WCK - watch your lifestyle and diet!

[Lee Chiang Po]

Hi

Look into Paleo or Primal eating.

Grains and Legumes are B.S. and the biggest indicator of health and longevity in the U.S. is belly fat (especially in men). Fitness is important too, especially in regards to having cardio and muscle reserves for when we are ill. Being able to walk vigorously for an hour a day, lift heavy things and do a little sprinting means we can recover more quickly from injury and as we age will prolong our health and vitality.

Look at Marksdailyapple.com, Paleo diet, neanderthin etc.

Our ancestors may have had a shorter lifespan due to disease, accidents, war, wild animals etc. However, the hunter gatherers of 10,000 years ago who lived till there 30's tended to have longer lifespans by 3 - 4 years and larger brains to boot. There is lots of research out there to support what I am saying and lots of lobbies against it.

Dave McKinnon

I have the book, Neanderthin. The auther is an old friend of mine. In this area, and in most areas, fish were the main diet of people. Fish, small mammals, birds, and the occasional large animal, nuts, berries, and the occasional green veggie. The human evolved to eat this way. If we put a wild animal in a cage we would strive to feed it exactly what it would eat in the wild, but we tend to shove poisons down our own necks.

[Lee Chiang Po]

There is always going to be conflict over what constitutes a natural diet. Not much has changed in the past 10,000 years, so here is a test. Go out into the woods and start scrounging up foods. See if you can come up with enough grains to make bread. How about fresh fruit? Even if it were not seasonal, how many times have you walked up on enough fruit to load up on? Nuts would be about all you could find in abundance that would keep over time. Berries in season. Birds and eggs when in season, but fish could provide year around.
Diabetes, arthritis, obesety, and many other so called diseases have proven to be diseases of the auto immune system. Why would your own immune system attack itself? Adult onset diabetes is now simply called type 2 and it involves children below their teen years. It was unheard of in 1900. But then sugar consumption averaged about 2.5 pounds a year. Care to guess how much the average person eats per year today? There is good reason that diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, and obesity are so promenent today, and that is because so many people think a well balanced diet is safe. If whole grains, fruit several times a day, and dairy 2 or 3 times a day were good for you, those fat a$$es would be healthy.

[wtxs]

They should legalize marijuana and outlaw commercially prepared foods.

Aaahh ... a man after my own heart, bring back the buddha sticks!

[sanjuro_ronin]

Lets put things in perspective shall we, Paleotic man had nothing on modern man, he was smaller, weaker and lived less.
Modern sport athletes push the pinacle of human physical achievement, they do NOT do it on a "paleo" diet.

[chusauli]

I think the person will have to decide what works for them best. Variations on Adkins, Zone Diet, South Beach, Raw Foods, Blood Type, Paleo run about. Some have better effect for a certain body type.

A general formula is taking burning more calories than what you tke in will result in weight loss. But weight should not me the only factor one looks for in judging health. Things like BMI, muscle mass, blood tests, lipid panels, glucose tests, thyroid panels, blood pressure, and colonoscopy are very important to really judge health and diagnose disease.

[anerlich]

They should legalize marijuana and outlaw commercially prepared foods.

If you legalise dope but outlaw foods like doritos, rocky road, tootsie rolls, chocolate honeycombs and the like, you will have a riot on your hands after the first legal smokers get the munchies.

[chusauli]

If you legalise dope but outlaw foods like doritos, rocky road, tootsie rolls, chocolate honeycombs and the like, you will have a riot on your hands after the first legal smokers get the munchies.

LOL! Great!!!

Marijuana is great for cancer patients. I have seen my cancer patients taking it for pain, poor appetite, and nausea from chemo, and it has some benefit.

[Wayfaring]

I think the person will have to decide what works for them best. Variations on Adkins, Zone Diet, South Beach, Raw Foods, Blood Type, Paleo run about. Some have better effect for a certain body type.

A general formula is taking burning more calories than what you tke in will result in weight loss. But weight should not me the only factor one looks for in judging health. Things like BMI, muscle mass, blood tests, lipid panels, glucose tests, thyroid panels, blood pressure, and colonoscopy are very important to really judge health and diagnose disease.

I actually like that someone started a lifestyle thread, with a lot of great practical examples. People's diets will be a matter of opinion, but eating "clean" and living a lifestyle that promotes long-term health is an excellent thing to discuss and incorporate.

[chusauli]

I was a big pho and rice eater and in between that I'd eat buns, soup noodles, italian pasta, soft drinks, tea with cream and sugar, Snapple Ice Teas and sodas, and other junk food. I learned a hard lesson to cut down on all of that and benefited greatly.

Mark Cheng introduced me to Kettlebells a few years back and I've been addicted since. In the quest to do different workouts, I incorporated running, and other exercises with free weights, Hindu Squats/push ups (thanks to Alan Orr via Matt Furey) and the like and found that a lot of old school training was better than what I used to do in gyms on various machines for me.

We have a saying in Chinese Medicine, "Before 40, you cheat disease; After 40, disease cheats you." There is a truth to that. Good diet and regular healthy exercise is key.

[sanjuro_ronin]

Hi Sanjuro,

Your last post, while true in certain known cases of malnutrition and starvation, has been generally discounted on the whole. Pre-Industrial man and Paleolithic man in particular are considered to have been much more muscular than us.

Not only did pre-industrial men eat differently; they behaved differently. They did much more physical exercise than we did, and by looking at the bone record paleontologists have determined that Neanderthal and Paleo Man were incredibly muscular. This article discusses their musculature in greater detail.

Looking at the actual nutritional intake of our ancestors, we see that they ate a diet remarkably rich in Iron, something like 3-5x more Iron than what we're told to have in our diets. Researchers believe that the high Iron diet relates to their increased musculature and their increased levels of dangerous physical activity, as well as the concomitant risk of blood loss.

When Western Doctors started doing anatomical dissections on humans, they primarily dissected young (<40) deceased persons. Not long after the Industrial revolution, the dissection results began to change: medical research dissections gradually shifted from the young men and women with pre-industrial lifestyles to older men and women with post-industrial lifestyles because people were living longer (primarily the result of better hygiene.)

Results of the new, modern dissections became the standard model for human anatomy (remember the book "Gray's anatomy?") and information from the old dissections fell into disuse. Medical historians have recently compared the old dissections to the new, "normal" bodies of modern man and have discovered that, on the whole, pre-industrial man would have been considered to "suffer" from Muscular Hypertrophy! In actuality, however, it's understood that modern man suffers from muscular HYPOtrophy because of the modern sedentary lifestyle that is so popular these days. Moreover, it's not that big of a stretch to consider that Neanderthal and Paleo Man may have been hypertrophic even by pre-agricultural standards.

As such, I believe that a healthy paleolithic human would be much more muscular than us, and would eat accordingly. I also think that if we try to eat like our ancestors, we'd better be ready to behave like them as well... such a high Iron content in such a sedentary lifestyle as the modern lifestyle would quickly cause problems for most people.

Our best bet is to up our exercise and to eat fresh foods as much as possible. I'll also recommend Sam Graci's THE FOOD CONNECTION as a good start to healthier eating - you'd be surprised how important meal scheduling is!

Its great to have all those theories, but what do the facts tell us?
What is the current world record for the 100 meter? what was it 50 years ago?
What do you think it was 1000 years ago?
Again, its fine to theorize what MAY h ave been, but we don't discount what IS because of theory.