So over the past month or so(I haven’t written a mind blowing post lately) I have delved my weirdo brain into anthropology, cognition, basically the human mind and how it relates to evolution as well as how it relates to modern day. My views on the whole paleo movement have changed. Not that I no longer still agree with it, but I see it with a new set of eyes. I always have my defenses up and I always question everything. Even after reading study after study about how saturated fat has NO relation to ill health or disease, it doesn’t still leave me thinking it is anything more than a benign substance for the human body and its intake gauging a ketogenic adaption or a glucose adaption by the body with hormonal regulation. Which works best is for no one to decide but you.
Like most things, I have no answers but plan to share some mind blowing realizations I have made over the past few months. First, well actually like for the millionth time, the human body is an EVER evolving strange and adaptable….thing. Does it not blow your
mind someone can survive with one kidney, with NO gall bladder, a missing amygdala … this drives my mind bonkers. It is absolutely astonishing. The human body and mind have evolved as a consequence of our cognitive niche, our cultural influence, our genetic expression and our ability to reason and draw conclusions through information sharing. Don’t forget that when talking ‘paleo’ ‘GROK’ did not have language, he couldn’t write let alone portray a message to someone else. Think of how we have evolved. The inclusion and overconsumption of meat by the paleo man allowed for our brains, specifically our prefrontal cortex to grow to maturing levels and enabling what we have gotten ourselves into. Mass farm production, a culture that has a birth to death age of around 78 but ONLY with the addition of the massive medicine and pharmaceutical industry help. Grok lived until his 30’s; he birthed, grew, fucked and died. That was the life of grok. Its no wonder the human gene is evolved to hit fertility and slowly dwindle down and away in health. It is the by product of evolution.
sidenote….did Grok find farts funny??? haha
However, so much has changed this day in age that some people opt not to have children because they do not want to bring them into a world of stress and chaos. With life comes so much pleasure and so much pain, each to be experienced. Humans are uniquely destructive, think about it. We often do more harm than good to ourselves, our lives and others because we hold on too long. Many of us grasp anything, a concept, a belief and hold onto it so strongly that the rest of life passes us by and we are still stuck not passing go and not collecting our $200. We were smart enough once in history to develop complex tools and large smart brains, but lordy what happened after that. Our world is uncooperative and massive controversy causes mayhem.
What gets me, is how we managed to develop the abilities we have. How the HELL did we develop an ability to make words that make sense, to convey emotions, feelings, thoughts and opinions. Not to mention needs and desires. That’s amazing. Language, social communication and genuine intelligence, how we got a hold of it is a mystery to me but the only conclusion I draw is that somewhere in evolution Darwinism got a hold of a select set of humans and their genes to create an environment where such advances were possible. It seems the pattern is our minds adapt to our environment. Well let’s delve into our modern environment. COMPLETE CHAOS. The United States lives in a world of WEIRDNESS, not to mention forced assimilation, one sided opinions, conformity, fairness, and cooperation…total chaotic stress. Our whole country is so atypical to whatever you consider natural to be its ludicrous.
Placing yourself in a capable and creative atmosphere almost guarantees your success. And that is damn near impossible. Eric Weiner wrote a book depicting this scenario and his conclusion :
The results seemed to identify two different aspects of happiness: an overall feeling that your life is satisfactory and the experience of positive emotions. Life satisfaction does correlate fairly well with income, but evidently the link between enjoying life (or not) on a day-to-day basis is much less well correlated with income. … the study seems to have identified two different types of resources: the possession of economic resources affects life satisfaction, and the possession of psychological/social capital affects day-to-day reports of positive or negative feelings. The study shows that these two flavors of happiness are separate
My thoughts, our world is full of fear. There was a lady born without an amygdala I remember reading about. SHE HAD NO FEAR…meaning the lack of her head containing an amygdala meant she did not possess the ability to sense fear, and nothing threatened her. How weird and inconceivable an idea that is. Courage, I would wager is the opposite of fear but without the ability to understand fears how do you have courage? Again, amazing.
Further, I read a study about psycho-analyst people who can tell by looking at your eyeball, something dealing with how you see and how your retina look, and from that gauge your level of depression. So chicken and the egg…are you depressed which leads to the change in your sight, or does the change in your sight lead to depression. Does withdrawing from society due to depression have something to do with how your retina react?
“Some recent research has found that in the retinas of depressed people, the response to black/white contrasts was notably lower than in healthy people. This backs up an earlier study which found that depressed people had a harder time detecting differences between black and white”
That, is crazy. So a depressed person not only thinks in gray and low self worth, they also literally SEE that way. That damned amazing brain.
On a similar thought, when a group of people is listening to a speaker, is the speaker controlling our brains or are we controlling our brains as we perceive the speaker and his/her message? What I mean, when you read my writing are we thinking in the same brain length or are you in total control right now? Language limits how I can portray a message to you. I can tell you time and again that the key to recovery from anorexia is acceptance. It is always step one, always the first step to the final decision. But what I am trying to portray and what you THINK I am trying to tell you could be two totally different things. Again, the human language limits what I can make you try and understand. I wonder what is happening in my own brain as I write this, and how your brain perceives it. Many of us subscribe to subconscious beliefs whether we realize it or not. I could tell you 2934865234 times that the ONLY WAY to speed up your metabolism is to eat more food. But unless you truly believe, commit and accept that you’re controlling your own destiny nothing will come of it. If you don’t believe that more food equates to a faster and more productive body, then you won’t benefit from its results. Stress and your own mind will ALWAYS WIN. The only way for you to get well is to eat more. Plain and simple. The only way to speed up your metabolism, get over yourself, your doubts and your fears is to just fucking eat, a lot, and accept it. It’s not ‘what to eat’ when to eat or how to eat. IT IS JUST FUCKING EAT FOOD. Then decide, how do you feel, what makes you feel good INSIDE, what digests well, what gives you strength, mental clarity and happiness?? THAT, is YOUR paleo. If you are truly listening to your body and eating what it wants when it wants, then that is your evolutionary milestone, what your body and genes have evolved to want and desire for the best achievable health FOR YOU.
I read the following on an anthropology website I frequent. If I learned ANYTHING in 2010, it is DO NOT read food blogs, health blogs, or paleo blogs based on weight and food. Anyways, what I found:
1. Hunter gatherers do not, as a rule, enjoy robust health. They must endure the vagaries of the natural world without recourse to the food stores we slovenly civilized folk take for granted. Rather than eating a varied diet, indigenous people have to make do with whatever handful of foodstuffs happens to be available, if any. The uncomfortable reality of hunter gatherers is that they frequently starve to death. The average life expectancy of a Paleolithic hunter was less than 30 years.
2. Our ancestors did not evolve for any particular environment, for any particular diet. Premodern humans lived in a huge variety of settings, from the arctic tundra to tropical jungle, from remote Pacific islands to high-altitude deserts. There is no such thing as a “hunter-gatherer diet.” Think you need to eat a lot of nuts and wild grasses? Tell it to an Inuit.
3. We didn’t evolve during the Pleistocene. By which I mean, we didn’t evolve just during the Pleistocene. Our 23,000 genes are the legacy of 3.7 billion years of evolution; the Pleistocene era accounts for less than 0.1 percent of that. Much of our metabolism dates back to the days when were amoebas. (We are insanely hardy buggers!) And what’s more, we continue to evolve. A gene that allows us Europeans to digest milk sprang up about 7,500 years ago in the wake of the domestication of cattle. I’m of European descent; why shouldn’t I consumer dairy? I evolved for it!
4. Nobody’s a perfect fit. Yes, we live in a different world from our ancestors. But so does every organism. Nature is a dynamic and unpredictable place, and every organism has to constantly adjust. Our environment is different because we have changed it, but we are not unique in that regard. A general evolutionary principle is that behavior precedes adaptation. An organism begins to exploit a new resource, and then changes to exploit that resource better. Thus, a duck is only going to start growing webbing between its does after it starts mucking around in the water. Perfection is a moving target.
5. For a bunch of misfits, we’re doing pretty well. Yes, we’re a nation of tubbies. But our life expectancy is high and continues to climb. A person born today can expect to live to 78 – two and a half times longer than a cave man. So where’s the dysfunction, exactly?
Cavemen have enough problems. Angry mammoths, giant cave bears, angry spirits – the last thing they need is a bunch of whiny descendents giving them posthumous grief. So let’s declare a moratorium. No more ragging on Pleistocene hunter-gatherers.
This can be countered by:
1. Two fallacies in the first paragraph. First there is no evidence that they often starved to death. No more so than you see wild animals in their natural undisturbed environment starving to death. Population stabilizes at the level for the available food. It wasn’t until farming where we could grow more food than we needed that population increased and we become dependent on a bountiful harvest. Second there is no evidence whatsoever that they only lived until 30. The math doesn’t even add up. It took until age 15-16 to become sexually mature. Then nine months to make a baby. If you were dead before age 30 you would be dead before your first child was raised. To sustain population you would need to be able to bring several kids to sexual maturity in order to compensate for the ones that died in accidents or were eaten by wild animals. What evidence does exist shows that when they died they had bones comparable to today’s 40 year olds. What this means is that by eating the paleo diet their bones didn’t degenerate like ours do now.
2. What we know is there were certain foods not eaten at all. And a universe of foods that people ate from depending on what was available where they were located. Optimal foraging theory says that we would have eaten what is most easily obtainable at that locale. This is why the paleo diet simply has “in” foods and “out” foods. We don’t know how much of each “in” foods were eaten.
3. That’s right. Until we developed tools 2.5 million years ago (allowing us to kill and eat animals) we ate insects. The high protein and nutrition that they provide would have been needed for us to have developed into such brainy creatures. The ability that Europeans evolved for digesting dairy is simply that the lactase enzyme now sticks around past infancy. So we can digest milk sugar. This doesn’t mean that dairy proteins are good for us. Each species has milk that evolved for that species. Cows are herbivores. We are omnivores.
4. Yes, but it takes far longer than 10,000 years to make small evolutionary changes. And you need to give natural selection free reign. These days we are able to treat all sorts of problems caused by our Neolithic diet which allows people incapable of handling these new foods to continue to procreate.
5. Our life expectancy is high as we spend billions on medical costs to treat problems that wouldn’t exist if we were eating the paleo diet. We could live even longer. And age without all these ailments.
6. Yes, they had a hard life. Only the lucky ones lived to a ripe old age.
So, it gives you a lot to think on…my conclusion? As always, JUST EAT THE FUCKING FOOD. Be healthy minded enough to realize you need vitamins/minerals FROM FOOD everyday, and the rest is up to you, what it is you find when you accept recovery, and learning what makes you feel best. I’m not telling you to go binge on coconut oil, or sweet potatoes, but to eat overly well of real food, eat a lot of meat and fat and let the rest fill in. You’ll learn what you like and what works. The more you think the more you fuck with your brain the more obnoxious you make eating be and the higher likelihood you have of either becoming resistant to insulin, fucking up your body responses, screwing with your weight, becoming a closet binge eater etc etc. It is all in your head and the longer you spend looking for the answer(which doesn’t exist) the harder it will be to accept and holding on longer means you lose sight of what you want and what you need.
Zeroing in on Recovery 