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PaleoGarden's Review of The New Evolution Diet
publication date: Dec 20, 2010
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author/source: Arthur De Vany
Zach Shelton just posted a review of The New Evolution Diet (in case you don't know the title yet) over at his great PaleoGarden site. Few others beside Zach could tie all the elements together this way because of his transformation through Evolutionary Fitness and his understanding of self-organized, decentralized systems operating far from equilibrium. Zach has done much more than write a review, he has recontructed some of the history of my work in evolutionary fitness and the way it ties into the themes now taken to be more-or-less standard in the growing paleo movement. I have a few comments about this review, not critical, just filling out the missing parts of his history of my research. The only thing not in his complete narrative is my "Why We Get Fat" paper (it is available here on my site). I really don't know now how I did that paper. I somehow solved the problem of modeling a forager's energy state in a complex, fractal landscape of prey and activity. At that time you could not find a fractal model in the optimal foraging literature, though there are now many papers on the movement of predators on the hunt that show they exhibit fractal movements. Fractal energy intake is still not understood, notably the concavity and convexity of weight gain and loss. All this was the basis for my "lazy overeater" theorem which still has not made into the paleo model. Conserving energy (not jogging around the camp site to expend it but using it to hunt and forage) and eating everything in sight as you rest after the exertions of the hunt is a necessary strategy in the fractal stochastic energy landscape of the Paleolithic. The lazy overeater strategy is a necessary, but not sufficient, solution to survival in the stochastic energy environment of our evolution (for any organism). Nor has the negative correlation between energy intake and expenditure made it into the "standard" Paleo model, though Nassim points to it in his Afterword to my book. Intermittent fasting and activity just fall right out of the model in my paper "Why We Get Fat". This mathematical discovery explains the energy management problems our metabolism had to solve in the Paleolithic setting. It seems to provide a basis for the emerging empirical studies that demonstrate the benefits of intermittent, power law variation in eating and exercise---it is what our genes evolved to cope with in order to keep us alive in the stochastic environment in which we emerged. The hormetic effects of acute, intermittent stress have been noted for years, and beneifts of intermittent fasting and exercise can now be seen as hormesis. [I see the title of my "Why We Get Fat" paper has now come up on the cover of Gary Taube's latest book, but it really starts with George Williams and Randall Nesse in their fine book on evolutionary medicine, Why We Get Sick. I wrote the final version of the paper for a UCLA conference honoring Randall Nesse.] The hard task in writing my book was to take this complex thinking, controversial then and still, and present it in an accessible and friendly way. With the help of my great editor, Bill Tonneli, I hope we have at least partly accomplished that. The nice thing about all this complex thinking is that it leads to really simple practices that anyone can do, if they let it happen. The hardest part is getting yourself out of the way. |