Archive for September 2008
The “Groan” Diet
Mark Sisson dissects "The Zone," and precisely so. I respect Barry Sears, and certainly, his prescriptions are far better than, say, those of the attention grabbing low-fat fat-face Ornish (I emphasize: huge understatement). I tried that diet (Zone) for a couple of months back in the mid-90's when the original book came out. I soon knew it would never work for me. Mark's section on "hunger" is really the essential point. In the end, it suffers from the same deficit as I think the Paleo diet does. Fat is king. It's more than twice as efficient by volume than either protein or carbohydrate, and it's what really makes the difference in dietary success, and I'm thoroughly convinced of that. Fat (animal, coconut --avoid vegetable oils) is what makes the difference between giving in and dialing Pizza Hut, setting off a cascade of diminished-self-image failure, and going in and fixing a cheese omelet cooked in butter. At least it was for me. I said "was." Funny thing is, and you may have noticed: I don't blog nearly as much about the wonders of fats. That's because I don't eat nearly as much, anymore. And it was completely natural. Once I reset...
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Cancer
I had occasion just a bit ago to reference a couple of of posts from the past concerning some unconventional treatments for cancer. Given that there are so many new readers and that this information is so important, I'd thought to highlight those posts. The first has to do with an ancient idea with and even more ancient basis. We didn't evolve side-by-side with refrigerators and freezers. In other words, food was often scarce, so we went hungry sometimes. And, even if food was plentiful, if we're anything like modern carnivores or omnivores, we probably get a pretty good hunger going before bothering to get food. After all, if plentiful, success was assured, so why sweat it? Incidentally, this is now my mode of operation. I never care that much about any particular meal. Hunger is relative, and not very important. Indeed, it's even sometimes enjoyable. Anyway, it turns out that normal cells insulate themselves against stress when you're fasting. However, cancer cells can't do that. The result: fasting protects healthy cells against the ravages of chemotherapy, thereby tipping the balance in the war of attrition that is chemo. Next up concerns the simple logic of macro-nutrient composition applied to...
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Leaving Soon
I'm headed off soon for the weekend, no WiFi. So, this may be the last entry until Sunday night. So, let's make it a food pic, eh? Polish Sausage (uncured), green & red cabbage, onion. Super simple. Maybe 10-15 minutes total, 5 or so in the Wok. This was a while back, so I'm not sure exactly what fat I cooked it in, but I'd say coconut would be just fine.
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Question #8
For those who took the survey (thanks), answered question #8 in the affirmative, and for whom it may not have been strictly hypothetical, please feel free to email me for discussions. No obligations, of course. As I said, you'll not be contacted -- in fact, I have no way of knowing identities anyhoo -- but please do contact me if interested in participating.
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“Jack LaLanne Is Still an Animal”
Well, I can assure you that I had no idea that was out there when I chose the new name for the blog. How, after all these years, does the godfather of fitness do it? By balancing the brain with the beast... Yep, pretty much. Yet, I rather like to think of it as a full embrace of your animal nature and a full embrace of your rational mind. 100% and 100%; 1+1=3. Balance implies dichotomy, and there is none. You are fully, 100% animal biologically and to the extent that you compromise that in any way, you'll suffer (and your mind along with). But I'm sure I know what Jack means. (HT: Mike OD at The IF Life)
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Half Mil
Sometime last evening, this blog surpassed the 500,000 mark for lifetime page views. So, thanks for viewing.
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Would You Eat 18 Ears of Corn?
Here's a theme on what I generally say to people who extoll the goodness and health of fruit juices. Would you eat two dozen oranges in a sitting? I've been known to eat two, but the couple dozen required to make a large glass of OJ? Nope, and this is the problem with highly processed foods: concentration. Go over and see Regina Wilshire's 1000-word picture.
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Dinner Simple & Quick
Grilled swordfish with lemon garnish. Green beans, carrots, yellow squash and a bit of sweet potato (all previously cut up, uncooked leftovers from a seafood Thai curry the other night) stir fried in coconut oil, then finished with a couple of dashes of toasted sesame seed oil and whole seeds. 15 minutes, start to finish.
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Keeping the Animal Free: Pets
How badly some people treat their pets. Some are actually ignorant and arrogant enough to feed dogs a vegetarian diet. I've seen it. It often makes them fat, immobile, flatulent snorting machines. Then they die young, often of heart failure. Here's our two beasts during a hike behind our cabin in Arnold, CA. American Rat Terriers. Nanuka ("Nuke") in the foreground is a 3-yr-old champion female. Rotor, in the background, a 9-yr-old male in pristine health. There's three things we do that keeps them as fit as they are. Lots of play. Lots of walks, including off-leash; not so much so they can run as that they can sprint, all out. Ultra-high protein, ultra low carb. No grains or HFCS: EVER! Now, if you have the time, money and attention, then maybe BARF is for you. But while I'm interested to try it out on the munchkins, I just don't see how it could improve things. Anyway, for better than a year, now, they've been fed exclusively EVO. For snacks, they get the dried chicken and duck meat...ingredients: chicken; duck. The end. It's pretty easy to obtain, but go to all the stores in your area that carry it. Some...
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Seafood Stir Fry
A few weeks back, I'd guess. It's a pack of frozen Seafood Medley from Trader Joe's (shrimp, scallops, calamari), along with celery broccoli, and maybe a thing or two other I can't recall. It's fried in the wok in coconut oil, of course, then sprinkled with paprika and black pepper.
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Public Service Announcement
I plan to do this once per quarter, as I think it's a very worthwhile project. KIVA.ORG Now, you can lend as little as $25 to real micro entrepreneurs in developing countries around the world. You're lending to small business people so they can grow, prosper, and lift their communities. If you're like me, perhaps you have a distaste for most charitable endeavors. Typically, if I like them at all, they'd be something close to home or involve some affinity (such as firefighters across the country giving to the families of 911 firefighter victims). That's cool. But when was the last time someone offered to pay you back, and actually did it? Really, it's only marginally charitable at all. The borrower actually pays interest. You forego interest, which helps to fund the whole endeavor. Pretty slick, if you ask me. In 2 1/2 year, Kiva has accumulated 340,000 lenders who have lent out a total of $50 million in 62,000 loans. Loans average $500 each, and the historical repayment rate is 98%. Good job, I say. I currently have $250 I lend out, which will recycle as payments come in. I plan to add $250 per quarter. I hope you...
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“Noodle Food”
Now with a somewhat ironic metaphorical title for her blog, Diana Hsieh has it nailed. If you have time for the -- now -- 85 comments, you'll see how she has really educated herself quite deeply. No surprise for a professional philosopher -- particularly one used to operating from a set of general, reality based principles. It's a small world. I knew of Diana from USENET way years back, like '94ish. Also, her now husband, Paul. She didn't know until I replied that I was one of those muckrakers on the Objectivist philosophy newsgroups, as I posted under a pseudonym at the time. How surprised I was last night to get an email from Diana out of the blue, also addressed to Art De Vany and Mark Sisson, thanking us all for the help we've been. I'm no match for those guys (yet, I hope), but Beatrice is always telling me that I'm helping more people than I even know. It really is quite a reward to see increasing numbers of people benefit from this knowledge.
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From Hunt to Table
Last week I blogged about my brother's taking of a big mule-deer buck in Utah. Now, here's what it looks like on the table. He writes: I cooked the Venison in Ghee, instead of the traditional flour coating and bacon grease. I sautéed the shitake mushroom in the Ghee and the vegetables in the coconut oil. On a side note, I discovered that cauliflower is absolutely delicious in the coconut oil. The Tomatoes are Heirloom, with fresh mozzarella, onion, and little olive oil and balsamic. I added a little more Ghee to the pan after cooking to deglaze and then poured over the meat, and it was excellent.
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A College Education in Evolutionary Fitness in 8 Minutes
Do you have eight minutes to spare, to acquire every essential you need in the quest to Free the Animal? Thanks to commenter Ricado in a recent hunting post for providing it. I disagree with him on the ethics issue. Provided animals are dealt with in a humane and rational fashion, and the purpose is consumption as food, it passes ethical muster for me. However, there are differing levels of respect for me. Bow hunters get more than rifle hunters. But no one compares to these guys. This is the Gold Standard of hunting. See how many principals you can take from this. The essential one is that this is why you walk the Earth, today. At some point, our primitive ancestors noted that consuming high-energy density animal flesh was a far better strategy for survival, allowing for lots of languid free time and rest. Herbivores spend all their days foraging. Observe gorillas a bit. A dead end, evolutionarily. They simply have no time to do anything but munch on pounds and pounds of fibrous vegetable matter. No time at all to get themselves in the sorts of jams that natural selection feeds on. Of particular note: grasp how our...
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Real Reader Results
Hot out of the email inbox. Last time I went from 2XL to XL. Today, I went from XL to L. Since I eliminated most of my diet soda consumption, and really monitored alchohol intake during fasts -- like none -- I have broken through my latest plateau -- around 232 -- down from 255 -- looking to go back to 2-3 lbs per week. I am ready to do what do what it takes to go down to target 210-212 or 10% body fat -- your last post with your picture illustrations pushed me over -- it is time to stop f***ing around and get serious. Your post was great motivation to me and I am sure many others. Also: I have cut out all "gym aerobics" -- have absolutely no need for any class or mindless activity. It's yours, for the taking. And it's only natural, Animal. Fun. One you learn to Free it.
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Bad Science and Confirmation Bias
Good honest science is first approached by collecting observational data, analyzing for certain relationships, and finally forming hypotheses around the data. But that's just the beginning. The good scientist then does his level best to disprove the hypotheses suggested by the data. To the extent he tries and fails, the hypotheses gain more acceptance. Then, other good scientists set about to disprove, and to the extent they try and fail, the hypotheses become to be "established science." The underlying methodology is one of falsifiability in scientific propositions. Put another way, a scientific proposition must be formed in a way that methodologically makes room for a negative result. Here's my favorite illustration, from the late Carl Sagan in his book, The Demon Haunted World. "A Fire-Breathing Dragon Lives in My Garage." Now, what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to...
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Art De Vany on Lazy Overeaters
This is a clip from the Art De Vany Evolutionary Fitness seminar I attended last May in Las Vegas. This is from his 4-DVD set, seven hours of lecture. At $140 it's a bargain compared to a flight to Vegas, two nights in the hotel, meals, and self-imposed bodily and financial abuse.
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You and Your Animal Are in Charge
Good advice from Doc Eades (author of Protein Power and others) on how to deal with your nutritionally ignorant doctor. The important thing to remember is that you - not your doctor - are the one ultimately in control of your health. I can guarantee you that if you have been reading this blog for any length of time or have roamed through and read in the archives, you are much more nutritionally savvy than the vast majority of doctors out there. The old saw is absolutely true: doctors get very, very little nutritional training in medical school and even less in their post-graduate training. In my own case, I got exactly one lecture on nutrition in medical school, and that was from a registered dietitian, which should tell you all you need to know. And it wasn’t even a lecture on nutrition; it was a lecture on how to write orders for various diets for hospitalized patients. Virtually all of my nutritional knowledge was self taught. And most doctors don’t bother - I didn’t bother for the first five years of my practice. I said all the same ignorant things and gave the same terrible advice that most doctors...
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What Do You Really Know About Dietary Fat?
A commenter on my recent Lard post highlighted a post by Dr. Mary Dan Eades, and that reminded me of a section in Taubes' Good Calories Bad Calories. Let's take a look at both. First to Eades. Now let’s compare lard to that darling of the disciples of the Mediterranean diet: olive oil. Olive oil contains 71% oleic acid, that heart-healthy, monounsaturated fat that we’re supposed to get more of. Lard contains 44% oleic acid, which is more than sesame oil (41%) and double or nearly so the amount in corn oil (28%), walnut oil (28%), and flaxseed oil (21%), more than double the amount in cottonseed oil (19%) and sunflower oil (19%), and nearly triple that in grapeseed oil (15%) and safflower oil (13%). The oleic acid content of lard also exceeds that in beef tallow (43%), butterfat (29%), and human butterfat (ie the fat of breast milk at 35%). Lard also contains a fair amount (14%) of the 18-carbon saturated fat, stearic acid, which has been shown in clinical testing to lower cholesterol. [...] Like olive oil, lard contains 10% of the omega-6 fatty acid linoleic acid, again, roughly the same as human butterfat (breast milk) at 9%....
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Why All Diets and Exercise Programs are Fads and Usually Wrong
It's because they do not integrate evolutionary thinking. This leads to the eating of highly processed and packaged foods, the eating of non-foods, the eating of anti-nutrients and toxins we didn't evolve to eat (like grains -- chiefly wheat and corn), puts us in chronic caloric depravation, ignores gene expression pathways critical to optimal health, overtrains us, focusses on weight loss instead of fat loss and lean gain, and on and on. So, why is an evolutionary approach so essential? From Loren Cordain's free Paleo Diet Update. The graph below illustrates the magnitudes of the time our ancestors ate a Hunters and Gatherers' (H-G) Diet versus when our ancestors consumed a Mass-Agriculture Diet. The specific times used in this graph are 2,000,000 for the H-G Diet and 10,000 years for the geologically recent Mass-Agriculture Diet. Although exact dates and amounts can be argued, and would change some among different ethnic groups and regional histories, the graph would always look very much the same - because regardless of the specific dates you utilize, it always would very definitively involve magnitudes of change difference. Bar graph illustrating a ratio of geologic time: 2,000,000 years vs. 10,000 years. These times are good representations...
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