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that has emerged in the blogosphere–Mark, Art, Robb Wolf, Matt Metzgar, Tim Penn, and I actually co-authored an unpublished book together in 2007.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.