So if the standard view of nutrition - eat less animal fat, eat healthy oils, drink low fat milk and eat more healthy grains - is right - why is this chart the way it is? Surely if we took the nutritionists' advice, we should all be thinner and more healthy now?
Is this because most of us disobeyed and ate more animal fat and red meat and less healthy grains?
Well we did almost stop eating lard. So what fats did take animal fat's place?
Now we see this - we have an answer. It is vegetable oils that have taken over. THIS is the fat that we eat today. We eat hardly any of the "bad" fat that they all go on about. But they still talk abut eating too much fat. So what fat are we eating? Its the fat they recommend!
And grains? What have we replaced all the calories we ate in animal fat with? With grains.
Note that sugar itself has been in decline. What has been on the rise is HFCS. This is in nearly all processed food. And what about soda?
All sodas are up. HFCS replaced sugar in about 1980. Also look at how "diet" soda has taken off. We thought that diet soda would help. And the result was? We got fatter.
And what about milk? Low fat is less fattening right?
So 65% of all milk drunk by kids is 2% or low fat. Is this helping?
So what is wrong with this picture?
We have done all that the nutritionists have asked us to do and we are fatter and more sick than ever.
Time for Nutritionists to think a bit harder. More here
It's hard for us all to give up these ideas. 35 years of the message being pounded into us has made the conventional wisdom the truth. If you are puzzled by why this has not worked, please give my book a shot. You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy offers you a broad manual for how to take charge of your health - I cover diet, your body and your social world. I wrote it for people who now question the whole message of health. Do you wonder about diet? Do you wonder about exercise? Do you even wonder why medicine has not made us well.
If you have these questions, I may offer some new answers.
How are we boomers going to live out our long lives? I worry about this myself a lot. My concern is why I have sold our big house on PEI and moved to a small one here in Quebec near my kids. It is why we have set this house up to run on very low energy costs. It is why we bought in town so that we can walk everywhere if we have to.
I have a tiny pension and the government one too. I do have some savings but I wonder about their safety and again how long they will last.
75% of American nearing retirement age in 2010 had less than $30,000 in savings. Most have no pensions.
One of the biggest exposures that all older people have as they age in becoming chronically ill. What price illness? What price disability?
More than any factor - even energy costs - being chronically ill is the greatest threat that any boomer will have to how we live out these last decades.
This is why I took charge of my health. It is why I urge you to think about taking charge of yours too. For at our age, the forces of Natural Selection - that protect the young so that they can have kids - have abandoned us. We have no protection except what we do for ourselves. Here is more on this vital topic by the expert in aging, Professor Michael Rose.
You can do a lot to reduce your risks of becoming disabled by chronic illness. It is all about living your life as close as possible to our evolutionary fit. Eating what we are evolved to digest. Using our body as it needs to be used - that is being active, sleeping well and getting enough sun. And having a purpose and so a proper social place and connections.
These are all easier to find as we get older and have more time.
At my age, this is my kind of porn and it is also where I am weak and can and do cheat sometimes on my paleo diet.
Last weekend I was away for a party. I fell off the wagon completely. Had half a loaf of French Bread at dinner. A Burger King Burger on the road WITH bun. Ate what was put in front of me all weekend - all totally non paleo and had more Burger King on the way back.
I put on 5 lbs immediately. But worse, I felt like shit. Cramps and generally crummy.
A week later I am nearly back to normal having been very strict. My point is this - apart from acknowleding how hard it is to give up bread etc, it is to wonder at how sensitive my system has become since I have not made wheat and sugar part of my diet.
It takes only a few hours to start to feel "off". When we eat like this all the time, does our feedback mechanism stop? I know that in theory when we feel or see something new, after much repitition the novelty fades. Is this what happened to us when bread etc was the staple of life?
I think that the good news here is that once we have made eating the old way a new thing, then when we fail, we get reminded so hard and fast that this is not good that it is easy to get back on the better path.
If you are thinking about taking charge of your health, consider being a strict paleo dieter for the first 3 months. This will first of all show you a new looking and feeling you. Then it will set you up to react when inevitably, you cheat later.
My new book - You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy is now available on Amazon for Kindle. - You can get it here.
70% of chronic illness is driven by how we live: by what we eat, by how we use our bodies and by our social world. In writing this book I have gone to all the experts in all of these fields and I have synthesised their knowledge into one practical manual for living.
We are designed to live out a healthy, active and participatory life. Provided we live close to our own design. In the book I show you why this statement is true.
The book is a personal manual for taking practical charge. You can go as far as you wish but there are simple steps that any of us can start with. I, an old fart, have managed to go a long way and I am sure you can too.
I wanted to show you more though than a diet or an activity plan. I have done my best to bring all the factors for our health into view so that you can see how they all help each other. I have also gone deeply into the science here, so that you can see why this book is not just another self help book.
I wanted to help you take control at a time when medicine has not been successful at preventing you from becoming ill and at a time when the safety net is being reduced as we all age.
I wanted to help us all reduce the immense direct and indirect costs of being ill. In Canada, the average man is disabled by chronic illness by 65 and lives another 10 years. Think of what this means to you as his family? In America health care costs are beyond the reach of any family and a bad diagnosis is often a step to bankruptcy.
Our health is truly in our own hands. When we can accept this, then we change the world that we live in today. This is the greatest step for true freedom that any of us can take today. This is how each of us become the core of any resilient community.
I hope you enjoy the book and I hope that it will help you.
Here is my new standing desk - I hacked a wooden box to sit onto my old Georgian desk. My dad would have been horrified at the look but it works very well and fits me exactly.
So why have I done this? Sitting all day is one of the worst things we can do for our health.
Here is more about how you can get a standing desk and the benefits:
Choosing a Desk
You can do what I did and hack a desk or just go out and buy one. Here is a link to a review of desks and how to adapt to to them.
I work at home and for myself. It was easy for me to choose to work this new way. It also cost me nothing. If I had more money I would add a treadmill. The ideal is to walk at 1 1/2 miles per hour all day.
If you have a job, you have to convince your employer. There is good evidence that this works well and that organizations that are getting behind this gain benefits very quickly. If they struggle with this idea, get them to set up a small experiment at work and measure what happens. Like this:
"Take Salo, a financial consulting firm based in Minneapolis. The company has 12 treadmill desks, and encourages walking meetings and a mini-breakaway game — a mixture of pingpong, tennis and a bit of squash.
Throughout the day, employees rotate on and off the available treadmill desks. Craig Dexheimer, Salo's director of operations and administration, loves his. He's lost 25 pounds since he started using it. If employees get distracted while walking, he suggests they stop or slow down the treadmill.
A few years ago, Salo took part in a Mayo Clinic study headed by Levine to see what happened when employees used treadmill desks. The study was small — just 18 participants. For six months, they rotated on and off the desks, walking, on average, about three hours a day. Everyone lost weight. And overall, Dexheimer says, health improved. "Total cholesterol decreased, plasma triglycerides dropped on average 37 percent in total for all 18 participants.
"Remarkable," he says. "We didn't even go to a gym. We just went to work!"
And productivity didn't suffer. In fact, Dexheimer says, during the six months of the study, Salo's revenues were the highest ever. The environment, he says, was simply "more dynamic." (Source: NPR)
This story has it all. Make moving at work the new normal. Activity is not an add on. It must be how we live.
The study involved over 63,000 Australian men from New South Wales, ranging in age from 45 to 65. The researchers questioned the men about whether or not they had various chronic diseases. The men also reported how many hours they spent sitting down each day.
The study revealed that the men who sat for four hours or less daily were much less likely to have a chronic condition -- such as cancer, diabetes, heart disease or high blood pressure -- than those who sat for more than four hours each day. And the men who sat for at least six hours daily were at significantly greater risk for diabetes, the researchers noted.
The number of chronic diseases reported increased along with sitting time. This was true even after the investigators took the men's physical activity level, age, income, education, weight and height into account.
"We saw a steady stair-step increase in risk of chronic diseases the more participants sat. The group sitting more than eight hours clearly had the highest risk," said Rosenkranz.
"It's not just that people aren't getting enough physical activity, but it's that they're also sitting too much," he said. "And on top of that, the more you sit, the less time you have for physical activity."
The study was published online recently in the International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity.
My upcoming new book You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy 9 - Out later this month - explores this issue of activity in detail.
I was talking to an American friend about his health insurance. It now costs $1,700 a month. This includea a $7,000 deductible. This is up from $1,000 5 years ago. This is a house payment. I asked him when he thought it would reach $2,500 a month and what would happen then. "At this rate in maybe 2 years and I just won't be able to afford it"
If you think this is bad, and you live in Canada, don't be too smug. In less than 3 years Canada's smallest province, PEI will have total health care costs that exceed its tax receipts. In 7 years time, health care costs will be double the tax receipts. This trend will apply to all provinces in time.
By 2030, Alzheimers alone will cost Medicare the entire budget. The Health Care system that we know - get a pill for each ill when you are ill is going to crash and burn. It has already in places like Greece that does not have the funds to pay anymore. Source NPR
"There have been changes in the health sector across Europe. For example, raising copayments for medicine and doctors' visits are now more common. But the cutbacks in Greece have been the most drastic so far.
The effects of these cuts are obvious at the Hellenikon Metropolitan Social Clinic outside Athens, located near an abandoned U.S. Air Force base.
Olga Baklatzi is one of the many volunteers at what they call the underground clinic, created 13 months ago to serve those no longer covered by health insurance. She describes the kind of people who come to the clinic.
"Middle-class, simple people, working people, they just lost their jobs, builders, people who worked in shops, they are well-dressed, not scruffy or dirty," Baklatzi says.
Medicines are donated by families of patients who don't need them any more and by pharmacies.
In just over a year, 4,500 patients have visited this clinic, which provides everything from dental to cancer care.
A well-dressed, 56-year-old woman waits in line at the reception desk. She prefers not to give her name for privacy reasons. She has come for free medicines for her breast cancer. She hasn't had health coverage since 2008, when her family recording company went bankrupt.
She is angry. Her three grown children have university degrees, speak several languages and have all lost their jobs. She holds back tears. Her bitterness, she says, is the cause of her cancer.
One of the founders of the underground clinic is cardiologist Giorgios Vichas. With three years of austerity cuts, he says, life expectancy is dropping, while infant mortality has grown by 4 percent — shocking statistics in peacetime in the Western world.
The clinic, Vichas says, offers more than doctors and medicines.
"We also give them back the hope and dignity that has been taken away from them," he says."
I don't think we can count on this system anymore. And with all this cost, what do we all get? Are we as a society getting more healthy or less? You know the answer.
So the nest question is, What are you going to do?
One of the things you can do is to read my new book - out in March - You Don't Need Medicine to Get Healthy. Should be ready in March.
There is a real reveolution in health taking place where how to live to be healthy and to get healthy is becoming more and more clear. This book will offer you a guide to diet, your body and your social world. It is both personal and also rooted in the new science.
In medicine, the dose is important. Too much, and the cure will kill you.
We are designed to be active. We may even have been designed to run. Here is more on this
But how much exercise is the right dose?
What does the Dr prescribe? So, after the Holiday Blowout, when we all know we have to do something here is where the science is.
And in Denmark a major study has confirmed that 30 minutes a day is the sweet spot - I can do that!
You’re wasting your time if you exercise for more than 30 minutes a day in an effort to become healthy. At least if you’re a moderately overweight man aged between 20 and 40.
This is revealed in a new study, which has examined how 30 and 60-minute daily exercise sessions over 11 weeks affect young men’s risk of developing cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes.
“We have studied a group of overweight young men, who do not lead very active lives – the couch potatoes. They actually make up about 40 percent of all Danish men in the 20-40 age bracket,” says Michala Holm Reichkendler, MD, who is currently putting the finishing touches on her PhD thesis.
“They often have a little trouble getting started with their exercise. But the good news from our study is that they get the same health benefits regardless of whether they exercise for 30 or 60 minutes a day.”
Here are more of my working notes for part of my new book: You Don't Need Medicine - To Be Healthy.
The central thesis of the book is that our health is directly connected to the environment. That is why you and I can make the changes that we need to be healthy.
This post is a sketch for the chapter in the book that will be about our body. My Notes on the choices that we face for Diet are here. My notes for the ideal Social World will be here. My notes on all the science that supports this thesis are here.
It's all a system. See the connections to the rest as we look today at your body.
The Body and the Natural World - Make the ideal fit
Today, most of us sit for 10 to 15 hours a day, do no heavy physical work and live in an environment where night and day have no meaning. Most of our lives are spent inside. We think that this is normal. We think that this is progress.
But our bodies were designed for a very different way of life.
For millions of years, so long as we were awake, we moved. We did not take exercise, we were active. We carried a baby all day. We carried wood, water, animal carcasses and our possessions. We used our bodies as tools. The sun and the moon were our main sources of light. They, and the seasons, drove when we went to sleep or woke up. We lived outside. We lived in the sunlight of the day. At night, we felt the pull of the moon. We were integrated into the natural world and our bodies were linked into all the signals of that larger world.
We are still that person. All our "wiring" is designed to operate in this kind of environment. If we live like this our bodies do well. If we don't....
Think for a moment how different your life is today from even your grandparents. Think of how little you use your body in the normal course of the day. Think of how unimportant the dark is. Think of how the clock and not the sun rule your day. Think of how different your children's life is. They are inside all the time. They hardly ever move. They know nothing of the natural world. Think how normal this all feels!
It is very hard for us to see how massive these changes have been. We don't see the huge gap that has opened up between what we do and what our bodies need. All we might hear is "Take more exercise". The gym, sport or even a marathon is not the issue.
The gap is not about what we add onto our daily lives. The gap is to be found in our daily lives.
So let's see what this gap is. When we see it, we can see what to do to close it. We can see what is in our control to be healthy again.
Activity - Don't sit!
I used to sit at work for more than 8 hours a day. I was in the car for 2 hours a day. And, when I got home, I sat all evening and watched TV. 8 hours at the office, 2 hours in the car. 4 hours watching TV. I was a blob.
Every day people exhort us to "Take More Exercise". We understand this to mean "Go to a Gym"; "Train for a Marathon" ; "Play Sport" and "Get a Personal Trainer". I could never do this. As with diet, I could not do what all the experts told me to do and I bet this may be hard for you too. I did not have the time and I hated mindless exercise. But the real issue is not "Exercise" but "Activity". Sitting all day is the big mismatch.
So now I saw that sitting all day was my life, what did I do to change this?
So how do we do modern office work without a chair?
This is an answer. This picture is of my standing desk. As you can see I hacked it out of my old desk and a box. I now only sit down at the end of the day and have a drink and read before dinner. And that is when it is not my turn to cook and so keep standing.
So I work, as most of us do today, in front of a screen. But, because I stand, I move all day. At first this was hard. By 10.30am my legs would ache. But, after 3 months, this became my new normal. It is like taking sugar out of your coffee. At first, you hate the new taste. But after a while, you can never go back.
This one decision not to sit all day at work is a game changer.
Choosing a Desk
You can do what I did and hack a desk or just go out and buy one. Here is a link to a review of desks and how to adapt to to them.
I work at home and for myself. It was easy for me to choose to work this new way. It also cost me nothing. If I had more money I would add a treadmill. The ideal is to walk at 1 1/2 miles per hour all day.
If you have a job, you have to convince your employer. There is good evidence that this works well and that organizations that are getting behind this gain benefits very quickly. If they struggle with this idea, get them to set up a small experiment at work and measure what happens. Like this:
"Take Salo, a financial consulting firm based in Minneapolis. The company has 12 treadmill desks, and encourages walking meetings and a mini-breakaway game — a mixture of pingpong, tennis and a bit of squash.
Throughout the day, employees rotate on and off the available treadmill desks. Craig Dexheimer, Salo's director of operations and administration, loves his. He's lost 25 pounds since he started using it. If employees get distracted while walking, he suggests they stop or slow down the treadmill.
A few years ago, Salo took part in a Mayo Clinic study headed by Levine to see what happened when employees used treadmill desks. The study was small — just 18 participants. For six months, they rotated on and off the desks, walking, on average, about three hours a day. Everyone lost weight. And overall, Dexheimer says, health improved. "Total cholesterol decreased, plasma triglycerides dropped on average 37 percent in total for all 18 participants.
"Remarkable," he says. "We didn't even go to a gym. We just went to work!"
And productivity didn't suffer. In fact, Dexheimer says, during the six months of the study, Salo's revenues were the highest ever. The environment, he says, was simply "more dynamic." (Source: NPR)
This story has it all. Make moving at work the new normal. Activity is not an add on. It must be how we live.
So, now you don't sit at work, what about the rest of the day?
The Commute
Most people commute. The average American spends 18 1/2 hours a week in their car. They spend 2 months a year in the car! (Source)
2 months a year sitting in the car! Ideally, we all have to reduce the time we spend sitting in the car. And, apart from the downside of sitting in the car for so long, think of all the other things you might do in this 2 months? Think about what this 2 months in the car also costs you? (See You Don't Need a Job)
I solved my commute time challenge by working at home. I work as a writer. My commute is a 20 second walk to the home office. But working at home has its draw backs too. We get lonely. We get interupted. We lose momentum. We are not designed to work alone. Do you have a Co Working site near you? Co Working sites are in many locations now. Here is a directory. There will likely be one closer to you than your office. When I lived on Prince Edward Island, the Queen Street Commons, my co working place, was 10 minutes away by car. It was a welcome break from home.
But what if you have a job and live far away from work? Can you negotiate a telecommuting deal? Progressive employers are getting behind telecommuting. It's not for everyone and it is not for every job or employer. But neither is 2 months in the car. Some jobs have to be at the plant too. So in the end, we have to decide what on balance is best for us. Many of us don't have jobs anyway. Most of us will lose our jobs. (See You Don't Need a Job)
The Job and how that system works is of course the centre of the problem of the health breakdown of modern society. As you will, see throughout this book, the Job adds risk factors to our health. At some point, we all will have to confront this.
But for now, ask yourself how can you reduce the amount of time you spend sitting in the car commuting?
TV - Get rid of it
The average American watches 76 days of TV a year (153 hours a week Nielson) I cannot stop thinking about the 2 months in the car commuting and 2 months on the sofa watching TV. No wonder we don't have any time.
It's not just the time spent sitting watching TV: which is such a long time anyway. But I think also of how TV drives all sorts of additional poor health factors. TV acts like a sedative. We don't just sit, we slump. We go into a zone. It also isolates us. Each family member has their own TV and schedule. So it affects how we eat and with whom. We tend to eat alone and to make the TV schedule the home schedule. TV also is a major factor in why so many sleep so badly. We stay up too late and we upset our circadian clock by its light.
TV is like junk food. It is a pivot of the culture that is making us ill. And of course Junk food and TV go together don't they? Getting rid of junk food and TV are the two easiest actions we can take for this choice depends on no one else. It is all in our control. Both are hard to do at first but, after only 3 months, you will feel so much better and this good feeling will spur you on to do more.
My wife and I have been disconnected from the TV for 3 years now. At first, this was hard. TV was so central to our lives. But soon we felt the difference. I don't slump for hours at the end of the day. I am not assaulted by all the ads and jabber. Meal times are social again and they drive the evening schedule. We have time to cook real food. We talk! We read. And we go to bed early. More on that in a minute. Oh and cutting the cord to TV saved us about $90 a month or $1,000 a year. It just about pays my wine bill.
But what about the web? We spend a lot of time there too. The great thing about the web is that it is not passive. We do not just collapse before it. It does not force us to break our attention every 4 minutes. We don't have to be slumped in a lazy boy to use it. I stand to use my computer. It has no schedule. It's not perfect but it is much better than TV.
Get rid of your TV. I promise that you will not regret this decision.
Walking is the best exercise
When I hear the words "take more exercise." I think of gyms. I think of good looking, young and thin people in expensive outfits. Then I think of the cost, the time and how old I am and then I get put off. So here is the good news. While going to the gym is good for you, there are simpler and cheaper alternatives to ensure that you are fit.
We have to build activity into our daily lives and not make it an add on. Walking is best exercise that we can take. And, to make this even easier, 30 minutes a walk is the optimum amount of time. That's not too hard to fit into a day is it?
So here is my "gym".
Here is my Personal Trainer!Having a dog is a wonderful motivator. Rain, snow or sun: every day the dog calls me to walk. Not just once a day but at least 3 times a day. There need to walk like this is an important reason why I choose to have a dog. Dogs are like children. They demand a lot for us. But I think they are worth it and I plan always to have one.
Or get a bike. Look around cities like Copenhagen or Amsterdam where biking is the norm. Look at the people. See the difference. It's all about choices.
I have chosen to live in a small community where I can walk to all the important parts of town. The General Store is 5 minutes away. The bank, post office and restaurants are maybe 8 minutes away. This choice was very deliberate on my part.
Chose to make your car less important in your life. Once you make this choice, other avenues open up for you.
We have to be strong
It is important to be strong. As we get older, we lose strength. As we get weaker we can do less and less. It's a vicious cycle. In the end we can do next to nothing to help ourselves live a normal life. So again do we all have to go to the gym to get strong? You can. This is an area where the gym can be a big help and again, you don't have to spend hours there. My Crossfit friends spend very little time at the gym but their time there is very intense.
Intensity is important in strength training.
But I don't go to the gym. I have instead tried to build strength into my daily life. Just as I have tried to build activity into it as well. After all our paleo ancestors did not workout. They just worked.
Here is a big part of my strength building activity.
The joke about heating with wood is that it keeps you warm in three ways. First of all there is the sourcing of the wood. Cutting and stacking. Secondly there is the moving the wood inside and stacking it there for the winter. Lastly there is the moving of the wood every day to the stove. Oh and yes the stove gives off heat too!
You can find your own way to be more active around the home. This is my answer but there are many others. Gardening would be a big help. All that lifting and bending.
What helps is to find something that has a high utility and that forces you to work with your body. It can be anything but the test is "Is it part of your life?' or "Is it an add on?"
Can you see the pattern I am drawing?
An active life is a life where all that you need to look after the bio mechanical needs of our body is built into the life that you live every day. It is the same as eating differently.
The most important factor in how you sleep is light. Our circadian sensors are acutely sensitive to light.
It's the same kind of process with Leptin and appetite. If we eat grains and sugars, we block the Leptin channel that tell us that we are full. Our light sensors tell us to get sleepy is the light goes away. If we stimulate them with light well into the night, they get confused. We lose our internal clock.
So how best to get our clock running properly again?
Here is what works for me. Never have the TV in my bedroom. Even better, don't have a TV as it can keep you up in the light long after you are ready to go to sleep. Read before bed in another room in low light. The bed is for sleep or love.
Keep off social media in the later evening (OK I do cheat here sometimes) NEVER read email late at night.
Go to bed early. I am usually asleep by 9.30pm in the winter. So if I wake up at 3am, as older folks tend to do, I can know I have already had nearly 6 hours sleep and don't fuss.
Have blackout curtains. Many of us live in urban settings with high intensity street lights. If they shine into your bedroom, they will confuse your clock.
Diet plays a role in a good night's sleep too. I used to suffer from heartburn and apnea. My dad died of apnea. Taking grains and most carbs out of the diet has ended this. I regret that I find drinking less is a huge help too.
You don't have to have all your sleep in one go either. We are not designed to sleep for 8 hours straight. We are designed to sleep in batches. A good nap is also very restorative.
The job plays a large role in our not sleeping well too. The job works on clock time and we work by circadian time. Knowing that we have to get up at a fixed time every day puts "Performance Pressure" on our sleep. How I remember waking up and looking at the clock and worry about how I only had 2 hours left. How wrenching the alarm could be. How wonderful it is not to have to get up at a fixed time! I still get up early but now I wake naturally and there is no pressure. Now when I wake in the middle of the night, I can go back and have the kind of dream filled sleep that I had as a teen. It's a joy to go to bed.
Make sleep as important a priority as good food and activity. It's worth it I promise as you will find out as you sleep better.
The Sun and Vitamin D
The sun has become our enemy. When we go outside, we are told to lather on the sunscreen. But the reality is that we are designed to be outside. The sun is how we get most of the hormone that we need to stay well. Many of us live in zones that make it all but impossible on the best of days to get this vital benefit from the sun.
The problem is that we are now starved of a key hormone, Vitamin D.
” Vitamin D is by far the greatest deficiency in the civilized world. Surveys show that at least 70% of all Americans are vitamin D deficient, and up to 85% of African-American women of child-bearing age are deficient. 48% of young girls aged 9 to 11 are deficient. 76% of pregnant mothers are severely vitamin D deficient causing widespread deficiencies in their unborn children. 90% of all hospital patients are deficient, and 99% of nursing home residents are deficient. 65% of Chicago residents are deficient and even doctors living in southern Florida are 42% deficient. It is estimated that at least 1 billion people worldwide are deficient.” Saunders Vitamin D Deficiency (Link pdf)
It is hard enough to get enough D naturally in the North. But now we live indoors, many of us get next to none.
"Caucasian skin produces approximately 10,000 IU vitamin D in response to 20–30 minutes summer sun exposure. This is over 16 times higher than the US government’s recommendation of 600 IUper day!
This high rate of natural production of vitamin D3 cholecalciferol(pronounced koh·luh·kal·sif·uh·rawl) in the skin is the single most important fact every person should know about vitamin D—a fact that has profound implications for the natural human condition.
Technically not a “vitamin,” vitamin D is in a class by itself. Its metabolic product, calcitriol, is actually a secosteroid hormone that is the key that unlocks binding sites on the human genome. The human genome contains more than 2,700 binding sites for calcitriol; those binding sites are near genes involved in virtually every known major disease of humans.
Current research has implicated vitamin D deficiency as a major factor in the pathology of at least 17 varieties of cancer as well as heart disease, stroke, hypertension, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, depression, chronic pain, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, muscle weakness, muscle wasting, birth defects, periodontal disease, and more.
Vitamin D’s influence on key biological functions vital to one’s health and well-being mandates that vitamin D no longer be ignored by the health care industry nor by individuals striving to achieve and maintain a greater state of health.
If well adults and adolescents regularly avoid sunlight exposure, research indicates a necessity to supplement with at least 5,000 units (IU) of vitamin D daily. To obtain this amount from milk one would need to consume 50 glasses. With a multivitamin more than 10 tablets would be necessary. Neither is advisable." (link)
I am not advocating sun bathing. Just as I am not saying we have to be at the gym all day. I am saying that we need to build the sdun back into how we live our lives. This means being outside a lot more and wearing less clothing and NOT putting on tons of sunscreen.
Back to walking the dog. Playing with the grand kids. Wood cutting and stacking. Gardening. Biking. You choose: but get outside as a matter of routine in the summer and take Vitamin D pills in the winter. How much to take? I take 8,000 units a day. This is the equivalent of 20 minutes outside in summer.
Summary
I find that bringing how I live every day back to how I use my body is the best way to look after it.
I can design how I live today to meet the needs of how evolution has shaped my body. I can also do that with how I eat. But can I also live socially as I was designed to live? Can I bring the tribal life and all that comes with that back into my reality too?
How many hours do you sit a day? 8 at work. 2 in the car. 4 watching TV and eating. All this sitting is a novel behaviour for humans. It's now seen as a MAJOR health risk that cannot be offset by an hour in the gym. Once I started to think about how much I sit, I was able to change this. I have a standing desk and I walk a lot now. It's not hard to find ways.
Here is why in more detail and here is what others are doing
The context from Dr James Levine at the Mayo Clinic:
"Too much sitting also seems to increase the risk of death from cardiovascular disease and cancer.
One recent study compared adults who spent less than two hours a day in front of the TV or other screen-based entertainment with those who logged more than four hours a day of recreational screen time. Those with greater screen time had:
A nearly 50 percent increased risk of death from any cause
About a 125 percent increased risk of events associated with cardiovascular disease, such as chest pain (angina) or heart attack
The increased risk was separate from other traditional risk factors for cardiovascular disease, such as smoking or high blood pressure.
Sitting in front of the TV isn't the only concern. Any extended sitting — such as behind a desk at work or behind the wheel — can be harmful. What's more, spending a few hours a week at the gym or otherwise engaged in moderate or vigorous activity doesn't seem to significantly offset the risk.
Rather, the solution seems to be less sitting and more moving overall. You might start by simply standing rather than sitting whenever you have the chance."
"Suppose you stick to a five-times-a-week gym regimen, as I do, and have put in a lifetime of hard cardio exercise, and have a restingheart rate that’s a significant fraction below the norm. That doesn’t inoculate you, apparently, from the perils of sitting.
The research comes more from observing the health results of people’s behavior than from discovering the biological and genetic triggers that may be associated with extended sitting. Still, scientists have determined that after an hour or more of sitting, the production of enzymes that burn fat in the body declines by as much as 90 percent. Extended sitting, they add, slows the body’s metabolism of glucose and lowers the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol in the blood. Those are risk factors toward developing heart disease and Type 2 diabetes.
“The science is still evolving, but we believe that sitting is harmful in itself,” says Dr. Toni Yancey, a professor of health services at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Yet many of us still spend long hours each day sitting in front of a computer.
The good news is that when creative capitalism is working as it should, problems open the door to opportunity. New knowledge spreads, attitudes shift, consumer demand emerges and companies and entrepreneurs develop new products. That process is under way, addressing what might be called the sitting crisis. The results have been workstations that allow modern information workers to stand, even walk, while toiling at a keyboard."
A central part of my upcoming book - You Don't Need Medicine - To get Healthy - is to do what Martin Luther did for religion. It is to give us access to ideas that we can all understand and use to take charge of our own health.
I am just starting the part of the book where I introduce you to the amazing people who have worked for decades uncovering the systemic aspects of how our health works. Here is a heads up of the cast of pioneers who will help us all change our own lives and so the world. It's just a quick survey - The Book will have so much more and lots of data and images.
We all take it for granted that as we get older, we will get ill. In reality this is indeed the case for most of us today. But is Aging = getting ill part of our evolutionary design or is it no more normal than the fact that if you lived in London in 1850, you would likely die of cholera?
Professor Michael Rose (UC Irvine) is the world's leading thinker on Aging. It was his insight that convinced me that I could avoid becoming ill and disabled as I grew older and so set me on this course for myself.
What Michael, and his colleague, Larry Mueller, have found out is what we think of the inevitability of aging = decrepitude is not a set pattern. And for humans not at all.
Humans are designed to get old as fit and contributing people. This does not mean that we don't get wrinkles and grey hair. It does not mean that our sight and hearing may not decline. But it does mean that we are designed to be active contributors to society. The reason for this is tied into our evolutionary past. Raising human children takes such effort, over such a long time, that a small tribe had to have no baggage. The Middle Aged and the Old had to be contributors. In tribes where they were not, they died out.
There is a plateau where the loss of powers ceases. We can see the remnants of this in those family members who reach 85 and are still fit. This group can go on well into their 100's. Of course they die. But they remain vital until just before the end.
What Rose and Meller have found out is that this plateau will normally kick in in middle age - Provided that we live close to the rules of environments that we are evolved to do best in.
The closer our ancestry is to Hunter Gathering the more the risk and the more the opprtunity. Here is what that means in practice:
Eat the right diet - a very varied diet that has NO grains or novel foods - Novel being foods that we have not evolved to eat
Be active - not go to the gym for an hour 3 times a week - get off your bum and move all day
Have a real Tribe - aka be part of a small community where you play a real role and have a real place. Loss of control and identity is a major negative.
Be brought up as a small child in a community where adults create a trusting structure around us
Live in a small community - there is a very tight correlation to aging well and small communities
Obey the time and seasons of nature - sleep a lot - get sunlight
Don't travel too much or too far or be in contact with people who do
There is no silver bullet. Our health and how we age is a complex matter involving many interactions that we have with our environment. But the good thing about complex systems is that they have simple rules that we can all understand and so act on.
We can choose to eat differently. We can choose not to sit all day. We can choose to have a real network and to put meaning back into our work. We can choose to make parenting the most important job we have. We can choose where we live. We can choose to go to bed earlier and to spend more time outside. We can choose not to travel too much.
Each of these choices challenge the prevailing culture that we live in. We can choose to push back from that and get more connected to the other pioneers who are doing the same.
All of these choices are hard to make. All connect to each other but they all roll up to the big choice. Do you want to get ill as you age or not? For living as we do today makes chronic illness your destiny. The institution of medicine is making no progress in prevention and can only help you with the sypmtons. Only you can keep you well and only you can restore your health if you lose it.
So here, in the evolutionary setting, is the cast of today's Pasteurs - Doctors and Scientists - who are part of the new revolution in health.
We are all told to "Eat Healthy" and to "Take more Exercise". But what is healthy eating? Lindeberg has done all the work and he is clear. Traditional societies - those close to our Hunter Gatherer way of life - have NO chronic illness.
The one thing that traditional people do NOT eat are grains and lots of sugars. Neither do they eat any kind of processed food. When they start to eat the modern diet, they get ill. When Lindeberg took people off the modern diet, they got well.
The modern diet is too novel for us. 10,000 years is nothing in evolutionary time. And the past 50 years of industrial food, is a blip.
Diet is the most leveraged part of taking charge of your health.
Our next two pioneers take Lindeberg's work to the next level.
Your digestive system is not only a set of organs. Our digestion is a complex and co-evolved colony of partner bacteria. We have trillions of bacteria in our gut that do the real work of digesting our food. The make sure that the good stuff is shared and the bad stuff is eliminated. They are the gatekeepers.
Our digestive system is the core of our immune system. Sick gut flora allows toxins to leave the disgetion and enter the body. All chronic illness has some form of inflammation at the core.
Grains are major disrupters of our gut flora. Anti Biotics are mega disrupters.
Gut health is a vital part of total health. McBride, whose son developed autism and so spurred her work in diet, is a great communicator and her lab has developed a wide range of strategies that can help.
Fat does not make us fat. We get fat when we disrupt our insulin mechanism. We do that when we overload it with too much sugar. When I say sugar I mean a very wide range of foods that have a high sucrose and glucose load.
Once you understand how this process works, you will never believe that fat makes you fat again and you will be able take make a major change to your health.
Dr Gordon is one of many people that are working on this metabolic part of our health. I offer her up here because she is so clear and personable.
We are all told to "Take More Exercise" - We think that this means go to the gym. The real issue is we must be more active. One hour three times a week in the gym, has little effect on you if you have sat for 10 hours a day.
Professor Levine makes it quite clear that sitting on our bum all day is a big problem. We are not designed to sit all day. We are designed to move all day.
How long do you sit all day? 8 hours 12 - 16? We have become like astronauts but in a bad way.
So what to do? Design activity into your day. I use a standing desk. Walking is the best exercise too. Have walking meetings like the monks used to do. Your son has ADD at school - maybe not - Maybe he is right and needs to move around all day - maybe it is school that is sick?
This one insight offers all of us a wide range of new possibilities to improve our health. Activity is a design issue.
Just as we are designed to be active, we are designed to sleep. Sleep is not a waste of the day time: it is a powerful resetting process that operates many restoring and repair functions for the mind and body. Dr Czeisler is one best people in the field. His work explores not only what sleep does for us but what YOU can do to get better sleep.
When we moved inside as a species, we lost contact with a vital part of what we get from the sun, Vitamin D. The Vitamin D Council is a goldmine of information about why we need more D than we are getting by living inside all the time.
We evolved in Africa. We are evolved to need a lot of Vitamin D.
Do you work at the bottom of a hierarchy? Then you will get ill and die 4 times earlier than those at the top. Married to your work as a man? Retirement will kill you in 5 years. Are you at the lower end of the vast income inequality in the US and the UK? You will get ill.
How much control and Status we have in life directly affects our health. Medicine and access to healthcare has nothing to do with these differences in health outcomes.
Dr Sir Michael Marmot is the world's leading authority on how human social environments affect our health. Cubicle land and factory work is lethal. Large differences in national income is lethal. Inequality is lethal.
His research on the Brtish Civil Service is a landmark piece of work that sheds light on how this works.
So how does this process work? All primates get stressed by social issues. Zebras only worry at the moment when they are being chased by the lion. Baboons worry all the time about their place in the troop. Humans worry even more. Our consciousness can be a curse. We can worry oursleves about the mortgage or global warming too.
Sapolsky is the leading scientist studying the primate and human stress mechanism.
Sapolsky is a brilliant scientist and a remarkable explainer. His lectures online are very accessible and offer massive insights as to why we, as the most social of all animals, have to pay attention to our social environment and do all we can to make it less stressful.
And what to do to cope with our stress? I have two favourites here - The late Dr Viktor Frankl and the very much aliveDr Gabor Mate.
The single most important social factor on our health over a lifetime is the social environment that we had from 0 - 3. When I say 0, I mean from the moment of conception. Children's world view, and so their stress reaction to life is set by 3. This setting drives the development trajectory for life.
Professor Doug Willms is the authority on the link between family culture and long term development outcomes for children.
So how we parent is key. If we are too top down, use power all the time, don't touch enough, speak to but not converse with - all signs of a stressed person - then we set up poor conditions. If we allow everything, let the child run her life, don't stand firm on important issues, are distant - then this too has poor outcomes. The worst being when each parent has one of these two styles.
The best outcomes are from parents who stand firm on important things but allow a lot of room for all others. Who have lots of conversation with their infants. Who touch their kids a lot and who are affectionate with each other.
This style of parenting is not tied into any one income level. So many of us have been captured by our own stress response to the corporate world. It leads me to believe that earning our living in a different way will help.
Social Environment Parenting - The Late Jean Liedloff
Just as Michael Rose goes back in time to show us a lifestyle that is suited to how we evolve, so the late Jena Liedloff does this in how best to parent. Her work is the manual of our evolution and is very accessible and pragmatic
PTSD is a massive issue in the west today after more than a decade of warfare. Here again people have been shaped by their environment. So is the cause of PTSD the trauma of seeing or doing bad things?
Shay has discovered that this is too simple a perspective. The deeper cause of PTSD, and all illness caused by trauma, is Betrayal. This is why incest is such a terrible act as it involves the worst betrayal of all.
PTSD is driven by bad leadership. A military that has leaders who care not for their men but for their careers. A political class that goes to war and exploits the patriotism of their young men for a game and not a real cause. A system that rotates men too often and breaks their attachments.
This betrayal was seen everywhere in Vietnam. All that was wrong in Viertnam has taken place again in Iraq and in Afghanistan. As those involved learn that they were betrayed, their feelings will deepen. The PTSD epidemic will grow.
Shay also has done the work to find a way for these men to come home. And it is not drugs or experts. It is in helping people help each other. It is in helping them find a tribe again. Medicine and conventional therapy does not work. Only the tribe can offer the trust required to quiet the demons.
How do we change our wiring? If we have depression, PTSD, had a shitty childhood, have addictions? There is no pill. There is no smart man in a white coat. But there is a proven social process and journalist Alan Deutschman has made a lifetime study about what this is.
His work, Sapolsky's, Mate's, Frankl's and Shay's all intersect and support each other. Alan offers a special clarity and great case studies.
And so what is this kind of change that Alan reviews so clearly? ? We have to rewire our brain - literally. Our beliefs, or our automatic responses to an event, have been hard wired in our brain by repetition. The more times we go to THAT place, the faster we go there. It is like a river cutting a chasm.
Doidge and Sapolsky have unravelled how this mechanism works and are using the understanding of the plasticity of the brain to change the wiring.
Dr Norman Doidge has had great success in helping people rewire. Even people with schizophrenia.
Good for you
This is a long list and if you have reached this far, well done. As you can see there is not a pill in sight. I hope you can see that all of this is related and all of this intersects. It's complex. But if you make a start, you will be amazed at how you start to change and gain confidence.
The best place to start is diet. It is the most leveraged area and you will get the fastest response in health gains. Then you will have the confidence to try other areas.
If you want to know more now, I have a supporting website called the Missing Human Manual. There is loads more information, videos, articles etc from all of these people there. If you want to even deeper, Michale Rose has put together a major work on the evolutionary context at 55 Theses
Projects Powered by Podio I am working with Christ Church Cathedral Choir - Grace Church to set up a Virtual Choir School - The team is all over the world and we use Podio to do our work
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