Quote: Oceans getting hammered

The three forces combined -- hypoxia, sea dead zones and climate change -- are creating conditions similar to those found at the start of major die-offs of marine species in the past, suggesting that the world is at the cusp of another mass extinction event, the scientists say.

Nathanial Gronewold and ClimateWire  
Scientific American
Pollution and Climate Change Accelerate Ocean Degradation

Quote: Fruits, vegetables, and healthy fats protect against Alzheimer's

It looks like a healthy diet that contains a lot of fruits and vegetables and healthy fats would be important for people who have Alzheimer's disease or conditions that put them at risk for developing Alzheimer's disease.

Suzanne Craft, PhD
Medscape
Diet Appears to Modulate Alzheimer's Biomarker

Becoming Paleo, Part 3: Breaking the Anxiety Barrier

The object of my cravings was often dictated by what was available. In Argentina, they took the form of local pastries, the eating of which could accurately be called a national pastime in that country.Post by John Michael

Cardboard pint boxes of frozen yogurt piling up in my bedside dust bin, alongside gummy bear and chocolate bar wrappers: this was only one of the many manifestations of my eating problem. (Yes, I would often eat my comfort food in bed.) Aside from this, there were the odd situations that I found myself in on account of it, like listening to the gripping, if still horrific, story of a recent drive-by shooting in my neighborhood, as I waited for a double cheeseburger in the 24-hour corner store below my apartment at midnight. And then there were the effects that it had on my body. With regards to my weight, the only certainty was that it would fluctuate. Because my stomach was often distended, my posture suffered, and I found it easier to develop lower back pain. One day, I was looking in the mirror at my love handles, and I asked myself, “What is this anxiety that I allow it to ruin my physique like this?”

One thing I’d learned was that the more refined my self-awareness was, the more complex were the issues that I could address. All of my earlier approaches to solving this problem had followed a rather crude strategy: I would try to change my eating habits by force of will alone, attempting to simply resist my cravings when they awoke within me. I had failed each time because this problem was far more complex than I gave it credit for.

In March of 2011, I decided that I would try a new approach. Instead of using brute force of will, I would study my eating problem, in the hope of divining its underlying mechanism. The best method that I could think of for intensifying its symptoms to the point where I could clearly observe them was to fast. As I knew from experience, resisting the symptoms would heighten them; the idea was to let them do so, until they grew to the point where I would be able to discern their finer parts, and perhaps understand how they worked together.

Fasting for me was nothing like what you read about on hunter-gatherer.com or Mark’s Daily Apple; this was no thirty-six hour fast. In fact, it wasn’t even a six-hour fast. Instead, my fasting consisted of eating only when I was hungry, and of eating only until my hunger was sated. But even this was a challenge for me. On the first morning of my fast, I found myself light-headed as I walked through my neighborhood, even though I had just eaten. (Interestingly, one of the first things that I had to do during my fast was to learn to distinguish between my cravings and genuine hunger because I had been operating for so long according to the input of the former that I had forgotten what the latter felt like.) I had switched to Paleo foods in order to provide a contrast between what I was eating to diminish my hunger and what I craved. As the day progressed, I found myself rediscovering my connection to my stomach.

With my attention directed towards my gut, my curiosity began to generate questions. “What is hunger?” I asked myself, and immediately my mind went in pursuit of the answer. “What is thirst?” More questions followed, growing in complexity and refinement as I answered their simpler precursors. “How much food do I really need?” and, “If I eat slowly and attentively, will this reduce my later cravings?” Tentative answers began to accumulate, like, “An empty stomach is not necessarily a hungry one.” Slowly I managed to relearn the simple system of signals that my digestive tract uses to communicate with me, which allowed me to turn my concentration to the study of my cravings.

The first thing that I realized was that my cravings did not originate in my stomach; they had nothing to do with hunger or thirst. Instead, they originated in my mind, and had to do with an entirely different need. But what was it? Mustering all of the mental subtlety that I could, I set myself to observing the thought patterns that culminated in my cravings, and what I saw surprised me. The cravings often hit hardest in the evening, usually a few hours before I fell asleep, and on this particular night I watched in fascination as they activated, revealing to me their inner workings.

A craving would begin as a problem that presented itself to my consciousness – in this case, it was the statement, “I’m going to be alone tonight.” (At this time, I was living in Bogotá, having moved there from Santa Marta, where I had left behind many good friends.) I would ignore it – in this case perhaps under the influence of the belief that I could live without companions for a little while – and this would repress the problem, which would then return to my consciousness as an image of junk food. The image would remain in my mind, slowly charging with anxiety, until I went and sought out the food that was pictured within it. Once I had attained the object of my craving, there was little time spent savoring it, as a friend had once pointed out. I would eat it quickly, because I wasn’t interested in its flavor; it had only one use: the reduction of my anxiety. It achieved this reduction by filling my stomach, and so dulling my awareness, which hid the problem that had initiated all of this, until it receded from my consciousness, and I could sleep.

The following morning, my will to fast buckled, and I found myself indulging my cravings again. But I wasn’t worried, because the previous day’s efforts had yielded great knowledge, within which I knew resided the key to breaking the anxiety barrier.

Stay tuned for Becoming Paleo, Part 4: The Projections of Anxiety.

Related Posts
Becoming Paleo, Part 1: The Yale Food Addiction Scale
Becoming Paleo, Part 2: The Anxiety Barrier 
Becoming Paleo, Part 4: The Projections of Anxiety 

Dr. George Forgan-Smith joins Primal Docs

Primal Docs is a new network of physicians, and soon other health professionals, that educate their patients on Primal/Paleo health. George Forgan-Smith, MBBS in Melbourne Australia just joined the network and says:

Having taken on the paleo diet I have lost a substantial amount of weight and I like to think I am living proof that I must be equally as willing to participate in my treatments as my patients.

Learn more about doctor George Forgan-Smith at Primal Docs.

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Dr. Catherine Shanahan joins Primal Docs

Primal Docs is a new network of physicians, and soon other health professionals, that educate their patients on Primal/Paleo health. Dr. Catherine Shanahan in Bedford, New Hampshire just joined the network and says:

Everything I learned about diet from the medical establishment was turned on its head by my experience in Hawaii. Animals are actually easier to raise than vegetables, requiring only pastureland and water, and so many of my patients also raised their own goats, pigs, and chickens, and caught fish. I realized I was seeing firsthand the kinds of practical food-gathering, storing, and cooking solutions that our ancestors used throughout history; I was learning the foods that made us human.

Learn more about Dr. Shanahan at Primal Docs.

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Quote: Geothermal energy (2)

"the top one percent of the planet has enough energy to power and heat civilization for approximately 6 billion years."

Craig Dunn

Scientific American
Stop Mining for Oil (and Coal), Start Drilling for Heat

New Primal Docs website launched

Chris Armstrong recently announced a new website featuring a map-based directory of physicians with an interest in promoting Paleo/primal health. As Chris writes:

I’ve created the Primal Docs Website in an effort to bring people together with like-minded physicians. We’ve only just begun and we just have a handful of physicians listed so far, so stay tuned for a physician near you. If you know of an MD (anywhere in the world) who you think would be a good fit for the site, please have them get in touch with me.

Chris notes the site will soon feature other health care practitioners, "but that won’t be ready for another month or so — stay tuned for more details on that." 

Hopefully the directory will grow into a worldwide resource. I am pleased to have been included. Visit the site and provide Chris your feedback. We at PaleoTerran would also like to know your impressions. 

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Quote: Agriculture's toll on health

When populations around the globe started turning to agriculture around 10,000 years ago, regardless of their locations and type of crops, a similar trend occurred: The height and health of the people declined.

Carol Clark
eScienceCommons
Dawn of agriculture took toll on health 

also see Early Farmers Were Sicker and Shorter Than Their Forager Ancestors

The Standard or Average American Diet

Post by Dr. John

John Durant over at Hunter-Gatherer raises concern about the use of the term "Standard American Diet". He writes: "I hate when people use the phrase the "Standard American Diet", or SAD, to exemplify what's wrong with our food system.  It's so contemptuous."

Instead, he proposes the use of "industrial diets" or "industrial foods." I agree we should not use the moniker with contempt. However, even our modern-Paleolithic vegetables and fruits usually don't come from our own backyard but are produced and delivered by the food industry.  The term "Average American Diet" would be more accurate and would avoid the use of the SAD acronym. Regardless of the terminology, the key issue is knowing, on average, where dietary calories come from so we can determine where the nutritional challenges lie and whether we are making progress. 

According to Civil Eats and the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, these are the average daily calories per capita consumed in the U.S. in 1970 and 2008. The proportion of vegetables and fruits remains pitifully small. Grains have ballooned by almost 200 calories, added fat by about 230 calories, and added sugar by over 50 calories. The challenge for the Paleo community is increasing.

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Becoming Paleo, Part 2: The Anxiety Barrier

Post by John Michael

If taking control of my eating habits were something easy to accomplish, then I would have stopped consuming cheeseburgers and brownies years ago. But the truth is that gaining control of our diets is often a difficult thing to do, requiring a measure of self-will and discipline that nowadays might be called out of the ordinary, if not simply extraordinary. Taking this into account, my transition from the Standard American Diet (SAD) to the Paleo Diet was not an overnight affair, but instead the culmination of several small efforts that I enacted over the course of two years.

If I had to point to where this transformation started, then I would say that it all began with my yoga practice. I had practiced yoga for several years, trying various styles, from sauna-like sessions of Bikram Yoga, to methodical and in-depth Iyengar classes, but it wasn’t until I began attending Abhyasa Yoga Center in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that I found the style of yoga which most suited me. The owner of this studio, J. Brown, had a simple philosophy, “Do what feels right,” which allowed me to strengthen my connection to both my mind and body, and so opened to me the possibility of real personal change.

J.’s philosophy, which he shared with me in a clear and accessible manner, while illustrating points with examples from his personal experience, was composed of variations on the yogic principle of ahimsa, or, non-injury. It doesn’t matter how you look in a pose, J. would tell me; what matters is how you feel. He once shared with me the story of how he had discovered this philosophy: he was an avid practitioner, who could do amazing poses and was often asked to demonstrate them for other students, but who found himself suffering from chronic pain that only increased. One day, he traveled to India to deepen his knowledge of yoga, where he met a swami with whom he decided to study. The swami, after asking him to narrate what he was doing in a certain pose, cut short J.’s long-winded description of his body’s anatomical positioning, and asked him, “Yes, but how do you feel?” The moment was an epiphany for J. From then on, the basis of his practice would not be meeting a pose’s requirements, but the extent that his body could comfortably enter the pose, which he gauged by paying close attention to how he felt.

Using measured breathing to calm myself, I gently entered each pose, directing my attention to both the exterior position of my body, and to the interior disposition of my feelings. As happens with all new habits, the emotional sensibility that I developed within the yoga studio began to appear in my daily life. Yoga, as J. had said, can happen anywhere, at any time. I soon found myself paying close attention to the emotional responses that I had to everyday situations, like waiting in the checkout line at the grocery store, or dealing with an unruly student in the classroom. My yoga practice at Abhyasa had started me down the path of addressing the severe self-awareness deficit that I had developed by watching television, playing video games, and performing other sedentary, and, in my case at least, stupefying activities. 

I began to do an inventory of my feelings, for the first time ever getting concrete definitions for emotions like fear, anger, and shame. As my knowledge of these lower emotions grew, I began to experiment with changing them into their higher transformations: fear became courage, anger peace, and shame compassion. After about a year of self-study, I managed to quit smoking and limit my drinking. Things were going well, and I was pleased with my progress. But when I tried to control my eating habits, which were rather bad, often taking me off of my normal route to work in search of just the right chocolate bar, or causing me to eat a pint of frozen yogurt (sometimes two) per night for weeks on end, I failed miserably.

Each time I’d try to alter my eating habits, the same thing would happen: as the duration of my resistance to the cravings increased, I would feel anxiety building within me, a kind of jittery, unpleasant energy, that would grow until it cracked my will power, at which point I’d find myself driven out of my apartment in search of whatever junk food my mind presented to me as the best way of soothing myself. No matter how many times I attempted to stop my poor eating, I encountered this same emotional reaction, which I came to call the anxiety barrier.

Stay tuned for Becoming Paleo, Part 3: Breaking the Anxiety Barrier.

Related Posts
Becoming Paleo, Part 1: The Yale Food Addiction Scale
Becoming Paleo, Part 3: Breaking the Anxiety Barrier 
Becoming Paleo, Part 4: The Projections of Anxiety

Monday Quote: Geothermal energy

By drilling three to five kilometres into the Earth, enormous resources of geothermal power can be tapped that are clean and can’t be exhausted. 

Luisa D’Amato
The Record

Becoming Paleo, Part 1: The Yale Food Addiction Scale

Posted by John Michael

Society’s strong motivation to lose weight combined with the tremendous amount of energy and resources spent on the “obesity epidemic” suggests that the problem of obesity is not driven by a lack of motivation or effort.

Preliminary Validation of the Yale Food Addiction Scale

I’ve known about the Paleo Diet for several years, ever since my dad started altering his eating habits to match those set out in Dr. Loren Cordain’s book The Paleo Diet: Lose Weight and Get Healthy by Eating the Food You Were Designed to Eat. “The fact is,” Dr. Cordain writes on his website, “that virtually our entire physiologies operate exquisitely when they are functioning in the native human ecological niche in which they evolved – employing both the diet and exercise level of a hunter-gatherer.” I’d always had problems with diet and exercise (like many Americans, according to the statistics), so when my father told me about the Paleo Diet, I was interested, but acquiring it didn’t seem feasible, because, while I recognized that this diet was probably my best option, I couldn’t control my eating habits, which were driven by cravings that appeared out of my control, and the Paleo Diet is all about restricting what we eat to the foods that our hunter-gatherer ancestors enjoyed. The diet remained in my head, a seeming impossibility until recently, when Yale University published the Yale Food Addiction Scale, and I decided to take control of my eating habits. 

The Yale Food Addiction Scale is a survey designed to detect and measure the severity of food addiction. While food addiction’s not fully recognized by the medical establishment as a disorder, several studies have been conducted to explore the possibility of its existence. Although some of these studies seem strange, like the one which found that rats preferred high doses of sugar to comparable doses of cocaine, or the one which studied the fierce sweet tooth that former alcoholics can develop, others are serious attempts to define what food addiction is and to create tools that measure it. (Interestingly, all of these studies suggest that food addiction is caused by the exorbitant excitation of reward circuits that evolved in our brains during the times of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. This leads me to speculate that perhaps food addiction is due to an excessive stimulation of these reward circuits, which evolved in the absence of “high fat and high sugar foods,” and which were perhaps never meant to be as stimulated as they are today.)

After reading about the release of the Yale Food Addiction Scale, I decided to take it myself, because I had recognized my own eating problem in the articles that I had read about it. The survey, composed of twenty-seven items, is based on the American Psychiatric Association’s substance dependence criteria, as well as other scales “used to assess behavioral addictions, such as gambling, exercise, and sex.” As I took this survey, my eating problem began to take shape in my mind. It was most revealed by the items that I scored highly on. The first sixteen items are statements, like, “I find that when I start eating certain foods, I end up eating more than planned,” that the participant scores from 0 to 4, with 0 being “never,” 1 being “once a month,” 2 “2-4 times a month,” 3 “2-3 times a week,” and 4 “4 or more times daily.” Among the statements that I marked 4 on were, “I find myself continuing to consume certain foods even though I am no longer hungry,” “I have consumed certain foods to prevent feelings of anxiety, agitation, or other physical symptoms that were developing,” and, “My behavior with respect to food and eating causes significant distress.” The second to last item asks participants to check foods that they “have problems with.” Which foods did I mark? Ice cream, hamburgers, cheeseburgers, soda pop, chocolate, doughnuts, and cookies.

Like I’ve told students in the classroom, the first step in solving a problem is recognizing that you have one. I had known for years that I had a problem with eating, and now, with the Yale Food Addiction Scale, I had begun to take the second step in problem-solving: observing the problem that you have, so that you can figure out a way to solve it. 

Stay tuned for Becoming Paleo, Part 2: The Anxiety Barrier.

Related Posts

Becoming Paleo, Part 2: The Anxiety Barrier

Becoming Paleo, Part 3: Breaking the Anxiety Barrier

Becoming Paleo, Part 4: The Projections of Anxiety

John Michael is a traveling writer and a teacher with a deep interest in humankind’s connection to the natural world. Learn more.

Apple's Mothership: What does it have to do with modern Paleo?

Image: www.cultofmac.comOn June 7, Steve Jobs of Apple Computer revealed a proposed new addition to its headquarters in Cupertino, California. The building would be set on a 150-acre tract in part previously occupied by Hewlett-Packard. The unique design is being referred to by many news sites as a "spaceship" or "mothership".

According to MacDailyNews:

The design for the new Apple campus puts 12,000 employees in one building! “It’s a little like a spaceship landed,” said Jobs. It’s a giant 4-story ring; curved all the way around with not a straight piece of glass in the place. Jobs said that Apple’s experience building extreme glass for retail stores contributed to the campus’ design know-how.

Image: www.cultofmac.comSo, what does this have to do with the modern Paleolithic lifestyle? Well, more than it first appears. It is certainly very modern, even ultramodern. However, as these images suggest, it also helps reconstruct the natural world. Nature is not treated as an afterthought such as a thin rim of landscaping around a building perimeter or trees and bushes at the edge of a parking lot.

MacDailyNews:

The site will go from approximately 3,700 trees to around 6,000. The employee count increases by 40%, space will increase by 20%, landscaping by 350%, the aforementioned trees by 60%, and the surface parking (asphalt) decreases by 90%.

Apple plans to generate their own power via natural gas and other means that will be cleaner than using the electrical grid. They will use the grid as a backup, not as the primary power source.

If approved, the building may serve as a model for future business development, at least where similar space is available. But, why not take it a little further? Plant vegetables and fruits in the central courtyard to supply the café. If similar reconstruction occurs near the campus in the future, connect the building to nearby rings through underground travelways and extend the natural component even further. Then, further and further ..... to a modern Paleolithic.

More images of the "mothership" here and the video of Steve Jobs' presentation to the Cupertino City Council here. 

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Monday Quote: 50 years of oil

“We’re confident that there are around 50 years of oil left.” 

Karen Ward, HSBC Senior Global Economist
New York Times