What will life be like in the UK and the US and Canada for our young and old as more and more of us are shut out of the job and the official institutional world?
In Greece, where there is nothing left of the old but a shadow and NO confidence in government, there is a new hope. This excellent video shows how many city slickers are returning to food making in the country and on the Islands. All are asked if they would return to the city if things got better. All say firmly no.
Micro agriculture is surging.
They know now that this life can sustain them and offer them a freedom that they never had before.
I see small early signs of this movement too here in Canada. On PEI there are quite a few new tiny farms that are already viable. I see so much land here in the Eastern Townships with housing that is much cheaper than in town.
I offer more context as to why this is taking place and how you can get ready in my book, You Don't Need a Job
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.
We all know that smoking is not good for us. It is a lifestyle choice. And it is hard to give up once you are addicted. But more and more have given up. Look at how deaths have fallen in the UK as a result of more and more people giving up smoking and then think about what you eat or how active you are. (Link here)
It is hard to change your diet and life. But once people knew what smoking would do to them, many did make these changes.
Over the past 20 years Britain has seen the biggest decreases in the world in national rates of death before age 70 from lung cancer and breast cancer (which are both down by half) and cancer in general (which is down by almost one third). Still, however, two-thirds of the risk remains, and Oxford scientists are well placed to help the current revolution in the multi-disciplinary effort that is cancer research to yield new causes and new cures.
My book You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy is a practical guide to what you can do in terms of Diet, your body and your social world to improve your health. It has the information that you need and a guide for how to take each step to live differently.
If we live like this, we can expect to be active and healthy for most of our lives. If not.....
Now we ALL KNOW this about smoking. Soon we will all know this about diet, activity and our social world. Armed with this, you will be in charge of your health. You will be well and FREE.
Our children's health is in our hands as parents. It's tough to hear this. But it's the truth.
"We are raising our children in a world that is vastly different than it was 40 or 50 years ago," says Yoni Freedhoff, an obesity doctor and assistant professor of medicine at the University of Ottawa. "Childhood obesity is a disease of the environment. It's a natural consequence of normal kids with normal genes being raised in unhealthy, abnormal environments."
Here is the summary of a great article on this in Scientific American. The full article is here.
"This is a lot more complicated than ‘eat less, exercise more,'" Freedhoff says. "If weight management or childhood obesity prevention and treatment were intuitive, we'd have a lot of skinny kids running around." Freedhoff himself is developing a program for families that focuses on "redrafting" kids' and families' environments, starting with more home cooking.
"Every parent would die for their child, but most won't cook for their children on a consistent basis with whole ingredients," he says.
"What I'm amazed by is the constant use of fast food to pacify children and reward children—there is no event too small for candy or fast food."
There are many places communities could start: making school lunches healthier, ditching vending machines and access to fast food inside schools, not celebrating sports wins at fast food joints, and ending the use of candy or fast food as rewards, such as "pizza days" and other unhealthy food-themed school events, to name a few.
"People don't appreciate that parents are around children a minority of their days," he says, so it really will take a village to turn back the clock in terms of kids' environments. "If we had a time machine, it would be the world's best weight-loss program," Freedhoff says. "It's the world that has changed, not people."
I may be able to help you a bit. My new book "You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy" is a comprehensive manual for what what is really going on and what each of can do to take charge of our heralth - AND of our children's.
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.
You have chronic back pain. You go to the Dr. She prescribes a pain killer. If this does not work, she recommends surgery. Not once will she discusss why you have back pain. You get addicted to pain killers. The pain increases. The back surgery is now mandated. You get worse....
You have breast cancer. She confines her discussion to treatment. She never talks about why you got it other than to offer generalities or "Genes". (Less that 10% of breast cancer is releated to genes). You go through treatment and then are told that you have to take at least 5 years of tamoxifen. You feel terrible and have pain and side effects. You still have no idea of what you can do to reduce your chances of a recurrence. Your doctor does not know.
You have type 2 diabetes. You are prescribed insulin. You never have a program to get you to eat better. AND the dietary advice she gives is likely wrong. You are put on more and more drugs. Then you have to have a foot amputated. Then you might lose your sight....
You have had a heart attack. You are prescribed statin drugs. You are told that you have to get your cholesterol down. You are told to lower your intake of animal fat and to eat more healthy grains. You get worse. She ups the dose. You start to get side effects.....
You have depression. You are told to take anti depressants. After a year, you feel worse. She ups the dose. You start to feel suicidal....
You have rheumatism. Your are prescribed a drug like Vioxx. You get worse. She ups the dose. You have a heart attack. See above.
Medicine has become centred on drugs that deal with the symptons of chronic illness. I think this is because of how everyone in medicine gets paid. Dr's get paid for time and for selling products. They don't get paid for giving advice. Especially advice that does not include selling a product at the end. God forbid that a pill may be a simple as Vitamin D. Or the advice being learn how to get better posture. Cost a book or a few lessons.
Do you think that a pill will get you well? Or are you like millions today who are starting to take charge of your own health?
A real "Traditional Marriage" would be one that surely has lasted for millions of years and that was the same the entire world over for all humans. There is such a model and it not one man and one woman united to raise a family.
The Real Traditional "Marriage" was the Tribe.
Who we are as men and women was formed by this experience. The story of the real traditional mariage began more than 2 million years ago with the advent of a new proto human. Home Erectus.
HE had the first modern human body plan. She had narrow hips, enabling her to run and her babies had big brains. She lived in a hunting culture where the tribe moved a lot. She and the baby had to be mobile. How evolution solved this complex equation produced us - modern homo sapiens.
So this is why we are what we are and not what the traditionalists think. This is the real tradtion.
The Homo Erectus infant could not be carried to term as our ape cousins do. The pelvis had to be narrow to allow us to run but the dense nutrition of our new diet had expanded the size of the brain. The head would be too big to fit through the now much narrower pelvis. The evolutionary answer to this paradox was to birth the baby prematurely. HE babies and human babies are born at least 6 months premature. HE, and human, babies are totally helpless when compared to apes and other primate babies. Raising a HE baby was a much more complex job that any other ape or monkey mother would have confronted.
This then set up the next evolutionary challenge. How does a mother, who is on the move all the time, care for a helpless infant? How does she ensure that she does not have more children than she can carry or care for?
This problem was solved by long term breast feeding. Constant breast feeding suppresses fertility. Hunter Gatherers cannot afford to have lots of children. Long term breast feeding reduces fertility. Constant breast feeding for two years also ensures that the child has the most robust immune system possible. Tribes that had long intervals between children had an evolutionary advantage. Children with good immune systems, had an evolutionary advantage. Long term breast feeding was the process. Breast milk evolved as a long term diet for infants that adjusted its composition as the child aged. Also, in the pre tool era, breast milk was an easier form of feeding a child than pre chewing the food.
Once again, there is another problem that has to be solved. If all the mature women in the tribe are having children, as apes and other primates do, the demands of raising a big brain child that is slow to mature will overwhelm the tribe. Raising a complex, slow to mature advanced hominid, was too much for a single mother on her own.
This too drove an evolutionary response. In tribes where the middle aged women stopped being fertile, more kids lived until adulthood. Many closely aligned females shared the work. And so Professor Sarah Hrdy thinks menopause, a uniquely human attribute evolved. Human females are the only primate to have menopause.
And so what about the men? How did this challenging role of raising young who were helpless or of little use until maybe 8 affect men? The answer might be in how HE used sex as a social binder.
Human females are the only primates, other than bonobos, to have emotional and recreational sex. Human females do not come into estrus as all other primates do. When they are fertile, there are no visible signs. Human females can choose when they have sex and with whom. Sex was not closely linked to reproduction. With long term breast feeding, their fertility only came on in 2 or 3 year intervals. They are the only primate whose vaginas have adapted to face to face sex. Why is this so? There must be a good evolutionary reason for sex to be fun. Sex must have been used to strengthen bonds between men and women and not only for procreation. Then the question arises, was this to strengthen the pair bond or to strengthen the pair bonds?
What then is the “Traditional Family”?
From evolution’s point of view, would it be smart for a woman to place all her meat expectations and all her protection on one man? What if he was killed? Who would feed her and her children? What if she died? Who would look after her children? (Sex at Dawn by Ryan and Cacilda Jetha ) Would it be smarter to have more than one partner and so that all the children were the children of all the tribe? We can never know. But it is likely that, in a culture where there was no property and where all food was shared, that sharing partners would be the norm. The physiological set up for human sex suggests strongly that sex is a deep part of how we “groom” each other and so strengthen our social bonds.
In this case the whole tribe has to raise all the children.
As well as sharing the men, did women share the babies? Human female physiology suggests that we did. Human females, who live in groups, coordinate their estrus cycles with each other. There is a good evolutionary reason for this. It means that there are always several lactating women at all times. Should a mother die, her child can still be fed. Tribes that could do this had better evolutionary outcomes.
Many factors bond the social group intensely. Food is shared. Bodies are shared. Love is shared. Children are shared. Hunting itself is intensely bonding. As is gathering and communal food preparation.
So what about health and aging? In such a small group, was there room to spend 20 years looking after granny? Here is where Michael Rose’s Plateau comes into view.
In a group of 35 people, that moved all the time, there is no room for grandpa and grandma to retire, get feeble and need to be looked after. In a group of 35, with 16 young, it is also vital to keep the key knowledge intact about where the water is, what plants will heal, where the game goes, what the stories are and all the vast repertoire of hunting and gathering lore that we cannot imagine today. We talk of skills today and have no comprehension of the skills needed to hunt and gather. In tribes where the old were active and contributors, the next generation survived.
Here is the most important evolutionary outcome of all. We, as Professor Michael Rose makes clear, are designed to grow old as fit, healthy and active people. Yes, we will get wrinkles and go grey. But we are designed to age well. Tribes where the old were not well, did not last.
So as the institutions of the modern age wither and die, we may well be forced to consider this model again. For we need more than a stressed out couple or single person to raise a child. We cannot just ship dad off to the home. We cannot afford to all live alone.
I see some form of this real traditional model coming back - what about you?
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