The Paleo Garden

Inside Baseball

Uncle Lew — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 17:39:09 +0000

I have always thought that the pursuit of ancestral fitness involved at least two layers. Maybe, like onions, and ogres, and parfait, ancestral fitness is simply a thing of layers. There is the simple game, and the deep game. Inevitably, the more one pursues this thing we call ancestral fitness, the deeper one goes. This is, of course, true of almost everything, not only onions, ogres and parfait. (That’s a Mike Myers reference, kids!)

The two levels? There is the advanced, complex level, where we throw around phrases like glycemic index, ketogenesis and epigenetics. And there’s the simple level, where we say things like “eat real food.” Both levels are working towards a similar goal—a basically fit human, but they’re vastly different in terms of the depth and sophistication with which they approach that goal.

Inside baseball is looking to build Mark Sisson, to build Arthur de Vany. Inside baseball is looking to maximize human performance. Inside baseball is all about applying the serious study of human anatomy and physiology to take the raw human meat and make it, in the words of the old Army commercial, all it can be.

Both Mark and Art provide excellent, introductory level guides to ancestral fitness, Mark with his Primal Blueprint and Art with his Essay on Evolutionary Fitness. Both of them, however, operate at a much higher level than just “eating real food.”

Unfortunately, the deeper you get into the game, the weirder and more abstruse you sound to outsiders. There have been times when I would attempt to explain ancestral fitness to someone and their eyes would glaze over. My enthusiasm would lead me to start reeling off phrases like “insulin resistance” and “ketogenesis,” “catabolic state” and “glycemic index.” TEGO. (Their Eyes Glaze Over) When you’re talking to a layman, even an interested layman, about ancestral/paleo/primal/evolutionary fitness and you launch into a discursion on the ratios of omega 6 and omega 3 fatty acids in grass fed vice grain fed beef, you are liable to scare off a potential convert.

I mean, meat is meat, right?

On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, no. Come on—after delving into ancestral fitness and doing the background readings, we all know that grass fed, grass finished, hormone free, antibiotic free beef is an entirely different product than what I like to call “industrial meat.”

It’s fun to deepen our understanding of ancestral fitness, and to explore, further, how to self-experiment and tinker with our bodies. It’s pleasant to be able to converse with our fellows at a high level of sophistication. It’s tremendously satisfying to feel that we can pierce the veil of misunderstanding, and arrive at a better mythology of how our bodies work.

But that’s inside baseball.

While confessing this might jeopardize my status as a good American, I don’t really pay attention to baseball. I may watch a game from time to time, but I do so more to hang out with my friends in a convivial atmosphere than to actually follow the game. I understand the basics of baseball—three strikes and your out, four balls and you walk, nine innings with a stretch in the seventh. When things get beyond that, my poor head starts to ache. I think I’m smart enough to understand baseball, if I spent the time to learn more about it, but time is fungible and there are other things I’d rather understand, or try to understand. Baseball just isn’t that important to me.

I understand baseball at a very superficial level.

Let me hasten, now, to point out that there’s nothing wrong with having a superficial understanding of things. While I consider myself a student of history, there are vast swaths of history that I understand only superficially. I am aware that Sir Francis Walsingham was a counselor and spymaster to Queen Elizabeth I of England. That’s pretty superficial. I’ve spoken with a real student of Elizabethan history, who had devoted many long hours to Walsingham. I was humbled by how little I knew . . . but I was able to follow along when the information was presented in an easily digestible manner.

The world is full of people who are eating the Standard American Diet (SAD), who could be helped with even a superficial understanding of ancestral fitness. If we have any interest in helping people, we need to be able to communicate our information at a superficial level.

Fortunately, we can do that. Ancestral fitness is, at its base, a simple concept. For better health, eat like your ancestors did. There! Isn’t that simple?

Starting in the 1970s, the United States government changed its recommendations for what we should eat. A much higher emphasis was placed on a high consumption of grains, while foods high in saturated fat were deemphasized, shunned and abjured. A breakfast of bacon, eggs and buttered toast gave way to a breakfast of oatmeal. At the same time, processed foods became much more popular, as “food science” applied scientific principles to the production, packaging and distribution of food. These changes occurred as an experiment in making us fitter and healthier. If you are in (very early) middle age like me, you have seen the experiment play out before your eyes. Has it worked?

Have rates of obesity, diabetes, or coronary artery disease remained the same, declined, or increased? Are we healthier now than we were then? Have the changes we made to our diet worked for us? If your answers are that obesity, diabetes and coronary artery disease have all increased, and that we are not noticeably healthier now than we were then, how could we change things?

An easy answer would be “Eat real food.” What is real food? Real food is food your grandmother, when she was a young woman, would have recognized as food. Real food isn’t shelf-stable, for months and months. Real food isn’t highly processed. Real food doesn’t have a long, long list of ingredients. Read the ingredient lists and avoid anything with high fructose corn syrup. Eat less bread, pasta, grains and potatoes. Don’t buy convenient foods. Don’t buy food you have seen advertised on television.

There’s lots more we could say about ancestral fitness. There’s lots more, in fact, that we do say about ancestral fitness–that’s why we blog, that’s why we comment, that’s why we try to push our understanding further. The superficial description listed above, however, could serve as the introduction. Three strikes and you’re out, four balls and you walk, nine innings and a stretch in the seventh.

How much more do you need to know? Do you need to know the biochemistry of carbohydrate breakdown? Do you need to have a firm grasp on whether its carbohydrates themselves, or insulin, or inflammation, that supplies the underlying mechanism poisoning your body? How does the old joke go? “Doctor, it hurts when I do this.” “Don’t do it any more.”

Inside baseball—or rather, inside paleo—-is about building Spartans, whether of the Leonidas or HALO versions.

Outside baseball—or rather, outside paleo—is about reducing the chronic poisoning of the human body that is an inevitable consequence of the deficiencies of the standard American diet. We don’t all have to be Mark Sisson, we don’t all have to be Arthur de Vany. A lot of people will never have the time or interest in pursuing that level of health and fitness. But if we can explain a few simple steps that will help people get started on the way to better health, and better fitness, we can help a lot of people. Hundreds? Surely. Thousands? Probably. Millions? Why not.

With all due apologies to GEICO, ancestral fitness really is so simple even a caveman could do it.

I See Dead People

Lorette C. Luzajic — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 00:56:28 +0000

Today I took a human brain out of a Tupperware and held it in my hands.

It’s not every day that I play Dr. Frankenstein, poking around human dissections with latex-gloved fingers.

But today I was a participant in a cadaver lab. A good friend who was studying healthcare had invited me. As part of her studies, she had no option. I did, but given a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see dead people I didn’t already know, I took it.

I confess that if I’d understood ahead of time that we’d be peeling back layers of skin and muscle from corpses, I likely would have declined. Somehow I thought it would be more of a morgue situation, and because I frequently write about death, I wanted to push my comfort limits, to get acquainted with the inevitable. I pictured bodies trussed up for casket display, or maybe fresh in from a hospital death, still on a gurney but certainly not opened or dismembered.

As the students and guests were given gloves and splotchy lab coats (ewwwww is right), we filed into the basement. My stomach lurched in terrible anticipation. The room did indeed have an unforgettable stench, but it wasn’t nearly as vile as I’d expected. I’m not recommending it or anything- just saying it was less awful than I’d thought it would be.

About twelve people were laid out, bagged in plastic and covered with white sheets, all on individual examining tables with bright lights overhead. The scene of shrouds in stark medical light was like something from a movie. My heart was beating wildly as I pondered whether I should turn back now, or stay.

I stayed.

Within moments, a serene calm came over me. The calm dissolved briefly when the plastic bag was peeled off of Exhibit Number One, and I gasped to see not just a naked corpse, but a corpse cut open completely so that med students could look inside of her.

The doctor who was teaching very casually pulled off a layer of fat and started pointing at connective muscle tissues and so on. The sight was far less traumatizing than I’d expected, and I felt strangely grateful that this generous woman had given herself to science. Cutting her open was not undignified in any way. It was terribly, terribly beautiful.

We are amazing. What is the spirit or consciousness that makes our beautiful, ugly bodies alive? We barely understand how our bodies work, but after meeting with several cadavers, I had a terrific sense of how I am put together. It is incredible.

I turned my attention away to another table, where a doctor was removing the white sheet. Something plopped out onto the floor. Yes, a piece of this human being spilled out and landed on the tiled floor. The doctor nonchalantly reached down and picked it up, as if it were just a pen or something. This poor chap was in a state of disarray, to say the least. As I approached, the calm inside turned to nausea very quickly as I saw a peculiar bowl-like bone, and realized that the dude’s skullcap had been sawed off. But I took a slow breath of formaldehyde-laced oxygen, and moved in for a closer look. The doctor was holding up a piece of skin that was still attached to the head of this poor chap.

It was part of his face.

At one station, there was a man whose leg bones were connected with a metal instrument. I realized that he had an artificial knee. At another station, one student was holding up a grey mass that looked like some kind of sea coral. “Intestines,” he explained. There were also the bones of a pelvis, and we discussed whether or not it had belonged to a man or woman. Then, there were some plastic bins. Someone opened one, and I looked inside to see a human brain.

None of the anatomy drawings or all of my years of studying psychology and reading up on how my medications affect my nervous system could prepare me for that second. It was one of the most stunning moments of my life. I took a human brain into my hands and held it. It was a grayish, dense mass like plasticine. Within this small organ in my hands was the most miraculous computer in the whole wide world. In this grey bundle in my hands, was the whole of a human life.

Underneath the ick factor and the deep emotional impact death has on the living, anytime, anywhere, I was deeply moved. I felt a well of tears inside, for our beauty and our hideousness. We are meat and bones. And we are something that makes that flesh come alive, something no one has ever yet been able to describe or know, though we have always tried.

I haven’t felt God for a long, long time. But here, the mystery was so big, so vast, so ineffable, that I found myself praying and giving thanks. I felt the dawn of history, when we traveled in small groups crossing the savannahs, hunting. I felt the electrifying miracle of technology, the bounty of today’s cutting edge. I felt a connection to everyone and everything in this moment.

Holding the human brain was one of the most profound things that have ever happened to me. I was feeling so peaceful- there’s nothing to be scared of in the physicality and the decay of death. The spirit or spark departs. The meat rots. Ashes to ashes.

The stench has lingered on me for the rest of the day, and a small wave of nausea rose up every time I remembered the peculiar stink. But part of me felt connected to life in ways I have never been before.

I wondered if my words would ever be worthy enough to outlast my body. And I felt a renewed inspiration to honour my body and take care of it, so that it could create more words. One day, I too, will be laying on a gurney with med students poking at me like I was a carved turkey. Soon, but not too soon- I’ve got so much work to do before the lights go out.

Check out Lorette’s popular series, “A Matter of Life or Myth”, and other articles here in The Paleo Garden. You can also check out here her Fascinating People, gossip for smart people.

The Paleo Post has been updated

zachary — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 16:18:11 +0000

In the left hand column of the The Paleo Garden you will find The Paleo Post, the latest snapshot of pretty cool stuff to read. In the mix, as usual, there’s some older posts thrown in, as well.

Other stuff to check out, too. Jimmy did a landmark interview with Lierre Keith, author of The Vegetarian Myth.

And in honor of Stephan’s fantastic write up of how corn oil literally is bonecrushingly healthy, I aim to ruin the song Killing Me Softly. Please DO NOT read below if you value this song, because after you read the revised lyrics, it will never be the same for you.

Here’s the original (youtube video below):

Killing me softly with your corn, The Paleo remix

Harvesting my pain with its kernels
Singing my life with its carbs
killing me softy with your corn