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Local Farming and The Fight for Quality Food

Posted by on October 25, 2011 34 comments

Unhealthy animals make for unhealthy food. Poor health is usually caused by missing nutrients, toxins, and infections. Naturally, food from an unhealthy animal has a higher chance of being malnourishing, toxic, or infectious.

Our industrial food production system relies on genetically disturbed animals raised in crowded conditions and fed unnatural diets.

Fortunately the movement to healthier food production has been gathering steam recently. In most cities, it’s possible to meet local farmers at farmers markets and obtain naturally raised meat and vegetables.

We’ve been meaning to learn more about local farms and their food production methods. On Saturday, we joined the Livin’ Paleo in Boston group on a visit to Green Meadows Farm in Hamilton, Massachusetts. Green Meadows Farm was founded by General George S. Patton and is still owned by one of his heirs. It is managed by Andrew and Diana Rodgers. We were delighted to meet Diana at the Ancestral Health Symposium, and have looked forward to visiting her farm. I thought I’d share some photos and information from our visit.

Chickens

The Rodgers keep a pen of Cornish Rock chickens as an educational exhibit. Cornish Rocks supply the great majority of the chicken consumed in the United States; yet they are a genetically disturbed breed that develops arthritis by age 10 weeks and commonly dies young or fails to reproduce.

They are characterized by extraordinarily rapid growth and large breasts – so large that they have difficulty maintaining their balance and walk awkwardly. The breed doesn’t like to walk and if given food and water and if their poop is removed, they will happily live their whole lives in one spot.

The Rodgers force their Cornish Rock hens to walk by placing their feed a short distance from their coop:

Virtually all supermarket chicken meat is obtained from this breed, and even though their unaided growth is extremely rapid, producing a full-size chicken in 6 to 8 weeks, I have read that growth hormones are sometimes injected to accelerate growth further.

The Rodgers keep other, healthier breeds of chicken:

These are working animals. The farm is actually an organic vegetable farm, and the animals are used to clear and fertilize vegetable plots. They do sell their chickens in the fall, but apparently the healthier breeds of chicken produce a stringier meat that most Americans don’t care for.

Pigs

Currently only 20 acres of the 230 acre farm are in cultivation. The rest has been occupied by forest, or is too wet to farm. The Rodgers are steadily trying to clear woodland to create new vegetable plots, but it is a slow process.

They begin by confining pigs to a wooded area using electrical fences. The pigs root around, clearing underbrush and weakening the root systems of the trees. After a season of pig exposure, the trees can be cut down more easily.

Here you can see some pigs:

The orange electrical fence is on the left.

Sheep

After the trees have been cut down, it still takes at least a year – generally more – to naturally break down roots and prepare the field for plowing. Sheep and chickens are the animals that effectively turn a former woodland into a fertile, root-free vegetable field.

Here are some sheep in a plot that is currently occupied by clover, a legume that restores nitrogen to the soil:

Here is a sheepdog in training:

If you ever find yourself on Asbury Street in South Hamilton, Mass., here’s the farmstand to look for:

Livin’ Paleo in Boston Group

Here is a photo of our tour group:

Diana Rodgers is on the far right, Andrew Rodgers (fifth from the left) is visible only as a head. I’m in the red shirt and green shorts sixth from the right; Shou-Ching was the photographer. I won’t try to name everyone but the organizers of the tour, Shilpi and Amit Mehta, deserve special thanks; they are in the back row slightly left of center.

Joel Salatin, Michael Pollan, and Farmageddon

Joel Salatin is a hugely entertaining family farmer in Virginia who has deservedly become famous. Here’s a short video introducing him – this is from the documentary “Fresh”:

For a description of how Salatin’s Polyface farm operates, there may be no better source than Michael Pollan:

Unfortunately, the regulatory and legal climate is actively hostile to local farms. Here is the trailer to the documentary “Farmaggedon”:

Farmageddon – Movie Trailer from Kristin Canty on Vimeo.

A Canadian dairy farmer is currently on a hunger strike protesting laws restricting the sale of milk, and in a similar Wisconsin case Judge Patrick J. Fiedler recently ruled that “Plaintiffs do not have a fundamental right to produce and consume the foods of their choice.” So these are active issues.

Shou-Ching and I strongly support the liberation of food production and consumption from repressive regulations, and recommend checking out your local farms. In our experience, the food is better than that at Whole Foods, and often cheaper. I know we have a number of farmers among our readers; please, let us know if there is anything we can do to promote your businesses.

The Ancestral Health Symposium

Posted by on August 9, 2011 25 comments

We’re back from the California and the Ancestral Health Symposium, which was a fantastic meeting – the most enjoyable symposium I’ve attended. Brent Pottenger, Aaron Blaisdell, and the host of volunteers who assisted them deserve tremendous credit for organizing it. Bravo!

It had the feel of a Paleo Woodstock: the leading names in the movement were gathered in one place for the first time, and there was a festive atmosphere, especially on the first day and at a pre-event party hosted by Aaron Blaisdell. For Shou-Ching and I, it was a delight to meet in person friends we had come to know through the Internet. We were pleased to meet some of our commenters – and had lunch with one, Mia.

Those who didn’t attend will be able to catch up on it later: presentation slides may be found here; videos of the talks and interviews will be posted here.

People and Pictures

Already there’s a great deal of information about the meeting online. Some participants were active twitterers – check out the Twitter tag #AHS11 for a blow-by-blow account of the meeting. I’m sure many attendees will be posting their own appreciations in coming days, but here are links to some of the early birds:

Richard Nikoley took a lot of pictures at Aaron’s Thursday night party and has more photos in his appreciation of the symposium. PaleoHacks has a thread for pictures from the meeting and a thread for recommendations about talks. Emily Deans has posts about talks and people.

Melissa McEwen, Stephan Guyenet, Chris Masterjohn, Jamie Scott, Andreas Eenfeldt, and Matt Metzgar have posts.

Many at the meeting remarked on how good looking the attendees were. You can find appreciations of looks from Melissa (“the conference was full of beautiful people”), Jamie (“I have never been around so many beautiful people in one room as I have been this past weekend.”), and Stephan (“I was very impressed by the appearance of the attendees”).

I was equally impressed, but that observation leads me to one more. Nearly everyone at the meeting had at one time been following bad diets and had to seek out Paleo. In Denise Minger’s talk, she asked how many people had been vegetarians at one time, and a startlingly large number raised their hands. To discover a healthy way of living, in a world full of mistaken information and unhealthy foods, is possible only for inquisitive, intelligent, discerning people. This was not only a beautiful, but a smart, crowd.

And so very friendly and cheerful. Good health, I believe, leads to good spirits. It was a pleasure to be around everyone, both during the meeting and after hours.

The Talks

A brief summary of the the most notable talks I saw:

S. Boyd Eaton kicked off the conference as the only speaker without a competitor in the parallel track; a well-deserved honor in light of his pioneering role in the Paleo movement. He spent only ten minutes on diet and moved on to expressing a quixotic hope for decreases in the global population in order to restore a more Paleo-like environment. Among the highlights was a picture from the Korean DMZ, a 400-square mile depopulated area that has apparently regained a flourishing wildlife.

Loren Cordain followed with an excellent talk, most of which will be familiar to his fans. I liked his talk a lot, in part because his slides on hunter-gatherer food intakes support our macronutrient ratios.

Staffan Lindeberg gave an excellent talk that also revisited material from his work. A few factoids: blame for the invention of vegetable oils goes to David Wesson, who figured out how to detoxify cotton seeds in 1899, thus giving us “Wesson oil”; and autopsy studies show that at age 40 most people already have atherosclerosis, a disease that is non-existent in wild animals and thus is presumably caused by industrial diets.

Robb Wolf finished the morning session and was his usual dynamic self. Shou-Ching, who hadn’t yet listened to one of his podcasts, was impressed.

If Friday morning felt like a celebrity fest, Friday afternoon was the meat of the symposium. Two Friday afternoon talks were among the best of the meeting.

Emily Deans’s talk was magnificent, pulling together a rich thread of material. Jamie Scott gave an inside look at the practical side of improving health in a corporate setting.

Dr. BG and Dr Tim Gerstner gave an outstanding talk, one of the best of the meeting. Dr BG’s story was fascinating and fast-paced. She and her sister are writing a book, “Jillian’s story,” about Dr BG’s autistic niece who has seen great improvements from chelation therapy. Heavy metal toxicity is an important subject and it looks like Dr BG and her collaborators are going to make an important contribution. We went to dinner Friday night with Dr BG, her sister, Dr Gerstmar, and J. Stanton of gnolls.org, and had a wonderful time.

In attending these two great talks, I missed two of the star attractions of the meeting – Stephan Guyenet, whose talk I would dearly love to have seen, and Gary Taubes. The buzz of the main ballroom when we got back was that Gary had, in the question session, cut to the front of the question line in order to challenge Stephan in some fashion. I expect this video will be the most downloaded one of the conference. UPDATE: Video of Gary’s questioning is here and a detailed account here.

Curious to hear about Stephan’s talk, we had returned to the main ballroom during the break, and stayed to watch Michael Eades. He gave a very nice talk focusing on the pre-history of the Paleo diet – going back to some early clinicians, one of whom was a friend of Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who had tried low-carb Paleo diets on their patients with success.

Again, I was torn between two great speakers as I very much wish I could have heard the talk of anthropologist Craig Stanford, who was opposite Eades. I had a pleasant chat with Dr. Stanford at Aaron’s pre-meeting party and it turns out our professional paths seem to be criss-crossing: I am working on a book on evolutionary biology, applying my economics ideas to the problem, and he is considering writing a book on diet. Small world!

Friday’s last talk was by Chris Masterjohn, who gave a superb exposition on LDL receptors, how LDL-R status can influence LDL time in the blood and oxidation status and, therefore, health. I had read most of the material on Chris’s blog, but still took copious notes. Chris is a most impressive and well-organized speaker.

On Saturday I started with Seth Roberts and Tucker Max. Seth’s talk was excellent – the gist can be found in recent blog posts, such as the one on butter reducing his coronary calcium score.

Tucker Max’s talk was fascinating in light of Todd Hargrove’s recent guest post here (How to Do Joint Mobility Drills, July 26, 2011). Tucker’s idea was that violence, both against animals (hunting) and people (warfare, homicide), must have been a critical factor shaping Paleolithic culture, and that this had important implications: Paleolithic peoples must have spent a lot of time play fighting as practice and as a fitness technique; and they must have developed philosophies, like those associated with all modern martial arts, to develop calmness and serenity in the face of violence – since the natural human reaction, panic, is unhelpful. It sounds as though mobility and serenity practices such as Tai Chi or yoga, which Todd endorsed, and components of religions such as Zen Buddhism may be modern descendants of Paleolithic martial arts. I liked this talk because it reminds us that “ancestral health” encompasses more than diet.

Mat Lalonde’s talk was outstanding. The subject of food toxins is extremely important for health, under-researched by scientists, and lacking in good overviews. (Step Two of our book is among the best, but only scratches the surface.) Mat reviewed research on a number of major food toxins, and discussed the ability of these toxins to survive cooking, enter the body, and contribute to disease. The talk had only one disappointment: Mat dis-associated himself from what he called “your movement.”

Mark Sisson and Denise Minger gave two of the most pleasant, fun talks at the meeting, as befits their super-positive personalities. Luckily on Saturday the two sessions were in neighboring rooms and it was possible to see some of each.

Nora Gedgaudas gave an excellent talk on the use of diet as a clinical approach to mental health disorders. It had plenty of citations that I’m eager to track down. We are fans of ketogenic dieting for neurological diseases, and Nora obviously is too – indeed she promotes a diet that verges on zero-carb. I think this will work well as a fast-acting therapy until she meets a patient with toxoplasmosis or some similar protozoal brain infection, but that the benefits of ketosis have to be balanced against long-term risks of glucose deficiency.

Melissa McEwen gave a fantastic talk about the evolution of the gut. It was fact-filled, science-rich, and entertaining. Interesting part: there is significant human variability in, for instance, colon size and structure. This is important because the digestive tract is really the only part of the body that evolves in response to changing diets. There has been some talk about different populations needing different diets; Melissa’s work suggests that instead of “metabolic typing” we may some day do “gut typing” to determine an optimal personal diet.

John Durant gave an entertaining and informative talk on the history and future of zoos. We had just visited San Diego Zoo and the San Diego Zoo Safari Park (formerly Wild Animal Park) earlier that week, and the Bronx, Washington DC, and Cleveland zoos fairly recently, so I enjoyed John’s take.

Andreas Eenfeldt and Richard Nikoley were another duo that were hard to choose between. Richard is entertaining at all times, and Andreas had an interesting story about the low-carb diet revolution in Sweden. I tried to catch both talks as best as I could.

After fitness talks from Doug McGuff, Frank Forencich, and Erwan LeCorre we chatted with friends new and old before leaving for the airport for our redeye flight back home. Shou-Ching pulled out her camera for a few photos. Here’s one:

All in all, a fabulous meeting. I think the Ancestral Health Society is going to have a big impact, and can’t wait for AHS 2012. Thanks, Aaron, Brent, and everyone else responsible for this enjoyable event!

Therapy AND Life

Posted by on February 17, 2011 102 comments

UPDATE: The Daily Mail article cited below was not only silly, it appears to have been dishonest. I’ve received the following email:

There is an article on your website about me (17/2/2011). Yes, I’m Judith Fine and that article was in the Daily Mail. Firstly, they completely twisted everything that I said so that it makes it look as if I have severe eating problems. Most of that article was a complete pack of lies, neither is it me in the photograph. Could you please, immediately remove it from you website as I am in the process of picking this up with the Daily Mail.

I’ve edited the post to remove content related to Judith. — PAJ

“Orthorexia” has been in the news recently, for instance in this Valentine’s Day article by Diana Appleyard in the Daily Mail:

We all know the type. They never let wheat, yeast or dairy pass their lips. They’ve cut out alcohol and caffeine. They’re obsessed with healthy eating — yet every day, they look more unwell and unhappier.

These are the symptoms of a condition called ‘orthorexia’ by dieticians….

Orthorexia was coined in 1997 by Californian doctor Steven Bratman in his book Health Food Junkies, and means ‘correct appetite’ (from the Greek orthos for right and orexis for appetite). It is a fixation with eating ‘pure’ food that, far from doing you good, can become so extreme that it leads to malnutrition, chronic ill health and depression.

Well, I don’t eat wheat; I didn’t even know yeast was a food; and though dairy is a big part of my diet, alcohol and caffeine modest parts, I recognize that milk proteins, alcohol, and caffeine can be problematic.

Given that none of these foods are necessary for good health, it’s not obvious to me why excluding them would lead to malnutrition, chronic ill health and depression.

But from the rest of the article, it looks like the real trouble with orthorexia is not the fixation with healthy eating, but faulty ideas of what constitutes a healthy diet. The article’s leading example of an unhealthy “orthorexic” diet is one that excludes fat.

Any fat-less diet is bound to be malnourishing. Perhaps the trouble is not orthorexia, but mistaken ideas about nutrition. Diets people think are therapeutic are, in fact, damaging.

Therapy versus Life … sometimes

Which brings me to a recent essay by Kurt Harris, “Therapy versus Life.”

It’s almost impossible to excerpt, so I’ll just assume you’ve read it. It’s strongly worded, but the ideas are familiar:  I suspect at least 90% of medical doctors would agree.

Doctors are healers, God bless ’em; but every day they have to face patients they cannot heal. This breeds a certain mental toughness.

As I often say, malnutrition, food toxins, and chronic infections are the primary causes of ill health. In some cases, like Judith Fine’s inability to have periods, it’s easy to recognize malnourishment as a likely cause. But the causes of most patients’ impaired health are much less obvious.

Unfortunately, doctors generally cannot diagnose or treat either bad diets or chronic infections. Doctors are great at treating acute disease, and can mitigate many symptoms that chronic diseases generate, but most are helpless to remedy mild, chronic ill health.

Doctors may believe that a patient’s declining health is simply natural aging; or that genuine health impairments may be undiagnosable, untreatable, or incurable. Kurt says it in his forum:

[T]he healthy should not assume they are sick and even the sick may be wasting their time trying to fix what can’t be fixed.

When patients learn that doctors can’t help them, they often turn to experimental self-treatment.

99% of the time, this works out badly. As Kurt’s car metaphor shows, there are many more ways to damage your body than to heal it.

And the 1% of the time it works, the patient doesn’t go tell the doctor. But when it backfires, the patient goes back to the doctor worse than ever. So the doctors see this method fail 100% of the time.

This reinforces the doctors’ consensus: Be prudent. Try to live normally – as healthy people do. Eat like healthy people, live like healthy people, and bear with your incurable maladies as best you can. Thrashing and groping for cures will only do harm.

Therapy – experimental self-therapies – are damaging to life. Choose life, not therapy.

But Diet Is Therapy

But that’s not all there is to it … because the right diet can fix many health problems.

Kurt says this himself:

[T]here is a dietary metabolic milieu that we are adapted to, and the best chance we have of optimizing our health is to try and emulate it …

The human body often can [fix itself] if we just stop ruining it.

We agree. The Perfect Health Diet is, in essentials, identical to Kurt’s PaNu. And when people in ill health eat this way, they commonly get better.

So the right diet is therapy. Choose this diet as therapy, and you’ll have a better life.

What If Your Life is Malady-Inducing?

I chose life over therapy for decades. I rarely went to the doctor. I focused all my energy on life. But I ate a lousy diet.

This isn’t the place to tell my story – that’s coming – but a lousy diet and a focus on life, not therapy, gave me a disabling chronic disease.

And a therapeutic diet gave me my life back. The Four Steps of our book are essentially the steps I took to cure a disabling neurodegenerative condition. With antibiotics, they worked.

So when Kurt asks,

Do you think every problem in your life can be fixed by changing your diet?

I can honestly say: every health problem was fixed!

Therapy for Life

If the Ewald hypothesis and Jaminet corollary are right, then we all stand in need of dietary therapy. As we age, our infectious burden increases and our immune system gets less effective. Sooner or later, infectious diseases threaten us all.

Our rescue is not from medicine, which does not yet know how to treat chronic infections. Our best chance for a long, healthy life lies in diet, nutrition, and immunity-enhancing behaviors like fasting.

Fortunately, the scientific evidence is accumulating to tell us what the right diet is. Specialist professionals still can’t see the forest for the trees, the elephant for its parts; but generalists, aided by respect for ancestral/traditional diets and for evolutionary selection, have blazed the trail. Kurt lists some reliable guides.

Conclusion

Diet is the best therapy. A good diet is life-giving. Good diet and nutrition may cost a few extra minutes a day, but can add decades of happiness.

So I say: choose therapy AND life. We can be healthy centenarians together. Let’s do it!

In Memory of Jack Lalanne

Posted by on January 23, 2011 18 comments

Jack Lalanne, the great fitness guru and natural food advocate, is dead at 96. (Hat tip: Jamie Scott.)

He died of pneumonia, just a year after having heart valve surgery. Both conditions are suggestive of Chlamydia pneumoniae infection; perhaps antibiotics could have gotten him to 100.

The Associated Press obituary notes that his youthful diet wasn’t very good:

The son of poor French immigrants, he was born in 1914 and grew up to become a sugar addict, he said.

The turning point occurred one night when he heard a lecture by pioneering nutritionist Paul Bragg, who advocated the benefits of brown rice, whole wheat and a vegetarian diet.

“He got me so enthused,” LaLanne said. “After the lecture I went to his dressing room and spent an hour and a half with him. He said, ‘Jack, you’re a walking garbage can.'”

Lalanne was an advocate of eating whole foods, but may have over-emphasized the carbohydrates. Late in life, his diet consisted mainly of fruit, vegetables, brown rice, and fish. Rather like the Kitavans, but with less coconut oil.

Nevertheless he was a great example of healthy living. He joked at age 92 that he couldn’t die, because it would wreck his image.

Here he demonstrates fingertip push-ups:

Here he explains how to cure “pooped out-itis”:

Thanks, Jack! The fitness classes of heaven just got a little more entertaining.