Robert Paterson's Weblog

Practical steps to get and to stay healthy - You can live like your ancestors

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.

Best wishes

Rob

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An introduction to the Science for taking charge of your own health

 

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.

Aging - Professor Michael Rose

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.

Diet - Profesor Staffen Lindeberg

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.

Diet - Dr Natasha Campbell McBride

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. 

Diet Dr Mary Vernon

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. 

Diet Gary Taubes

If you are still hanging onto the fat makes you fat and that grains are good for you, then Gary Taubes has done all the research to demolish this. 

Activity - Dr James Levine

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. 

Sleep - More than a rest - Dr Charles Czeisler

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. 

Sunlight or Vitamin D - The Vitamin D Council

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.

Our Social Environment - Dr Sir Michael Marmot

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. 

Our Social Environment - Professor Robert Sapolsky

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 alive Dr Gabor Mate. 

Social Environment Early Childhood - Dr J Doug Willms

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

Social Environment - PTSD - DR Jonathan Shay

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. 

Changing Deep Beliefs - Alan Deutschman

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.

Changing Deep Beliefs - Neuroplasticity - Dr Norman Doidge

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

Queen St Commons - Leaving my "Meme Baby" behind

One of the new age mantra's is "Letting Go". I have been letting go of our lovely place here on PEI. Letting go of much of our stuff. It's hard. But next week I let go of one of my Meme Babies, and this is hard.

The Queen Street Commons is one of the earliest co working sites in the world. Dan James, Cynthia King and I founded it in a moment of intuitive madness back in 2005. I have been its chair for 3 years and next week I give up my role as chair and become the most junior of members - a non resident Network Member. 

But I leave it as a parent does when they have a grand child. There is a special love for a child that now has taken up the full role of being an adult and that gives new life to others. I know this feeling well as both my real kids have their own children now. So I know that how I feel about the QSC as it moves on playing such a role in the life of PEI.

What a wonderful Tribe it has become. What a proud grandpa I am. How fortunate!

 

De Urbanization - Population Strategy for PEI?

My niece sold her 700 square foot 2 bed condo in downtown Toronto for about $350,000. Young people are on the high wire in terms of their costs in a big city. 

Rather than trying to employ existing Islanders here on PEI in call centres - could we not make it easy for young families to come here AND still work in the big city?

It's a huge trend:- (link) It just needs a few smart folks to work on how best to do this.

A study by researchers at the University of Kansas shows that de-urbanization is gaining momentum. An analysis of data provided by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) showed that people are moving from big cities of more than 4 million people to smaller cities with populations of 1 or 2 million. The study, which was published in 2009, looked at data collected during the last decade.

One of the bonuses of living in a city used to be proximity to shops and services. However, now that consumers can buy almost everything they need online and have it delivered to their doors, do they still need to congregate in cities? As improvements in infrastructure make rural living more convenient, people are likely to decide that the benefits of living in the country - clean air, peace and quiet, and wide open spaces - outweigh the attraction of the bright city lights.

Thanks to technology, it will soon be possible to earn a living from anywhere in the world, so long as there is access to the Internet. With information travelling at the speed of light, physical distances shrink into insignificance. As virtual workspaces develop further, a colleague on the opposite side of the country will feel no more distant than the worker in the next cubicle. Combined with the many attractions of rural environments, these technological breakthroughs could soon lead to a mass exodus of people from the world's major cities. De-urbanization looks set to be an important demographic trend in the 21st century.

Why I am Backing Inspired Farmers Urban Farming Project #localfood #resiliency

I am backing the Inspired Farmers Project - they will start the first demo for Urban Farming in Charlottetown next week. 

The project is lead by Karen Murchison of the Queen St Commons and her partners at the Murphy Community Centre (Where most of the "Farm" will be) The City of Charlottetown, Cycle PEI, Holland College and the Food bank and Soup Kitchen in Charlottetown

It's a tiny project but has huge potential to make PEI more sustainable. If you want to make a difference that please help. Your help can be a few dollars or a donation of stuff.

You can donate $ here:

Or you can  help with stuff like this:

Here is how I see this project and why I am backing them and why if you care for the future of PEI, you might help too.

It starts often like this - with a community using a barren public space to grow food as a demo. The idea is to inspire us to think differently about the urban landscape. No longer only grass, concrete and isolated trees. When we see this in downtown Charlottetown, we can imagine how different our street could be.

This is not simply a new esthetic either. In World War II 40% of the food eaten was grown by people at home - most in cities. 

At the heart of this is the food and the health crisis. By making urban farming - which uses very small spaces and high intensity - important we all learn how to grow our own food. This Saturday there is a workshop on this. We meet our neigbours in a new way. We are more active and we have better nutrition.

We start to escape the trap of being dependent on Factory Food.  The Food Bank becomes a hub of a network of people who help each other grow food and cook food.  Growing food and making meals return as skills that most of us have lost.

This is big - isn't it? And you only have to make a small step to help. 

We start this weekend! 

PEI now has a Local Crowd Sourcing Platform - Bootstrap #crowdfunding

Do you live on PEI? Do you have a small amount of money to raise? Do you have a community that will support you?

Then Bootstrap can help

One of the lessons of the PEI Indiegogo deals is that most of the support comes from locals and all the money is Canadian. Another is that many financings here will be for smaller amounts of money.

Matt Sullivan has built a local tool to address these issues. 

• It is in Canadian Dollars
• Aimed at PEI and later at any small community like ours
• Designed for modest amounts

Called Bootstrap - you can find out more by going to this address and you can see the first beta deal for the Inspired Farmers here. 

The Vet College opens it walls - Learn about wild life May 22

The Atlantic Vet College is starting to open its walls. The plan is to make more and more of what it does available to the public online. 

We start on May 22 with a livestream of a popular workshop on how best to interact with wildlife. On PEI we all have foxes and coyotes close to us. We all have birds and skunks. How do we coexist best with these neighbours?

As we learn how best to do this - we will expand our online outreach. You can find out more about hoew to get connected by joining the AVC Friewnds and Family Community - it's free and organizes a lot of cool events such as Vet Camp and the ever popular Open House where all kids who love animals have a whirl.

Here is the info:

People and wild animals are increasingly crossing paths, which can result in human-wildlife conflicts. AVC will present a community workshop entitled “Living with Wildlife” on May 22, from 7-9:30 p.m. in Room 287N, The McCain Foundation Learning Commons at AVC.

A team of wildlife experts will provide information and answer questions about the “do’s and don’ts” of dealing with wild animals. The speakers include Dr. Marion Desmarchelier, AVC Zoo, Exotic Animal and Wildlife Service; Dr. Heather Fenton, AVC Wildlife Pathology Resident; Chuck Gallison, PEI Department of Fish and Wildlife; and Jody Kocsis, Technician, AVC Zoo, Exotic Animal and Wildlife Service.

Admission is free, and everyone is welcome. The workshop is part of AVC’s award-winning Community Workshop Series and is sponsored by AVC Friends & Family.

People who are not able to attend the workshop in person are invited to view it live at a link that will be added towww.upei.ca/avc/friendsand family on the evening of May 22.

Day 1 Startup Canada's visit to PEI - The Sleeper must Awaken - #StartupPEI #StartUpCanada

What a day we had yesterday as a group of PEI Entrepreneurs met. What I saw happen was this. As we met and talked, we could feel the power. We could see that we were not alone. We could see that there is a critical mass of people who want to create some thing. People who would not wait for "Them" but take action.

Something started to awaken. The understanding that the future of PEI was in our hands. That we could regain our historic self reliance. 

Over the next 3 weeks I will share many stories from these people and I hope then that you will see what I saw yesterday. The Sleeper Must Awaken - and it will.

 

Kickstarter - Indiegogo - A Guide for Community Finance #Startupcanada

New financing tools like Kickstarter and Indiegogo will transform how we finance very small and personal business. For as we were reminded yesterday in our first day of meeting on PEI with StartUp Canada, getting conventional funding for a very small personal enterprises from banks or government is all but impossible.

Here is a short excerpt from one of my new series of books to be published in June "You Don't Need a Banker" that is written as a guide for all who wish to use Community Based Finance. I hope that it will help you access this much better source. 

If you have a real network. If people really trust you. If you have something real to offer, then you can ask your network to fund you. If you have what it takes, you get this. If you don't, you get this.

This is how it all works.

Patrick Ledwell is a well known comedian on Prince Edward Island in Canada. He needed to find a way of having an income to support him to write a book. You will see from the image above that he raised $4,290 in this financing on Indiegogo. It’s not a lot but it is enough for him. In fact he raised nearly $1,000 more than he asked for.

 

These tools offer you a simple mechanism allowing you to reach out to people with your project and to ask them to contribute.

Most of these deals have something to sell. A new online game, a new watch, pasture meat boxes (a super CSA). The tools track the investors and enable all the logistics to take place. They include a simple to use payments systems for both the principal and the contributors. And of course, they charge a fee. They have raised small amounts such as a few hundred dollars and also large amounts in the millions.

Let’s unpack Patrick’s deal and see how the old rules apply to the new tools. 

The structure of the deal was simple. He presold the book. Most of the money raised was in the $35 range where, as a contributor, you buy the book in advance. He had one big deal, for $800. For this sum he would perform at a party given by you. This was taken by a local business for their Christmas party. 

So how did he get so many to buy an unwritten book and to hire him to perform at a party? For none of this was merely a series of transactions. He was able to do this because he is already well known and liked in his community. He was relying on his position in his network to come to his aid.

This type of financing depends completely on the social capital of the borrower. The more social capital you have the better your access to financial capital.

Patrick knew that he had a deep well of social capital to draw from and he also knew that this network had a hierarchy of its own. Some people were closer to him than others and some had more influence themselves than others. If this inner group came in early they would add momentum and social acceptance to the deal. If they came in early, they would bring their network. So much of Patrick’s efforts focused on this small group. His deal had momentum from the outset.

Most of the support came from his home community of Prince Edward Island, population 140,000. Not much came from outside this network.

I think that this is an important point. Just as some people have better networks, so do some places. This is why big cities are at a disadvantage. I think that there is too much anonymity. Tech deals do well because the Valley is a kind of village where all know each other too.

Your community is not Facebook. Though connecting to your community on Facebook makes life easier in these situations. Your community are people that really do care for you. 

A dense physical network such as we find on PEI helps. We meet each other in the street. I see Patrick several times a week. In such a real community, there is strong social pressure to participate because Indiegogo and Kickstarter are also public. In a small place like PEI, we have to face people in the street or in a store with the consequences of choosing to support or not.

In a small community, the mainstream media can be a lot more help than in a big place. When we launched a project for Raymond Loo, maybe PEI’s best known organic farmer, we made the local TV news. Everyone knew about the deal and talked about it. We raised the required $12,000 in 2 weeks. 

It helps even more if your family is well known too.  Patrick and Raymond have large extended families here that have a strong and positive reputation. This would mean nothing in London or New York but it means a lot here. 

They both use their good name and so their network and the good name of the key players in their network. And, unlike a conventional financing, the positive effects do not stop once the deal has been finalized and the money paid. 

What we are also seeing is that the relationship is further strengthened once a person has contributed like this. Raymond is selling more meat at his stand at the market. Patrick is getting more gigs. People feel that they are part of the future success of the person and want to help them do even better. The community now has a stake.

So we can see that there is no instant success for the unprepared here.

If you have no network. If you have nothing of value. If you live in an anonymous city. You will find that this kind of financing will be easy. Your work then is to build a real network. 

StartUp Canada comes to PEI Next Week - Why you should care

Want a job? Worried that your kids will have to leave PEI to get work? Worried that your kids wont come back to PEI because there is no work for them? Losing your job soon? You are the Premier and want to increase PEI's population to 150,000 and offer more work to do this?

The reality is this. Start Ups are THE engine for jobs and immigration.  Here is the data:

The study reveals that, both on average and for all but seven years between 1977 and 2005, existing firms are net job destroyers, losing 1 million jobs net combined per year. By contrast, in their first year, new firms add an average of 3 million jobs.

“These findings imply that America should be thinking differently about the standard employment policy paradigm,” said Robert E. Litan, vice president of Research and Policy at the Kauffman Foundation. “Policymakers tend to focus on changes in the national or state unemployment rate, or on layoffs by existing companies. But the data from this report suggest that growth would be best boosted by supporting startup firms.”

Because startups that develop organically are almost solely the drivers of job growth, job-creation policies aimed at luring larger, established employers will inevitably fail, said the study’s author, Tim Kane, Kauffman Foundation senior fellow in Research and Policy. Such city and state policies are doomed not only because they are zero-sum, but because they are based in unrealistic employment growth models.

An outcome that I look forward to by the end of this week is that we shift our focus to supporting Start Ups and understand what this means. 

Here is the calendar of events next week in support of StartUp Canada's Visit

Here is the link that will take you to each event.

If you are a micro entrepreneur - I invite you to join an event just for you at the Queen Street Commons on Tuesday May 8 at 6pm - details are here