Robert Paterson's Weblog

My personal journey to taking charge of my health - Part II My Body

Here are more of my working notes for part of my new book: You Don't Need Medicine - To Be Healthy.

The central thesis of the book is that our health is directly connected to the environment. That is why you and I can make the changes that we need to be healthy.

This post is a sketch for the chapter in the book that will be about our body. My Notes on the choices that we face for Diet are here. My notes for the ideal Social World will be here. My notes on all the science that supports this thesis are here.

It's all a system. See the connections to the rest as we look today at your body.

The Body and the Natural World - Make the ideal fit

Today, most of us sit for 10 to 15 hours a day, do no heavy physical work and live in an environment where night and day have no meaning. Most of our  lives are spent inside. We think that this is normal. We think that this is progress. 

But our bodies were designed for a very different way of life. 

For millions of years, so long as we were awake, we moved. We did not take exercise, we were active. We carried a baby all day. We carried wood, water, animal carcasses and our possessions. We used our bodies as tools. The sun and the moon were our main sources of light. They, and the seasons, drove when we went to sleep or woke up. We lived outside. We lived in the sunlight of the day. At night, we felt the pull of the moon. We were integrated into the natural world and our bodies were linked into all the signals of that larger world.

We are still that person. All our "wiring" is designed to operate in this kind of environment. If we live like this our bodies do well. If we don't....

Think for a moment how different your life is today from even your grandparents. Think of how little you use your body in the normal course of the day. Think of how unimportant the dark is. Think of how the clock and not the sun rule your day. Think of how different your children's life is. They are inside all the time. They hardly ever move. They know nothing of the natural world. Think how normal this all feels!

It is very hard for us to see how massive these changes have been. We don't see the huge gap that has opened up between what we do and what our bodies need. All we might hear is "Take more exercise". The gym, sport or even a marathon is not the issue.

The gap is not about what we add onto our daily lives. The gap is to be found in our daily lives. 

So let's see what this gap is. When we see it, we can see what to do to close it. We can see what is in our control to be healthy again.

Activity - Don't sit!

I used to sit at work for more than 8 hours a day. I was in the car for 2 hours a day. And, when I got home, I sat all evening and watched TV. 8 hours at the office, 2 hours in the car. 4 hours watching TV. I was a blob.

Every day people exhort us to "Take More Exercise". We understand this to mean "Go to a Gym"; "Train for a Marathon" ; "Play Sport" and "Get a Personal Trainer".  I could never do this. As with diet, I could not do what all the experts told me to do and I bet this may be hard for you too. I did not have the time and I hated mindless exercise. But the real issue is not "Exercise" but "Activity".  Sitting all day is the big mismatch. 

So now I saw that sitting all day was my life, what did I do to change this?

Move when you work

Who 150 years ago sat all day? Who 200 years ago even had a chair? Chairs are something that only Kings sat on. Here is Professor Michael Rose talking about how novel chairs are and why they are bad for us. 

 

So how do we do modern office work without a chair?

This is an answer. This picture is of my standing desk. As you can see I hacked it out of my old desk and a box. I now only sit down at the end of the day and have a drink and read before dinner. And that is when it is not my turn to cook and so keep standing. 

So I work, as most of us do today, in front of a screen. But, because I stand, I move all day. At first this was hard. By 10.30am my legs would ache. But, after 3 months, this became my new normal. It is like taking sugar out of your coffee. At first, you hate the new taste. But after a while, you can never go back. 

This one decision not to sit all day at work is a game changer. 

Choosing a Desk

You can do what I did and hack a desk or just go out and buy one. Here is a link to a review of desks and how to adapt to to them. 

I work at home and for myself. It was easy for me to choose to work this new way. It also cost me nothing. If I had more money I would add a treadmill. The ideal is to walk at 1 1/2 miles per hour all day.

If you have a job, you have to convince your employer. There is good evidence that this works well and that organizations that are getting behind this gain benefits very quickly. If they struggle with this idea, get them to set up a small experiment at work and measure what happens. Like this:

"Take Salo, a financial consulting firm based in Minneapolis. The company has 12 treadmill desks, and encourages walking meetings and a mini-breakaway game — a mixture of pingpong, tennis and a bit of squash.

Throughout the day, employees rotate on and off the available treadmill desks. Craig Dexheimer, Salo's director of operations and administration, loves his. He's lost 25 pounds since he started using it. If employees get distracted while walking, he suggests they stop or slow down the treadmill.

A few years ago, Salo took part in a Mayo Clinic study headed by Levine to see what happened when employees used treadmill desks. The study was small — just 18 participants. For six months, they rotated on and off the desks, walking, on average, about three hours a day. Everyone lost weight. And overall, Dexheimer says, health improved. "Total cholesterol decreased, plasma triglycerides dropped on average 37 percent in total for all 18 participants.

"Remarkable," he says. "We didn't even go to a gym. We just went to work!"

And productivity didn't suffer. In fact, Dexheimer says, during the six months of the study, Salo's revenues were the highest ever. The environment, he says, was simply "more dynamic." (Source: NPR)

This story has it all. Make moving at work the new normal. Activity is not an add on. It must be how we live. 

So, now you don't sit at work, what about the rest of the day?

The Commute

Most people commute. The average American spends 18 1/2 hours a week in their car. They spend 2 months a year in the car! (Source)

2 months a year sitting in the car! Ideally, we all have to reduce the time we spend sitting in the car. And, apart from the downside of sitting in the car for so long, think of all the other things you might do in this 2 months? Think about what this 2 months in the car also costs you? (See You Don't Need a Job)

I solved my commute time challenge by working at home. I work as a writer. My commute is a 20 second walk to the home office. But working at home has its draw backs too. We get lonely. We get interupted. We lose momentum. We are not designed to work alone. Do you have a Co Working site near you? Co Working sites are in many locations now. Here is a directory. There will likely be one closer to you than your office. When I lived on Prince Edward Island, the Queen Street Commons, my co working place, was 10 minutes away by car. It was a welcome break from home. 

But what if you have a job and live far away from work? Can you negotiate a telecommuting deal? Progressive employers are getting behind telecommuting.  It's not for everyone and it is not for every job or employer. But neither is 2 months in the car. Some jobs have to be at the plant too. So in the end, we have to decide what on balance is best for us. Many of us don't have jobs anyway. Most of us will lose our jobs. (See You Don't Need a Job) 

The Job and how that system works is of course the centre of the problem of the health breakdown of modern society. As you will, see throughout this book, the Job adds risk factors to our health. At some point, we all will have to confront this. 

But for now, ask yourself how can you reduce the amount of time you spend sitting in the car commuting?

TV - Get rid of it

The average American watches 76 days of TV a year (153 hours a week Nielson) I cannot stop thinking about the 2 months in the car commuting and 2 months on the sofa watching TV. No wonder we don't have any time.

It's not just the time spent sitting watching TV: which is such a long time anyway. But I think also of how TV drives all sorts of additional poor health factors. TV acts like a sedative. We don't just sit, we slump. We go into a zone. It also isolates us. Each family member has their own TV and schedule. So it affects how we eat and with whom. We tend to eat alone and to make the TV schedule the home schedule. TV also is a major factor in why so many sleep so badly. We stay up too late and we upset our circadian clock by its light.

TV is like junk food. It is a pivot of the culture that is making us ill. And of course Junk food and TV go together don't they? Getting rid of junk food and TV are the two easiest actions we can take for this choice depends on no one else. It is all in our control. Both are hard to do at first but, after only 3 months, you will feel so much better and this good feeling will spur you on to do more. 

My wife and I have been disconnected from the TV for 3 years now. At first, this was hard. TV was so central to our lives. But soon we felt the difference. I don't slump for hours at the end of the day. I am not assaulted by all the ads and jabber. Meal times are social again and they drive the evening schedule. We have time to cook real food. We talk! We read. And we go to bed early. More on that in a minute. Oh and cutting the cord to TV saved us about $90 a month or $1,000 a year. It just about pays my wine bill.

But what about the web? We spend a lot of time there too. The great thing about the web is that it is not passive. We do not just collapse before it. It does not force us to break our attention every 4 minutes. We don't have to be slumped in a lazy boy to use it. I stand to use my computer. It has no schedule. It's not perfect but it is much better than TV. 

Get rid of your TV. I promise that you will not regret this decision. 

Walking is the best exercise

When I hear the words "take more exercise." I think of gyms. I think of good looking, young and thin people in expensive outfits. Then I think of the cost, the time and how old I am and then I get put off. So here is the good news. While going to the gym is good for you, there are simpler and cheaper alternatives to ensure that you are fit.

We have to build activity into our daily lives and not make it an add on.  Walking is best exercise that we can take. And, to make this even easier, 30 minutes a walk is the optimum amount of time. That's not too hard to fit into a day is it?

So here is my "gym".

Here is my Personal Trainer! Having a dog is a wonderful motivator. Rain, snow or sun: every day the dog calls me to walk. Not just once a day but at least 3 times a day. There need to walk like this is an important reason why I choose to have a dog. Dogs are like children. They demand a lot for us. But I think they are worth it and I plan always to have one. 

But you don't need a dog, you only need to make walking your normal. Walking is why people in cities are now much more healthy than rural folks. The difference is walking. City folks walk more.  

Or get a bike. Look around cities like Copenhagen or Amsterdam where biking is the norm. Look at the people. See the difference. It's all about choices. 

I have chosen to live in a small community where I can walk to all the important parts of town. The General Store is 5 minutes away. The bank, post office and restaurants are maybe 8 minutes away. This choice was very deliberate on my part. 

Chose to make your car less important in your life. Once you make this choice, other avenues open up for you. 

We have to be strong

It is important to be strong. As we get older, we lose strength. As we get weaker we can do less and less. It's a vicious cycle. In the end we can do next to nothing to help ourselves live a normal life. So again do we all have to go to the gym to get strong? You can. This is an area where the gym can be a big help and again, you don't have to spend hours there. My Crossfit friends spend very little time at the gym but their time there is very intense.

Intensity is important in strength training.

But I don't go to the gym. I have instead tried to build strength into my daily life. Just as I have tried to build activity into it as well. After all our paleo ancestors did not workout. They just worked. 

Here is a big part of my strength building activity. 

The joke about heating with wood is that it keeps you warm in three ways.  First of all there is the sourcing of the wood. Cutting and stacking. Secondly there is the moving the wood inside and stacking it there for the winter. Lastly there is the moving of the wood every day to the stove. Oh and yes the stove gives off heat too!

You can find your own way to be more active around the home. This is my answer but there are many others. Gardening would be a big help. All that lifting and bending. 

What helps is to find something that has a high utility and that forces you to work with your body. It can be anything but the test is "Is it part of your life?' or "Is it an add on?" 

Can you see the pattern I am drawing?

An active life is a life where all that you need to look after the bio mechanical needs of our body is built into the life that you live every day. It is the same as eating differently. 

Sleep

Just as food is not a pitstop, so sleep is not just a rest. Sleep is a major part of how our body and mind restores itself. But modern life makes it hard to get the sleep we need. 

The most important factor in how you sleep is light. Our circadian sensors are acutely sensitive to light.

It's the same kind of process with Leptin and appetite. If we eat grains and sugars, we block the Leptin channel that tell us that we are full. Our light sensors tell us to get sleepy is the light goes away. If we stimulate them with light well into the night, they get confused. We lose our internal clock.

So how best to get our clock running properly again?

Here is what works for me. Never have the TV in my bedroom. Even better, don't have a TV as it can keep you up in the light long after you are ready to go to sleep. Read before bed in another room in low light. The bed is for sleep or love.

Keep off social media in the later evening (OK I do cheat here sometimes) NEVER read email late at night.

Go to bed early. I am usually asleep by 9.30pm in the winter. So if I wake up at 3am, as older folks tend to do, I can know I have already had nearly 6 hours sleep and don't fuss.

Have blackout curtains. Many of us live in urban settings with high intensity street lights. If they shine into your bedroom, they will confuse your clock.

Diet plays a role in a good night's sleep too. I used to suffer from heartburn and apnea. My dad died of apnea. Taking grains and most carbs out of the diet has ended this. I regret that I find drinking less is a huge help too. 

You don't have to have all your sleep in one go either. We are not designed to sleep for 8 hours straight. We are designed to sleep in batches. A good nap is also very restorative.

The job plays a large role in our not sleeping well too. The job works on clock time and we work by circadian time. Knowing that we have to get up at a fixed time every day puts "Performance Pressure" on our sleep. How I remember waking up and looking at the clock and worry about how I only had 2 hours left. How wrenching the alarm could be. How wonderful it is not to have to get up at a fixed time! I still get up early but now I wake naturally and there is no pressure. Now when I wake in the middle of the night, I can go back and have the kind of dream filled sleep that I had as a teen. It's a joy to go to bed.

Make sleep as important a priority as good food and activity. It's worth it I promise as you will find out as you sleep better.

The Sun and Vitamin D

The sun has become our enemy. When we go outside, we are told to lather on the sunscreen. But the reality is that we are designed to be outside. The sun is how we get most of the hormone that we need to stay well. Many of us live in zones that make it all but impossible on the best of days to get this vital benefit from the sun.

(Source)

The problem is that we are now starved of a key hormone, Vitamin D. 

” Vitamin D is by far the greatest deficiency in the civilized world. Surveys show that at least 70% of all Americans are vitamin D deficient, and up to 85% of African-American women of child-bearing age are deficient. 48% of young girls aged 9 to 11 are deficient. 76% of pregnant mothers are severely vitamin D deficient causing widespread deficiencies in their unborn children. 90% of all hospital patients are deficient, and 99% of nursing home residents are deficient. 65% of Chicago residents are deficient and even doctors living in southern Florida are 42% deficient. It is estimated that at least 1 billion people worldwide are deficient.” Saunders Vitamin D Deficiency (Link pdf)

It is hard enough to get enough D naturally in the North. But now we live indoors, many of us get next to none. 

"Caucasian skin produces approximately 10,000 IU vitamin D in response to 20–30 minutes summer sun exposure. This is over 16 times higher than the US government’s recommendation of 600 IUper day!

This high rate of natural production of vitamin D3 cholecalciferol(pronounced koh·luh·kal·sif·uh·rawl) in the skin is the single most important fact every person should know about vitamin D—a fact that has profound implications for the natural human condition.

Technically not a “vitamin,” vitamin D is in a class by itself. Its metabolic product, calcitriol, is actually a secosteroid hormone that is the key that unlocks binding sites on the human genome. The human genome contains more than 2,700 binding sites for calcitriol; those binding sites are near genes involved in virtually every known major disease of humans.

Current research has implicated vitamin D deficiency as a major factor in the pathology of at least 17 varieties of cancer as well as heart disease, stroke, hypertension, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, depression, chronic pain, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, muscle weakness, muscle wasting, birth defects, periodontal disease, and more.

Vitamin D’s influence on key biological functions vital to one’s health and well-being mandates that vitamin D no longer be ignored by the health care industry nor by individuals striving to achieve and maintain a greater state of health.

If well adults and adolescents regularly avoid sunlight exposure, research indicates a necessity to supplement with at least 5,000 units (IU) of vitamin D daily. To obtain this amount from milk one would need to consume 50 glasses. With a multivitamin more than 10 tablets would be necessary. Neither is advisable." (link)

I am not advocating sun bathing. Just as I am not saying we have to be at the gym all day. I am saying that we need to build the sdun back into how we live our lives. This means being outside a lot more and wearing less clothing and NOT putting on tons of sunscreen.

Back to walking the dog. Playing with the grand kids. Wood cutting and stacking. Gardening. Biking. You choose: but get outside as a matter of routine in the summer and take Vitamin D pills in the winter. How much to take? I take 8,000 units a day. This is the equivalent of 20 minutes outside in summer. 

Summary

I find that bringing how I live every day back to how I use my body is the best way to look after it.

I can design how I live today to meet the needs of how evolution has shaped my body. I can also do that with how I eat. But can I also live socially as I was designed to live? Can I bring the tribal life and all that comes with that back into my reality too?

I can and have done that.

 

Related articles

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

My personal journey to taking charge of my health - Part 1 Food

Can you believe medical research? Why you should be careful. What is to come!

Sitting - The biggest health risk we have - Easiest to change

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

Why Modern Medicine is a Fail for Chronic Illness - And What will replace it

Why has modern medicine failed to stop the chronic illness epidemic? My quick answer is this. Modern Medicine has been captured by a simple linear idea of how the world works. It can only deal with local and simple problems. It cannot comprehend complex problems. It keeps trying to use simple tools, a pill based on one pathway that are based in the simple idea of cause and effect.

This all came from early success. 

Joseph Lister created a breakthrough in medicine in the 1860's when he discovered that you could prevent infection in major operations by washing your hands and spraying the site with carbolic acid. Of course it took more than 10 years to be accepted but by the 1890's surgery did not mean a high chance of dying from infection.

Lister solved a problem that was simple and local. Keep the wound clean. Keep all that touch the wound clean. Keep the room where you treat the wound clean. Jenner did the same with small pox. Vaccinate with a close relative and you create immunity. 

That is progress. But it is also the problem. Ever since then medicine wants the simple answer. It's early success in treating the simple has trained it to see only local cause and effect. 

This is why it has failed and can only fail in treating chronic illness. For Chronic Illness is a complex problem brought on by interactions between your ancestry, the food you eat, what you do with your body, how much time you spend outdoors, your social status and how much sleep you have. There is no local cause. There is no one cause. There is only many variables interacting over long periods of time that result in emergence of disease that in turn result in the emergence of more disease.

You become obese, then you might develop Type 2 Diabetes, then heart disease, then eye problems and so on. Or you might get depressed and then get an auto immune disease such as IBS or worse. 

Modern medicine treats each new disease as a stand alone. Much of the treatment drives further disease.

Our failure to see the difference between what can be seen as simple and local and what is complex is what is at the root of our failure.  Now chronic illness is an epidemic. Every decade in the 20th century it has got worse. Since 1980, the epidemic has accelerated exponentially. Billions of dollars has been spent in "research". The entire medical world has been looking for answers. And they have failed. Why?

I had a flash this weekend as I was doing a final edit for the first book of my series You Don't need a ..." Modern Medicine, like all of our industrial institutions, has a machine design. All are based in a core process that ends in the sale of a product or a procedure.

Modern medicine is a linear world where the pay off is in the sale of a drug, a test, or a procedure such as an operation or a Botox shot. No one gets paid to work with complexity. So no one does. 

All of Modern Medicine is focused on finding direct cause and effect pathways that end in a transaction that is based also on a mass market model. So in this world, depression can be "cured" by one pill. 

If I am correct - what do you think pile in please - then we cannot expect any results from medicine. Medicine is captured by the fallacy that all linear institutions share of the world being linear and so reducing all interaction to a single payoff - a classroom with a teacher - a newspaper with a journalist - a pill with a doctor.

All the money you raise to go to this research is wasted. All the money we spend in this model is wasted. Investing more in the study of epicycles is not going to make the Ptolemaic system work any better.

So what to do?

Dave Snowden's Cynefin model says it all for me. Modern Medicine lives in the right hand quadrant but our chronic illness lives in the left hand side. 

I don't think that the profession of medicine will welcome this insight. After all they all make their money and gain their status by their investment in the fallacy.

But we can help ourselves. For the systemic causes of chronic illness are all rooted in our lifestyle and in our ancestry. While complex they have only 4 quadrants.

1. Diet - Eat real food - give up all processed food - give up all grains and sugars - don't eat any food that has a chemical in it that you cannot read aloud
2. Be Active - Don't sit for more than 3 hours a day - Do physical work - be outside for at least an hour a day - get a dog - garden - get a standing desk
3. Get a Tribe - You will thrive when you have a real place and status in a  social group - we are primates - we have to groom and be groomed
4. Sleep More - Sleep is not just a mechanical time out - it is a vital part of keeping us renewed and well - we need 8 hours a day - have a dark room - light is the enemy - don't watch TV in bed - don't read in bed - don't get stimulated before bed

There is then one variable about how all of this interacts and that is our ancestry. The closer you are to beig a Hunter Gatherer, the worse the outcomes of breaching the evolutionary norms for these quadrants. That is why First Nations People, Polynesians and Scots and Irish do do badly in the chronic illness spectrum. 

There are no doctors in this picture are there? There will be a new research world though. A Big Data Crowd Sourced world. Where millions of us will share data about who we are - the ancestry variable and what we are doing and then we will start to see the emergent truth of what works best for you and for me. 

Emergence is the new research frontier. But the powers that be will hate that because there is no transactional payoff. There will be no pill. There will be no procedure. There will be only the knowledge that what you and I are eating or doing is working or not for us as individuals. 

We will have to find a new way of setting up this kind of research. 

Trillions of dollars of cost will go away. There will be a true revolution in health and in human society. 

Much more later this fall when I will release "You Don't Need a Doctor" I am still on track to release "You Don't Need a Job" and "You Don't need a Banker" at the end of June.

Sleep - Stop Worrying about it - Reassurance here

Lots of people today sleep very badly. I sleep a lot better and more now but I do always wake up at about 2am and fuss for about an hour. I read this today - that tells me that this is quite normal. How about you?

Our anxiety about sleep can stop us from sleeping well - also naps are good and normal!

"The data suggests that if you go back 100 years, people were sleeping an average of nine hours a night," Dr. Naiman says. "People also had a very different relationship with sleep at that time. Sleep patterns were very different. It was routine that people woke up in the middle of the night for about an hour or two. It was called night watch. Everybody did it. People also slept during the day.

Think of the Yin and Yang; the white wave representing in this case waking; the dark Yin wave representing night and sleep. There is a dark Yin sphere within the white wave. This is a place of rest in the middle of waking consciousness and natural rhythms. In the middle of the dark Yin wave, there is a place of Yang, a white sphere suggesting that there is a place where awareness, a kind of waking, awareness in the middle of the night.

When we lose sight of that, we overreact to two things. We tend to overreact to being sleepy during the day, and we tend to overreact to being awake at night. And overreactions cause anxiety."

To Nap or Not to Nap…

According to Dr. Naiman, we're actually biologically programmed to nap during the daytime, typically in the middle of the afternoon. Some European countries still adhere to the daily siesta and close shop for a couple of hours in the middle of the day when the heat is also at its most pressing. Most employers in Western countries, however, do not accommodate daily snoozing, so when the natural tendency to get drowsy sets in, you may try to alleviate it with coffee, or simply fight the urge to take a nap.

The problem is, you're now training your body to resist the urge to sleep, which can then lead to being unable to easily fall asleep at night.

"Also, in the middle of the night, when we falsely assume that any kind of awareness is pathological inside, people get up and go, "Oh crap, its insomnia." I've asked hundreds and hundreds of people over the years… "What's the first thing that comes to your mind when you wake up in the middle of the night?" The most common answer I've gotten over the years is, "Oh, shit." People wake up and they curse their wakefulness."

However, as Dr. Naiman explains, occasional waking in the middle of the night, perhaps as many as five times, is actually completely normal. You may pull up the covers or fluff your pillow, then go back to sleep.

"[But] when we learn this automatic judgmental reaction to wakefulness; as soon as there is a spark of it and we judge it, we spin out," he says.

Another common reaction is to look at the clock.

"Patients have actually said to me, "Gosh, I wake up, I get exactly 2:20 every morning." …It's the first thing people—they want to anchor in waking consciousness. They want a sense of control over this ephemeral night consciousness. This addiction to numbers is the problem.

There are nuances with sleep just as there are with waking. There are so many different ways of being awake, different kinds of experiences. Light sleep is fine. Being half awake and half asleep is fine. In fact, I really believe that in any moment in time during the day and at night, it's a mixed percentage. Right now, you and I are talking; we're probably 98 percent awake. I'm just making up a number. There is a restful part of us. We might say we're 2 percent asleep. Closer to bed time it might be 50/50.

What we call being sleepy is being 'part of awake, part asleep.' In the middle of the night when we get up to use the bathroom, we might be 95 percent asleep still and 5 percent awake just to find our way there. We need to allow a mix of these different forms of consciousness."

Sleep - Are you a Zombie or a Human?

Most Americans as you can see sleep less than 8 hours a night - many a lot less. How about you?

Are you OK if you do sleep less than 8 hours a night? The quick answer is no you are not. Here is the research:-

Every two hours during the day, the researchers tested the subjects’ ability to sustain attention with what’s known as the psychomotor vigilance task, or P.V.T., considered a gold standard of sleepiness measures. During the P.V.T., the men and women sat in front of computer screens for 10-minute periods, pressing the space bar as soon as they saw a flash of numbers at random intervals. Even a half-second response delay suggests a lapse into sleepiness, known as a microsleep.

The P.V.T. is tedious but simple if you’ve been sleeping well. It measures the sustained attention that is vital for pilots, truck drivers, astronauts. Attention is also key for focusing during long meetings; for reading a paragraph just once, instead of five times; for driving a car. It takes the equivalent of only a two-second lapse for a driver to veer into oncoming traffic.

Not surprisingly, those who had eight hours of sleep hardly had any attention lapses and no cognitive declines over the 14 days of the study. What was interesting was that those in the four- and six-hour groups had P.V.T. results that declined steadily with almost each passing day. Though the four-hour subjects performed far worse, the six-hour group also consistently fell off-task. By the sixth day, 25 percent of the six-hour group was falling asleep at the computer. And at the end of the study, they were lapsing fives times as much as they did the first day.

The six-hour subjects fared no better — steadily declining over the two weeks — on a test of working memory in which they had to remember numbers and symbols and substitute one for the other. The same was true for an addition-subtraction task that measures speed and accuracy. All told, by the end of two weeks, the six-hour sleepers were as impaired as those who, in another Dinges study, had been sleep-deprived for 24 hours straight — the cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk.

So what can you do? Well first of all - know that you have a problem. Secondly here are some tips for a better night's sleep. 

In May I will be launching my project on how we can all take back control of our health. Sleep is of course a major part of this. For sleep is more than rest. It heals us and also is an active part of our cognitive and learning process. How often have you had a problem that you could not solve and yet woke up one morning with it solved?

Sleep is part of the 3 part continuum of of ideal settings for a healthy life.

1. Diet - eat what we are evolved to eat
2. Social - live in social settings and have the kinds of relationships that we are evolved to do best in
3. Natural Environment - live as we are designed to be - this includes align with our circadian nature (this is where the right kind of sleep is key) and also be Active (exercise is not enoughy - we have to design our lives to moce around a lot - why I have a standing desk now)