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Nassim Taleb

October 29, 2007 04:38 PM

Many of you know Nassim Taleb from my site and from other venues, particularly his fine books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan. He also was a Wall Street trader and the founder of the kurtosis fund Empirica.

He sent me this nice comment today "Of all the blogs I've read in the past couple of years, I can certify that yours has been the most consequential for me."

As for how he is doing on his version of Evolutionary Fitness, he says:

"I am at my best. I don't work out much anymore (I lift once a week on average) but cutting all carbs (outside of ancestral food) changed me. I am better condition than when I used to ride 100 miles a week.

Ciao,
Nassim"

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (1)

A WW TAco

October 27, 2007 01:11 PM

WW has Evolutionary Fitness meals down pat. This is chicken, various chiles, cabbage (red and white), and her secret ingredients. Too bad, it is only for me.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness ~ · Meals · Comments (7)

Food or exercise?

Given Robb Wolf's experience with many clients who train in his Cross Fit program, which I think is close to evolutionary patterns, I think it is instructive to see what has worked for his trainees. Quoting his (lightly edited) message:

...we need activities and foods that mimic those we are wired to do and eat. Which is more important, food or activity? Which actually leads weight loss? Taubes thesis, and I wholeheartedly support it, is that food is the larger factor here. I'd wager the only factor. The literature seems to support this and it is absolutely the truth in our training practice.

We can start nit-picking whether or not my clients are training in an evolutionarily smart manner but the fact is I can stratify our clients into a few categories:
1-only activity is with us.
2-some activity outside our training.
3-loads of activity outside our training.

Among ALL these folks, if they have a body fat issue it WILL NOT resolve unless they remove dense carb sources from the diet. It's an insulin issue. Like I said in my blog post, I wish this was not the case for the simple bodycomp shifts but in my experience this is absolutely the case.

This is NOT to be mistaken with general health improvements with exercise. There is no doubt about that, but that is not the question at hand. Much evidence exists that overweight people who exercise are healthier than those who do not. Smokers who exercise are healthier than those who do not. No arguments there. The question posed is: Does exercise contribute significantly to fat loss? I'd have to say no. Food is the larger factor.

If we look at the effects of exercise on things like hormone status it is a middling thing compared to insulin levels. Insulin potentially affects reproductive hormones, leptin hunger...the essence of life. It's not surprising food plays such a potent role.

My own experience is that food is a key factor. It is the foundation for metabolic health. But, it is far too complex to place a weight on food or activity. It is like trying to quantify factors that separate life in the wild from modern life.

Yet, I do not doubt Robb's basic point that without altering the eating patterns of athletes and other high volume trainers, they are unlikely to alter their body composition. After all, he has the data, which I would encourage him to spell out a bit more. The problem is that when people begin to train they start to take the supplements and adopt a strange eating mentality that may even make them fatter than when they began.

Nearly every body builder that one sees in the gym is too fat and that is because they drive their insulin levels with poor food intake. They are fat in spite of often heavy training (though of a non-optimal type and excessive). Many of the friends I have encouraged to follow Evolutionary Fitness began with changes in their eating and dropped large amounts of fat even without the exercise component. I can go long periods without gaining or losing weight or unfavorable changes in body composition without exercising.

Runners, cyclists, tennis players, football players, swimmers, and athletes of other sorts tend to eat poorly and have poor body composition relative to the optimum. In spite of their high activity, they carry too much fat because they rely so heavily on carbohydrates. Sports drinks, "replenishment" and "gainer" drinks, protein bars, carbo loading, and so on are far over-used in these sports and the consequences are excess body fat, particularly in the abdominal region. They also tend to obsess about eating often, which lessens insulin sensitivity. I doubt any of them would go a day or so without eating and many even get up during the night to eat for fear of going into negative nitrogen balance.

It is almost comical. So, of course, they can't lose fat with training. In fact, because they are training, they pursue these poor consumption choices and practices. And, training does make you more hungry, which seems to be something these athletes fear and work hard to avoid. So, all too often, beginning an exercise program sets many onto a deleterious, carb-laden way of eating. Or, they just eat more of the same poor diet that brought them into the training program in the first place. Recall all the athletes we have catalogued here over the past few years whose programs led them to become diabetics. It is an untold story of how many body builders and endurance athletes are diabetics or near-diabetics.

But, I think it is not productive to place weights on diet or exercise, that is far too narrow. We have to unwrap the mind set that associates training with high carbohydrate and protein intake and with incessant eating. The sports supplement industry has promoted this association to our detriment.

Think of what happens to a hunter-gatherer when they leave the traditional life and go to the city. Both their activity and their diets change. They quickly become diabetic or pre-diabetic, whether they are Australian aboriginals or Eskimo. In the bush or wild their diets differ dramatically, though their activities are equally demanding. This supports Yuneek's point. Yet, they share the same fate when they leave the bush for the city. They exchanged their evolutionarily adapted way of life for something very different. And, both suffer similarly. When they go back into the bush or tundra, they recover their health and strength. Which is the more important change? Their food or their activity? There is no answer because they are intertwined in metabolic networks and gene interactions that are far too complex to separate or assign degrees of "importance" to. And their living patterns are more closely matched to those of the environment with its variation and occasional bursts of drama. So, I say "live as though you were in the bush".

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (3)

Carbs drive insulin drives fat

October 25, 2007 10:25 AM

This article in New York Magazine by Gary Traub, the author of Good Calories, Bad Calories, is part good, part not so good. He fails to note that exercise increases insulin sensitivity and, therefore, reduces the amount of insulin circulating in the body, which, in turn, directs nutrients to muscle and organs rather than fat.

And, it turns out that well-prescribed exercise, in conjunction with diet, does reduce fat and increase lean muscle mass. The Washington University group has established that point convincingly. A further point is that at low energy expenditure the appetite mechanism has no resolution, as an evolutionary argument makes clear (see my Why We Get Fat under the research link). We fatten cattle by confining them and still they eat beyond their energy expenditure. At higher energy expenditure, appetite and energy expenditure are well-matched. We must "learn" the disconnect since, as children and infants, we are able closely to match intake and expenditure.

Still, the article might have been written by yours truly when it comes to the thermodynamics. I wonder if Taub reads my blog.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (8)

Evolutionary Fitness for 25 years

October 23, 2007 10:01 AM

Though I can't pinpoint just when I began Evolutionary Fitness, it was about 25 years ago. I added much along the way, but the intensity, brevity, variety, and eating style were there from near the beginning. The Power Law and elements of chaos and order came soon after and then the intermittent eating.

It has worked pretty well and I am OK at 70 years of age. I just did a physical and blood panel and had a long talk with my doctor. (He hasn't seen me in nearly 3 years.) I weighed 197 pounds, just what I did when I was 16 -- 20.

My metabolic panel is fine. My insulin is below the test limits of the lab, which is to say less than 2. (So is Wonder Woman's because we eat and exercise in a similar way, even though we pursue different kinds of exercise.)

My lipid profile puts me at zero cardiac risk: cholesterol at 200, triglycerides at 49 (the range is 55-149), HDL at 92 (above the range 40-75), VLDL 10 (low for the range 11-29), and LDL at 98. Cholesterol/HDL is 2.2. But, more importantly TRIG/HDL is 0.53. With a blood pressure of 118/70 my doctor says I will live to be 100.

The low TRIG comes from being lean, since most TRIG comes from one's own body fat. High HDL keeps blood vessels clear (and scans confirm this for me) and the very low VLDL assures that these easily oxidized particles cannot stick to lesions and become clots. Even if you worry about my total Cholesterol of 200, you shouldn't because the HDL is so high and I read the literature in a way that suggests TRIG/HDL is more informative. On this ratio, my tests are spectacular.

Testosterone is 660 (lab range 350-720), the highest the doctor has ever seen for someone 70, or even 60. This goes with the low insulin since insulin depresses testosterone production and also puts on fat that aromatizes testosterone into estrogen. Free testosterone is right in the range but on the low side at 78.4 (range 50-210).

In addition to low insulin and low body fat as contributors to high testosterone, I should mention sleep. I sleep well, which is important for GH and testosterone production. Both these are released in pulses or bursts that primarily occur during REM sleep or early morning.

I don't worry about the moderate free testosterone reading. It is well known that there is little evidence, other than theoretical reasoning, to suggest that free testosterone is biologically more active than bound testosterone. Bound testosterone is transported by sex hormone binding globulin, not inactivated by it. Moreover, it is known that the tests have serious errors (partly because the formulas are wrong and for other reasons). The gold standard is a dialysis form of test for free testosterone and this shows that the other tests may error by 400 percent.

In my reading of the literature (and according to two of my doctors who think the Mayo Clinic research points to total testosterone as the crucial variable), total testosterone is what counts. It seems to work for me as I have lost no bone density or muscle mass over the years. I see little change in energy as well.

For those who think genes are the answer I just want to point out that both my parents had high blood pressure, both had high Cholesterol, and my father died at 72 from a heart attack. My mother made it to 90. As I say, it is how you express your genes and that can be managed by eating and exercising the EF Way.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (2)

Michael Yon and mainstream media

You may not know that nearly all of my receipts from this web site for chapter sales went to Michael Yon to support his fine reporting. The rest went to families of soldiers killed or injured in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here is Michael at his finest Resistance is Futile showing the gap between mainstream reporting and what is going on in Iraq.

LINK · Uncertainty · Comments (3)

The disease network of obesity

October 20, 2007 12:08 PM

Have a look at the complex interaction of genes, friends, spouses and families in this network of diseases associate with obesity. Obesity is linked to 7 other diseases. Friends and spouses are to a significant degree proxies for diet, activity, and how we live life. The complex network of genes, behavior and metabolism is slowly being pieced together. It is not a pretty picture. Behavior and genes drive the metabolic network, which in turn, shape gene expression and behavior.

I think this picture strongly supports Evolutionary Fitness and its strategies. Stay lean and you stay out of this destructive network.

LINK · Complex Systems ~ · Evolutionary Fitness · Comments (0)

A Nobel in Economics I can agree with

Hurwicz, Maskin and Myerson do deserve the Nobel. Still, there is a good deal lacking in mechanism design: it is a stylized form of decentralization, too rooted in equilibrium, and does not allow arbitrage against inefficient incentive-based behavior. The "lemons" theory is not so strongly borne out by the evidence (see John Lott's Freeomnomics for many tests that show the theory fails because of the incentives that are created to solve the inefficiencies).

And, the agents are imbedded in a far more complex environment than the model permits. Still, by putting incentives and information at the center of economic (and human) activity, it advances economic analysis. In the old days at UCLA with Armen Alchian and Jack Hirshleifer, and a proper skepticism, as our guides we knew this, even though it did not have a name then.

LINK · Complex Systems ~ · Uncertainty · Comments (0)

Quants Get it Wrong too

A nice article from Technology Review showing that the quant models also fail. Imagine they didn't expect the variation to be as large as it turned out to be.

LINK · Complex Systems ~ · Uncertainty · Comments (2)

A nice summary of complexity and self-organization

This is one of the more readable and thorough explanations of self-organization Complexity and Self-Organization

The ideas are highly relevant to fitness and health, and life, as I have tried to show.

LINK · Complex Systems ~ · Evolutionary Fitness ~ · Uncertainty · Comments (1)

Cherry Garcia: Peter Huber's Thoughts on Socialized Medicine

October 15, 2007 01:02 PM

Peter Huber is one of my favorite writers and thinkers. I know him only from a few conversations and several of his books, Galileo's Revenge, and Hard Green. He is always fresh and analytical, being an MIT engineer and head of his own law firm.

In this Cherry Garcia and the End of Socialized Medicine he shows how complex modern "disease" is and how a one-size-fits-all socialized medical system of the kind being proposed by various politicians, would fail. Politicians are not thinkers, nor should we let them be social engineers. They see the world in an odd way. Better, they see an odd world that bears little resemblance to the world we live in.

How can socialized medicine cure people when it is individual biochemistry driven by a personal mixture of genes, diet, activity and disastrous living habits?

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness ~ · Uncertainty · Comments (1)

A 12 Year Old Boy on Evolutionary Fitness

October 13, 2007 09:47 AM

A father who is dedicated to his son's health and fitness contacted me. His son is a talented athlete and trains hard to be the best football player he can be. The father knows a lot about training (and reads the blog regularly) and uses the best techniques to help his son train. When the boy hit 12, he began to gain weight and slow down. His foot speed dropped and his weight increased. They were both a bit frustrated and asked me what they should do. From what they told me I could see that they were over training. The boy was also going through a growth spurt and needed more rest and variety. He wasn't eating right either.

Because he was over training, his nervous system was dulled or perhaps even exhausted. The fall off in his speed was as much from nervous system fatigue as from the weight gain. And the weight gain almost certainly was from the insulin resistance fostered by the high level of stress hormones induced by over training. He was snacking on chips and eating too late at night as well.

I advised them to drop most of the sprinting and plyometrics and do one hard down hill run a week. The overspeed training would stimulate the nervous system to maximize muscle recruitment and would train the FT fibers to fire more completely. It would also increase his stride frequency, the most important part of speed. More rest would regenerate his neural responsiveness. I also suggested some strength training, which they do using bands that are easy on the joints and promote nerve firing through isometric contraction.

On the diet side, I suggested pure Evolutionary Fitness eating. They stopped his late eating and he eats nothing after 8pm. The chips and potatoes are gone and he mostly eats meat, fruit, vegetables and nuts.

In about 5 weeks or so he went from 139 pounds to 127. His waist dropped from 31 to 27. His speed has improved significantly. He is starting to show "cuts" in his musculature. He is more energetic and has even taken up tennis in addition to his football.

I often tell people that over training is the route to becoming fat and slow. It may seem hard to believe, but only because people seem to subscribe to the "body as machine" theory of fitness. Over training is so easy to do, most people don't even know they are doing it. And modern fitness advice promotes over training. It is the primary cause of injury and resignation to a life of poor health and fitness after the injuries pile up. More is not better and routine training is joyless and lifeless.

The last group of marathoners and triathletes who came here for the Huntsman Senior Games looked haggard and injured. I was in the crowd when I registered for softball and I did not feel as though I was in a group of athletes at all. They just looked like a bunch of old people.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness ~ · Sports · Comments (2)

Weightlifting is Dangerous Too

October 2, 2007 06:06 PM

If I have talked a lot about the dangers of jogging, long distance cycling, and marathoning it is because they are so often held out as models for good health by the fitness industry and media. The danger is in doing these things when you have an undiagnosed heart condition. Beyond that there are the dangers of excessive oxidatitive damage and poor diet.

Weight lifting has similar dangers. If you have a pre-existing heart condition, it can be fatal to experience the sudden rise in blood pressure that is caused by a heavy lift, as this Cardiology article points out. I think it is important to not grimmace and grip too tightly as both raise your blood pressure when you lift a heavy weight. Nor do you want the sudden denial of blood to your heart when you hold your breath and pressurize the chest volume so high that the blood does not reach your heart.

I don't agree with either chronic running or chronic weight lifting and think there are far better models for health. You know that by now.

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Justice Clarence Thomas

I ordered Justice Thomas' book yesterday. It was number one on Amazon. If you can believe it OJ's book was number 12. That is the good and bad of it.

A reader alerted me to Rush Limbaugh's interview with Justice Thomas; I read the part about his younger brother dying while jogging. We know about the dangers of jogging.

I have read a few of the Justice's opinions and found them to be true to his statement about his writing and approach from the interview:

JUSTICE THOMAS: My role is to interpret the Constitution, when it's a constitutional case and a case or controversy. It's to interpret a statute. It is not to impose my policy views or my personal views on your Constitution, our Constitution, or on your laws. It's not my private preserve to work out these theories, and I guard very, very diligently against doing that. I think a part of being able to stay within the confines of that limited role, one has to be humble about one's -- a judge has to be humble about his -- own approach and what his capacities are. Before I start the term, and certainly in many, many cases, I had a little prayer that I used to say years ago when I was at EEOC: "Lord, grant me the wisdom to know what is right and the courage to do it." So I also think that, in addition to wisdom or humility, you need the courage to do what is right. If the answer is something that is difficult or that will lead to criticism, you still have to do it, if it's right. It's your oath. So that's, in a nutshell, my approach to the job.

He is inspiring.

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Comments on Comments

October 1, 2007 10:25 AM

It really is fun to see these intelligent and interesting comments on the last two posts. I should be doing something else right now, but will take a moment to go over them.

Home runs. The real straw man is the unfalsifiable hypothesis that Bonds and others "must have done or taken something" to do what they did. There is no amount of evidence that will make it false. I have looked and fail to find any evidence that steroids will prevent the end of season fatigue that the comment rightly points to as a possible factor. If there is some, I would like to see it. On the other hand, prolonged steroid use carries so many side effects that they might create their own problems. One, seldom pointed to, is the loss of mental discipline. This would be highly unproductive for a hitter. Bonds has never shown a loss of his remarkable plate discipline. My main point is that the statistics are so wild that no one has or is likely to find convincing evidence that the performance of Bonds, McGwire, Sosa and others is beyond the variation that is always there in the elite world of exeptional home run hitting. There is no norm as is posited by those who make the argument that they must have done something.

Walter's interesting comment prompted others pointing out he may be getting too few calories and that adaptation takes a couple of weeks. I also think that one huge meal a day is counterproductive; the surge of protein and carbohydrate, along with fat, is a shock to metabolism and kills insulin receptors by the score. Better to eat every other day, spread over several meals than to do this. And, be careful what kind of fruit you eat; most modern fruits are excessively sweet. I prefer melons of all kinds with splashes of other fruits only for variety and color, not as a main element of the meal.

The bonus was Chris H's posting of this link Ketogenic Diets and Physical Performance from Nutrition and Metabolism. Its creative commons license permits me to post the link and gives you access. The Innuit diet it discusses is not for me, but the controlled studies do show that the modern high carb diet for endurance athletes is over rated (and other evidence shows that it is harmful) and the low carb diet works just fine for real world endurance.

LINK · Evolutionary Fitness ~ · Sports · Comments (14)