The New Evolution Diet: What Our Paleolithic Ancestors Can Teach Us about Weight Loss, Fitness, and Aging - Softcover

De Vany, Arthur

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1609613767 ISBN 13: 9781609613761

Verlag: Harmony/Rodale/Convergent, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Believe it or not, our DNA is almost exactly the same as that of our ancestors. While scientific advances in agriculture, medicine, and technology have protected man, to some degree, from dangers such as starvation, illness, and exposure, the fact remains that our cave-dwelling cousins were considerably healthier than we are. Our paleolithic ancestors did not suffer from heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, or obesity. In fact, a good deal of what we view as normal aging is a modern condition that is more akin to disease than any natural state of growing older.


Our predecessors were incomparably better nourished than we are, and were incredibly physically fit. And certainly none of them ever craved a doughnut, let alone tasted one. In fact, the human preference for sweet tastes and fatty textures was developed in an environment where such treats were rare, and signaled dense, useful energy. This once-helpful adaptation is the downfall of many a dieter today. It's what makes it hard to resist fats and sweets, especially when they are all around us.
We are not living as we were built to live. Our genes were forged in an environment where activity was mandatory—you were active or you starved or were eaten. This created strong selective pressure for genes encoding a smart, physically adept individual capable of very high activity levels. Humans are among the most active of species, and we carry energetically expensive brains to boot. Our energy expenditures rank high among all animals. At least they once did.

The New Evolution Diet by Arthur De Vany, PhD is a roadmap back to the better health our ancestors once enjoyed. By eliminating modern foods, including carbohydrates, dairy, and all processed foods from our diets, we can undo much of the damage caused by our modern food environment. The plan is based on three simple principles:
1. Enjoy the pleasure of food and do not count or restrict calories. Eat three satisfying meals a day filled with non-starchy vegetables, fruits, and high-quality, lean proteins
2. Do not starve yourself, but do go hungry episodically, for brief periods, to promote a low fasting blood insulin level and increase metabolic fat-burning.
3. Exercise less, not more, but with more playfulness and intensity. The goal is to create a strong body with a high resting metabolism and a large physiologic capacity to move through life easily—not to burn calories.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Arthur DeVany, PhD is a Professor Emeritus of Economics at The University of California, Irvine and is the author of more than 100 scientific publications. He is the founder of Evolutionary Fitness and has appeared on PBS, ABC radio, NPR, and in the London Times, the New York Times, and other national media as an expert on the paleo lifestyle, and speaks at universities and conferences on the topic. DeVany has appeared on Fox and Friends, Nightline, and NPR, among others.

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CHAPTER 1

My Journey

It seems as though I have been researching this book all my life.

I began lifting weights and taking an interest in diet at the age of 14. As I have heard many others say, it all began in a garage with a 90-£d weight set. My gains came quickly, so at 16 I joined a gym operated by John Farbotnik, a former Mr. America. John's gym was a hangout for Olympic athletes from the Pasadena Athletic Club, and I wanted to be around them. I weighed 196 £ds at age 16 (almost 60 years later I weigh about the same) and began lifting in the demanding Olympic style because it was more athletic than what I had been doing.

I had hopes of playing professional baseball and felt that the speed and power I developed through weight training were what I needed to gain a competitive edge. It was a good move because few ballplayers then lifted, and it made me strong and quick. I signed a contract with the Hollywood Stars, a minor league team that was part of the Pittsburgh Pirates organization, right out of high school. But my eyesight and ambitions got the better of my baseball career. I went on to UCLA, where I got my Ph.D. in economics. After a few years working in think tanks, I became an academic so I could follow my own research interests.

I was primarily interested in studying what was not known in my field, which took me into the realm of complex systems, wild variations, and extreme events--the so-called black swans that author Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes about. This led me back to Hollywood, not to play baseball but to study the movie business and how it adapted to uncertainty. I didn't know it at the time, but this was excellent preparation for the study of metabolism. I wrote a book about the economics of Hollywood and settled into the University of California, Irvine Department of Economics and Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences for the last 20 years of my academic career.

My education in metabolism began the year I was a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, during the blizzard of '79. My youngest son, Brandon, had developed type 1 diabetes, probably from a viral infection that triggered a strong immune response. The doctors believed that my son's pancreas suffered collateral damage from the firepower his immune system aimed at the virus. When this happens, insulin secretion in the important beta cells of the pancreas stops or is severely depressed.

Only type 1 diabetics suffer this autoimmunity, for reasons that are still unclear. There is a genetic link--my wife, Bonnie, later developed diabetes, too--but something has to trigger the expression of the genes that cause this excessive response from the immune system. My guess is that both my wife and son had very active and aggressive immune systems, since they almost never got sick. In Brandon's and Bonnie's cases, their immune systems permanently altered their metabolisms.

Because I was an academic at heart, I responded to my son's medical crisis by going to the university bookstore. I bought books on diabetes and metabolism and a large textbook on endocrinology that I owned until a few months ago, when I donated it to the local library. I learned as much as I could about insulin and diabetes. Eventually, I knew enough to discuss these topics intelligently with Brandon's doctors, and even to engage them in friendly debate about various treatments and appropriate insulin injection doses.

Food was our most contentious topic. My son's doctors wanted him to eat cereal or pancakes with syrup and orange juice for breakfast, sandwiches or pasta for lunch with Jell-O for dessert, and beans or potatoes and low-fat meats for dinner. Carbs were friendly, the doctors maintained, and fat was the enemy. Doughnuts were fine and starches were healthy. The American Diabetes Association still recommends a relatively high-carb, low-saturated- fat diet some thirty years later.

But it was evident to me that my son was not eating the right foods. He was getting too much carbohydrate and injecting too much insulin to manage the load it imposed on his damaged metabolism. Each dose of carbohydrate had to be followed by an injection of insulin or his blood glucose would rise too high. But if we injected too much insulin, his glucose level would drop dangerously, and he would become jittery and angry. If this condition worsens, it can lead to unconsciousness and death. Brandon would sometimes even refuse to take a glucose tablet, a problem many diabetics experience as their blood glucose drops and they become emotional and stubborn. Their brains, in glucose crisis, descend into primitive behavior and lose control of rational decision making.

As you may know, insulin's job is to extract glucose (a form of sugar) from the bloodstream to store it for later use. But things go wrong when this hormone performs its task too well. It will actually withhold glucose from the bloodstream even when the brain is being denied this essential fuel and nears unconsciousness. The other hormones that can also mobilize energy are powerless to help. The brain in those instances could extract the glucose it needs from elsewhere in the body, mainly from the liver and muscle-- except that the insulin overrides the hormones (glucagon and cortisol) responsible for that task. Insulin is essential but also potentially dangerous; it is the instrument of choice in movies (and sometimes, in reality) when a doctor wants to murder his wife or a rogue nurse wants to kill patients.

I knew as an economist that it made no sense to try to manage blood glucose, which is a flow, with a storage hormone like insulin. Eating carbohydrates and then hoping to inject just the right amount of insulin to utilize the glucose was a crude, imprecise approach to disease management. It was bound to make my son gain excess weight, because safety required that he consume more sugar than he needed, lest his brain get too little glucose and go into shock.

Eventually, we got off the carbs-insulin seesaw. But not just yet.

My education in metabolism was furthered when my wife, Bonnie, also developed type 1 diabetes, 12 years after Brandon. We weren't sure why this happened, and neither were her doctors--type 2 diabetes is the form of the disease typically referred to as "adult-onset." My hunch was that she had been taking too much thyroid medicine, which stressed her metabolism to the breaking point. We had better tools for diabetics by then; meters had become simple and inexpensive, so we could measure her blood glucose more accurately than we could Brandon's when he was diagnosed.

Bonnie ate as her doctors suggested because she loved pasta, potatoes, pancakes, and bread. But injecting insulin to manage her starchy diet made her gain weight, too, and soon she was doing her best to balance between too little insulin and too much. We experienced many terrifying nights with Bonnie deep in insulin shock as I tried to get some glucose into her.

I began to examine Bonnie's testing numbers and correlate her blood glucose with her meals. I used my training in statistics to look for patterns in her readings; I wanted to see if I could find the triggers for her worst episodes of insulin shock and high glucose. I tried to determine which foods increased her blood glucose and how much insulin was necessary to bring it back down to a healthy level.

It soon became apparent that striving to keep blood glucose in a narrow range using insulin injections was counterproductive, even dangerous; this is a conclusion that current research also supports. It is now well recognized that tight glucose control improves a few markers of damage from hyperglycemia, but is associated with higher mortality. Both my wife and my son experienced too many episodes of low blood glucose that put them in or close to insulin shock. These ordeals were...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Harmony/Rodale/Convergent
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1609613767
• ISBN 13: 9781609613761
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 224
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland