Two Art de Vany-Related Ideas

Posted by on December 14, 2010 75 comments

I mentioned Art de Vany’s new book on Saturday; today I came across a few blog posts relating to some of his more important ideas and thought I’d talk about them.

The Economic Analysis of Diet

Today I recorded an interview with Jimmy Moore, which should appear on his “Livin’ La Vida Low-Carb Show” sometime early next year.

One of the things we talked about was our “economic” approach to nutrition and diet – how analyzing nutrients the way economists analyze factors of production helps sort out the confusing, seemingly contradictory results found in the scientific literature.

Since any factor calorie that is overly abundant will look like a “bad factor calorie” and any factor calorie that is too scarce will look like a “good factor calorie,” it’s easy to explain why the same nutrient can appear as “good” or “bad” in different studies.

Today, Mark Sisson features a passage from Art’s book. He says this:

At some point I realized that a human being is just another economic system. Indeed, your body contains an entire economy. There is the allocation of assets according to a hierarchy of needs. There are competing interests that sometimes struggle over resources and other times cooperate for the common good. There are surpluses. There are shortages. Like economies–like the movie industry–your body is a complex, decentralized system poised between chaos and order.

We tend to think of biologists as rigorous “hard” scientists and of economists as mushier “soft” scientists, but actually in analyzing complex cooperative networks economists are decades ahead of biologists.

The analysis in many biology papers, if translated into an economics paper with factors of production substituted for the dietary nutrients, would be recognized immediately by most economists as primitive and fallacious. Economists have developed many analytical ideas that diet researchers could usefully copy. It’s no surprise that Art and I both found our economics backgrounds helpful in sorting through the diet literature.

Intermittency in Diet

If there is a single idea that I associate with Art, it’s the desirability of intermittency and randomness to explore the extremes of the body’s metabolic networks.

Art touches upon this in the passage at Mark’s site:

According to chaos theory, certain systems that seem to be random in fact are not–it’s just difficult for us to perceive, at the outset, all the subtle factors that set the course and determine the outcome….

Another scientific concept, the power law, also comes up often in my discussions of health and fitness. It is based on the Pareto principle, named for Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto. In essence, it describes the relationship between how common a factor is and how much influence it exerts. It says that the most unusual events will have the greatest impact. Pareto’s study determined that 80 percent of privately held land in Italy was owned by 20 percent of the population.

Similar power laws exist all around us.…

There is a power law of exercise, too: Your least frequent, most extreme exertions will have the greatest influence on your fitness. The peak moments of a workout count far more than the amount of time you spend working out…. When a work-out becomes an unvarying, monotonous routine, it loses its effectiveness.

Art’s ideas suggest that it might be beneficial to explore dietary extremes, for instance in calorie intake. Sometimes we should fast, forcing our body to economize on nutrients; sometimes we should feast, giving our body a surplus of nutrients that it has to dispose of.

In our book we discuss the benefits of intermittent fasting – it promotes autophagy, which extends lifespan and protects us against bacteria and viruses – but we don’t discuss whether feasting has any merits.

While there has been no real scientific study of feasting (except in the context of every-other-day implementations of intermittent fasting), feasting has been a hot topic in the Paleo blogosphere lately:

Coincidentally, Chris Masterjohn today offers us a review of Tim Ferriss’s new book, The 4-Hour Body.

For weight loss, Ferriss recommends intermittent fasting and feasting:

His fat-loss regimen sticks to a five-rule “Slow-Carb Diet” six days a week, but on the seventh day he resteth. This is the day for “reverse Lent,” otherwise known as bingeing on whatever the heck you want. In fact, Ferriss considers overfeeding one day a week to be a critical component of his fat loss regimen because of its effects on metabolism-boosting hormones.

In this respect he seems to have come to conclusions similar to those of Ori Hofmekler of Warrior Diet fame, who advocates fasting in the day and overfeeding in the night, and Matt Stone, whose High-Everything Diet uses overfeeding as its very lifeblood.

Stone recently told Jimmy Moore that one of the issues he’s still trying to tweak with his diet is to get rid of the initial gain in weight. Tim Ferriss may have solved that problem with his version of overfeeding, as folks on his diet usually gain weight on overfeeding day but nevertheless experience a net loss of several pounds per week from the very beginning.

So add Ferris to the group of self-experimenters who find benefits from occasional feasting.

Chris also discusses protein restriction:

Ferriss notes that periodic fasting from protein induces a process called autophagy, wherein the cell cleans out its mishandled, degraded, and aggregated proteins that otherwise accumulate. This is consistent with my experience. I had developed a problem with small wart-like risings on my hands and fingers at one point. Complete fasting for two weeks helped somewhat, but going vegan for two weeks made them completely disappear. The problem has never come back, despite my regular sumptuous feasting on animal foods of all kinds.

Perhaps protein cycling provides an answer to the question I had raised in The Curious Case of Campbell’s Rats. Namely, is there an intermediate intake of protein that maximally protects against cancer, toxicity, and fatty liver under all conditions? Perhaps the answer is not an intermediate intake of protein, but a periodic cycling of protein intake.

We note in our book (and this blog post) that protein restriction, even if calories are not restricted at all, promotes autophagy and therefore intracellular immunity and longevity. So we’re happy to endorse protein restriction.

But high intake of protein, especially of ketogenic branched-chain amino acids like leucine, does promote muscle synthesis. So what is a bodybuilder or athlete, who seeks the greatest possible muscle growth, to do?  Is there an inevitable conflict between athleticism and longevity?

It’s possible that protein cycling – say, a week of protein restriction followed by a week of high-protein intake – might help resolve the dilemma, providing 80% of the longevity and health benefits of protein restriction and 80% of the muscle synthesis benefits of high-protein diets.

If so, Art de Vany would not be surprised.

Cambridge Fried Rice

Posted by on December 12, 2010 57 comments

CarbSane has asked for a recipe for Yang Zhou Fried Rice; Yang Zhou is a city in southern China in a leading rice-farming region.

As far as we know there is no special ingredient, though Wikipedia says that barbecued pork is a characteristic ingredient. The great thing about fried rice is that you can adjust the ingredients to your taste; use as many or as few as you like. So, here is our recipe — let’s call it Cambridge Fried Rice.

The key steps are to “fry” (really, warm and coat in oil) the ingredients separately, to get a good diffusion of oil throughout the rice and food.

Here’s how it’s done. As always, click on images to enlarge.

First, gather ingredients. You’ll need oils, eggs, long-grain rice (short-grain rice sticks together and doesn’t work as well), plus other ingredients of your choice.  Here are peas, carrots, scallions, and shrimp — we’ll also use mushrooms:

Friedrice1b

Next, scramble some eggs. Use whatever oil you like, we think eggs go well with butter:

Set the scrambled eggs aside, add new oil to the pan (now we’ll use olive oil), and add any of the miscellaneous ingredients that need cooking:

Again, set these ingredients aside:

The long-grain rice should have been cooked, but long enough ago that it has had time to cool and dry. Traditionally, fried rice uses leftover rice — cooked earlier in the day or the previous day.

Add oil (now we’ll use coconut oil) and rice to the pan, stir until rice has soaked up the oil and is uniformly coated:

Now return all the ingredients to the pan, mix, and add spices to taste:

In this case we added salt and pepper, divided the fried rice in two, and added turmeric to one half. (Soy sauce can be added to hot oil when frying vegetables and meat, but it’s not necessary.)

Serve:

We haven’t measured weights or counted calories, but it’s fairly obvious that this is a fat-rich (oils, egg yolks), carb-moderate (rice), protein-light (shrimp, egg whites) recipe with vegetables for good measure — essentially, the Perfect Health Diet macronutrient ratios.

This is the basic recipe, add spices or ingredients to your taste!

If you would like another view of Yang Zhou Fried Rice, from a professional chef, here’s a video:

Art de Vany’s New Book and Video

Posted by on December 11, 2010 26 comments

Art de Vany’s long-awaited book, The New Evolution Diet, has finally been released.

For those who don’t know him, Art is an economist, former professional (minor league) baseball player, and early adopter of low-carb Paleo dieting, which he used to help address the diabetes of his first wife and son. He is also a fitness guru, and had one of the first popular Paleo sites. Now 73, he looks fantastic.

I discovered Art in 2005, thanks to a link from Newmark’s Door. At the time I had a chronic illness that had progressed steadily for 13 years and was becoming disabling. I had experimented that year with Chinese herbal medicines and found some dramatic effects, good and bad. This experience had persuaded me that what I ingested could have big effects on my health. I began to try to optimize my diet, and Art persuaded me to give low-carb Paleo a try.

Like the Chinese medicine, Art’s diet (or my implementation of it) had big effects, both good and bad. Our experience with it set my wife and I off on a search for the perfect diet for human health, and resulted 5 years later in our own book.

In the end, my health was repaired, but effecting a cure required significant refinements to the Cordain – de Vany style Paleo diet.  

I owe Art a great debt: without his work I would never have recovered my health. I’m pleased, therefore, to be able to link to his new book, which I intend to read soon. On his web site and DVD, Art has always had many excellent and interesting things to say, especially about fitness and lifestyle. I’ve implemented his “hierarchical sets” method of training in my own exercise routines; and he was the one who got me started on intermittent fasting. His idea that intermittency and variability are needed for optimal health is a seminal contribution which could prove important.

Melissa McEwen has a review with some quotes. Unfortunately, it seems that all of the major weaknesses of the diet which caused trouble for me 5 years ago are still present. Art advises, in my view, insufficient intake of two of the principal calorie sources of actual Paleolithic diets:

  • Safe starches. Starches have been a leading calorie source in the ancestral human diet for two million years; Richard Wrangham credits them with making us human. Yet Art restricts plant foods to vegetables and fruit – as if our ancestors were forest dwellers, like mountain gorillas and chimps, instead of the open woodland and shoreland dwellers they were.
  • Fat, especially saturated and monounsaturated animal fats. Cracked bones and skulls at Paleolithic sites testify to the hunger of our ancestors for marrow and brain. Yet Art advises eating lean muscle tissue.

Perhaps influenced by the lipid hypothesis, Art seems as positive toward industrial canola oil as toward animal fats and egg yolks.

Regarding the diet, I share Melissa’s feelings. It is a good, but flawed, diet. Our book is a much better source of diet advice. Yet I’m sure there will be much that can be learned from Art’s book.

I will always be grateful to Art for introducing me to Paleo eating. I encourage everyone to view Art’s promotional video; it’s a very impressive introduction to a remarkable man.

Christmas Special

Posted by on December 9, 2010 87 comments

I have been a little over-worked and I forgot to put up instructions for bulk orders. Shame on me! I had planned to have it up so that people who wanted to buy multiple copies as Christmas gifts could get discounted prices.

Well, there’s still a few days left to place an order and assure receipt by Christmas. So, I’m offering a Christmas special on bulk orders: $14.99 per book. Minimum order is 5 copies, and it has to go to a single address. Shipping is free to the US and UK, discounted elsewhere.

If you’d like to do this, send me an email with number of copies and your address and phone number. I’ll send you a Paypal money request which you can pay by credit card.

A Few Good Experiences

Every once in a while someone emails or comments lets us know that their health has improved because of our diet, or that they enjoyed the book. We always appreciate hearing these things.

Recently, Claire wrote:

I just received the book today and enjoying the read! I love the combination of easy-to-read plus enough scientific information to help me tailor the diet and supplements to my chronic illness, gastroparesis (started in 2003 – got sick while traveling in Brazil, slowly got worse and diagnosed with gp by breath test in 2009).

My main and most debilitating symptom is vomiting, which for example in the past 2 months has been about 75% of what I eat. In the past 4 days of applying the perfect health diet (avg. 1400 kCal, protein/carb/fat ratios 24%/18%/58%) I have not vomited once ! I realize I need to further optimize my nutrient intake, but I’m already noticing major improvement.

It sounds like Claire acquired a gut infection in Brazil, and fructose makes the germs very happy and her small intestine very unhappy. Our diet cuts down the sugar and replaces it with fat which the germs can’t eat. Starving the pathogens a bit seems to have stabilized her gut; hopefully it will bring her to a full recovery in time. Sometimes solutions are really simple and quick!

Jay wrote to talk about how a ketogenic Paleo diet had helped him run a marathon successfully, but gave him kidney stones – something perhaps our kidney stone post will help him overcome:

I jumped on the paleo diet last April. Moved to more of a Primal diet in June and then PaNu in July. I started experimenting with a Ketogenic diet in August and September. I am a runner. I run half marathons, marathons, and ultra marathons. I started serious training for the Fall season this last Summer. My whole goal with nutrition was to 1) get on a better nutritious diet. 2) Recover quicker, reduce inflammation. 3) train my body to use fats/proteins for energy instead of glycogen so I wouldn’t bonk after a couple of hours of running.

I trained by usually running in the mornings without eating anything prior to running. No matter what the distance. I found that once I was ketogenic, I could run without “hitting the wall”. I think it worked and worked very well. When I finally ran the marathon in October, I carb’d up for 3 days prior to running. I ate lots of carbs and some protein prior to the race. I knocked off an amazing 20 minutes from the previous best time. I didn’t hit any wall, although I had cramps after the race, big time.

But the point, I ate little carbs, was dehydrated a lot because of the heat, probably didn’t eat enough salt, ate a lot of almonds, etc. So based on your blog posts, I now know exactly why I have a kidney stone. Or at least, good reason to suspect….

I am going to eat more carbs and less protein than what I had been doing. We will see if I can clear this up soon.

Thanks for the books and thanks for all the information on your site. I have learned more about nutrition and my body in the last 6 months than I have in my entire life time. I definitely think we need to spread the word about the Perfect Health Diet!

Our Thanks for Your Support

I noticed that Melissa McEwen blogged about the “worst Paleo book ever” and our book came up multiple times in the comments. No, not as a challenger for the worst book!

Thank you so much to everyone who recommends our book. We hate to self-promote, but when others spread the word, we are most grateful. We believe our work can help many to find the great health that everyone deserves, but we know that the only way anyone will discover our book is through your help. So, thank you very much!