Category: paleo

At the Ancestral Health Symposium

Seth Roberts6 Comments

I am in Los Angeles for the Ancestral Health Symposium. I am giving a talk called “What Foods Make My Brain Work Best?” Readers of this blog won’t be surprised: I will talk about flaxseed oil, pork fat, and butter. On Thursday, there was a party at Aaron Blaisdell’s house for presenters and volunteers. It was kind of magical to see at the same party Mark Cohen, Gary Taubes, Denise Minger, Mark Sisson, Jimmy Moore, Boyd Eaton, Loren Cordain, Chris Masterjohn, and Tucker Max. Plus others, such as Staffan Lindeberg, whom I didn’t manage to meet. More like an historical tableau in a mural or tapestry than an actual event.

There was more meat than any other party I’ve ever been to. Grilled outside. Mostly steak but also boar and salmon. It was delicious. I wish I knew the name of the grillmaster so I could thank him.

Great Delusions: James Watson

Seth Roberts3 Comments

In an interview, James D. Watson, co-discovery of the structure of DNA, said

Some day a child is going to sue its parents for being born. They will say, My life is so awful with these terrible genetic defects.

(Quoted by Richard Bentall in Doctoring the Mind.) Watson is implying that genetic defects matter in the big picture of human impairment. They don’t. Changes over time in disease incidence, migration studies (in all instances I know of, the disease profile of the migrating group changes to match the place where they live), powerful nutritional effects (e.g., Weston Price) and other evidence of environmental potency show that all major diseases (heart disease, cancer, depression, obesity, plague, tuberculosis, smallpox, etc.) are mostly caused by the environment, in the sense that environmental changes could greatly reduce their incidence. Genes are a distraction. (To say that major diseases are also “caused” by genes in the sense that genes affect environmental potency is to miss the point that we want to reduce the diseases — want to reduce obesity for example — so it is the environmental lever that matters. If a child could eliminate its obesity by changing its environment, it would not sue its parents.) If Watson was unaware of that, okay. But for him to claim the opposite is a great — and I am afraid profoundly self-serving — delusion.

As I blogged, Aaron Blaisdell had a certifiably “genetic” disease. The chromosome involved had been identified. It turned out to be under nutritional control. When he improved his diet, it vanished. Calling it “genetic” seriously distracted from learning how to eliminate it, it turned out. Another example of how “genetic” problems are not what they seem — impossible to change — is provided by lactose intolerance. The rate of lactose intolerance varies greatly from group to group. (I thank Phil Price for the link.) It is rare in Sweden, common in Asia, including China. I assume these differences reflect genetic differences. Yet Beijing supermarkets have aisles full of milk products. How can that be? Because the aisles are full of yogurt. Yogurt bacteria digest the lactose. So lactose intolerance is not a big deal. You can still drink milk, after it has been predigested by bacteria.

The dreams of geneticists.

 

Tucker Max on Paleo: “I Started Feeling So Much Better”

Seth Roberts2 Comments

In this interview, Tucker Max talks about eating paleo.

Once I started doing this, I started feeling so much better. My brain felt like it worked better. Everything about me improved. So I kinda went down the rabbit hole, and I started reading up on diet and nutrition from alternate sources. Art De Vany, Robb Wolf, and Loren Cordain, they didn’t invent it but they kinda popularized the concept of paleo eating. I realized that if you’re just a normal person, and you have the normal ideas about diet and nutrition, everything you know is wrong.

If you ask me, Tucker’s enthusiasm/support for paleo is huge. Max Planck said progress happens funeral by funeral. I say it happens keg party by keg party — college students, more than anyone else, have open minds. A friend told me that when she was a freshman in college, her sociology professor criticized the textbook. Whoa! she thought. Textbooks can be criticized!? She had thought they were beyond criticism. As far as I can tell, American college students respect Tucker more than they respect anyone else. (My Tsinghua students may favor Nassim Taleb.) For example, this recent tweet: “ TuckerMax is my idol. and he’s on this paleodiet…so i think im going to do it too.” I found no tweets about the dietary influence of Michelle Obama (“ coolest First Lady ever“).

In spite of what the interview was shortened to say, Tucker got the idea of eating flaxseed oil from this blog, especially Tyler Cowen’s experience. He wrote to me about it at the time. I posted his comments about dental health (here and here) and sports injuries (here, here and here) under the name Anonymous.

I am pleased to announce that Tucker will be talking at the upcoming Ancestral Health Symposium at UCLA. The title of his talk is::

From Cave to Cage: Mixed Martial Arts in Ancestral Health

Sorry Tucker Max fans, symposium tickets are sold out. But after the conference you will be able to see the talk on the website.

Tucker’s latest book is Assholes Finish First.


The Growth of Paleo: Patrick Vlaskovits Interview

Seth Roberts10 Comments

I wondered if Patrick Vlaskovits, who runs the question-answer site PaleoHacks, could shed some light on the recent growth of interest in a Paleo approach to health. So I asked him a few questions.

SETH What have you learned from PaleoHacks about the growth of the Paleo movement during the last year?

PATRICK Well, one thing is certain … the Paleo movement IS growing. One can look at various proxies for this — Google Trends – for example – https://www.google.com/trends?q=paleo+diet — or more frequent mentions in the mainstream media. But your question is about what I have learned from PaleoHacks.com with regard to growth. PaleoHacks.com’s traffic is definitely growing and my sense is that Paleo (by that I mean eating in an evolutionarily appropriate manner) is about to cross the chasm into the mainstream.

A few interesting measures of growth vis-a-vis PaleoHacks are:

1) The increasing frequency of meta-discussions on PaleoHacks –people who have been eating Paleo for some time are now looking to the future about what it means to be “Paleo” and how long-time Paleo eaters are changing their Paleo diets. This is, IMO, is a good thing as Keynes said: ”When the facts change, I change my mind — what do you do, sir?” We are learning more about how our health changes after some time eating Paleo – and what needs to be fine-tuned when it comes to things like bacterial/gut health (probably the most important thing to worry about) and hormonal changes relative to our environment, e.g. cortisol levels increasing due to lack of sleep which can result in unwanted/unhealthy weight gain or weight loss.

2) More people are blogging about Paleo and also more people are trying to monetize Paleo and I see them on PaleoHacks. (For the record, I have no problem with anyone trying to monetize Paleo as long as they are responsible about it as I feel that anyone monetizing Paleo should also be a good steward of Paleo.)

SETH How much has PaleoHacks traffic grown over the last year?

PATRICK Short answer: A lot. Longer answer: Depends on which metric you use — but still a lot. Ranges from 6x to 8x YOY increase in visits, uniques and page-views. Currently, PaleoHacks gets +500k page-views a month. [I double-checked my internal stats with public information on Compete.com & Quantcast – and it looks like they undercount (BTW this is a well-known and hotly debated topic).]

SETH What do you think is causing such fast growth? The broad idea is really old. Even the details are old — Weston Price wrote in the 1930s, for example. The Weston Price Foundation, which was started many years ago, is growing much more slowly.

PATRICK Cutting to the chase: no idea. Some thoughts:

Paleo’s growth appears highly correlated with CrossFit — but what has caused CrossFit’s growth? Not sure. It too has been around a while.

Social media have certainly accelerated/lubricated Paleo’s growth but I don’t if social media actually *caused* Paleo’s growth. What causes memes like Paleo to spark, and then die out or go dormant and then spark again to grow into a raging wildfire? I wish I knew.

Getting a little meta and perhaps off-topic — my assumption is that is true for most “Big Ideas”. We rarely recognize or know of their true “discovery” because for-whatever-reason the implications are not fully, if at all, appreciated at the time of discovery. For example, I believe this was the case with penicillin. A French medical student discovered it 1896, Fleming re-discovered it in 1928 and then it lay around until 1939 when Florey fully appreciated it.

I certainly didn’t put two and two together when I read Why We Get Sick back in 2000-ish. I thought it a fantastic book (and still do)– but I didn’t think of applying the evolutionary lens to diet/nutrition, even though in retrospect, it seems obvious.

Evolutionary Health Journal to Start

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Building on the success of the Ancestral Health Symposium — it will be in August, but it’s already a success — Aaron Blaisdell is planning to start a scientific journal on the subject.

It will be an historic thing. The notion that ancient lifestyles are especially healthy has been around, and taken seriously, for at least a few hundred years. Serious data began to be gathered in the early 1900s. Weston Price is an example. For a very long time this idea seemed to go nowhere, or at least the mainstream ignored it. In the 1970s there began a small irregular stream of publications (e.g., a book called Western Diseases edited by my friend Norman Temple) but again the mainstream ignored it.

But mainstream medicine doesn’t work very well. The notion that when you get sick you should take a dangerous expensive drug doesn’t make a lot of sense. You didn’t get sick because you lacked the drug. More plausible is that when you get sick you should reverse the environmental conditions that caused the sickness and find out if your body can heal itself. Even more, you should prevent disease from starting. Along with mainstream medicine’s implausible intellectual foundation has come pathetic results. Robin Hanson has emphasized the RAND experiment that found that a large fraction of medical spending produced little benefit. Tyler Cowen has pointed out that Americans spend far more than other countries on health care with no better results. A doctor at a county hospital once told me, “The truth is that we can’t help most people that come in.” They come in with diabetes, obesity, and so on. Why don’t you do something that does help? I asked. Because when you do prevention research, she said, you don’t get people thanking you. She was describing a protection racket: make people sick — if only by failing to tell them how to be healthy — so that they will come to you for help.

An academic journal with a steady stream of articles and supporting evidence is a big step toward getting the paleo alternative taken seriously. It will help researchers who take paleo ideas seriously publish their work, of course, but it will also help them get feedback. Because it will help them publish, it will help them get research support. Because the journal (like any new journal) will be open access, it will help those who want to learn about those ideas. When ideas about health are forced to compete on their merits (such as cost, safety, effectiveness, and quality of the supporting evidence) and becoming an M.D. confers less of a monopoly (on information and treatment), a great change will come. Richard Nikoley recently posted an example of what a difference this can make.