Share |

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

The Primal Diet & Running

As I was reading "Born to Run" by Christopher McDougall, which you all know I loved, I was sharing a lot of the information from the book.

Well, wouldn't you know, Marcus took off running with the information, researched it, added in the primal diet and Voila! Blog.

I'm sharing it here because I edited it for him and I think he did a superb job of tying these things together. Let me know what you think.


The Primal Diet and Running

One of the more common questions I get is: "What makes you believe that eating raw meat and unpasteurized dairy (fat) is the way?"

Well, to understand the theory of what food to eat one must understand human origins, and most importantly, how we evolved and what we were meant to eat. So, first understand that the way modern humans prepare food is relatively new. And when I mean prepare, I am not talking about the processed food revolution of the past 60 or 70 years. I'm talking about the first significant and supposedly the greatest advancement in food preparation, which is of course is cooking with fire.

So the questions are:
  1.  How did we prepare and eat our food before we cooked it and for how long?
  2. And was the post-cooking period in history a significant enough amount of time for our digestive systems to have evolved to deal with cooking easily and effectively?
Well, let's do the math.

As I said before, humans have been eating this processed-food diet for approximately 60-70 years, and prior to that we have been eating some sort of natural, agricultural-based diet starting around 10,000 years ago (The Neolithic period). Humans on a whole, in the form they are now (Homosapiens), have been around for an estimated 150 thousand to 200 thousand years. So, for the first 120 thousand years (The Paleolithic period) or so we evolved to be hunter gatherers using only the simplest stone, wood, and bone tools with the limited use of fire created by lightning for heat at night and during the winter. There is some evidence we eventually started cooking stem and root tubers, but whether we used fire to cook our meat, that is up for debate.

One bit of human evolution that may support Paleolithic man's primarily raw diet is how we used to hunt. The common perception of the Stone Age man is him hunting in small packs with spears and bows, killing game in some grandiose and melodramatic way just like in the movies. Then they would bringing back the kill to the celebratory cheers and adulation of the women and children of their tribe. But in real life it went much differently than the movies depict it, as usual. Experts now report that our first evolutionary increase in intelligence is intimately connected to how we hunted and the eating of raw flesh and particularly fat.

How...?

Well, intelligence is all about brain size, and brain size is all about nutrition, specifically protein and fat. So how do small, soft, relatively week flesh bags (humans) take down massive and dangerous wild animals for the food they need to evolve their large brain size? The spears and bows you say.

Here the interesting part though...

To invent tools to plan and hunt large sources of game Stone Age man needed to evolve a bigger brain, but to evolve a bigger brain he needed to consume ample amounts of nutrition i.e big game first. It's kinda the chicken or the egg conundrum. The reality is our brains did get bigger and we did start using tools and strategy.

So how did man hunt large game without tools or weapons keeping in mind how frail he is compared to the rest of the animal kingdom? It would seem impossible except for one unexpected evolutionary advantage. The way we breath. Yeah, I know, you're saying, "I don't think my breathing is that special or an advantage. I mean, 'In and out' right?"

Well, yes and no... Yes, all mammals do breathe just like you, in and out, but you have the distinction, as do all humans, that your breathing and your diaphragm are not connected to your gate like most animal's gate and breathing are.  What does this mean? That we humans can run and breathe independently of each other. If you wanted to, you could run fast and breathe slow or run slow and breathe fast. For most animals, their inhales and exhales are perfectly synchronized to their gate. They have to breathe fast to run fast. How is this an advantage for us? Unlike most animals, we can regulate the way we breathe. This allow us be more efficient breathers over longer distances. We are the long distant champs of the wild.

This is how we hunted big game before we had the weapons to do so. We ran them down until they could not run anymore. Yup, we ran things to death.

Running has been with us as long as we've been human, maybe longer. So no melodramatic movie scene showing the superior intelligence of man over the beasts. More like the entire tribe taking part in a ritualistic marathon hunting experience.

The question is how does Stone Age man running down his prey have anything to do with not cooking their prey? Put yourself in his place. You are part of a small hunting party of the best runners followed by the weaker runners of the tribe, the elderly and women carrying small children. You pick up the trail of your prey and you start tracking it with your hunting party. After about 20 or so miles, your prey stops due to exhaustion and it's yours. The slower runners catch up and there you are, the the whole tribe.

Do you try and carry your 1500 pound plus kill home, 20 or more miles in the hot sun understanding that meat is your life blood and that it will probably take twice as long to get it back as it did to find it? Will you chance the meat spoiling, being stolen by predators, or your tribe being attacked? Of course not.

In reality, what would actually happen is the elderly, women and children (who are usually the slower runners) would catch up to the kill and they would skin it, gut it, and then eat it right there. The whole tribe would gorge themselves on all the meat they could, and cut up the rest to dry in the sun for travel jerky.

This is the way it was for at least 120 thousand years of human history, maybe more. But that was quite a while ago, right? Not really. We've been eating the cooked farm based diet for about 12 thousand years and that is just a drop in the bucket in genetic evolutionary terms. It takes about 10 thousand years for small genetic changes to evolve, like hair or eye color. To deal with this new style of food we would have to change our entire digestive track and pancreas. It's obvious that human digestive tracks have not had enough time to evolve the ability to properly deal with this relatively new style of eating (cooked), not to mention the crazy franken-foods and pesticide-developed foods we've consumed in the last 70 years.

What does this all mean.?

Humans have been doing two thing to stay healthy before they where even humans, and should continue doing so if they want to stay healthy: running and eating raw animals. 

We all where Born to Run  and eat Primal. It's our way.
















Here is a video that goes into a little bit of what I was talking about, and also the upside of barefoot running. Check it out. I'm a fan.




More Interesting Katie Strand World Posts

New Music
&
Posts 
at
Katie Strand Music
Posted by Katie Strand at 3:13 PM
Labels: , , , ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Download Instructions

DOWNLOAD INSTRUCTIONS TO ALL SONG BUYERS:
After clicking on your song of choice, click ADD TO CART. You will then sign up for lulu and pay for song. Then follow this link or click here for

COMPLETE DOWNLOAD AT:
http://www.lulu.com/account/downloads.php