Robert Paterson's Weblog

Becoming Human Again? Life at a BBQ versus Death in a Cubicle

I was talking to a new colleague of mine Sherry Pelkey this week. We were struggling to find a commonplace experience that represents how we are really meant to be as humans. What is the modern Paleo experience?

She said what about a family BBQ?

The light bulb went on for me! So here is a test.

How do you feel at a BBQ? Especially when it is outside on a nice day where you had fun socially but also did your share of cooking and in bringing your share of the food to the party.

How does this feeling compare with other parts of your life?

For me such an event always feels great. So then why? Does it bring us back to our Paleo design? I think it does. 

Here is how I unpack this picture in this context. First of all it is a social gathering all centred on sharing the gathering, preparation and eating of food. This is our Paleo hallmark. This process is what made us social. 

There is fire. Our core technology. Fire made us human. The big jump to Homo Erectus meant nearly a 2 foot increase in height, the loss of the big chewing jaw and the loss of half our gut. Something happened to give is a cheap way of eating a lot of energy. Cooking is a good candidate. It would have enabled us to eat a lot more meat and many veggies and tubers that we could not eat raw. 

There are all ages here - no age ghettos. All the ages are mixed up.

There are about 30+ people in the picture. This is the normal size of a tribe in Paleo times.

They are all outside. What is it about eating outside? It is special isn't it?

Now contrast this with this event that happened last weekend.

A woman went to work on Friday in her cubicle. She was found the next day dead in her cubicle. No one had missed her at the office at the end of the day. No one had missed her at home. She was isolated in every way.

We surely need more of the BBQ and less of the cubicle. One makes us more human the other kills us.

The Middle East and Israel - The Dogs are off the leash

The Middle East and Israel remind me of dogs.

I walk our dogs off leash. I only put the leash on when I see people and other dogs who are not socialized. Dogs on leashes tend to behave badly with each other because they can get away with it and in many cases are reacting to the fear of their owner that something bad will happen. But if you go to a park that has a leash off policy, you tend to find confident well socialized dogs and owners who share these attributes.

Israel has been on a leash - protected by a nervous owner. This has meant that it can behave badly with no real consequences. It can give power to its own fundamentalists and to the settlers who drive an agenda that makes any peace impossible. For on the leash, Israel does not need to be serious about peace.

Israel lives in a dog park that insists on leashes. America has had a leash on Egypt and Jordan and many other Arab states too. This too has had internal consequences for these leaders. I wonder if their own fundamentalists have been empowered by this?

What seems to be certain now is that the Dog Park Rules have changed for all. It is going to be a No Leash park.

There will be real consequences for bad behaviour. I don't mean that there will be no bad behaviour, I mean that it will come with a big price. 

And the "Owner"? The US is left helpless the other side of the fence looking in.

What to do?

Realize that depending on imported oil is where the power and the pain lies. America's greatest defence is to make itself less vulnerable to oil. Local resiliency is the path to freedom

Revolutions and the Middle Class - Dropping Out or Pitchforks?

Dougald Hine wrote a fascinating post today where he looks that how dispirited the American Middle Class has become. He notes the article in the NYT yesterday that shows that many American College students are depressed and fear that they will not have the same future as their parents. 

Dougald ends with the fascinating point that maybe this is the time for the youth of today to reassess their future. Should they join the system of their parents or try something new?

I see many of my own children's friends on the edge of this decision. They are in their early thirties. There is no place for them in the SYSTEM. Few openings and when they try it, they hate it. It is so inhuman to them. We old farts just sucked it up. We had the 60's but then after our own revolt we joined our own parents and became Don Draper.

My kids now live outside the system as do most of their friends. I don't know of a single one of my graduates from business school on PEI that have jobs that appeal to them. If they have them - they are marking time.

I wonder if Dougald is onto something?

If he is wrong, watch out. Real revolts come not from the oppressed masses but from the Middle Class. What is taking place in the Arab world right now is a Middle Class revolt. The Russian and French Revolutions and even the American Revolt and the English Civil War - all came from a Middle Class that thought that it was being shut out. 

At the heart of America was the "Dream" - that anyone could rise. There is a lot of evidence that this is not longer true. Social mobility is all but over. Inherited wealth has a lock on all the levers and avenues for power. The Middle Class is being squeezed.

So what will it be? A revolution based on a new alternative system or pitchforks and tumbrils?

Crisis drives change in food system - -What would a new system be like? Part 3 #paleo

I doubt that the early users of the plow could predict what their new approach to food production would bring. They were simply addressing a problem. How could they get more output of grain along the fertile banks of the Nile?

They were also building on all sorts of other connected innovation that had taken place before. Grass had been bred to have a higher yield. Oxen had been domesticated. Pot making had enabled more storage. The plow was a capstone element that brought all of this togeher and made it into a system.

It is likely that most of the parts of the new system exist today. They just need to be brought together. Maybe a crisis will do that? The crisis may be driven by an oil crisis.

With expensive oil, we will not longer have the inputs that drive our system such as fertiliser and pesticides. We will not have the equipment such as tractors. We will not be able to use concentration and corn fed confinement as the basis of meat production. We will have much reduced refrigeration. We will not have the fuel to transport food and goods so cheaply. 

It may also be a health crisis. For we can no longer tolerate the costs of the illnesses that stem from our making grain and corn in particular the key component in all our food and in what our animals eat. 

These are the problems that we will have to solve soon. So what can we see that is going this way.

Meat - New Old/Models - We have bred animals that are designed to be confined, live in barns and eat corn. We have "Poodleized" them and made them weak. But there have always been grazers that can tolerate being outside for most of the year. 

The Buffalo herd was 60 million in 1800. We slaughtered them to kill off the plains Indians and the clear the land for cattle. In 1900 there were less than 1,000 left. But in the last 20 years there has been a renaissance. In 2005 the North American Herd was about 500,000 and in Canada 2000 ranchers have a herd of about 250,000. It is even larger today and the issue that confronts the folks in the buffalo world is how to expand the herd.

Why the success and what does this teach is as an element? It is that there are animals that "Fit" our environment. Buffalo are the natural herbivore in North America. They can cope with the worst weather. They build up the grassland. They certainly don't need a barn.

There are two reasons why the herd is booming and that more people are getting involved. Most importantly, there is demand for the meat. Meat from a true grass grazer is on the top of the health lists now for those that can afford it. On the rancher side, the costs of keeping buffalo are much less that for cattle. 

They are not easy to keep. They are to cows as wolves are to dogs. They are a wild animal. So they cannot be confined. They need large areas and really strong fencing. 

BUT they offer us a clue I think to the future of meat. Today we set up an entirely artificial environment for the animals that we depend on. What if instead we selected animals like the Highland cattle seen below that fit and thrived where we live instead?

I am NOT saying we have to all be buffalo ranchers - though out west this could be vast. I am saying that our new paradigm might be to favor animals that fit well with local conditions and so need very few inputs and capital to ensure that they thrive. 

If we can breed a Holstein to have more milk than could be imagined, we could breed more adapted animals like this Highland Cow that can tolerate cold very well.

In the UK the Blackface Sheep is the Gold Standard meat sheep who can tolerate extreme cold and poor pasture. Their wool is also highly esteemed making it a multipurpose sheep.

The Berkshire pig does well outdoors even in Atlantic Canada. 

There are breeds of all our basic domestic animals that can be rescued from history and offer us a low input low cost alternative to the "poodle" breeds we have now. 

You do not have to wait years for Organic certification to beging this way of raising animals. You can start next year. There is also a large and fast growing market for this kind of meat now. Maybe not here on PEI yet but there is an export market that will enable us to get up to scale for when we all have to eat locally like this anyway. 

If you start small with other your risk is low. 

Grass - the opposite of the plow - The plow is all about getting rid of the existing natural system and replacing it with an artificial one. At Polyface Farm, the system is all about keeping and building on grass. Each animal has part of a rotation that uses different parts of the grass and that fits into a larger system.

Pigs have their job at the edge of the system.

Chickens come in after the larger animals. All add more back so over time the grass improves and so can carry more load. The opposite of our current system As the years go by the ROI on the farm goes up. the opposite of our current system. 

As well as producing meat and eggs that rely on very few extra inputs, this system produces the very healthiest of product. Why? Because the animal fits its environment. Chickens and pigs were designed to live like this and to eat like this. If we go down this road we work WITH nature. 

This can all be done locally. 

Imagine if we made grass our focus? We have such ingenuity. Polyface Farm is to the future what the crudest early plow is to our modern system.

So what then about crops - what about veggies, fruits and nuts? How might we tie into a grass system a system for this?

I think that the answer is in Permaculture. 

This is what Permaculture looks like. Looks chaotic but it is not. Again the principle is "Fit". We plant to mimic nature and to enhance nature. Most are perennials. As the system ages, it gets more productive. For the parts all reinforce each other as the animals do on a grass farm. Too many slugs = not enough ducks!

This is the DNA of the structure.

Ponds and woods are key to the design. 

The Salatins at Polyface have discovered the importance of linking their woodland to the grass land. Both feed the other. 

Both get stronger over time. Both end up needing almost no inputs. Both have an ever increasing ROI and offer the farmer more and more margin and so independence.

This is what working with nature looks like. It's early days now. But I think that these two related ideas have great potential. Could they not work for you? If they did what would happen to you?

In the next and last post of this series, I will play with what this might do for society. For how we get our food shapes our culture and power. I will play with how this might work in small place like PEI.

I have no idea as of today how this imagining will work out - please join me in speculating.

 

Crisis drives change in food system - System? What System 2 #paleo

This picture sums up for me the essence of the last Food Revolution about 10,000 years ago.

If we can unpack the meaning of this picture we can see more clearly why we have a crisis and we can see the direction of the New Food System and how it may affect society.

The Design Issue - Grain is at the centre of the last revolution. In choosing grain, an annual crop, we separated ourselves from nature and forced our will upon her. This is what we see in the picture above.

Nature always wins these arms races. Only the application of the power of oil has made us so successful in the last 100 years.

Only oil can give us the crop protection, the fertiliser and the sheer power needed to keep ahead of what nature wants - a diverse self balancing system. Only oil allows us to keep farming in the same place year after year. Only oil allows us to grow food far away from where people live. Only oil allows us to have most of the food processed or cooked far away from our homes. Only oil allows us to sell food in a very few places through a handful of organizations.

Only oil allows most of us to live in mega cities. 

So when the oil gets expensive, we have to lose this race.

When oil gets too expensive, we will have to find another way that will not be based on having dominion over nature.

We will have to find a way of working WITH NATURE so that we can use her help.

This may mean that we have to find a new BASE FOOD for people to replace grain. For it is the focus on grain that demands an annual crop that covers immense acreage that has to the both defended and supported artificially that is the design flaw.

A new base food gown with nature will change every part of our society because how we grow our food is what shapes how we live. 

The Impact on Society of the Grain Design - Grain has driven a process of centralization and control.

This is a model of an Egyptian granary. Because grain could be stored, someone was going to emerge who "owned" it.

The egalitarian life of the HG Tribe was a casualty of the essence of the properties of grain. Food was no longer communal - it was owned by someone. Pharaohs and Kings appeared. As did granaries like this on.

Property emerged as the key idea. Note also the scribes. With this kind of property emerged writing. Yes the bean counters came before the poets! 

The written word for most of history has been used by the elite to keep the little people in line. The same is true for the child of the written word, the law.

To know that you could pass your property down to your son, you had to know who your son was. So you had to control women. You had to control their access to other men. So Patriarchy is a direct consequence of grain. 

A vast difference grew up in the social status of people. The little people did all the hard work.

They still do - the US food system depends utterly on immigrant food workers who are little more than slaves. 

The elite concentrated all the wealth and assumed God Like Powers.

They still do. Wealth has been concentrated today more than at any other time than perhaps at the time of the Pharaohs. 

Our concentration in cities and our close links with domestic animals created the modern infectious diseases that did not exist in HG societies. These wiped out indigenous peoples such as the Aztecs and Mayans when contact was made with us.

We have "conquered" these types of disease now but our even greater focus on corn has lead to the new disease of modern times - the effects of a diet too focused on simple carbs. 

No part of this system is sustainable.

Soon, we will be forced to find another way that does not depend on beating back nature. For only with oil can we do that. 

Another factor is health. We cannot afford as individuals or as nations to spend the money to treat the diseases of modern civilization as our populations age. 

These stats on diabetes for PEI I am sure apply to any western society. 

They are driving costs that we just cannot absorb as most people in the west will be over 60 in 20 years time. 

So we need to find a new core idea for our food.

"But we cannot replace grain" you may say. But think of it. Grain has only been the staple for at the most 7,000 years. We are designed to eat so many other foods that are so much better for us. Grain is a double edged sword. Grain + oil has meant that in 110 years our population has risen from 2 billion to 7 billion. 

With no cheap oil, we will have no alternative but to look at another way that uses different foods grown in a different way. With healthcare costs greater than our ability to tax, we will have no alternative.

I don't think we can still keep 7 billion people around and I don't think that the process of conversion to a new system will all be fun. It wasn't the last time either. 

But right now we can see the principles emerging for a new system. There are even examples of it that exist right now.

In my next post we will look at what these may be - in the final post after that - we will see what their implementation might imply for how we live. 

 

 

 

Crisis drives change in food system - then and now part 1 #paleo

12,000 years ago a crisis ended millions of years of Hunter Gatherer society. We did not happily chose a new way of life. A crisis forced it upon us and our brilliance at using our minds to solve problems lead to us inventing new technology that took us down a path that created the modern world as we know it.

I can see that such a crisis is upon us again and that once more we will have to use our ingenuity to find a new way. This series will be my sketch book as to what that might entail.

Let's start with what happened to us the last time and then I will go on to look at why we face a crisis of similar scale today and then what we might to to get us out of it. 

The Crisis that Ended Hunter Gathering

Who better than James Burke to show us what happend

 

The crisis was a change in climate in the middle east that destroyed the wild habitat that the large population of Hunter Gatherers needed to sustain themselves. 

The big new idea was domestication of plants and and animals. The core tool would be the plow. The core new food would be grain. A food that you could store. And so a food that you could control. A process of control that lead top the idea of property, of kings and their great tool for control - the written word. 

It meant nothing that this food was a poor substitute for what we had eaten before. We lost a foot in mean height. We developed the diseases of modern civilization. It was eat this or starve.

This was a food that could also expand the population exponentially. Farmer/herder societies could field armies and then take over lands of Hunter Gatherers who had no defence. The grain produced the population, the king, the army and then the conquest.

Our world view is shaped by this history. The normal of centralized control. Of power concentration and the use of the word to control us. Of cheap and easy food.

By 100 AD and the rise of Rome, the end of the Hunter Gatherer world was certain.

Our modern crisis

So what's the crisis? It had better be a big one for our current system is so well entrenched!

I think that these are the elements of the crisis that will force us to change as our Hunter Gatherer ancestors were forced to change.

Our food system today depends utterly on the availability of cheap oil. This is what has made available the expansion of world population from 2 billion in 1900 to 7 billion today. This expansion coincides with the oil age. Some time soon this will no longer be available. 

This is Timgad in North Africa - the Capital of the Prairies of the Roman World. If you want to know where the top soil is look here in Ephesus across the Mediterranean.

The great port of Ephesus silted up from topsoil blown from North Africa. Constant plowing destroys the topsoil. Just as constant irrigation destroys it from salt build up

Our focus on grains and the plow and inputs to feed and to defend a concentrated row crop ALWAYS destroys the land. 

The clock is ticking for the prairies and California.

Making corn and sugar the centre of the modern diet and the agribusiness, we are also driving a health problem  that is overwhelming us. Not just a health crisis but a financial crisis. The costs of dealing with this are too much for any of us to bear or any society.

We are starting to understand now that the very core crop, grains, that saved us all that time back will now destroy us.

We have reached the limits of what the agricultural revolution can offer.

This feels like a crisis to me that cannot be undone by working harder to do what we have always done.

In the middle east back in the day, you could not hunt harder either. 

And, I nearly forgot. Nature is also doing her thing. Weather instability is making crop growing a very hard thing to do and it is getting worse. With 7 billion people to feed, we cannot miss a beat but we are.

So in my next post I want to explore how a new diet may drive a new food system. A new food system as radically different as the one that the plow created and with all the ramification for human society and power that a real revolution implies. 

Taking back control of my health - the series

The good thing about blogging is that it enables me to work out ideas as they unfold. The bad thing is that it is then hard for you to find my stuff. So in this post I am going to list the key posts that I have done to help me understand why and how I can take back control of my health as I get older.

The deal is simple - find the best fit you can in what you eat to what you are designed to eat. The better the fit the beter you will be. You are designed to be fit as you age. Like him!

I can choose to age well. The science backs me up AND more importantly I can feel the difference already.

• The Context - Our evolution designs us to be fit and active until we die. The diseases of the modern world are just that. They are a product of gap between our design and how we live today. In particular the gap in what we have been evolved to eat and what we eat. I and you can live long and well. It's now a choice.

• Healthcare is not health - Most of us worry about our access to healthcare and don't realize how much power we have to make sure that we are not ill. All the great improvement in our health have taken place when we have made big changes to our environment. For cities it was sewers etc. Medicine is good but it is not the most important factor. So what can we do now to make a big societal shift in our health? Eat better.

• Aging does not mean we have to get ill and weak - We are designed to be active as we get older. Why? Because, the tribe was needed to raise young that took 25 years to reach maturity. People who don't eat what we do dont age like we do.

• What are we designed to eat - We have been eating our evolved diet for more than 2 million years. The closer we stick to our genetic fit the better we will be. 

• Why not grains and dairy - It's all about how long your genetic stream have been eating this. If you don't come from northern Europe - it may have been only 100 years or LESS. Even if like me you do, it is at most 7,000 year compared to millions. No animal eats milk after they are weaned!

• Sugar is the biggest problem - Most of us have only eaten sugar since the 1880's. Simply put carbs are sugar too. It is since we have reduced fat and increased carbs that the obesity epidemic has taken off.

• So you can take charge

How you smell and look - Health or makeup & soap?

I found this very interesting - I see this in my dogs. When they are well they have great coats - don't smell and fart less. When they aren't.....

So what about us? Why should this be any different?

Amplify’d from freetheanimal.com

For the most part of what i've read of these comments, it seems that no-one has yet addressed that a persons state of health and diet is the major contributer to body odours. You can be a person that bathes, shampoos and deodorises regularly but still stink offensively to high heaven from poor food choices, lack of fruit and veg, too much processed junk and the degenerative diseases developed. On the other hand, you can be a person who is physically active on a daily basis, eats only fresh food, lightly cooked meats and seafoods, avoids grain foods (because we are NOT birds) and smell perfectly fine from not using cosmetics and soaps, etc. To determine/decide if another potential mates' odour was offensive or not is one of many important evolutionary 'tools' to ensure that humans mated with other humans who were in good health with good genes. Cosmetics were originally developed to mask a persons poor health, rather than making the effort to improve their health (more like ignorance in the face of decadence). We almighty Human Beings forget that we are just another animal on this planet, and how many of them (animals) do you see using processed foods, soaps and clothing? Compare the health of a chimpanzee (our closest biological relative) to most humans, these chimps are much better off than we are without our modern vices. We apply chemicals to our skin, eat food from sources that are not digestable in their natural state, technology that does all our moving/movement for us, yet still have it in our heads that we are 'smarter' than other living organisms on this planet. Our sense of 'smart' seems like a hell of a lot of 'stupid' to me. If our animal friends shared the same voice and could point and laugh, we would never hear the end of it, except we are HARMING THEM in all these processes. Read more at freetheanimal.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/blt1p

via Amplify.com

How human are you? If not too much then you will get ill!

I have been talking a lot recently about our diet and the need to have a fit to our human design. John raises the other side of the coin. Do you fit your human social design?

John Tropea has scoured the web to assemble a wonderful post that looks at "What makes us human".

It's a great example of how a thoughtful person may curate material from many sources and weave a powerful answer to a great question. As you read this piece a clear picture emerges about how evolution has designed us to be social - social in a particular way. A reason why solitary confinement is such a terrible experience for us.

We are primates!

Here is how he ends this epic search:

Looking more deeply at the invisible forces that link one human being to another helps us see something even more profound: our brains and bodies are designed to function in aggregates, not in isolation. That is the essence of an obligatory gregarious species. The attempt to function in denial of our need for others…violates our design specifications. The effects on health are warning signs, similar to the “Check Engine” light that comes on in today’s cars with their comptuerised sensors. But social connection is not just a lubricant that like motor oil, prevents overheating and wear.

Social connection is a fundamental part of the human operating and organising system itself.

What is becoming clear is the cost of not being fitted socially. The result of a poor fit is endless stress. That in turn means that many of us are in the fight or flight mode all the time. That produces Cortisol. And Cortisol if present enough attacks our immune system.

This can kill you.

This slide needs a little explanation. Dr Sir Michael Marmot investigated the British Civil Service over a 25 year period. The Whitehall Study. What he found is that there is a distinct gradient for death of heart disease. (CHD) The Admin folks are the senior execs. The people lowest in the hierarchy with the least amount of say (Think touch) who are ordered around - died 5 times more often than the folks on the far left.

The slide also shows that all the risk factors that we normally associate with heart disease play only a small part in this increase in deaths. Most of the bar shows "unexplained". 

Marmot's life work is revealing that social isolation and inequality has a huge impact on our health.

So have a look at John's piece and see how you check out. How connected are you?

Here is the best short piece I have seen on this process.

 

Sap or Sapiens - Taking charge of my health #paleo Part 1 - Context

This is me - a year ago. A "normal" overweight 59 year old male. 205 lbs and 5.11" My BMI is 28.6 or just under Obese at 30.

I am 60 years old. Life expectancy for a man of my time and age on PEI is 75. On Average by 65 the average of men like me will be helpless.

My own father died at 55. My mum has been an invalid since she has been 45. So the big question that I am confronting is not when I should die but will I too become a helpless invalid soon and burden my family and the state with looking after me.

The issue for me is not about death but about my life! My question is - How will I live out my last decades? Will I be getting progressively more frail or will I be healthy, active and a contributor until my end?

This question is about my health and also about my finances. 

Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, dementia are all how most of us end up. Even in Canada with the state paying - this can be crippling financially. If my mother did not have a pension from my dad I don't know how we would have coped.  In the US the costs are immediate and can ruin a family. If you are an American and you get any of these, you will end up bankrupt. 

In Canada and in the UK, when most of us are over 65, the costs of the new normal way of aging will ruin the state as well. On PEI the costs of healthcare will double in 2015 and double again to 2.4 billion in 2018. The total tax revenue from PEI's own resources is currently $600!

Now that most of us will be old, the stakes are huge - for me and for you as individuals and also for the societies that we live in.

So what to do? I and you are surrounded by fad diets and by people making their living by giving us "answers"

I have the motivation but I did not have a context for action so that I could choose a path that I could sustain. For I, like you, am a creature of habits that will be hard to break. I had to find not simply a diet but a way of life that would suit me and one that was not impossibly hard for me. I had to find a way that I could adhere too.

I had to find a context for action.

My regular readers will know that I have long espoused a return to a more Human way of life that is more akin to our Tribal Norms. I have written for a time and extensively about what this may be like. I have written also about how to grow food in a new/old way.

So one day abut 3 months ago, I got a call from a friend who wanted to introduce me to a colleague of his - Dr Michael Rose. Michael is one of the leading Evolutionary Biologists of our time and is one of the leaders in the world on the process of aging. Thus has begun one of the most formative relationships of my life.

For my bias has always been science. As many bang on about this and that in areas that I care about sich as how the Social in Social media work - I look to the science. Hence my interest in Robin Dunbar whom I have been following for many years. So my interest in parenting is not about this fad or that but in the science of how family culture affects children's development. Hence my interest in Doug Willms. So my interest in how our institutions affect the health and spirit of employees is not just a rant but based on the research of Dr Sir Michael Marmot.

What Michael Rose has opened my eyes to are these vital contextual points that are rooted in not a "How To Book" but in a lifetime of research and from a mind that is laser like. 

• Aging is not downhill all the way from our peak to the grave - that trajectory is a product of how we have bolted our modern culture onto our Paleo biology. We can halt aging. It does halt normally if we reach about 80 - but we can halt it earlier. I want to halt mine NOW!
• The diseases of modern times that cause us to age in this way and that make us so ill are a result of how our culture - Post industrial living and eating of 50 years - Farming and Settled of  7,000 years for North Europeans and much less for all else and 100 years for Natives - has violated our biology of more than 2,000,000 years. We have got too far away from whom we are!
• Diet is a very important first step in regaining our health and with a more "Human" diet, we can undo a lot of damage - modern diseases are unknown in the few remaining Hunter Gatherer societies.
• But so are other areas of how we live - How we are employed - how large the population of the place is where we live - how much sunlight, sleep we get - the strength of our tribe connections - the kind of activity we get.

In short, Michael is recommending that I and you do our best to live a Paleo or more Human life - to live again as a Sapiens and not as a Sap!

By this he does not mean return to skins and a cave. Remember at the time of the Renaissance, people also re-discovered the wisdom of the Classic Age and using this Wisdom overthrew the Dogma of the Medieval time that was based on the self interest of the governing institutions of the time - the church and the hereditary monarchies. 

This lead to a cultural change.

We too today live in a Matrix. We think that it is "Normal" that we get ill the way we do. We think it "Normal" that we look the way we do. We hope that the institutions will "Cure" us when we get these Normal Illnesses. There are powerful forces out there that do very well out of this and we think their role in our life is "Normal" too.

But then in 1500 the Universal Church, the Inquisition and Monarchies were normal too.

This new series will be my kind of 95 Theses. I am going to show you the "Observed Truth" not the fad. I will confine myself to science. Not just Michael's work but a host of other scientists, who each have a piece of the puzzle well worked out now. In my next post I will outlines the areas that I will be working in.

The greatest challenge we will have - you and I are our own beliefs and habits and the vested interests of the powerful who wish us to stay as we are. Later I will explore this too. I will explore Resistance and the Coming Inquisition. 

But for now - for you to chew on - what am I doing that is helping me fit my life closer to my paleo biology and how is this working.

Here I am aged 18 - at the peak of my life in terms of health and vitality. I weighed 140 lbs then. Check out what I looked like last year.

My plan is to get back to about 165 lbs. Most important to lose my tummy fat. I am now at 185 lbs so I have lost 20 lbs already. Imagine carrying a back pack with 20 lbs of books around all day. At 165 lbs I will have lost 40 lbs. You try  carrying 40 lbs around all the time - you probably do!

So that is my goal - what am I doing? I am trying to be Human again. Trying to match the life that I am designed to live by my evolution. I am doing my best to mirror the following:

Food and Diet - In our Paleo past - all 2 million years of it - we ate mainly meat, insects, nuts, fish and leaf and root veggies. We have been cooking for at least 2 million years. We did not mainly eat Raw food. Nor did we only eat veggies and plants. Our brain development was powered by meat. (I know that many will be upset to hear this and in later posts I will make the link to the science)

Der Spiegel

I come from Northern European stock. My genes are the most adapted to dairy and grain. But we lose this adaptation by our middle years. If you are of African descent, you have no adaptation to this. Most of you are lactose intolerant. If you are Asian - dairy is out! If you are a Native American or Canadian - you were eating a traditional diet only 100 years ago and you have no tolerance for any modern food - least of all for the very worst modern foods - sugar and high fructose corn syrup.

No one!!!! Is adapted to the Agribusiness Diet. Look at the global obesity and diabetes epidemic that has taken off since the 1980's.

If you are a Native - the answers are in your traditional culture - what an opportunity to go home for you.

Lot's more to say here later - for of course the Food Pyramid is wrong. Wonder why? Also need to help you with "a calorie is not a calorie issue" - we are not a simple machine and different foods get dealt with in different ways. Controlling calories and attempting to burn them off is too simplistic an idea.

Nor is this about sacrifice - if it was no one could do it. 

Am I hungry? Not at all. One of the interesting things about giving up grains is that mow my Leptin works - this is what tells me and you when you are full. Sugar kills this off. As soon as I have had enough, I get told. I am never hungry.

Sleep - Hunter Gatherers lived by the Sun. They sat around the fire at night but got up with the Sun. Dreams are a key part of how they process issues. How much sleep do you get? Most of us are deprived and sleep has all sorts of healing properties - it also enables you to process complex problems. I get at least 8 hours a night and I wake to the sun. My window faces East. 

Work - Of course when you get up in the morning is connected to how you work. If you have a "job" you usually use clock time. If you commute - it is even worse. If you have kids - it's even worse! But our real normal is to work in a tribal setting not in the setting of the "Man". So work is task based and the work part of the day is punctuated with long periods of social or rest time. Daycare is your eldest daughter or sister. Work made up about 25% of the day. It probably does for you too - the rest is in meetings or commuting. Can you do any work at work anyway?

I have been self employed for 15 years and I get up when I want to. My commute is 8 steps. I go to bed when I am tired and get up with the light. In summer that is very early. In winter it is late.

Exercise and Daylight - When have you seen a ripped Hunter Gatherer? When have you seen them exert themselves except for a reason? This is the bit I like! We are designed by our biology to be active. That is to be moving around a lot and to carry loads. The word here is ACTIVE not exercise. Walk - carry wood - carry babies - carry food. Have stairs and use them. Stand a lot.

Be outside a lot. Most of us who live in the North are very deficient in Vitamin D - the best place to get it is outside in the sun. 

Have a Tribe - Then worst thing that could happen to a Paleo person was to be shunned, expelled or to be without her tribe. We are designed  to be part of a small group of people that we would die for. Many today have barely a parent. I have my web tribe that is very small but where the feelings of trust and love are high and I have an active extended family that increasingly looks after each other in very tangible ways. 

The worst thing that can happen to your health is to lose a loved spouse or to have a major  break with a sibling. These kind of social events can kill you.

Live in Small Groups - Most of the infectious diseases of our time come from concentrations of people and animals. We are designed to live in small communities where we "Know" most people. We are intensely social with all sorts of social tools that keep us informed as to what is really going on. When we live in big places we shut all of this down to protect ourselves from the noise. We switch off most of our feedback mechanism and so get "lost' - we tend to disappear into ourselves. This is the root of so much dysfunction and depression.

I live on PEI - total pop 140,000. We all know everyone! The big city is 35,000 this size of Athens of Socrates and London of Elizabeth 1st. 

Mission - A Tribe has a compelling mission that all adults are prepared to die for. The kids must survive and have their time as the leaders of the Tribe. This is no faux corporate mission - this is the reality of all existence and we have largely forgotten it. It can be a larger mission that includes all the kids in your city or state or province. 

At 60 my own kids are important but now so are all kids. I am devoted to doing my best to give them a better chance - for it is me and our generation that has used up so much of the planet just for us and that has given them shit for a future.

Having a mission gives the later years of my life a purpose and with a purpose a reason to stay vital and active.

So my dear readers - this is the thesis.

Over the next few weeks I will delve into every part of this and introduce you to the Scientists and to their work - Any of the points that I have made now that are odd - seem wrong etc I will expand on. 

I am not saying that you have to do anything. I will talk about what I have done and will do. My point is to show you that what I am doing is possible - I have done it or I am doing it.

All I am doing is also rooted in science. I am not trying to sell anything. But if you want to take charge of your health - please pile in.

Oh and PS - Alcohol - Very early in our history - Thank God!