If you’re going to talk about design, it sure helps to experience it.  A Ming-style wine cabinet I finished last week.

A series of articles have flown across my desk in the last two weeks, most involved with the role of social connection and general health.  They’re written by academics, and what’s so stunning is that the core mechanism of social connection, without really any disagreement, is developed empathy.  The scientists describe the phenomenon, but can barely utter the word.  Though the results confirm basically all the principles I talk about on this blog, it’s still amazing to me that the various researchers have difficulty with the connection.  But when you’re reporting out knowledge from a social structure that is essentially undeveloped with respect to empathy, it should serve as no surprise.  That’s what my Theory of Everything predicts.  Which, while potentially rewarding to my own ego, is fundamentally daunting.  We’ve all got to get this change thing going on.

Here’s a great example, from the Harvard Gazette.  Titled “Good genes are nice, but joy is better” , you’d expect to read something about individual emotional states.  But instead, not surprisingly, the entire piece is about connected relationships and how they contribute to longevity.  Here’s a pull quote:

“Good relationships don’t just protect our bodies; they protect our brains,” said Waldinger in his TED talk. “And those good relationships, they don’t have to be smooth all the time. Some of our octogenarian couples could bicker with each other day in and day out, but as long as they felt that they could really count on the other when the going got tough, those arguments didn’t take a toll on their memories.”

I’m not going to get lost in the psycho-social weeds with this piece, but the headline also indicates the level of empathetic development of the author.  Instead of talking about empathy, talking about joy would be the expected perspective of someone from a v-Meme where emotional empathy was front and center.

This week, I also watched another video that I CAN’T FIND AGAIN!  (ARRRGGHHH!) about social connection and longevity.  It too, backed up many of the points from the Harvard study — that social connection was very important.  But the main point of the video was not just that close, familial relationships mattered.  It was actually a rich bed of peripheral social relationships, and casual connections made during the day that really determined longevity and overall individual happiness.  It’s easy enough to find the scholarly papers to support this — see this summary in Science Daily.  This piece makes the “connection as mental exercise” argument that I make regarding how empathy exercises the brain.  Here’s another review article from the NIH that backs up this point.

Why do I keep bringing this up?  In many ways, these pieces, by moving past the notion that it’s “family uber alles”, which is a lower v-Meme, Externally Defined Relationship pattern, shows that empathetic exercise is the key, and as long as you get it, it doesn’t matter WHERE you get it.  You need to be part of a larger collective.  And if you don’t have a big family that takes care of you, then you can make your own safety net.

One more piece discussing social capital research done by the folks at UC Berkeley show a much more evolved view of social connection than the piece from Harvard.  Here’s a pull quote from that piece:

Helping seniors to stay engaged with their community and to continue to make positive contributions, according to James, is invaluable.  The health benefits of volunteerism are well documented, including its impact on increasing longevity, he says—but it’s even more powerful when your efforts give you a sense of purpose in life.

“People who have the strongest sense of purpose are much less likely to become depressed, have neuroticism, or get Alzheimer’s,” says James.

Vonda feels the same way. Her community has plans to keep themselves connected socially and actively involved with each other’s welfare, while still maintaining ties to their surrounding community. They will have a central community space open to other groups to use, and will be inviting seniors to teach each other new skills—like gardening or blacksmithing—that are useful to farm living.

“We plan to have people doing real work, instead of being taken to the mall or asking them to engage in invented, frivolous time-occupiers,” says Vonda.

What’s so awesome about this is we can also see the self-empathy, Performance v-Meme development mode start to surface.  Learning genuine competence, and sharing it with others, is really a key to lifelong development.

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Why does this matter for our larger future?  At the same time, the articles above were cascading through my information flow, this excellent piece came across my business feed — a critique of the establishment of Amazon Go.  Amazon Go is designed to eliminate the butcher, baker, and greengrocer from your life, while delivering to you with maximum efficiency the ostensibly algorithmically exact thing you think you need.  John Battelle lays it out exquisitely:

My first take on Amazon Go is this: F*cking A, do we really want eggplants and cuts of meat reduced to parameterized choices spit onto algorithmized shelves? Ick. I like the human confidence I get when a butcher considers a particular rib eye, then explains the best way to cook that one cut of meat. Sure, technology could probably deliver me a defensibly “better” steak, perhaps even one tailored to my preferences as expressed through reams of data collected through means I’ll probably never understand.

The non-empathetic, algorithmic Externally Defined Legalistic/Authoritarian v-Meme gives you the steak you think you want.  But empathetic interaction with the butcher that you’ve developed a trust-based relationship with will likely lead to higher performance as the relationship develops over time.  Grounded in your exchange of preferences, the butcher’s expertise, and the larger social capital generated, as friends in your network exchange their feelings about the total experience, it will also help you live longer.  Amazon Go may make your world, in the short term, seem like a more efficient use of your time.  But it totally discounts the metacognitive potential of talking to the butcher, and maybe hearing a suggestion for something else that’s in the meat case that’s on special, that may suit even better.  And Amazon Go completely eliminates the empathetic connection exercise your brain needs to stay alive.  You won’t even know what you don’t know.  It may be the perfect pork chop.  But part of you will still die inside.

When it comes to the last part, I actually have real experience to back this up.  When I lived in Vienna Austria for a year, and experienced the joy of shopping every day in the long, open-air markets where fresh fruits, vegetables, meat and bread are sold.  My German had always been mediocre — but my kids were at a cute age (7 and 9), and every day, we’d go to the market with our basket and shopped.  Of course, the first time we’d stop, no one would really talk to us.  But after the third visit, the vendors would want to know who we were.  They’d ask me about my sons, whose German was rapidly improving as they were in school there.  The kids started talking back, and before you know it, the market had turned from a place to buy a turkey leg to an hour and a half social experiment.

And what really drove the point home about the actual value of the experience was when I returned home, and one year later, got divorced.  I didn’t have my sons, and I didn’t have the market.  Instead of the enjoyable banter of the butcher and vegetable seller, I had the isolation of Walmart and the laser scanner.  I can still remember the profound loneliness of checking out plastic shrink-wrapped vegetables, and realizing the benefit of those small sips of empathetic water I had received from all my face-to-face interactions that were enshrined in everyday Viennese city life.  Empathetic droughts will do that to you.

Battelle’s piece is well worth the read.  With an awesome, well-contrasted argument, he makes the point about choosing empathetic evolution (your own personal developed heuristic with the butcher)  vs. increasing sophistication (some algorithmic, big-data analysis of your tastes provided by Amazon GO) in a gut-punch sort of way.  He even gets at the agency argument I talk about.

I’ll wrap up by saying that the research demonstrates clear pathways ahead toward fulfillment, as well as an ominous warning for those that will take it.  Our longevity research is really clear on how empathy, and its manifestation, social connection, matters for our health and well-being.  And it’s also clear that we get that well-being from a multiplicity of sources — not just one great partner, or your family.  We might start connecting the dots (as Battelle did) and realizing that a super-monopoly like Amazon, besides the unexplored-yet-obvious abilities to manipulate us by manipulating our primary information stream, by killing off the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, is quite literally gonna kill us off.  And that will happen right at the end of our super-efficient, totally structured, lonely work life.  When The Man is done with us, well, stick a metaphorical fork in us — we’re done.  Now, if that doesn’t excite some Survival v-Meme neuroplasticity in you, I don’t know what will.

 

Route of the Hiawathas (the Milwaukee Road abandoned train line) that’s now a popular bike ride on the Montana/Idaho border

Things are pretty busy getting another round of the Industrial Design Clinic, my capstone project vehicle for undergraduate seniors, kicked off for another semester.  But I read this little piece of joy in design and thought I’d share.  Angela Guzman, along with her mentor and friend at Apple, Raymond (no last name given, and I looked!) formed a synergistic mentor/mentee team, and friendship, that led to some of Apple’s versions of the glossy little suckers that we live with on a daily basis.  Emojis are fascinating little things in that they started the process of moving straight text messaging out of the pure low-empathy, binary Authoritarian v-Meme state of communication, to a way of expressing emotion and affect that humans need in order to form better, kinder, and more empathetically evolved modes of information transfer.

It’s a great story to read and reflect on, as well as place in the context of Apple’s current Animojis, which then in real time, map facial expressions from your face, onto text messages and the like.  Empathetic evolution is always in play, even during times of what appear to be devolutionary pressures.

There’s a lot of this blog that deals with what could be called ‘The OS for collective intelligence for humanity” — a little clinical and sterile at times.  And while I don’t discount friendship and love, I don’t talk about them very often as outgrowths of developed empathy, and leadership principles that also create these environments.

But they’re a very real part of that rapidly evolving world we live in.  Sometimes, in the middle of a particularly gray, rainy winter in the Pacific Northwest, it’s good to remember that empathy and connection, overall, produces happiness as well as performance.  And that’s a great thing.

Father and Son, in front of the perfect human form, Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence, Italy – pre- weight loss, 2015.  Note that Michelangelo’s David does not have metabolic syndrome!

One of the largest cognitive challenges I’ve found in understanding and disseminating my work is that we are not accustomed, at all, in thinking of populations as having Gestalt thought processes outside what various social mores dictate.  We are very comfortable in saying, for example, that Japanese people are very polite, or that the French like to argue.  And we are also accustomed to saying pro-social things like ‘academics are liberal’ or ‘universities are full of smart people.’  Equally so, we are also comfortable with negative stereotypes of populations that are culturally contained.  As someone from the foothills of the Appalachians, I am very familiar with the American cultural notion of “the stupid hillbilly.”

The problem with all this is the initial interpretation, especially if the stereotype is negative, is that we’d like to then state something like “hillbillies are smart” to escape a negative labeling of our own perceptions and tendencies to stereotype — because most people, if asked if stereotyping is bad, will say “of course.”  Stereotypes of stereotypes come out of the lower status-based v-Memes.  And before you know it, things get very meta.  It’s turtles all the way down.

But when you step outside of accepted social demarcations, discussing how people think is fraught with peril.  I’ve found that most people view it as a boundary violation (“how dare you tell me how I process information in my brain!” )  and usually leads to being shut out of their larger consciousness — especially if they haven’t developed any deeper reflective process on their own.  And on a larger, societal scale, what this prevents is more thoughtful analysis of how our culture changes over time, and what are the origination v-Memes that will generate the future cultural sidebars that may be more long-lasting.

We’re prevented from understanding ourselves in aggregate as we evolve over time — which means hindsight is the only politically palatable and available means for modification of our own perception.  And that doesn’t really help with the here-and-now.  If one examines our current political milieu, for example, will a stereotype emerge that Americans are, for example, very conflict-prone?  Are they victims of a unique bi-polar disorder when it comes to politics?  Or has this really been a long time coming?

With this piece, I’m going to discuss how excess sugar consumption might be affecting our fundamental v-Meme tendencies, and convert us from a more egalitarian, communitarian society, to one where Authoritarianism is the dominant v-Meme.  But I also hope to show how one might move people beyond the current dichotomous world — and to help understand the real implications of our Theory of Everything applied to multiple factors that shape our current consciousness.  I’ll discuss how the Principle of Reinforcement, and the self-similarity it advocates for– the idea that what we see in the society at large is reflected in the individuals, and those individuals then have their aggregate probabilistic v-Memes reflected upward — are in play, and always have been.  The implication is that  how our brains function, even on the smallest neural scales, on an individual basis, will inevitably express itself in the larger society.

The other thing that seems impossibly difficult to accept (in part because it requires faith in the powers of reason, no matter where they may lead) is that societies manifest their v-Memes across the entire spectrum of potential causes-and-effects in the larger system.  Lately, for those that follow this blog, I’ve been writing about diet.  And as crazy as this may see at the beginning of this — my sons warned me that writing about this, to the casual observer, as being ‘Tinfoil AF’ — as I said at the beginning, I’m going to make the case that sugar and its consumption/over-consumption in Western diets is one of the major drivers of our current neurogenic, physical, as well as political ills.

The minute that someone says something like this is that most people will expect a conspiratorial argument, along the lines of “the Sugar Industry is behind the scenes, pulling the levers politically, and they are making a ton of money off of making us sick.” The way society in general views large problems is often from the perspective of a cabal of Illuminati, working diligently to advance their financial cause, and screw anyone, or anything that gets in the way.  Very Authoritarian/Legalistic “known knowns, unknown knowns” kind of stuff, direct from our Reptilian Overlords, whose real interests are fattening us up for the slaughter.

And certainly, there are cases where conspiratorial dynamics truly ARE the case (or rather, a major part of the case.)  Take the domination of the oil industry over our society for the past 120 or so years.  Anyone wanting a global perspective on the use of oil can read Daniel Yergin’s amazing book, The Prize, for a compelling look on how money, power, and resource networks form, thrive, and actively manipulate politics.

Yet at the same time, even though there are clear names of dynastic families and companies to put on the conspiracies present in that book, it’s also important to realize that the behavior of this network was also emergent out of the v-Memes of the time.  Winston Churchill, the primary driver as the First Lord of the Admiralty for Great Britain of converting the British Navy from coal to oil, had no choice but to pursue oil as the dominant energy source for its navy, for Great Britain to emerge as the dominant empire of the 19th and 20th century.  The speed gained in her warships, and the transportability and availability of fuel was vital to projecting Great Britain’s Legalistic Authoritarian v-Meme set across the globe.

There is no question that conspiracies were at work, both known and unrecognized.  But there were also emergent factors, such as the fundamental laws of naval physics, that drove adoption.  One can never separate oneself from the desire of information and its replication, be that encapsulated in understanding as genes, culture, or memes, or what have you, to spread and persist.

The other interesting artifact about oil as a substance, though, is that it gives perspective that large systems can be influenced through leverage points, regardless of the obvious complex system of feedback loops involved.  Cut off oil, or raise the price, and all of the sudden, societies will indeed race for renewables, for example.  All sorts of pronounced  exigencies of the need for oil, if it is taken away, will become meaningless.  People, or rather the information structured and embodied in people and their social networks, will find a way. I’ve found that it makes people uncomfortable to think of themselves in this fashion.  But that’s the way the v-Memes roll.

And this is true, unless something on the inside of the social network attacks the way the information contained in the people, is fundamentally disrupted.  Even though I’m not going argue against the power of propaganda, this is hard to do on a superficial level. If you, for example, hate Donald Trump, and there’s a positive piece on him on the front page of your favorite website, it’s unlikely that your mind is going to be changed. But what if you understood your love or hate for Donald Trump as some part of the larger social dynamic that you were part of?  How might that modify your perspective?

And even deeper, what if there was something in the larger psycho-social-environmental ecosystem that predisposed you and your thoughts, subconsciously, or even unconsciously, to an increased Authoritarianism? Though I’d argue we were well on this path as a country before 9/11/2001, there’s also no question that when Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda operatives flew the three planes into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the world became far more predisposed to Authoritarianism in the Free World.  We’re still emptying obvious bottles of water in the name of flight safety at TSA checkpoints in airports.  At the time, there was no way to express an alternate opinion on the wisdom of invading first Afghanistan, or even Iraq.  And now we are left with the larger consequences of those impulsively driven actions, even today.  Hindsight may be 20/20, as it’s said.  But the fact that we still cannot extract ourselves from either Iraq, or Afghanistan, indicates the persistence of the mental models, and their underlying v-Memes, as anything extant in the world today.

Below, I’m going to make the argument that our consumption of sugar is one of the most powerful emergent drivers of Authoritarianism in our society today.  I want to start by giving credit where credit is due.  I’ve been listening to a handful of books that I’ll list below that are the source material for the individual, independent background necessary to synthesize the material I’ve thought about.  Any independent credit belongs to these authors.  The psycho-social dynamics, though, are all mine.  The books are:

• The Case Against Sugar, by Gary Taubes
• The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet, by Nina Teicholz
• Fat Chance: Beating the Odds Against Sugar, Processed Food, Obesity and Disease by Dr. Robert Lustig
• The Hacking of the American Mind: the Science Behind the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains, also by Dr. Robert Lustig

Because I’m an academic, and it’s part of our code of ethics, I want to start, before I launch into the larger argument, where I got the background information for the various ideas, from each source.  There’s likely MORE stuff that’s jumbled up in my head that comes from these books — but hey, this is a blog post.  Not an academic paper.

From Taubes’ book, I learned about the history of sugar, as well as the etiology of sugar as a source of Western medical maladies, and the interrelationship of sugar industry sponsorship and the campaign against dietary fat — especially saturated fat.

From Teicholz’s book, I learned about the history of the whole Dietary Fat -Heart Hypothesis, as well as how cholesterol rose front and center in our belief that saturated fat causes heart disease.  This book also profiles the birth of the notion of (and deceptions regarding) the Mediterranean diet, and other current diets, as well as the genesis and extreme potential problems with vegetable oils.  It also fleshed out the continued bias in the research community of even challenging the notion that saturated fat was bad, and in reality, was probably good for your overall health.

From Fat Chance, by Dr. Lustig, I learned about the basics of sugar metabolism, and the separation between sugar from fruit, as opposed to refined sugar.  I also learned about childhood metabolic issues, as well as the increase in sugar consumption.

From The Hacking of the American Mind, by Dr. Lustig, I learned about the twin reward systems of serotonin and dopamine in a more concise way, as well as dynamics in the food industry and how this shapes their perspective on change.

All four books I processed over many long bike and car rides.  All four I listened to as Audible audiobooks first.  For any missed ideas and citations, I’m more than happy to cede credit to the four authors above.

What is happening to health in the United States, and increasingly, in the rest of the world is stunning.  In spite of remarkable leaps and bounds of understanding human biology and metabolism, the entire world is getting fatter and more unhealthy.  Though treatment modalities and success/cure rates are improving, cancer rates are on the rise.  The same for depression, especially among the young.  If you track childhood depression next to obesity, we see that both track each other over a ten year period, with obesity rising approximately 2% over the period 2005-2015, and depression rising 4%.

If you click through on the cancer link, you’ll see a study for the U.K., with the rationale that ‘people are living longer,’ and the caveat that about 50% of the population will contract cancer at least once in their life.  It sounds so reassuring — we’re getting cancer because we’re better off, health-wise, over a longer period of time, and something has to get us.

But if you look at the long historical record, even though cancer has always been part of human existence, the reality is in aboriginal societies, there was essentially no cancer.  Taubes does an extensive review of the British literature, which had access to reportage from the far-flung reaches of the British empire.  Cancer simply didn’t exist until Western diets showed up.  And one of the inevitabilities of our showing up was the introduction of refined sugar and flour.

Sugar, which is what I will refer to from here forward for the term ‘refined sugar’, is a very interesting substance.  Everyone from either basic health, or chemistry class, will have learned about the Krebs cycle, or how the body uses glucose to fuel all of our actions (which is what we are taught, but turns out not to be true, either.) Yet, at the same time, sugar is almost non-existent as a pure substance in nature.  Sure, there’s honey, and sugar cane, as well as agave plants.  But sugar itself is only identifiable to humans as a sweet taste in fruit, which is a sugar heavily buffered by lots of fiber, that has lots of other consequences in our guts.  The short version is that the fiber slows sugar uptake, as well as limiting the amount we can eat.  Read Fat Chance for more details.

I’ve done a lot of thinking on why the body would focus on using sugar, and its partner in energetics, to drive metabolism, when it is such limited availability in the outside world.  Our bodies are great at taking things like starches, or even protein, and turning it into sugar.  And in fact, that’s the key insight.  Evolving the ability to use a high-energy fuel source inside our systems, made from a variety of feedstocks that are available external to the system, is a fascinating evolutionary adaptation for a complex creature.  It allows us to traverse many diverse environments, where foods may come in a variety of macronutrient forms (carbohydrates, fats, and proteins) while converting any and all of them into energy.

At the same time, because our primary energy driver ISN’T typically available in the external environment, it has allowed us to develop an exquisitely tuned biological system that maintains its own homeostasis regardless of the environment it’s placed in.  It goes beyond being a warm-blooded animal.  Our entire system has evolved to have an extremely limited reactivity to the outside environment.  No wonder we can live in the Tropics, as well as the Arctic.

This is a modestly difficult concept to understand.  So here’s an analogous example.  Perhaps you, or someone you know, has hay fever.  Every year, when the grass pollinates, or if you take a walk through golden fields that may appear beautiful to others, your eyes start watering.  Your nose starts running.  You get a headache.  What’s really happening is that your body is losing its ability to self-regulate the actions of your mucus membranes.  As a result, you’re covered in snot, have to take an antihistamine and go to bed.  That’s the result of losing homeostasis because of stimulus from the outside environment.  The same effect happens if you’re allergic to cats.  Cute kitty slithers up next to your legs in a friend’s apartment, and you start to do a dance.

Needless to say, an organism wouldn’t be particularly evolutionarily successful if its primary motive force was subject to the same type of environmentally caused dysregulation.  If our environments had deep-historically been flooded with available sugar, then we would have evolved in some form or another to buffer this outside influence.  1+ million years of shared humanity will do that.

But the sugar glut is really recent — only the last 400 or so years. The problem is now our environments are flooded with ingested refined sugar, and the idea that just because sugar is available inside our muscles, or in our bloodstream, does not negate the potential for loss of homeostasis.  And indeed, over time, that’s what happens.  Why?  Because of a phenomenon called insulin resistance.  Insulin is the primary hormone, excreted by the pancreas, that is used in the energetic transfer of sugar that moves our bodies, and fires our brains.  Insulin resistance is when the cells lose their ability to regulate glucose levels in the muscle, resulting in higher and higher levels of blood glucose.

But it’s worse.  Insulin is a double-stack substance.  It is also a key signal in the control system that governs our metabolic homeostasis.  When you dump sugar into the system, over a period of years, the body also loses its ability to control blood sugar, or restore homeostasis.  The key result of this collapse of function is the body then starts taking the glucose and packing it on as fat.  This leaves a person exhausted without knowing why, other than they either ate sugar or some form of a refined carbohydrate, like white flour-  a usual suspect.  The short version is that insulin is part of the metabolic process.  But it is also the trigger that things are about to happen.

What this means is that over time, ingestion of sugar not only destroys the homeostasis of your energy balance.  It also destroys one level up — your ability to control that homeostasis.  If you’ve ever messed around with car engines, it would be akin to spraying carburetor fluid in the engine.  If you did this, any mechanic will tell you that the engine will rev.  But that’s the only thing you’re doing.  You’re spraying carburetor fluid, which is highly volatile, all over the electronics that control how your engine revs.  This double whammy feedback loop is now having amazing, terrible, and unforeseen consequences.

Part of the problem in creating a deeper understanding of all this comes directly from the people studying these effects — especially in the medical community.  Physicians are arranged in modified legalistic/authoritarian hierarchies, which immediately dictate the level of metacognition and knowledge structures that they have access to in explaining things.  For those unfamiliar with the work in this blog, reading Taubes’ book will give a good description of these problems.  But once you unpack the knowledge structures that these individuals work with, you can see the deeper problems.  Authoritarians in general gravitate to dichotomous thinking, and one-on-one mappings.  If sugar is used by the body, then it must not be a poison when eaten externally.  Your muscles use sugar, after all.  Sugar is obviously either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ — and since the body uses it, it must be ‘good’.  Or so the collective thinking goes.

Low empathy social structures are also terrible in understanding long-term anything.  Authoritarian social structures work on transferred authority, where questioning is really not allowed or desired.  This belief-based thinking sits, as has also been explained in this blog, primarily in the limbic centers.  Long-term developed timescales are not its strong suit.  That’s why doctors are so prone to prescribing a pill for any given condition – a point solution for a systemic problem. It’s the way their brains are wired, and it takes the exceptional physician to see beyond that tendency.  And therein lies the rub.  The obesity crisis has been generated over decades, or really the last four centuries.  It is not amenable to Authority-based understanding or superficial mappings.

And it gets worse. Sugar itself is an addictive substance.  Yes, we have nice terms for it, like having a ‘sweet tooth’.  But fundamentally, the desire to eat sugar is rooted deep in one of our primary reward centers — the dopamine pathway — where we get our own little secret rush out of drinking a Pepsi, or chewing on a candy.  It does not affect our primary empathy and attachment reward system, which is dominated by the hormone serotonin.  As Dr. Lustig describes it, it’s the difference on an individual basis between pleasure, which is all about you, and eudaemonia, which is the sophisticated word for long-term happiness and contentedness, which usually revolves around connection with others or self.  Sugar does not promote empathy.  This is easy enough to observe on Halloween, as kids argue over buckets full of candy.  And since it is an addictive substance, sugar is its own hack into our neurobiology, which means bringing it up as a cause of major societal dysfunction is likely to meet with serious resistance.  Sugar as a substance has its own memetic protective mechanisms.

This is in spite of the fact that we are now surrounded by seas of metabolically destabilized individuals, which may very well include you as a reader of this blog.  The odds of spreading enlightenment are not in our favor.

For those wanting to bounce back to Spiral Dynamics, and its oscillation between ‘I’ and ‘We’ v-Memes, the psycho-social implications of sugar also start opening up.  Sugar is not a substance that is prone to influencing a person’s desire to meditate.  It sits firmly down in the lower ‘I’ v-Memes.  It’s mostly Egocentric/Authoritarian v-Meme – pleasure mode, with maybe an occasional reach up to improving performance (hence the Performance/Goal-Based v-Meme) at best.  And if you were really hungry, of course, you’d eat it to survive – though almost nothing else living on the planet shares our affectation, which is why it can be used as a preservative, and is.

You don’t have to be a budding psychonaut and Spiral Dynamics junkie to see how any reference to removing sugar from one’s diet is socially destabilizing.  Sugar is a primary reward that parents use for their children.  We marvel at our children’s incipient excitement at a frosted birthday cake. And my Facebook feed is filled with parents feeding their infants their first taste of ice cream. If sugar really is poison (and an addictive poison at that) what does that say about that moment of reflection regarding what we’ve done with our own kids?  And too often, it’s far easier to just kill the messenger (decide, for example, that I’m Tinfoil AF, as my boys said.)  Telling someone what and how they should reward their kids with is about as family boundary-violating as it gets.  Don’t bring it up at Christmas dessert, or a birthday party, for chrissakes!

And then, the Authoritarian v-Meme, with its superficial mappings, just keeps on talking.  Focusing on the obesity symptom of the real problem, called metabolic syndrome, which is the result of our sugar addiction, and the precursor to Type II diabetes, is the easy, limbic, superficial thing to do.  And that leads to a whole Authoritarian v-Meme cascade.  Once we move away from our systemic understanding that metabolic syndrome provides — that obesity is merely one symptom of larger metabolic function, the whole systems-thinking thing gets thrown out the window.  Once we huck that important link, we end up with the thinking that people are obese because they are lazy, and they don’t move around.  They’re fat because they have perverse appetites (that’s a real technical term!) and they can’t control their eating.  Which implies they need someone to do that — like some Authority.  And the person who’s obese won’t be too happy when that happens.  And that is built, of course, on the sound science that a calorie in is the same as a calorie out (another one-one superficial mapping, that remains a dominant view in society today.)

There’s a whole anti-empathetic case to be made as well about the origins of sugar in our society.  Sugar was a primary driver for the slave trade, which originally exported slaves from West Africa to the Caribbean and Brazil.  Slave ships had some 400-850 people crowded in their holds, on their way to being beaten to do a task that only slaves could be compelled to do — cultivate sugar.

The problem with reinforcing such perceptions regarding sugar is much larger than just repeating outdated models regarding the cause of obesity, because it directly affects our mental function.  Sugar hacks our brains.  Studies have shown clearly that sugar causes brain inflammation.  Here’s a piece on what happens to rats when they get too much sugar.  Rats fed sugar became passive, and refused to swim when placed in water.  Additionally, they became far impulsive and scattered in their behaviors.  From the article:

“A typical experiment goes like this: rats are deprived of food for 12 hours each day, then given 12 hours of access to a sugary solution and regular chow. After a month of following this daily pattern, rats display behaviours similar to those on drugs of abuse. They’ll binge on the sugar solution in a short period of time, much more than their regular food. They also show signs of anxiety and depression during the food deprivation period. Many sugar-treated rats who are later exposed to drugs, such as cocaine and opiates, demonstrate dependent behaviours towards the drugs compared to rats who did not consume sugar beforehand.”

After reading this, you may become worried about the effect of sugar on you, and perhaps your loved ones.  The larger problem in a society that consumes somewhere close to 1/4 – 1/2 lb. of sugar every day (this turns out to be a hard number to pin down exactly)– and since this is statistically distributed, some people eat far more than that — then becomes that the psychosocial dynamics of an entire population are affected.

What does that mean?  We have a population that is seeing epidemic levels of depression, and with that, the incumbent passivity that depression creates.  That we can know.  Add to that the bias toward impulsive thinking, and increasing dopamine habituation and self-gratification behavior that comes from animal research, and clear biological reactivity mechanisms.  The cluster of these effects are clearly reflected, and reinforced in the Authoritarian v-Meme.  As we’ve witnessed this past year, we have a national government where the rule of law is flouted on a daily basis, led by a knowledge-fragment Twitter-tweeting narcissistic psychopath.

And lest the Left gets too heady on its fundamental self-righteousness, it too has fallen to a different wave of Authoritarianism — counting on individual authorities, like Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller, to take out Trump.  Vast marches and social action have faded away, once again characterizing the larger social Gestalt.  A hero — or really, someone else that we don’t know, is going to save us.  Talk about passive, faith-based thinking.

Unfortunately, it gets worse.  The ideas in the paragraph above are easy to take as a snapshot of things that WOULD be different had the elections not turned out the way that they did.  But that is not the case.  One of the biggest problems with the sugar epidemic is the dramatic rise of metabolic syndrome.  Metabolic syndrome doesn’t strike young people, for the most part.  In my own personal experience, it started slowing me down around the age of 43.  Though childhood obesity statistics, and presence of childhood metabolic syndrome are growing, it’s still a disease of middle age and onward.  Taubes and Lustig both write about the current problems with childhood obesity because of increased insulin resistance showing up in the womb, with earlier and earlier onset of problems.  But children aren’t responsible for larger political decisions — that’s for adults.

And when you start statistically reducing your middle-age population’s knowledge structures to knowledge fragments, the process is started regarding diminution of the neural value of extensive temporally continuous experience bases.  Now that’s a mouthful!  What it really means is that it’s life experience that more than anything that gives us windows into “shades of gray” and modulated, multiple solution thinking, as well as the empathy that creates this type of thought.  It’s THE primary bridge toward a broader appreciation of individual circumstance, as well as deeper and more profound consequential thinking.  Sugar will statistically affect that — and its extreme form, even create Alzheimer’s Syndrome, which is now becoming known as Type 3 diabetes.

And while you can argue that only a certain percentage of the population possesses this kind of developmental empathy, there’s a profound shrinking of the pool of available intelligences and consciences. I’ve been involved in political work across multiple scales (local, regional, national) for a number of years, and can speak on authority that you’ll find evolved people (as well as the non-evolved!) working at all levels, on all sorts of problems.  One can see a self-similar degradation of collective intelligence in solving all sorts of societal maladies.  The smartest and best are not always at the top.  So it’s not just that this epidemic affects national governance.

What this means is that if we can’t fix this problem of sugar consumption, that is affecting the core of our psycho-social cognition — the base evolution of our collective consciousness — it will be extremely difficult to recover our brains enough to evolve the empathy we’ll need to fix our problems in that more complex world. Devolutionary Authoritarians are not going to be the folks that find a better way out of power and control, and into connected synergies and kindness.

Lest all of us fall into the rut of thinking sugar is the only thing that needs to be fixed in order to have society start fixing itself, I want to warn against that kind of single-solution thinking as well.  The lowering of empathy in broader society is multi-factorial.  No question that the broadening income gap, and stagnating or declining salaries at the lower end, self-arrests many well-known empathetic development ladders, like increased time for independent social contact, or travel.  And fundamental insecurity and safety of home drive trauma, another huge potential impediment to empathetic development.  Trauma and income deflation are both huge causes of our problems, which sugar feeds into as a dopamine-infused balm.  The challenge, though, comes in developing a shared leverage point between the classes.  The rich in aggregate haven’t shown the will to go along with income redistribution.  And while trauma as well is something the powerful in society share as a problem, they don’t particularly want to discuss it as a shared problem.  I can’t recommend Bessel Van der Kolk’s book, The Body Keeps the Score, highly enough, especially for its discussion on how Sigmund Freud’s various dream theories arose as an explanation for upper-crust Vienna’s need to hide the prevalence of incest.

Sugar may be that leverage point.  It affects everyone.  Both rich and poor alike could have healthy diets.  And while the potential collapse of our health care system might affect the poor first, it will hit home with the rest of larger society.  We need more clear-headed poor people, and a kinder and more empathetic rich class.

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Why should you believe the argument and statement of the problem above?  Why should you start by working to cut sugar out of yours, and your connected others’ diets? Understanding the argument means backing up our intellectual process and asking what knowledge structures we, as humans (and social communities) have that can understand  such a large, interconnected problem.

To start, as Taubes clearly states in his book, there is no way to run a traditional scientific hypothesis-testing experiment on the effects of sugar on human metabolism.  We can’t take a group of people, split them into two groups — the experiment, and the control, and over a 20-year period feed one sugar and one not.  The best we can do is run these kinds of experiments on animal proxies, like rats, and we’ve done that.  There’s lots of research on rats that show how sugar messes them up.  I’ve linked to some above.

The ‘Why’ or ‘How’ of sugar is also elusive for people.  Taubes talks about how certain researchers have maintained a program around the ‘anything sweet’ hypothesis, which would then put sugar an artificial sweeteners in the same harmful category as sugar.  Where this hypothesis falls apart is in understanding the pure energetics of sugar in the body.  Metabolic pathway research can, and has, shown how sugar works in the body.  Saccharin and other artificial sweeteners can’t compete.

Classic epidemiological research, performed by the nutritional community, has been until recently, a total disaster.  One of the real fathers of our dietary science woes, Ancel Keys, the psychopathic nutrition professor behind the Diet-Heart hypothesis, was funded by the sugar industry, and rammed the notion that dietary fat was behind all our metabolic disease woes.  He actively persecuted scientists who refused to assume his dietary fat hypothesis, and actively worked to discredit individuals like John Yudkin, founder of the nutrition department at Queen Elizabeth College in London, and author of Pure, White and Deadly, which was one of the original expose’s on the perils of sugar.

Looking at long-time history is useful, and Taubes does this in his book.  Additionally, he profiles a couple of aboriginal societies, and the emergence of the host of Western diseases as those social groups were exposed to sugar, albeit in an uncontrolled (from a scientific perspective) fashion.

What this means is that there is a v-Meme knowledge structure stack that creates a very convincing case for sugar as a major dietary vector of metabolic syndrome and Western disease. To recount, with the v-Memes next to the evidence:

• Guiding Principle thinking — a deep understanding of maintenance of bodily homeostasis (Global Systemic)
• Classic laboratory studies on lab animals (Legalistic)
• Metabolic mechanism studies (Legalistic/Performance-Based)
• Epidemiological Studies on transplanted aboriginal populations (Authoritarian/Legalistic)
• Long-term history of sugar (Tribal/Mythic)

The list could go on.  But it’s the consistent v-Meme stack that shows how we might navigate complex decision making with some level of confidence.  All these levels reinforce each other as far as the veracity of the conclusion that sugar is the culprit in our dietary woes — and a potential leverage point for larger societal system dynamics.

—————-

I’m not going to comment on low empathy solutions to this problem.  They won’t work, and they just give the psychopaths justification for wild behavior.  The answers that come out of Performance and Communitarian v-Memes rely on individual experimentation, and social support.  Both are powerful forces, and evolve a shared understanding on what is possible.  It’s not that solutions like laws restricting sugar wouldn’t help some, or having various Authorities speak against sugar consumption — they would.  But we’re not going to ban the white stuff, and even if we did, as with all addictive substances, people would find a way.  Prohibitions never work.

But social networks CAN  be part of the solution.  During my weight loss period, I started my journey by deciding to make it public on Facebook.  My Facebook ‘friends’ are a relatively diverse lot, from arch-conservatives to arch-liberals, and are people who I’ve met as I’ve traveled through life.  A big hunk of them are my high school friends, as well as students that I’ve taught.  I’m not easy to embarrass, so I posted photos of my big belly for everyone to see as I ran the experiment on myself.    In hindsight, the result wasn’t surprising.  People on my list who were middle-aged started tracking what I was doing, and encouraging me to keep posting.  They also started carbohydrate reduction and sugar elimination themselves.  Many started messaging me with questions, and most lost significant amounts of weight (+15 lbs. or more) with a couple losing 50-60 lbs.  Alone, we are subject to the vagaries of our own dopamine habituation and sugar addiction.  But together, we formed a reasonably powerful collective intelligence regarding the issue.  With my high school friends, I have a reputation as a “brain/geek” so it was easy to accept my authority with the science.

But understanding the science turned out only to be a small part of how to implement weight loss in my own minimally-sized population. Most people don’t work on science (my friends are no different,) and few have the education that can teach them how to critique whether a particular study is scientifically valid or not.  I’ve read a significant hunk of the historical research, and it’s definitely been a pretty unproductive use of my time.  It’s absolutely unrealistic to expect that those non-scientifically trained will have any response other than their eyes glassing over.

What did my social network actually need?  People need coping techniques for the various feelings experienced during sugar withdrawal, and a transition to a more healthy intermittent ketosis state.  I found others had experienced the same lack of empathy, and consequently, analysis of hunger feelings that I had with the medical community.  People are quick to run back to “genetic variations” or “need more exercise” when weight loss slows or stops, because that’s what they hear from authorities most often.  Both promote powerlessness.  You can’t do anything about your genes, and many people are so overwhelmed by their lives, and also have dramatically reduced levels of energy because of their own manifestation of metabolic syndrome, that this is reason to give up.

And simple things like how to modify eating habits eluded many of my friends. I posted quite a bit of information on what I would do while traveling, when you can’t control your food environment as well as being surrounded by sugary foods and refined carbs that make up the food-scape we have to pass through.  People have traditionally associated dieting so heavily with starvation, instead of metabolic modification, it’s challenging to convince people to start any behavior mods that will lead to encouraging, tangible results early on.

Not surprisingly, changing people’s behavior also required modifications and justifications up and down the v-Meme stack.  The fundamental guiding principle — carbohydrate reduction/elimination — may have governed the advice I gave.  But folks also listened to me because of my authority as a man of knowledge inside my community.  And equally important was encouragement directed toward individuals to develop their own heuristics.  Certain individuals in my social network had problems with the concept of my authority, but nonetheless would, over time, adapt a more experimental approach toward diet because I would establish the example, and then broadcast encouragement to them.  Most 12 Step programs for kicking addiction emphasize messaging about being powerless over the addictive substance.  I view this as counterproductive.  Sugar is an addictive substance in the classical sense.  But instead, I insisted on more agency building and adaptive heuristic reasoning.  You CAN use acquired knowledge to adopt new habits and modes of eating that will be satisfying and improve your life.  I also helped people reason through other fads they might be exposed to, and understand them from a shared basis of metabolic fact.  Not discounting approaches that others have, while sometimes challenging (the walking barefoot as galvanic grounding as a solution to weight loss regime did get to me a little) paid off with keeping information flowing in the social network.

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There’s a lot in the piece above to chew on (so to speak!)  And at some 6300 words already, I’m going to cut this off.  But the short version is, when it comes to refined carbohydrates, and sugar, we’re going to have to go all Authoritarian v-Meme on you and just say this: cut that shit out.  Because at first, it messes with our heads.  And over long-time, it’s really going to kill us, and our children, each generation more quickly than the last.

 

 

 

 

A re-take of a picture Conor and I took four years ago, titled ‘Immigrant’s Son’.  Mike Beiser photo credit

I’ve been hammering away on a longer piece about the creeping effects and feedback loops in Authoritarian societies, which we certainly seem to be drifting towards as the New Year approaches.  It’s almost done, but I was out for a cross-country ski this morning, and thought about how I would advise people to consider issues, and the decisions they make, in the New Year.  I’ve settled on an acronym, DDDVRP — or Triple D-V-R-P.  The idea is that as much as possible, we’d like to make scaffolded and supported decisions as we roll into the New Year.  Our v-Meme Knowledge Structures (which coincidentally has the first version of the photo above!) point the way on how to do this.  Our goal with any decision-making process is to do our best to minimize metacognitive uncertainty, by inventorying what we know, and then comparing it to what others know in our larger social network, and then actively reflecting on this, as well as giving our own deeper intuitive processes some potential for emergence.  We know stuff we don’t know we know.  And our understandings are almost always incomplete.  And while humility is in order, it’s important to know we CAN make good decisions.

So here goes!

• D  —  Determine a decision/change needs to be made, and start the change process in our own minds.  This might come as part of a quarterly meeting, a change in circumstance, or the emergence of something from deep in your own mind.
• D  —  Data – collect as much data as we can from past experience, larger available data sets, experiments we’ve run, or are going to run (a la Lean/Agile perturbations and such) and so on.  Understanding hard numbers is almost always useful as well, because it so often forces us to confront our belief structures that are too often oh-so-deep in our brains.  The best example that pops into my mind from my recent weight-loss journey might be “Think you can lose weight by exercise?”  The data simply doesn’t support it.  That’s the gift that data gives.  The start to challenging your assumptions and ingrained mental models.  And finally, the famous quote from one of my heroes, W. Edwards Deming.  “In God we trust.  All others must bring data.”
• D  —  Dynamic – can we identify cause-and-effect relationships inside the data that show information is not merely correlated, but causal?  Here’s where Peter Senge’s notions of mental models and more conventional understandings of systems thinking come into play.  Seeing two trends line up side-by-side might give us pause.  Having a causal mechanism, based on some principle extant in the physical world, whereby one is plausibly linked to another is even better.
• V  —  Validation is so important.  What this means is mapping our understanding of the problem to others’ understandings and perceptions, as well as the larger real world.  Here, developed empathy becomes key.  Why do others think the way they do? What experiences undergird why they think the way they do?  What’s the scaffolding look like for their decision-making process?  How can you either steal a page from their playbook, or appropriately discount their opinion?  How can you synergize others’ perspectives into your own process?  How many valid solutions, from others’ different decision making heuristics, can you come up with?
• R  —  Reflection.  So important.  Why do we think the way we do?  What cognitive biases and flaws in our own thinking do we have?  What are areas we know nothing about that are not included in our own personal calculus?  How does earlier trauma affect the course we steer for others and ourselves?  What’s our own confirmation bias in the situation?  A perfect reason for a long bike ride — or cross-country ski, run or other contemplative cycling of your thoughts.
• P  —  Pull the trigger.  All good decision-makers make decisions.  Pull the trigger and make the decision.  Always good to put into place post-decision monitoring, so you can watch, in an engaged way, how the decision plays out within yourself, your engaged publics, and the broader world.  But in the end — you have to Pull the Trigger!

Triple D VRP!

And for those that want, you can go back and see how this maps in with the v-Memes.  Every time you make a decision, you’re working on your own brain evolution!

Postscript: Friend and Big Data scientist/mathematician, Kevin Vixie, wrote this nice piece which basically says the same thing, in perhaps a more emotionally approachable lexicon.  Recommended.

 

 

100 Islands National Park, Philippines, 2013

By now, it’s no surprise to me to find inter-species empathy.  Especially between two groups of mesoscale predators, who have already evolved collective behavior to hunt as part of core survival mechanisms.  In the case of the article below:

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2012/05/01/dolphins-that-help-humans-to-catch-fish-form-tighter-social-networks/

The post is from 2012, but just came across my Facebook feed today.  The article documents the shared fishing behavior between humans in Laguna, Brazil, using nets to fish for coastal mullet, with the help of dolphins who drive the fish into nets.  Turns out dolphins that practice this kind of behavior have tighter social networks than dolphins that don’t.  Empathy much?

What’s mind-boggling is NOT that two separate species share coordinated behavior, and in a novel way show the power of diversity, making my point that I’ve made earlier that diversity increases data-driven rational acting.  What’s wild is that instead of looking at the behavior for the obvious learned behavior that it is, scientists want to explain it with genetics.  Think about that — two of the species with the biggest software processor on the planet must have this kind of behavior hard-coded, due to selfishness.  V-Meme egocentric projection talking much, scientists?

 

Sunrise on top of Yellow Mountain (Huangshan), Anhui Province, 2013

Those following this blog extensively know that I’ve been on a weight-loss lifestyle change that has yielded tons of insight not just in ordinary health — I’ve dropped about 57 lbs. as of this writing, and am back to the weight I was in my mid 30s.  It’s also yielded a ton of insight on why we, as a culture, believe much of what we believe, and how our diets portend for us a future that is either deeply grounded in reality, or lost to us in sickness and delusion.

When I started the journey, back at the end of May, I was at the end of a two week bicycling frenzy that had logged about 300 miles.  You might think that this would cause me to lose weight.  The reality was that I kept the scales pegged at 292 lbs. and rising.  I’ve always been a cyclist — I used to call myself a ‘fit, fat guy’ — so the time on the bike was both a joy and a sign of resignation.  If I couldn’t lose weight, the least I could do is ride my bike and be super-fit.  I now know that 99% of us can’t be both, and that obesity is almost always caused by other problems.  It’s not a character flaw.  Obesity is a symptom of metabolic instability and disease.

But that was at the beginning of the journey.  Fellow chronic co-conspirator Ryan Martens, gearing up to run a marathon (his story, and the social network that facilitated it is a blog post soon to be released) and who carries far less excess poundage than Yours Truly, recommended a in-part diet book by Tim Ferriss, The Four Hour Body.  Tim is a super-interesting author in that he believes that if an expert is going to get reviewed for the advice doled out, Tim himself is going to apply the advice given and see how things turn out.  The Four Hour Body is his aggregation of narratives, as well as recommendations, on how to lose, as well as gain weight and muscle strength.

His weight loss diet, explained simply, is ‘meat, beans, greens and nothing else – especially NO white food (like potatoes, rice and sugar.)’  I’ve written about this with the following posts.

Weight Loss — it’s in the V-Memes

Weight Loss — It’s in the v-Memes (II)

Weight Loss by the V-Memes — (III) What’s the v-Meme stack look like?

Weight Loss by the V-Memes (IV) or Channeling your Inner Australopithecine

I can still remember the beginnings of all this, staring at the Costco Italian sausage and can of refried beans I had microwaved for lunch, and thinking “here goes nothing!”  What happened in the subsequent days was transformative.  I lost 8-9 lbs. in two weeks.  And I had never lost weight before, consistently.  And yes — I’ve exercised for all my adult life.

Ryan went on to drop 20 lbs. (or something!) and successfully completed his marathon.  At this point in the timeline (December 3) I’m down close to 60 lbs., and likely will have a very hard time losing past my current fluctuating 235 lbs.  But I’m super-healthy, never tired, and possessing endless energy.  Definitely not what I was, body-composition-wise, when I started all this.

It was back, though, at 282 lbs., at the very beginning, that my brain kicked in and said “Why?”  Why am I losing weight, when I had suffered under the illusion that exercise and moderately healthy eating was the best I could manage?  Why was I strung out on an increasing list of typical late middle-aged prescriptions (blood pressure medicine, sleep apnea machine, occasional gastro-esophageal reflux, creeping pre-diabetes, swollen joints and a need for Ibuprofen, and recommended-but-never-taken statins)?  The doctors were more than happy to tell me I was just getting old, and that I better adapt to my failing health, because I was doing most everything I could.  Pain, obesity and decrepitude were all part of the mortal contract.  And they would make it better, or rather, drag it out, if I would just take one more pill.  Man-boobs, regardless of my exercise habit, were my destiny.  98% of people who lose weight put it all back on in a year.  “Science” has shown that.  I would most likely fail as well.  If only I would stop drinking alcohol, things would change.  Maybe.

Of course, I know now that all of that is total bullshit.  What disorder I had, diagnosed by friends over the Internet, and what I learned it was called, by putting myself out on Facebook and having my entire community work on my problem (and theirs as well) is called metabolic syndrome.  Coupled into metabolic syndrome is a prime characteristic known as insulin resistance.  I’m not alone. Over 100 million of my fellow Americans have similar problems.  Another third are overweight, and on their way.  We are literally witnessing a Great Dying due to ‘something.’

What that ‘something’ is is a fascinating story in itself — and not surprisingly, it has to do with what we believe that is not true — a reliability/validity conflict of massive proportion.  It’s layered deep with human intrigue, loaded with control, manipulation and psychopathy, and unpacks the v-Meme stack in how we know things and interpret them as a culture AND an individual.  And it also wraps in the Principle of Reinforcement, addiction, and timescales outside the empathetic development of most of the culture.

But back to the point of me staring at my Italian sausage and refried beans.  Or rather, 10 days after, when I had lost ten lbs.  I HAD to figure out why, after so many years, miles on the bike, and hours in the gym (which were not wasted – but did not affect my weight) I lost 10 lbs. in two weeks, but could never dream of such an outcome only two weeks earlier.  What was wrong with my thinking?  What didn’t I know?  And more importantly, what didn’t I know that I didn’t know?

I started doing research, commencing with the podcasts recommended by Ryan, and reading The Four Hour Body.  I followed Tim Ferriss to Dom D’agostino, to Rhonda Patrick.  Friends chimed in who had suffered similarly.  I was given the terms metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance by a formerly morbidly obese friend who is now a bodybuilder.  That led to the usual superficial descriptions, but layered underneath by scientific citations, which I am lucky enough to have the education to be able to read.  Lots of Wikipedia and familiarization with various terms in biochemistry, as well as resurrection of knowledge learned in high school followed.  I emerged into the world of ketogenic dieting with lots of connections between fields, some learned, some made by myself.  Along with my Facebook page came re-emergence of old friendships, people who were following my weight loss journey, and decided, oddly inspired by my example, to begin their own.  I figure in aggregate, we’ve lost about 400 lbs. together.

And as my own brain works, I used it.  I’m constantly looking for deeper causal mechanisms and connections.  It’s what I do.  At the end of all of this, I finally ended up with three books, which had already documented professionally much of what I had independently done, and learned.  Here’s the gift.  These three books, written by four people, really had already traversed the ground I had followed on my own — besides doing it in a more thorough, professional way.  The good news is that you don’t have to buy into my own ‘Deep Paleo’ theories (read my blog posts for more detail.)  You can read better, more scaffolded versions in these three books, written by experts.  They are:

• The Case Against Sugar by Gary Taubes.
• The Big Fat Surprise by Nina Teicholz
• The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living by Jeff Volek and Stephen Phinney

After reading (I actually digested them with a mix of reading and Audible.com) these three books, you can come to the same independent conclusions I came to, along with a ton of other stuff.  I’ve made this point before — the difference between an amateur’s understanding (I’m definitely an amateur when it comes to weight loss) and a professionals’ is v-Meme scaffolding and completeness of information content.  But I came to exactly the same conclusions — you can be a skilled learner as an amateur.  If you were to believe me alone, you’d have to be going on faith in my limited authority.  With these three books, exhaustively researched (Nina’s project took nine years, and Gary has been writing on these things for the last 15 at least, with a published Nature article) you don’t have to take my word for it.  And if you need to hear this from experienced doctors and nutrition researchers, Volek and Phinney are the ticket.  Pick your authority.

But if you want the most complete, interesting story, and only want to listen to one, I’d have to recommend The Case Against Sugar.  Teicholz’s book is almost as impressive, and worth it if you need convincing the need for adding animal fat to your diet.  Volek and Phinney’s is a bit drier.  Both Taubes’ and Teicholz’s books are available on Audible.com.

What is fascinating about Taubes’ book, and Teicholz’s as well, is that both are journalistic reviews of scientific literature, where both journalists undertook a journey to read and digest the current scientific literature, as well as do deep tracing of original sources to understand the true roots of current perspective.  For the rest of this post, I’m going to focus on The Case Against Sugar.  But much of the praise, as well as the thinking, can also be attributed to Teicholz’s book.

In The Case Against Sugar, Gary Taubes executes what we in science call a meta-review.  What is a meta-review?  It’s where someone pulls all the relevant past research on a particular area, and exhaustively looks for commonalities and contradictions in the literature to show how various hypotheses are, or alternately not, supported.  A traditional scientific meta-review constrains itself only to the scientific literature.  It is typically written by an authority in the field, and through virtue of precedent, constrains itself solely to facts and figures from the reviewed material.  Though opinion is implicit, it is suppressed.  Usually review papers are written by invitation only, from people dominant in the field.  And as Taubes reveals in his book, such an approach would never result in a damning indictment such as his.  Why?  Because so many of the researchers in the nutrition discipline have been bought by the sugar industry, or brought up to never question the basic hypotheses regarding the ostensible deleterious effect of saturated fat in diet that pervades the thinking and funding in the nutrition community.

The general form of The Case Against Sugar is laid out in the Author’s Note at the very beginning of the book.  Taubes lays down the gauntlet in the first and second paragraphs.

The purpose of this book is to present the case against sugar — both sucrose and high-fructose corn syrup — as the principal cause of the chronic disease that are most likely to kill us, or at least accelerate our demise, in the twenty-first century…. If this were a criminal case, The Case Against Sugar would be the argument for the prosecution.

Taubes then goes forward to exhaustively document the history of sugar, and refined flour as well, its known effects against indigenous people (it rots out their teeth, destroys their health and incapacitates them in short order.)  Anyone needing some deeper insight into Sherman Alexie’s book, You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, and Alexie himself, discussed here on this blog, on what happened to the Spokane Indians when they lost salmon from their diet after the construction of Grand Coulee Dam, can map the same outcomes Taubes discusses for tribes like the Tohono O’odham in the U.S., and the Tokelau in New Zealand, in detail to the Spokane Indian tribe.

Taubes decisively makes the case that sugar is a long-acting addictive, and destructive agent, acting over decades.  He chronicles in-depth the impact: increases in metabolic syndrome, which basically captures all the various internal organ dysfunctions; heart disease; and the obesity epidemic.  He even devotes a whole chapter to three specific illnesses that plague us — gout, cancer, and Alzheimer’s disease, stacking up the evidence and the conclusions.

But what’s truly awesome about Taubes’ work, from a v-Meme perspective, is that while Taubes himself is unaware of a v-Meme classification for knowing, he attempts to explain the differences between levels of causality that exist in the different knowledge structures.  And throughout the book, he really looks at the psychodynamics present in the community that made these decisions.  He digs deep into the “why” and “how” certain conclusions in the nutrition community got created, which then puts him in the bailiwick of my own work.  What is the fundamental OS that generated the specific knowledge that has led us to getting so far off-track with how we eat?  When the average American ingests over 150 lbs. of sugar and year, and didn’t eat nearly so much only 50 years ago, how can we believe there is NO effect?  Or, at a minimum, believe that there is no effect worth investigating? Formally, we might call this a reliability/validity crisis.  But informally, it’s gaslighting of the highest order.

Taubes walks up the v-Meme spiral, from the loss of heuristic causality present in Performance v-Meme German science pre- WWII and its analysis of obesity as a metabolic disorder, to the re-established postwar authority of the far less scientifically evolved and sophisticated, Legalistic v-Meme, and far more Authoritarian American medical community.  He continues with critiques of a lack of clinical experience in testing theories in the American medical community, and then finally moves toward advancing the long-time notion of sugar as a driver for most modern Western diseases.

Along the way, he confronts the authority of psychopathic actors, like Ancel Keys, credited with inventing the military K-ration, and one of the most famous nutrition professors of all time. Funded by the sugar industry, Keys advanced the Diet-Heart Hypothesis, that maintained that replacing saturated animal fats with vegetable polyunsaturated fats would prevent heart disease.  The indirect result of Keys’ aggressive advocacy for invalid science was the removal of saturated fat from processed food, and the massive substitution of sugar in those same foods in an attempt to retain palatability.

Keys drew these conclusions from his famous Seven Countries Study, which would become infamous not for rigorous science, but confirmation bias and convenient omission.  He was also infamous for his chronic, rebarbative attacks against his fellow researchers who were openly skeptical of Keys’ recommendations — in particular,  John Yudkin, another famous nutritional research professor at Queen Elizabeth College in London, who attempted to warn the public about the dangers of sugar as far back as the late 1950s.

Taubes attempts to wrap up the book explaining the value of scaffolded heuristics (my words, not his!) and how the existence of uncertainty is part and parcel of any grand theory.  There are times I think he remains not completely convinced of his own conclusions — which is a good thing.  In the final chapter, he buttresses his insights with long-time knowing about changes in history, which once again reflects some pretty profound metacognition on his part.  As well as the ability to change his mind.  That’s awesome.

Can we place sugar in a larger context inside our current woes?  Based not just on Taubes’ book, but on further reasoning as well, I think we can.  Sugar turns out to be the perfect addictive substance for a feedback loop into our current Authoritarian malaise.  Sugar and insulin resistance create the metabolic conditions for low energy and depression.  The decline in health is slow, so effects on the actors only culminate in old age, after effective work life is complete.  Unlike other addictive substances, like heroin, that incapacitate individuals almost immediately, sugar takes decades.  And its constant ingestion then makes the individual dependent on a host of other industries in order for sustained survival.  Not the least of which is Big Pharma, who makes the drugs to counter the bad effects, and Big Agriculture, that makes the high fructose corn syrup, and sucrose in the first place.

Conclusions emerge from his basic work.  If sugar is the cause of the diabetes/obesity epidemic, its effects are striking earlier and earlier in our young people.  Type II diabetes used to be unheard of in our young people.  Now it is rising across the globe at epidemic rates.  If sugar causes brain inflammation and incumbent depression, it’s no surprise to me that in large populations, we see an escalation of such tragedies as school shootings, which then reinforce trauma mentality and emergence of Survival v-Meme thinking. T, in turn, increases Authoritarianism and destroys empathy and its development in our young people’s schools.  And then that same Authoritarianism creates a lack of desire for understanding causal thinking, or even promotes divergent and unsupported perspectives.  Which THEN become refocused on such things as environmental toxins, which may have effects, but are far less supported or plausible than the 150 lbs./year of sugar we eat.  Sugar turns out not just corrosive to our health.  When we live in denial of its impact, it becomes far more corrosive to our sense of truth.

As wild as it may seem, if there’s one place in the Principle of Reinforcement — that individuals create thought patterns in societies, that then in turn create thought patterns in individuals — that might suggest a profound intervention in our political woes, it is in our diet.  And while diet is indeed complex, and sugar is not the only element that needs fixing (a return to saturated fats is also mandatory,),  eliminating sugar is a great place to start.

There’s more stuff to unpack here that I’ve been thinking about.  Here are a few, peripherally related thoughts to work on connections yourself:  Insulin itself is a fascinating core control chemical in the body, and its ability to separate core energy systems in the body, from external drivers in the environment is likely the reason we evolved dependence on insulin in the first place, since we use sugar for our primary energy cycle, but can’t find it very often existing in nature.  The fact that wheat and Authoritarian hierarchies to grow it co-evolved, and led to conflicts with hunter-gatherer cultures were likely no surprise.   You needed the suppression of independent expression, if not agency, to get everyone to go to war in some orderly fashion — another great expression of the Principle of Reinforcement.  Understanding caste cultures built on vegetarianism, such as India, is an area rich for understanding control of large populations through food.  Advocacy against sugar as a daily ingested substance, at this point in time, will likely net you the same looks that anti-tobacco advocates sixty years ago.  As Dr. Robert Lustig noted in his most recent book, The Hacking of the American Mind, sugar as a dopamine-producing agent, fuels addiction and pleasure seeking, and thus reinforces the Authoritarian social structure, whereas animal fats promote serotonin production, and very likely promote empathetic development.  The implications in shifting population densities and social structures are staggering — humans come together over eating animals, but as we shifted up into Authoritarian and Legalistic hierarchies, we evolved a food source that made us passive and self-reinforcing for the new population-dense social structure.  Wow.  Alcohol is on average is pro-empathetic, sugar anti-empathetic.  These are just a few things shooting through my head as I’ve, uh, digested all this material.

Our brains are so dependent on the food we ingest.  I’m looking forward to spring and all the bike rides I’ll have to muse on this.

But when it comes to sugar, for my mind, there isn’t that much complexity.  As I’ve been telling my friends lately — just cut that stuff out.

 

Swimming with dolphins in the open ocean, Kealakekua Bay State Historical Park, 2013, the Big Island of Hawaii

For those that need a break from our self-created trauma machine of social media lately (there’s a whole post on that, but I just can’t bear to write it!) I just got this link from Frans De Waal’s Facebook feed.  Not surprisingly, the science is coming back that cetaceans have complex societies.  Whales and dolphins both engage in intense empathetic behaviors that have led to the rise of cetacean ‘cultures’.  From the piece:

The long list of behavioural similarities includes many traits shared with humans and other primates such as:

• complex alliance relationships – working together for mutual benefit
• social transfer of hunting techniques – teaching how to hunt and using tools
• cooperative hunting
• complex vocalizations, including regional group dialects – ‘talking’ to each other
• vocal mimicry and ‘signature whistles’ unique to individuals – using ‘name’ recognition
• interspecific cooperation with humans and other species – working with different species
• alloparenting – looking after youngsters that aren’t their own
• social play

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-10-whales-dolphins-rich-human-like-cultures.html#jCp

The most interesting thing I found in the article, though, is the statement from one of the professors from Stanford, Dr. Kieran Fox:

Dr Kieran Fox, a neuroscientist at Stanford University, added: “Cetaceans have many complex social behaviours that are similar to humans and other primates. They, however, have different brain structures from us, leading some researchers to argue that whales and dolphins could not achieve higher cognitive and social skills. I think our research shows that this is clearly not the case. Instead, a new question emerges: How can very diverse patterns of brain structure in very different species nonetheless give rise to highly similar cognitive and social behaviours?”

I think I might just have to drop him a note.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Me, about 50 lbs. ago, on the Salmon River in central Idaho, Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, in 2016, followed by me a little over a year later, next to friend Mike Beiser’s sailboat.

For those that have been following my weight loss journey — far more immediately impactful that some of the secrets-of-the-universe squirrel talk that appears on this blog — you’ll remember that I make a couple of big points about how we view food.  For those without the patience to read the older posts, here they are:

1.  Most of how we view food in the contemporary world, and fat, has absolutely nothing to do with the actual biochemistry of how our bodies process food.  Even the stuff about how we’re supposed to feel when we EAT certain food!
2. Most of how we view food is wrapped deeply in notions of social control that feed the Authoritarian v-Meme in our society.
3. The deep shame that the top of the Authoritarian food chain wants to lay on us for ostensibly being lazy deprives us of receiving meaningful information on what food (and hunger) actually does to us.  The short version of our current food crisis is a.) we eat sugary food because it gives us a buzz, we’re depressed, and it’s addictive, and b.) it makes us fat, and then that feeds back into a system where other people call us lazy.

I’ve advocated for a diet, very similar to Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Body, I’ve taken to calling “Deep Paleo”.  This is the diet we actually evolved to eat, over about 1 million years.  Screw the various “genetic bottlenecks” that say humans evolved to blow up into zeppelins with minimal food, or the very distinguished folks that say “because we nearly starved, we had to figure out how to get along with each other and hunt cooperatively.”  Those beliefs, though widely held (and reliably recited — hang on to that thought) are very likely total bullshit.  Empathy — the thing that really organized us — requires energy surpluses.  Not energy shortages.  Food shortages would drive more factionalization and extinction.  Not more social evolution.

But back to that ‘social structure/influence-free’ diet.  That evolutionary diet’s history (once again, think a million years ago, not 10,000) is straightforward — for 10 months each year (the Dry Season in central Africa) we ate lizards, and things we could run down, because we could run a long time.   Two months of the year (during the Wet Season), we ate fruit, and we got fat, and the women produced estrogen, and got pregnant.

And then, when the fruit was gone, we shifted back to being skinny, because that’s what we needed to be in order to chase impalas and lizards.  Farley Mowat showed you could eat mice and be a large carnivore and do just fine.  And because it wouldn’t do for us to wander around starving for months at a time, our bodies evolved to shift into lizard-grabbing/antelope chasing food mode in about a week – without much pain.  As crazy as it may seem, you’re supposed to be able to lose weight and get back into shape without much pain.  We mastered that over a million years of evolution.

The bottom line is NOT that we should go back to that 10 month/2 month cycle.  The bottom line is that our deep history tells us what we should eat if we want to lose weight and be lizard-grabbing lively, or carbohydrate-sleepy.  We don’t HAVE to do anything (including eating lizards) for 10 months at a time.  We can lose weight for a week or so, eating figurative lizards and antelopes and still not being hungry, and then grab some jalapeño poppers with our friends at the bar once every other week or so.  It’s really that easy to control your weight.  The deep insight is intensely liberating — and also promotes agency.  Something else the control-oriented in our society aren’t so into.

All this is pretty cool.  But you don’t have to just believe me.  Watch the video below — about horses and humans racing along in Wales.

 

Someone with a lot tighter editorial control than this blog is singing my song.  They attribute our ability to run all day to cooling abilities of early proto-hominids as opposed to their prey.  I totally agree.  I’ve said that, barring a super-hot day, you ought to be able to easily exercise for 3-4 hours without a Camelbak.  Certainly without ‘hitting the wall’.  And the science supports this.  But the other unexpressed elephants-in-the-room, are the food we ate to be able to do that, as well as the efficiency of bipedal locomotion.  It also means, implicitly, that ketosis and gluconeogenesis were the historic way humans dealt with getting the majority of the energy, especially for motion, most of the time, that they need.  Not carbs, glycogen, glycolysis, and fatty livers.

Because our society can’t process the real basics of who, and what we are, and these basic principles of how our metabolism evolved, we, as a nation, are destroying ourselves.  What many of us get, especially as we age, is insulin dysregulation, more properly called, insulin resistance, that leaves many of us suffering with metabolic syndrome.

Even Stephen Hawking has warned us of the ramifications of the obesity crisis.  Though, not surprisingly, as a good, old-fashioned Authoritarian, he’s warned us (kinda) about the wrong thing.  “Sitting to much is killing us,” and he’s partially right.  But he blows any opportunity to really change the debate by doubling down on the old ‘humans are lazy’ trope, instead of discussing the real driver, diet – sugar, fat, and metabolic syndrome — the real demons in this passion play.

What’s really interesting, though, is how the whole food discussion is also a great way to understand the “reliability/validity” discussion I’ve talked about on this blog.  We can look at our deep ancestors and come up with all sorts of reasons to reliably support our current views on eating lots of cinnamon rolls and bananas.  That doesn’t make them insightful, true or accurate.  It just means they’re repeatable, and everyone will basically say the same thing.

But validity-wise, all this is really falling apart.  On our carbohydrate-dominated, processed food diet, almost everyone is getting fat.  You can go to your local Walmart, or even your local health food store (lots of obese, unhealthy looking people there too!) And we believe we can actually eat that stuff.  Our beliefs, more than anything else, drive the creation of our food supply, as well as what we put in our mouth.  And everything about that fails profoundly the validity test.  When we reach for the cinnamon roll AND the orange juice at breakfast — what we believe balances pleasure and health, we’re still getting fatter.  That means it fails the validity test.  In spades.

What I’ve found in my own world (or rather, my own body) is that my big brain gets pretty happy when I eat carbs.  Which makes sense — the brain burns something like 20% of the calories  we eat.

But sometimes you just shouldn’t listen to your brain.  Sometimes, you just need to go out and grab a lizard.  Or remember those days, loping across the Central African savannah, chasing an antelope with your homies.

Shout-out to co-conspirator Ryan Martens and his successful marathon completion.  Ryan’s a little younger than me (not much), and after training only a couple of months (he was in fine shape, but not a marathoner a priori) he ran a marathon all with sub 10-minute miles.  Interestingly enough, empathy drove his training — he was coupled with an app and a group of other fine folks, who encouraged each other to stick to the training regimen, virtually chasing that antelope all together across the savannah.  Kinda like we did 1 million years ago!

 

Les, son Conor, and Teresa after a successful day salmon fishing in the ocean off the Columbia Bar.  Les was one of my original design process and leadership mentors.

Tomorrow, I’ll be presenting, along with chronic co-conspirator, former Rally Software CTO Ryan Martens, and new friend, SAFe Fellow Jennifer Fawcett, at the Scaled Agile Summit, a convergence of software managers and engineers interested in accelerating and managing ever more complex software development projects.  We’ll be sharing the stage and talking about development of empathy in leadership, which I discuss in my posts below on Servant Leadership 2.0.  We’re shifting the terminology a little bit, but at the same time, I think it’s fair to commend Jim Collins’ work in Good to Great on Servant Leadership as a starting point for my process of reflection on how leadership works.

As well as what has changed. The demands of companies as we approach the year 2020 are still somewhat the same — we have to ship product or services and make money.  But with increasing diversity, global markets, and far more connected systems and integration problems, lots has also changed.  Collins’ book was originally published back in 2001, when doing business in China, for example, wasn’t exactly new, but also still relatively difficult.  Now the entire globe is mapped together with interconnected supply chains, software is traded in 24/7 work cycles that follow the rotation of the Earth, and even locally, customers expect levels of personalization for basic products that were heretofore reserved only for the very high end of anyone’s product line.

Equally, the challenges of integrating larger social and environmental concerns loom large, and as a corporation, what you’re not aware of not only can hurt your bottom line, but increasingly, on a planet beset by global warming, can literally kill us all.  24 hour media cycles, and the ubiquity of the Internet also means that the expanse of global awareness has been amplified almost immeasurably.

And though, at times, this seems like a burden, it’s a good thing.  We are all interconnected, of course, so the actions of everyone can and do affect the whole.  At the same time, the enlightened leader has to prioritize actions, and spheres of influence.  We can feel deep compassion for starvation in the South Sudan.  At the same time, our own survival is keyed to shipping the next revision of our product.  That’s just a fact.

What Ryan, Jennifer and I will be presenting on is not a topical-level road map toward solutions of all these problems.  Anyone telling you that you’re going to master leadership by clicking through a checklist is selling an increasingly long bill-of-goods.  The evolutionary answer is to create the circumstances within your empathetic self, so your awareness grows — becomes emergent — and you can use all those tools, skills and experiences gained over your lifetime and career to facilitate the growth of the people around you.  As well as yourself.  It’s not an open loop process — it’s a coupled system, and as your empathetic self becomes more connected to others and feeds information and energy into others, so it also comes back to you.  There is no chicken, nor egg — but we can help with the process of self-preparation.  That’s our intention.

How do we intend to do this?  We’re going to lay out the real Big Picture — the meta- road map of how we’re all connected, from the neural level through our own organizations and desired outcomes, to larger societal cultures, constraints and intentions.  And then we’ll help with a little self-training.  While it is true that we’ve only got 45 minutes, we also believe that you can start the evolution process, interestingly enough, by seizing the development of personal agency through interaction with others.  And then hopefully, you’ll take that back and use it on yourself.  Of course, there’s more.  But all great quests begin with a handful of friends.

The connections you make will influence how that path will develop, and where those differences will be made.  We can’t know, and don’t pretend to.  But we do hope to inspire, at least a little by example.  How?  With one of the main lessons I think all three of us have learned in our own very different paths — by facing our ignorance, accepting ourselves, and then committing to action.  It’s as simple as the statement “I don’t know.  But I believe in myself enough that I can find out.  And I’m going to do it.”

All my Servant Leadership 2.0 posts are listed below.

Servant Leadership 2.0 — A Starting Point
Servant Leadership 2.0 — It’s coming, whether you like it or not
Servant Leadership 2.0 — some Semi-Final Thoughts
Servant Leadership 2.0 Continued — the Evolved Global Holistic Team
Design Thinking and Servant Leadership — the First in a Series
Design Thinking and Servant Leadership — Part II — Understanding the Legalistic Transition
Design Thinking and Servant Leadership — Part III — Trust-Based Relationships and Leadership Acceleration
Combining Servant Leadership 2.0, Empathy, and Design Heuristics in High Performance Teams

Postscript:  This hit my Facebook feed today.  None other than Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, is singing the importance of empathy.    And the most in-depth, systemic perspective is right here on this blog.  Word.

Braden with about 200 or so of his relations — spawning landlocked kokanee salmon in Isabella Creek, Clearwater NF, ID

One of the most popular subjects I’ve written about lately has been my weight loss journey, inspired mostly by Tim Ferriss’ Four Hour Body, which I heartily recommend.  I’ve lost 45 lbs. in about 15 weeks, mostly by modifying my diet.  I’m not done with weight loss yet — my goal is to dump another 25 lbs. and get back to my weight in my mid-20s.

My Story and the Medical Profession

Just a little background — I’ve always been an exercise/bike geek, riding around 1500 miles/year, which is nothing for a hard-core rider, but quite a bit for someone who just goes out for recreation.  I fill the rest of the time with weight training and running on the infernal elliptical 3-4 times a week during the lousy-weather season.  None of this had prevented consistent weight gain. By the beginning of last May, I was 292 lbs.  Trainers in the past have called me a ‘fit, fat guy’.  If there was an advertisement  for how exercise doesn’t prevent weight gain, I was most definitely it.  I still had the increasing incremental health problems that happens when your weight goes up.  Most of these, the current medical community attributes to aging, and that philosophy has become so normalized in this society, when you protest — even me — people shame you for not accepting your slowly degrading fate.  For the most part, they’re all going downhill, too.  And in a low-empathy environment like an academic institution — or a hospital, you don’t get much sympathy, or empathy, for anything.  “Hey, you’re tenured!”  That’s your consolation.

As I write this today, I am 247 lbs., and have fixed a majority of my health problems, which while not severe, were headed in the wrong direction.  As we age (I’m 55 as I write this) you go to the doctor’s office with a new problem.  And they go “tsk, tsk… there’s a pill for that.”  They give you the pill, you go out the door, and even with that symptom remediated, you’re only an annual check-up away until you’re back in the door with a new problem.  And then, of course, they go “tsk, tsk… there’s a pill for that.”  They always ask “do you exercise?” and, in my case, I’m already exercising.  They shake their heads (most of them are also fat, and many are also obese) and give you another prescription, or another study.  In my case, the progression of prescribed pills looked sort of like this:

• Blood pressure (“well, you’re under stress in your marriage/incipient divorce…”)
• Gastro-Esophageal Reflux Syndrome (“more work stress!”)
• Rising cholesterol (“this just happens as you age…”)
• Anti-depressants/anti-anxiety medicines (“well, we all know the state of the universities and budget cuts nowadays!”)
• Sleep disorder/apnea (“time for a sleep study — we can get you on a CPAP — that ought to help!”)
• Erectile dysfunction (“well, there’s this thing called male menopause, where Old Reliable just isn’t that Reliable!”)
• Pre-diabetes (“you know it’s just increasing in the general population, and losing weight just isn’t an option. 96% of all people who lose weight just gain it back.  So take this pill, or you’ll end up on the dialysis machine.”)

I’m paraphrasing the input I’ve received from the medical community here, but a lot of it has not been far off.  But, not surprisingly, there’s little sense of empathetic, systemic thinking at all.  For example, what might have happened to my health had I been taking all the prescribed medicines and treatments together?  (Just so you realize, I resisted every step of the way, not taking many of the drugs, partially because I was an exercise geek.)  What about the potential interactions?  What about a slowly degrading homeostasis that’s experienced with many of these drugs?  What about the intersection of effects that create mood change?  An experienced endocrinologist would recognize that what’s wrong with me here is likely metabolic syndrome.

But no one in any doctor’s office ever mentioned that term to me during the whole time I was experiencing it.  I was “just getting older.”  And not dealing with the inevitable very well.  For example, if you didn’t understand the connection between visceral fat and increased estrogen production (visceral fat drives estrogen production, which shows up as the discussable gynecomastia– enlarged breasts in men,) how would one then interpret (or even discuss) the surge in Viagra sales in the U.S., a likely side effect of increased estrogen production in obese men, which is far less a subject of polite conversation?

It took a crisis, and a friend, to start the process of figuring out what what was really going on with my weight.  And, of course, I had a powerful tool — the Theory of Everything that I write about on the blog.  Sometimes people ask me “what is all this v-Meme/empathy stuff good for?”  Well — this.  Why?  Because there are so many perspectives on weight loss, all with some piece of information.  And since we as a society have NOT figured it out, someone’s got to pull it all together.  That’s what this piece does — as well as give you a meta-roadmap to your own weight loss issues.

The crisis hit last March.  I was out skiing with my younger son, and two friends, who live in McCall, ID.  It was one of those “powder, but slushing up” days at Brundage Mountain, where it was 8″ of freshies that were DEFINITELY not blower pow.  I was just about ready to head in, feeling unsteady in the deep stuff, when my compatriots ducked a rope for one last schuss through some untracked.  We stopped above a moderate grade with some trees.  Upon start-up, I took one of those slow, twisting falls where bindings only work nominally, and partially tore my ACL.  I ended up taking my first Ride of Shame down the mountain on the rescue toboggan, after wrestling myself back in-bounds.  The poor, geriatric ski patrollers in charge of lugging my 292 lb. carcass huffed and puffed the whole way while dragging me back to the base.

I went to the doctor, and had the usual things done when you screw your knees up — x-rays, MRIs and such.  The diagnosis was a torn meniscus and a partially torn ACL.  Surgery was marginal, and rehab turned into time on my bike, which was what I would be doing anyway.  From March to the beginning of May, I swam, and did the low-impact thing.  Weight loss was never mentioned at the doctor’s office nor with the physical therapist — both of whom are extremely competent and had a great bedside manner.  Compared to many of the people they treat, I’m really not that fat.

And inside my head, I also resolved that if I couldn’t lose weight (remember — I hadn’t figure all this out at this point, and was bombarded with the same bullshit about not being able to permanently take off the pounds) I would take the summer and ride miles on the bike.  I’ve had friends who get to 3000+ miles on the bike, so I could easily re-attain my old performance of 2000 miles.

It was the middle of May when I started complaining to my friend and chronic co-conspirator, Ryan Martens, who’s a sort-of retired CTO of a medium-sized software concern, Rally Software,  in Boulder, CO.  Ryan’s a great guy — and he’s also embedded in a completely different information stream than I am.  “Everyone in Silicon Valley is using Tim Ferriss’ book, The Four Hour Body.  Why don’t you give it a try?  I’m planning on losing about 20 lbs. myself. It’s really not that hard.”  There was no formal competition, collaborative agreement or anything between us regarding weight loss — just a suggestion from a friend.  But at this point, having nothing to lose, I ordered the book, and started.

Below is a graph of my weight loss to date.  I’ve managed to maintain a relatively linear weight loss pattern.  This pattern, through understanding the v-Memes of what is known, is likely to change — but that’s the subject of another post.  Here’s my weight loss for the past 15 weeks.

I started the diet staring into a a bowl of canned refried beans that I had stuck a cooked Costco Italian sausage in, determined to give it a try.  I lost 4 lbs. very quickly.  The graph starts at that point (288 lbs.)  I also started taking the recommended supplements — the PAGG stack.  The PAGG stack isn’t some crazy concoction — it’s garlic pills, green tea pills, an anti-oxidant (alpha-lipoid acid) and a triglyceride chopper (policosanol) taken essentially with meals.  They are concentrated, of course, so they do give a heightened push to your metabolism.  But it’s not like taking benzedrine or other true amphetamines.  Far from it.

Those that know me also know that once I say I’m going to do something, I do it.  And so I did.  The big thing is on a diet, I don’t cheat.  And the big promise with Tim’s diet was that you’re not hungry.  Hunger was always my bugbear, so a diet that wouldn’t make me hungry was absolutely mandatory.  For me, hunger meant headaches, and incapacitation to think clearly.  I’m the primary income for my family, and having a headache would mean not working effectively.  It was the deal killer with all the usual starvation diets.  I’ve written about this before — but this lack of empathy in understanding hunger is, I think, the real deal breaker in the medical community with recommending diets in general.  Hunger is real — but it means different things for different people.  A key insight I gained in all of this is that it’s a key indicator of what’s happening metabolically in your world.

There are no restricted quantities of allowed foods on the diet — you basically can’t eat sugar, dairy, fruit and wheat — but you can eat in even portions as many eggs, meat, green vegetables and beans (with a couple of exceptions) as you can stomach.  You also are supposed to vigorously hydrate yourself — up to a gallon of water a day.  The beans are the unique separator from other Atkin’s-type diets.  Once a week, you get a splurge day, where you can eat anything you’d like — and you’re supposed to take it.

And the pounds just started falling off.  As I’ve written in previous posts, the first three days, I walked around with my brain in a fog.  I wasn’t hungry, but I definitely felt weird. I kept up the same exercise pace I always had.  Then things started changing.  Not just the weight — but how my body dealt with its stresses.  First thing that happened was my joints stopped hurting.  I still have the occasional twinge of pain from my torn ACL.  But my knees used to hurt all the time.  Now they don’t.  I have a whiplash injury that’s prevented range of motion in my neck that always hurt.   That pain is gone.  My body, and my kidneys, process water very differently than before.  I drink a glass of water — it passes, appropriately, through the system.

And finally, I am blessed with abundant energy.  I am never tired.  I breathe differently, likely largely a function of the loss of fat around my liver that formerly pushed up on my diaphragm.  And I can go camping again without fear of insomnia because of my sleep apnea.  I used to wake myself up from snoring every 30 minutes.  And while I’m not exactly sleeping through the night, I can easily sleep for two hours without my CPAP before waking.

Starting our Understanding of WHY the Four Body Diet Works – National/Cultural and Deep Paleo Diets

But WHY did it work?  Tim alludes to some of the effects in the book.  He’s famous for running experiments on himself.  A classic Performance v-Meme individual, if someone comes in with an idea, he’ll say “well, let’s give it a roll.”  He’s wired himself up to blood glucose monitors, weighed his inputs, and his, well, outputs.  So there’s no question that the Four Hour Body diet works for lots of folks.  And he’s done some digging.  There are allusions to performance heuristics and connections.  All that could be enough — and is enough — for most people.

But not for me.  WHY?  Why did what he invented work so well for me?  And how is it different from other diets?  Or rather, instead of thinking in status-based terms (which of the Four Hour Body/Atkins/South Beach/Paleo/etc. is the BEST diet?) maybe we can really get off the Mario Kart level and understand the deeper dynamic, not just behind the Four Hour Body, but all the diets.  Let’s look at the v-Meme stack — the meta-diet representation.  And then you can deal with the comments that inevitably come when one starts talking about diets.  You’ll likely hear from many people “well, everyone’s different.”  Or “you just have to count calories.”  Or some such icks.  Because what these statements REALLY are are low-empathy declarations that prevent larger coherence.  They keep us trapped in a superficial paradigm that directly disallows the development of a larger, current collective intelligence.  Yeah, everyone’s different.  But how are we also the same?

And here’s the kicker — with the near universal extreme modification of national/cultural diets, which were our back-up protection for basically all our history, we’re doomed, unless we come up with a new, shared understanding of food.  National/cultural diets are fascinating things, which like culture itself, are compacted information from up and down the v-Meme stack, that we can only guess at the origins of.  But they have kept respective societies healthy for the past 10,000 years.  And through the spread of ubiquitous, various processed food products, all these diets are changing.  And as a consequence, everyone, around the world, is now getting fat.

In this previous post, I talked extensively about what I call the Deep Paleo Diet, which is really what Tim’s diet has at its core.  The short version of the Deep Paleo Diet is that if you roll back our diet not 10,000 years ago, but 100,000, or even a million years, you have the diet that proto-hominids evolved to eat.  What THAT diet contained was ten months of protein, fats, grass and beans during the dry season, along with two months during the wet season of fruit.  During the wet season, everyone would bulk up on sugar, the newly accumulated fat would make the women estrogenic, fertility would be achieved and babies would be made.  During the ten months of dry season, we naturally would shed excess pounds — not through some wild agony of starvation, but through metabolic (and as I know now, ketogenic) processes because that would increase our fitness to go club bunnies, or impalas over the head.  We’d fill in the gaps catching easy prey like lizards, and eating the occasional seed source we’d find.  And so we would thrive for a million or so years.

Yes, there were influences from extinction and starvation events.  But the idea that hunger dominated our profile our entire existence is absolute nonsense. Our collective nature, and the empathy it fundamentally requires, belies this Authoritarian, depressive lie.  In order to move up in social organization, collective agents (read as tribes of humans) would have to have put hunger aside as a driver.  You can’t get consistent, coordinated collective living habits if everyone is grumpy all the time.  When you add in the fact that female humans have both hidden estrus, and are relatively constantly sexually available (at least biologically!) this also belies the starvation stories.  Humans are deeply social, and attachment behavior is a cornerstone of our existence.

Larger cultural/national diets came next, as humans spread all over the globe.  It’s important to understand those national/cultural diets and how they evolved, and place them in the context of maintaining entire populations in healthy homeostasis.  If you live on the Beaufort Sea, the Inuit diet has salmon, whale and seal meat.  If you’re in France, it’s red wine, creamy soups, vegetables, cheese and bread.  Northern Germany, pigs, sausages, cabbage and beer.  And so on.  All those diets represent mythic-level, long-term, time-averaged data for success, built on food availability now having to do with different seasonal requirements, as well as different ecosystem productivities, deep cultural knowledge of preparation, the balance of micro-nutrients, and so on.  They have been modified only slowly over time (potatoes were in the New World, and didn’t show up in the Old World until Columbus returned, for example) and the fact is that they work.  Because if those diets did to their populations what our current diet is doing to the world population, they would perish.  These diets were not just built as buttresses against starvation, which is the popular model.  They were also constructed as nourishment for societies facing different levels of challenges at different times.  As a core part of the energetic requirements of civilizations, national diets often directly dictated ranges of cultures and their success against competing cultures, which often wanted to kill them.  Empathy and negotiated boundaries between In-Groups and Out-Groups are relatively new phenomena in human existence.  If your diet wasn’t adequate, you couldn’t maintain a national or cultural identity.

One of my favorite myths involves the Yaqui Indians, who were originally vegetarians, but received a vision that they should eat deer after the Spaniards invaded, because they needed the strength to fight.  The Yaquis, who had a reputation for being particularly ferocious, were one of the only unconquered tribes during the whole Spaniard conquista.

Those cultural/national diets haven’t completely vanished.  Japanese still have sushi, and if you go to Taiwan, you’ll find roast squid on a stick. Russians still have borscht, and the French still have duck l’orange.  Mexicans have rice, beans, and steak, and we, well, we still have hot dogs.  But everyone around the world now has ice cream, and Twinkies, and Coca Cola, which no one 1000 years ago could have predicted.  There are large thematic ingredient differences between past and present.  We have machines that grow food, and crops that produce macronutrients (like high-fructose corn syrup) that used to be exceedingly rare.

The entire story of global food is a long one — but the core notion is that we are not going to recover our health through reversion to national diets.  We need a different understanding of food, and how it affects us on all levels, than what we have now.  It has to be Global Holistic, AND well-scaffolded by the lower v-Memes.  Because if it isn’t, we can’t share the important information and diversity that’s out there.  We remain trapped in rejection of information because of perceived differences, instead of understand our fractalized, self-similar genetic backgrounds that actually dictate what happens with our bodies and our health.

And here’s the big rub — if we’re not healthy, we can’t be the more evolved, empathetic humans we so need to be.  We’re much more prone to being depressed, and as such, limited in our curiosity toward others.  And much more likely to be manipulated by psychopathic relational disruptive Authoritarians toward needless conflict.  In short, not understanding the diet thing is really gonna kill us.  Really.

So here’s a start below, where I give the Four Hour Body diet a v-Meme once-over.  As a mechanical engineer and complex system scientist, I fully realize that what below is incomplete.  And yeah — it starts from one guy, reading a bunch of material, and understanding his own body.  But it has to start somewhere.

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So here goes.

How does the Four Hour Body diet work?  And WHY does it work, at least for some of us, so well?  The first thing we need is an understanding not so much of food, but of how the body works.  And that is metabolism.  Metabolism is the top, Guiding Principles place where we have to start our journey.  All humans across the globe possess, in varying amounts, the same metabolic processes.  We breathe air, and utilize energy with two primary methods — glycolysis and ketosis.

For any of us that have taken an introductory biology class, we’re all intimately familiar with glycolysis.  This is the process of breaking down glycogen into glucose, which our cells use to create energy.  We’re taught about how the body takes food, converts it into glycogen, which is always readily available to convert to glucose, and then burns this when we exercise.  When we “hit the wall” during a run, or “bonk” — it’s the result of your body running out of glycogen and glucose.  For most folks, it usually happens about an hour or so into whatever intense physical activity you’re participating in.  After that, you need to suck down some Gatorade, eat a candy bar, or something, to keep going.  And this, if you believe most of the textbooks, is the END OF THE STORY.  We need glucose, sugar, whatever — because if we don’t get it, we don’t have any energy.  And then the body consumes itself, or something, and we die.

As with many understandings of how our bodies (or our world) functions, it’s not wrong. It’s just not the full picture.  There’s another half — and that’s ketosis.  Ketosis is what your body uses for energy when the glucose runs out.  Sort of. Ketosis is your body burning ketone bodies for fuel when glycogen and glucose hit critical levels.  Ketone bodies come from fat, and so ketosis directly burns the fat cells you have saved up, that your body has socked away using insulin from the various foods you eat.

The reality is that these two are in some form of balance at all times in your system.  And that balance is a direct effect of your diet.  How your body reacts to the homeostasis that you establish will directly affect how you feel.  I can’t find any studies about how the body balances that, so any of my readership wants to add comments, let me know.

First, I’ll tell you that most of our deep Paleo ancestors likely ran mostly on ketosis.  Humans aren’t speed hunters, like cheetahs or lions.  We tend to follow animals until they’re exhausted, and then put a spear or something in their side.  That means that we evolved to hunt this way — no human alive can run as fast as the slowest antelope.  But we keep going.  And that pursuit is likely an all-day affair.

What does that mean?  What are the system requirements for running down an antelope?  It likely means we had to be extremely efficient in our locomotion.  And we are.  The research is, for example, well-established that exercise isn’t a great way to lose weight — something like 10% of weight loss, for anyone other than Michael Phelps, is geared to exercise.  That’s because we evolved ourselves to be energy efficient.  As well, we were designed to run all day — not just for an hour until we hit the wall and bonked.  That means the modern runner, strapped on the back with Camelbaks full of energy drinks are not representative of any proto-hominid.  Any self-respecting proto-hominid would likely fill up with water at the beginning of the day, or at a clear stream, and then run with his or her buddies until the game was exhausted.  There wouldn’t be any time to ingest any squeeze packets, eat a Clif bar or sip from a water bottle.  You ran on some residual fat,  for hours at a time.

And if you had to get along with your buddies to make a kill, evolution would not favor you being in a bad mood.  Think about that.  What this really means is that all the stuff we’ve associated with pre-civilization life is mostly bullshit.  It’s not that it was rosy, nor that death wasn’t somewhat common.  Infant mortality was likely high, and you still had to contend with diseases and such.  But hunger?  Not such a big deal.  Or else we could never have evolved socially.  And in the back of all of it was ketosis.  Glycolysis was for the fruit season, where we’d lay around and get fat, have sex, and make babies with the estrogenic women and the extra calories. Fat wasn’t just about some insulation from starvation.  It was actually part of metabolic changes and storage required to make more humans.

And then the fruit would end.  Our bodies would have little use for the extra calories gained during the fat season– fat slows you down.  So we’d naturally shed the weight, with minimal pain, get back to running and chasing bunnies, and wait for the next sex fest when the apples showed up back on the trees.

That’s the REAL “Deep Paleo” diet.  It was geared, of course, to the two seasons we evolved in. And it’s what we evolved in for literally over a million years.  But the transition from one season to another wasn’t some agonizing month or so where we almost starved.  Rather, it was a couple of days for our bodies to get used to sticking the fuel line in the ketosis tank, instead of the glycolysis tank.  The modest disharmony probably worked to spread people out a bit as well, as even in abundant landscapes, there are still only so many lizards per acre.

For me personally, one of the big changes that happened was my need to fuel myself on my bike rides.  I noticed this directly.  Before I started the Four Hour Body diet, I’d pack my energy drink (Cytomax was my chosen tool of destruction) start my ride and wait until about 45 minutes in to take my first sip.  After that, I’d carefully regulate my consumption, sipping along the way, and inevitably gain weight.  I found that if I stopped too soon, or ran out, I’d bonk.  And then that would be that.

After I started the Four Hour Body diet, though, the world changed.  I now ride regularly three hours without anything but a couple of quick stops to pee.  I don’t drink water unless it’s really hot — I don’t even take it with me.  I remain hydrated throughout the whole ride — remember Tim’s requirement of super-hydration?  I have plenty of reserve water.

And interestingly enough, if I’m sitting around typing and getting hungry, the easiest way for me to kill my hunger is to hop on my bike and go riding.  It puts my body back into strong ketosis, and kills the hunger.  My own experience is that the brain runs far better on glucose than ketones, which is an interesting observation deserving its own speculative column about the rise of civilization.  But on a bike ride, I usually practice meditation and audiobooks.  The brain is just not that engaged.  Ketosis now has become a much larger part of my energetic make-up.  And when I couple that, with a change in diet that helps re-balance my energy consumption toward ketosis (it’s not complete — there’s still a mix) I feel great.

Interestingly enough, my cycling times show the change.  After about 500 miles training on a glycolysis-dominant regime, my cycling times between Moscow, ID and my house, around 15 miles, averaged out at an hour.  Now, with a Four Hour Body diet, I average about 1 hour 10 minutes.  This matches the idea that fats burn more slowly and longer than carbohydrates.  It also shows how the body adapts energetically to different diets.

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Everyone knows that if you want to lose weight, you have to burn fat.  You have to have some accelerated ketosis from wherever you’re sitting.  I can directly tell whether I’m in ketosis or not during exercise because I will taste the ketones in my mouth.  They taste kind of metallic, and it’s definitely different from regular breathing and burning carbohydrates.  On my morning bike rides, I’m most definitely in ketosis for the first hour of any ride — any sugars from the eggs and bacon I’ve digested haven’t kicked in.  And I can taste it.

A simple (and incomplete, but still useful!) way of conceiving this top level of energetic process is to understand your body has two fuel tanks.  One is glycolysis/sugar.  The second is ketosis/fat.  If you’re a standard American, you eat lots of carbohydrates and sugar, and run most of the time with your fuel line in the glycolysis tank.  As we get older, running our systems on this readily available fuel source gets more unbalanced, especially because we’re often busy, with our modern diet, dumping tons of processed sugar into the system.  Refined sugar in the quantities we have in the American diet is just awful for our health.  It’s like spraying nitrous into the top of our car’s carburetor/fuel injection system constantly.  The engine revs, and then the insulin floods and packs away all that sugar as fat.  Think about that the next time you bite into a Pop-Tart.

The second fuel tank  is the ketosis/fat system.  The way I like to think of this is more like a diesel engine.  Diesel is a heavy fuel, that takes longer to burn.  But it can keep your system running longer, once you get it going.

And here’s the rub.  If you run your system on carbohydrates, which bias heavily toward glycolysis, then your system gets used to it.  When you attempt, however, to switch over, your engine sputters, and you feel like you want to collapse.  Like you “Hit the wall.”  The reason is your metabolic engine has adapted to running on carbs.  And then if you’ve also been dumping tons of sugar into the system, through Big Gulps and Super-Sizing, you’re just really screwed.  We do know what happens in that system — massive hormonal dysregulation and sooner or later — system failure of your other cleaning/exhaust/engine-metabolic systems, like your liver, pancreas, and kidneys.

So, at the top of Tim’s diet, the fundamental Guiding Principle is to re-regulate your core metabolism by knocking down insulin production.  This works for many of us because we are on this diet because we are obese, and likely have developed insulin resistance.  Right off the bat, Tim says “NO SUGAR”.  That’s a huge one, and likely responsible for many of the problems people have anyway.  He also hits all the “white vegetables” heavy in starch, which are another sugar pathway.  The one easily accessible carbohydrate he does allow in the diet — beans — have tons of fiber, which is useful for buffering glucose absorption in the system, and also aid in digestion.  Tim’s fixations with beans then turns out to be very smart.

Tim also hacks our social system, and then in turn, our body’s metabolic system, by introducing fat into it — especially in the morning.  Our whole society tells you fat and eggs are supposed to be bad for you.  But for the diet, you’re supposed to eat eggs and some fat source (like bacon) every morning.  What actually happens is satiety is increased so you don’t want to eat more.  It’s a metabolic hack in multiple ways.  Once you’re on the diet for a while, by eating fat, in a system already balanced more toward ketosis, it becomes the readily available energy source during the busiest time of the morning.

Metabolism has core drivers.  I’ve focused on researching insulin, because insulin resistance was my problem.  But there are others in this level of systemic understanding.  Below is a figure for our larger Global Systemic/Global Holistic Metabolism top level.  They are all functions of the endocrine system, which regulates our evolved instantiation.

 

There are a ton of things I don’t understand about dysfunctional metabolism — what happens, for example, if you have a thyroid problem.  And estrogen also seems to be huge.  Estrogen is produced by the visceral fat that surrounds your liver and other internal organs once you become obese, and becomes somewhat a self-fulfilling prophecy.  More estrogen in the system, the easier it is to get fat, which then creates a positive feedback loop producing more estrogen.  You get the idea.  In our Deep Paleo past, it used seasonally to produce babies.  Now it just messes us up.

Next down in Tim’s stack is he has you eliminate all dairy, wheat, and fruit, except on splurge day.  These are obvious caloric sources, but it turns out that they are far more interesting than just that.  One of the biggest things I noticed after starting the diet was the decrease in inflammation across my body.  My joints stopped hurting, and even more interesting, my kidneys (as I mentioned above) started dumping water far more quickly after ingestion.  I’ve thought about this, and what I think is really going on is that Tim is likely eliminating the majority of potential food allergies and various intolerances that different people have.  By reducing inflammation, one also makes water function more normally in the body, not creating edema, and also allowing for more balanced metabolism.  Smart!

At the same time, allergies are different in scale for lots of different people.  My suspicion is that these built-in genetic intolerances are responsible, once core metabolic function has been fixed, for the variable results many people see with different diets.  Much of this is well-documented.  Asians, for example, are known for being lactose intolerant.  So if you dump milk out of the diet, you’re getting down to a much more healthy, well-functioning core metabolism, which then helps you burn fat.

Allergies also have profoundly nonlinear effects in the context of diets.  For myself, I can take hay fever season for a while.  But once my system reaches some level of histaminic reaction, I have to take antihistamine in order to knock down my mucus production.  It is  similar with food, of course.  You can eat a certain amount, say, of cheese, or wheat, and lose weight.  But once you cross that threshold, all of the sudden you’re in the nonlinear effect zone for inflammation, and then bad things (like no weight loss) start happening.  Interestingly enough, Tim hedges his bets by dumping ALL the big potential allergy sources.  That’s likely part of the reason for the success.  He leaves you with beans and veggies, which I’ll bet are the least likely to have allergic responses.  Smart.

Getting closer to the bottom of the v-Meme stack, we have the calorie counters.  Many folks swear the only way to lose weight is to count calories.  After all, the fundamental energy balance has to hold, doesn’t it?

And they are right — just not with the expected sensitivity to timescale that calorie counters says exist.  Short timescales, like minutes, hours, or even days, don’t matter.  What this means, of course, is that Fitbits and step counters are total bullshit.  Over long periods of time, calorie counting has to be true.  Like a year, maybe.  Or even a month.  But it is not true on any given day, and if metabolic processes are out of whack, different food sources will yield vastly different metabolic outcomes.  If you have insulin resistance, you’re not going to expend the typical “maintenance calories” on a given day.  If you eat two bowls of ice cream, you’re going to feel tired and go to sleep.  You may be under the calories counted for that given day.  But you’re still going to pack on the pounds.  That’s why I found that I could ride my bike to Moscow and back, drink a beer, and eat fries, and then gain weight — my metabolic process was out of whack, and all the calorie counting in the world couldn’t save me.

More than anything else, the calorie counter insertion into the v-Meme stack shows the value of scaffolding higher v-Memes with lower ones.  Tim, for example, says “no almonds” in the diet because while they may map to the metabolic process he’s trying to achieve, they’re still too calorie dense to make the diet work successfully.  And at the same time, it also shows why you shouldn’t limit your understanding by limiting your evolution.  There are so many things that calories alone simply can’t explain.  But you can’t ignore them entirely.

Finally, down at the bottom of our stack is the our long-time, averaged, story-based knowledge about diet.  Since the sources of such knowledge are literally shrouded in myth, it’s hard to know what should be taken seriously or not.  At the same time, there is often deep, embedded knowledge that should always be considered when listening to this source.  If you listened to most of the medical community until recently, ingesting omega-3 fatty acid, found in fish, was bad for you and would increase your cholesterol. We now know that it turns out to be very important for a variety of health needs, including even preventing depression.  And Tim, in his book, tells his own mythopoetic story of encountering a homeless man who insisted on eating garlic.

From deep jungle herbs to the larger structure of Chinese medicine, humans capture long-time knowledge in their stories.  And stories, through their very nature, have deeply synergized understandings, whose roots may have been forgotten.  Some of these stories may be bullshit.  I wouldn’t eat part of an endangered animal, regardless of what I’d been told, to save my life.  But to point out those as the reason for throwing out all that collective knowledge is just stupid.  Consider it — we have other tools as well.

OK — there’s a ton of information in this post.  It takes a while, pardon the pun, to digest.  But it’s a start on a deeper understanding on the dynamics of a diet like the Four Hour Body, and how it works.

What’s the point?  You can now start understanding OTHER diets from these perspectives.  Atkins, Paleo, and so on.  Notice that almost all eliminate sugar.  That’s hitting things at the metabolic guiding principles level.  Further down, different diets make different choices, usually based on cultural precedent.  Cultural precedent often maps to specific allergies that occur with different genetic types spread across humanity, so it’s not such a bad way to roll.  And if there’s one takeaway I’ll leave you with, it’s this — experiment on yourself.  Here are the basic principles.  Try something.  If it works, keep it.  If it doesn’t, change a variable and track your progress.  At the most basic level, if you dump sugar, and move to a protein and fat breakfast, you’ll lose weight at least for a while.

But you don’t need to starve any more.  It’s not, well, empathetic.  And remember — you first have to empathy with yourself before you can have it for other people.  Same as it ever was!