Older Bolder Life

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ancestral health

Ancestral Nutrition (Esp. Low Carb) in the Crosshairs: Two Fascinating Examples

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Like many of you, I find it most interesting when critics sling their arrows at the revolution happening in the human nutrition world these days.

I’m specifically referring to the tidal wave of evidence suggesting that consumption of overly processed, carbohydrate-centric, and fat-phobic diets has led to an unparalleled decline in overall health and disease markers over the last 40 years or so, and the rather stunning results that people from all walks of life have had when reverting back to more “ancestral” eating patterns.

And for the sake of discussion, let’s stipulate that these ancestrally-aligned food plans, when compared to the standard American (or Western) diet, are lower carb, feature moderate protein intake, and high amounts of healthy fats. There are a lot of different ways to skin this dietary cat if you will, but for discussion today we’ll focus on a LCMPHF approach.

Like many of you, I read different versions of what are often very repetitive talking points hammering ancestrally-oriented nutrition plans; many of the criticisms are based upon myths, hearsay, and some even overt misrepresentation.

Here are two that particularly caught my eye of late, in part, due to their sources.

An Interesting Perspective From the Foodie World

Late last month, Bon Appetite’s healthyish published this article – Before You Go Paleo, Keto, or Whole30, Think About These Side Effects. The thrust of the piece was that rigid food rules can have unintended consequences, with the author focusing on food obsession and a sense of loss and deprivation, which led to her personal failure when attempting to use Whole 30 to revamp her nutritional paradigm.

The author shared –

…Through my work as an eating psychology coach, I’ve seen that we can’t undo the cycle of dieting and weight gain until we understand what’s underlying our constant desire to drop pounds. At its core, dieting is a coping mechanism, and not a healthy one. We’re not born wanting to change our bodies, but billions of dollars are spent telling us that we should.

I’ve come to believe that, to end the diet-binge cycle, there has to be an inherent acceptance of the bodies we’re in. We don’t have to love it, but we can start with accepting it…

Bottom line – she missed the entire focus, and point, of eating a more ancestrally-aligned food plan. The game is not about deprivation, and it’s not about weight loss. The game is all about optimizing your health and function.

Is weight loss part of that process? It sure as hell can be (or should be) for some of us (obesity rates remain impressively high, just look around at the grocery store today…). But that’s not in any way, shape, or form the primary objective of eating ancestrally. The goal is optimizing health.

An Angry Perspective from Conventional Medicine

Early last month, MedScape, a physician and health provider news aggregator and CME site, published an interesting online piece titled The Low Carb Community is Its Own Worst Enemy.

You’ll need a free account to read the piece in full, and I heartily recommend that you do so when you have 20 minutes to spare. You’ll need that much time to read through the comment section as well; it’s packed with fascinating perspectives and as much vitriol as I’ve seen in some time directed toward the ancestrally-oriented community.

In part, the author’s premise (of note, he’s a family physician working in a bariatric clinic in Canada) is that physicians and leaders of the “low carb community” manifest all sorts of unprofessional and unbecoming behaviors. To wit, from the article –

Of interest – the author calls out what he classifies as vitriol and misrepresentation with, ironically, vitriol and misrepresentation. The comment section is similarly filled with all sorts of fascinating opinions…

I agree wholeheartedly with those who suggest that the increased attacks flowing toward the ancestral or non-standard American / Western diet folks these days are most likely evidence that we’re honing in on significant issues, issues that have been sadly mismanaged by the bulk of conventional medicine and nutrition gurus for several decades now. Why use the term mismanaged? Simply looking at obesity rates and incidence of T2DM is enough to prove the point.

Two quick additional points. The vital key is using the best food and nutrition plan you can find to best suit your personal physiology today – as your system adapts and changes, your nutrition plan very likely will need to as well. Customize, customize, customize.

Second, not all those good folks practicing conventional medicine are out to persecute you as a Paleo guy or keto gal; modern medicine offers so much in terms of potential contribution to your overall health, it’s frankly insane to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater here. A thoughtful, skillful, listening primary care doc deserves a seat on your health and wellness team, and they’re out there – you might have to do a bit of prospecting to find one, but they’re out there.

Big Tech Manipulating Health Data? Say It Ain’t So

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There have been whisperings over the past several months, actually more than just whisperings, that “Big Tech” (most accounts name Google as the principle player given their dominance in search technology) have been manipulating search data results in a way that downgrades “alternative or non-mainstream” health and wellness information.

Mark Sisson actually wrote about it in his weekly missive this past weekend (quoted in part below), and posted the image above borrowed from Robb Wolf’s IG account –

In other words, so-called “alternative” health websites—ones that offer substantive counterpoints to the conventional wisdom regarding diet, health, and wellness—have taken a massive hit on their visibility in Google search, while the ones peddling the conventional lines of advice have seen a huge increase in their visibility. Since Google is the world’s largest search engine by far, so much so that “to google” means to search for something on the Internet, this has inevitably reduced our search (and overall) traffic.

Some of this is due to Google weighting their algorithms toward “expert” advice, toward opinions and articles written by people with MDs and PhDs after their names. I’ve tried to overcome this by changing the way I cite research. I’ve always cited and linked to tons of medical studies, far more than the “experts” like Mayo Clinic and WebMD ever have, but now I’m actually listing a “References” section with those proper citations in the proper academic format. You’ve probably noticed. It’s helped a bit, but the drop-off has been larger than this can account for.

In my opinion, this development just means that people like me and Robb are over the target. We’re a threat, and institutions are worried. We’ve already had a huge effect on the way people eat, live and exercise. Grandmas are going keto. Grandpas are doing CrossFit. Your kid’s school teacher is IFing. Large multinational food corporations are buying boutique avocado oil-based mayo brands for large sums of money. It’s an interesting time. Conventional institutions are feeling the heat, and this might be one way to try to stem the tide.

Does Big Tech Really Manipulate Health Search Data? Say It Ain’t So, Joe

I have to admit, I actually chuckled a bit when I first read Sisson’s weekly email.

Big Tech has been censoring and manipulating search results for years, often targeting groups over political and religious ideology, despite being castigated over and over again for it, and even hauled before Congress on multiple occasions with the requisite harrumphing and handwringing testimony broadcast on C-Span.

If you don’t believe that’s been happening for years now, I have some swamp land in southern Arizona you’d probably be interested in buying.

The bigger question, at least from where I sit as a classically trained physician having fairly recently “defected” to the ancestral health world, is why the push now to filter and downgrade access to what a bank of Google engineers appears to view as “alternative” health information?

While I’m not one prone to run to conspiracy theories to explain strange things observed in today’s world, I’m with Sisson on this one. The alternative health world, driven largely by the evolving science related to ancestrally-oriented nutrition and practically oriented, functionally-driven fitness approaches, is beginning to turn what has been conventional medical wisdom on its collective ear in some areas, and the powers at be are getting itchy – and defensive.

There are a number of issues to consider here, one critical point being this – there are some charlatans and wackadoos peddling nonsense in the ancestral and alternative health worlds (just as there are ensconced in the conventional health provider arena); with a bit of digging, they’re pretty easy to identify, and are most often shrouded in a mist of anecdotal spiels versus anchored to objective science. Big Tech will likely argue they’re “protecting the masses” from these agents by censoring results, though of course they’re throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Good science is going to win the day here, and I’m convinced we’re going to see long-standing thinking about nutrition turned on its collective ear more and more each year; the Virta study is doing that right now in terms of carbohydrates and T2DM, and the lipid wars are picking up impressive steam month by month.

More than ever, caveat emptor in terms of the information you read. Trust, but verify. Read widely, and ask questions – about everything. These are indeed very interesting times…

A Nifty Counter to Genetic Programming Skeptics Flew Overhead This Morning

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The past few weeks I’ve been overflown on my early morning walks by both small and large flocks of geese headed south. We live in a small community north of the DFW metroplex, surrounded by pasture and farmland, and the flocks are resting overnight before flying out about sunrise. The biggest V formation had already passed when it dawned on me to grab a pic this morning…

Why geese here today?

I have a physician acquaintance from long ago who’s recently resurfaced and taken me to task for aligning with much of the ancestral health world in what I’ve shared here on the Older Bolder Life.

Rounding out the story, he’s a no-nonsense internist who happens to spend over half his time working with a bariatric surgery team managing the oft expansive metabolic dysfunction that can sometimes occur post these procedures. We’ve not interacted in some time, and while I’d not define our past interactions as being those of close friends, we were involved in a community service project together years ago.

He’s particularly offended by those of us in the ancestral health and wellness circle who dare to suggest that consuming the Standard American Diet (SAD) and living what for most is a sedentary lifestyle runs counter to our inborn, encoded genetic programing, leading to development of a host of metabolic disorders and functional impairment (insulin resistance, metabolic syndrome, T2DM, fatty liver are just a few that come to mind).

His argument appears to focus upon the fact that, at least from where he sits today, human evolution has been for the most part static for generations now, and that disease and metabolic dysfunction today, despite being damned prevalent, is primarily due to behavioral features that (in his view) most people simply can’t overcome; he goes on to argue that one’s “genetic program is simply the cards you were dealt” to play at your birth, and that the concept of using food and nutritional elements to “manipulate” genes is absurd.

He’s also gone on to suggest that man’s innate higher level cognitive abilities give us the power to override the (faulty) genetic programming we’re born with, at least most anyway, and he’s even suggested that the natural world around us offers very few concrete examples of deeply encoded genetic information that impacts the behaviors of creatures around us.

My acquaintance is dead wrong of course, and on a number of points.

The Canada geese honking their way overhead this morning are a beautiful example of deeply embedded programing that compels them to make their annual fall migration south, often covering thousands of miles, around the same time every year.

And, of course, there’s now decades of hard evidence supporting the fact that our genome appears to be encoded to thrive on a food plan that’s quite different from the SAD; my own experience (now having lost nearly 200 pounds!) is a prime example. The challenge of course is finding the optimal food/nutrition and activity/fitness plans to suit your particular physiology and activity demands, though it can be done, and it’s much simpler than you’d think.

(Postscript: My former colleague reluctantly admitted that he’s 70 pounds above his ideal weight range, is on statins, is insulin resistant and teetering on the edge of a formal diagnosis of T2DM, though he insists he’s “fit but fat”.)

Introducing the Older Bolder Bookshelf

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We’ve decided this week to add a new feature here on the Older Bolder Life, our blog for Older Bolder Fitness, a more or less weekly book recommendation, sometimes even a more detailed book review, for those among us interested in good health, longevity, protecting and preserving brain function, and good eats.

My lovely wife and I have been avid readers since we met in college several decades ago (and long before that actually), and invest a fair of time and effort to curate what in our minds at least is a very interesting and eclectic home library.

And while it’s perhaps in this day and age considered to be a dated and old-fashioned concept, I remain utterly convinced that it’s possible to become deeply knowledgable (dare I say even develop legitimate expertise) about almost any topic on the planet via reading and study, and one of the venues to gain that knowledge is by reading great books.

My intent will be to focus on solid reads, both current and foundational in the Primal / Paleo / ancestral health worlds, as well as great cookbooks (hey, it’s obvious we love great food around here…). I’ll do my best to see if I can wrangle some books to give away as well.

More to come….

Informed by History: Thinking About Ancestral Health and D-Day

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Those of us who invest time pondering the principles espoused by the ancestral health community often spend a fair amount of effort digging through what we can ferret out about the health, and feeding habits, of our humanoid ancestors.

We do so, at least in part, to gather pertinent intel to inform our own nutritional choices, with goals of optimizing our ability to face life’s challenges, and to prosper.

We choose to be informed by history, at least the best version(s) of human history we can derive and digest, and often work very hard to tailor the clues our ancestors left behind to fit our (seemingly) very different modern day.

The benefits we gain from choosing to be informed by history are often life changing (they certainly have been for me and my family).

Today on the 75th anniversary of D-Day, one of the most monumental human efforts and events in modern history, and yet one that is fading from our collective consciousness, I’d encourage you to spend a bit of time pondering what the young men and women of the world in that day faced, and the courageous choices made by participants around the world in the days and weeks leading up to 6 June, 1944.

By the way, one of the most moving accounts of that day I’ve ever come across was one published in The Atlantic in 1960; read it here, and the image below is sourced from their site.

Choosing to be informed by history isn’t necessarily the most popular activity these days, but there are lessons to be learned, choices and behaviors to be admired and emulated, and futures to be written.

Don’t miss the opportunity to remember and learn from D-Day.