I read somewhere that Brent Pottenger (blog here) had benefited from adopting an ancestral diet. (Brent, Aaron Blaisdell and I are organizing the Ancestral Health Symposium.) I asked him for details. His answer:
I had debilitating migraines and chronic sinus infections for years, despite being a top-performing multi-sport athlete and following Conventional Wisdom (Food Pyramid, etc.) nutritional recommendations diligently. I’ve always been interested in living as healthy as possible, so I had made sure to do things like eat lots of whole grains. Essentially, components of my diet were causing chronic inflammation, but I did not know it. As a result, I had to take antibiotics (Z packs, erythromycin, amoxicillin, etc.) repeatedly for many years (a scary thing in light of the importance of gut flora), usually about 5 to 10 times per year for infections. My migraines got so bad that I had to go to the emergency room four times during a 1.5 year span to get pain medications because my prescription migraine drugs and painkillers (like Vicodin) did not work. The migraines were so painful that I would shut down and could not even take a nap to let them pass.
I talked about it in part at BIL:PIL:
I did not set out to cure myself, but that’s what happened. I started down what turned out to be the right health path because I read Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan. In that book, Nassim referenced Art DeVany. I read Art’s work on Evolutionary Fitness. Nassim and Art dovetail nicely, and the idea that evolution could inform health decisions made sense to me. That nudged me to cut grains (and other things) out of my diet. Art also tipped me to Mark Sisson, and I related really well to Mark’s personal story as an athlete with a passion for health, and I enjoyed the logic behind his Primal Blueprint framework. From there, I got actively involved in what I call the Ancestral Health epistemocracy that has emerged in the blogosphere–Mark, Art, Robb Wolf, Matt Metzgar, Tim Penn, and I actually co-authored an unpublished book together in 2007. At this point, though, I still did not know that I had resolved my health problems for good; I just knew that these ideas were working–I gained lean muscle mass, had more energy, felt great, etc.–as I tested them on my own body. Through this involvement as both an e-patient and a hobbyist blogger/essayist, I realized that a few years had passed and I had not experienced a migraine or a sinus infection. Now, after over three years without a migraine and having only been ill one time, I realize that I cured myself nutritionally, as a side-effect of tinkering with the aforementioned ideas. During this process, I also found out about your work from Nassim. For lots of reasons, your work on self-experimentation seemed really valuable to me. For example, my neurologist examined me and prescribed some drugs that were, looking back, quite dangerous to take for a problem that was caused by things like grains, legumes, processed vegetable oils, and Conventional Wisdom nutritional guidelines. My self-experimentation was, ironically, much safer and ultimately more sophisticated from a philosophy of science perspective because I could react to local feedback that my neurologist did not have access to: my own body. From there, I realized that we are all experts in our own body and that physicians must partner with us respectfully if they want to act as agents who help us find cures for health problems. I’ve written about my experiences in bits and pieces elsewhere, but this is a brief synopsis that captures most of the highlights in one place.
Basically, thanks to an inquiring mind and persistence that I owe to my mom’s mentorship, I transformed my physiology remarkably thanks to trial-and-error solution searching with things I learned from Nassim, Art, Mark, and you. From there, I’ve added more “maps” into my portfolio of health practices from Doug McGuff, Keith Norris, Kurt Harris, and many others (many are listed on the Symposium presenter list). As a result, I no longer consume health-care resources and these resources can go to treat real medical problems. How remarkable were the improvements? One way to capture that besides the disappearance of my health problems is to look at my weight changes: at the same waist size, I’ve gone from 135 lbs. in 2002 to ~145 lbs. in 2004 to ~170 in 2010. That says something.
He later added:
Things I did to relieve my migraines that didn’t work:
– prescription glasses (theory = eye strain)– cutting out caffeine (theory = ? stress)– napping more (theory = better sleep)None of those experiments cured my health challenges. Only nutrition worked. Very few environmental factors have fluctuated much over the past ten years: I’ve lived in the same hours, slept in the same bed, been a student, played the same sports in the same places around town, etc.
His old diet and his new diet:
Pre-Ancestral Health diet: I followed the Food Pyramid and associated concepts closely, so I consumed lots of whole grains (breads, pastas, granola, bagels, etc.), fruits (whole and juiced), vegetables, non-fat milk, non-fat yogurt, some meat (all kinds), coffee, tea, beans (black, pinto, others), and some cheese (pasteurized) and nuts. I ate things like Cliff Bars, drank Odwalla smoothies, etc.
Ancestral Health diet: I follow a very carnivorous paradigm, so I consume lots of meats (from pork bellies to raw Ahi tuna) and eggs, lots of cultured butter, coconut butter & oil, full-lipid Greek Yogurt (highest saturated fat content of any yogurt on the market), some vegetables (onions, avocados, greens) and mushrooms (sauteed in butter with onions and meats), essentially no fruit (I’m in a ‘Fructose Detox’ self-experiment), a little raw cheese, coffee, tea, essentially no alcohol. I also supplement with some Vitamin D, which is anabolic I think as well. I take fish oil when I have not had fish for awhile. I’ve eaten fish my entire life, though.
I attribute my health improvements directly (and completely) to diet. As my diet evolved, I also altered how I train, transitioning a bit from ‘some long-distance running and sports playing’ to ‘mainly high-intensity, short-duration training (more weights and sprinting) and still sports playing as my exercise approaches. This energy expenditure evolution has, in my opinion, contributed to my stark body composition changes (lean muscle mass gain), but I think that my health improvements are due to diet and that my body composition would be much worse off if my diet had not changed like it has.
I will comment on this in my next post.
A bit off-topic, I keep hearing about people’s migraines cured with heart surgery to close septal defects. Apparently heart surgeons are doing this procedure in great numbers, without benefit of studies that demonstrate their effectiveness, and some doctors are decrying surgeons’ opportunism for preying on patients’ desperation. I don’t know how the patients are paying for such unrecognized treatment, but insurance coverage seems unlikely. Could it be that migraine pain motivates seeking effective treatment?
I know someone who had heart surgery for some other reason, and her migraines did vanish. It seems like just the sort of side effect that would be noticed and commented on (although experience suggests it would take a very long time for anyone to write about it). Similarly, the heart surgeon who noticed that most of his patients, but not colleagues, had a crease in their ear lobes, which did turn out to be strongly correlated with blocked arteries.
I wonder if surgeons can be persuaded to perform work to improve cranial venal flow in MS patients, despite the lack of studies demonstrating its effectiveness.
*Thanks to Dave Lull
Need to add that into this thread as well: He’s taught me as much about nutrition as anyone. And he’s a librarian.
Great post. That’s a nice summary showing what didn’t work and what worked. Also found it interesting that you’ve gained all that muscle mass without gaining inches in your waist. I agree that physicians need to work with their patients and patients should be more doubtful, think critically and don’t follow the blind faith of their physician…just because “they’re the doctor”.
Regarding Nathan’s post…that reminds me of an article showing that diabetes can be “cured” with bariatric surgery. They don’t know the mechanism but it seems to cure it instantaneously, before a change in diet can take effect. https://www.parade.com/health/2010/05/can-this-surgery-cure-diabetes.html
My wife and I are heavily involved with animal rescue, so we travel in vegan circles. I’ve heard many stories told by people who claim that their health problems went away after they stopped eating animal products and switched to whole grains, vegetables, fruits, etc.
It’s hard to know what to make of impassioned but utterly contradictory testimonials.
@Alex,
Aye, there’s the rub.
My guess is:
1. Often when people change their diets, they change a whole slew of things (including extra-diet factors).
2. Different people probably respond to food differently. This is most obvious with things like lactose intolerance, or people who metabolize alcohol differently, or gluten allergies. My guess is it’s also true for other things.
If 2. is right, then self-experimentation becomes more important, as typical studies will bring up (surprise) conflicting results.
Thanks, Stephen.
I agree with @Anthony.
@Alex: The goal isn’t to share impassioned testimonials; the goal is to share experiences and all the unexpected turns that those experiences take. We are all limited to some extent by our own experience, so we can look at other people’s experiences as sources of conjectures to test on our own bodies. I never set out to cure myself; I just assessed the logic of some other people’s self-experiments and ideas on health and then decided to test them on myself. I did not falsify these conjectures (and I experienced positive benefits), so I kept tinkering with them.
My n=1 may be helpful to others who can relate to my tale. However, the problem of induction and biochemical individuality make it such that your own personal experience trumps everything else. See my recent essays:
“Black Swan Logic for n=1 Health”:
https://epistemocrat.blogspot.com/2010/02/black-swan-logic-for-n1-health.html
&
“Self-Experimentation with Meta-Rules: Quality of Knowledge & Overcoming the Justificationist Addiction”:
https://epistemocrat.blogspot.com/2010/04/self-experimentation-with-meta-rules.html
Meta-Rules say nothing about whether or not you should eat meat; they say, “Listen to your body, then iterate.”
I like to say, “Self-experimentation rises to the surface as the most effective modus operandi in the face of nutritional opacity.”
That’s German for: Test things on your body and just see what happens.
But, when it comes to testing potentially dangerous things, I also like to say, “Outsource your body to Aaron Blaisdell and let him be your lab rat for a few days. It’s safer to live vicariously anyways.” lol
Cheers!
Brent
Alex, your story about vegans doesn’t strike me as contradictory as it might strike you, for three reasons:
1. I don’t see meat protein as special. Beyond being good for building muscle, I don’t think it has special benefits. It’s animal fat that makes a huge & surprising difference. Your vegans probably went from one diet low in animal fat to another.
2. I’m sure vegetables are healthy. I believe we like sweetness so that we would eat more vegetables — vegetables have far more sugar than meat does. Changing from a diet of meat & potatoes (and few vegetables) to all vegetable could be an improvement. At least you would be getting a decent amount of vegetables.
3. As Anthony says, any big change of diet (e.g., from high meat to meatless) will involve dozens of changes at the micro- and macro-nutrient level. As far as I can tell, the average American diet is so terrible that randomly picking another diet could easily be an improvement — I’d say the odds are about 50%. Even better (regression to the mean) if you have a health problem caused by diet.
@Alex and @Seth,
One more reason why going vegan might result in at least short-term improvements in health is by getting away from animal products from factory-raised animals. These have a very different fatty-acid profile than their ancestral brethren that our hunter-gatherer ancestors hunted and fished for. The omega 6:omega 3 ratio is very skewed in factory meat, closer to 15:1 than in wild animals and pastured animals (e.g., grass fed cattle, chickens, etc.) which have ratios in the realm of 1:1 to 3:1 O6:O3. The imbalanced ratio found in factory farmed animals is a likely contributor to chronic systemic inflammation, which seems to be a source of many of the diseases of civilization, in particular metabolic disorders and cancer. The hormones factory farmed animals are pumped with are also likely contributing to modern health woes. Like humans, cows were not meant to consume the seed grains from annual grasses (wheat, corn, etc.). The evidence is incredibly strong for just how damaging this is to both humans and our farm animals, especially when the grains are not properly treated (see https://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2010/05/traditional-preparation-methods-improve.html). Unfortunately, grains do not come with a “handle with care!” warning label, and it took humans millennia to figure this out. We seemed to have lost our ancestral wisdom over the last few hundred years, however.
The question that comes up for me is, sure, vegans get healthier when they chuck the standard (rotten) diet for a cleaner, non-processed diet. How much of that is merely the recovery from years of eating crap — and what happens to long-term vegans? It seems to me — from those I know and those whose blogs or experiences I read on the web — very many of them get better for a while, and then, as their body continues to get insufficient nutrition, they get sicker, or weaker, or reproductively damaged, or more and more allergic to more and more of the few things they WILL eat. Sure, some vegans do just fine — but is it most? (And how many of those “vegans” who do fine turn out to be eating some meat some of the time?) hard to count, hard to tell. But it seems less than optimal to ignore the human *animal* in nutrition decisions.