Archives for July 2012

I’m Outta Here—Hang Gliding

July 31, 2012 45 Comments

I half heartedly considered putting up something on the blog last night.

Went nowhere. Beatrice took me out for sushi instead.

I had just put version 2.0 of the book to bed—off to the editor—and we’ll see what comes of it. I ended up working far more on V2 than V1. It’s done for me, now. Still simple, designed for beginners, but: tons more info, more options, more ideas and more motivation.

…In other news, for the first time since the last Troll Virus months ago (and only one or two prior, ever), I’ve had to ban a girl who didn’t seem too trollish at first, but turned out to be…and then proved herself a troll in competently going around the ban—which is great because that proves she doesn’t respect the property of others (i.e., classic troll). As I write, she’s busily unplugging and plugging back in her dynamic IP modem to grab another IP, using different screen names, different email addresses…all in order to get comments through. But, you get to judge for yourself, as always. I gave her the benefit of dozens of comments, replying civilly to almost every one. But now she’s butthurt because she doesn’t, apparently, get to own my blog and I won’t let her own it. I’m so ashamed.

…Oh, and if you like animal fat, you’re contributing to the destruction of the planet. Y’know, just so you know. I certainly didn’t want any of you to take it non-seriously. Indeed: those links? The survival of the planet and the human race? Yep. At stake. So there you go.

I’m gonna go off and fly my ass off for the better part of a week. Same wing as last year. I’m going to go use global warming to my advantage, if I’m lucky, because hang gliders have two sources of power: gravity and solar (I’ll defer to the aeronautical engineers to explain why). Here’s some recycled photos from last year, ’round this time.

Human Wings

Bird Like

A Far Cry from the Drilled Tubing & Hose Clamps of the 70s

Everyone always asks and so yea, we wear reserve parachutes, repacked once per year.

Never Used

Oh, and did I mention? This one has sprogs in lieu of luff lines for reflex protection. Aren’t you glad?

Negative G Protection

And it arrives on the top of the car, and after taking you a few thousand feet over launch and keeping you there for as long as solar power will allow—which is usaually a few hours or until you tire—you pack it up, toss it top the car and haul it off to the next mountain to do all over again.

Portable

Now isn’t that fucking cool? Really.

I’ll try to report on-scene, as events and circumstances develop. There might even be the most amazing camping cooking you’ve ever seen. We’ll see. No guarantees, and I still have no idea what’s on the menu for my duty night. But it’s pretty much camping, cooking real and damn good, and hang gliding for the next week…upon which it becomes all about #AHS12.

So stick around, will’ya? (all except that troll, of course).

Man Alive! Chapter 9: The High Cost of Mindlessness

July 29, 2012 30 Comments

Here’s the post that kicked it all off. This is chapter 9 of 12, to give interested readers the chance to take on the free ebook chapter by chapter over the weekend, debate it amongst themselves, or even challenge the author who’s keeping tabs.

~~~

From: Man Alive! A survival manual for the human mind.

by Greg Swann

Chapter 9. The high cost of mindlessness.

When you are not thinking carefully, you are not not-thinking. If you are not asleep and not unconscious, you are always thinking – always sustaining an uninterruptible mental “dialogue” with yourself in Fathertongue. But if you are not thinking carefully – thinking mindfully – then you are thinking carelessly – mindlessly. Most of the academic nonsense I have mocked in this book consists of a scrupulous cataloging of the processes and consequences of human mindlessness – which is misrepresented by the professoriat as being the normal state of human consciousness.

The existence and substance of mindlessness are not what the researchers intend to document. Their work is simply a reflection of the fact that, for each one of us, the world we see outside the mind is the one we are looking for from inside the mind. If you want to be excluded entirely from any academic “study,” all you have to do is question the premises – the prejudices – undergirding the “research.” It suits the professorial temperament to insist that your purposive behavior must be the end-consequence of some type of mindlessness – genetics or physical-, psychological- or behavioral-determinism or brain chemistry or vestigial animality or social dynamics or anything except rationally-conceptual volitionality – free will. Accordingly, if you should dare to peek behind the curtain it will turn out that you are not an appropriate test-subject. If the territory does not correspond to the map, by all means dispose of the territory.

…

Dr. Garth Davis, Surgeon: I Warned You….

July 28, 2012 23 Comments

Dr. Garth Davis, after having—probably blissfully confident—posted comments in the original Forks Over Knives thread I blogged about (Doctor FAIL: Garth Davis, Bariatric Surgeon (and China Study Balderdash)) basically did the same blissfully confident, dismissive commenting on that post. Such as this:

This is one of the funniest yet saddest commentaries I have ever seen. You guys are ridiculous. Actually I started as a big time meat eater. I wrote a book in 2007 called “The Experts Guide To Weigh Loss”. In that book I actually wrote a section on diet that basically supported a zone diet. My thought was patients need as high protein as possible. My diet for patients was eggs for breakfast. Turkey and veggies for lunch. Chicken and veggies for dinner. Problem was after reviewing thousands of patients I was finding problems with cholesterol levels and weight gain over time…. [it goes on, devoid of proper paragraph breaks]

“Funniest.” Nice, lazy dismissal. Well, we’ll just see who brought it and who didn’t. Read on, if you want to see pure, unadulterated doctor/surgeon impotence.

….Oh, “as high protein as possible?” Wow. And you wrote a book recommending that? Hmm. He goes on in his comment to basically use the old “been there done that” shtick, without being willing to explain himself or qualify (Campbell does similarly…grew up on a dairy farm…where I guess dairy famers and their children drop like flies). For example, he conflates Blue Zones with 7th Day Adventists—not even conceding that one of the longest living Blue Zone populations—the Okinawans—eat more meat than the traditional Japanese…which would be pork, and that their traditional cooking fat is lard.

…One commenter even felt sorry for him over my treatment in the post. But she proved to be irredeemably irredeemable, in spite of all efforts. The thing is, comments on my blog are both devastating and fucking brutal if you don’t have your shit strait, or can’t defend your ideas. Intentional. No place in the Paleosphere even comes close. We put Socrates to shame and Hegel in short pants, here. There’s no catechismal dispensation here on Free the Animal. You put up, or…

“This is one of the funniest yet saddest commentaries I have ever seen. You guys are ridiculous.”
And why, exactly, are we ridiculous?
“Unlike you guys who get your science from blogs I go to the source sitting through lectures and reading journals.”
Ah yes, the whole tired old bloggers don’t know real science and mathematics schtick. Because no paleo-type bloggers have ever read or wrote about any scientific papers or understand that correlation does not equal causation, or have any sort of inkling of what real Science is, right Doc?
“I will never be set in my ways. If there is some ground breaking science that shows me there is a different way then so be it.”
I find your self assessment of open-mindedness pretty difficult to take seriously, coming from someone who repeatedly uses appeal to authority as an argument.

Dr. Doug McGuff (stating the facts, and only the facts, ma’am):

“Taking a statistics course does not make you a statistician” – ad hominem attack
“The actual china study was printed in Nature, one of the premier scientific journals….” – argument from authority
“Her opinions were published on her blog, not a journal” – argument from authority
“The problem is that lay people just cannot understand the difficulty of statistical significance and therefore will believe anything anybody tells them.” – Nice combo of argument from authority and slippery slope analogy.
“The Weston Price Foundation is one of the least scientific organizations I have studied.” – Unsubstantiated, narcissistic ad hominem attack.
“Why would people believe Minger over physicians and epidemiologists?” – Oh, the same people that gave us heart healthy margarin? – argument from authority.
“You cannot take raw data and make conclusions like she does.” – But you can use the raw data to show how epidemiologists are manipulating statistics to support their pre-determined beliefs. The entire basis of evidence based medicine is an emphasis on raw data as opposed to statistically derived data.

There’s tons there, 115 Comments as of now. After a bit, I began pounding him, including his incomplete and false information about the Masai, not to mention cholesterol and other stuff, including the Okinawans.

While he didn’t address anything I wrote, he did come in with another comment.

I can’t believe all the inflammatory words. You guys are an angry bunch. Doug I can’t believe your comments especially. What kind of doctor are you? I spend my whole life studying diet. I run a very big weight management clinic where we do medical and surgical weight loss and research into the cause and treatment of disease. Denise may be intelligent but any scientist who reads her work can tell she does not know how to analyze data properly. She made huge errors in her critique that even a junior med student should notice….

I had explained to him that Denise did exactly what Campbell did in The China Study in terms of isolated variables (to be more accessible), but that her formal critique included all the multivariate analysis she’d already done from the outset.

“The ridiculous commentary by the Minger is laughable to anybody who understands statistics. You cannot look at raw data and make conclusions, as Denise did, without controlling for confounding variables.”
She addressed this. She actually did numerous MV regressions before publishing her first critique, but wanted to keep it simple and basic for readers (just as in The China Study book). In her formal critique of 30 pages or so, she includes the MV analysis.
http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/08/06/final-china-study-response-html/
Also, it’s as though you didn’t read this post you’re commenting on. I included a number of links to Ned Kock, a statistician who performed a number of MV regressions on the same and different data sets (China Study II) and came to the same findings as Minger.

Alright, as I said, there’s a lot there and I wish I had space to highlight all commenters who added value. But as I said in the title, I warned him. Indeed I did.

Memo to Dr. Garth Davis:
Cat still got your tongue, sir? Well, here. Find me a study that contradicts any of this and factors in the nutritional cost of avoiding or eliminating whole animal foods from the diet.
Grains, Vegetarians, Vegans and Nutritional Density
An excerpt:
Again, look at the numbers at the tops of the bars that are off the chart in order to judge the real relative comparison. As with our other nutritional comparisons, here’s how these meals stack up:
850 Cal (5 pounds) Mixed Raw Fruit: 127% USRDA (4 of 21 nutrients over 100%)
850 Cal (about 8-10 oz) Omivorous Meal: 440% USRDA (12 of 21 nutrients over 100%)
Yes, indeed, in the fruit meal there are only 4 of the 21 nutrients that provide 100% or more of the RDA, but 3 of those 4, just barely (vitamin C being the only one off the scale). So in essence, a single nutrient at 1,500% of the RDA skews the whole analysis pretty badly. If we were to take vitamin C out of the equation and just average the other 20 nutrients, the fruit meal provides only 57% of the RDA. As you can see, however, we do not have nearly this same problem with the omnivorous meal, because 12 of the 21 nutrients are over 100% and of those, 5 are off the scale. Just removing vitamin C as we did in the fruit meal changes nothing at all, because the general nutrition is excellent and widespread.

No response, as we had already been accustomed to for days. My notice to him:

Dr. Garth. Well, what do you think? Inn’t interesting that pure layman are quoting studies to you? You’ve yet to respond to mine, or any of the others.
You stepped in shit. Didn’t you? You should very well know that I am going to blog your comments and your total failure to respond to valid responses if you don’t—and when I do, it’ll be far more Googlishly devastating than this post. I take no prisoners, but I’m a sucker for redemption.
…Yep. You did. You thought everyone would run and hide because you read studies all the time (but have yet to cite one—perhaps you’re afraid of how we’ll tear it to shreds?). We do too (and a number have been cited by myself and others).
Isn’t it wonderful? You have zero power. You have to earn your respect and you know what? You suck in this thread, compared to what others have posted….and everybody knows it. This blog gets over 100,000 visits per month. Thousands of people over years who are curious enough to look at comments are going to see who you relly are. Authoritarian. That’s about it.
And here’s another thing. OK, I can accept that a surgeon with an interest in nutrition eventually tires of the debate. But that’s only because there’s no real debate. This is clearly not the case, here. Very clearly. You have been challenged by your own standards, and you are silent, which of course speaks volumes.
At a point, I debated with myself whether my treatment of you in this post was justified.
Now I know that it was. I’ve been at this for a long time. My judgment of character is pretty spot on.
I remain a sucker for redemption.

Nothing.

Alright, so I kinda had let my warning to to the good Doktor slide; back of my mind and…back of my mind. Enter Stabby! Long time commenter, always keeping me honest, but always being honest himself. Comment from him last night.

Hey Richard, haven’t seen you in a while, just dropping in.
I can’t believe he would reference the EPIC trial. The other trials he cited are inane too, but the EPIC trial didn’t even show that vegetarians lived longer. They had a moderately lower risk of cardiovascular disease, although correlation isn’t causation. But there was no difference in all-cause mortality.
So yes he is a moron about The China Study but he is also a moron about the EPIC trial. And even if vegetarians were significantly healthier than omnivores, that wouldn’t mean much because then we would have to discuss the potential reasons why—and it wouldn’t look pretty for the “meat kills you” side. But oh no, let’s just cherry-pick epidemiology instead of having a real conversation. We just want a “gotcha”…hey, my correlation says this.
And if he’s going to cherry-pick like a knave he should at least learn how to be a good knave.

So there you go. Thanks for the resurrection and motivation, Stabby.

Coming Full Circle

July 28, 2012 24 Comments

I’ve tried a lot of stuff over the years. It’s so easy initially, because when you switch to real food in place of processed and fast, there’s a spontaneous reduction in caloric intake for nearly everyone. That’s why both Paleo and LC work so well initially for the fat people out there. Amazing how switching out processed crap for real food nourishes and satiates you better, and you naturally return to some measure of the real animal you were supposed to be in the first place.

But it’s a double edged-sword. It’s so easy for so many—so long as you resist the temptation to indulge too often—that an almost mysterious or magical element can seep in and some of us—me included—take (or took) some delight in believing we could just eat as much as we desired, so long as keeping it Real™.

Alas, it’s individual, too. Whether it’s because of just the right macro-ratios anyone happens to get right for them, their ability to keep reducing that intake as they lose weight and their base metabolic rate (BMR) comes down, age factors, gender factors… I don’t know. I have a hard enough time figuring it out for myself, much less advising anyone else beyond the basic principles to be applied…and then you’re on your own. Thankfully, I suppose, basic principles are so effed in general that just those alone make profound differences for many.

In the last 8-10 weeks I’ve been simply getting back to basics. What?

Real food (meat, fish, fowl, vegetables—including starchy ones—fruits, a few nuts now and then, a little dairy…mostly the fat).
Reduce drinking calories (including booze).
Intermittent hunger or fasting. Just don’t worry about being hungry. Do something instead.
No serious weighing or counting, but just a general sense of intake, ensuring it’s less than what you need to maintain body fat levels. Easy to do and your hunger can be your guide to that.
Choose very nutritious foods, i.e., eggs, liver, shellfish—including oysters, clams, mussels, and so on.

And fat begins melting away again.

What about the gym and the cold therapy? I tend to go to the gym spontaneously, when I feel I need to get that workout; but when I do, I mean it. I generally do 2 types of sessions, now: (1) DL and leg presses, both heavy, but also light enough to do 2-3 sets in a 6-8 rep range. (2) standing presses, bench or chest presses, and weighted chin-ups or pull-ups. That’s about it. Other than than, it’s play in the backyard with kettlebells.

As to CT, it’s just fun and invigorating, and so I do it, as well as time in the pool. I’m not convinced it has any effect that will overcome bad habits elsewhere. I have a new experiment along the lines of CT, more isolated…I’m still evaluating that. But, I’ve just got to say it: whatever you think you want to try, great. Try it. But I think that a solid diet and discipline in the amount you consume—with excellent, nutritious food choices making it the easiest possible—far outweighs anything else you can do, even solid exercise.

So just a short post, to make it simple. Simple is good.

My Current Paleo Anarchist Landscape; The Ancestral Health Symposium 2012 and the 21 Convention

July 27, 2012 81 Comments

Yea, I maybe want to blog more about fat bread and applications, including mayonnaise making, tuna salad and all sorts of cool such things which, quite to the contrary of motivating me to go hog wild with neolithic foods, has had quite the opposite effect. More on that later.

I’m dashing to finish up V2.0 of the book, now with plenty of pressure to get ‘er done. But I kinda blew myself out a couple of days ago with it and have dreaded getting back to it. I’ll get it done, but my mind is so elsewhere at the moment. Some bullets:

After just shy of 20 years at it, I have decided to close the company I started in a bedroom in 1993 with a coupla hundred bucks to my name (definitive decision Tuesday last). I grew it to a few dozen employees. I’ve hated it for years. Why do something you hate? For money?
I have not only four other books in the works with Hyperink, but I spent all afternoon up in their offices Wednesday shooting video for a beginner’s course on Paleo. This, I love. …Though I didn’t love the 2-hr drive back down to the South Bay in “rush” hour traffic.
I have two other primary initiatives, one as an adjunct to the business I’m shutting down—the part I like—and one as very Paleo related. More later.

What this means is that I’m going to move more and more into this landscape as a livelihood…because I love it, because I likely can, and because I really have a sense of how to do it far different than others—which is perhaps the most passionate aspect of it. And let’s face it. All the blog posts I’ve done are here. There’s a ton of them. In essence, every time I write a new one, it’s like competing with myself. How can someone make it truly better, in perpetuity? The reality is that it’s not possible in an ever increasing sense, and so you have to figure out different channels, new subjects, and so on. Look: how many times can I call dietitian morons fuckheads, and have you laugh?

Yawn. See?

So in less than a week I head up to Hat Creek to fly hang gliders for a few days. Videos of all that here on YouTube, the 4th, 5th and 6th on the list. This will I be my 15th or 16th consecutive year of flying that amazing site. I’ve lost count.

The day after I get back, it’s off to Boston and the Ancestral Health Symposium: #AHS12. Did you see the posts I did about last year’s event?

I actually just surprised myself at how much that event meant to me, realizing how much I blogged it. My presentation is going to be unique amongst all other presentations…I hope. I intend to demonstrate that diet and nutrition aren’t the only thing grains and agriculture fucked up beyond reason and recognition. Mine is: Paleo Epistemology and Sociology. Looks like the schedule has Ron Rosedale, MD and I at 20 minutes each, going up against Terry Wahls, MD, with a 40-minute presentation.

When I get back, it’s but a few days until I head off to Austin for The 21 Convention. I’m basically delivering the same presentation, only far more detailed, an hour vs. the 20 minutes I have at AHS. Other speakers include Keith Norris, Skyler Tanner, Doug McGuff, and Dave Asprey. Robb Wolf was on the schedule as well, but at last I heard he had to cancel. Greg Swann, the guy I’ve been featuring chapter-by-chapter for his book Man Alive! got a gig speaking there too, as a direct result of that series. He goes up right before I do.

Well that’s it for now. Sorry that my blogging has so sucked rancid dog semen this week. I ate something that didn’t quite sit right a couple of days ago and am just getting back to feeling human again.