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

Announcing Ancestry: The Foundation for the Ancestral Health Symposium and the Ancestral Health Society

Einstein said he had one idea.

Nassim Taleb says, "Two ideas, you're dead" (thanks to Dave Lull).

Ancestry is one idea.

And it's foundational to the Ancestral Health Symposium and the Ancestral Health Society, so I am excited to announce the new, official Web site:

ancestryfoundation.org

Click around and check it all out. Spread the good news too!

Brian Geremia did an awesome job with the Web design and Michal Naisteter did a fabulous job with the surveys/forms. The Ancestral Health Team and the Symposium Presenters (which now includes Art DeVany) have been tinkering collaboratively behind-the-scenes beautifully. Please fill out the Attendee Survey to receive updates as we organize. All people who attend the Symposium can submit abstracts for the lunchtime poster sessions; everyone can participate in that forum--feel free to submit a Poster Proposal at anytime (co-presentations encouraged).

Dates, venue, and other details to follow soon; stay tuned ... we'll let you know when ticket sales go live!

In the meantime, please check out Game Plan Academy (GPA), the nonprofit program that I co-founded and co-operate voluntarily with my friends. Our Spring 2010 camps in Sacramento and Compton start soon, so if you feel like supporting our work, you can "Chip In" and donate here:

Grazie!

Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend (my friend & mentor) Mark Sisson's PrimalCon because it falls on the first weekend of GPA, but he's put together a tremendous opportunity to enjoy that I encourage folks to take advantage of in April.

Finally, check out the Ancestral Resources on the AncestryFoundation.org home page:

Modern Paleo & Paleo Hacks

Diana Hsieh, Patrick, and others made these sites into fantastic resources for the Ancestral Health Epistemocracy community!

Now, back to reading for me:

1) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Richard Rorty (recommended to me by mentor/friend Dr. Kurt Harris at PaNu).

2) Food and Western Disease by Dr. Staffan Lindeberg (he sent me a copy, graciously)

3) The Evolutionary Biology of Human Body Fatness (Dr. Robert Lustig recommended it to me)

To good health,

Brent

Ancestral Health Symposium (AHS): Attendee Sign-Up List

In Summer 2011, the Ancestral Health movement will converge in Los Angeles for a (pre) historic event ...

Please see the form at the bottom of AncestralFitness.org ...

... or sign-up here:

Grazie!

We'll be in touch.

To good health,

Brent

Ancestral Health MeetUps

Over the past week, I've enjoyed meeting up with the following Ancestral Health epistemocrats:

Mark Sisson (see my review of The Primal Blueprint here), Stephan Guyenet, Frank Forencich, Jeff Erno, Aaron Blaisdell, Chris Owens, Erik Cisler, Nell Stephenson, Kai Pottenger, Brian Geremia, and Patrik (Founder of Paleo Hacks).

The core health principles that we've all independently arrived at based on our own research, reflection, and n=1 self-experimenting reflects the same dynamics that we've seen play out in nature through the independent evolution of survival characteristics like flight. Bats and birds evolved the ability to fly independently of each another; this type of convergence tells me something. When diverse groups of people tinkering locally arrive at some key global concepts, like Mark's Primal Laws, then these health conjectures carry more weight with me when it comes to evaluating which ideas to test on my own body.

Nassim Taleb's epistemocracy is coalescing nicely.

It's quite a supportive community that we're forming.

To good health,

Brent

Integrating the Financing and Delivery of Healthcare: An Argument from Agency

Top Figure: An integrated health system. Patients, as principals, hire agents to provide health and medical services, and these agents all operate under one organizational roof. Incentives are aligned and the *Three-Body Agency Problem is accounted for.

Bottom Figure: Third-party payor system. Patients hand over their healthcare resources, usually as deductions from their compensation for employment, and then parasitic health insurance companies (United, Aetna, et al.) hold these dollars until a patient accesses a provider and the provider in turn fights the burdensome tide in hopes of getting reimbursed equitably for his/her efforts.

(Note: If you're new to my health policy takes, perhaps perusing this essay and it's associated links will help provide context and bring you up to speed on my Physiological Economics for Health Care perspective.)

The *Three-Body Problem, which Nassim tipped me to via Henri Poincare, has a rich history in fields like physics, but it's critical to health policy and administration analysis at the present. Simple observation nudges us to realize that all those darn interactions (indicated by arrows in the lower figure) driving the third-party payor system just don't make sense in the context of any health policy and administration story. The healthcare system in the United States has been infected by parasites; I'd like to eradicate these viruses at some point. We know that "three's a crowd" when it comes to other domains, but my hope is we apply this aphorism in medicine some day.

Why? Because the more we outsource the financial components of healthcare decision-making away from the point of care--that is, from the clinic and bedside to some ecologically sterile remote third-party office buildings--the more we erode the integrity of the healing relationships between patients and physicians/nurses/et al.

Every medical decision presents an economic choice challenge, with costs and benefits of all types to be weighed, and as much as we'd like for this process to occur independent of financial influence, it turns out that the more we disregard the economic constraints that we face in health affairs, the more these financial factors impinge upon medical practice. As patients, we want our providers to be engaged in both the financing and delivery of healthcare services because this gives them more degrees of freedom to maneuver on our behalf--that's why we hire agents in the first place: to advocate for us and evaluate options for healing. However, when our agents get leached continually by third-party parasites, the path constraints that they face become cumbersome quite quickly. The net result is a reduction of agency that translates into less space for deductive reasoning and less room for incorporating individualized medical attention and n=1 treatment modalities.

Since I think agency is an important thing--it's why I think the placebo effect works so miraculously--I am willing to make a stand and argue along these lines in hopes of removing these agency-draining viruses from our health system ecologies.

Which is why an Ancestral Anti-Health Insurance Co-Op is my logical Black Swan health policy and administration innovation that integrates these financing and delivery pieces with the underlying physiological focus on what makes our bodies fail and become diseased in the first place.

To good health,

Brent

Overcoming the Justificationist Addiction: a 12-Step Program

It's a fundamental reality of epistemology: we simply do not know everything (at least I don't know everything, speaking for myself).

We're all partially 'blind', evidently, to empirical reality; it's a shared disability that shapes the human condition powerfully (unless, of course, you possess that rare allele at the 'insight locus' for the '20/20 vision' gene that bestows upon you the ability to perceive everything perfectly a priori).

Yet, inductivists, you see, seem to get lost in their overconfidence readily.

Even though it's clear to me, with a little bit of epistemic humility and a dash of deductivist decision-making, that we'd be wise to heed Socrates:

"Wisdom is knowing how little we know."

And he's talking about NNT's concept of Opacity--what we do not see; factoring for the invisible, the unseen. That is, the method of basing thinking and operating on incomplete understanding by respecting uncertainty and unpredictability.

So I did some thinkering (thanks to a grace nudge from my philosophy of science mentor, Dave Lull), trying to jump start a Justificationist Anonymous (JA) program for dealing with the addiction of justifying theories excessively with one more positive White Swan observation (despite the inherent asymmetry of uncertainty and the fact that we cannot prove anything to be true)--it's a start toward recovering from and coping with the justificationist addiction by invoking a bit of Black Swan logic strategically. But first, we need to start with a working definition of justifying (thanks to Wikipedia):

Justification is the reason why someone properly holds a belief, the explanation as to why the belief is a true one, or an account of how one knows what one knows.

In essence, when justification gets carried away, it morphs into a double-edged sword addiction rooted in the narrative fallacy that can slit our throats if we tunnel too deeply in the induction trap and forget to remember that each of us 'knows' things in different ways, based on varying threads and data points (and associated neural network connections), particularly from our own unique sensory experiences. For instance, I am aware of certain conjectures, which I suspect bubble up serendipitously from my 'intuition', that I cannot justify/explain/et al. right away (if ever, by the way), but I know that I can attempt to test them empirically (we can all test the same underlying 'truth/reality' by invoking dissimilar stories and personalized m=1 my-thologies) and can try to prove them wrong (I try to falsify them) by self-experimenting on my own body and in the context of my own daily living. Because, paradoxically, when it comes to philosophy of science reasoning, the single data point (n=1) rises to the surface as the most valued observation since one more additional White Swan justification support piece provides no evidence for proving something true (it's just a potentially misleading drop in the white noise sea of n=infinity data mining); instead, it's the single negative result data point that tells us that the truth is not that--it's searching through the impervious jungle/forest of knowledge by actively chopping away falsification fauna and exclaiming: "It's not that; not that; not that; not that; not that ..." ad infinitum. We simply approximate what is by deductively eliminating what is not. Obsession with what is can produce an addiction, and addictions are dangerous things, so to that end, here's a 12-Step framework for navigating this niche of epistemology terrain:

12-Steps to Overcoming the Justificationist Addiction

1) We admitted we were powerless over White Swan justifications--that our thinking had become un-human.
2) Came to believe that a power greater than ourselves, like Opacity, could restore us to sanity.
3) Made a decision to turn our thinking and our reflecting over to epistemic humility as we understood this concept from perceptive philosophers like Socrates, Hume, Popper, Miller, and NNT (et al.).
4) Made an open and honest inventory of our own thinkering activities.
5) Admitted to the world that the problem of induction cut our legs out from underneath us one too many times, proving us wrong continuously.
6) Were entirely ready to respect uncertainty and unpredictability in order to remove all our overconfidence in our top-down theories.
7) Humbly attempted to reorient ourselves around the central question of "What to do when we admit that we don't know everything?" by becoming more aware of the inherent, irreducible role that faith plays in our thinking and acting.
8) Made a list of all cases where we reasoned inductively with overconfidence and harmed people in the process.
9) Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10) Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong promptly admitted it and recognized these falsification events as nudges for learning gracefully.
11) Sought through prayer/meditation to improve our conscious contact with Opacity, as we understood this central limit to being human, hoping for deductivist decision-making guide posts to emerge and for the patience/diligence to work via meta-rule formation and tinkering.
12) Having had a spiritual/philosophical awakening as a result of these steps, we tried to carry this philosophy to justificationists, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

As a golfer, I'd love to have someone with that '20/20 vision' allele as my co-pilot caddy; it'd be nice to know when I am going to hit a bad shot a priori--I'd take note gracefully, restart my routine, and then aim and swing differently in hopes of averting a poor stroke effectively.

So what's the point of this post you say? Simple: Black Swan logic is about factoring for the unknown, which ultimately means becoming more aware of where your faith is because, at the margin, we all must have faith in something given that a negative Black Swan could strike any day, at any time, and turn everything we believe upside down instantly, in the blink-of-an-eye thanks to our ancestrally-shared disability of 'future blindness' in the art of living.

Though, as much as possible, I opt for the general reference frame of positive Black Swan treasure hunting--it's more uplifting--but, we must remember that we can't hunt for treasure if our legs get cut out from underneath us unexpectedly as a result of induction bravado and careless decision-making without regard for the limits of both statistics and reasoning from probability.

It's good to know where your faith is; it's part of doing due diligence.

It's foundational to the creation of a robust constitution in any epistemocracy.

And the Ancestral Health Society (AHS) community is just that: a self-organizing epistemocracy full of bricoleurs and epistemocrats thinkering passionately and collaboratively through n=1 clinical trials in hopes of coalescing William Baines' Biomedical Mutual Organization (BMO) approach to biotechnology.

To good health,

Brent