Nutrition & Our Hybrid Body
In the 1950s, my friend Bill was a very gifted Engineer who made an extraordinary car. The car’s main fuel source was electricity, and gasoline was to be put in whenever available.
It was fine for the car to use gasoline every other day or so, but the problem was that people ran it on gasoline nearly 90% of the time. This resulted in the car breaking down frequently, all the while Bill was trying to tell people;
“Use it the way it was designed!”
Despite his advice, people continued to theorize about how to properly use the car. Bill went bankrupt and left the automotive industry soon after.
This situation my poor imaginary friend Bill found himself in is quite like our modern health environment.
How Did Eating Get So Complicated?
Most of us just want to feel good, look good, and live a long life.
You would think by now there would be a straightforward consensus on what our eating habits should look like, but we’re faced with countless trains of thought on the topic.
Maybe we’re supposed to be doing the ABC diet or XYZ diet or something in between?
— One of the first “diets” was proposed by a man named George Cheyne in 1724.
On Amazon, you can find over 50,000 different books on the topic.
Like Bill’s car, surely there is a simple way we should be fueling our bodies that is most suitable for its design.
Obviously, we’re not engineered, but Homo sapiens emerged around 200,000 years ago and the majority of that time, the food environment could not have been anything like today’s food environment.
Agriculture didn’t even exist for a good 190,000 years of that time.Not even the fruits and vegetables we have today would have been similar as we hadn’t cultivated them to our liking.
What way of eating did we adapt to?
The environment would have chosen our diet rather than us.
Your choices would have been to eat what was available or be dead.
The idea that our body must have adapted to a certain ratio of macronutrients available in the environment is not novel; and recently has become quite well known due to the “Paleo diet”.
However, what I’m getting at is our body would have also had to have adapted to how often the food was available — there should be a natural frequency of eating that promotes health and longevity.
Where Do We Start?
The logic would be that more nourishment, more food would make you healthier and live longer.
But let’s take a look at this from the First Principles method as described by Elon Musk:
“It’s kind of mentally easier to reason by analogy rather than from first principles.
First Principles is a kind of a physics way of looking at the world.
And what that really means is you kind of boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say ‘OK what are we sure is true?’ and then reason up from there. That takes a lot more mental energy.”
What do we know about longevity?
Other than exercise, the word “superfood” might come to mind. Maybe more omega-3’s or some red wine or making sure to take supplements and drink less alcohol.
There are a lot of things that contribute to longevity, but there is one method accepted by science that you can use to consistently increase longevity.
“If I take any organism on the planet earth from yeast cells to spiders, insects, rabbits, dogs… and I reduce their caloric intake by 30%, they live 30% longer.
The only organism which has not yet been deliberately tested by scientists is Homo sapiens!”
Conventional Wisdom
For some time, the conventional wisdom has been that you need to get 3 balanced meals a day to stay healthy.
Ever since I was a kid, “breakfast, lunch and dinner” seemed as natural as sleeping or going to the bathroom.
Breakfast was the most important meal of the day, I needed a healthy lunch to focus the rest of the school day, and being sent to bed without dinner was child abuse.
The situation is basically the same in Japan where I now live, as with the rest of the world.
If we want to reduce caloric intake to increase lifespan, the only choice then is to eat less at each meal, because we need 3 meals, right?
But where did these 3 meals a day idea come from?
As Abigail Carroll suggests in her book Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal:
Eating three meals a day was basically invented due to culture. When European settlers got to America, they found Native Americans were basically just eating whenever they felt the urge to, rather than at specified times.
The Europeans took their lack of defined eating times as evidence that they were uncivilized and had them change.
In short:
The 3 meals a day paradigm is not based on our biological needs.
How Our Environment Designed Us
In a hunter-gatherer culture it wasn’t surprising at all to feast on a big catch, then survive on very little or no food for an extended period of time until they needed another big source of fat and protein.
In fact, the environment up until now would suggest that if we could not do that, we probably wouldn’t be alive to be reading about dieting.
The Pirahã people, an indigenous hunter-gatherer group of the Amazon Rainforest was extensively studied by an anthropological linguist named Daniel Everett.
He found they do not eat every day or even attempt to do so. They were even aware of food storage techniques yet never used them except to barter with Brazilian traders.
When questioned about why they do not store food for themselves they explained:
“I store meat in the belly of my brother.”
Until the advent of agriculture, eating 3 meals a day and in some cases even eating every day was a near impossibility.
Some of you may be pointing to the fact that life expectancy in the Paleolithic era was much lower than now at around 33 years, as a sign that our modern eating habits are healthier.
However, the infant mortality rate was a big factor in bringing that number down.
You have to understand that one of the effects of modern civilization and technology is that you can be unresourceful or made up of weak genetic material and not die.
As Doug McGuff explains about the life expectancy back then:
“It didn’t really have anything to do with anabolic catabolic balance or long term health benefits.
Because there were older survivors and the fossil evidence of those older survivors based on ligamentous attachments and bony assessment and bone mineral density was, they were extraordinarily robust.”
Glucose Metabolism & How “Conventional Wisdom” Failed
The common misconception is that stable blood glucose is necessary for survival, which would biologically justify 3 meals a day.
Bear with me through a bit of biochemistry to understand why constantly consuming carbohydrates to maintain blood glucose is not only unnecessary but can be a detrimental and vicious cycle.
After you eat some carbohydrates — bread, pasta, whatever:
Glucose enters the bloodstream.
Insulin is secreted to distribute the glucose properly.
Via an insulin receptor, glucose enters the cells to produce energy.
This can only happen at a certain rate, so to overload the cell with glucose or have glucose sit in the bloodstream…
70 grams can be stored in the liver and 200 grams in the muscle.
You have your morning bagel and some Frappa—
“Whatever you want, some vanilla bullshit latte cappa thing, you know whatever you got, I don’t care”
and you’ve stored all the glucose you can store.
It has to go into your body fat.
As well as storing it as energy, your body puts it in your body fat because the fat cells have less complex machinery than the other cells.
Too much glucose can bind to the proteins and muck up the machinery of the cells in a harmful inflammatory process called Glycation.
It’s kind of like pouring pancake syrup into a car engine.
The problem here is that if your energy levels start to wane, you can’t tap the energy out of your stored body fat because the hormone that does that- hormone-sensitive lipase is sensitive to insulin.
Insulin will not allow you to tap body fat for energy.
If you have a bunch of insulin sitting in your blood from processing a bunch of glucose before and you need energy, you’re going to get ravenously hungry and will need to jack your blood sugar up the short term with a snack or something to raise your energy levels again.
This is why if you’re following the recommended American diet, you’re usually going to be stuck in this loop of wanting to eat every time your blood glucose drops and 3 meals a day will feel very necessary.
Even Peter Attia, M.D. fell victim to this:
“Despite exercising 3-4 hours every single day and following the food pyramid to the letter, I gained a lot of weight and developed something called ‘Metabolic Syndrome’. “
In the 1950s, my friend Bill was a very gifted Engineer who made an extraordinary car. The car’s main fuel source was electricity, and gasoline was to be put in whenever available.
It was fine for the car to use gasoline every other day or so, but the problem was that people ran it on gasoline nearly 90% of the time. This resulted in the car breaking down frequently, all the while Bill was trying to tell people;
“Use it the way it was designed!”
Despite his advice, people continued to theorize about how to properly use the car. Bill went bankrupt and left the automotive industry soon after.
This situation my poor imaginary friend Bill found himself in is quite like our modern health environment.
How Did Eating Get So Complicated?
Most of us just want to feel good, look good, and live a long life.
You would think by now there would be a straightforward consensus on what our eating habits should look like, but we’re faced with countless trains of thought on the topic.
Maybe we’re supposed to be doing the ABC diet or XYZ diet or something in between?
— One of the first “diets” was proposed by a man named George Cheyne in 1724.
On Amazon, you can find over 50,000 different books on the topic.
Like Bill’s car, surely there is a simple way we should be fueling our bodies that is most suitable for its design.
Obviously, we’re not engineered, but Homo sapiens emerged around 200,000 years ago and the majority of that time, the food environment could not have been anything like today’s food environment.
Agriculture didn’t even exist for a good 190,000 years of that time.Not even the fruits and vegetables we have today would have been similar as we hadn’t cultivated them to our liking.
What way of eating did we adapt to?
The environment would have chosen our diet rather than us.
Your choices would have been to eat what was available or be dead.
The idea that our body must have adapted to a certain ratio of macronutrients available in the environment is not novel; and recently has become quite well known due to the “Paleo diet”.
However, what I’m getting at is our body would have also had to have adapted to how often the food was available — there should be a natural frequency of eating that promotes health and longevity.
Where Do We Start?
The logic would be that more nourishment, more food would make you healthier and live longer.
But let’s take a look at this from the First Principles method as described by Elon Musk:
“It’s kind of mentally easier to reason by analogy rather than from first principles.
First Principles is a kind of a physics way of looking at the world.
And what that really means is you kind of boil things down to the most fundamental truths and say ‘OK what are we sure is true?’ and then reason up from there. That takes a lot more mental energy.”
What do we know about longevity?
Other than exercise, the word “superfood” might come to mind. Maybe more omega-3’s or some red wine or making sure to take supplements and drink less alcohol.
There are a lot of things that contribute to longevity, but there is one method accepted by science that you can use to consistently increase longevity.
“If I take any organism on the planet earth from yeast cells to spiders, insects, rabbits, dogs… and I reduce their caloric intake by 30%, they live 30% longer.
The only organism which has not yet been deliberately tested by scientists is Homo sapiens!”
Conventional Wisdom
For some time, the conventional wisdom has been that you need to get 3 balanced meals a day to stay healthy.
Ever since I was a kid, “breakfast, lunch and dinner” seemed as natural as sleeping or going to the bathroom.
Breakfast was the most important meal of the day, I needed a healthy lunch to focus the rest of the school day, and being sent to bed without dinner was child abuse.
The situation is basically the same in Japan where I now live, as with the rest of the world.
If we want to reduce caloric intake to increase lifespan, the only choice then is to eat less at each meal, because we need 3 meals, right?
But where did these 3 meals a day idea come from?
As Abigail Carroll suggests in her book Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal:
Eating three meals a day was basically invented due to culture. When European settlers got to America, they found Native Americans were basically just eating whenever they felt the urge to, rather than at specified times.
The Europeans took their lack of defined eating times as evidence that they were uncivilized and had them change.
In short:
The 3 meals a day paradigm is not based on our biological needs.
How Our Environment Designed Us
In a hunter-gatherer culture it wasn’t surprising at all to feast on a big catch, then survive on very little or no food for an extended period of time until they needed another big source of fat and protein.
In fact, the environment up until now would suggest that if we could not do that, we probably wouldn’t be alive to be reading about dieting.
The Pirahã people, an indigenous hunter-gatherer group of the Amazon Rainforest was extensively studied by an anthropological linguist named Daniel Everett.
He found they do not eat every day or even attempt to do so. They were even aware of food storage techniques yet never used them except to barter with Brazilian traders.
When questioned about why they do not store food for themselves they explained:
“I store meat in the belly of my brother.”
Until the advent of agriculture, eating 3 meals a day and in some cases even eating every day was a near impossibility.
Some of you may be pointing to the fact that life expectancy in the Paleolithic era was much lower than now at around 33 years, as a sign that our modern eating habits are healthier.
However, the infant mortality rate was a big factor in bringing that number down.
You have to understand that one of the effects of modern civilization and technology is that you can be unresourceful or made up of weak genetic material and not die.
As Doug McGuff explains about the life expectancy back then:
“It didn’t really have anything to do with anabolic catabolic balance or long term health benefits.
Because there were older survivors and the fossil evidence of those older survivors based on ligamentous attachments and bony assessment and bone mineral density was, they were extraordinarily robust.”
Glucose Metabolism & How “Conventional Wisdom” Failed
The common misconception is that stable blood glucose is necessary for survival, which would biologically justify 3 meals a day.
Bear with me through a bit of biochemistry to understand why constantly consuming carbohydrates to maintain blood glucose is not only unnecessary but can be a detrimental and vicious cycle.
After you eat some carbohydrates — bread, pasta, whatever:
Glucose enters the bloodstream.
Insulin is secreted to distribute the glucose properly.
Via an insulin receptor, glucose enters the cells to produce energy.
This can only happen at a certain rate, so to overload the cell with glucose or have glucose sit in the bloodstream…
70 grams can be stored in the liver and 200 grams in the muscle.
You have your morning bagel and some Frappa—
“Whatever you want, some vanilla bullshit latte cappa thing, you know whatever you got, I don’t care”
and you’ve stored all the glucose you can store.
It has to go into your body fat.
As well as storing it as energy, your body puts it in your body fat because the fat cells have less complex machinery than the other cells.
Too much glucose can bind to the proteins and muck up the machinery of the cells in a harmful inflammatory process called Glycation.
It’s kind of like pouring pancake syrup into a car engine.
The problem here is that if your energy levels start to wane, you can’t tap the energy out of your stored body fat because the hormone that does that- hormone-sensitive lipase is sensitive to insulin.
Insulin will not allow you to tap body fat for energy.
If you have a bunch of insulin sitting in your blood from processing a bunch of glucose before and you need energy, you’re going to get ravenously hungry and will need to jack your blood sugar up the short term with a snack or something to raise your energy levels again.
This is why if you’re following the recommended American diet, you’re usually going to be stuck in this loop of wanting to eat every time your blood glucose drops and 3 meals a day will feel very necessary.
Even Peter Attia, M.D. fell victim to this:
“Despite exercising 3-4 hours every single day and following the food pyramid to the letter, I gained a lot of weight and developed something called ‘Metabolic Syndrome’. “
