First, you free yourself of the homeostatic delusion. We are not made to eat regular meals or take regular exercise, nor are we meant to suffer chronic stress in an office. Our ancestors ate when they could and kept moving. Most of their life was stress-free, but occasionally they would be subject to acute stress in the form of an attack by a predator. So Arthur e-mailed me these recommendations. “Don’t eat three square meals a day. Skip meals now and then. Work towards an extended overnight period of no eating. This means eat sometime before you sleep and don’t be in a hurry to eat breakfast… Do not fear hunger. Nothing but good will come of it, but it must be episodic, not chronic.”
And on exercise: “First, everybody over-trains. Don’t do it. Don’t trudge away on a treadmill, count sets or repetitions, or work out according to a top-down Soviet model. You will hate it and it does not produce results. You must let it happen. You must have a playful, intermittent form of exercise. And you must exercise. The benefits are profound… Make it fun, intense according to your own fitness and goals, and brief. The goal of an exercise session is to promote growth-hormone release, to build muscle, and to elevate insulin sensitivity. Brevity and intensity are keys. Intensity means a little burn in the muscle, not heaving and straining. Brevity means you do not release stress hormones. So, you are favourably altering your hormone profile.” Superman’s grandad, it turns out, gets by on no more than 45 minutes in the gym and only when he feels like it.
Right now, our genes are playing catch-up against modern scourges—like diabetes. Native Americans and Polynesians, whose cultures only recently adopted a European-style diet of refined grains, have the world’s highest rates of diabetes. The theory is that the “thrifty genes” that helped those groups survive famines haven’t had time to adapt to the glucose spikes caused by eating starchy food. “How we move sugars around and how we burn them has really changed a lot,” says Gregory Wray, an evolutionary biologist at Duke University.
It’s even possible that very recent changes in society and the workplace could underpin the recent rise in cases of autism. Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at the University of Cambridge, was struck by how many of the parents of children with autism who he tested were really good “systematizers”—people who understand the world according to rules or laws. They also were more likely to have a father who worked in engineering. He wonders if the increase in autism diagnoses could be partly due to “assortative mating”—that is, people picking mates like themselves. People with autism spectrum disorder are often detail oriented and analytical, and today they might have an easier time finding a spouse with similar abilities than they would have in past eras. Baron-Cohen notes that in the late 1950s, only 2 percent of the undergraduates at Massachusetts Institute of Technology were women; now, 50 percent are. So, he’s setting up a study to test whether assortative mating among people with a genetic predisposition for autism could be fueling the birth of more children with autism.
Contrary to the moans of many dieters, being hungry may make you happy. Or, at least, it can be a serious motivator whose evolutionary intent was to help you find dinner instead of becoming dinner.
When our bodies notice we need more calories, levels of a hormone called ghrelin increase. Ghrelin is known to spur hunger, but new research suggests this may be a side effect of its primary job as a stress-buster.
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The researchers think that hunger-induced happiness is an adaptive measure. Getting food, especially in the wild, requires concentration, clear-headed perception and often cooperation.
If hunger made us walk around in a funk, we’d likely become someone else’s dinner. Instead, ghrelin motivates and focuses us on getting some F-O-O-D! Stat!
It’s easy to fear and despise our body fat and to see it as an unnatural, inert, pointless counterpoint to all things phat and fabulous. Yet fat tissue is not the problem here, and to castigate fat for getting too big and to blame it for high blood pressure or a wheezing heart is like a heavy drinker blaming the liver for turning cirrhotic. Just as the lush’s liver was merely doing its hepatic best to detoxify the large quantities of liquor in which it was doused, and just as the alcoholic would have been far worse off had the liver not been playing Hepa-filter in the first place, so our fat tissue, by efficiently absorbing the excess packets of energy we put in our mouths, has our best interests at heart.
“Obesity is not due to any defect in adipose tissue per se; it’s an issue of energy balance,” said Bruce M. Spiegelman of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. If you are consuming too many calories relative to what you burn off, the body must cope with that energy surplus, he said, “and adipose tissue is the proper place for it.”
“If you had no fat cells, no adipose tissue, you’d still be out of energy balance, and you’d put the excess energy somewhere else,” he said, at which point really bad things can happen. Consider the lipodystrophy diseases, rare metabolic disorders in which the body lacks fat tissue and instead dumps its energy overruns in that jack-of-all-organs, the liver, causing extreme liver swelling, liver failure and sometimes liver-bearer death.
July Fourth is a celebration of outdoor cooking, as well as our nation’s birthday. It’s time to brush off the barbecue and throw masses of processed meat on the grill.
As we all stand around waiting for the fire to die down so that we can make s’mores, it’s also a time to ponder the notion that the barbecue is a ritual 700,000 years old or more, and it might have something to do with our big brains.
Human ancestors started out eating whatever they could; berries, bark, fruit and bits of small animals were probably the main fare. Anthropologists know these early proto-humans had an eclectic, mostly vegetarian, diet 3 million years ago because of the shape and size of their teeth. These folks had small front teeth and with short canines and giant flat molars, a mouth built for grinding, not for ripping apart hunks of flesh.
Around 2.5 million years ago, meat became a big deal.
What if human consciousness isn’t the end-all and be-all of Darwinism? What if we are all just pawns in corn’s clever strategy game, the ultimate prize of which is world domination? Author Michael Pollan asks us to see things from a plant’s-eye view — to consider the possibility that nature isn’t opposed to culture, that biochemistry rivals intellect as a survival tool. By merely shifting our perspective, he argues, we can heal the Earth. Who’s the more sophisticated species now?
The American Diet, if one may use the term to describe a fairly broad pattern, is so strange from a metabolic and evolutionary point of view that it simply cannot be used as some kind of norm. It is poor thinking to call a diet that does not mimic the present American Diet a fad diet.
That line of argument falls into the tyranny of the present fallacy that seems to argue that our times and practices are the best or have a privileged status. They don’t. In fact, our diet is of very recent origin and so are the quantities of calories we consume. Most of the so-called foods we consume entered our diet less than 100 years ago, some just 50 years ago. This is a drop in the bucket of time over the long course of human history and comes to nothing in evolutionary terms.
The natural selection has been removed almost completely. How did it get removed? Modern medicine, shelter, and agriculture. Almost everyone is kept alive because we have the technology to do so. And rightfully so; I’m not suggesting eugenics. What I am saying is that we just haven’t had a chance to adapt to modern foods.
Very interesting article about how in our current environment there simply is not enough evolutionary pressure to adapt to the current foods. The fact is, most of us can still survive and reproduce even if we’re sick.
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