The Evidence Mounts: Our Modern Lifestyle Is Unhealthy

A major study (17 years, 10,000 participants) finds that a busy lifestyle in which sleep is sacrificed is directly linked to increased disease risk across the board but especially heart disease, even when accounting for other risk factors such as smoking and obesity. Perhaps most astounding – to me, anyway – is that fully 40% of Americans get less than five hours of sleep, on average, per night. Between work and the kids, my wife and I don’t always get the luxury of 7 or 8 hours, and I know it’s the same for many of you.

Posted By: Mark Sisson

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King Corn Film Review

If you have your DNA analyzed (say, by submitting a strand of hair or a scrape of skin cells), you might be surprised to learn that you are almost entirely made of…corn.

Or so we learn from a riot of an independent film just hitting the festival circuit. If you liked Supersize Me, King Corn is a film you don’t want to miss. I had the opportunity to review an advance copy earlier this year and I was thoroughly impressed by the quality and the information. The story is pretty humorous, to boot.

Posted By: Mark Sisson

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Homeopathy: Can We Please, As a Society, Let This One Go?

You hear us rant almost daily about the ridiculous machinations of the modern medical establishment, namely the reliance on drugs and surgery to “fix” health issues that could often be better dealt with or eliminated with simple lifestyle changes. Modern medicine has become a bureaucratic, money-driven actuarial game wherein individual patient rights are routinely sacrificed for the greater good of large populations. And so you hear, “The operation was a success, but the patient died.” or, “We don’t care that you refuse to get vaccinated. You need to do it so the rest of us don’t die from an epidemic of this obscure disease.” Or “Despite debilitating side effects, this new drug appears to benefit 22% of patients who take it.”

Posted By: Mark Sisson

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How to Avoid Jet Lag

Unnatural Acts: a Primal Approach to Jet Lag

One of the coolest things about being a 21st century “evolved” human is that we can travel to just about anywhere on this planet within a very short period of time and experience different cultures. All but our most recent relatives lived their entire lives never straying more than a hundred miles from their birthplace, yet we routinely hop on a jet, fly across the country or halfway around the world for a few days of travel and then return to our caves just as easily as playing a round of golf (or in my case, even more easily than golfing).

Posted By: Mark Sisson

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Early Humans Chewed Gum

Another amusing “primal” tidbit, everyone: early humans chewed gum. Archaeologists have found a 5,000-year-old piece of preserved tree gum with clearly imprinted neolithic teeth marks. The gum is birch bark tar, which exerts an antiseptic effect on tissues. It’s likely that early humans chewed the phenolic tar to stave off gum infections. Move over, Trident.

Posted By: Mark Sisson

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