Yearly Archives: 2011 - Page 5

CrossFit NYC: 20 Tips for Optimal Health & Fitness

Posted by on November 22, 2011 82 comments

I’d like to thank Court Wing, Hari Singh, Josh Newman, and all the folks at CrossFit NYC for a delightful visit to New York on Saturday. Court was a most gracious host. Ninety-three people attended, and many introduced themselves to us; some were familiar commenters from the blog, and it was great to put faces to names. I spoke for 2 hours, and answered questions for another hour. The questions were very interesting, and most of the audience stayed through the question session.

My talk offered 20 tips for optimal health and fitness. I promised Court I’d make the tips available, and several readers asked for them as well. Here they are.

20 Tips for Optimal Health & Fitness

  1. Eat carbs in the range 20% to 30% of energy; higher adds muscle more easily.
  2. Eat protein in the range 300 to 500 calories per day; higher adds muscle more easily.
  3. Listen to and trust your “food reward system” – if you are eating natural foods it will guide you to the best diet.
  4. Eat bone broth and gelatin for a healthy extracellular matrix tissue scaffold.
  5. Get adequate sulfur, which means not only eating sulfur-rich foods like eggs, onions, and garlic, but also obtaining additional sulfur from sources like supplemental MSM or Epsom salt baths. (Sulfur was traditionally obtained from water, but no longer.)
  6. Supplement vitamin C, 500 mg to 1 g per day.
  7. Drink plenty of water.
  8. Eat sufficient salt – at least 3 g/day sodium (1.3 teaspoons salt).
  9. Get sufficient potassium – eat some vegetables!
  10. Eat only “useful macronutrients” in the right proportions; minimize omega-6 and fructose; balance omega-3 and omega-6; keep carbs and protein in the ranges mentioned earlier.
  11. Avoid unnecessary infections:
    • Wash your hands, cook your food, practice safe sex.
    • Live in a low-infection location – ideally, one with cold winters and a dry climate, perhaps some elevation, but plenty of sunshine; in the US, the Rocky Mountain states have the lowest rates of infection.
    • Get plenty of sunshine on bare skin, and optimize vitamin D!
  12. Know your pathogens; utilize diagnostic tests, like the Metametrix stool profile, to see which pathogens have infected you.
  13. Use antimicrobial medicines when appropriate. These can make a huge difference in health and athleticism.
  14. Don’t eat toxic or immunogenic foods, such as wheat, soy, or peanuts.
  15. Protect the gut. The most important step is eating fermented vegetables and fermented dairy, plus a “Goldilocks” amount of fiber. Also, modulate the gut flora in a positive way with foods like traditional herbs and spices, antimicrobial oils, acids including vinegar and lemon juice, green leafy vegetables, and berries.
  16. Nourish your toxin removal systems. Nutrients like glutathione are essential for liver detoxification; production of bile with cholesterol, vitamin C, taurine, and glycine is also helpful. Eating sufficient fiber can help bind and excrete toxins.
  17. Promote healthy circadian rhythms:
    • Sleep in total darkness and don’t use an alarm.
    • Eat in daylight hours.
    • Expose yourself to sunlight in the morning and at mid-day. Allow ultraviolet to reach your retina; do not wear glasses or contact lenses.
    • Avoid blue light at night; install f.lux on your computer and consider adjusting the colors on your television.
    • Make an effort to talk, socialize, and view faces during the day. If your work involves staring at a computer all day, put a digital photo frame on your desk and install something on your computer that shows faces. Take regular breaks to chat with colleagues, or if that is not possible then look at videos like this one (hat tip to Kris in the comments – thanks Kris!):

  18. Engage in intermittent fasting. A good method is to restrict eating to an 8-hour window each day. This will promote immunity and longevity.
  19. Exercise with variable intensity: routine low-level activity, such as walking or working at a standing desk; regular playful and mobilizing activity, such as sports, yoga, or tai chi; and occasional intense exercise such as resistance exercise or sprinting.
  20. Be sociable, be happy, and don’t be stressed! “Do not be anxious about tomorrow. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.”

Thank you, CrossFit NYC, and thank you also to the following writers whose material appeared in the talk (with acknowledgement): J. Stanton, Russ Farris, Seth Roberts, and Pål Jåbekk.

Welcome Dr Mercola Readers!

Posted by on November 18, 2011 22 comments

Thank you, Dr Mercola, for introducing your readers to our diet.

Perfect Health Diet is a refined Paleo diet: Paleo, meaning it is the sort of diet that would have been eaten by hunter-gatherers in the Paleolithic, but refined using many sources of knowledge including traditional cuisines and modern scientific research. It is much easier than other Paleo diets to adopt, because we support eating white rice, which makes noodles, crackers, gluten-free breads available to support the full range of foods.

We believe that the healthiest diet is a tasty diet. Our taste preferences evolved to guide us to healthy food. So a healthy diet is delicious. This is why ice cream — properly prepared, a healthy food — is on the cover of our book. The tastiest foods often combine fats and carbs, and this pairing is central to a healthy diet, as suggested in our Perfect Health Diet Food Plate:

The mission of this web site, PerfectHealthDiet.com, is to learn how diet can be used to treat or cure diseases; and to help our readers attain a full life of excellent health. Toward that end, we have a “Q&A” page where we take reader questions, and a “Reader Results” page where we record outcomes.

Please take a look around our site. We typically post 3 times a week:

  • Once or twice midweek, when we discuss the science of diet and disease;
  • On Saturday, when we survey what’s going on “Around the Web”;
  • On Sunday, when we put up a recipe or food post.

You can find topics of interest to you by browsing the “Categories” in the sidebar. We’ve given a lot of time to hypothyroidism, blood lipids, obesity, migraines, and infectious disease, among other topics.

If you’re interested in following the “safe starches” debate, Dr. Ron Rosedale has added a new installment to the series. The whole history:

Thank you for coming and I hope you find our work helpful to your health journey!

CrossFit NYC, Kindle Edition, Obesity and Bipolar, Dr Mercola, and Wise Traditions 2011

Posted by on November 16, 2011 51 comments

It’s been an eventful week and there’s a lot of news to share and people to talk about.

CrossFit NYC Talk

First, Shou-Ching and I are very excited to be visiting New York this Saturday, Nov 19, to speak at CrossFit NYC. The talk is at noon. After the Ancestral Health Symposium, John Durant asked us to come down to speak to the Eating Paleo in NYC group. It remained to find a venue and time. The owners of CrossFit NYC generously agreed to host the event; thank you so much, Court Wing, Joshua Newman, and all the folks at CrossFit NYC.

Since many of the attendees will have read our book and blog, I’m going to provide as much new or unfamiliar material as I can; and as befits a talk at a CrossFit gym, it will have a fitness/athleticism component. The basic structure of the talk:

  • Some often overlooked sources of evidence that guide us toward the optimal diet;
  • The most important factor driving an athletic (lean, muscular) body composition;
  • A review of various factors that impair health and fitness, and 20 tips for maintaining optimal fitness throughout life.

In addition to the talk, we’ll take questions and sign books. Books will be available for purchase at a discount. There will be a $15 door charge to cover expenses. CrossFit NYC is located at 25 W. 26th Street, 3rd floor (between Broadway and 6th Avenue). More information can be found at the Crossfit NYC web site.

This will be our only visit to New York for the foreseeable future, and is a rare opportunity to meet and chat with the elusive Shou-Ching. We’d love to meet our New York area readers, so please consider attending!

Kindle and eBook Editions

I have good news regarding the Kindle edition. Reader Jason Voegele is helping prepare Kindle and other e-book editions. I expect the editions to become available in December. Thank you, Jason!

Upcoming Posts

Coming soon is a series elaborating my view of the cause (and cure) of obesity. The main idea will appear in my CrossFit NYC talk, insofar as it relates to body composition – the strategy for building a lean, muscular body.

But before that series, I’ll have three interesting posts.

First, Jay Wright – better known to those who frequent the comment section as “Jaybird” – will share his weight loss story. He started our diet in March this year at 250 pounds, had a steady drop to his normal weight of 170 pounds by September 26, and has maintained that weight without difficulty for two months. Here are before and after pictures:

I met Jay in Dallas at the Wise Traditions conference and he is a handsome, slender man. You would never guess that he was recently obese.

I’m intrigued by Jay’s experience because his weight loss of 80 pounds in 6-7 months was remarkably smooth. He consistently lost about 2.5 pounds per week with none of the “plateaus” or weight regains that are evidence for “set point” theories of obesity.

Second, one of my Facebook friends appears to have found an effective dietary treatment for her bipolar disorder. I’ve briefly begun to look into the literature and it appears her technique may be applicable to many bipolar patients. This is an important discovery, so I’ll post on it as soon as I’ve done enough research into the science.

Third, Dr. Ron Rosedale is working on a guest post which will appear here. I’m excited to provide a forum for Ron, one of the pioneers of low-carb dieting and a gentleman as well as a scholar.

Dr. Mercola

I spent last weekend at Wise Traditions 2011, the annual conference of the Weston A. Price Foundation, where I was honored to meet the keynote speaker, Dr. Joseph Mercola.

Dr. Mercola attended my talk and invited me to appear in a video interview on his site. He’s going to post an article presenting his take on Jimmy Moore’s “Safe Starches Symposium”; our video interview will appear in December.

Wise Traditions 2011

I’m very grateful to Sally Fallon for inviting me to speak at Wise Traditions 2011. It was a fabulous conference. There were about 1500 in attendance, the food was delicious (although lacking in rice and potatoes!), and the event was flawlessly run by PTF Associates.

Best of all, it was an extraordinarily friendly group of people who were all a delight to be with. I made a lot of friends, and am looking forward to seeing them again in the future. I was also pleased to meet some of our readers and commenters in person.

About 600 people attended my talk, and many came up to me afterward and said the material was new and very interesting. The Weston A Price Foundation will be selling a video of the talk on DVD; I’ll post here when that is available.

There is much I could say about the people, vendors, and talks at the meeting, which were full of rich information. I got the most out of talks by clinicians, such as Natasha Campbell-McBride who spoke on Gut and Psychology Syndrome (GAPS) and Dr. Tom Cowan who spoke on low-dose naltrexone (a therapy I’ve been meaning to blog about for quite some time). But I’ll save my discussion of those matters for future blog posts.

Conclusion

It’s been a busy week, and as we head into the holidays I’m more excited than ever about blogging, speaking, and the great people I keep meeting through this work! Thank you all for being a part of our shared journey toward good food and great health.

Around the Web; Wise Traditions & CrossFit NYC Pre-Talk Edition

Posted by on November 5, 2011 27 comments

I’ll be speaking on Saturday Nov 12 at the Wise Traditions Conference in Dallas, doing the “Wellness Track” from 9:00 am until 12:15 am. The conference will be full of great speakers, so please consider attending:

Wise Traditions Conference ~ Dallas, TX ~ November 11-14 2010

I’ll also be speaking on Saturday Nov 19 at CrossFit NYC, at 25 W. 26th Street, 3rd floor (between Broadway and 6th Avenue). There will be a charge of $15 for a seminar plus question-and-answer session that will run from noon until about 2:30 pm. The talk will be in the 4th floor annex. Some information is also available through the Eating Paleo in NYC Meetup group.

In Dallas I’ll speak in two 90-minute sessions, the first on diet and nutrition and the second on healing and preventing disease. The second talk will include material that hasn’t yet appeared in our book or blog.

The CrossFit NYC talk will discuss evolutionary evidence for the optimal diet, factors that can impair health or sabotage fitness, and lifestyle and dietary steps to overcome those factors, with a special focus on a few bottlenecks to fitness that may commonly be overlooked by Paleo or CrossFit adherents.

I’m looking forward to meeting everyone in Dallas and New York!

Alas, due to a backlog of work, I probably won’t blog until I’m back from Dallas.

[1] Music to read by: Shirley Temple has animals in her stomach:

[2] Interesting posts this week:

Gorillas are dying from a common human respiratory virus, and an insect invasion is terrorizing Manhattan. Don’t worry, it’s the Upper West Side, CrossFit NYC is safe!

Stephan Guyenet refutes the insulin-is-to-fat-storage-as-a-car’s-gas-pedal-is-to-acceleration hypothesis of obesity by noting that genetic manipulations of various genes in the liver only generate high circulating insulin (4 to 10 times higher than normal) and yet these high insulin levels do not lead to an increased level of fat storage.

Wired magazine reports some explorations in food reward:

  • Music can change the taste of wine.
  • People prefer beer laced with balsamic vinegar (as long they don’t know it’s been added)
  • People prefer paté made from dog food.

So if you’re trying to make your food bland to lose weight, you might try playing music you dislike at dinner, keeping vinegar out of your beer, and removing dog food from your paté recipe.

A study finds that saturated fat increases BMI more than fat mass, which I take to mean that dairy fats promote muscle gain.

Kelly Starrett offers his most important MWOD ever.

Robb Wolf and Mr X discuss testosterone.

Seth Roberts reports “a stunning discovery”: it’s better to take vitamin D in the morning.

Ned Kock reveals the “mysterious factor X” in the China Study.

Don Matesz asks if antibiotics may cause obesity and cancer.

Touching on a topic raised here not long ago (Local Farming and The Fight for Quality Food, Oct 25, 2011), Melissa McEwen quotes Joel Salatin explaining why he raises an unnatural breed of chicken that can barely walk and sickens by age 10 weeks.

Also related to that post, Dr. Michael Greger offers some numbers on the health risks from unhealthy livestock.

Twenty thousand deaths a year from prescription drug overdose. Still waiting for the first case of Perfect Health Diet overdose.

The newest fashion: edible dresses. And the material is PHD compatible!

Happy blogiversary, Richard Nikoley!

Via Dr BG, “The Gut-Brain Connection: An Inside Look at Depression.”

Seth Roberts says that sunlight works “via nerve, not blood.”

Mrs. United States 2011 is Paleo and does CrossFit.

[3] Cute animal photo: The cute animals get all the love:

By Govardhan Gerhard Ziegler via Matthew Dalby on Facebook. Bonus red panda video, also from Matthew:

[4] Medical breakthrough! A California doctor has learned how to turn brown eyes blue:

Which calls for more music:

[5] Joshua Newman has your nerd humor:

Two chemists walk into a bar.

The first says, “I’d like to order some H20.”

The second says, “I’d like to order some H20, too.”

The second man dies.

[6] Comment of the week: Scotlyn on calorie restriction for longevity:

Regarding caloric restriction, I once had a short correspondence with Dr Speakman, a well-known caloric restriction researcher at Aberdeen university and one of the authors of this and this.

I was asking if there was any way to measure the overall well-being of calorically restricted rats, as one of the main considerations when extending lifespan is whether it is possible to extend the quality of life as well, or if the result instead would only be a “thin” extension of existence “like too little butter scraped on too much bread” (Bilbo in Lord of the Rings).

I also asked if there were lessons to be drawn from the Ancel Keys starvation studies, which showed that caloric restriction in humans led to constant hunger, cold, lack of energy or libido, and total fixation on food and other mental and physical health derangements.

This was his fascinating (and faultlessly generous to an unsolicited query) reply:

The Keys study is very revealing but differs from modern CR protocols in three ways. First the extent of restriction was much greater. Second they were also malnourished in some vitamin components. However, their experiences are all exaggerations of the experience of many modern people who do CR. The third difference is they were under involuntary restriction and have very different motivations to modern CR proponents who believe they will benefit directly from what they are doing. This cost benefit difference is very important to one’s psychological reaction to the treatment. I have no doubt many CR adherents are able to suppress much of the negative effects of deprivation. Lab mice are also not volunteers and I suspect if we could measure it they would be miserable.

Does this mean you would be miserable on CR? From your message I guess the answer is yes. Does this mean all CR people are miserable? Absolutely not.

It isn’t a life I would choose for a few extra months in the nursing home but for some people it clearly is. Its all down to personal choices I guess…

His last point is in reference to his own finding that lab rats who commence caloric restriction in adulthood gain only small increments in lifespan.

[7] Moving up the career ladder: Spanish neurologist invents “neurogastronomy” and becomes a New York City chef:

[8] Shou-Ching’s Photo Art:

[9] Video of the week: Two 20-foot tallwide, 1500 year old Giant Sequoias fall. German tourists capture the last moments on video: