What Generation of Pottenger's Cats are You? It's 'Primal Body, Primal Mind' time

I have to admit: I'm a big Nora Gedgaudas fan.

After all, an author who names a chapter of her book after my ancestor, Dr. Francis M. Pottenger, Jr., MD, is going to hold a special place in my book.

So, I am biased; biased positively toward what Nora has to say.

Everything is subjective anyways.

Because I happen to think that what she's trying to communicate in Primal Body, Primal Mind: Empower Your Total Health the Way Evolution Intended (... And Didn't) provides self-experimenting bricoleurs with an array of logical health conjectures to evaluate, assess, and then, perhaps, test on their own bodies via n=1 clinical trials. When you read books as an epistemocrat, you simply reflect on and judge them for what the author intended to accomplish; a single book cannot be all things to all people. Nora, in my opinion, accomplishes what she set out to tackle with this book.

Nora's sharp. And she writes with a memorable, enjoyable punch.

She understands things like the thought-experiment that it's naive to think most plants are our safe, edible friends: from an evolutionary perspective, it seems we'd be wise to be extra careful about the roles of plants in our diets (they may require special preparation and/or cooking, for instance, to be consumed safely) because they've evolved under selection pressures as immobile organisms--that is, without the ability to run away or fight back physically, plants protect themselves from herbivores and omnivores by producing, holding, and releasing toxins (such as tannins, lectins, etc.) throughout their bodies. Most animals, on the other hand, have evolved 'fight or flight' capacities and thus, if we catch them successfully, seem safer to eat because their tissues probably contain fewer poisons than plants' cells do.

She also embraces meta-rule formation for individualized health, reminding us to listen to our own bodies every step of the way as we deduce, for ourselves, what works and what doesn't work in our Patient of One cases. And, we must always remember a psychology concept that Aaron Blaisdell introduced me to called 'Overshadowing' (hat tip to Pavlov), which occurs when the initial stimulus is so strong that it blocks perception of a second downstream effect. For example, when people drink sodas, the initial stimulus from the sugar is so large that it overshadows the energy crash and poor health feelings that follow shortly after consumption. In this way, overshadowing inhibits people from responding appropriately to the poisons they ingest, and their abilities to learn via conditioning degrade as a result. Nora hopes to shed light on this type of overshadowing to help people really listen to their bodies in ways they never did before.

Nora's ray of light starts all the way back in the Ice Age, and then she works her way forward to the present, searching our ancestries for hypotheses about our physiologies. From these inquiries, Nora discusses Pottenger's research because she's concerned about our future generations. In his studies, Pottenger witnessed the degradation of health in successive generations when his cats were fed improper (processed/sugary) diets. Since the Industrial Revolution, it seems, as people have consumed more and more non-real, processed foods, human beings have experienced a degradation in health and a concurrent rise in Diseases of Civilization that parallel the problems Pottenger observed in his research. Nora hopes that we are not too many generations into our modern metabolic syndrome woes because Pottenger's experiments also showed that it takes a few generations of proper nutrition to restore animals back to vibrant health. Given our current healthcare and medical predicaments, what does Nora suggest? Well, within the "eat real foods" domain, she gracefully nudges folks toward good hyperlipidity from pastured meats, fish, butter, yogurt, coconut, avocado, and a few other key sources; moderate, quality protein, primarily from animal sources and some nuts; and, low-carbohydrate intake, mainly from non-starchy vegetables and some fruit (seasonally). That's a starting glimpse of her well-developed and thoughtful diet discussion; I'll leave the rest for you to peruse in her book.

Nora also feels that the destruction of our soil and the changes in the types and quality of our foods today suggests that supplementation may be necessary to achieve optimal health. Personally, I take fish oil and Vitamin D supplements almost every day, and everything I read from Nora about supplementation suggests that I should continue this regime.

She even features a chapter on exercise/movement that emphasizes the value of high-intensity, low-duration activities like sprinting and lifting occasionally, coupled with plenty of rest/relaxation (sleeping) and low-intensity energy expenditure (walking outdoors) in between. The spirit of her approach to fitness/training, as I see it, is essentially a bricolage of what Sisson / Norris / McGuff / DeVany / Wolf say.

At the end of the day, Nora shares a kindred spirit with the rest of the Ancestral Health epistemocracy (her book features notable quotes from Cordain, Eaton, et al.), and she'll be presenting at the Ancestral Health Symposium in Summer 2011, I am thankful to say.

To good health,

Brent