Proverbial Knowledge: Clinical Wisdom in the Art of Living as a 'Patient of One'

An epistemocrat is a 'Patient of One' clinician in the practice of 'n=1' philosophy, in the bricolage (and meritage) of self-experiments (clinical trials) with lifestyle design and 'm=1' my-thology.

It's ancestral, proverbial knowledge in the clinical practice of leading lives (not careers): taking general (meta) rules--like the Golden Rule (see Karen Armstrong's Charter of Compassion, for instance)--and applying them to specific situations, under unique circumstances, in the face of uncertain novelty.

It's an evolving cloud of sayings, slogans, mantras, etc. that embed hard-learned wisdom in the practice of living:

• Primum, non nocere
• Don't just do something, stand there
• Nullius in Verba
• Physician, heal thyself
• Epoche

And the list goes on.

The art of applying these insights is what real-world experience is all about. Capturing feedback from these (often stochastic) tinkering efforts requires a reference frame. Epistemocrats elect for a deductivist decision-making framework (thanks to Dave Lull), choosing to approach trial-and-error from the falsification perspective. The inherent asymmetry of uncertainty in this world creates a situation where we know what is bad for us much more clearly than we know what is good for us; hence the reason for defaulting to negative empiricism as the epistemocratic modus operandi for balancing searching and acting each and every day.

Yet the reality remains that, in light of the Black Swan thesis, there are no universal facts; there are only yet-to-be-falsified components of the working stories (working drafts) that we tell ourselves--our personal narratives--to make sense of, filter information in, and operate within this ever-increasingly complex and recursive world that we call human ecology. In fact, one of Karl Popper's most far-reaching gems of proverbial knowledge suggests this much: "In point of fact, no conclusive disproof of a theory can ever be produced." Ergo, we live by fiction.

Here's where Dave Lull's sage clinical wisdom steps in: "In order to avoid Platonicity, you're skeptical of even the notions of 'human nature' you make (careful, tentative) use of."

And this is where I suspect Nassim Taleb would default to epoche: suspend belief in the existence of the notions of 'human nature' on one hand, but then, simultaneously, search through falsification-spirited tinkering (Barbell diversified, of course) as if such realities could/do exist.

You hedge your bets that way--and you overcome the justificationist addiction along the way.

It's like my mentor Fr. McCurdy (a Jesuit priest) used to say: "I don't need to know whether God, truth, and love exist--following them helps me lead a fulfilling life either way."

Why? Because in doing so, we perform well in our local clinical settings: the proverbial knowledge we glean from these ancestrally-derived concepts informs, molds, and supports our efforts to be bricoleurs in the art of living.

As Dave Lull likes to say:

"In speaking like the virtuous--in telling a virtuous, a true, story--though we aren't really virtuous, whether knowingly and thus hypocritically or unknowingly--aren't we--especially if this homage to virtue is performed repeatedly--opening ourselves up to the influence of virtue through the power that stories can have over us?"

It's like the Ancestral Fitness Epistemocracy (AFE) emerging from the bottom up in the Blogosphere: it's a community of tinkerers in 'n=1' philosophy, lead by individuals writing, reflecting, questioning, speaking, and cross-communicating in hopes of "opening [Patients of One] up to the influence of virtue [in all things 'health affairs'] through the power that stories can have over us."

It takes a diamond to cut a diamond; a narrative to displace a narrative.

We need healthier narratives to displace falsified ones.

We're crafting dynamic 'story systems' in the AFE that help us survive and thrive.

But we must first open our hearts and minds.

Keep an open mind.

Because Dr. Jerome Groopman always reminds: "While knowledge and understanding are necessary for wisdom, they are not sufficient" (hat tip to Dave Lull).

Anecdotal Evidence: Gio Carmazzi's Self-Experiment with Ancestral Fitness

(Above: Gio Carmazzi shares his n=1 Ancestral Fitness self-experimentation experience)

Gio and I enjoy discussing Black Swans (Nassim Taleb, etc.), high-intensity/low-duration exercise approaches that challenge our proprioceptive systems, and other fascinating elements of the Ancestral Health lifestyle, but our best teamwork thus far is our co-founding of Game Plan Academy (GPA) with several of our friends. At GPA, while my partners at Academic Impact and I provide students with SAT test prep, tutoring, college counseling, writing assistance, and other leadership tools, Gio works alongside Alex Van Dyke (our other friend who played in the NFL; he's also tinkered with Ancestral Fitness concepts, such as Intermittent Fasting, successfully) to train high-school students in football skills and conditioning, bringing free mentorship services to students who normally would not have access to them.

We are proud of and thankful for GPA.

I filmed the above interview with Gio this afternoon--I may use a snippet of it in my BIL:PIL talk--and his thoughtful feedback speaks to the intuitive Qualitative Self. Gio likes to joke with me and call himself, "Mr. Anecdotal" (hat tip to Dave Lull). However, I value this form of data deeply; it's the inescapable nature of 'n=1' clinical trials--the statistics of individuals--that we must respect gracefully. Anecdotal evidence is empirical evidence when we apply falsification (thanks to Dave Lull) to our inquiries and our my-thologies--our local searching strategies.

There is value to the systematic, concrete Quantitative Self (hat tip to @whatbrett), but a bricolage / balancing / blend of the Quantitative Self with the Qualitative Self, I suspect, produces a personalized hybrid that provides the richest texture to and the most effective feedback loops for self-experimentation.

Be human: tinker.

I'll do my best to expound on and speak to these threads at BIL:PIL.

Self-experimentation sets physiologies free.

Nutritional bricolage sets healthcare free.

Be a bricoleur.

To good health,

Brent

Sharing Ancestral Fitness with Youth

I spoke to a small group of students at a football camp this morning about Ancestral Fitness.

The message that many modern foods and drinks, such as soft drinks, have only 'been with us' for a short period of time in the course of human history seemed to resonate really well with them. They named some modern foods that make no sense from this perspective: Vitamin Water, Skittles, candy bars, Gatorade (despite what Dwayne Wade says on TV), etc.--they all recognized that these items are just sugar sources that lack nutritional value. They also named foods in our modern world that do make ancestral sense: vegetables like broccoli, nuts like almonds, proteins/lipids like eggs and meats, etc.--they all enjoyed the pistachios that I brought for them to munch on during my presentation.

One student, who is trying to add some lean muscle mass to his frame, said he will self-experiment with yogurt (the high in saturated lipids kind) and nuts/fruit for breakfast. He shared that one of his teammates told him to eat "tons of Top Ramen noodles" in order to bulk up--I steered him otherwise.

As we left, another student told his mom, "Fat is good."

To good health,

Brent

Ancestral Fitness Meet Up: Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea in Venice Beach

[Above: (L) Chris Owens (@SingleOrigin); (M) Aaron Blaisdell (PigeonRat Professor of Psychology @UCLA); and, (R) me (@epistemocrat)]

I enjoyed an awesome, relaxing Ancestral Fitness meet up yesterday with Chris Owens, Aaron Blaisdell, and my brother, Kai (@kaipott), at Intelligentsia Coffee Bar & Tea in Venice Beach. Chris is the 'Educator' at the Venice Beach Coffee Bar, and his hip spot was just featured in GQ--very cool.

Chris regaled us with his insights on the entire coffee experience, ranging from sustainable farming and purchasing practices; to bean flavors, varietals, and roasting techniques; to the intricate human-coffee interaction history that emerged originally out of Ethiopia. Chris knows coffee--he understands his core product unbelievably well--and he has a sharp, intuitive entrepreneurial mind and spirit for tinkering innovatively. If you are ever in Venice Beach, CA, stop by Intelligentsia for a few--Chris and his crew won't disappoint you (sport your Vibrams too).

Chris shared his inspiring and practical Paleo/Primal/Evolutionary/Ancestral Fitness journey with the Ancestral Fitness Epistemocracy (AFE) about a month ago in my post, "An Ancestral Fitness 'n=1' Journey: Cheers to Chris!" He's definitely fit and healthy as a result of his conscientious lifestyle choices, as is Blaisdell.

A few notes (in no particular order) from our conversations:

• The number of healthy people subsidizing the medical care costs of the ill is dwindling rapidly--we need more healthy people (who do not consume resources) paying into the system in order to establish a sustainable cost-sharing model for those who are/get sick.
• We all have self-experimented with either raw dairy or with FAGE Greek Yogurt with positive, yet-to-be-falsified success.
• A mentor-based/apprenticeship model of education is an ancestral approach to learning that works remarkably well: learn a trade by interacting directly with a mentor/teacher--it's 's=1' (a School of One for the Student of One).
• Reform in any industry--whether pitted against Big Insurance, Big Food, or Big Education--works best by finding a niche and then exploiting it through disruptive innovations that hopefully spread to shape policy and administrative perspectives from the bottom up.
• Body-weight exercises, especially those that involve balancing, are incredibly effective (and enjoyable) for working out ancestrally.

There was more, of course.

I had a good time.

To good health,

Brent

Essay Mythologizing: Exploring the Unknown

I write.

With no end in sight.

I simply type, but I never know if I am right.

I just feel compelled to type; to write; to set things right.

When your modus operandi is negative empiricism--you prefer falsification over confirmation--the writing life is full of life (hat tip to Dave Lull); it's the spice of life. Your active searching through mythologizing never ends because those unexplored tunnels of opacity seem to diverge even further (hat tip @SkylerTanner) once you shine some essay-spirited light upon their dark caverns and reveal new insights:

"The literary essay, as she saw it, was a moral exercise that involved direct engagement with the unknown, whether it was a foreign civilization or your mind, and what mattered in this was you."--Alexander Chee on Annie Dillard

This is why I write. It's why we all write.

Because we feel like artists when we type; artists who write music with lines of (n=1 / m=1) insights:

"I do have a sneaking suspicion that part of the charm of music lies in the fact that we don't know what it means. ... That's why it is so refreshing to enter into the presence of great art, and why the greatest works of art always contain an element of ambiguity. A masterpiece doesn't push you around. It lets you make up your own mind about what it means—and change it as often as you like."--Terry Teachout, 'The Mystery of Music' (thanks to Dave Lull)

Which is quite a mythologizing insight; given the updating-function, ever re-editing nature of our iterative narrative guiding lights.

It's an ancestral tradition: telling stories that explore the unknown; that tell higher truths. Through time, these stories have passed through pictures, dance motions, drum beats, resounding words, and eventually, much more recently, through mythologizing essays.

That's my preferred medium; it's how I mold my thoughts as I write.

Because all I know is that I must type.

I know that not everything is right.

But I continue to write.

It's an n=1 / m=1 fight.

Because essays seem to, eventually, set things right.

That's why we write.

To good health,

Brent

Comment Highlight: Insights from Jeff Erno

[Above: In case you missed it, (click) here is the link to my recent interview on OurBlook. Sandy Ordonez interviewed me; she did a fabulous job.]

In this spirit, I want to start a new series: Comment Highlight.

Whenever a reader leaves an extra perceptive note in the comments section, I'll turn it into a full blog post.

My comrade, Jeff Erno (@ernoj), will start us off.

Here are his insights, in response to my previous post about Ancestral Fitness: An Anti-Health Insurance Co-Op for the Ancestral Fitness Epistemocracy (AFE):

The alternative insurance [model] has to happen in my mind. Food is really, really cheap, and we are used to it being that way. Little do people realize that they are transferring costs from food to health care. Due to the way we live and the way traditional health care plans [operate], we are subsidizing people's dimishing health. We can't go on like this since we pay essentially for both. If 80% of all health care costs are avoidable [through proper diet and lifestyle], then we are paying a lot for something only other people get.

My wife's company is starting down this path. You get a discount if you don't smoke and your BMI is less than 30 (my wife's is a bit shy of 20). A good start but a ways to go to make that close to reasonable.

Jeff's timely thoughts remind me of something that my thoughtful friend, Carlos Rizo (@carlosrizo) at the Innovation Cell (@ShareMyIdea), told me: "One of my patients told me she viewed her medicine cabinet as her refrigerator." She's absolutely correct: pharmacological modalities, like statins or ACE inhibitors, are nutrition as well--they are usually just more expensive, have far worse side-effects, and are ultimately less effective in the long-run than ancestral/paleo diets are. To be sure, drugs serve an important purpose in medicine: acute intervention. However, after this short-term application, the effectiveness of traditional pharmacological treatment wears thin, and the importance of ancestral/paleo nutrition rises to the surface as the real (cooling inflammation) cure for many of our modern-day chronic illnesses. Of course, there are many diseases that do require long-term drug therapy, but in the big picture, if folks fueled their physiologies more appropriately through ancestral/paleo diets, the number of cases requiring long-term pharmacology would decline rapidly.

The net result: Healthcare costs would plummet, rather than continue to climb through the roof.

Health reform is healthcare reform.

I advocate--via Physiological Economics--for transferring healthcare dollars from the United, Aetna, et al. (and Medicare) coffers back to patients because I, as a Patient of One, can think of lots of better ways to spend a few trillion dollars: Namely, I'd rather spend most of my healing resources in preventative ways on high-quality Ancestral Fitness foods and drinks and on my gym membership that serves as my healthy escape, among other things.

That's the cultural change needed for a healthier America.

Getting from here to there is the challenge: we need a healthcare bridge (hat tip to Keith Norris).

In building this bridge, we must somehow address the following cognitive psychology problem in linguistic anthropology:

As I like to say, "Sugar doesn't make you Sugar." This line is used this way: Right now, in linguistic anthropology terms, since people associate excessive visceral body fat (obesity) with 'fat' (lipids) in foods, they make the cognitive association/conclusion that "Fat makes us Fat." Since the statement "Sugar makes you Fat" lacks this crisp symmetry/logic and since the statement "Sugar makes you Sugar" doesn't make any sense, we struggle with the cognitive dissonance of two important facts: "Sugar makes you Fat" and "(Good) Fat makes you Lean." We can't surmount the culturally engendered link between dietary lipids and obesity, despite it's falsity. We need to displace inappropriate uses of the word 'fat' from our terminology: folks must stop calling obese people fat--it's degrading--and stop referring to dietary lipids as fats--'good' lipids (saturated animal, Omega-3's, etc.) are our friends.

I don't know how best to attack this deeply entrenched psychological/cultural problem, but I'm going to do my best. It's imperative.

Luckily and thankfully, I am part of a groundswell of bloggers in the Ancestral Fitness Epistemocracy (AFE), a bottom-up (grassroots) community of people who are willing to make stands against misinformation, lies, deception, and profiteering, and who are committed to setting things straight and advancing science in positive, health-supportive ways.

We respect this responsibility: our 'n=1' self-experiments demonstrate this much.

To good health,

Brent

Ancestral Fitness: An Anti-Health Insurance Co-Op for the Ancestral Fitness Epistemocracy (AFE)

Above: My Cooling Inflammation self-experimental progress over the past year. Zooming out like this--in terms of tiling pictures of my face over time as Qualitative-Self data to capture results--filters out white noise and provides a solid medium for comparison analysis. The picture on the left is from September of 2008. The picture on the right is from August of 2009, which was one month into my current Fructose Detox / Hyperlipidity self-experiment. Of course, this before-and-after juxtaposition of photos also reflects another full year of living the Ancestral Fitness lifestyle to the fullest--it's a Carpe Diem, "Grok On," Primal/Paleo type of thing. From my vantage point, I notice more pronounced facial definition--stronger 'smile lines'--in the 2009 picture than I do in the 2008 one--Aaron Blaisdell noticed improved eye symmetry. All good things. (What do you see?). Trust me, cognitively, I tried to 'smile' the same way in both of these photos: a picture says a thousand words.

As I mentioned and alluded to briefly in previous posts, the Healthcare Epistemocrat recently picked up a new archetypal friend, Mythocrat, in the epistemocratic Blogosphere, uniting the Ancestral Fitness Epistemocracy (AFE)--where 'n=1' for the Patient of One--with the Living by Bliss Mythocracy--where 'm=1'.

And here's the Mythocrat's personal progress from leading that Ancestral Fitness lifestyle, tiled across time--Ancestral Fitness is one of the central myths in Brian's personal, 'm=1' portfolio of healthy my-thologies--those stories we tell ourselves and those rules/heuristics we live by:

It makes sense, then, that when it comes to health affairs, given our dire (SAD) state of affairs, folks like Brian who lead self-respecting, conscientious and responsible lifestyles deserve a health insurance product that supports their Ancestral Fitness journeys.

So, this is my Master of Health Administration, Physiological Economics for Health Care 'dream':

Ancestral Fitness: An Anti-Health Insurance Co-Op for the AFE (click here)

It's 'anti-health insurance' because the fundamental goal is to avoid medical needs that require insurance claims in the first place! It's learning by grace, rather than by hard knocks, as much as possible, as we 'seize the day'.

Above is a screen-shot of the simple, placeholder Web site that I designed briefly the other day; click on the link to go check it out. Keith Norris, Jeff Erno, Aaron Blaisdell, (as well as others) and I share kindred spirits on this lifestyle-based co-op approach to sharing the costs of catastrophic medical care: it's personal accountability to a dynamic community of bricoleurs. Over a year ago, Joe Sobolewski, one of my ever-insightful Master of Health Administration colleagues at USC, and I started discussing this form of ecologically intelligent risk sharing, in light of the reality that we face an impending tidal wave of lifestyle-based health maladies. From these vibrant discussions, Joe coined two valuable phrases: "Reverse risk pool" and "Healthy people opt in". Both of these phrases hint at 'grace nudges' and proper incentive structures--we must construct empowering 'choice architecture' environments that nudge folks gracefully--(yes, there's a hint of paternal libertarianism in this approach)--towards healthier lifestyle decisions and behaviors. Part of this starts by changing our defaults, or displacing existing detrimental defaults (escalators) with supportive alternatives (musical stairs): Ancestral Vending Machines, for instance, as Blaidell's idea, or Piano Stairs (thanks to Dave Lull), as another (possibilities abound):

Notice how quickly folks start to move differently when their options change; it's like Blaisdell's lab rats listening for tones, pulling levers, and then altering their behavior patterns in response.

Defaults matter. Options matter. We need healthier defaults; healthier options.

It's nudging folks out of and away from Quadrant IV, back towards their ancestral roots and lifeways in Quadrants II & III, preferably spending as much time as possible in Quadrant I, in order to reduce our healthcare system's systemic exposure to negative Black Swan health risks.

For this reason, I added two imperatives--"Insurance like Vibrams" and "Physiological Economics for Health Care"--to this quartet stream of phraseology, in hopes of helping people move differently, much more cautiously and conservatively, as they navigate the treacherous waters of a medical system where iatrogenesis lurks at every turn. With this set of values in place, I cemented the core foundational scaffolding for an anti-health insurance co-op: a 'dream' that needs to happen; needs to become a reality, and soon.

I own the domain AncestralFitness.com (thanks to my friend Navanit Arakeri), so perhaps I will migrate this landing page over to that domain soon. (Hint: If there is anyone in the AFE interested in some Web work, please contact me ASAP!)

But, what would this Ancestral Fitness Anti-Health Insurance Co-Op look like financially and operationally? Well, I suspect that it would materialize like MediShare:

MediShare is a bottom-up, (religious) lifestyle-based medical cost sharing model that is quite innovative. Members of this non-profit co-op organization have eligibility rules--like no tobacco use--that members must adhere to. They also offer each other support during trying times and share lessons-learned with each other in order to uplift the health of the entire community. They even offer positive incentives as healthy discounts based on HbA1c levels, waist circumference, and BMI (not the exact same markers we would choose in our Ancestral Fitness community; my BMI is whack, thanks to all my lean muscle mass).

What happens when someone does get sick? This diagram describes the process:

In essence, MediShare helps negotiate the prices of a member's required medical services, and then these costs are shared with other members of the community who make payments voluntarily. Thus, it's not 'insurance', per se--this model would not be legal if it were--and they shirk the red tape by operating as a voluntary non-profit organization. This wellness-centered, intimate, grounded and socially-connected approach to paying for healthcare appeals to me in spirit: be accountable to a 'team' of like-minded people who share a genuine interest in your personal well-being (surviving, let alone thriving, is hard enough in this modern day Information Age).

Let's band together; as a groundswell 'uprising' of sorts: the Ancestral Fitness Epistemocracy (AFE) deserves a similar anti-insurance product to compliment their respectful lifeways: let's 'opt in' and 'reverse' our collective negative Black Swan health risks across the board.

Sporting our Vibrams proudly, of course. It's a barefooting to clip downside risk type of thing.

Let the t(h)inkering begin.

Because AFE folks like my super-lean friend, Will, go to work each day packing FAGE, raw almonds, coconut flakes, apple cider vinegar, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, and pistachios in hopes of continually thriving while striving and waving their 'n=1' self-experimentation flags high:

That's his 'hyperlipid drawer'.

I like hyperlipidity.

To good health,

Brent

Part 2: Interview Series with Aaron Blaisdell of UCLA

In the first installment of this fabulous series, I left you hanging on the edge of your seat by ending mid-question-answering, making you itch for more with the epistemocratic Dr. Blaisdell.

Well, here you go; on with the show ...

KP = Kai Pottenger

AB = Aaron Blaisdell

KP: In what ways does your research inform your personal health mythology or strategy?

AB: ... A naive observer, someone like a martian or a bushman, if they saw a barometer change and the weather change, they might become superstitious and begin doing a rain dance and think, "Oh, this event causes that; my crops are doing well, and it would be really nice if that watering hole wasn't drying up to get the animals back. Let's tamper with that barometer." That would be an error in a purely associative way to derive cause and effect relationships because actually the two things are both events of the common cause that that particular individual didn't know about, but the scientific method allows us to discover hidden causes in our world by manipulating events. We do this through experiments. Say we thought that the causal model was what I initially came up with; that the barometer is causing changes in weather. I am going to tamper with the barometer. Doing that experiment, you are going to discover that is doesn't cause changes in the weather. So you have to give up that causal model and think about what other causal models might actually be more accurate. Well, maybe there is a common cause. So we know about those common causes.

It's through science and manipulation, what we call intervention: you intervene on one variable, and if it effects another variable every time you do it, then you grow in your confidence that event A is a cause of event B. But, if you find that you manipulate event A and it doesn't effect event B, maybe they are correlated because of some other causal structure.

Can rats think like that?

Most people would assume not. Maybe through instrumental learning can they discover cause and effect relationships. But can they, before they even have a chance to intervene on something, entertain the idea that two events are correlated because of the common cause—that's what I set out to test and actually showed evidence of in rats.

KP: Is this similar to Taleb's idea of tinkering?

AB: Yeah, all these things are really playing with similar ideas—how we glean information and how we think about what we don't know.

So, some of the foundations of tinkering: it's not just instrumental learning, trial-and-error, but maybe, as Popper said, he wanted his hypotheses to die in his stead. Maybe mental tinkering [BP's note: I call this thinkering], before you actually physically tinker, allows you to throw out, depending on your model or mythology you are coming from, some bad hypotheses before you can try out some of the better ones. Rats have some of this.

To get back to *the rat study—it's very simple actually. What I did is: I had the rats learn that a light, a little flashing light in a Pavlovian box, is followed sometimes by a tone and sometimes by food. So they might have used Pavlovian conditioning; just as I said, Pavlovian conditioning might be the substrate by which animals learn to piece together spatial maps and maybe causal maps as well. If they treat the light as a common cause of the tone and of food, they see [hear] the tone and they predict food might happen. Just like if you see the barometer drop then you think, "Oh, the storm might happen." But, if you see someone tamper with the barometer and you know that the barometer and the storm aren't causally related, then you won't think that the weather is going to change. So, the question is, if the rat intervenes to make the tone happen, will it now no longer think the food will occur.

So there were a bunch of rats; they all had the same training—light as an antecedent to tone and food. Then, at test, some of the rats got tone and they tended to go look in the food section. So they were expecting food based on the tone—which humans would says is a diagnostic reasoning process. “Tone is there because light causes tone and light also causes food. Oh, there must be food.” Or, it's just second order Pavlovian conditioning. The critical test was with another group of rats that got the same training. We gave them a lever that they had never had before. They were in this box, and they have a lever that is rigged so that if they press the lever the tone will immediately come up. So now the question is, do the rats attribute that tone to being caused by themselves. That is, did they intervene to make that variable change? If they thought that they were the cause of the tone, that means it couldn't have been the light, therefore the other effects of the light, food, would not have been expected. In that case, the intervening rats, after hearing the tone of their own intervention, should not expect food. Indeed, they didn't go to food nearly as much. That is the essence of the finding and how it fits in with this idea of causal models and how we go about testing our world.

That has changed how I have been looking at the world—the way I look at this whole nutritional lifestyle change that I have been going through—it's kind of a metamorphosis as I go through all these blogs and stuff. I am tinkering with these ideas myself. I am realizing that I am more cognizant of the fact that I am creating causal models. Now, when I am entertaining a hypothesis, I am doing so through this kind of system of spinning ideas: "Is this the right mix or is that?" Then you can go on and test it through self-experimentation, trying to discover variables that are related causally and others that are not related causally. That's a very powerful tool.

Is there a specific example of a personal change that happened through this causal model?

I have followed a lot of the knowledge of grains being inflammatory. I have cut grains almost entirely out of my diet. I have lost a lot of the key inflammatory markers. My gums no longer bleed when I floss them. I have had confirmation of my hypothesis that I have gleaned from the internet. My belt size went down a notch. Don talked about this on Primal Wisdom: When he and others used to eat a lot of carbs, they'd feel bloated; they'd loosen their belts. I used to chalk it up to, "I just ate a lot; my stomach is bigger." That's a natural hypothesis; you think in terms of cause-and-effect: Stomach is bigger; it's basically a bag that stores food; so, you loosen your belt. But, now, I can eat as much as I want of meat and stuff, as long as it doesn't have grains or bad fats, like industrial oils. I don't get the inflammatory response anymore. I threw out one hypothesis that is more consistent with another one.

As Aaron shares, the best we can do is be humble, tinker, and live each day by our yet-to-be-falsified personal ('n=1') mythologies, positioning ourselves to seize positive Black Swan opportunities--chance favors the prepared mind--while clipping our exposure to negative Black Swan strikes: it's perceptive optimism in action (thanks to Dave Lull).

At some point, it is inevitable: we will have to re-edit the stories that we tell ourselves, as Aaron has done; we will have to let go of those falsified components of our narratives.

Sometimes, this can be quite challenging; but, the longer we wait, the more challenging it will become.

This is the process of becoming a Mythocrat, the Sophiological friend of the Epistemological Epistemocrat. They're two kindred, complimentary archetypes.

Epistemocracy and Mythocracy combine to form a dynamic 'united duad' for interdisciplinary inquiry into the human condition; it's simply reflection about, as Aaron said, "how we glean information and how we think about what we don't know."

Again, please leave any questions or remarks for Aaron in the comments section of this post, and he will respond promptly. He's awesome that way.

Please tune in again soon for Part 3 of this wonderful Interview Series.

Thanks again to Kai and Aaron: cheers!

To good health,

Brent

*Here's his abstract, by the way:

Causal Reasoning in Rats

Aaron P. Blaisdell (1*), Kosuke Sawa (2), Kenneth J. Leising (1), Michael R. Waldmann (3)

Empirical research with nonhuman primates appears to support the view that causal reasoning is a key cognitive faculty that divides humans from animals. The claim is that animals approximate causal learning using associative processes. The present results cast doubt on that conclusion. Rats made causal inferences in a basic task that taps into core features of causal reasoning without requiring complex physical knowledge. They derived predictions of the outcomes of interventions after passive observational learning of different kinds of causal models. These competencies cannot be explained by current associative theories but are consistent with causal Bayes net theories.

1 Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
2 Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, Nagoya University, Nagoya 464-8601, Japan.
3 Department of Psychology, University of Göttingen, 37073 Göttingen, Germany.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: blaisdell@psych.ucla.edu

The Price-Pottenger Story: Quotes from 'Pottenger's Cats'

(Above: The good folks at PPNF)

To augment this splendid video, here are some of my favorite quotes and passages from Pottenger's Cats: A Study in Nutrition--don't forget to remember when he lived; we're talking like 1945, but most of this sounds like something that I said just the other day (!):

"Conceptual visualization in scientific research is rare. Francis M. Pottenger, Jr., had such vision. Dedicated to the cause of preventing chronic illness, he made significant contributions to the understanding of the role nutrition plays in maintaining good health."--pg. ix

"Now, what are some of the indications that the average human diet is deficient? Surface indices easily recognized by a large portion of our population are: thin, splitting, peeling nails due to disturbance in protein assimilation, especially lysine; thick skin due to lack of fat, or the reverse, thick skin, which cannot be picked up between the fingers due to lack of iodine, or to excessive carbohydrate intake; and dry, brittle, lack-luster hair caused by too little unsaturated fatty acid. Moreover, a poorly nutritioned individual is apt to be irritable and unpredictable without cause. Exhaustion, in varying degrees, is a universal symptom of deficiency."--pg. 46

"Our clinical experience demonstrates that it is perfectly possible for a child to improve his physical fitness, tighten his ligaments, strengthen his muscles and harden his bones. It also demonstrates that as a child's health and well-being improve, his activity level improves and many academic and social 'problems' begin to resolve. But before these improvements can occur, he must be placed on a optimal nutritional program."--pg. 48

"Dentofacial deformity requiring mechanical reconstruction by the use of braces, retainers and bands is a wide-spread problem. There can be no doubt that modern dentofacial problems are encouraged, if not actually caused, by defective diets, by pathologic conditions of the nose and throat and by general poor health. There also can be no doubt that the study we conducted on 327 patients reveals that the wholesale bottle feeding of our infant population is contributing to this problem."--pg. 55

"To the bacteriologist, milk has been a source of much inquiry because of its great potential as a culture medium for all kinds of bacteria. ... The destruction of bacteria in milk by heat processing is assumed to be essential in preventive medicine because of the findings of Pasteur. However, there are many good properties of milk which also are affected by heat-processing because the entire physiochemical state of the milk is altered."--pg. 57

"Health officials can no longer in good conscience ignore the possibility that pasteurization of milk may be menacing the proper growth and development of many more individuals than it is protecting. It is time to take a fresh look at milk and milk production, and at other methods of insuring its quality and safety."--pg. 57

"My own definition of an optimal diet is one which provides man with the nutrients essential to regenerate his body cells; to enable him to mature regularly as determined by normal osseous, physical and mental characteristics; to resist disease; to reproduce his kind in homogeneity and to enable him to produce a livelihood for himself and his family. Healthy human beings have been known to fulfill these standards on various dietaries: (1) vegetarian with small amounts of eggs, milk, meat or fish, (2) carnivorous including fish, crustacea, mollusks and small amounts of vegetation, and (3) omnivorous including many combinations of vegetarian and carnivorous foods."--pg. 93

"The American people have become great faddists about diet. What may be a medical necessity for some frequently becomes a fad for others, not in need of treatment. When I was a child, cod liver oil was considered essential for all children. The chemist discovered that other oils contained similar physical properties and the cult of cod liver oil waned. About the time I entered medical school, salt was believed to cause high blood pressure and some diets were restricted in salt; this belief waned only to revive recently. Meanwhile, chemists were able to concentrate on vitamins A and D from fish livers, and vitamin preparations began their ascendancy and have remained popular as vitamin after vitamin has been synthesized. When dentists demonstrated that sugar caused tooth decay, there was a prompt decline in the use of sugar. One of the most recent fads is based on the assumption that excessive cholesterol is caused by foods including animal fat, cream, butter, eggs and by implication, all fats. Countering this is the discovery that unsaturated fatty acids, especially those found in vegetable oils and cod liver oil, reduce cholesterol in the blood stream."--pg. 94

"We know for sure that if we are to be a nation of healthy human beings, self-confident in our abilities to meet life's challenges, we must start searching our souls for ways to insure that unborn generations of Americans can still obtain and metabolize an optimal diet."--pg. 95

"Fats are present in every living cell and are essential to its life. ... Intracellular fat is an important constituent in tissues such as muscle, brain, pancreas, and skin. Nerves are surrounded by a myelin sheath largely composed of fats; and the leukocytes, the life-protecting scavengers of our body, are also largely composed of fats."--pg. 97

"Adequate fat intake not only provides the plastic surface covering for the skin, it provides the skin with bacteriacidal properties that prevent invasion by the myriad of surrounding pathological organisms. Likewise, the plastic layer prevents dirt and grime from penetrating layers of the skin. Consequently, not only does insufficient intake of fats produce a rough, unattractive skin, but it can cause the skin to develop painful cracks and abrasions."--pg. 98

"The prevailing fear of coronary disease causes people to avoid eating the fat of meats though it is a valuable source of fat."--pg. 99

"In our experience, dry skin provides an index of disturbed fat metabolism. Most patients attribute their dry skin disorders to one of the following causes: hard water, improperly neutralized soaps, detergents, various household chemicals, exposure to the sun or wind, dry weather, dust and incompatible or excessive cosmetics. Few suspect deficiencies in their fat intake. Recognizing that fatty acids have largely disappeared from our modern dietary, we have worked out a high protein, high fat, low carbohydrate diet for general rehabilitation. ... In our experience, the conscientious patient usually shows skin improvements in one week and may recover completely within two months."--pg. 99

"The food habits of our populations have undergone a marked change in the last decades. The amount of carbohydrate consumed has been increasing steadily with subsequent decrease in the consumption of fats and protein, particularly the latter. People have become vitamin conscious and in trying to obtain the necessary amounts of these compounds have neglected other food elements which are essential."--pg. 103

"3. Avoid soft drinks which are nutritionally valueless, provide excess calories and endanger the teeth."--pg. 106

"While he was attending medical school, he developed a 'hatred' for the way civilized man treated himself and his children. He wondered why people, so capable of advancing their technology, failed so miserably in promoting their biological health. He felt a driving need to know and to understand how man could maintain good health and eliminate chronic illness and so prevent children from suffering as he had. This missionary zeal led him to direct his inquiry towards the field of nutrition."--pgs.116-117

"In the 1940's, Francis became acquainted with Dr. Weston A. Price, a practicing dentist with a congenial spirit of inquiry. In his desire to explain the prevalence of tooth decay and facial inadequacies among his patients and 'civilized peoples,' Price set upon a worldwide odyssey to study the dietary habits of fourteen isolated and primitive peoples. He found that those natives who still ate their customary natural foods--whether primarily fish, meat or vegetable--showed broad facial structures, a 'perfection' to their dental arches and virtually no tooth decay; while those who had been exposed to the civilized diet of commerce based on refined white sugar, white flour, canned and packaged foods, showed narrowing of their faces, crowding of their teeth and a high incidence of cavities. They also showed increasing susceptibility to tuberculosis and other degenerative diseases."--pg. 118

"Appreciating the importance of Weston Price's findings and their confirmation of his own experimental and clinical findings, Francis became chairman of a committee established for the purpose of disseminating Price's work through exhibits, lectures and printed materials. Later, the Weston A. Price Foundation was organized as a non profit organization to further this educational purpose. At his death, Francis's extensive library of research data, slides, X-ray studies, papers and articles were entrusted to the foundation by his family. In response, the Board of Directors changed the foundation's name to Price-Pottenger Foundation and later to the Price-Pottenger Nutrition Foundation. The foundation now actively disseminates the work of both men."--pg. 118

Quite forward-thinking, indeed. It's worth a read; and a re-read.

Dr. Francis M. Pottenger, Jr., MD, was born in: 1901.

We'd be wise to learn from our ancestors.

To good health,

Brent

Pottenger's Cats: 'Ancestral' Ancestral Fitness

My current self-experiment ('n=1'): Awhile ago--Sunday, July 12th, to be exact--in response to one of Dr. William Davis' exemplary essays, I entered Fructose Detox, displacing my already-limited fruit intake with heightened hyperlipidity (particularly saturated lipids).

[Note: I now refuse to refer to lipids inappropriately as 'fats'. Mislabeling overweight people as 'fat' and then associating obesity with dietary 'fat' molecules (lipids) is one of the most far-reaching, problematic errors in linguistic anthropology that plagues us precipitously each and every day. The resulting cognitive dissonance is insurmountable for many folks, unfortunately. We need Ancestral Fitness architects to re-build our 'choice architecture' in modern day.]

Now, back in the summer, I knew intuitively (by "listening to my body"), even as a Paleo-practitioner for quite some time, that my body did not react well with many fruits--bananas, most notably--due to their elevated fructose contents. My body's natural reactions to these foods seemed to falsify, not justify, their inclusion in my energy fueling habits. That was all I needed to justify tinkering; inertia was hardly an issue this time around. So, I started a simple experiment, just to see what happens. That's all. The downside risk is clipped--I really have nothing to lose in the short-term--but the potential for upside gain exists. It's a free, 'cheap health option'. In essence, I went bowling for a positive Black Swan 'strike'.

(Above: Venture capital for my 'n=1' clinical trials in personal mythology.)

Here is my latest 'bowling' update ...

The Qualitative Self: This morning, I rode my bike to the gym, went for a swim, and basked in the California sun. The other day, on Thursday, I emerged from 10 days of down/recovery time in an effort to further integrate the spirit of Body by Science kurtosis into my energy expenditure pattern. During this relaxation time, I found that intermittent fasting, sleep, and reflection helped me 'lower the floor' in the physiological headroom equation. This is kurtosis in the 'least-you-can-do' direction. After this prolonged period of rest (there were two low-grade bike rides during this time off), I worked out intensely and enjoyably over the past few days, pushing myself and 'raising the roof' in the 'most-you-can-do' direction. This dynamic combination produced bidirectional expansion of my personal physiological headroom calculation--there is now greater bandwidth between the least I can do and the most I can do, which has effectively increased the degrees of freedom that I can 'tap into'/access when I move to interact with the world around me, my local ecology.

Which brings me to Pottenger's Cats: A Study in Nutrition. My ancestor, Dr. Francis M. Pottenger, Jr., MD, conducted an important series of experiments awhile ago. Here are the notes that I composed while laying out by the pool this morning (I used the 'Notes' application on my iPhone): It was a beautifully simple experiment. Take some cats; randomly assign them different diets; then, observe what happens over the course of several generations. Here's what happened: cats fed raw milk diets thrived; those fed pasteurized diets survived; and, those 'poisoned' with sugar-supplemented pasteurized milk products took drastic dives. In short, cats' diets materialized directly as physiological health: those that took 'dives' exhibited physical maladies of all sorts and compromised immune systems as well, while those that 'thrived' displayed the same vibrant, healthy characteristics that Dr. Weston Price, DDS, observed in humans during his global studies of groups of people who consumed ancestral diets. Pasteurization denatures enzymes in milk that aid digestion and confer positive health benefits. Raw dairy retains these proteins, along with the 'good' bacteria.

Now, I know that raw dairy--or Total FAGE Greek Yogurt, for that matter--is not strictly Paleo or Primal, but in light of Pottenger's research, perhaps raw cheese or raw milk are 'fruitful' compromises. Based on my own 'ancestral' Ancestral Fitness experiments, I suspect they are for certain groups of people. To start, raw milk cheese has no sugar--'good' bacteria fermented it away, producing lots of healthy byproducts in the process that support immune function and bone density. Plus, raw cheese, raw milk, and FAGE are all high in saturated lipids, our key ancestral friends. In our current state of healthcare affairs, we must find ways to incorporate 'good' bacteria into our diets to support digestive health and to stimulate our immune systems as proactive, preventive probiotic protection against pathogens like Clostridium Difficile and MRSA that our antibiotic culture in modern medicine created. Raw cheese/dairy and FAGE represent possible modalities to serve this probiotic nutritional bricolage purpose, but it will take your own individualized self-experiment to know for sure. Test some 'good' bacteria foods out; just to see what happens--'probiotic', after all, means, "for life."

To good health,

Brent

Debt Management: Sugars, Livers, & Cash Flows

(Above: My version of Nassim Taleb's The Fourth Quadrant)

There are Four Quadrants for Health--the Fourth Quadrant marks the limits of physiology.

Your liver is like your physiological bank account. It's a good thing to keep healthy.

You want to keep some residual cash on hand at all times; some savings for rainy days and unexpected catastrophes--those things you seem to never anticipate appropriately.

You don't want to bankrupt your liver; you want to maintain a manageable and a conservative cash flow cycle to cover your debts smoothly as you go.

Since sugar is like debt, it creates obligations that your physiological bank account must service in the future.

It's all about leveraging and maintaing manageable debt levels; at some point, our physiologies crumble under excessive debt/sugar loads.

If fructose (as an example sugar) were a credit card (as one common form of short-term debt), then using it is just fine as long as your liver can service, manage, process, and dispose of this potentially toxic intake effectively. In light of these toxicity spikes, noting that alcohol acts in parallel ways as well, at the end of the month, you better have the cash in your bank account to pay your monthly credit card bill (and enjoy the bonus points you accumulate freely from your credit card company; 'frequent-flyer miles', perhaps). Otherwise, if you lose the handle on your cash flow cycles, you are well on your way to liver toxicity and physiological bankruptcy--the time-value of compounding interest on debt is quite taxing, in multiple ways, they say.

A good credit rating makes physiological sense. It's physiological economics for health.

Within a given cash flow cycle, some folks may leverage up a bit--their sugar intake levels will rise for various reasons (maybe it's the holidays)--but what's good for your bank account is good for your liver: we must keep debt and sugar levels at bay so that we never spread ourselves too thin and expose ourselves too broadly and deeply to negative Black Swan hits for prolonged periods of time.

It's wise to be hyper-conservative in this regard.

Out of respect for your amazing physiology, stay clear of the Fourth Quadrant as much as possible (and barefoot cautiously when you do draw near); negative Black Swans like diabetes, cancers, arthritis, sudden cardiac death, and the entire gamut of metabolic syndrome maladies lurk in the dark shadows out there.

We need physiological economics robustness in health affairs.

We need to get back to square-one; land in Quadrant One.

That's where those positive Black Swans like to play.

They seem to swoop in and save the day.

But we have to go out and play.

Find our ancestral lifeways.

Today; I say.

Part 1: Interview Series with Aaron Blaisdell of UCLA

(Above: Dr. Blaisdell's 'triangle', posted on Mark Sisson's Weekend Link Love)

Part I

My bright brother, Kai Pottenger, a graduate from UCLA with a degree in Neuroscience and an interest in financial decision-making under uncertainty from a cognitive psychology perspective (think heuristics and biases of the Kahneman type), recently interviewed Aaron Blaisdell, a Professor of Psychology at UCLA and an ardent Ancestral Fitness practitioner.

Dr. Blaisdell can be spotted on campus proudly sporting his Vibram Five Fingers shoes or doing primal sprints in Wilson Plaza. Every day, he puts 'Theory to Practice' as as an active epistemocratic academic--a scientist and a professor--at one of the top research universities in the world.

I invite you to learn more about his lab and research here: Blaisdell Lab.

During this series, please leave questions for Aaron in the comments section, and I am sure Aaron will respond promptly and insightfully.

KP = Kai Pottenger

AB = Aaron Blaisdell

KP: Briefly share your research interests and one or two projects you are currently working on.

AB: Well, I am basically interested in animals. I want to know what makes them, including us, tick. The framework I take is a cognitive framework, and I think it's a really great heuristic by which to ask questions: what are animals doing and what do they think about the world? So, kind of early on in my studies, I came along the idea of representation, like cognitive maps and evidence that animals can hold cognitive maps of their environments. That was the beginning of what sparked my interest. I have always loved animals. It was natural for me to start looking at them from that cognitive perspective, and it has carried through to my research to this day. I got trained in the mechanistic level of Pavlovian conditioning. Those are really great tools to probe the mind of the animal and the human. So, I use Pavlovian conditioning techniques to ask how animals, specifically pigeons and rats, represent the world. What kinds of representations do they show evidence of acquiring and using--of course, their world in my laboratory is a little bit more minimal.

I always liken it to the chemistry approach, where instead of studying chemical reactions in the world where things are very messy, I bring it into the lab where I can isolate a lot of factors, hold them constant, and really manipulate much more cleanly those particular variables that I am interested in to see what that tells me about the underlying processes. Presumably, that would scale back into the more ethologically relevant context. That's always a question. Even though I don't do ethological research myself, I think it is very important to bring these questions into the real world. I have talked to ethologists and such and there are definitely people who do the in-between work--they go between lab and real world. But I use the lab as a chemistry approach to looking at representations.

Actually, I study cognitive maps. Do pigeons acquire spatial recognition of the world, and if they do, how do they and how do they use it? Some of my evidence from pigeons is that they do seem to acquire spatial representations of the world, like something out there is related to something else out there--that's a spatial relationship. I have some evidence that some of the simpler mechanisms like Pavlovian conditioning is one of the mechanisms used to bind together the spatial representations. So, there is kind of an interface between or building on top of level, which is very interesting. A lot of cognitive scientists think this way too. There are simpler levels that have been built in from evolution, like simple learning processes, and then those can be the foundation upon which cognition works. That's kind of the approach I am taking, the interplay between lower and higher cognitive levels.

KP: In what ways does your research inform your personal health mythology or strategy?

AB: There are specific questions that I ask. There is another line of work that maybe has been more influential in those terms--my work on causal reasoning. I had a paper come out in Science in 2006, and it showed evidence that rats display a certain type of causal reasoning. That's something people thought rats couldn't do. I'll give you an example of a basic way humans reason this way and the paradigm example, and then I will work my way back to the rats. So, we understand how barometers work. A barometer's reading goes up or down, and it's very closely correlated with the weather. When the pressure increases, we expect that the weather will get nicer, sunnier ... whereas, if we see a sudden drop in the barometer level, we anticipate an impending storm coming through. Those two events are correlated, but they share a common cause. They are both effects of a common cause. We can use one to guess about the other because they are very tightly correlated. And this is what David Hume said is how we learn about cause-and-effect relationships: we see "constant conjunction" (his words) of events. We associate things that go together--that change together--and this associative learning process allows us to infer cause-and-effect relationships. But there are situations where that inferential approach breaks down; exactly in the case where two things are correlated, related not because one is the cause of the other, but because they are both effects of another common cause. So, before we had the ability to come up with ideas about air pressure and before we had the ability to invent barometers to detect it, we didn't realize that there was this cause-and-effect relationship.

Stay tuned, my friends, there are more gems to come ...

Thanks again to Kai and to Aaron for connecting for this interview.

Comments and questions welcomed.

To good health,

Brent

My-thology: the Quantified Self vs. the Qualitative Self

My-thology is foundationally important (hat tip to Brian Geremia, author of the new blog: Living by Bliss) to the Patient of One: it's personal mythologizing with an 'n=1'.

Because everything ultimately starts back at square-one, with step number one: telling, compelling, and re-editing our stories, the narratives/myths we tell ourselves and live by.

It's reflective, interdisciplinary inquiry into ourselves, who we are as beings and how we would answer so many transcendental questions.

When it comes to health and fitness mythology, if we "go all the way back to the beginning," as Mark Sisson and the rest of the Patients of One in the Ancestral Fitness Epistemocracy (AFE) suggest we do, then our personal my-thologies must confront one self-experimentation, toxicity of information paradox, conundrum (thanks to Dave Lull):

Ever since we started providing people with more and more nutritional information about the foods and drinks they consume--food labels that skew the choice architecture toward high-carb, low-fat diets that kill us and cause the metabolic syndrome gamut of 'diseases', or the Food Pyramid that instructs us what to eat, serving amounts and all, through an incorrect top-down platonic model with no basis in metabolism nor evolutionary philosophy, to name just two--the rates of obesity, illnesses (like cancer) caused by chronic inflammation, diabetes, and most of what ails us in modern medicine have spiked exponentially, with no slowing in sight.

In essence, the nutrition information that we have provided to people over the past number of decades is simply toxic. It pollutes our minds, as viral memes like to do, and pushes us irreverently to make deleterious decisions that pollute our bodies. This is the problem that results from outsourcing risk management and decision-making to third party 'experts'--they think they know more about your body (or business--think 'consultants') than you do, and they steer you in directions, sometimes with well-meaning intentions (this is how they were trained to think and act), that are unfortunately detrimental to your health and wellness.

We need to turn inward once again. You are an expert in/on/of your own body; no one else has access to the information, feedback loops, 'gut' feelings, and experiences that you do. This is a powerful, empowering reality--a piece of my-thology for real-world grounding.

Unfortunately, though, we have drowned out our innate, intuitive and instinctual biofeedback mechanisms in seas and groves of sugar. We need sugar detox in order to reconnect with our inner-selves, our ancestral-selves. The roots are there--they were shaped over millions of years in environments drastically different than the ones we inhabit today--perhaps embedded in our epigenetic codes, so we do have the chance to rekindle them, re-evolve our physiologies, and bubble up from the depths of our (stem) cells healthier spiritualities that compel us to thrive both mentally and physically while maturing emotionally.

So, what's your reflective personality? Just like there exists a healthcare spectrum, there exists a self-experimentation feedback spectrum as well. The Quantified Self marks one end of this pole, while the Qualitative Self marks the opposite pole. On the Quantified side, we track numbers; we make graphs; and, we try to turn results into concrete constructs that we can use to alter our behaviors, indicate whether a protocol is working or not working, or gauge the marginal benefits and costs of our trial-and-error solution searching efforts. Maybe you're a 'numbers person'. The Internet abounds with tools for you to use:

For instance, you can check out my FitDay, from the other day--although it's just one day--and see what the numbers have to say.

Or, you can build a graph on FacetofLife, track all components of your life, and see whether the results provide you with insight or simply more emotional strife.

These platforms can be great, to be sure, if accessed and interacted with in the right ecological way.

But, what about Your Ancestor, the one who lived with Grok, roaming the land as a nomadic hunter-gatherer, intimately tied to the twists and turns of Mother Nature's multi-fractal ecology? Would Your Ancestor have been a 'Quantified Self' type of person. I (suspect) think not. I suspect that Your Ancestor and Grok would have been much more qualitative in their assessments of personal well-being. Visualization--how you looked from your inner lens--and that nebulous emotional Feel--how you felt as you moved about your day--would have trumped modern-day biomarkers in so many ways. Personally, I have no intuitive sense of what a Calorie is anyways--what is it? I really don't know what to do with caloric intake information; if anything, counting calories would simply push me toward nutritional deficiency because I would move away, shortsightedly, from the Ancestral Fitness energy fueling (anabolic) math of high fat, high/moderate protein, and low carb intake. This notion represents the Qualitative pole of the self-experimentation feedback spectrum. All the 'science' (remember, PubMed is just an anthology of mythologies), iPhone applications ("there's an app for that"), Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) embedded with 'health information' (thanks to Dave Lull), and technological devices in the world, although able to potentially provide helpful 'grace nudges' and possibly useful data points, cannot replace the primal qualitative signaling that our bodies perform in hopes of prodding us back toward our ancestral lifeways. Although, we can devise, and there do exist, ways to capture qualitative results efficiently and effectively as well: diaries, photos across time (such as facial shots taken once per week and then tiled next to each other over the course of a year or more), or comments from others (such as, "You look great!"), as a few possibilities. In the Information Age, as the Ancestral Fitness Epistemocracy (AFE) Patients of One understand, each person will test out and move about along this vast spectrum in his/her own unique way, searching for that mythical 'sweet spot' place that let's you iterate stochastic tinkering efforts, capture the results accurately, and keep traversing along your self-development and health optimization pathway.

Because it's all just my-thology at the end of the day.

And reflection on your 'n=1' bricolage feedback personality type will help you make the most of each and every day. Feedback can be useful, but there's a toxicity of information paradox front that we must constantly confront.

I always remind myself of what Elton John had to say, "There's a time for everyone / if they only learn / that the twisting kaleidoscope / moves us all in turn."

With one small turn of the kaleidoscope, we stumble serendipitously upon new reference frames.

"Everything starts somewhere; somewhere small," as Seth Roberts likes to say.

As an amateur scientist--a self-owned anti-scholar (Nullius in Verba)--I hybridize my Quantified Self with my Qualitative Self to produce myself, naturally leaning, associating, and progressing much closer to the qualitative pole with each passing day, openly awaiting that 'twist' that will signal my 'time' to make my next 'move'.

Because 'that's how I roll'--Raw milk cheese, FAGE yogurt, and all.

That's my healthcare epistemocrat, archetypal my-thology.

It's time to triage/tinker/iTunes/bricoler away.

To living by bliss,

Brent

Bricolage: An epistemocrat is a bricoleur

"Bricoler (tinker) away!" is what Dr. Black Swan proclaims playfully to his esteemed colleague Dr. DJ as they both sign off from another interesting and rewarding day of partnering with their patients in 'n=1' clinical trials in nutritional and musical therapies, among other things, complimented by pharmacological interventions for acute treatments only when deemed absolutely necessary.

Every patient is different: some like asparagus; some like listening to Phoenix--it's the 'spice of life' on prominent, open display.

Results are what really matter at the end of the day.

One diabetic patient faces income constraints, so, under Dr. Black Swan's participatory medical partnership guidance, she is experimenting with lower cost foods that provide ancestral 'bang-for-your-buck', such as sardines, eggs, high-fat yogurt, and coconut flakes, as well as others (like homemade iced tea instead of soda)--all high (good) fat, high/moderate protein, and low carb foods that she can turn to in lieu of the array of cheap carbs she consumed previously. She even uses Fit Day to track her diet intake--she's diligent that way--and peruses WellSphere to track her favorite health bloggers' latest takes.

She's an epistemocrat; an empowered Patient of One bricoleur: a bottom-up (stochastic) tinkerer with all things lifestyle who engages in non-linear, Barbell-diversified bricolage daily.

Archetypes matter; they form the foundations for the Patient of One my-thology (proudly serving alongside Grok, a kindred spirit, in Mark Sisson's Primal Blueprint mythologizing).

Because we only have so many and certain resources--time, income, energy, willpower, etc.--available for us to tap into and use for self-experimenting anyways.

Bricolage (hat tip to Navanit Arakeri for the term) is the act of mobilizing, combining, and operationalizing resources, that just so happen to be available, in creative ways to solve problems and overcome challenges--it's a practical way to seize the day. Living is bricolage. Cooking is bricolage. Competing athletically is bricolage. Painting is bricolage. Song-writing is bricolage. Improv is bricolage. This essay is bricolage. It's all bricolage; it's the Levy-flight lifeway.

Nutritional bricolage is just one facet of (self) experiments in lifestyle design. But, when it comes to our modern health(care) crisis, it's the facet to focus on most intently if we hope to achieve health(care) reform on any noticeable level.

Think of the bricolage struggles that our physiologies must endure when trying to construct healthy, flourishing and fully functional body cells, tissues, organs, and organ systems from poor diets--it's like trying to build a house with sand and some Elmer's glue; it's a non-starter, a no-win situation. It's no wonder that sugar toxicity produces unhealthy body tissues that make us look like aliens in so many ways.

But what if Dr. Black Swan doesn't serve your neck of the woods?

No problem.

The Ancestral Fitness Epistemocracy (AFE) is always accepting new patients.

Just triage (tinker) away.

It's self-directed, bricolage friendly healthcare--medicine sans primary care.

It's respectful, resilient personal responsibility.

Because you're a bricoleur, and you're willing to bear a bit of the burden.

To good health,

Brent

We are well on our way - I will be speaking at BIL:PIL

BILPIL.com

The topic for my BIL:PIL presentation is Nutritional Bricolage: Elevating the Status of Self-Experimentation in Medical Practice and Research via Patient of One 'n=1' Clinical Trials with All Things Lifestyle.

... because that's how we are going to construct personal mythologies that help us lead vibrant, healthy lifestyles that empower us to thrive.

With the SAD (Standard American Diet) and associated modern-day sedentary lifestyles, we've taken quite a collective dive; and, as a direct result, the majority of the 'diseases' that we expend trillions of dollars on in this country for 'healthcare' simply represent the escalating costs we must pay for deviating too far from our ancestral lifeways--I long for a return to those nostalgic (non-occluded coronary) pathways.

Question: Today, when raised according to mainstream Conventional Wisdom ways, will a child who grows up with diabetes and other chronic (inflammation) illnesses that result from the metabolic syndrome caused by poor nutrition (sugar toxicity, primarily) generate more 'wealth' for the economy over the course of his/her life than the resulting total cost of his/her 'healthcare'? (Think wholistically).

I think we are far past the point of diminishing returns; we are experiencing devastating losses; our lifestyles are imposing a 'net loss'--socialized costs alongside privatized profits--in this regard.

I can think of some better ways to spend 2.5 trillion dollars (FAGE Yogurt anyone?).

And this is the contemporary medicine ecology that the Patient of One must traverse carefully, cautiously, especially if iatrogenesis is on the rise or may strike from the blind side at anytime.

Time moves along. Primary care is dead. We missed that boat years ago. A physician shortage is present, inevitable, and only increasing with each passing day. It's okay, the Patient of One knew this already ("Ain't no thing," they say). The Patient of One was already prepared to triage (tinker) away in a self-directed, patient-centered healthcare system sans paternalistic primary care anyways. With a vertically (financially & operationally) integrated Catastrophic Kaiser (CK) health insurance product that resembles Vibram Five Fingers 'barefooting' shoes protecting against negative Black Swan strike bankruptcy risks and with healthcare resources in his/her pockets instead of the United, Aetna, et al. coffers, the Patient of One thrives with pride when empowered with this type of respectful agency.

As problems with access to medical services continue to climb, patients need alternative outlets to pursue their healing needs: 'Physician, heal thyself', is one such creed. The Patient of One credo states that 'n=1' nutritional bricolage tinkering clinical trials represent the best modus operandi in the face of healthy diet opacity (though Paleo / Primal / Evolutionary / Ancestral Fitness appear to shine some nice, 'grace-nudging' guiding lights for startup testing). As a principal in this self-experimentation process, the Patient of One may elect to contract with an agent, perhaps a physician or some other medical system practitioner, to aid in discovering diet- and lifestyle-based modalities for enhancing, maintaining, and restoring health instead of resorting to riskier pharmacological and surgical therapies, where and when appropriate: "Start with and exhaust conservative, preventive, and practical 'cheap health options', like music or 'good' bacteria, first--Primun non nocere--when time is on your side," Dr. Black Swan and Dr. DJ like to opine in sync.

But, regardless of whether mainstream medicine elects to partner with the Patient of One in this bottom-up participatory medicine trial-and-error solution-searching engine, platforms like CureTogether, PatientsLikeMe, 23andMe, and Track Your Plaque, among others like Fit Day, have emerged on the Web and in the Blogosphere to fill the void: it's open-source medicine in the 21st Century, individualization as espoused in the Ancestral Fitness Epistemocracy (AFE).

We are well on our way.

We're slowly regaining our ancestral lifeways.

Because we know that culture will ultimately win the day.

That's the spirit of what I plan to say.

To good health,

Brent