Category Archives: Gratitude - Page 4

Happy Thanksgiving!

Posted by on November 24, 2011 19 comments

Today is Thanksgiving Day in the United States. It is a day of gratitude, and of fellowship.

Shou-Ching and I have much to be grateful for, but most especially the fellowship on this blog.

Our book, Perfect Health Diet, was released a year ago. Many have found it helpful, as the stories on our Results page indicate. But its success in finding an audience is entirely due to readers who have recommended it to their friends and family.

We are most grateful to all those who have helped to spread the word. We firmly believe that diet, nutrition, and appropriate antimicrobial medicines are the proper path to curing most if not all disease; and that this strategy will work a revolution in medical practice. As authors, our fondest hope is that our ideas will receive a fair hearing; contribute to the triumph of truth; and help bring good health to all. Good health is and should be our birthright!

Special thanks is due to Aaron Blaisdell and the Ancestral Health Society, for organizing the Ancestral Health Symposium and an upcoming journal; Sally Fallon and the Weston A Price Foundation, for inviting Paul to Wise Traditions 2011 (DVD of Paul’s talks available here); to CrossFit NYC, for hosting our recent talk in New York City; and to Dr Mercola, for discussing us in his newsletter and an upcoming video interview.

Above all, we are grateful to our readers, especially those who have made our little community on this blog so pleasant by commenting and sharing your stories. We hope to get caught up answering questions on the Q&A page soon, and ask those who try our suggestions to share their outcomes. Together, with a process of experimental exploration, we can develop knowledge that helps others find perfect health.

Finally, Shou-Ching’s photo art:

Have a very Happy Thanksgiving!

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.

Podcast with Chris Kresser and Danny Roddy

Posted by on August 23, 2011 80 comments

I’d like to thank Chris and Danny for a very enjoyable podcast. Thanks to the great hosts and the great questions submitted by the audience, I think it came out really well.

Chris gave our book a great recommendation even before it was published and really introduced us to the blogosphere; we’ll always be grateful for that.

A little note about our posting schedule: We didn’t do a food post on Sunday because Shou-Ching is away at a conference. Food posting will be back next Sunday. Also, I’ll be continuing our Low Carb Diet and Thyroid series shortly; it should be a very interesting series.

Thanks, Chris and Danny!

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!