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“Vegetables are not food. Vegetables are what food eats.”

“Salad is just a vehicle for cheese, bacon bits, and dressing.”

“If we are supposed to eat veggies, why do they taste so revolting? Broccoli can make me ill just smelling it.”

These are comments from a Facebook conversation I participated in not long ago that started out with a discussion about why being a vegan isn’t something the people making comments really cared to do. Of course, it is easily possible to find comments out there from vegans about how inherently revolting meat is. The point is not about veggies or any other particular class of food, but about impulsive reactions to food that become lifetime habits of avoidance.

In my experience, these are not uncommon kinds of sentiments. They have never made sense to me because I am good at liking food. I can enjoy almost any well prepared meal. I like trying new things and usually enjoy them. Of course I have preferences, but that’s not the same thing.

Being good at liking food is a skill. I remember, in college, consciously deciding to develop this ability. I grew up in a normal, Irish Catholic household, with fairly generic American food, in the late 60′s and 70′s. I didn’t try yogurt or many other “exotic” foods until I was in college. I decided then that I would learn how to like food. And I did, by trying lots of different kinds. After awhile, it was easy to like most any food that was skillfully prepared with quality ingredients. Some foods are an acquired taste—I need to try them several times before I learn to like them. Others are love at first bite. A few things I have not learned to like: beets, green peppers, most sushi. If I had to learn to like them, I probably could (well, maybe not beets). But I like most things.

I encounter many people without the skill of liking food. They react to new foods as if their first impulse to dislike them has an eternal validity. They don’t know how to like food. They have a set of foods they find palatable and any new food that is not immediately liked (usually due to similarity to food already liked) is eternally placed in the “ick” bin.

That’s a problem for the expansion of the paleo template for eating. Many people have imprinted on processed food, restaurant food, and food that children eat. That’s it. They can enjoy a microwave pizza, but a home cooked  meal made from fresh whole ingredients tastes mostly wrong to them unless it’s from a small subset of foods from childhood. They are “finicky.” I think that more and more people don’t know how not to be finicky. In an environment filled with fast food, convenience food, and other crap that has been designed by food scientists to be palatable but not satiating, real food tastes wrong. No amount of pushing “fresh fruits and vegetables,” complaining about “food deserts,” or taking soda machines out of schools will fix this problem. I’m not sure what will. I find some of those foods palatable as well, but I like real foods well enough that it’s easy for me to choose those instead.

More and more people seem to have been trained to be nauseated by any foods that are not awful for them. How do we get past that?

Unfortunately, when applied to food, capitalism tends to push for what is simple to sell. And what’s simple to sell is mass-produced junk food. The paleo template represents resistance to this basic pattern of efficiently producing cheap palatable junk that fills the belly but generates malnutrition and disease. Over the last 15 years or so, paleo has gone from something no one’s heard of, to laughed at, to argued against, to an approximation of a mainstream trend.

That’s made especially manifest when Oprah magazine recommends paleo. Sort of like when the Gap moves into trendy urban spaces and thereby drains all the edginess away, when the “cave man” diet is a popular trend, then the market inevitably zooms in to distort it. We’ll see “paleo” restaurants in a number of cities and “paleo” frozen dinners in upscale markets. The word “paleo” will be corrupted to mean gluten-free and low in sugar. What it won’t mean anymore is real food, because it’s hard to make serious profits off of real food and most people have no idea what real food is. It’s much easier to pick just a couple of parameters and make food that meets those technical requirements in the cheapest manner possible that still sells. That’s what paleo will come to mean in terms of mainstream products.

Eventually, paleo will be old news and the mainstream will move on to some other fad.

“Remember paleo?”

“Oh, yeah, I used to eat that stuff. How early 21st!”

In the meantime, the big companies will try to profit from it. For the next few years, much of what paleo actually means will involve resisting what the market wants “paleo” to become.

If you’re setting up a paleo blog and looking for a name, feel free.

For example, it ignores (in fact, treats as “error”) variability among subjects. A drug could, on average, cause great improvement in some condition while, for a few subjects, causing significant worsening. In a controlled experiment like this, it might look like the drug does good stuff, without detecting that some subjects are harmed. Also, group comparison studies cost a lot of money and take a long time.

In the paleosphere, there is considerable discussion of “N=1″ experiments, by which they mean people experimenting on themselves.  I thought I’d discuss the science of experimenting with one person, because paleo folks often have a good understanding of group comparison studies while not knowing much about the science of experimenting on one organism at a time.

The most accurate technical term for an experiment on one organism is not N=1, but rather a “single subject experiment.” This kind of research also has its limitations, but has the significant advantage that it shows how the variables manipulated in the experiment apply to one individual. That’s exactly what most paleo folks are interested in.

The critical thing about any experiment, this type included, is control of all the relevant variables. It is necessary to demonstrate, in a very convincing way, that the effects we see in the experiment are caused by the variables we control, and not by random factors or other variables that we may have manipulated by accident. The wrong way to do a single subject study is illustrated here:

This is technically a “case study” or “pseudo-experiment.” What’s wrong with it? When we switched from a generic crap diet to a real food diet, symptoms improved dramatically. How is that not convincing? No matter how well other factors are controlled, there is no particular reason to think that some other event, happening at the same time, could not have been responsible for this change. No researcher worth his or her salt would find it believable that we have demonstrated that our intervention really changed the subject’s symptoms.

This is what an actual single subject experiment might look like:

What have we done? We’ve conducted a reversal. We started with a crap diet, collecting enough data to establish that the numbers are basically stable. Then we switched to a real food diet and symptoms improved dramatically. So far, so good, but it’s not very convincing—symptoms sometimes randomly improve, and it might have happened even if we hadn’t changed the diet. To control for that, we switch back to the crap diet, and symptoms get worse. Interesting. For good measure (and because we’d rather not end on a crap diet) we switch back to real food. Once again, symptoms improve.

Assuming we have controlled for other variables (we did not take a special medication on the same days we were eating real food, for example) it seems vanishingly unlikely that symptoms would have randomly gone up and down like this as a result of random chance. We’ve conducted an actual experiment with one subject, establishing control over the experimental variable we were measuring (symptoms).

But isn’t there supposed to be a control group, you might ask? The subject is acting as his or her own control in this experiment. It’s OK, really it is. What about statistical significance? There are ways to apply inferential statistics to this kind of experiment, but they are generally considered a waste of time. If the pattern is anywhere near ambiguous with visual inspection, then experimental control has not been established. The data above are not at all ambiguous.

Statistical significance is used to determine whether it is likely that the results obtained with a sample group (100 volunteers, for example) would be the same if that experiment could be conducted with the whole population we are interested in (all U.S. adults, for example). In a single subject experiment, that’s really not the question we are asking.

There are lots of ways to complicate this kind of experiment. We can explore more than one set of changes over the course of multiple sequential conditions and reversals. A more complex version, comparing the relative effects of diet, exercise, and combinations of the two, could be done, for example. We can do the same experiment with several people, conducting multiple concurrent single subject experiments (this is called a multiple baseline experimental design). The second chart above, however, shows the basic template for a single subject reversal. It would not be too hard to do with yourself.

If you are interested in the theory behind this methodology, the classic (and quite readable) text is Tactics of Scientific Research by Murray Sidman. The most used modern textbook is Single Case Research Designs by Alan Kazdin.

Last weekend was the daylight savings time switchover. We lost an hour. On Sunday night, for reasons I don’t understand, I woke up several times and had trouble getting back to sleep. On Monday I ate a normal breakfast and lunch, but still came home ravenous and craving carbohydrates.

I wonder if the paleo emphasis on sleep quality might be almost as important as that on food quality. Lots of Westerners seem to push off as much sleep as they can and compensate with coffee or energy drinks. In the long run, that in itself may be a recipe for terrible health.

Then at FuturePundit this week, I ran across a link to a study on sleep and appetite.

The researchers studied 17 normal, healthy young men and women for eight nights, with half of the participants sleeping normally and half sleeping only two-thirds their normal time.

Participants ate as much as they wanted during the study.

Researchers found:

• The sleep deprived group, who slept one hour and 20 minutes less than the control group each day consumed an average 549 additional calories each day.
• The amount of energy used for activity didn’t significantly change between groups, suggesting that those who slept less didn’t burn additional calories.
• Lack of sleep was associated with increased leptin levels and decreasing ghrelin — changes that were more likely a consequence, rather than a cause, of over-eating.

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At the Atlantic, Marion Nestle, a professor of Nutrition and some other stuff at New York University, has a post entitled “The Importance of Portion Control.”

How to deal with the portion size problem? Use small plates and cups in the dining hall. When eating out, order appetizers, not entrees. Order the small size, or share large portions with friends.

If you consume way too much energy, and your body metabolizes it, that will create a number of health problems. From that perspective, it makes sense to consciously control how much food you eat. From an evolutionary perspective, however, that’s crazy talk. Animals in a natural environment don’t get fat, even when food is plentiful. (They do if they have a reason to, such as when storing energy for hibernation.) Wild humans are not obese even in times of relative plenty. They have a natural homeostasis mechanism that regulates appetite to prevent getting too fat or too thin, because those extremes would affect their ability to survive.

People living on industrial Western diets frequently have broken appetite control mechanisms. When that is the case, it may make sense to consciously limit portions, because the normal system is not doing it for you. When you and everyone you know cannot imagine eating anything other than an industrial Western diet, you may naturally come to believe that there is no natural appetite control mechanism and deliberate limitation of food portions (along with exercise) is crucial for health and maintenance of a healthy weight.

My person experience on a Western diet was typical. Through my 30′s and 40′s I gained weight slowly and steadily. When I switched to paleo I did so without ever limiting portions. In fact, my subjective experience was that I ate like a pig. I did occasionally skip a meal (two in a row a couple of times), and there was certainly some sort of calorie deficit going on, but there was no point at which I limited or counted calories, points, blocks, grams, or any other measurement of food. I just tried to eat very little sugar or starchy food and ate plenty of real food.

Since then, I have continued to eat paleo, gradually adding more starchy tubers (and occasional white rice) into my diet. I have never limited or counted portions. All that time, I have stayed within two pounds, plus or minus, of 150 lbs. My portion sizes are sometimes small, sometimes large, depending on how much I feel like eating.

Does my experience prove that portion control isn’t needed if you eat paleo? If you are lucky like me, then sure. My natural appetite control kicked in when I began to eat real food and avoid industrial food. If you’re not so lucky, your system has been broken by years of crap food and real food might not fix that. You might have to control portions even of real food in order to get yourself to a healthy weight. Once there, you might be able to slowly reset your set point by staying on a real food diet and keeping portions under control. Eventually, the system might begin to work the way it’s supposed to. Or maybe not.

Modern shoes suck. They suck a lot. A generic modern shoe lifts your heels up, prevents you from striding in a natural manner, disrupts balance, and prevents most proprioceptive feedback to your feet from the surface they are in contact with. Our ancestors walked around barefoot or in the kind of handmade shoes worn by Otzi, the well preserved neolithic human found in Switzerland. “Primitive” shoes like that provide simple protection for feet without modifying gait and without attempting to provide “support” to the arches that, over time, weaken the feet—as any physical supportive device must do. It is only relatively recently that people in most societies began wearing the awkward things we think of nowadays as shoes. (Of course, things are worse for women. I really feel for the women I see tottering around on their toes looking “stylish.” Ack!)

Over the past year, I’ve been lucky enough to be able to transition away from crappy Western shoes. When I can, I go barefoot. The rest of the time, I wear minimalist shoes whenever possible. I own a pair of black Vibram Fivefinger KSO Trek toe shoes. Those are wonderful in many situations, but when I don’t want to look like I have weird monkey feet, I wear Merrell Barefoots. I have a pair of Merrell Trail Gloves and a pair of brown Tough Gloves. I’ll talk about the Tough Gloves here.

Work for me is usually business casual. Since my job sometimes involves physical training (teaching staff in schools, hospitals, residential programs, and other facilities how to safely work with individuals with disabilities who sometimes become agitated and aggressive) it makes sense for me to have a pair of shoes that look businesslike but also a bit “sporty.” The Tough Gloves, with their leather upper, fit that description very well. They are less casual than sneakers and less formal than men’s dress shoes. They do have a semi-subtle Merrell logo on the side, which I don’t like but can live with. The back of the shoe has a loop that you can crook a finger into in order to make them easier to pull on. In a business formal environment, they would definitely not pass.

The Tough Gloves are minimalist “zero drop” shoes. That means the sole is relatively thin and the shoe doesn’t raise your heel any higher than the forefoot, so your gait is similar to what it would be if you were not wearing shoes. There is no support per se, although the sole is not flat—it hugs the contour of the arch of your foot. They are astonishingly light and flexible. The upper is thin but sturdy leather that provide some protection to the foot. (Not as much as regular leather shoes. If someone steps on your foot, you will really feel it.) The sole is made by Vibram (the same folks who make Five Fingers). It provides excellent traction while remaining very thin and providing fairly good ground feel. The back of the shoe hugs your heel and the middle is fairly tight to keep the shoe from sliding around. The front of the shoe is very wide, allowing your toes to splay in the same way they would if you were barefoot. I think that’s a good approach to keeping the shoe on the foot without inhibiting the front part of the foot from doing what it’s designed to do.

All of these features allow a natural walking gait. Walking in these things is very different than in “normal” shoes. I can feel the ground. If I plod along on a hard surface such as concrete or pavement, banging my heels into the ground, that means that it hurts a little to walk. Because of that, I naturally walk differently. My overall walking posture is improved, and the achey back I sometimes used to get is gone.

My balance is much better in these than in “normal” shoes. Really, I feel like freaking Spiderman. I am much more graceful in these things than in regular shoes. Compared to barefoot, I have better traction and, while I do need to be more aware of what I’m stepping on than with regular shoes, I can walk confidently on almost any surface without worrying about broken glass, small rocks, or other things that I would otherwise have to be very careful about. I find myself naturally walking on the tops of curbs, on rocks, and other terrain simply because I can. They are also great for running in, provided that you use a forefoot or mid-foot landing stride. Slamming down on your heels (which is not what your feet are designed to do) is not a good idea. They have plenty of traction for most surfaces, although they can be kind of squeaky on freshly waxed tile.

I have now had these for nearly a year, wearing them very frequently. Other than getting a bit scuffed up (unavoidable with leather), there are no significant signs of wear. I haven’t even had to replace the laces. They take shoe polish just fine. They are lasting better than a regular pair of men’s shoes would for me.

Are they expensive? Yes, they are. They list for $120, which is more than I am accustomed to spend on a shoe. If they were wearing poorly, I would regret spending that much. As it is, I expect to get another year out of them, which makes them cheaper than a basic pair of regular rubber soled men’s shoes.

The only bad part is when I have to go back to men’s formal shoes. When I do that now, I feel like I am being forced to walk on a weirdly unbalanced forward-tilted surface. The shoes feel clunky and I imagine that I am clomping around like Frankenstein’s monster in one of those bad old movies. I am much more clumsy and things start to hurt. At some point I’ll find an alternative for that situation, but for now these work just fine most of the time.

Strongly recommended.

Of course, mice are not tiny furry humans, so these results may or may not mean anything for other species. However, I personally find that my 48 year old eyes began to work a lot better a couple of years ago when I began transitioning to a paleo diet and supplementing with vitamin D3. At the time, I’d been putting off seeing an ophthalmologist and getting glasses to correct the eyestrain and decreased visual acuity I was experiencing. In particular, I was finding that if I focused at a short distance for a few minutes, my eyes would take several minutes to adjust to longer distances. I almost failed a vision test when renewing my driver’s license because I made the mistake of reading on my iPhone while waiting for the test. My eyes didn’t have enough time to adapt to the further distance.

About a month after starting to take D3 (4,000 IU per day, except when I get a lot of sun), I was very surprised to notice that the slowness to adapt to distance changes was no longer happening. It seemed as if my corneas were now more flexible (corneas naturally get harder with age). While I still have a little trouble with reading small type, I continue not to need glasses and have no unusual eyestrain or blurring. I have not had my visual acuity or night vision tested, but I am convinced that they are better than they were.

That’s one of the many unexpected side benefits of taking an evolutionary perspective on personal health.