Robert Paterson's Weblog

Sap or Sapiens - #paleo Part 8 - Sugar: My New Year Challenge for you

Well I got through Christmas with only a few falls off the wagon. A few mince pies. Gravy and stuffing. 3 slices of fruit cake. An Egg McMuffin on the road. But for the most part I stuck to my guns.

I am eating a diet that matches my evolutionary biology.

Results in 6 weeks:

• My belly fat is all but gone. My waist is now a 32 versus a large 36. This in 6 weeks. Belly fat is the single most important indicator of trouble for men.  Belly Fat is more important than weight itself. For years I have been told that to get rid of this, I would have to exercise a lot. Many say that you have to starve yourself and eat less. I have not done this. All I have done is to walk the dogs! I have eaten about the same total amount. This band of hard fat has melted away. Why has this happened? The answer later in this post.

• I can bend down again! More important - I feel great and have got a lot of energy back. Why has this happened? Why if I am not eating sugar, carbs and dairy do I have all this energy that I did not have before? The answer later.

• I am never hungry. Never. How can I lose this weight and not starve myself? After all, are we not meant to eat less and take more exercise? I am eating the same and taking only moderate amounts of exercise. Why? Answers later.

So here is the "Heresy" that is at the core of what I have been talking about in this series on a return to our Paleo way of life. 

Eating Fat does not make you fat.

Eating less does not always make you thin or healthy.

Taking lots of exercise on its own does not make you thin or healthy.

For I am eating a lot of fat. I am eating a lot of food. I am taking only moderate exercise.

But I am NOT eating any sugar, any grains and any dairy. I am not eating any processed food at all. I am eating what I have been designed to eat. 

But then I am disobeying the Food Guide! Ask who designed this!

I eat no beans at all. That includes peanuts which are a form of bean. I do eat tree nuts such as walnuts. I drink no juice but eat a lot of fruit. 

Most of this chart is not what I eat. And it is not what you are evolved to eat. 

What makes you the "right weight" and the "right healthy" is to mimic the diet and lifestyle of our evolutionary heritage. The link will take you back to my first post on this that lays this out.

What makes you fat and unhealthy is eating foods that are not part of this heritage. Public enemy #1 on this list is sugar. An entirely new food for us.

As a population, we have been eating sugar for only 200 years. 

So what is so wrong with sugar anyway?

Source: Taubes
Sugar is also addictive. That it is why it is also so hard to give up. The good news is that - as with cigarettes, if you can stay off for a year, it gets easier and easier to stay off. 

Heresy #2 That getting fat is a mechanistic process where more calories in than we use = fat gain. In reality a calorie is not a calorie. We process different food differently. Sugars tend to go to fat and the more fat we have the more energy is diverted to the fat and the less is available for activity. Why when you are fat, you feel lethargic.

If the "Fat is bad idea" is correct - ask why we are all getting so fat? For we have been eating less fat.

Source: Lustig

Ever since the "Fat makes you fat" idea gained dominance, we have have been reducing our consumption of fat but at the same time our weight have been going up. Why?

But what have we replaced it with? Why are we getting fat? What are we told to eat instead? More grains. What is in that low fat yoghurt that makes it feel "fatty"? Cornstarch.

We have replaced animal fats with vegetable oils. We have replaced butter with margarine.

But what is the result? We are getting fat.

We are getting Type 2 diabetes.

The obesity epidemic began in the late 1970's. It is accelerating today. So is diabetes. Related to all of this is heart disease, cancer, strokes and dementia, arthritis. 

We think that it is normal to get these diseases. But they do not exist and never have in populations that do not eat a modern western diet.

These diseases are only normal the same way that typhus was normal in big cities before we understood the link between poor sanitation and the disease.

Once we could see the link, we could do the right thing and look at the result.

One day, maybe, in the future our great grandchildren may have a slide like this - showing the result of us awakening to the link between the modern western diet and our own modern diseases. 

Why do this? I am doing this to get healthy and most important for me as a 60 year old man - to stay fit and active well into my old age. 

I don't want to be the average PEI man who is helpless by 65!!!! I want to live out my life fit and independent and then drop dead - as I and you are designed to do.

I can't make the detailed case in a long post like this. But I do offer you this New Year Challenge - Give up these food for the month of January and then think about how you feel and look as a result.

• All processed foods
• Sugar
• ALL grains - ALL!!!!
• All beans and legumes - includes peanuts
• All dairy
• Juice

PS I can treat myself with Dark Chocolate and I do drink wine.

I bet that you will notice a big difference. Then you may wish to see the science. You may wish to see it now - if so - here are the heavy weights plus a couple of easier ways into the idea of matching your life to your evolutionary biology.

• The calorie is not a simple calorie - Gary Taubes has reviewed the entire literature and here is a link to a lecture of his that will give you I think the best context. His big book is called Good Calories Bad Calories. His new book which is more for the general reader is called Why we get Fat. 
• Sugar - the arch villain in the story - there is no better source than Dr Robert Lustig - here is his tour de force lecture. 
• Your health and a paleo lifestyle - Dr Staffan Lindeberg is the authority - he has reviewed all the literature on all foods. His book - Food and Western Disease - is a landmark but is not cheap. Here is his website that will give you a taste. 
• If all of this is too much - and my role here is to show you where to find good material that I have read for you - Robb Wolf has it all summed up in The Paleo Revolution 
• One of the most fascinating books out there is called Catching Fire by Richard Wrangham - he tells the evolutionary story of how fire made us human. Cooking enabled us to eat a lot more meat - you try chewing raw steak - fire made us human.

 In closing here is a very short and funny video that sums all of this up in just over 5 minutes.

 

Happy New Year and good luck in trying this.

 

 

Travel Chaos - Twitter - Lessons for us all

Millions of travellers have been stuck this holiday season. The question is what can you as a traveler and what can you as a supplier do about this kind of event.?

The lesson taken from this Christmas is surely larger than travel but also applies to any bad event – such as Skype’s system failure. You can imagine what your equivalent might be in your organization.

I can see that part of the answer is to be found in social media. Here is how the NYT ran their version of the story today:

While the airlines’ reservation lines required hours of waiting — if people could get through at all — savvy travelers were able to book new reservations, get flight information and track lost luggage. And they could complain, too.

Since Monday, nine Delta Air Linesagents with special Twitter training have been rotating shifts to help travelers wired enough to know how to “dm,” or send a direct message. Many other airlines are doing the same as a way to help travelers cut through the confusion of a storm that has grounded thousands of flights this week.

But not all travelers, of course. People who could not send a Twitter message if their life depended on it found themselves with that familiar feeling that often comes with air travel — being left out of yet another inside track to get the best information.

For those in the digital fast lane, however, the online help was a godsend.

Danielle Heming spent five hours Wednesday waiting for a flight from Fort Myers, Fla., back home to New York. Finally, it was canceled.

Facing overwhelmed JetBlue ticketing agents, busy signals on the phone and the possibility that she might not get a seat until New Year’s Day, she remembered that a friend had rebooked her flight almost immediately by sending a Twitter message to the airline.

She got out her iPhone, did a few searches and sent a few messages. Within an hour, she had a seat on another airline and a refund from JetBlue.

“It was a much, much better way to deal with this situation,” said Ms. Heming, 30, a student at New York University. “It was just the perfect example of this crazy, fast-forward techno world.”

Although airlines reported a doubling or tripling of Twitter traffic during the latest storm, the number of travelers who use Twitter is still small. Only about 8 percent of people who go online use Twitter, said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project, a nonprofit organization that studies the social impact of the Internet.

“This is still the domain of elite activist customers,” Mr. Rainie said.

Of course, an agent with a Twitter account cannot magically make a seat appear. More often than not, the agent’s role is to listen to people complain.

I recently posted about Trust and how important it is. Being silent is THE worst position. Even when you cannot offer a fix, offering an ear and the truth helps. Skype kept a running commentary about their problem and now that they have fixed it have shared the post mortem on their blog. Please look at the comments on the Skype Blog - a lesson for us all!

I had been critical of Air Canada until this Christmas - but even they have upped their efforts on Twitter to work with clients and to offer sympathy when they could not help.

They still do promotion as you can see but look at the other tweets – Air Canada are starting to get how this can help their Trust levels.

Now Twitter is still an elite tool for the elite. But all new things start this way. I am thinking of all those who were in the information dark looking over their shoulder at those who were in contact and can see that it will not take long for Twitter and Social media to become the normal for how we find our way around problems. Here is a brief summary of my own travel hell. Where I reach out on Twitter and my friends help me.

This illustrates for me the next phase of using social media to navigate crisis. Right now an airline or your organization can use social media to communicate from your own perspective. But what if you could harness, as I did, the collective wisdom of the network?

In my case I could not be sure of what the roads were like in the last 4 hours of a 13 hour trip. I asked my pals for their opinion and in minutes got enough “TRUSTED” advice to make the call to stop. My pals may have saved my life. So what if an airline could use its followers to help each other look at local weather – hotel rooms – alternative routes etc – even put each other up? What would it take to have a real community of customers? For if you did – they could do this.

Again this demands a new relationship with your customer. A customer is no longer a person out there but a node in here.  If you can build up trust with an inner group, you can partner with this group in all sorts of ways.

• Marketing
• Crisis Management
• Problem Solving

Let’s play with this in later posts.

 

You’ve Got to Have (150) Friends - Robin Dunbar

The critical component in social networking is the removal of time as a constraint. In the real world, according to research by myself and others, we devote 40 percent of our limited social time each week to the five most important people we know, who represent just 3 percent of our social world and a trivially small proportion of all the people alive today. Since the time invested in a relationship determines its quality, having more than five best friends is impossible when we interact face to face, one person at a time.

Instant messaging and social networking claim to solve that problem by allowing us to talk to as many people as we like, all at the same time. Like the proverbial lighthouse blinking on the horizon, our messages fan out into the dark night to every passing ship within reach of an Internet connection. We can broadcast, literally, to the world.

I use the word “broadcast” because, despite Facebook’s promise, that is the fundamental flaw in the logic of the social-networking revolution. The developers at Facebook overlooked one of the crucial components in the complicated business of how we create relationships: our minds.

Put simply, our minds are not designed to allow us to have more than a very limited number of people in our social world. The emotional and psychological investments that a close relationship requires are considerable, and the emotional capital we have available is limited.

Indeed, no matter what Facebook allows us to do, I have found that most of us can maintain only around 150 meaningful relationships, online and off — what has become known as Dunbar’s number. Yes, you can “friend” 500, 1,000, even 5,000 people with your Facebook page, but all save the core 150 are mere voyeurs looking into your daily life — a fact incorporated into the new social networking site Path, which limits the number of friends you can have to 50.

What’s more, contrary to all the hype and hope, the people in our electronic social worlds are, for most of us, the same people in our offline social worlds. In fact, the average number of friends on Facebook is 120 to 130, just short enough of Dunbar’s number to allow room for grandparents and babies, people too old or too young to have acquired the digital habit.

This isn’t to say that Facebook and its imitators aren’t performing an important, even revolutionary, task — namely, to keep us in touch with our existing friends.

Until relatively recently, almost everyone on earth lived in small, rural, densely interconnected communities, where our 150 friends all knew one another, and everyone’s 150 friends list was everyone else’s.

But the social and economic mobility of the past century has worn away at that interconnectedness. As we move around the country and across continents, we collect disparate pockets of friends, so that our list of 150 consists of a half-dozen subsets of people who barely know of one another’s existence, let alone interact.

Our ancestors knew the same people their entire lives; as we move around, though, we can lose touch with even our closest friends. Emotional closeness declines by around 15 percent a year in the absence of face-to-face contact, so that in five years someone can go from being an intimate acquaintance to the most distant outer layer of your 150 friends.

Facebook and other social networking sites allow us to keep up with friendships that would otherwise rapidly wither away. And they do something else that’s probably more important, if much less obvious: they allow us to reintegrate our networks so that, rather than having several disconnected subsets of friends, we can rebuild, albeit virtually, the kind of old rural communities where everyone knew everyone else. Welcome to the electronic village.

Robin Dunbar is a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Oxford and the author of “How Many Friends Does One Person Need? Dunbar’s Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks.”

via nytimes.com

I keep banging this drum - I do this because the "big idea" that most support is the "More Friends the better" - whereas in reality the issue is the quality of your relationship with a few and theirs with a few.

You can still reach a lot of people - if this is your goal - but via a network of real friends and real trust. Here is how a circle of 4 real friends will work:

With 8 friends who have just 4 friends - 8 is the core of intimacy - I can reach 4,000 people via a trusted route. With 34 I can reach over a million. At the extreme Limit of 144 - as described by Robin Dunbar - I can reach over 400 million!

The implications of this are significant. It means that the task of having influence is not one that is reliant on a big financial budget but on Trust.

2 – 16

3 – 82

5 – 625

8 – 4,096

13 – 28,561

34 – 1,336,336

55 – 9,150, 625

89 – 62, 742,241

144 – 429, 981, 696

Small groups of people that have legitimately earned the trust of others will have the most social power. Those who simply blast out in the old way will not.

A good example of this revolution is Boingo. Here is a link to a piece I write about who Boing uses ONE person at HQ that has developed a group of "Super Fans" as a Trusted Tribe. http://www.fastforwardblog.com/2010/09/27/boingo-part-2-using-the-power-of-th...

If you are interested in how this works - think of what you are doing - look at what Boingo is doing and at the social reality of Trust being the medium.

PS I do not work for Boingo in any way but I am a "super fan" myself

Playdo

Keeping The Promise: Lt. Dan Choi and Senator Reid

via youtube.com

Our entry for Cuteness of the year - Beat this if you can!

 

Health - Pets are really good for us

Nice piece with 6 reasons you should have a pet

Amplify’d from www.care2.com

2. Pets Reduce Stress This one is kind of a no-brainer: a survey by Mindlab International found that 55 percent of people were more relaxed after spending time with their pets–44 percent were also less worried about specific problems such as job security and finance. Dr David Lewis, a psychologist at Mindlab said that “Interacting with a dog is a profound and effective stress reducer. It increases feelings of contentment and relaxation.”

One quarter of respondents described their dog as their best friend while one in six women said they confided their deepest thoughts only in their pets–and walking the dog was also found to be a more effective means of spending quality time with the family than even mealtimes or holidays. Read more at www.care2.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/io20

via Amplify.com

Food Safety - A Deeper Look at Antibiotics

If you concentrate animals as is the way now and you feed them food they should not eat - you have to give them antibiotics.

The system is an arms race with only collapse at the end. There will be another way even if you don't want to change this for Mother Nature will enforce her laws first.

Amplify’d from www.wired.com

This afternoon, the Food and Drug Administration posted without fanfare a report that many people have been waiting a long time for: Its first-ever estimate of the amount of antibiotics sold for use in food animals in the United States.

 

And the number is: almost 29 million pounds in 2009.

 

The reason why antibiotic use on farms is a concern, of course, is because such use stimulates the emergence of drug-resistant organisms that move off the farm in animals, in groundwater, in dust, on the wind and in the systems and on the clothes of those who work there, and makes new resistance factors available to be swapped among bacteria. (For much more about that, see these three posts and this long archive at my former blog.)

 

Update 2: A day after the release of this report, Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY), author of PAMTA and a public-health microbiologist, commented on the data — and also said she’ll be reintroducing the legislation again in the next Congress in January.

 

This report illustrates the overuse of antibiotics in food animal production and makes a strong case for some common-sense limits on antibiotic use. We are putting millions of pounds of antibiotics into the food supply unnecessarily every year. This cannot continue and it’s my hope that these new data from the FDA will encourage even more members of Congress to join me next year when I reintroduce this legislation.  Moreover, the FDA must move fast to issue strong regulations on antibiotic usage in agriculture. Read more at www.wired.com

 

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

via Amplify.com

Food related illness in the US - Reductionism at its worst

Typical - we focus on the obvious - acute illness - and we IGNORE the chronic disease that is where the greater health issue lies - obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancer etc.

Not even the antibiotics issue is raised.

Science has a lot to answer for and why did not the NYT add this missing factor in the article - they could have - it was the first thing that came to my mind - but they too can only see what is in front of their nose.

No wonder we are all so ignorant!

Amplify’d from www.nytimes.com

In a pair of research reports made public on Wednesday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that about 48 million people a year get sick from tainted food, down from the previous, often-cited estimate of 76 million. The number of deaths estimated to come from food poisoning also went down, to about 3,000 a year from 5,000.

 

The revision means that one in six Americans gets sick each year from tainted food, not one in four, as the old study, conducted in 1999, projected.

 

But that does not mean that food poisoning is declining or that farms and factories are producing safer food. Instead, officials said, the government’s researchers are just getting better at calculating how much foodborne illness is out there. Read more at www.nytimes.com

 

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/iih5

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Sap or Sapiens - #Paleo Part 7 - Booze Interlude - Brewed before Bread

The cat is stoned.

The great news for me is that while we have to take into account that alcohol is a poison and so needs to taken in moderation - many animals and humans have been booze hounds for a really long time.

Here is quite a serious article by Der Spiegel on our history of booze and drugs - and here is a much more amusing slant

I am drinking less but better.