Arvind Ashok: Fitness & Nutrition Simplified

In my last post, I spoke about ‘eat­ing paleo’ as part of my next steps. In this post, I want to give you a bit more details about what the paleo diet is. I will keep this sim­ple, as there are a lot of great resources out there that talk about paleo. If you are already aware of what paleo is, just skip on down to the end, where I point you to more resources.

The basic idea
As the name sug­gests, the idea is to emu­late our pale­olithic ances­tors — to eat and live like pale­olithic humans. Use them as a good start­ing point, a tem­plate — be inspired by their lifestyle, and see what it trans­lates to today. More on some of the awesome+smart peo­ple pio­neer­ing this.

So, how did the paleo human eat and live? They slept soon after the sun went down, woke up when it rose. They ate when they were hun­gry, and when they had the food for it. They fasted when food sup­ply was restricted, while on a hunt per­haps. Since paleo refers to a period when there was no grains, no soda, no fast food, no chips. You get the drift. That meant our paleo ances­tors ate a diet of mostly meat, seafood, fruits, ani­mal prod­ucts and veg­eta­bles. They walked — a lot. And they did a whole lot of sit­ting around and doing noth­ing as well. And they were fit! Real fit!

But didn’t they die young, you ask. As Ron Hog­gan says,

High rates of infant mor­tal­ity and life spans of less than 30 years for Pale­olithic humans would be most unlikely. Human­ity could not have grown and spread around the globe given such a lim­ited lifes­pan. A first child would be likely to enjoy its mother’s nur­tur­ing until puberty. Mom would be 26 to 29 years old by then. The next child would have a mother who was 29 to 32 years old. But that would mean that she had prob­a­bly died before the sec­ond child reached puberty. If such sug­ges­tions of Pale­olithic life spans were accu­rate, we should have num­bers and be geo­graph­i­cally restricted in ways that approx­i­mate other pri­mate pop­u­la­tions. Some­thing is obvi­ously wrong with such assump­tions about the life span of Paleo Humans. The most likely alter­na­tive is that our Paleo ances­tors lived longer than is cur­rently suggested.

Still not con­vinced? Let’s think about it. The amount of med­ical facil­i­ties avail­able today are extra­or­di­nary. Tech­nol­ogy has improved, an obvi­ous under­state­ment. So, get­ting badly injured then might mean death, while today it might mean a cou­ple of months in the hos­pi­tal. That can def­i­nitely skew the aver­age age down. But the aver­age age was not 30, but about 50% higher than that at least. And if you dis­count infant mor­tal­ity etc., and look at the aver­age life expectancy at 45 or so, it is about 25 years (45+25=70). That means a lot of them lived to be a lot older than that too — and weren’t old, senile and lying in bed all day. They lived healthy, active lives. They didn’t suf­fer from can­cer, or die of a heart attack. “Uhh, How do you know that? They died, didn’t they” you say. We know by observ­ing hunter-gatherer soci­eties that con­tinue to live today like our paleo ances­tors did, the Kita­vans for example.

Kita­vans strad­dle the line between agri­cul­tural and hunter-gatherer lifestyles. They eat a diet pri­mar­ily com­posed of tubers (yam, sweet potato, taro and cas­sava), fruit, veg­eta­bles, coconut and fish, in order of calories.

What? Only 28″? Hmm

Their macronu­tri­ent split looks like this –about 70% car­bo­hy­drates, 20% fat (most of which is sat­u­rated), and 10% from pro­tein. But that’s very irrel­e­vant, and the only rea­son I am bring­ing it up is to show the irrel­e­vancy. Other cul­tures, like the Kita­vans exist out there — the Inuit and the Masai for exam­ple. The Inuit eat a diet high in fat — about 80% (if fat causes heart attacks, the Inuit must be falling like sticks, right), while the Masai eat a diet low in carbs, and rich in milk, meat, and blood — high fat again!

“Wait, hold up a bit” you say. “These guys are behind the times, to be eat­ing like how our ances­tors used to eat. We’ve evolved since then. We can­not be expected to eat like this”. Evo­lu­tion. Ok. Long story short — no. Our bod­ies are bet­ter suited for eat­ing like how we used to, and not how we at today. Evo­lu­tion is a very long process. Very very long.

What about the dis­eases and stuff these guys suf­fered from?

• “lack of sud­den car­diac death and exertion-related ret­roster­nal chest pain among Kitava’s 2,300 inhab­i­tants (6% of which were 60–95 years old), as well as among the remain­ing 23,000 peo­ple on the Tro­briand Islands” — from the Kitava study, by Lind­berg (and oth­ers) — one of the anthro­pol­o­gists who has stud­ied this a lot, one of the pioneers!
• No signs of demen­tia or poor memory
• No evi­dence of stroke, ath­er­o­scle­ro­sis, heart attacks etc.
• No can­cer and stuff like that.
• They died from, falling from trees, acci­dents, being killed in a fight, of infec­tions (malaria etc) or of old age. They did not die from the hun­dreds of dis­eases we die from.
• They were not wor­ried about cho­les­terol num­bers. Not like those num­bers mat­ter, but that’s another story (they do mat­ter if they are really ter­ri­ble, obviously)
• They did not have over­weight peo­ple, and obvi­ously haven’t heard of obesity.
• Obvi­ously, no blood pres­sure issues etc. You get the drift.
• Even stuff like bald­ness — uncom­mon or nonexistent!

They didn’t stop with just healthy. These guys were strong, fit, pow­er­ful, ripped indi­vid­u­als. Back then, and now. They were flex­i­ble too. And no, they did not do yoga. Pretty awe­some huh!

But I am not gonna have a heart attack…

True, not everyone’s gonna have a heart attack. But almost all of us, due to our sub-optimal diets suf­fer from a bunch of issues, rang­ing from mun­dane to deadly. I am not gonna list every­thing here, except for auto-immune dis­or­ders. Switch­ing to paleo has ‘cured’ peo­ple of auto-immune dis­or­ders like Hashimo­tos, lupus, mul­ti­ple scle­ro­sis. That’s just one small example.

Long story short

It is pos­si­ble to eat a whole range of foods and be healthy. As long as you avoid stuff like grains, indus­trial seed oils, sug­ars (too much of it any­ways), and any other processed food you can think of. Walk around a bit, play some sport, maybe lift some weights, hang out with friends, get enough sleep — you are golden.

If you want to know more

Staffan Lind­berg is one of the lead­ers of the research group that is doing pio­neer­ing stuff in this stuff, one of the lead­ing experts in the field.

Art De Vany — wanna see a 70+ year old guy who is fit­ter than you? Look no fur­ther. He has a book out, which might be a good start­ing point.

And then there’s Robb Wolf, who is really tak­ing Paleo main­stream. I first came across Robb’s web­site a cou­ple of years ago. At that time, he was a lit­tle more ‘rough around the edges’, and I ignored what he said because he refused to talk about veg­e­tar­i­ans. Pretty stu­pid of me to not lis­ten to stuff, even if it was not directly use­ful to me. I’ve met Robb at one of his nutri­tion sem­i­nars, and he is a great guy to talk to. He empha­sizes that peo­ple shouldn’t take this paleo thing too seri­ously and turn it into a reli­gion. And if it turns out he was wrong and is called out, he puts his hand up — that doesn’t hap­pen too often though. Not a bad guy to have — pio­neer­ing the paleo move­ment! Like he needs my endorse­ment, con­sid­er­ing he has a best­seller out there, and about 200,000 or so peo­ple that he’s helped.

My next steps

Like I said, I am going to eat paleo. That means eat­ing meat. Some­thing I haven’t done in 3 years. I am gonna slow dip my toes into it, because I don’t know the first thing about cook­ing meat. Thank­fully, I had a friend cook my first fish for me. If any of you are inter­ested in try­ing out paleo for 30 days, send me an email. Let me see if I can orga­nize some­thing for that.

I know a lot of my read­ers, you guys, are veg­e­tar­ian. And might’ve been read­ing me because I com­bine get­ting fit with eat­ing healthy. I know that’s def­i­nitely pos­si­ble, and this is just con­tin­u­ing the exper­i­ment, and the eas­i­est per­son to exper­i­ment on is me. I have learned a lot from try­ing to max­i­mize per­for­mance while eat­ing a veg­e­tar­ian diet. Now, I want to com­pare it to the paleo diet. I will con­tinue to exper­i­ment, and keep writ­ing about it. And this doesn’t mean I’ve for­got­ten what I’ve learned while being veg­e­tar­ian. So, stick with me :)

What do I hope to get out of this? Well, am gonna find out. Reported suc­cess of thou­sands of peo­ple with paleo include amaz­ing increase in per­for­mance, dras­tic improve­ment in qual­ity of life, get­ting rid of stuff that they’ve suf­fered from for years, to even sav­ing their lives. Me — I don’t have any dire issues, my ath­letic per­for­mance is pretty good, inflam­ma­tion is under con­trol etc., so my returns might be min­i­mal, or hey, maybe it will sur­prise me. I won’t know until I find out, but I am very cau­tious about my expectations.

See you at the Olympics.