As you know, I am a fan of Ayurveda. One of the greatest living Ayurvedic physicians in the world, Dr. Brihaspati Dev Triguna, told me that going to bed regularly at 10:00 PM each night was the number one health promoting habit people could adopt. Many of the greatest minds from alternative medical systems echo similar advice: follow a regular schedule of eating, sleeping and exercise to build robust health.
I also enjoy statistics and recently I was reading The Black Swan author Nassim Nicholas Taleb's website. I came across his post on Ancestral Lifestyle. He espouses advice that is diametrically opposed to the time-tested advice I just described. I tend to trust advice from systems such as Ayurveda because it has the advantage of being tested over a greater period of time than things we have dreamed up in the last few years or decades. Nevertheless, I am intrigued by the concept of an Ancestral Lifestyle built around randomness of routine. Here is what Nassim Nicholas Taleb said about his own experiments in this area:
Skeptical-empirical lifestyle & ecological conservatism: try to replicate as much as feasible the type of randomness that prevailed in our natural, ancestral environment --even if it "does not make sense". Defer to nature, not to your intuition. It does not mean that the ancestral world is necessarily better --it is just a default assumption that what has been around for a long time is more robust and more stable than what is less seasoned. And mother nature's ecological intelligence is vastly superior to that of humans (particularly academic scientists).
It looks like we need randomness in both energy output and expenditure, with a negative correlation between the two. Just consider that we worked harder when hungry (thus compounding the deficit), and conserved energy during periods of feeding --exactly the opposite of the dictates of Platonic "equilibrium". The effect is to make our net energy "lumpier": large deficits followed by large excesses, followed of course by large deficits, etc.
I am discovering from the literature (under Art De Vany's guidance and based on his ideas on metabolic switches) that three meals a day is for morons --we need episodes of hunger punctuated brief by periods of replenishing. Hunger improves insulin sensitivity, brain function, etc. So it is a good idea to, counterintuitively, fast on days when we need the energy, rather than the opposite. Our Platonic "make sense" indicates that you need to "eat well" during a period of physical stress --the opposite holds true empirically: fasting chemo patients do much much better. Without actual testing, every cancer patient has been told to "eat well but not excessively".
The same applies to thirst.
Stochastic sleep: I have not seen anything on the subject in the literature, but I am also realizing that stochastic sleeping periods might be good for us. I have been traveling on red eye flights and went through such memorable experiences as a whole night standing at Mumbai airport (there were no seats available and I needed to stay near the gate). After a sleepless night. I always manage to catch up, as I design my own schedule. I am now discovering that sleep if vastly more enjoyable after periods of deprivation --much like the taste of water under extreme thirst.
So, by tinkering, I figured out that I fare best under the following conditions: no breakfast, working out randomly (but in a lumpy way: long walks & intense weight lifting without a scheduled time limit), "working" randomly, fasting when working out, avoiding modern carbs (and modernized fruits), avoiding contact with economists and finance idiots, taking red eye flights & fasting during episodes of jet lag and similar physical stressors.
I cannot say that I agree with everything Taleb says, but I do want to learn more about these ideas. I just wish he had been more exacting when it comes to his use of the words intellect and intuition when he said, "defer to nature, not to yourintuition." If Taleb had said, "defer to your intuition, not your intellect" instead, his comments would have been more consistent with my use of these terms. He nails it when he says, "And mother nature's ecological intelligence is vastly superior to that of humans (particularly academic scientists)." That statement succintly describes why I have more trust in Ayurveda than I do in allopathic medicine. Taleb clearly understands the limitations of the left-brained intellect. He does understand the value of tapping into nature's intelligence. He may not, however, understand that nature's intelligence and human intuition have an intimate relationship. (Or maybe he is just referring to the type of intuition left-brained academic scientists possess - i.e., often not very well developed.)
For one who has a modest degree of mastery (or just sufficient experience) with sustained higher states of consciouness,nature's intelligence and your intuition will, by definition, be in close agreement. And your heart (traditionally, the true seat of intelligence) will be integrated with your mind. On that basis I can say, defer to your intuition and your true intelligence, not your intellect. (I don't think this restatement fundamentally differ's from Taleb's intent - it is just a matter of semantics.)
To break free of the limitations of the "facts" that have been stuffed into our intellects over the course of our lives and of our habit of left-brain, egocentric thinking, it does help to experiment with unconventional approaches, exactly as Taleb is doing. I admire his courage to find his own truth. He clearly knows that it is unwise to trust left-brained academic scientists when it comes to our health (or to finance/economics). In addition to that, I believe it is wise to trust time-tested systems like Ayurveda. While respecting the traditional knowledge, one can verify what works for one's self through careful observations - what Taleb calls "tinkering". Keep in mind that Taleb is a highly trained scientist, so tinkering to him most assuredly involves careful observation and probably represents what I would call subjective research.
Even when it comes to my reliance on time-tested traditional systems of knowledge like Ayurveda, there is a lot of similarity with Taleb's thinking. His approach is based on going back tens of thousands of years in human history and trying to understand what worked best for early humans with a genetic makeup like our own. Where we differ is that I do not believe the limited knowledge we have of the evolution and lifestyle of early Homo sapiens tens of thousands of years ago rivals the knowledge that is preserved today in ancient systems like Ayurveda. My approach might be to apply the ideas of playful randomness within the Ayurvedic framework rather than on the basis of our very limited understanding of the early Homo sapiens lifestyle.
Taleb says he is working under the guidance of Art De Vany. I want to share the following information from De Vany's publication about Evolutionary Fitness (which is where Taleb's ideas originate), available on De Vany's website (linked above).
This is a sketch of the ideas that are developed more fully in the book. The health
and fitness strategies developed fully in the book are based on a few key ideas:
1. The human mind and body are non-linear dynamic systems poised in a far-
from-equilibrium attractor. Health, fitness and diet are dynamic concepts.
Linear, static thinking (counting calories consumed and expended) is com-
pletely inadequate for devising effective strategies for health and fitness.
2. Human form and energy metabolism are adaptations to the evolutionary
environment. Virtually all of our human and prehuman ancestors lived as
hunter-gatherers in an environment dominated by Ice Ages.
3. Insulin resistance spares glucose for the brain and was an essential adaptation
to the glucose scarcity during the Ice Ages. In a modern world abundant
in cheap and readily available carbohydrate, insulin resistance sets us up
for hyperinsulemia (chronically elevated insulin) which is a major factor in
almost all modern diseases.
4. Hyperinsulemia and hypoexertion (wasting away of the lean mass of the
body through inactivity) are the most important health risks (the National
Institutes of Health) in Western cultures.
5. A conservative and effective strategy for attaining superior health and fitness
is to counter hyperinsulemia and hypoexertion by incorporating diet and ac-
tivity patterns from our evolutionary past.
6. An evolutionary diet is not a "diet". In the conventional meaning, being
on a "diet" implies that you are restricting calories (as in a prescription)
and eating in a habitual manner. Evolutionary eating is not a diet, but a
natural way of eating. Properly considered, the purpose of a diet is to provide
nutrition and maintain health, not to lose weight.
7. In the Evolutionary Fitness Diet you consume abundant simple, fresh plant
foods rich in minerals, flavonoids, phenols, and phytochemicals, substances
that coevolved over millenia with humans and that no manufactured drugs or
substances could reproduce with present technology. The low carbohydrate
and near zero raw glucose content of the diet, combined with the natural
antioxidants provide protection from glucose-mediated oxidative damage to
body proteins; the advanced glycation end products that accelerate aging and
the stiffness caused by cross-linked proteins in connective tissues.
8. You do not eat in a habitual and highly regulated way; indeed, variation in
foods and caloric intake is an essential element of natural eating. Your food
is high in protein (by modern standards, but moderate in terms of the protein
intakes of hunter-gatherers), moderate in fat (but balanced in Omega 3 and
6 composition), and low in carbohydrate. It contains no grains, milk, beans
or processed foods. There is no caloric restriction because you eat only
nutritionally dense, low calorie food and your appetite is reset to become a
healthy guide to your nutritional needs.
9. An evolutionary activity pattern is mixed and varied. It contains brief, in-
termittent episodes of highly intense physical action mixed with languid pe-
riods and play. Healthy activities mimic the patterns of wild animals and
contain elements of chaos and order. Power laws that are typical of self-
organized, far-from-equilibrium, dynamic systems, describe such patterns.
10. Power law training, which is developed in the book, mimics the ancestral
activity pattern and promotes hormone drives that counter hyperinsulemia
and build lean body mass.
11. Most fitness programs, whether aerobics or weight training, are too unvaried
and routine; they result in overtraining, depletion of the body's antioxidant
stores, compromised immunity, and are a chronic load on the body. They
take too much time and are ineffective. Dieting has a 95% failure rate wastes
lean body mass, and is unhealthful.
12. The evolutionary fitness diet and exercise program is very effective, takes
little time, and is fun. It is the right way to feed and care for your hunter-
gatherer body and mind.
And finally, I will end by pasting some information I found in an article to which I have lost the link to the original source. The whole article wasn't that good anyway, but the follow section, which I saved, is somewhat similar to the conclusions supported by the well-researched work of Dr. Campbell in The China Study and Dr. Fuhrman in Eat to Live.
Ancestral Foods: Plants
The vegetable foods available to prehistoric foragers grew naturally, without cultivation, and included nuts, leafy vegetables, beans, fruits, flowers, gums, fungi, stems, and other similar items. These had been primate staples for tens of millions of years, but at some point along the hominid (human-like) evolutionary track, the digging stick came into use. This simple implement widened dietary breadth by providing access to roots, bulbs, and tubers, which were plentiful but previously inaccessible sources of food energy. The nutrient values of such foods vary naturally, but if one pools the several hundred representative vegetable foods that hunter-gatherers utilized during the twentieth century and then compared their averaged nutrient content with the mean values of vegetable foods commonly consumed in Western nations, several noteworthy differences emerge. For example, wild-plant foods provide less energy per unit weight. A 3.5-ounce (100 gram) portion of the fruits and vegetables that our ancestors ate would yield, on average, only about one-third the calories that 3.5 ounces of contemporary vegetable food provide. This is primarily because so much of our current plant-food intake is derived from high-energy cereal grains--rice, corn, wheat, and the like. Stone Age humans knew that grains were a potential food source. However, given the technology available to them, the work required to process wild cereals into digestible form was generally excessive compared with the work needed to gather and process other types of wild plants. Foragers generally viewed grains as emergency goods to be used during times of shortage. It was only "late" in the human career, perhaps thirty thousand years ago in Australia and between ten an fifteen thousand years ago elsewhere (for example, the Near East), that evidence of routine cereal-grain use became common.
Another difference between the vegetable foods of the hunter-gatherers and those of Western nations is illustrated as follows. The nutrient content of wild-plant foods is high, especially when one considers the ratio of nutrients to calories. While there is, of course, considerable individual variation among these foods, a mixed grocery bag of the fruits and vegetables available to ancestral humans would provide substantially more vitamins, minerals, and fiber than would a comparably representative collection of contemporary plant foods. In many cases, vitamins and some minerals are artificially added to current foods, making them "enriched." This enrichment process is less successful for adding fiber and is not yet feasible for phytochemicals, which are plant constituents that influence the body's metabolic reactions. Phytochemicals can be considered semi-vitamins, but their total number (at least dozens, perhaps hundreds) is unknown and their mode of action is poorly understood. However, the importance of phytochemicals for optimal health is becoming increasingly well established. Ancestral human biology became genetically adapted to the phytochemicals provided by fruits and vegetables over hundreds to thousands of millennia. The phytochemicals of modern-day cereal grains, in contrast, are relative newcomers to the human metabolism. It is perhaps for this reason that fruit and vegetable intake appears to reduce cancer susceptibility and consumption of cereal grain products has little or no such effect.
Lastly, the plant foods available to ancestral humans afforded a fairly balanced ratio of essential polyunsaturated fatty acids. Like essential amino acids, the body does not synthesize these fatty acids--humans must obtain them from their diet. Polyunsaturated fatty acids are necessary for cell membrane fabrication, especially in the brain, and they are also the basic molecules from which eicosanoids, a large class of important locally acting hormones, are made. Essential fatty acids are divided into two families: omega 6's and omega 3's. Both types are required in mammalian physiology, but they produce opposing biochemical effects, so roughly equal amounts in the diet are desirable. Their effects on blood clotting provide a good example. If there is too much omega 6 in a person's system, their blood clots too easily, which increases the likelihood of coronary thrombosis (heart attack). An overabundance of omega 3 in a person's system reduces blood clotting excessively and increases the risk of cerebral hemorrhage (one kind of stroke). Roughly equal dietary intake of each type of these polyunsaturated fatty acids avoids both undesirable consequences. Unfortunately, in recent decades the use of safflower, corn, sunflower, and cottonseed for spreads and cooking oils has distorted the ratio. These materials contain fifty to one hundred times more omega 6 than omega 3 and, overall, Americans now consume ten to fifteen times more omega 6's than omega 3's.
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