J.D. Moyer

sci-fi author, beatmaker

Category: Health/Body-hacking Page 19 of 20

Sleep Experiment – A Month With No Artificial Light

By

On March 4

In Evolution/Biology, Health/Body-hacking, Lifestyle Experiments, Mental Health, Metaprogramming

In an earlier post, I mentioned how my family (it’s not something you can do without your whole household participating) went without artificial light (including all electric lights, TV, and computers) after sundown, for all of June in 2009.  June, being the month of the longest days, was the easiest month for such an experiment.

“Full of Ideas” by Cayusa

Soon after writing that post, we decided to try the experiment again, but this time for the month of February — a month with much shorter days and longer nights.  I was traveling during the last week of February, so it was effectively only a twenty day experiment.  Still — both the effects and the experience itself were dramatic. In a nutshell: more sleep, better sleep, improved mood, and an entirely different rhythm to both waking and sleeping life.  There were some downsides too, which I’ll also discuss.

WHY

The first time we tried the experiment, in June 2009, we were primarily interested in catching up on sleep.  Our daughter was born in March of 2008 — after more than a year a full night’s sleep was still elusive.  As someone who had always been a night-owl at home, but never had any trouble going to sleep by 8:30 when camping, I already suspected that artificial light (as opposed to firelight, starlight, or moonlight) was what was keeping me from going to bed earlier.  Reading this article by Verlyn Klinkenborg in the New York Times confirmed that suspicion.

An even earlier, unrelated 30-day experiment (I’ve done over a dozen at this point), during which I resolved and attempted to go to bed earlier, had failed miserably.  On average I’d gotten to bed 45 minutes earlier; say quarter-after-eleven instead of midnight.  I just found it impossible to go to bed when I wasn’t sleepy (which I distinguish from tired — just because your mind and body need sleep doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll feel sleepy).  Just trying — willing myself — to go to bed earlier didn’t work very well — it certainly didn’t result in the kind of radical sleep improvement I was looking for.

On the other hand, the June experiment with no artificial light was a huge success.  Kia and I immediately started going to bed between 9 and 10 instead of around midnight.  We quickly caught up on sleep, sleeping ten or eleven hours a night at first, then normalizing around eight hours.  One thing we both noticed was a huge boost in mood — moments of unexplained, unreasonable joy would strike us at random times during the day.  I’m not talking about the calm sea of serenity — I’m talking about bursts of goofy delight — the kind that’s really obnoxious to the moody people around you.

So … we wanted to try it again.

THE RULES

Compared to June, February was a whole different ball game.  Some days in June the sky was light until 9:30pm — in February we ended up lighting the candles as early as 5pm.  I was concerned about not being able to get any work done, so we set 7:30pm as a cutoff for computers getting turned off.  Here’s a list of the rules we decided to live by:

  • no artificial light, including overhead lights, lamps, and the refrigerator light
  • candles allowed
  • computers allowed until 7:30pm
  • TV not allowed after sundown (except TV on computers until 7:30)

THE NEGATIVES

Anger
One thing I experienced during the experiment was anger and frustration at not being able to f*cking see anything.  Stepping on toys on the floor, bumping into table corners, searching for matches by moonlight — none of it fun.  Cooking by candlelight can also be difficult.  After a day or two I gained some awareness around what was happening emotionally.  I did choose to do this, after all.  The key to dealing with the anger was to conduct my actions more carefully, and with more foresight, during the long evenings.  Light the candles before it gets totally dark.  Make sure to light a couple candles in the bathroom.  Be vigilant about cleaning up toys (and getting our daughter to clean up her toys) before it gets dark.

Drip drip drip.

Wax
Wax is pollution.  Little wax drips, everywhere, are hard to avoid when you’re walking around (or stumbling over things) while holding a candle.  Scraping hardened wax off of tables and floors is a drag.  Kia was reading a book — it might have been a George Elliot novel, in which people who stay up late are called wax-drippers.  This seems to imply that, at least in pre-Industrial England, most people didn’t even bother lighting candles; they just went to bed when it got dark.

The pollution angle; it made me think about how entire classes of pollution can disappear, practically overnight.  In the horse-and-buggy age, major cities were covered in horse shit.  It was a serious problem, with no end in sight.  Once the car came along, the horse shit vanished.  Wax drippings similarly disappeared as a major problem with the advent of the electric light.  This book review in the New Yorker talks about the same idea in more detail.

If we’d had proper candle-holders with wide bases this problem could have been avoided, or at least attenuated.

Less Productivity
Sometimes getting in a couple hours of work (in the broadest sense, including creative work and “fun” work) after the kid goes to bed can make a day feel more productive.  Feeling productive, while not important for everyone, is important for my own mental well-being.  I don’t really buy into the idea of the Protestant Work Ethic (nobody works harder than Japanese salarymen, and they’re pretty far removed from any Calvinist cultural heritage), but I do feel better at the end of the day if I’ve created wealth, whether it be in the form of billable hours, progress on a music or writing project, fixing up the house — anything with a tangible, observable result that has at least a chance of positively affecting my own (or someone else’s) future experience.

It’s hard to be productive by candlelight.  I took to writing longhand in a notebook, which I’m still doing, but in the evenings I couldn’t work on music production (computer needed), clean the house (more light needed), work on programming projects (computer needed), work on artwork, contracts, or email correspondence for Loöq Records (once again, computer needed), or most anything else that results in feeling like I got something done.

No TV
This is more of a wash than a negative.  I didn’t watch any TV during the experiment — there just wasn’t any time.  I like TV — at least good TV — and I missed it somewhat.  It wasn’t that it wasn’t allowed — I could have watched my favorite shows during the day if I’d really made it a priority.

Now that it’s March I’m all caught up on Lost.  Thank you Hulu — the motives of the smoke monster are slowing becoming clear.

THE POSITIVES

Sleep
Going in, I wasn’t as sleep-deprived this time, but we immediately started going to bed earlier.  Sometimes I would sleep straight through the night, 10 to 6 or so.  Other times I would go to bed really early, like 8:30, and then get up around 2:30am.  This was alarming at first, but then I remembered that this sleep pattern was quite common in pre-electric light days.  When this happened I would end up reading or writing by candlelight for an hour or two, then going back to bed.  This is apparently called bimodal sleep, as noted in the Verlyn Klinkenborg New York Times article where he describes an experiment conducted by sleep researcher Thomas Wehr (Wehr ‘s volunteers have subjected themselves to to 14 hours of darkness each night):

What Wehr found was remarkable. The first night the volunteers slept 11 hours, and in the first weeks of the experiment they repaid 17 hours of accumulated sleep debt — i.e., they slept 17 hours longer than they would have called normal for the same period. It took three weeks for a sleep pattern to stabilize, and when it did it lasted about eight and a quarter hours per night. But it was not consolidated sleep, and it was not just sleep. Over time, Wehr explained, “another state emerged, not sleep, not active wakefulness, but quiet rest with an endocrinology all its own.”

Each night the volunteers lay in a state of quiet rest for two hours before passing abruptly into sleep. They slept in an evening bout that lasted four hours. Then they awoke out of REM sleep into another two hours of quiet rest, followed by another four-hour bout of sleep and another two hours of quiet rest before rising at 8 A.M. This pattern of divided sleep, separated by rest, is called a bimodal distribution of sleep, and it is typical of the sleep of many mammals living in the wild, which is to say that it is atypical of humans living in modern Western society. Yet in a forthcoming article, to be published in a volume called “Progress in Brain Research,” Wehr concludes that “in long nights . . . human sleep resembles that of other mammals to a much greater extent than has been appreciated.” Bimodal sleep, punctuated by quiet rest, was a pattern to which modern Americans reverted almost as soon as they were given the chance.

“In healthy people,” Wehr remarked, “this bimodal pattern of sleep would be called a sleep disorder, although the resemblance to animal sleep confirms its naturalness. And as people get older they revert to this pattern of divided sleep. Perhaps it gets harder to override it.”

I asked Wehr whether any of his subjects had gone crazy lying in the dark during those long nights.

None had. “Anyone could do it,” he said.

In addition to getting enough sleep each night, the quality of my sleep was definitely better.  We’re still co-sleeping with our daughter, now 2, and any restlessness tends to affect me most.  On bad nights I sometimes prefer the couch to our overcrowded bed.  However no couch for the month of February — when I was sleeping, I was out cold.

Illuminated.

Our daughter also got on an earlier schedule.  In January she’d gotten in a bad cycle of staying up until 9 — no fun for anyone.  She would get overtired and overstimulated, and falling asleep was getting harder and harder.  Immediately — by Day 1 of the experiment — she was fast asleep by 7.  What a huge relief.

With no artificial light, there is definitely more time in bed, half-awake.  Wehr refers to this state as quiet wakefulness.

Living year-round on midsummer time, with long days and short nights, “has obtained,” Wehr writes, “for so many generations that modern humans no longer realize that they are capable of experiencing a range of alternative modes that may once have occurred on a seasonal basis in prehistoric times but now lie dormant in their physiology.” While humans worry about how much further we can compact our actual sleep time, we’ve already jettisoned six nightly hours of quiet winter rest. In a most meaningful sense, those are transitional hours. Once in the night and once in the early morning, Wehr’s volunteers woke out of REM sleep, which is strongly associated with dreaming, into a period of quiet wakefulness quite distinct from daytime wakefulness. Perhaps as we’ve learned, over time, to sleep a less characteristically mammalian sleep, we’ve also learned to sleep a less human sleep.

Quiet wakefulness is great, especially when you’re not worried about not being asleep.  In other words, if you’ve already slept seven or eight hours (because you went to bed at 9pm), then being awake, or half-awake, in the middle of the night isn’t accompanied by fears of being tired the next day.  In this state, which sometimes persisted for more than an hour, I would let my mind roam … sometimes just watching my dreamlike thoughts, sometimes directing them a bit.  What will a character in my novel do next?  What color should I paint the garage?  It’s a great time to ask your brain questions which require creative answers.

Alternative Activities & Entertainment
During the long, candlelit evenings, without computers or TV, we found other ways to occupy ourselves.  We read by candlelight, we had friends over for after-dinner drinks and snacks, we played board-games, and, well, use your imagination.  The evenings were long and enjoyable.

Adventure Fantasy, Imagining The Past
The experiment gave our evenings an adventurous flavor.  We were roughing it (a little).  I would sometimes imagine we were living in the woods, far from civilization.  The experience made me consider how each generation lives differently, and that with new technologies we both gain and lose certain types of experiences.  It’s valuable to step out of the current technological zeitgeist — it changes the way you think and perceive the world.

CONCLUSION
The convenience of being able to flip a switch and have instant illumination can’t be overstated.  But the downsides of cheap light may be as serious as the downsides of cheap food.  Artificial light disrupts our circadian rhythms, prevents the production of melatonin, increases the risk of certain cancers including breast cancer and prostate cancer, and can generally wreak havoc with our health.  My guess is that artificial light is causally linked to obesity, depression, immune disorders, and cancer, not to mention daytime tiredness.

Candle time.

After the experiment I see artificial light as something like sugar.  We’re drawn to it, but too much is bad for us.  In fact, it seems to be bad for us in many of the same ways — sleep deprivation reduces insulin sensitivity in the same way excessive sugar intake does.

For me, gone are the nights of having every light in the house blazing.  The refrigerator light is back on, the bathroom light goes on when I’m in there, but otherwise it’s candles and maybe a mood light here and there.  Even with this limited artificial light, the glow from my laptop is keeping me up later.  Last night I slept from 11:45 to 6:15 — not bad but nothing like the solid eight hours I was getting most nights in February (one night I even slept eleven hours — I was tired and there was nothing preventing me from catching up).

I can function with as little as five or six hours of sleep as night.  But with that little sleep (especially for more than one night), I’m not at my best, or my happiest, or my most creative; I’m just grinding through life.  Since the only thing we have in life is quality of our consciousness, and sleep deprivation so obviously and negatively affects the quality of our consciousness, it makes sense to prioritize sleep.  Most people would agree, but almost nobody does dedicate enough time to sleep.  Why?  The ubiquity of artificial light.  It’s like going to a cake store, buying every delicious-looking cake, coming home and arranging them on your dinner table, and then resolving not to eat any sugar.

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The Unlasting Benefits of Practically Everything

By

On February 23

In Health/Body-hacking, Metaprogramming, Writing

Habit trumps all.

All self-improvement efforts are ultimately irrelevant and ineffective if they don’t evolve into habits or routines.  A string of yoga classes you did last year?  Worthless.  A meditation retreat you completed two months ago?  Now adding nothing to your peace of mind.  A two week cleanse?  Why bother?

This is a frustrating reality of maintaining a biological, constantly regenerating organism.  You can’t build your body or mind like a house; there’s too much flux.

Brick hard abs -- nice one.

There are crucial moments in the development of a human being where the environment can exert a permanent effect.  Early-childhood education, prenatal nutrition, and a loving family home  are all important.  But in adult life, what matters far more is what we do every day.

Is this an obvious concept?  A truism?  It seems like it is, but it’s contrary to the way health, fitness, and personal development practices are presented to us.  Lose ten pounds in two weeks.  Participate in a ten day intensive, life-changing meditation retreat. To me these two pitches sound exactly the same.  Do something for awhile, then stop doing it and watch any positive effects fade away.

Is it implicit, in the “improve yourself temporarily” style pitch, that the behavioral change will be permanently implemented?  I don’t think so.  The pitch is usually to expend a great amount of willpower over a short amount of time to see fast results.  But if the practice is unsustainable — either because it requires too much effort or because it overstresses the organism — then it won’t be continued.  The id will rebel.  The results might be ugly.

ID REBELLION

Personality is not monolithic; we careen through life propelled by a chaotic network of warring motivational subcenters.  On good days our frontal cortex mediates the disputes and we present the world with something resembling a rational, consistent human being.  It’s a false front.  Free will is mostly illusory.  At best we can steer ourselves a little, modifying the well-worn pathways that control our behavior so that our habits better serve us.

The superego-heavy approach, where we whip ourselves like racehorses, compelling our bodies and minds to conform to whatever high expectations we have set up for ourselves (or others have set up for us), can work for a period of time.  There’s nothing wrong with driving ourselves hard, especially if we believe in what we’re working for or towards; if the result will pay lasting dividends to ourselves or our loved ones or all of humanity.  But if this period of intense self-control is not followed up by a more relaxed interval — either a conscious letdown, a vacation or stay-cation, or at least some relaxation of standards — then our subconscious minds may grab the reins and force the issue.  We act out.  We break down.  We hit creative blocks.  We burn bridges.  The reptilian brain, in its lowly position at the bottom of the spinal totem pole, still wields a great deal of power.  Respect the id.

HABIT AS LEVERAGE, OR WORK MULTIPLIER

I’ve discussed the idea that willpower is a commodity; we only have so much each day to spend.  The workaround is establishing a habit.  Habitual behavior doesn’t require willpower — it’s the default setting.  It’s cruise control.  If we can find ways of eating, sleeping, working, relating to people, and even thinking that serve us well, it’s in our interest to habituate those behaviors.  That’s where the willpower comes in — making the change.

I say this not as a paragon of good habits, but rather as someone who’s interested in seeing the effort that I do expend go further.  Essentially, I’m lazy.  I prefer both rest and recreation to back-breaking work.  I don’t mind work itself, but I hate pointless work, or work that doesn’t produce something of lasting value.

Deciding what is a good habit requires some degree of analytical thinking and experimentation.  Whatever analogy you want to use to describe our genetic, cultural, and historical predestination (“the hand we’re dealt” or “the set of tools we’re given”), the fact is that there is no single best way of living that works for everybody.  A lot of this has to do with what we like to do.  An exercise regimen based on jogging won’t work if you hate jogging.  Okra may be in high in vitamin C, but that won’t benefit you if you can’t make yourself eat it.  Making money by selling a product online and building your website via targeted marketing won’t work if you hate analyzing web traffic.

Thanks but no thanks.

We can force ourselves to do things that we hate doing, under the auspices that those things are “good for us,” or “smart things to do,” but ultimately we’re just burning willpower for no good reason.  There are hundreds of ways to stay fit and hundreds of ways to eat healthfully.  It makes sense to search the permutations until you find a method that you don’t detest.

On the other hand if we spend time and effort “locking in” effective behaviors that we essentially like to do anyway, repeating them so often that they became second nature, then that nervous system modification becomes a neurological asset.

With more effort we can also habituate behaviors we dislike.  This can play out one of two ways; a soul-crushing self-loathing feedback loop, or, if we’re lucky, we come to “like” what we’re good at and do every day — our sense of preference is as malleable as anything.  It’s worth remembering that the job is the reward.

In either case, behaviors we habituate are going to multiply the results of our efforts.  When we spend willpower, we’re going to get more bang for the buck.

DENTAL HYGIENE, MENTAL HYGIENE

I read an interview with David Lynch in which he marveled at people’s unwillingness to dedicate a little time each day to meditation.  People are willing to dedicate five minutes a day to dental hygiene so that their teeth don’t rot.  Yet they are unwilling (or don’t know how) to spend a few minutes clearing their mind and communing with the infinite.  The benefits of meditation include lowering blood pressure, improving immunity, increasing focus and recall ability, increasing empathy, and probably dozens of other positive effects.  So why don’t we all meditate every day?

Meditation isn’t hard … but culturally there is no expectation to do it every day (at least in the United States), so it’s up to the individual to establish a routine.  You also have to pick and learn a method, either from an ancient tradition (zazen, vipassana) or a more modern derivative.  But the key action to establishing a habit is to pick a time and a place and do the same thing, every day, until the behavior becomes as second nature as brushing your teeth at the bathroom sink before you go to bed (hopefully you do that, or the equivalent, already).

CLOSING THE GAPS, MY OWN HABIT-BUILDING INTENTIONS

I should note here that I haven’t yet established a rock-solid meditation routine for myself.  I keep waffling on the time — morning or evening — and end up only meditating three or four days a week.  The benefits I perceive when I meditate (even if just for a few minutes) are so enormous that it’s insane for me not to close this gap.

Writing every morning — another behavior I’m still working on cementing.  Too often I end up checking email, reading news feeds, responding to a client request, or getting distracted by one of a dozen other projects.  When I do write in the morning, it colors the entire day.  Even if I only write a few crap paragraphs, I still feel a sense of accomplishment that stays with me regardless of what else happens that day.

Why wouldn’t I meditate and write every day?  Both behaviors pay obvious, immediate dividends.  While I take 100% responsibility for my own behavior, I don’t believe that I control my own behavior 100% — “I” am a chaotic network of warring motivational subcenters.  But to the extent that I can actually steer myself — to act as a fully conscious human being — I see value in establishing both behaviors as more-or-less permanent aspects of my daily routine.

A Meta-analysis of Kooky Diets, Part II

By

On February 19

In Health/Body-hacking

In my last post, A Meta-analysis of Kooky Diets, Part I, I covered the odd eating habits of multi-billionaire/raw-juice enthusiast David H. Murdock, as well as the “all-meat” (in reality, “mostly grease”) diet of Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson.  Both men had a strong interest in health.  My next subject is interested exclusively in taste, but is in good apparent health nonetheless.

PAUL RUDNICK’S ALL-CANDY DIET

A Drake's Yodel

Playwright and humorist Paul Rudnick, according to this New York Times article by David Colman, subsists on milk chocolate, pastries, ice-cream, and candy.  In addition, he eats some simple unsweetened foods, like peanuts, Cheerios, and plain bagels.  He abstains from meat, poultry & eggs, seafood & fish, whole-grains, beans, fruit, and vegetables.  He’s been eating like this as long as he can remember.  At fifty-two, he’s tall, lean, and in good health.  Interesting.

I should note here that Paul Rudnick is in no way suggesting that anyone else should eat the way he does.  He likes candy, he eats candy — end of story.

ANALYSIS: What do we take from this “case study”?  Is Rudnick a freak of nature?  Or does his all-candy diet suggest that eating whole, unprocessed food is less important than we think?  Maybe it’s more important that we don’t overeat (according to the article, Rudnick doesn’t eat actual meals — he sort of grazes all day).  If he’s not eating large amounts of candy at a time, and he abstains from soft drinks, it’s possible that his blood sugar doesn’t spike too badly throughout the course of a day.  He’s not eating plates of pasta or potatoes with his candy — he’s just eating the candy.

  • Driving philosophy:  eat exactly what Paul Rudnick wants to eat, and nothing else
  • Staple foods: Hershey’s kisses, Drakes Cakes Yodels, plain bagels, peanuts, ice-cream, dry cereal
  • Not allowed: anything allowed, but Rudnick doesn’t seem to eat fruit, vegetables, or meat
  • Supplements: unknown
  • Importance of organic foods: none
  • Health advantages: low in calories, some polyphenols from chocolate and peanuts
  • Possible health risks this diet overlooks or does not address:  scurvy, type-2 diabetes
  • Ecological impact: low (no meat, some packaged/processed foods)
  • Cost: low (no meat, no produce, organic foods not required, Rudnick prefers “low-brow” sweets)

Summary: Examples like Rudnick are important to keep in mind to avoid obsessing about food and what the “best” diet is.  People thrive in all sorts of strange ways.  Lamar Odom is another example.  On the one hand, these men may possess unusual metabolisms that allow them to effectively process massive amounts of refined sugar without detrimental effects to their health.  On the other, the rest of us might be underestimating the resiliency and adaptive powers of the human digestive system, or overestimating the negative effects of refined sugar.

My guess is that Rudnick is NOT a freak of nature, and that the health benefits of what is essentially a low calorie diet outweigh the negative effects of eating all that crap.  I wouldn’t be surprised if he sustains his health into old age.

As an aside, Paul Rudnick has an incredibly cool office.

THE PALEOLITHIC DIET (AN INTRODUCTION)

The Paleolithic Diet (also known as The Caveman Diet) is an eating plan that, in its strictest form, includes only pre-agricultural foods.  Grains, including pasta, bread, rice, oats — even fancy hippie grains like quinoa and amaranth — are OUT.  So are all legumes; beans, peanuts, and, depending on the variant of the diet, even innocent vegetable legumes like green beans, snow peas, alfalfa sprouts, and clover sprouts.

Paleo-fitness helps with the ladies

Dairy products are out too — our caveman ancestors had not yet learned to domesticate cows, goats, or sheep.  Nightshade fruits and vegetables, including tomatoes, potatoes, eggplant, all varieties of peppers, tobacco, and even the antioxidant-packed goji berry are all considered to be Neolithic foods (products of agriculture), and are thus eliminated.  Salt isn’t allowed, nor are alcohol and caffeine.  Refined sugar is of course not allowed, nor are any industrially processed foods (basically anything you can buy in a package at the store).

What’s left?  Quite a lot, actually.  Most vegetables are allowed, including leafy greens and starchy tubers (the Paleolithic Diet isn’t necessarily a low carb diet).  Less sweet fruits, like berries, are allowed, but sweeter fruits that have been pumped-up with sugar via years of selective breeding and/or genetic manipulation are not recommended (think of a large, juicy, sweet, store-bought apple vs. a small, gnarled, sour, slightly starchy example you might find on a tree in your backyard).  Nuts and seeds are okay, and olive oil is usually allowed.  So are fatty fruits like avocado and coconut.

Wild game and wild-caught fish are preferred foods on the Paleolithic Diet.  Almost all animal foods are allowed, so long as they are wild or grass-fed.  A real Paleo enthusiast might have an extra freezer or two in the garage, where they store a side of grass-fed beef, or a whole hog.  Meats that some of us might consider unusual, like ostrich, venison, kangaroo, bison, crocodile, rabbit, goat, and springbok (antelope) might be considered regular Paleo fare.

The logic of the Paleolithic Diet is that our ability to produce novel kinds of nosh has far outpaced our ability to digest it.  In other words, cultural evolution proceeds at a faster pace than genetic evolution, and as a result our health suffers.  Human beings, and our hominid ancestors, evolved over the course of hundreds of thousands of years on simple fare like shellfish, antelope, mastodon, tubers, frogs, and berries, and that’s the kind of fare our digestive and metabolic systems are optimized to handle.  We invented agriculture, which ensured us a more-or-less reliable source of calories, but our bodies didn’t change; we could only derive sustenance from grains at a cost to our health.  Later, the negative effects of cheap calories were exasperated by the Industrial Revolution (and thus industrial food production, which gives us refined flour, low-fat pasteurized milk, and high-fructose corn syrup).  Sure, we can survive on Yodels, bagels, and Planters salted peanuts, but we can’t thrive on such food (Paul Rudnick would of course disagree).

The biochemical Axis of Evil, according to Paleo science, consists primarily of lectins, gluten, casein.  All three are substances that both interfere with digestion and muck with our hormonal profile.  Fructose and sucrose are also considered problematic, as are excess amounts of omega-6 fatty acids.

Grains -- they're EVIL

Lectins are proteins that interfere with digestion, prevent absorption of certain nutrients, and are associated with allergies and auto-immune diseases.  Lectins seems particularly adept at tearing up the epithelial lining of the gut, resulting in something called leaky gut syndrome where whole undigested protein molecules are allowed to enter the bloodstream.  The immune system, which only expects to encounter amino acids in the bloodstream (not whole proteins) mistakes the undigested food particles for invading pathogens.  Auto-immune problems can then result if the protein entering the bloodstream happens to resemble some sort of human tissue; the immune system is tricked into attacking its host body.  Yuck.

Lectins are found in grains, legumes, seeds, and to a lesser extent in other vegetables and nuts.  If an organism does not have an evolutionary interest in being eaten (like fruit), it tends to evolve ways to defend itself.  If you try to eat a zebra, you might find your jawbone shattered by a swift kick.  Plants, on the other hand, have more creative (and sometimes insidious) ways of defending themselves.  Nuts have tough shells.  Some plants produce phytoestrogens, which negatively impact the species dining on them (sheep eating fields of red clover may find their fertility reduced).  Grains and beans have lectins.  If you doubt the effect lectins can have on your digestive system, gently simmer (don’t boil) some dried red kidney beans until they are soft enough to eat, then chew on a few.  Just kidding, don’t try this.  Really, don’t — you might die.  Not all lectins (there are thousands of varieties) are harmful, but quite a few have been shown to have a negative impact on human and animal health.

Fried gluten balls

Gluten is a protein found primarily in wheat, rye, and barley (including the refined varieties) and can wreak similar havoc on the digestive system, at least in sensitive individuals.  Casein is a milk protein, and can cause health problems even for people who are lactose tolerant (casein is probably more of problem for people who consume high amounts of lectins and gluten — their torn up gut linings may allow casein to enter the bloodstream whole).

To most people, cutting out bread, pasta, cheese, milk, yogurt, ice-cream, candy, all desserts, beans, tofu, tomatoes, potatoes, grain-fed meat, refined sugar, alcohol, coffee, salt, and all processed food sounds overly restrictive.  You don’t say. In its strictest form, the Paleolithic Diet is as ascetic as raw-food veganism.  Consider, though, Stefansson’s experience in getting used to (and eventually coming to enjoy) a diet consisting solely of raw frozen and boiled unsalted trout, with only fermented whale oil as a garnish.  What a human being experiences as pleasurable is largely dependent on the available range of experience.  We acclimate quickly; a diet of champagne, caviar, and rich desserts, day in and day out, quickly becomes boring, just as fermented whale oil rapidly becomes a “special treat” if that’s the only thing you have to put on your raw fish.

Are there health benefits?  There seem to be, in spades.  Practitioners report rapid fat loss, muscle gain, increased energy, improved immunity, better mood/attitude, reduced blood pressure, freedom from allergies, increased sexual vitality, and improvement in auto-immune disorders.  Clinical trials indicate the Caveman Diet can improve glucose tolerance, potentially reverse Type 2 diabetes, and significantly improve body composition in as short a time as ten days.

Most modern practitioners of the Paleolithic Diet allow small to moderate amounts of salt, alcohol, and caffeine to be included, which instantly makes the diet about a thousand percent more palatable.  Some modern cavemen further add in delicious foods like tomatoes, green beans, and even the occasional chunk of pastured raw cheese or very dark chocolate.  This is starting to sound a little more manageable.

I’ll disclose here that my own eating style bears similarities to the Caveman Diet.  Significantly cutting back on grains, legumes, dairy, and sugar (and adding in a few supplements) helped reverse moderate asthma symptoms I experienced for a good portion of my thirties.  I’ll discuss this in detail in another post.

NEXT POST: There are three figureheads of the Paleolithic Diet I’d like to write about in detail, including Loren Cordain, Arthur DeVany, and Mark Sisson.  All three are interesting characters, and each has a somewhat different approach and emphasis.  I also want to put some of the ideological kookery behind some Paleo advocates under a magnifying glass.

I may also look at one or more of the hardcore raw-foodists — some of them are really extreme and therefore entertaining.  Maybe I can discover exactly what they mean by the word “toxin.”  Maybe they mean uric acid, which is a by-product of protein digestion.  Or maybe they mean oxalic acid, found in extremely high levels in both raw spinach and raw parsley.

A Meta-analysis of Kooky Diets, Part I

By

On February 15

In Health/Body-hacking

In the 1930’s a dentist named Weston Price traveled around the world studying indigenous populations and their traditional diets.  He was interested in why some populations remained free of tooth decay (despite the lack of availability of toothbrushes and toothpaste).  Traveling far and wide, hitting every continent, he studied Swiss mountain people, Scots of the Outer Hebrides, Eskimos, South Pacific Islanders, Australian Aborigines, Native Americans, the Watusi of Rwanda, and dozens more groups.  After many years of field work he concluded that modern illnesses and degenerative diseases (everything from caries to cancer, heart disease, asthma, allergies, and even tuberculosis) were due to the poor quality of the modern Western diet (one based on refined sugars, refined flours, canned and processed foods, etc.).  He published his research in this book (a public domain version is available here).

Picture from Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price, with original caption: FIG. 7. Above: typical rugged Gaelic children, Isle of Harris, living on oats and sea food. Note the breadth of the faces and nostrils. Below: typical modernized Gaelics, Isle of Bardsey. Note narrowed faces and nostrils.

The most interesting thing, to me, is the wide variety of indigenous diets that Price discovered could support robust health and freedom from most degenerative diseases.  Eskimos ate a great deal of seal meat and blubber, but no fresh fruits or vegetables.  People living in an isolated valley in Switzerland subsisted mostly on whole-rye bread and raw, whole-milk dairy from pastured cows.  Scots on the Isle of Lewis ate primarily seafood and unsweetened oat-cakes.  Inland Australian Aborigines dined on kangaroo meat, ducks, wallabies, lizards, insects, berries, and wild bird eggs.  These diets could not have been more varied, but everyone was in excellent health (and had excellent teeth).

Dr. Weston Price concluded, and modern food philosophers like Michael Pollan would agree, that a healthful human diet can consist of a wide number of combinations of various plants and animals, so long as the food is whole, fresh, and relatively unprocessed.

So, that settles it, right?

These days the question of what we eat is anything but simple.  In the United States, there are no surviving traditional regional diets — immigrants come from hundreds of different dietary traditions and Native American diets have been degraded by modern foods like flour, sugar, processed meats, and alcohol (with some efforts to reverse this trend). Health-conscious modern society is in search of its ideal diet, a kind of nutritional holy grail.  We all want to be lean, strong, and energetic (with excellent teeth).  Unfortunately, the foods that are most readily available are of poor quality: fast-food burgers and fries, homogenized pasteurized low-fat milk from corn-fed cows, soft drinks and candy, and lots of bread and noodles made primarily from refined flour.  In response to these poor choices, we collectively invent alternatives — artificial dietary restrictions created to maintain our health (or, in some cases, to circumvent our scruples).  Lacto-ovo-vegetarianism, raw-food veganism, the Zone Diet, Atkins, the low-fat diet, etc.

I’m not going to write about any of these; they’ve all been covered fairly exhaustively.  What interests me are slightly more extreme diets, especially when accompanied by an founder (often an evangelist of sorts), and sometimes a popular movement replete with its own strangely consistent non-food related beliefs. (Why are most adherents of the Paleolithic Diet climate-change skeptics?  What’s up with that?  And are there any Republican vegans?)

Over the course of several blog entries, I’m going to do a Weston Price style survey of a number of unusual diets.  The practitioners don’t find the diets unusual of course — but most other people probably would.

DAVID H. MURDOCK’S FISH-VEGETARIAN WITH LOTS OF RAW JUICE DIET

I recently heard a radio interview with business mogul David Murdock, the 86-year-old multi-billionaire who owns Dole Food Company and the entire Hawaiian island of Lana’i.  Murdock founded the Dole Nutrition Institute, a kind of research-slash-PR company that works tirelessly to extol the health benefits of pineapples, bananas, packaged salads, and other Dole products.  Questions of research neutrality aside, Murdock does seem to have a genuine interest in spreading the word regarding the healthfulness of a plant-based diet.  After his first wife died of cancer in 1988, he changed his own diet, eliminating meat, dairy products, refined sugar, and refined grains.

David H. Murdock receiving his H.S. diploma

Murdock is an unapologetic fan of personal discipline, and espouses the typical conservative view that a person’s misfortunes can in almost all cases be traced to personal weakness, laziness, or ignorance.  This belief informs his style of nutritional evangelism, which can be summarized as “Eat fruits and vegetables, dumb-ass, so you can be healthy like me!”  Over the course of the interview, the British interviewer tossed mostly softballs at Murdock, but did press him on the possibility that some people might value “living the good life” over the promise of optimum health and longevity.  Murdock’s response was to recount a story about a meat-eating, cocktail-imbibing friend — the friend’s wife called Murdock in a panic, her husband had collapsed — what to do?  “Call 911,” said Murdock, “he’s probably had a heart attack from all the bad food and saturated fat he’s been eating!”  Never one to miss an opportunity for a lecture, apparently.

I found this video clip where Oprah interviews Murdock, goes shopping with him at Costco, and samples his baby-shit green health shake comprised of raw spinach, celery, grapes, tomatoes, carrots, kiwi, mango, red bell pepper, and a few other raw fruits and veggies (he drinks this concoction three or four times a day).  Breakfast is unsweetened oatmeal with fresh fruit.  Lunch is an egg-white omelet with vegetables.  Dinner is fresh fish and vegetables.

ANALYSIS: Murdock seems as fit and healthy as he says he is.  This means very little in itself; there are plenty of Scotch-swilling, chain-smoking 86-year-olds who are just as spunky.  However both modern nutritional science and traditional human diets back up Murdock’s approach on most counts.  His diet is incredibly high in vitamins, mineral, and phytonutrients, his meals have a low glycemic load, he gets plenty of protein and fiber, and his diet includes no processed or refined foods of any kind.

Murdock also restricts saturated fat to zero.  Nutritional science is split on this subject.  The latest research seems to point to the Omega-6/Omega-3 fatty acid balance as being more important than total saturated fat intake.  A number of studies have failed to find any positive correlation between saturated fat intake and heart disease.  Still — Murdock’s avoidance of red meat is overcautious at worst — human beings don’t need to eat a side of beef every week to stay healthy.

From the looks of the foods Murdock is tossing into his cart at Costco in the Oprah clip, it appears that he doesn’t give a fart about organic food, or sustainably-grown food (circle of jumbo prawns grown in chemically fertilized dirt pits — check!).  He also disapproves of supplements and medications of all kinds, considering them absolutely unnecessary for people who are eating correctly.

  • Driving philosophy:  live for as long as possible, as vitally as possible, by eating lots of Dole fruits and vegetables
  • Staple foods: fresh fruits and vegetables, fresh-water fish, egg whites, nuts, oatmeal
  • Not allowed: meat, poultry, dairy products, bread/noodles, most grains, refined sugar
  • Supplements: none
  • Importance of organic foods: unknown, but apparently not very high
  • Health advantages: high in food-based antioxidants, high in soluble fiber, low glycemic load
  • Possible health risks this diet overlooks or does not address: pesticides, some saturated fat intake may be healthful
  • Ecological impact: low (no meat or dairy, very little grain)
  • Cost: moderate (no meat, organic foods not required, no supplement costs, fresh fish is expensive, lots of produce)

Summary: Murdock is the type who’s “in it to win it.” Life is a contest, and Murdock is going to be the last one standing (and the richest too — with the most land).  Choking down four slimy green vegetable shakes a day is a small price to pay for that kind of glory.  May he live to be a thousand.

VILHJALMUR STEFANSSON’S ALL-MEAT DIET

Vilhjalmur Stefansson was an Artic explorer and anthropologist who extensively studied and lived with the Inuit Eskimo people for approximately eleven years.  During his first year he gradually adopted and came to enjoy the traditional Inuit diet of raw frozen fish and unsalted boiled fish.  At other times, engaged in Arctic exploration, he and his men would subsist for weeks on nothing but seal meat, caribou, and the occasional polar bear.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson, chillin' on the steps

Stefansson’s first-person account of getting used to this diet, in this 1935 article in Harper’s Monthly, is fascinating.  At first he refuses to partake of the boiled fish (steelhead trout, referred to as “salmon trout” in the article), and has his specially baked.  As a fish-hater, he only nibbles at it, and desperately misses salt.  Over time, he tries and enjoys both the boiled and semi-thawed raw fish, which the Inuit eat like a cob of corn, tossing the bones and frozen entrails to the dogs.  Eventually he comes to enjoy such delicacies as fermented whale oil and spoiled fish in advanced stages of decay.  “I tried the rotten fish one day, and if memory serves, liked it better than my first taste of Camembert.”

Stefansson considers his own health to be excellent during these long periods abstaining from the vegetable kingdom, and even notes an occasion where his “all-meat” diet (which includes fish, organ meats, and generous quantities of animal fat) cures cases of scurvy in his fellow explorers.

Upon returning to New York City, Stefansson encounters many skeptics in the medical and dietetic communities; nobody believes that a diet devoid of vegetable matter can support human health (at least in the “white man” — the Eskimos are widely believed to have special constitutions or mutations that allow them to thrive on this diet).  Stefansson disagrees; the crews of his exploring ships hail from all regions of the world, and men of European, African, and South Pacific descent have all thrived on the all-meat diet (after a period of considerable complaining).  Stefansson volunteers to take part in a rigorously controlled scientific experiment at Bellevue hospital, where he and a colleague (a Danish former crewman by the name of Karsten Anderson) will eat nothing but meat for an entire year, and will be under medical supervision or surveillance 24 hours a day (no cheating allowed).

Both men thrive on the diet, becoming considerably leaner despite consuming most of their calories from animal fat.  This is not a white-meat chicken diet; typical fare includes brains fried in bacon drippings, juicy lamb chops, and fat sirloin steaks.  Stefansson notes that he is free of headaches (which otherwise plague him when he is on a “mixed” diet), has no digestive problems, and has improved strength and endurance.  Both men generally feels strong, happy, and optimistic during both summer and winter months.  The only problem occurs when, as an experiment within an experiment, the researchers at Bellevue deprive Stefansson of fatty meats and feed him only lean meat, an experience he has also undergone during his expeditions when, at times, the only available meat was half-starved caribou.  In his own words: “The symptoms brought on at Bellevue by an incomplete meat diet (lean without fat) were exactly the same as in the Arctic, except that they came on faster – diarrhea and a feeling of general baffling discomfort.” When Stefansson adds fat back into his diet, his good health returns (and remains for the duration of the study).

The results of the study, when published, are met with much skepticism, as is evident in the tone of this 1930 article in Time magazine (aside: reading an article from 1930 online is vaguely surreal).

ANALYSIS: The biggest risk from eating a so-called “all meat” diet is eating too much meat and not enough fat.  Too much protein, more than about 25% of calories, does seem to be associated with kidney inflammation and digestive problem.  The Bellevue experiment concluded that about 80% of Stefansson and Anderson’s calories came from fat — it should really be called the “mostly grease” diet.

A secondary risk is scurvy, especially if meats are overcooked, and fresh organ meats are not included in the diet.  Stefansson does note, in Part 3 of the same article, that eating fresh meat as you go provides superior protection against scurvy during polar voyages than do canisters of stale lime juice.  Apparently there’s plenty of vitamin C in a fresh penguin to stave off scurvy, provided you eat the whole thing.

Provided the diet is sufficiently varied and fresh, the “all meat” diet seems to support vigorous physical activity, a lean body, high immunity, freedom from dental caries, freedom from diabetes and heart disease, and no problems with osteoporosis despite being low in calcium.

  • Driving philosophy:  ideal and most efficient diet for supporting health during Arctic explorations
  • Staple foods: frozen fish, seal, caribou, polar bear
  • Not allowed: fruits, vegetables, grains, beans, dairy products, nuts, seeds, sugar
  • Supplements: none
  • Importance of organic foods: 100% wild meats, no agricultural foods = no pesticides
  • Health advantages: zero glycemic load, high in essential fats, overeating unlikely with no carbs
  • Possible health risks this diet overlooks or does not address: scurvy, parasites from raw meat or fish
  • Ecological impact: high, especially if animals are conventionally raised (on the other hand, no land lost to agriculture)
  • Cost: high, unless you hunt it yourself

Summary: Stefansson concludes, at the very end of Part 3, that eating meat as a primary food probably does not prolong life, but rather contributes to a more vigorous life, in effect speeding up all metabolic process, including aging.

Stefansson himself ate a diet heavy in meat for most of his life, and lived to be 83.  He maintained his health and fitness throughout his entire life.


NEXT POST IN THIS SERIES: THE ALL-CANDY DIET, THE PALEOLITHIC DIET

Eating Animals, Getting Eaten by Animals

By

On January 27

In Health/Body-hacking

I’ve often thought about the ethical implications of eating animals.  I can’t say I’ve struggled with the issue, because whenever I’m presented with a roasted chicken or a sizzling plate of bacon, ethics are the furthest thing from my mind.

Would I kill an animal myself, in order to eat it?  Certainly I would, though I’d prefer not to.  I’m all for division of labor in this case — so thank you cattlemen and butchers.  On the other hand, if left to my own devices in the forest, I’d probably try to sharpen a stick and spear myself a deer to accompany my foraged chanterelles, roasted grubs, and wild greens.  As for my chance of success at this imagined endeavor — admittedly slim.  But it wouldn’t be zero; I spent a good deal of my free time in junior high developing my spear-throwing skills (not to mention nunchucks and throwing stars).  An ancillary skill I developed, related to these activities, was the installation of new windows.

Foraging ... perhaps easier than hunting.

Both sides have some good arguments.  No animal wants to be eaten, and many animals show every sign of being conscious creatures with emotions.  If you follow this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, then it makes no more sense to kill and eat animals than it does to kill and eat each other (and not just because of the prion issues).

Ethically concerned meat-eaters, on the other hand, might argue that many animals have become much more successful, on a species level, exactly because they are so yummy.  Chickens, pigs, and cows excel in this regard (there are more chickens roaming the earth than people).  For this group, the question is not so much if we eat animals or not, but how we treat them while they’re alive.

Unfortunately, most animals raised for food in the United States (and most other countries) are treated poorly.  This sort of animal abuse is well-documented, as on this site.  If you find this kind of treatment of conscious, living creatures to be abhorrent, then you’re probably 1) a vegetarian or 2) a buyer of ethically raised meat whenever possible.  Niman Ranch claims to raise their animals humanely, Glaum Egg Ranch doesn’t cage their hens, and hundreds of other producers provide (or claim to provide) their animals with environments that include open pasture, normal socialization with their own kind, and other animal perks that make animal eaters like me feel less guilty.  Pretty much all the meat, eggs, and dairy products that I buy falls into this category, but there are definitely some items in the unknown category (like salami).

And when I go to a dinner party, I never quiz the host.  I suppose there must some sort of cognitive dissonance going on here.  I do care about animal welfare, but even more so, I don’t want to be an obnoxious guest.  And when the steaming roast comes out of the oven, I’m not even thinking about the life or last moments of that unfortunate beast.  My baser instincts take over — I just wanna eat it.

Care to discuss Omega-3 fatty acids with this guy?

Does this make me a hypocrite?  Probably.  I do sometimes feel guilty about eating meat (especially when I’m not hungry).  I would have no problem with animals eating me when I’m dead, but surprisingly few animals would want to (vultures, mountain lions, great white sharks, tigers, and hyenas would all happily consume my flesh, but none of the animals I like to eat [sheep, cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, ducks, fish, oysters, mussels, octopus, squid, and snails] would have any interest in reciprocating, thus disrupting the potential symmetry).

What about vat-grown pork?  This will soon be a viable option.  If there’s only pig meat — no pig brain, and therefore no pig consciousness — there can’t really be anything ethically wrong with this approach, can there?  Unless you’re Jewish and kosher, I suppose, or Muslim, or hung up on vague nonsense concept like “natural.”  In any case, it sounds like the meat turns out a bit soggy, and lacking in muscle tone.  I think I’ll stick with Niman Ranch, and tolerate the occasional twinge in my conscience.

What About Health?

The healthfulness of eating or not eating animals, and what kind of animals, and what the animals themselves eat, is a hugely debated, highly divisive topic.  At social events, bringing up the topic of what a person should or shouldn’t eat has become a taboo equivalent to bringing up politics or religion.  It’s just not done in polite company.  Of course I do it all the time (all three) and usually end up regretting it.  These topics are simply too personal, too hot to handle.

When one person suggests to another person that they might be better off by changing their diet in some way, what usually happens is kind of an emotional head-on collision.  The person giving the advice is thinking “I care about you,” and “I want you to be healthy.”  The person receiving the advice is thinking “Do you think I’m so much of an idiot that I don’t know what foods are good for me?” and “You’re a totally obnoxious busybody.”

That dynamic aside, most of us are at least somewhat interested in the health effects of food.  Since there are financial interests backing every single food out there, there are no shortage of industry shills and scientists-for-hire presenting evidence that that you should consume their particular food item in large quantities.  Dark chocolate is good for your heart, as is red wine.  Milk is good for your bones.  Meat can prevent anemia.  Broccoli can prevent cancer.  But much of the information out there is contradictory.  There are advocates for all-meat diets and all-vegetable diets.  You can even get contradictory advice from the same person.  During the time that I was a vegetarian (approximately three years, during high school, which I am now convinced stunted my growth — my evidence for this is my 5’8″ height vs. my 5’11” arm span) I was an evangelical vegetarian, so much so that at my 20 year high school reunion some of my old friends still seemed to be carrying some resentment against my overzealous lectures, those that had occurred two decades previous.  These days I believe in the health benefits of a modified paleolithic diet, but I’m a much more cautious advocate.  I’ve learned that people don’t like to be lectured, and also that the content of my own advice can change over time (radically, in this case).

Eating whole foods and avoiding processed foods (like high-fructose corn syrup) probably has more impact on a person’s health than whether they do or don’t eat meat.  Genetics also has something to do with it — my ancestors co-evolved with cattle and thus I’m capable of producing lactase (which breaks down lactose) as an adult, while some of my friends won’t come near a glass of milk without a package of Lactaid.  So what about meat — is it bad for you or not?  It’s possible that eating large amounts of red meat (even from grass-fed, humanely raised animals) may raise the risk of some chronic diseases.  But if you look at the actual evidence that MEAT = BAD, it’s quite weak.  A lot of diet/health research studies are based on self-reported eating habits, which is about as accurate as  self-reported incomes on all those subprime loan applications.  The evidence that saturated fat is bad for you is even weaker (the latest evidence shows that small dense LDL’s — those that are produced from eating carbohydrates — are much more dangerous than the big fluffy LDL’s that are made from saturated fat).

Michael Pollan, in his book In Defense of Food, warns against “nutritionism,” a dogmatic belief in the value of individual nutrients, or itemized components of food rather than the food itself.  He points out, quite correctly, that conventional wisdom about food changes over time, so we should be cautious about food fads.  (He would probably call the paleolithic diet a fad as well, but at least it’s a fad backed by several millions years of hominid evolution.)

Bottom line?  I’m going to keep voting with my dollars, buying animal products only from suppliers that treat their animals humanely.  I may also continue to feel a twinge of regret when I see a cute pot-bellied pig at the zoo, after having eaten bacon for breakfast (or, if I haven’t eaten breakfast, maybe I’ll feel a twinge of hunger).

And if I’m hiking in the Oakland hills and a mountain lion eats me, well, fair is fair.

You look good ... to eat.

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