Health Matters To Me

Wellness Consultations Are Now Available!

2011-08-15T17:11:00.000-06:00

I am now offering donation-based personal health consultations to help you achieve your health goals. Click the following link for more information: Wellness Counseling For Preventative Health

Good health is our birthright, and it's truly something to smile about!

Fecal Transplants: Ben's Story

2011-08-14T16:43:00.001-06:00

Continuing my adventures in understanding the long hollow tube that is the human GI tract, I've been in correspondence with a blog reader, Ben D., for the past month or so regarding fecal transplants and our similarities in intestinal dysfunction. We are definitely gut brothers from other mothers, as his symptoms match up incredibly well with my own. When he told me he would be trying the human probiotic home infusion protocol a few weeks ago, I was very curious to follow his progress. Ben was wonderfully light-hearted and humorous about the whole thing while providing very useful information regarding his 10-day transplant experience. Here is his intestinal saga in his own words. Thanks, Ben!

What's up gutsers? I am coming to the end of 10 days of fecal transplant therapy carried out at home with my doctor's blessing and prescriptions.

I am posting here because I want to answer any questions people have about the procedure, especially if they are considering doing it themselves. So far it has improved my symptoms quite a bit, but has not been a total cure. I think it is going to turn out to have been a very valuable tool in the treatment, and eventual cure of my condition.

Below is a short version of the whole story of my illness. Check it out before asking questions... the answer may be in there.

My name is Ben. I'm 25 and I've been dealing with Post-Infectious IBS-C since January 2010. It started on a trip to India with some diarrhea and then I became constipated for the next two months of the trip. I tried the usual fiber + probiotics and I think they just made things worse. Since nothing was moving, I think they just gathered in my small intestine and gave me a case of SIBO because I ended up with terrible bloating on top of the C.

I had stool and blood tests done, as well as a colonoscopy, while traveling and they all found nothing. The Indian doc diagnosed the P-I IBS-C and gave me Lactulose, a daily laxative. I took that for a while and it helped the constipation, but made the bloating much worse. I eventually got another case of diarrhea, took some antibiotics for the diarrhea, and all the symptoms went away. About a week after the antibiotics, some symptoms returned in a very mild form, but didn't bother me much.

Then in January of this year (strangely enough around the same date that the first flare began in India), after 8 or so months of relative health, the constipation came back. Again I tried more fiber in my diet and probiotics and again this produced the backed-up, SIBO-esque bloating. I had stool and blood tests and an ultrasound that found nothing. I then tried 3 rounds of various antibiotics, because they seemed to help back when I was traveling. None worked this time, so I started working with alternative treatments: Oregano oil, raw garlic, cloves, Wormwood, Black Walnut hulls, Aloe Vera, acupuncture, Chinese herbs, etc. I've also been on the Specific Carbohydrate diet since early April. Some of the alternative treatments helped, and the SC Diet keeps the bloating from being too crazy, but nothing was really moving me in the direction of a cure. I also saw a holistic doctor who had me do a stool test with Diagnos-techs. It found a very light amount of Candida, moderate pathogenic Strep, occult blood, and low SIgA.

I got a recommendation for a tropical medicine doctor in New York (Dr. Kevin Cahill). I saw him and he inspected a scraping of my colonic mucous that revealed an infection with Entamoeba Histolytica. I was relieved to finally have a more clear diagnosis. He gave me Paromomycin, an anti-amoeba drug, and Doxycycline, an antibiotic. I took them, was retested by him, and came up negative for the amoebas. He told me it may take a couple months to heal and feel well again, but after abouta month and a half I only felt worse.

At that point I began to assume that the amoebas and all the antibiotics I had taken had caused some other damage to my whole flora that needed to be addressed. My holistic doctor had mentioned fecal transplant as a possibility and so I began to look for donors. Without intending to actually ask her to donate, I mentioned the procedure to a good friend's girlfriend and her eyes immediately lit up. "Do you want me to shit for you, Ben?!," she excitedly asked.

She told me she was very comfortable gut-wise and went 2-3 times a day consistently, which sounded great to me considering I was dealing with constipation. I started the low-fiber diet part of Borody's protocol right away and got her a stool test kit. Her test came back clear, and after 3 weeks of the low-fiber, I started taking Vancomycin, as recommended by Borody, as well as Nitazoxanide, an anti-protozoal just in case any of the amoebas were left.

The antibiotics made me feel horrendous. They added to the general feeling of unwellness that I had been experiencing for months, made me more constipated, and worsened the depression that this whole experience had created.

On the first day of infusions, I noticed an almost immediate loss of that depression and malaise. It could have been simply the hope involved in trying a new treatment, but it felt like there was a more physical, medical connection. It made me even more sure of the brain-gut connection and the ability of our flora to effect our emotions. I remained constipated for a couple days, but on the morning of the third day, I woke up to an immediate, easy, giant, solid BM. Those easy morning BMs have continued, except for one more bad day on day 5. Tomorrow will be the last infusion and then time will tell how well the new bacteria will colonize my gut.

The bloating after meals remains so I think it is a related but separate issue. Like I said before, it didn't start until a week or so into the constipation flares, after I had eaten lots of fibrous foods and taken probiotics in trying to move things along. If it does not fade with time, I'm definitely going to get tested for SIBO, and then treat that somehow, possibly following up with more transplants to keep things moving well.

Fecal Transplants: The Turd Twister & A Historical Account

2011-08-08T16:09:00.001-06:00

I have been voraciously exploring the world of human gut bacteria, fecal transplants, and the like as of late, and I wanted to update all you readers with some information that I've found particularly invaluable. Well, okay the first bit of info isn't invaluable, per se, but it is pretty funny. My awesome aunt, a frequent reader of this blog, recently sent me something she dug up as she was preparing for an estate sale. I don't know if anybody else out there has heard of this. It's called a "Turd Twister." I thought it would make a great gag gift, especially for a potential fecal transplant donor. There are many wonderful shapes that can be produced and presented with this device! Anyway, the version I received is kind of old school and uses hard cardboard, but for more serious turd twisters, you might want to check out the website for a modern and far more comfortable-looking model.

Next, I wanted to reiterate a point I made in the comments of a previous post in order to further bolster the merits of the "sh*tshake" method. Here is a comment from "Mike K" on the Freakanomics radio show website:

Forty years ago, we treated antibiotic resistant bacteria in the colon by giving the patient a dose of antibiotic sensitive E. coli in a malted milkshake. The sensitive bacteria would replace the resistant bacteria in a day or so. Our theory, or that of my professor who devised the treatment, was that “wild” or sensitive bacteria are better adapted to the normal colon environment. Antibiotic resistant bacteria can only take over when the sensitive bacteria are killed off by antibiotics, as when a patient has been treated for an infection like diverticulitis. When the antibiotics are stopped, the normal sensitive bacteria will quickly oust the resistant ones which are less adapted for life in a normal colon. All that is necessary is to provide a dose of the normal wild bacteria.

In the County Hospital, we used the same method although we did not have the nicety of cultured sensitive bacteria. We would take a fecal sample from a healthy patient coming in for hernia surgery, for example, and give it to the patient in a milkshake.

Needless to say that none of the patients were ever told the extra ingredient of the milk shake.

This marks the second time I have heard of a fecal transplant used in such a manner. The first time was from a retired nurse who basically said the same thing. What surprised me in both cases is that the amount of "donation" required was minimal enough for the patients to not even realize they were drinking a poo concoction. Also, one might think that the milk would cause a serious acid dump in the stomach and kill the beneficial bacteria, but this didn't seem to happen. Must be a strength in numbers thing. Anyway, this just goes to show that the essence of the fecal transplant's magic is actually pretty simple, and it certainly doesn't require some of the exorbitant costs and methods of implementation that are associated with it.

Next up, I have a very juicy post to share about an adventurous blog reader, Ben, and his recent foray into the fascinating world of home fecal transplants.
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My Intestinal Saga, Part 10: Final Thoughts (cont'd.)

2011-07-08T13:57:00.002-06:00

Okay, let's add some more notes to parts 5 through 9 of of the saga.

Part 5, Monastyrsky and Kwasniewski: The most important lesson I learned from this time period was that the heaviness in my body was directly related to being constipated 24/7, and that there were ways to restore my intestinal motility. I highly recommend Monastyrsky's book, Fiber Menace, to anybody interested in the ins and outs (pun intended) of digestion and how to maintain a smoothly functioning GI tract, as this is what ultimately opened my eyes. This book has a combination of the author's deep experience and thorough research, which makes it a very powerful read. His recommendations are solid and very helpful to most modern people struggling with GI problems.

Part 6, It's All Digestive My Dear Watson: Damn, I wish I could eat all the fat I wanted without having gut issues. Maybe someday I'll be able to if I ever resolve things completely. Until then, I have to actually keep fat consumption at moderate to low levels because I get the same symptoms as I described in this post: the bad breath, the muscle tension, the bloating, the insomnia. All of these things I believe are related to the slow motility of my intestines. And I discovered this by thoroughly observing my body's response to eating food. This is a fine art, and it requires an understanding of just how food travels through the body.

I have found through talking with others that the one place many folks get tripped up in evaluating their own bodies' digestive capacity is not knowing their symptoms connect with very specific parts of the GI tract. For example, I have heard many people complain about "feeling full" after a meal, and they'll often say that their "stomach is full." Yet, when I see where their hands go to describe this fullness, I realize it is not their stomach that is full at all -- it is actually their lower abdomen that is bloated and uncomfortable. The stomach, of course, is just below the sternum a little to the left -- not around the belly button. So this "fullness" is most likely coming from the last part of the small intestines. This region is probably bloated from some kind of dysfunction and is putting pressure on the GI tract above it, including the stomach -- which gives the sensation of having eaten too much. Knowing about little things like this can help a person really narrow down and target their specific digestive ailments.

Part 7, The Holy Grail of Probiotics ... Part 8, A Fecal Transplant Story ... Part 9, The Long Journey of Mister Poop: I'm covering all of these parts together because they fall under the same general category: taking someone else's poo and putting it in my body to restore intestinal flora. There are many things that I would do differently now if I did the procedure again -- possibly antibiotics before the implant; better donor selection; make a more palatable concoction and pinch my nose (!) while drinking. I'll outline my plan in more detail in an upcoming blog post. For now, I will say that I have not ruled out this procedure and still have great hope for its use in the near future.

I believe very deeply that this is the ultimate tool in regaining digestive health and it deserves far more attention and research than it is currently getting. However, word is definitely getting out, and I'm encouraged by some of the latest coverage of the treatment. Here's a list of very recent and active links that I've found regarding fecal transplants:

Freakanomics Radio: The Power of Poop -- A good primer for potential donors on the merits of the procedure. And it's entertaining.
Fecal Transplant - I Took the Plunge! -- On the "Healing Well" forum. Exhaustive 5-part resource on individual experiences and questions regarding the treatment.
Home Fecal Transplants -- A group of people attempting transplants. Some are beginning to consider doing an oral transplant similar to the one I did.

How Are Things Now?

I am currently fairly stable in my gut as long as I follow certain rules that seem to work for me:

1) Low fiber diet: in addition to meat, butter, cheese, etc., I eat white rice or peeled potatoes for my starches and occasional bowls of homemade ice cream (with unrefined sugar).

2) No gluten: this without a doubt keeps my GI tract stable and happy.

3) Magnesium supplementation: prevents hard stools better than anything else I've tried.

4) Pancreatic enzymes: these appear to aid the digestion of foods in my stomach, particularly starches.

5) Moderate to low protein and fat: if I don't gorge on meat and fat (as much as I want to), things remain stable.

6) Two meals a day: this gives my digestive tract time to rest and be free of symptoms, and it appears to allow me to sleep through most of the night without intestinal disturbances.

7) Chewing fennel seeds: three or four times a day I'll grab a pinch of fennel seeds and chew them like gum. I extract as much of the beneficial oils as possible before spitting out the fiber (when there is no taste left). Really helps with expelling trapped gas and relaxing the gut.

When following these guidelines consistently, I find that my bloating is very minimal, my muscles have very little tension, and my mind is clear and focused. Overall, I just have more energy.

This Is (Not) the End, My Friend

Well, here we are at the finish of my intestinal saga -- at least for now. There will certainly be more updates in the future as I continue to discover more and more about my condition. I still have a great amount of curiosity in exploring the mystery that is my GI tract, and only time will tell what kinds of crazy treatments I might stumble upon. One thing all of you out there in blogger land can be sure of is this: you will hear about it. Thanks for reading -- and happy digesting!
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My Intestinal Saga, Part 10: Final Thoughts

2011-07-01T15:55:00.001-06:00

For this final installment of "My Intestinal Saga," I wanted to add a few notes and resources to each of the previous parts before I close with an assessment of where I am now, as well as ideas I have to further improve -- or possibly completely resolve -- my digestive problems. I would appreciate any input from others, as well. Please leave a comment if you think you might have more insight into all this gut stuff. Here we go again down the long, hollow tube!

Part 1, Dabbling in Parasites: Here I delve into my childhood health issues a bit, which included headaches and TMJ (tempromadibular joint) disorder. My best guess as to why these things were happening is the same reason that I experienced them in a more mild form as I grew older: digestive tension/pain. There is a direct correlation for me. I believe I had a problem with gluten as a young child, and this created a poor digestive environment and subsequent pain in the GI tract that referred pain and tension to my neck and jaw. Here is a quote from a great blog post explaining this phenomenon:

In a nutshell, referred pain happens when nerve fibers from regions of high sensory input (such as the skin) and nerve fibers from regions of normally low sensory input (such as the internal organs) happen to converge on the same levels of the spinal cord.

This is something to keep in mind for folks out there engaged in your own health explorations. The body can be a tricky bugger sometimes, so it is important to stay open to what the origins of your discomforts truly are.

I also want to expand upon some of the thoughts I had in this post about bloating. I was completely unaware that the bloating was a simple distention of my belly and not an actual "gut." This unawareness created body image issues for me, as I thought I was fat and struggled to get rid of the belly. No matter how hard I worked out, it remained, and it left me feeling frustrated and inadequate. I imagine there are others out there for whom this may be the case, and I just want to say that bloating is not fat! Even today, I can see my belly go flat and distend over a matter of hours depending on my mealtimes, types of foods eaten, etc.

Part 2, Lower Back Pain: This is where I discovered the magic of referred pain and what measures I truly needed to take to resolve it. The tweaking of my back left me debilitated, and at that time I thought it was because I had a "bad back." This turned out to not be the case, as I found out while working in the wilderness, where my back pain disappeared while eating very little. It was all digestive, once again.

I want to share a wonderful resource that I came across a few years ago that shed a lot of light on how digestion is connected to much of the pain and discomfort I have felt in my life. It is a book called, The Digestive Awareness Diet. Interestingly enough, the author actually says that the reason we suddenly throw out our back or get a tweak in our neck isn't from muscle strain, but digestive tension. This certainly rang true for me. Check it out. It might help you better understand your body. I know it helped me.

A few more resources about general body awareness that might be useful which I utilized during my "yoga years" are the Feldenkrais Method and the Alexander Technique, both of which got me thinking about posture and what is and isn't the natural, optimal use of the human body -- or "use" for short. One of the authors even suggested something I had already intuited: observing little kids and indigenous people to understand proper use. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that resolving digestive tension is a big part of regaining our bodies' natural ease. Utilizing the body awareness techniques in combination with digestive understanding is a potent combination in restoring some of the light and easy feelings we are supposed to have in our bodies.

Part 3, Making Connections: Ahh, the wondrous world of the ileocecal valve (I found this page randomly on Facebook -- I am one of two people that like it so far. Ha!). Some natural health practitioners believe this is the root of many of our digestive ailments. All I know is that it was directly related to my back pain. The interesting thing is that once I got my posture back on point after doing yoga and the aforementioned body awareness methods, I was able to feel the pain exactly where it was -- my lower right abdomen -- as opposed to thinking it was only my back muscles acting up. This reinforces the idea that, in order to come to more full understanding of what's happening in the body, an individual must use a multi-faceted approach to health observation.

Part 4, Gurus and Rotten Meat: One interesting occurrence from this period of wild dietary experimentation was a complete malabsorption of fat. Looking back, I believe this was due to my duodenum just beginning to recover from years of being beat down by the gluten in my diet. A classic consequence of such a beating is flattened microvilli, which inevitably leads to the poor processing of proteins and fats. There is also a chance that Giardia played a role in this process. Whatever the case may be, this problem resolved on its own after several months.

The chest pain I experienced during this time was exclusively due, once again, to digestive stress. The chest pain was most likely my stomach being unable to resist the huge amounts of acid it was all of the sudden releasing for my high-meat diet. I'm sure it was in a weakened state from years of malnourishment. I swore I was having a heart attack.

I also describe a "heavy" feeling in the entirety of my body. I believe this was a result of very slow intestinal motility and the hard stools I was constantly having. Another symptom I didn't mention at this time was shallow breathing, presumably from the stiffness of my abdomen. I have heard accounts from others of a similar phenomenon, and it is something that I still have now and again.

Final thoughts on "My Intestinal Saga" to be continued ...
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Accepting Donations From My Fellow Health Nerds

2011-06-30T17:39:00.000-06:00

If you look to the right of my blog, you'll notice that I've set up a donation button for anybody interested in supporting this blog and my health explorations. I would appreciate any amount you can offer. I also accept gifts through the mail, such as gluten-free cookies or books that might be of interest to me. Mostly, I just want cookies. Donations of healthy poo -- freeze-dried and neatly packaged -- for my next attempt at a fecal transplant will be assessed on a case-by-case basis. (Kidding!) Thank you. :-)
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My Intestinal Saga, Part 9: The Long Journey of Mister Poop

2011-06-28T14:07:00.002-06:00

Having decided that the best way to treat the entirety of my GI tract with a fecal transplant was through the oral route rather than rectally, I pondered just how in the heck I would get myself to consume my friend's sh*t -- I mean, it can't taste good, right? Hmm. Probably not. Then there was the problem of administering the concoction. I didn't have a nasojejunal tube and sedatives, as Borody's clinic does, so I would certainly have to just toss it down the hatch and pinch my nose. One woman I was in contact with -- a retired nurse -- said that fecal bacteriotherapy used to be around in her day (the 60s) as a last resort therapy for ailing patients, and it often worked (interestingly enough without antibiotic or colon lavage preparation procedures). How did they administer the therapy back then? Milk + poo. A sh*t-shake. I thought this would be an easy and perhaps even pleasant way to go. Heck, I might even have a burger and fries with it.

So, on day three of my adventure in feces shenanigans, I popped open the yogurt container with my donor's deposit inside. Stinky! (Duh.) I mixed a bit of the stool with water and strained it into a mason jar. I had some goat milk on hand and stirred it in. The mad scientist was at it again, and nobody could stop him. I looked at the whitish-brown beverage in front of me. For a second I thought about sweetening it or something, but I had already begun to feel my body and mind rejecting the idea of consuming the liquid, so it was now or never. Just do the damn thing before doubt takes over. Glass to lips, in it went. Oh, dear God! It was the most acrid taste I've ever experienced in my entire life. My gag reflex kicked in and almost kept me from swallowing, but somehow I managed to get it down. Gurgle! Gulp! ... Holy sh*t. I just ate sh*t. The horrible taste remained, so I immediately began rinsing my mouth and smearing toothpaste all over my gums. I must have rinsed for 20 minutes. During this time, I realized I could have probably at least pinched my nose while I drank the poo drink. Oh well.

And so the millions of bacteria were now in my stomach doing God knows what. The long journey of mister poop had begun! Thankfully, I had no need to vomit. In fact, besides the objectionable taste, it was a downright quick and painless experience. I wondered how this would turn out. Would I have diarrhea or a food-poisoning kind of episode? Only time would tell. Surprisingly, that evening, as I laid down to go to bed, I had a feeling that I hadn't had since I ate very little food for several years and did yoga and meditation every day. It was a feeling of complete and total comfort in my gut -- my body felt 100% relaxed. I think it worked! I fell asleep quickly and woke in the morning feeling refreshed and energetic. I remember playing guitar and singing that day -- my voice was smoother than it had ever been. I presumed this was due to my stomach not being bloated and stiff, so I could finally breathe fully again. Amazing!

The afternoon rolled around and I felt a strong urge to sh*t. When I did, it happened very quickly and without difficulty -- definitely something new for me, since I was usually the opposite. It was a soft, well-formed stool and, hot damn, it smelled just like my friend's poo! The poo cocktail must have survived the acid bath of the stomach and traveled the entire length of the intestinal tract. The question was, would these feelings remain? Unfortunately, they didn't. That evening, I had trouble sleeping again and woke the next morning to another difficult bowel movement. "Well," I thought, "maybe it will take some time for the bacteria to fully establish." I was certainly done drinking sh*t-shakes, so I decided to stop the experiment. Everything returned to "business as usual" in my intestines, and I decided that most impressive conclusion of this experiment was that nothing changed, good or bad.

Up next, Part 10 of "My Intestinal Saga" -- final thoughts ...

My Intestinal Saga, Part 8: A Fecal Transplant Story

2011-05-26T14:58:00.001-06:00

I've done a lot of crazy things in my life. I dropped a college scholarship to go live on an isolated homestead with a mountain man named Peter Bigfoot. I lived in my car in frigid cold temperatures in the foothills of the Chiricahua Mountains, waking up in the middle of the night to high speed winds rocking my vehicle and groups of 50 illegal immigrants passing by; border patrol agents would flash their lights in my windows hours later. I did several survival trips into the wilderness with little or no gear, sleeping on the cold hard ground and eating cactus, lily bulbs, any creature I could get my hands on -- lizards, rodents, grasshoppers, scorpions. I went for years as a low-calorie, highly-active vegetarian, working as a wilderness guide for troubled youth for weeks at a time and hiking many miles on nothing but lentils and ash cakes. I jumped into dumpsters to retrieve ripe avocados and flour tortillas to avoid buying food from our country's faulty factory-farm system. I ate rotten meat because I thought it would improve my health based on the recommendations of a guy who calls himself Aajonus. Oh, and I worked in a retail store at the mall once.

My friend and yours ... Fleet Eneman!

But all of that pales in comparison to the gastrointestinal exploration I was about to embark on. Bathroom door closed behind me, a sealed yogurt container in front of me. I popped the lid. Smelled like sh*t. Looked like sh*t. It was definitely sh*t. My friend had left it for me that morning, a gift -- "the good sh*t," we had earlier joked. It was helpful to have a sense of humor around such an odd and awkward circumstance. But with the backing of an MD and an ND, hours and hours of research, and the home infusion protocol in hand, I was confident in this circumstance. I decided to skip the antibiotics in the protocol because I wanted to avoid them if I could, and I wondered if things would work without this step. I also didn't do a colon lavage or bother to get any saline solution for mixing. I wanted to see what would happen if I just did the damn thing with no preparation.

So this was it. Now or never. My friend's turd was my medicine. I scooped out some poo with a spoon and mixed it in a separate container with a little water until I had a brown slurry. I then poured the slurry through a strainer into another container. This watery sh*t shake was then streamed into a small fleet enema bottle, after which the I screwed on the probe-like lid. The concoction was prepared. The mad scientist in me became excited for the unknown results of what I was about to do. I got in enema position. Then in it went, where the sun don't shine. Squirt. I held it, got up, cleaned up, and left the bathroom that cold winter morning with somebody else's crap in my colon.

I went about my day as usual, preparing some breakfast and sitting down to eat. "Hmm. No difference so far." About two hours later, I felt the urge to "drop the kids off at the pool." To my surprise, what came out wasn't my usual brew -- it smelled and looked exactly like my friend's sh*t. And it came out much easier than was usual for me. Okay, so obviously my donor's bacteria had multiplied and formed stool in my colon. But would that last? To my disappointment, I had my usual hard stools that evening. The next morning I did the protocol again with the same result. Again the following morning. Damn. Something isn't right. I realized I might not be getting the bacteria far enough up the colon to make a difference. In Borody's clinic they often implant the feces deep in the colon through a colonoscopy instrument -- all I had was a little squirt bottle. Add in the fact that my bowel problems appeared to be more in my small intestine near my ileocecal valve, and I decided I needed to treat more than just the first few bends of my colon. Knowing it wasn't possible at home to replicate the clinical procedure, I began pondering another route to get deeper into the GI tract. Borody had employed another method of fecal transplant which involved a "nasojejunal tube." This instrument was basically a complicated way of getting the feces into the small bowel through the nasal passage and stomach. Well I wasn't about to snort some sh*t. But crazy as it sounds, I was strongly considering drinking a sh*t shake.

Part 9 of "My Intestinal Saga" coming soon ...
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My Intestinal Saga, Part 7: The Holy Grail of Probiotics

2011-05-23T13:34:00.005-06:00

At the end of my rope after years of irritating intestinal symptoms, I decided there had to be something out there that was a silver bullet -- something that would end my problems for good and allow me to live my life free of abdominal discomfort and 3 A.M. insomnia. Manipulating my pattern of eating only helped mildly and did not work as a long term fix. I was on a maintenance plan of suboptimal health, and I was tired of it -- ready to try anything.

Me and my dog. Note the sh*t-eating grins.

One sunny winter day, on a hike with my dog in the mountains of southern Utah, I was pondering what else I could try that I hadn't already. My thoughts were abruptly interrupted by a grotesque munching sound: Chomp, squish, blurg! It was my little black lab enjoying some fresh cow dung. I'd seen her do this countless times in her puppy years, and I always figured she was getting a healthy dose of beneficial bacteria with every squishy bite -- perhaps to stimulate her immune system or to settle her stomach. In a sense, my pup was happily choking down natural probiotics in that slurry of cow excrement. As I witnessed this phenomenon for the umpteenth time, a light bulb went off in my head: "That bovine poo must be absolutely teeming with hundreds of species of millions of bacteria -- probably in greater diversity than could ever be produced in a laboratory. I wonder if there are any accounts of humans eating feces for health as some animals appear to. And, if so, could this be something that would help me?" Not the weirdest thought I've ever had, but certainly up there on the list.

I voraciously researched the internet for anything relating to humans and feces consumption that wasn't connected to some odd fetish or mental disease. My first lead came from a humorous website, called "The Straight Dope." This website answers questions people have about random, often shocking subjects. A woman had written in to ask whether or not coprophagia -- sh*t eating -- was dangerous for humans. The website authors, who actually appeared to be quite intelligent despite the mocking and sarcastic nature of the site, dug into some research to answer her question the best they could. What they found, in a scientific journal, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, was this:

... consumption of fresh, warm camel feces has been recommended by Bedouins as a remedy for bacterial dysentery; its efficacy (probably attributable to the antibiotic subtilisin from Bacillus subtilis) was confirmed by German soldiers in Africa during World War II.

Fascinating! A bacterial remedy for a bacterial illness. So, did I go out and eat cow dung after reading this? As tempting as it was to a crazy, fringe health dude like myself, I decided to do some more research first. After coming across other counterintuitive silver bullets in reversing disease, such as helminthic (worm) therapy, and coming full circle reading about Aajonus Vonderplanitz (God, I love that name) and his recommendations to eat animal crap, I finally stumbled upon what appeared to be a scientifically-validated therapy for gut issues, called "fecal bacteriotherapy" or "fecal transplant." In a paper, called "Bacteriotherapy Using Fecal Flora: Toying With Human Motions," Austrailian gastroenterologist, Thomas Borody, outlined the historical and scientific precedence for a procedure he developed to treat severe digestive diseases. What was this procedure? Basically, he was implanting the feces of healthy people into sick people -- orally or rectally -- and achieving amazing results, not the least of which was a long term remission of crohn's disease. Holy sh*t.

I found out that Borody offered this procedure in his clinic in Australia. Well, I wasn't about to fly to Australia and pay thousands of dollars to eat feces when I could probably do it just as well at home. (Wow. That would be a funny sentence to quote out of context.) Sure enough, I found a "human probiotic home infusion protocol" (nice euphemism) that I could use in collaboration with a doctor and a donor. This protocol described how to go about doing an enema with a poo mixture. To my surprise, my doctor had already heard of the therapy, and I quickly found a donor in a friend of mine who was healthy and free of bowel problems (or so I thought after interviewing him -- more on that later). After having my friend, who I was about to become incredibly intimate with, tested for all the bad bugs and viruses that could be transferred in human feces -- and once more consulting with my M.D. -- I was ready to take the leap.

Part 8 of "My Intestinal Saga" -- it gets even better -- up next ...
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My Intestinal Saga, Part 6: It's All Digestive, My Dear Watson

2011-03-31T15:17:00.002-06:00

On Kwasniewski's Optimal Diet, I felt the strongest I had felt since I was a high school athlete working out at the gym 6 days a week. My body composition was extremely desirable to me. I felt solid and seemed to build muscle very easily. Eating gobs and gobs of fat along with just enough protein, I was never unsatisfied with meals. The satiety factor of this dietary pattern was incredible, and I happily stuck to it for close to a year even though I had odd muscle tension throughout my body and would toss and turn in my sleep, sometimes waking up for three hours around 3:00 A.M. My breath also was absolutely horrible, as my girlfriend at the time made perfectly clear to me. There were so many things right with the Optimal Diet and, yet, so many things were wrong. I had the body and strength that I wanted, but, good Lord, was I slothful at times.

Me on the Optimal Diet

During the Optimal Diet, I began to tweak my mealtimes to see whether or not my symptoms were fully attributed to the digestion and absorption of my food. I experimented with one meal a day, which was easy to do and get adequate calories from since the foods I was eating were so low in fiber and very calorically dense. As I had expected, my symptoms suddenly became isolated to certain times, depending on when I ate.

First, an hour after eating, my chest would usually begin hurting and feeling tender and then subside over another hour. Also during this time, I would often get a headache and a bit of lower abdominal discomfort along with a unique "pins and needles" feeling in my chest/upper abdomen. About 8-10 hours after the large meal, in addition to bloating, I'd feel heaviness come over me in the form of shoulder, abdominal, and -- oddly enough -- left calf tension. From my studies of human digestion, I knew this is when the food would have been traveling through my small intestine (food typically empties from the stomach in 3 hours). So I thought maybe something was wrong with that part of my GI tract, but had no clue what it could be. Sometimes the abdominal tension (which felt like a rock) would be so bad that it would "push up" my stomach, and I'd actually have to vomit. Taking the experiment further, I learned that if I fasted for a day, I would feel absolutely amazing the entire next day. Upon eating again, I'd experience some "tender chest" pain, but no "pins and needles," headache or lower abdominal discomfort. I realized after eating the next day and then feeling those symptoms coming on that they were actually happening 24 hours after my last meal. I came to call these the "24 hour symptoms" as a result of this discovery. The "8-10 hour symptoms" consistently happened the same time after mealtime.

So I had my answer. My detective work paid off. It was all digestive. It wasn't "all in my head" as some of my close friends and family suggested. It wasn't due to poor posture or not exercising enough. It wasn't because I was some kind of hypochondriac. It was because I had friggin' digestive problems.

Abdominal/Pelvic CT scan

At this point, some of you may be thinking, "Ryan, why the heck didn't you just go to a doctor to diagnose all of this?" Well, I did. I saw quite a few M.D.'s, Naturopaths, and body workers, and they all provided some pieces of the puzzle, but I never got a definitive answer from any of them. I was subjected to various tests, as well -- barium swallow abdominal/pelvic CT scan, gall bladder ultrasound, and stool/blood analyses of all kinds -- and nothing informed me that I had specific digestive problems. Yet, here I was with direct experiential proof that all of my symptoms were, in fact, digestive.

I felt defeated, worn out -- ready to be done with these problems that plagued me over the years. I knew I was having GI problems, and I had tried the herbs, enzymes, HCL, etc., etc., and the only thing that worked was to either eat nothing or eat less. And to do that meant I would be back at an unhealthy weight, feeling weak and hungry. Wonderful. I was stuck with this sh*t. But I wasn't ready to give up. In fact, I was entirely prepared to do whatever it took to get well again. Onward into the fascinating world of *drumroll* fecal bacteriotherapy. Say what?! Yes, this is where it gets interesting, folks.

Part 7 coming up next. Warning: May not be suitable for the squeamish!

My Intestinal Saga, Part 5: Monastyrsky and Kwasniewski

2011-03-11T13:09:00.005-07:00

After my introduction to the man known as "The Bear," I followed the zero-carb "path" and ate nothing but rare-cooked steaks, liver once in a while, bites of butter, and occasional eggs. To my surprise, I remained at a stable weight during this extreme dietary experiment. I also had energy to go on long walks, infrequent runs, and swim for hours whenever I could find a body of water large enough. Despite all of this energy, though, I was still bogged down by the same heaviness that I had felt since I began eating lots of meat again. The only thing that seemed to alleviate it was eating one meal a day in the evening, after which I would feel the heaviness but it would be gone by morning. The other problem I had -- hard stools -- was still plaguing me, as well.

In the meantime, I was still reading a lot of zero-carb material on the internet, trying to sort things out. One man, Jeff, started his own forum dedicated to proving that human beings thrive when there are no sugars and starches in the diet. He also made it a point to exhibit that, no matter how many calories he ate on a zero-carb diet, he would not gain or lose weight. At one point he was as high as 4,500 calories a day, literally drinking more than a quart of heavy cream each day. He also was out to show that exercise is completely different while avoiding carbs and eating an extremely high-fat diet, and his daily and weekly logs displayed how many miles he'd ran and how he felt for days afterwards. One thing that struck me was that he claimed to not feel sore at all after running over 20 miles in a day -- this coming from a guy that was not, by any means, a runner before the experiment. I was certainly impressed by all of this and similar reports from others, so I kept on with zero-carb hoping that I would adjust as other folks had.

I never adjusted, and I was starting to get frustrated. Spending time on forums, I couldn't find anyone that shared a similar predicament aside from a handful of folks. I had a few "gut buddies" who related to much of what I had going on, and we would all communicate what seemed to be working and what wasn't. We each individually tried manipulating our eating patterns and supplementing digestive aids like enzymes, herbs, probiotics, and all of those things that are typically recommended to people with the catch-all health problem known as "irritable bowel syndrome." While some approaches appeared to have benefit, by and large nothing did the trick. In the end, we still had the same symptoms. Seeking to deepen my understanding of what was going on, I returned to studying the human digestive tract. I payed careful attention to where I was feeling what and how the symptoms could be related to certain organs and functions within my GI tract. Much of the information I came across was pretty dry and lacked experience. I needed to find someone who had resolved his or her digestive problems experientially and could help me along. The problem was that every digestion expert out there seemed to recommend fiber as the Holy Grail of gut reparation. I was already skeptical of this method of improving intestinal problems because 1) it hadn't worked for me and 2) fiber appeared to be completely unnecessary in digestive functions anyway -- lots of folks I was in contact with weren't having any problem with a zero-fiber diet. But why the heck was I having problems? Enter Konstantin Monastyrsky, author of a book called Fiber Menace.

I caught wind of Mr. Monastyrsky's gut manifesto on a forum I frequented. Reading excerpts from his book, I knew this was the guy to learn from. His story was very similar to mine -- a vegetarian who developed digestive problems and then realized that things needed to change. Fiber only seemed to make his problems worse, and so Monastyrsky looked at other means of getting well again, delving into medical texts and other research to find out more about human physiology. Like me, he was a health detective, and he labeled this approach to wellness "Forensic Nutrition." In Fiber Menace, Monastyrsky laid out the fundamentals of what got him better and built a strong case against many of the mainstream health mantras of our time, such as the supposed "dangers" of a low-carb diet and the necessity of drinking eight glasses of water a day. I found his viewpoints fascinating and quickly devoured his book. Shortly thereafter, I tried out some of his supplement recommendations, which included a non-habit-forming laxative (a form of vitmain C) and probiotic bacteria with small amounts of soluble fibers to feed them. These were things I'd tried before, but for some reason I always ran into problems with. But when I tried Monastyrsky's supplement regimen, I was free of hard stools for the first time in several months. Astoundingly, the heaviness in my body went away, and I felt lighter and tension free like I hadn't in a very long time -- probably since I had been eating very little food as a vegetarian.

Dr. Jan Kwasniewski

After a close to a year of eating zero carbohydrates, I began to feel like it was time to eat like a somewhat normal human being again. I wanted to add some starches back into my diet, but not so much as to disturb the "keto-adaptation" (a term coined by The Bear) I had worked hard to achieve. I still wanted my body to use fat for fuel, as this felt like very efficient energy and I had certainly grown used to it. So I went with what I felt was a good dietary transition and began the "Optimal Diet" -- a way of eating developed by a Polish doctor, Jan Kwasniewski. This diet was all about the ratio of protein, fats and carbohydrates and keeping them in balance to achieve optimal health. The ratio to be followed was 1 : 2.5-3.5 : 0.5 -- protein : fat : carbohydrates. What that meant was that I would literally be eating sticks of butter and drinking heavy cream. And I did gladly. I love fat. Always have. Always will. So it was easy to eat the Optimal Diet -- however, the heaviness seemed to return as I began eating more consistently and the supplements I was on slowly started to lose their effectiveness. Crap. Could I ever win?

Part 6 of "My Intestinal Saga" coming soon ...
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Palate Expansion Update, 2/27/11: Finally Got It!

2011-02-27T14:15:00.007-07:00

The Homeoblock appliance with case and advancement tool.

On my way home from Arizona, I swung by Dr. Darlington's office for an appointment to fit my Homeoblock and take it home with me. Dr. Darlington, as usual, was very kind and accommodating to my needs as a patient living six hours away, scheduling the appointment for when it was most convenient for me. The Homeoblock fitting and insertion procedure took about a half-hour due to the upper palate device not fitting very well. It was a back-and-forth scenario with Dr. Darlington inserting the appliance and then me giving him feedback on how it felt. There was some discomfort around my gums, and he adjusted the Homeoblock with small pliers to fix it (similar to what is seen in this training video by Dr. Belfor). I was pretty surprised how easy and painless it all was. I was also relieved to find out that I would only be wearing the appliance at night, rather than all day and night for a few months as I initially thought.

The upper Homeoblock fit well enough, although I still felt that it wasn't optimal. Dr. Darlington said I could adjust the wiring as I needed to when I got home with my fingers, so I wasn't too worried about it and decided to get back on the road. The Homeoblock was given to me in a retainer-like case with an adjustment tool to advance the appliance a quarter turn each week. It's a pretty slick system.

At home, I made sure to take some "before" pictures to compare later down the line when I finally look like the Neanderthal that I've always wanted to. Kidding. But it will be interesting to see what changes occur, however subtle. Here's some of my mug shots to show you all what I'm working with. Please understand that I sacrificed a great beard so that my facial structure can be seen for what it really is -- all in the name of science. First face pictures:

Note the yellow line above that I drew on my face to illustrate its lack of symmetry. The left side appears to droop down, particularly noticeable by observing the eyes and lips. In the picture on the right, you'll notice that while smiling there is a definite natural face lift going on for me, but there is still marked asymmetry around the nose. Now let's take a look at my glorious upper and lower palate as they are now.

On the far left, you can see how my teeth come together off centered. My lower palate (center) is pretty narrow and my front teeth are slightly overlapping due to years of shifting (I got my braces off at age 13). On the right is my upper palate and a similar process is underway with one tooth in particular poking out a bit. Of course, also note that neither palate has the wisdom teeth courtesy of my high school orthodontist.

After analyzing my facial features and chompers, I was excited to try the much-anticipated Homeoblock out that night. I inserted it right before bed, slept through the night fine (besides a little excessive drooling), and woke up to fairly sore teeth. Things were definitely moving! My jaw felt like it had a bit of a workout. I could still eat solid foods and the soreness went away after a few hours in the day. The next night, I decided to try to adjust the upper Homeoblock to get it to fit better. I toyed around with it a bit much, apparently, as one of the wires snapped! "Well, it was an interesting $1700 experiment while it lasted," I thought to myself. So I wore only the bottom palate that night. I called Dr. Darlington the following day to inform him of what had happened. He said to just send it to him and he can get it fixed, and since it still seemed to not fit well, he would replace the broken wire with a "ball joint" to see if that helped. If it didn't we could just have a new upper palate Homeoblock made from a freshly formed cast of my mouth. Great! I really feel supported by Dr. Darlington, and I'm grateful that this is all covered under the initial cost that I paid.

So I should get my upper Homeoblock back next week sometime. Until then, the doc said that it would be fine to wear my lower palate appliance. I will update everyone once I pass the two or three week mark with that. Also, I would like to compare the Homeoblock with Damon Braces at some point. I am awaiting Dr. Belfor's thoughts on this subject when he returns from traveling.

One more thing. Those of you interested in the subject of adult facial enhancement should drop by Nourishing Nancy's website to keep up with her updates on the Damon Braces system. She has already seen very significant results!
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Return From Wintercount

2011-02-27T14:13:00.000-07:00

It was another great time at the Wintercount Primitive Skills Rendevous this year. Beautiful weather and beautiful people; primitive skills galore and amazing speakers and discussions; and, as always, a wonderful sense of community in the Arizona desert. Now that I'm back in freezing cold Utah, I'm kind of kicking myself for not getting more sun while down south. Oh well, I guess I'll have to keep up my vitamin D stores through food.

My class on Primitive Nutrition and Health was a blast to teach. The folks in attendance were very engaged and had lots of insight and knowledge to share. I'm always amazed by the collective wisdom of a group of people, and the discussions that came about from this particular group were quite thought-provoking, to say the least. I'm especially grateful for the folks that were well-versed in some of the finer details of human evolution, which really added a lot to the class. It was also fun hearing others' stories about diet and health and their response to some of the material I provided. One man, who had been on a diet of donuts and soda, expressed his relief that to eat healthy doesn't mean that you have to munch on baby carrots and celery all day long -- and that a diet of steak and potatoes is a viable way to achieve wellness. He liked that idea very much.

Wintercount Primitive Skills Rendezvous 2011

2011-02-08T12:19:00.000-07:00

I'm off to Arizona for the yearly primitive skills gathering, Wintercount. I'm looking forward to going "abo" for an entire week and teaching a few classes. This year, I'll be covering the history of the human diet -- from paleolithic to modern -- and the studies of Weston A. Price once again, along with an edible Sonoran Desert plants walk. I'm hoping to learn more about the atlatl, as well, as I want to set up a range at the wilderness rehab I work for. Should be a good time. If any of you blog readers out there are planning on being there, I'd love to meet you!

I'm also planning on picking up my Homeoblock on the way back, so I'll update everyone on the details on that upon my return. See you in a week or so!

My Intestinal Saga, Part 4: Gurus and Rotten Meat

2011-01-24T15:22:00.000-07:00

Rotting meat in mason jars.

So there I was. It was late summer 2006. The sweltering Tucson sun beat down on the city relentlessly. White tail doves could be heard flapping and cooing on rooftops and power lines, and the cicadas' symphony was in full swing. I sat inside, bathing in the cool air of the swamp cooler, a plate of raw ground beef sitting in front of me. I took a bite. It went down easy. I took another and my body screamed for more and more -- so I fed it. I followed the meat with a few spoonfuls of raw, "unheated," honey and some raw butter. I was satisfied like I hadn't felt in years. And it was all thanks to a man by the odd name of Aajonus Vonderplanitz and his book, The Recipe For Living Without Disease. In this book, Vonderplanitz outlined the key to optimal health and vitality through food, and it enthralled me. Raw meat, unheated honey, raw dairy, raw vegetable juices -- these were the ingredients to becoming well again, and I had no problem eating all I wanted and enjoying the heck out of it. My family and friends were somewhat worried about me at his point. Salmonella, E. Coli, and countless other bacteria existed in raw food products -- how would this negatively affect my health, particularly my already stressed out gut? Surely I would get food poisoning at the very least. And straight butter? Heart attack city! Well, after several weeks of the eating all of the foods suggested by the quirky Aajonus, I was happy to report that I had absolutely no problems. In fact, I had more energy than I could remember feeling in my whole life. Then I thought, "Hmm. I wonder if I could feel even healthier?"

Aajonus Vonderplanitz believed if raw meat was healthy, then rotten or "high" meat is probably even healthier. The Inuit traditionally enjoyed rotted flesh as part of their diet, and so did many cultures around the world. I was insanely curious about this. Would it feel good in my body? Or would I get really sick? So I began making "high" meat -- filling mason jars with sliced up beef and airing them out every few days. Oddly enough, the rotten smell that developed over a few weeks began to please my senses. It smelled good, it looked good -- I couldn't wait to eat it. Then the day came when it was ready. So I took a jar filled with rotting, slimy meat outside, opened it, and reached in for my first taste of this supposed health elixir. I loved it. Weird, I know. It just tasted way good for some reason. Although the little white beads on the meat that had developed over the weeks somewhat disturbed me. Were these some kind of worm eggs or something? Was I ingesting parasites? Well, even if I was, Mr. Vonderplanitz assured me in his book that they would merely detox my body and consume my unneeded intestinal wastes. Win-win for me and my little worm buddies. They get to eat and I get better! Oh lord, I have done some interesting things in my life, and this one is up there on the list.

Again, much to my surprise, the most shocking thing that happened was -- well, that nothing happened. I remained healthy and feeling quite good overall on my raw and rotten diet. After a few months of this "primal diet," I encountered something even more alluring in my continual research: the raw paleo diet. I joined a forum where there were a handful of folks experimenting with this diet -- consisting of nothing but raw meat and fat -- and experiencing great results. (Apparently these folks still exist.) Their stance on eating mostly organ meats made a lot of sense to me, as this was where the most nutrients exist, and if my goal was optimal health, well then I wanted all the nutrients I could get, gosh darn it! I began the raw paleo diet with enthusiasm, picking up raw liver and raw beef fat from the butcher at a local organic foods store. Damn, did that stuff taste good to me. I swear, at the time, the liver tasted like chocolate and the beef fat tasted like ice cream. Soon I was gorging on kidneys, spleens, tongues, and any other raw offal I could get my grubby little hands on.

Pretty soon I realized that zero-carb, raw paleo was the way to go (naturally, right?). I felt great -- well, for the most part. My back pain was pretty much gone at this point, but I seemed to have developed hard stools from the sudden transition to zero carbs + zero fiber. Not only that, but I began to see fat chunks in my stool, which, at first I thought were gall stones until, ahem, closer inspection. There also was this "heavy" feeling in my body at times, like I was walking underwater. Also, another problem --chest pain -- came about when I started to try to eat only one large meal a day, as some folks on the raw paleo forum were suggesting as the optimal eating pattern. It would sort of come and go and actually wasn't too bad ... until I tried to do some push-ups -- ouch. I thought I was having a heart attack. I calmed myself and decided that maybe it was just some kind of strain. It hurt horribly for two days.

The Bear

During my raw paleo stint, I was also floating around the Active Low-Carber forum and talking with some zero-carb folks on there. (You can probably still look up my posts; just search for my username, "rk900.") We were a ragtag bunch of wandering souls. There were people who swore that the only thing that kept their weight stable was absolutely no carbs -- not even too many eggs or liver. Others were on the paleo bandwagon. Still others were curious about the diet, but were not bought in due to fears of losing their cherished carbohydrates. I felt proud to be one of the few who was practicing full-on paleo zero-carb, just as primitive humans had done for millions of years before me (or so I thought). Then, all of the sudden a post appeared: "The real human diet is a totally carnivorous one." The author of the post was a man simply known as "The Bear." It began:

I have been eating the natural human dietary regime for over 47 years now. I do not eat anything whatsoever from vegetable sources. The only things veggie I use are spices. My diet is usually 60% fat and 40% protein by calories. I used to eat 80/20 when younger and about twice as much quantity of meat also, but that seems too much energy at my age, which is 71- even though I am very active. I think the body actually becomes more efficient with energy as you age, but I have no way of proving it true. Otherwise, my body today is very like it was at the age of 30. I figure most of what we call 'aging' is due to insulin damage to the collagen and other body structures. No carbs = no insulin. I don't heal quite as fast when injured as I did as a youngster, however. But I have few wrinkles, and my skin is still strong and elastic.

The guru had arrived. Responses came pouring in. The Bear had answers for everything. His healthy 47 years of experience with the zero-carb "regime" proved that modern humans could live well on such a diet without problems. There was a very strong divide on the forum: some loved him and others thought he was full of crap. One guy even started a dedicated blog on the "Zero Carb Path." The Bear validated everything I believed at the time, and I followed guru's advice on eating and living well. I still had the aforementioned problems with my gut, but decided that I felt better than any other time in my life, so I continued on "the path."

The saga continues in Part 5, coming soon.

Palate Expansion Update, 1/10/11: First Appointment

2011-01-10T12:51:00.003-07:00

Brief break from "My Intestinal Saga" to bring all you readers out there an update on my palate expansion pursuits ...

I'm a few weeks away from being an official homie on the block. I recently took a trip to Flagstaff, AZ for my first Homeoblock appointment. The dentist, Scott Darlington, was very pleasant and shared his excitement about the procedure. It's rare that people come to him for adult palate expansion, which he thinks is unfortunate because the benefits are so great -- particularly in opening up the airways. I told him I was interested to see how my craniofacial structure would change and whether or not this procedure would provide any significant benefits for me.

For this initial appointment, I had a short dental check-up followed by my mouth being filled with plaster to make forms of my upper and lower palate -- all of which was completely painless. These forms are currently being sent to a lab where they will be used to manufacture my own custom Homeblock. This usually takes a few weeks. I plan on returning to Dr. Darlington's office in Flagstaff to pick up my appliance around mid-February on my way to Wintercount. For the first few months, Dr. Darlington recommends wearing the Homeoblock as much as I can, including daylight hours. After this, I will only have to wear it at night and it will be recreated every few months to continue optimal expansion. The cost for all of this -- appointments, new appliances, and all -- is $2000. I payed up front for a substantial discount of $250, so the final cost was $1750. I'm looking forward to looking like a retainer-wearing teenager for a short time -- maybe I'll even have a cool accent like Shelly from South Park.

My Intestinal Saga, Part 3: Making Connections

2011-01-07T15:47:00.003-07:00

With the realization that my back pain was somehow related to what I was eating, I began connecting some dots. Less food + Simple food = Less back pain. More food + Varied foods = More back pain. But what the heck did food have to do with muscle pain? Why would my lower right back hurt so incredibly much based upon my dietary choices? Why did I feel so much lighter and tension-free when I ate less or fasted? I began researching the human body and its inner workings to find out why my pain was so localized to this one place on my body. It turned out that, in the lower left abdomen where the junction of the small intestine and large intestine, there exists something called the ileocecal valve. This little valve controls when undigested food exits the small intestine and begins the journey into stool formation in the large intestine. Hmm. Did this area have something to do with my back pain? I pressed on my abdomen where the ileocecal valve was located. It was tender. Not only that, but I felt the pain from my back transfer to this spot when applying pressure. It was an epiphany for sure. I thought, "Wait just a gosh-darn minute here! Does this mean my pain is actually intestinal, not muscular or skeletal?" Apparently it was. Fascinating!

My entire school of thought shifted. No longer was I wholly committed to a purely external yoga or massage-manipulated path to healing. I believed I had found the root cause of the pain and tension I was experiencing, and now I only had to figure out how to manage this internal problem. Easier said than done. For several months I experimented with herbs, digestive supplements of all kinds, probiotics -- the whole gamut of intestinal warfare. Nasty herbs for any parasites that might be still hanging out. Enzymes to aid the breaking down of food. Good bacteria to repopulate my sad, miserable gut. All these things, along with continued yoga and the like -- yet, aside from simply eating nothing at all, I experienced little or no improvement. What hadn't I changed? Was there anything else I could do? Or would I have to live with this inconvenient pain the rest of my life?

Finally, the cognitive dissonance had to come to an end. I was underweight. I was fatigued. I had little zest for life. I asked myself a difficult but honest question: Was I unhealthy because I was a low-calorie vegetarian? It was time. I was ready to take a good, hard look at this mostly philosophically-driven food choice -- one that I had always thought could only make me healthier. That's what all the books I was reading at the time were telling me. Everything in my mind up to this point had said "yes" to a vegetarian diet. All these years, however, my body had been crying out a resounding "NO!" Time to eat some meat. And, while I'm at it, why not eat nothing but meat for a while? Oh, how I loved extremes at that time in my life. So on I ventured into the world of zero-carb, "The Bear," and a sudden fondness for the Inuit. More digestive lessons were soon to come.

Part 4 of "My Intestinal Saga" up next.

My Intestinal Saga, Part 2: Lower Back Pain

2010-12-20T13:40:00.000-07:00

Following the parasite party in my gut, I had a few months of sulfurous burps that just would not go away. I was the weakest I'd ever been in my life. If my memory serves me correctly, this was the start of years of funky stools (the description of which I'll spare all of you readers out there unless you personally inquire), as well as a sudden increase in the lower back pain I'd had since high school. One day, maybe a year after the gut bug debacle, I was shoveling dirt in a garden when all of the sudden I tweaked my back into immobility. This lasted 3 days. It was incredibly painful and a huge wake-up call for me -- something about what I was doing for my health wasn't working. Rather than blame it on being weak and malnourished from vegetarianism and parasites, I turned to purely external physical solutions, such as yoga, acupuncture, chiropractic, massage, and body posture practices. I focused on keeping my spine aligned and balancing the use of my muscles. To a certain extent, this worked quite well and kept me somewhat capable physically, although I honestly could not imagine having to do yoga or pay attention to my posture the rest of my life -- it seemed unsustainable. And why was it that primitive peoples -- who I had begun to study in depth -- appeared to be so light and tension-free in their bodies without needing to do daily maintenance practices such as yoga? Also, working around kids a lot in summer camps I noticed how they naturally had absolutely perfect posture without any kind of attention to it. I decided it was my goal to experience this natural freedom from tension. Yet all that seemed to work was doing yoga three times a day and paying careful attention to my body posture. There had to be a better way.

In the summer of 2005, I began work with a wilderness therapy program, called The ANASAZI Foundation, and was spending weeks in the backcountry with troubled youth. Not learning my lesson from the experience with Vince Pinto in the Chiricahuas, I was confident that I could drink from streams without purifying the water. I was so convinced psychologically that I was the healthiest, most resilient dude of anyone I knew that I believed I could withstand whatever nature threw at me. I was wrong. Again. Three more parasitic episodes over a couple of months and I finally started purifying my water like a logical person would. I no longer felt invincible and really started to question some of the crazy things I was doing, such as constant yoga and a vegetarian diet.

During my time at ANASAZI, I also realized something profound about my back pain: it would subside to almost no pain at all while I was in the wilderness. At first, I thought this might be the product of living a more natural lifestyle and walking the earth as humans had done for millions of years before me. Over time, however, I began to realize that there was something about the food I was eating in the backcountry -- both in amount and type -- that appeared to lessen the pain. Lentils, rice, and ash cakes in small amounts were my staples in the field. When I came back to civilization, I'd load up on loaves of bread, peanut butter, salad and tons of yogurt. So I tried an experiment: eat how I ate in the field while I was at home in the city. The results were the same: far less back pain and an overall feeling of being lighter in my body. I thought I had found an answer. I remained underweight and felt dizzy upon standing, had sunken eyes and a lack of energy, but without back pain, I felt 1,000 times better. It seemed that more pure food -- and less amounts of it -- was the key to regaining my health. Or was it?

Part 3 of "My Intestinal Saga" up next ..

My Intestinal Saga, Part 1: Dabbling in Parasites

2010-12-12T13:16:00.005-07:00

Wow. It's been a really long time since I've posted a blog entry. I'd like to have some extravagant reason as to why, but the truth of the matter is that I've simply been inspired in other directions for the past several months. My own physical health progress has been at a standstill this whole time until quite recently. As some of you may know, I have had long-standing digestive problems that possibly came about after many episodes of backcountry parasitic infections beginning almost 8 years ago (which also was the time I began experimenting with vegetarianism). My digestive problems usually manifest in the form of a slowed down transit time, hard stools and bloating, along with infrequent sharp pains in my intestines (my apologies if anybody is disturbed by my blunt description). These symptoms have greatly affected my body and my mental state in negative ways: poor sleep, sudden fatigue, coming and going depression, muscle tension, pain, and the like. When I began eating well again and adding certain supplements to my diet, I was able to lessen or eliminate many of these issues. I thought I would delve a little deeper into my health history and describe what kinds of changes I made along the way get well again, dietary or otherwise, with the intention of possibly guiding some of you folks out there in blogger land to better health and also receiving feedback from anybody who wants to offer me some other directions I might be able to take to further improve my situation.

Hmm. Where to begin? I guess I should probably go back as far as I can remember, and that would be my childhood years. The major body disturbances I recall from this time, let's say around age 8 and for several years after, were TMJ syndrome and frequent headaches. I would grind my teeth at night and wake up with a sore jaw quite often. The headaches seemed to arise at random moments throughout the day, but I remember them being excruciating. Besides that, as far as I know, everything ran smoothly (if you know what I mean). It's debatable whether or not the aforementioned problems were from digestion, but later -- in the midst of my health transformation, around age 23 -- I would discover some connections that surprised me. More on that later. (See the three part post on my own personal health profile for more on my physical transformation and dietary history.)

Now on to high school. This was when I first started to notice bloating in my lower abdomen. I've been an avid athlete all my life and high school was the most active time of my life. Lifting weights 6 days a week; running 3 miles every other day; swimming laps and doing sprints; and practicing on baseball and soccer teams on top of all of that. Pretty active, right? Well despite all of that, I still had this perceptible "belly" on me. At the time, I attributed it to fat, but I'm fairly certain now that it was just bloating -- I was pretty ripped in every other regard. So what caused the bloating? I don't know for certain. My educated guess based upon later experimentation is that it was brought up by some kind of milk and/or gluten intolerance. Another primary physical issue of that time in my life was lower back pain. This was why I absolutely abhorred doing any kind of physical labor that involved bending over and lifting. Again, I now believe I have answers as to why that was happening. We'll get to these epiphanies in the chronological order that I discovered them.

Okay, post high school -- my time of spiritual journeying and reconnecting with nature. Here's where the "fun" begins. Parasites. Wonderfully horrible parasites. My first episode happened after going on a survival trip with my friend and mentor, Vince Pinto (who owns and operates a nature school, called Raven's Way Wild Journeys). We hiked into a stream in the Chiricahua Mountains of southeastern Arizona with minimal gear, including a complete lack of water purification. Vince drank from this stream on several occasions with no problem, so I was confident that I would do just fine, as well. Along the stream, there were cow patties literally every couple of feet. This meant that the water was likely contaminated. Welcome to the wild, wild West, where cattle have more rights in nature than humans. Cow excrement aside, Vince and I found a pristine place up stream which we assumed would be safe to drink. 36 hours later, instead of camping in the desert, I was camped beside a toilet. Giardia. Vince, on the other hand, was fine. Unlike him, I was underweight and underfed at the time, so I attribute my susceptibility to the little buggers -- and his resistance to them -- to that.

Part 2 of "My Intestinal Saga" coming soon.

If, for some odd reason, you are absolutely enamored with how cute and cuddly the giardia microbe above is, you can get your very own plush doll at Giant Microbes.

Obesity & Heredity, Part 4: Epigenetics

2010-04-03T18:00:00.013-06:00

I first heard about epigenetics from Dr. Theodore Belfor, the man behind the adult palate expansion device called the Homeoblock. It is his opinion that epigenetics will be the most important field of science in the next decade. In brief, epigenetics is the study of the changes that take place within the epigenome – literally, "on top" of the genome – due to environmental factors, such as food and pollution, without affecting the DNA sequence. Here's a more lengthy explanation from a website published by a European group who call themselves “The Epigenome Network of Excellence:”

Conrad Waddington (1905-1975) is often credited with coining the term epigenetics in 1942 as “the branch of biology which studies the causal interactions between genes and their products, which bring the phenotype into being”. Epigenetics appears in the literature as far back as the mid 19th century, although the conceptual origins date back to Aristotle (384-322 BC). He believed in epigenesis: the development of individual organic form from the unformed. This controversial view was the main argument against our having developed from miniscule fully-formed bodies. Even today the extent to which we are preprogrammed versus environmentally shaped awaits universal consensus. The field of epigenetics has emerged to bridge the gap between nature and nurture. In the 21st century you will most commonly find epigenetics defined as 'the study of heritable changes in genome function that occur without a change in DNA sequence.'

Take home quote from above: “...epigenetics has emerged to bridge the gap between nature and nurture.” This is extremely important in the study of health and nutrition, as there are many questions of what brings about good health and poor health in the context of inheritance, none of which can be fully answered without evaluating specific individual choices – dietary, environmental, etc. – made within each generation (which affects future generations). In other words, nurture – how we are taken care of as children and how we take care of ourselves as adults – is what molds and shapes nature – the way our bodies and minds express themselves epigenetically, which is then potentially passed to our children.

How do epigenetic changes take place? The Epigenome Network of Excellence reporter, Brona McVittie, puts it this way:

The genetic blueprint, like a complex musical score, remains lifeless without an orchestra of cells (players) and epigenotypes (instruments) to express it... Epigenetic factors include both spatial patterns, such as the arrangement of DNA around histone proteins (chromatin), and biochemical tagging...With some 30 000 genes in the human genome, the importance of silence, as with any orchestral performance, must not be underestimated...As cells develop, their fate is governed by the selective use and silencing of genes... Failure to silence genes can produce a hazardous cacophony.

What does all of this have to do with obesity? Well, scientists have discovered that epigenetic changes in mice that are pregnant mothers can directly impact the health of the offspring. How? By turning on or off specific genes through dietary or environmental means. One of these health effects, in addition to cancer and diabetes, is a tendency of the offspring to become obese as adults. In one study, if a single gene, called the “agouti gene,” is overexpressed through the failure to suppress another gene (Avy), it greatly influences the ultimate health of the offspring (emphasis mine):

Failure to epigenetically suppress the Avy gene during development causes the agouti gene to be ectopically overexpressed later in life. This high level of agouti expression in essentially all tissues causes numerous downstream metabolic and endocrine effects that ultimately affect gross biological end points such as obesity and survival. This agouti overexpression and its physiological effects have been termed the yellow agouti obese mouse syndrome. This syndrome includes a yellow or mottled yellow coat color, altered metabolism and obesity from a young age. It also results in adult diabetes, increased cancer susceptibility and, by 24 mo of age, twice the mortality seen in normal mice.

Interestingly, whether or not a mouse becomes obese seems to depend on the levels of methyl-donating substances, such as folic acid (a vitamin naturally found in high amounts in organ meats, many kinds of legumes, and dark leafy greens). The reason behind this has to do with the way that DNA passes information to cells in the body -- a process called DNA methylation. Whether or not certain genes are expressed has a lot to do with this process. Without enough methyl-donating substances, such as the B-vitamins, betaine, choline, SAM-e and genistein (from soybeans), DNA methylation is disturbed and abnormal cell expression, along with switching on or off certain genes, results. You can see why folic acid supplementation is recommended for pregnant women and why women in traditional cultures consume "sacred" foods rich in methyl-donating nutrients, such as liver, before and during pregnancy.

So, if obese people supplement their diet with folate or genistein, can they reverse the epigenetic changes that may have brought about their obesity? Short answer: we don't know. In animal studies, there's more certainty. Here's what Randy Jirtle, an expert in epigenetics, has to say:

Weaver et al. (Nat. Neurosci. 7: 847-854, 2004) at McGill University, however, have shown recently that maternal nurturing behavior can stably alter the epigenotype in rat pups soon after birth. Moreover, these epigenetic changes are reversible in adulthood following methionine supplementation or treatment with histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors (Weaver et al.Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 103: 3480-3485, 2006). Thus, data supporting the reversal of environmentally induced epigenetic changes via dietary supplementation or pharmaceutical therapy in adulthood is mounting.

The implications for humans are far-reaching. Perhaps someday we'll have a way of epigenetically treating obesity, diabetes, and cancer. For now, the best we can do is eat a nutrient-dense real-foods diet while avoiding processed and refined foods -- the foods that have most likely brought about our health dilemmas in the first place.

For a great overview of epigenetics, check out PBS Nova's educational page on the subject. Also, here's a nice website by the University of Utah.
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SIDEBAR: Is Plastic Making Us Fat?

Aside from diet, another significant factor in the tendency of the agouti mice to become obese comes from the mother's exposure to biosphenol-A (BPA), a common plastic found in many food and beverage containers. Here's Randy Jirtle again to explain:

We have demonstrated recently that when female pregnant mice are exposed to BPA, the incidence of yellow Avy offspring is markedly increased because DNA methylation of the agouti gene is decreased (Dolino et al.,Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 104: 13056-13061, 2007). BPA also epigenetically alters gene expression of at least one other gene, indicating a genome-wide effect. Yellow agouti mice become obese in adulthood and have a high probability of developing diabetes and cancer. Consequently, BPA exposure leads to adult diseases in agouti mice by altering the epigenome during the earliest stages of development—a condition that can be counteracted by maternal nutrient supplementation with methyl-donating substances (folic acid, etc.) or genistein.

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SIDEBAR: Weston A. Price & Epigenetics

Epigenetics may seem obvious to folks out there who are familiar with Darwin's theory of evolution. “Of course our bodies and minds are shaped by our environment; and of course we evolve (or devolve) throughout time and generations. That's the way nature works!” The big difference, as far as I can tell, is that unlike DNA, epigenetic changes actually take place within one lifetime, not over eons of evolution. The way the epigenome appears to be altered is by dramatic changes in environment, particularly diet. Think Nutrition and Physical Degeneration or Pottenger's Cats.

Actually, one might say that Price and Pottenger recognized epigenetics when they observed physical degeneration in the people and animals they respectively studied, although they didn't call it that. The changes in facial structure and lowered immunity in their studies appeared to be a direct result of poor diet generation after generation. Once again, during one lifetime, the epigenome can be altered significantly. Could it be that the mothers and fathers eating a modern diet and the cats eating cooked food altered their epigenome and then passed on these traits on to the next generation? Is this why each generation appeared to be progressively worse than the last? The field of epigenetics suggests this is the case.
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Obesity & Heredity, Part 3: Why Are Thin People Not Fat?

2010-03-25T20:48:00.001-06:00

Below is an intriguing BBC documentary, called "Why Are Thin People Not Fat?" In this film, ten thin people who have no history of obesity overeat whatever foods they want for several weeks and the results are evaluated at the end of the experiment. One especially interesting facet of the documentary is the fact that the Asian participant gains the least weight of all the participants and also appears to have the most elevated metabolism. Could it be that his genes are more pure -- i.e. less degeneration in his family -- than the others? Watch and decide for yourself!

Obesity & Heredity, Part 2: You Are What Your Parents Ate

2010-03-22T22:48:00.003-06:00

Stephan Guyenet at Whole Health Source wrote a brilliant blog series a few months back, called “The Body Fat Setpoint,” in which he describes the mechanisms behind an individual's ability to maintain a very specific weight. No matter how much a person overeats and how much weight is gained, his or her body is simply primed to be at this “setpoint” and will “defend” it diligently through natural fat regulation mechanisms. Stephan references a study where:

They overfed lean and modestly overweight volunteers 50% more calories than they naturally consume … After 6 weeks of massive overfeeding, both lean and overweight subjects gained an average of 10 lb (4.6 kg) of fat mass and 6.6 lb (3 kg) of lean mass... Following overfeeding, subjects were allowed to eat however much they wanted for 6 weeks. Both lean and overweight volunteers promptly lost 6.2 of the 10 lb they had gained in fat mass (61% of fat gained), and 1.5 of the 6.6 lb they had gained in lean mass (23%).

To me, the most interesting aspect regarding human overfeeding studies like this is that, once the overfeeding period has ended, the participants return to their original weight without dieting. As Stephan indicates, this means that our bodies have the inherent ability to maintain our “normal weight.” Refer to the post I wrote on tribal fattening practices and the fact that the fattened women who refuse to overeat their real foods diet return to a healthy weight in short order. Normal weight, however, appears to be different for every individual. For example, when a person has a normal weight – a setpoint – that, by all standards, can be seen as obese, we are left with the question of just why in the heck this is happening. Why does the body insist on remaining in such a biologically abnormal state?

Many scientists and researchers claim that leptin – a hormone which regulates appetite – plays a key role in obesity, as many people who are overweight exhibit low levels of the hormone. Much research has been conducted on the validity of this theory and it is now recognized that leptin resistance – in which the body can no longer can recognize when it has had enough food – is what enables a person to eat more than they need, thus leading to obesity and keeping that person obese. And, surprise, surprise: artificial fructose is a prime culprit in leptin resistance because fructose doesn't stimulate leptin (or insulin for that matter). No stimulation, no appetite regulation.

Skinny Jeans & Skinny Genes

Okay, so leptin appears to play a role in weight maintenance. That's all fine and good, but why can some people eat and drink whatever they want -- including artificial fructose -- without affecting their body composition while some people become obese? This is where I believe heredity comes into play. Depending on what stage of degeneration a person is in – first, second, or third generation of processed food consumption, let's say, and/or what a person's mother ate while pregnant with him/her – obesity can be more or less of a potential complication.

In my case, for example, my mother wasn't overweight when I was in the woom and neither of my parents are overweight now. This is despite consuming a lot of high-fructose corn syrup and omega-6 vegetable oils for much of their lives. I was raised on this typical industrial diet and never experienced issues of overweight as a child, and I have no issues now. At age 18, I altered my diet and cut out processed foods, which is how I eat now, eight years later. But my older brother, now age 29, has continued to eat our childhood foods without gaining significant weight. Other health problems aside, my family has no weight issues. Is there something about us genetically that is behind all of this? I think it's a strong possibility. And maybe this is because, like Don Gorske, we may have a closer-to-pure hereditity. We are not yet degenerated to the point where the disease of obesity has set in.

In contrast, I know of a few childhood friends (two brothers) who now appear to be on the receiving end of metabolic discord through familial degeneration. In their twenties now, they are both experiencing weight problems. They also drink a lot of beer and don't seem to have the best diet in the world. Observing their parents, the mother has been overweight for at least half of her life (including several years before becoming pregnant) and the father has always been slim, despite drinking a lot of beer and not having the best diet in the world just like his sons. Why is dad slim while having very similar dietary habits to his overweight sons? Are his genetics more pure and less degenerated – less overall processed food consumption – than the mother's genes, which appear to have a hereditary predisposition to being overweight? This may be the case, and it would explain the weight issues of the two sons, as they would inherit half of their mother's genes.

Several studies have been done evaluating the role heredity may play in obesity. The most compelling subset of these studies are those that include data from adopted children, their adoptive parents, and their biological parents. Here's an abstract from one of these of these studies, called “Genetic contributions to human fatness: an adoption study:”

A strong relationship was found between the degree of fatness of biologic mothers and that of their adult offspring who had been separated from their mothers at birth and adopted during the first year of life. This relationship persisted even after age, height, and possible confounding environmental factors were controlled. There was little evidence for either selective placement on the basis of parental fatness or gene-environment interaction. There was no relationship between the degree of fatness of adoptive parents and that of the adoptees.

It's interesting that the weight of the child was directly affected by the weight of the biological mother and is not affected by the environment of the adoptive home. This supports my theory on the two sons who I described above. There is, however, one glaring confounding factor in all of this talk about obesity and heredity, and that is the increasing consumption of high-fructose corn syrup in the last 30 years. This amazingly effective human fattener was not significant in the industrialized diet until 1980, when Coca-Cola officially began adding this biochemically engineered sweetener to its popular soft drink. This also happens to be the time when obesity levels really began to take off. Check out the graph below from the paper, “High-fructose corn syrup in beverages may play a role in the epidemic of obesity:”

So does that mean that heredity may not be as important as diet in the development of obesity? Not necessarily. I believe the two go hand-in-hand and, as I said earlier, it's possible that it is heredity and the diet of the mother which determines susceptibility to the effects of HFCS or other processed foods.

So what lesson have we learned here? Well, there's still a lot of questions, but I think we can safely say that some people have more difficulty with weight than others, and that reason may not necessarily be connected to dietary choices in all cases. Rather, there are several lifetimes of degeneration that may be influencing each individuals propensity to gain – and keep on – the fat.

For solutions to inherited susceptibility to obesity, I refer you back to Stephan, who I think provides some good advice. As far as my recommendations, the best change anyone can make in their diet to make a difference in health, and perhaps body composition, is to simply eliminate the four nasties: artificial fructose, gluten, trans fats, and vegetable oils. Eat real food. And please, please, please raise your children on real foods so they don't have the same health difficulties that many of us adults have!

Obesity & Heredity, Part 1: Don Gorske

2010-03-18T14:09:00.004-06:00

For better or for worse, we inherit much of the body composition tendencies of our parents. This can be argued as merely adopting their food habits, which directly affects our health, and I believe that's a big part of why our bodies are the way they are. However, there are most certainly genetic predispositions to certain body shapes and sizes, as well. Often times, I focus on diet as the #1 instigator of health and disease, but when it comes to issues of overweight and obesity I often find myself wondering just how much genetics can play a role in whether a person is thin or fat, muscular or lanky, apple or pear-shaped. Many of us know folks who can eat whatever the heck they want without any apparent health effects or significant body composition changes.

Case in point, Don Gorske, the infamous McDonald's enthusiast who has eaten 24,000 Big Macs since 1972. Despite this indulgence -- and the sodas that come with it -- Gorske appears to be in good health. (I say “appears” because he is not overweight and has good cholesterol numbers; not so sure about his teeth, triglycerides, HDL:LDL ratio, VLDL levels or other markers of health.) He has a full head of dark hair, walks every day, and also has a positive outlook on life. Arguably, these are signs of good health. How can this be? Isn't fast food one of the prime suspects in modern disease? Could this mean that fast food is off the hook? Well, before you go out gorging on McDonald's because of one man's seeming success on such fare, read on.

Mr. 180, Matt Stone, recently blogged about Gorske, pinpointing dietary, philosophical, and hereditary reasons as to why this man's physical health seems to be unaffected by the foods he eats. Of all the reasons listed by Matt, I believe heredity to be the most important factor. For one thing, as Matt says in his post, Gorske grew up “...in cow country and didn't start eating fast food until age 18 ...” Developmentally speaking, this Big Mac-lover had a head start in good health -- especially if we consider that he only started eating fast food after his body and metabolic tendencies were well-established. And while it's interesting to observe Gorske's apparent well-being and question the assumption that fast food is detrimental to our health, the picture would not be complete without full consideration of his unique heredity. Perhaps he is the fortunate heir of health not-far-removed from that of our ancestors. What of his genetics, his childhood health, his parents' and their parents' health?

Unfortunately, I don't have access to this information, but I would hazard a guess that his parents were closer to a traditional diet than not for most of their lives, and that they were maybe the first or second generation of degeneration. In contrast, many of us have parents or grandparents who were well on their way to degeneration during their life time and this directly affected our health -- epigenetics influenced strongly by diet. (See section below, “Degeneration in the Cafeteria.”) Maybe some of us, like Gorske, are able to avoid some of the dramatic metabolic changes seen today -- namely obesity -- simply because our parents and grandparents hadn't quite reached that particular stage of degeneration. Obesity, if we think about the very low historic levels and the high levels of today, appears to be a stage of degeneration that comes after maybe three generations of poor food habits. It also appears to be in direct connection with the consumption of the modern franken-foods -- artificial fructose, trans fats, white flour, vegetable oils.

Whatever the case may be, it's evident that obesity is an abnormal human state brought about by heredity, which is influenced by dietary changes. What's interesting, however, is that some people -- like Don Gorske-- due to perhaps a closer-to pure heredity, are able to escape the effects of poor food habits during their lifetime. How their children might fare is another question.

You know what would be an awesome experiment? Taking a bunch of thin people who appear to do just fine on junk-food, like Gorske, and feeding them lots and lots of food and seeing how quickly they gain weight, how their metabolism reacts, and whether or not they return to their normal weight when the experiment is over. Maybe this would provide answers as to why thin people are thin. That post is up next.

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SIDEBAR: Degeneration in the Cafeteria

Imagine a line at a cafeteria with a limited amount of food. There's (1) the traditional foods of our ancestors: raw dairy, grass-fed meats, fish, fresh grains, fruits and vegetables; there's (2) a mixed-diet of these traditional foods with some processed foods (mainly sugar and white flour); then there's (3) the factory-raised meats, white flour, artificial fructose, and rancid vegetable oil-laden diet of today. First in line, our great grandparents, enjoyed a diet primarily of traditional foods and experienced good health. Second in line, their children (our grandparents) approached the front of the line and much of the traditional foods had already been eaten by their parents, so they began eating some white flour and sugar with some ill health effects, notably lowered immunity and dental disease. Third in line, these childrens' children (our parents) arrived at the food and they were left with more white flour and sugar than traditional foods; they developed physical deformities from nutritional deficiencies and might have developed some issues with weight and diabetes as well as other degenerative diseases, depending on their parents' food choices. That brings us to the last ones in line (the 20 and 30-somethings of today) who are left with the most processed of all processed foods: high-fructose corn syrup, rancid vegetable oil, trans fats, and the like. These poor folks not only have a poor diet, but may inherit the traits of their parents 100-fold, possibly becoming obese and diabetic at an early age, in addition to a slew of health problems that come along with being at the end of a long line of degeneration. Below is a (purely theoretical) visual representation of this.

Adult Palate Expansion, Part 2: A Brief Chat with Theodore Belfor, DDS

2010-03-10T17:57:00.005-07:00

As a follow-up to my last post on palate expansion in adults, I decided to give Dr. Theodore Belfor a call to find out more about his Homeoblock palate-widening appliance, as well his background and interest in the subject of craniofacial changes. What followed was a brief, yet fascinating chat that delved into many subjects. Here's a bulleted summary our conversation.

The cost of the Homeoblock procedure: anywhere from $2600-6000, depending on your own personal facial structure, which can be evaluated at Dr. Belfor's clinic in New York through a catscan and 3d image analysis. He tries to keep the cost of the Homeblock close to the popular teeth-straightening product, Invisalign
Human de-volution: Dr. Belfor acknowledges that human beings have rapidly devolved in a very short amount of time -- i.e. the last 100 years. While Darwin's theory of evolution recognizes changes in species over millenia, our rapid de-evolution is an indication that something we are doing externally is influences our physical deformities. He suggests diet and pollution as main causes.
Epigenetics: (This is the changing of genes through influences other than DNA -- i.e. facial deformities) Dr. Belfor believes this is going to be the most important field in science in the 21st century as people come to realize that many of us are not expressing our genes fully and that we must find out why and do something about it.
Sudden infant death syndrome: Recently, Dr. Belfor spoke with a doctor in Australia who connects craniofacial deformities with sudden infant death syndrome. With a lacking craniofacial development, the 9th (Glossopharyngeal) nerve in the head, which controls swallowing, gag reflex, and speech, could very well play a role in SIDs in that arterial blood flow to it may be be restricted, which could lead to a lack of signaling to baroreceptors, Belfor says. Baroreceptors signal the central nervous system to regulate blood pressure levels and with their malfunction could lead to possible cardiac arrest. (Hopefully I'm getting all of this right.)
Weston A. Price, DDS: Dr. Belfor is familiar with Nutrition and Physical Degeneration and says that Price's research is the basis for the realization of our physical deformities and, thus, influences any dental work (including his) that seeks to restore the facial structure of the human genetic blueprint.

Unfortunately, Dr. Belfor had to leave the conversation somewhat abruptly because he had patients to tend to, but I'm extremely grateful that he was willing to speak and share what he did for the ten minutes we were on the phone. It seemed that if he was not busy, he would have talked to me for much longer, as he definitely has a passion for what he does and seems to enjoy very much sharing that passion with others -- even if they are some random blogger/independent health researcher like myself. What a great guy! If I was in the New York area, I would not hesitate to go in for a craniofacial evaluation.

Adult Palate Expansion

2010-03-09T15:57:00.008-07:00

I am deformed. I look nothing like my ancestors. As a child, I had braces. I was a frequent mouth breather. At age 16, I said bye to my wisdom teeth. I have only 24 teeth left. My dental palate is not broad and sweeping; my jaw isn't square; my nasal passage isn't wide. I'm a human being raised on a processed food diet, and this is the result. When I first read Weston A. Price's book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, it was hard to find out that I'm not developmentally optimal. I thought, "Well, crud, there's yet another thing that's wrong with me that can't be fixed." I began comparing photos of myself as a child with some of the photos from Price's book. Here's me next to a traditional Swiss gal:

See the lack of resemblance? Check out the overall roundness of the Swiss girl compared to my more narrowed facial structure. Compare my nasal passage to hers. Cheek bones? Jaw? And, wow, how about them teeth! This isn't due to genetics, as many of you know. It's all about nutrition during the developmental years, as Price discovered. Damn you, margarine, sugar, and white flour!

The other day I was thinking about how it might feel the have the facial features characteristic of the healthy cultures in Weston Price's studies as opposed to the narrow palate, brace-straightened teeth, weak jaw, narrowed nasal passage, and lackluster cheek bones that characterize my own facial structure. If I were all of the sudden blessed with an optimal facial structure and all the teeth the good Lord intended me to have, would I breath easier? Speak better? Smile more fully and more often? Have less tension in my jaws? Feel a heightened sense of well-being? While it's interesting -- if not somewhat depressing -- to imagine such a possibility, I never thought once that this would ever be achievable. I guess you can say that's why I've come to terms with my deformed self. I can't change it, can I? What other choice do I have besides acceptance of my not-so-optimal lot in life? Sigh.

I was impressed by a study about two twins recently referenced in Wise Traditions, the Weston A. Price Foundation journal. One twin received palatal expansion, while the other did not. Here's a photo that shows the dramatic difference in the two -- not just in their teeth, but their overall facial structure:

Impressive, eh? It's readily apparent that dental appliances can make a huge difference towards regaining the facial structure of our ancestors. But I'm far beyond the developmental time period during which such devices can help me attain a facial appearance closer to that of the human genetic blueprint, right? These things only work for the growing child or teenager. At age 18, the bone plates are fused, and there's no budging them. Once you're an adult, there's no room for any adjustments, right? Well, I began to wonder: Is there such a thing as adult palatal expansion? And, if so, would it make any difference health-wise if I were to apply such technology to my own head? Let's just find out. (Google, you are my friend.)

The first website I came across, called Facial Development, is absolutely fascinating. It's authored by Theodore R. Belfor, DDS, who has a clinic in New York state that actually specializes in expanding adult palates using a dental appliance called a Homeoblock. From his website:

The Homeoblock™ appliance is a revolutionary patented oral device that is much like a retainer in looks, but the results go way beyond teeth straightening...The Homeoblock™ appliance works with the body, so that physiological changes occur naturally; developing the bones of the face and resulting in the strengthening of facial muscles. These changes occur due in large part to each person’s genetic potential Often, facial development does not reach its potential due to the food we eat, polluted air and poor dental care to name a few.

Wow. A dentist who acknowledges that facial development is influenced by diet? I wonder if he knows about Dr. Price. Browsing the website further, I came upon a paper that Dr. Belfor wrote called, "Facial Changes as a Result of Palatal Expansion in Adult Patients Using the Homeoblock Appliance." Check out this before and after 3d image taken of one of his patients who used a Homeoblock:

Look closely and notice the differences in the cheek bones, chin, and lips. Pretty incredible. So not only does palatal widening make for straighter teeth, it also induces significant changes in the overall facial structure -- even in adults. Dr. Belfor markets his work as a way of creating a more youthful appearance in addition to straightening teeth. An interesting effect of palatal widening is reduced wrinkles. But he's also very enthusiastic about other changes that occur with the procedure (emphasis mine):

I am experiencing the most incredible excitement on a daily basis. I routinely expand adult underdeveloped maxilla and mandible taking the teeth along for the ride. There are many different goals, as many as there are different patients. However, the result is always the same; more prominent cheekbones, wide smiles, and strong jaws!"

Prominent cheek bones? Wide smiles? Strong jaws? Is this guy Weston Price incarnate? So, wait a minute, how can any of this actually work if the bones are fused by age 18, as is commonly believed? Well, let's let Dr. Belfor answer that one:

Bone is essentially plastic in nature. Tension and intermittent pressure persuade the bones to redefine at any age. In fact, our typical patient is between 30 and 60 years old. In the upper dental arch nature has provided a suture line front to back between the two bones that form the palate. This allows for an easy widening process and as the palate expands, the cheekbones as well, creating more prominence.

Okay, so maybe there's a chance for a "deformie" like me to experience optimal facial structure after all! I would like a second opinion, though. I mean, isn't there a possibility of teeth relapsing or other complications happening? Let's see what one scientific study had to say about adult palatal widening procedures and the risks involved, in this case using an implement called a Haas expander:

Rapid maxillary expansion (RME) in the adult is thought to be an unreliable procedure with several adverse side effects and, consequently, surgically assisted RME is considered the preferred procedure...Rapid maxillary expansion using a Haas expander was examined in 47 adults and 47 children...The results indicate that nonsurgical RME in adults is a clinically successful and safe method for correcting transverse maxillary
arch deficiency.

This study had a follow-up time of an average 5.9 years, and the patients' teeth remained in place. Here's a dramatic before-and-after image from the study showing one case of palatal expansion, a 30-year-old female:

Now that's just amazing. 30-years-old and there's still room for correction of the dental arch. I wonder, though, are there any health benefits to having the palate expanded and the resultant craniofacial changes that take place? Dr. Belfor, what do you think?

Orthopedic jaw development, particularly arch expansion, allows for improved sinus drainage and widens airflow passages. This can result in snoring reduction and lessened symptoms of sleep apnea...Voice enhancement. Improved facial balance and skin tone. Arresting and reversing the premature aging of the face.

Sounds to me like it would be worth it. Only one problem, I have no idea how much the procedure actually costs. I'm sending an e-mail to Dr. Belfor to find out. Also, I'm going to ask him if he's influenced at all by Weston A. Price, as he seems right there with the 1930s dentist philosophically. If anybody out there has more information on the procedure, please leave your comments.

Here's one more link with an article and video on adult palate expansion: "Skull Stretching."

Primitive Nutrition Talk: Health Stories (Continued)

2010-03-05T12:03:00.002-07:00

Here's some more footage from part one of the Wintercount discussion. Here I continue my health story and recount fond memories of my experiences with zero-carbohydrate diets, digestive problems, and giardia.

Primitive Nutrition Talk: Health Stories

2010-03-03T22:43:00.007-07:00

Here's the first of a series of videos from my discussion/presentation on Primitive Nutrition, which took place at the Wintercount Rendezvous 2010. In this video are a few of the diet experiences shared by folks that sat in on the talk, as well as my own health story. I'll be publishing more videos of this presentation in the coming weeks, covering many nutrition and health topics from an evolutionary and anthropological perspective, as well as diving into the work of Weston A. Price.

By the way, if anybody knows how to sync video and audio, I'd greatly appreciate some advice, as you can see that the second half of the video is a few seconds off.

Wintercount Rendezvous 2010

2010-03-01T11:21:00.003-07:00

After going shirtless and stocking up my vitamin D reserves in the Sonoran Desert at the Wintercount Rendezvous, I'm back to blogging and am pretty excited to share some of the experiences I've had over the last few weeks. I bought a digital video camera just before attending the gathering in order to document some of my Primitive Nutrition classes, as well as an interview or two. Now I'm learning how to edit the footage and soon will have some of these videos to share here on my blog. For now, I thought I'd provide a glimpse into what I've been up to lately -- particularly for all you curious folks out there who might be asking yourselves, "Just what in the heck in this 'Wintercount' thing this guy mentions so often?" Enjoy!

Small Game in Primitive Living, Part 3: Cooking For Maximum Nutrients

2010-01-19T14:41:00.008-07:00

Indigenous peoples all over the world applied universal cooking practices to their animal foods for optimum nutrition. For larger game, a common practice was to consume nutritious organ meats -- liver, kidneys, heart, etc. -- in addition to muscle flesh and fat after roasting over the fire, boiling in stews, or burying in pits lined with hot rocks. The full spectrum of amino acids, water-soluble and fat-soluble vitamins exist in these parts of the animal. For minerals, bones were added to long-cooked broths or cracked open to extract the rich, creamy marrow inside. Smaller bones were sometimes gnawed on; the flavorful juices perhaps provided a dose of calcium and gelatin, similar to the nutrients found in bone broths. The Townsend Newsletter For Doctors and Patients (2005) published an article about the properties of traditional bone broths and had this to say about nutritional content:

Broth can be thought of as a protein supplement, and a calcium supplement. The chemical ingredients extracted from broth are glycine and proline (collagen/gelatin), calcium and phosphorus (minerals), hyaluronic acid and chondroitin sulfate (GAGs), and other minerals, amino acids and GAGs in smaller amounts.

If my memory serves me correctly, I once read an anthropological account of a few hundred years ago in which one Native American tribe always had a pot of broth on the fire and added scraps and bones to this pot continuously. The observer of this practice states that this tribe drank "copious" amounts of the broth.

Aside from the boiling of bones to release their minerals and nutritive elements, some tribes went to great lengths to supply yet another source of fat -- in addition to marrow and body fat deposits -- called "bone grease." This type of fat was attained by the long boiling of smashed bone and skimming the resultant grease off the surface. In a book called Imagining Head-Smashed-In: Aboriginal Buffalo Hunting on the Northern Plains, author Jack Brink goes into incredible detail about the production of bone grease, even going so far as to reproduce indigenous boiling techniques by adding hot, fire-heated rocks to buffalo hide containers filled with water. He explains how bone grease is different than marrow:

Though bone looks to be solid, it is really more of a latticework of twisted strands of bone tissue interspersed with tiny spaces ... The tiny spaces ... aren't empty; they are filled with small globules of fat. Called bone grease, it is a fat separate from the marrow in that is located in the bone structure itself, not the marrow cavity. (p. 190)

Another universal practice among primitive cultures is the use of blood. In a class I took at Wintercount one year, called "Using the Whole Animal," we caught the blood of a freshly slaughtered goat in a bucket and consumed the thick, scarlet red liquid after cooking it in a frying pan over a fire. It resembled ground meat and tasted very rich and satisfying. Of course, many of us know of the Masai and their practice of drinking raw, fresh blood -- so cooking isn't a requirement. Blood is a good source of electrolytes, especially sodium, which are sometimes hard to come by in primitive living. It is also high in protein and, in and of itself, a very sustaining food.

Powdered Woodrat

Now that we've reviewed some of the primitive cooking and eating practices for larger animals, let's examine how this information relates to the main subject of this series: small game. While it goes without saying that all of the nutrients present in large game are also present in smaller game, the difference in cooking techniques to maximize these nutrients requires some explanation. The cooking of small game is perhaps a simpler, more effective means of maximizing nutrition in primitive living due to the simple fact that long boiling times and extensive processing and butchering is not required. In fact, many small animals can be eaten whole, bones and all (of course, removing the intestines is a probably good idea in any case).

Author Paul Campbell, who I've met at several primitive skills gatherings, documents the traditional hunt and preparation of white-throated woodrat in his book, Survival Skills of Native California (pp. 340-345). A Kiliwa Indian named Sam Ochurte leads Campbell on the hunt and, after procuring a few woodrats by way of bow and arrow, the native builds a small fire to cook his quarry. He then singes the hair off, cooks the skin to a crisp, bacon-like consistency and removes the charred pieces of skin, eating each with a pinch of salt. Ochurte then removes the intestines from the woodrats and returns them to the coals to finish cooking. When thoroughly cooked, the whole rats are set upon one rock and pounded with another, as in a mano and metate setup, until they are a small pile of shredded meat and crushed bone. He then picks out any uncrushed fragments and the rest -- smashed up bones, teeth, meat, and organs -- he eats. As Campbell acknowledges, "The nutritional value of even one complete rodent must have been considerable."

Campbell notes that similar processing techniques were observed historically in several other California tribes. Rabbits, hares, squirrels, and other small game were prepared this way. In addition to this, larger game bones, such as deer vertebrae, were also pounded and stored or eaten -- ancient calcium supplements in a sense.  He describes other cooking methods for small game, including the boiling of whole small animals -- taken out temporarily to remove the skin similar to the above account -- and eaten whole, guts and all.

By using the whole animal, primitive peoples easily attained the nutrition required for optimal health, and modern abos would be wise to follow suit in primitive living excursions and experiments if they are to sustain their health and maximize nutrients to thrive in the wilderness.

Small Game in Primitive Living, Part 2: Protein, Fat, & Calories

2010-01-13T14:59:00.004-07:00

Without a doubt, the procuring of adequate food while in a primitive living situation is one of the most consuming (pun unintended) tasks that any modern abo-wannabe participates in. After several days in the backcountry with a group of fellow primitive living enthusiasts, food fantasies inevitably come up. "Oh, man, it'd be so great if we came across a pizza smothered in cheese, topped with pepperonis and meat. " Sometimes these food fantasies take on a spirit of their own and the resultant food combinations are often dishes that no normal, well-fed human being would enjoy (or even think of, really) in civilization. I once heard a guy say, "I had a dream last night that I was gorging on Church's Chicken topped with ice cream and chocolate syrup." Mmm ... fried chicken and Ben & Jerry's in one glorious conglomeration.

What does it take to keep a person satisfied in the wilderness when he or she is living on the land, solely utilizing what is in nature to fill his or her belly? Is it possible to live primitively, happily, with a full stomach while keeping the food fantasies at bay? First and foremost, it depends on the environment in which one is attempting to get fed. Many natural areas in the world are sorely lacking in many of the abundant plants and animals that used to flourish only a few hundred years ago. In the Sonoran Desert, for example -- my stomping grounds -- wild antelope, grazing on extensive, lush grasslands, used to be a common sight. Now, in most areas where the antelopes once roamed and the grass once grew, there remains scrubby, sad-looking mesquite trees, strangling the land and creating an impermeable barrier of interlaced thorny branches. Along with over-hunting and over-population, this is a direct effect of over-grazing cattle on lands where they never ranged historically.

Human beings have left a profound mark upon the earth, and this leaves folks who want to recreate a primitive living experience with limited resources. What modern abos are left with is but a miniscule piece of nature's pie. "The old gray mare, she ain't what she used to be." And, unless we go to Alaska or other relatively unspoiled places, we cannot simply walk out into our backyards and find dinner. Or can we?

A question I've pondered often is whether or not human beings can live comfortably and successfully with what is available in these altered natural places -- can we work with the limited resources available? While the abundance of large game animals and wild plant foods in most places -- especially deserts -- has dwindled, perhaps there remains an underestimated, underutilized opportunity for sustenance in small game animals, whose populations have remained relatively stable over time. Can squirrels, rabbits, birds, mice, and other tiny creatures provide all that a person needs to live well in the wild or elsewhere?

Matt Graham's experience suggests that it is indeed possible to meet at least one person's caloric and nutritional needs on such fare. By setting traplines of two simple traps -- one being a spring snare and the other being a Paiute figure-four deadfall -- checking them every day, and cooking the caught animals (mostly squirrels and rabbits) for optimum calories and nutrition, Matt was able to provide for himself during his three months of full-on primitive living in the southern Utah desert. However, over those three months, he also ended up slowly losing body mass, indicating inadequate caloric intake over time. Just how many squirrels and rabbits was he eating day to day? If he had attained more, would he have felt more satisfied and maintained a better body composition? And what quantity of small game would that require? I hope to discuss some of these questions with Matt at Wintercount. Until then, I thought it would be interesting to speculate a little.

Using the data from a research paper (intended for the evaluation of predators' diets in zoos) called "Nutrient Composition of Whole Prey (Excluding Fish) Fed in Zoos" -- and a lot of help from Stephan at Whole Health Source -- I was able to make some calculations and come up with the protein, fat, and calorie content of a few small game animals per pound of whole carcass (note: some animals are eviscerated, meaning their hides and internal organs are discarded):

Here we see that, while a pound of each animal provides adequate protein, when it comes to fat and overall calories, any person would be feeling pretty darn hungry after a while on such a dietary regimen. Aside from that, there's also the reality of just how many successful traps one can set in a day and just how many animals such traps can provide. Let's say we want a minimum of about 1500 calories per day, give or take. That would require roughly:

56 adult mice (avg. 20 grams each)
2 gray squirrels (avg. 1.1 lbs each)
1/3 of an eviscerated domestic rabbit (avg. 9 lbs each)*
1/2 of an eviscerated black-tailed jackrabbit (avg. 8 lbs. each)
6 Japanese quail (avg. 1/3 lb each)**

*Wild cottontail rabbits, for comparison, weigh an average of 2.3 lbs
**Similar in weight to Gambel's Quail of the Sonoran Desert

If we want to have enough calories to maintain body mass and even build muscle in primitive living, it would require twice those numbers. Realistically, no person is going to be able to procure the amount of mice it requires to sustain a person in this way. I certainly wouldn't be up for setting the number of traps that it would take, considering the fact that one whole mouse is only one bite and down the hatch! However, when we look at some of the larger animals, surviving comfortably in the wild becomes more than a pipe dream. Catch a few squirrels, maybe some mice and quail, and a rabbit or two per day and you have the makings of a successful primitive living experience! The question of fat, however, is inescapable, and may require the taking of some animals soley for the fatty parts, which would add on a few more squirrels or one more rabbit to account for this need (if we are to achieve an ideal 60/40 or, best, 80/20 ratio of protein to fat).

Of course, not all of the animal can be eaten in most cases (aside from the very tiny ones) so we are left with the question of just how much of each animal can, in fact, be digested and utilized for nutrients. In the next post, we'll discuss cooking small game in primitive living.

Note: I realize I'm leaving out the addition of plant foods to the primitive diet and their caloric contribution. Seasonal variation and environmental degradation, not to mention the extensive processing many wild edibles require, makes them a questionable food source for practicing abos in many parts of the world. If they're abundant, though, definitely eat 'em!

Small Game in Primitive Living, Sidebar: Awareness

2010-01-11T12:47:00.007-07:00

Our pre-neolithic ancestors were able to achieve the feat of thriving in the wild -- seemingly impossible in the eyes of modern folks -- without a hitch. Why they were able to do this is simple: they knew the patterns; they knew where the food was; and they knew the ingenious methods to put a roast on the spit. In short: they knew the land.

So, before we get into the specifics of attaining adequate food in the wild -- calories and nutrients -- let's first acknowledge a very important primitive living skill that any modern-day abo should have in his or her repertoire: awareness. This means awareness of, not only skills, but also the place where these skills are being practiced. It goes without saying that knowledge of plants, animals, and seasonal variations in any given environment is a huge advantage in primitive living. Where's the water? Where's the food? Where's the hazards? Knowing these things is important. In addition to these things, an abo would be wise to have a keen sense of personal needs. This means asking questions, such as: What does true hunger feel like? When am I strongest? When am I weakest? Am I thirsty? Am I tired? It sounds easy enough, but, in my experience, this self-awareness was sorely lacking until I had plenty of "dirt-time."

To sum it up, awareness in primitive living can be thought of as a sense of one's own needs and how to meet them with the resources available. When we observe indigenous people in their environment -- their element -- it's readily apparent that they are very comfortable and content. They know themselves. They know their place. They are satisfied. With practice, we moderns can achieve a similar comfort and satisfaction in primitive living. In the world of health and nutrition, we cannot go back to the vibrancy in physical being of our ancestors. Similarly, in primitive living, we'll never be as skilled as Ishi, Last of the Yahi, but we can come close. I've met many people who have attained awareness, skills, and, most telling of all, comfort in the wilds. It can be done.

For a great resource on increasing your own personal awareness and nature skills, I highly recommend the Kamana Naturalist Training Program created by Wilderness Awareness School. For absolutely amazing dirt-time experience, check out the Boulder Outdoor Survival School. Also, primitive living skills can be learned hands-on at an affordable price at any of a number of skills gatherings across the country, the big two being Wintercount and Rabbitstick. By combining awareness and skills, primitive living enthusiasts can become "whole" in nature and truly feel at home.

Small Game in Primitive Living, Part 2 -- in which I'll delve into the calories and nutrients of whole animals and cooking methods to get the most out of your small game quarry -- is coming soon ...

Video Footage of Weston A. Price

2010-01-02T11:20:00.003-07:00

I'm currently working on crunching some numbers to put together part two of the "Small Game in Primitive Living" series and will hopefully finish it soon. Until then, I thought I'd post this video I came across on YouTube the other day. It's a segment from an odd, somewhat dated television show -- public access, I'm guessing -- called "Homekeepers." The host is interviewing a woman -- a "Certified Nutritional Consultant" -- who describes the findings of Weston Price. I'm not sure who this woman is or what she's all about (besides the fact that she's very politically correct when it comes to nutrition) but I'm very grateful that she dug up some fascinating video footage of Price. If you want to skip the interview (which I would recommend) and go straight to the press release footage of Price, fast-forward to 3:26.

Small Game in Primitive Living, Part 1: The Paiute Deadfall

2009-12-11T13:26:00.009-07:00

Some of you may recall the post I wrote on Matt Graham, called "Talking Nutrition with a Wild Man," in which I describe his 6-month primitive living experience and explain how he attained adequate nutritional support in the wilderness of southern Utah. Most of what he ate consisted of small game: mice, squirrels, rabbits. What I didn't get into was the methods Matt utilized to capture these animals and the specific nutrients and calories that they supplied him with. In this post I'll describe one of the methods he used -- my friend and yours, the figure-four Paiute deadfall. In a later post, we'll dive deeper into the nutrional contents and caloric contribution of small game commonly caught by such a trap.

Mouse Pancakes and Squirrel Flapjacks

When I was 19-years-old, I learned how to make my first trap from my long-time mentor and friend, Vince Pinto (who now owns and operates Raven's Way Wild Journeys). It was a simple little contraption. Two sticks, each around six inches long and some agave fiber cordage made for the basis of a trap that I would use to procure many rodents in many primitive living trips in the years that followed. Named the figure-four Paiute deadfall after the very crafty, very omnivorious Northern Paiute natives who apparently pioneered it, this ingenious trap is hailed by modern-day abos everywhere as a reliable way to provide food in the bush. Matt Graham certainly endorses it. In fact, on his primitive trip, Matt only used two traps to supply his meat quarry: the Paiute deadfall and a spring snare. Knowing how to set a few traps really well, in his opinion, is better than knowing how to set many types of traps poorly. Quality not quantity.

Taking into consideration all the Paiute deadfalls I've set over the years, I'd say that this trap has squashed a mouse or a squirrel 50% of the time. Set six traps, get three little critters in my stomach. Matt and other masters of this trap with plenty of "dirt time" in the wilderness probably have a much higher success rate due to intimate knowledge of their regions as well as years of refinement and experimentation.

The Paiute deadfall components, in all its glory (aside from the rock needed to set it), is pictured below:

Yup, that's it. A few sticks and some cordage with a "toggle" piece attached. The sticks, made from pine, can be fashioned out of any sturdy type of wood. The uppermost stick in the photo -- the top-piece -- has cordage tied on and a notch carved into it for reasons you'll understand in a little bit. The other stick -- the foundation piece -- is carved to a flat point to fit nicely into the top-piece's notch; it's two stubby "legs" give it more stability when setting the trap. The cordage is made from artificial sinew, but any strong natural fibers will do. When I lived in the Sonoran desert, I was a big fan of yucca and agave fibers. I'll leave natural cordage-making skills for another time, though.

The dimensions pictured are by no means the only way to go about making this trap, but they seem to work well for me. All of the fancy carvings on the sticks aren't really neccesary, but I find them helpful in allowing me to adjust the length of cord on-the-fly by wrapping it around the top-piece, as well as securing the cord better on the bottom foundation piece. Below is what the trap looks like once it's set (here, you can see more clearly how I used the carvings):

You'll notice that, to complete the trap, I had to (1) find a rock with a nice flat bottom and wide base and (2) attain a long, thin bait stick to thread underneath the rock. Obviously, if I was actually setting this trap to procure an animal, I'd have speared some bait onto the bait stick before setting, such as local wild plants that a small animal might like -- maybe pinyon pine nuts, seed heads of various grasses -- or food I might have with me as trail snacks, such as raisins or peanut butter. Mice seem to really love raisins. Although no rodents came along after I set it, to my good fortune (and perhaps to the benefit of the more squeamish readers of this blog), this particular trap attracted a wild desert tangerine!

Notice the rocks I stacked on top of the main rock after setting the trap. This increases the weight and, thus, crushing force and speed of the deadfall. It also allows me to evaluate the stability of the trap. Now let's trigger the trap, lift the rock, and see what happens to the unsuspecting tangerine:

Ouch! As you can see, when the bait stick is tugged at or nudged in any way, the trap is triggered and the rock falls abrubtly, leaving very little time for the animal (or, in this case, fruit) to escape. The main components of the Paiute deadfall spring neatly into the air and out of the way of the rock, allowing the rock to lay perfectly flesh with the ground (or, ideally, a hard, flat rock underneath) -- only the thin bait stick, along with the bait, actually receives the impact. The unlucky creature who happened to trigger the trap is instantly crushed to death. Squish! Mouse pancakes!

More Resources For the Paiute Deadfall

For brevity's sake, I'm going to leave a more detailed discussion of this trap to Jim Riggs, one of the great influences of the primitive skills movement and a man with a lot of "dirt time." His article "Rocking On with the Paiute Deadfall" is by far the most thorough and well-written piece I have seen on this subject. Those of you out there in cyberland who want to experiment with a Paiute deadfall will benefit greatly from Mr. Riggs' description of the trap.

Also, a very good explanation of the Paiute deadfall is given in this video. I've never met the man who made this tutorial (Mark Lummio of Bushcraft Northwest), but he seems to really know what he's talking about. Absolutely fantastic video.

In the next post, I'll get into the nutritional and caloric details of small game animals that a person might find underneath his or her deadfall rocks day to day; and I'll evaluate the realities inherent in living off of such fare as Matt Graham did: processing, cooking, and eating trapped animals to thrive -- not just survive -- in the wilderness primitively.

Thanks to my good pal, Jeff Macdonald, for helping with the pictures.

Roadkill Mule Deer: $417

2009-11-16T12:56:00.006-07:00

Out here in rural Utah there really isn't much traffic. More than five cars driving through town at the same time feels like rush hour and fender-benders are rare. There isn't a stop light for at least 50 miles. Yet, safe as this sounds for drivers on these country roads, there are still dangers lurking behind every juniper tree, potential disasters waiting in the sagebrush. Deer, elk -- even rabbits -- are hazardous highway threats and can leap out into the road at any mile marker. The damage they can cause to a vehicle -- and the person inside that vehicle -- can be monumental. Anything from a smashed grill, broken headlights, or a complete totaling are all possibilities, along with injuries to driver and passengers if the deer or elk happens to blast through the windshield.

So I was glad to receive a phone call and hear that my friends, Danny and Gretchen, were safe and sound after hitting and killing a two-point mule deer buck near the town cemetery. I was also quite excited to hear that they intended to call the game warden and take the deer home with them to butcher -- and that they needed my help to load the animal into their pick-up truck. "We'll give you some of the meat, if you're interested," Gretchen said. Hmm. Fresh venison, bones for soup, maybe some liver -- sounds good to me!

So off I went with my girlfriend at 9:30 p.m. to do a little "gathering." I can't really say that there was any hunting involved, as all we did was pick up a very dead deer. After loading it into Gretchen and Danny's truck, we agreed to meet up the next day to butcher.

On a beautiful Sunday afternoon in the front yard of a friends house, we began the fascinating process that human beings have engaged in for hundreds of thousands of years before us -- except we used modern technology to get the job done quicker. Danny tied one end of a rope to the hitch of his pick-up truck and the other end over a sturdy tree branch and around the buck's neck, almost like a noose readied for a hanging. Hopping in his truck and pulling forward, the 200+ lbs. animal magically rose into the air and was suspended at the perfect butchering height. Now that's country.

Danny then quickly and efficiently removed the hide of the deer by pulling it back and cutting the fine, sheath-like material just underneath. Once it was freed, Gretchen decided to work the hide and prepare it for tanning. Next, Danny hacksawed off the legs above the knee joints and began quartering the animal, procuring all the choice cuts: brisket, loins, backstrap, and plenty of meat for roasts. He had already thrown out the liver, heart, and other organ meats as they were all damaged and bloody. This particular buck was fairly lean, which makes sense given that it was a lower elevation-dwelling mule deer in October. Deer and elk in higher elevations would certainly be fatter this time of year as they pile on extra stores for the cold winter months.

Danny explained that much of the meat on the buck was questionable for human consumption due to the prevalence of CWD -- Chronic Wasting Disease -- in Utah deer populations. The risk of transmission of this prion disease (similar to the infamous "mad cow disease") to humans is thought to be very low, if at all. But we weren't willing to take the risk, so any meat stained with blood from the spine was discarded (CWD is a central nervous system disease). And we sure weren't about to eat deer brains either, so the head was also tossed.

In the end, after quartering and butchering the buck, we attained 70-80 lbs. of roasts, steaks, and tough meat for burger grind. My friend at the local meat locker was kind enough to blend the grind meat with some grass-fed beef fat he had on hand, which made for some amazing hamburgers. We also hacked up the bones, rich with marrow, for broth and soup.

Total processing costs: $17. Estimated damage to Danny and Gretchen's vehicle: $400.

Roadkill Mule Deer: $417. A true country delicacy.

Tribal Fattening Practices

2009-10-28T12:53:00.003-06:00

While in America "thin is in," in some cultures around the world "fat is where it's at." One such culture can be found in the desert-streaked country of Mauritania, located in West Africa. Here, the true marker of beauty and health in a woman is the amount of rolls she has. But there's one problem: human beings eating normal amounts of natural foods don't get obese and overweight, and the common foods available in West Africa include raw goat's milk, meat, millet, couscous, dates, peanuts, and other whole foods. While most of us in the Western world can easily become fat through years of eating fattening, unnatural, metabolism-altering foods like high-fructose corn syrup, trans-fats, and high-gluten white flour, the Mauritanian people don't have such "luxuries" -- so they resort to good old-fashioned force-feeding to accomplish the task.

The Mauritanian fattening practice, called leblouh, takes place when young women enter a tiny sandstone hut. Inside resides an old woman, the "fattener," whose primary job in the community is to make sure these young women (sometimes beginning as young as 5-years-old) become plump and, thus, attractive and suitable for marraige.

Obvious moral and ethical implications of this practice aside, I thought it would be interesting to find out just how much food is utilized to accomplish the fattening. I was surprised to find out that these women typically are force-fed -- to the point of nasuea and vomiting at times -- a whole-foods diet of up to 16,000 calories. This includes four meals per day of:

...crushed dates and peanuts with couscous and oil ... cloying, egg-size balls of around 300 calories apiece. Each girl eats about 40 per day, along with 12 pints of goat's milk and gruel ... (Source)

To bolster the fattening process, the women also must not get any exercise whatsoever, remaining in the huts for several years until they are married off. Additionally, because the task of eating such inordinate amounts of food is so physically challenging to the young women, the old woman "fattener" threatens to beat them if they refuse to eat.

Because the Mauritanian women are limited to traditional foods, which lead to satiety rather quickly due to high nutrient content and are difficult to overeat, some have sought out methods to increase their appetite unnaturally to be able to gain those extra pounds of beauty. One such method is the purchase of certain pharmaceuticals:

Sold secretly at city markets, they include hormones used to fatten camels and chickens, and steroids for asthma and cancer ... (Source)

The difficulty inherent in these traditional peoples' ability to gain weight while eating whole foods challenges the notion, once again, that carbohydrates lead to obesity. Here we have a culture whose only way of fattening young women is by force-feeding them massive amounts of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats. If to fatten the young women it was only necessary to emphasize carbohydrates in the diet, as Gary Taubes and other low-carb proponents might suggest, then why must the women be forced to eat excessive amounts food to become overweight? Why not just eat millet and couscous and dates? Many modernized folks seem to have no trouble at all gaining unneeded weight while eating far less than 16,000 calories. Yet these Mauritanian women must resort to appetite increasing drugs or the threat of a beating while eating about that much food to do the same:

Although hardly skeletal at 5'6" and 180 pounds, Hawer [a 26-year-old Mauritanian woman] says she has trouble piling on weight, and was teased by plumper girls as a teenager. Recently, her husband told her that he "didn't like sleeping with a bag of bones. Desperate to be bigger, Hawer uses drugs to aid weight gain." (Source)

It's the quality of food that's the difference. Traditional versus modern food. High-fructose corn syrup, one the great fatteners in the indutrialized nations, would be a prized commodity in Mauritania.

One other interesting observation is that the older women in the culture, who have already gone through the fattening process during their younger years and have resumed eating a normal amount of traditional foods, appear to be at a healthy weight. Did they diet to lose their weight? I doubt it. Below is a picture of women who are campaigning against the practice of leblouh. All have gone through the leblouh in their youth, and none of them remain overweight:

The People of the Deer

2009-10-04T15:29:00.016-06:00

Lately I've been enjoying an anthropological narrative called People of the Deer by Farley Mowat -- the famed and tenacious environmentalist, humanitarian, and defender of true scientific inquiry. In this colorful true-story adventure, first published in 1952, Mowat finds himself drawn, as he so often does, to a place far away in the middle of nowhere in the deep northern territories of Canada. It is here that he befriends and lives among an Eskimo group called the Ilhalmiut and begins to understand how modern encroachment -- namely fur-trapping and government policy -- is negatively affecting the native peoples' ability to live in a place where their ancestors had thrived for thousands of years before them. Mowat writes, quite bluntly, in the foreward of the 1975 edition of the book: "Genocide can be practiced in a variety of ways." Similar to Weston Price, he is not hesitant to place blame on Western culture for the decimation and struggle of the traditional peoples with whom he became intimately acquainted. From the foreword:

We have long prided ourselves on being a democratic nation, dedicated to the altar of freedom. Freedom for whom? If it is only freedom for ourselves to do as we please at the expense of others, then our pious stance is even more abhorrent than that of any overt tyrant -- for ours is based on a vile hypocrisy.

Fat and Deer Hairs

While the book contains many fascinating tidbits, among the most intriguing are Mowat's detailed descriptions of the traditional Ilhalmiut diet and their shifting health as a result of Western influence. When he first arrives at the small settlement of Ilhalmiut, the author is welcomed with a tray of meat that might make any Westerner's stomach churn:

Half a dozen parboiled legs of deer were spread out in a thick gravy which seemed to be composed of equal parts of fat and deer hairs. Bobbing about in the debris were a dozen tongues and, like a cage holding the lesser cuts of meats, there was an entire rib basket of a deer.

Still hungry? There's more!

There were side dishes too ... a skin sack, full of flakes of dry meat ... a smoking bundle of marrow bones ... neatly cracked to so that we would have no trouble extracting the succulent marrow. (p. 82)

Yum.

The cooking varied somewhat, but the food did not. The rule was meat at every meal and nothing else but meat, unless you could count a few well-rotted duck eggs which served as appetizers. To satisfy my curiousity I tried to estimate the quantity of meat Hekwaw [a member of the tribe] put away each day. I discovered he could handle ten to fifteen pounds when he was really hungry... (p. 85)

It doesn't take Mowat long to identify the key ingredient of the Ilhalmiut diet: fat. From his own experience on lean meat for an extended period of time, he describes the vast importance of fat in an all-meat diet through his battle with an affliction which he names, for want of a better term, mal de caribou, also known by a great many arctic explorers, prisoners of war, and human carnivores as rabbit starvation:

... persistent diarrhea was only part of the effect of mal de caribou. I was [also] filled with a sick lassitude, an increasing loss of will to work that made me quite useless ...

Mowat's guide -- a half-Eskimo, half-white man named Franz -- prepared and administered a peculiar remedy:

... he took out a half-pound of precious lard, melted it in a frying pan, and, when it was lukewarm and not yet congealed, he ordered me to drink it. Strangely, I was greedy for it ... I drank a lot of it, then went to bed; and by morning I was completely recovered ... I was suffering from a deficiency of fat and did not realize it. (p. 88)

Death and Disease Among the Ilhalmiut

Concerning the health of the Ilhalmiut people, Mowat goes into extensive historic, anecdotal, and statistical detail while attempting to get at the root of the Northern natives' plight of disease and illness following the arrival of Western culture. It's no secret to those who have studied into the writings and theories of nutritional heroes such as Weston Price, Sir Robert McCarrison, T.L. Cleave, and others that when modern foods such as white flour and sugar are introduced to a traditional culture ill health follows, worsening from generation to generation. Farley Mowat joins the ranks of these great independent thinkers when he waxes sensible, explaining his own theory as to why the people of the far North and other native peoples in history have succumbed to tuberculosis, measles, and small pox:

Perhaps you have heard of the decimation of the forest Indians brought about by disease, by lack of adaptability, by inherent laziness and indolence or by other causes ... you have never heard the truth, for all of these apparent causes are manifestions of the real destroyer, which is -- starvation. If you ask about the thousands of Indians and Eskimos who die each year of tuberculosis, if you ask about the measles and smallpox epidemics which ... have destroyed over one-tenth of the Northern natives ... these people too die of starvation ... (p.91)

Is it just me, or is Mr. Mowat on to something here? He goes on to tell the story of an Inuit tribe he lived with in the winter of 1948, the Idthen Eldeli -- literally meaning "Eaters of the Deer":

In 1860 ... there were about 2000 members of the Idthen ... when the deer moved ... the Idthen people followed after ... [they] anually traveled over a thousand miles through the Barrens.

In the eighteenth century the famous explorer Samuel Hearne journeyed ... with a band of these Indians and he speaks, as do many others, of the almost superhuman endurance and physical capacity of the Idthen people.

In the winter of 1948 when I lived with the Idthen ... they numbered a little over 150 men, women, and children who spent the winters on their scanty trap lines, starving through the cold months until they could fish for life along the opening rivers ... They are a passive, beaten, hopeless people who wait miserably for death. (p. 92)

What could be the instigator of such an unfortunate circumstance? Ol' Farley doesn't mince words:

Starvation first came to them when they began to subsist on a winter diet which now consists of 80 percent white flour, with a very little lard and baking powder, and in summer almost nothing but straight fish. The Idthen people now get little of the red meat and white fat of the deer, once their sole food. Three generations have been born and lived -- or died -- upon a diet of flour bannocks and fish eaten three times a day and washed down with tea. Each of these generations has been weaker and had less "immunity" to disease than the last. (p. 93)

Government aid: giving natives the short end of the stick in America since 1492. It's interesting how what Mowat refers to as starvation can also be seen as a displacement of native foods, as Weston Price pointed out in the 1930s. Either way, the result is lowered immunity and degeneration. Mowat's solution for the dilemma of this "starvation?" Here it is, in characteristic common sense:

Surely there is but one way to cure a man of the diseases which are the products of three generations of starvation, and that is to feed him. (p. 95)

Let them eat meat and fat!

The Ambiguity of Scientific Research

2009-09-17T11:36:00.013-06:00

It always boggles my mind how, in so much of the health research focusing on diet that we see today, there is little to no emphasis on the types of foods eaten by participants in the studies. One case in point is a study that Stephan Guyenet recently blogged about, called "Effect of a High-Protein, Low-Carbohydrate Diet on Blood Glucose Control in People With Type 2 Diabetes." This study is a typical example of diabetics who go on a low-carbohydrate diet and experience positive results in moderating blood glucose levels. The participants were split into two groups -- one high-carb, the other low-carb. The authors describe the diets as follows (emphasis mine):

The control (15% protein) diet was designed according to the recommendations of the American Heart Association and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The diet consisted of 55% carbohydrate, with an emphasis on starch-containing foods, 15% protein, and 30% fat (10% monounsaturated, 10% polyunsaturated, and 10% saturated fatty acid). A second diet was designed to consist of 20% carbohydrate, 30% protein, and 50% fat. The saturated fatty acid content of the test diet was ∼10% of total food energy; thus, the majority of the fat was mono- and polyunsaturated.

The authors also describe their low-carb diet as a diet "in which readily digestible starch-containing foods have been de-emphasized."

Okay. Is it just me, or are studies like this almost completely worthless? Yes, it's fascinating that when carbohydrates are lowered in the diet, blood sugar levels normalize -- this a very consistent finding throughout the scientific world. But, why? Why does this happen? What is the mechanism behind it? Is it simply a reduction in carbohydrates that makes the difference? Or could it be a reduction in harmful foods like sugar that does the trick?

In other words, the study is setting itself up for ambiguity. Do the results mean that everyone who is near-diabetic should immediately "cut the carbs?" Or should they "de-emphasize" starch containing foods? Or should they reduce sugar consumption? What is the real problem here?

Well, let's see. Maybe -- just maybe -- we can determine the composition of the diet and dive deeper into these questions. Let's take a look at a nifty table from the study:

Not real helpful is it? Now we know that the participants on the high-carb diet ate 274 grams as "starch" and the rest (114 grams) as sugars of some kind. That tells us absolutely nothing about what foods the participants actually ate. For all we know, they could be eating nothing but waffles and sodas for carbs!

Now, the reason this frustrates me is because certain foods -- namely wheat, trans fats, and sugar/high-fructose corn syrup --- can have profound effects on human metabolism in and of themselves. For example, Dr. William Davis of The Heart Scan Blog recently had this to say about the metabolic effects of wheat (emphasis mine):

A patient would come to the office ... with a blood sugar of 118 mg/dl (in the pre-diabetic range) and the other phenomena of pre-diabetes or metabolic syndrome (high blood pressure, high inflammation/c-reactive protein, low HDL, high triglycerides, small LDL), and the characteristic wheat belly. Eliminate wheat and, within three months, they lose 30 lbs, blood sugar drops to normal, blood pressure drops, triglycerides drop by several hundred milligrams, HDL goes up, small LDL plummets, c-reactive protein drops.

As for trans fats, check out what the authors of this study (done on rats) conclude:

In this study, we observed profound metabolic responses to a low-fat diet enriched with trans-fatty acids that were associated with hyperphagia, increased hepatic and visceral fatness, and diminished whole-body glucose disposal, all hallmarks of metabolic syndrome.

(This particular study, it should be noted, has its own flaws in terms of isolating factors, but the stuff on trans fats seems pretty solid.)

And then there's refined fructose-containing foods, such as high-fructose corn syrup and sugar -- don't get me started!

So would somebody please explain to me why these harmful foods aren't taken into consideration in so much of the mainstream dietary research out there (such as the low-carb study that I began this rant with)? It would seem to me that, due to the significant metabolic effects of these foods (vegetable oil, I haven't forgotten about you!), any dietary study not detailing complete food logs is not even worth a glance. It's great that reducing carbohydrates has a positive effect on the health of diabetics, but would simply reducing wheat or sugar or trans fats have the same effect? If there's a study out there that dives into this molotov cocktail of franken-foods, I'd love to see it.

My Health Profile (part 3): The Turnaround

2009-09-14T15:49:00.004-06:00

At a friend's potluck in Tucson, I said "what-the-heck" and ate a palm-sized portion of New Zealand Grass-Fed lamb. After all, the meat seemed ethical, and my friend -- who I respected as a morally responsible, spiritually-savvy person -- was enjoying the meat, too. After a few hours, I found myself asking an attractive woman for her phone number. Something was definitely different. My 2.5 year vegetarian streak was over.

The next morning, I woke up with muscles where I hadn't felt muscles in years. My head felt crisp and clear. It was the first time in years that I felt genuinely excited about the day ahead. A gratifying, "Ahhhhh ... " came out of my mouth. That's when I decided that I had found an answer.

A few days later, I was visiting that same friend who fed me my first tasty morsel of meat in over two-and-a-half years, and it just so happened that he had a very intriguing and pertinent book on his book shelf that I was drawn to: Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon. I borrowed the book and devoured the information whole like a wolf scarfing down a fresh post-famine kill. I had an intuitive hunch before diving into this book that animal foods were a necessary part of the diet -- after all, I'd felt much better after eating some meat and butter -- but Ms. Fallon, bless her heart, provided me with the reason behind this vague feeling and assisted me in further understanding the whys and wherefores.

Now, I was on a mission to rebuild my body and my life with nutrient-dense foods. I tried eating meat more often and didn't deny myself of Thankgiving turkey or Christmas ham. My first "meat-fest" trials ended in pain and agony as my body had forgotten just how to digest the rich proteins and fats. For a few weeks I had horrible indigestion headaches and a heavy feeling that permeated my entire body. But I was determined to feed myself and get through the adjustment period. Researching information on the internet, I found that the body can take weeks to months to rev up digestive juices for meat after being without it for a long time. This is probably why vegetarians often say, "I tried eating meat again -- I felt horrible!" After about a month's time, I was beginning to feel stronger and lighter in my body. After a few more months I was back to my ideal weight and body composition, my facial hair grew in thicker and more evenly, and my libido was definitely back. And I was genuinely happy and outgoing -- a big change from my low-energy, slightly-depressed vegetarian days.

Nowadays, I feel grateful and blessed to have pulled myself out of the vegetarian abyss that seems to suck so many people in. Many intelligent, environmentally sensitive, and/or health-driven individuals fall far into this black hole of nutrition and can't get out. My hope is that by sharing my story and disseminating nutrition and health information based on evolution, history, traditional cultures, personal experience, and modern-day science, I can influence others to change their bodies -- and their lives -- for the better.

My Health Profile (part 2): Seeking Wellness

2009-09-08T11:20:00.007-06:00

After summer was over and my muscles had shrunken significantly, I decided college wasn't for me and rejected a scholarship to the University of Arizona, resolving to fulfill philosophical fancies I'd had since age sixteen to live in the wilderness and learn how to survive with nothing and need nobody.

I ended up in central Arizona as a farm intern at the Reevis Mountain School of Self-Reliance, a living, working homestead eight miles deep into the Superstition Wilderness. It was here that my foray into alternative health and healing began (and my muscles continued to shrink). Despite the fact that the founder of the school, Peter Bigfoot, was a former vegetarian of 30+ years -- fully fruitarian for one of those years -- and was unabashedly eating plenty of meat when I arrived, somehow (possibly from the media and word of mouth) I got the bright idea that vegetarianism was the healthiest diet to consume. Now for the downward spiral.

As I got deeper and deeper into wilderness survival following my time at Reevis, I also got deeper and deeper into simple vegetarian staples: amaranth, quinoa, oatmeal, peanut butter, raisins, beans, huge salads with olive oil, and other "healthy" whole foods. I also got more and more interested in restricing my food intake -- maybe someday I would have to eat so little that I could survive in the mountains all by myself and be a hermit! Wouldn't that be nice? Oh, to be 19 again.

The skinnier I got, the healthier I thought I was becoming. Anyone that ate the typical American diet became a glutton and destroyer of the earth in my eyes. After all, it was the problem of over-consumption that was bringing the planet to an early demise, and food was one of those products that was almost certainly abused and taken for granted. So I was going to be better than that. Yes, I was going to be a low-calorie vegetarian, save myself and save the planet.

Now, not only was I a vegetarian for health and survivalist reasons, but I also had the entire world's suffering behind me to rationalize my choice. I ate less and less. I fasted. I dumpster-dived. I ate wild edibles and garden veggies. I harvested citrus in Tucson over the walls of neighbor's yards. I learned to survive in a brutal, unforgiving, and unethical world. I felt empowered, independent, free. Yeah, I weighed 155 pounds and looked gaunt and sickly -- so what? I was healthy! Wasn't I?

It took about 3 years of that behavior -- that way of relating to myself and the world -- to finally give meat a try again. I was at my body's breaking point. I felt dizzy when I stood up, fatigued and weak. Daily yoga two or three times a day was all that seemed to keep my limbs, joints, and muscles feeling relatively pain-free. My lower back was worn and aching constantly. Anything physical became a chore. My libido was completely shot -- I hadn't thought about being with a woman for years. Then came the miracle.

My Health Profile (part 1): The Formative Years

2009-09-04T14:44:00.018-06:00

Health awareness and a desire to be in the best health I could be began at an early age for me. I can recall being six or seven-years-old and eating the crust on my bread -- not because I liked it, but because I was told it was good for me. I would choke down green peas or iceberg lettuce in order to satisfy the arbitrary requirement for something "green" with dinner. Last at the dinner table, I sat slowly chewing gristly, lean meat until every morsel was gone. Then, and only then, could I indulge in some ice cream.

A craving for real food seemed to permeate my childhood. Lean, well-cooked meat, cereal, 2% milk, enriched wheat bread and pasta, and the occasional cookie (or two or three) didn't seem to satisfy this craving. I often found myself nibbling on margarine when clearing the dinner table or spreading some other butter substitute on bread so thick that it would leave teeth marks. Naturally, I desired something fatty and rich and nutrients, but since no such thing was available (besides cheese), I went for the trans-fat laden, unreal goop that was as close to real butter as I could find in the refrigerator.

All that being said, I'd like to believe that I ate better than most kids growing up in America in the 80s and 90s. Or maybe I just ate less junk food than most kids. It seemed to be rare in my friends' households to limit soda and candy as my family did, or to only have dessert when dinner was finished. My family also emphasized exercise, and my brother and I were engaged in sports by age 4. Also, as much as I hated it as a kid, I have to give lots of credit to my dad for insisting that I play outside during the day and only watch a maximum of 2 hours of television daily. This certainly kept me active and physically fit growing up.

At the tail end of elementary school, it was time for that orthodontist-assisted rites-of-passage we call "braces." Pictures of me before the procedure reveal that I was your typical crooked-teeth, pinched nostrils, narrow-faced kid.

When middle school approached and I began to have more responsibility for my health, I would frequently spend some of my lunch money on the soda machines on school grounds. I was up to a 3 soda per day habit, and I felt guilty because I knew soft drinks were "bad" for me in any amount besides moderation. Fast forward to Freshman year in high school when I began abstaining from sodas completely after making a deal with my mom that if I stopped, she would stop, too. From then on, it was mostly water, orange juice, and occasionally gatorade as my beverages of choice. To this day, I haven't taken up drinking sodas again.

High school was a time of pumping iron, playing sports, building muscle, and trying my best to eat "right" according to what the bodybuilders at the gym were recommending: egg whites, protein powders, and lean meat -- essentially an emphasis on protein as the ultimate food and keeping fat as low as possible. Yes, I was attempting to adhere to a low-fat diet. That's probably why I ate so many fructose-fueled Power Bars. I was compensating for the lack of fat in my diet. Looking back, it's astonishing to see how "puffy" my face and overall musculature was. It was also during this time that I had my wisdom teeth removed, a "necessary" procedure (according to the orthodontist) if I was to prevent future dental disasters.

Following high school graduation, I thought, "Time to start being realistic." The expensive protein shakes and Power Bars were not economically viable options if I was to survive in the real world. Nor was a gym membership. I drastically changed my diet and lifestyle to appeal to my economic sensibilities. I stopped lifting weights and pounding protein shakes and began experimenting with hiking for exercise and eating cheap staple foods like beans and rice, pasta and tortillas. A month later, my muscles deflated.

The Darwin of Nutrition

2009-07-28T12:33:00.005-06:00

Here is an excerpt from an article I wrote called, "Weston A. Price: A Search For True Health," recently published in The Bulletin of Primitive Technology, Spring 2009.

Following the realization that food was the major contributing factor in human health and disease, Weston Price kept a keen eye out for what specific foods seemed to keep the primitives in good health. It was already obvious that industrialized foodstuffs weren't supportive of optimal health, so now it was Price's mission to determine what particular “nutritional programs” contributed to the well-being of the primitive groups. What food traditions had thousands of years of trial and error resulted in? Dr. Price noted every culture's dietary habits, including special foods utilized during times of child-rearing for the man and woman. It impressed him that the primitives seemed to be aware of preventative measures beginning with the health of the parents:

A very important phase of my investigations has been the obtaining of information from these various primitive racial groups indicating that they were conscious that [physical degeneration] would occur if the parents were not in excellent condition and nourishment. Indeed, in many groups I found that the girls were not allowed to be married until after they had had a period of special feeding. In some tribes a six month period of special nutrition was required before marriage. (Nutrition & Physical Degeneration, p. 3)

Dr. Price was convinced by the ubiquitous nature of this practice that many ailments of modern civilization were caused by prenatal undernourishment and that many of these problems could be prevented by the proper nutritional reinforcement of the parents to be.

Curious about the nutritional content of the primitive diets – particularly those that were emphasized for child-rearing – he took several samples of foods from each locale in order to test them at his laboratory in the United States. Armed with such information, Dr. Price believed that he could then determine what all the varied diets of each culture had in common and further understand the nutritional wisdom of the primitives. When he analyzed the traditional foods, he was excited to find that, on the whole, foods in the native diets were four times richer in water-soluble vitamins and minerals and ten times richer in fat-soluble vitamins than the industrialized American diet of his day. Of the native foods studied, Price realized that the foods which the primitives most emphasized and often times considered sacred (especially for child-rearing) were rich in “fat-soluble activators:” vitamins A, D, and what he referred to as “activator X” – now understood to be vitamin K2. This included foods such as fish eggs, liver, certain insects, and other cholesterol-rich, fat-rich foods (see table below; foods high in fat-soluble vitamins are in bold).

The qualities of the foods, Price came to realize through testing native foods as well as conducting experiments in his laboratory, depended greatly on the quality of the soil and the feed given to the animals. For example, grain and hay-fed dairy products in the United States had far less vitamin and mineral content when compared with dairy products from the Swiss in Loetschental Valley, which was produced from cows grazing on “rapidly growing green grass” in the spring and summer and chlorophyll-rich hay in the fall and winter. Price determined that the color of the butterfat from such dairy products could accurately predict the nutrient-density: a deep yellow or orange color reliably indicated high vitamin content. The laboratory tests of traditional foods further bolstered his confidence in the “wisdom of the primitives.”

The Reality of Primitive People's Lifespan

2009-07-16T11:39:00.002-06:00

Human lifespan is one of the topics that frequently comes up in my discussions with others about primitive nutrition and health. In our day and age, this subject has become a trendy factor in gauging the overall health of any given population or individual. If a person lives a long time -- say 100 years -- they are considered long-lived and must have lived a healthful life to reach such an impressive age. Yet, there are always anomalies to this assumption. Comedian George Burns lived to be 100 while smoking between 10-15 cigars a day. At 98, he joked, "If I'd taken my doctor's advice and quit smoking when he advised me to, I wouldn't have lived to go to his funeral."

Western cultures' obsession with lifespan has existed for a very long time. The Bible cites people living for hundreds and thousands of years in ancient times. More recently, researchers were fascinated by claims of the Hunzakats commonly reaching ages of 120 and beyond (this myth is dispelled quite well by this website). On the other end of this spectrum, many experts and laymen agree that primitive humans' lifespan was nothing to be impressed about: old age during those times was thought to be around forty years old.

Recently, I came across a study that blows all these distortions, assumptions, and obsessions out of the water. The study is a meta-analysis -- meaning it draws off of the research of many other related studies, and is titled "Longevity Among Hunter-Gatherers: A Cross-Cultural Examination." I suggest you give the full study a read, as there are many fascinating tidbits in it. The authors, Gurven and Kaplan, assembled lifespan and mortality data from around the world that included isolated hunter-gatherers (the closest living relatives to our paleolithic ancestors that we have), acculturated hunter-gatherers, isolated neolithic cultures, Western modern civilizations, and even chimpanzees for comparison. The authors focused solely on reliable demographic data from a handful of cultures. The table below sums up the results of the study well:

This data may come as a surprise to both romanticists of the ancients' supposed longevity, as well as to those that claim primitive human beings lived a life that was "nasty, brutish, and short." Here we have numbers that secure a middle ground amidst these two extremes. The authors of the study sum up their compiled information as follows:

The average modal age of adult death for hunter-gatherers is 72 with a range of 68-78 years. This range appears to be the closest functional equivelent of an "adaptive" human lifespan.

So there you have it. Convincing research suggesting that our hunter-gatherer ancestors are not at all far-removed from modern civilized human beings in terms of lifespan.

Health Profile: Geronimo

2009-06-15T13:59:00.012-06:00

A well-known Chiricahua Apache and leader of his people, Geronimo is most recognized for his bouts with -- and escapes from -- Mexican and U.S. military troops in the mid to late 1800s. Among the Apache, Geronimo was thought to have great powers, including the ability to see into the future and leave no tracks when moving through the mountains and deserts of his tribe's territory. His band of Apache warriors were among the last Native American peoples to surrender to the U.S. government and live on reservations.

Tales of Geronimo's cunning retreats from his military pursuers abound. One story holds that Geronimo and his band disappeared without explanation when trapped in a cave that had no second entrance. On horseback, he and his warriors were able to keep ahead of the U.S. cavalry -- with its horses and loads of supplies -- at a pace of 70 miles a day while carrying very little and living on wild plants and animals, even resorting to killing their own horses for sustenance. During battles, Geronimo was shot and wounded several times yet never succumbed to death from a bullet wound.

In short, the man was -- like most traditional native peoples of his time -- quite a specimen.

Looking at his photos, Geronimo's beautiful facial structure -- round face, square jaw, prominent cheek bones, wide flaring nostrils -- is readily apparent. This indicates a full and proper development during his formative years as an infant, young boy, and teenager. (We can't comment on his teeth as he never smiled in photos, but he probably had all of them.) His broad shoulders and upright posture suggest agile movement and strength. Like a wild animal, Geronimo was optimally built for his rugged environment of high mountain sky islands and vast seas of low desert. Having lived near, and backpacked through, the Chiricahua Mountains in southeastern Arizona (Geronimo's former stomping grounds) for several months, I can attest to the ruggedness of this landscape.

Lifestyle plays a major role in the fitness levels of Geronimo. Traveling on foot or horseback for up to 70 miles, stalking wild game, and crafting tools and shelters from his surroundings, he spent his life using his body. This lifetime "use" was certainly a major contributing factor to his physical capabilities. Yet, perhaps he wouldn't have been as capable -- his body not as supported, his build not as solid, his immunity and ability to recover from bullet wounds diminished -- if he hadn't also eaten the natural, primitive diet of his people. What kind of diet was that? Here's a list of some of the staple foods that the Apaches ate and the nutritional qualities that make them supportive:

Wild game: deer, elk, quail, rabbit, etc. --> utilizable proteins and fats, which provide amino acids, b-vitamins, fat-soluble vitamins, and, when using the whole animal (as was common in Geronimo's day), every single needed nutrient the human body needs. (Interstingly, the Apaches had taboos against eating snakes, frogs, fish, and bears.)
Corn, beans, and squash--> starchy carbohydrates traditionally processed to eliminate anti-nutrients (fermented, roasted, soaked, leached, etc.) providing supplemental energy and sparing fat loss; additional vitamins and minerals (for an interesting account of how Apaches prepared a fermented corn drink called tizwin, see bottom of this post)
Agave--> heart of the plant pit-roasted, young stalks eaten; provides supplemental starch and sugars in the diet; spares fat loss ... but gives horrible gas (I can attest to this myself after eating a pit-roasted agave -- yeesh!)
Acorns & Pine nuts--> roasted, soaked, leached, pounded, or eaten fresh (some species); beneficial proteins and fats; particularly rich in monounsaturated fatty acids
Prickly Pear Cactus--> fruit cooked into syrup or eaten fresh and young pads boiled or roasted (high in oxalic acid raw); fruits rich in electrolytes for a hot, dry climate; pads rich in calcium and vitamin A beta-carotene

Really, if we break it down, we find that the Apaches were quite omnivirous much like other hunter-gatherer tribes across the world (Australian Aborigines and Bushmen of the Kalahari come to mind). Geronimo's very supportive, nutrient-dense Apache diet of meat and properly prepared plant foods allowed for the full facial and skeletal development -- as well as the mental sharpness and alertness -- common to traditional peoples eating a traditional diet (see Weston Price's studies for more on this).

So, it seems that the famous Apache leader lived healthfully with vigor and "fierceness" (as many accounts report) throughout his life. But what of his lifespan? Does it fit the description, "nasty, brutish, and short?" Not in the least. Geronimo lived from 1829-1909, dying at age 79 from pneumonia after drunkenly falling off his horse and contracting a severe cold. Had his life not been cut short by this accident, perhaps he would have lived well into his 80s or 90s.

"I cannot think that we are useless or God would not have created us. There is one God looking down on us all. We are all the children of one God. The sun, the darkness, the winds are all listening to what we have to say."

Making "Tiznin" -- An Apache Fermented Corn Drink

"First, they soaked the corn overnight in water. They dug a long trench and lined it with grass, placed the soaked corn in the trench, and covered it with another layer of grass. Sometimes they covered the whole with earth or a blanket. After sprinkling the corn with water morning and evening for ten days, during which it sprouted, they took it out, ground it with their grinding stones (mano and metate), and then boiled it for five hours. Finally, they strained off the liquid and set it aside. After about twenty-four hours, when it stopped bubbling, it was ready to drink." (From Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place by Angie Debo, p. 22)

Back From the Wild

2009-06-11T17:07:00.010-06:00

I recently returned from my first 8 day shift (and hiatus from blogging) as a field guide with a local wilderness therapy organization here in Utah. For those unfamiliar, the wilderness therapy industry is made up of organizations -- private, non-profit, and corporate branches -- which treat clients with behaviorial and substance-abuse issues by removing them from civilization and plopping them in the desert or woods or mountains for several weeks of backpacking and therapeutic work. Field guides (like me) in these programs backpack with a group of 2-10 clients (both teens and adults) for a period of 8 days at a time in the wilderness with 6 days off between shifts. If you're a guide like me, you do it all in homemade tire sandals (see picture). The particular program that I now work for specializes in addictions of all kinds, incorporating a 12-Step model (i.e. Alcoholics Anonymous) as the centerpiece of their approach.

In addition to this, primitive living skills are utilized and encouraged as important metaphors. A fire-by-friction bow-drill, for example, provides clients with an opportunity to interact with their surroundings in a practical and creative way to make fire for cooking, warmth, and comfort. When a client has met such a challenge, the accomplishment can be a significant confidence-builder, supporting the difficult recovery from addiction as the client says, "Hey! I just made fire with sticks! Maybe I do have the ability to stop using drugs." Other skills include general backpacking know-how (tarps, sleeping gear, cooking, etc.), caring for pack llamas (yes, each group has a few of these disgustingly lovable creatures), and wayfinding in the wilderness.

Of course, as someone who has a keen eye for nutrition and how it relates to health, I observed the foods being eaten by both the field guides and clients in the program. To my surprise, the foods weren't all that bad. Aside from the typical wheat products (and the potentially problematic gluten therein), I was pleased to see that each client was given a pound of cheese every four days, tuna, fresh meat once a week, and mostly starchy carbohydrates (the sole exceptions being dried fruit, sweetened granola, and "gookinaid" -- a powdered, sugary, electrolyte drink). The group foods included a pound of butter. Questionable foods that one might lump under the "good-not-great" category included: peanut butter with hydrogenated palm oil, spam, and "instant" refried beans.

While this wilderness therapy program isn't tailored to incorporate nutritional therapy, they do so without knowing it by providing the clients with a low-fructose diet. This in and of itself can go a long way towards restoring health, in my opinion. With such a diet, as well as the daily physical activity of backpacking and camping, I found the clients to be quite stable, even those coming off of hard drugs like heroin.

That's not to say that things couldn't be better. I'm a big believer in the power of nutritional therapy and would love to see some use of vitamins, minerals, and amino acids. Particularly for a population like addicts and alcoholics who are in a physically depleted and/or unbalanced state, it would be great refuel their bodies and alter their addictive brain chemistry with the help of supplements. As for food, it would be ideal if clients had access to pemmican (which I personally made and brought out for myself), more fresh meat, and perhaps some fresh raw milk, cheese, cream and butter -- all preferably from grass-fed animals. Supplying digestible, low-toxin foods (such as white rice) and eliminating many of the canned meats and commonly allergenic foods (such as wheat) might help immensely as well. A wilderness therapy program that incorporates these things could be far more successful in terms of graduating clients' continuing sobriety. With such results, the program might be more financially stable as it attracts publicity and recommendations due to its higher success rates.

One such program -- the only one in existence that I know of -- is Open Sky Wilderness Therapy based in Durango, Colorado. These folks have a constant flow of clients. Why? A big reason is their use of all organic and grass-fed foods -- something that people look for nowadays with all the media attention and rising popularity of such products. (*cough* Michael Pollan *cough*) To me, this attention to quality nutrition is the wave of the future in wilderness therapy, and I am hearing more and more talk about it. However, from what I gather from others who have worked with Open Sky, my only criticism is their minimal use of animal products (little to no meat and a lot of rice or quinoa or beans in group stews with little added butter or coconut oil is common -- check out their food menu) and their belief in unprocessed "whole foods," which means nutrient-robbing toxins bound up in whole grains, nuts, seeds, and beans aren't eliminated during cooking. Phytates for breakfast, anyone?

So What's For Dinner?

2009-05-23T09:07:00.008-06:00

Part 5 from my paper, "Modern Health, Primitive Wisdom: American Health History and the Findings of Weston A. Price."

"Meat, potatoes, and gravy. I don't like vegetables; I can't hardly eat any of them. The potatoes take care of all the vegetables."

-- Lena Stanley, Centenarian (Edelman 1999, p. 378)

The world of human health and nutrition is a bewildering labyrinth at times. Just about everybody has their own idea of what is and isn't healthy, and there are plenty of diet books, doctor's recommendations, health gurus, and dieticians out there to guide the way. Who is right? Who is wrong? What is the optimal human diet? It is questions such as these that can stir up confusion and debate. Yet, nutritional science is still in its infancy, having only been in the public light since the late 18th century. There is plenty of room for confusion and debate. As one nutritionist says, "It's all theory" (A. Minear, personal communication, January 17, 2007).

If we are to only work with what the last 100 hundred years of research and science has told us about how the foods we eat affect our health, we are left with but a small period of time upon which to base our ideas -- we only see how food has affected human health over a millisecond of the time that people have been eating. During this brief period of history, we have conducted multitudes of studies that make very convincing arguments for or against certain aspects of nutrition. An interested, research-oriented individual can find in books, articles, and journals many studies supporting a low-fat, high-carbohydrate way of eating, for example. That person can also find many resources that support the complete opposite -- extolling the benefits of high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet. Add in the varied interpretations by the scientists involved in these studies, as well as the opinions of independent researchers, the media, doctors, nutritionists, friends and family -- and that's when bewilderment arises.

This is where Weston A. Price comes in. His research and conclusions are drawn from a combination of modern and ancient dietary wisdom. The traditional population groups he studied had all been eating a certain way for thousands of years. With the aid of modern science, Price found that the foods these people ate provided needed nutrients in consistent quantities to allow for optimal growth and development -- and these foods worked for these cultures over thousands of years. In studying nutritional science, why work with only a miniscule piece of human health history (as in the last hundred years) when there exists a firm foundation in the dietary wisdom of primitive peoples -- a foundation built over thousands of years? In interpreting our own health, why not look to our ancestors and ask what kept them free from degenerative diseases? Dr. Barry Groves, a health researcher and author, puts it this way:

We should not be looking for answers to the diseases we suffer from today, but why many peoples in the world don't get them at all. That way we might stand a better chance of an answer to the dreadful plague of ill-health we are beset with.

It is extremely important for our modern world to acknowledge the findings of Weston A. Price. In considering Price's discoveries of healthy traditional cultures, we have the basis for a logical advancement in modern medicine: the creation of a benchmark that describes what true health looks and feels like. This is something that does not currently exist in the medical establishment. Though we have many tests and procedures to determine whether or not a patient is "normal" or "at-risk" for disease, we have no set standards for optimal human development. This was Price's idea in the first place: he wanted to find "control groups" of healthy populations who were not suffering from the physical and mental malfunction of his day -- he wanted to define what it meant to be truly alive and healthy:

Instead of the customary procedure of analyzing the expressions of degeneration, a search has been made for groups to be used as controls who are largely free from these affections (p. 1).

And this is what Weston Price found in primitive peoples across the world. He found in these people a new standard for human potential. But how can we define such a standard in a world where disease and deformities are the norm?

Like Price, we simply observe the people who are actually healthy. When we look at the photos that Dr. Price took during his travels, we witness a level of physical and mental well-being simply unknown to most modern human beings. When we see those broad faces, perfect teeth, and -- as Price stated again and again -- high moral character of primitive peoples, we are observing a higher degree of human health. It is readily apparent that primitive peoples have many qualities that modern people do not possess. Through the observation of these ancient cultures, whether through books, photographs, documentaries, or travel, it isn't hard to see that they are different -- and not just culturally. We can gain immense benefit from observing these differences and determining what they possess in health and well-being that we do not.

Minds and Hearts

Let us consider the way primitive people use their bodies and minds: how they respond to excitement or danger, the values they live by, the nature of their temperaments, and the way they breathe, eat, play, and live. Are they hyper-anxious? Do they steal, cheat, and murder? Do they have nagging physical problems, such as back, neck, and shoulder tension? In large part, the answers are: No, no, and no. We moderns can use the answers to such questions -- and the implications therein -- in the betterment of our own health. In addition to subjecting the "control groups" of healthy indigenous people to medical tests, let us also communicate with these people and sense with our hearts the degree of their well-being. Let us observe closely what separates them from us in body, mind, and spirit. And let us ask what we can learn from these differences.

Perhaps a good start would be to eat the way our ancestors did. In returning to the food traditions of antiquity in the United States, we have a chance to restore our health. Much has changed in American food habits over time. Most people would say that our nutrition has improved immensely in modern times; after all, we have progressed in technology, medicine, and hygiene -- isn't it obvious that we would have enhanced our nutrition as well? With all of the knowledge that we have accumulated in the sciences, children are still being born with facial and dental deformities. These deformities are not questioned so much as they are accepted. In fact, they aren't even referred to as deformities as they were in Weston Price's day, and they are not at all believed to be connected with nutrition as Price's research revealed.

In the U.S. these days, it is just part of life to have your wisdom teeth removed, have a narrow face, get braces, or develop a chronic health condition. We assume we are advanced enough to know if something isn't right with human growth and development. Yet again, how can we know that something isn't right if we don't have any clue as to what is "right" in the first place?

Once again, traditional peoples like our American ancestors paint a picture of how human beings are meant to be. Our ancestors provide -- through their facial and skeletal development and lack of degenerative disease -- an example of close-to-optimal health. I say "close-to" because Americans at the turn of the century still did not match up to the vibrant glow of the aforementioned primitive cultures of Price's studies, all of which were completely free from disease and deformity. However, early Americans were far healthier in many ways than we are today. And, as was suggested earlier, all things in consideration: early Americans' lifespan closely matches the life expectancy of today.

Once we observe the characteristics -- physical, mental, and spiritual -- in traditional peoples across the world, it is readily apparent that modernized populations are sorely lacking. It is only sensible then to ask how traditional peoples attained such refined attributes. It was apparent to Weston Price that diet was a key factor, and this is my assertion as well. Centuries of nutrient-dense foods have allowed for the creation of superb human beings in traditional societies:

One immediately wonders if there is not something life-giving in the vitamins and minerals of the food that builds not only great physical structures within which their souls reside, but builds minds and hearts capable of a higher type of manhood ... (p. 27).

The "minds and hearts" of primitive people provide our modern civilizations with a lucid, inspiring picture of what true health is. We are given a wonderful opportunity to observe these examples and ask how we can attain this health through employing traditional food habits and following the wisdom that our ancestors have left for us.

References

Edelman, Bernard. (1999). Centenarians: The Story of the 20th Century by the Americans Who Lived It. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Groves, Barry (2005). Our love affair with fat -- a historical perspective.
http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/love-fat.html

Price, Weston A. (2003). Nutrition and Physical Degeneration. La Mesa, CA: Price- Pottenger Nutrition Foundation.

What About Cholesterol?

2009-05-15T11:49:00.005-06:00

Here is Part 4 in a series of blog posts adapted from my paper, "Modern Health, Primitive Wisdom: American Health History and the Findings of Weston A. Price."

It is commonly believed that saturated fat and cholesterol are primary culprits in the current heart disease epidemic in the United States. We have already taken a look at saturated fat, but what about cholesterol? Is there any substantiation behind the claim that a high-cholesterol diet leads to clogged arteries or dangerously high blood cholesterol levels? What about early Americans and other traditional people who ate cholesterol rich foods and did not suffer from heart disease?

Returning to Weston Price's studies of traditional cultures, one finds that the most prized foods were very rich in fat and cholesterol. Some of these foods include liver, butterfat, fish eggs, and a variety of rendered animal fats, such as lard, tallow, and chicken fat. These cholesterol-rich foods are also rich in fat-soluble vitamins, the catalysts responsible for proper protein and mineral assimilation, and may be the key to rearing healthy children with round faces. Price found no evidence of heart disease, cancer, and other degenerative diseases in the people who enjoyed such nutrient-dense foods. On the contrary, he found primitive people to be the most vibrant and healthy people he'd ever seen.

Like other traditional cultures, early Americans saw no reason to avoid cholesterol-rich foods. They savored hearty, nutrient-dense foods that were high in cholesterol. Butter, cream, egg yolks, lard, tallow, and untrimmed animal meats (including organs) were not disdained -- these foods were thoroughly enjoyed and used extensively in recipes of all kinds. Before the advent of nutritional sciences and USDA food pyramids, turn-of-the-century Americans were enjoying such foods while having no knowledge of cholesterol and its function in the human body. They were unknowingly supplying their bodies with a nutrient that is very supportive to good health.

Cholesterol is not a fat -- it is a waxy alcohol that is not utilized for energy by the body; it does not supply calories. Rather, it is absorbed directly by the intestinal wall without needing to be broken down like fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. The amount that is absorbed by the body generally amounts to less than 50%. Cholesterol plays a key role in brain growth and development (especially in infants), cell membrane integrity, and the healing processes of the body -- thus, it is usually present in scar tissues where there is a repair process happening, as in arteriosclerosis (scarring of the arteries). In addition to all of these functions in the body, cholesterol is the raw material for our hormones. This includes sex hormones and adrenal hormones (also known as "stress hormones"). The adrenal hormones are especially needed in the modern world where stress is a constant part of our lives (Enig, 2000, pp. 48-50, 56-58).

The story of how such a vital nutrient went from being revered in the early century, to being maligned and feared in modern times, is well-documented in The Cholesterol Myths, by Uffe Ravnskov. In this book, Ravnskov makes it clear that there is very little reason for Americans to fear the theory that dietary cholesterol contributes to heart disease and high blood cholesterol levels (the diet-heart theory). (Interestingly, according to the author, blood cholesterol levels may not have any pertinence in evaluating the risk of heart disease.) Several population groups are cited by Ravnskov that consume substantial amounts of cholesterol-laden foods and do not have heart disease or high blood cholesterol levels. This includes both modern and primitive populations. It is also noted by Ravnskov that the studies upon which the diet-heart theory are based are either flawed or skewed to prove the truth in the theory.

One of the pillars of the diet-heart theory is The Framingham Heart Study, which is often referred to as proof that high cholesterol levels lead to a greater risk of heart disease. Ravnskov found this study to be flawed in a number of different ways. The director of The Framingham Heart Study had this to say about the final results of the project:

In Framingham, Massachusetts, the more saturated fat one ate, the more calories one ate, the lower the peoples' serum cholesterol ... we found that the people who ate the most cholesterol, ate the most saturated fat, ate the most calories weighed the least and were the most physically active (as cited in Enig & Fallon, 2001, 5).

Such inconsistencies in the diet-heart theory have spawned an entire network of scientists, researchers, and health professionals who call themselves The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics, or THINCS. This organization has among its members many reputable individuals who have taken it upon themselves to disseminate unbiased information and engage in discussions concerning the science and health effects of dietary cholesterol. Armed with this information, the interested individual can arrive at his or her own conclusions about whether or not one should worry about cholesterol in the diet, as well as determine whether or not high-cholesterol foods were detrimental to early Americans.

Sources:

Enig, Mary G. (2000). Know Your Fats : The Complete Primer for Understanding the Nutrition of Fats, Oils and Cholesterol. Silverspring, MD: Bethesda Press

Ravnskov, Uffe (2000). The Cholesterol Myths: Exposing the Fallacy that Saturated Fat and Cholesterol Cause Heart Disease. Washington, D.C.: New Trends Publishing.

Next up, the thrilling conclusion: "So What's For Dinner?"

Big, Fat Changes in American Foods

2009-05-09T12:00:00.004-06:00

Part 3 in a series of posts adapted from my paper, "Modern Health, Primitive Wisdom: American Health History and the Findings of Weston A. Price."

Over a hundred years, we have conquered tuberculosis and pneumonia, improved safety measures in work environments, developed methods to increase food supply, and improved infant survival rates. Yet the quality of our lives is now diminished through conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. These changes in disease patterns over the last century correlate strongly with changes in diet. Aside from an increase in processed food consumption since the early 1900s, our consumption of fats and oils has shifted quite dramatically in terms of quality (not so much quantity, contrary to popular belief). In other words, the type of fats (animal, fruit, and vegetable) and specific fatty acids (saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated) that Americans ate one hundred years ago were very different from those that are eaten today. The table below provides an overview of the changes that have taken place.

Much of the fats that Americans have eaten for centuries -- and that many traditional cultures have eaten for thousands of years -- have been mostly saturated and monounsaturated. Animal fats top the list in 1890 as the fat of choice for cooking, baking, and spreading. Yet, heart disease (commonly believed to be caused by animal fat consumption) was far less prevalent during this era. In 1990, we see vegetable oils are leading the way, while animal fat consumption is so minimal that it does not make the list. For the first time in history, people are ingesting large amounts of polyunsaturated oils extracted from seeds and grains. These oils are often unknowingly eaten in prepackaged foods, as they are the oil of choice for the modern food industry due to their cost-effectiveness. Most potato chips, for example, use corn, canola, or soybean oils -- none of which were consumed in significant amounts by our ancestors.
As the type of fats and oils that the United States consumes has changed in the last 100 years, degenerative diseases have became more and more common. Saturated fat consumption has been blamed for causing many modern diseases. Modern Americans are claimed to be eating too much saturated fat and have been encouraged to cut back as much as possible to prevent disease. Is saturated fat to blame? If it were, one would expect the consumption of saturated fat to have increased substantially since the early century. This has not been the case, however:

Over the course of the 19th century, as heart disease has increased and cancer has become a common cause of death in the United States, saturated fat consumption has remained quite stable. Monounsaturated fat consumption has increased substantially. Yet this change pales in comparison to the growing popularity of polyunsaturated fat in the American diet. In the 1950s, with polyunsaturated vegetable oils gaining favor by the edible oil industries (whose primary motivation was to make a profit), Americans began eating more and more of these unnatural, man-made fats -- fats which were traditionally only consumed as whole foods, such as grains, vegetables, seeds, and nuts.

In her book, American Food Habits in Historical Perspective (1995), Elaine N. McIntosh states: "Essentially, the consumption of animal fat has declined since 1940, and the consumption of vegetable oils has increased steadily since 1909, overtaking animal fats in 1950" (p. 210). The transition from a diet rich in saturated and monounsaturated fatty acids (mostly from animal fats) to a diet high in polyunsaturated fatty acids (vegetable oils -- many of which are hydrogenated trans fats) has been one of the most significant changes in human nutrition in the past 100 years.

Source for above tables:
Enig, Mary G. (2000). Know Your Fats : The Complete Primer for Understanding the Nutrition of Fats, Oils and Cholesterol. Silverspring, MD: Bethesda Press

Next, Part 4: "What About Cholesterol?"

Were Early Americans Really Living Shorter Lives?

2009-05-01T12:12:00.012-06:00

This is Part 2 in a series adapted from my paper, "Modern Health, Primitive Wisdom: American Health History and the Findings of Weston A. Price."

Looking deeper into the life expectancy statistics that are used to gauge our country's health status, one quickly finds that it is not a simple black-and-white procedure. Many factors create discrepancies in the data. One prime example is the role that infant mortality rate plays in determining life expectancy data. As the mortality numbers of the overall population are added up, every infant death contributes a "0" to the tally, significantly impacting the final average. Below is a graphic representation of the result of this phenomenon. (blue = infant mortality; yellow = average lifespan.)

In the above figure, we see that infant mortality rates in 1900 are quite high at 14 %. Correspondingly, average life expectancy of newborns in 1900 is very low at 47.6 years. In 1992, with infant deaths (along with infectious disease, undernourishment, and death from injury) being largely controlled by medical technological advancements, the infant mortality rate drops drastically to less than 1%. For that year, we find that life expectancy has risen by nearly 30 years compared to data from the year 1900.

It is also important to note that the data for life expectancy in the above figure is only representative of the number of years a newborn infant is expected to live. In other words, at age "0" a white person in 1900 is expected to live up to 48 years; in sharp contrast, a white person born (age "0") in 1992 is expected to nearly 77-years-old. However, if the 1900 person escapes infectious disease, injury, miscarriage, and undernourishment and manages to reach 40-years-old and beyond, the numbers shift significantly (blue = 40+ life expectancy in 1900; yellow = 40+ life expectancy in 1992):

Here we see that if a white American in 1900 reaches age 40, he/she can expect to live 28 years longer (age 68). A white American in 1992 is expected to live 39 years longer (age 79). This is a difference of 11 years. Furthermore, if the 1900 person should live to age 80, he/she is expected to reach age 85. If the 1992 man lives to 80 years, he can expect to see age 87. This is a difference of 2 years. Thus, it can be seen in the above figure that as the age of the individual increases, the gap between the life expectancy data of 1900 and 1992 diminishes. Returning to the first figure, which is based on newborn (age 0) life expectancies, we find a much larger gap in the data -- a difference of nearly 30 years.

Once again, we must remind ourselves of the many changing factors over the century that play an important role in interpreting this data: better hygiene, control of infectious disease, increased food supply, and improved infant outcome. Such influential factors must be taken into consideration when using lifespan data to analyze the health of the United States population throughout the century.

Sources
American Food Habits in Historical Perspective (McIntosh 1995, 219-220)

National Vital Statistics Reports (Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics 2006)

Next Post, Part 3: "Big, Fat Changes in American Foods."

American Health Then & Now

2009-04-29T15:50:00.019-06:00

This blog post is adapted from a paper I wrote in 2007 called, "Modern Health, Primitive Wisdom: American Health History and the Findings of Weston A. Price." Enjoy!

One dietary characteristic that was readily apparent in the traditional primitive cultures of Weston A. Price’s studies was the lack of modern, processed foods. There was in these cultures a widespread use of foods high in nutrient content and comparatively low in calories. When processed foods replaced traditional foods, physical deformities and ill health followed. This pattern of less consumption of nutrient-dense foods and greater consumption of processed modern foods has happened in the United States just as it has in the primitive cultures of the world.

A look around the American population with Dr. Price’s discoveries in mind quickly reveals the state of health in our country today. It's common for modern Americans to require braces and other dental corrections, as well as frequent visits to the doctor due to general illness, such as flu, colds, and other symptoms of lowered immunity. As Dr. Price noted in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, it only takes one generation of men and women who regularly displaced their native foods with processed foods to give birth to children displaying physical irregularities and exhibiting lowered immunity to disease. These deteriorations are now commonly observed in modernized societies, like the United States, where a large proportion of the foods eaten are processed and devitalized.

Comparing American eating and disease patterns in 1900 to those in 2000, one can find several significant changes that have taken place over the last century. In 1900, Americans ate mostly whole foods, although substantial amounts of processed foods were eaten as well. The whole foods eaten by turn-of-the-century Americans included untrimmed meats from pasture-fed animals, fresh vegetables and fruits, grains, and fats like butter, lard, and coconut oil. Of course, this diet differs significantly from the foods Americans eat today: vegetable oils, refined and “enriched” grains, simple starches, sugar, and factory-reared grain-fed meats (in a few words: fast food). Table 1 provides an overview of the changes in American disease patterns before (1900) and after (2000) these processed foods fully crept into the food supply.

Table 1. Leading Causes of Death in 1900 & 2000*

1900_________________% Total_______2000__________________% Total
Tuberculosis.......................11.3...........Diseases of Heart.................31.4
Pneumonia.........................10.2...........Cancer .................................23.3
Diarrheal Diseases..............8.1............Stroke...................................6.9
Heart Disease......................8.0...........Lung Disease........................4.7
Liver Disease.......................5.2...........Accidents..............................4.1
Injuries.................................5.1..........Pneumonia & Influenza.........3.7
Stroke..................................4.5...........Diabetes Mellitus...................2.7
Cancer..................................3.7...........Suicide................................1.3
Bronchitis............................2.6...........Kidney Diseases....................1.0
Diphtheria...........................2.3...........Liver Disease & cirrhosis..........1.0
*Adapted from Food Politics (Nestle 2002, 32)

In Table 1, it can be seen that the shift in American health over the last century has been one of major transition. In 1900, many deaths were due to infectious diseases or injury (6 of 10). This was an era when hygiene was not fully understood and such untimely deaths were commonplace. Heart disease and cancer -- the diseases of modern man -- are seen occurring in moderate percentages during this time. Flash forward to 2000, following many years of processed food consumption, and a very different picture is painted. Almost all of the top diseases (8 of 10) causing death at the time of the millennium are chronic degenerative conditions. The numbers for heart disease and cancer top the list, increasing by four and six times respectively compared to 1900.

The drastic changes in American disease patterns require a broad perspective to fully comprehend. As stated before, in addition to dietary changes, many environmental changes (crowded living conditions and an inadequate food supply) no doubt had a prime role to play in the shift in health that took place over the last hundred or so years. This is one reason why the average lifespan in the United States in 1900 is commonly believed to be far less than it is today. The average lifespan data during this time is also influenced by untimely deaths, such as infectious disease, injury, lack of food, and miscarriages.

Stay tuned for the next post titled, "Were Early Americans Really Living Shorter Lives?"

Storm & Family: Degenerating Raw Vegans

2009-03-28T12:50:00.004-06:00

While individual dietary experimentation can be fascinating, far more valuable information can be gained by observing entire groups of people on certain diets. Weston A. Price's studies are a good example of this, as each unique primitive group he came across displayed varying levels of health on varying diets. What they had in common was beautiful cavity-free teeth and freedom from degenerative disease. All were healthy and vibrant beyond a modern person's wildest dreams. All included animal foods in their diet.

With this in the back of my mind, a friend of mine informed me of a family of 100% raw-food vegans. She handed me a DVD of the family that endorsed their diet and themselves as the ultimate way to optimal wellness. She simply said to me, "I think you'll find this very interesting."

The idea in and of itself was intriguing: an entire family on a raw vegan diet. What did they eat? Were the parents healthy? Were the kids healthy? What were their temperaments like? I was excited to observe the family with these questions in mind.

Here's a decription of the family from their website:

Storm has been eating a raw-vegan diet of fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds in their natural unheated state for over 30 years and is known for his body builder's physique. At 60 he looks far younger than his years. Jinjee started eating a raw diet 15 years ago. Her before and afters show her weight loss transformation. Our family is 100% raw-vegan and thriving! On this site we share our photos and stories, photos of the kids growing up raw, and videos of raw vegan cuisine being prepared.

Watching the DVD, it's clear that this is a family on a mission to be the healthiest people they can possibly be. Storm, the husband and father, is the most enthusiastic of the bunch, sharing his reasoning behind the "Garden Diet" (as he calls it) and stories about improved health in his family and others who have experimented with this way of eating. His physique is quite impressive for a raw vegan, although nothing close to some of the omnivorisitic hunter-gatherers I've seen. Over the years he'd eaten higher-fat and protein versions of the raw diet -- mostly nuts and seeds -- which seemed to be best years for him in terms of building muscle and being fit. Slowly he transitioned to a more low-calorie raw vegan diet, and now he drinks mostly fresh orange juice for his calories. A low-protein, low-fat, high-sugar diet. Whoa, dude.

Here are a few pictures of Storm over the years.

It's pretty easy to see that his transition from nuts to orange juice isn't helping him much. To be fair, he is 60-years-old now. But this ripped, omnivoristic Austrailian Aborigine (below middle -- not a raw vegan) amidst some other phenomenal physical specimens from his tribe looks to be about the same age or maybe older, and time doesn't seem to be hurting him much:

Of course, there's more to a person than their physical form. In addition to appearance, Weston Price also noted the generous, vibrant, and uplifting nature of the healthy primitives. So I kept an eye out for the overall temperament of the raw vegan family members while watching the film. In certain segments, Storm can be seen philosophizing about the raw lifestyle in a very solemn, kind of soft, muted tone. His eyes look relaxed and sedated. Other scenes find Storm all fired up and ranting like a madman with his eyes bugging out all over the place. There seemed to be some definite blood sugar swings going on, which would make sense since the man was living on orange juice during the making of the film. Lacking a proper balance of amino acids, fats, and b-vitamins -- not to mention a complete absence of fat-soluble vitamins -- Storm appears to be unstable and obsessive. Someone get this man some fatty meat!

Storm's wife, Jinjee, makes several appearances on the DVD, endorsing the raw vegan way of life as whole-heartedly as her husband. Yet Jinjee expresses difficulty in sticking to the diet. She describes periods where she reverted back to cooked foods, but she "knows" raw is the ultimate path to unimaginable health and energy -- if she could only stick to it for life! It's evident that she's torn between listening to her body -- which obviously is craving cooked foods -- and adhering to the arbitrary law of raw. Her pregnancies were either mostly raw or 100% raw, as she explains in the film. Video clips are shown of her pregnancies with each child, and it's a little disturbing how skinny she is for a pregnant woman (see photos).

This brings us to the most fascinating portion of the film: the children. In Weston Price's studies of primitive populations, he discovered that adults suffered suboptimal health when abandoning their traditional diet for one rich in industrialized foods. The children of those adults then grew up with lowered immunity and physical degeneration. We'll get to the raw vegan kids shortly, but for now let's remind ourselves what a healthy traditional child (left) looks like compared to an unhealthy modernized child (right), according to Price:

Notice the round face, prominent cheek bones, wide nostrils, square jaw, and broad dental arch of the child on the left. Now observe the narrow face, sagging cheeks, pinched nostrils, weak jaw, and dental deformities of the child on the right. The child on the left was raised on nutrient-dense food (including animal foods high in vitamins and minerals), while the child on the right grew up eating processed foods like white flour and sugar.

Now that we've been refreshed as to what a healthy, properly-developed child on a traditonal diet actually looks like, take a look at the kids who Storm and Jinjee raised raw vegan (see photos).

Observe the narrow faces, weak jaws, pinched nostrils, and sagging cheeks of the raw vegan children. Like every modern child raised on a deficient diet, these children exhibit facial and dental deformities. The raw vegan diet -- though consisting of primarily whole foods in their "natural, unheated state" -- has not rescued them from the classic manifestations of poor physical development.

The theory of raw veganism is steeped in fanciful and delusional thinking. There has never been a group of human beings in the entire evolution of our species that were 100% raw vegans -- or even vegan for that matter. During Price's travels he was always on the lookout for a primitive population that subsisted solely off of vegetable foods. He never found one. Not only did every group utilize animal foods, they also made great efforts to obtain these foods and held them in very high regard -- particularly for child-rearing. Anthropologists and archaeologists have determined that meat and animal fat consumption (in some cases full-on carnivory) have been a mainstay in the human diet for several million years. Today, healthy traditional cultures all over the world eat cooked plant and animal foods and stay healthy from generation to generation.

Those that believe raw veganism is the ultimate path to wellness -- as Storm and his family do -- fail to take note of these facts and completely disregard hundreds of thousands of years of time-tested human foodways. We were left with the knowledge of proper diet by our ancestors -- perhaps we will only attain optimal health by returning to those food traditions of the past.

Can High-Carb, Low-Fat Be Healthy?

2009-03-06T14:14:00.034-07:00

Compared to us moderns, many paleolithic and neolithic cultures who ate high-carbohydrate, starchy diets exhibited good health -- full sets of teeth and nicely developed noggins along with an absence of degenerative disease. A few of these cultures include the Kitavans (tubers, fruit, coconuts, & fish), the Kuna (plantain, yucca, kidney beans, fruit, & wild game/fish), and the traditional Peruvians (potatoes, quinoa, & guinea pigs -- seen in Nutrition & Physical Degeneration by Weston A. Price). As somebody who has adhered to a carbohydrate model (ala Taubes) in explaining present-day diseases and ill health, the fact that human beings can thrive on high-carbohydrate diets fascinates me. So let's explore this!

We'll begin by examining some of the obsevations of T.L. Cleave, who wrote an important book called The Saccharine Disease. In this book, Cleave notes that the rural Zulu of Africa (in the 1950s) were in good health on a diet comprised of 90% carbohydrate calories (Matt Stone recently blogged about this subject and sparked my interest). In contrast, the urban Zulu ate less carbohydrates (81%), yet had more diseases than the rural Zulu. Cleave concluded that the amount of carbs being eaten by the two groups didn't matter so much as the types of carbs. This seemed to make all the difference: the rural population ate maize and root vegetables while the city-dwellers consumed refined, industrialized carbs, such as sugar and white flour. Through observations such as this, T.L. Cleave, like Weston A. Price before him, showed quite convincingly that refined foods are the cause of modern degenerative diseases.

But this isn't the entire story. If we are to think critically about Cleave's theory, we find that he oversimplified things a bit too much, lumping all detrimental foods into one category: refined carbohydrates. What this implies is that a person can consume all the whole grains, fruits, and potatoes he or she wants without experiencing the "diseases of civilization": diabetes, obesity, dental caries and crooked teeth, gastrointestinal ailments, heart disease, etc. As long we avoid sugar and refined grains, we'll live in good health, just as the rural Zulu did. Hmmm ... maybe.

While Cleave may or may not have been right about the general nature of refined carbs and their effects on human health, one glaring hitch in his theory is the fact that he overlooked something very simple: the chemical differences in carbohydrate foods and how these differences may be major factors in present-day diseases. In other words, it's not as simple as whole foods vs. refined foods -- it's also a matter of the qualities of the foods. To illustrate this, let's evaluate two of the evils that Cleave proclaims to be the cause of modern man's health demise. On one hand we have white flour: a starch -- also known chemically as a polysaccharide -- which is broken down to glucose in the body. Sugar, on the other hand, is a disaccharide with a significant difference: it's composed of glucose and fructose, which the body handles quite differently than it does starch. Gary Taubes, author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, explains sugar's disaccharide nature in the body:

"The fructose will stimulate the liver to produce triglycerides, while the glucose will stimulate insulin secretion. And the glucose-induced insulin response in turn will prompt the liver to secrete even more triglycerides than it would from fructose alone, while the insulin will also elevate blood pressure apart from the effect of fructose." (p. 201)

The effects of fructose and glucose on the formation of AGEs (junk proteins in the body implicated in age-related chronic diseases) is also interesting. Taubes writes:

"Glucose [alone] ... is the least reactive of all sugars, the one least likely to attach itself without an enzyme to a nearby protein, which is the first step in the formation of AGEs. As it turns out, however, fructose is significantly more reactive in the bloodstream than glucose, and perhaps ten times more effective than glucose at inducing the cross-linking of proteins that leads to the cellular junk of [AGEs]. Fructose [induced-AGEs] ... seem more resistant to the body's disposal mechanisms than ... glucose. It also increases markedly the oxidation of LDL particles, which appears to be a necessary step in atherosclerosis." (p. 201)

Glucose -- the "least reactive of all sugars" -- appears to be the most ideal carbohydrate to consume if we are to avoid disease. Fructose seems to be the worst. Together, as sugar or honey or high-fructose-corn-syrup -- all glucose/fructose combinations -- they are the worst of the worst. It's kind of like putting Vin Diesel and Chuck Norris in an action flick together. Not good. You know somebody's gonna die.

So perhaps it is sugar (more specifically, fructose) and not refined foods like white flour or white rice (starches) that lead to our modern health ailments. It's hard to say for certain which food caused problems when evaluating primitive cultures as Cleave and Price did because, in every case examined, where there was smoke there was fire: white flour and sugar were being eaten at the same time. Yet, if it were all refined carbohydrates that lead to ill health, then how are we to explain healthy cultures on a diet centered around white rice such as the Japanese and Koreans? These cultures also consume animal foods in the form of fish, beef, and eggs -- all cholesterol-rich foods. Yet they have little heart disease. What's missing, which many industrialized cultures consume plenty of, is excessive sugar and high-fructose corn syrup (particularly in the form of soft drinks). Fructose intake in these countries has been very low traditionally, although it continues to grow from year to year.

I was actually in Seoul, Korea recently and noticed that almost everybody was slim and healthy-looking. The only obese Koreans I observed were a few children here and there. As consumption of soda, candy, and other fructose-sweetened products are increasing, displacing the starch calories in the diet, it appears that nation-wide obesity (and its slew of health complications) is on the rise.

With all of this to consider, we are left with a question: is fructose the culprit in present-day chronic disease? A man by the name of Dr. Richard Johnson theorizes that it is. His research strongly indicates this food as the main player in everything from diabetes to heart disease. The more and more I research it, the more I am convinced of such a theory. The Nutrition & Metabolism Society had this to say in a paper on fructose:

The alarming increase in fructose consumption may be an important contributor to the epidemic of obesity and insulin resistant diabetes in both pediatric and adult populations.

And this (italics mine):

A high flux of fructose to the liver, the main organ capable of metabolizing this simple carbohydrate, disturbs normal hepatic carbohydrate metabolism leading to two major consequences... perturbations in glucose metabolism and glucose uptake pathways, and a significantly enhanced rate of de novo lipogenesis and TG [triglyceride] synthesis, driven by the high flux of glycerol and acyl portions of TG molecules coming from fructose catabolism. These metabolic disturbances appear to underlie the induction of insulin resistance commonly observed with high fructose feeding in both humans and animal models.

What I'm getting at here, in a long-winded, haphazard sort-of-way, is this working theory:

Fructose in excessive quantities (i.e. standard American diet) is detrimental to human health.
Starch alone is not detrimental to human health.
A high-carbohydrate, starch-based diet -- that includes animal proteins & fats -- is a viable diet for long-term health.
Human beings can thrive on a wide variety of diets -- a high-fructose diet does not seem to be one of them.

All of that being said, there is one important caveat to consider. If a person is already affected by diabetes and/or obesity or some other degenerative condition, a simple reduction in fructose may not provide health improvement. When the metabolism or equilibrium of the body is disturbed in such an unnatural way (theoretically from over-consumption of fructose), starch or any other carbohydrate may exacerbate the condition further. For these kinds of people, a low-carbohydrate diet may be the most therapeutic diet for the long-term.

I'd also like to add that, although fructose -- and not carbohydrates in general -- may be the true instigator in degenerative disease, a high-fat, low-carb diet has advantages that a high-carb diet does not: lipolysis, stable blood sugar, greater satiety, lack of hunger, more "protective" and nutrient-dense foods, and so on.

Not to mention the fact that the more carnivoristic tribes of ancient and contemporary history dispaly greater strength, minimal dental caries, and denser bones compared to agricultural, starch-eating peoples. Here's Dr. Price's observation in Africa:

In contrast with the Masai, the Kikuyu tribe...are charcterized by being primarily an agricultural people... [they] are not as tall as the Masai and physically they are much less rugged... teeth with caries [were] 5.5 percent ... 36.4 percent [of the population]. (pp. 138-139)

Therefore, although it's interesting that human beings can live in good health on a starch-based diet, I'll stick with a low-carb (100 grams or less), diet rich in animal products, thank you!

ADDENDUM TO THIS POST: Stephan from Whole Health Source challenged me on the notion that it is fructose alone that leads to the diseases of civilization. Read the comments section for our debate and witness Stephan -- the master of persuasion -- single-handedly alter my perspective on this issue ...

The Medicated Child & Weston A. Price

2009-03-05T10:26:00.013-07:00

Last night I watched a PBS Frontline episode called "The Medicated Child." The show covered many aspects of the unfortunate -- and most likely unnecessary -- phenomenon of prescribing antipsychotic and/or behavioral medications, such as lithium and ritalin, to children as young as 3-years-old who are diagnosed as ADHD or bipolar. Arguments were provided for both sides of the issue, but in the end it seems plain obvious that kids should absolutely not be given meds that have never been fully evaluated to be safe and effective for adolescents and infants. It is also readily apparent that drug companies could care less who they're hurting by encouraging widespread use of these potent medications. This is especially evident when Frontline reveals that drug companies suddenly became interested in testing the effects of behavioral meds on children only when the Clinton administration gave adequate monetary incentive for doing so.

But all of that is another issue having more to do with politics and ethics. A far more intriguing question that I would like to address is: why are children exhibiting behavioral abnormalties? What is the root of all this madness? Surely it's not a deficiency in meds!

When I seek to answer a question like this, I always consider nutrition and physical health to be huge contributers. And I always think of my good buddy, Weston A. Price. This man truly observed something revolutionary about the physical and mental health of primitive populations on poor diets, and it is this radical observation that I thought of immediately when I saw a particular scene in The Medicated Child:

A woman is explaining the inadequate brain activity of a young boy to his family through the use of a color-coded brainscan. One sees the boy's brain and its array of greens, oranges, yellows, and reds. Then, next to that, a "normal" brain is shown with a very different color pattern. The woman points to different areas in the boy's brain and says, "This is abnormal and indicates that there is not very much activity here." Okay, so far very interesting. Then she turns the family's attention to a part of the brain called some fancy scientific name, which is visibly smaller than a normal brain. "That's where the problem is," she tells the family, who all seem very impressed.

My question is: What the heck is so impressive about this diagnoses? Where are the answers as to why this happened in the first place? How is this a satisfying experience in the least bit?

Doctor: "Your son has an abnormal brain. Here are some meds to fix it."

Parents: "Wow, thanks, doc. You're a life saver."

Stop. Hold the phone. Why? Why is his brain abnormal? Just because? Of course not. There are simple answers that are easily overlooked by all of the "experts" because they're used to thinking about things in such a complex fashion. What if, for example, the son is nutritionally deficient? What if he needs an improved diet? While nutrition appears to be the most fundamental root cause of illness -- especially when we see these kids on Frontline eating twinkies and corn dogs and goldfish crackers -- these are questions that are never addressed by the doctors. ADHD caused by too much sugar? Naw, couldn't be! Could it be that these children need more animal fats and proteins in their diets? No way -- that stuff causes heart disease!

It seems like the further we progress scientifically, the more we forget the simple questions and answers. For example, when "experts" are asked why more and more kids are diagnosed as bipolar, the answer is unsatisfying:

Top experts offer a range of reasons. They acknowledge some of the increase is likely due to bipolar being mislabeled; some think "bipolar disorder" has become a catch-all diagnosis for kids with a range of problems. But many experts say the increase is simply because doctors are better at identifying bipolar in children today than they were 10 years ago. They believe these kids have always existed, but that doctors failed to recognize the symptoms of bipolar and called these children oppositional or diagnosed them with ADHD. Some experts also cite evidence of a genetic link behind the rise in childhood bipolar, and some even speculate that environmental factors are playing a role in triggering childhood bipolar. source

First of all, that's quite an assumption that these kinds of kids have "always existed." A quick evaluation of primitive populations will find the opposite to be true. Second, not one of these mainstream experts even speculates the cause may be related to diet. Yet, even if we are to attribute behavioral abnormalities to nutrition, we still don't get a satisfying answer. Even if we instruct families to cut out sugar and other junk foods and add more animal fats/proteins to the diet, and as a result we see dramatic shifts in a child's behavior, we still haven't answered the question of "why does the child have a smaller, more compressed brain structure than a normal brain?" And why is this phenomenon becoming more and more common? Again, we return to nutrition as the root cause, but this time let's focus on the diet the child was raised on and the diet of the parents before conception and during pregnancy. Now we're getting somewhere.

Here we return to good ol' Dr. Price. His study of primitive populations showed that, with inadequate nutrition of the parents in the prenatal period and when provided with a deficient diet postnatally (during the formative years when still growing), a child develops facial, skeletal, and dental deformities. In other words, rather than a child having a nice round face, square jaw, wide nasal passage, and all 32 teeth, the child has a narrow face, sagging cheeks, pinched nostrils, and crooked teeth. All of these changes are due to inadequate nutrition, not genetics. And with these deformities comes an overall more "squished" brain due to poor formation of the skull. This can potentially lead to poor blood flow and, thus, abnormal brain function. Children with ADHD have 3-4% less brain volume than children without ADHD.

To further add to the argument of poor nutrition/poor skeletal development being the cause of behavioral disorders, it's interesting to note that every single child in The Medicated Child exhibited facial deformities. Most kids had overbites, some were mouth breathers, and all had narrow faces. For a visual example, return to the top of this post and observe the child on the DVD cover.

In summary, I theorize that the root of behavioral abnormalities is:

Inadequate nutrition (animal fats/proteins) of parents prenatally
Inadequate nutrition of child postnatally, during developmental years
A combination of the above leads to the child's skeletal deformities, part of which is comprimised brain volume due to underdeveloped skull
Smaller brain volume, in addition to poor diet, leads to poor brain function and, thus, behavioral abnormalities

All of that being said, with nutritional intervention (nutrient-dense, animal food-rich diet) a child may improve and function well. If this isn't enough, other therapeutic interventions and/or medication (as a last resort) may need to be utilized. In the end, however, it all starts prior to conception with the diet of the parents. If we are to truly resolve these disorders -- and many others -- it is necessary rebuild our children's health generation by generation until we return to the legacy of optimal health left by our primitive ancestors.
For a fascinating article on facial and dental deformities, check out this article: "Is it Mental or is it Dental: Cranial and Dental Impacts on Total Health," by Raymond Silkman, DD.

Talking Nutrition with a Wild Man

2009-02-27T18:13:00.004-07:00

At Winter Count, a primitive skills gathering in Casa Grande, AZ, I had an enlightening conversation concering nutrition with an amazing modern-day abo named Matt Graham. This is a man who lives primitively -- utilizing only what the land offers him -- for months at a time. Recently, in southern Utah, he stayed out for 6 months -- 3 months of which was living solely on the land with no packed-in foods. In a realistic primitive-living situation (the same situation that our ancient human ancestors found themselves in for more than 2 million years until the Neolithic era around 10,000 years ago) it has been my assertion that a person must procure animal foods to remain in good health. Not only that, but anybody in a primitive setting will crave the essential nutrients found only in meat and especially fat if they are out there long enough (animal forms of fat-soluble vitamins A, D, and K). In other words, plants will not sustain any lengthy wilderness survival sojourn.

Keeping this in mind, I asked Matt how he sustained himself while in the wild. What foods did he eat? It was a very simple answer: most of his calories and nutrients came from trapped squirrels, rabbits, and rodents. He would eat watercress salads with other wild greens, as well minimal amounts of other wild plant foods. Yet animal foods were his main source of sustenance. When eating an animal, he ate the entire carcass (barring large bones, guts or fur). After cooking, he consumed the organ meats first, then the rest of the animal, crunching down any easily chewed bones along with it. When asked about fish in the area, Matt replied that he ate fish maybe one or two times a week -- no more than that, though. Why? Because he noticed that while he subsisted mostly off of fish he felt fatigued and not as strong as when consuming mainly squirrels. Apparently, the Apaches also avoided eating too much fish, according to Matt.

My guess as to why this would be (and Matt agreed) is that fish are not nearly as fat-rich as wild land mammals. Not only that, but I would add that fish consist of mainly monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids and very little saturated fats. In a primitive living scenario where most of the calories are coming from animal flesh, it would seem important to get the right mix of fatty acids, including saturated fats, to meet the needs of the human body, which has a similar fatty acid content to pork: mostly saturated and monounsaturated. If starchy or sugary plant foods are available in abundance, then the body can make the saturated fatty acids it needs from those carbohydrates. But when only animal foods are being utilized -- which is more common than not in primitive living -- getting the wrong mix of fatty acids could cause problems in the long run.

I would hazard a guess, therefore, that Matt and the Apaches experienced fatigue from fish due to an over-abundance of mono and poly-unsaturated fats and a lack of saturated fats. This is important to understand because the body needs saturated fats to function properly and optimally. So, it would make sense that Matt felt better eating squirrels and rabbits than he did eating mostly fish, as the land mammals have a higher percentage of saturated and monounsaturated fats. It seems that these are the most likely fats that our human ancestors evolved on according to stable isotopic analyses of ancient bones which reveal a diet of terrestrial grazing animals and "freshwater foods" (the latter can indicate fish, shellfish, and/or waterfowl and other creatures that feed on aquatic plants and animals -- my guess is that waterfowl, with a more optimal fatty-acid profile, played a significant role in this type of food pattern).

Another intriguing tidbit that Matt offered me during our conversation was his discovery of -- and feasting on -- a deer carcass. It may have been left by a hunter or Matt himself may have trapped it -- I don't recall for certain. At any rate, he was able to procure a large deer carcass with plenty of meat and fat. When Matt came across this find, he had been living off of squirrels and rabbits and wild edibles for quite a while. He had lost a lot of weight, and he felt good in his leaner body, but he was unsure how long he could feel strong with his lower body fat percentages. The deer carcass provided him with much-needed calories, and he realized that he would have to take it easy and not gorge himself into indigestion and discomfort. Despite this intellectual acknowledgment, Matt ended up eating over ten pounds of meat and fat in one sitting. He exclaimed, "I thought I was going to feel horrible, but I felt great!" The meat was digested smoothly and efficiently, sparing him from losing more much-needed fat from his body.

Winter Count

2009-02-23T14:05:00.005-07:00

I'm back in civilization after a week-long primitive skills gathering in Casa Grande, AZ. This event, called "Winter Count" after the tradition of yearly pictographic calenders kept by Plains natives, attracts survival skills enthusiasts, artists, musicians, modern day abos, environmental educators, back-to-the-land advocates, and other interesting groups who wish to learn the ways of the ancients. With such a hodgepodge of people engaging in timeless activities like fire-by-friction, basketry, cordage, trapping, bow-making, felting, animal processing, and living on the land, there is ample opportunity to network and gain tons of knowledge and inspiration.

This year was my 6th year attending since 2003 -- my second year as an instructor. As a student I learned the basics of wilderness living and now have a solid background in fire-making, edible wild plants, and survival. As an instructor, I've been presenting, refining and discussing my passion, which I call primitive nutrition. Other names for this subject might be nutritional/medical anthropology, paleolithic diet, or hunter-gatherer foodways. I thoroughly enjoyed discussing this broad and highly debated topic at Winter Count. Can't wait until next year!

Doctor, please don't poo-poo the Paleo diet!

2008-12-06T12:37:00.006-07:00

A friend of mine forwarded an article to me about the paleo diet a while ago. It's a question and answer session in Oprah Magazine with a doctor named David Katz, MD. The article is called, "Should We Eat a Paleolithic Diet?" and it's flawed in many ways. See for yourself:

http://www.oprah.com/article/omagazine/200812_omag_katz_paleolithic

After reading the first few paragraphs, it is very apparent that the author is one of these politically-correct nutrition gurus that never seems to make a solid stand on anything except what mainstream nutritionists and dieticians recommend. Certainly not a breath of fresh air from all of the unfounded dietary recommendations that inundate the media. Following are points brought up in the article by Katz, along with my response.

Quote: "However, many anthropologists prefer describing our ancestors as gatherer-hunters because about two-thirds of their diet was plant based."

You begin to see from this quote that he has strong bias towards a plant-based diet for maintaining health. Two-thirds is a huge stretch, in my opinion. Studies of modern hunter-gatherers conflict with this information. Loren Cordain, one of the foremost researchers on the Paleolithic diet, has very solid data showing HG's eating a meat-based diet. (However, like this Katz guy, Cordain sells out to politically correct nutrition, claiming that HG's ate very little saturated fat and cholesterol.)

A great resource for paleo diet information, based on anthropological research can be found by doing a search for HL Abrams. This dude is on par, in my opinion.

Quote: " The flesh of antelope, which paleontologists believe most resembles the flesh our Stone Age ancestors would have eaten, has a very low fat content, roughly 16 percent of total calories. Contrast that with beef, which can be 30 percent fat or higher. Even more important is the quality of the fat. "

Typical ignorant viewpoint from a man who has most likely never butchered an animal. Fatty portions of an animal that HG's used include: bone marrow, back fat, cavity fat, tongue, kidney fat, intestinal fat, brains, and -- in some cases, when boiling bones for long periods -- bone grease. The fatty acid composition of muscle meat is irrelevant because HG's didn't only eat muscle meat -- they ate the whole animal!

By the way, much of an antelope's fat is actually quite high in saturated fatty acids. Not to mention *gasp!* cholesterol!

Quote: "Meat from animals that graze on grass contains a much higher proportion of polyunsaturated fat, including those heart-healthy omega-3s."

Notice he says grass-fed "meat" contains a higher proportion of polyunsaturated fat. Again, he neglects to mention all of the fat from the rest of the animal, which are dominated by saturated and monounsaturated fatty acids. Not only that, but he is implying that polyunsaturates are the healthiest fats to consume. A big no-no, indeed, considering the studies done on test animals in which a high-polyunsaturated vegetable fat diet leads to death and disease. Also, factor in the lack of polyunsaturates in HG's diets when taking into account the entire animal.

Quote: "Our Stone Age ancestors lived to only about the age of 40—who knows how their health would have fared after 80 years of eating like this?"

Lifespan statistics are influenced by infant mortality rates, which were certainly higher before the advent of modern medicine due to environmental factors. For every set of bones from a paleo 80-year-old, an infant death -- being listed statistically as 0-years old -- will affect the average. The average of 80 and 0 is 40, correct? You can see how statisticians come to such silly conclusions. Also, factor in deaths from weapons and accidents. The fact is that there were elderly castes in many primitive cultures, such as the aborigines. I've heard anectodotal accounts from personal communications with modern Native American people claiming that their grandparents lived to be 100-years-old and beyond. I'm sure if I searched enough I could find some archaelogical evidence (dentition studies) of ancient peoples reaching such an age.

And, as for HGs health when they reach 80-years and beyond: if they still have all of their perfectly straight teeth and dense bones at 80, they're doing a hell of a lot better health-wise than us brace-face moderns. Ancient skulls would suggest that paleo people were optimally healthy (perfect teeth, fully-developed noggin) throughout their lives.

Quote: " The dietary plan I prefer to espouse is one supported by both anthropology and modern science: plenty of vegetables, fruits, and whole grains as a stand-in for the wild plants our ancestors ate, nuts and seeds, beans, seafood, lean meats, eggs, and low-fat or nonfat dairy."

Lord, have mercy! This guy isn't saying anything new -- just sticking to the same line of BS that we've been hearing since faulty, biased studies in the 50s and 60s "proved" that all disease is caused by fat and cholesterol. If this guy truly eats this way, he's got to be one hungry, fat-starved dude.

Our ancestors ate lean meat WITH FAT from all parts of the animal. Gathering plants is entirely impractical in many parts of the world. Hunting animals is the most energy-efficient way to attain nutrition in the wild (especially the all-important vitamins A & D from animal fats -- as documented by Weston Price -- and complete amino acids). We evolved on meat and fat with supplemental plants in season. And, in my opinion, this is what we are biologically suited for. Period.

Stuck in the Sand

2008-07-07T16:03:00.006-06:00

An essential country living skill that every small-town inhabitant around me seems to know about is the art of getting a vehicle out of the dirt. Folks around here carry boards, chains, jacks, and shovels just in case their truck or jeep gets its tires spinning in some unpaved backcountry road. It happens. Luckily, preparation for such an event can remedy the situation faster than you can say, "Garsh durnit." Without the proper tools, well, it's just a waiting game until somebody shows up who can help you.

My good friend Lyman was nice enough to give me firsthand experience in backcountry vehicle know-how. As we scouted his upcoming ATV trip in a borrowed truck, we climbed dirt roads and squirmed through sandy spots like butter. All the way, Lyman shifted in and out of 4-wheel drive, skillfully manuevering the truck as if was an extension of his body. Up to the top of the forested mountains we went, later making our way down into the desert red-rock wilderness. It was here that my education began.

Climbing a particularly steep hill in 4-wheel drive, Lyman asked me, "Are the front wheels spinning?"

I looked out the window, "Nope. Not as much as the back ones."

"Shoot," he said, "That means the 4-wheel drive is out."

"Huh?" Being a city boy, I needed more clarification.

"These automatic hubs have a tendency of going out eventually. Then the 4-wheel drive doesn't work."

"Oh," I replied, half-understandingly. "So what do we do?"

"Well, I think we can make it the rest of the way from here. Should be easy."

Famous last words.

We hit the first deep, sandy soil coming around a bend in a white-walled canyon. Some off-road motorcyclists came swerving along in the opposite direction, right by us. Their wheels made snake-like tracks in the sand, as they used their feet to keep themselves up.

"They're working hard," Lyman commented, "Glad we're in this truck."

More famous last words.

Around the next bend, we hit a wavey, rough sandy patch of road that caused the wheels to bounce: thud-thud-thud-thud-thud! Then we stopped moving. Lyman tapped the gas pedal in an attempt to crawl out of the jam to no avail. We hopped out of the truck and saw that the back tires had burrowed into the dirt.

"Shoot," Lyman said, "I forgot the shovel. We have to use our hands." He began scooping dirt from the front of the driver side rear tire. I followed his lead on the passenger rear.

Soon we had a small basin in front of each rear tire. Lyman got back in the truck and gave it gas. It scooted out of the soft depression after a few tries. Then we were on our way again.

"We're good, Ryan," Lyman says to me, "That was easy."

Once again: famous last words.

As we drove downhill from the canyon, the quality of the road changed from sandy-gravely to more of a dusty beach-like texture.

"I don't remember it being so soft on this road," Lyman thought out loud. I figured we'd be okay.

Then we hit dirt that felt like we were driving on a pile of dust. The truck swam through the road like a salmon making its way upstream in a heavy current, slowly inching its way forward. I suddenly remembered that we didn't have 4-wheel drive. The truck stopped, the wheels spun, and Lyman tapped the pedal to crawl out. Shoot. Stuck again.

We got out to assess the damage. It wasn't good. The rear tires were deep -- half-covered with dirt.

"This is bad, Ryan," Lyman says, "I don't think we're getting out of this one."

For the next couple of hours we dug out the dirt with our hands, jacked up the rear end, put sticks underneath the tires, and gave it gas. Nothing moved it. We were definitely stuck. An ant falling into an ant lion's den -- the more we tried, the deeper we got.

"I'm pretty sure I can get cell phone reception from up there," Lyman said, pointing towards some ridges off in the distance. "I'll call somebody to come help us." Off he went, while I stayed back at the truck -- just in case somebody else showed up.

I waited. And waited. And waited. No Lyman. I started to wonder if he had fallen and broke his leg. Maybe he got bit by a rattlesnake. What if he got lost? All thoughts that pass through a guy's mind while he waits for his buddy to return from the desert in the middle of nowhere.

Hours later, just as darkness was falling, Lyman showed up. "I just walked ten miles," he said, "I wish I had my heart rate monitor." Spoken like a true exercise junkie. "I got a hold of Pearl and Kendall to come pick us up. We might be waiting a while."

Soon, the troops showed up. Pearl, the rough-and-tumble hunter/fisher/dental assistant/sweetheart of a woman, and Kendall, a Wayne County local who seemed to know more than a little about getting out of a backcountry jam. They had the boards; they had the chains; they had the shovel; they had the 4-wheel drive. We were saved.

On the drive home, Lyman turns to me and says, "I think I'm going to change the ATV trip route." I couldn't agree more, buddy. I couldn't agree more.

Leave the Leaves

2008-06-07T19:21:00.015-06:00

Here in rural Utah (where I currently live), I've been fortunate enough to find work that I can both enjoy and learn from. A short description of my job would be: mulcher. But that really doesn't explain exactly what I'm up to. Yes, I'm mulching (moving tons of organic matter onto an orchard to soak up water and create better soil), but I'm also observing the land, keeping out cows, setting up rainwater harvesting earthworks, and maintaining irrigation lines. Yet, if I want to tell somebody what I do for a living these days, I tell them I'm a mulcher.

The fine art of mulching has been a gift of mine for quite some time. I can remember being a child and sweeping up buckets and buckets of leaves from the patio of my family's Tucson home. My dad would put a 55-gallon plastic garbage bin, a broom, and a dust pan in front of me -- time to pick up the leaves. My older brother, Randy, helped with this activity also. We hated it. Damned trees just never seemed to stop dropping their leaves.

If picking up the dead stuff wasn't bad enough, the weekends often found Randy and I waking up to the sound of clippers next to our bedroom window. My dad was at it again. Clip, clip, clip -- trimming the trees. He was a man possessed. There was no stopping him. It was always one of those, "Aw, man" moments. When my bro and I heard those falling branches, we groaned, "Awwww, man!" It's funny how close that remark is to "amen." Yet we felt anything but blessed to be assigned the arduous task of sweeping up the sea of fallen branches on those weekend mornings.

Well, this wasn't exactly mulching. Our assignment was to pick up the organic matter and throw it away in the garbage or alley. The patio was to be licked clean by the tongues of our hard work. As kids, this was really hard work. So sometimes my bro and I wouldn't pick the leaves up as we were supposed to. We'd take a shortcut. The worst part of the job was scraping out the fallen leaves inside the planters. Sometimes we'd skip this part and let the leaves rot away. If my dad wasn't looking, we'd even push the leaves from the patio into the planters, hiding them in the shrubbery -- sort of like cleaning your room by shoving everything under the bed.

I didn't realize until years later when I took my first Permaculture Design course that -- in our unwillingness to pick up the leaves -- we were unwittingly mulching the soil. I learned in my Permaculture education that it's beneficial to "leave the leaves" (especially in a desert like Tucson), rather than scraping them up and throwing them away. Any mulch -- leaves, bark, woodchips, straw -- left on the soil will perform multiple beneficial functions:

(1) Shade the soil, preventing moisture loss

(2) Provide an environment for living organisms (such as worms and bacteria and fungi) to thrive, contributing to soil enrichment

(3) Over time, mulch will break down (by way of the above mentioned organisms) and its nutrients will be available for plant use

(4) A living sponge is formed which soaks up water, rather than letting it runoff

When I heard this, it made sense. That's how nature works, right? And that's what permaculture is all about: imitating nature.

When I learned about the wonderful attributes of mulch, I couldn't help but think about those hundreds -- maybe even thousands -- of garbage bins full of leaves that I helped haul away to the trash as a kid. What if my bro and I had left the leaves in the planters? How much rich soil would have built up over time? How much water would have been conserved? How much time did we waste on picking up leaves when we could have been wasting our time playing video games? (Kidding, of course.)

So there was one of the great epiphanies of my life: leave the leaves. And, after that Permaculture course, I became an ardent mulcher. I began to see all landscaping and yard maintenance crews as the enemies of mulch. It was their job, after all, to haul every dead, fallen thing away -- out of sight, out of mind -- for their clients. The whole idea seemed insane to me. They were throwing away gold (as my friend and fellow mulcher, Lyman, says).

And now here I am, years later, mulching and building the soil of an orchard just as nature does it. Truckload after truckload of organic matter we haul: wood chips, straw bales, hay, pine needles, and anything else we can scrounge up. In a year or two, there will be rich, moist, dark soil where the mulch now sits, teeming with insects and soil organisms. The trees will be happy, thanks to the mulchers.

Intention of the Blog

2008-06-04T18:56:00.010-06:00

By creating this blog, I hope to pour out all of those nagging, lingering, and brilliant insights that fall from the sky down into my lap each and every day. This will be a way to keep track of myself, as well as share with others the fantastic discovery, undying challenge, wondrous rapture, and immaculate imperfection that is my life.

Also, it will be an exploration into the workings and events of the world -- you know ... the world we all share?

More questions than answers. More theories than "truth." More wide-eyed curiousity than "Ha-I-already-knew-that!"

Mostly, I just like to see my name in big letters.

And yes, my life is an imperfection. Isn't yours? I believe it was in the movie, "Troy," where it was said that the gods envy us. As humans, we can experience emotions, pain, love, and loss. We are imperfect, and our lives are filled with twists and turns. We are not settled and sitting on a cloud in the sky. In our lives, we are moving, changing, growing, and dying. A god cannot experience such things. It's our striving towards perfection (and never getting there) that truly makes life worth living.

And that is why I'm here, writing this blog. It is yet another thing inching me closer and closer to the perfection I will never achieve. (Thank God!) Perfection is a means to no end. It is an inspiration to keep moving. As I refine my thoughts and rewire my mind, I revel in the full awareness of the changes all around and within me. Things sure are moving, so onward I go ...

Wanna come with me?