Friday, March 19th, 2010

Archive for January, 2010

The Paleo Post has been updated

Thursday, January 28th, 2010

In the left hand column of the home page of The Paleo Garden you will find the latest issue of The Paleo Post.

“I will reach back and draw them into me, and they must come, for at this moment, I am the whole reason they existed at all.”

–Cinque calling on his ancestors from “Amistad.”

This is our latest snapshot of what’s going on in this evolutionary life for those of us on the frontlines of our ancestry living healthy by taking advantage of the lessons of the past, and doing it in such a way that is the healthiest for the earth right now and for our future generations.  And surprise, surprise, that certainly doesn’t mean eating soy and avoiding meat.  In this week’s episode look into a world when Chicago gangsters don’t run booze but are trading bullets for the right to sling butter.   You gotta fight, for your right, to live primal!

One Million B.C. from Rudolph's Shiny New Year

Also, check out the economic rap battle between John Maynard Keynes (the Standard American Diet in human form) and Friedrich August von Hayek (the economist on Team Paleo).    The Austrian economic perspective really does help explain how we got to where we are with mass feedlot and subsidized grain production in industrialized societies.  Our piece on Wooden Nickels and Metabolic Syndrome goes into this a bit regarding how unfettered money printing and currency devaluation brought down the Roman Empire… but it was to prop up agricultural subsidies.  In our modern times, if/when prices of grains go up, look for more government intervention in the marketplace regarding subsidies and price controls.  Which will artificially make paleo foods less competitive and more expensive in comparison.  Making people’s health worse as they gorge more and more on propped up grains and HFCS.  Making health care costs for the metabolically deranged skyrocket.  You may not be an Austrian economic adherent, but if you want affordable paleo food you’re more on Team Hayek than Team SAD/Keynes.

As Uncle Lew points out, someone like Keynes, whose most memorable quote is “In the long run we’re all dead”, has no concern for what carnage is left behind by his destructive policies that cause the bubbles that blow up into economic downturns.   I guess that philosophy is OK if you’re dead by the time your actions lead to the inevitable destruction.  Outside of the mass murderers of the last 100 years, the two people that have done the most damage to humanity are probably Keynes and Keys.  Two peas in a pod that should have gone bowling together.

Rounding out this issue of The Paleo Post are ostriches, paleo kosher, SAT FAT redemption, a crazy curmudgeon, and the return of megafaunas to our plates.

I can just see the return of the Fred Flintstone barbecue party and off in the corner the low-fat crowd licking their lips.

bbq_thumb

“Silly Ancel, mammoth steaks are for the evolutionary living.”  

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Don’t call it backsliding!

Tuesday, January 26th, 2010

Recent events have impacted my rigorous adherence to the ancestral fitness paradigm.  Part of it was the holidays—Christmas and New Year’s—they are celebratory times, and I bet even the most rigorous ancestral geek is from time to time tempted.  Part of it was my own extracurricular happenings—my Christmas Eve birthday, my new baby’s birth on 29 December, the whole stress level associated with that issue.  And since my wife is Russian, we also celebrate Orthodox Christmas (January 7) and Orthodox New Year’s (January 14).

That’s a lot of opportunities to eat processed crap.

And when your daughters look at you with beaming faces, offering up the German chocolate cake they baked, umm, that ain’t really the time to say, “Get thee behind me, Sugar!  I reject you and all your works!”  Sure, I could have said that, and broken their dear little hearts, but in all honesty, there’s no way I’d tell my daughters that, on my birthday, when they’d baked me a cake.

So I had some cake.

And not just cake, either.  I’ve dipped back into the land of processed carbs over the last couple of weeks, and I don’t feel particularly bad about it.  Check that, I don’t feel particularly bad in a moral way about that.  I do, on the other hand, feel physically bad.

The Healthcare Epistemocrat writes about self-experimentation, and I have taken it to heart.  There are, of course, positive and negative experiments.  Positive experimentation is most of what I’ve done—moving away from grains, moving away from HFCS, moving away from processed foods in general, supplementing with Vitamin D, making an effort to get more sunshine, all the good stuff that is involved in this paleo/primal/ancestral/evolutionary fitness tao.  I’ve liked the results I’ve had—otherwise, well, I wouldn’t be writing this stuff, would I?

Going hand in hand with positive experimentation is negative experimentation.  Sometimes you need to see if the positive results you’ve had are based in what you’ve done, or if there was something else going on, unobserved, that was responsible.  You want to eat that Twinkie?  Go ahead!  Then pay attention to how you feel.

So I ate the cake, I ate some pizza, I “backslid” and I kept an eye on how I felt.  I felt horrible.  The sugar rush like to blew my head off, and then the slow sickening slide into lassitude and torpor took place, that logy feeling came down to sit on me.  When I’m in full paleo mode, and I gorge on a pound or more of good beef, pork or lamb, I end up with the feeling of being “agile full.”  Full, that is, but with the feeling that if I had to go play a game of ultimate Frisbee, or throw a spear at an invader, or sprint for the trees to get away from an unexpected predatory megafauna, I could do it.  The sugar full, the carb full, the processed full—those are entirely different from the agile full.

The sugar/carb/processed full is when you want to lean back, undo your belt, and nap, because you can’t do anything except digest.  Probably not actual glycemic shock, but the next worst thing.

That “sick full” feeling, however, is a very temporary thing.  It goes away after an hour or two.  What other symptoms can we observe?  (In the patient of one mythos, you are responsible for self-observing and thinking about your state instead of outsourcing responsibility for your health to strangers.)

I got sick again.  For years, before I did the gut check and paleo’d up, I suffered from ongoing, recurrent upper respiratory problems I dubbed the “creeping crud.”  The creeping crud was a cough, and a phlegmy feeling, and a general constriction of the respiratory system that was moderately debilitating.  I had that crud for weeks if not months at a time, recurring throughout the year.  When I went paleo, the creeping crud went away.

After going paleo almost 18 months ago, I was only sick once, with common cold symptoms that lasted three days from onset to resolution.  Yes, I upped my dosage of vitamins C and D.

This negative experimentation brought back the creeping crud.  It sat in my lungs and lingered, I spat up mucus, I felt constricted and restrained.  Yes, I upped my dosage of vitamins C and D, and no, it didn’t seem to ameliorate the problem.  I felt under the weather, and my eldest daughter turned around the diagnosis I used when she was ailing: she said I had sad sick little eyes.

You can call it backsliding if you want–sometimes I do, too.  But I prefer to call it negative experimentation.  I checked my progress, I dipped a toe back into the standard American diet, and I experienced the results: a near-immediate degradation of health.  No problem, though.  I know what I did wrong, I know what to do right, I’m already recalibrating the meals we’ll be putting together.  I checked my premises, and found my premises to be correct: eating ancestrally (primally/paleolithically/evolutionarily) increases health, eating the modern diet decreases health.  I’m back on track.  My negative experimentation has demonstrated that I was doing the right things, and that turning away from them imposes negative health consequences, and I’m ready to resume right living.

Don’t call it backsliding!  (Well, ok, I backslid.)  

Posted in Uncle Lew | 6 Comments »

Paleo Medicine

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010

I’ve always liked the line from Good Will Hunting regarding not underestimating where a novel questioning of the status quo may come from:

Professor Lambeau:

“In 1905 there were hundreds of professors renowned for their study of the universe, but it was a 26 year old Swiss patent clerk, doing physics in his spare time who changed the world. Can you imagine if Einstein would have given that up just to get drunk with his buddies?”

good-will-hunting

By the way, it wasn’t a “Swiss patent clerk”, it was the German-born Einstein working in Switzerland.  But I digress…

What’s unique in the paleo/evolutionary living community is that there are paleo medical professionals who admit what they previously didn’t know and acknowledge that they learned it from people outside of a so-called prerequisite field. There are also many paleo health and fitness professionals rendering nutrition and weight training “treatments” that are doing more for people than any mainstream M.D. pushing a low-fat concoction of horror. In turn, there are a lot of low-fat, low-intensity, heavy on the pasta and cardio type of trainers making a lot of money in appearance fees but whose actual advice isn’t worth a penny compared to a low-carb (normal carb!) doctor’s medical appointment.

In the end, it’s the combination like that of Professor Arthur De Vany, Mark Sisson & Robb Wolf with Drs. Eades, McGuff and Davis (and countless others) that allows for the paleo remnant to see that the clinical and the research minded evidence is out there, understood, explained and offered by the Doc to his patients, by the trainer to his trainee, and by the wise professor to a gathering crowd seeking epistemology.

Mainstream Medicine would like you to ignore evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology and all forms of evolutionary medicine and accept on faith and faith alone the government approved food pyramid, HFCS, and the false correlation of cholesterol & heart disease.  Mainstream Medicine hoists up a cheap sheepskin (educational/medical degree) onto a vanquished and crumbling low-fat/high-carb rampart as if that sheepskin allows for someone to deny gravity (or the existence of insulin).  And in the same breath, they reject all of humanity’s accumulated medical knowledge from the dawn of time until Ancel Keys did his Seven Countries Study with cooked books.  Essentially, such skewed statistics became gospel, and those that questioned “the modern low-fat medicine men” were called witch doctors.

However, the strength of the evolutionary living community is completely opposite.  There are no sacred texts.  The paleo clinicians (the trainers, the crossfitters, the lifters, the reformed carb-addicts) and the paleo doctors are learning with each other.  One group feeding data to the other group and circling back again.

The challenge before you is to learn what all of these different voices are saying. If you’re a doctor, resist pride and understand that the Ancel Keys textbooks you have studied are no more than a bucket of leaches. You’re still required to pay those medical student loans that made you take those Ancel-inspired courses, however, that fact shouldn’t stand in your way.   On the other hand, if you’re a layman, whether a bricklayer, a bodybuilder or a lawyer, resist the temptation of submitting to the “approved” health advice meme. You were never given the full explanation of all of what they said before, so don’t just repeat the words of the medical professionals you see on CNN or on Oprah and accept it as the gospel truth.

ornish1gupta1c16greenedr-oz1

This requires you not to just regurgitate the latest epidemiological statistic paid for by the obligatory interest group, but to actually dig in a bit on the endocrinological basis of the paleo diet. Read up on the evolutionary basis as to why our fast and slow twitch muscles do that they do. Why lifting heavy things beats a spin class. Why a 30 minute walk or jog doesn’t mean you’ve ”earned” your breakfast of a yogurt, bagel and orange juice. Don’t take it all at face value. Cross reference. Google it.

Read The Paleo Diet.

Read Good Calories, Bad Calories.

Read Primal Blueprint.

Read The Protein Power Plan.

Read Body By Science.

Read articles from Nutrition and Metabolism (with a dictionary handy expecting to only understand 30% at first).

Read the dozens of other paleo sites out there of people (whether they have a medical degree or not) performing n=1 methodology (h/t health epistemocrat).

If you can’t explain it in layman’s terms to someone else, you’re not there yet. As a layman or doctor if you can’t politely discuss this with low-fat doctors without posing questions leaving them speechless, you’re not there yet.  I don’t have a cabinet to store this all in, instead it’s stored in the evolutionary living community members I listen to, the things I read, the decisions I make, it’s in the food I eat, it’s in the rest while I sleep, and it’s in the words I offer up to others for their sake in return.

There’s a Native American phrase when praising someone that says,”He/she has strong medicine.” But in the English vernacular that doesn’t mean that the person necessarily had the best pharmacy in the tribe (e.g., really knew about herbs), it could have meant a whole host of things. The person offered good words at a pow-wow or meeting, the person offered good prayers or perhaps provided good spiritual guidance. Maybe, the person was indeed the best at presiding over a religious service. Or, it could actually mean that his/her ability to look for and find herbs for medicinal purposes was second to none.

medicine-wheel03

A couple of weeks ago I made a list of the great evolutionary living sites out there. I made a mistake by putting the group in cardinal order. What I should have done was to describe these sites as members of a “support group” or even a paleo council. So, those that were on my recent list should not be seen as being numbered from 1 to 10, it should be seen rather as a group sitting in a circle, with no distinction of rank or title. They were mentioned because I find them to provide rather good paleo medicine, in the above mentioned sense. Mark Sisson may be the only “medicine” I take on a given day, other times it’s from many others not even on that list.

Learn how to make “medicine” for yourself. This means actually understanding why and what your doctor is prescribing for you. This may indeed require prescription pills under the supervision of a doctor or perhaps even surgery at points in your life.  In no way am I implying that modern medical knowledge shouldn’t be considered, or that you should avoid going to the hospital when you have a broken leg! But remember, just because an Ancel Keys indoctrinated doctor can write a prescription on a pad of paper doesn’t mean that he’s giving good medicine. Thankfully, we have doctors amongst us in this online paleo world that are humble and wise enough to admit to you that they learned about good paleo medicine after years of handing out bad medicine.

Posted in Medicine, The Paleo Garden Party | 5 Comments »

Go Lou Go!!!

Sunday, January 17th, 2010

Go Lou Go!!!

Live Video Stream as referenced on Robb Wolf’s site.  

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The Paleo Post has been updated

Sunday, January 17th, 2010

In the left hand column of the main page here at The Paleo Garden you will find the latest edition of The Paleo Post.

Congrats to Dr. McGuff on his one-year anniversary of publishing Body By Science.  If ever there were a true debate between the establishment’s health recommendations and low-fat diet (provided to you by our friends who run the granary) and our evolutionary birth rite diet and training methods, McGuff’s book along with a handful of others would definitely be entered into the official record.

BBS definition of health: “an appropriate balance between an anabolic and catabolic state”

Go Lou Mars, Go!  Drum, Lou, Drum!  Helping kids, breaking records, and promoting the paleo diet.

We appreciate the readership making the last 30 days our most successful month ever.   

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Somebody requisition me a beat!

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

This post is in support of Lou Mars upcoming attempt to set the Guinness Book of World Records for marathon drumming.  The Paleo Garden commends his efforts “to do well by doing well” by donating a drumset to raise money to help children go after their dreams while at the same time raising the attention of a healthy paleo lifestyle.  To learn more about Lou’s upcoming attempt please go here.  To donate to Lou’s “Little Kids Rocks” please go here.  

OK, OK—I’m about worn out thinking about war and death and autonomy and the coming collapse of the American Bubble, the SAD (Standard American Diet) and Big Ag and Big Pharma and Big Government, and the relative merits of the .45 ACP vice the 9mm.  All important issues, of course!

Well, the .45 vs. 9 thing has been done to death, but it keeps coming back.  Like a zombie.  Like a fast zombie.

So today I’m going to talk about music.  So far as I can tell, humans like music.  I’m a human, and I like music, and I think there’s some fallacy that says Aristotle was a man, all men are human, so all men are Aristotle . . . but I’m not going to go there yet.  But I am going to talk about music, and I’ve brought audiovisual aids with me to help out.  I can justify posting a series of music videos because as the Healthcare Epistemocrat reminds us, music is important for your health.    First off, I’m going to lay some drums on you.  There’s not much in the way of musical instruments that qualifies as primal more than drums.  I mean, think about it: stick, gourd, skin.  You’ve got your club, you’ve got the skin from your latest kill, and you’ve got a gourd that you gathered.  It’s juicy primal hunter-gatherer goodness!

You’ve got your modern rock drums. (youtube video below)

Then there’s Japanese taiko drumming.  (youtube video below)

African drums.  (youtube video below)

Middle eastern drums to shake to.  (youtube video below)

Drums are nice, but sometimes they cry out for something else.  What goes with drums, like ham goes with cheese?  My answer would be bagpipes.  Ah, bagpipes!  Talking about bagpipes is almost as dangerous as discussing politics, religion and red headed women.  People tend not to be neutral on the bagpipe issue; they either love them, or they hate them.

“A sound like a cat being strangled with its own intestines” is how one of my friends put it.  Me, I beg to differ, but that could be a genetic predisposition deriving from my status as a mixed-mutt East Texas Celt.

Today in the popular imagination, Scotland is associated with three cultural artifacts: the kilt, the basket hilted broadsword, and bagpipes.  (Well, and haggis.)  Not only is Scotland associated with these three things, but these three things are associated, almost exclusively, with Scotland.  I think that’s kind of funny, because two of the three aren’t indigenous to Scotland.  (Yes, the kilt is exclusively Scottish in origin, and more particularly, Highland Scots in origin at that.)

I’m going to try and squeeze a couple of whole posts out in the future about kilts and swords, so I’ll let them lay fallow for the moment, and address bagpipes.  (It’s that thematic consistency thing I keep reading about.)

Bagpipes are another musical instrument with deep primal roots.  As a drum is, essentially, gourd, skin and stick, a bagpipe is, essentially, an animal skin with a pipe stuck in it.  The origins of the bagpipes are, as they like to say, lost in the mists of time.    Without wanting to get my PhD in music history, let’s just say that maybe the Assyrians were strangling cats with their own intestines, back in the day.  And that was way back in the day.

The popular imagination (hey, I like that phrase) associates bagpipes with the Highland Regiments of the British Army. (youtube video below)

We’ll politely overlook the bagpipes association with wild and lawless Highlanders being expressed through the lens of military (i.e., regimented) music.

Now, the genre also includes tribal piping, like the Saor Patrol.   (It’s pronounced like “Shore Patrol” and is derived from saorus, or liberty/freedom in the Gaelic language.)  For me, tribal pipes and drums are made of awesomeness, and basted in excellence sauce, and trimmed with bacon (nitrate free bacon).  For me—and I don’t pretend it’ll be true for you, because you might hate it, not that there’s anything wrong with that—- wild pipes and drums stir a Dionysian passion and frenzy in me.  They make me want to be barefoot (or Vibram Fivefingered) and kilted, barechested in a chill mountain morning, running along stones with Erwin le Corre.  For me, for my soul, that’s the balm, that’s the bomb.

And one of my favorite things in this whole wide world has been watching my middle daughter, Lena, almost five, turn on the boombox and sway and rock out to the CD of Saor Patrol I burned for her.  The drums thud and boom, the pipes wail and skirl, she loses herself in the music, she bounces and prances and shakes her arms and wiggles her torso, she laughs and smiles and tosses her hair from side to side, she’s an exuberant animal. She’s fiercely alive, pulled along by that funky tribal beat.

How could that not be one of my favorite things? (youtube video below)

Also, Albannach. (youtube video below)

Wild, shaggy, free-form, with drums thudding and echoing and resounding all through your head, and over and above it floating the fierce skirling of the pipes . . . somebody requisition me a beat.

Oh, and this post’s title is from Hermes Conrad, bureaucrat of Planet Express!  Yeah, I’m a Futurama geek—whatayagonnado?

Uncle Lew’s series “Wolves Among Dogs” and other posts may be found here in The Paleo Garden.  

Posted in Music, Uncle Lew | No Comments »

Paleo Candy

Saturday, January 9th, 2010

by Lorette C. Luzajic

It’s one point five days into the no-carbs New Years and doing fine, just fine. But why oh why can’t there be nutrient-dense proteins in fine wine? Robust health in Canada’s pride prize wheat and its spectrum of beers?

The paprika-garlic marinated pork roast with peppery pumpkin seeds made day one easy sailing. Gotta love Alabama white BBQ sauce- mayo, vinegar, lemon juice, and black pepper. And no one wants to drink again on New Year’s Day. So it was kind of a no-contest success story to kick start things off with for this experiment.

The experiment I’m talking about is taking the final plunge into my unexpected role as the spokes-model of the Paleo re/generation. Because I don’t exactly look like that spokes-model- and never have, pretty as I may be “in my own way.”

Weird Monologues for a Rainy Life

But the more I learn from my writing, the more I share of my research, the better my own life gets. My health and mental health get better and better. The strides taken toward that modern jungle have cured me of a lifetime of pesky autoimmune disorders, you just can’t go all the way if enjoying alcohol is an important part of your life. Cancer, diabetes, dry hair- I have to start saying “no thanks.”

But aye, there’s the pub. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist such a corny pun.) Our ancient gods of grain and grapes are made of liquid carbs! Pure sucree. Pure sacree. What’s a girl to do?

Now that I know that life without carbs is not suffering, but the opposite of suffering, I’ve got to trust that knowledge and bid humankind’s favourite folly farewell. Goodbye, fair love.

Is today’s melodrama sugar withdrawal? Probably. I followed it to the Valu Mart across the street. I thought some fruit might ward off tempting fantasy options like a baguette with brie, or, well, wine with that baguette with brie.

So I paid for a nice crispy-feeling Spartan apple and wondered why humans and animals all love stuff that will kill them more than they love anything else. There’s no way a dog’s going to eat only one potato chip, either, given free reign of a couch and Sour Cream and Onion crisps. And wine and beer is a universal pillar of joy and compulsion in lives the world over. Ants head straight for the sweet stuff- you can spill some sugar away from the house and they’ll all leave your kitchen.

Our earliest ancestors were making candy, too- sun drenching fruits to make them sweeter; hunting out fermented fruit juices and intoxicating plants; making honey taffy. As soon as recorded history began, we were making candy by rolling nuts and berries in honey, from China to Egypt. Later, some genius added cocoa to the concoction and the real party started- the ancient rendition of the chocolate bar.

On the way out of the shop, I glanced over a Christmas product clearance to see if there was anything useful. With curiousity, I picked up a box of Christmas cookies. They were on sale for .79 cents, a savings of $3.19! Then reason washed over me. I’d never had these cookies before in my life, and there was no real point to start now, two days into a carb detox. My eyes skimmed a list of a dozen ingredients I couldn’t pronounce. Mister Christie, you make good cookies?

We’ve got to stop feeding this shit to our children.

I put the box down thinking, that’s a lot of bang for that buck. Heading back out into January’s clime, I went walking down the chilly, bright streets. The apple was delicious.  

Posted in Food ideas, Lorette | 1 Comment »

The Golden Rule and Evolution

Monday, January 4th, 2010

A long time ago, there was a place called Eden. Eden was a beautiful garden. And in this garden there was love, there was blood, there was birth, and there was death. And in this garden, people lived.

While living in the garden, even before teeth were sunk into that famous apple, something wondrous happened there. There was fire, and meat roasted on a spit.

The curly wisps of smoke like helixes rose up to the sky out of the flames. And in the smoky air over the years the faces and bodies around the fire began to change.

the-paleo-garden

The people learned to hunt together, for each other. They learned to gather, for each other. What they picked, dug up or stuck with a spear didn’t upset the balance of the garden (just don’t tell that to the mega fauna!). What they ate and metabolized allowed for the various cell colonies and organisms in their bodies to live in harmony. There was balance regarding what the humans took from the garden to eat,… for what they took was needed by the garden to be taken. And that which was taken by the humans to eat provided their hormones and cells an environment in which it was advantageous to work together.

They did on to each other, for themselves and the garden, as they would have each other and the garden do onto them.

But then one day, they ate a forbidden apple from a tree (although it might have really been crushed wheat that was their downfall, perhaps the serpent offered an apple pie?), and obtained a knowledge of agriculture, namely, how to domesticate grains, that challenged the garden’s hunting and gathering way of life. And for this, they were cast out. Out of the garden.

cast-out-of-eden

And did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?

Hot ashes for trees?

Hot air for a cool breeze?

Cold comfort for change?

And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?

-from Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here”

And humans lived on. They began to grow plants and further domesticate animals.  And thousands of years later, this system provided them food very unlike how it was provided for them when they lived in Eden.

And they began to take more from their gardens than they put back into them. The wheat and corn and sugar and soy and rice began to strip the land of its wealth. They began to fight for the land and water and crops at a scale that brought a level of destruction that was unlike anything ever seen in a tribal war.

They cared not how they treated each other. The Human Action that created the economics of hunting, gathering and trading with each other their fruits and vegetables and meats for mutual health and wealth ceased. They just ignored the fact that their food was making them sick, and instead concentrated on fighting with each other over the power to see who had the authority to dole out the rations from the granaries.

And so appeared a top-down growing model, nothing like a garden, an agricultural system that grew to become based on fiat/paper money and ag subsidies. Their fields produced high fructose corn syrup for gluten and sugar laden foods begotten from an exhausted earth. These strange foods were even fed to their animals (and bees to make honey!), which made the animals as sick as the humans.

And the people cared not what they did onto the earth to grow their food, and the dying earth began to do onto them in the same way back. Famine, drought, and underproduction occasionally took their respective tolls on the centrally planned food system and accompanying centrally planned human societies founded on malinvestments in unhealthy sugars and carb-filled crops using the sandy bedrock of paper money that makes profits turn into debt and bankruptcy via inflation.

10,000 years after their exodus from the garden, the food that the people ate started to cause war among the colonies of cells within their human bodies. The high carbohydrate diet from the grains and sugar caused the adipose tissue to expand and horde nutrients at the expense of the organs and the brain. Hormones that used to work in harmony now spoke past each other in a cacophonous discord causing metabolic syndrome.

What they thought was enough food stored in their granaries was pure sugar, and it began to slowly cause them debt, and cause them to become sick. And they began to realize that what they thought would be enough, wasn’t. And they couldn’t grow enough anymore for everybody. Quite simply, the “real” price of their grains was becoming known, and it was an investment based on incorrect assumptions of currency stability, the food’s health benefits, and the ability of the earth to continue growing in unsustainable ways.

The Golden Rule preached 2,000 years ago which echoed the lost life of the garden, now in this day and age is forgotten by many. But not by all. These teachings are a part of religion for many, they are teachings that I indeed try to follow. There are many who don’t follow a religion, and instead explain the world solely through the scientific method. But these teachings are also part of our evolution, our lives both in and out of the garden, and in our bodies, and amongst our cells. The aspect the Golden Rule plays in our evolution can be understood by those who hold the Golden Rule as part of their religious outlook.

We may not be able to return to Eden, but the Golden Rule applied to evolutionary living will help us find a way to feed each other.  We are now the faces that may be seen through the smoke. We are the ones now sitting around the campfire once again figuring out a way to continue to live for our mutual health and wealth.

fire

Do onto others, as you would have them do onto you. This is part of us, this is how we may evolve if we are to continue.

We are part of this evolution right now.  

Posted in EF-De Vany reference, Granary, Kairos, The Paleo Garden Party | 3 Comments »

The Paleo Post has been updated

Sunday, January 3rd, 2010

In the left hand column of the home page for The Paleo Garden you will find the latest edition of The Paleo Post.

Along with Keith Norris’ piece on a T-Muscle article, which I thoroughly enjoyed and keep coming back to in my thoughts, I have spent a lot of time thinking about Keith’s other post on Rapid Force Development. Go here, and I strongly recommending perusing all of the links that Keith provides including the videos, and read and reread what he’s trying to say here. Good stuff.

Also, a sea change has occurred in the paleo/primal/evolutionary community.  Robb Wolf is now doing podcasts.  Start from the beginning,  download them on your iPod, listen to them on your daily commute, or stream them when your chopping and making dinner.  If you don’t know who Robb is, get to know him.  He’s a giant in the community, and not as well known IMHO as he should be.  This is going to change really soon and really fast. 2010 is going to be a good year for Robb and his projects.

The Paleo Post is a snapshot that I try to do once every week or so of things going on in and out of the evolutionary living community that I think are of note, in no way is this a complete picture, of course.  If you have any links to suggest, please post them as a comment to The Paleo Post Update posts, or email them to me, and I’ll post them in the next edition.  In place of a blog roll, I wish you Happy New Year, and offer this Top 10 list of sites to recommend to those starting out on their evolutionary kairos moment.

1. Arthur De Vany (The Godfather of the Paleo movement.  Look for “The New Evolution Diet” this year, one of the most anticipated books in our community of all time.  Evolutionary Fitness is a phrase Art coined, and he’s inspired a lot of others to go out and spread that message in their own ways.)

2.  Loren Cordain (Author of The Paleo Diet.  He goes where the science takes him.  His views on sat fat may differ from some others’, but he follows his interpretations of the data, and he’s NEVER afraid to adjust his findings according to what he discovers.  Cordain’s book, research and analysis are keystones.)

3. Dr. McGuff (Author of Body By Science.  This book changed the way we look at everything.  The Big 5 workout and the dose/frequency message is something that I incorporate into my regiment with great success.  I could write for pages on what this book did for me, and how I really had lightbulbs going off when listening to McGuff’s interviews.  Go to Jimmy Moore’s site for what I think is McGuff’s best interview.)

4.  Keith Norris (The brains and brawn behind Theory To Practice.  I think of Keith as the great synthesizer between the body building/power lifters, paleo diet practitioners, athletes, intellectuals, scholars, experts and novices interested in weight loss and/or getting in shape.  Keith is the one who brings all of it together for me.  If I’m having problems in piecing it together, I look at the cave wall Keith is painting on and it all suddenly becomes very clear.  In a given month, I’ll do my once-a-week workouts, though it’s all subject to how I feel and my insane schedule, and I’ll do a De Vany inspired workout, a workout inspired by McGuff, a modified CrossFit WOD, and something out of Keith’s bag.  I have found that this approach is working out really well, and keeping things always interesting.)

5. Jimmy Moore (Jimmy is a low carb junky, an inspiration that you should pass on to any loved one struggling with a weight issue.  Jimmy’s podcast show never fails to impress and amaze.  Jimmy’s got an Atkin’s take on things, but is open to all knowledge, and interviews the most interesting scientists, researchers, health experts and doctors from whom evolutionary living enthusiasts should add information to their evolving knowledge bases.)

6. Robb Wolf (A giant in the world of CrossFit.  He’s recently left that organization, I’ll not comment on that, as I don’t have a dog in the issue, but his accomplishments in the CrossFit community should always be remembered.  Robb’s a protege of Dr. Loren Cordain.  Robb speaks the most intelligently and understandably on nutrition and fitness than anyone in the paleo community.  I’m looking forward to seeing where Robb goes from here.)

7. Mark Sisson (A week is not complete without catching up with what’s going on at Mark’s Daily Apple.  Mark probably more than anyone in our community is responsible for getting the paleo message out to the broadest audience possible in a way that appeals to all segments, whether a housewife, a gym rat, extreme sports enthusiast, a student or a doctor, Mark has a way of speaking to you.  His site might as well be renamed Paleo Wikipedia, his prolific work serves as a resource for any novice or long time follower of evolutionary living.)

8. Dr. Michael Eades (Dr. Eades, along with his wife, quite simply is an institution.  His writing is witty, intelligent, eclectic, opinionated, and sometimes jaw dropping when he comes full circle in making a connection that you never saw coming.)

9. Dr. William Davis (Taking the paleo message to heart is cardiologist, Dr. Davis.  His insight to a healthy heart via a paleo diet should be a resource to any of you or any of your loved ones following the misguided advice of eating lowfat and taking statins.)

10. Richard Nikoley (”One of us.”  Richard is a paleo renaissance man.  Along with being a great amalgamator and connector of really big ideas, his insight into how to best tear down the veil of the lowfat/whole-grains dogma is helpful to many trying to muddle their way through all of the big pharma/big ag propaganda to reach the goal of returning to their birth rite diet and lifeway.  Richard, one of us, wearing a hardhat and making a difference.)

Hey, where are you, Son of Grok!?  You’re always high on my list, Erick, thanks for your inspiration.  Simply put, without Son of Grok, there wouldn’t have been the nudge to have created The Paleo Garden.  See you in 2010.

One to watch in 2010, healthcare epistemocrat. You’re going to see this site quite a bit in The Paleo Post in months to come.  Watch out for this guy, he’s wicked dangerous.

There are so many others out there, and they routinely can be found here at The Paleo Garden on The Paleo Post.  I’ll post another Top 10 list 6 months from now, because really after the first 3 in the above Top 10 list there are about 30 other sites out there that are top notch.

Again, Happy New Year.  The Paleo Garden has been around now for 6 months, and after a busy December, we just now are only really getting started.  Just wait… we’re looking forward to hunting and gathering knowledge with you, and hanging around the campfire to figure out just what we’ve brought back to camp.  We’re going hunting for mastodons this year, we’ll need your help.  

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