed the more we seek to model and simulate our evolutionary heritage.

Short version: predatory animals don't often hunt on full bellies.