You hear a lot about type 2 diabetes on this and other sites in the community. It’s easy to see why: type 2 diabetes is the “lifestyle” diabetes, the preventable one, the one that “doesn’t have to happen” and that you can “fix if you just dial in the food.” All true, for the most part. Whether you’re in the camp that thinks it’s red meat or egg yolks causing it, or fatty liver from excess PUFAs and fructose, the point is that people commonly accept the idea that T2D is preventable and manageable with the right diet and lifestyle. But what about type 1 diabetes? Why don’t we hear so much about it?
Read MoreI think we can all agree that a basic goal in life is the attainment of happiness, that mind state characterized by positive and pleasant thoughts and emotions. But how do we become happy? By definition, happiness requires some type of pleasure to be present. We need good feelings and good physical sensations. Furthermore, the pleasure must come first, before the happiness. Something, and I don’t care what it is, has to make you feel good before you can truly call yourself happy. As such, our behaviors and our motivations are shaped by that pleasure-seeking tendency. And that pleasure-seeking is mediated through the reward system, which has several different but interrelated components: liking, which describes the sensation of pleasure; wanting, which describes the desire to obtain the thing; and learning, the Pavlovian-esque conditioning. Basically, if we do something or expose ourselves to something (a fun social situation, a healthy food, the sun) that confers a survival and/or health benefit (improved social standing, some vital nutrient that our body needs, vitamin D production), our reward center “activates.” We like it, we want it, and we learn that having it is in our best interest.
Read MoreYou could say this post is a long time coming. In the last few years, I’ve lost count of the huge number of emails I get from parents with kids who have special needs either asking for advice or explaining how The Primal Blueprint has made a significant difference for their children. These are parents who love their kids for all their abilities and differences and who want to explore every reasonable lifestyle intervention they can to make their kids’ lives everything they can and should be.
I’ll state the obvious here. I’m not a disability expert, but I’ve been moved and motivated by these parents’ emails. From a general health perspective, I’ve wondered how our modern lives could be contributing to the epidemic. Likewise, I’m curious how research can illuminate potential benefits of lifestyle interventions. What is the biological picture behind the dysfunction in these conditions, and how can biology be harnessed to restore functioning? A recent approach focused on the whole brain and whole body is asking those exact questions – and finding answers.
Read MoreIf you ask most people, they’ll pretty much agree that optimism is better than pessimism. Oh, you might get one or two who laugh at the cockeyed optimists and their naivete about the world and its harsh, grim realities, but when you get down to it, optimists feel good about their lot in life, while pessimists feel bad about where they and the world are headed. Feeling good is a good, desirable state of being. Feeling bad about the future, well, just feels bad. Which would you rather experience?
Exactly.
Read MorePretty much every feature of the human body can be found, in some form or another, on other species. Opposable thumbs? Great for building and using tools, but apes have them, too. Even the giant panda has an opposable sesamoid bone that works like a thumb. Bipedalism? Helped us avoid direct mid-afternoon sun and carry objects while moving around the environment (among other possible benefits), but plenty of other creatures walk upright, like birds and Bigfoot. The human foot? Okay, our feet are quite unique, but every other -ped has feet (just different types), and they all work well for getting around. So, what is it that makes us so different from other animals (because it’s got to be something)?
Read MoreA couple weeks back, the LA Times published a piece on a geneticist’s experience with “personalized medicine.” Based on careful and constant monitoring of his sequenced DNA and around 40,000 health markers – or “omics” – over 14 months by a team of his colleagues, Stanford geneticist Michael Snyder observed in painstaking detail exactly what his body was doing during periods of sickness and health. If and when a viral infection entered the picture, Snyder and his team could watch how thousands of biomarkers responded. He could track its invasion, his body’s battle against it, and its eventual retreat. Although Snyder had no family history of diabetes, his sequenced DNA revealed he was at risk for it, so he began monitoring his blood sugar. Sure enough, a couple weeks after the viral infection, he noticed that his glucose was abnormally elevated. Analysis of his “omics” profile during the infection showed that auto-antibodies, which are often produced by the body in response to infections, had begun targeting an insulin receptor-binding protein which impaired his ability to clear glucose from the blood. Snyder was eventually diagnosed with the disease (but later fought it off with diet and meds), and though it isn’t spelled out clearly in the article, it sounds like the fallout from the viral infection may have precipitated his development of type 2 diabetes.
Read MoreA time-honored and research-tested way to extend an animal’s lifespan is to restrict its caloric intake. Studies repeatedly confirm that if, say, a lab mouse normally gets two full bowls of lab chow a day, limiting that mouse to one and a half bowls of lab chow a day will make that mouse live longer than the mouse eating the full two bowls. Cool, cool, a longer life is great and all, but what about the downsides of straight calorie restriction, aside from willfully restricting your food intake, ignoring hunger pangs, relegating yourself to feeling discontent with meals, and counting calories and macronutrients obsessively? Are there any others? Sure:
Loss of muscle mass. Humans undergoing calorie restriction often suffer loss of lean muscle mass and strength, all pretty objectively negative effects (unless you really go for the gaunt “Christian Bale in The Machinist” look and use a super-strong bionic exoskeleton for all your physical tasks).
Read MoreA hallmark of the Primal Blueprint is that our genetics were shaped by our ancestral environment. That the foods to which we had access, the amount of sun and stress and sleep to which our bodies became accustomed, the movement patterns in which we engaged represented environmental factors that exerted selective pressure on our genetic makeup and phenotypic expression to make us who we are today. As a result, heeding those environmental factors generally results in excellent health. And, even more importantly, many evolutionarily novel environmental factors – like grains, refined sugar, and high omega-6 vegetable oils (plus chronic stress, poor sleep, and all that other good stuff ) – are things to which we’ve only recently been exposed. When we are exposed to them in excess, like in say 21st century America, it generally results in poor health. Hence our current predicament.
Read MoreA couple weeks ago, I wrote about how becoming an efficient fat-burner helps mitochondrial function, and last week I went over some of the nutrients and supplements most important for your mitochondria. All good and all useful, but today I’m going to talk about another route: exercise. It makes intuitive sense that mitochondria are profoundly affected by exercise, doesn’t it? They are the power plants of the cells (and that goes for muscle cells), they are the organelles that convert fat, protein, and glucose into usable energy – and continuously producing ample amounts of cellular energy to lift heavy things, run really fast (or really far at a slower pace), or jump high is what exercise is all about. What I like about exercise is that it’s an entirely self-contained lifestyle modification. Modifying your energy pathways from sugar to fat and obtaining certain nutrients requires eating different foods and different amounts of those foods, and supplementing (obviously) requires taking supplements. But exercise is entirely up to you. If you want to. It’s a subtle distinction, but an important one. And an empowering one, if you ask me.
Read MoreI receive a lot of emails from folks worried about losing too much weight on the Primal Blueprint, underweight readers who need to gain weight, or the formerly overweight who have reached their target weight and wish to stay put. No, they don’t outnumber the questions from overweight readers, but that’s to be expected given the obesity rates in industrialized countries, from which most of MDA’s readers hail. Anyway, with the frequency of those emails increasing, I decided to take a look through the archives for pertinent posts. Other than the post on how to gain weight and build muscle, I realized that gaining weight hasn’t been addressed at length on MDA. I’ve explained how to pack on muscle mass, but what about the folks who aren’t going to squat heavy and don’t care about getting 70’s big?
Is Primal right for those people? I’m talking about:
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Ⓒ 2023 Mark's Daily Apple
