Art De Vany: April 2005 Archives

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Hits on this site

April 30, 2005 03:31 PM

I put this entry under uncertainty because I had no idea how many people might come to my site as it got under way. I can tell you that I am amazed; we have over 30,000 hits this first month of operation and the month is not quite over.

Thanks to all of you for your readership and for your comments.

LINK · Uncertainty · Comments (3)

Three Day Food Diary

April 28, 2005 08:05 PM

Here are all three days condensed into one entry. There is some repetition because I want to eat the leftovers before they spoil. The next three days will likely involve some other sequence of different, but related foods. I think the diary was a popular request because it is hard to use your imagination to come up with a different way of eating after you have been doing it for so long. Habits form and then you fall into a rut. Variety, freshness, texture, and color are good guides to eating. Low energy density is desirable.

One thing you will see about the food is the weight; the meals are heavy in weight and quite filling. Yet, the high water content, which is key to weight, makes digestion fairly easy. And the energy density is low. As I look over these meals there is no simple CHO and no manufactured food.

I go through a store on the perimeter, first to the produce, then to the meat, seafood, and eggs. Now and then I make a stop in the canned meat section to get some tuna, salmon, and smoked oysters. Then I leave. I have no clue what is in the center of the store, aside from the beer section. When my wife asks me to get bread, pasta, or frozen foods I have a hard time finding them. This is rare as she eats the same way I do, but for the odd waffle and toast now and then.

Day 1

Breakfast: three eggs with one yolk omlette style with fresh rosemary from my yard. Three link sausages. Three slices of honeydew melon and two slices of cantelope. Two cups of coffee.

Lunch: a handful of mixed nuts. About half a roasted chicken over romaine lettuce with some raw broccoli pieces. A large chunk of chopped ginger. With balsamic vinegar and olive oil. One Budweiser beer.

Dinner: a few nuts before dinner. A mustard green salad with blue cheese dressing. Two smoked pork chops, six asperagas spears, a large piece of broccoli. Half a cup of coffee.

Day 2

Breakfast: 4 chunks of Jennie-O smoked turkey breast. Three large slices of a large honeydew melon, cut end to end. About a cup and a half of cottage cheese. Two cups of coffee. A fast, easy and nutritious meal.

Lunch: Trader Joe's smoked salmon, the whole can, over raw broccoli, romaine lettuce, kale, two cloves of garlic, a large chunk of ginger. A Budweiser beer.

Dinner: a wonderful meal. Here is a picture.

Half a side of baby back ribs, done in an improvised Greek style. I used Greek olives, which I grilled, along with the olive juice on the ribs. A little bit of very low carb Kraft barbecue sauce (CarbWell I think was the label) for a bit of tomato flavor, Chipolte sauce, and a bit of Greek dressing (Kraft Athenos). An artichoke for our salad, dipped in olive oil and red pepper flakes and a large stem of bok choy which I grilled along with the ribs.

Day 3

Breakfast: half a ham steak, three eggs with one yolk fried with fresh rosemary. One navel orange, two large slices of honeydew melon. Two cups of coffee.

Lunch: chunks of turkey breast, leftover roasted chicken, one apple. A Budweiser beer.

Dinner: leftover Greek ribs, half a rack, and grilled Bok Choy. Half a cup of coffee.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (7)

Science comes to Golf

Just as science has come to baseball and somewhat to the movies, so it is making inroads in golf. Here, as in baseball technique, old traditions are giving way to scientific investigation of technique. Charlie Lau Sr. and Jr. have made their contribution to baseball technique and their work will be validated and improved in the lab. Lau Jr. was ARod's hitting coach during his formative years. I can vouch that the parallel hands and one arm extension through the ball, pioneered by Lau Sr., works for slowpitch softball hitting.

The golf swing is changing too, with more emphasis on a single swing plane, forward hip stability and more torque in the torso. We may even see the old Vardon grip go by the wayside, as many long drive competitors now use a modified baseball grip for better forearm rotation. Forearm rotation is a key to preventing a slice as this article about science and golf from the WSJ Online shows Golf in WSJ, via a Yahoo link.

LINK · Sports · Comments (1)

Another CDC Blunder

The CDC has corrected its earlier claims that obesity is the number 2 killer in the US. No one who knows anything about epidemiology and its dismal state believed this claim, though plenty of do-gooders who want to tell you what to do made much of it.

It has long been known that body mass is a predictor of mortality, but insufficiently recognized that rapid loss of body mass is part of the dying process. If you lose 40% of your body mass, you are dead, whether the underlying condition is sepsis, AIDs, cancer, etc. The aged simply die on a longer time scale, over the course of an adult life and they do so as, eventually, their body mass falls to the 40% point. Basically, one dies as body mass declines to the critical point and this is not a matter of age, but of the ability to sustain a system far from equilibrium.

Mass is the measure of how efficiently you maintain your non-equilibrium, thermodynamic state as you take in from and expel energy to the environment. So, what some call the "effect" of mass on mortality is really a complex dynamic interplay of mass and mortality. Among older individuals, body mass is associated with increased longevity. But, it is non-linear; above a certain point the curve turns downward. The same thing can be said on the downside; lower mass improves longevity (particularly among rats), but further loss of mass is associated with higher mortality.

How could it be otherwise? Humans evolved under a strong set of environmental and physiological constraints and, thus, there is an optimal body size. Extremely tall people do not live as long as others; their circulatory system is under stress from maintaining a high blood column and there is a scaling effect from the high mass on the vascular and pulmonary systems. Undersized infants do not fare well and some become insulin resistant in the womb in the competition for the mother's scarce nutritional resources. Paradoxically, such infants usually battle obesity later in life, a major problem among the insulin-resistant.

Epidemiology is not a science, it is statistical alchemy, creating epidemics where there are none. You make your career in the field by finding (meaning: statistically torturing the data to find) a "problem." The media are happy to announce and even exaggerate the results before they are peer reviewed and to ignore later retractions or corrections. This latest correction just happened to get some publicity; one can go back over recent announcements and find contradiction after contradiction (wine is good for you, wine is bad for you).

G. Le Fanu, a British physician and medical writer, has a really fine book, The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine, that calls for the dissolution of departments of epidemiology, who have strayed far from the foundations of the field. I agree.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (2)

Questions and answers

April 26, 2005 10:19 AM

I have had some interesting questions, one of which I will defer for later, as it is a bit complicated.

1. When will Evolutionary Fitness be available? I can't really say, but I am through all my academic commitments now that I have sent off my chapter on the movies for the Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture. So, it should be clear sailing. I am a fast writer, but I'm not in a hurry either. I am interested in questions so that I can address them in the book, though I will not likely take the time to answer them all here. Better to put that time into the book. But, please do ask and don't be offended if I wait to address them in the book.

2. On Weston Price and fat in the diet. I did read Dr. Price's remarkable book and learned much from it. Sally Fallon saw my essay on the Navajo and asked to publish it and I agreed. It has earned me an angry comment from some, who tell me they are Indians, but I think if you read it you will see that I am totally sympathetic to their plight and would like to see them able to live their traditional ways if possible. I stressed that they should understand their activity -- diet dilemma.

As to the debate between Fallon and Cordain regarding fat in the diet, we really don't know the answer (they both have good arguments, but it is not what I would call a scientific hypothesis, since it cannot be falsified) and you will see that I do not count the proportions of energy I get from food sources. I am not on a diet; I eat and cook by texture and color and strive to attain reasonably low energy density in my foods. I do not avoid fat, but I do try to keep a balance of Omega 3 to Omega 6 fatty acids and to avoid trans-fats. I also trim fat from meat and eat a fair amount of salmon and tuna.

3. Why do you choose to carry so much muscle?

Well, it really is natural for me given the kinds of activities I wish to engage in. I am more a sprinter than a jogger by inclination; it is more pleasureful to trek and run now and then on a trail than it is to do heavy mileage on a track. Softball is a burst/pause kind of activity, so that is how I train. I have weighed right around 205 for all my adult life. I had to starve my way into the 198 pound Olympic lifting class when I was 17 years old. My playing weight in minor league baseball was 208 50 years ago and that is what I weigh today. So, it is not so much deliberate, but natural for me to weigh what I do.

As to the muscle mass, it is weird: I do not look like I weigh anything like 208. I had a laugh the other day when I took my shirt off during softball practice. The guy pitching to me thought I looked too thin because he could see my abdominals and serratus magnus muscles, something you don't see in the over 65 group (or most age groups these days). But, I am the only over 65 player among more than 100 teams to hit it out of the park at the last Huntsman Games (fence is 305, 12 feet high, and with a soft .44 or .43 compression ball).

So, I work out the way I do because this pattern is what mimics the activity patterns of a carnivore --- power law variation --- with highly intense brief episodes interspersed with languid periods. There is no average or typical pattern, just as a power law has no natural scale. I don't live like an agriculturalist and I don't do factory work in the gym, like so many body builders do.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (16)

Navajos, Amerindians, and Type 2 Diabetes

April 24, 2005 10:41 AM

As you may know, the Navajo as well as other Amerindians (Eskimo, Pima, Mexican and others) living in North America, suffer from high rates of adult onset or Type 2 diabetes. Current knowledge suggests this group a native Americans arrived from parts of Asia by migrating over a land bridge that formed across the Bering Sea during the last Ice Age. This was about 15,000 years ago, though the date is still in flux, when water levels around the Earth were about 100 meters below their current level (the water was trapped in the ice). The region of Asia feeding migrants over the land bridge was populated by Mongols and all Amerindians living today show the peaked incisor shape characteristic of Mongol people. DNA testing is likely to establish further evidence of the primarily Mongoloid source of Amerindian genes, if it hasn't already been demonstrated.

Right now, Type 2 diabetes is at high levels among nearly all Amerindians who have departed from their traditional hunter/gatherer ways. A traditional Eskimo male has about 11% body fat. A city-dwelling Eskimo male has about 33% body fat. Diabetes is rare among Eskimo who follow traditional ways and it is above 30% for those who don't. They differ dramatically in strength as well as tested by grip strength in published research. Pima indian males often carry body fat in excess of this latter figure. And, the incidence of diabetes among the Pima differs according to their diet and activity levels; those living in the US have diabetes rates near 50%, while those living in Mexico have rates far below this.

The Mexican Pima do hard agricultural work and eat a simple, natural diet (if too high on carbohydrate-laden beans and corn). The US Pima live on some of their own farmed food, but the bulk of their food comes from the same sources we all rely upon. But, the remote locations of the Pima and Navajo reservations makes the availability of fresh fruits and vegetable problematic (few realize the health benefits that flowed from the US Interstate Highway system that made the trucking of fresh foods to rural areas possible). Thus, their diet relies on long-shelf life manufactured foods.

The reservation areas are also limited in their agricultural potential, so there is less home-grown produce among the US Pima than among the Mexican Pima. And, in both instances, as well in all other reservations, the lack of private property limits the incentives the users have in developing their land for agricultural use. (I published two articles long ago on the adverse incentives and diminished productivity of the Ejido land reform areas in Mexico and the same points apply to reservations where property is held in common rather than individually.)

So, add it all up: a paucity of fresh, nutritious foods, dependance on high starch food sources, low physical activity, high abdominal fat deposits, and perhaps a genetic disposition to direct nutrients to fat (though this "thrifty gene" hypothesis is off the mark in my estimation) and you get a sense of why diabetes is stalking the Amerindian population. Transpose the same set of conditions on the rest of the American population (and slowly this is taking place and is present now in some rural areas) and you set the conditions for a wave of Type 2 diabetes which is now beginning to gather force in the US.

These were my concerns when I wrote of a trip my wife and I took to Santa Fe, where I was attending a conference at the famous Santa Fe Institute. As we drove there through Navajo country, I had these thoughts which were published in the Price-Pottenger Newsletter. This link is to their site A Visit to Navajo Country

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (1)

My Current Workout

April 23, 2005 04:49 PM

I know some of you have seen this picture before (at 60-61 years old its about 6 years old) and are thinking what do I look like now at 67? My answer: better. I am a little heavier at about 208 instead of the 205 in the picture and a bit leaner and more muscular. I will post some pictures when I have time to take some.

Here is my present work out. I have a bit of refinement to do, as it is a bit too much for my 67 year old body with the added stress I have from my wife's recent illness. My trainer, Mark Leatherman, is at the local Gold's Gym here in St. George, Ut and he helps me do the negatives that I use to end many exercises.

I do have a fair number of old athletic injuries and Mark has a fine eye for form, so he is an important part of my come back program as I deal directly with my injury-induced weaknesses. If I fall into poor form it is in pronating my shoulders to protect them from motorcycle racing injuries and in sometimes flattening my back on a squat. Of course a slightly flattened lower back (upper pelvis rotated a bit back) is a given for an academic who sits and thinks and writes all day for nearly forty years. Mark has helped me connect up the lower-to-central part of my back to maintain lordosis in nearly all I do now. My posture is better, it was always upright, but the shoulder pronation is gone and the lower to central back zone feels tight and really strong. I even have new cuts running diagonally across my back tying the lats into the lower center of the back. It has a name but I forget it.

I designed this work out to attain certain goals:

Shoulder flexibility and stability. Power. The delts are primarily fast twitch fibers and I am playing softball and some golf so I want to be able to do rapid shoulder rotation. The negatives are part of this as they recruit FT fibers.

Balance and core. Always essential, but I felt that my balance was limiting my golf swing in particular. It is also important in my motorcycle riding. The core strength is essential to stay on plane for both baseball and golf swings. It is crucial too for fast trail riding. A tight core requires strong internal obliques, multifidus, and transverse abdominus. I find that a tight core makes control better in all my moves and, in motorcycle riding, it keeps the body's mass near to its central axis which lowers the polar moment of inertia, permitting fast direction changes.

Leg drive and symmetry. I am looking for front to back and left to right symmetry in leg drive. I also want to increase the mid to upper leg drive relative to the lower as I find that this is where jumping drive begins. The upper leg drive is mostly from the lower leg and the lateral vastus where more FT fibers are located. On the front to back symmetry, I am looking to be able to flick my heels up to my buttocks again. This will let me lift my legs quickly to avoid dragging a partially extended leg and straining the quads and hip flexors.

I am also training the anaerobic pathway. I do this by exhausting the phosphates, taking a quick rest of no more than 15 seconds, and then doing the next set or exercise. Exhausting and replenishing the phosphate energy stores in successive cycles trains the body's recovery systems. This burst, rest intermittency is the very best kind of training.

Notation: I list the reps in the successive sets, example 15, 8, and 4 for a set of 15 reps followed by a 10 second pause. Increase the weight and then do 8. Pause. Then increase the weight and do 4. Some of these, what I call hierarchical sets, continue with 2 sets of a heavier weight for just one rep. This is shown as 2x1. Then, a few sets might end with 2 negatives.

So, here are the exercises. This is what I do, if you choose to follow this example, it is your choice. You should make this choice with a careful examination of your condition and health. You may not be ready for it.

1. Thrusters or push press: 15, 8, 4. Varying depth and weight in progression.

2. Bent arm pullovers with press: 15, 8, 4. Full depth on all. On a flat bench.

3. Upper machine rows: alternating arms, 15, 8, 4.

4. Shoulder machine press: 10, 6, 3, 2 x 1, 2 negatives.

5. Concentration curl: 10, 6, 4, 2 x 1, 2 negatives. For number 4 and 5, if you do not have a trainer to help lift the weight to the negative position, then you can push it up with two hands and lower it with one.

6. Leg curls, standing: 15, 8, 4, 2 negatives.

7. Squats: 15, 8, 4 varying weight and depth. Less depth with higher weight.

8. Dead lifts: with a trap bar or DB do a bent leg dead lift on the up move, then do a straight leg dead lift on the way down. 6, 3, 2x1. Use the bent leg position to lift up, but lower from a staight leg position, keeping the lower back tight and in lordosis. The idea here is to get a heavy weight up with bent legs and then do a negative straight-legged dead lift on the way down. This will lengthen the erectors as it strengthens them. Back troubles always begin with loose stabilizers (internal obliques, multifidus, and transverse abdominus) and tight mobilizers, in my case the erectors and ham strings. In this exercise you are tightening the stabilizers and stretching the mobilizers. The erectors will gradually add sacromeres near their end and this serial sacromere length will change the force curve of the muscle so that it is less tight initially and very powerful later in any mobilization effort.

9. Incline DB press: 10, 8, 6. Emphasize descent.

10. Standing crane. A balance move. Stand on one foot, lean forward and lift the leg behind you, keeping back and leg in line.

11. Ab hang. Hang from your arms and pull your knees up. Keep your toes up too.

12. Tabata cycle and arm dyno. Go all out on the arm dyno for 20 seconds. Rest 10 seconds. Do it again. I only do 3 or 4. Then do the same thing on a cycle for the legs.

Now you are toast. This is one of my longest and most strenuous work outs. By all means, if you feel done on the first two sets, stop. I never, ever go to failure. It teaches your nervous system bad things and poor form. And, your muscle is too exhausted to benefit; it can't produce enough force to do any good.

I checked my blood pressure after this work out. My pulse was up a bit (post exercise metabolism, which is good), but my blood pressure was nice and low. If your blood pressure is significantly raised, then do less.

« Close It

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (6)

The New Government Food Pyramid

There it is. We have been waiting breathlessly for the latest government food pyramid. In my opinion it is still wrong, even though there are modest improvements, such as the addition of activity. There is still no warning as to total intake, only the proportions are shown and these are far off by any reckoning of the evolutionary record.

A better pyramid is the California Cuisine Pyramid, developed at UCLA and now featured by the Avocado Growers Association.

This diet is closer to the evolutionary experience, with 60% carbohydrate, 20% protein, and 20% fat. It has a high antioxidant/phytochemical content and enough fat and protein to approximate the Paleolithic diet. The fats are biased more to the Omega 3 than the Omega 6 group, which is helpful in reducing inflammation (the antioxidants help too), a stealthy killer.

My own diet is a bit like a Paleo Mediterranean/California Cusine diet. Just removing the grains, milk and cheese, and added sugars from the California Cuisine diet comes pretty close.

By dropping the grains, you will shift the Ph balance of your food from acidic (grains contain a lot of phytic acid) toward a more neutral and even slightly alkaline state. This will permit better mineral metabolism, adding density to your skeletal mass; it will also help your kids grow properly.

Grains were a major factor in the rickets epidemic in Great Britain which caused developmental problems with the poor children of the Industrial Revolution --- stunted growth, bowed legs, sunken nasal and upper jaw area of the face, bad teeth, and club feet were all symptoms of too little calcium, zinc, and deficient protein in the diet of children fed a grain diet.

In our modern times, excess grain intake, acidic coffee, and phosphoric acid from soft drinks seem to be factors in the loss of bone mass that begins as we grow older. All these induce an acidic condition that the body buffers by using bone calcium as an antacid.

I don't think it is appropriate for government agencies to get into nutritional guidance. I know that is a strong statement, but my reasons are: 1. the incentives are not quite right, 2. science is not done by consensus as these recommendations must be, and 3. when errors are made, and this revised pyramid is partly a recognition of previous error but with no acknowledgement of error, it is hard for the agencies to admit error or even move far from previous recommendations. To do so undermines their credibility which they have a stronger incentive to avoid than to correct their errors to limit the harm they do.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (2)

Post exercise drinks

April 22, 2005 01:05 PM

Here is a bit of evidence on the value of high carbohydrate drinks (gainer drinks). I have already noted that these drinks are unnecessary and undesirable. Here is an abstract of a little experiment from the journal Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise that finds that high CHO drinks alter mood and focus.

The effects they note in the study are consistent with a form of post high CHO ingestion "bonking." This is a fast rise in blood glucose after the drink followed by a burst of insulin which causes a sharp decline in blood glucose. Hence the altered mood and brain function. A brain deprived of glucose by the strong insulin response to a high glycemic dose is not a brain that functions well. The irony is that the period after a work out is a time that your blood pressure drops and you feel good. A big dose of high glycemic starch and or sugar destroys this and leaves you feeling worse. Refer to my earlier posts on post-work out drinks for more on this.

POST-EXERCISE CHO DRINKS MIGHT HAVE ADVERSE PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECTS

Bloomer, R. J., Baldewicz, I. I., Keller, H. A., Vukovich, M. D., & Sforzo, G. A. (2000). Alterations in mood following acute post-exercise feeding with variance in macronutrient mix. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, 32(5), Supplement abstract 121.

The role of post-exercise feeding patterns on mood state were investigated in resistance-trained men (N = 10). Two to four hours following a standardized exercise routine, Ss were given: whole food (35 g protein, 75 g CHO, 7 g fat), a supplemental drink, an isocaloric CHO beverage, or a placebo. The POMS was used to measure mood states.

Results suggested that excessive liquid CHO consumption following resistance exercise night cause acute feelings of fatigue, irritability, and mental dullness.

Implication. Following resistance exercise, the consumption of a balanced mixed meal might be psychologically more beneficial than a CHO drink.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (1)

Stars and Bombs

So many people seem to believe that stars can make a movie open big that I used to have to remind my class that they can also make a movie bomb. The bombs go off often, but people somehow cling to their belief in stars. So I often used a little gag to make my point.

I would ask them if they heard about the bomb scare yesterday in Santa Monica. Then I would say don't worry it just turned out to be the opening of Madonna's latest movie.

The formula was general however. You could substitute many names in place of Madonna's and, eventually, nearly all the big stars would fit the formula. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mariah Carey, Ben Affleck, even Tom Cruise eventually fall victim to the bomb. It even works for lizards like Godzilla and other large creatures such as The Hulk.

The general rule is: A bad movie with a big star bombs faster than anything else. Explanations may be found in my Hollywood Economics, but by now you knew that.

LINK · The Movie Business · Comments (4)

Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture

April 21, 2005 04:28 PM

This is the introduction of my chapter on the movies for the upcoming Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture. The Handbook series is edited by Ken Arrow and Mike Intrilligator (one of my old professors) and has developed a good reputation for authorative statements on the state of the art in economic research in various fields.

Arthur De Vany, "The Movies," in Victor Ginsburgh and David Throsby, eds. Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, North-Holland (forthcoming).

Abstract

This chapter is an overview of a new kind of economics of the movies; it also is my attempt to lay a new foundation of the economics of art and culture. The essence of cultural goods is that the are creative goods that have no natural limit on their consumption or dissemination; they are information goods. And they are wildly uncertain. I show how this vision may be implemented in a rigorous and insightful way in the study of the movies. A centerpiece of the analysis is the stable Paretian hypothesis and its usefulness as a model of motion picture revenues, costs, and returns. The industry’s organization, contracts, pricing, and compensation deals are also seen as rational adaptations to the uncertainty captured by the stable Paretian probability model.

The essence of the stable Paretian model is that the probabilities of motion picture outcomes are far from Normal. The tails of the stable Paretian distribution are “heavy” and large scale events are far more probable in a Paretian than in a Gaussian world. The large events far out on the probability tails dominate sample statistics. The variance is infinite and, for some variables, even the mean does not exist. Movie box office revenues, therefore, have no natural size or scale and there is no typical or average movie; each is unique unto itself. Revenue and cost dynamics are complex and expectations of cost or revenue at level X are proportional to X.

1 Introduction

The movie business is hard to understand. It defies conventional economic models on many levels. But, this is what makes it so interesting. I see the movie business as a laboratory for developing a new kind of economics of art and culture. It is an extraordinarily well-documented business, so there is a rich data base to be exploited by researchers. Where else can you follow a product from birth to death in a matter of weeks or months? Where else can you study the evolution of its revenues and market penetration in such detail? And for so many products. Studios get overnight reports of box office revenues. Weekly reports are available in industry trade publications, on internet sites, and on the evening news.

There are at least three proprietary data sources where the researcher can follow statistics on a weekly or annual basis. And these data sources go back for years. Detailed filmographies exist of casts, producers, and directors for virtually every film ever released in North America. Because screen credits are so important in the movies, filmographies are highly accurate. Their accuracy is insured because craft unions have elaborate criteria for awarding screen credits. Where else can you find so widely distributed such a careful documentation of creative work and rigorous delineation of creative credits?

The industry requires all this information about box office returns and reputation in order to solve the many vexing problems the industry faces. I think the first order of business for research is to recognize that the movies are an information industry, arguably the first of the twentieth century. The industry produces information, for all that a film really is, and it lives on it. Without this elaborate reporting of film revenues and reputations, the industry could not function. The reporting is required because nobody knows what a film will gross so the industry has to have in place the instruments to adapt flexibly adjusting prices and supply to demand when the audience reveals it. Reputation is crucial when artists and creative inputs are hired for short periods of time and each can become the critical input at some stage of production.

Movies are one-off products that only go around once. You do not know if you
will like a movie until you see it. If you like it, you tell your friends about it. This
simple act of sharing information leaves no less of the movie for you to enjoy and may even increase your pleasure. This means information can be multiplied.
If information can be multiplied, motion pictures will have increasing returns.
Movies that have many viewers will grow more rapidly than movies that have few
viewers. The supply of theater seats is perfectly elastic because the run can be
extended to increase supply until it equals demand. This means box office revenue is just a number, with no natural limit or scale. It turns out that scale-free distributions capture the statistics of movies with high fidelity. Because information does not obey the usual laws of production, the statistics of the movies are rather strange: distributions of variables are sharply peaked and skewed, with a long tail to the right. They are scale-free and high on kurtosis.

The need to manage and adapt to information leads to interesting business practices and contracts. The industry is filled with colorful phrases and unusual contracting practices like “four-walling”, “road shows”, “pay or play”, “house nut”, “legs”, “blind-selling”, and “block-booking”. It is an extremely hierarchical business, with a few movies, stars and directors standing far above the rest in box office grosses. It is frighteningly risky, yet the rate of return is low. Most movies lose money and a handful make nearly all the profit the industry earns.

Movies are produced in a novel way too. Producers assemble temporary teams
from a large pool of artists and craftsmen to make movies. These production teams live only for the duration of the project and disband when the movie is finished. At any point in time, just a few people in the industry are actually working. But, a few well-connected actors and directors are very busy and they make most of the movies that dominate box office revenues.

Most movies take several years to produce. There are many pitfalls along the
way and the final product is nothing more than a few reels of celluloid. All its
production costs are sunk by the time a movie is finished and ready to be released. They may not be recoverable and a finished movie might never get a chance to be seen on a theater screen.

Cost is notoriously difficult to forecast and some movies famously go far over budget. A studio can go broke if it goes just one year without a hit. And movies are financed in unusual ways.

These are hard problems, but the hardest one of all is that nobody really knows
how much a movie will gross at the box office. If people in the industry did know, there would be no need for its strange practices and they would disappear. It is because “nobody knows” that the movie industry is so fascinating and so different from dentistry or warehousing. It does have analogues though in other creative activities that deal in information such as publishing, music, stage, and patents. The emphasis on complex dynamics and their statistical basin of attraction that has been the basis of a good deal of the work on the movies reviewed in this chapter would appear to have a profitable use in other industries.

“Nobody knows” is the core problem of the movie business. This is the problem
almost all of the industry’s colorful and strange practices, contracts and business organization are designed to solve. It is the source of its preoccupation with rank and power and relationships. It elevates “the deal” to its mythical status in the industry.

In this chapter, I shall try to use the ideas of sequential contracting and uncertainty in cost and revenue to explain the movie business. In the process, I will review some of the literature on the movies, but my intention is to reveal what light these concepts shed on these issues rather than to survey the literature.

There are three bodies of research on the movie business; the old, the new, and what I call the new-new. The old research came out of the decade of the antitrust litigation that eventually led to the dissolution of the great studios (and to much antitrust involvement in the movie business in other countries beyond the United States). The approach was to apply conventional antitrust economics to the industry, seeing virtually all its hard-to-fathom practices as attempts to exploit market power. This research is exemplified by Michael Conant’s (1960) book, by the testimony in the Paramount litigation (Federal Trade Commission, 1965 or the more recent book by Litman, 1990). The bulk of this research did not see the movie business as an information industry and by incorrectly applying models suited to industrial products to this new industry they failed to see the efficiency of the industry’s contracts and institutions. This research often confuses demand with supply, as when Seagrave (1997) says that Hollywood “dominates” the world’s movie screens. Large openings may temporarily dominate theater screens, but that is supply, not demand. If demand does not fill seats, theaters quickly drop a film for something more promising.

The old motion picture research has been tested and found wanting. In a detailed analysis of the Paramount charges, De Vany and Eckert (1991) showed that the industry’s organization and contracts were clever and necessary adaptations to the nobody knows principle. De Vany and McMillan (2004) used stock market prices to show that the forced divestment of theaters by the studios was a major financial blow to the industry and that the pattern of losses among firms was inconsistent with the idea that the industry had functioned as an implicit price-fixing cartel (the primary basis of the court’s judgment). De Vany and Lee (2001) have shown that market shares are wildly volatile and unstable and that the industry is concentrated, as all information industries are, but the players at the top turnover at a high rate.

The new motion picture research is a modern variant of the old. A number
of researchers have been drawn to study the industry (which is good), but have
brought with them tools that are, essentially, game-theoretic versions of the old
models. Papers have appeared that model the choice of opening date as a strategic game among studios, entry and exit decisions of theaters are modeled as a location game, and rental price differentials among theaters have been described as (centralized) price discrimination (when they are determined in a completely decentralized fashion by the audience under the terms of the exhibition license).

There is, of course, an element of truth in each of these points of view; studios
do try to avoid opening against a blockbuster. But, no one knows half of what the models posit of the agents, which is more a criticism of the large information requirements of standard models than of the research. Say, for example, you move your opening two weeks later to avoid going against Titanic only to find that Titanic is just getting its legs and completely flattens your movie. The models (at least those I have seen) do not correctly portray the uncertainty the agents face, and it can be shown that models that are faithful to the complexity of the problem are computationally intractable. I think the nobody knows principle cuts sharply against this line of research. But, this is good for economics and will eventually lead to progress.

The motion picture industry challenges equilibrium models and existing mathematics in fundamental ways that will require a new kind of modeling. The highly decentralized and adaptive mechanisms employed by the industry are difficult to model in the centralized, strategic mindset typical of optimizing models. I believe capturing the “wild” uncertainty and adaptive decision processes of creative industries provides a more rigorous and insightful basis or a new-new economics.

By bringing the “wild” uncertainty of creative enterprises to the forefront, the work I report on here lays a foundation for a New Economics of Art and Culture.

A hint of the formidable challenge of understanding “wild” uncertainty in motion
pictures and the way the movie business relies on adaptive and decentralized
mechanisms is developed in work I and colleagues have been doing. This work
is a continuation of ideas originally developed by Mandelbrot (1963) and Simon
(1955). The key ideas are that production is sequential and that there is a “wild”
kind of uncertainty in cost. Motion picture revenue (nobody knows) unfolds during the run in a complex and recursive dynamic that can “go anywhere,” but the dynamics converge on a statistical attractor, the L´evy stable distributions with “heavy” (non-Gaussian) tails. These properties set the information discovery and contracting problems that are at the core of the industry’s structure, contracts, and organization.

This research is statistical in nature, emphasizing the complexity of motion
picture revenue and cost dynamics and their basins of attraction. It is focused
on a characterization of the sources and nature of the uncertainty which is then
used to discover the problems to which the industry’s organization, contracts, and practices must be adapted. This line of inquiry was originated by De Vany and Eckert (1991) and pinned down by De Vany and Walls (1996) and famously named the “nobody knows” principle by Richard Caves (2000) in his Creative Industries (after screenwriter William Goldman’s line “With all due respect, nobody knows anything.” in his Adventures in the Screen Trade, 1983). Cassey Lee’s doctoral dissertation (Lee, 1999) was one of the first explorations of the stable Paretian hypothesis in motion pictures, which lies at the core of this line of work. Other papers have appeared in this vein recently by Chris Hand (2001), Collins, Hand, and Snell (2003), and Jordi McKensie (2003). John Sedgewick’s (2001) book on British filmgoing during the 1930’s is also very much in this vein. This is the line of research I shall emphasize in this chapter because I believe it is foundational to the development of a New Economics of Art and Culture.

In Section 2 I begin with a discussion of the essential economics of the business.
This is Movie Economics 101 and its aim is to identify the main issues that
confront the business and show how they are solved; you will see that the movie
business shares many features and practices of other creative industries for they
are all information industries. Following this, in Section 3, I apply these ideas to
a brief historical analysis of the movie business. The purpose here is to show how the industry’s methods of production, its structure and regional distribution, and its exotic contracts and practices evolved historically as solutions to many of its more vexing problems. You will see that the judges and lawyers relied on concepts more suited to toasters and bricks than to one of the first information industries— the movies. In this section, I also cover the Paramount antitrust cases and show how the courts reshaped this nascent information industry in the mode of the old economics of antitrust.

Section 4 covers the graduate level course in movie economics. It begins with
the laws of the box office and with a discussion of the L´evy stable distribution.
(Since we will often be interested in the upper of lower tails of this distribution
and these tails are Pareto distributions, I shall freely interchange the terms stable Paretian distribution and L´evy stable distribution, letting the context indicate if the tail or whole distribution is at issue.) The laws of the box office are those of a winner-takes-all contest. The laws are driven by a non-linear information dynamic that takes movies that are close to one another and propels them apart at exponential speed. Under the influence of these recursive and non-linear processes, movie revenues can “go anywhere.” They may even be chaotic.

The extreme skew of the revenue distribution, the influence of extreme events, and the unstable and non- finite moments provide a rigorous basis for the nobody knows principle. I show that the stable Paretian model captures with high fidelity all the essential features of the statistics of the business. I use the concept of statistical self-similarity to show the importance of extreme events in all facets of the industry from film revenues to budgets, productivity, pay, and careers. The influence of marketing and stars and the opening are discussed here in terms of the non-linearity of the revenue dynamics of motion picture information. In this section I show how pay keys on extreme events and I reveal the laws of stardom.

Other topics taken up in the graduate course are the structure of the industry
implied by the stable Paretian hypothesis and the evidence for it, the pricing of
talent, and the many decision problems that are engendered by the wild statistics of the movies. I introduce the concept of stochastic industry structure and use it to show that concentration measures are not well-founded in this industry. I show the industry is stochastically concentrated, but intensely competitive. Leaders turn over at a high rate and the Hershman-Hirfindahl index, a gold standard for antitrust, does not even exist. Then I discuss the difficulties of making decisions in a business where the probabilities are non-Gaussian and confound expectations.

The stable Paretian probabilities lie somewhere between risk and uncertainty and they lead to many decision errors. I explain the “curse of the superstar”, the “angel’s nightmare”, the “sure thing principle”, and the “producer’s curse” as examples of the many decision paradoxes faced by movie makers. In Section 5, I reach some conclusions.

Naturally, this chapter is a somewhat personal view of the business and what
I think is interesting and important about it. Much of the material draws on my
research in many articles and from my book Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry. This is not a review of research. Rather it is an exposition of a modeling strategy and a research agenda that I have found to be productive and informative. In my own work on this industry I have found that all the complexity of economics can be found there and there is much to explain that stretches the boundaries of current economic theory.

Much of economics focuses on averages, expectations, and standard deviations.
Economists focus so intently on these measures that they often toss out “outliers” to eliminate their influence. This might be right for toasters or trousers, but the movies are not like that. The statistics of the movies are “wild” and utterly non- Gaussian. The outliers are the main event, not something to be tossed out, and averages are just numbers signifying nothing. Motion picture revenues are just a number—pure information—and have no natural scale or limit. Expectations and higher moments of the distribution need not even exist.

One of the key lessons of trying to do science in such a non-standard industry is that we have to take the focus away from explaining particular events (why movie A did well and B did not) to undertanding process and pattern; the ultimate object of a science of the movies is the probability distribution and the dynamic process that produces it.

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Follow Up to "Water Bottles,..."

April 19, 2005 09:39 AM

To follow up on my post on the overzealous promotion and consumption of water.

Your thirst over the course of a day, not within a brief span of hard work, is an excellent guide to your water requirements. Research in the Journal of Physiology shows that you don't need the 8 glasses of water "authorities" recommend (a lot of this advice comes from bottled water and sports drink manufacturers).

You need water when you are thirsty. Just realize that your thirst is a bit slow to come on line when you are doing hard work. You can anticipate this effect by sipping before you become thirsty if you are on a long hike or working in hot weather. Even then, there is little risk your body will fail to become thirsty in time to keep your water balance. How could it be otherwise when our ancestors survived the African Savanna for millions of years?

A bit of evolutionary reasoning tells us: 1. that thirst is an adaptive mechanism evolved over thousands of generations of humans; it can't be all that wrong. 2. the urgency of thirst is compelling, another evolved adaptation that keeps us from ignoring this important signal. 3. humans are the only carnivore that can operate at high daytime temperatures; wild cats can't because they lack the thermoregulatory system and sweating systems of humans. This adaptation gave humans a niche in which to operate where there was less competition from other, lethal (to us) carnivores. 4. watering places were dangerous; prey (including other humans) attracted carnivores, so it would have been maladaptive for humans to have required water on a continuous basis, as some trainers practice and recommend for their clients. To do so would have entailed continuous exposure to carnivores. 5. hunter gatherers obain a good deal of their water from their consumption of plant food as well as the blood of prey. Similarly, we modern humans get a lot of it in our food. I hope this makes clear the need to think beyond proximate or mechanism-based explanations (you get thirsty to manage your water balance) to evolutionary explanations that give a deeper understanding of why the proximate mechanism evolved and how it works in a broader scheme.

Unlike your hunger mechanisms, which go awry at the low energy flux sedentary individuals live at, your thirst mechanism is pretty much spot on. There are some individuals whose sense of thirst is over-developed even to the point of craving water well beyond physiological requirements. This "water intoxication" may stem from constant water binging.

You need water when you feel thirsty and not otherwise. Excess water bloats you and is hard on the kidneys. Water does help to cleanse the kidneys, but too much puts a burden on them. When you carry extra water you carry extra weight (which slows you down and increases your work rate), you dilute the minerals in your blood which changes the chemical gradient across cell membranes (intefering with metabolism and thermal control), and your blood volume can rise to a level that stresses your heart. Exess blood volume builds up in the circulatory system and leaks through the vessels into the interstices of the body (the same thing that happens with congestive heart failure).

I could go on, but a more general point is lurking here. A lot of fitness advice is just repeated rather than thought through and it is probably true that most manufacturers go beyond the pale in marketing their products.

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"Rocket Science" comes to baseball and the movies

April 17, 2005 09:39 AM

Remember when so-called "Rocket Science" came to Wall Street? What that meant, then and now, is the use of modern statistical analysis of the performance of stocks along with the use of modern portfolio theory to find and exploit arbitrage opportunities. This meant that a stock could be priced or valued by the prices of other stocks that could replicate its performance characteristics (mean and standard deviation).

The quite wonderful book Moneyball by Michael Lewis brings this kind of analysis to baseball, showing how the Okland As could put championship teams on the field of dreams with a payroll that was a fraction of the payrolls of teams they regularly beat. How could they do this? By looking at the historical performance of players, not their appearance and by disregarding the personal perceptions of baseball scouts of the player's potential. The As drafted and signed players whose on-base percentages (hitting and walks) were high, even if their "underpants were too large" and they didn't look the way scouts thought a baseball player should look. They would rather sign the "God of the walks" than a player who was physically more gifted, but undisciplined at the plate. It was the performance, based on sound statistical evidence, that ruled, not perceptions and imagining what a player might become.

The similarity of Moneyball to my Hollywood Economics is almost eery. Of course, my book is all about the performance of actors, directors, and movies, not the personalities of studio heads and marketing directors. And, I hasten to add that historical performance is far less reliable than in baseball because a movie is a one-off, novel product that involves many elements and performances, not just who the leading star is or how she/he performs in the role.

Where the two books come out the same way is in showing how the "insider" point of view is wrong. And these false beliefs create opportunities for arbitrage. The As exploited these opportunities and fielded great teams for little money. The arbitrage possibilities are there in the movies too, particularly in the ratings category; Hollywood has consistently over-produced R-rated movies and under-produced G-rated movies. (There is some recent movement on this arbitrage front. Finally.)

The cherished beliefs of baseball scouts and studio personnel are wrong. In both cases, they are anchored on story-telling about what this player or movie might become (another Willie Mays or another Forrest Gump), rather than the reality in the outside world. The reality as expressed in the statistics is that most movies will perform poorly, that a few will earn nearly all the returns, and that the historical average of movies of similar "type" is unstable and fails to predict performance. In short, "nobody knows anything" because the statistics are wild, with a non-stationary average and an infinite variance.

Hollywood thinks it is doing "Rocket Science" by using simple statistical models to try to predict movie revenues, but these models fail to match reality, are never tested, and place too much weight on stars and marketing. They engender a false security and confidence in "formulas" for good movies. Paradoxically, Hollywood would make better movies if it did not try to make them according to their formula. If you make a really good movie, people will find it. As in baseball, if you play a good game, they will come.

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Follow Up to "Food in America"

April 15, 2005 08:47 PM

This is a followup to my earlier post about my wife's stay in the hospital and our ensuing battle with the ADA (American Diabetes Association) diet guidelines. She is out now and during her 9 day stay she gained 7 pounds. This is a prodigious gain for her; she has had a stable weight for many years. If you saw the earlier comment you will know that the ADA diet raised her blood sugar and we had to increase her insulin to manage the starcy and high glycemic index foods she was given. (The ADA recommends this diet because many Type 2 diabetics have trouble metabolizing fat, but that is because they are too fat to begin with and, thus, have a large pool of triglycerides floating in their blood stream.) The quantities she was given were very large as well. She chose to eat far less than the hospital gave her and to choose as carefully as she could from the foods offered.

This was not enough. What happened, and happens to many people with diabetes, is that she had to increase her insulin to cover the carbohydrate in her meals. As a result, she had to eat more later to avoid an insulin reaction from the insulin load. She was chasing her food with insulin to keep her blood glucose within a healthy range. Insulin directs nutrients to muscle and then to fat if the muscle is already full of glycogen. So she put on fat at a high rate. She put on more than 7 pounds of fat because even though her body weight only increased 7 pounds, her confinement caused her to lose muscle mass.

There is a large lesson here for people struggling with their weight. Your body goes through the same sequence even if you are not diabetic. Since my wife is a Type 1 diabetic she does not produce insulin and we had to "cover" the unhealthful food she was given with more and larger insulin injections. In a non-diabetic, high glycemic and starchy food produces higher insulin levels automatically as the body tries to cope with the carbohydrate load. This does two important things: 1. it causes your blood sugar to fall and makes you hungry and a bit foggy or irritable, 2. it preferentially directs the energy you eat into fat rather than muscle and organs because they become resistant to the insulin signal.

It is a prescription for weight gain and one many people live on because of the food they eat and their lack of insulin sensitivity from too much starchy food and too little activity.

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Water Bottles, Sports Drinks, and Ancient Tastes

April 14, 2005 04:19 PM

Don't carry a water bottle when you work out. It slows you down and you won't work out hard enough and quickly enough. This means the stress will not be optimal and you fail to trigger the hormone drives that bring change. The most important of these is growth hormone. If you need a drink, walk to the water fountain, better yet, don't have a drink until the workout is over. The bottled water is only filtered tap water anyway and differs little if at all from the water in the fountain. You slow others up because you tie up equipment and benches when you lay your water bottle down. You want to be a bit thirsty because thirst is a slight stressor that will cause a growth hormone release; slight dehydration is a strong growth hormone releaser.

The point of the work out is to stress your body and initiate an adaptive response. The drink will lower your core temperature when you want to elevate it to promote growth hormone. Another reason is to spare the environment. All those plastic bottles that so many people drink their water from now end up in landfills and the rate at which this is happening has accelerated now that people seem not to trust the water supply (for some good reasons in some parts of the country and with some water supply systems). Lastly, if you are carrying a quart or gallon of water with you in one of those cloudy plastic bottles, you are ingesting compounds used in manufacturing these bottles which resides in pores of the plastic. You are also ingesting minute particles of plastic which research indicates may mimic your body's natural hormones. When the particle docks in a hormone receptor site, the real hormone can't dock there and do its job. In a work out of 30 to 40 minutes you can't sweat enough to become dehydrated.

This water bottle trend started a few years ago, partly perhaps as a response to the declining quality of water in the United States. Some of it may be show as it seems to be trendy and hip to carry a bottle, as though this indicates the carrier is serious and knowledgeable. Part of the explanation may be advertising. Every sports drink out there advertizes heavily that you must "rehydrate" after a work out. Few individuals work out so hard and for so long that they have more than a slight need to rehydrate and this is easily done on two extra glasses of water.

Since muscle is 70% water, some body builders believe that if they overconsume water they will gain muscle more rapidly. I have been around gyms for so long that I can remember when body builders began carrying around those gallon containers of water during a work out. One used to carry and consume a gallon of milk during workouts (and this was one of several reasons he could never get ripped and always looked rather smooth). I can only speculate that some writer for a body builder magazine found a story in the point that muscle is 70% water and a few body builders saw it and began drinking lots of water during workouts and a pattern developed. Of course, body builders do so much volume of work and their work outs take so long that they may need a drink or two to get through the work.

Evolutionary Fitness followers have no such need since their work outs do not exceed 40 minutes. Hold all your drinks until after the work out and then consume only water until your next meal (which should be breakfast). After the work out do not drink sports drinks or "gainer" drinks and do not consume any powdered protein supplements or protein bars. The best thing to do after a work out is to take a 40 minute walk. During this walk you will burn fat because you have released growth hormone and your body is using free fatty acids to restore the phosphates and glycogen in your muscles. If you block that process by consuming anything that contains simple carbohydrate (and all the items I mentioned above do) you will shut down this fat burning process.

There is more. You are slightly insulin resistant after a work out because growth hormone is an antagonist of insulin. Hence, any glucose that makes it into your blood stream will not be well-controlled and you will have excessive blood glucose, with all the consequences that this entails. It will be a mild form of elevated blood glucose, but it will be there nonetheless and it is to be avoided. Sports and gainer drinks are sold on the theory that exercise drains glycogen from the muscles and you must refill those stores. Nonsense. You want to drain the glycogen from your muscles, which you do through the glycolytic exercises that are part of the Evolutionary Fitness workout. One reason (and it may be the primary reason) people become insulin resistant and diabetic is because they never drain their muscles of glycogen and other energy stores. Muscle is the most insulin sensitive tissue in the body and you must have lots of it and drain it so that it retains its sensitivity and ability to soak up glucose from the blood stream. Replentishing muscle glycogen rapidly requires the ingestion of glucose in large doses. Once you compensate for the drained glycogen by refilling the muscle you lose the insulin sensitivity which the exercise produced. Athletes who supercompensate through carbohydrate loading to increase the glycogen content of their muscles, diminish their insulin sensitivity. Those who do no exercise have lower insulin sensitivity than more active individuals.

It is the progressive loss of insulin sensitivity that initiates the aging cascade. Aging becomes accelerated with diminishing insulin sensitivity as abdominal obesity begins to develop and glucose-triggered advanced glycation end products begin to accumulate. One of the main purposes of exercise is to enhance insulin sensitivity. When you ingest the gainer and replentishment drinks or attempt the supercompensation practiced by some endurance athletes (which was one of the things that started the pasta craze during the Berlin Olympics, a practice that has now been abandoned by elite athletes) you lose the sensitivity that was the objective of the exercise. You may even be worse off if you work out and practice compensation than had you just taken a walk.

The popularity of sports drinks and gainer protein supplements has a shred of physiology behind it and billions of dollars of commercial interest. These drinks and supplements rest on a reasonable physiological principle that is blown out of proportion into a vast business that has adverse health consequences. They destroy your insulin sensitivity and diminish the beneficial effects of exercise on sensitivity and total insulin action. They are also a source of excess calories that allows your growing insulin resistence to result in abdominal obesity over time. Sensitivity was one of the main objectives of the exercise in the first place. So, you nullify what is perhaps the most important benefit of the exercise. You definitely do not need the elevated blood glucose that comes from the many post work out drinks and bars that are sold out there.

Paradoxically, ingesting simple carbohydrates after a work out will cause an increase in your blood triglycerides (fats). This is because the growth hormone released by the work out releases fatty acids into the blood stream in preparation for using them as a source of energy to rebuild the muscle's energy stores and to fuel the clearance of damaged muscle cells. When blood glucose become elevated after the sports or other drink or bar, the body switches from using fat to using glucose, insulin is released in response to this and the effectiveness of growth hormone is diminished. The free fatty acids remain in suspension until the insulin response is strong enough to cause the fats to reesterfy and move back into adipose tissues. In the competition between fatty acids and glucose for scarce disposal pathways, glucose wins and the fat is left behind in the bloodstream where it can then precipitate onto the lining or enter the epythelium, with the help of insulin.

Another reason not to consume sports drinks is that they keep your sweet tooth alive and well. Sports drinks taste very sweet to someone like myself who consumes glucose so rarely that when I find it in a drink or food I am aware of it and find that it tastes peculiar and unpalatable. Small amounts of sugar produce a cloying taste response in me when they are not even noticed by others. Let's face it, every mass produced drink or manufactured food item has to be sweet in order to sell to the bulk of people whose food contains sugar in some form. They wouldn't sell if they didn't appeal to mass tastes that have already been conditioned to expect salt and sugar and fat. And it is an evolved adaptation to find glucose pleasant tasting. The brain lives on glucose for its energy and tastes evolved during a time when glucose was scarce. Take an energy-hungry brain that had to be protected during a time when glucose was scarce and you get a human animal with a strong preference for sweet substances.

So there is a natural, evolutionary basis for a liking of sweet substances. But, there is a cultural factor that has taken this to extremes. The American food supply is loaded with glucose and with starches that become glucose in seconds when digestion begins. People who are conditioned to American food, particularly in its manufactured form as frozen, canned, or pre-prepared foods or drinks, will not buy substances that do not taste pleasant. Pleasant to someone like this means with a lot of glucose or sweet tasting substitutes.

Mass-marketed foods and drinks appeal to our most basic preferences by offering too much of what was scarce and too little of what was abundant during the Paleolithic. American food is laden with fat. Fat was scarce in evolutionary times. Plants contain little fat and they formed the base of food in all but the Northern latitudes. Wild animals are lean because they expend large amounts of energy to forage for food and the foods they eat are low in energy per unit of mass. Our ancestors had to be skilled and lucky enough to have succeeding a hunting down game in order to get any fat. And even then they got very little. Only about 4% of the animal's weight was fat, barely enough to provide the conutrients required to metabolize the protein in the carcass and avoid protein poisoning. Every bit of fat in the animal was used in order to avoid protein poisoning; that is why brain and bone marrow were extracted and even fat in the feet and eye sockets was used. Without this fat there was too little carbohydrate in the plants to let the hunter successfully metabolize the protein content of the animal.

Chronic consumption of protein greater than 40% of total calories will result in ammonia poisoning from excess protein. So, modern humans love fat because this taste let their ancestors survive and food producers are anxious to fill this ancient taste to our detriment. Fiber on the other hand was abundant during the Paleolithic. Consequently, we don't care much for tough, fibrous plants which are the only sorts of plants one finds in this time period. Fibrous foods are hard to digest so their energy cost is high. Yet, they tend to be low in energy density. So, fibrous foods would have been far down the evolutionary menu in preferences. Yet, it was unavoidable in all plants, which were always the underlying nutritional fall back during lean times and seasonally.

The human colon is somewhat large relative to the stomach, which is suggestive of a fibrous diet. Hunter gatherers eat large amounts of fiber, about 400 grams a day. Modern humans do not. Even with urgings from every nutritional authority, Americans eat far less fiber than our ancestors and far less than medical research shows to be heathful. But, it all fits the strategy that would have kept a Paleolithic human alive: seek and eat foods that are dense in energy and metabolizable at low energy cost; avoid foods that are low in energy per unit and expensive to metabolize. These, of course, are vegetables. A sizable portion of the research the food industry funds is trying to change this by making vegetables and fruits that are sweeter and less fibrous. The more they succeed in raising the energy density and reducing the metabolic cost of fruits and vegetables, the more will public health suffer. Fiber speeds transit time through the gut and reduces the energy extracted from food. It slows the absorption of the carbohydrate in the plant. And it makes food heavy. Human appetite mechanisms seem to be geared to weight more than hunger or caloric intake. So, whatever reduces the weight of food and increases its energy density will be likely to contribute to excess energy intake.

Plants are important sources of minerals and phytochemicals. Abundant minerals and phytochemicals give plants strong tastes and may make them somewhat bitter. Again, since eating them was unavoidable, we did not evolve positive preferences for minerals and phytochemicals. Now, we avoid their strong tastes. When was the last time you had a brussel sprout? Modern versions of many vegetables are almost devoid of their original, strong flavors. With the loss of these flavors there is a loss of the nutrients, minerals, and biologically active substances that these strong tastes signal. Some gourmets ask, where is the flavor?, in response to the taming of American vegetables and the blanding of our foods in the store and restaurant.

The texture of our food is suffering as well as they become less fibrous. As we lose flavor and texture we also lose nutritional value. Our foods become more dense in energy and can be metabolized with less energy. Sweeter plants with less fiber elevate blood glucose and promote insulin resistance. The change in energy content relative to metabolic cost makes promotes a positive energy balance.

All these changes in American plant foods and meals promote weight gain and lower nutritional quality. Food in restaurants can be of excellent quality. But, there are few such restaurants. Most serve meals that are high in energy density because that is what our tastes demand. There is negligible fiber content in all fast foods and only a hint of it in the vegetables you may get in a good restaurant. The best meals feature quality and presentation, not quantity and energy density. Good meals contain fresh ingredients and a variety of vegetables with meat or sea food.

No quality meal, in my opinion, contains rice, potato, or pasta. If they do, they should be very small portions as a side dish in a meal primarily made up of vegetables with meat or seafood and fresh spices. Aroma and color are the signs of minerals and phytochemicals and good nutrition. Color is a sign of content in the plant food. Contrasting colors that are visually pleasing together are a signal of balance in nutritional content. Reds, greens, yellows and white of many hues are good signs of nutritional content and balance. A dominant color in American meals is the color of baked goods. The golden brown of a pie crust or pancake, muffin or toast is prominantly featured in the multicolor menus that chain restaurants use. This color is attractive to many people because they associate it with baked goods and sweet foods that are high in energy density. The color is the result of a chemical and thermal reaction that oxidizes the protein in the food. The combination of sugar and heat promote oxydation of the protein in the flour of the baked food item, an Amadori reaction that results in the production of what are called advanced glycation end products. This is the reaction that turns the baked bread crust brown and makes your toast brown and rigid. It is the same process that ages you internally when free radicals react with glucose and protein. The formation of these glycation end products is the result of too much glucose or oil and the free radicals under high temperature and they promote a more rapid pace of aging when they occur. The stiffening of your connective tissues is a result of this reaction forming cross bridges in the collagen of connective tissues and on the surface of muscle. The "browning" of proteins in your body accelerates the rate at which you age and become stiff, like your toast.

On the color menu in all of the popular chain restaurants, the brown color indicates that the food item contains the ingredients of the Amadori reaction---oil and or glucose and protein. The first two provide the free radicals to brown the latter. The brown color indicates the food was prepared in a way that forms free radicals, which baking and many forms of cooking do. Broiling or baking meat covered with oils also results in a browning. In this case, it is the fat that oxydizes and promotes the formation of free radicals that brown the meat. This would have been a good sign to our ancestors because browned meat is meat that has fat in it and, as we know, fat was an essential co-nutrient to the protein in meat. Game meats do not brown when they are roasted unless oils are basted on them. To brown turkey one must ladle butter or fat onto it. A steak with high fat content will brown readily when broiled.

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"Food" in America

April 12, 2005 02:10 PM

My wife is in the hospital right now where they put her on the ADA (American Diabetes Association) diet. She is diabetic, but she is the Type 1 or autoimmune type, not the far more common Type 2 diabetic. She is slender, not obese, and has an excellent fatty acid profile, unlike Type 2 diabetics whose circulating fatty acids are elevated by their large abdominal deposits of fat. The depot of fat keeps the blood-borne fats, particularly triglycerides, circulating in the blood at a very high level. Hence the serious problems these diabetics have with cardiovascular risk.

Few seem to know that fat is a very metabolically active tissue that secretes a number of hormones that make Type 2 diabetics more insulin resistant. The fatter you become, the more insulin resistant you become, which makes you fatter still around the waist, which makes you more insulin resistant, and so on.

Among the last tissues to become insulin resistant is the brain. But, given a sufficient level and duration of insulin resistance, the brain begins to suffer malnutrition because it resists the action of insulin, which should open the cells to nutrients. Accelerated senility is just one of the possible outcomes when the brain resists the entry of nutrients because it has become insulin resistant.

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Interview on Evolutionary Fitness with Robb Wolf of CrossFitNorCal

April 5, 2005 03:44 PM

This cover of the Economist is a take off on a famous Time magazine picture of man evolving. The Economist has it right; the active human genotype is not suited to the life many moderns live. What follows is the introduction to my interview with Robb Wolf. Robb studied with Loren Cordain, a physiologist well-known to those who adopt an evolutionary perspective to health and diet; he has communicated with me for some years. He is now affiliated with the CrossFit program (link below), a program that incorporates many elements of my own approach to fitness and one I heartily endorse.

Robb: Arthur De Vany is Professor Emeritus of Economics and Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He has conducted groundbreaking research in many areas of economics, but is perhaps most noted for his work concerning decentralized, nonlinear systems. Professor De Vany is an accomplished athlete with an extensive background that ranges from Olympic weightlifting to professional baseball. As early as 1995, Professor De Vany had synthesized a holistic approach to health and fitness that he called Evolutionary Fitness. Many people currently involved with the CrossFit community, including me, can trace their own fitness odyssey back to Professor De Vany’s Evolutionary Fitness. We are profoundly grateful to Professor De Vany for sharing with us his work and insights. Would you please elaborate on how you came to form your ideas about Evolutionary Fitness?

Art De Vany: Like most truly complex endeavors, it is hard to identify a turning point or a key inspiration or insight. There are so many intertwined layers of science, learning, experience and so many different fields involved that I don’t know at what point they came together. Nonetheless, key elements are my interests in complex systems (which was integral to my understanding of power law behavior and intermittency as components of human action) and my interest in evolution. My training as an economist was extremely helpful since it gave me the perspective required to understand how a decentralized system allocates scarce resources in the self-organized human physiology. My interests in genetics and cognition also came into play as it led me to appreciate the key role of gene expression and how diet and activity alter what the genes express. At the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, my true home for the last fifteen years of my career, I was surrounded by cognitive scientists, brain scientists, mathematicians, statisticians, geneticists, biologists, and information scientists. These all come into play in evolutionary fitness.

The whole interview is available in the (free) first issue of CrossFitNORCAL's new journal The Performance Menu: Journal of Nutrition and Athletic Excellence (great stuff). Go to their web site at: CROSSFITNORCAL

One of the best questions Robb asked was....

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Better Baseball through Better Chemistry?

April 2, 2005 04:32 PM

Not likely.

The steroid controversy in professional sports, and baseball in particular, seems far overblown. It is surely another way for Congress to compromise the choices individuals make and to gain attention. In the case of steriods, the wholly moderate effects are borne almost completely by the user and no one else. The only exception I can see is if a spouse may be harmed by the increased aggressiveness shown by heavy steroid users.

When scientific studies are done, it seems steriod use is modest among professional athletes (how Congress takes testimony from Jose Canseco and has no scientists speaking to the extent of use that can be documented says a lot about their agenda). Studies say that about 6% of athletes use them, others say far more, but they have only rumour and annecdote for evidence. Jose claims most pro baseball players use them. This seems false on the face of it.

If many pro athletes were using steroids and if the effects are so harmful as to warrant public outcry, then where is the evidence? Of the few documented effects of steroid use that are replicated (most show that effects are highly dose-dependent and individual), the one that is most reliable is an alteration of blood lipids: lower HDL and the same or higher LDL. This corresponds to an elevation of cardiovascular risk, but where are the heart attacks in MLB? None. The only ones that have any reliability are heart attacks among football players attempting to lose weight and taking ephedra and undergoing dehydration.

Body builders are more at risk from manipulating their insulin levels and becoming insulin-resistant in spite of their muscle mass and high activity than they are from steroids.

Should we change baseball records to have an asterisk for possibly steroid induced performance? Steroid users do not gain mass or lose fat unless they train hard. Even then the average muscle gain is 4 pounds and this is almost insignificant in large athletes who are already training and far above the average, and pitiful, muscle mass of American males. And speaking of asterisks, where are the asterisks to show records set with moderate travel schedules, shorter season and preseason, and mostly day ball to set off the older, easier times from today's hectic and stressful season for a modern player, with incessant travel and night games and 3 relievers per game?

I don't think anyone can seriously claim that pro baseball players have harmed their health or have increased their performance by anything more than modest levels by the (documented) limited use of steriods.

This is surely no public health matter, few are, and Congress is one of the least able modern institutions for addressing it. If it were not for the antiquated antitrust laws of our country, Congress would have little power in the matter. But, currently, baseball has an exemption from the antitrust law; one that I feel is proper since it is not a cartel, but a league of competing and cooperating teams, subject to much competition.

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