Thanks Mr Cannibal

I remember reading a news report some time ago about how worried people in Germany were about Creutzfeld Jacob disease. It was actually making a lot people sick with worry yet at the time statistics showed that not even one person had come down with the disease inside Germany. Creutzfeld Jacob disease was going to become the new AIDS - which by the way didn’t turn out to be as bad as was predicted but that’s another story. Scientists certainly made the disease look like it had the potential to become a major problem with its long incubation and widespread entry into the human food chain from dodgy animal feeding practises.

Now below I mention that our pre-historic ancestors probably indulged in a lot of cannibalism. This is a direct result of our intelligence strangely enough as intelligence can easily over-ride innate instincts that largely prevent such repugnant behaviour from occurring. From a pre-historic person’s point of view it makes a lot of sense to eat the flesh of humans rather than just let it go to waste. It tastes a bit like pork apparently which is a favourite of all primitive people. Also it is likely that humans didn’t even consider humans from other tribes to be of the same species. Even in recent times it has been common for human races to consider other races to be somehow sub-human and closer to animals than themselves. There have been reports from the Congo of rebels hunting and eating pygmies as if they are food animals for example. The widespread occurrence of cannibalism amongst primitive peoples across the planet implies that it has been very common throughout human history. Evidence gathered from bio-chemical analysis of fossilized human faeces and the cuts and scrapes found on human bones all suggest widespread cannibalism.

Well it turns out those Germans didn't need to worry because cannibalism might have saved us from an epidemic of Creutzfeld Jacob disease or other prion diseases. It appears that most humans are protected from prion disease and the only explanation is that we have been selected to survive such diseases. Our ancestors indulged in so much cannibalism that we all now possess genes that protect us from the unhealthy effects of cannibalism.


Widespread cannibalism may have caused prehistoric prion disease epidemics, Science study suggests:

Human flesh may have been a fairly regular menu item for our prehistoric ancestors, according to researchers. They say it's the most likely explanation for their discovery that genes protecting against prion diseases -- which can be spread by eating contaminated flesh -- have long been widespread throughout the world.

The genes, which are mutant versions of the prion protein gene, show key signs of having spread through populations as the result of natural selection, the researchers report in the journal Science, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Such mutations, or "polymorphisms," could have provided prehistoric humans a better chance of surviving epidemics of prion diseases, similar to modern day diseases such as Creutzfeld Jacob disease, or kuru.

Stomachs and Evolution

The closest relatives of humans are the chimpanzees and bonobos. Bonobos are almost identical to chimps yet have a very different social structure, temperament and diet. It almost looks like humans are a mix of chimp and bonobo with added intelligence thrown in. Chimps eat mostly fruit augmented with protein and fat from insects and any smaller animals they can lay their hands on. Bonobos eat a lot of vegetable matter much like gorillas do. This is because they live south of the Niger River where there are no gorillas. Not having to compete with gorillas has resulted in them developing quite differently to chimpanzees. A diet consisting mostly of vegetables with fruit has resulted in a society where the leaders are females and empathy and sexual orgies abound – one female bonobo was observed copulating fifty times in one day. Ok, I’m digressing now.

The digestive systems of primates vary quite markedly. Chimps, bonobos and gorillas have large colons whereas humans have smaller colons but more volume, proportionally, in the small intestine. The overall gut volume in humans, on average, is proportionally smaller than the other high primates. This implies that humans have adapted to eating higher caloric and easier digested foods. The digestive tracts of the other primates are adapted to eating more vegetable matter that requires a higher degree of processing. Humans have adapted to eating high quality food that is mostly absorbed by the small intestine. In the pre-agricultural era this food would have been meat and starchy roots augmented with nuts and fruits. Selective pressures resulted in an animal that had a smaller gut volume relative to body size. A smaller gut is probably advantageous when running down prey. Predators tend to have smaller abdomens than herbivores.

Today we have greatly increased the ‘quality’ of food. Fruits and vegetables bear little resemblance to their ancestral originals. Fruits and vegetables are packed with sugars that we also extract and refine to produce super foods. Unfortunately we still have a cave-man type of mindset that eats when food is available – especially high carbohydrate food that doesn’t elicit a full response when enough has been consumed. The reason for this is unclear however such foods are so unnatural that we probably haven’t had enough time to adapt to nourishing ourselves with them. The future may well see a human with very small intestinal volume that matches the quality of food taken. We are already starting to do this now with surgical intervention. Stomach reduction surgery is now a very common method of controlling obesity.

Perhaps we will need to consider reducing the gut volumes of new born humans in order to prepare them for an environment where food is available in lethal quantities. If we don’t evolutionary forces will do it for us anyway. Already the epidemic of diabetes and other diet related diseases are working on adapting the human body to the new diet regime by killing off and reducing the fertility of individuals who cannot control their eating impulses. Diabetes and obesity is inflicting individuals at ever younger ages these days and looks set to continue. The survivors will be those most able to optimally process the high caloric foods that abound today.

Mind Games

You’ve heard it said, maybe a million times, we are creatures of habit. The road to a healthier lifestyle is simply about breaking the bad habits and developing good habits. Once a habit has become established it becomes second-nature and no longer a struggle. A personal example is my habit of not eating breakfast and only eating a piece of fruit and something high protein like sardines for lunch. This has now become so ingrained that I never feel like changing the regime and if I do it is a bit of a struggle.

The problem today is that people have acquired a plethora of bad habits. They do things that are bad for their health without even thinking about it. What was once a rare treat is now part of the daily regime, which is a shame in that rare treats are now, well, rare in themselves. I remember when cashew nuts, fruit juice, restaurant meals and chocolate were great luxuries.

At the end of the day success depends on the outcome of the mind game. Unless you are very lucky a persistent and consistent approach to life is absolutely necessary to achieve your goals. The reason for this is because this is the only way to develop a habit. A habit is analogous to regularly putting money in the bank – a little by little great things can be achieved over time. It is essential, of course, to identify what are bad habits and what are good habits. The analogy of the bank can be applied to eating but in a bad way. People eat just a little too much each and everyday and before they know it (literally) they have a very impressive store of fat. This didn’t just happen over night. No, no, no this is the result of years of over eating every single day.

When I look at the general condition of people I see walking around the mall it strikes me that most people have become misshapen, many grotesquely so, as a direct result of poor eating habits. Other habits, too, have contributed to this freak show such as smoking, drinking and shunning exercise but far and away the single most contributing factor is a poor eating habit. Not a single day passes that I don’t spy a person walking by and think to myself, why, why, why have you done this to yourself? Isn’t your body the most precious thing you have?

Yet the solution is so simple - win the mind game by developing good habits.

More N.E.A.T Thoughts

I was a big advocate for intense exercise but now I’m not so sure. The problem with intense exercise that produces a body capable of great strength and endurance is that it needs to be maintained constantly. Any let up in the program and after about two weeks, or even less, the muscles start to revert to their previous state of feebleness. Also, the muscles are always feeling a little sore – you’re doing a lot of exercise yet when you walk up the stairs at work your legs ache leading one to wonder, what is the point? The goal should be to develop a feeling of supreme wellness whilst possessing functional strength and endurance. Intense exercise is probably more a young person’s game whose body has greater flexibility and bounce back, whose injuries heal quicker and are less likely to occur in the first place.

Most deliberate exercise is very unnatural and doesn’t result in particularly functional strength. You might lift weights regularly yet when it comes time to do some useful work like lifting ladders when painting the house you find that it still makes you sore. You may even be more susceptible to injury because you have strong muscles in the wrong places that put undue strain on weaker parts of the body.

So maybe the old folks were right when they advised that instead of exercising for its own sake you should do something that is actually useful – it’s less boring than it first appears. The trick, as I noted before, is to consciously think of useful work as exercise. Do work with the best form possible and do work constantly. Yard work should be seen as exercise and done with good spirit and swiftness just like you would when doing an exercise program.

There will be obvious advantageous spin offs with this strategy. Firstly you will get a lot of work done. Family relations will be great because you will be pulling more than your weight around the home and you’ll be doing it cheerfully – you’ll be a hero. Apparently husbands who do more housework get more sex which can be a great work out too (think of sex as exercise!). You will develop more skills around the home that should save you money. Walking somewhere, instead of taking the car, will also save money on gas. At work your enthusiastic energy and relentless devotion to working will pay great dividends and promotions and rewards will surely be forthcoming. You’ll be a great role model to your children. Others in the household will cease to look at you with the distain they once did when you gladly exercised yet were loathe to do any useful housework – the nagging should stop.

The strength you will be acquiring will be of the totally useful kind which is exactly the kind that is necessary for advancing into old age.

This is N.E.A.T.

You can divide human energy consumption up into three generally recognised categories. They are base metabolism, active exercise and non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT). You need about 80 calories an hour just to stay alive – this is what you burn while lying on the couch watching TV. When you put on your running shoes and sprint around the block that is active exercise. When you get up and go to the fridge to grab a beer you burn a little more and this activity is N.E.A.T.

So the energy consumption of a human body that is an idle state is relatively high at around 2000 calories a day more or less depending on the individual. When you actively exercise you can burn around 100 to 500 calories more. This figure is often greatly exaggerated and people sometimes include the base metabolism burn rate along with the extra amount consumed during active exercise when they are calculating how many calories they have expended.

It has been found that the area where people seem to vary the most with their energy consumption is in every day activities. The difference between some fat and thin people is not in the energy that they consume as food but the energy that they expend just moving around. There can be a huge difference with some people burning as much as 2000 calories more than others. These people must be on the go all the time, rarely sitting down to rest throughout the day. They probably never rest and pace backwards and forwards and generally fidget all day long. At the other end of the scale there are people who rarely move, work at a desk and as soon as they see a chair they sit in it. Young people in general fit into the naturally active category and it seems that as we age we get less and less active. If you observe children they are always on the go, even when they are talking to you they will often be rocking back and forth or spinning around. This would be rather strange and possibly downright scary in an adult which is a shame as this is the best sort of activity if you want to burn heaps of calories. In theory, if you kept up a childlike sort of energy expenditure you could get away without having to worry too much how much you ate.

One good thing about this sort of energy use is that it is generally non-damaging. Active exercise, where you are striving to burn calories or increase strength is fraught with danger, running can cause severe damage to knees and ankles while weights and other exercises can damage backs and arms, especially if done with poor form. Too much weight lifting and running can leave you virtually crippled if you are not very careful and you could end up being forced to be inactive and having to rely on strict diets to control your weight while being barely able to function a s a normal active human being. An older person is probably more prone to injury and slower recovery too. It's way better to be just functionaly fit rather than super fit if being super fit exposes you to structural damage.

The answer is to be aware of and actively embrace N.E.A.T. All activity should be seen as a form of exercise. This bit is important as it seems that if you think mowing the lawn or doing the vacuuming is an exercise that improves your body and burns calories then it is much more effective and enjoyable as well. At all times throughout the day you should be thinking about keeping your body moving. Never sit when you can stand, take the stairs, walk to your destination if it is feasible. Consciously hold your gut in and try to keep a good posture as this will improve your core and consumes energy. Stand on one leg or lift your self up on your toes. Never hesitate to bend down and pick things up. Always be on the look out for ways to burn energy and keep the body moving and flexible.

In short, make constant movement a habit of a lifetime. The goal will be to eventually achieve it without conscious effort and maintain a healthy, flexible body that is practically functional long into old age.

Update on the High Fat Diet

It has now been eight weeks since I started actively eating more animal fat. The extra fat has come in the form of mostly full cream. Unfortunately I haven't been as strict with my diet in other areas as I normally would and have been indulging in some high carb food in the form of chocolate with nuts, lots of cashew nuts and some ice-cream and occasional treats. Not huge amounts but probably more than I should have. Also due to injury and unusually wet weather I have not done a lot of aerobic exercise. The result now is that I am a little more than one kilo heavier. Now one kilo is not very much and you can easily be one kilo out on a day to day basis but the measurements are consistent enough to set off some warning bells. Weight = 71.5 kg - average over one week.

I get the feeling that fat has been deposited in the form of visceral fat as my belly seems larger as if fat has built up below the muscle layer. A fat belly is exactly the opposite of what I desire to achieve. My arms, legs and fingers all feel lean and sinewy with just bone, muscle, sinews and skin. Sometimes the wrists and fingers feel frighteningly thin as if there is no padding there whatsoever and I need gloves when doing weights. As men age even the thin ones can retain slim limbs and chest yet develop a pregnant look where visceral fat has built up in the abdomen. This is not a good look and is definitely not healthy.

Now this is in no way scientific as there are so many factors involved but I am going to stop drinking full cream and reducing the amount of cashews, nuts and cheese I eat. Chocolate is off the menu as well.

Time to get back on the wagon. It seems the greatest appetite suppressor is obsession. I can feeling it kicking in now - if leanness is more important than food then you will achieve good results.

Celebrity Demise Again

See the happy picture above? Who would guess that the two on the left are now dead and what a sorry tale it is indeed. I was drawn to this article entitled 'Stress' kills the mother of tragic TV star Mark Speight being attracted to tales of tragic deaths in my search for "life lessons", preferably other peoples ones in order to learn about pitfalls so that I can avoid them.

In short, but you can read the whole thing by clicking on the link above, Mark and Natasha spend an evening drinking, snorting cocaine and taking sleeping pills. She ends up taking a bath in extremely hot water burning sixty per cent of her body and dies then and there. He gets arrested and loses his job. A few days later he hangs himself with his shoe laces and then his mother suffers a stroke and keels over too.

So three people now dead who shouldn't be. What would an Active Survivalist do? Firstly you need to know your limits when it comes to drugs and alcohol. Preferably you should take no drugs and limit alcohol to a level that is beneficial to health. Kinda boring I know but imagine the living hell Mark went through after everything went pear shaped. Drugs put you in great danger of doing things that you wouldn't ordinarily do. Things that are set forever in time and space with no chance of ever changing, things that are sometimes too dreadful to bear. Why expose yourself to such a risk? It's not just yourself who is in mortal danger but those around you as well.

Always keep in mind that everything you do is set in the space time continuum for evermore. Don't end up being an example to others of what not to do for all time. If you can't live with the consequences don't do it - should be obvious really. Actively look ahead and avoid danger in all its forms and give yourself the best chance of survival. A drug taker is not an Active Survivalist.

Man of One Tree Hill

Within walking distance to where I live is a 300 acre park that surrounds and includes an extinct volcanic cone. It is probably one of the best parks in the southern hemisphere and a great place to go jogging and cycling. It is also a working farm with sheep and cattle and chickens wandering about. Once it was the site of a large Maori pa (fortified settlement) and all around there is evidence of their occupation in the form of food storage pits and earth redoubts.

Inside the main crater there are many scoria stones that tend to roll around on the surface. People use these to make their mark on sunny weekends, usually writing their names or leaving a message. I spotted the design above yesterday and had to take a photo for the archives. You can see from the first photo just how large this picture is. It's quite a feat to produce such a large picture with stones. I’m thinking of doing this regularly as there are many different variations of temporary messages created here and probably no one is recording it for history. Sometimes you will see a gem like a large penis. What sort of person would spend so much time and effort creating a stone drawing of a phallus one wonders? On one volcano someone created a huge phallic symbol using weed spray on the grass which was highly visible for weeks - wish I had taken a photo. Nevertheless, very Palaeolithic.

Falling off the Wagon

A lot of people have had a lot of success with losing weight and or increasing fitness levels. Almost as many people have let it all slip away and got back to where they started or ended up in even worse shape. When my weight first blew out and I actively worked on getting it back down again I found it to be much easier than I thought it was going to be. A few months later for some reason I lost my focus and the pounds just started piling back on again and I suspect that in the back of my mind I knew that at any time I could regain my focus and strip it all off again. Yet this proved not to be the case and summoning the willpower to do the hard slog again was much more difficult the second time around. Apparently this is quite common.

So what happens? Winter comes around and suddenly exercise is not such an attractive activity even though exercise is a poor weight control method it still seems an essential component of the healthy living ethos. You get a cold and generally feel miserable. Your joints start to ache and you decide to take a bit of a break from things that turns out to be a break of epic proportions. You binge eat on rubbish that is on special at the local supermarket and somehow never think to stop. You notice the weight going back on but you choose to ignore it or vainly endeavor to maintain weight rather than lose weight. You get the feeling that your body seems to be able to put on weight much more easily than before even though you are also actually eating continuously. You avoid standing on the scales. The task of getting back into shape grows more daunting by the day. Maybe being fat and weak is not so bad after all.

You are now in mortal danger…..time to get back on the program!

Early Celebrity Demise File

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away. Psalm 90:10














Three score years and ten (70) was the Bible’s calculation for the lifespan of man, noted some three thousand or so years ago. Yet these days dying at around seventy seems too young especially considering all the advantages of modern medicine. Unfortunately we have all the disadvantages of modern diet and misinformation to contend with as well. One wonders what would happen if we married stone-age diet (minus the cannibalism) with modern medicine and carefully controlled exercise. To find the answer to this is impossible now as experiments that involve human longevity take so long to complete so we have to use our best guesses.

Today I note in the news that two entertainment personalities have died at what appears to be too young an age these days yet fulfilling the Biblical prediction. They are Don LaFontaine and Jerry Reed ,shown left and right,respectively, above.

I’m thinking of regularly posting on the demise of well known people and seeing if we can learn something from their deaths that may help with the longevity project.

I note that their deaths were 'natural' and not accidental. The main contributing factor of their deaths appears to be smoking. Both were smokers at some stage in their lives with Reed smoking until the end and LaFontaine had smoked but gave up twenty years ago - even so, he died of complications from a collapsed lung. Here is LaFontaine in his own words:

...the real point of all this is the Genesis of the condition. I was a smoker, on and off, for thirty years. I quit nearly twenty years ago, but that crap has a tendency to lie doggo in your system. It finally caught up with me, and as you've just read - it ain't pretty. For those of you who are in the Voice Over business, and you think that smoking is adding some wonderful quality to your instrument - WAKE UP! Quit! Today! Whoever you are - if you smoke - Stop! All you are adding is garbage to your vocal cords, and a nice deep layer of tar and poison on the linings of your lungs.

I tell you all this, because I need to clear the air, because there has been a lot of speculation out there, and because it should serve as a cautionary tale.

Reed, who had quadruple bypass surgery in 1999, died on Monday of complications arising from emphysema which is a typical smokers disease.

Looking at the pictures it seems both had put on a bit of weight in their later years too and I can’t help wondering if this has contributed to their early demise. Overweight means over nutrition which means that the body never gets a chance to perform the clean up of dead and dying cells. Cancer cells are constantly fed a diet of high glucose, which they love and the body gets tired of regulating the glucose spikes that it has to constantly contend with. Seventy years of this sort of punishment will lead to the body breaking down and refusing to carry on.

Clearly both of these guys broke two of the rules of Active Survival - they smoked and they gained weight in their later years. Reed was 71 and LaFontaine 68. Not bad, but they could have done better and now serve us with their "cautionary tales".

What Would an Active Survivalist Do?

There was a case in New Zealand recently where a young man jumped into a river to save what he thought was a drowning dog only to drown himself and the dog survived. At the funeral there were glowing testimonies about how this young man was so nice in everything he did. He used to spend a lot of time in his room or with his grandmother reading the Bible, always there to help out and never a cross word. I can't remember exactly the details of how good a person he was but it was certainly a tragic waste of a young life. There's a common saying that only the good die young and there is some truth in this. It seems that both ends of the spectrum lead to an early demise, being too good or too evil.

If you do a Google search for people drowning while saving dogs you get quite a few results. For instance:

A man drowned when he jumped into the sea to rescue a dog. His body was pulled from water off Blackpool promenade after a major search by police and coastguards. Link


So what would an Active Survivalist do in this situation? Risking your life to save a dog is clearly not an intelligent option. Indeed dogs are naturally good swimmers and drowning is extremely unlikely. In fact if the dog drowns you have absolutely no chance of surviving in the same conditions. Also, the spectacle of a drowning dog, not something one sees everyday, will ensure that the day is not entirely wasted. Perhaps you could, if you like dogs, get a branch or stick and try and help it out, but I'd be careful, it might be rabid or something.

The lesson in all this is that you don't want to be too good a person. Your obituary should have little to say because hopefully you have out-lived all those that had anything nice to say about you which wasn't much anyway. Can't see anyone at my funeral blathering on about how he loved dogs.......

All you never wanted to know about saving drowning dogs

Step 1d: As a last resort, swim to the dog. Protect yourself. Bring something for the dog to cling to or climb on and be pulled to shore.

Yeah right.

Step 5d: Alternately (after 30 seconds), hold the dog's mouth and lips closed and blow firmly into its nostrils.

I don't think so!

Wolverines!

I occasionally get hits on this blog from people searching for survivalist information and imagine that it must be very disappointing to come across a health and fitness site.

In my younger days I dabbled with survivalist culture, read books on how to survive in the bush, stockpiled guns and ammo and that sort of thing. It was kind of fun imagining survival scenarios like fighting off Russian invaders in a South Pacific replay of Red Dawn, shooting collaborators or defending the food stockpiles from hordes of starving orphans. All these things are extremely unlikely to happen yet the idea of increasing your chances of survival whatever the environment throws at you is worth thinking about and acting upon. The reality is that the diseases brought about by our modern lifestyles pose a much more significant existential threat than do rampaging Russian marines.

Smoking for instance is the health equivalent of being meekly led off to the gas chambers. Getting no exercise is like letting your rifle barrels go all rusty and getting your ammunition all wet. Spending your days eating healthy food and focusing on improving your well-being is equivalent to stocking up that cabin in the mountains with long term survival provisions.

The real enemies attack you from within with the epic battle for your survival taking place in the tunnels of your cardio vascular system. The cabin in the mountains is your immune system. You need to train for survival. You also need to avoid danger and not depend upon luck getting you through. Indeed, avoidance of danger will be your primary survival skill. This means avoiding or minimising stressful situations and stress factors. Coping strategies and contingency plans should be developed to prepare yourself for the evil days that lie ahead.

The goal at all times should be to be in the optimal mental and physical condition for your age. To do this you need to embrace Active Survivalism.

Killer Karbs

More evidence that sugar and carbs are bad for you. Every time you eat some bread or take a swig of soft drink you are unleashing a wave of tiny free radicals to wreak havoc on cells in your brain. Like a band of Cossacks descending on a Georgian village. Bread and sugary things become a whole lot less appetizing when you view them in this way. It seems to me that if it attacks these brain cells other brain cells are in jeopardy also. Could this be the reason for the rise in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s too?

"A diet rich in carbohydrate and sugar that has become more and more prevalent in modern societies over the last 20-30 years has placed so much strain on our bodies that it's leading to premature cell deterioration," Dr Andrews said.

Link

The Tide is Turning

Men's Health are promoting saturated fat.

In some ways I'll be a little disappointed if this becomes mainstream. I like being part of an extremist minority.

Michael Phelps – Champion Eater

There’s a lot of buzz around the Internet about the Michael Phelps diet.

Apparently this is his typical daily diet:

Breakfast: Three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise. Two cups of coffee. One five-egg omelet. One bowl of grits. Three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar. Three chocolate-chip pancakes.
Lunch: One pound of enriched pasta. Two large ham and cheese sandwiches with mayo on white bread. Energy drinks packing 1,000 calories.
Dinner: One pound of pasta. An entire pizza. More energy drinks.

And looking at his body this diet, high in both carbs and fat, is not doing him any harm. There is a lot of criticism directed particularly at the high fat part of the diet. This from the Wall Street Journal Health Blog:

But what about the choice of foods? All those eggs and ham and cheese can’t possibly be good for him, can they?

It’s strange but I would have thought they were the ‘healthy’ components of his diet. It goes to show how far most people have been indoctrinated into the ‘fat is bad for you’ way of thinking when they think that powdered sugar and energy drinks are better for you then eggs.

Without a doubt Phelps is a remarkable specimen of a human being and he illustrates the wondrous ability of the human body to convert all sorts of foods into good things. Compare his body with that of the cannibals shown below.

It will be interesting to see what effect this regime of massive eating and massive exercise will have on his longevity. The idea is to win gold medals and not live forever though.

Stone Age Diet

Not a lot is known about the culture of early man. We have a few clues here and there but very little of substance and mostly conjecture. It seems reasonable to conclude that early man operated in much the same way as uncivilized people we have encountered in the recent past.

There is a bit of a movement to return to the Stone-Age diet and I have some sympathy for it as modern man evolved eating a diet that is quite different to that of today. Evolution would have moulded an optimal human for a diet that was hunted and gathered from the wild. – the classic hunter/gatherer lifestyle.

This from Wikipedia:

Food sources of the hunter-gatherer humans of the Stone Age included both animals and plants that were part of the environment in which these humans lived. These humans liked animal organ meats, including the livers, kidneys and brains. They consumed little dairy product or carbohydrate-rich plant foods like legumes or cereal grains. They also ate leaves and roots.

For about a million years humans used flint tools that barely changed over that period of time. It seems amazing that humans were able to stay static for so long and I have often wondered why. Was there some radical alteration in human thinking that suddenly occurred and propelled humans into the world of inventiveness that we see today? How could a million years pass without any significant development at all?

It would appear also that the human population stayed fairly static during that time as well. Only with the advent of agriculture have humans been able to increase their numbers so dramatically. This is one of the most compelling arguments for agricultural diets.

My theory is that humans ate mostly meat during this time. It was a time when we were shedding instinctive responses and developing rational responses. Better ways were being slowly developed to catch and prepare animals for eating. Ironically the shedding of instincts also led to a long dark age of humanity.

This was the age of cannibalism and this may be the reason why the human population stayed static for so long.

Look Who's Here

Notice what this woman is holding?

The Hunger Buster

So you don’t want to feel hungry? Here is my solution. The Active Survivalist Hunger Buster.

Get 150ml of full whipping cream and pour into a cup. Add 75 ml of full cream milk and stir. Microwave until it’s nice and hot but not boiling. Stir in a scoop of Milo. Wait to cool a bit, being careful when you drink it as being very high in fat it retains the heat for longer than a normal drink and can burn your throat. Once finished, eat two boiled eggs and wash down with a glass of multi-vitamin and a couple of fish oil capsules.

If you wanted to go super low carb you could swap the Milo for coffee or cocoa powder. The cream binds with the carbs and slows the digestion process.

This should be about 600-700 calories which is quite high but I guarantee that you will not feel hungry for hours afterward. You can go a whole day on this and feel uncomfortably full. It has everything you require to sustain life and a super low GI. The high calories are not fattening calories either.

Go on – give it a try!

The Benefits of Fasting

The two great fears that people have about fasting is losing muscle mass and slowing metabolism. People often also experience weakness and dizziness.

It seems to me that most people think it is essential to never feel hungry and that being hungry is a highly dangerous state for the body to be in. They are at risk of muscle wasting and scurvy or something. Mothers have always forced their children to eat and are greatly concerned when their children don’t eat their packed school lunches. It is ingrained from an early age that you need to stay well nourished.

Many of the world’s religions have promoted fasting and the decline in religious belief has probably had something to do with the decline in fasting too. It kind of seems nutty to go on a fast even for just a single day.

Yet could there be health benefits to be had from fasting? Check out this interesting link and have a read.

My thinking is this:

If you lose muscle due to not eating enough your body is probably smart enough to recycle bits of itself that are not in an optimal state. Cells that are old or damaged are likely to be recycled first and this, to my mind, must be a good thing.

Slowing metabolism is also a good thing as a slower metabolism will mean a longer life. It may not result in you winning an athletics competition but how many of us are doing that anyway?

Weakness and dizziness is a result of sugar addiction. If your body is trained to burn fat as a primary fuel source you will not experience this as you have plenty of stored fat to draw upon. Even a lean person has many weeks of stored fat.

Disease like scurvy and other vitamin deficiency ailments are as the result of severe malnutrition. Scurvy happens as a result of months at sea on a square-rigger eating nothing but dry biscuits. This is unlikely to happen to you!

The Okinawan Diet

People in Okinawa live longer on average than the people of mainland Japan. That’s saying something because it is well known that the Japanese are quite long living and healthy. Apparently this could be changing as the Okinawans adopt a more Western ‘industrialized’ diet.

It would be worthwhile, therefore, to study the traditional diet and lifestyle of Okinawa for clues that can help guide the Active Survivalist on his quest for a long and healthy life.

A quick search on the Internet reveals the following gem from okinawa-diet.com:

"They have more nutrients, greater bulk, and fewer calories per gram." Vegetables are the least calorically dense foods you can eat. Fruits are runners-up, then whole grains. After that come lean proteins like skinless white-meat chicken, pork tenderloin, extra-lean beef, and seafood, then fatty proteins like dark-meat chicken with the skin on and fattier cuts of beef and pork. The most calorically dense foods include fats, oils, and sugars. If this sounds like a new food pyramid, it is. To lower the caloric density of your diet to more closely match the Okinawan diet, you need to eat fewer fats, oils, sugars, and fatty protein sources while you increase your intake of vegetables, fruits, whole grain and lean proteins, says Dr. Willcox. Vegetables and fish make up the bulk of the Okinawan diet.

This is bullshit! As if the Okinawans just love to eat skinless white-meat chicken, the least appetizing part of a chicken. It’s amazing what lengths people will go to demonize animal fat – it’s criminal. Look at the picture above, that’s what Okinawans love – hmmm mouth watering.

Here is a more scientific appraisal from PubMed:

The present paper examines the relationship of nutritional status to further life expectancy and health status in the Japanese elderly based on 3 epidemiological studies. 1. Nutrient intakes in 94 Japanese centenarians investigated between 1972 and 1973 showed a higher proportion of animal protein to total proteins than in contemporary average Japanese. 2. High intakes of milk and fats and oils had favorable effects on 10-year (1976-1986) survivorship in 422 urban residents aged 69-71. The survivors revealed a longitudinal increase in intakes of animal foods such as eggs, milk, fish and meat over the 10 years. 3. Nutrient intakes were compared, based on 24-hour dietary records, between a sample from Okinawa Prefecture where life expectancies at birth and 65 were the longest in Japan, and a sample from Akita Prefecture where the life expectancies were much shorter. Intakes of Ca, Fe, vitamins A, B1, B2, C, and the proportion of energy from proteins and fats were significantly higher in the former than in the latter. Intakes of carbohydrates and NaCl were lower.

…the reality of the Okinawan diet from Okinawan Cuisine:

Pork appears so frequently in the Okinawan diet that to say "meat" is really to say "pork." Everything from head to tail is used. As the saying has it, only the "oink" and the toenails go begging. It is no exaggeration to say that the present-day Okinawan diet begins and ends with pork.Especially in the case of hogs, what the meat lacks in (vitamin A, D and others), the entrails more than make up for it. The stomach and innards are cooked together in a clear "Nakami" soup. The liver and heart, together with vegetables, make "Motsu" (giblet) dishes.

These dishes contain high-quality protein and are rich in vitamins and minerals.We have the belief in Okinawa, based on the philosophy of food as medicine, that when one or more of your internal organs is out of kilter, it is good to eat the same innards of animals. The idea is to eat a food that supplies whatever is lacking.Pig feet and pork with the skin on are washed under boiling water and then simmered and eaten. The skin contains a high-quality protein called collagen.

The Okinawans traditionally cooked their vegetables in pork lard too. Notice too the emphasis on eating as much of the animal as possible. I suggested that this is a healthy thing to do a few posts down. It's madness to throw away the fat and skin of an animal and just eat the lean meat.

Let's all become Okinawan!

Update: You know, I'm well aware that we all find what we are looking for and maybe I'm just finding stuff that suits my own inclinations.

Other people have studied Okinawa and concluded that low fat is the way to go. Check out the Wikipedia article on Okinawan cuisine and the conclusion that:

"Okinawans eat low-fat, low-salt foods, such as fish, tofu, and seaweed." even though in the same article it says clearly, "Okinawan sayings include the phrase that Okinawan cuisine "begins with pig and ends with pig" and "every part of a pig can be eaten except its hooves and its oink"

- pork is fatty is it not? .....Idiots.