1

Copyright © 2010
Hans Wu

All Rights Reserved

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Disclaimer

This book is not intended for the treatment/prevention of disease. My

advice does not substitute for medical treatment whatsoever.
Everything has been provided for informational purposes only and all
recommendations outlined herein shall not be adopted without
consultation with a doctor. Use of guidelines in this book is at your
own risk and is your responsibility.

Author's Note

The ideas explained and discussed in this book are by no means novel
discoveries. Most things have been discussed and researched in the
literature and online communities for many years now. This eBook is
just an explanation for what I have implemented in my life and
recommend for others. For more information visit my blog Beyond
Paleo. The url is: http://beyondpaleo.blogspot.com

If you have any questions you can contact me at:

beyondpaleo@hotmail.com

Hans Wu (2010)

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Acknowledgements

There have been many resources online that I have used to discover
many of the issues discussed here, my home forum is the Immortality
Institute (http://www.imminst.org) where the participants have already
discussed the various ideas laid out in the book before I even had the
capability to understand them all, so I would like to thank all the users
there.

If you do not know by now, I hate to proofread and my grammar is

horrendous, so I would like to thank Lisa Ma for taking the time to
look over the book and correct my numerous mistakes. If there are still
mistakes it is her fault.

Last but not least I would like to thank my mother for entertaining these
crazy ideas that I have tried to implement in the household. Sounded
crazy at first but the results are undeniable.

Also thanks for reading the book, not the highest quality you will
ever see but hey it is free.

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About This Book
Everybody has their own idea of what healthy eating is. People
shun certain foods and eat others with gusto with nothing to base
their ideologies on other than the word of the “experts” and how
they feel. Over the years I have found that expert opinions are
usually conflicting and that how you feel is not a good barometer
for your health; the body adapts and the mind overpowers.

Over the years I have tried to combine my interest in science and

motivation to live a long healthy life and work my way from the
bottom up to determine what in our lifestyle can be beneficial or
detrimental to our health. If you have every worked in a hospital
or experienced the slow unrelenting loss of function that older
folks experience, you know it is something that one definitely
wants to avoid. My goal is not to be bed bound at 100, instead it
is to be able to carry my great grandchildren on my shoulders.

For years I have been reading books, research papers, and

articles in the field of nutrition, exercise, and health. Henry Ford
said that “thinking without constructive action becomes a
disease.” This is an attempt at constructive action.

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 Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................7

Chapter 1: The State of Nutrition................................................9

Chapter 2: The Paleolithic Diet.................................................12

Chapter 3: Calories and Nutrients.............................................30

Chapter 4: Weight Loss/Gain....................................................44

Chapter 5: Minimizing Damage................................................. 53

Chapter 6: The Natural and Supplements.................................63

Chapter 7: Maintaining the Body..............................................71

Chapter 8: Biometric Measurements........................................77

Chapter 9: Perpetual Leanness.................................................84

Chapter 10: Paleo Shoes, Posture, and Sitting..........................93

Chapter 11: How Much Life Left?..............................................98

Appendix I: Olive Oil................................................................105

Appendix II: Acne and Balding................................................110

Appendix III: Skinny Fat Body Type..........................................115

Appendix IV: Riskier Supplements...........................................117

Appendix V: Bodyweight Exercises..........................................122

Appendix VI: Soft Tissue Therapy and Stretching....................123

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Introduction
Take care of your body with steadfast fidelity. The soul must see
through these eyes alone, and if they are dim, the whole world is
clouded. ~Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Evolution created intelligent but imperfect self-repairing

machines. Our cells and tissues are constantly wearing out and
being regenerated and most of the time we don’t even notice it.
We age because of this incomplete process. As we exhaust our
cells, it gets repaired, but it is never like the original. Slowly over
the years the gap between our original state and repaired state
widen expressing itself as the typical changes of old-age.

Only recently has this “gap” come to the forefront. In the past
we suffered from infectious diseases, injuries, and starvation;
most of the world still does, but modern science has focused on
the new problem of chronic diseases (that is where the money
is). For those reading this book, you are probably more likely to
die of the diseases of civilization than the more “tropical”
diseases. Modern technology has rid us of many diseases that
would otherwise end our lives when we turn 40; instead we now
live until 80, a territory where evolution has not had a chance to
act upon. In return for our extended lifespan, technology has
made us stressed, out-of-shape, and overweight.

While we have doubled our lifespan in the last century (and will be
able to extend it in the next), people now suffer from diabetes, heart
disease, and dementia. It is not exactly my preferred way to live the
last half of my life. One extreme intervention for preventing this
suffering is Calorie Restriction with Optimal Nutrition (CRON).
This is a lifestyle where you consume less than you expend but
achieve all your required nutrients. The metabolic adaptation that
takes place extends maximum lifespan (probably your best bet to
achieve 120 years of age), but also keeps you younger at the older
age. The Okinawans probably

7
went through some form of Calorie Restriction due to poverty
from World War II and they are the healthiest and longest
living population on earth for now.

Am I practicing Calorie Restriction? Not yet. Despite the

attractions of CRON I cannot bring myself to implement it. The
benefits are that it extends health (physical and mental) and life
span, the cons are emaciation. Doesn’t seem like a very bad
trade-off, and I don’t have a good reason for not doing it, but
it’s like when you know you should write that thank-you letter
but you don’t. You don’t have a good reason for not doing it but
you still don’t do it.

Instead of implementing CRON, I have tried to develop a

lifestyle regimen which is a happy middle ground between an
extended health/life-span and the lack of emaciation, and this
book is my attempt to share it.

Due to the internet and the accessibility of information everyone

today is trying to improve their health. People nowadays want to
understand their conditions more than ever. Most want to take an
active role in their own health in hopes of living a healthier and
happier life. There is a lot of information out there and it is hard
to sift through it all. My book is just one of many, I cannot
guarantee the ideas are right, but that’s up to you to decide.
Everyone should try to understand the human body and learn
how to treat it well. It may not seem urgent to keep yourself
healthy now, but your actions today will affect you for the rest of
your life. The damage may not be apparent when you are young
but it is happening and will show itself down the road.

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Chapter 1: The State of
Nutrition
It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly
sick society. ~Krishnamurti

The modern food guide was not created until 1992. By this
measurement the science telling us what to eat is only 18 years
old, a science in its infancy stage. Nutrition and metabolism are
intertwined and metabolism is an incredibly complex topic.
While a lot of work has been done in the field what is right and
what is wrong is still under debate, despite what the “experts”
will tell you. To settle all this we should base our theories on
the results of Random Controlled Trials (RCTs) but this is very
hard to perform on humans

Most of our data comes from epidemiological studies and

experiments performed on rats/mice. Epidemiological studies are
a problem because of mutlicollinearity: some things just go
together and make it hard to determine which one is responsible.
In nutritional epidemiological studies they take a group of
people, ask them what they eat, and determine which ones died
of a heart attack (or cancer, or got Alzheimer’s) then do a lot of
complex math and see which ones match. This is where
multicollinearity comes in. If saturated fat and carbohydrates
commonly show up together in food products how do you
determine which one is the cause of heart disease? For example,
if you find that people who eat donuts get more heart disease,
what in the donut is causing the problem? You can do as much
math as you want but you won’t find the answer, but at the same
time that doesn’t mean you won’t come up with an answer. There
are better ways to do these studies such as prospectively,
longitudinally, interventional but I won’t go into detail regarding
those.

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The other problem is the data collected from rats, mice and
hamsters. Let’s say we used lions instead for our studies. We
feed it celery for 6 months and we are surprised it died of a heart
attack, we feed it beef for 6 months and they are perfectly
healthy with clean arteries. Then the newspapers can say that
celery causes heart disease, and then the researchers can use
their data and find a relationship between celery and heart
disease (I have seen weirder correlations). It’s too bad lions
don’t have a shorter life-span. Mice and rats do have a shorter
life, in that way we don’t have to wait decades for the results of
a study to come out. The problem is what do rats eat? They are
herbivores. Their natural diet is a bunch of plants with hardly
any cholesterol or saturated fat. If we feed it lots of fat no doubt
something bad happens.

Beginning in 1992 the US government began recommending a

diet high in whole grains and low in animal products (a high-
carbohydrate low-fat diet). This began to alter our psychology
of what was considered healthy. With the fear of saturated fat
spreading across the nation, the only thing left to turn to was
carbohydrates and the industry jumped at the idea of low-fat
products, which suddenly meant that high-carbohydrate diets
were good. The agriculture industry (which provides the grains
we use to make processed foods) had developed into a very
powerful entity which now greatly influences our food choices.
If you look at the advisory panel for the USDA Dietary
Guideline recommendations it does not seem very impartial.

One dietary regimen that I thought cut through all these problems
was the Paleolithic Diet. It is based on the principle that what helps
us maintain our health is what we evolved to eat. Just like a cow
eats grass and lions eat meat, in our natural environment we eat a
certain way. The problem is that the diversity of the human diet is
vast. Some are high-carbohydrate and some are low-carbohydrate,
but this is a recent phenomenon. Anthropology shows that we
evolved in the equatorial region of Africa for millions of years and
the diet present there is probably

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the diet we are adapted to consuming. Also, despite the variation in
diets, there are strong commonalities between them all.

This idea of the Paleolithic diet will be the foundation from

where we will start and improve our nutritional choices.

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Chapter 2: The
Paleolithic Diet
Red meat is not bad for you. Now blue-green meat, that‟s bad for
you! ~Tommy Smothers

Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote an essay in 1973 titled, “Nothing

in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution.” This
is the principle that the Paleolithic Diet is based on. We are what
we are because we ate what we ate. Through millions of years
we consumed foods available to us in nature which have now
allowed us to become what and who we are today. Gary E.
Belovsky (1986) modeled Hunter-Gatherer Foraging and in a
table he laid out the calories from meat and vegetables of various
tribes (reproduced partially here):

!Kung Winter !Kung Fall

Meat (%) 31 90
Vegetables (%) 69 10
Intake (g/ind) 740 816

Source: Belovsky BE. Hunter-Gatherer Foraging: A linear

Programming Approach. Journal of anthropological
Archaeology.1987. 6, 29-76.

As far as I know we evolved from the tribe of the !Kung, who

live in equatorial Africa. By taking an average of the winter and
fall percentages we see that we probably ate half our calories
from plant sources and the other half from meat. The ratios
aren’t that important. What we can see from the table is that we
are omnivores. We ate both vegetables and meat (especially if we
could get our hands on it). We are not made to be vegetarian (like
many people would lead you to otherwise believe).

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To understand why this diet has so much appeal you would have
to understand evolution. Here’s a small refresher course that I
hope helps. I love Kent Hovind’s explanation of evolution:

“Twenty million years ago there was the big bang. 4.6 billion
Years ago the earth cooled down. It rained on the rocks for
millions of years and turned into soup, and the soup came alive
3 billion years ago. So your great great great great great great
grandpa was soup.”

This tells you what happened but not how it happened. Before
we start I want to say that this is a thought experiment, I
apologize for any inaccuracies portrayed here. So, imagine a
population of 10 primates living in the jungle. They all eat
leaves. One day a primate happens upon some meat (I don’t
know how) and eats some of it and dies. Its digestive tract hasn’t
evolved to consume raw meat. Soon the primate is replaced.
Another day another primate finds some meat and eats some, by
some quirk of the randomness of nature (mutations) this primate
has developed not only the digestive capability of digesting meat
but also has developed a taste for it. This primate then has
children who also have the same quirk, but this new primate also
utilizes the nutrients better (another mutation) and thus develops
bigger muscles and brains. This bigger muscled, more brained
primate is liked by more females thus also has more children
with the same quirks. So on and so forth until the meat eating
primates’ move somewhere else to find more meat. The
vegetarians stay behind to become chimpanzees and apes, the
omnivores move on to become us.

Extend this process down to minute-details over millions of

years and there you have human evolution. The first primate
died because of the lack of ability to digest meat. This is because
it didn’t have the mechanisms to digest it. This principle also
applies to us. There are some things that we haven’t developed
the mechanisms to digest yet and probably never will
(considering human evolution has either completely stopped or
at least slowed down incredibly).

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However the thing about evolution is that it only acts up to the
point of reproduction (or maybe a little bit farther, grandmother
effect). So while it may provide us with big muscles in the short-
term it probably doesn’t extend it into the long-term. This is the
trade-off we see with CR. By restricting calories we signal to the
body that it is not a good time to reproduce (bring a child into the
world) so the body should try its best to preserve itself until
times are more plentiful. That is not to say we should ditch the
Paleolithic Diet (PD), but there are lessons we can learn from it.

Nature did not intend us to grow old and ill. We were designed
to die young, of old age, but free of disease. – Ernst L Wynder
and Marvin M Kristein

Note: One way of extending the human lifespan would be to

implement a policy stating couples cannot have children until
60. Therefore only those with good enough genes to reproduce at
60 will be able to have children. The people with bad genes will
not have children thus those won‟t get passed down. This would
be artificial selection. Not something we can implement
ethically/morally, just interesting.

Grain and Anti-nutrients

Nature is a battle for survival. We survived because of our

brains; other animals survive through sheer size, speed, or just
really good camouflage. Every species has adapted to their
environment and there’s balance in the world (at least without
us). Plants also survived, probably the best the most successful
(except maybe insects). However plants are immobile, sure some
are lethal physically (e.g. venus fly-trap), but most must utilize
other methods to protect themselves. One method is anti-
nutrients which are found in high amounts from legumes and
grains. Vegetables such as broccoli, kale, tomatoes, etc… seem
to have defenses too but we seem to be much better adapted to
these than the ones found in grains and legumes, most likely
because grains and legumes only became a large part of our diet
14
10,000 years ago, which is a far cry from the millions of years
we have been evolving. There are two important classes of anti-
nutrients: class A (the protease inhibitors and lectins) and class B
(the antiminerals e.g. phytate).

Protease inhibitors block your digestive enzymes preventing it

from breaking down protein.

Lectins are plant proteins that bind to carbohydrate moieties on

our cells. This is a special type of anti-nutrient that everyone
should take the effort to either destroy or just simply avoid.
Lectins are dangerous because they bind to carbohydrates found
on your gut cells, and of course these carbohydrate groups have
other function besides being bound by an anti-nutrient. When
lectin binds it can lead to a host of problems. You can think of
the carbohydrates on your gut as a lock and the lectin as a key.
Normally the lock should not be opened because your gut
protects you from the outside world (just like our skin). You
would not want your skin to have gaping holes, so following this
train of thought, you definitely do not want your gut to have
holes. When the lectin (the key) binds to the carbohydrates (the
lock) it opens a door that leads to malfunctioning membranes
and proteins, and may even cause inflammation and autoimmune
disorders.

Could it be that it is our modern consumption of lectin that leads

to obesity? The study below speculates that the holes caused by
lectin will allow lectin into the bloodstream, where it can then
bind to a bunch of other carbohydrates in the blood (like the
brain):

Jönsson T, Olsson S, Ahrén B, Bøg-Hansen TC, Dole A,

Lindeberg S. Agrarian diet and diseases of affluence--do
evolutionary novel dietary lectins cause leptin resistance? BMC
Endocr Disord. 2005 Dec 10;5:10.

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By consuming large amounts of lectin (from grains, peanuts,
beans, etc…) you will be opening yourself up to the risk of
autoimmune disease:

Cordain L, Toohey L, Smith MJ, Hickey MS. Modulation of

immune function by dietary lectins in rheumatoid arthritis. Br J
Nutr. 2000 Mar;83(3):207-17.

The consequences of lectin consumption are not things you want

to deal with. Another question we may have: do dietary lectins
cause disease?

Freed DL. Do dietary lectins cause disease? BMJ. 1999 Apr

17;318(7190):1023-4

Phytates (or phytic acid, or IP6) are a strong acid that binds to
divalent and trivalent heavy metal ions which then form
insoluble salts (not absorbable), for e.g. zinc, calcium,
magnesium and other trace minerals. Oxalic acid is another class
B anti-nutrient. There are doubts as to whether class B anti-
nutrients can cause deficiencies in the diets of western societies
considering the amount we eat, but if you’re not getting enough
minerals in the first place large amounts of the anti-nutrients will
probably be detrimental.

Both of these classes are found in large amounts in grains (e.g.

wheat, barley, maize, rye, rice etc…) and legumes (e.g.
soybeans, beans, peas).

The good thing is that we can inactivate these anti-nutrients.

Why not just avoid them? Well because they are just too damn
tasty (they also contain nutrients too).

A dentist named Weston A. Price traveled the world over 60

years ago studying the dental health of isolated populations.
What he found was that many of the people in areas untouched
by Western civilization had very healthy teeth. They had proper
jaw development, very little tooth decay, and were all generally

16
in very good health. He wrote about his findings in a book titled,
“Nutrition and Physical Degeneration” published in 1939. Price
found that cultures who consumed grains or beans took great
effort to prepare them properly. They removed the bran, ground
the grains, soaked them and also fermented them. That seems to
be quite a bit of work but the benefits are numerous (and tasty).

For a very detailed overview of fermented cereals around the

world the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the
United Nations published a book in 1999 titled, “Fermented
Cereals a Global Perspective”.

Amazingly, the effort put into grinding, soaking and fermenting

is able to inactivate and break-down the various anti-nutrients
found in plant material and then heating it finishes of the job for
most of them. Stephan over at Whole Health Source, a blog, has
this recipe:

Soak brown rice in dechlorinated water for 24 hours at

room temperature without changing the water. Reserve
10% of the soaking liquid (should keep for a long time
in the fridge). Discard the rest of the soaking liquid;
cook the rice in fresh water.
The next time you make brown rice, use the same
procedure as above, but add the soaking liquid you
reserved from the last batch to the rest of the
soaking water.
Repeat the cycle. The process will gradually improve
until 96% or more of the phytic acid is degraded at
24 hours.

Very simple process that takes very little effort.

Wheat
The wheat we know today traces back to a wild grass called
Triticeae. From what I’ve read it has a very pleasing flavor, so
that’s probably why it got utilized from the beginning. The

17
modern wheat we consume today arose from a variety of wheat
called einkorn which had 14 chromosomes. Through artificial
breeding and selection we now utilize a variety of wheat that
contains 42 chromosomes. There are numerous reasons for this,
including easier seed collection as well as improved texture from
increased gluten content.

Gluten is a protein found in wheat. In patients with celiac disease

their immune system reacts to gluten and in turn causes immune
system to attack the gut. The result is flattening of the villi:

On the left the increased surface area increases nutrient

absorption, on the right, the surface area is less thus decreasing
nutrient absorption. Common symptoms are failure to thrive in
children, diarrhea, abdominal pain, and nutrient deficiencies.

There is speculation (especially in the Paleolithic Diet world)

that many react to gluten but just lack the symptomatology.
There are beliefs that gluten causes leaky gut syndrome, which
then leads to various other disorders. Also it seems that when
gluten breaks down it causes opioid-like peptides to be produced,
causing addiction (discussed in Chapter 4):

Bernardo D, Garrote JA, Fernández-Salazar L, Riestra S, Arranz

E. Is gliadin really safe for non-coeliac individuals? Production of
interleukin 15 in biopsy culture from non-coeliac individuals
challenged with gliadin peptides. Gut. 2007 Jun;56(6):889-90.
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While the Bernardo et al (2007) study is preliminary (only 6
subjects) what they found was that non-celiacs also responded to
gluten (had an inflammatory/immune response). There is an
hypothesis by Dr. Fine (from Enterolab.com) that only 0.4% of the
population is not reactive to gluten because certain proteins (HLAs)
found on most of our cells are reactive to gluten and only 0.4% of
the population do not have those proteins. So even if you do not
have out-right celiac disease, you may have some sort of reaction to
it. This is not good considering that these holes in your gut will
allow bacteria and toxins through, leading to many problems down
the road (possible autoimmune diseases):

Drago S, El Asmar R, Di Pierro M, Grazia Clemente M, Tripathi

A, Sapone A, Thakar M, Iacono G, Carroccio A, D'Agate C, Not
T, Zampini L, Catassi C, Fasano A.Gliadin, zonulin and gut
permeability: Effects on celiac and non-celiac intestinal mucosa
and intestinal cell lines. Scand J Gastroenterol. 2006
Apr;41(4):408-19

Beyond the gluten there are the dangers of wheat germ

agglutinin (a lectin, see section above). There are some
researchers who think that lectin causes celiac’s disease rather
than gluten. While the whole issue of gluten is questionable, the
issue of wheat lectins is definitely not:

Pusztai A, Ewen SW, Grant G, Brown DS, Stewart JC, Peumans

WJ, Van Damme EJ, Bardocz S. Antinutritive effects of wheat-
germ agglutinin and other N-acetylglucosamine-specific
lectins. . Br J Nutr. 1993 Jul;70(1):313-21

This evidence, combined with the fact that Weston A. Price

discovered cultures who consumed wheat but only consumed it
in the form of sourdough bread (which is fermented, which may
alter the gluten), gives me reason to avoid it.

19
No Soy for the Boy
Besides the anti-nutrients found in soybeans, there are other
substances found in soy that probably have detrimental health
effects (this may be more applicable to males than females, but I
strongly caution against soy in either case). Soy is commonly
touted as a health food these days because it seems to be a good
source of protein (but the anti-nutrients interfere with that), low
in fat (just because it is low in fat doesn’t mean it is good for
you), and apparently the “healthy” Asians consume tons of it. If
you have ever been to some of the Asian countries it is true that
they consume tofu (which probably contributes to their shorter
stature) but it is not their main source of protein. It is almost
always a side dish, and most times it has been fermented (which
removes the anti-nutrients, but not the isoflavones). While there
are numerous speculative mechanisms by which soy could
provide health benefits to the consumer, I have yet to see solid
evidence that the isoflavones being consumed confer any
benefits; if anything all I see are risks.

Genistein and daidzein are phytoestrogens found in soy protein.

They are very weak estrogen mimics, meaning they do things
that estrogen does but much more weakly (so you have to take an
larger amount to equal the estrogen your body produces to create
the same effect). While in pre-menopausal women the
phytoestrogens may not have an effect, in post-menopausal
women and males, it has a marked effect. As an analogy, think of
the young healthy female as a big bucket full of water (estrogen).
If you put a drop of water (phytoestrogen) into it there won’t be a
big difference. On the other hand, think of males and post-
menopausal females as a thimble with water, if you put a drop
into it there is a considerably larger effect.

The connection between estrogen and breast cancer is

conflicting, so is it even worth it to take the risk? For males,
there is research to show that soy consumption leads to
decreased sperm production/quality and decreased testosterone
production. In these studies, healthy males consumed 60mg of

20
the soy isoflavon, approximately 30g of tofu per day (2mg of
isoflavones per 1g of tofu). This is really not a lot. While there
seems to be support for the aging effects of testosterone (eunuchs
live longer and castrated dogs also live longer), the decreased
testosterone may perhaps be a benefit for longevity. At the same
time, I do not think the trade-offs are very impressive.

Finally, my biggest problem with soy is the possible effects it has

on the brain:

White LR, Petrovitch H, Ross GW, Masaki K, Hardman J, Nelson J,

Davis D, Markesbery W. Brain aging and midlife tofu
consumption. J Am Coll Nutr. 2000 Apr;19(2):242-55.

Here is a prospective epidemiological study (which is a good

type of study) showing the effects of tofu consumption on brain
degeneration. They found that adults consuming tofu daily had
worse memory performance than those who did not consume
tofu. This is quite scary because Alzheimer’s is one disease I
would rather avoid. There is not enough evidence to speculate on
what the possible mechanism may be; it could be the
isoflavones, the aluminum, etc. While various soy studies have
shown beneficial effects, those were short-term studies; this one
was a long-term high quality study.

For more information there is a great article: “Soy What? The

jury's still out on soy's benefits” by David Schardt.

The choice to consume soy is up to you. The benefit/risk ratio

does not seem very favorable to me. It really depends on where
your goals are:

Male – If you want to have breasts, be impotent, and

imbecilic then be my guest.
Female – If you want to risk breast cancer and brain
atrophy then soy is the key.

21
Vegetable Oils
If vegetables are healthy, shouldn’t vegetable oils be healthy? It
really depends. If you can press it out of the plant in question it
seems okay. If you must extract it with modern processing, that
is another question.

By Weight Soybean Margarine Butter Olive Lard

Oil Oil
Polyunsaturated 57 34 3 8 10
%
Monounsaturated 26 49 29 75 44
%
Saturated % 15 17 56 16 42

This is a table with some commonly used fat sources.

McDonalds used to use lard, but after the saturated fat scare they
changed to corn oil (similar to margarine). Others in the food
industry did the same and the result was trans-fatty acids.

By comparing soybean oil and lard we can see that there is a

large difference. The soybean oil (modern processing) has a very
high polyunsaturated fat content (very high in omega-6 fatty
acids), while the lard is higher in saturated and monounsaturated
fatty acids. Based on the Paleolithic Diet we should be
consuming a fatty acid profile closer to that of lard rather than
margarine or soybean oil.

There are many important differences between polyunsaturated

fatty acids compared to monounsaturated and saturated fatty
acids. The first is the hormonal effect in the body. The
polyunsaturated fatty acids can be split into two groups, the
omega-6 fatty acids (n-6) and omega-3 fatty acids (n-3). These
are known as the essential fatty acids (EFAs). They are required
for important production of various factors our bodies require to
survive. Generally n-6 are inflammatory (they cause things to
become red and swollen), while n-3s are anti-inflammatory
(e.g. fish oil, aspirin). Therefore, if you consume a diet that is
high in n-6 and low in n-3 your bodily state is skewed towards

22
inflammation. Short-term inflammation is necessary, its long-
term inflammation that can cause problem. If your blood vessels
are constantly inflamed something is bound to happen. With the
introduction of soybean oil, corn oil, and margarine to replace
our traditional fat sources, the n-6/n-3 ratio has been strongly
skewed towards n-6 with commonly known dietary ratios today
of 20:1. Compare this to our Paleolithic ancestors, who
probably had ratios closer to 1:1.

You cannot necessarily solve the problem by increasing your n-

3 intake. Instead, it is important to bring your n-6 intake down
because of the other important differences between the fatty
acids type: oxidation and reactivity.

Saturated
Monounsaturated Polyunsaturated

The basis of the fatty acid names are descriptive of how many
double bonds each type has. The number of double bonds is
important because it determines how reactive it is in the
presence of oxygen or free radicals. It’s a tough concept to
explain so hopefully you have had some chemistry classes. All
you really need to know is that the more double bonds it has the
more chances there is for it to “break” (oxidize).

There is not only controlled oxidation of fatty acids (beta and

alpha), but autooxidation (happens by itself) as well. The type
of damage that happens in autooxidation is bad because it
perpetuates more damage. Just think about keeping non-
hydrogenated margarine at room temperature and butter at room
temperature and seeing which one goes rancid faster. The
increased rancidity in butter is due to autooxidation, a process
that also happens within the body.

23
The important thing to realize is that the type of fatty acids
you consume in your diet ends up being the type of fatty acids
your body utilizes. The more polyunsaturated fatty acids (the
ones more likely to go rancid) causes your body to go rancid
(the actual process is a bit more complicated).

One of the numerous mechanisms by which CR works is by

decreasing the incorporation of polyunsaturated fatty acids
into cells. So we should try the same by using safe oils:

Coconut Oil
Palm Oil
Avocado
Olive Oil (please see Appendix I)
Animal Fats

Our diets should be mostly saturated fats and monounsaturated

fats, leaving polyunsaturated fat consumption to our intake of
foods such as nuts, avocados, and the 3 servings of fish per week
(and maybe some flax seed oil).

Weston A. Price Nutrients

Through his research he discovered the importance of fat-soluble
vitamins and found that there were several nutrients that
provided the populations he studied with such incredible dental
health. They were Vitamin D3, Vitamin A, and Activator X (later
found out to be Vitamin K2).

Recently there has been considerable research done on these

vitamins. Weston A. Price was definitely ahead of his time in this
field.

Vitamin D3

This has actually been misclassified as a vitamin, for in reality it

is a hormone. Vitamins are something our body cannot create
thus we must obtain it from the diet. On the other hand,
24
hormones are closely regulated by our body and are created
under the correct circumstances. D3 is a hormone because we
produce it from the sun. A young man near the equator standing
naked in the sun for 30 min can produce up to 20,000IU. This
may seem like a lot but under these conditions the body regulates
itself (like he was designed to). The government sets the
maximum recommended intake at 2000IU. This is the minimum
I recommend. If you are supplementing with Vitamin D3 you
should obtain it in a softgel form (because its D3 is fat-soluble
and tablets don’t have fat). For more information on the
importance of D3 you should visit the Vitamin D Council’s
Website (http://www.vitamindcouncil.org). There is a lot of
research that shows that if you are deficient in Vitamin D3
(which most people in western society are) you are at much
higher risks for cancer, infectious diseases, osteoporosis, muscle
loss, etc. Start dosing with 20IU/lb of bodyweight for 3 months
and then get a blood level test from your doctor. Aim for 30-
50ng/ml (75-125nM/L).

Vitamin K2

The Institute of Medicine has set an RDA for Vitamin K, but that is
for the plant form (phylloquinone) AKA Vitamin K1. What we are
interested in is the animal form K2. Sources for K2 usually come
from pastured butter, organ meats, dairy, and fermented products,
many of which we do not consume today. K2 is important not just
for bone health but for other reasons as well:

Supports endocrine function

Reduces chronic inflammation
Decreases mortality rates
Proper development and growth for children

There is a great article on the Weston A. Price Foundation

website by Chris Masterjohn: On the Trail of the Elusive X-
Factor: A Sixty-Two-Year-Old Mystery Finally Solved
(http://www.westonaprice.org/abcs-of-nutrition/175-x-factor-is-
vitamin-k2.html).
25
Today, all newborns in developed countries get an injection of
Vitamin K. The reason is because nowadays newborns lack
Vitamin K due to 2 reasons: 1) poor placental transport of
Vitamin K, and 2) lack of production of Vitamin K due to sterile
gut flora. I seriously doubt that thousands of years ago a baby
had to have vitamin K injections to be healthy. The problem may
be due to the fact that the majority of the developed world
ingests Vitamin K1 instead of K2, the plant form rather than the
animal form. It seems that K1 has problems passing through the
placenta but K2 doesn’t seem to have as much of a problem:

Iioka H, Akada S, Hisanaga H, Shimamoto T, Yamada Y,

Moriyama IS, Ichijo M.A study on the placental transport
mechanism of vitamin K2 (MK-4). Asia Oceania J Obstet
Gynaecol. 1992 Mar;18(1):49-55

From this we see that thousands of years ago our ancestral

mothers consumed Vitamin K2 from their organ meats and
fermented foods, allowing the fetus to receive adequate Vitamin
K from both the placenta and breast milk and thus side-stepping
the need for injections.

Japan has one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world
(recently surpassed by Singapore and Sweden). I would not say
that their standard of care is better than everyone else’s or that
their technology is better. There may be some cultural issues
involved, but one difference that I have seen is that newborns in
Japan receive Vitamin K2 (the animal form) while most other
countries utilize Vitamin K1.

There are many forms of K2 (due to differences in the length of

the carbon chain) but two forms with plenty of research behind
them are MK-7 and MK-4. MK-7 comes from fermented plant
products such as natto, and MK-4 comes from the organs of
animals. If you choose to supplement with MK-7 45mcg seems
to be enough per day, if you choose MK-4, 1mg per day is
needed.
26
Just like at one point Vitamin D3 was considered the miracle
vitamin, the next one the media stumbles upon will probably be
Vitamin K2.

Vitamin A

Vitamin A is an interesting vitamin in that it also has hormonal

actions on the body. It definitely works in synergy with Vitamins
D3 and K2. There are studies showing the risk of fractures with
high intakes, but most of that research has probably been done
on populations deficient in K2 and D3, because these nutrients
are very important for bone health. If studies come out with data
that show those with higher intakes of Vitamin A done in people
not consuming D3 and K2 it does not apply to us. However this
is the only data we have for long-term Vitamin A intake so it is
better to be safe.

If you eat a varied enough diet with enough beta-carotenes and

consume meat daily, then you probably do not need a Vitamin A
supplement. There does seem to be evidence that some people
with polymorphisms (altered genes) may prevent the conversion
of beta-carotene to retinol. I do not know how you could figure
out if you have that polymorphism, but I suspect hyperkeratosis
of your skin may be a sign that you are deficient in Vitamin A,
either by not ingesting enough beta-carotene, or not converting it.
Keratosis pilaris (bumps on the back of your arm) seem to
respond to Vitamin A supplementation but the data is scant. If
you do supplement I wouldn’t recommend more than 1500IU a
day, and you must consume Vitamin D3 and K2 to hopefully
prevent possible bone fracture. Most multivitamins have large
doses of retinol (Vitamin A) so be careful.

Fructose/Sugar
Table sugar is half fructose and half glucose. You may know
fructose as the fruit sugar/”natural” sugar. It's commonly used as

27
a sweetener as it is almost twice as sweet as glucose, but fructose
causes a very different metabolic response than glucose does:

Stanhope KL, Schwarz JM, Keim NL, Griffen SC, Bremer AA,
Graham JL, Hatcher B, Cox CL, Dyachenko A, Zhang W,
McGahan JP, Seibert A, Krauss RM, Chiu S, Schaefer EJ, Ai M,
Otokozawa S, Nakajima K, Nakano T, Beysen C, Hellerstein
MK, Berglund L, Havel PJ. Consuming fructose-sweetened, not
glucose-sweetened, beverages increases visceral adiposity and
lipids and decreases insulin sensitivity in overweight/obese
humans. J Clin Invest. 2009 May;119(5):1322-34.

What was found in this study was that the group consuming
fructose gained the same amount of weight as the glucose group;
however, the fructose group gained it all around their abdomen.
This is called visceral or central adiposity. Waist size is one of
the best predictors of metabolic syndrome because that huge
belly is a sign that your metabolism is damaged. Your body has
three main types of fat stores: intramuscular lipids,
subcutaneous/deep subcutaneous, and visceral/central adipose
tissue. The subcutaneous type is found under the skin, this is the
type that you measure when looking at skin folds. The visceral
type is the poisonous type.

Visceral adipose tissue is located around your organs. An

especially important organ with regards to diabetes, heart disease
and metabolic syndrome in general is the liver. Visceral adipose
tissue doesn't respond to hormones like normal adipose tissue
should. The turn-over rate with visceral adipose tissue is very
high (even in the presence of insulin), and it is constantly
releasing free-fatty acids (even when in the fed-state). It also
releases inflammatory hormones and interacts with the hepatic
portal vein (which is very important in signaling the metabolic
state of the body). All of this coupled together interferes with the
normal processes that should occur when you consume food and
when you are not consuming food. If you continuously feed this
adipose tissue then at some point your body just gives up.

28
Fructose is commonly found in large amounts in sodas, candies,
and anything that has been sweetened. And yes, it is also found
in fruit.

This does not mean you shouldn't consume any fruit, as fruit has
a lot of beneficial factors in and of itself. It's just best not to
make fruit a central of your diet. Two servings of fruit a day
should be enough to get the benefits.

The problem with fructose is that the other parts of the body
don’t have the mechanisms necessary to deal with it, but the liver
does. So when it passes through the liver the body tries its best to
metabolize it. Nowadays most peoples’ glycogen liver stores are
constantly full so what happens is that fructose becomes
involved in lipogenesis (making of fat) which then leads to fatty
livers (like with alcohol).

If you suffer from gout, it may be the fructose that is the

problem:

Nakagawa T, Hu H, Zharikov S, Tuttle KR, Short RA,

Glushakova O, Ouyang X, Feig DI, Block ER, Herrera-Acosta J,
Patel JM, Johnson RJ. A causal role for uric acid in fructose-
induced metabolic syndrome. Am J Physiol Renal Physiol. 2006
Mar;290(3):F625-31.

Gout is a painful disorder caused by the crystallization of uric

acid in your joints and soft-tissue. Uric acid is one of our natural
antioxidants we utilize when under stress. Usually our kidneys
are pretty good at getting rid of it when it’s not needed, however,
under hyperinsulinemia (high insulin levels) due to
diabetes/metabolic syndrome, the kidneys have trouble filtering
uric acid as well as salt (which leads to high blood pressure).
Kidney problems coupled with the fructose-induced uric acid
production leads to gout.

29
Chapter 3: Calories
and Nutrients
„Tis not the eating, nor „tis not the drinking that is to be blamed
but the excess. ~John Seldon

For this section I recommend getting used to the program Cron-

O-Meter (http://spaz.ca/cronometer/):

There are tons of different programs available to track your

diet but this one is free, up-to-date, and gets the job done. It’s
also open source!

30
Calories
The amount of energy your body burns in a day is represented by
the calorie. The resting metabolic rate (RMR) is a measurement
of how much energy your body requires in a day if you just sat
there for 24 hours.

Everyone’s RMR is different (just like everyone’s set-point is

different) but there are equations out there that can help you
estimate your daily requirements. The most accurate equation is
probably the Katch-McArdle formula which is based on lean
body mass (LBM). This equation requires your body-fat
percentage, which most people don’t know. The other formula is
the Mifflin-St Jeor Equation:

Male: BMR = 10×weight(kg) + 6.25×height(cm) - 5×age + 5

Female: BMR = 10×weight(kg) + 6.25×height(cm) - 5×age –
161

Multiplied by an activity factor:

1.200 = sedentary (little or no exercise)
1.375 = lightly active (light exercise/sports 1-3
days/week, approx. 590 Cal/day)
1.550 = moderately active (moderate exercise/sports 3-5
days/week, approx. 870 Cal/day)
1.725 = very active (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days a
week, approx. 1150 Cal/day)
1.900 = extra active (very hard exercise/sports and
physical job, approx. 1580 Cal/day)

A male who is 70kg, 170cm, and 20 years old has a BMR of

1667.5, and including his activity factor (1.200), his daily
caloric requirement is 2000 calories.

The best way to determine your maintenance calorie level

would be to observe your normal eating habits for one week by
measuring and weighing everything that you eat. Taking the
31
average amount per day out of those 7 days would be your
required daily caloric intake for weight maintenance. I’ve done
this many times and the Mifflin-St Jeor equation is actually
very close to my number.

Macronutrients
Protein, carbohydrate, and fat are the macronutrients. In terms
of calories this is how it breaks down:

1g of protein = 4 calories
1g of digestible carbohydrate = 4 calories
1g of fat = 9 calories
Others: 1g of fiber = 1-2 calories, 1g of alcohol =
7 calories

In the end, calories do count. If you want to lose weight you

have to eat below maintenance; if you want to gain weight you
eat above. While it is calories that account for your overall
weight, there are factors we can manipulate that hopefully
increase our non-fat mass while decreasing fat mass
(discussed in Chapter 9)

Protein
Protein is an essential nutrient, our bodies can make the fats and
carbohydrate we require but without protein we cannot survive.
While very low carbohydrate diets and very low fat diets are
possible, a very low protein diet is not; this would lead to protein
deficiency (Kwashiokor) and result in death. Consequently, when
designing a proper diet the first consideration should be protein
intake.

The RDA for protein is 0.8g/kg of bodyweight, however Flango et

al. (2010) have recently shown that there is “evidence that protein
requirements have been significantly underestimated,” and that the
RDA should probably be closer to 1.0g/kg.

32
Athletes regularly consume 2.2g/kg of protein per day to achieve
higher performance and muscle mass. This can be accomplished
via two important pathways: insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1)
and the mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) pathway. Both
pathways are involved in causing growth. However, this may be
detrimental to long-term health. Calorie restriction inhibits these
pathways, and while they may not be the main mechanisms
through which CR acts, they are definitely important. Excess
calories and dietary protein (specifically leucine and methionine)
activate these pathways.

I have chosen to consume a more moderate amount

(between 1.0-1.25g/kg/day) because personally, I’m not
interested in growing; I am interested in extending my
health-span. While 1.0g/kg of protein is good enough to
maintain a moderate amount of muscle, it’s decidedly not
enough for significant muscle growth.

Osteoporosis

High protein intake is usually explained as bad because of the

increase in acid it causes the body. When things head to your
kidneys to be filtered it is either in the form of an acid or a base,
and protein causes more acid at the kidneys. Acid is supposed to
be bad because the only way your body can buffer it is by
removing calcium from the bones (which is basic) thus
neutralizing the acidity, but this causes calcium loss which then
leads to bone loss (osteoporosis and osteopenia). It definitely
makes sense, but as always the body is much more complicated
than that and we should be consuming more than the RDA rather
then less.

Osteoporosis is a disease where your bones are not as strong as

they should be. If a teenager tripped and fell, he would be able
to get back up without an issue, however if a senior with
osteoporosis tripped and fell they have a very high chance of
fracturing/breaking a bone. If they happen to break a very big
bone (e.g. pelvis) they die. So this is something we have to try
33
our best to avoid. Some commonly recommended prevention
interventions are weight-training (stresses the bones causing
them to grow) and increased calcium intake from supplements.
While the former has supporting data, the latter is conflicting. As
you read in Chapter 2 Vitamin K2 and Vitamin D3 are very
important for bone health. While things are changing, most
calcium supplements do not contain these other vitamins and
most people do not take enough of K2 and D3 to have a large
effect. So while calcium intake is important, you have to also
consume K2 and D3 (note: avoid supplements that contain
magnesium and calcium, because they compete with each other
for absorption).

Most of the studies that the acid-base theory was based on did
not reflect reality (pure protein instead of whole food protein
sources, small sample size, and errors in the methods). It is
fairly clear now that adequate protein is required for calcium
homeostasis and hormonal support for the bones:

Hunt JR, Johnson LK, Fariba Roughead ZK. Am .Dietary

protein and calcium interact to influence calcium retention: a
controlled feeding study. J Clin Nutr. 2009 May;89(5):1357-65.

This was a random controlled trial (very good) showing that

higher dietary protein intake was associated with greater
retention of calcium than the lower dietary protein intake.

For older folks it is recommended that they consume over the

RDA (>0.8g/kg) thus I recommend 1g/kg as mentioned above:

Cao JJ, Nielsen FH. Acid diet (high-meat protein) effects on

calcium metabolism and bone health. Curr Opin Clin Nutr
Metab Care. 2010 Aug 16

Whether this whole acid base theory has any relevant

significance I do not know. Long term metabolic acidosis
definitely seems bad for the bone, but it also seems protective
against heart disease.
34
Get your RDA of all nutrients, do some weight-training,
adequate protein (1g/kg), and get the fat soluble vitamins
(K2 and D3) and you might stave of osteoporosis.

Carbohydrates
Many people blame excess sugar and carbohydrate intake for the
increase in chronic diseases today, and I would have to agree.
This is not to say that you should not eat any carbohydrates
whatsoever, but you should definitely eat within your body’s
ability to deal with the load.

Diabetes is a disease of insulin resistance that comes about due

to overloaded energy stores. Your body stores carbohydrates and
fats in 3 places: muscles, adipose tissue, and the liver. The
adipose tissue stores it as lipids, muscles have the ability to store
it both as glycogen and lipid droplets, and the liver stores it as
glycogen (but pathologically can also store tons of fat). When the
adipose tissue is full and the skeletal muscles are full, the extra
carbohydrates and fats you consume in your diet float around in
the blood causing a host of problems (hyperglycemia).

When you eat pure carbohydrates (not including fructose), your

body goes into carbohydrate oxidation mode and shuts down fat
oxidation (saving the fat). When you eat a mixture of
carbohydrate and fats, the carbohydrate is preferentially burned
and the fat gets stored. If you eat pure fat, fat oxidation is
bumped up because of the lack of carbohydrate. Now this all sits
on a spectrum. If your metabolic rate is 2000 calories a day, and
you consume 2000 calories of carbs, it’ll burn off the 2000
(unless you are diabetic). If you consume 1000 calories of
carbohydrate and 1000 calories of fat, you’ll burn it all off but
you would never tap into your fat stores. To tap into the fat
stores you must create a caloric deficit; the body has to have a
reason to tap the fat on your body.

35
It is common belief that obese people eat a ton of food. While
that may have previously been true, they don’t eat 4000 calories
per day forever; if they did they would just gain more and more
weight. A lot of people claim they have a slow metabolism, but
in reality their metabolic rate divided by their lean body mass is
very similar to normal people, if anything it is a bit higher (fat
is metabolically active too). It’s not that their metabolism is
slow; instead, their body’s ability to defend the set-point in the
face of excess calories is not as effective as a lean person’s.

Let’s say a male who is 180 pounds with a metabolic rate of

2000 calories consumes 4000 calories for a couple of months
because of stress, and as a result he balloons up to 250 pounds of
mostly fat. After this, he goes back to his original 2000
calories/day diet. Good news: he won’t gain anymore weight.
Bad news: even though he’s eating much less, he still won’t lose
the weight. To lose weight you must tap into your body’s fat
source.

Ingested glucose shunts to 3 pathways: glycolysis, glycogenesis,

and the hexosamine biosynthesis pathway (HBP). Glycolysis is
where you use the glucose as fuel, glycogenesis is where you
build more glycogen, and HBP helps signal your cellular energy
levels (among many other functions). As mentioned before,
today’s society suffers from excess energy intake. When you
satisfy your caloric needs glycolysis is full, and when you eat
lots of carbohydrates your glycogen stores are full. In the end,
the only pathway left is HBP, and HBP activation leads to insulin
resistance.

One way to avoid this fate is to ensure you glycogen stores are
low. If your glycogen stores are low your body has space to
store the incoming carbohydrate. This way if you ever do
consume junk-food high in sugar/carbohydrates (e.g. pasta) on
special occasions, your depleted glycogen stores can be utilized
to sidestep the excessive glucose intake (and maybe even offer a
margin of safety in caloric intake).

36
Human glycogen stores are around 15g/kg of bodyweight. For a
70kg male that turns out to be 1050g of carbs (4200 calories).
That means 2200 calories over maintenance; this is a
considerably large margin of safety in case you cheat that day.
The important thing on that day would be to not consume any fat
because it would just get stored.

Beyond these facts, there’s also the danger of hyperglycemia

(aka high blood sugar). Hyperglycemia is a very damaging
condition because of the reactivity of sugars like glucose
(causes glycation, see Chapter 5).

One interesting aspect of low-carbohydrate diets is ketosis.

Ketones are a break-down product of fatty-acids and many
tissues in the body can utilize it as an energy source. When
glucose is absent or low, the body produces ketones so that
glucose can be saved for the brain. There may be benefits to
ketones but I haven’t been fully convinced as of late, and the
safety of long-term ketogenic diets are untested. I choose to
stay at the border into ketosis at 100-120g of carbohydrate a
day (excluding fiber). I actually intermittently enter ketosis due
to fasting and resistance training which depletes glycogen.

Everyone’s brain is around the same size, so we all utilize

similar amounts of glucose. This means 100-120g is set for
everyone. It’s important to get the 100g of carbohydrate because
this circumvents the need for gluconeogenesis, which is the
creation of glucose from amino acids and glycerol. Considering
our lower protein intake, it would be best to save the amino acids
for what the body requires and provide the glucose directly from
our diet. This also helps save our muscles from being
catabolized to provide the amino acids.

Fiber

Fiber also falls into the group of carbohydrates so it will be

discussed here. Much of the anti-nutrients I discussed above are
present in the bran of grains which people love to consume as a

37
fiber supplement. I prefer to get my fiber from non-grain sources
such as green-leafy vegetables, root vegetables, mushrooms, and
nuts. In total I get 30-40g of fiber a day. I’m not certain as to
what the optimal fiber intake is, but I have found that 30-40g of
fiber from fibrous vegetables is needed to help reach the RDA of
all the nutrients.

Intake of indigestible carbohydrates does have other benefits

besides keeping you regular and promoting satiety through
volume. One of them is the production of butyrate in the colon
and the maintenance pf healthy flora in the gut. Something that
has been spreading in naturopathic magazines and journals is
the concept of the leaky gut. Basically, your gut is only
supposed to allow nutrients through and keep toxins and poisons
out. However, because of damage to the gut through
consumption of lectins (remember chapter 2), excess sugar
intake, not enough fiber and too much gluten, holes develop in
our intestinal wall allowing everything to get through, leading to
various problems. I don’t know if leaky gut syndrome actually
exists but this certainly illustrates the importance of your gut
flora (gut bacteria). They are a part of us and help us regulate
our metabolism and protect us from the outside environment.
Without them we would die, so it is important to keep your gut
bacteria happy and healthy. This can be accomplished by getting
your fiber and consuming fermented food products (e.g. cheese,
yogurt, kimchi, sauerkraut, etc.). There is extensive research
connecting fiber and the prevention of colon cancer. It may be
multicollinearity again, but it may also be the phytate that helps
prevent colon cancer.

Fats
So far we have established that a 70kg man should be consuming
70g of protein, 100g of digestible carbohydrate and 30g of fiber.
This total caloric intake comes out to 740 calories. Considering
he probably requires 2000 calories a day to maintain his weight
that leaves 1260 calories for dietary fat, which turns out to be
140g. In reality, if he incorporates this lower-

38
carbohydrate/moderate protein intake diet he will spontaneously
decrease his caloric intake. This would cause loss of body fat
(granted if he performs resistance exercise and watches his
nutrient timing). Some nuts, some cheese, some olive oil on
your salad, some fatty cuts of meat and some flax seed oil and
you’re there.

Considering the carbohydrate intake and protein intake, this diet

automatically becomes a high-fat diet. This is good for several
reasons. Firstly, fat is satiating which helps control caloric
intake. Studies show that low-carb diet spontaneously help
patients decrease their caloric intake, so maybe we can get some
benefits of calorie restriction after all, especially considering our
use of intermittent fasting in all this. Secondly, the fats help keep
our body functioning smoothly as it helps support hormone and
neurotransmitter levels, provides us with more stable energy
levels throughout the day, gives us better skin, etc.

Micronutrients/Phytonutrients
Dr. Bruce Ames, who has done considerable research on Alpha
Lipoic Acid and Acetyl-L-Carnitine, has also established a
theory of aging: Triage Theory. Basically, without optimal
nutrition the body sacrifices short-term survival at the expense of
long-term survival. Each micronutrient your body uses is
involved in some important process to keep you alive, so if you
are missing one of them or some of them the mechanisms
involved in keeping you alive are not functioning optimally,
leading to DNA damage, cell damage, oxidative damage, etc.

By using the program Cron-O-Meter and measuring your food

intake for a week you should get an idea of which vitamins and
minerals you are deficient in.

The other component is the phytonutrients. Phytonutrients are

the substances found in vegetables which seem to confer health
benefits upon the consumer. Unlike the anti-nutrients in grains,
the phytonutrients have probably been consumed by our

39
ancestors for millions of years as hunter-gatherers. There is an
interesting theory about xenohormesis which suggests that as
environment conditions worsen, plants alter their phytonutrient
content and thus mammals that consume these plants begin to
prepare their bodies for the tough times ahead.

You’ve probably heard about ORAC values, a measurement of

the antioxidant capacity of substances in a test tube. This really
has very little to do with how the same substances function
inside our bodies. We are not looking at ORAC scores, we want
phytonutrients which have strong evidence backing their benefits
such as I3C from broccoli, ECGC from green tea, and allicin
from garlic have other functions beyond their antioxidant
capacity. If you are getting the 30-40g of fiber from fibrous
vegetables then you should be getting plenty of phytonutrients.
Some fruits and vegetables with research supporting their
benefits and should be eaten often are:

Broccoli
Blueberries
Green Tea
Dark Chocolate
Olive Oil

Many of the beneficial phytonutrients are found in the peel of

the fruit. Many people are afraid of the chemicals and other
substances on it, so what I recommend is either soaking the
vegetables/fruit in water with a very light amount of soft
detergent or purchasing one of those all-natural vegetable
washers or detergents. Heck I even eat the orange peel because
of the benefits of d-limonene (if you ever have heart burn give
some orange peel a try).

In terms of micronutrients it’s probably best to aim for 1.5x the

RDA just in case. With value investing, a very common principle
is the margin of safety, meaning that if you want to buy
something you think is worth 1 dollar, it’ll be better if you spent
50cents just in case your estimate is wrong. I would say that the
40
use of Cron-o-meter and relying on your measuring and
weighing skills definitely constitutes an estimate.

Carninutrients

Just like plants have phytonutrients, meat has carninutrients

(carni- stands for carnivore). There are various carninutrients that
we consume which are beneficial. A lot of research has been
done with regards to vegans/vegetarians because of their lack of
meat intake. If they don’t consume meat they don’t get the
following carninutrients:

Taurine
Carnosine
Creatine
Vitamin B12

There are many more but these are just some of the important
ones. Take taurine as an example:

Sebeková K, Krajcoviová-Kudlácková M, Schinzel R, Faist V,

Klvanová J, Heidland A. Plasma levels of advanced glycation
end products in healthy, long-term vegetarians and subjects on a
western mixed diet. Eur J Nutr. 2001 Dec;40(6):275-81.

This study found that vegetarians have higher plasma levels of

advanced glycation end products (see Chapter 5). It is
suspected that lack of taurine might be the cause. If you do
decide to be vegetarian make sure to get your bases covered by
supplementing with the carninutrients.

Is Meat Bad For You?

If you have read the Paleolithic diet chapter you know we
probably evolved on meat. As you are also aware of now,
meat has carninutrients which have beneficial properties. The
orthodox view of our society is that saturated fat causes heart
disease. This whole scare probably started with Ancel Key’s
41
“Seven Country Study.” Then came the “China Study” by Colin
Campbell which blamed fat consumption on the various diseases
in Chinese populations. With this bias the problem of
multicollinearity took its place and we have this connection
today, saturated fat causes heart disease. Nowadays we use
cholesterol levels as a risk factor for heart disease, and we use
the reasoning that saturated fat raises cholesterol and cholesterol
causes heart disease. Then we do a bunch of studies showing that
saturated fat raises cholesterol, which should then lead to heart
disease. My understanding of heart disease is this:

As you get older you accumulate fatty streaks (this is normal),

but as the fatty streaks get worse (and your blood vessel get more
inflamed due to other factors) macrophages invade the blood
vessel and eat up the fat. As they eat the fat they get bloated and
become foam cells (which are found in plaques). As you can see
the blood vessel shrinks and become much smaller (on the right).

What causes this accumulation of fatty streaks and

macrophages? It is probably oxidized LDL (oxLDL). The fatty
streaks are deposited by lipoproteins. Fatty acids don’t flow
through the blood by itself, it is usually attached or contained
in lipoproteins. There are different classes of lipoproteins, and
that is where you get HDL, LDL, and triglycerides (I will be
discussing these in the biometric chapter).

OxLDL is bad because the fatty acids get damaged then become
small. This leads to shrinkage in the size of the LDL particle and
a change in shape. When it changes shape, the body utilizes it
less effectively and thus it floats around, leaving time for the fat
to become oxidized in the blood. As it gets more and more
oxidized, the fat becomes sticky and attaches to the blood vessel.

42
If you remember from chapter 2 on the Paleolithic Diet, the type
of fatty acid most likely to become oxidized is polyunsaturated
fatty acids (the one with lots of double bonds). Your
lipoproteins are in the contents of whatever you are eating; if
you eat tons of PUFAs you’ll get tons of PUFAs in your
lipoproteins. If you consume lots of saturated fats you get
saturated fats in your lipoproteins.

It’s true that the plaques (that block the blood vessels) are
made out of fat (and various other materials) but blaming it on
saturated fats is jumping the gun.

What is it then? Is it the protein that’s bad for you? Well

you need that protein so no.

There is one thing that makes meat bad, namely its high fat and
protein content. This is due to the methods by which meat is
usually prepared these days. Cooking fats with protein at high
temperatures (grilling, baking, frying, etc.) is a very bad idea
because at these high temperatures, oxidation is rampant and
the formation of glycative-damaged products is very high. It’s
not that meat in and of itself is bad, it’s the way that it is
prepared that is bad. We all know consuming burnt material
isn’t good, but it doesn’t have to look charred for it to be burnt!

43
Chapter 4: Weight
Loss/Gain
Don't dig your grave with your own knife and fork. ~English
Proverb

Eating and storing is much more evolutionarily advantageous

than not eating and not storing. This is the Thrifty Gene
Hypothesis: those more likely to store energy are more likely to
survive. It is much harder to lose fat than gain fat. While your
body does gain weight when you eat more and lose weight when
you eat less, it is much more complicated than that. We all have a
programmed set-point. It is a weight range that our bodies fight
to maintain. If you have tried a diet before you know how hard it
is to lose weight and keep it off. For example, I am 5’10” and
weigh 175lbs at 10-11% body-fat. On an average daily basis I
consume 2100 calories to maintain this composition. If I ever
wanted to get down to the single-digit body fat levels I would be
required to decrease my caloric consumption down to probably
1700-1800 average daily. While I may be able to achieve those
caloric intakes for a while soon metabolic adaptations will take
place that will make me colder, less likely to exercise, dreaming
about food, shot libido, loss of muscle mass, all which are the
result of going below your set-point because the body is trying
its best to conserve energy and make you eat. If I eat over set-
point, like 2600 calories a day, my metabolism will go up, I will
have more energy, and I would gain weight. Everyone’s body
tries its best to defend a set-point, and every person has a
different in response when defending the set-point. You probably
seen those very thin people who eat a ton and yet stay thin; they
have a very good defensive mechanism. If one day they eat a ton,
they are more likely to become active and increase exercise and
non-exercise activity thermogenesis (such as tapping their legs
and fidgeting).

44
The big problem here though is that our set-points are much more
likely to go up, than it is to go down. Set-point is by feedback to the
brain and in general I consider there to be two pathways: the
Reward pathway and the Fed pathway. The reward pathway has to
do with how happy you feel after eating. For example, if you have
ever been stressed or got dumped you are much more likely to eat
sweets and carbohydrates. The simple reason for this effect is that
these types of foods raise dopamine. Under these conditions the
reward pathway is below its natural set-point so the body tries to
raise it by any means necessary, thus eating. This pathway is usually
responsible for addiction to drugs such as cocaine and nicotine.
After smoking for months, your brain is used to a higher dopamine
level and when you try to stop smoking, it’s hard because your
dopamine levels drop, so most people begin to eat, but sooner or
later they start smoking again. One thing you see with addiction is
that, the person never “breaks” the addiction, they just use
“willpower” to overcome it, but they will always crave it under
similar circumstances. As you can see set-points usually go up, but
doesn’t come back down (just like weight gain), this is because on
the way up the body is adapting to stronger signals (more
dopamine), but on the way down it has nothing to adapt to because
if set point were to move lower, it has to adapt to a lack of signal.

The Fed pathway is where the body tells itself it is full. If you
eat and your stomach is full or your body knows it’s gotten
enough calories your appetite gets suppressed. If you ate an extra
1000 calories the day before and didn’t exercise it off, today
you’re not as hungry so you spontaneously eat less. Then why
do we get fat if the Fed pathway works. It stop workings because
of the reward pathway, that feeling of happiness overrides the
fed pathway, ever hear of the saying “there is always room for
desert.” So what happens is that one day you start consuming a
lot of junk food constantly stimulating the reward pathways
(which the body likes) and a few months later your 15lbs heavier
(freshman 15).

45
Why would nature develop such a detrimental mechanism? In
our natural environment it is not detrimental at all; in nature we
do not have constant access to concentrated sugar, wheat, and
fats. Today we do have access to these supernormal stimuli. We
have existing mechanisms which are supposed to respond to
thing in nature like sweetness (sweet potato, occasional fruit,
rare access to honey), but today this response becomes
exaggerated because our access to it is exaggerated. Our bodies
did not evolve to be in the presence of donuts and cookies, it
evolved to be in the presence of berries and potatoes. It is the
supernormal stimulus that causes the reward pathway to short-
circuit our fed pathway, sooner or later our fed pathways get
damaged (leptin resistance, insulin resistance) and we suffer
the consequences (diabetes, heart disease, obesity).

This is why most diets never work, sure you can follow it for
a couple of months at best but sooner or later our body wants
to get back to set-point.

What can we do then? The first thing is not to gain the weight
in the first place. But if you have gained the weight there are
some things we can utilize that might fix the system a bit.

Weight loss is a long-term goal. No one is looking for a short-

term fix, anyways yo-yo dieting probably isn’t the best thing
for your metabolism:

Steen SN, Oppliger RA, Brownell KD. Metabolic effects of

repeated weight loss in wrestlers. JAMA, 1988 Jul 1; 260(1):47-
50

What the study found was that wrestlers who cycled their
weight up and down had a slower metabolism compared to
those who did not. This is commonly seen in those who diet and
then suddenly gain back more weight than they started with. It is
known as the rebound effect and is present in many systems in
the body.

46
So we don’t want a short-term solution. A long-term solution has
two qualities that make it work:

Flexibility (rigidity causes to much mental stress)

Adherence (you have to be able to follow it long-term)

A big reason why diets fail is because of the rigidity imposed by

the rules. Let’s say you are on a low-calorie diet trying to cut fat,
one day you eat a couple cookies and all of a sudden your 500
calories over your limit. At this point the mental stress caused by
this low-calorie eating breaks your will-power causing you to
give up on the diet and binge 2000 calories over your limit. Later
you suddenly realized what you’ve done and decide to give up
on the diet. Or another example, you are dieting and one day you
are invited to a party with lots and lots of food. The environment
causes you to lose control and again you give up on the diet.
What we want is a way to increase the flexibility of the diet, we
don’t want a plan after the fact, we want it before the fact. By
planning this cheat day ahead of time we can mentally prepare
ourselves for the repercussions and take steps to offset that day.
This is where fasting comes into the picture.

Fasting is where you do not eat for a set number of hours. I

consider fasting to be greater than a 16 hour period where you
do not ingest calories. There’s lot of talk out there about not
skipping meals, your metabolism will slow down, it’ll hurt you
gut, bad for your health, blah blah blah blah blah. I mean it does
make sense but the problem is that just because it makes sense
doesn’t mean its right. Of course your metabolism slows down
compared to when you were eating, but it doesn’t slow down to
zero. If you consume 500 calories your body has to digest and
process those 500 calories. If your body utilizes 500 calories to
digest 500 calories that is a very inefficient storage system (goes
against the thrifty gene hypothesis), so it must take less to digest
500 calories, lets say 50. Then we store 450 calories. Sure your
metabolism is faster by consuming that meal but it doesn’t speed
up enough to overcome the extra 450 calories stored. The smart
thing to do would be to just not ingest those calories in the first
47
place. What about for health? I have never read anything about
how constantly exposing your arteries to influx of dietary
products is healthy. If anything it is damaging. There is a lot of
damage that occurs in the post-prandial state (after eating) and
there is a lot of research about how to minimize post-prandial
damage (see Chapter 5). I will discuss this concept of fasting
more in a later chapter, but for now all you have to know is that
fasting is beneficial, not fasting is harmful.

So let’s say you are going to a big party where you know you can’t
resist. Why not just create a huge caloric deficit the day before or
on that day. If the party is on Friday, fast for 16 hours on
Wednesday and Thursday, after the fast eat a normal sized meal.
That way you just created a deficit of probably 2000 calories, and
then do your thing on Friday. If you throw in some resistance
training on Friday in the morning or before the party that’s even
better for calorie partitioning (more on this later too).

Don’t be too hard on yourself when you fall of the

bandwangon. You have 100 years to live, one day isn’t going to
put a huge dent in your lifetime.

The next part of a successful long-term diet is adherence. It has

to be a diet you can follow. It doesn’t take too much willpower
(this also ties into flexibility) and is also a diet you don’t feel
deprived of. This is where the low-carbohydrate diet comes into
the picture. I discussed many of the issues in the previous
chapter but I will go over them again.

Blood glucose helps regulate your appetite. Your brain is a very

selfish organ and it always gets what it wants. Because if it doesn’t
you die. That hunger you get after eating a high-carbohydrate snack
isn’t “real” hunger in the sense that you should eat something
because your body is running below its set-point. No it’s “fake”
hunger, because of that quick spike in your blood sugar levels,
excess insulin was produced which causes your blood sugar to fall
below baseline, which means less sugar for your brain so your brain
wants you to eat. This is the whole

48
low-blood sugar thing people experience when they are hungry.
What it leads to is consumption of sweets and constant grazing
throughout the day. I’m sorry but we are not cows or apes.
Humans probably went through periods of fasting, where they
hunted (exercised) and then consumed after a successful hunt.
Our bodies have adapted without the need for a constant infusion
of glucose. The reason people rely on snacks nowadays is
because this constant grazing has shut-down fat-burning
mechanisms.

This leads into a hotly debated topic of the Metabolic Advantage

(MAD). The metabolic advantage is a state that low-
carbohydrate dieting confers upon its user by allowing intake of
unlimited about of fat/protein in the absence of carbohydrate but
still leads to weight loss. While if you consumed the same
amount of calories on a high-carbohydrate diet you would be
humungous. There’s good points on both sides but from my
reading of the research it definitely doesn’t seem like unlimited
calories. There probably is a metabolic advantage for those with
a derangement in their leptin/insulin signaling systems but
outside of those folks, the metabolic advantage probably doesn’t
exist, in my honest opinion (At most the metabolic advantage
seems to be 300 calories). So if the metabolic advantage
probably doesn’t exist on the low-carbohydrate diet why do I
recommend it? I recommend it for its other qualities:

It’s tasty
More satiety
Stable blood sugar
Breaks the supernormal addiction (at least gives you
the willpower)

If you are consuming low-carbohydrate, then the calories has to

be made up with something else, either protein or fat. Now
protein isn’t a good idea, because excess will become glucose,
and probably leads to aging (more on this later). So what is left is
fats.

49
Carbohydrate loading is easy and also fun while we’re doing it.
Athletes and bodybuilders can easily consume over 3000 calories
of carbohydrate in a day. There’s something unsatiating about
carbohydrates. I could easily eat a whole box of cereal in one
sitting (depending on the box probably 2000 calories) but could
you eat 2000 calories of cheese? The funny thing is that I would
probably be hungry after the box of cereal (resulting low blood
sugar) but with the cheese I would be full and disgusted for the
day. By lowering your carbohydrate intake you not only stop
consuming the junk-food but it allows you to increase the fat
content of the diet which keeps your blood sugar level and
satiety centers satisfied.

The other benefit of a low-carbohydrate high-fat diet is it turns

up fat-burning machinery (this doesn’t mean you burn more
fat from your body, that will depend on your caloric intake).
This spares glucose for the brain while the rest of the body
runs on fats (ketones). The ketones may also have beneficial
properties themselves.

Beyond the ability of low-carbohydrate high-fat diets to control

your caloric intake, a low-carbohydrate diet also has benefits
that will prevent the damage of your cells. This is important for
the prevention of chronic illnesses as we get older.

Left out of the discussion is the importance of exercise.

Remember I said set-point doesn’t go lower, well it seems when
exercise is applied it does go lower (it also seems that way with
fasting too). By combining exercise, fasting, and a low-
carbohydrate diet a body fat percentage for males below 15%
and for females below 25% should be fairly easy to attain and
maintain.

Body Types
You probably heard of the term endomorph, mesomorph, and
ectomorph. It usually specifies the type of body that people have
naturally. The endomorph has a very easy time gaining weight as

50
fat; their metabolism is less likely to compensate for the extra
calories they consume and they are more likely to gain fat
instead of protein. This ratio of fat and protein is called the P-
ratio (protein/fat).

Dulloo AG, Jacquet J, Girardier L. Autoregulation of body

composition during weight recovery in human: the Minnesota
Experiment revisited. Int J Obes Relat Metab Disord. 1996
May;20(5):393-405

This study shows from the famous Minnesota Experiment that

every individual has there own P-ratio, thus putting them on the
spectrum between ectomorph and endomorph somewhere. An
ectomorph would gain more muscle than fat (if they can gain)
and a mesomorph gains equal amounts of both.

Apart from the P-ratio there are two more components that
determine your body type: speed of your metabolism and how
effectively you unconsciously control calorie intake. Your
metabolism is actually made up of a couple of parts. There is
there basal metabolic rate (BMR) I mentioned in the beginning
of Chapter 3. There is the thermic effect of activity (the activity
factor you multiply by, the more you exercise the more you
burn), the thermic effect of food (it takes calories to digest food)
and the biggest factor, the non-exercise thermic effect of activity
(NEAT) which are movements outside of exercise such as
shaking your leg, fidgeting your hands, bouncing up and down
in your seat. NEAT can actually burn off up to 700 calories a day
depending on the person. While the movements may seem small
it adds up over the entire day.

The other component is how well you control your caloric intake
around your set point. Some people control it really well, some
people don’t.

51
Endomorph
Low P-ratio
Low NEAT
Does not control caloric intake well

Ectomorph
High P-ratio
High NEAT
Controls caloric intake well

Mesomorph
In the middle

What determines your body type? In the end it is probably

genetics and the environment in which you grew up, but I
believe they can be overcome with hard and smart work (Chapter
9).

Recently a new phenotype has been described and that is the

skinny-fat bodytype. The skinny-fat body type are the people
that are thin but have metabolic dysregulation just like someone
that is overweight with insulin resistance. While other people
would gain weight, the skinny-fat person does not gain weight
but can still end up with Type II diabetes (discussed in Appendix
III).

52
Chapter 5:
Minimizing Damage
About the only thing that comes to us without effort is old age.
~Gloria Pitzer

Aging is a disease because of damage. Just like the transmission

of a car gets worn-out, every cell in your body gets worn-out.
Unlike a car though, you can’t replace your cells with new
parts. The damage created is just a part of being alive. Our body
tries our best to fight the entropy but evolution just did not have
the need to act on the parts that would keep us alive forever.
Even though we cannot prevent all the damage from occurring
we can try our best to minimize it. It just makes a lot of sense
that we should minimize damage to our bodies, we don’t need
to increase the speed by which we age.

Source: Cai W, He JC, Zhu L, Chen X, Wallenstein S, Strike GE, Vlassara

H. Reduced Oxidant Stress and Extended lifespan in Mice Exposed to a
Low Glycotoxin Diet. Am J Pathol. 2007 June; 170(6):1893-1902

In this study Cai et al show that the group of mice consuming a

lower AGE diet lived longer. AGE definitely is not good for
mice, but they also aren’t good for humans. There is also a
study showing that by combining a high AGE diet with CR, the
CR benefits are abolished (no lifespan extension). Clearly this
type of damage should be minimized.

Lesson on Survival Curves

Kaplan Meier survival curves are useful because they allow you to
look at how a population is doing. On the x-axis (horizontal) you
have age of death (or some function of time) and on the y-axis you
have the percent still alive. So for example, we’ll use the black
line. At the very left up top, 100% of the rats are alive,

53
by the time you move along the line and get to the middle 50%
are alive, then at the bottom 0% is alive. So the lines can take
different paths. It can become more square, meaning less rats
die near the beginning, but then suddenly drop off at around the
same age (like humans), or that there is a very high death rate
throughout the lifespan creating the blue line (not accurate
because the blue line also shows a decrease in lifespan). The
other way it can move is parallel, the graphs could shift to the
right showing that at each time period the rat is living longer,
thus extending life span.

So in our example above with mice and AGE diets, the AGE-fed
mouse is the blue line and the controls were the black line (a CR-
mice would be the red line).

There are two sources for this type of damage: your blood sugar
levels and the damaged intermediates you consume in your diet.

Blood Sugar
High blood sugar is a dangerous thing. The body keeps blood
sugar regulated in a fairly narrow range through various
hormones (e.g. insulin, glucagon, glucocorticoids, epinephrine).
If your glucose levels are too low you die (the brain needs
glucose); if your glucose levels are too high, nothing acute
happens, but high glucose levels eventually lead to diabetes.
How well you body responds to your carbohydrate intake
depends on many factors such as source of carbohydrate, how
54
much fiber, protein, and fat you consume, how long since you
last ate, exercise, etc. However, the major factor is your insulin
sensitivity.

When you ingest a bowl of white rice (which is just starch and
water), the amylase (enzyme) in the mouth begins digesting the
starch molecules, which continue to be broken down in your
small intestine. It then gets broken up into tiny glucose
molecules, which are then absorbed through the hepatic portal
vein and released into blood for all the cells in your body. Your
body cannot really burn off all the carbohydrates at one time, so
now the muscles, adipose tissue, and liver suck it up from the
blood to prevent it from doing damage. This absorption of
glucose from the blood depends on a hormone called insulin,
which is released when you eat in preparation for storage. For
many reasons, consuming too many calories and excess
carbohydrates leads your muscles, adipose tissue and liver to
stop responding to insulin. This can lead to high blood sugar
levels (hyperglycemia) and then diabetes. Since your liver cannot
respond to insulin anymore, it believes that you don’t have
enough glucose in the blood, which then causes it to start
pumping out glucose into the blood, making matters even worse.

55
Glucose may not sound damaging, but in large amounts it is. In
the picture above (on the left) you have a normal shaped protein.
Protein does its job because of its shape; if you change its shape
you change the protein. Usually for a protein to do its job it has
to fit into another protein that accepts its shape (like a key and
lock). If the protein’s shape is changed it will no longer work
properly (the key doesn’t fit). The picture on the right is the
same protein but with a glucose molecule attached to it (the
circle), by attaching a sugar to the protein it alters its shape, and
the shape is no longer allowed to do its job (it becomes
damaged). It becomes attached through a reaction known as the
Maillard reaction.

This may not seem like such a big deal since new protein can be
created and usually old protein can be broken down, but what
we are worried about are the proteins that stay with us forever,
such as the proteins that make up our arteries and the proteins
that make up our neurons. If they get damaged, they don’t get
removed or replaced.

Glycation doesn’t just end with the proteins. It can also cause
damage to fats. PUFAs are very reactive, and under high
temperatures they are reactive with sugars too. By damaging the
protein and lipids of the body, more and more damage occurs in
a vicious cycle. Glycative damage is actually one reason oxLDL
are produced. As the arteries get damaged by the excess sugar,
inflammation occurs and more macrophages are produced.

A good way to measure this type of damage is testing glycated

hemoglobin. Hemoglobin is the protein that carries oxygen in
the blood, thus it shares its environment with glucose. Red blood
cells have a turnover rate of 120 days, so as the hemoglobin gets
damaged and removed, new undamaged ones are made to
replace them. From this you can find the percentage of
hemoglobin that is damaged. The more glucose you have in the
blood, the higher the percentage.

56
To get this test go to your doctor and ask for it. You preferably
want a level between 4% and 6%, however if you are already
diabetic aiming for below 7% is good.

In normal healthy individuals, glycated hemoglobin is a good

measure of how well you handle post-prandial hyperglycemia.
Post-prandial meaning after eating. Your blood glucose doesn’t
spike up and down randomly throughout the day for no reason, it
usually follows what you consumed. If you ate 250g of
carbohydrate then your blood glucose will spike much more than if
you ate 100g. If you happen to have a blood glucose meter I prefer
to keep post-prandial glucose below 120mg/dL, this is where my
130g of carbohydrate a day number also came from.

Here’s another example to further stress the damaging nature of

glycation. Meat undergoes the Maillard Reaction, this is what
gives it the flavor when you grill it. Te Maillard reaction is what
leads to browning and it is also what leads to burning. This
process occurs in the body. The higher your blood sugar goes,
and the longer you stay in that environment the more “browning”
and “burning” occurs to the cells in your body. If you cook your
meat at a very low temperature it takes the meat longer to burn
into nothing, more normal glucose levels slow down the damage
you accumulate.

To prevent blood sugar spikes, consume fiber with your

carbohydrate sources (vegetables) and have some fats to slow
digestion. Also make sure to get your exercise and consume a
lower-carbohydrate diet because this depletes glycogen stores,
increasing insulin sensitivity (the emptier your energy stores
are the faster and more they can store).

Glycemic Index
The glycemic index is a measurement for how different food
types spike your blood sugar level. This would be a useful tool
if everyone ate only one food at a time, but I consider it a moot
point considering people consume mixed meals. Sure, white rice

57
has a high glycemic index, but when you eat it with a bunch
of broccoli, some meat, and fruit, what is the glycemic index
measuring exactly? The glycemic index diet probably works
because it tells you to eat more vegetables and less sugar.

Damaged Food-Products
Besides the glycation that occurs inside your body, you should
also be worried about the glycation in the food you digest
outside of your body. In the study I mentioned at the beginning
of the chapter, it showed that the AGEs in your diet matter. Fried
meat, bread crust, and evaporated milk are all processed at high
temperatures which lead to excessive glycative damage.

Here’s a table showing the AGE content of a selection of foods:

Food AGE
Pasteurized skimmed milk 0.35
Pasteurized whole milk 0.52
Evaporated whole milk 46.2
Butter 0.37
Cheese 5.80
Raw minced beef 0.72
Boiled miced beef 5.02
Fried minced beef 11.2
White bread crust 37.1

Source: Goldberg T, Cai W, Peppa M, Dardaine V, Baliga BS,

Uribarri J, Vlassara H. Advanced glycoxidation end products in
commonly consumed foods. J Am Diet Assoc. 2004
Aug;104(8):1287-91

For a more recent list it can be found in this study:

Uribarri J, Woodruff S, Goodman S, Cai W, Chen X, Pyzik R,

Yong A, Striker GE, Vlassara H. Advanced glycation end
products in foods and a practical guide to their reduction in the
diet. J Am Diet Assoc. 2010 Jun;110(6):911-16.e12
58
What was found in the study by Uribarri et al (2010) was that:

Fats contain more AGEs Meat is the

largest contributor Carbohydrate
groups contain the lowest
Grains, legumes, breads, vegetables, fruits, and milk
are the lowest in AGEs

Another interesting point in the paper was that if you marinate your
meat in acidic vinegar the AGE content is reduced by 50%.

What we learn from all this is that high temperatures for long
periods of times are damaging. We should cook in moist heat
and lower temperatures. Between time and temperature, which
one is more important? Well, the rate of chemical reaction is
usually exponential with temperature and linear with time, so it
is better to cook at lower temperatures for longer, then higher
temperature for short periods.

Why don’t we just consume grains, breads, and legumes all the
time? Firstly, meat has carninutrients we should be getting, and
we must also be aware of balancing blood sugar and the
consumption of dietary AGEs. Diabetes is a disease due to high
blood sugar, so I think keeping your blood sugar under control is
more important.

Basically, stay away from processed foods (high temperatures,

especially evaporated products like infant formula) and when
you cook meat, steam it or boil it after marinating it in vinegar
and various spices. Also, always use moist heat to make dishes,
there really is no reason to be frying your vegetables in oil. You
can quickly heat them on a pan with water then add the oil later
if necessary.

59
Iron Levels
Women have monthly cycles which cause them to lose ~30mg
of iron every month while males gain ~1mg of iron per day after
the end of their growth period. There may be many explanations
as to why women live longer than men (~7 years longer, e.g.
estrogen, disposition) but one interesting possible reason is that
men get overloaded with iron as they age and women do not
(until they hit menopause).

Overall, our bodies are actually fairly good at regulating iron

stores. At the same time, hemachromatosis (a disease which
causes iron overload in humans) shows us the dangers of excess
iron: liver damage, diabetes, heart disease, arthritis. We can see
that excess iron is a bad thing. Iron causes all these problems
because of its interaction with the free radicals that are produced
from metabolism. The free radicals by themselves are not that
damaging, however, when combined with free iron the damage is
increased. The more iron there is, the more damage that occurs.
Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and liver disease are all associated with
increased iron stores in their respective locations. Here is a
prospective study showing the association between high iron
stores and atherosclerosis:

Jehn ML, Guallar E, Clark JM, Couper D, Duncan BB,

Ballantyne CM, Hoogeveen RC, Harris ZL, Pankow JS. A
prospective study of plasma ferritin level and incident diabetes:
the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities (ARIC) Study. Am J
Epidemiol. 2007 May 1;165(9):1047-54.

The problem with many supplements and fortified foods is that

they are very high in iron. Not only that, but people go out of
their way to purchase extra iron supplements. Nowadays many
people also take multivitamins which contain Vitamin C. Mixing
Vitamin C and iron together is bad because not only does
Vitamin C increase iron absorption, but it also reacts with it
causing the production of free radicals. Dietary iron is usually
not a big problem (as long as you implement the interventions

60
discussed below) because it comes with substances that protect the
body from the damage (e.g. phytochemicals, carnosine, taurine).
Most multivitamins include the entire RDA for iron, so if you are
eating a wholesome diet you are getting 2x the RDA.

There are two types of iron: heme-iron (found in red meat) and
non-heme iron (found in vegetables, grains, legumes).
Absorption of non-heme iron really depends on the environment
where various fatty acids, proteins, and vitamins/minerals can
affect its absorption, but overall the absorption of non-heme iron
is not very good. Non-heme iron makes up ~85% of dietary
intake. Heme iron is absorbed very well thus while it only
contributes ~25%, it provides more iron to our bodies than non-
heme.

Based solely on this we can conclude that we should not

consume any meat. Yet just like many things regarding your
health, just because too much is bad does not mean that none of
it is better (e.g. protein See Chapter 2). In my opinion, it is better
to be on the lower side than the higher side. However,
decreasing dietary iron should not be the goal because dietary
iron helps outcompete cadmium and lead in our intestines thus
preventing heavy metal toxicity. Instead we should be focusing
on how to get rid of the excess in men (unlike women, men do
not have cycles).

Exercise is good for getting rid of iron because just by sweating

and breaking our cells we lose 1mg from exercise (so you have
to sweat!). The other thing we can do is to donate blood:

Meyers DG, Strickland D, Maloley PA, Seburg JK, Wilson JE,

McManus BF. Possible association of a reduction in
cardiovascular events with blood donation. Heart. 1997
Aug;78(2):188-93

What was found in this study was that men who donated blood
were less likely to have heart attacks (which is a good thing).

61
Donating at least twice a year is good. Not only do you
help others but you also help yourself in the process.

The other thing you can do is to supplement with an iron chelator

such as phytate (see Appendix IV), other phytonutrients also
work (such as those found in green tea). Phytate is very good at
binding iron, but the thing to watch out for is to not go overboard
(or else you get anemia). So if you do plan to supplement with
phytate, make sure to get your ferritin (this stores iron) levels
checked. We want it on the low side, but not past it.

62
Chapter 6: The Natural
and Supplements
Better to hunt in field, for health unbought, than fee the doctor
for a nauseous draft. ~John Dryden

A lot of this book has discussed the Paleolithic diet: we evolved

in nature to eat certain things, therefore it may seem like what is
natural is best, ergo what is natural cannot do any harm. This is
the naturalistic fallacy. If everything in nature was good for you,
why are there poisonous plants and mushrooms? Clearly we
need to view what is “natural” with a more skeptical eye. If you
walk into a supplement store today you will see numerous herbal
extracts, vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and other ingredients.
If you ask the sales clerk if all this stuff is safe they would say,
“oh yeah it’s all natural” and the customer will buy the
supplements, take them home, and consume them without
knowing that there could be consequences down the road. When
you spend money on something that is supposed to make you
healthier, one should definitely apply a more skeptical eye to
what they are buying. We aren’t supposed to be looking for what
is natural; we want to look for what is safe and effective.

Now safety is not something that can always be judged, so when

you consume something it should definitely have a very high
benefit to risk ratio. Every supplement you consume outside of
whole foods means taking a risk, if you want to take that risk, the
trade-off better be beneficial.

Let’s take aspartame and stevia for example. Both are zero calorie
sweeteners commonly used in products today for those who do not
want to consume sugar. Aspartame is regularly blamed for causing
cancer, and stevia is championed as being all-natural, thus entirely
safe. I prefer my drinks with aspartame. While stevia has been
used by for generations by South American Natives, this type of
data doesn’t have any edge on
63
clinical data (outcome trials, animal toxicity data, prospective
epidemiology). Just because it has been used historically doesn’t
mean that it’s safe. How is one generation supposed to link
cancer 40 years down the road to their ingestion of stevia leaves?
If stevia caused diarrhea I can see how they would make the
connection. To determine what is safe and effective we must turn
to the scientific method, and so far aspartame, sucrolose, splenda
all have this type of data behind it while stevia does not.:

Magnuson BA, Burdock GA, Doull J, Kroes RM, Marsh GM, Pariza
MW, Spencer PS, Waddell WJ, Walker R, Williams GM.
Aspartame: a safety evaluation based on current use levels,
regulations, and toxicological and epidemiological studies. Crit
Rev Toxicol. 2007;37(8):629-727.

The most convincing study is this one that has life-span data:

Source: Soffritti M, Belpoggi F, Degli Esposti D, Lambertini L, Tibaldi E,

Rigano A. First experimental demonstration of the multipotential
carcinogenic effects of aspartame administered in the feed to Sprague-
Dawley rats. Environ Health Perspect. 2006 Mar;114(3):379-85.

What they show in the study is that the rat fed aspartame and the
control rats had the same lifespan. In other words aspartame did
not cause more deaths despite what the conclusion of the study
states (the data was probably due to chance because the
researches were just really bad at taking care of the rats, many
rats died prematurely). If anything, the female group seemed
live longer when fed aspartame. So for the occasional treat I see
no reason why I would choose regular soda over diet-soda (30
grams of sugar or couple 180mg of aspartame).

Supplements

The supplements you should be taking should really be

determined by your diet. After a week of tracking with Cron-O-
Meter you should have a good idea of what you are deficient in.
If for some reason you can’t reach 1.5x the RDA for each
64
vitamin and mineral, you can decide to take a supplement.
Buying a supplement is a hard decision, because not only do
you have to buy the right form of the ingredient, you should also
try your best to buy a high-quality supplement so that you get
what you are paying for.

Beyond the “active” ingredient in the pill, it can also contain

other ingredients that are used to fill up the pill and also make
it easier for the machines to pack the pill:

Lubricants. Fatty acids, or stearates, which speed up

manufacturing.
Disintegrators. Cellulose or sodium lauryl sulfate
that help the pill breakdown.
Binders. Promotes cohesion, like polyethylene glycol.
Diluents. Fillers, such as starch that increases the bulk
of a product.

This is by no means an exhaustive list but you should be aware

of what you are putting in your mouth. If you take a look at
pharmaceutical drugs most pills don’t have more than 5 of
these other ingredients. The less it takes to make the pill, the
higher quality the pill usually is.

Some other ingredients I stay away from are:

Propylene Glycol
Artificial Colorings
Sweeteners
Sodium Benzoate
Aluminum Silicate

While ones I consider safe are:

Magnesium Stearate
Gelatin
Stearic Acid
Lecithin
65
 Cellulose
Di-Calcium Phosphate
Glycerin

These lists are by no means extensive but just keep an eye out
for how other ingredients there are. I have found some very
pricey supplements with 8-10 other ingredients.

Which supplements should you be taking then? Well there iss the
Weston A. Price nutrients, vitamins A, D3, and K2 (MK-7 or
MK-4) and maybe some magnesium and a source of omega-3s,
because modern diets are usually deficient in these nutrients.

Vitamin D3

This is not actually a vitamin but a hormone that our bodies require
to function optimally. Back near the equatorial region of Africa we
probably produced tons of Vitamin D3 due to exposure from the
sun. In 20 minutes our bodies have the capacity to produce
20,000IU of Vitamin D3, yet for most of us, when we go outside
we cover ourselves up, stay in the shade, and slap on sunscreen.
These are actually fairly smart things to do considering that UV
light causes skin aging, damage, and maybe cancer, but doesn’t do
much for our Vitamin D status. So the first thing you should be
supplementing with is at least 2000IU of Vitamin D3. What should
optimally be done is to supplement with 25IU/lb of bodyweight
then get blood tests performed measuring your levels to ensure that
you are in the optimal range >30ng/ml and less than 50ng/ml. You
can read more about Vitamin D and the Vitamin D Council
website.

When you purchase the supplement ensure that it is in a

softgel form because Vitamin D3 is fat-soluble, and tablets
don’t have any fat.

66
Vitamin K2

We are animals so we use K2, but K2 is found mainly in cheese,

organ meats, and fermented soybeans; many foods people do not
consume today and because of modern processing even if you do
they are not present in large enough amounts. This means we
should probably supplement with it. Most people associate
vitamin K with bone health and this is true. Vitamin K2 helps
activate Vitamin K dependent (VKD) proteins allowing the body
to bring the calcium to where it is needed, instead of letting the
calcium float around in the body possibly leading to calcification
(heart disease).

Beyond just bone health, it has an array of other benefits:

Cancer
Neuroprotection
Cardiovascular health
Dental health

There are two forms: MK-7 and MK-4. MK-7 comes from
fermented soybeans while MK-4 is the endogenous animal form.
If you take MK-7 take 45mcg a day, if MK-4 take 1mg a day.
Also ensure that it is in a softgel form.

Magnesium

If you’ve analyzed your diet you are probably deficient in

magnesium. It takes conscious effort to design a diet sufficient in
magnesium so most people would rather supplement with it.
Even though I do achieve the RDA I choose to supplement with
some extra to get over the RDA just in case.

In the distant past, the majority of our magnesium was probably

from our water intake. Nowadays we filter our water and it
basically has no minerals in it. Supplementing with 250mg of
extra magnesium a day would benefit a lot of people in terms of
bone health, cardiovascular health, and diabetes.
67
There are many different forms of magnesium but a cheap and
absorbable form to take would be magnesium citrate. Make sure
to stay away from magnesium oxide. While the oxide form is the
most popular, it’s not as absorbable as other forms. The reason
oxide is used is because the pills are smaller than if you used
citrate.

Omega 3 Fatty Acids

I actually don’t recommend fish oil unless you have neurological

problems. The reason for this is that the very long chains of
polyunsaturated fatty acids in fish oil will be incorporated into the
inner mitochondrial membrane and possibly reduces your lifespan.
I am not saying that omega-3s are not beneficial, just that I would
rather get my n-3s from shorter chain fatty acids. If you remember
the section on vegetable oils in Chapter 2, double bonds are more
likely to react and oxidize. Well, the PUFAs in fish oil have the
most double bonds you will find. The more fish oil you consume
the more long chain PUFAs in your body.

For an introduction to this aging theory read here:

Hulbert AJ.Explaining longevity of different animals: is

membrane fatty acid composition the missing link? Age (Dordr).
2008 Sep;30(2-3):89-97.

Basically what has been found is that species with more long
chain PUFAs in their membranes live a shorter life than those
with less PUFAs. It is interesting to note that CR also reduces
the incorporation of long chain PUFAs into the membranes.

What do we supplement instead? Well get your fish three times a

week, and the rest of the days supplement with 6g of flax seed
oil (1 tablespoon).

Common arguments against this are that flax seed oil conversion
into animal form omega 3 fatty acids are inefficient (~10%), but

68
just because it is inefficient doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen at
all. Research has placed optimal amounts of omega-3 intake at
around 250mg (which comes out to 3 servings of fish per week).
One tablespoon of flax seed oil is enough to make 250mg.

This may seem like a mechanistic argument (which is bad) but

there is also research to show that flax seed oil has just as good
cardiovascular outcomes as fish oil. You may also have heard of
the flax seed and prostate cancer association. If it is the lignans
in the flax seed, the oil doesn’t have any lignans so it doesn’t
matter. If it is the actual oil itself, well a new study out in March
2010 showed that there is no connection:

Carayol M, Grosclaude P, Delpierre C. Prospective studies of

dietary alpha-linolenic acid intake and prostate cancer risk: a
meta-analysis. Cancer Causes Control. 2010 Mar;21(3):347-55

It looks at prospective studies (which is good) and they found

no connection.

The Rest of the Nutrients

It’s preferable if you get the rest of your nutrients from food, but
if you find it hard I suggest topping it up with a multi-vitamin.
The only good brand of multivitamins out there is AOR. Don’t
take the full-dose, a partial dose will do.

I only suggest a partial dose because unless you are munching on

sugar all day, you do ingest nutrients. Most of the multivitamins
designed nowadays follow the principle “the more the better,”
which is good for the companies because that’s what people will
buy, but it is not good for you. As I mentioned in chapter 2, too
much pre-formed Vitamin can double your risk of fractures, too
high of a zinc-copper ratio leads to prostate cancer, too much
copper can lead to dementia, extra selenium (and most
multivitamin has a lot of that) can lead to diabetes, too much
folic acid and thiamine will cause cancer down the road. Most
multi-vitamins these days contain a lot of these vitamins and
69
minerals, because these vitamins and minerals are what
customers actually seek out. If someone buys a multivitamin it
is not rare to see them taking an extra b-vitamin supplement
(way too many b-vitamins) and some extra zinc.

Just a quick note on folic acid, if you consume 100mcg of folic

acid from food you absorb 50mg, if you consume 100mcg from
supplements you absorb 100mcg. The RDA is set for food
intake not supplement intake.

Toxicity is not the only problem. It’s the design of the

multivitamin that is also something one should pay attention too.
There are eight forms of Vitamin E, most vitamins use alpha-
tocopherol which can decrease your body’s stores of the other
forms of Vitamin E (in nature the gamma-tocopherol is the one
that is consumed in higher amounts). The beta-carotene is
usually synthetic (cheaper to make), inclusion of various herbal
extracts with no evidence backing up its safety or efficacy, and
also inclusion of various phytonutrients that are beneficial but
not in high enough dosages to have an effect (included for
cosmetic purposes). Many also include green tea extract, which
binds to minerals decreasing absorption, as well as magnesium
oxide instead of the other forms because it fits into a smaller
pill. However, it is not absorbed properly.

Not only is taking a full dose and badly designed multivitamin

incredibly dangerous, but at best you are just wasting your
money. As I said, I only know a couple of companies that design
their multivitamins and do not suffer from these deficiencies, and
one of them I trust is AOR. Be careful out there because your life
and health depends on it.

Please see Appendix IV for more risky supplements that I

believe may also beneficial.

70
Chapter 7: Maintaining
the Body
Fasting is the greatest remedy, the physician within. ~Philippus
Paracelsus

Our world is full of stress. We experience internal (e.g. free

radicals, oxidative stress) and external stress (e.g. toxins, lack of
food). Many people assume that no stress is best but that may not
be true. Our bodies are very adaptive and when exposed to
various stimuli, our body is capable of up-regulating protective
mechanisms, which we can then utilize when the stress
disappears. So it seems like the right amounts of stress,
intermittently in various forms, is probably good for us in the
long-term. This is called hormesis.

Some examples of hormesis are: exercise, alcohol, fasting,

eating vegetables (xenohormesis); some more controversial ones
are radiation and small doses of poison.

As we all know, exercise is good for you, but too much leads to
overtraining and down the road your body is going to
breakdown. There is evidence to show that alcohol intake
probably leads to better cardiovascular health (20g or so a day),
perhaps through the production of hydroxytyrosol (which is also
found in large amounts from high quality olive oil).

Plants also elicit these mechanisms in us. As I mentioned in the

anti-nutrient section of Chapter 2, plants develop defensive
mechanisms to protect themselves from predators. While we may
not be adapted to grains we may be adapted to the various green
vegetables and fruits found in nature that we would feed on, so
we've adapted to these poisons. “That which does not kill us
makes us stronger,” to a degree.

71
Hormesis probably played a role in our evolutionary history by
selecting those who had mechanisms in place that could be up-
regulated when exposed to stress, thus preparing them for
larger stresses in the future. Those without the gene that leads
to up-regulation probably died off when those large stresses
came about.

For an example of the importance of hormesis we will use

exercise. When you exert yourself your blood starts pumping
and you take more breaths because your body requires more
oxygen. It is the utilization of oxygen that produces the free
radicals that everyone takes antioxidants to prevent them from
damaging our cells. Quite intuitive, isn’t it? Take antioxidants
that soak up free radicals so no damage is done and thus we are
healthier. But no, that's not what happens. There's an
evolutionary reason for these free radicals, which is to help up-
regulate stress coping mechanisms (and exercise is a stress).

In this study:

Ristow M, Zarse K, Oberbach A, Kloting N, Birringer M, Kiehntopf

M, Stumvoli M, Kahn CR, Bluher M. Antioxidants prevent health-
promoting effects of physical exercise in humans. Proc Natl Acad
Sci USA. 2009 May 26; 106(21):8665-70

What they found was when vitamin C (an antioxidant) was

given to an untrained individual performing exercise, the
beneficial effects of exercise was blocked. It seems that free
radicals help signal, telling the body it has to adapt. This is a
very good example of the difference between “it makes sense
that it should do this” vs. “does it actually do this.”

Autophagy and Fasting

Calorie restriction may also work its magic through autophagy
(self-eating). Our bodies are constantly making new enzymes,
cells, and other stuff all the time. Our bodies aren't perfect so it’s
bound to make numerous mistakes in our lifetime. Also

72
considering the damage we do to it by the crap we eat and the
stress we experience, it is a surprise we don’t age faster. While
our body does have mechanisms by which to deal with some of
it, we never get into the optimal state to remove the garbage.
Today we are taught to eat 3 square meals a day and maybe even
have some snacks when hungry. We are constantly in a fed state,
and never have a chance to enter the fasted state. We are always
trying to build and store nutrients instead of breaking them
down. The only times that we may be in the fasted state is when
we are asleep but that doesn't take into account the fact that lots
of people eat very late night snacks.

So let’s say you don't eat for 24 hours (fasting). During the 24
hours your body still needs to run on something so it taps into
your body’s own energy stores. It requires glucose for the brain,
which the body can produce by breaking down liver glucose
stores. If your liver glucose stores are low, the body tries to leave
the glucose for the brain and instead breaks down fatty acids into
ketones. This allows other tissues to use ketones while the all-
important brain can still get its glucose. Another source of
glucose would also be amino acids. But this isn't amino acids
from your muscles, its most likely the crap that doesn't work and
instead is floating around in your cells and body. Basically, by
not eating your body decides to recycle the garbage. So as you
can see, if you never fast, or never eat below maintenance (i.e.
calorie restriction), you never get to take out the garbage. Also
there's the added benefit of ketones (if your liver glycogen stores
are depleted, which we will do with resistance training, Chapter
6, and low-carb diets).

There are some common myths associated with not eating and I
will address the two important ones here:

Metabolism slows down: FALSE

Heilbronn LK, Smith SR, Martin CK, Anton SD, Ravussin E.

Alternate-day fasting in nonobese subjects: effects on

73
 bodyweight, body composition and energy metabolism. Am J
Clin Nutr. 2005 Jan; 81(1):69-73

What this study shows is that the metabolic rate did not slow
down. It also showed that the use of fats as energy increased
(as it should).

Even if metabolism did slow down, it wouldn't slow down

enough to overcome the deficit you created that day. On that day
you created an 800 deficit, by finishing the fast with a 1200
calorie meal. Do you really expect your metabolic rate to slow
down to 1200 within 24 hours?

Muscles will break-down: FALSE

Norrelund H, Nair KS, Jorgensen JO, Christiansen JS, Moller N.

The protein-retaiing effects of growth hormone during fasting
involve inhibition of muscle-protein breakdown. Diabetes. 2001
Jan;50(1):96-104

So by fasting you actually increase growth hormone, which

has the effect of helping you retain your muscle mass. It
doesn't make any sense for your body to directly attack your
muscles and start breaking them down for energy. You need
muscles to hunt and survive.

If anything, it definitely seems like for effective muscle growth

to occur, periods of nutrient depletion are required. This may be
due to the rebound effect the body experiences when going from
the fasted state to the fed state.

At a minimum I recommend fasting 2x per week for 24 hours,

then ending the fast with tons of vegetables, and some meat, and
some carbs.

A 24 hour fast would work like this. On Monday, finish your last
meal at 6pm then don't eat until 6pm the next day. Then choose
another day to do that. I've actually included my fasting schedule
74
into a larger scheme combining calorie cycling and
resistance exercise.

One problem with fasting is that it brings you into an insulin

resistant state because you are burning fat during that 24-hour
period. Insulin resistance is beneficial under this circumstance
because the glucose should be saved for the brain. However,
breaking a 24-hour fast with one meal may put quite a bit of stress
on the body, especially if your meal contains carbohydrates. What I
have been doing over the past couple of months is consuming a
small meal beforehand with some carbohydrate, protein, and fiber;
usually just a salad with a small sweet potato, or some oats with
lean chicken breast that will return insulin sensitivity before I
consume my larger meal. When I say small, I mean very small. One
bowl of vegetables with about 20g of carbohydrate and 1 serving of
lean chicken breast.

Supplementation During Fasting

On fasting days, do not consume antioxidants. It may be that it is
the increased free radicals (just like with exercise) that provide the
benefits. A research paper published in 2010 found this:

Underwood BR, Imarisio S, Fleming A, Rose C, Krishna G,

Heard P, Quick M, Korolchuk VI, Renna M, Sarkar S, García-
Arencibia M, O'Kane CJ, Murphy MP, Rubinsztein
DC.Antioxidants can inhibit basal autophagy and enhance
neurodegeneration in models of polyglutamine disease. Hum
Mol Genet. 2010 Sep 1;19(17):3413-29.

Just like Vitamin C inhibited the beneficial adaptations of

exercise, excess antioxidants may even prevent basal autophagy;
the type of autophagy that happens on a regular basis. Better
rethink those antioxidant supplements.

Fasting versus Calorie Restriction

Intermittent fasting (IF) is commonly described as calorie
restriction without the calorie restriction. It extends life but you
75
still get to eat the same amount of calories as before. Careful
analysis of the data shows this is probably not true, there is
simply no life extension without loss of bodyweight (implying
reduced caloric intake), and looking at the autophagy data those
that lost the most bodyweight due to fasting had the most
autophagy. There has been research done comparing different
measurements such as insulin sensitivity between CR and IF. The
data is conflicting, but one of the most recent and well-done
studies done in humans has shown that IF does not provide the
benefits of CR if calories consumed are the same (and weight is
maintained). This agrees with the rat/mice data (IF does not
extend life without calorie restriction), however, one difference
that has been shown is that IF may offer greater protection of the
brain than CR:

Mattson MP, Wan R. Beneficial effects of intermittent fasting and

caloric restriction on the cardiovascular and cerebrovascular
systems. J Nutr Biochem. 2005 Mar;16(3):129-37.

Fasting and calorie restriction are not the same thing, and I am
not recommending you consume all the calories you didn’t eat
one day in the day after. While IF may not provide the life
extending benefits of CR, there are benefits and it is better than
not doing anything at all.

76
Chapter 8: Biometric
Measurements
Friend to Groucho Marx: “Life is difficult!” Marx to Friend:
“Compared to what?”

Modern medicine has provided us with many ways to measure

our health. Some tests I wish I could afford are the genetic
screening provided by 23andme and the Biophysical250, which
tests 250 biomarkers (basically most of them in existence). To
judge your health you do not need all those 250 markers, but
there are some important ones that you can easily ask your
doctor to prescribe and then interpret yourself.

Vitamin D3

I discussed the importance of Vitamin D3 in Chapter 2. Take

20IU/lb of bodyweight for 3 months then get a blood test and
aim for 30-50ng/ml (75-125nM/L). If your doctor doesn’t want
to give you that blood test either try and convince him (read the
Vitamin D Council Website) or find another doctor. An
alternative would be to just pay for one from the Vitamin D
Council Website (as of August 2010 it costs 65USD).

Lipid Profile

This test gives you 4 numbers, total cholesterol (TC), high

density lipoprotein (HDL), low density lipoprotein (LDL),
triglycerides (TG). This is my lipid profile as of July 2010:

TC: 5.47mmol/L (211mg/dL)

HDL: 2.53mmol/l (98mg/dl)
LDL: 2.69mmol/L (104mg/dL) (calculated)
TG: 0.51mmol/L (45mg/dL)

77
The LDL number is not actually measured, instead it is
estimated from the Friedewald equation which estimates LDL
based on TC, HDL, TG. It is actually inaccurate when TG are as
low as mine are, and as low as most low-carbohydrate dieters
are, there has been a new equation for low TG created:

Ahmadi SA, Boroumand MA, Gohari-Moghaddam K, Tajik P, Dibaj

SM. The impact of low serum triglyceride on LDL-cholesterol
estimation. Arch Iran Med. 2008 May;11(3):318-21.

Friedewald (1972) Formula: LDL = TC - HDL - TG/5.0 (mg/dL)

Iranian (2008) Formula: LDL = TC/1.19 + TG/1.9 – HDL/1.1 –
38 (mg/dL)

Using the new formula my LDL is actually 1.91mmol/L

(74mg/dL), which is lower the American Heart Association
guideline! If you are low-carbohydrate dieting and your doctor is
trying to interpret your profile, make sure to provide them with
the real numbers, and maybe even educated them on these new
findings.

Dr. Ronald M Krauss determined two patterns for the lipid

profile, A and B. The A pattern profile is where the LDL (the so-
called “bad” cholesterol, looks more like a band-aid to me) is
large and buoyant. OxLDL are the small dense LDL of pattern
B. So pattern A is good and pattern B is bad. Since most doctors
do not prescribe VAP tests to actually measure LDL size and
particle number we have to estimate. As you know, oxLDL is
bad, so Pattern B is very bad. Pattern A is what we want.

Pattern A is usually present if you TG are low and your HDL is

high. Pattern B is present if TG are high and HDL are low.
This can be represented in the TG/HDL ratio, which is one of
the most accurate predictors of heart disease based on your
typical lipid profile test.

78
Diet, micronutrients, and exercise determine your lipid profile.
If you consume the American Heart Association (AHA) low-fat
diet you will inevitably end up with Pattern B (ironic eh?), if
you consume low-carbohydrate high saturated fat you will end
up with Pattern A. The triglycerides are very representative of
your carbohydrate intake. If you consume lots of carbohydrates,
your triglycerides are high, the high carbohydrate intake also
somehow decreases HDL (by somehow increasing an enzyme
that breaks down HDL). Saturated fat also helps boost HDL.
After knowing this, it definitely seems like the whole lipid
profile thing was just a measurement of your carbohydrate
intake, which represented your intake of processed junk foods.
After a couple years they found that total cholesterol didn’t tell
much so they then focused on LDL, then LDL didn’t tell much
and now its TG/HDL, but the TG/HDL ratio is low only when
you are consuming saturated fat and low carbohydrate (with an
exception, which is calorie restriction).

Magnesium and various other nutrients also seem to have a

connection with the lipid profile but the mechanisms are not
clear yet, but just know it’s important to get your nutrients. Also,
exercise increases HDL and decreases TG. We want Pattern B,
not Pattern A.

Even after knowing all this, government and medical society

recommendations are still to lower TC, instead of focusing on
the profile itself. A study in 2008 done in Japan found that
cholesterol levels above 5.18mmol/L (200mg/dL) were at lower
risk of dying than those with lower cholesterol levels
(<4.14mmol/L[160mg/dL]):

Kirihara Y, Hamazaki K, Hamazaki T, Ogushi Y, Tsuji H,

Shirasaki S. The Relationship between Total Blood Cholesterol
Levels and All-cause Mortality in Fukui City, and Meta-analysis
of This Relationship in Japan. Journal of Lipid Nutrition Vol. 17
(2008) , No. 1 pp.67-78

79
By depleting your body of cholesterol you may not be able to
build the plaque (controversial still), but at the same time your
body requires the cholesterol for other functions, and if you don’t
have enough you are more likely to die. Doesn’t seem like a very
good trade-off to me.

Glucose Related Tests

There are two tests in this category you should get if you can:
HbA1c and fasting glucose
My results (as of August 2010):

HbA1c: 4.3%
Fasting Glucose: 4.5mmol/L (81mg/dL)

In Chapter 5 on minimizing damage I discussed HbA1c. It is

basically a test of how much damage is done by the glucose in
your blood. The higher the percentage, the more damage being
done, and possibly the faster you age. Best to keep it below
5%, but below 6% is good.

Fasting glucose is a test of your insulin sensitivity. If you

consume less than 0.8g/kg of carbohydrate per day (excluding
fiber) your fasting glucose may be as high as 5.5mmol/L
(99mg/dL), which is nothing to worry about because you are in a
non-pathological insulin resistant state. The important number is
HbA1c, because this is an actual measure of damage. Since I
consume around 100-120 grams of digestible carbohydrate per
day, my fasting glucose is fairly low.

C-Reactive Protein (CRP)

This is a measure of inflammation. While the data is conflicted

about its importance in real life diagnosis, I consider excess
inflammation bad. I like the CRP near the lower end of the range.

80
Body Fat

I wish there was an easy and inexpensive way to test your body
fat percentage but there is not. I also wish we had a test for
visceral adipose tissue but I do not know of one (CRP maybe?).
So I have opted for how you look in the mirror and calipers to
make sure you are not getting fatter. Cheap calipers may be
very inaccurate but it is useful to gauge relative change. If you
are getting fatter you should see it in the mirror and also on the
calipers.

Another measurement that can be utilized is the waist to hip

ratio. If you have a lot of visceral adipose tissue your waist
circumference will be larger, it is taking up space and pushing
out the organ (e.g. beer belly). Women should have a waist to hip
ratio <0.7 and men <0.9. Measure waist circumference at the
belly button and hip circumference at the widest part.

Resting Heart Beat

My resting heart rate is 60 beats per minute, ideally it should be

below 70. Faster heart rates are usually due to excess stress and
inflammatory factors.

Blood Pressure

This is an interesting biometric that lots of people have problems

with. Optimal blood pressure would be near or below 120/80
(systolic/diastolic). When doctors find out that their patients have
high blood pressure the common advice given is to decrease salt
intake. From all the literature I have seen decreased salt-intake
does not work that well, and because this folk wisdom has been
passed around, people are even becoming iodine deficient (most
modern diets source of iodine comes from salt).

81
It definitely makes sense that by decreasing salt intake
blood pressure should go down:

On the cup at the top left you have a semi-permeable membrane

separating the two sides with different amounts of salt. The semi-
permeable membrane only allows water through but not the salt.
In the beginning the water level is the same on each side, but as
the water flows through the membrane, more water accumulates
on the right so that it can dilute the salt concentration until it is
the same as the left. The reason for this is diffusion. If you place
a drop of blue dye into water it tends to expand uniformly until
the water is a homogenous blue. This is because it takes energy
for the blue dye particles to stay together so they float apart
because nothing is keeping them together. This also occurs with
water; by having more salt on one side there is “less” water, so
the water from the left flows to the right (because it takes energy
to concentrate water).

The bottom half of the picture is your blood vessels. On the right
is a person without hypertension with normal amounts of salt.
On the right is someone with hypertension and for some reason
has more salt, thus water flows into the blood vessel, increasing
the volume and it pushes again the blood vessel (like filling a
balloon with water). The extra pressure causes the heart to work
harder than the heart on the left (this leads to left ventricular
hypertrophy, which is bad).

What causes excess salt to accumulate in the blood? This is

where the renal system comes into play. Your kidney produces
82
your urine. Urine is concentrated byproducts your body doesn’t
require anymore and this includes excess salt. If you have too
much salt in your body it is probably because your kidney is not
doing its job properly. There is a very strong connection between
diabetes and hypertension; there is lots of data to show that
excess sugar causes damage to the arteries leading to the kidney,
and also that hyperinsulinemia (high insulin levels) prevent the
kidney from filtering uric acid and salt:

Muscelli E, Natali A, Bianchi S, Bigazzi R, Galvan AQ, Sironi

AM, Frascerra S, Ciociaro D, Ferrannini E. Effect of insulin on
renal sodium and uric acid handling in essential hypertension.
Am J Hypertens. 1996 Aug;9(8):746-52

If you have hypertension check your insulin levels, if it is high,

lower your carbohydrate intake.

Apart from insulin, magnesium and potassium intake are also

involved. Your fluid balance is closely tied to your salt balance
(as shown in the picture provided up top). The internal balance
of calcium, potassium, sodium, and magnesium are all very
important. Some common deficiencies in the average diet
include magnesium (as I mentioned in Chapter 6) and potassium.
Instead of decreasing sodium intake, everyone should be
checking their intake of magnesium and potassium (yams and
vegetables are a very good source of potassium).

83
Chapter 9: Perpetual
Leanness
The idler never attains great age. ~Thomas Easton

Exercise is not going to extend you life into the extreme. On

average, I suspect maybe 2 years at most:

Paffenbarger RS, Lee I. A natural history of athleticism, health

and longevity. Journal of Sports Sciences, Volume 16,
Supplement 1, 1 May 1998 , pp. 31-45(15)

What the study found was that those from the Harvard Alumni who
remained active gained 1.5 years by age 90. However, exercise is
something everyone should still be doing; while it does not extend
life it does decrease your chances of dying prematurely. By
exercising you protect yourself from many chronic diseases such as
heart disease and diabetes. The improvement in strength and
endurance you achieve applies to all parts of the body: improved
heart function, increased bone strength and a more robust brain. It
lowers blood pressure, burns up fat, controls weight, and helps
improve your lipid profile. Finally, exercise not only makes you
feel good, but it also makes you look good which is what most
people are interested in.

How does one remain lean 24/7/365? We are all aware of the
cyclical dieting that many people go through. When summer is
over, they pack on the weight, pack on more weight at the
holidays, then try their best to cut down for the beach season
again (but most fail). As I mentioned in Chapter 4 on weight
loss, this up and down cycle is not very good for your
metabolism. It probably increases the likelihood of gaining
weight when you are older. What I am more interested in is
maintaining a lean state all year round. Now, each person’s
natural state of leanness is different, but this is mainly due to
genetics and the environment one grows up in (remember Set-
84
Point). What I hope is that I have created is a regimen that helps
you maintain your muscle mass and helps cut body fat. Extra fat
is not good and loss of muscle is not good either (we need it as
we get older, and it also seems that loss of muscle leads to loss of
bone. We don’t want to die of a simple fracture due to tripping
over a tiny rock). My recommendation is that men achieve 15%
or lower, and women achieve 25% and lower (unless pregnant).

There are various ways to measure body fat (the accurate ways
are expensive) but to keep it simple let the mirror be your
friend. If you see more definition and fewer lumps you are
heading in the right direction.

Many types of different training can be performed and they

differ in their metabolic effects on the body. There is resistance
training (e.g. weight lifting) and endurance training (e.g.
jogging) (yoga and pilates like activities can also be another
separate category). Each type of exercise/activity burns a
different amount of calories:

Acivity and Calories/min 123lb woman 170lb man

Running (8min/mile) 11.3 15.0
Swimming (fast crawl) 8.7 12.0
Walking (5.5 km/h) 4.5 5.9
Weight Training (strength) 4.4 6.0
Weight Training (circuit) 10.4 13.7
Cycling (8.9 km/h) 3.6 4.9
Rope Skipping (fast) 10.0 14.2

As you can see, the most effective calorie burner is aerobic

exercise. Steady state is much more effective at burning calories.
You can run for 1 hour but you can’t do interval training for 1 hour.
Even if you take into account excess post-exercise oxygen
consumption (EPOC) it will not compare to 1 hour of cardio.
However, my focus is not to burn calories (you should watch how
many calories you put into your mouth in the first place. Of course,
cardio is great for emergencies and cutting to single digit body-
fats). My focus is more of the positive metabolic effects of
85
exercise and I think resistance training offers all those without
the possible detrimental effects of cardio.

Cardio has become synonymous with heart health. Lots of

people I know do marathons for healthy reasons. If
cardiovascular exercise is good for the heart we would expect to
see marathon runners with a lower risk of heart disease:

Eur Heart J (2008) 29 (15): 1903-1910. Running: the risk of

coronary events: Prevalence and prognostic relevance of
coronary atherosclerosis in marathon runners. Möhlenkamp S,
Lehman N, Breuckmann F, Bröcker-Preuss M, Nassenstein K,
Halle M, Budde T, Mann K, Barkhausen J, Heusch G, Jöckel
KH, Erbel R

They looked at 108 healthy male marathon runners (ran at least 5

marathons in previous 3 years). When they compared
Framingham Risk Score (FRS, which is what your doctor uses)
they found that the marathon runners’ scores were lower than
that of age-matched controls. However, when the researchers
looked at coronary artery calcium and late gadolinium
enhancement (probably the best predictors of heart attacks,
second to the actual heart attack itself) the marathon runners
were actually at higher risk (and 21 years down the road, 4
marathon runners had a heart attack as well as very high CAC
scores). In a later paper by the same authors, it was found that
the more marathon runners ran, the higher the risk of heart
attack.

It could be a matter of intensity; perhaps 1 hour of cardio a day is

beneficial and more is worse. It may be the speed at which they
run, as well as the crap that runners eat to support their energy
intensive activities (all those carbohydrates).

Exercise is not the cure to aging. However, it is definitely

beneficial. My activities consist of resistance training, the
occasional basketball/soccer game, and the very occasional 5km
run. I choose resistance training not only because it provides
86
more benefits than endurance training, but also because I find it
more enjoyable and it doesn’t cause the injuries that might occur
if you do lots of cardio. By injuries I mean the ones caused by
the repetitive motion of running for long periods of time. Your
body is meant to move in various ways, running locks you into
one way for a long period of time. The more repetitive
movements you perform the more likely you are to get injured.

The benefits of resistance training are numerous: increased

insulin sensitivity in the muscles (upregulated GLUT4), signal
maintenance of the neuromuscular junction (which tend to die
off as you get older), strength maintenance, muscle maintenance
(which probably doesn’t help with sarcopenia, but if it does help,
it is much better than cardio), and finally bone stress (which thus
signals maintenance and improvement of bone mass).

How does resistance exercise fit into the picture of perpetual

leanness, which includes fasting and low-carbohydrate eating?

The Schedule
Low Intensity High Volume High Intensity Low Volume
(LIHV) (HILV)
Total Duration: 30 30 min workout:
minutes 2-3 sets, 3-6 reps.
4-5 sets, 10-20 reps.
Alternating lower-body and
Alternating lower-body and upper-body.
upper-body. Weighted Squats -->
Squats --> Pushups --> Weighted Pushups --
Lunges --> Pull-ups --> > One-legged Squats
Ab Wheel on Knees --> --> One-armed
etc... Pushups -->
Weighted pull-ups or
One-arm Pull-ups -->
Ab Wheel on Toes --
> etc...
87
Note: please see Appendix V for discussion of some
bodyweight principles.

Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday

8:00am 6:00pm 8:00am 6:00pm 8:00am Rest day Rest days.
LIHV Eat LIHV Eat HILV Stop
Workout dinner, Workout dinner, a Workout eating
a 24 24 hour food every
12:00pm hour 12:00pm fast. night at
Eat fast. Eat largest 12:00pm 8:00pm
largest meal of No more Eat first though.
meal of No the day eating meal of
the day more after the day Fasting on
eating 6:00pm 8:00pm this day is
6:00pm after Start (better If you do up to you.
Start 8:00pm eating for want to Sometimes
eating (better again sleep). include I do
again for whenever, one day sometimes
whenever, sleep). but stop of I don't.
but stop eating by cheating
eating by 6:00pm this is
6:00pm the day
to do it.

There are 2 (sometimes 3) 24 hour fasts in the week. I do not

workout on fasting days because that would just speed up
muscle catabolism, instead, I workout on days that I eat. When
you exercise there are a lot of beneficial adaptations that take
place in terms of nutrient portioning and body composition
(increased blood glow, GLUT4 upregulation). So if you
consume your meals after working out, hopefully the nutrients
get taken up by the muscles instead of the fat.

Low intensity high volume days are interspersed with fasting

days because this helps with glycogen depletion. By depleting

88
glycogen it leaves room for the extra carbohydrate days
that might come on Friday (for example if you cheat).

By depleting our calorie stores between Monday to Thursday we

take advantage of the low calorie days to burn fat. The resistance
training is meant to help you retain your muscle mass and not
lose it in the 4 days. Then comes Friday, where you crank up the
intensity which then sets into motion muscle building factors and
you can take a break for 3 days to allow for adequate recovery.

I do not know if this actually works but I have seen beneficial

effects over the last couple of months. I am sure that if you
included carbohydrate in the rest days (Friday-Sunday) you
would actually be able to increase muscle mass without
gaining fat (a lean bulk). Since that is not my goal I have
settled on this schedule to allow for workouts, fasting, and
recovery. For now this seems optimal to me.

Exercise Supplements
If you walk into a supplement stores you find various
workout supplements. There are pre-workout, intra-workout,
post-workout, pre-sleep formulas and many more. Many of
the expensive brands contain 50 or more ingredients and the
amounts/dosages are all hidden under the term “proprietary
formula.” Most people continuously switch between various
products and brands because they just do not see the claimed
effects, so how proprietary can it really be? These claims
include:

Increase muscle mass by 300%

Boost testosterone by 800%
Gain 6 lbs of lean mass in two weeks
Lose 2 inches of your waist in 2 days
Third party research/Backed by Science

These claims seem unlikely, and to tell you the truth they are.
They aren’t false but they aren’t true either. For example, by

89
claiming an increase of lean muscle mass by 300%, are they
saying that if you have 100lbs of lean mass you will suddenly
have 300lbs of lean mass by taking their supplement, or do they
mean they found in some obscure study done on rats where the
circumference of their forelimb increased from 0.00001 to
0.00003 gain 6lbs of lean mass? Water is lean mass too; I can
drink 6 lbs of water pretty easily. Lose five inches? By not eating
for two days I can drop 2 inches (I just urinated it out). Don’t
waste your money on these products, because they just do not do
that much. If there are benefits they are incredibly small, and the
risks you’re taking are incredibly big. Remember our benefit to
risk ratio, well in these situations it is really low.

A commonly utilized ingredient in workout supplements is

arginine. It is used because it is a precursor to nitric oxide (NO)
that dilates blood vessels and gives users that “pump” they feel
when they exercise. NO is actually a very important molecule
inside of your body, the NO pathway is involved with many
different processes. For example, blood vessel dilation under
stress: the ability of your blood vessels to react is very important
for your survival, and by supplementing with arginine you are
basically short-circuiting that process. Not only that, by
supplying excess arginine which is then converted to NO by
your body, you may be suppressing your endogenous production
of NO later on in your life when you discontinue the arginine. In
my opinion the risk is too high and the benefits are nil. Another
claim for arginine is that it boosts growth hormone:

Marcell TJ, Taaffe DR, Hawkins SA, Tarpenning KM, Pyka G,

Kohlmeier L, Wiswell RA, Marcus R. Oral arginine does not
stimulate basal or augment exercise-induced GH secretion in
either young or old adults. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 1999
Aug;54(8):M395-9.

This study shows that arginine does not increase growth

hormone; instead it may even decrease GH after your workout,
again interfering with a possible adaptation to exercise.

90
The other widely sold product is branched chain amino acids. I
doubt we truly require these isolated. If you consume adequate
protein (especially in the form of whey) you are getting a large
amount of BCAAs already (whey is 25% BCAA while beef is
15%). BCAAs are expensive and useless if you are ingesting
adequate protein. However there are benefits, if you don’t ingest
adequate protein BCAAs will help with retaining muscle mass
and might also boost your immune system in times of sickness
when you cannot ingest enough food.

If you truly want to gain muscle, there are only three things you
need: whey protein, creatine monohydrate, and caffeine. (I won’t
go over all the forms of creatine but the monohydrate form is the
tried and tested one, sure the other ones don’t cause bloating, but
that is probably because it doesn’t work).

Stretching and Balancing

Our joints are supported by muscles, connective tissue, ligaments
and for them to function optimally and without pain everything
must be in balance so that the joints are not pulled apart (e.g.
hips, ankles, knees, and especially the shoulders). Commonly
utilized bodyweight exercises are pull-ups, pushups, and squats
and if not balanced can cause muscular imbalances. The pushup
for example depends on the contraction of your chest and hips so
to balance this we throw in a stretch that is very similar to the
plank exercise for abs except the other way around:

So you basically make yourself into a table. This helps to extend

the chest and hips. It is sort of like the opposite of a pushup. At

91
first you may have tightness in your shoulder not allowing you
to flatten out completely but with practice you’ll get there.

The squat relies on the contraction of your psoas muscles and

many others in the front of your body, thus to counteract that
we utilize a back bend (which I took from Yoga):

This helps extend the front of the body.

Now to balance the pull-up we also use another position from

Yoga called the downward dog:

This position activates your back muscles to help support the

position.

Ensuring muscular balance helps prevent pain and injuries that

will occur down the road as our bodies wear out. There are
many other therapies just as trigger point therapy and soft tissue
massage which I will refer you to better resources in Appendix
VI.

92
 Chapter 10: Paleo Shoes,
Posture, and Sitting
In our natural state we did not have chairs to sit in, nor did we
have folk wisdom guiding our posture. Our ancestors most
likely all moved in an optimal state with optimal positioning.
This chapter will explore some of these issues.

Shoes
Running shoes are terrible. We did not evolve in the presence of
running shoes, or even shoes in general; we evolved with our
bare feet touching the dirt and rocks on the ground. We ran
barefoot, we walked barefoot and we stood and sat barefooted.
The mechanics of motion when wearing shoes and not-wearing
shoes are different. For example, go run on the grass with your
thick-soled, supported arch, raised heel running shoe, then try it
bare foot, it’s quite a different experience. With shoes we tend
to flex the foot and strike the heal, while bare feet our foot
position is more relaxed and its more of a front-mid foot strike.

What I have done is bought some very expensive shoes to mimic

our natural state. There’s Vibram Five Fingers and then for
something more natural, Vivo Barefoot shoes. Both are well
made but pricey. However, you’ll thank yourself for spending the
money. The way you feel by activating the proper muscles and
technique for walking/running is something worth spending the
money on.

Related to barefoot states, our feet have also been in contact with
the ground. The ground from before is not smooth and
homogenous like the floors we experience today. It’s much more
varied and for the uninitiated its also much more painful but
you’ll get used to it. By evolving barefoot our bodies have also
developed mechanisms that react to various stimulations of the
foot:
93
 Li F, Fisher KJ, Harmer P. Improving physical function and
blood pressure in older adults through cobblestone mat walking:
a randomized trial. J Am Geriatr Soc. 2005 Aug;53(8):1305-12.

So, every once in a while go walk on some rocks/pebbles. Nike

can’t improve upon something that evolution has taken millions
of years to perfect.

Posture
The picture on the right is the posture
most people today are told is the
proper posture. Shoulder’s back head
up, which causes an excessive curve
in the lower back. But in reality
based on traditional populations the
posture on the right is more
“natural.” Hip back until you can
drop a straight line down from the
hip socket to the ankles. To
counteract the weight backwards we
must lean forward (think caveman
like) then we pull our head up and
back. This gives us a much straighter
spine. If you have children you will notice that this is how your
children stand.

The posture on the left is held up by your muscles and

ligaments while the posture on the right is held up by each and
every bone sitting on top of another. For more information read
Esther Gokhale’s book “8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back” (it is
accessible for free on Google Books). Also, make sure to read
the section on sleeping (stretch lying on the side).

Sitting
Today we sit on reclining chairs and stools, when we “do our
business” we sit on a toilet rather than squat over a hole. The
94
back problems and hip problems commonly found among people
today may have roots in the lack of indigenous squatting done
today. What is the indigenous squat?

You keep your heels flat on the ground. Feet a bit wider than
shoulder width apart, then take your glutes straight to the floor.
Many people have problems with this at first, their behind cannot
pass parallel. This is tightness in your hips. If you have
problems, try holding onto something in front while squatting
down. If you can get all the way down, it is more of a stability
issue (not activating the right muscles). With practice you will
get there. Every day you should take some time to get down into
this position and open the hips and stretch the spine.

Here’s a research paper using X-rays to study the quality of the

spines comparing indigenous populations to Western society:

Farhni WH, Trueman GE. Comparitive Radiological Study of

the Spines of a Primitive Population with North American and
Northern Europeans. J Bone Joint Surg Br. 1965 Aug;47:552-5

It is probably the squatting that provided indigenous

populations with their higher quality spine.

95
If you watch Western people squat, to get their posterior down to
the ankles they have to lift their heels from the floor. Lifting the
heels defeats the purpose.

Sleeping and Circadian Rhythm

Just like in the past we did not have chairs and shoes to alter our
physical form, we did not have constant sources of light
throughout the day. The earth rotates within a 24 hour period. In
nature certain things happen when there is light and certain
things happen when it is dark. By developing an internal 24
hour clock our bodies can carry out processes at the right time
of the day and night. These internal timers can be found all the
way down to cyanobacteria who upregulates photosynthetic
machinery during daylight hours so it can absorb the most of
amount of light. The presence of circadian rhythms in bacteria,
plants, reptiles, and mammals shows that it probably confers
some type of advantage which helps species survive. In humans
we can see the diurnal rhythms in our hormone levels (e.g.
leptin, cortisol), behavior, body temperature, liver metabolism,
and much more.

What has been shown is that by deviating from this 24 hour

synchronicity humans can develop all forms of metabolic
disorders (e.g. diabetes, cancer, heart disease, all things we
are trying to avoid):

Scheer FA, Hilton MF, Mantzoros CS, Shea SA .Proc .Adverse

metabolic and cardiovascular consequences of circadian
misalignment. Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2009 Mar 17;106(11):4453-
8.

In the study by Scheer et al what they show is that by extending

the human circadian rhythm from 24 hours to 28 hours decreases
leptin levels, increases glucose levels, increases insulin
resistance, and alter lipid homeostasis which is all associated
with metabolic syndrome (which we want to avoid). This is
probably why shift workers and night-workers are associated

96
with increased risk of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and cancer.
Not only that, what has also been shown is that species who deviate
from the 24 hours the most also have decreased lifespan:

Wyse CA, Coogan AN, Selman C, Hazlerigg DG, Speakman JR.

Association between mammalian lifespan and circadian free-
running period: the circadian resonance hypothesis revisited.
Biol Lett. 2010 Apr 14.

Lots of factors affect your internal clock (such various nutrients,

caffeine, alcohol) but one of the ways your internal clock
synchronizes to the rotation of the earth is through light. So it is
important to make sure that you do not alter your circadian
rhythm too much. You should go to sleep at around the same
time everyday, wake up and make sure you get exposure to
enough natural light in the morning. Also ensure that you do not
consume food later in the day (because glucose, protein, and fats
do alter the rhythm too), thus the association between altered
circadian rhythm and obesity.

Some things I implement in my life to improve sleep quality is

to use black-out shades (because I do prefer to sleep later). I also
utilize a program called f.lux (http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/)
which dims the computer screen thus decreasing the amount of
light into the eyes when the sun is down. Also ensure that lights
are turned down later in the day.

97
Chapter 11: How
Much Life Left?
Storing your car in New York is safer than entering it in a
demolition derby. But not much. ~Daniel S. Greenberg

Currently maximum human lifespan is thought to be 125 years,

which is just shy of the record holder Jeanne Calment, 122 years.
The rest of us probably have no chance of reaching such an
advanced age. To become 120 years old you would have to have
incredible genetics (look at the supercentenarians that smoke and
drink) or implement calorie restriction, and maybe even have to
do both. The Leiden University Medical Center has studied
populations of older individuals. One population study of 420
Caucasian families which included long-living members has
turned up some very interesting data. Numerous studies have
been released looking at various health factors (remember
Chapter 8) and it was found that the children of centenarians
have similar biometrics as their parents. For example,
measurements of serum glucose, triglycerides, insulin, blood
pressure, thyroid hormone and insulin sensitivity were all much
more favorable than matched partners (such as the centenarian’s
son’s wife who does not have centenarian parents). What this
shows is that extensive longevity has a very strong genetic
component.

What is interesting is that calorie restriction takes a person

without centenarian parents and alters the biochemistry and
metabolism of the practitioner to match those of the very long-
living. CR increases insulin sensitivity, lower blood glucose,
allows for the same cholesterol profile (high HDL, low LDL,
triglycerides, and overall low cholesterol), low blood pressure,
and the same thyroid hormonal profile (high TSH, with normal
T4, suggesting TSH resistance, by today’s measurement this
would be hypothyroidism, however, it is not pathological in
centenarians and CR-folk). Considering that CR actually slows
98
down the rate of aging, I think that CR-folk can probably
reach up to 110-120 years old depending on their genetics and
when they started practicing, earlier being better. CR done
today is practice in conjunction with Optimal Nutrition (ON),
while centenarians probably do not practice ON. If those who
are genetically gifted practiced CRON, I would suspect that
they could live beyond 120.

Life Span
It may seem like we have extended our lifespan in the last 1000
years. The ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians had a life
expectancy of 30, now we can expect to live up to 80 (Japanese
women can expect to live up to 86.44). Its seems we easily doubled
our life span and if you plot it, it looks like we are gaining a solid
2.5 years every decade in a straight line with no plateau in sight. If
you plot human survival curves it definitely seems very square, but
the squaring effect stopped at about 1950 (figure 3 in the study
below) and seems to be shifting parallel:

Westendorp RGJ. What is healthy aging in the

21st century? American Journal of Clinical
Nutrition, Vol. 83, No. 2, 404S-409S.

Remember Chapter 5?

In 1950 we reached the black line and now the survival curve
seems to be moving like the red one. As I said in the beginning
99
of the chapter, maximum lifespan seems to be 125 years and I
suspect that this has always been the case for thousands of years.

The jump in life expectancy had nothing to do with our

understanding of the biology and underlying mechanisms of aging,
it had to do with eliminating factors that kill us (e.g. infectious
diseases, acute injuries, starvation) and securing things that keep us
safe (e.g. health care, food, refrigeration, sanitation).

With the help of modern technology we have eliminated most

causes that kill us prematurely and now we are exposed to
aging itself. The previous gain in life expectancy isn’t
something we should expect to see again because now it is
different. Instead of preventing the bacteria from killing you,
you have to prevent your metabolism from killing you, and so
far the only way to slow that down is through calorie restriction.

How long can you expect to live by implementing my suggested

changes into your lifestyle? If CR-folk can reach the age of 110-
120, with the interventions in this book it may be possible to live
to 98-100. Here is some data to back it up:

Mackenbach JP, Kunst AE, Lautenbach H, Oei YB, Bijlsma F.

Gains in Life Expectancy after Elimination of Major Causes of
Death: Revised Estimates Taking into Account the Effect of
Competing Causes. Journal of Epidemiology and Community
Health (1979-), Vol. 53, No. 1 (Jan., 1999), pp. 32-37

Mackenbach et al (1979) determined that by preventing heart

disease, cancer, and various other diseases (e.g. diabetes, stroke,
etc…) one can expect to gain 10 years in their life expectancy.
What if we were to try our best to optimize ALL our risk
factors? Let’s take 11 of them: diastolic and systolic blood
pressure, smoking, vital capacity index, blood glucose,
hematocrit value, body mass index, serum cholesterol, sex, pulse
rate, and left ventricular hypertrophy. If we made all these
measurements into the lowest risk factor group, how long can we
expect to live? Luckily the math has been done:
100
 Manton KG, Stallard E, Tolley HD. Limits to Human Life
Expectancy: Evidence, Prospects, and Implications. Population
and Development Review, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Dec., 1991), pp. 603-
637

Manton et al. optimized the 11 risk factors above and predicted

that life expectancies up to 100 years old can be achieved. Since
models are usually wrong, and regarding age people like to be
optimistic, as well as factoring in the “luck of the draw”
(genetics) I estimate that I can personally live to 90-95 years old
(10% down adjustment). Just a big fat guess but I feel confident
about this number.

Health Span
Even if we took the pessimistic view of 90, I would still
implement the lifestyle described in this book. Healthy life
expectancy is the number of years one can live with minimal
morbidity. For example, let’s say you live until 90 but have
diabetes for 15 years, then cancer for 10. Your healthy life
expectancy from birth is only 75.

Japan has the longest healthy life expectancy:

Takeda S.[Healthy life expectancy and the standardized

mortality ratio for the elderly in Japan's 47 Prefectures] [Article
in Japanese]. Nippon Koshu Eisei Zasshi. 2007 Jan;54(1):25-31

It seems the longest health span is 80-84. This is quite close to

the life expectancy of 86 (I know I’m mixing up data but close
enough).

From all the research, health span and life span are closely
correlated, healthier people just tend to live longer. But as
lifespan begins to reach the maximum (outside of anti-aging
interventions) morbidity will be compressed as people get
healthier. Even if I were to only achieve 86.44 (not saying I’m a

101
Japanese woman, just that this is a number for the healthy) I
would be glad that I gained 10 years of healthy lifespan where I
am not suffering from cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and
Alzheimer’s.

I have volunteered at a care home for over 4 years and had the
chance to work at a hospital for 1 year, the way that seniors
spend the rest of their lives in these situations is not something I
want to go through.

When I am 80 years old I still expect to be able to walk on my

two feet without help, get out of a chair, pick up my great-great-
grandchildren, lift weights, and debate/discuss with the younger
generation. To do that you must keep your body and mind
healthy at a young age.

Where to Now?
Research in the field of aging is exploding. Of course, there has
been some resistance (hey, death is “natural”) but sooner or later
we will have interventions that will expand both our health span
and our life span. The common interpretation of anti-aging
interventions is that you will be 120 years old but be more
decrepit than a 90 year old (which is really bad), but this is not
how these interventions will work. The new technologies being
developed will not make you “older,” instead it will extend you
lifespan by making you younger. The first development that will
come will probably be CR-mimetics. These are pharmacological
interventions that will mimic the metabolic altering effects of
CR, after that it will be Strategies for Engineered Negligible
Senescence (SENS) (read Aubrey De Grey’s book on this matter,
“Ending Aging”). SENS isn’t about trying to mimic the effects of
CR, it goes beyond that in that it is trying to go into our bodies
and fix/reverse/remove the damage that happens. If the damage
is gone then the cause of aging is diminished. This seems like a
tall order but it is definitely possible.

102
It is because of SENS that I have put serious thought into
adopting CRON (please donate to SENS). It is the only way of
ensuring maximally robust lifespan, and this is important
because of the speed at which science advances. Less than 20
years ago we did not have the internet, and now it permeates
almost every facet of our world. Science and technology build
upon themselves and with each new block they reach farther
heights than ever before. To take advantage of these new
discoveries from SENS one has to have a body that is robust
enough to deal with the effects of these new drugs/interventions.
If you reach the age of 70 but can hardly move and have
dementia, you will not be able to survive the application of the
new technologies. However, if you are 70 years old with robust
health (like with CRON) then you can. Let’s say the intervention
extends your life by 10 years, because of that one discovery,
more will come and within those 10 years another intervention
will come along extending life another 20 years, and so on and
so forth, until immortality is reached (this is by no means far-
fetched). I am not saying that these interventions will be created
in my lifespan or yours, but the thing is that you never know, and
it would be best to not only live as healthily as possible, but to
live as long as possible. The only way to achieve the maximum
is through caloric restriction (this speeding up of technology is
known as the Singularity, read Ray Kurzweil’s book, “The
Singularity is Near”).

(If you plan on practicing CR make sure to do tons of research.

Roy Walford‟s book “Beyond the 120 Year Diet : How to Double
Your Vital Year” is a good place to start. As far as I know the
downsides are: loss of libido, hunger, social struggles and
emaciation)

I think that I have taken this lifestyle as far as it can go, the only
other place to enter now is the world of the extreme, calorie
restriction with optimal nutrition. Will I enter that realm, I don’t
know yet, but it is best to decide sooner rather than later.

103
Concluding Thoughts
My goal when I started researching all this was to try my best to
prevent the chronic illnesses. I saw how much pain they can
cause to everyone. Just take Alzheimer’s for example: lifeless
eyes with no sense of self, time, or place, a dreadful disease with
a slow progression that places strain on yourself as you lose your
soul as well as strain on your family, friends and society. Even if
you wanted to end it you couldn’t because you have basically
disappeared. Everyone’s goal in this life is different, but I am
certain that no one wants to end up in such decrepitude. The
regimens laid out in the book will help with preventing this,
screw the USDA Food Guide and the American Diabetes
Associate Diet, throw out common “wisdom” and rely instead
on hard science. The basic principle of this book is: eat the right
foods, but not too much; allow the body to take out the garbage;
be conscious of what you put in your body; and exercise.

104
Appendix I: Olive Oil
There has been a Slow Food movement in our Western culture.
The idea that we can access authentic traditional cuisine through
local food, as well as the proliferation of extra virgin olive oil
(EVOO) are both prime examples of this movement. Today, the
best selling brands are the ones with the name of countries like
Italy, Spain, and Greece plastered on the front signaling the
source of the oil and providing a connection between the
consumer and the country of origin. However, large producers
have taken advantage of our love of olive oil and many of your
purchases today are not as high a quality as you would think. In
terms of olive oil, quality is very important, because without it
you are just consuming another plain old oil without the flavor,
aroma, or the health benefits of olive oil that has been used for
hundreds of years.

After reading an article on olive oil and then doing some

research, the health benefits of olive oil were pretty clear. The
Mediterranean diet definitely seemed to confer lots of health
advantages to the user and olive oil seemed to be the difference
(among many others). Thus, even though everyone is afraid of
fat nowadays, olive oil is still a best seller.

Is it the monounsaturated fat and low saturated fat in the olive oil
that provides the health benefits? Well, after learning about the
Paleolithic diet and looking at the research, saturated fat does not
seem to be a problem. Comparing the monounsaturated fat intake
of the U.S:

Dougherty RM, Galli C, Ferro-Luzzi A, Iacono JM. Lipid and

phospholipid fatty acid composition of plasma, red blood cells,
and platelets and how they are affected by dietary lipids: a study
of normal subjects from Italy, Finland, and the USA. Am J Clin
Nutr. 1987 Feb;45(2):443-55.

105
It was probably not the monounsaturated fat so that left the
polyphenols:

Konstantinidou V, Covas MI, Muñoz-Aguayo D, Khymenets O,

de la Torre R, Saez G, Tormos Mdel C, Toledo E, Marti A, Ruiz-
Gutiérrez V, Ruiz Mendez MV, Fito M. In vivo nutrigenomic
effects of virgin olive oil polyphenols within the frame of the
Mediterranean diet: a randomized controlled trial. FASEB J.
2010 Jul;24(7):2546-57.

The polyphenol content varies depending on the quality of the

olive oil, which in turn depends on many factors: where the olive
was grown, how it was harvested, how it was grown, when it
was harvest and grown, at what maturity level was the olive, the
transportation, milling, packaging and storing all affect the
polyphenol content, quality, taste, and aroma of the oil. In the
past couple years, chemical tests have been developed to
determine if the oil is adulterated, but of course not all oils are
tested and as individual consumers it is fairly hard to get all the
oils in your grocery tested. However, there is another way to
determine the content, which is tasting. Tasting works because
many of the polyphenols provide differing flavors to the oil, e.g.
oleuropin is bitter, and various other polyphenols and substances
found in olive oil provide various effects such as pepperiness,
fruitiness and bitterness.

Buying high quality olive oil is important because since the

popularity of olive oil increased, many companies and producers
have been adultering the oils we purchase in stores. While a high-
quality olive oil may cost 20-30 dollars per 500ml, we can
nowadays buy it for less than 10 dollars per liter. Some things I
have read about is mixing olive oil with cheaper oils like soybean
oil, corn oil, hazelnut oil (which made me sick considering how
much I try to avoid those oils), adding chlorophyll (green color),
beta-carotenes and other things to vegetable oils to make it look
like olive oil, labeling normal low-quality olive oil as extra virgin
olive oil. Over the past couple years there has been huge scandals
involved in sham olive oils

106
thus necessitating the need to create ways to detect them, which
there are many of now, but regulatory bodies do not have the
capacity to test all oils so it is left up to the consumer to be able
to determine what is real extra virgin olive oil.

Tasting
Why is the label “extra virgin” important? This is a term from
the International Olive Oil Council that signifies that the oil
must have passed certain chemical tests, be fault free, and passed
rigid taste tests. However, these tests aren’t exactly in place to
ensure quality, but are just there to ensure that the oils are
deemed edible.

If there is a defect
the oil is labeled
as virgin, and if it
is inedible it is
labeled as lamp oil
(scary thought that
lots of people may
be consuming
lamp oil grade).

Thus we either
have to pay
independent labs
to test our oils,
which can get
expensive, ask
the producer to
provide us with
independent tests they have performed (and not all companies
are happy to oblige) or we try our best to use our senses to taste
for extra virgin olive oil qualities.

The first thing is that the oil has to lack defects. On the picture
you can see the various defects; I have had experiences with oils

107
that have tasted rancid, sour, and metallic, but were labeled
as extra virgin.

The positive attributes are harder to get used to and it would be

best if you go to an olive oil tasting session, or visit a gourmet
store and ask if you could taste the various olive oils on the
shelf (some are happy to oblige). These positive attributes are
important because it is the health conferring polyphenols that
provide these various palates.

The bitterness and fruitiness should be a flavor you taste/smell in

good extra virgin olive oil, while the pungency is the
pepperiness you will feel when swallowing that stings the back
of your throat. Below is an example of each category:

Defects
Fusty: Brined olives, lactic acid.
Musty-Humid: Mouldy
Muddy: Stale muddy water, baby vomit, wet soil.
Sour: Vinegar
Metallic: Metal on teeth (try some Epsom salts).
Rancid: stale oil (try leaving raw walnuts in a room for a couple
of days)

Positive Attributes
Fruity: Grass, orange, lemon, apple, nutty, leafy, almond,
eucaplyptus, perfumy, buttery. Bitter: grapefruit rind,
tonic water.
Pungent: chili, makes you cough, hot, pepper.

Always check for a date on the product you are buying, making
sure it is not too old (also taste for rancidity, it is a very bad
sign).

There is a process to tasting olive oil (just like wine) and this is
due to the fact that our noses and our tongues are connected
(oil should be at around room temperature):

108
 1. One tablespoon in small container with lid
2. Swirl: releases aroma
3. Smell it: you should have a fruity smell
4. Slurp: this brings in air which spreads the flavor/aroma
5. Swallow: it should sting and last for a bit.

For more information buy Deborah Krasner’s book, “The

Flavors of Olive Oil: A Tasting Guide and Cookbook.”

Chemical Tests
Some producers do have certificates of authenticity (COAs) on
hand that might show the free fatty acid level and peroxide
levels. These are important because it tells you how well the oil
is stored and how “fresh” it is.

Fats are usually in the form of

triglycerides. When the fat becomes
red, part of it breaks off (bad
storage) the fats, which are actually
acids, creating acidity. So COAs
testing olive oil usually give an
acidity value that should be lower
than 0.8%.

The other important value is oxidation/peroxidation. This is a

measurement of how damaged the fats are (due to heat, light,
preparation). We don’t want damaged lipids so this value should
be 20mEq/kg or less.

While we can taste for polyphenols it is not the most accurate

way to determine the concentration. Many of the studies seem to
show that consuming polyphenol oils with content of 300mg/kg
and above are the best. If the producer is willing to provide a test
on the polyphenols, that would be great.

109
Appendix II: Acne
and Balding
There are a couple disorders that affect our self-esteem today
that our ancestors probably did not have to experience, obesity,
acne, and balding. By setting up a lifestyle that can prevent
metabolic syndrome we can prevent the damaging
psychological effects these disorders have and hopefully be on
our way to achieve a healthy body image.

Acne
In western populations acne affects up to 95% of adolescents and
50% over the age of 25. The economic and psychological effects
are undeniable and best avoided. However in hunter-
gatherer/traditional populations there have been no reports of
acne in the anthropological reports:

Cordain L, Lindeberg S, Hurtado M, Hill K, Eaton SB, Brand-

Miller J. Acne vulgaris: a disease of Western civilization. Arch
Dermatol. 2002 Dec;138(12):1584-90.

It is commonly stated that acne has no relation to diet and that it

is mainly genetic but taking into the account that acne is fairly
recent phenomenon genetics just does not explain the
pervasiveness of this ailment in western society.

Acne vulgaris (vulgaris meaning common) develop because of

many factors: 1) pores get clogged because excess skin cells
clog the pores (hyperkeratinization); 2) increased sebum
production (which is the waxy/oily substance your skin produces
to protect/maintain itself); 3) Propionibacterium acnes colonizes
follicles causing inflammation. Below is a picture I drew
depicting the usual path that a pimple takes. First the gray stuff
gets produced in to large amounts, which then clogs the pores as
110
more gets produced and as sebum gets produced. It then causes
and the bacterium is allowed to proliferate which then causes
the big red bump all over your face.

Our skins should not have evolved so that everyone gets acne, it
should only occur to signal to the other sex that something is
wrong with the metabolism. The metabolism goes awry because
of your hormones and hormones depend on diet (and genetics
but only in special cases). Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS)
affects women and is characterized by excess androgen (male
hormones), too much insulin, and insulin resistance. PCOS
patients often struggle with acne. These hormonal profiles are
associated with acne in “healthy” people and by correcting the
hormone levels acne lesions decrease:
Smith RN, Braue A, Varigos GA, Mann NJ. The effect of a low
glycemic load diet on acne vulgaris and the fatty acid
composition of skin surface triglycerides. J Dermatol Sci. 2008
Apr;50(1):41-52.
The diet is a very important factor that determines insulin levels.
By elevating insulin with a high carbohydrate diet, it activates
pathways which then results in increased androgen production.
This leads to elevated insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) and
decrease insulin-like growth factor binding protein 3 (IGFBP-3)
[which bind IGF-1, thus resulting in more free IGF-1]. Somehow
this leads to low amounts of retinoids in the skin which is
responsible for keeping cell proliferation at proper levels (thus
the use of retinoids to treat acne). So to stop this progression we
have to lower insulin and we lower insulin through a low-
111
carbohydrate diet (like the one espoused in this book). By
lowering insulin we prevent the hyperkeratinization, excess
sebum production and even lower inflammation. Without the
environment of excess growth (caused by IGF-1, insulin, and
androgens) the bacteria is not allowed to grow excessively.
I briefly discussed the glycemic index in chapter 4. Many
studies on acne these days utilize the glycemic index instead of
actually controlling total digestible carbohydrate intake. This is
probably the reason why the studies are equivocal. One low
glycemic index diet can lead to an overall high carbohydrate
intake (grains), while another will lead to a low carbohydrate
intake (mostly vegetables). So just make sure to keep you blood
sugar and insulin levels under control and your acne will soon
go away.
Note: Foods like milk and chocolate have also been implicated
in causing acne. I suspect that milk might be a problem because
of the growth factors present in the milk (which also raises IGF-
1, possibly so if you are trying to get rid of acne you should
probably stop the milk intake). Chocolate is not a problem
unless you are consuming milk chocolate. Milk chocolate is not
“real” chocolate in the sense that most of it is sugar and milk. If
you like chocolate go for 90% and above dark chocolate and the
acne problem should go away.

Male Pattern Balding (MPB)

Here is a disorder that men will pay thousands and thousands of
dollars per year to prevent and hopefully reverse. For now totally
reversing hair loss is a dream (except for maybe implantation)
and slowing it down and stalling it has nightmarish side effects
(depending on the method implemented). Some of the most
common drugs utilized today are DHT lowering drugs which
stops the enzyme that converts testosterone to DHT. While DHT
is one of the many culprits the whole pot of risk factors which is
metabolic syndrome is in my opinion the greatest cause of MPB:

112
 Su LH, Chen TH. Association of androgenetic
alopecia with metabolic syndrome in men: a
community-based survey. Br J Dermatol. 2010
Aug;163(2):371-7. Epub 2010 Apr 23

From what I have seen metabolic syndrome (e.g. large waist

circumference, beer belly, bad diet, acne, fat mass) is correlated
with MPB. Also it seems that those who consume low-fat diets
and exercise a lot (such as marathon running) are also
predisposed (remember Chapter 9, probably has to do with the
damaging diet they consume, exercise does not prevent illness!).
What this all points too is that in general metabolic syndrome
causes hair loss because of the inflammation, higher DHT
levels, and insulin resistance:

González-González JG, Mancillas-Adame LG, Fernández-Reyes M,

Gómez-Flores M, Lavalle-González FJ, Ocampo-Candiani J,
Villarreal-Pérez JZ. Androgenetic alopecia and insulin resistance in
young men. Clin Endocrinol (Oxf). 2009 Oct;71(4):494-9

This connection has only recently been studied and there are many
issues to tease out. Some studies show that those with MPB have
higher levels of testosterone but metabolic syndrome decreases
total testosterone and sex-hormone binding globulin. The way
most hormones work is that they are created by cells but also
present in the blood stream is a binding factor that inactivates the
hormone. This is done so that there are always hormones in the
blood but when needed the binding factor can be broken down to
release more hormone instead of making more hormone from
scratch. Treatments such as DHT lowering agents do seem to work
so it does have an effect but for all I know it is preventing the
damaging effects of high insulin, glucose, and inflammatory
levels. Metabolic syndrome may decrease total testosterone but
free testosterone could be higher or the conversion to DHT could
be higher or sensitivity of the

113
hair follicles to DHT is higher. But one thing for sure is that if
you want to keep your hair, do not use steroids and do not get
metabolic syndrome.

114
Appendix III: Skinny
Fat Body Type
The skinny fat body type has become a problem
over the years, not only for those trying to gain
muscle but also as a health policy subject. We are
not surprised when someone says that the United
States is suffering from a diabetes epidemic, but
most are surprised that China is also suffering an
epidemic. It is true diabetes is usually associated
with obesity, but obesity describes body fat, and
thin people can be fat too. There are two types of
ectomorphs, the ones that stay “ripped” while
consuming 8000 calories and another softer
ectomorph: these are the skinny types.

Mandavilli A, Cyranoski D. Asia's big problem.

Nat Med. 2004 Apr;10(4):325-7

China’s diabetes problem (now 1 in 10) went undetected

because the measurements we utilize today only apply to
Caucasians e.g. waist size and body mass index. While these are
good measurements for most Westerners, most Asians fall into
the skinny fat phenotype (I think it is probably the lack of proper
nutrition in most Asian countries). So, people see a country of
all underweight people and assume there is no problem. The
individuals themselves also assume there’s no problem. I know
many people who eat like shit all the time and they say it is no
problem because they are not fat. But they are fat, and they are
doing just as much damage to their bodies as the obese are.

This phenotype is due to genetics (mainly your predisposition

towards an anxious personality) and probably undernutrition
while in the womb and as an infant:
115
Freedman LS, Samuels S, Fish I, Schwartz SA, Lange B, Katz M,
Morgano L. Sparing of the brain in neonatal undernutrition:
amino acid transport and incorporation into brain and muscle.
Science 1980 Feb 22;207(4433):902-4

The brain gets what it wants, and when it doesn’t, other tissues
are not allowed to develop properly such as the muscle tissue.
This also stresses the body probably priming your neural
circuitry for a less stress-robust personality (leading to
overproduction of cortisol which is a hard environment to build
muscle in and also decreases anabolic hormones). For some
reason, this body type leads to tall and long bone structures that
stretch the muscle, decreasing the amount of tension you can
place on the muscle. There is also a decrease in fast-twitch
muscle fiber, which leads to the soft look many skinny-fat types
have.
Skinny fat types are not just a problem for Asians; I have seen
them from all cultures. I suspect they have very high amounts
of visceral adipose tissue.

In the study above about China, you can find a picture

comparing the body fat between a normal weighted Caucasian
man and a typical skinny-fat south Asian. The Caucasian man
has 10% body fat, and the skinny-fat Asian has 20% (but by all
means the Asian looks much thinner than the Caucasian).
The moral of the story is that even though you are thin you are
not safe. Your best bet would be to get the blood tests (in
Chapter 8) and determine your health.

116
Appendix IV: Riskier
Supplements
Some other supplements that I personally take that I think are
worthwhile are:
Lithium
Phytate (IP6)
Beta-alanine
Taurine
Acetyl-L-Carnitine and Alpha Lipoic Acid

Lithium [1.25mg/day]
This mineral is not on the Institute of Medicines official list of
essential vitamins and minerals but there is convincing evidence
that humans do require it and consumed it in times past:

Schrauzer GN. Lithium: occurrence, dietary intakes, nutritional

essentiality. J Am Coll Nutr. 2002 Feb;21(1):14-21

We most likely got the lithium from our drinking water:

Ohgami H, Terao T, Shiotsuki I, Ishii N, Iwata N. Lithium levels

in drinking water and risk of suicide. Br J Psychiatry. 2009
May;194(5):464-5; discussion 446.

What the study shows is that populations with more lithium in

the drinking water are happier and at less of a risk of suicide.
Most people know of lithium as an anti-depressent, but those are
pharmacologically high dosages greater than 120mg per dose. It
seems our unofficial RDA for lithium is probably around
1mg/day.

117
Lithium is interesting because of the neuroprotective properties
is can confer at higher dosages but there is speculation that this
also occurs at lower dosages:

Chuang DM. Neuroprotective and neurotrophic actions of the

mood stabilizer lithium: can it be used to treat
neurodegenerative diseases? Crit Rev Neurobiol. 2004;16(1-
2):83-90.

I take 1.25mg per day because the pills usually come in

5mg dosages.

Phytate (IP6) [2g/day]

In Chapter 2, phytate was labeled as an antinutrient. IP6 binds to
covalent ions rendering them inabsorbable thus wasting them. If
you eat over the RDA some phytate in your grains and bran
should not be a problem, but for me I would rather not dump my
minerals in the toilet. Phytate does have numerous benefits and
the research has been going on for years and years.

Kumara V, Sinhab AK, Makkara HP, Beckera K. Dietary roles of

phytate and phytase in human nutrition: A review. Food
Chemistry Volume 120, Issue 4, 15 June 2010, Pages 945-959

It is very effective in preventing colon cancer (at least in rats, but

it probably transfers to humans in this case), modulates the
immune system and has an anti-inflammatory effect. I break it
down in my legumes and grains but I also choose to supplement
with it as a pill. If you do choose to supplement it, consume it
away from food, two hours after a meal or two hours before.

Besides the anti-cancer effect, the prevention of calcification of

tissues (which Vitamin K2 also prevents) as well as the decrease in
iron content in men can be a benefit in the long-term.

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Beta-alanine [2g/day]
This altered amino acid is a precursor to the dipeptide carnosine.
Carnosine prevents cell damage and aging, it also prevents
glycation end-products:

Alhamdani MS, Al-Azzawie HF, Abbas FK. Decreased formation

of advanced glycation end-products in peritoneal fluid by
carnosine and related peptides. Perit Dial Int. 2007 Jan-
Feb;27(1):86-9

While you can buy carnosine in a supplement, I prefer to

utilize beta-alanine because 1) it is cheaper and 2) the human
data showing tissue elevation of carnosine is very extensive.

Vegetarians lack beta-alanine.

Taurine [250mg/day]
The reason for supplementing with taurine is a paleolithic one.
Taurine is found in high concentrations from seafood and organ
meats. Cooking also destroys about half of it from the meat we
commonly consume today. While some mammals produce taurine
by themselves, other mammals such as cats and humans rely on
dietary ingestion. Taurine is involved in many activities:
preventing atherosclerosis, modulating intracellular calcium,
osmoregulation, preventing glycation, and possibly even
preventing the transfer of diabetes from the mother to the fetus:

Bouckenooghe T, Remacle C, Reusens B. Is

taurine a functional nutrient? Curr Opin Clin
Nutr Metab Care. 2006 Nov;9(6):728-33

Vegetarians lack taurine.

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Acetyl-L-Carnitine (250mg) and Alpha Lipoic
Acid (150mg)
These two are in my opinion the riskiest of them all. The data on
the long-term safety of these supplements are lacking but the
benefits sure seem impressive.

L-Carnitine is something we consume in our diet from meat. It

is involved in transporting long chain fatty acids from the
outside of the mitochondria to the inside of the mitochondria
where it gets burned. Therefore there is speculation that ALCAR
deficiency may cause insulin resistance because the fat trapped
in the muscle has nowhere to go. Acetyl-L-Carnitine is just L-
carnitine with an acetyl group attached, making it more
absorbable and also helping it reach the brain better. The data in
rats regarding mitochondrial regeneration is very impressive:

Aliev G, Liu J, Shenk JC, Fischbach K, Pacheco GJ, Chen SG,

Obrenovich ME, Ward WF, Richardson AG, Smith MA, Gasimov
E, Perry G, Ames BN. Neuronal mitochondrial amelioration by
feeding acetyl-L-carnitine and lipoic acid to aged rats. J Cell
Mol Med. 2009 Feb;13(2):320-33.

The data regarding ALCAR in humans also shows its safety. Most
studies are done in humans regarding Alzheimer’s disease and
weight loss. While the positive effects seem very weak, I use it as a
preventative measure to keep my mitochondria healthy.

Most studies use alpha lipoic acid and acetyl-l-carnitine together

because they are synergistic (carnitine also seems to increase free
radical production while alpha lipoic acid soaks them up,
however, the studies used very high dosages of l-carnitine, much
higher than what we consume). My main reason for
supplementing lipoic acid is for the post-prandial effects as it
definitely seems to help with glycative products in type II
diabetics:

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 Mittermayer F, Pleiner J, Francesconi M, Wolzt M. Treatment
with alpha-lipoic acid reduces asymmetric dimethylarginine in
patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus. Transl Res. 2010
Jan;155(1):6-9.

There are two forms of Alpha Lipoic Acid you can purchase:
racemic (normal) or the stabilized R form. We are interested
in the R form because the racemic (normal) form contains the
S-form, which is not found in nature.

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Appendix V:
Bodyweight Exercises
An important part of various exercises is to utilize the full-range
of motions. Sure, cutting the distance you have to move by a
couple inches makes it easier, but it would be better to activate as
many muscles as possible. Let’s take the pushup for example:
As you move
down your hips
should not sag
downwards.
Keep them up
by pushing the
glutes up. The
chest should
touch the floor
then when you
go up and reach
the very top,
and make sure
to activate the
various muscles
around your
shoulders and ribs, and also try to extend up as far as possible.
Most people just wait until their elbows lock and then head back
down, what we want to do is reach the top and try and reach
more. Hopefully you can feel the difference.

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Appendix VI: Soft Tissue
Therapy and Stretching
Beyond your muscles and bones there is connective tissue,
ligaments, tendons, etc. sitting in between everything else. These
can be injured just like your muscles can. I don’t know if hunter-
gatherer/traditional populations required soft tissue therapy and
stretching, but they didn’t sit in front of a computer in a chair,
using keyboards and mice, and playing console games with
controllers by contorting their body in weird positions then
keeping it there for hours on end.

Over the years of playing video games, sitting in front of the

computer and playing sports I have developed pains in
various part of my body. This usually goes away when I
exercise but would later come back with a vengeance. It
wasn’t anything excruciating, it was just very annoying. Soon
I discovered soft tissue therapy and it has been a godsend:

Muscles: Testing and Function, with Posture and Pain

by Florence Peterson Kendall (Editor),
Elizabeth Kendall McCreary (Author),
Patricia Geise Provance (Author), Mary
McIntyre Rodgers (Author), William
Anthony Romani (Author)

The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook: Your Self-

Treatment Guide for Pain Relief, Second Edition
Clair Davies (Author),
Amber Davies (Author),

Anatomy Trains: Myofascial Meridians for Manual and

Movement Therapists
Thomas W. Myers LMT NCTMB ARP Certified
Rolfer (Author)

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These three books are great in terms of helping you understand
where the pain comes from and also helping you solve it.

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