J.D. Moyer

science fiction author, beatmaker, against fascism

A Meta-analysis of Kooky Diets, Part III — PALEO!

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On March 17

In Evolution/Biology, Health/Body-hacking

This post is a continuation of A Meta-analysis of Kooky Diets, Part I and Part II.  In this post I’ll discuss three proponents of the so-called Paleolithic Diet.  In Part II I introduced the Paleolithic Diet and discussed its core concepts — if you’ve never heard of it you might want to read that post first.

Meat. Not required as part of the Paleolithic diet, but not discouraged either.

In short, the Paleo Diet is a method of eating that excludes foods that were not widely available or consumed by our pre-agricultural ancestors, such as grains, legumes, dairy products, refined sugar, oil, and salt, instead favoring non-starchy vegetables, less-sweet fruits, meat, fish and seafood, poultry, eggs, nuts, and seeds.

Personally, I no longer find this way of eating to be “kooky” in any sense.  When I first heard about it, it seemed both radical and silly.  Sure, it’s reasonable to cut back on white sugar and white flour, but to also cut out whole-grains?  Wholesome oats and brown rice are out?  Whole-grains are good for you, aren’t they?

Whole-grains may be good for you when compared to eating refined grains, and that’s what most of the research examining the health benefits of whole grains has looked at.  For whatever reasons, few researchers have compared a diet including whole grains to a diet including no grains.  Those that did found that a grain-free diet led to rapid weight loss, improved glucose tolerance, faster muscle gain, and a number of other benefits (please see Part II for links to clinical studies).

The Paleolithic Diet has been around since the 70’s, but more recently a number of Paleo evangelists have been spreading the word; grain-free is the way to go.  I’ll introduce three of these health nuts and you can draw your own conclusions.

Arthur De Vany

I first became aware of Arthur De Vany after reading an interview with him about nutrition and exercise, and seeing the picture on the right.  A guy approaching seventy who looks that ripped?

Arthur De Vany, at age 68, going for a quick sprint.

There are plenty of meatheads in their twenties or thirties can develop a ripped physique, even if their diet includes Pop Tarts and pasta.  Decent genetics, lots of working out, maybe some steroids, and BAM! there you go — comic book muscles.  But Art De Vany — he seemed to defy aging.  It got me, and a lot of other people, very curious.

I began reading Arthur De Vany’s blog at http://www.arthurdevany.com.  I learned about his system of health dubbed Evolutionary Fitness, based on a “Paleo-Med” eating plan (a cross between Paleolithic diet and Mediterranean diets) and short, irregular bouts of intense physical exercise, with an emphasis on weight-lifting, sprints, jumping and leaping, and no distance running or jogging (the latter two being actively discouraged).  He also blogged about more personal things, including his beloved wife passing away, his frustrations with his incompetent softball team, and his occasional trouble with insomnia.  His blog included a wide range of intellectual ideas; he shared his opinions and theories about teaching, Hollywood economics, evolution, climate change, and a number of other topics.  I use the past tense because he has since made his blog private — its popularity was resulting in excessive bandwidth fees and occasional outages.  Art De Vany himself is still going strong — and you can still read his blog if you don’t mind paying the subscription fee.

One interesting feature of his previous public blog is that he would occasionally post a picture of a meal.  At first Art seemed a bit baffled — why were those simple posts so popular?  His readers kept requesting more pictures of his meals.  The fact is that it’s hard to imagine what a grain and starch free meal looks like if you’re used to eating cereal and milk for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, and pasta for dinner.  Seeing pictures of Art’s breakfasts (maybe an omelet with fruit on the side, or a pork chop with half a melon, usually with a cup of black coffee), and lunches and dinners (colorful salads, grilled vegetables, sizzling steaks, racks of ribs, slices of avocado, olives, sometimes a glass of wine or a beer) helped me and a lot of other people think more creatively about our meals.  That’s what a diet is, after all, it’s meals.  You’ve got to put food on the table three times a day, and like it, in order to stick to any kind of eating plan.

There was an ad I saw about ten years ago (I forget what for), a picture of a juicy steak like this and the caption was “the new health food.” No longer so shocking …

At the time I was reading his blog on a regular basis, Art De Vany’s version of the Paleolithic Diet included lean meat, poultry and eggs, seafood, nuts, non-starchy vegetables (both raw and cooked), and fresh fruit.  Olive oil and olives were included, as well as some wine and cheese (the “Med” part of “Paleo-Med”).  De Vany, at least at that time, limited his saturated fat intake by trimming the fat off of his steaks, and preferring low-fat cheeses such as Jarlsberg.

For supplements, Art De Vany takes (and recommends) cod liver oil and l-glutathione, the first for its Omega-3 and vitamin A content, the second for its antioxidant and anti-aging properties.  He also recommends Mark Sisson’s supplement pack, which is how I came to learn about Sisson (who I’ll discuss next).

Art De Vany is an interesting character.  His writing style can come off as over-authoritative, but at the same time he’s obviously well-educated and extremely knowledgeable.  I heard a radio interview with him, and was surprised by how soft-spoken he was … somehow I expected a more macho or at least enthusiastic tone.  How to put this … he’s like a nerd-athlete hybrid.

Art De Vany’s views around climate change have generated some controversy.  His opinion, as I understand it, is that most models of climate change are bunk; there is too much randomness and there are too many variables that influence climate to be able to generate a reliably predictive model.  This opinion has somehow “rippled out” among the “Paleo community” as it is; there seems to be a large of number of “climate skeptics” or “global warming deniers” — whatever you want to call them — among Paleo diet enthusiasts.  Maybe it has to do with people who identify themselves as bucking the status quo and thinking differently from the mainstream.  Or maybe it’s the macho thing, eat meat and drive a big car?  I really don’t get it.  The logical approach to environmental issues if you are a skeptic of global warming models is extreme conservationism, as outlined here (see entry #120) by Nassim Taleb (the author of The Black Swan, and also a follower of Art De Vany’s Evolutionary Fitness program).

I’m glad I discovered Art De Vany’s site … it influenced me to eat more healthfully and helped me imagine what a meal without a “pile o’ starch” could look like.  But it wasn’t until I started reading Mark Sisson’s blog, marksdailyapple.com, that the Paleolithic Diet really came together for me.

Mark Sisson

Mark Sisson is a former professional athlete (distance runner and triathlete) who now writes a popular blog at marksdailyapple.com.  He’s written a number of books on diet and exercise, and also runs a supplement company called “Primal Nutrition.”

Mark Sisson doesn’t seem to own any shirts.

He’s 56 and in very good shape.

His blog is an abundant (and sometimes overwhelming) source of information.  He’s not kidding about the daily part; there really is a new, detailed post every day.  Topics are centered around what Sisson calls the “Primal Blueprint” — his holistic plan for total health that is based on his version of the Paleolithic diet — but also branch out to cover a vast array of health-related topics.

Sisson’s version of the Paleolithic Diet is comparatively easy to follow.  He recommends cutting out grains, legumes, potatoes, and refined sugar almost entirely, but moderate amounts of coffee, tea, wine, beer, salt, dark chocolate, and even cheese are not discouraged.  Sisson comes right out and says that a Paleo Diet should be a high fat diet.  The first time I read that, I remember feeling skeptical, but those two words turned out to be the key for me to personally adopt a Paleo eating style.  Before I started using more olive oil, butter, coconut oil in my cooking, and eating fattier cuts of meat and more fatty fish, I would just get too hungry if I wasn’t eating breads and cereals.

Sisson also recommends supplementing with fish oil.  In fact, he recommends supplementing with just about everything.  Check out the ingredient list for his top-selling supplement “Damage Control Master Formula.”  If those doses are

If I ate like this every night I wouldn’t have to take any fish pills.

supposed to be daily, some of them strike me as too high.  The water-soluble vitamins aren’t a problem, but trace minerals like zinc, copper, selenium, and manganese can build up in the body and have toxic effects.  This article references symptoms of manganese toxicity occurring in individuals drinking water with levels as low as 2mg/liter (each dose of Damage Control Master Formula has 10mg).  On the other hand, the same article points out only one case of manganese toxicity from supplement use, and none from food, so maybe 10mg/day is a reasonable dose.

Questions of dosages aside, Sisson gives the impression of genuinely caring about the health of his readers and customers — I don’t doubt his claim that his supplements contain fresh, high quality ingredients.

There is definitely a sense of community among the readers of Sisson’s blog — people supporting each other in a lifestyle choice that many people view as radical (for some reason people are more threatened by the idea of the Paleolithic diet than they are by vegetarianism).  Sisson often shares reader testimonials — like this one which I found to be quite moving.  It parallels my own experience — feeling that my body was somehow permanently damaged or broken (with adult-onset asthma and allergies in my case) and then experiencing a total cessation of symptoms within days of changing my diet.  A “second chance,” a “new lease on life,” — those phrases don’t do the feeling justice.  Here’s a brand new body — one that works! That’s more what it felt like.

Mark Sisson’s blog is a great source of information, and his tone is friendly, non-dogmatic, and nonjudgmental.  If a friend or family member expresses interest in changing the way they eat, I usually refer them to marksdailyapple.com

Loren Cordain

Dr. Loren Cordain is a professor in the Department of Health and Exercise Science at Colorado State University, and is the author of The Paleo Diet, a popular book published in 2002.

Dr. Cordain, rockin’ the center part.

Cordain’s take on the Paleolithic diet is similar to both Art De Vany’s and Mark Sisson’s.  He suggests that genetically, human beings are poorly adapted to eat grains, beans, dairy products, alcohol, and salt, and recommends eating fruits and vegetables, lean meat, seafood, poultry, nuts, and seeds instead.

In the Paleo community, Cordain’s view that saturated fat intake should be limited is controversial.  In The Paleo Diet, Cordain clearly puts saturated fats in the “bad fats” category, along with trans fats and polyunsaturated fats like corn oil (as opposed to “good fats” like Omega-3 fish oils and monounsaturated fats like olive oil and avocado).  In the same book he argues that wild game is quite lean as compared to domestic cattle.

Since then, it seems that Cordain’s view on saturated fats has become more nuanced.  If you carefully read the FAQ on his website you’ll see that Cordain no longer recommends reducing saturated fats.  He seems to consider them more “neutral” than “bad” at this point, and concedes that prehistoric humans probably preferred fattier meat when they could get it (this coincides with the Inuit’s warnings regarding the overconsumption of lean winter caribou as discussed in my previous post A Meta-analysis of Kooky Diets, Part I).

Cordain still holds to the view the eating lots of bacon, sausage, and other salty, fatty meats is no good for health and may raise the risk of heart disease.  To me this seems reasonable, despite the fact that it overlaps with conventional dietary wisdom.

Cordain has some interesting views regarding tomatoes.  Unlike other Paleo advocates, he considers them a neolithic food (my wife Kia challenged this assumption when she heard it — tomatoes had to grow in the wild somewhere and someone must have been eating them since pre-agricultural times.  The Department of Horticulture at University of Wisconsin-Madison agrees with her — early inhabitants of what is now Peru probably dined on wild tomatoes.)

Beautiful, delicious, and … evil?

In any case Cordain consider the lectin in tomatoes (which, by the way, is impervious to heat) to be harmful to human health.  He views the peanut lectin, the protein casein in milk, and grain lectins with equal disdain, but we already knew those foods were not allowed for wannabe cavemen, didn’t we?  But the delicious and healthful tomato?  Packed with vitamin C, potassium, lypocene, and glutathione?  Really?

If you have the time, and can stomach it, watch Cordain’s hour long lecture on lectins and multiple sclerosis.  It’s fascinating (and disturbing).  He explains in great detail how various lectins make their way into the bloodstream and interact with the immune system, essentially tricking your own body into attacking itself.  I used to use a great deal of tomato paste in my cooking — I don’t any longer after watching the video of his lecture.  I still sometimes eat fresh tomatoes though, as long as they’re ripe.  (Did you know green tomatoes have a poison calls solanine in them?  Yes, fried green tomatoes = poisonous snack.)

SUMMARY

There are a number of criticisms of the Paleolithic Diet, but most of them are quite weak.  The low-fat diet recommended for the past several decades by official sources in the U.S. has been largely debunked; in practice it has led to massive weight gain, greater instances of Type 2 diabetes, and no appreciable reduction in heart disease or cancer.

Sometimes the Paleo diet is lumped in with Atkins, but this doesn’t make sense; unlike Atkins the Paleo diet is rich in antioxidant-packed fruits and vegetables, is low in salt, and very low in processed foods of any type.  It is generally low-carb, but far from zero-carb (Sisson recommends keeping carb intake between 50 and 100g/day if you want to lose body fat, up to 200g/day depending on your size and muscle mass in order to maintain).

One criticism that I consider to be at least semi-valid is the fact that humans have evolved biologically in the 10K years or so since we invented agriculture.  Some of us have genetically adapted to our “new” neolithic diet, at least to some extent.  I, for one, have no problem digesting lactose.  I’m lactose tolerant — I inherited the “right” genes from my European ancestors who co-evolved with cattle (less than 25% of humans carry this gene, and yet we talk about “lactose intolerance” as if it were some kind of rare disorder!).  People whose ancestors evolved in agrarian societies tend to have more copies of the gene that helps produce amylase, the enzyme in saliva that breaks down starch.  This is one example, discussed in this NY Times article, of how culture and the human genome co-evolve.

That’s the big picture — we push against our environment, our environment pushes back, and we either adapt ourselves, or change our environment, or both, or we perish.  Human beings haven’t stopped evolving genetically.  In fact, we’re changing faster than ever.  Still, genetic change happens slowly, over many generations, and it’s obvious that the modern industrial diet of highly processed, high-carb fake food is not the ideal fuel for the human body and mind.  Paleo diet advocates (myself included) would go further and say that the relatively “new” foods like grains, legumes, dairy products, and nightshade vegetables, while they may not be harmful in small amounts, are not ideal staples (and for most people in the world they are staples).

Another possibly valid criticism is that not everyone in the world can afford to eat a diet that is high in protein and low in grain.  This might be true — we know that the world’s fisheries are overburdened, and also that it takes a great deal of water, pasture and/or grain to raise a cow, but these facts must be weighed against the following counter-arguments.

  • The collapse of the world’s fisheries has as much to do with poor ocean resource management (a lack of protected areas, poor enforcement of existing protections, wasteful and destructive fishing practices, etc.) as it does with how much fish we eat.
  • Growing grains and beans takes up an enormous amount of land and water and fossil fuel fertilizers and pesticides; intensive polycultural farming techniques that produce meat, vegetables, and eggs might give us more food in exchange for less land and water, and improve the soil quality while we’re at it.
  • The number of overweight people in the world (not just the U.S.) has reached epidemic proportions.

Some of use may be better adapted to “modern” foods, but most people would probably experience health improvements if they switched to a diet that more closely resembled what our distant ancestors ate.  I think groups who would most benefit from a Paleolithic diet, in order, would include:

  1. Anyone with a direct intolerance of gluten, anyone with celiac disease, anyone with IBS, anyone who has noticeable trouble digesting grains and/or dairy products
  2. Anyone with an autoimmune disorder of any kind, including multiple sclerosis, arthritis, lupus, asthma, or allergies.
  3. Anyone with (or at risk for) Type 2 diabetes, Metabolic Syndrome/Syndrome X
  4. Anyone who wants to reduce their risk of heart disease, cancer, and dementia
  5. Anyone who wants to gain muscle, lose body fat, have more energy, have clearer skin, not get sleepy after meals, sleep better at night, have a higher sex drive, and feel happier.

Did I leave anyone out?

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Sleep Experiment – A Month With No Artificial Light

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On March 4

In Evolution/Biology, Health/Body-hacking, Lifestyle Experiments, Mental Health, Metaprogramming

In an earlier post, I mentioned how my family (it’s not something you can do without your whole household participating) went without artificial light (including all electric lights, TV, and computers) after sundown, for all of June in 2009.  June, being the month of the longest days, was the easiest month for such an experiment.

“Full of Ideas” by Cayusa

Soon after writing that post, we decided to try the experiment again, but this time for the month of February — a month with much shorter days and longer nights.  I was traveling during the last week of February, so it was effectively only a twenty day experiment.  Still — both the effects and the experience itself were dramatic. In a nutshell: more sleep, better sleep, improved mood, and an entirely different rhythm to both waking and sleeping life.  There were some downsides too, which I’ll also discuss.

WHY

The first time we tried the experiment, in June 2009, we were primarily interested in catching up on sleep.  Our daughter was born in March of 2008 — after more than a year a full night’s sleep was still elusive.  As someone who had always been a night-owl at home, but never had any trouble going to sleep by 8:30 when camping, I already suspected that artificial light (as opposed to firelight, starlight, or moonlight) was what was keeping me from going to bed earlier.  Reading this article by Verlyn Klinkenborg in the New York Times confirmed that suspicion.

An even earlier, unrelated 30-day experiment (I’ve done over a dozen at this point), during which I resolved and attempted to go to bed earlier, had failed miserably.  On average I’d gotten to bed 45 minutes earlier; say quarter-after-eleven instead of midnight.  I just found it impossible to go to bed when I wasn’t sleepy (which I distinguish from tired — just because your mind and body need sleep doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll feel sleepy).  Just trying — willing myself — to go to bed earlier didn’t work very well — it certainly didn’t result in the kind of radical sleep improvement I was looking for.

On the other hand, the June experiment with no artificial light was a huge success.  Kia and I immediately started going to bed between 9 and 10 instead of around midnight.  We quickly caught up on sleep, sleeping ten or eleven hours a night at first, then normalizing around eight hours.  One thing we both noticed was a huge boost in mood — moments of unexplained, unreasonable joy would strike us at random times during the day.  I’m not talking about the calm sea of serenity — I’m talking about bursts of goofy delight — the kind that’s really obnoxious to the moody people around you.

So … we wanted to try it again.

THE RULES

Compared to June, February was a whole different ball game.  Some days in June the sky was light until 9:30pm — in February we ended up lighting the candles as early as 5pm.  I was concerned about not being able to get any work done, so we set 7:30pm as a cutoff for computers getting turned off.  Here’s a list of the rules we decided to live by:

  • no artificial light, including overhead lights, lamps, and the refrigerator light
  • candles allowed
  • computers allowed until 7:30pm
  • TV not allowed after sundown (except TV on computers until 7:30)

THE NEGATIVES

Anger
One thing I experienced during the experiment was anger and frustration at not being able to f*cking see anything.  Stepping on toys on the floor, bumping into table corners, searching for matches by moonlight — none of it fun.  Cooking by candlelight can also be difficult.  After a day or two I gained some awareness around what was happening emotionally.  I did choose to do this, after all.  The key to dealing with the anger was to conduct my actions more carefully, and with more foresight, during the long evenings.  Light the candles before it gets totally dark.  Make sure to light a couple candles in the bathroom.  Be vigilant about cleaning up toys (and getting our daughter to clean up her toys) before it gets dark.

Drip drip drip.

Wax
Wax is pollution.  Little wax drips, everywhere, are hard to avoid when you’re walking around (or stumbling over things) while holding a candle.  Scraping hardened wax off of tables and floors is a drag.  Kia was reading a book — it might have been a George Elliot novel, in which people who stay up late are called wax-drippers.  This seems to imply that, at least in pre-Industrial England, most people didn’t even bother lighting candles; they just went to bed when it got dark.

The pollution angle; it made me think about how entire classes of pollution can disappear, practically overnight.  In the horse-and-buggy age, major cities were covered in horse shit.  It was a serious problem, with no end in sight.  Once the car came along, the horse shit vanished.  Wax drippings similarly disappeared as a major problem with the advent of the electric light.  This book review in the New Yorker talks about the same idea in more detail.

If we’d had proper candle-holders with wide bases this problem could have been avoided, or at least attenuated.

Less Productivity
Sometimes getting in a couple hours of work (in the broadest sense, including creative work and “fun” work) after the kid goes to bed can make a day feel more productive.  Feeling productive, while not important for everyone, is important for my own mental well-being.  I don’t really buy into the idea of the Protestant Work Ethic (nobody works harder than Japanese salarymen, and they’re pretty far removed from any Calvinist cultural heritage), but I do feel better at the end of the day if I’ve created wealth, whether it be in the form of billable hours, progress on a music or writing project, fixing up the house — anything with a tangible, observable result that has at least a chance of positively affecting my own (or someone else’s) future experience.

It’s hard to be productive by candlelight.  I took to writing longhand in a notebook, which I’m still doing, but in the evenings I couldn’t work on music production (computer needed), clean the house (more light needed), work on programming projects (computer needed), work on artwork, contracts, or email correspondence for Loöq Records (once again, computer needed), or most anything else that results in feeling like I got something done.

No TV
This is more of a wash than a negative.  I didn’t watch any TV during the experiment — there just wasn’t any time.  I like TV — at least good TV — and I missed it somewhat.  It wasn’t that it wasn’t allowed — I could have watched my favorite shows during the day if I’d really made it a priority.

Now that it’s March I’m all caught up on Lost.  Thank you Hulu — the motives of the smoke monster are slowing becoming clear.

THE POSITIVES

Sleep
Going in, I wasn’t as sleep-deprived this time, but we immediately started going to bed earlier.  Sometimes I would sleep straight through the night, 10 to 6 or so.  Other times I would go to bed really early, like 8:30, and then get up around 2:30am.  This was alarming at first, but then I remembered that this sleep pattern was quite common in pre-electric light days.  When this happened I would end up reading or writing by candlelight for an hour or two, then going back to bed.  This is apparently called bimodal sleep, as noted in the Verlyn Klinkenborg New York Times article where he describes an experiment conducted by sleep researcher Thomas Wehr (Wehr ‘s volunteers have subjected themselves to to 14 hours of darkness each night):

What Wehr found was remarkable. The first night the volunteers slept 11 hours, and in the first weeks of the experiment they repaid 17 hours of accumulated sleep debt — i.e., they slept 17 hours longer than they would have called normal for the same period. It took three weeks for a sleep pattern to stabilize, and when it did it lasted about eight and a quarter hours per night. But it was not consolidated sleep, and it was not just sleep. Over time, Wehr explained, “another state emerged, not sleep, not active wakefulness, but quiet rest with an endocrinology all its own.”

Each night the volunteers lay in a state of quiet rest for two hours before passing abruptly into sleep. They slept in an evening bout that lasted four hours. Then they awoke out of REM sleep into another two hours of quiet rest, followed by another four-hour bout of sleep and another two hours of quiet rest before rising at 8 A.M. This pattern of divided sleep, separated by rest, is called a bimodal distribution of sleep, and it is typical of the sleep of many mammals living in the wild, which is to say that it is atypical of humans living in modern Western society. Yet in a forthcoming article, to be published in a volume called “Progress in Brain Research,” Wehr concludes that “in long nights . . . human sleep resembles that of other mammals to a much greater extent than has been appreciated.” Bimodal sleep, punctuated by quiet rest, was a pattern to which modern Americans reverted almost as soon as they were given the chance.

“In healthy people,” Wehr remarked, “this bimodal pattern of sleep would be called a sleep disorder, although the resemblance to animal sleep confirms its naturalness. And as people get older they revert to this pattern of divided sleep. Perhaps it gets harder to override it.”

I asked Wehr whether any of his subjects had gone crazy lying in the dark during those long nights.

None had. “Anyone could do it,” he said.

In addition to getting enough sleep each night, the quality of my sleep was definitely better.  We’re still co-sleeping with our daughter, now 2, and any restlessness tends to affect me most.  On bad nights I sometimes prefer the couch to our overcrowded bed.  However no couch for the month of February — when I was sleeping, I was out cold.

Illuminated.

Our daughter also got on an earlier schedule.  In January she’d gotten in a bad cycle of staying up until 9 — no fun for anyone.  She would get overtired and overstimulated, and falling asleep was getting harder and harder.  Immediately — by Day 1 of the experiment — she was fast asleep by 7.  What a huge relief.

With no artificial light, there is definitely more time in bed, half-awake.  Wehr refers to this state as quiet wakefulness.

Living year-round on midsummer time, with long days and short nights, “has obtained,” Wehr writes, “for so many generations that modern humans no longer realize that they are capable of experiencing a range of alternative modes that may once have occurred on a seasonal basis in prehistoric times but now lie dormant in their physiology.” While humans worry about how much further we can compact our actual sleep time, we’ve already jettisoned six nightly hours of quiet winter rest. In a most meaningful sense, those are transitional hours. Once in the night and once in the early morning, Wehr’s volunteers woke out of REM sleep, which is strongly associated with dreaming, into a period of quiet wakefulness quite distinct from daytime wakefulness. Perhaps as we’ve learned, over time, to sleep a less characteristically mammalian sleep, we’ve also learned to sleep a less human sleep.

Quiet wakefulness is great, especially when you’re not worried about not being asleep.  In other words, if you’ve already slept seven or eight hours (because you went to bed at 9pm), then being awake, or half-awake, in the middle of the night isn’t accompanied by fears of being tired the next day.  In this state, which sometimes persisted for more than an hour, I would let my mind roam … sometimes just watching my dreamlike thoughts, sometimes directing them a bit.  What will a character in my novel do next?  What color should I paint the garage?  It’s a great time to ask your brain questions which require creative answers.

Alternative Activities & Entertainment
During the long, candlelit evenings, without computers or TV, we found other ways to occupy ourselves.  We read by candlelight, we had friends over for after-dinner drinks and snacks, we played board-games, and, well, use your imagination.  The evenings were long and enjoyable.

Adventure Fantasy, Imagining The Past
The experiment gave our evenings an adventurous flavor.  We were roughing it (a little).  I would sometimes imagine we were living in the woods, far from civilization.  The experience made me consider how each generation lives differently, and that with new technologies we both gain and lose certain types of experiences.  It’s valuable to step out of the current technological zeitgeist — it changes the way you think and perceive the world.

CONCLUSION
The convenience of being able to flip a switch and have instant illumination can’t be overstated.  But the downsides of cheap light may be as serious as the downsides of cheap food.  Artificial light disrupts our circadian rhythms, prevents the production of melatonin, increases the risk of certain cancers including breast cancer and prostate cancer, and can generally wreak havoc with our health.  My guess is that artificial light is causally linked to obesity, depression, immune disorders, and cancer, not to mention daytime tiredness.

Candle time.

After the experiment I see artificial light as something like sugar.  We’re drawn to it, but too much is bad for us.  In fact, it seems to be bad for us in many of the same ways — sleep deprivation reduces insulin sensitivity in the same way excessive sugar intake does.

For me, gone are the nights of having every light in the house blazing.  The refrigerator light is back on, the bathroom light goes on when I’m in there, but otherwise it’s candles and maybe a mood light here and there.  Even with this limited artificial light, the glow from my laptop is keeping me up later.  Last night I slept from 11:45 to 6:15 — not bad but nothing like the solid eight hours I was getting most nights in February (one night I even slept eleven hours — I was tired and there was nothing preventing me from catching up).

I can function with as little as five or six hours of sleep as night.  But with that little sleep (especially for more than one night), I’m not at my best, or my happiest, or my most creative; I’m just grinding through life.  Since the only thing we have in life is quality of our consciousness, and sleep deprivation so obviously and negatively affects the quality of our consciousness, it makes sense to prioritize sleep.  Most people would agree, but almost nobody does dedicate enough time to sleep.  Why?  The ubiquity of artificial light.  It’s like going to a cake store, buying every delicious-looking cake, coming home and arranging them on your dinner table, and then resolving not to eat any sugar.

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The Inefficacy of Using Physical Objects as Reminder Flags

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On February 28

In Metaprogramming

Last week I stayed at my friend’s place in Seattle — a sort of writing retreat to work on my novel.  I made huge progress on the book, took long walks in some of the area old-growth forests, ate fantastic food, and relaxed — a good week.

My friend, in addition to being a gracious host (he might even qualify as a patron of the arts — we’ll see how my book turns out), is one of the neatest people I know.  Not neat as in neato, but neat as in meticulously clean.  His house is spotless.  Granted, I arrived minutes after the housekeeper had cleaned the place, but it’s obvious he’s organized and keeps his house in order.

Really?

This is something I aspire to.  Coming home, I immediately started cleaning our place — after you’ve been away you see your own abode (and its grime) with fresh eyes.  With a toddler in the house, cleaning feels like running up the down escalator — as I’m scrubbing the countertops she’s scattering playing cards on the floor; as I’m picking up the playing cards she’s leaving a trail of cheese crumbs in another room.  Still, at the moment, the house looks and feels pretty clean.

All this got me thinking about stuff, and how we process stuff in our lives.  The idea in particular I was thinking about — I think it’s from David Allen’s book Getting Things Done — is that it’s almost always a BAD idea to put or leave something on your desk or workspace as a reminder that you need to do something about it.

Unless you have a freakishly low number of things that you need to do in your life (that makes me think of Doris Lessing’s creepy story “To Room Nineteen”) then using the “put it there so I remember” method will lead to nothing except a messy desk.  In the more severe cases, this method can lead to a kind of personal geology; strata of object/to-do-item matrices teetering in unstable stacks.  After the initial layer becomes visually obscured, the “reminder” function ceases to operate and the entire layer devolves into undifferentiated junk.

Not my wife's desk.

What is the alternative?  My wife, frustrated with her own less-than-orderly workspace, happened to ask me that very question this morning.  (As an aside, I’ve been trying to get her to read the David Allen book for about seven years.  Periodically she’ll accept the book and place it on her desk, where it will sit, unread, until buried by other papers and items.)

Since I’d been thinking about the subject for the last couple days, I had an answer ready: don’t use stuff as a reminder; instead put the thing (whatever it is) away, and put whatever action is required on your to-do list.  Kia immediately understood and implemented the idea, and within half an hour her desk was transformed into a postmodern minimalist’s masturbation fantasy.  Okay, not quite, but it looked clean and organized, with only one pile of papers.  The rare book she needed to return went to the bookshelf.  Her passport (which needs renewing) went to the drawer.  And so on.

Most of the time I accumulate things to do faster than I can do them.  This imbalance is reconciled by the fact that some things never get done.  I’m fine with this reality — there will always be more possible actions than actual actions in life.  If it’s not going to get done, I’d rather have the doomed to-do item be represented as a line of text in my calendar software than a piece of crap on my desk.  The extra typing is well worth it.

Find the little kid.

In some cases, putting the object away (like returning a book to your bookshelf) may not even reduce the chance that you see it and remember to do something with it.  This comes back to the zero percent chance that the visual reminder trigger will work if you put anything on top if it.

The Unlasting Benefits of Practically Everything

By

On February 23

In Health/Body-hacking, Metaprogramming, Writing

Habit trumps all.

All self-improvement efforts are ultimately irrelevant and ineffective if they don’t evolve into habits or routines.  A string of yoga classes you did last year?  Worthless.  A meditation retreat you completed two months ago?  Now adding nothing to your peace of mind.  A two week cleanse?  Why bother?

This is a frustrating reality of maintaining a biological, constantly regenerating organism.  You can’t build your body or mind like a house; there’s too much flux.

Brick hard abs -- nice one.

There are crucial moments in the development of a human being where the environment can exert a permanent effect.  Early-childhood education, prenatal nutrition, and a loving family home  are all important.  But in adult life, what matters far more is what we do every day.

Is this an obvious concept?  A truism?  It seems like it is, but it’s contrary to the way health, fitness, and personal development practices are presented to us.  Lose ten pounds in two weeks.  Participate in a ten day intensive, life-changing meditation retreat. To me these two pitches sound exactly the same.  Do something for awhile, then stop doing it and watch any positive effects fade away.

Is it implicit, in the “improve yourself temporarily” style pitch, that the behavioral change will be permanently implemented?  I don’t think so.  The pitch is usually to expend a great amount of willpower over a short amount of time to see fast results.  But if the practice is unsustainable — either because it requires too much effort or because it overstresses the organism — then it won’t be continued.  The id will rebel.  The results might be ugly.

ID REBELLION

Personality is not monolithic; we careen through life propelled by a chaotic network of warring motivational subcenters.  On good days our frontal cortex mediates the disputes and we present the world with something resembling a rational, consistent human being.  It’s a false front.  Free will is mostly illusory.  At best we can steer ourselves a little, modifying the well-worn pathways that control our behavior so that our habits better serve us.

The superego-heavy approach, where we whip ourselves like racehorses, compelling our bodies and minds to conform to whatever high expectations we have set up for ourselves (or others have set up for us), can work for a period of time.  There’s nothing wrong with driving ourselves hard, especially if we believe in what we’re working for or towards; if the result will pay lasting dividends to ourselves or our loved ones or all of humanity.  But if this period of intense self-control is not followed up by a more relaxed interval — either a conscious letdown, a vacation or stay-cation, or at least some relaxation of standards — then our subconscious minds may grab the reins and force the issue.  We act out.  We break down.  We hit creative blocks.  We burn bridges.  The reptilian brain, in its lowly position at the bottom of the spinal totem pole, still wields a great deal of power.  Respect the id.

HABIT AS LEVERAGE, OR WORK MULTIPLIER

I’ve discussed the idea that willpower is a commodity; we only have so much each day to spend.  The workaround is establishing a habit.  Habitual behavior doesn’t require willpower — it’s the default setting.  It’s cruise control.  If we can find ways of eating, sleeping, working, relating to people, and even thinking that serve us well, it’s in our interest to habituate those behaviors.  That’s where the willpower comes in — making the change.

I say this not as a paragon of good habits, but rather as someone who’s interested in seeing the effort that I do expend go further.  Essentially, I’m lazy.  I prefer both rest and recreation to back-breaking work.  I don’t mind work itself, but I hate pointless work, or work that doesn’t produce something of lasting value.

Deciding what is a good habit requires some degree of analytical thinking and experimentation.  Whatever analogy you want to use to describe our genetic, cultural, and historical predestination (“the hand we’re dealt” or “the set of tools we’re given”), the fact is that there is no single best way of living that works for everybody.  A lot of this has to do with what we like to do.  An exercise regimen based on jogging won’t work if you hate jogging.  Okra may be in high in vitamin C, but that won’t benefit you if you can’t make yourself eat it.  Making money by selling a product online and building your website via targeted marketing won’t work if you hate analyzing web traffic.

Thanks but no thanks.

We can force ourselves to do things that we hate doing, under the auspices that those things are “good for us,” or “smart things to do,” but ultimately we’re just burning willpower for no good reason.  There are hundreds of ways to stay fit and hundreds of ways to eat healthfully.  It makes sense to search the permutations until you find a method that you don’t detest.

On the other hand if we spend time and effort “locking in” effective behaviors that we essentially like to do anyway, repeating them so often that they became second nature, then that nervous system modification becomes a neurological asset.

With more effort we can also habituate behaviors we dislike.  This can play out one of two ways; a soul-crushing self-loathing feedback loop, or, if we’re lucky, we come to “like” what we’re good at and do every day — our sense of preference is as malleable as anything.  It’s worth remembering that the job is the reward.

In either case, behaviors we habituate are going to multiply the results of our efforts.  When we spend willpower, we’re going to get more bang for the buck.

DENTAL HYGIENE, MENTAL HYGIENE

I read an interview with David Lynch in which he marveled at people’s unwillingness to dedicate a little time each day to meditation.  People are willing to dedicate five minutes a day to dental hygiene so that their teeth don’t rot.  Yet they are unwilling (or don’t know how) to spend a few minutes clearing their mind and communing with the infinite.  The benefits of meditation include lowering blood pressure, improving immunity, increasing focus and recall ability, increasing empathy, and probably dozens of other positive effects.  So why don’t we all meditate every day?

Meditation isn’t hard … but culturally there is no expectation to do it every day (at least in the United States), so it’s up to the individual to establish a routine.  You also have to pick and learn a method, either from an ancient tradition (zazen, vipassana) or a more modern derivative.  But the key action to establishing a habit is to pick a time and a place and do the same thing, every day, until the behavior becomes as second nature as brushing your teeth at the bathroom sink before you go to bed (hopefully you do that, or the equivalent, already).

CLOSING THE GAPS, MY OWN HABIT-BUILDING INTENTIONS

I should note here that I haven’t yet established a rock-solid meditation routine for myself.  I keep waffling on the time — morning or evening — and end up only meditating three or four days a week.  The benefits I perceive when I meditate (even if just for a few minutes) are so enormous that it’s insane for me not to close this gap.

Writing every morning — another behavior I’m still working on cementing.  Too often I end up checking email, reading news feeds, responding to a client request, or getting distracted by one of a dozen other projects.  When I do write in the morning, it colors the entire day.  Even if I only write a few crap paragraphs, I still feel a sense of accomplishment that stays with me regardless of what else happens that day.

Why wouldn’t I meditate and write every day?  Both behaviors pay obvious, immediate dividends.  While I take 100% responsibility for my own behavior, I don’t believe that I control my own behavior 100% — “I” am a chaotic network of warring motivational subcenters.  But to the extent that I can actually steer myself — to act as a fully conscious human being — I see value in establishing both behaviors as more-or-less permanent aspects of my daily routine.

A Meta-analysis of Kooky Diets, Part II

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On February 19

In Health/Body-hacking

In my last post, A Meta-analysis of Kooky Diets, Part I, I covered the odd eating habits of multi-billionaire/raw-juice enthusiast David H. Murdock, as well as the “all-meat” (in reality, “mostly grease”) diet of Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson.  Both men had a strong interest in health.  My next subject is interested exclusively in taste, but is in good apparent health nonetheless.

PAUL RUDNICK’S ALL-CANDY DIET

A Drake's Yodel

Playwright and humorist Paul Rudnick, according to this New York Times article by David Colman, subsists on milk chocolate, pastries, ice-cream, and candy.  In addition, he eats some simple unsweetened foods, like peanuts, Cheerios, and plain bagels.  He abstains from meat, poultry & eggs, seafood & fish, whole-grains, beans, fruit, and vegetables.  He’s been eating like this as long as he can remember.  At fifty-two, he’s tall, lean, and in good health.  Interesting.

I should note here that Paul Rudnick is in no way suggesting that anyone else should eat the way he does.  He likes candy, he eats candy — end of story.

ANALYSIS: What do we take from this “case study”?  Is Rudnick a freak of nature?  Or does his all-candy diet suggest that eating whole, unprocessed food is less important than we think?  Maybe it’s more important that we don’t overeat (according to the article, Rudnick doesn’t eat actual meals — he sort of grazes all day).  If he’s not eating large amounts of candy at a time, and he abstains from soft drinks, it’s possible that his blood sugar doesn’t spike too badly throughout the course of a day.  He’s not eating plates of pasta or potatoes with his candy — he’s just eating the candy.

  • Driving philosophy:  eat exactly what Paul Rudnick wants to eat, and nothing else
  • Staple foods: Hershey’s kisses, Drakes Cakes Yodels, plain bagels, peanuts, ice-cream, dry cereal
  • Not allowed: anything allowed, but Rudnick doesn’t seem to eat fruit, vegetables, or meat
  • Supplements: unknown
  • Importance of organic foods: none
  • Health advantages: low in calories, some polyphenols from chocolate and peanuts
  • Possible health risks this diet overlooks or does not address:  scurvy, type-2 diabetes
  • Ecological impact: low (no meat, some packaged/processed foods)
  • Cost: low (no meat, no produce, organic foods not required, Rudnick prefers “low-brow” sweets)

Summary: Examples like Rudnick are important to keep in mind to avoid obsessing about food and what the “best” diet is.  People thrive in all sorts of strange ways.  Lamar Odom is another example.  On the one hand, these men may possess unusual metabolisms that allow them to effectively process massive amounts of refined sugar without detrimental effects to their health.  On the other, the rest of us might be underestimating the resiliency and adaptive powers of the human digestive system, or overestimating the negative effects of refined sugar.

My guess is that Rudnick is NOT a freak of nature, and that the health benefits of what is essentially a low calorie diet outweigh the negative effects of eating all that crap.  I wouldn’t be surprised if he sustains his health into old age.

As an aside, Paul Rudnick has an incredibly cool office.

THE PALEOLITHIC DIET (AN INTRODUCTION)

The Paleolithic Diet (also known as The Caveman Diet) is an eating plan that, in its strictest form, includes only pre-agricultural foods.  Grains, including pasta, bread, rice, oats — even fancy hippie grains like quinoa and amaranth — are OUT.  So are all legumes; beans, peanuts, and, depending on the variant of the diet, even innocent vegetable legumes like green beans, snow peas, alfalfa sprouts, and clover sprouts.

Paleo-fitness helps with the ladies

Dairy products are out too — our caveman ancestors had not yet learned to domesticate cows, goats, or sheep.  Nightshade fruits and vegetables, including tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, all varieties of peppers, tobacco, and even the antioxidant-packed goji berry are all considered to be Neolithic foods (products of agriculture), and are thus eliminated.  Salt isn’t allowed, nor are alcohol and caffeine.  Refined sugar is of course not allowed, nor are any industrially processed foods (basically anything you can buy in a package at the store).

What’s left?  Quite a lot, actually.  Most vegetables are allowed, including leafy greens and starchy tubers (the Paleolithic Diet isn’t necessarily a low carb diet).  Less sweet fruits, like berries, are allowed, but sweeter fruits that have been pumped-up with sugar via years of selective breeding and/or genetic manipulation are not recommended (think of a large, juicy, sweet, store-bought apple vs. a small, gnarled, sour, slightly starchy example you might find on a tree in your backyard).  Nuts and seeds are okay, and olive oil is usually allowed.  So are fatty fruits like avocado and coconut.

Wild game and wild-caught fish are preferred foods on the Paleolithic Diet.  Almost all animal foods are allowed, so long as they are wild or grass-fed.  A real Paleo enthusiast might have an extra freezer or two in the garage, where they store a side of grass-fed beef, or a whole hog.  Meats that some of us might consider unusual, like ostrich, venison, kangaroo, bison, crocodile, rabbit, goat, and springbok (antelope) might be considered regular Paleo fare.

The logic of the Paleolithic Diet is that our ability to produce novel kinds of nosh has far outpaced our ability to digest it.  In other words, cultural evolution proceeds at a faster pace than genetic evolution, and as a result our health suffers.  Human beings, and our hominid ancestors, evolved over the course of hundreds of thousands of years on simple fare like shellfish, antelope, mastodon, tubers, frogs, and berries, and that’s the kind of fare our digestive and metabolic systems are optimized to handle.  We invented agriculture, which ensured us a more-or-less reliable source of calories, but our bodies didn’t change; we could only derive sustenance from grains at a cost to our health.  Later, the negative effects of cheap calories were exasperated by the Industrial Revolution (and thus industrial food production, which gives us refined flour, low-fat pasteurized milk, and high-fructose corn syrup).  Sure, we can survive on Yodels, bagels, and Planters salted peanuts, but we can’t thrive on such food (Paul Rudnick would of course disagree).

The biochemical Axis of Evil, according to Paleo science, consists primarily of lectins, gluten, casein.  All three are substances that both interfere with digestion and muck with our hormonal profile.  Fructose and sucrose are also considered problematic, as are excess amounts of omega-6 fatty acids.

Grains -- they're EVIL

Lectins are proteins that interfere with digestion, prevent absorption of certain nutrients, and are associated with allergies and auto-immune diseases.  Lectins seems particularly adept at tearing up the epithelial lining of the gut, resulting in something called leaky gut syndrome where whole undigested protein molecules are allowed to enter the bloodstream.  The immune system, which only expects to encounter amino acids in the bloodstream (not whole proteins) mistakes the undigested food particles for invading pathogens.  Auto-immune problems can then result if the protein entering the bloodstream happens to resemble some sort of human tissue; the immune system is tricked into attacking its host body.  Yuck.

Lectins are found in grains, legumes, seeds, and to a lesser extent in other vegetables and nuts.  If an organism does not have an evolutionary interest in being eaten (like fruit), it tends to evolve ways to defend itself.  If you try to eat a zebra, you might find your jawbone shattered by a swift kick.  Plants, on the other hand, have more creative (and sometimes insidious) ways of defending themselves.  Nuts have tough shells.  Some plants produce phytoestrogens, which negatively impact the species dining on them (sheep eating fields of red clover may find their fertility reduced).  Grains and beans have lectins.  If you doubt the effect lectins can have on your digestive system, gently simmer (don’t boil) some dried red kidney beans until they are soft enough to eat, then chew on a few.  Just kidding, don’t try this.  Really, don’t — you might die.  Not all lectins (there are thousands of varieties) are harmful, but quite a few have been shown to have a negative impact on human and animal health.

Fried gluten balls

Gluten is a protein found primarily in wheat, rye, and barley (including the refined varieties) and can wreak similar havoc on the digestive system, at least in sensitive individuals.  Casein is a milk protein, and can cause health problems even for people who are lactose tolerant (casein is probably more of problem for people who consume high amounts of lectins and gluten — their torn up gut linings may allow casein to enter the bloodstream whole).

To most people, cutting out bread, pasta, cheese, milk, yogurt, ice-cream, candy, all desserts, beans, tofu, tomatoes, potatoes, grain-fed meat, refined sugar, alcohol, coffee, salt, and all processed food sounds overly restrictive.  You don’t say. In its strictest form, the Paleolithic Diet is as ascetic as raw-food veganism.  Consider, though, Stefansson’s experience in getting used to (and eventually coming to enjoy) a diet consisting solely of raw frozen and boiled unsalted trout, with only fermented whale oil as a garnish.  What a human being experiences as pleasurable is largely dependent on the available range of experience.  We acclimate quickly; a diet of champagne, caviar, and rich desserts, day in and day out, quickly becomes boring, just as fermented whale oil rapidly becomes a “special treat” if that’s the only thing you have to put on your raw fish.

Are there health benefits?  There seem to be, in spades.  Practitioners report rapid fat loss, muscle gain, increased energy, improved immunity, better mood/attitude, reduced blood pressure, freedom from allergies, increased sexual vitality, and improvement in auto-immune disorders.  Clinical trials indicate the Caveman Diet can improve glucose tolerance, potentially reverse Type 2 diabetes, and significantly improve body composition in as short a time as ten days.

Most modern practitioners of the Paleolithic Diet allow small to moderate amounts of salt, alcohol, and caffeine to be included, which instantly makes the diet about a thousand percent more palatable.  Some modern cavemen further add in delicious foods like tomatoes, green beans, and even the occasional chunk of pastured raw cheese or very dark chocolate.  This is starting to sound a little more manageable.

I’ll disclose here that my own eating style bears similarities to the Caveman Diet.  Significantly cutting back on grains, legumes, dairy, and sugar (and adding in a few supplements) helped reverse moderate asthma symptoms I experienced for a good portion of my thirties.  I’ll discuss this in detail in another post.

NEXT POST: There are three figureheads of the Paleolithic Diet I’d like to write about in detail, including Loren Cordain, Arthur DeVany, and Mark Sisson.  All three are interesting characters, and each has a somewhat different approach and emphasis.  I also want to put some of the ideological kookery behind some Paleo advocates under a magnifying glass.

I may also look at one or more of the hardcore raw-foodists — some of them are really extreme and therefore entertaining.  Maybe I can discover exactly what they mean by the word “toxin.”  Maybe they mean uric acid, which is a by-product of protein digestion.  Or maybe they mean oxalic acid, found in extremely high levels in both raw spinach and raw parsley.

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