Paleodyssey

Toward an evolution-informed life
5 January 2012

In the press recently

Tara Parker Pope has an article in the New York Times Magazine called The Fat Trap about how people who are very overweight are different from the rest of us. They can lose some weight—sometimes a lot of weight—but research suggests that they usually gain it back. Comprehensive, life-changing weight loss is impossible for most people, she concludes.

At the Atlantic, pro blogger Ta-Nehisi Coates references that article and comments that he himself has lost a bunch of weight, but done it slowly over eight years or so.

Obviously I wish this had happened faster and smoother. But the upshot of taking the long way is that I’ve learned a lot about how to negotiate  world where, at almost every step, cheap high calorie food is at the ready. You can’t get that understanding in a lab and you’re unlikely to get if your trying to burn of 3-4 pounds a week. That sounds like masochism.

Megan McArdle, another Atlantic blogger (who had a dustup a few months ago in comments on her blog over the issue of grains with paleo hero Dr. Kurt Harris), responds to Coates’ blog post in What Do We Really Know About Losing Weight? Her main point is that it’s very hard to study weight loss over the long term, because you can’t get a group of participants to stay on one diet, dutifully reporting everything they eat, for many consecutive years.

She has a snarky footnote at the end of her post that references paleo eating.

And yes, this applies to low-carb too; you can keep the weight off if you stay on Atkins/Sugarbusters/Paleo, but just as with other sorts of diets, people mostly don’t.  They do great for 6-18 months, and then they start getting cravings for carbs, and eventually they give in, and the weight comes back . . . and the diet’s advocates explain that of course paleo works, but not for lazy slobs who inexplicably go off it.  At least from what I’ve seen, the pattern is really surprisingly un-different from other sorts of diets.

It’s sort of a fair point. It’s kind of a “duh” that paleo (or any other way of eating that is healthier than an industrial Western diet) doesn’t help you anymore if you stop doing it and go back to eating processed crap. You can lose weight (if you are fat) and get healthier with any reasonable diet if you stick with it.

Paleo is getting more popular now and there are lots of people doing it. If past diet trends are any guide, in 10 years most of the people who have lost a bunch of weight on paleo will no longer be on paleo, and will have gained the weight back. I can argue that paleo is easier than other diets to follow, and in some ways it is. It tends to be satiating and, if done right, is satisfying. There is an online community that provides lots of support, and that’s not likely to change any time soon. However, if you follow paleo blogs you occasionally see one go dark. Sometimes that person comes back a few months later, admitting to having gone off of paleo for one reason or another and proclaiming a renewed commitment to eating well. Those blogs then sometimes go dark again, presumably because it’s frustrating to keep “coming back” to paleo. Most people on paleo have no blog, but there is no reason to think that sticking with paleo over the long term will be what most paleo practitioners will end up doing.

The fact is that paleo is hard. You are surrounded by people who eat differently than you and maybe even make fun of you for it. You have to cook almost all of your food from scratch, which is fun sometimes and a real chore at other times. You have to be careful in restaurants and other places outside your home. It’s kind of tiring. While you’re on paleo you tend to feel great, but once you’ve been off it for awhile there are many factors limiting your motivation to start again.

If you go off of paleo, it’s not because you are a “lazy slob.” Permanent dietary change is challenging in a culture that values convenient, cheap, crappy, heavily advertised food. If you are aware of the barriers and plan around them, you can minimize the chance of falling off paleo so that you can enjoy the myriad health benefits. My biggest hope is that paleo will eventually generate enough interest, money, and research that it becomes mainstream, and something closer to paleo becomes the thing that most recognized health experts recommend. That would generate attempts to monetize paleo, creating fake paleo products, and so on, but it would also make it easier for people to find their way toward real health.

Here’s hoping.

Update: Paul Jaminet uses The Fat Trap article as a springboard to a post on his Theory of Obesity. It is, as usual, thoughtful, well-argued, and interesting. Go read it.

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2 January 2012

SAD

In the paleo world you will often here the phrase “standard American diet,” or “SAD.” I don’t use it.

Bad diets are not exclusive to Americans, as international statistics on obesity and diseases of civilization show. If you live in New Zealand, do you eat the SNZD? In Hungary, the SHD? I don’t think it’s helpful to deprecate the eating patterns of any one country; nor is it helpful to give a pass to unhealthy from other places.

Also, does “SAD” mean the diet eaten in the United States, or does crap food from any country in North or South America count?

It’s a dumb term. I use “industrial Western diet,” personally. I know “IWD” doesn’t exactly flow trippingly off the tongue, but I tend to prefer precision over vapid catchiness.

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1 January 2012

Cast iron

My most used and most versatile cooking tools are my two Lodge cast-iron pans. Sarah Ballantyne has an excellent post about what’s great about cast iron cookware and how to use and care for it. I hadn’t thought about it, but it does make sense that cast iron went out of style when cooking with fat went out of style, because it doesn’t really work for low fat cooking. Fortunately, that’s not really a problem when cooking real food.

I’d simply add this to her post: If a pan is so soiled that scrubbing with water won’t clean it, you don’t need to wash with soap and then season it again. Instead, boil water in the pan for a few minutes. Let it cool a bit and you’ll find that cleaning is now easy.

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30 December 2011

Not doing it right

Paleo is an excellent substrate for health. If we had all eaten this way from birth (after our mothers had in turn eaten that way from birth) I think there would be little need for treatment of what are known as diseases of civilization.

I, however, spent 46 years eating an industrial Western diet before switching to paleo. Luckily, paleo seems to have pretty much resolved the health issues that I was experiencing. On the other hand, I don’t expect that those 46 years will have no effect. There is probably metabolic and cellular damage that will catch up with me sooner or later.

Other people are less lucky than me. If you comb through the posts at paleohacks.com, you find people with serious health problems (hypercholesterolemia, fibromyalgia,  failure to lose/gain weight, allergies, etc.) that paleo has not corrected. There are two ways of looking at an issue like that:

  1. There are perhaps a few ways to tweak the paleo paradigm to get a better outcome. More fat, less fat, less cheating, no dairy, fermented vegetables, elimination diet, organ meat, grass fed meat, more vegetables, no vegetables, no fruit, no nuts, higher carb, lower carb, zero carb, supplements, exercise, leptin reset: there are lots of ways to do paleo. Some of them might fix a particular health problem that “generic” paleo hasn’t solved.
  2. Maybe the person is simply damaged beyond the ability of paleo to repair. There is no reason to think that the harm caused by an industrial diet can always be corrected by a healthier diet. Sometimes medication, surgery, or other intervention is necessary. In other cases, there might be no way to fix the problem. There is no point at which it makes sense for someone to blame themselves (or have other people blame them) for health problems that persist after a reasonable attempt to implement a paleo approach to diet and wellness. Just because a particular problem resolves for some people on paleo is not a reason to believe that problem will go away for everyone on paleo.

How do you tell whether changes to paleo will solve any particular problem? Beats me. If paleo isn’t working, I think it does make sense to spend some time making changes that might help. At some point, it’s probably necessary to seek other remedies. At that point, the problem is finding a practitioner who won’t tell you that the first thing to do is stop that crazy paleo stuff and start eating a normal diet again. That will become easier as paleo becomes more mainstream and has more research support.

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27 December 2011

You may not understand how odd you are

Weird Science

If you’re going to think about homo sapiens in evolutionary terms, it’s valuable to compare the ways in which humans differ from other animals. It seems to me that, even aside from behavioral oddities such as building giant civilizations and tweeting about the Kardashians, we are stranger than platypi. That’s easy to miss, because we think of ourselves as normal. Hah!

Here are a few of the ways that we are weirdos:

  1. Humans have huge freaking brains. Brains are useful things; most critters have them. But ours are gigantic. That’s weird because there are definite disadvantages to having so much neural tissue wadded up at the tops of our bodies. First, the metabolism thing. Brains use lots more energy, ounce for ounce, than most other tissue. For that reason, we need to eat more than other animals our size. When we experience metabolic impairments like famine, we must let other tissues go to waste in order to keep greedy brain tissue going so that we don’t die. Another problem is that the size of our brains requires a big head. Look at a baby some time. They seem like they are half head! When we are born, our big honkin’ heads need to fit through our mother’s pelvis, which they barely do. Human men (including me) are attracted to women with narrow waists and wide hips, because those women will be more likely to survive childbirth. Other animals, including apes, find giving birth to be no big deal, something they may nap through. Not so for wild humans, who have incredibly difficult, painful births and high rates of death for mothers and children in childbirth.
  2. We walk upright, and we do it pretty well. Can you think of another critter that does that? Some animals, such as bears, are mainly quadrupeds but can get up on two legs for a better view and sort of waddle slowly around, then go back down on their forelegs when they need to make speed. Other animals, such as penguins, walk upright poorly and are optimized for swimming. Apes can walk bowlegged on two legs, clumsily, and knuckle walk for speed.  Two-legged fast movers like therapods and ostriches have a T body configuration, with most of the body balanced horizontally on two legs. The human ability to stand, walk, and run fully upright (far better than what we can do on all fours) is very strange. If we didn’t do it every day, it would be perfectly reasonable to think that upright walking is not really possible.
  3. Human females are strange (yes, I know I’m not the first human male to remark on that). First is the concealed ovulation. The females of other species, including our ape cousins, generally go into heat when they are fertile. Males and females actively engage in mating and sex when females are fertile and don’t get horny when those behaviors will not produce offspring. There are mechanisms in place to signal when a female is fertile and when she is not. By contrast, human females seem designed to prevent detection of fertility (and thwart use of the rhythm method of birth control). Thus, we tend to want to have sex all the time, whether it will result in procreation or not. This is utterly strange and biology has no good explanation for it (there are lots of theories, none of them all that convincing). All other species have evolved not to waste energy, time, and precious bodily fluids on sex when there is no chance of producing offspring. We are the only ones whose biology lets us do it for fun. There is also the matter of breasts. There is no obvious reason why breasts enlarge when girls enter puberty. Milk glands are not that big (breast tissue is mostly fat), and other mammals have no need for the enlarged teats that many (not all) human females exhibit. David Brin thinks that breasts and other adult sexually dimorphic characteristics may have the evolutionary purpose of encouraging human males to imprint sexually on adult females rather than children. That’s the least stupid-sounding theory I’ve read. Whatever the cause, I am in favor of breasts, and human females in general.
  4. Those in the paleo community like to argue about the meaning of the human eating/digestive apparatus. By comparison to other creatures, we have weak little baby teeth, pathetic for killing or chewing. Compared to our ape relatives, we have short guts that have little plant fermentation capability. However, our guts are not quite built for carnivory, either. However, by comparison to other oddities, our guts seem a paragon of normality.

I’m sure a physical anthropologist could list a few more bits of strangeness (and perhaps correct a few errors on my part), but this is a good start. We are freaky-deaky critters.

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6 December 2011

What if this is not an outlier?

This is the video that’s been shared around the paleosphere recently. If you haven’t seen it, take the time to watch. It is worth your time.

This is particularly interesting to me because I’ve spent my career working with people who have problems. I’ve worked with people with neurological conditions (traumatic brain injury, stroke, Huntington’s, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s), developmental disabilities (autism spectrum disorder, mental retardation), and psychiatric conditions (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, personality disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder). I’ve done my best to help create a therapeutic environment for the people I’ve worked with. Every single one of them is, to some degree or another, a tragedy. If you’ve never met a person with advanced Huntington’s disease who was a functioning, productive adult 5 years ago but who now can’t remember what happened 60 seconds ago, I assure you that it is heartbreaking.

In any institutional environment, the diet is carefully designed (usually by a certified dietitian) to meet nationally recognized standards of nutrition. In some cases, I’ve been involved in trying to make the diet healthier—less sugar, more vegetables, etc. It is incredibly hard to get most teenagers who suffer from debilitating mental illness to eat anything but junk. It’s the same with most others.

I have no nutritional credentials, so there is be no way for me to advocate for anything like the diet that Dr. Wahls used to reverse her symptoms of multiple sclerosis. I would be dismissed as a crank and ignored. I wonder, however. Her experience is that of one person. It’s anecdotal data, of no scientific generalizability.

Imagine, however, that you could do the experiment. Take 1000 people with debilitating degenerative neurological diseases. Divide them randomly into two groups. Give them both standard therapy, while one group eats a normal diet and the other eats an optimized paleo diet. What if the results that Dr. Wahls got were typical for the paleo diet group?

Do the same experiment with other groups, such as people with autism, combat veterans with traumatic brain injury, victims of child abuse affected by severe trauma, and others. Imagine that many of them show similar improvement to that of Dr. Wahls. Not all, of course, and most not “cured.” But significant, noticeable, clinical improvement.

That could change the world. It could happen in the next 30 years. The research is certainly do-able. The biggest barrier, of course, is the lack of profit to push it. No large companies make lots of money pushing a paleo diet for people with disabilities. Lots are invested in the status quo. That makes the project much, much harder. It would take very clear results from large, well-controlled studies to generate any momentum. Not impossible, but very hard.

It is interesting to think about. I wonder…

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4 December 2011

Soaplessness

soapy feet

I began experimenting with eliminating soap about a year after starting paleo. If humans are not broken by default, then it makes no sense that our skin and hair require that we use harsh chemicals to strip them of oil each day and then fix any resulting problems with moisturizers and conditioners.

I started by transitioning to dilute Castile soap for washing and shampooing. I added more water to the solution every time I filled the container. Then, when I had a week off from work, I switched to using only water to rinse off. Nothing bad happened. No unusual body odor. No other problems. So I continued, using soap only to wash my hands.

Then the hair. I started washing it only every other day, with daily conditioner. I tried rinsing with a solution of water and baking soda, followed by apple cider vinegar. (Do not get A.C.V. in your eyes!) That worked OK.

Finally, I just went cold turkey. I had previously had fairly greasy hair that needed to be washed every day or it looked and felt gross. I had also previously had dandruff, which disappeared on paleo. For a couple of months I used the baking soda and cider vinegar treatment once a week, then every other week. After awhile I just forgot to do that and it was fine.

Now I shower every day with just water. That’s all I seem to need. I have less body odor now than I did before changing my diet and eliminating soap. I still use an aluminum-free crystal deodorant as I have a job involving lots of social interactions and, sometimes, physical activity.

Would this work for you? I have no idea. I am a Caucasian male with regular hair that I keep short, along with a short beard and mustache. This approach might work well for you, or it might transition you into social unacceptabiliy-ville. I’ve seen lots of discussion on going shampoo-free on various message boards; clearly some have more trouble with that than others. You may find that it works very well, or you may not.

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4 December 2011

Self and sensibility

Just two years ago, I weighed 35 lbs. (about 16 kg or 2.5 stone) more than  I do now. Many people have lost a lot more weight than that on paleo, but it’s pretty significant to me. I weigh 10 lbs. less than I did when I graduated from high school. I’m not skinny (except in comparison to many of my fellow Americans) but I am no longer overweight.

It’s only in retrospect that I realize the things I did to avoid confronting my physical self. I was certainly clear that I could stand to lose some weight, but didn’t think about it much. For the most part, I just avoided thinking about it at all. I refused to buy pants with a waist larger than 32 inches (81 cm), even though they didn’t fit that well any more (I started buying the ones with a stretch waistband for “comfort”). I figured out which brands made pants labelled “32,” but which were really a bit larger. I am now at a 29, which is hard to find in the U.S. (many brands start at 32 and go up from there). I never went to the beach or anywhere else that involved taking off my shirt, and I bought shirts that were a bit too large without thinking about why, which was to cover up.

All of that is obvious to me in retrospect, but was a tiny part of my conscious self awareness at the time. I didn’t think about diet or health. I didn’t go to the doctor unless I got bronchitis and needed a prescription. My eyesight was deteriorating, I got winded a lot more easily, I gave up anything athletic, my teeth started hurting, and I am sure in retrospect that I was working toward my first heart attack. All of that was too unpleasant to think about, so I didn’t.

It may be that I’m now too aware of health issues—I have certainly been accused of that. But by comparison, things are so much better now that it seems a worthwhile tradeoff.

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1 December 2011

Notes from the road

Diamond Lakes Park, Hephzibah Georgia

I am posting lightly this week as I am on the road on business in Georgia (the U.S. one, not the Caucasus one).

I find it challenging to try to stick to paleo while traveling, which I have to do fairly often for my job. I do the best I can, but many restaurants haven’t clued in to what no gluten means (my mother in law, who is also allergic to wheat, once got “you mean there’s wheat in bread?” from a waitress). They also use industrial seed oil for all kinds of stuff, which blows the inflammatory omega 6 levels way up. When I’m traveling in urban areas it’s not so bad as I can often find a Whole Foods or something similarly yuppified and find some approximation of real food. In rural areas I do the best I can and balance it out by eating clean when I get home.

I do take the opportunity to move as much as I can when I’m not working. This evening I got a chance to check out Diamond Lakes Park in Hephzibah (love the name), which seems to be part of Augusta. I only had about 45 minutes as the park closes at sundown, which comes early this time of year. While I was in work clothes, I was wearing a pair of stealth barefoot athletic shoes (Merrell Barefoot Tough Gloves) that are acceptable for casual business wear, which meant that I could do some sprints on back trails. That’s good, because I’ve been really lazy about sprints lately, so I needed it.

Hotels, unfortunately, are almost universally transitioning their “fitness centers” to having only hamster wheels cardio machines. I used to find resistance equipment and occasionally bar bell sets, but the lawyers are ruining that as they have ruined so many other parts of life. Instead I do body weight exercises in hotel rooms. I also find that get some pretty good asymmetrical workouts just lifting the desk chair or other hotel room furniture over my head, moving it from one shoulder to another, and carrying it around the room. I try to book hotels that have swimming pools. Unfortunately, my first hotel this week has an outdoor pool (too cold to be open in late November even in Georgia) and my current hotel’s indoor pool is closed for maintenance. Oh, well.

Soon I’ll do a post on self-management of eating, but that will have to wait until I am back home and have access to some of my books for reference material.

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22 November 2011

Easy caramalized onions and mushrooms in cream sauce

mushrooms and onions

Here’s a really simple and delicious addition to most meat dishes.

Ingredients:

  • 2 tbs. fat of choice (butter, bacon fat, ghee, etc.)
  • 1 yellow onion, chopped.
  • A large handful of sliced mushrooms, or 1 package.
  • 1 tsp. garlic powder.
  • Salt and pepper to taste.
  • 3 tbs. heavy cream.

Put a medium saucepan on medium-high heat. Melt FOC. Add onion and mushroom. Stir frequently until they lose about half their volume to evaporation and begin to brown around the edges. Add spices and stir. Add cream. Bring heat to low-medium. Continue stirring until cream has noticeably thickened. Serve on meat or almost anything.

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