Dear Readers
From time to time I’ll get an email from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader that just throws me for a loop. It might be esoteric, simply outside of my core knowledge, or just downright strange. Still other questions are best answered by consensus.
When enough of these spill into my inbox I’ll crowdsource the questions, opening them up to the infinite wisdom of the MDA community. This has resulted in some great discussions in the past (Dear Readers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
Well, it’s that time again. Help out a fellow MDAer with a response in the comment board. Thanks, everyone!
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Question 1
I’ve been reading your blog for some time, but looked at it in a new light after hearing you on The Art of Manliness podcast.
I have to say, the Primal Blueprint is basically a very exact way to spell out how I’ve thought about food for a while – what would a caveman do? I love the anecdotes about Grok, and have been following your eating plan for 2 weeks now.
So, I want to ask you something related to health, but not exactly diet and exercise. I have tried (and failed) to quit smoking too many times to count. Is there any way something like this would fit into the Blueprint? If we assume Grok was addicted to smoking (perhaps he threw tobacco on the fire one night) and knew it was bad, how would he stop doing it?
Aaron
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Question 2
I’ve been following a primal/paleo style of eating for three months now, and have no complaints. I was curious, these days, I notice there’s more and more guys losing their hair at a resonably early age, guys as young as me (I’m 22 btw). Even though I don’t exhibit any signs of hair loss myself, the ideal scenario would be to keep my hair for a very long time. I was wondering maybe if our increasingly poor eating habits may have anything to do with this? I notice both you and Art DeVany (who’s blog I also follow) both have full heads of hair, and eat similar diets. In your opinion, is there any correlation between diet and hair loss? Thanks in advance.
Brandon
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Question 3
I’m very curious to find out your thoughts on toothpaste. It is obviously made up of many chemicals grok would never have had access to. When I was a child I used to swallow the stuff after brushing much to the horror of my parents. Then I found an article that said that flouride attacks and damages glass and I got to wondering what it was doing to my insides, my toothpaste swallowing days were over. Anyway is toothpaste that great? What did grok use? Is it really that necessary to brush your teeth if you’re consuming a low suger diet? Thanks!
Steve
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Question 4
A trainer at my gym once told me that when doing pull-ups, one shouldn’t go all the way down because that will put unnecessary stain on your rotator cuffs, which would weaken it over time and create problems later. Is there any truth in that?
Jibby
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Question 5
I did a search around your site and read all the articles concerning barefoot running/living and footwear, however, I found nothing about callus maintenance of the feet. I take care of the calluses on my hands because they tend to tear off during lengthy workouts with deadlifts or pullups, but I seldom read something about maintenance of the feet. Since I have some pain on the outer part of my right foot, which I assumed was callus-related, I began thinking about this. From an evolutionary standpoint, it might be beneficial (extra cushions), but since we aren’t able to wear out the unnecessary parts of cushioning, perhaps we should cut them away?
Bert
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Posted By: Mark Sisson
Re Question 4 pullups: I watched a TV show a few years ago where some celebrity learned how to perform on the flying trapeze. The instructor (a longtime trapeze performer) said that when you are hanging, never to “relax” so that only your “grip” muscles are holding you on the trapeze. If you do, your rotator cuffs are supporting your weight and that is not good. He said to keep tension in your upper body so that the bigger muscles are supporting your weight.
So the issue is protecting the rotator cuffs, not the range of motion per se. You should be able to go through a full range of motion if you keep tension in your upper body.
Smoking…read the website whyquit.com.
Read it for two to three days, especially the 8-page pdf and the 149-page pdf. The addiction to nictotine is explained in detail along with all the details to help you overcome with a cold turkey quit. Do NOT do nicotimne replacement techinques as it only feeds your nicotine addition. You can do it. I did. two & a half packs per day, quit after reading that website for three days. That was almost 3 years ago and just two weeks ago, ran my first 13.1, with a full marathon scheduled for 02-21-09. best wishes! and NEVER TAKE ANOTHER PUFF!
#3
i am a dental assistant, and have been working in restorative dentistry for 10 years. it is necessary to brush your teeth, and floss them. it is not necessary, however, to use fluoride. a recent study shows that it can actually leech calcium from your bones, and even be linked directly with bone cancer. the ‘ol baking soda and water works wonders. from my studies in dental histomorphology, our grandad grok used to chew sticks and fibrous materials which kept his teeth pretty clean. with so many advancements now, we can effectively replicate this (or do even better) with floss and toothbrush. chemicals are totally unnecessary for this. -by the way, bone loss is what you are preventing when you floss, so it’s not just as simple as sugar habits and cavities!
Regarding Question 5. Callouses and barefeet. I am a long time barefoot/minimalist shoe guy which happened as a lifestyle mostly because I am a martial artist and one thing led to another.
In the olde days, I think that people paid a lot of attention to the state of their feet. The whole “anointing your feet with oil” and the practice of washing someone’s feet who have come in from a long journey (awesome by the way) speak to that.
Here are some things that I have discovered from being barefoot a lot over the past 35 years:
1. Getting fissures in your feet from thick callouses splitting should NOT be ignored. You can get a nasty case of cellulitis from foot infections. If your feet have painful fissures in the heel callouses get it attended to. I had cellulitis from this once that worked its way up to midthigh in about 8 hours. IT took a month of IV antibiotics to get rid of it. In grok’s time that would have killed me. (I do not think going paleo obviates using antibiotics when you really need them. That would be stupid
.
I noticed that hanging out on the beach naturally abraids callouses. Salt water, sand, lots of activity in and out of the water…you can simulate that with a foot file and salt water soaks if you aren’t near a beach.
2. I think that foot coverings (not modern shoes that overly bind and weaken our feet but moccasin-like things) were used pretty early. The Iceman…the paleolithic fellow that they found in the Italian Alps had moccassins on. He was pretty well outfitted for a 5300 year old fellow actually. His moccassins were winter versions…fur, calf high and stuffed with moss…http://archaeology.about.com/od/iterms/qt/iceman.htm
So some foot covering seems decently grok like to me and appropriate to wear to avoid getting infected. So I wear VivoBarefoots and Five Fingers when I do wear shoes. This actually helps with preventing callouses from turning into wounds and my feet are decently calloused but I still regularly take care of my feet as well.
3. I once saw a picture of a sherpas foot. The Sherpas would often prefer to go barefoot, according to some of the things I have read about them, even if the climbers they were helping bought the sneakers. The fellows foot looked like the bottom of a dogs foot. It was interesting. Not the kind of thing you’d see on a supermodel for sure. It still seemed supple but who could tell from a photo. At any rate, I suspect that being chronically barefoot from birth allows a natural development of protection in your feet that we all have to play catch up on. So I think that feet that are continually bare do become calloused and that callous does help with protecting the paleo foot.
What I think is the most problematic in terms of fissure development is when you spend a lot of time barefoot on surfaces that are hard but not so abrasive. Like a floor of a dojo. In that situation your body gets the incentive to grow callous but the floor is not abrasive enough to wear it down. Plus after stimulating your feet to callous up people often turn around and put shoes on, incubating the growing callous and allowing it to get nice and thick. Then you go barefoot and it dries out in that thick state and cracks. So its that combination of stimulation but then protection from abrasion that actually causes the serious problems. So yeah. To counter that you have to grind your callouses down I think.
I have a nice balance between my minimalist shoes and going barefoot these days that feels natural and good.
Karsk
#2: I had to chime in with male pattern baldness being absolutely impacted by diet.
I want to do a real write up some day but I’ll be brief… I started going bald rapidly from the temples. I researched… Propecia, and its possibility of permanent sexual dysfunction and that was not acceptable. Rogaine doesn’t work on frontal balding… What to do, accept my fate without fight? Never.
I kept researching and found a sage called Immortal Hair (google it, there’s a great community). He developed a regimen of supplementation and promoted a primal diet to help. Main ones being, CLO, VitD, alpha lipoic acid and many others. It’s an incredibly frantic search for most, and far from a scientific environment -so there is much variability.
For brevity, going bald was one of the best things that has ever happened to me. I no longer subsist on cheap carbs, I am thriving and am constantly improving my diet and life.
Almost all of the lost hair grew back (I attacked early) I still have hair, and if I am still losing it it’s at a vastly, vastly slower rate.
Once I made the decision to give it a shot (so glad I did) I was militant… I could count the candy bars and sodas I’ve had since then on my hands. And that was over 2.5 years ago.
If you are balding, check out ImmortalHair’s site… As always it’s a mix of genes and environment, in differing ratios for different people… If you’re are bald, and I’m sure women will back me up here, physical fitness, confidence and compassion are all more important than hair.
Hair doesn’t mean shit to women. If you are alone, it’s not because you are bald. But is that all that matters? You don’t necessarily have to be lean, or strong, or even healthy to be attractive to the opposite sex. But we all want to be our best, don’t we?
I hate when people just dismiss balding by making some comment about how it’s not what matters to women, or how you should just shave and bulk up or whatever. I started losing hair (or rather, realising I was losing hair) at about 20. I like hair, regardless of what anyone else thinks. Doesn’t have to be long hair, but hair is awesome. Baldness looks unhealthy. Probably because it -is- unhealthy. I’m not sure I buy the idea that it’s natural. As one of the elements of decay as we age, sure, but not as something that “just happens”, certainly not at what we today consider the peak of youth. It obviously happens, and there is obviously a genetic component, but is it meant to happen? The argument is that baldness is a sign of age, so commands respect and status or whatever, but… when you start to think about that, it’s a very strange AND circular argument.
Your recommendation (ImmortalHair) seems interesting. I have been thinking about how hairloss ties into general health ever since I started taking my health seriously and not dismissing all problems as isolated things. My childhood/teen diet essentially consisted of bread, cold cuts, whatever could be fried in old, used (30 or more times before it got replaced) soy/sunflower oil, and coke. So, okay, I don’t have scientific evidence (with so many variables, is there really such a thing in this field?), but it seems to me like baldness is just another symptom of a general lack of health.
Let’s face it… those who say “it’s genetic, there’s nothing you can do about it” don’t really understand baldness. They are just stating “we don’t know much, but we do know this little bit”. Considering human beings cannot be treated like lab rats in carefully controlled long term studies, we have to take everything that is stated by medicine about general long term health issues (which includes male pattern baldness) with a grain of salt.
Re: Baldness
I discovered D-E and have been taking it every morning in my Smoothie.
http://www.earthworkshealth.com/human-use.php
Not only has my hair grown back, but toenails & fingernails grow MUCH faster, and my FUGLY toenails have completely cleared up.
Also MANY other benefits from D-E.