The Physics of Tinkering: Inertia, Momentum, and Self-Experimentation When No One Else is Looking

At some point, the clapping stops.

The attention ends. The adoration subsides.

It's just you, and it's the ultimate thrive or dive: What you do when no one else is looking.

When no one is looking; no one is clapping; and, no one is glorifying your performing, you define yourself as the Patient of One.

That's when the Patient of One thrives.

Why?

We have data-, tradition-, custom-, and ancestral-embedded mythology to guide the way; epistemocrats have fruitful fiction to live by: "epoche," they say.

Let's find out why.

I truly enjoy physics (hence, Richard Feynman as one of my 'hero of heroes').

Though, I favor human psychology even more (including all things 'choice architecture', grace 'nudges', behavioral economics, decision-making / cognition, and beyond).

But, Physics + Psychology = a particularly interesting meritage -- a bricolage of the 'seen' and the 'unseen'.

Like Dr. Atul Gawande, I gravitate towards interdisciplinary inquiries into the human condition (via essays -- thanks to Dave Lull).

As a heuristic, it serves as a helpful default to track back to physics occasionally for grounding (in every sense of the word).

As our bodies show (objective observations from our real-time open 'lab'), many of our current and ongoing empirical experiments in health, healthcare, and medicine have been failing fast for some time now. Self-experimentation can empower us to do better. Epistemocratic tinkerers and entrepreneurs, like the good folks over at Hello Health (Jay Parkinson, Sean Khozin, et al.) or up at the Innovation Cell (Carlos Rizo, Neil Seeman, et al.) don't mind failing fast -- it's an inevitable part of the pathbreaking process -- but these resilient leaders rebound from failure even faster (think of Tiger Woods making a birdie after a bogey; the 'bounce-back' stat). The Patient of One can 'bounce' because he/she has a trampoline-like platform standing firmly beneath him/her. When we fail -- and we will fail (we will falsify parts of our ongoing narratives) -- we don't want our entire foundation to fall out from underneath us -- we don't want to 'blow up' and have our 'legs cut out from underneath us' -- we want to land safely on our feet, brazen not broken. Instead, failing fast means failing with clipped downside risk (as much as possible), then picking ourselves back up and engaging in trial-and-error yet again with a Barbell portfolio diversification strategy.

The key is to have a strong platform to anchor to, to return to -- a home base of sorts. Cognitive psychology research shows that human development requires reliable and dependable home bases from which we can explore the world, uncover novelties, and then return home to recharge, reflect, retool, re-edit our stories, and mature as a result.

When it comes to health, Ancestral Fitness is one such platform, one foundation to anchor to and bound from.

Take, for instance, the Barbell approach to eating; that is, eating hyper-conservatively -- "I just decide what foods fit my latest nutrition story and stick to them until I think my prediction about them has been falsified." -- while also engaging in some tinkering and re-editing from time to time -- "Then I edit them out of my story and edit other foods in or just stay with the standard so-far-unfalsified elements of my story until I'm ready to experiment with something else." It's like Nassim Taleb's approach to investing -- and you are investing when you are eating and drinking (investing in your health): keep the majority of your portfolio invested in the 'safe' (I'll side-step the philosophical debate about whether 'safe' exists), such as cash (and hire a bodyguard), and then explore the 'spice of life' sometimes to maintain exposure to the envelope of serendipity and the positive Black Swan hits that may emerge unexpectedly.

The two insightful quotes inserted in the above paragraph come compliments of Dave Lull. His approach captures a valuable message that is simple, yet elegant: it's sage-like sophistication in action.

For me, this Barbell nutrition strategy looks something like this (I employ the same diversification approach to energy expenditure as well, which I will save for another post):

There are the current 'tried and true' (they are in the regular rotation; the 80-90% of my nutrition portfolio) items that have not been falsified yet (they do not cause inflammatory responses for me, and I am not allergic to them; they do not make me feel bad after I eat them) -- here are five sample highlights (there are many more, such as onions and mushrooms sauteed in olive oil and balsamic vinegar):

1) Classic FAGE Total yogurt with almonds, coconut, and pistachios (a 'non-losing' combination -- notice the 'negative empiricism' statement, rather than a 'winning combination')

2) Wild Sockeye salmon with slices of raw milk cheddar cheese

3) Cobb salad, always with extra bacon and eggs, minus the tomatoes*

4) Tuna (love that high myoglobin content in Ahi)

5) Fish/Flax oil supplement

And then there are the items on the horizon, those un-exercised options that I may 'call in' at some point through further inquisitive self-experimentation -- here are a few possibilities:

1) Goat cheese

2) Sardines

3) Kefir

4) Send me suggestions!

Clearly, right now, my 'fructose-free' (*as little fructose as absolutely possible, that is) self-experiment influences the composition of investment holdings in this personal nutritional portfolio. I have yet to experience an observation that falsifies this fructose reduction approach, but I will keep my eyes peeled and ears alert for negative results.

So, then, where do physics and psychology enter this scene? Well, physicists tell a particularly fruitful story, a materialistic mythology of sorts, that includes the useful and practical concepts of inertia and momentum. Psychology research shows that these two core physics concepts play out in human affairs cognitively and emotionally every day. When we hit the gym or trail for a high-intensity, low-duration interval training session, for example, we must break the inertial barrier -- 'break a sweat' -- and get our hearts pumping in order to generate enough momentum ('flow' for athletes) to help us stretch the ceiling -- 'raise the roof' -- of our physiological headroom.

Thankfully, for the Patient of One, mythology provides the venture capital (energy) funding to jumpstart tinkering. As self-directed and self-owned scholars, epistemocrats can stumble about in the PubMed Anthology (as one resource) to find short-stories to motivate testing. Here are a few short-stories (by Bains) that may spur some folks to raise or continue raising the 'n=1' self-experimentation flag:

1: Med Hypotheses. 2008;70(4):719-23. Epub 2007 Oct 23.
The Biomedical Mutual Organization: a new approach to developing new medical treatments.

Bains W.
Self-experimentation is an efficient, productive and proven way to generate new treatments for mild and serious disease. But it is limited by materials available to the individual and the amount of testing one person can do. I advocate the formation of Biomedical Mutual Organizations, self-funded groups of individuals that provide mutual support for exploring new ideas in medical treatment. Such groups could achieve three things. Firstly, they could pool analytical services to validate the quality of materials and analytical services used in self-testing and self-medication, including verification of the identity and purity of medicine ingredients sourced from non-traditional sources. Secondly, they could pool resources to conduct group experiments in new treatments, interpret the results, and generate new hypotheses which could in turn be tested. Thirdly they could conduct more formal clinical trials on the group as a whole of new, indeed radical, therapies, in effect becoming a self-funded biotechnology company. While many practical objections remain to all of these, especially the last, and the last option may actually be illegal in some countries, some of the ethical objections that prevent such arrangements outside the context of a Mutual Organizations are overcome by the alignment of interests of those involved.


1: Med Hypotheses. 2008;70(4):714-8. Epub 2007 Oct 29.
Truly personalised medicine: self-experimentation in medical discovery.

Bains W.
Biomedical research need not be carried out solely by 'Them': distant, dissociated, enormously costly institutions and companies. It can, and increasingly in the 21st century will, be carried out by 'Us', the informed non-professional. Conventional clinical trials treat humans with the same experimental model as laboratory rats - regarding them as mute, variable, unreliable material from which results must be obtained as fast as possible to maximise return on investment and patent life. The alternative is longer term, self-reported clinical studies of new treatments, based on the assumption that the experimenter is informed, intelligent and aware. A wide variety of new treatments for chronic disease are available, involving elements of diet, behaviour, environment and non-prescription medication as well as ethical pharmaceuticals, and previous experience suggests that they can be enormously effective. The key is objective, quantifiable measures of outcome. These can be achieved with over-the-counter diagnostics for a variety of parameters, as well as with self-built test systems, and careful and systematic observations of symptoms. Hypothesis generation is a key part of this process.

As these mythologies indicate, self-experimentation in the Information Age needs platforms for helping people run their 'n=1' clinical trials. Dr. Davis does this already over at Track Your Plaque, and other patient-centered startups are advancing rapidly on this front as well -- see Facet of Life to start tinkering with ways to reduce chronic pain. Through practical, user-focused and accessible platforms like these, by creating an inviting, respectable, and open community of Patient of One self-experimenters — an epistemocracy for health — we can all learn from each other, regardless of where we are on our Ancestral Fitness treks. Whether still debating whether to get our feet wet or already going full throttle with all things Paleo / Primal / Evolutionary / Ancestral and beyond, as long as we are engaged in some level of inquiry, some level of continual searching together, our collective bottom-up knowledge base will both inform practice (Practice to Theory) and will motivate others to continue their journeys, continuing the never-ending maintenance and improvement process (momentum).

The most challenging human psychology hurdle (inertia), I suspect, though, is how do we create a culture of experimenters, of trial-and-error solution-searchers: “If I could just get folks to experiment …” is the phrase that continues to rattle my brain.

Our current experimental set up is empirically broken; our bodies tell the story lucidly. We need to scrap the existing lab set up, pull the Food Pyramid poster down from the laboratory bulletin board, hire some new lab techs, edit the laboratory manual, and start testing new hypotheses aggressively: we need to operationalize many new mythologies for health.

This is the power of 'n=1' for the Patient of One –> the goal is to get the self-experimentation engine started, overcoming inertia and empowering exploration. Psychologically, we all need support ‘getting our feet wet’ and ‘testing the waters’, so whatever baby steps we can get going to overcome inertia are monumental: hopefully, in time, as momentum builds, the engine will be self-funded and self-perpetuating (complexity science suggests this much: feedback loops matter and spiral according to momentum). Personally, I didn’t change over night. I did all of the above on my road to discovering the Ancestral Fitness lifeway. No doubt, the machine is well-greased at this point, thankfully, but the startup was not so fast, nor easy.

Interestingly, I have a good friend and golf buddy -- he's the leanest person I know -- who played quarterback in the NFL, among numerous other athletic achievements, and he has slowly stumbled his way in the dark (with my prodding, of course) toward Ancestral Fitness, leaving the old Soviet-style football training regimes behind for ancestral energy expenditure patterns and mimicry and, more importantly, shifting his eating and drinking (energy fueling) practices to align more with ancestral nutrition principles. In order to motivate this transition, he has disregarded science, theory, and clinical studies, opting for the following storytelling exercise instead:

"I choose not to eat ____ because my body doesn’t feel good after eating ____ , and I like to feel good. I am happier when I feel good, feel fit and feel healthy. Thus, eating _____ does not make me any happier; in fact, it makes me feel worse (including 'carb crashes', inflammation, dry skin, digestion problems, etc)."

From this world-class (and I mean world-class) scholar athlete who learned by years of 'hard knocks', I have learned the following: The best ceaseless question for 'n=1' self-experimentation is: “How do I feel after I eat ___?” “How do I feel after I perform ____ (in regards to exercise)?” All that matters is what happens to our own bodies in our specific cases -- does it work, meaning has it not been falsified yet?

Thus, I listen to my body — it knows more than the rest of us combined, especially when nurtured in the right ecological manner. My body talks to me when no one else is listening; this feedback trumps everything else.

Mark Sisson's Primal Blueprint Health Challenge, Richard Nikoley's Free the Animal, Keith Norris' Theory to Practice, Dr. Doug McGuff's Body by Science, Stephan Guyenet's Whole Health Source, and Kurt Harris' PaNu (Paleolithic Nutrition), to name just a few, all provide wonderful Ancestral Fitness 'choice architecture' by providing 'social scaffolding points' to help the Patient of One overcome inertia, discover connections, and then generate, maintain, and build momentum.

But, at the end of the day, sustainable self-experimentation requires searching and acting diligently, when no one else is looking -- when the clapping stops. The Patient of One internalizes this agency approach and triages away either way.

In this light, I suspect the medical system would be wise, given impending resource constraints, to facilitate, advise, oversee, and empower self-directed, patient-centered healing modalities, such as 'safe' self-experimentation, where practical and appropriate (ie. don't tinker with your ankle when it breaks; go to the ER instead). However, bringing patients and providers together to team up in 'n=1' trial-and-error requires overcoming stigmas and preconceived notions, but the goal persists: We need to overcome stigmas associated with and elevate the status of self-experimentation in medical practice and research. We also need to elevate the status of nutrition. Hence, I perceive room for synergy and 'killing two-birds with one stone' here. Self-experimenting with nutrition is one concrete way to cultivate these processes in parallel. Experimenting with nutrition is relatively safe and is practical since patients shop for their diets already, so increasing patient participation in their health experiences through physician-supported (practitioner-supported, more generally) nutrition experimentation represents a vehicle that could contribute to a cultural transformation and evolution in medicine.

The full-scale essay (book, perhaps) on this fascinating topic, could start something like this:

Nutritional Bricolage: Tinkering with Diet as a Vehicle for Raising the Status of Self-Experimentation in Medical Practice and Research

You are lost. It is dark, but the sun is shining. You look left; you look right, but things just seem so opaque--opaque because you cannot seem to figure out what path to take. Where are you? You are in the grocery store down the street from your house--stuck somewhere in the cereal aisle, mesmerized by the sea of marketing-screaming boxes--trying desperately to decide which foods and drinks to buy that are good for your health: 'Bueno para mi salud' is the phrase that dances through your mind. You are a reflective person, so you think about the existing nutrition models that could help inform your decision-making process. Of course, there is the Food Pyramid that asserts one set of nutrition values. Diets like Atkins, South Beach, and others swim in your head as well. It is all so confusing; you throw your hands up in the air; "I give up. They cannot all be right," you tell yourself, frustrated with the uncertainty that a simple activity like grocery shopping involves. This situation represents opacity--opacity is defined as a concept or condition (scenario) that is difficult to perceive correctly, such as how best to eat and drink to restore, maintain, and enhance health. In the face of such nutrition opacity, you unleash the scientist within and draw a sophisticated, humble conclusion: "If no one knows anything about nutrition and proper diet, then I will just have to start self-experimenting with my food and beverage choices and simply see how I feel while eating and drinking different diets. My friend told me about this concept called Ancestral Fitness the other day, so I will start there. Chronic illness and obesity seem to have spiked rapidly ever since that Food Pyramid scheme came out anyways. For three months, I will consume a diet that mimics, as much as possible, the patterns of my pre-agriculture, paleolithic ancestors and see how it goes. Time to tinker away. What aisle is the salmon on again?"

As each week passes, you record your experimental results diligently using an online tool, Bricolage Labs. Bricolage Labs allows you to set up and run your own self-experiments ('n=1' clinical trials) online, empowering you with the ability to make graphs and track progress along the way (you can even 'Tweet' observations, such as your energy level scores directly after leaving the gym following a new type of workout). Literally, bricolage means to create something from diverse materials that happen to be available, such as your grocery store, your own body, and your online platform in Bricolage Labs. In this fashion, the Bricolage Labs Web site reads: "Improve your life. Discover connections. Leverage serendipity by engaging in discovery through self-experimentation, tinkering, and trial-and-error. You can capture your hypotheses and experiments here, learn from the community, and vote-up interesting and useful results." By the end of three months, you have recorded your mood, weight, and general health outlook using self-created scales and measurement methods. The results are stunning: while tinkering with Ancestral Fitness principles, personalizing your eating and drinking habits to accommodate your personal and aesthetic preferences, you discover that you are leaner, have lost ten pounds, have experienced clarity of thought, feel more positive with your general mood, and are sure that your overall health has improved as a result. "Wow. That's pretty fascinating--I learned more about myself, nutrition, and health in these past three months than ever before. I feel a sense of agency; I am an active participant in my medical care. I am the Patient of One," you conclude to yourself, leaning back in your computer chair, repeating, "Yes, I am the Patient of One. It's the statistics of individuals: no one in the world is like me--I have a unique biochemical makeup and genetic composition, for instance--so self-experimenting is an unavoidable and inherent requirement to uncovering just how best to navigate that treacherous grocery store safely and effectively. I am going to tell my doctor about this revelation; I bet other patients could benefit from this process as well. Perhaps physicians could assist patients' tinkering efforts and help them learn by trial-and-error in safe ways using tools like Bricolage Labs. This seems to be the next step in Web-based medicine. Exciting stuff. Plus, nutritional bricolage is much more conservative and practical compared to the pharmaceutical, surgical, and procedural bricolage efforts that comprise most of modern medicine." In this way, you frame self-experimentation with nutrition as a 'cheap health option'--a way to figure out what is healthy by engaging a process that has clipped downside risk (food allergies, for example) but possesses much upside benefit potential (you lose enough weight and regain insulin control to levels that cure you from diabetes, as one possibility). As an individual within a healthcare system that typically views public health through a populations lens, you feel comforted by realizing that individuality in medical care is quite scientific, empirical, and yet achievable at the same time.

A few months pass, you are still thriving on your Ancestral Fitness lifestyle, learning little things from experience each and every day that help you along the way--you realize that skipping breakfast a few days per week and intermittent fasting for at least twelve hours proves fruitful in stimulating your energy levels, as one gem that you discover on your treasure hunt. You visit your primary care physician for a physical, and you pop the question: "Doc, have you ever viewed medicine as an experiment; like a series of live experiments in people's bodies? Maybe when you prescribed a drug that you were not sure would work; how did you approach those scenarios?" With a wry smile, your physician chuckles, and then responds: "Why yes--I encounter that situation every day. Every prescription I write is an experiment, on some level. Each person is unique--people react differently to standard treatments all the time, and usually in unexpected ways. My job is to make sure that these experiments 'first do no harm' and second, help my patients heal." Impressed, you answer back: "Well, that is encouraging to hear. How about with nutrition? Have you ever helped patients experiment with their diets to heal, as opposed to drugs, that is?" "No, but tell me more," your doctor states, the tone of his voice expressing genuine interest. Seizing the opportunity to share your newfound wisdom, you explain: "For the past five months or so, I have been tinkering with Ancestral Fitness principles and have recorded my observations and tracked my results online using this free Web-application called Bricolage Labs. The results have been promising. I learned a lot about myself, both positive and negative. I learned that I feel good after eating salmon and tuna, but I do not like eating beef, even grass-fed varieties. I also found out that I needed more fat and probiotics (good bacteria) in my diet and minimal sugar in order to stay lean and keep my energy levels high and my immune system strong. The rest is all there online, like a live diary that I share with the world. Other people can see my self-experiment and conduct their own, copying my lab set up or generating novel hypotheses to test. It seems like a great way to engage patients in taking more responsibility for their personal health states, but more importantly, it provides a platform for searching in the face of opacity." Impressed and enthused, your physician exclaims back: "Opacity; yes, the art and science of medicine is defined by the non-linear task of decision-making under uncertainty, in the face of opacity. I think you are on to something here. I see much value in self-experimentation in medical practice and research--it's a noble tradition in medicine, in fact--especially using nutrition as a vehicle to get the ball rolling. We do need a cultural revolution in this regard. Unfortunately, there are some stigmas associated with self-experimentation. Paternalistic approaches tend to receive higher status in medicine. But, as our health system resources become more scarce, patients are going to have to make more and more health choices for themselves, so physicians could help assist this shift by working closely with their patients to run personalized tinkering trials in all things 'lifestyle'--when and where appropriate, of course. Certainly, this is a relatively untapped domain in medical practice and research. Here, show me this Bricolage Labs site on my laptop; I want to learn how to use this participatory medicine device."

Minimally, the 'physics of tinkering' suggests that contextualized information, embedded in a story like Ancestral Fitness, could help people jump the psychological hurdles that inertia presents, engaging mythology to build and maintain momentum for leading healthier, happier, and more fulfilling lifeways.

When no one else is looking, the Patient of One will thrive by living this epistemocratic way.

Triage (tinker) away, Doc.

REFERENCES
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-experimentation (*see reference to Seth Roberts)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-experimentation_in_medicine
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=self-experimenters
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/02/all_my_life_for.html
http://www.jyi.org/features/ft.php?id=1326
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2005/03/learning_from_s.html
http://www.amazon.com/Who-Goes-First-Self-Experimentation-Medicine/dp/0520212819
http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/research/projects/DeptIII-KatrinSolhdju-Self-Experimentation
http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/cgi/reprint/6/7/475.pdf
http://www.uihealthcare.com/depts/med/orthopaedicsurgery/research/ioj/2009/historyofmed/history.pdf
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0005192
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/04.29/11-selfexperiment.html
http://www.marksdailyapple.com/richard-nikoleys-self-experimentation-and-transformation/
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16735-eight-scientists-who-became-their-own-guinea-pigs.html?full=true
http://www.springerlink.com/content/64685g8161m75652/
http://www.insightjournal.net/Volume1/Using%20Self-Experimentation%20and%20Single-Subject%20Methodology%20to%20Promote%20Critical%20Thinking.pdf
http://www.harpers.org/subjects/SelfExperimentationInMedicine
http://www.jstor.org/pss/30053887

Agency: Another Benefit of Self-Experimentation

The placebo effect matters.

It is well-documented throughout numerous short-stories in the mythological PubMed Anthology that the placebo effect is powerful (and, perhaps, getting stronger? hat tip to Dave Lull).

Self-experimentation, I suspect, harnesses the positive placebo effect (by selecting for and collecting 'cheap health options') quite well.

But, what is the placebo effect; psychophysiologically, that is? On some level, the positive experiences that stem from the placebo effect result from increased agency: the physiological (emotional, physical, etc.) responses to feeling better able to shape your destiny and health state. Perhaps, the hope (expectation) of uncovering a novel solution on your own terms drives beneficial hormonal responses (dopamine release, for instance) -- through self-experimentation the Patient of One becomes an active player, an agent for restoration, maintenance, and enhancing change.

Agency matters to the Patient of One.

As I have said before, in healthcare, there exists a spectrum of medical care and services. This spectrum runs from complete patient agency on one pole to medically-assisted agency on the other end. It's a messy spectrum, but a rough conceptual approximation that helps me think about the moral role that medical practitioners should play in ethical partnerships with their patients. The Patient of One, at some point, as he/she approaches the pole of emergencies and disasters, yields some individual agency (autonomy) for medically-assisted agency in partnership with trained healthcare professionals. It's not a black and white proposition; shades of grey color this epistemocracy. Physicians, nurses, and the entire gamut of healthcare professionals train for years to act professionally in the face of uncertainty, but patient agency should never leave the front of this health scene.

For epistemocrats, then, the question becomes where do 'safe' tinkering spaces (with clipped downside risk) exist along this healthcare spectrum? As we move closer to the emergency / catastrophic end of the medically-assisted agency realm, tinkering, I suspect, carries more and more risk (although, it could just save your life). However, in our daily lives, as we shop for nutrition, as we move about and rest in our environments, and as we reflect about the meaning of it all, plenty of safe tinkering spaces emerge that we could explore in hopes of restoring, maintaining, and enhancing our health states. And, the term 'our' is doubly appropriate here, since we can help each other through our self-experiments by providing possible solutions to problems, ideas for new tests, and negative results from trial-and-error. As ever-evolving biological beings, each day, we are all presented with an open lab for experimentation.

Going forward, as medical resource constraints increase, healthcare practitioners could participate in the self-experimentation process with their patients in the lifestyle (basic Facets of Life like nutrition, exercise, etc.) domains to solution-search in creative, resourceful, and practical ways. Some experiments will surely start well, thanks to the placebo effect, but may quickly taper off -- these results may not signal long-term solutions, but they may yield short-term relief and improvements. Others, though, may produce replicable results that help people transform their health and wellness tremendously (in cost-effective ways).

[Tinkering is searching and acting in action; it's the agency modus operandi that epistemocrats engage as solution-searchers, as positive Black Swan treasure-hunters.]

"If I could only get my patients to experiment with Ancestral Fitness," a doctor may one day say. "Once they feel better and feel like they have a foundational platform for experiencing health in new, enhanced ways, who knows what fascinating gems they will discover about their minds, bodies, and souls. I know Mark Sisson tells a good (Primal) story (mythology is self-experimentation venture capital), perhaps I should send some of them his way ..."

Ancestral Fitness: Defining 'Ancestral' by Accounting for Time

Anthropology in an Epistemocracy demands generalism.

'Paleo', although fruitful and quite useful, has its limits (conceptually).

Ancestral Fitness embraces generalism; it's a holistic account of the human condition with respect to health.

Ancestral Fitness accounts for all time, since the beginning of time.

Time plays a central conceptual role in physics (consider Albert Einstein's Special Relativity or Richard Feynman's Space-Time View of Quantum Electrodynamics), so I suspect time could inform human physiology as well. Physics and physiology synergize well.

When I use the term 'Ancestral', I hope to capture the most general time-scale and timeline as possible, accounting for the emergence of time, the building blocks in the primordial soup, the first single-celled prokaryotic anaerobes, the aquatic creatures that inhabited the seas, the transition to land from sea, the paleolithic hunter-gatherer experience, the development of sedentary agrarian societies, the recent industrial revolution, the current information evolution, and all other historical (fractal) 'fractures' in between -- remember, history crawls and jumps (see Mandelbrot); it doesn't jog (no chronic cardio!). From this perspective, when we map the modern-day human experience on a universal timeline, obesity, diabetes (the metabolic syndrome), and all things 'alien' in contemporary physiology/medicine register as infinitesimally small blips on the radar. This is (partly) why our current chronic inflammation epidemic is such an alarming predicament -- our bodies are swimming in inflamed pools of 'protein cement'. In 'the blink of an eye', we somehow turned into 'aliens' that our evolutionary ancestors would not recognize. We can re-find our way.

What can we learn from this generalist timeline perspective? Well, we spent far more time in primarily anaerobic environments than we have in our modern-day anaerobic/aerobic mixed ecology. We 'lived' (in many forms) in the sea for longer than we have inhabited land. Later on, we moved about as paleolithic hunter-gatherers for quite some time. Our energy expenditure and consumption patterns, I suspect, were shaped (in some important ways) by this more holistic conception of time. And, philosophically, this notion only further supports all things Paleo and Primal because the anaerobic energy expenditure pathway and the high fat + high protein + low carb energy fueling combination reach even further back into pre-Homo sapien history, further validating our personal 'Patient of One' self-experiments today with this ancestral lifeway.

Mythologically, for instance, when I eat salmon (seafood, generally), I tell myself the short-story that I am somehow reconnecting with those swimming sea creatures that are, in some sense, my (our) evolutionary ancestors. It's one concrete way that I 'live by fiction' and achieve empirically tested positive health outcomes as a result (I enhance my lean muscle mass, for instance).

Ancestral Fitness health anthropology encourages epistemocrats to search throughout all time and space for novel concepts to test via 'n=1' self-experiments -- developing new research questions is a lifelong scientific journey. And, it turns out that the concept of Physiological Headroom helps us expand the degrees of freedom with which we can search and act in this world. So make the mythological stretch and stretch your physiological headroom by lowering the 'floor' (rest and de-stress => the least you can do) while raising the 'roof' (lift and sprint; see Dr. Doug McGuff's Body by Science & Keith Norris' Theory to Practice to start => the most you can do). You just might enhance your body's multifractal complexity in the process -- Free the Animal -- and, hopefully, inhabit this earth for a longer, healthier period of time. Minimally, you will certainly avoid the problem of expanding waist lines and shrinking minds (cognitive decline -- thanks to @KeithNorris & Dave Lull).

Ancestral Fitness accounts for all time.

To good health,

Brent

Medical Mythology: PubMed is an Anthology of Mythologies

PubMed is an anthology of mythologies.

From drug-trials to review articles to policy perspective pieces, PubMed is an extensive library that houses numerous volumes of fiction.

Why fiction? Simple: if the Black Swan and Popperian Falsification exist, and I suspect they do, then any fact / conjecture / conclusion / description / statement about this world and its complex textures, however 'scientific' in appearance, can be turned upside down (falsified) instantaneously by one single observation.

In the PubMed Anthology, abstracts are short-stories; stories with data-embedded hypotheses, results, and further questions for inquiry.

My short-story looks like this:

Ann Emerg Med. 2008 Dec;52(6):677-685. Epub 2008 Aug 27.

Regionalization of care for ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction: is it too soon?

Pottenger BC, Diercks DB, Bhatt DL.

School of Policy, Planning, and Development, University of Southern California, CA, USA.

Interest in regionalization of the care of acute ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) has gained momentum recently. Optimal treatment of STEMI involves balancing time to treatment and reperfusion options. Primary percutaneous coronary intervention, when performed in a timely fashion, has been shown to be more effective than fibrinolysis. However, numerous practical barriers prevent many STEMI patients from receiving primary percutaneous coronary intervention. In an effort to increase beneficial primary percutaneous coronary intervention administration to STEMI patients, health care leaders have proposed regionalized STEMI care networks with advanced emergency medical services (EMS) involvement. Constructing regionalized STEMI networks presents a policy challenge because this shift in STEMI care would require changes in current EMS and emergency medicine practices. Therefore, we present various perspectives and issues that decisionmakers and system organizers must address properly before deciding whether to adopt this new model of care. Reorganizing STEMI care in a manner analogous to how trauma and stroke care are currently triaged and treated appeals intuitively; however, given the absence of evidence that STEMI regionalization actually improves patient outcomes and is cost-effective, more research is needed to determine whether STEMI regionalization is an efficient model for providing evidence-based care. The concept of STEMI regionalization represents an effort to inform policy according to evidence-based medicine, but real-world quality, geospatial, financial, cost, business, resource, and practice barriers present obstacles to implementing this concept efficiently and effectively.

Collectively, a tremendous amount of research, reflection, reading, writing, editing, tinkering, etc. went into the process of composing this scholarly short narrative. That's great; but, like all narratives, all short-stories in the PubMed Anthology communicate personal perspectives, are subject to biases, and paint pictures of the world from specific points-of-view. The 'Patient of One' must navigate these ever-shifting, multi-current waters carefully. Anthropology demands a holistic approach to the human condition, and Ancestral Fitness is open and evolving health anthropology. In this context, Keith Norris' perceptive comment from my previous essay, Ancestral Fitness: Choice Architecture for Epistemocrats, deserves to be restated because it serves as the self-experimentation information filtering device that we must employ via 'n=1' trials:

The Buddha advised his followers not to accept his teachings blindly, but to test them out; take what is useful, discard what is not. Good advice, I say, from the original epistemocrat.

We'd be wise to heed this (ancestral) wisdom -- narratives are seductive, yet necessary and potentially powerfully in transforming culture for the better (moving lifestyles in healthier directions, for example).

And 'research studies' are narratives -- we are all storytellers (some speak truths, some tell lies), despite our 'titles' -- it's just that some stories prove more fruitful, thanks, perhaps, to deeper reflective learning, in helping us search and act in the face of our opaque, uncertain ecologies (consider the Bible). Remember, we live by fiction. Since any proposition about the world can be falsified in the 'blink of an eye', mythologies, hypothesis, theories, narratives, et al. are all 'scientific stories' that we tell ourselves and others to make sense of, understand, derive meaning from, and inform our thoughts and choices in this world. The more data that a particular mythology embeds within its narrative, the better (in general, I suspect, because this involves more reflection--see next paragraph), save for the reality that one observation can blow the entire paradigm up anytime.

Perceptive narratives, like Nassim Taleb's The Black Swan, emerge from deep, non-linear and cross-disciplinary reflection. This type of reflection interweaves philosophy, spirituality, 'hard' scientific data/experiments, tradition, experience, and the entire gamut of the human condition. Therefore, we do, as Nassim Taleb and Annie Dillard (thanks to Brian Geremia) state, 'live by fiction'. Non-fiction does not exist if the Black Swan continues to rear its head. A fact is not a fact; it's a tentative story that temporarily describes some texture of our existence. Here is where phronesis proves useful in informing self-experimentation. Since one person's self-experiment may or may not be generalizeable to others' (consider ancestral differences like genetics), we must simply take one person's experience, evaluate it in light of our own experiences and conceptions -- our choice architectures -- and put this concept to the test (Theory to Practice). If it works one day, we test it out another day (practice to theory). But, this test never ends -- falsification could emerge any day. Say I enhance my lean body mass eating FAGE Total Yogurt, and then someone else sees value in my narrative and decides to give it a try, then this person is 'testing the waters' in a scientific manner, searching for observations that will falsify my positive experience in his/her specific case. Thus, the key to self-experimenting is to recognize upside changes, but, all the while, focus primarily on potentially falsifying data points -- it's another way to clip downside risk as well (try to avoid avoidable loss).

In essence, through self-experimentation, we are searching for rough approximations (think fractal roughness) that help us navigate our way through the world's turbulent waters. We learn what does not work much quicker than what does work, generally, so there is value in knowing, however transiently, what doesn't work in situations that closely approximate past experiences. But, of course, at the margin, even this fails, since no two situations and contexts are ever the same. Therefore, it comes down to figuring out how to do our best; how to be human and tinker most effectively. The Barbell platform for tinkering engages (~ 80 - 90% of) our energy in activities that have not failed in the past or were validated 'scientifically' through empiricism to build a 'stable' foundation while also diversifying (~ 10 - 20%) our energy into new modes of thinking and acting in order to remain open to unpredictable possibilities and to test novel propositions. For instance, eating the same foods that have not failed in the past (they have not caused allergic reactions, inflammation, etc.) most of the time is a risk-averse and safe step that could compliment well with occasionally trying a new type of food or drink that may, eventually, 'find its way into the rotation'. Experimentation is the 'spice of life'.

The 'bounded' nature of Herb Simon's 'bounded rationality' demands that we engage in 'blind trial-and-error' tinkering (searching and acting), but if we are truly blind in these instances, we must tell ourselves some form of short-story to initiate (perhaps 'rationalize') this experimental course of navigation. The PubMed Anthology is full of gems (stories) to serve as startup venture energy funding for self-experimentation. Though, in searching through this anthropological information jungle (PubMed), two potential problems could arise: 'over-searching' and 'throwing the baby out with the bath water'. Firstly, our brains appear to be wired to search endlessly -- we are 'seeking machines' (thanks to Dave Lull) -- and, at some point, we must transition from searching to acting, from surveying to self-experimenting. Luckily, Ancestral Fitness can help us here. The Ancestral Fitness lifestyle paradigm is a healthy approach to searching and acting in the Information Age because its Levy energy expenditure pattern, if it is entropy maximizing given fixed path-length constraints, saves us from 'over searching' in one niche for too long: we read and read articles, blogs, studies, etc. about the benefits of interval training for awhile, but then we escape that niche and get out into nature and start sprinting along the beach to immerse ourselves ecologically where the 'rubber meets the road'. Secondly, commonly, throughout the PubMed Anthology, you will find themes to these narratives. Unfortunately, some of these themes are particularly dangerous because they 'throw the baby (good fat) out with the bath water (bad carbs)'. Many short-stories in the PubMed Anthology test the modern 'Hamburger (with bun, of course), French Fries, and Milk Shake' diet (fat + carbs), which is a treacherous combination that our metabolisms do not know how to handle (= inflammatory responses). Our metabolism thrive on high fat + high protein + low carb mathematics. When subjects of these experiments experience poor health outcomes, researchers (narrators) often ostracize fat (an unfounded conclusion) instead of the sugar (starches, refined carbs, etc.) in their short-stories. Epistemocrats know better: don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Hope abounds, though, as more and more short-stories are being published in the ever-evolving PubMed Anthology that test nutrition properly and show the benefits of good fat, demonstrate the dangers of sugar toxicity, and even parse out interval training versus chronic cardio, as opposed to lumping all energy expenditure into one category called 'exercise'.

PubMed is a fabulous anthology -- an anthology of mythologies -- but the 'Patient of One' only cares about what happens in his/her specific instance (this is the ethical statistics of individuals), so 'n=1' self-experimentation is critical to testing, validating, and falsifying these short-stories, filtering information, and deriving practical applications from this data-embedded Anthology that we can apply in our every day lives (in the grocery store, at the gym, in the office, at home, and everywhere in between).

To epistemocratic searching and acting (tinkering funded by mythology),

Brent

Tinkering: Sketching an Epistemocrat and Ancestral Fitness

Tinkering or 'thinkering' through writing (word sketching) ...

In the (semi-permanent) right-hand column of my blog, I have attempted to sketch / outline / define / capture / describe / approximate (roughly, in spirit) answers to two important questions for inquiry:

What is an Epistemocrat?

What is Ancestral Fitness?

Here are my (current) word sketches:

What is an Epistemocrat?

In his marvelous book, The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb defines an epistemocrat as "someone of epistemic humility, who holds his own knowledge in greatest suspicion." For Dr. Jerome Groopman, this person continues to search for answers by asking, "What else could it be?" From Chester Newland's perspective, an epistemocrat never stops "searching for human dignity."

Epoche, a Greek word that translates as "suspending judgment," lies at the heart of an epistemocrat's quest -- a quest that began many years ago in medicine by empirical skeptics like Sextus Empiricus and Aenesidemus (founder of Pyrrhonism --> skepsis).

Today, an epistemocrat is an "anti-scholar," a person who, concerned with what he or she does not know, engages in life-long learning and erudition to hedge dynamically against and embrace uncertainty.

Essentially, an epistemocrat is a practitioner (a thinker and a doer) who embraces (via paradoxes) the humble limits of being human and searches (via stochastic tinkering) for practical, real-world solutions that help us live and grow together in our increasingly complex and recursive world: opportunistic generalists tend to survive ... diversify.

What is Ancestral Fitness?

Ancestral Fitness is health and fitness choice architecture for epistemocrats. It's a mythological platform and framework -- an epistemocracy -- for individuals to self-experiment upon and within to mimic, where useful and fruitful, their evolutionary ancestors' energy intake and expenditure patterns (the math is fractal & Levy-distributed). Ancestral Fitness combines the high-technology benefits of the Information Age with the humble "we'd be wise to learn from our ancestors" perspective to encourage and empower widespread, curious, and diversified non-linear tinkering via the Barbell Strategy through local 'n=1' trial-and-error self-experimentation with all things Paleo, Primal, Evolutionary, Ancestral, and beyond. By uniting a community of exemplary scholars, Ancestral Fitness serves as a conceptual bricolage for all those working near the envelope of serendipity to transform the cultural tide in all facets of every day life. It's anthropological 'searching and acting' in hopes of unleashing positive Black Swan hits that improve our lives and environments from the bottom-up: the possibility that things may turn out even better than expected exists, but remember (try) to keep downside risk clipped.

Ancestral Fitness embraces and understands 'The Patient of One': triage (tinker) away, Doc.

Like all things 'epistemocratic', these are 'working notions' that I am constantly re-evaluating, testing, editing, and reflecting on. Mythological constructs are (just like) scientific hypothesis, subject to the demands of empiricism.

Feedback on missing pieces, communication improvements, and any other insights are always greatly appreciated.

We are in this together; emerged in a search for epistemocracy.

Healthcare Epistemocrat's Ancestral Fitness 'Birthday Cake'

I turned 26 today (I was born on 8/20/1983).

I celebrated with nine holes of golf (shot 36), some tennis (played in Vibrams), a workout and swim, followed by enjoying the Ancestral Fitness 'Birthday Cake' pictured above.

I am thankful for many things, including my health (hence the 'Cake' of 'high fat, high protein, high good bacteria, high fiber, high antioxidants, great taste, and low carb' above).

To good health,

Brent

Why Mythology is So Important to Health: Self-Experimentation Venture Capital

Above: Classic FAGE Total (Greek) Yogurt with Almonds, Coconut Flakes, and Pistachios. This combination is high protein, high (good) fat, high fiber, high antioxidants, high vitamins & minerals (calcium), and very low carb; plus, FAGE Yogurt contains billions of live bacterial cultures (good bacteria) for strong immune system support. More importantly, though, I like the taste; I feel good after eating this mix (I am not lactose intolerant and fermentation eliminates most of the lactose anyways --> low-inflammation response); and, I suspect that my health is improving as a result of incorporating this mix into the 'tried and true' (80%) section of my personal nutrition portfolio. At the end of the day, eating this dish is nothing more than another 'n=1' self-experiment: as epistemocrats, we must question our knowledge constantly, and this tinkering trial may or may not yield promising results, but I am always searching for improvements (through the Barbell approach).

So, what informs these searches? Why would one of my current nutrition searches include the items above? Well, in opening the doors to tinkering, I need reasons--'venture capital' motivations--to test this or test that. Since all scientific knowledge can be refuted with one observation--Sir Karl Popper and Nassim Taleb remind us of this--we all must engage personal mythologies to make decisions and initiate actions. Each person's 'choice architecture' for decision-making is embedded within mythology, the stories and folklore that we tell ourselves in order to perceive, navigate, and make sense of the complex textures of our world. Now, I view this in a positive light--mythologizing can reflect numerous data points, extensive reflection, and years of real-world experiences. Just like a 'scientific' hypothesis, mythologies are conjectures about the world that require empirical testing. Since Ancestral Fitness is a mythology for health--choice architecture for epistemocrats--it requires wide-scale testing to discover what works, what does not work, and what new avenues need to be pursued. However, often, inertia inhibits us from altering our routines, our established patterns, and trying new things. Here is where I conceptualize mythology as startup venture capital for self-experimentation: tell yourself a story to jumpstart action. For instance, Seth Roberts developed the Umami Hypothesis to explain many things, including immune system deficiencies, based on the notions that our bodies lack adequate exposure to pathogens and we do not eat enough good bacteria. Because sour, complex, and variable flavors that humans enjoy eating emerge from fermentation, Seth suspects that consuming fermented foods (yogurt, kombucha, kefir, etc.) is good for us because they contain lots of healthy bacteria. Couple this insight with my Clostridium Difficile analogy, and you have quite a story to tell yourself when deciding whether or not to give Classic FAGE Total Greek Yogurt a try. Remember, you can always edit this story later, should the results not turn out as expected, but given the relatively clipped downside risk, truly acting on the tenet to 'maximize exposure to the envelope of serendipity' would nudge you gracefully to give it (or another experiment) a try. The world is our anthropology lab; our bodies are our chemistry flasks; and, self-experimentation is the scholarly process for progress.

In instigating the 'search' pictured and described above, I derived startup capital to overcome inertia from thousands of health, fitness, and nutrition data points (including Seth's recent additions) that I have stumbled upon through my extensive research over the years, so I snapped this photo today from my desk to capture a few of the more recent 'data points' that contribute to my ever-iterating, ever-evolving, ever-editing personal narrative--it's a live, non-linear (Levy-like) updating function--that informs my tentative cognitive psychology framework:

This picture features many gems; take a look around this epistemocratic jungle.

Each one of these books, for instance, is another mythological construct--a hypothesis for testing--that provides data points, commentary, insights, and 'pearls of wisdom' that we can operationalize through self-experimentation: authors write books as 'calls to action', and readers read books as 'searches'; thus, self-experimenting is one constructive way to respond with action (although doing nothing is always one possible and worthwhile action as well). My Ancestral Fitness mythologizing draws deeply upon concepts communicated in the works pictured above--I put them 'in play', as Tiger would say.

And, it turns out, that this type of mythologizing is critically important to improving our health states because we desperately need a rich culture of new 'Patient of One' self-experiments--triage away--to displace our failed fructose binges. Luckily, the other day, the keen and supportive Dave Lull shared with me his perceptive thoughts on why mythology is so important to engaging self-experimentation, whether with personal philosophy or diet composition:

Hi Brent,

I certainly agree that the stories I tell myself have at times seductively kept me from acknowledging, or even, for a time, seeing, data that falsifies (parts of) them. I'm not as savvy as you (and other more profound scholars of self-experimentation (and of statistics) such as Seth) when it comes to self-experimentation. What guides me in my self-experimentation is probably too simplistic (necessitated perhaps by my statistical naïveté), but for what it's worth, here are a few notions I hold to.

I'm a deductivist (not an inductivist) decision maker (beware the black swan is my motto):

David Miller.
Deductivist decision making

I see my stories as equivalent to scientific hypotheses and I believe, as David Miller puts it, that "[t]he hypotheses of science (and those of daily life) are always conjectures . . . ." They are conjectures that I try to refute. Frankly, self-experimentation, for me, requires storytelling, or something like Brent's mythologizing.

I am a sort of critical rationalist, with an epistemology similar in certain basic respects to Karl Popper's:

J. C. Lester
A Sceptical Look at - A Skeptical Look at Karl Popper

I believe, as Mr Lester points out in his article, that data corroborates or falsifies, but does not confirm, theories or hypotheses (or my stories (beware the black swan)). But I have to have a (tentative) story to begin with, parts of which I work at trying to refute, and when I do, I re-edit my story; it's an editing job that never ends, on a story that might never be ready for publication, except maybe among friends who ask me how my story's coming, and I show them and reply, "Slowly, uncertainly, tentatively--but I think I'm making some progress."

Best,

Dave

We need stories (statistics aside), however tentative they may be, to help us move from searching to acting. The human condition is so tentative in the information age, but that does not mean that we cannot construct data-rich, perceptive, reflective, and empowering mythologies to help us live and play together in our increasingly global world.

Ancestral Fitness accomplishes just that. As an epistemocracy for health, Ancestral Fitness is an umbrella that captures a diverse group of epistemocrats' personal mythologies, tinkering efforts, and passionate searches--we can all learn from each other in this context, re-edit our stories, and, when the sun goes down, know that our Ancestral Fitness mythologies may never be ready for publication, except amongst friends. In this way, we can each serve as 'shining lights' for one another in the face of nutrition, fitness, and health opacity, trading 'tricks-of-the-trade' with other epistemocrats, inspiring each other with new twists to our stories that serve as further 'venture (energy) funding' for novel self-experiments. From the ground level feedback that we receive from the bottom up, our conceptions of how best to search and act evolve, gaining sophistication and precision along the way.

Epistemocrats write with pencils, not *pens (it's messier that way); don't worry if this experiment doesn't 'pencil out'; you can always use that darn eraser or grab another sheet of paper. Self-experimentation provides a tool for sketching the textures of our world, making the unseen seen, and as tentative and uncertain as this process may be, it's the best we can do: be human and tinker.

Ciao.

*Conflict of Interest Statement: I took all my organic chemistry, calculus, and physics exams in pen during college (they all turned out okay).

Cognitive Dissonance: Fat Math & Inseparability

Yikes! (lol -- don't be afraid)

I am pretty sure, unfortunately, most folks would be scared of the nutrition label above (for Classic FAGE Total Yogurt = an absolute gem mix of good bacteria, high fat, high protein, and low carb that I recommend self-experimenting with; give it a shot, then decide 'yah or nay'). Most people who stumble upon this product in the store would squirm; their knee-jerk reactions would certainly be "that's going to clog my arteries and make me fat." Basic physics and metabolism principles tell us that both of these reactions are unfounded -- in fact, they are incorrect -- but they do exist in masses, which is the more important reality. Attacking our health challenges effectively demands addressing these cultural misconceptions creatively.

'Fat math' is a serious case of cognitive dissonance.

Remember, you can't "get sugar on sugar," but thanks to a historical accident in linguistics, we now associate the term "fat" with the state of obesity, and, as a result, we believe that we "can get fat on fat." It's a deep, prevalent cultural myth. The 'diamond to cut this diamond' with is the Ancestral Fitness myth; a mythology that encourages folks to self-experiment with (good, which includes animal) fat in order to discover, for themselves, that fat does not make us fat: sugar does!

Here's the mainstream math, based upon faulty thermodynamics: Fat has 9 calories per gram, those 'experts' say, and carbohydrates only have 4 calories per gram. Surely, low-fat dieting is the way to go to lose weight and achieve health. Epistemocrats know better ...

To help quell this cognitive dissonance over 'fat math & linguistics' and to encourage more n=1 self-experiments with nutrition (a safe and practical tinkering space), here are my thoughts that emerged and materialized this morning in response to Keith Norris' wonderful essay, 'The Mainstream's Bungled Take (Again!) on Exercise and Weight Control', on his exemplary blog, Theory to Practice:

Energy expenditure (exercise, play, movement, etc.) and energy fueling (eating, drinking, ie. nutrition) are truly inseparable: they are so intimately linked that we cannot think of one without the other. No problemo: Epistemocrats can handle such messy math.

Carbohydrate (sugar) fueling and aerobic energy expenditure (chronic cardio, for instance) reinforce each other and spiral via linked feedback loops physiologically into carb and cardio addictions = chronic inflammation, obesity, poor health, etc. This is the health equation for achieving Catabolism.

Fat and protein fueling, sans (or with minimal) carbs, and anaerobic energy expenditure (high-intensity, low-duration bursts like sprinting, lifting, etc.) reinforce each other and spiral via linked feedback loops physiologically into lean muscle, reduced inflammation, dynamic/vibrant health = low inflammation, improved cardiovascular health, etc. This is the health equation for achieving Anabolism.

Human development is about anabolism: we want to keep building ourselves, improving ourselves, not breaking ourselves down and losing ground via catabolism.

On the whole, right now, the ‘fueling’ component of this equation is most skewed (we are eating ourselves to death) — hence Gary Taubes’ focus on nutrition — but the energy expenditure component is intimately linked and critical as well — the fact that lean muscle burns more fat, for example, is one critical component.

Even further, carbs, through their inflammatory spiking devises, act as 'protein cement' and inhibit movement and play. I think that removing the inflammation spiking source — poor nutrition sugar highs — is the first step to take to degrade this ‘cement’ and free people’s bodies from the shackles of inflammation so that they feel good about exercising and feel compelled to move. Then, helping folks move in ancestral patterns while fueling on ancestral diets will reinforce one another through dynamic coupling.

But, in conceptualizing inflammation as protein cement (remember, protein movement defines life), I do see this: if I were to try and break a cement block, how would I accomplish this task most effectively: (A) Constant chipping at a low intensity (chronic cardio) or (B) high-intensity, low-duration blows (jack hammer). Answer: high-intensity, low-duration would degrade the cement block faster, more efficiently.

Thus, from this perspective, expenditure and fueling are inseparable and can thus be reinforcing in positive ways by conceptualizing inflammation (caused by sugar and chronic exercise) as ‘protein cement’ -- the thought experiment goes like this: How can we degrade this protein cement that inhibits us most effectively (?) — well, one, remove the cause-agents (carbs and chronic cardio); and, two, engage the solutions: fat + protein (minimal carb) ancestral diets and bring the high-intensity, low-duration (movement/exercise) sledgehammer with some heat! Dr. Doug McGuff's Body by Science suggests this works quite well. Increase the elasticity of those coronary arteries with some bursty pulses of blood flow from heart-throbbing sprints and lifts.

Sugar is like debt. We need a lot less of it (see Nassim Taleb's letter here, thanks to Dave Lull). Minimal is okay; extensive is dangerous leverage that stretches us too thin, in health and in finance. Debt fueled our economic systems, leading to collapse: debt provides 'fuel' (money) for operating businesses, and sugar provides 'fuel' (calories) for living, but both fail to provide nutrition for thriving in healthy ways. We need to de-leverage in finance and in nutrition. The vitality of our lives and businesses depend upon it ...

Fat math, the inseparability of fueling and expending, and the cognitive dissonance of it all demand that we continue reflecting, researching, experimenting, and progressing, re-editing our personal mythologies iteratively to help us live as local animals in an increasingly global world. The human condition is a tentative proposition in the information age ...

Ancestral Fitness: Choice Architecture for Epistemocrats

(Above: Levy flight visualized)

At some point, we just have to self-experiment (n=1).

It is a noble tradition in medicine, uncovers new ideas for further research, and drives discovery of practical solutions to everyday problems ('cheap options').

Self-experimentation is the modus operandi that rises to the surface as the most effective solution-searching engine in the face of opacity. No one or group or anything knows everything, but we do know things. When it comes to health, for instance, Ancestral Fitness captures lessons-learned by 'hard knocks' from practitioners' trial-and-error tinkering experiences. Like Ben Hogan finding his golf swing 'in the dirt', members of the Ancestral Fitness community have reached their tentative conclusions through real-world feedback. Then, they have embedded these gems from 'ah-hah' moments within a larger ancestral mythology. For instance, I used to do chronic cardio at a very high athletic level fueled on 'complex carbohydrates' (I could 'run forever'), only to learn that this aerobic pathway combination did not help me achieve health or feel good -- I got sick too often, was sore too often, and did not look as I hoped too often. That was one of my many personal hard knocks; a series of hard knocks that were manifestations of following the Food Pyramid, the mainstream 'exercise' culture, and other fallacious recommendations. From that suffering, I learned quite a bit about what does not work, so I inquired intently about what really works. Through research, I stumbled upon other folks, like Mark Sisson, who experienced similar challenges on the traditional paradigm. From there, I chose grace, and I started self-experimenting with Ancestral Fitness concepts (the gamut of all things Paleo, Primal, etc.) as an epistemocrat in action.

And, today, as the humble process continues, I continually learn more and more about what works and what does not work for me, the 'patient of one'. It's a bottom-up, empowering process, not top-down drudgery. For example, I recently (starting July 12th when I read Dr. Davis' 'Goodbye Fructose' post, thanks to Dave Lull) engaged in a fruit-free, fructose-free experiment in an effort to reduce my sugar intake even further (it was very low already) for six months, just to see what happens. The downside risk seems minimal to me, but the upside potential, I suspect, could be quite beneficial -- so I am simply giving it a shot to learn more about the 'suicide by sugar' perspective. Knowing that Clostridium Difficile bacteria thrive on sugar is one factor that also motivated my decision, but, ultimately, these data points simply serve as start-up (funding) energy to overcome inertia and kick start my self-experiment. In my Ancestral Fitness mythology, I envision ancestral fruits as having much higher acid contents and much lower sugar contents than they do today, thanks (unfortunately) to intensive agriculture.

Sure, there's a hint of paternal-libertarianism in Ancestral Fitness -- it's 'choice architecture' for epistemocrats. But, it's minimal; instead, it's a bare-bones foundational platform and skeleton upon and within which you can tinker to personalize your diet, movement, play, and lifestyle patterns according to aesthetic preferences and individual differences. Clearly, many of our contemporary experiments have failed miserably when it comes to health, so providing folks with some social scaffolding points -- intermittent fasting, no bad carbs, fat is good, protein is a must, etc. -- seems wise because we'd be wise to learn from our ancestors. For example, the nutrition labels on the packaging of foods and beverages skew the choice architecture of our diet choices: the RDA percentages bias our thinking toward the low-fat, high-carbohydrate model and scare us away from ancestral eating and drinking practices. This is the problem with top-down social engineering, which is what food labels are -- realize, again, that our health states have only degraded further since we learned just how many calories, fats, etc. are in the foods that we eat. Moving beyond the reality that the 'calorie-in, calorie-out' thermodynamic theory is wrong, I think Ancestral Fitness has a more spiritual respect for individuals in the context of their evolutionary ancestries. Context matters, and our current mainstream mythological context is disconnected with our ancestral roots. We must reconnect, merging the benefits of technology and information age 'creature features' with our evolutionarily tried and tested roots.

In this mythology, the universal character is "Your Ancestor" prior to agriculture (Jared Diamond refers to agriculture as the worst development in human history, spurring overpopulation, poor health, inequality, resource constraints, ecological destruction, etc.). Your mythology is not about my ancestor; it's about your ancestor (we account for genetics that way). The choice architecture of Ancestral Fitness provides you with 'jumping-off points' for leveraging serendipity. Take eggs out of your diet for a week; who knows, you may feel better (or worse). Add shots of olive oil and balsamic vinegar into your routine for a month; who knows, your energy levels or mood experiences may change for the better (or not at all). The possibilities are vast. The downside risk is relatively clipped; the tests are practical and generally inexpensive -- you really don't have much to lose -- but the chance for improvement, things turning out better than expected, and positive unintended consequences abound when you maximize entropy given fixed-path constraints (such as income, time, amount of food eaten per week, etc.) by experimenting in non-linear ways (of the Levy flight variety; see image above). If visualized (as in the image above), your inquiries into the human condition in the information age, your self-experiments, your thinking, your ____ can look like Levy flights (which some opine is messy and disorganized) and that is just fine; in fact, it is quite fine -- it's self-organized in a fractal manner, which is sophisticated math at a higher order of cognition. Think of the nodes (high density areas) in a Levy flight pattern as the 'social scaffolding' points of the Ancestral Fitness framework that serve as 'grace nudges' to help you unleash your physiological potential. 'Grace nudges' respect people's agency, letting folks 'figure it out for themselves' while still moving in the generally right direction.

Yet, self-experimenting and tinkering are not without detractions. Sometimes, the question of "What more do you want?" is appropriate and necessary. Maintaining health is important as well. The adage, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," slides in here. And, here is where I default back to the Barbell Strategy. When you reach a happy state, a healthy state, and things are going well, don't rock the boat in unneeded ways, turn to the Barbell instead: continue expending 80 to 90% of your energy, resources, efforts, strategies, etc. on and toward the 'tried and true' -- the bread and butter that works -- and then diversify the remaining sliver of your personal portfolio into various 'cheap options' through tinkering, self-experimenting, and trial-and-error solution searching. This way, your retain your platform, knowing it won't fall out from underneath you as easily, yet you still, as Richard Feynman said, "keep the door to the unknown ajar." That's the best we can do: be human and tinker.

Sure, the choice architecture is there, but Ancestral Fitness is about 'the patient of one' figuring out what works individually. If you have not started already, Mark Sisson's awesome Primal Health Challenge is one way to test the waters and start self-experimenting today. For those epistemocrats already spanning connections amidst the Ancestral Fitness nodes and scaffolding, to good health and continual open-source sharing with the rest of the community to refine and evolve the decision-making ecology even further.

Cheers.