By Tommy Leung on 11/04/2011 in Fitness, Life
Before I discovered the paleo diet, I wouldn’t have thought for a second to consult with evolution or ancient cultures to deal with or help shed light on modern health issues. It seems like common sense now that we should look at how humans have lived, thrived, and evolved in order to understand what good human health ought to be. That’s how we study every other creature on the planet: we observe what they do in their natural environment.
The natural next step after modeling diet around evolution is to see what other things can also benefit by applying the same ideas. A paleo-style diet works wonders so it is logical to suspect similar benefits can be achieved in other parts of life like physical fitness, sleep, activity levels, and even sex. It is important that we remember this isn’t paleolithic times. The objective isn’t to imitate cavemen and ignore modern science but, to use what we know about human evolution to guide us.
I came across this post at Hunt Gather Love about the sexual practices of two indigenous tribes in sub-Saharan Africa through one of Mark’s Daily Apple’s Weekend Link Loves and it intrigued me! Yes. Sex interested me. Shocker! I even read the entire text of the study. I read the full text of a lot of studies and papers so this isn’t something strange but, this was more entertaining to read about than a study on how vitamin D3 supplementation affects bone density and prevents fractures in seniors. As much as I love vitamin D, sex is just more interesting!
There’s a few charts in this study and one that stood out is this one about frequency of sex in a week:
This is a comparison between married couples and not the overall population of the United States and the people from the Aka and Ngandu tribes. There’s plenty of jokes in the modern world about couples having virtually no sex once they’re married and this data for Americans seems to support it! It looks spectacularly worse compared to these African tribes. So, what the hell? Are we not doing it enough? There’s plenty of studies that point to more sex correlating to better health. Whether these studies have any merit is another story but, why would anyone ignore any piece of science that tells them to have more sex?!
This chart makes married Americans look like sexless prudes but, are these indigenous peoples really having that much sex? And if they are, why? And how are they doing this? Sex eight times a week is no physical feat to scoff at. I’m sure larger waist sizes in America isn’t helping our cause but, if we’re not having enough sex, are they having too much sex? The Ngandu tribe seems to have a much more reasonable and desirable amount of sex. Why the disparity between the two tribes?
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By Tommy Leung on 10/02/2011 in Fitness
Before we get too excited, I’m talking about man-breasts. Not so appealing now, is it?
So, what does bread have to do with jugs on a dude? Everything. It might be the single biggest factor leading to more and more men walking around with a protruding belly and a pair of man-breasts as a complement. I’ve advocated breaking up with bread in the past but, this might be the best one yet. My past reasons to break up with bread were good ones but, nothing holds a candle to how bread–specifically the wheat–causes you to gain visceral fat, develop a pot belly, and then the dreaded man boobs.
Conventional wisdom is to eat healthy whole grains. Things like whole wheat bread, cereal, pasta, etc. Whole grains are healthier than white flour. This is true. Studies have shown that markers of health all improve when you replace white flour with wheat flour. However, as Dr. Davis, the author of Wheat Belly, points out, just because something is better doesn’t mean a lot of it is even better.
Stated differently: just because filtered cigarettes will kill you slower than unfiltered ones doesn’t mean that more filtered cigarettes will make you live forever.
That’s the logic error we’ve made with wheat. It’s better than white flour but, that doesn’t mean it isn’t still detrimental to your health. And just by using our observational abilities, we can see that folks are getting fatter and fatter while they are eating more and more healthy whole grains. We can’t claim causation through such a general observation but, you’d have to be blind as a bat to not see that there is clearly something going on!
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By Tommy Leung on 09/29/2011 in Fitness, Life
One of the reasons people try vegetarianism is to boycott the inhumane treatment of animals. Namely cows, chickens, and pigs. Spectacular documentaries like Food, Inc have shed light on the horrible living conditions of these animals in factory farms. There is no reasonable person who would question how cruel and disgusting our conventional livestock farming system is.
But, the moral question isn’t and shouldn’t be the only unacceptable reason. Animals raised in these filthy and cramped conditions are substantially poorer in nutrition and kept alive by drugs to combat the illnesses they develop because of the unsanitary living conditions. It is no coincidence that a population eating these nutritiously inferior and sick animals are also themselves nutrient deficient and sick.
The old saying is right: you are what you eat.
The fight to raise livestock humanely is not solely a vegetarian cause. In fact, vegetarians have little affect on the food producers compared to those of us who consume meat. Which is why choosing to become a vegetarian for moral reasons is misguided and unhelpful to the cause of improving the living conditions of livestock.
Imagine you wanted to change the way farmers–all farmers–grow their vegetables. You want pesticide free, organically grown, and non-GMO produce because it doesn’t have harmful pesticides, is more nutritious, and isn’t genetically modified. Would you stop eating vegetables? Of course not! That wouldn’t do anything to change their practices. If we opt out of doing business with them, we have no pull with them. We are no longer in the market.
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By Tommy Leung on 09/25/2011 in Fitness
Do you want a bigger back? That highly coveted V-shaped torso? The even more coveted six pack abs? Or any abs at all really. How about forearms with the strength to crush rocks? Or at least other people’s hands? There might be some women on the planet who aren’t interested in such things at all but, I can’t think of many men who wouldn’t. In fact, we–as men–are willing resort to almost every form of exercise and nutrition trickery to get there.
Well, I am going to give you the secret to the V shaped torso, bone crushing grip strength, and ab definition that you’ve only dreamed of. Are you ready? The secret to all those things is the pull-up.
How could it be that simple? Why should it be difficult? There is a caveat, of course. You’d have to be in fairly good shape to begin with for this to work. If you can’t do a single pull-up, this isn’t for you. Part of the secret is doing an insane volume of pull-ups. If you can’t do 1, it’ll be very hard to do 100.
Come back to this after you’ve improved your base strength. For the rest of you, here’s what over 3000 pull-ups did to me–and can do for you–in 30 days. I wish I was selling you something but, I’m not. The idea couldn’t be simpler. It is up to you to do it.
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By Tommy Leung on 07/10/2011 in Fitness
I was at the NYC premiere of Farmageddon. It’s a documentary about the unseen war on American family farms. That war is being perpetrated by our food overlords in the FDA, USDA, and government bodies at large.
I’ve been on the paleo diet for a year now and the paleo diet is largely a branch of the whole/real foods movement that’s been brewing for quite some time. People are learning that their health is better suited with real foods grown locally and humanely.
We don’t want cows that are fed an unnatural diet of corn and soybeans and are then injected with antibiotics to remedy the problems brought about by such a diet. We don’t want our animals huddled together like a can of sardines unable to get any exercise and literally living in their own excrement. Livestock raised this way are less nutritional and more liable to causing illnesses in humans.
Farmageddon is not advocating that we get rid of these factory farms in favor of small local farms. It is merely presenting the case that we should be allowed to choose between factory farmed goods and sustainable, locally farmed goods. And the powers that be are making it harder and harder for local family farms to get their goods to market.
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