(ARCHIVER NOTE: some images/hyperlinked texts from the original are omitted)
Part 1
On Diet (Part 1) Feasting and Fasting
Paul Skallas Feb 22
It’s difficult writing a piece about diet because diet isn’t really about the food. It’s about a lot of other things. The contemporary discourse on eating right and dieting doesn’t really address these concerns.
Most of the time eating isn’t even about eating.
It’s about:
Finding novelty
Getting volatility out of your day with it
Alleviating stress
Alleviating boredom
Alleviating loneliness
Mimetic desire
Being part of a group or cause
To relax
To take a photo to put it on Instagram
Etc
We will go over some of these reasons for eating in future issues.
Deep Roots of Diet
It’s no surprise people get emotionally involved when it comes to what it means to “eat healthy”. Conversations turns heated. Much more than in other domains. People get mad at each other over diet but not over fitness
Diet: There’s one way, you’re wrong, I’m right. You’ll die a painful death and I’ll live for many years after you happily
Working out: You got your thing, I got my thing. It’s all good. Let’s just enjoy moving around
Why? I don’t know. There is something deeply human about food, diet and its connection with culture. You see people in every nation boast about the superiority of their cuisine. One of the staples of life for a very long time is eating together. Going to restaurants. Having dinner. So it is no surprise that cuisine has historically mapped to culture. Nations get conquered by invaders and while languages and religions change the cuisine does not. Cuisine is a robust indicator that passes through the filter of time.
There are the cultural demarcations: Olive oil (Med) vs butter (N Eur) vs ghee (India) vs rice (Middle East)
Kosher and Semitic Diet Restrictions
Much of Semitic dietary laws kept people from socializing outside their group. If we can’t eat together then we can’t intermingle, marry, or merge with our neighbors. It’s a mechanism for keeping separation in an environment where you are a minority or where there are other minority groups around you. Was this the intention of Kosher? Is there a health basis? Well, the evidence is not really clear that Kosher is worse or better than the diet of other Mediterranean diet cultures around them at the time. It did, however, produce the effect of maintaining a distinct Jewish identity (and genetics) that exists up to this present day, even when in foreign lands.
Interestingly, the opposite happened with Christianity. The aim was for universalism. So one of the earliest edicts is to remove the dietary laws. Dietary laws separate Jew from Gentile. Pericles ‘Perry’ Abbasi @ElectionLegal @PaulSkallas Christianity would not have become the world’s largest religion if not for the Apostle Paul’s being able to remove Jewish dietary restrictions
Islam came a long a little later. It adopted the Jewish Kosher laws but it added another restriction: It “discouraged” alcohol as a fence. Alcohol was allowed both in Christianity and in Judaism, and groups of paganism linked to Bacchic ( Iobacchi) & Dionysian societies prevalent in Asia Minor/Levant (Temple of Bacchus in Baalbek) at the time.
Veganism and Keto/Carnivore
This phenomenon is not only found in ancient religions, you see it today. Take for example the contemporary diets of Veganism and keto/carnivore. They are not just guidelines on what food to eat, but entire cultures, social groups and identities.
Veganism for example with its liberal/left wing slant, it’s emphasis on yoga, bicycle riding, animal rights, long distance running and urbanist living.
The Carnivore/keto people tend to be more right wing, into lifting and have no qualms with animal rights.
There is also more skepticism of governmental authority on the keto/carnivore side. They will share with you their disdain for sugar and carbs and the food pyramid made by the US government. It was interesting seeing how so many of the carnivore/keto people went hard-core COVID truther last year. It’s no surprise that Bitcoin has also clustered with this diet.
Bitcoin’s great threat is government trying to eradicate it because it sees it as a threat to its sovereign right to issue tender.
Again, the food is almost incidental to the culture and identity that forms around it. Both carnivore/keto and veganism purport to be healthy for you and each show you a range of studies trying to demonstrate that. What we eat and who we associate with how we eat is an extremely deep part of the human experience.
Fasting
When we look at most ancient religions we tend to see one commonality. Fasting. Refraining from food for a certain part of time. If something is in almost every religion, it probably is a signal. Before the modern era, food availability was unpredictable and highly irregular. Frought, war, insect infestations and disease all played a part in restricting food, sometimes to the point of starvation. So did the seasons: during the summer and fall, fruits and vegetables were plentiful but during the winter and spring, they were scarce. Periods without food could could last weeks.
There’s a reason that one of the 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse is famine.
As human societies developed agriculture, these periods of famines were gradually reduces and eliminated. However, ancient civilizations, recognized something deeply, intrinsically beneficial to periodic fasting. As periods of involuntary starvation faded, ancient cultures replaced them with periods of voluntary fasting. These were often called times of “cleansing,” “detoxification,” or “purification.”
Religions do a lot of things, and one of them is be a vehicle for activities that help humans survive. LindyMan @PaulSkallas when it comes to things like diet, architecture and health…
tradition is smarter than you….
Humans started becoming more than just another species of monkey when we started transmitting culture with high fidelity. Humans evolved big brains in order to be able to maintain cultural-adapted practices (like making a fire). Everything that separates us from the apes is part of an evolutionary package designed to help us maintain this kind of culture, exploit this kind of culture, or adjust to the new abilities that this kind of culture gave us.
Fire is an especially important food processing innovation, and it is entirely culturally transmitted.
Go outside and try to start a fire. Can you do it? Flint is involved, rubbing two sticks together works, sometimes.
I predict that you will not be able to do this, despite you having an IQ far beyond that of most of our hominid ancestors. In fact, some groups (most notably the aboriginal Tasmanians) seem to have lost the ability to make fire, and never rediscovered it. Fire-making was discovered a small number of times, maybe once, and has been culturally transmitted since then.
But it’s not just about chopping things up or roasting them. Traditional food processing techniques can get arbitrarily complicated. Nixtamalization of corn, necessary to prevent vitamin deficiencies, involves soaking the corn in a solution containing ground-up burnt seashells. The ancient Mexicans discovered this and lived off corn just fine for millennia. When the conquistadors took over, they ignored it and ate corn straight.
For four hundred years, Europeans and Americans ate unnixtamalized corn. By official statistics, three million Americans came down with corn-related vitamin deficiencies during this time, and up to a hundred thousand died. It wasn’t until 1937 that Western scientists discovered which vitamins were involved and developed an industrial version of nixtamalization that made corn safe. Early 1900s Americans were very smart and had lots of advantages over ancient Mexicans. But the ancient Mexicans’ culture got this one right in a way it took Westerners centuries to match.
There’s manioc. This is a tuber native to the Americas. It contains cyanide, and if you eat too much of it, you get cyanide poisoning. From Henrich:
Rationalists always wonder: how come people aren’t more rational? How come you can prove a thousand times, using Facts and Logic, that something is stupid, and yet people will still keep doing it? For basically all of history, using reason would get you killed.
A reasonable person would have asked why everyone was wasting so much time preparing manioc. When told “Because that’s how we’ve always done it”, they would have been unsatisfied with that answer. They would have done some experiments, and found that a simpler process of boiling it worked just as well. They would have saved lots of time, maybe converted all their friends to the new and easier method. Twenty years later, they would have gotten sick and died, in a way so causally distant from their decision to change manioc processing methods that nobody would ever have been able to link the two together.
What Fasting Does
Fasting—allowing our bodies to exist in a state of want us unquestionably good for our health and longevity. We stress the body. And it adapts and get stronger. There are processes like autophagy that happen as well.
What happens when we fast?
Insulin Goes Down: Regularly lowering insulin leads to improved insulin sensitivity, the opposite of insulin sensitivity, high insulin resistence, is the root problem in type 2 diabetes and has been linked to heart disease, stroke, obesity, cancer, gout and sleep apnea.
Adrenaline Increases and Metabolism Speeds Up: Rather than slowing the metabolism, fasting revs it up.
Growth Hormone Goes Up: Excessively low HGH levels in adults leads to more body fast, less muscle mass and decreased bone density.
Fasting Leads to Longevity
A Cornell University professor named Clive McCay demonstrated that rats fed a diet containing 20 percent indigestible cellulose (cardboard) lived significantly longer lives than those that were fed a typical lab diet. Studies demonstrated again and again that fasting and calorie restriction (without malnutrition) leads to longevity in all sorts of life-forms.
In 1978 on the island of Okinawa, a researcher learned that the total number of calories consumed by schoolchildren was less than two thirds of what children were getting in mainland Japan. Adult Okinawans were taking in about 20 percent fewer calories than their mainland counterparts. Okinawans had a longer lifespan than Japanese mainlanders, but so was their health span. They had significantly less cerebral vascular disease, malignancy and heart disease.
The Mediterranean Diet is a Lie
The important thing is not just what we eat but the way we eat. As it turns out, there is a strong correlations between fasting behavior and longevity in Blue Zones such as Ikaria, Greece, “the island where people forget to die,” where one-third of the population lives past the age of 0- and almost every older resident is a staunch disciple of the Greek Orthodox church and adheres to a religious calendar that calls for some manner of fasting for more than half the year. On many days, that means no meat, dairy products, or eggs. Additionally, many Greeks observe perods of total fasting before Christmas or Easter or Holy Communion. Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb The Cretan diet is fiction. @GuruAnaerobic @drjasonfung
Other longevity hotspots, such as Bama County in southern China, are places where people have access to good, healthy good but choose to forgo it for long periods of each day. Many of the centenarians in this region have spent their lives eschewing a morning meal. They generally eat their first small meal of the day around noon, then share a larger meal with their families at twilight. In this way, they typically spend sixteen hours of more of each day without eating.
Breakfast
We see over and over in Ancient literature a disregard for breakfast. Here Plutarch shows us there is a long history of frowning upon people who ate breakfast:
Thomas Aquinas, in his Summa Theologica, lists praepropere—eating too soon—as one of the ways to commit the deadly sin of gluttony; the eating of a morning meal, following that logic, was generally considered to be an affront against God and the self. Fasting was seen as evidence of one’s ability to negate the desires of the flesh; the ideal eating schedule, from that perspective, was a light dinner (then consumed at midday) followed by heartier supper in the evening
If you skip breakfast you get an extra 6-8 hours of fasting. Which leads to enormous health benefits. This was all known.
What happened?
The Industrial Revolution of the 19th century—and the rise of factory work and office jobs that accompanied it—normalized breakfast, transforming it to an expectation. The later years of the 1800s, in particular, saw an expansion of the morning meal into a full-fledged social event. Wealthy Victorians in the U.S. and in England dedicated rooms in their homes to breakfasting, the BBC notes, considering the meal a time for the family to gather before they scattered for the day. Newspapers targeted themselves for at-the-table consumption by the men of the families. Morning meals of the wealthy often involved enormous, elaborate spreads: meats, stews, sweets.
Breakfast became a feast in its own right. And that soon led to another feature of industrialization, health problems, indigestion chief among them, that people of the 19th century and the early 20th came to know as “dyspepsia.”
Cereals invented by Graham and Kellogg and C.W. Post became popular in part because they could simply be poured into bowls, with no cooking required; soon, technological developments were doing their own part to turn the laborious breakfasts of the 19th century into briefer, simpler affairs. The advent of toasters meant that stale bread could be quickly converted, with the help of a little butter and maybe some jam, into satisfying meals. Waffle irons and electric griddles and the invention in Bisquik, in 1930, did the same. Those appliances and other cooking aids made breakfast more convenient to produce during a time that found more and more women leaving the home for the workplace—first in response to the labor shortages brought about by the World Wars, and then on their own accord.
Part 2
Seasons and the Cycles
I am currently writing this newsletter in the middle of March 2021. We just endured a brutal winter, that was made worse by a virus with the subsequent lockdown and curfew. The temperature has slowly warmed and daylight has extended into the afternoon.
I went for a Lindy walk earlier this afternoon, in the golden hour - and I could feel that winter was receding deep in my bones. The seasons have a strong overall effect on my spirit, mood and body.
This is no surprise. The seasons are important. Periodic seasonal changes have influenced all life forms, as exemplified by seasonal physiology and behaviors across plant and animal species.
How much we are influenced by seasons? That’s been obscured because we sort of live “outside of nature” these days, while maintaining a consistent lifestyle no matter the season outside. But that’s not how we work. Our genes literally change depending on the season.
Certain genes are expressed depending on if it’s summer or winter.
A recent study found one-fifth of all genes in blood cells undergo seasonal changes in expression depending on the season. In the winter your blood contains a denser blend of immune responders, while summer veins swim with fat-burning, body-building, water-retaining hormones.
Your immune system ramps up in the winter, inflammation is the body’s response to harm, and in the winter we are more susceptible to harm. But in the summer–an aggressive inflammatory system can be a liability, as it puts you more at risk for cardiovascular and autoimmune disorders.
If you dig deeper into the research you even begin seeing other seasonable changes, such as Heart Rate Variability and Mood.
The Seasons change and so do I.
Cold Weather
The seasons cycle cold weather and warm weather. Exposure to these temperature changes is beneficial. Up to a point.
It does us little good to spend our entire lives in a thermoneutral zone. Our genes didn’t evolve for a life of pampered comfort. A little stress to induce hormesis once in a while goes a lone way. Stress comes from cycling.
The baths, an ancient Roman tradition, essentially was about cycling your body in heat and cold.
These baths weren’t just tubs, as we might think about them today, but instead consisted of a complex progression of open-air swimming pools, and rooms of varying temperature, progressing from cold to super-heated, for steaming and sweating. The Frigidarium for cold and the Caldarium for a hot plunge.
One of the successors to the Roman baths is the modern Sauna. Temporary heat exposure. There was a study that followed a large group of Finns for 20 years who went to regular sauna for 20 years. The people who went to sauna up to 7 times a week had an up to two fold drop in heart disease, fatal heart attacks and all cause mortality events over those who only heat bathed once per week.
The benefits of episodic cold exposure are mainstream now. With cold showers and cryotherapy chambers everywhere. Personally, I find it difficult to do cold showers. I work a job for a living and the warm shower is an extremely enjoyable part of my day. I do not want to give that up. When you work for a living you are constantly pushing yourself to perform, long time readers who have read my work know about the consistency space.
However, I know there are benefits to cold exposure. The best way to activate mitochondria in your brown fat is by being a bit cold. Sometimes I do a brisk walk outside wearing shirt on a winter day. This is enough to turbocharge the creation of brown adipose tissue.
Exposure to cold activates longevity genes. Sirtuins are switched on by cold, which in turn activates protective brown fat in our back and shoulders. Animals with abundant brown fat have much more of the mitochondrial, UCP-boosting sirtuin and experience significantly reduced rates of diabetes, obesity and Alzheimers.
If you choose to expose yourself to the cold, moderation will be key. The greatest benefits come for those who get close to, but not beyond the edge. Hypothermia is not good for our health. Neither is exercise in cold weather below -15F.
It turns out exercising vigorously in the cold messes up with your lungs. You can give yourself asthma.
A study on cold-weather exercise looked at the effects of running a five-kilometre race outdoors in cold weather. All the participants exercised regularly in the cold, whether it was running outside, cross-country skiing or ski mountaineering. Participants reported symptoms of bronchoconstriction, or narrowing of the airways, consistent with levels that would be considered exercise-induced asthma.
If you fight the seasons too much, you’re going to hurt yourself. You’re fighting the cycle. It’s too cold to be doing a marathon. You do it anyway because of some crazy athletic brainwashing regime you live under. Propaganda from Nike or Adidas has infected your head. You’re a confused beast.
Historical Dietary Habits
We’ve already established that cycling temperature is good for us. Let’s move on to diet. Let’s do a quick history lesson on how we ate.
For most of our history we were hunter-gathers, or rather hunter-foragers. Close observers of hunter-gatherers have been struck by how their life was punctuated by bursts of intense activity over short periods of time. The activity is enormously varied, hunting and collecting, fishing, picking, making traps - and designed in one way or another to take best advantage of the natural tempo of food availability. Tempo is the key word here. The lives of hunter-gatherers are orchestrated by natural rhythms of which they must be keen observers: the movements of herds of game (deer, gazelle, antelope, pigs); the seasonal migrations of birds; the runs of desirable fish upstream or downstream; the cycles of ripening of fruits and nuts, which must be collected before other competitors arrive or before they spoil; and appearances of game, fish, turtles and mushrooms, which must be exploited quickly.
The activities of the earliest village in the Mesopotamian alluvium, span several food webs - wetlands, forest, savanna, and arid - each which its own distinct seasonality. We came from an environment where we must take advantage of the scattered and episodic bounty nature may bring our way.
Hunter gatherers were aware to the distinct metronome of a great diversity of natural rhythms.
However, after we shifted to agriculture this diversity narrowed. Farmers, especially fixed-field, cereal-grain farmers, are largely confirmed to a single food web, and their routines are geared to its particular tempo. When we transitioned to agriculture, Homo sapiens entered an austere monastery whose taskmaster consists mostly of the demanding genetic clockwork of a few plants. Mostly wheat and barley.
Seasonality and cycling are key themes of ancestral dietary patterns. The turn to agriculture narrowed the scope of our diversity and seasonal patterns.
On Meat
Is meat bad for you? Well, we’ve been eating it for a million years, so I doubt it. However, there may be a connection with consistent meat eating and chronic kidney disease and Cancer.
What do we know about meat? Well, meat doesn’t conserve. It spoils quickly. We also know there were days when there was no meat. Hunter gatherers didn’t eat meat everyday. Hunting is a tough business. But when they did eat it they ate a lot of it.
Religious festivals tended to have meat. When you see something in many religions, that’s a signal. Christian easter has lamb. The end of Ramadan has meat. Carnival has meat. And not only a little bit, but a lot. There is excessive indulgence in meat during those days. Thereby mimicking the end of a successful hunt.
We humans are omnivorous, compared to more specialized animals such as elephants (who eat salads) and lions (who eat prey). The ability to be omnivorous had to come in response to more variegated environments with unplanned, haphazard, and serial cycling availability of sources.
We are generalists. Not specialists. Specialization is the response to a stable habitat free of abrupt changes. Our excess of pathways is a response to a more diverse habitat. The human diversification of function had to be in response to variety.
A variety of a certain structure.
The cow and other herbivores are subjected to much less randomness than the lion in their food intake; they eat steadily but need to work extremely hard in order to metabolize all these nutrients, spending several hours a day just eating. The lion succeeds in a small percentage of kills, but when it eats, its get all these nutrients.
So take the following principles derived from the random structure of the environment: when we are herbivores, we eat steadily; but when we are predators we eat more randomly. Hence, our proteins need to be consumed randomly.
There is a big difference between getting our nutrition together at every meal, with steak, salad, followed by fresh fruits, or eating them cyclically.
Why?
Deprivation is a stressor. Reactions to stressors are important throughout nature Twitter avatar for @PaulSkallasLindyMan @PaulSkallas Valuable things come from stress. This applies to exercise, fasting and other antifragility mechanisms Image
and we know what stressors do when allowed adequate recovery. They make us healthier, stronger and heal our issues.
Convexity effects at work here again: getting three times the daily dose of protein in one day and nothing the next two is not biologically equivalent to “steady” moderate consumption if our metabolic reactions are nonlinear. All at once and then the stressor cycling will have benefits the “steady” does not.
We are antifragile to randomness in food delivery and composition, at least over a certain range, or number of days.
IF you eat meat, you need to eat it INFREQUENTLY. Even within the day Romans ate one meal. You can starve between meals (lions) or eat salads (humans are omnivore for a reason).
Eating the same thing every day is an insult to the variation of nature. An insult to the universal law of Seasons and Cycling. And you will pay the price for going against nature.
Cycling food groups maybe benefit from hormesis by eating a portfolio of a small amount each of a wide variety of plants. To take another example, maybe not eating enough meat informs cells to perform autophagy.
It doesn’t matter if we don’t yet know what the precise mechanisms are: the point is that variety may have hidden benefits
Diets, no matter what may have hidden downsides due to the steadiness. We may not know what though. Until it’s too late.
Long-term High Fat Ketogenic Diet Promotes Renal Tumor Growth in a Rat Model of Tuberous Sclerosis
Our bodies respond to changes in input, or information from the outside. Our ancestors went through variation in what they ate, and how they moved.
We may thrive slightly more eating meat only as carnivores instead of cycling omnivores, but the hidden downside could be catastrophic. You’re risking ruin to the system.
Picking up pennies in front of the steamroller.
Standard American Diet
We saw what happened in the 20th century with the Standard American Diet.
3 (or more) meals a day, snacking, and no cycling.
Obesity, cancer, heart disease and crying.
People take pharmaceuticals to stop the terrible from happening. It was a science experiment and it ended terribly. So now we’re back to square one with new diets.
Hidden Downsides and Second Order Effects
It’s difficult to see what the hidden downside of certain things are. It’s even tougher to see the second order effects. With keto or meat only diet it may be kidney problems or cancer.
What about plant based diets?
Maybe it’s weakening of Bones.
Bones are important.
We’re beginning to see they are much more than a structure. They are alive. and linked to memory, fertility, and many other areas. Twitter avatar for @PaulSkallasLindyMan @PaulSkallas excited to announce that a senior researcher from the Karsenty Lab is coming on to the Lindy Podcast to discuss Bone health, Osteocalcin and the skeleton. We used to think the skeleton was just scaffolding. Turns out, it’s alive and is important
Bone Hormone Improves Memory in Old MiceAge-related memory loss may be reversed by boosting blood levels of osteocalcin, a hormone produced by bone cells, according to mouse studies led by Gerard K…youtube.com
There’s even studies linking low sperm count in Vegeterians and vegans.
Maybe it’s the second order effects. Many Vegans supplement with vitamin b12. However, We know high b12 circulation through supplementation increases lung cancer risk.
I guess we’ll find out soon.
Cycling Food Groups
Do we have any studies on diets that cycle food groups? Some, yes. Remember the Mediterranean diet fad that became popular? People looked at longevity of Cretans, catalogued what they ate and inferred they lived longer because of feta cheese or fish.
But wasn’t looked at was the variations in intake. The Greek Orthodox church has almost 200 hundred days of fasting per year. In fact, I am in the middle of eating vegan for 40 days. During the Christian season I was a pescatarian for 40 days.
Essentially, I am going through protein deprivation. The compensation for the absence of some nutrients from my daily diet will take place in lumps. I will make up my deprivation of protein with fish on days when it is allowed, and then at Easter I will eat a lot of Lamb. And then I will eat fatty red meat for a long while thereafter.
During this time of cycling my body will respond to deprivation and stressors. Essentially healing itself and getting stronger.
When the holiday arrives (the hunt) the meat will taste amazing, because there is this antifragility to the stressor of the fast. The deprivation and then the subsequent feasting produces euphoria in one’s system.
Luckily, we have a control group: The Monks in the Monastery.
These monks adhere to a cycling diet of vegan/fasting/meat eating throughout the year.
The studies done on them have been positive:
Calcium, nutrient and food intake of Greek Orthodox Christian monks during a fasting and non-fasting week
Health benefits and consequences of the Eastern Orthodox fasting in monks of Mount Athos: A cross-sectional study
How do Mount Athos Monks stay so healthy?
The Modern Environment
I think people underestimate how strange the modern environment is. We take it for granted a little bit that we live 12 months out of the year in a climate controlled indoor environment. We take ourselves out of the natural cycles of the season. People complain about Seasonal Affective Disorder. Yeah it isn’t fun to get a little blue in the winter. But that’s probably normal. There’s a deprivation and stressor there. Sure, if you’re going to jump off the roof of the building, you should get help. But if you’re just feeling regular sadness, that is something that comes with the cycling of the seasons.
Christmas lights look so beautiful in the winter.
Maybe we should be cycling more than just our diets. Maybe we should be doing different sports depending on the season. Maybe we should have different habits during the seasons. This is a topic that maybe I will explore in a different newsletter.
Abundance and Seed Oils
I don’t think we are really equipped to handle living in this world of abundance. The options are limitless. The food everywhere is delicious. You have to really try hard to diet. That’s one issue. And I think the modern diets get around this by creating a culture around it or by creating extended ethical issues. You’re making the world a better place by eating like x. The other side of this argument is optimization of the individual. If you eat like x you are optimized for perfection.
The second issue is the hidden harms of modernity. Seed oils are found everywhere. And the increase in consumption of them in the 20th century has lead to a big increase in heart disease.
Thirdly, the complete breakdown of authority of nutrition. In the 20th century the government sponsored a food pyramid and other dietary education studies. It was a disaster. Most people feel like they are on their own when it comes to dietary advice.
Finally, big Pharma is working on releasing miracle wonder drugs to deal with the problems of obesity. We are admitting that the human is so separated from his environment that he now has to engage with pharma to fix the issues.