Intelligence Intact

I had to dig into an old eZine I had written two years ago this morning, fetching a recipe that will be part of the RBTI Intro Package due for release next weekend.  And while I was digging, I took a moment to read one of the articles I had written on the importance of critical thinking - and of constantly seeking out opposing viewpoints to your sacred conclusions instead of banding together with like-thinkers and drifting away to crazy town.  Anyway, it made me smile in a nostalgic kind of way, especially in light of the strange new world of the surprisingly-effective RBTI that I have openly immersed myself in over the past three months.  Guess I was born to be a guinea pig, cuz I really love this wild world of health and nutrition.  So full of surprises.  Okay, here it is... 

One of the most difficult challenges I’ve ever come across in pursuing health understanding is keeping my own intelligence intact. I have common sense, and I have come across some of the greatest material ever written on the subject of health. That information and common sense combined have shown me, proven to me beyond any doubt, certain fundamental truths. These truths are very basic, such as carbohydrates are not bad. Saturated fat is not bad. Cholesterol in egg yolk doesn’t contribute to heart attacks. Fiber does not cause digestive illness. Strict vegan diets suck. It is unsafe to build a diet around non-nutritive white powders. Cutting calories and over-exercising to lose weight is a futile strategy.


But time and time again, before these fundamentals really became concrete, it was all too easy to get swept away with the latest intriguing theory. I don’t regret pursuing all kinds of ideas, from being a vegetarian for years in my early 20’s, to eating a bunch of gnarly raw foods – from whole heads of cabbage to raw chicken hearts. It was all an adventure. Each brought forth its very own insight, and gave me a rich experience from which to draw upon.

Much of this was done in the spirit of exploration. For many others, it is a very different situation in which they are drawn into the realms of narrow-minded dogma.

Like Lierre Keith, recent disgruntled author of The Vegetarian Myth.  Keith followed a strict vegan diet for something like 20 years. Oopsies! An assortment of health problems later and Keith’s vegan education was complete. Vegan score appointed by Keith… F.

Others hear the preacher behind the low-carb pulpit talking up a complicated-sounding storm about how there is insulin and leptin and lipolysis and metabolic syndrome – and if you eat carbohydrates you’re just going to magically accumulate fat because of all that insulin you’re secreting. Sounds good. The theory makes sense. Carbs raise insulin. Insulin stores fat. Therefore carbohydrates make you fat. I mean come on! They feed corn and grain to pigs and that’s what makes them fat. Everybody knows starch is fattening! (or so they claim).

I’ve even had the luxury of dealing with some of the most insane and one-sided folks of all, the raw Primal/Paleo type folks. I’ve been accused of treason for condoning the consumption of “mind-altering cooked foods!” For that special someone, mind alteration could be just the ticket to bring them back to sanity. Yes, there are nutrition cults out there eating massive amounts of feces, drinking their own urine, and using human semen for skin health. A little research and the voice of someone who overcame a serious illness or two is all it takes to get a massive and devout gang of followers.

I guess all I’m saying is that even I, with a great and diverse wealth of knowledge and experience, still get curious. I want to know what people are experiencing on their health escapades. The conclusions that people have come to in their own explorations are always of profound interest to me. I can’t get enough of it, and my mind remains eternally open to new ideas. I cover all my bases to the best of my ability, hoping that nothing goes overlooked, and that I haven’t missed some great discovery that someone else has made. And in doing so, I drift a little in that direction to really give it a fair shot. I allow myself to buy into the ideas and believe, even if for only a moment, that I might have made a tragic mistake in my own health conclusions.

We all will do this, not just in the arena of health, but in all avenues of life. But without checks and balances to keep us from straying into a realm of the totally illogical, it is easy to get lost and do ourselves some harm.

Whatever your beliefs are about health or otherwise, it is important to repeatedly challenge yourself on those ideas. If you think you have all the answers, take your ideas to a place where they will be met with stiff opposition. It is there that you will find good arguments that you will have difficulty explaining away. It is in the face of this challenge and conflict that you will develop a more complex and deeper understanding of the issues you had thought were solved. It’s here that you’ll find what you thought was a neat and impenetrable theory to be, in actuality, painfully oversimplified and blind.

If I’ve found any theme amongst all the health cults that have come to downright retarded conclusions, from vegans to raw chicken-eating carnivores, it is that they are terribly opposed to having their theories challenged and tested. Anyone who doesn’t agree is an idiot or has scandalous motives. Some vegans call the Weston A. Price Foundation “factory farming propaganda.” I kid you not. That’s like calling a group of protesting anti-abortionists “baby killers.”

I comment at blogs and websites preaching all kinds of health sermons, and I typically go to these sites and directly square off with their conclusions. The result is that I get banned. I’m told that I don’t “support their community’s objectives” and need to get lost. They are not interested in conversations. They are not interested in answers or advancing their knowledge because they already have all the answers. They are inflexible. They are blind. They are drifting off into space, becoming ever more isolated and ever more defensive as they collectively fall off the deep end of reality.

So the tidbit of advice I have to give is one that has served me incredibly well, and will no doubt serve me in the future – keeping me constantly honing in on better and more sophisticated answers. That is simply to be a critical thinker. Challenge yourself and others and revel in their assaults on your own conclusions. This is helpful. This is part of the natural feedback mechanisms that are established for every aspect of our existence. We need this. We need both support and challenge to have fuller, more comprehensive perspectives in our many endeavors – be it in health, in religion, in finance, and in relationships. This is what keeps our intelligence intact, and from drifting into deep space where we get lost and find ourselves gasping for oxygen by the time it’s all said and done.

Pee Freelea and Couchrider

Please bear with my sick sense of humor, but Pip and I did a short spoof of the 80-10-10 raw vegans Durianrider and Freelea of 30bananasaday.com. 

What's wild is that the information in this video is pretty accurate.  That is Pip's actual age, she has lost a lot of weight since starting to work with Challen 6 months ago, she does no structured exercise and hasn't for a decade.  I asked her yesterday how many days out of 7 in a week she ate ice cream as she was achieving the body she currently has (which is much leaner than she was when we were living in Hawaii together and she was eating semi-raw Paleo).  Her answer... 7. 

I too am getting lean quickly on Challen's program, with no exercise other than walking a mile or so around town every day to and from his office.  Funny thing is - I gained a lot of weight eating to appetite of junky foods in April.  But with subtle changes in meal schedule, meal timing, and meal frequency - here I am losing weight eating to appetite of the same type of foods (ice cream, pizza, etc.), and with even less exercise.  And hey, my pet allergies of 15 years have subsided and the nasty rash I had break out all over my lower body after eating tons of bananas in the month of June disappeared immediately after arriving in Wheeling.    

Anyway, that's enough for the previews.  On to the feature presentation... 

The 80-10-10 Diet (811rv)

In the world of health and nutrition, there is not much out there that is wackier than Doug Graham’s self-fabricated 80-10-10 raw vegan diet. Don’t get me wrong. I have actually been positively influenced by the diet in some ways, and have reviewed all of Doug Graham’s materials as well as that of many of his even wackier disciples – including Durianrider of http://www.30bananasaday.com/ as well as Fred Patenaude (this guy actually appears to be sane), Michael Arnstein, Adam Panetta (kinda cool), and a handful of others. Heck, I’ve even watched a few videos by the Raw Brahs. They helped me to overcome my fruit phobia, which has proven to be a plus in my own personal healthscapades as of late.

The incorporation of absurd quantities of calorie-rich fruit and juice in my diet has decreased my allergies to pet dander, improved my breathing/asthma, cleared my nasal passages to such an extent that one person contacted me to tell me of the noticeable difference in my voice vs. older videos, improved the warmth of my toes (which occasionally felt slightly cool and clammy), gave me an increase in vascularity and vasodilation, and improved my exercise performance and recovery (although I’ve been doing very little lately other than chasing a Frisbee). I would also say that my skin looks noticeably younger, and, even though my teeth felt much worse for the first month or so – my teeth feel about the best they’ve felt in the last several years (still brushing only a few times per week).

So yes, these 80-10-10 folks are not totally out of their minds, and I have no doubts that athletic performance can in many cases be made superior by a very carbohydrate-heavy diet. But, there is an extreme darkside to this diet. That’s what I want to discuss. There is plenty of 80-10-10 worship going on out there in the fruitarian inner circle. A heavy dose of both skepticism and reality is what I hope to offer here for those out there who are perhaps following that diet and having some health challenges come up. Hopefully this post will be a voice of reason for those finding the diet lacking, and who are only being told “you’re not doing it right, you’re not doing it right” every time a problem arises.

Let me spell out the basics of the potential perils one could face on this diet and lifestyle promoted by Graham and his crackers…

My research has led me to believe that preserving a high metabolic rate and high body temperature is the essence of good health and delaying the aging process. You can read about that in THIS FREE EBOOK. But Graham, in something he titled “Cool Runnings” talks about how his diet and lifestyle helps to decrease body temperature to what he feels is the ideal body temperature – about 93 degrees F (similar to the tree sloth – the mammal with the lowest body temperature). It is true for the purposes of running or any endurance activity as I’ve stated many times before – for best performance you want your body temperature and resting metabolism to be as low as is humanly possible. As you lose body fat to very low levels, typically body temperature plummets due to the drop in leptin. As you lose muscle mass either from a low protein diet, low-net calorie diet (raw food is less absorbable than cooked food), or endurance exercise – body temperature falls even more. These are all adaptations that make it easier to perform endurance exercise because it enables a person to burn fewer calories per mile. The fewer calories you burn per mile, the less effort it takes to travel long distances – and the fewer calories you burn per mile, the longer you can travel on one “tank.”

I think this is one key, fundamental reason why those who stop doing endurance exercise due to burnout or injury tend to gain fat at an incredible rate – but that is another conversation…

If you are an endurance or ultra-endurance athlete like Michael Arnstein – your performance will be enhanced by eating a diet that is so incredibly effective for stripping away both body fat and muscle mass due to the extremely low levels of protein being taken in. From that vantage point, you can see why a fruitarian-ish diet would be a strong performance enhancer. It is the ultimate catabolic diet in which adequate energy for exercise is still being supplied (unlike just doing a water fast, which makes exercise impossible).

But this comes with metabolic penalty. When the metabolic rate falls, you notice things like being cold all of the time and having freezing cold hands and feet even in warm temperatures.

With a low metabolism, especially in the context of a vegan diet which greatly limits the body’s ability to manufacture cholesterol (the precursor to the steroid hormones), the rate of cholesterol conversion into highly beneficial, pro-longevity, pro-fertility, pro-sex drive, anti-autoimmunity hormones such as pregnenalone, progesterone, DHEA, and testosterone becomes greatly reduced. With this you see a predictable decline in sex drive in both men and women over time, lack of menstruation in women and other menstrual irregularities, and a host of other problems including a loss of skin elasticity and accelerated aging. You can see Arnstein talking about lowered sex drive here – a result of being overly lean, extreme fat restriction, catabolic endurance exercise, and other facets of his diet and lifestyle that is a perfect anti-fertility cocktail…



In terms of aging – while Doug Graham has an astounding level of fitness, athleticism, and agility for a man in his late 50’s, and I wouldn’t hesitate to take lessons from him on performing functional exercise for that purpose, comparing a recent video of him to a video 10 years ago...





…One has to wonder if Graham is competing for the title of world’s most rapidly-aging man. People who have met with him in person describe his skin as being extremely reptilian and aged – something he blames on sun exposure. Oh, the diet is healthy as long as you stay out of the sun! Whee! Sounds awesome!

Keep in mind that Graham’s response to the diet is presumably the best-case scenario.  Just like Sisson, this is a naturally healthy, elite athlete we're talking about here - which isn't always a result of the their diet and lifestyle nor can others expect similar results even if they do happen to be good (in Graham's case, I would argue the results are not good, but I don't give a flying rat's hiney about how many pullups a person can do - especially if they die of a stroke before age 65, my official prediction for Graham). 

With 80-10-10 you also see quite a bit of silliness, and the perpetuation of the belief that diseases like cancer are a result of eating impure or cooked foods. Nonsense. Cancer appears to be primarily a defect of cellular respiration and energy production – a result of having a low body temperature, low production of the hormones of youth like DHEA and progesterone, and an impairment of the mitochondria’s ability to produce energy. Sure, many toxic compounds and estrogenic chemicals in the environment can do this. I’m not discounting that. But you can surely achieve this carcinogenic state without ever taking in a single bite of non-organic or cooked food. Having metabolism fall as it does in aging is what predisposes someone to cancer. Being old is the leading risk factor for cancer for that very reason, as a lowered metabolism is the body shutting down.

Of course, just having a low cholesterol level is a much greater risk factor for stroke and cancer than having a high level of cholesterol is a risk factor for heart disease. It’s not like, by having a low cholesterol level, you are somehow protected against disease. In many cases, it is quite the contrary – especially on something like Graham’s 80-10-10 raw vegan diet in which cholesterol and fats are so restricted that the amount of cholesterol needed to synthesize steroid hormones properly is so limited as to cause the body to methodically shut down given sufficient time.

So whatever, I’m not going to go on and on about Graham and his crackers. Just remember that there is much more to health than losing some body fat and having your fitness levels improve in the short-run on 811rv. Fitness is certainly not a gauge for health as the recent death of the marathon queen Grete Waitz shows…
http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/scimedemail/la-me-grete-waitz-20110420,0,3207916.story

Short-term results and long-term results are often the exact opposite. If feeling better in the short-term was the key to health, we could all just take drugs. But unfortunately there is hell to pay for taking such a route, and I believe from what I’ve experienced, studied, and heard from others – that 811rv has a dark side that rears its ugly head in the long-term, usually starting with small things like lack of morning wood, coldness, and disappearance of the menstrual period followed by an escalation into much more serious health problems like anemia, infertility, hair loss, severe digestive problems, frequent illness/immune disorders, autoimmune disease, and any number of other strange complications.

More importantly, this diet is totally unproven, the brainchild of just one human being’s conclusions and a handful of mostly emaciated-looking devotees support, is totally polluted by a religious championing of vegan diet and lifestyle, and is a historically unprecedented diet for human beings, which instinctually would never eat a 95% fruit diet even if fruit was available in unlimited quantities. Add those together and you have the word “RISKY.”

But hey, thanks for showing me that fruit is a health food and that sugars can be friendly in the right context. I, as well as dozens of others that have been piling my email inbox high with thank you’s and pro-sugar testimonials over the past month are very thankful.

Oh and hey, apologies for any condescending and self-righteous tones in my writing as of late. You must understand that my young and impressionable mind was brainwashed by this kind of stuff as a kid… “I’m hot, and you’re not. You wanna hang with me I’ll give you one shot…”

Traditional Diets

This week is shaping up to look like diet week, where we examine a handful of popular diets or concepts in greater depth. In a sense, much of it will be review for the long-time followers. My hope is that it will get the attention of the people that are following some of these diets, being told that they are the best thing since sliced, gluten-free bread, and suffering some of the common and easily-identifiable consequences of being on such diets. We start with the broad concept of “traditional diets…”

Old habits die hard. One that I’ve found hard to kill, and still see others referencing with far too much enthusiasm, is the ol’ tradition-o-philia. Perhaps it was my own over-reliance on traditional diets as a tether in arguments, perhaps it is something else. But, I must say, this traditional diet concept is very limiting, misleading, overly worshipped, and in many ways foolish. So I propose a new rule – stop talking about traditional diets.

Seriously, if I hear “Masai” or “Kitavan” one more time I might scream. Or at least run to the nearest McDonald’s.

While it’s always of great interest that there were many traditional peoples that had excellent markers of good physical development such as great teeth and skull formation, and that these excellent indicators eroded with the sudden introduction of refined foods like white sugar and white flour, the past really needs to be left behind.

Anyone tried the Masai diet? I did - or at least I came pretty close eating only milk for nearly a month. It sucked ass, I had extreme allergies to everything and severe chest pain after only 27 days – plus it was not fun. I’d much rather eat whatever the heck I want out of convenience and go to the dentist for repairs than do that for life. “Oh, but it was the quality of the milk!” Perhaps, but that was about the best quality any reasonable person could find or afford without buying their own cow and farm. In today’s society, nothing about that is really functional even if it did give you some magical health like the Masai who, even with great health, don’t exactly live to be 100 years old. So it’s rather pointless to imitate.

How about the Kitavans? Who is going to wake up to a breakfast of boiled yams, a lunch of fruit, and a dinner of more yams, greens, and a little fish… maybe some coconut thrown in here and there – 365 days per year for the rest of their lives? Chirp, chirp, chirp.

When discussing traditional diets, the word “irrelevant” sneaks in with ever-increasing volume.

There are so many other variables as well. For example, one argument that I recently came across in the book Deep Nutrition (ironically about traditional diets mostly), goes something like this…

A mother smoking during pregnancy is known to increase the risk of asthma in the child. The author’s logic goes something like this…

1) Mother is breathing in a bunch of toxic chemicals, convincing the body that the world the baby is about to come into is full of pollutants.

2) Initiates the pulling of a set of epigenetic and hormonal levers that prepares the baby for the world the body thinks it’s about to enter into.

3) Baby is born with a hypervigilant response to airborne material for heightened protection against airborne threats.

Of course, this is just one example. I think most mothers in the modern world, just because of the nature of the modern world, are under a lot of stress and inflammation. Compounding this is the fact that the cells and tissues of modern humans are overloaded with the building blocks for inflammation – Linoleic acid and Arachidonic acid.

But what I’m saying is that a baby with that heredity is fundamentally very different from someone living in a traditional society. That person has very unique dietary and lifestyle requirements, all of which should be geared up to minimize stress and the production of inflammation. That person cannot go and run a billion miles like such and such tribe, or eat a lot of overtly inflammatory foods like French fries. He or she certainly can’t go on a standard low-carb diet, which requires much greater demand from the stress system.

Taking a deeper look down this same hole, the human genome literally undergoes massive changes in response to diet, trying to prepare the infant for the world it is entering into. Traditional peoples were in synch with their environment, eating the same general diet generation after generation. Even if they did eat a diet that was stressful such as the diet of the Eskimo, it was consistent enough and with enough regularity and nutritional excellence for them to adjust their epigenome to the diet. Modern humans trying to mimic this diet without having the proper hereditary blueprint for it (something one can only acquire by having Eskimos as parents), yields disaster.  It's very plausible that any drastic departure in diet from what your parents ate could backfire and make your health worse, not better. 

This brings up a couple more important points. For starters, the Eskimo, while they had great teeth and no signs of heart disease, still aged rapidly. I’m not talking died young because they starved to death or got bitten by polar bears, but aged rapidly (reported as looking a lot older than they were and dying of natural causes at very young ages – typically 60’s and 70’s). Harsh climate, low sunlight over the winter, a diet lacking carbohydrate, high in polyunsaturated fat – this will age ya quickly. No one should be infatuated with this diet.

Secondly, traditional diets the world over were generally VERY specific. Nowadays you have people saying, “oh, the Eskimos didn’t eat carbohydrates, so it’s safe to do the Atkins diet.” The Eskimo boiled whole fish, which contains thyroid hormone. They ate copious amounts of rotten fish, potentially full of short-chain fats that a normal low-carb dieter wouldn’t get. They subdivided the adrenal glands of animals amongst tribe members to get adequate vitamin C. Their diet was seasonal, synchronizing their diet with the current environmental demands. They relied in large part upon intuition when eating. They didn’t starve themselves when hungry after a long day because eating extra food wasn’t on their diet plan. These are all very specific things that people don’t take into account when they just decide to eat nothing but ribeye from Wal-Mart for a few years. And a misstep on any one of those important factors can be the difference between health and destruction. Traditional diets are simply too area and tribe specific and restrictive to be mimicked in today’s world.

Restraint and restriction is another important and underappreciated aspect of trying to eat a traditional diet – whatever that is. The human brain and emotions are extremely complex and powerful, potentially having more of an influence over one’s health status than the quality of their diet in many cases. Trying to eat a strict diet when you are surrounded by tempting other options is not something traditional peoples had to deal with. The food they had was all they knew, so as long as supplies were adequate, they knew not deprivation. But the feeling of deprivation or wanting something and not providing it to your body are powerful triggers of physiological changes within your body – namely catapulting your body into a hibernatory, low metabolic state.

Of course, we shouldn’t discredit all elements of traditional food eating. I think the main lessons that can be gathered and banked on are that they ate the whole animal, ate whole foods, never ate a vegan diet, and ate foods with a high nutritional value in terms of vitamins and minerals. These are great fundamentals. However, complexity still remains. Eating the whole animal is something that is impractical for some, many lack the skills, abilities, knowledge, and equipment to “cook the whole animal,” many can’t conveniently acquire whole animals, and many see the brains and liver and eyes and such as yucky. Trying to force down unpalatable food is a health liability as far as I’m concerned, and studies have indicated that eating something that’s not enjoyable reduces mineral absorption from that meal.

Traditional peoples, while they had excellent health, were still not some magical pinnacle of human health and longevity. They should not be worshipped as if they lived to be 700 years old. They didn’t. Many aged just as quickly as we do. Many aged much faster. With modern science we can see precisely what type of diet and lifestyle (and most importantly, mindset) accelerates aging and which kind slows the aging process. Jack LaLanne probably had a higher degree of functional longevity than almost any traditional tribe member. Don Gorske will outlive most Eskimos eating only Big Macs, parfaits, and Coca Cola, presumably because “he’s lovin’ it.”

But just because a traditional tribe ate something does not mean that a certain food gets an out-of-jail-free card. Hey, many of them ate shellfish. So shellfish are healthy. Oops, sorry you had an anaphylactic reaction and died eating that healthy food.

We are in a new frontier of human society and it calls for great flexibility with our eating, and a better understanding of the straightforward relationships between food and our physiology. The world is so unique in the history of our species that trying to match an old diet with a new lifestyle and a truly new physiology (hyperinflammatory) is no guarantee, and may create a mighty mismatch. As I’m sure many of you will see if you’ve attended some kind of traditional nutrition conference, the health status of the attendees on a generic “traditional” diet doesn’t appear to be any different than that of the mainstream public. It is not a panacea. It does not appear to be worth the grandiose effort of trying to eat a mythological “perfect diet” built around an unintelligent hodge podge of what traditional peoples around the world ate to go with their specific lifestyle, environment, and epigenetic blueprint.

Speaking of blueprints, like the line uttered by Chong Li at Frank Dux in the movie Bloodsport, I looketh in the direction of Sisson, pointing, and say, “You are next.”  We will have some fun with 80-10-10 raw vegan as well. 



One word summary of traditional diets... IRRELEVANT!

If you’d like some ammunition to make fun of me, read my FREE EBOOK where I am annoyingly fixated on traditional diets and say "Masai" and "Kitavan" about 20 times each.