The New Evolution Diet: The Smart Way to Lose Weight, Feel Great and Live Longer
Last read January 20, 2022
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28 highlights.
Why, then, does this same genetic material, which once expressed health and muscular leanness in our ancestors, now express obesity and chronic illness? The answer is in the interaction between our genes and their surroundings – in other words, our modern, affluent society. In short, we are genetically engineered to thrive in a different world.
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We are, in essence, programmed to be lazy overeaters.
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The list is long and depressingly familiar: obesity, adult-onset diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, and so on. Each of these modern ailments is recognised to be a sickness of metabolism and inflammation. Something in modern life is disturbing the internal systems that evolution handed down to us.
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Each child born today carries genes that prepare it for the life of a hunter-gatherer, the occupation of every human who has ever lived except for we few generations who came after the recent invention of agriculture 10,000 years ago.
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Many of the foods we eat today are completely novel substances from an evolutionary perspective. We do know that our predecessors were incomparably better nourished than we are, and that they were very powerful, fit and not fat. Their activity levels are more typical of elite athletes than office workers.
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Our ancestors had a higher probability of death at every age than we do, but they lived a smaller portion of their lives in disability. Modern humans live longer but age more rapidly than our prehistoric ancestors, and we live more of our lives in chronic illness. (This, arguably, is better than not living at all.) Our forebears were fit well into their advanced years. A good deal of what we call ‘normal ageing’ is a modern condition that is more akin to disease than any natural state of growing older.
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Enjoy the pleasure of food and do not count or restrict calories. Eat a diet low in glucose and starch that is similar (but not identical) to the one humans lived with for thousands of years as human metabolism evolved.
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Do not starve yourself, but do go hungry episodically, for brief periods. That just means you should practise partial fasting once a week or so. An easy way to do that is to skip meals when you have other things to do.
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Exercise less, not more, but with more playfulness and intensity. Exercise for the pleasure of the sensations, not to burn calories. Exercise to create a beautiful, strong body with a high resting metabolism and a large physiological capacity to move through life easily and handle stress and challenges easily.
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Muscle is medicine; it releases many substances that promote health. Fat is poison; it sends forth chemicals that disrupt metabolism and promote chronic disease and ageing. Building muscle alters metabolism to direct energy and nutrients to our brain and muscle and deny them to fat. By becoming slender and muscular we can reach a balance of fat and muscle that makes it easy to maintain weight in a stable range.
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They do not include cashews, which are toxic to eat raw; ‘raw’ cashews are actually processed, though not roasted, and are high in carbohydrates.
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If seeds were too tasty and nutritious, the plant world would never have survived this long. There is an evolutionary arms race fought between plants and the animals that eat them. A highly nutritious plant that did not defend itself or its seeds would become extinct. Thus seeds contain many toxins, anti-nutrients such as lectins, chemicals such as plant oestrogens (which chemically castrate the males that eat them), acids that interfere with mineral metabolism or proteins that damage the eater’s intestines.
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Here’s another good reason to keep your workouts short: the physical stress causes the release of adrenaline, which mobilises fat for burning. But if the exertion goes on too long, the body will release another stress hormone, cortisol, which we don’t want, at least not now (it will be released, moderately, later on to help heal the exhausted muscles).
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The main goal here is to reach for intensity. I don’t want this to sound scary, but each workout needs to take you to an extreme. Your body should be required to do something it has never done before.
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Women do not have sufficient testosterone to build serious muscle mass even if they wanted to. For that you’d need to inject testosterone or a related steroid. Working out with weights won’t make you big – just strong.
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Eating right after a workout also suppresses gene expression. If you go to the gym hungry and stay that way for an hour after you’re through, you are burning more fat, improving your hormonal state, and therefore taking maximum advantage of all that hard work.
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Finally, the fact that too much aerobic exercise causes harmful oxidation should also be taken as a sign that, from an evolutionary perspective, our bodies are not well adapted to jogging. The mortality curve is J-shaped: it declines with exercise, hits a bottom, and then rises. The over-exercised fare no better than the under-exercised.
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Like economies – like the movie industry – your body is a complex, decentralised system poised between chaos and order, a constantly changing situation that is, second by second, atom by atom, also adapting to those changes. All this ran counter to the popular illusion that what happens inside our bodies is a stable, linear, orderly process controlled by the head office – the brain – which dictates the proper actions of everything below.
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The Richter law of earthquakes says that the most common quakes are small, and the rare big ones do nearly all the damage. This relationship between low frequency and high impact is found again and again, in various fields of science, business and elsewhere.
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All human brains are biased toward excess energy intake and low energy expenditure,
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Your liver, muscles and fat are actually capable of supplying enough glucose to keep the brain fed without help from external sources, as you get from carbs. But in order for that mechanism to work properly, you need to lay off bread, baked goods, anything with sugar of any type, or grains such as corn, rice, etc. Give it a try.
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Increase and maintain your muscle by challenging it on a regular basis, which means you need to move it against the stress of resistance. For most of us, that will require some time at the gym, lifting weights. You must also feed your muscle tissue with sufficient protein to fuel its growth. Rest it, too, so the muscle can restore itself.
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Exercise. Move your body in a way that will bring you joy. Beyond that, you need to find a way to relieve or even dispel all the long-term emotional and psychological stresses that are doing you no good.
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why would you want to be a vegetarian? There are reasons for making that choice, I concede, but they have nothing to do with health, function or longevity.
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What we call ‘normal’ ageing is in reality the long-term effect of sedentary living combined with carbohydrate abuse. It’s the accumulation of damage from too little exertion and too much insulin.
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your level of C-reactive protein, normally tested in a metabolic panel, is one reliable measure of inflammation. High levels are predictive of atherosclerosis and heart disease. A great deal of inflammation is a function of bad diet and insufficient activity. If you know how strong someone is, what their insulin level is and how inflamed they are, you know quite a lot about how long they can expect to live. You can also predict how long that person will be free of chronic disease, and how much time (if any) they will spend in a nursing home.
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first steps to ensure a healthy old age need to be taken while you are still young: get a good education, save your money and don’t take unnecessary risks.
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It appears that when the body has only fat to burn instead of glucose, it is a signal to genes that nutrition is scarce, so they must keep themselves in good repair.
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