China Study II: Income and Disease

I was one of the lucky few to get an advanced copy of The China Study II: Income and Disease. It hits shelves May 23rd, and I have to admit, the data is compelling.

In this culminating work that pools the same national data as the original The China Study, T. Colin Campbell applies a sophisticated form of meta-analysis to reach some startling conclusions about how our wealth affects our health.

Here's my favorite page, right out of The China Study II. Notice the strong correlation below?

The China Study II: Income and Disease is rife with correlation after correlation like the one above. Since correlation indicates causation, the conclusion is clear: money causes cancer, and is probably responsible for the sweeping array of debilitating diseases of the wealthy, from chlamydia to hairy tongue.

The data has spoken. I urge you to give up your wealth in order to achieve better health. Send your money to poor countries like Ceylon and El Salvador, so they can be the ones with face cancer. It's only fair that they share the burden of wealth with us, for we are all equal children of God.

Happy April fools,

Kev

More Vegetables Than Vegetarians

The media has done a superb job of branding the paleo diet as a meat diet. Indeed, people seem to think that's all we eat. Many naysayers go there first, naming The China Study or maybe even some other idiot who skipped Day 1 of Stats class (when they teach the refrain, "correlation is not causation"). Or worse, they cite conventional wisdom as a legitimate source, "But all doctors say the same thing about meat."

Conventional wisdom holds little weight with me, but if that's what will convince some people (perhaps the ones who skipped stats AND history class), then let's roll with it. (History class, by the way, is where you learn that conventional wisdom is ALWAYS wrong.)

Perhaps the most universally accepted piece of conventional wisdom about health, told by our grandmothers and our cartoons and our doctors and our vegetarians alike, is "eat your vegetables." Well, I'm here today to demonstrate that the paleo diet is more vegetably than a vegetarian diet. Now please allow me to unravel your cognitive dissonance with copious amounts of what is known in academic circles as 'quantifiable proof'.

Following are 4 randomly selected vegetarian food pyramids from the interwebs that espouse vegetarian diets. To account for paleo bias, I chose three that were vegan.

Vegetarian Example 1: Vegetables come in at about 15-20% of total food volume. The biggest group? You guessed it! Grains.

Vegetarian Example 2: Vegetables come in at about 15% as well, being stamped out big time by grains that dominate almost 30% of the pyramid.

Vegetarian Example 3: Same story with vegetables again at 15%, being drowned out by Neolithic foods like grains, dairy, beans, even sweets.

Vegetarian Example 4: Vegetables come out of nowhere with 30-35%! Don't know why tomato is in the carb section, but I'll let that slide.

Vegetarians average (an inflated) 20% vegetable intake on the pyramid. Not too shabby.

Now, for some mind-blowing. Four Paleo Pyramids:

Paleo Example 1: Boom. Primal Blueprint puts vegetables in the base of the pyramid, I'd say that's about 20-25%.

Paleo Example 2: Some random loser posted this I bet. Veggies at 15%. (Outlier, obviously. But we'll count it.)

Paleo Example 3: CastleGrok's pyramid gets chosen at random and delivers vegetables at a whopping 25-30%.

But wait. Paleo Example 4 (perhaps closer to average than any other) delivers vegetables at about 30% yet again.

Paleo wins with about 25% vegetables in the diet. But I'm not satisfied.

I know for a fact that I eat almost twice the vegetable matter than my veggie-minded friends and especially more than my conventional-eating cronies. And I think that deserves some exploration.

First, let's look at the economic incentives. Vegetarians are likely to eat disproportionately more grains and legumes than the pyramid recommends because those things are cheap; Paleo dieters are likely to eat disproportionately less meat/fish because those things are expensive (we buy fresh, wild, grass-fed to boot).

Another confounding variable is population. Vegetarianism attracts people for two reasons: ethics and/or health. In particular, people sympathetic to animal rights and sold on disease prevention. These populations are not concerned with measuring proportions or optimizing athletic performance and are therefore more likely to stray from the 'optimal model' or pyramid, quite reasonably leading to indulgences, not to more vegetables.

The paleo population is also dominated by people concerned with ethics and/or health. In particular, environmental responsibility and athletic performance. Because they are motivated to excel athletically, they are likely to adhere to the optimal model, which limits fruit and nut intake, inevitably leading to even more vegetables than their vegetarian counterparts who stray.

Also worth noting is that vegetarianism in general contains more categories of food, commonly dairy, grains, legumes, sweets, fruit, etc. The more categories, the more each category becomes diluted. And you bet your ass that the vegetable category dwindles with all the others.

Now, excuse me while I go eat meat.

Building Ideological Bridges

A handful of fringe disciplines relate to the ancestral/evolutionary paradigm in some interesting ways, and I'd like to discuss them a bit here. By no mean is what I have to offer conclusive; rather, I simply find the ideas fascinating and want to explore these complex topics with you. So please share your thoughts in the comment section below about any or all of these.

Feminism. Uncomfortable word for some, I know. And I thought so too, until I took Feminist Theory and Literature (honors-level) at university. I'll say this: Once you read the foundational scholarship yourself and get to know the actual philosophy behind it's early leaders, you'll realize pretty easily that true feminism is unlike the popular notion of man-hating bra burners. It's an intellectual movement at it's core, and is what eventually evolved into Gender Studies, which intersects with race, class, queer, and other

minority studies to be the foundational scholarship for social justice today. 'Gender equality' is the more common, acceptable word used today, but it's just a different brand for the same product.

It's relevant to the ancestral paradigm because feminism is about personal freedom and inherent rights. It's a sociocultural dissection and critique that looks at women AND men. Most notably, it took the idea of gender and defined it against sex (man vs. male). The distinction: I was born a male, but acculturated a man. So gender covers the cultural impact on learned behaviors, not instinctual ones.

And that's why it's important. Today still, we are taught cultural values, norms, and ideals that vie with our nature and limit our freedoms. Acknowledging how culture forms gender might shed light on how your own life can be improved. I think immediately of the He-men out there that don't dance or hug because it's girly, or the anemic standard of female beauty, and the list goes on. Looking at gender from a paleo perspective can make things much more clear.

Urbanization. A good friend of mine introduced me to the concept of 'urban sprawl' and the 'rise of surburbia'. In Europe, urbanization worked out: walkable towns and cities, tight communities. In America, during the age of oil, we constructed our communities around extensive suburbs. Nice to live out by the countryside right? Yeah, 'cept it's not actually the countryside and the 'burbs are anti-social and isolationist by design. Most urban public space serves only to fragment communities.

What can evolution tell us about urban design? We are social creatures that require positive social interaction. Big concrete cities induce psychoses on the cultural level and pollution on the environmental level, which is certainly not the ideal. But small or moderately-sized, tightly-knit, well-designed communities might be a step in the right direction for social well-being.

Gay rights. Whether or not homosexuality occurs in nature is an non-issue from the scientific perspective. Ask any naturalist and the answer is clear. A nearly unanimous: gay happens. (I'm reminded of Stephen Colbert's gay bearorist, ha!) Moreover, this is an issue about freedom. And what is more natural than freedom?

Veganism. Ultimately, everyone wants social justice and environmental restoration. But getting there is gonna take a long look at the facts and the acknowledgement of some admittedly dark truths about reality. We already agree about factory farming and corn subsidies. The detriments of agribusiness are not a far cry. Vegans can totally get on board with respecting nature's harmony and striving to keep balance in the world's ecosystems.

Politics. I'm not gonna take a position here, but this is fascinating. When you think about politics in terms of a vast political spectrum, you get anarchy on one end and socialism on the other. Zero government all the way to pure government. Libertarians would be right next to anarchy (minimal government). This is interesting to me because some paleo leaders are outwardly libertarian, but that seems at first to vie with an evolutionary perspective. If tribes share resources and America is just one big tribe, then socialism would be the paleo model for the modern world.

So why the difference? Perhaps because America is not one big tribe, but millions of little ones. Contemporary culture defines the tribe as the nuclear family (rather than the extended family in the Paleolithic). So in a political sense, we only share resources with our own 'nuclear tribe'. And perhaps libertarianism is a way to make sure government doesn't interrupt that model.

What do you think?