We can probably go ahead and blame Dr. Loren Cordain for sticking us with “the Paleo Diet”, who published a book by the same name. It’s a good book, don’t get us wrong, but it’s also not the definitive guide to “paleo”-eating, though likely many of us discovered the general tenets of our diet from Cordain’s work. The problem with the label are many, not the least of which is when people say they “eat paleo”, they’re not necessarily refering to Cordian’s Paleo Diet. Cordain is known in the paleosphere as being somewhat less supportive of saturated fat as other paleo gurus, and tends to distance himself from other foods, like dairy, that many of us still consume. We don’t know just how many people eat according to Cordain versus those who eat a paleo diet modeled more after Robb Wolf’s The Paleo Solution, or a “Primal” diet ala Mark Sisson’s The Primal Blueprint, or after the many other works out there that are based on or very similar to The Paleo Diet. Yet when we look at the loudest or most outspoken voices in the paleosphere, it sure does seem like Cordain’s camp is among the minority.

Unfortunately, the media hasn’t bothered to look into this paleo brouhaha with any investigative sense, because it likely doesn’t pay to do so. It’s easier to lump all of these dietary variations into “the caveman diet” and call it a day. If the media needs a specific fact on the diet, they just go to any paleo-like diet book and pick a fact that helps make their point. In many cases, it’s Cordain’s book.

We can’t blame Cordain, though. He never claimed to have have invented the diet, he merely researched and marketed it well. It’s rather unfortunate because in order to sell a book providing dietary advice, you have to cater to fat people and market the book as a weight-loss guide. And though the name “Paleo Diet” is catchy, it’s also misleading, because it pushes the idea of dietary reenactment a little too far. While those within the paleosphere know that re-enactment is not the diet’s goals, the media doesn’t, and in turn, people who rely on the media for facts instead get fed a lot of bullshit.

The confusion doesn’t end there, though. Over at Paleo Hacks, Kamal tried to put together a “Master List of Paleo Diet Variations“, and while arguably a valid effort, the list and responses read more like a parody than anything else.

So change the name, Sherlock.

We’re not the first person to suggest we stop calling it the “Paleo Diet”, but guys like Robb Wolf are quick to chime in that we kids never had it so good. In their day, they would have been happy to have the kind of support and awareness that paleo eating has today, and renaming the diet would set the whole movement back. Wolf has a point, but it doesn’t do the paleosphere any favors when there’s a growing misconception about the diet, and little movement among Paleo gurus to “formalize” a common link. Our modest suggestion at Paleo Hacks was to do just that and call these variations sub-diets of the “Paleo Template”. That way, people can still keep saying they “eat paleo” even though they’re not all eating the same stuff. It also distinguishes the greater movement from Cordain’s work, and seems a reasonable solution. No one took the bait.

Instead, everyone seems content in their own paleo camps, at best calling the greater movement “ancestral” or “evolutionary”. At worst, there’s somewhat of a growing dischord between camps, as Richard Nikolay recently remarked:

But it seems to me that the whole thing has really gone tribal, with virtually all the trappings of tribalism, including which faction of the meta-tribe one belongs to, identified by which t-shirt and style of Vibrams they wear. 

Richard goes on to express thoughts we’ve mulled about for some time now, and that’s the distance a lot of the more prominent paleo gurus have placed between themselves and the “paleo” label:¹

…those I find myself most in line with while not feeling a need to agree with everything, don’t really wear a paleo badge, nor extend the secret handshake. Paul Jaminet. Martin Berkhan. Stephan Guyenet. Kurt Harris. Even Lyle McDonald. While none of these guys call themselves paleo, they all care about good nutrition, quality food, and a fat loss approach that doesn’t amount to the equivalent of: eat as much fat as you can and magic will happen…with the caveat that there’s no such thing as too much bacon; and oh, by the way, have you tried the “paleo” brownies, pancakes & cookies?

There’s something to be said for the approaches these folks have, and even more for the fact that they don’t all make money off their research. It’s a logical fallacy to say someone’s advice is invalid because they make money off it, but there’s also a degree of natural skepticism that accompanies someone recommending “whole foods” who is also trying to sell you a dietary supplement, another eBook promising better health, and advice contrary to conventional wisdom. Fortunately, that kind of behavior isn’t too common in the paleosphere, but we’ve seen it as a growing trend.

It’s not just about eating, right?

Things don’t get simpler when we start thinking there’s a difference between eating paleo and being paleo. Russ Crandall at Highbrow Paleo makes a case that people shouldn’t say they are paleo because it makes them self-identify with a group, creating the dreaded us vs. them mentality. Instead, we should focus more on the benefits we seek from foods, and less on aspects of the diet that may alienate ourselves from others. Crandall has a point too, but in reality, we’re not convinced most people care whether we use “eat” or “are” to qualify our paleo-ness. Most people who say they are paleo simply mean they eat according to paleo principles, not that they’re somehow engrossed in a lifestyle transcending diet. The choice of words preceding “paleo” is insignificant, because most any other aspect of a paleo lifestyle not having to do with food is done by people who don’t eat paleo, too.

There are Vegans who wear Vibram FiveFingers and go “no ‘poo”. There are Crossiftters and MovNat’ers who eat the SAD². And there are plenty of “paleo” folks who don’t do any of this stuff.

There are also plenty of “paleo” folks who supplement with creatine, protein shakes, and synthetic vitamins and minerals, even though these things aren’t whole foods and therefore “aren’t paleo”. Labels schmabels.

We say it doesn’t matter whether you call yourself paleo or simply say you eat paleo because to an outsider, it all pretty much means the same thing. They don’t eat what I eat is the message people receive, and everything else is details.

Though, the details matter, because they identify you as either being honest, or a hypocrit. We found it rather surprising when we started our paleo journey over a year ago that the paleosphere talked about sustainable food, but so little on sustainability in general. Being close with nature is great when you’re working out and need to relieve stress, but once that’s over, time to get right back to our 21st century ways and buy plastic shit made in China and throw away those paper cups, right?

So even if you hear someone say they are paleo, you should know it’s probably a big lie anyway, and all the more reason to assume they just mean they eat paleo. Anyone who’s fully vested in paleo ideals beyond just the dietary would place a little more value on green ethics, after all.³

It’s about the money, stupid.

We honestly believe there are people in the movement who want to help, but the monetary aspect is inescapable. So much of the paleosphere is built around weight loss that a lot of otherwise good information gets lost under how do I shed these last five pounds? Cordain once said that in order to get The Paleo Diet published, his publisher required that the book present itself in a way that appeals to people wanting to lose weight. Yet in the recently published The Paleo Answer, which Cordain claims to have had more control over, the subtitle is “7 Days to Lose Weight, Feel Great, Stay Young”. So much for getting away from the weight-loss emphasis.

Can we blame Cordain if this is what it takes to fund the research? Some will argue that by catering to the weight-loss crowd, it’s easier to get the word out, but the content will inherently shift according to the target audience. For example, it took the paleosphere some time to adapt to the idea that low-carb was primarily beneficial to those seeking to lose weight, while those who were already lean could reintroduce carbs without issue. One has to wonder if many paleo books didn’t focus on weight loss, would their messages have been different from the get-go, or would the research have been steered slightly differently.

Then again, being all about the money doesn’t make paleo unique. After all, a primary reason the SAD is such a problem is because corporate greed got in the way of real food. But it does mean the paleosphere needs to retain a degree of skepticism about itself, questioning both new and old theories when confronted with evidence to the contrary. More importantly, it means calling out people within the paleosphere when their actions and ideas are based on bad science, or simple pseudoscience. To do otherwise is to do the movement a disservice, especially when there are individuals modifying their stances to fit evolving facts.

All’s not lost.

Of course, one of the merits of the paleo movement is that unlike other dietary programs, the former is adaptable. Even Cordain has loosened his stance on saturated fat since The Paleo Diet was published. Evolving with new facts and research is a major strength of the paleosphere, and we need to remember not to lose sight of that.

Perhaps what we call our style of eating isn’t as important as understanding why we choose to eat that way. Getting caught up in a label is a poor way to make a decision, especially if we forget the fundamental tenets of why we opted to go paleo in the first place. And we need to remember that a lot of these tenets are praised by those who don’t share all of our opinions. For example, before we embarked on our paleo journey, we found a lot of great ideas in Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, and still do today. Yet Pollan is easily dismissed among paleo circles, despite the fact that he’s endorsed whole, real foods for years, and declared nutrient breakdowns to be inconsequential compared to the synergies various native diets provide. It’s taken the paleosphere how long now to admit low carb or high fat is not the definitive answer?

Since the last Ancestral Health Symposium, there’s been a degree of infighting in the paleosphere, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing if it’s science we’re arguing over. There’s a need to question the established paradigm, and just as great a need to ensure that we’re getting the new one right. And if what comes out of that questioning isn’t a more qualified definition for a Paleo Template, then at least let’s get the underlying facts sorted sans label.

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Every couple weeks we read about someone else taking up a private journal with Day One, a journaling app available for both iOS and OS X. One of the key benefits of the app is its cloud-based synchronization, allowing you to use iCloud or Dropbox to keep entries updates across devices. The app is also acknowledged for its rather good-looking interface, which sets it apart from similar apps available in the App Store.

We picked up Day One for iOS several months back, but didn’t use it too extensively.We’ve wanted to keep a private journal for many years now, but find that we never etch enough time into our schedule to make it happen.¹

Day One is fairly simplistic as far as journaling apps go. There’s limited Markdown support at the moment, and no integration with social networking sites, nor with embedded media outside of hyperlinks. In a way, that’s one of Day One’s strengths, because it focuses you on writing, not reviewing what you posted on Twitter earlier that day, or where you checked in via FourSquare.²

Where we’ve found Day One to excel is in writing short journal entries and tracking some amount of information we’d otherwise lose sight of. For example, we’ve used other apps to track lifestyle activities like meals eaten, workout results, and general physical condition. These tend to be activity-specific apps, like Livestrong’s MyPlate, or Azumio’s Heart Rate monitor. Day One allows us to compile all this information into one daily log, which may not offer fancy graphs for tracking this data visually, but still serves as a useful log for later reference.

It’d be great if the various tracking apps we use could easily export to Day One using a URL scheme,³ but Launch Center already supports starting a new Day One entry with clipboard information, so as long as a given tracking app will let you copy information to the clipboard, a simple workflow follows accordingly.⁴

While we’re still not using Day One for longform entries, the app remains on our iPhone and iPad to track other daily notes, likes foods eaten and how we felt accordingly thereafter. It’s great for this, and we wonder why we didn’t think of using Day One to journal these types of activities earlier.

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Paul Graham wrote a great piece on “stuff”, and how the trend of recent decades has been to amass an inordinate amount of it. It’s a message that some other bloggers have made as well, because there really is something to be said for the simplicity of having less stuff and living a more streamlined life. On a recent cross-country move where we had little personal belongings with us on the coast-to-coast drive, we found it rather refreshing to have little on our minds other than the drive ahead and locating a suitable rental at our destination. Evenings were spent with family, and our primary outlet into the rest of the world was our iPad, which is itself a statement of simplicity compared to computers of yesterday.

But this experience isn’t why we link to Paul Graham’s article. Rather, it’s this statement of Graham’s:

Before you buy anything, ask yourself: will this be something I use constantly? Or is it just something nice? Or worse still, a mere bargain?

Most of us are probably guilty of buying something we didn’t need but that we picked up just in case, because the price seemed good. Meanwhile, we sometimes gawk at the more expensive prices associated with certain items that we really would use a lot, yet hesitate to purchase because of the up-front cost. Our philosophy has generally been to spend more money on quality items, versus buying something cheap that we’ll outgrow or have to replace in the near future because of cheaper construction. Yet, we still shy away from certain expensive items because we don’t necessarily need them, like an iPhone 4S. We do, after all, already have an iPhone 4. Some minimalists will a argue that this hesitation is just: the iPhone 4 is good enough, so skip the iPhone 4S. But Graham made a statement that’s equally valid: if we’ll use the iPhone 4S constantly, then the purchase may make more sense.

So we don’t feel as guilty about upgrading our iPhone 4 now. We advised a friend in the past that such an upgrade, based on the merits of what the new iPhone offers, is likely not worthwhile, but we’ll now revise that claim: if you use your iPhone 4 a lot, and expect to continue doing so, then upgrading to the iPhone 4S is absolutely worthwhile. More specifically, if you use the iPhone camera, and anticipate regular use of Siri, then the upgrade is definitely a functional one, and an upgrade you should really consider. If, however, you don’t use your iPhone much beyond a phone, and maybe a handful of apps, then an upgrade to the 4S is likely not worth your money.

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On Friday, we drove by two Targets, a Best Buy, and an AT&T store to see if anyone was selling the Jawbone UP early. None were. The reports we heard about UPs selling early must have been very isolated experiences, though it seems people had more success at Apple stores, who apparently are more likely to not play by the rules.¹ Both Target stores we visited had places set aside, complete with labels, for the three sizes of the UP initially available, yet employees at neither store could tell me whether they already sold out of their UP stock, or if they hadn’t received any yet. We decided to return to the AT&T store on Sunday morning.

We had sized our wrist using the printable template available at the UP site. This proved to be a waste of time, because not only did the AT&T store have demo units out to try on, but the packaging on each UP box has a plastic template included, so buyers can check for their size when in the store. It’s a nice touch, and shows Jawbone’s attention to detail. So we bought our UP, and set it up in the car on the way home.² We won’t bother to give a full review here, because we found Shawn Wall’s review to be plenty thorough for a product that’s only officially been on shelves for less than two days, but we will respond to some points he made for the sake of completeness.

The rubberized bracelet is bendable to a degree. It’s not the simplest task in the world getting it on or off your wrist, but thankfully you don’t really need to take it off given its waterproof nature.

Jawbone actually calls the bracelet water resistant, and only to a fairly shallow depth. The idea is that you can wash your hands, and even take it into the shower, without worrying about it getting damaged. We even saw a picture of someone wearing it in a shallow pool, so the idea that you can wear it most places is obviously something Jawbone wants customers to understand. But don’t think about taking the UP diving. In fact, the notion of taking this thing in the ocean makes us a bit uncomfortable, and we’d rather someone else tried it first.

When we took a shower this morning, our hesitation for getting the UP wet made us take it off. It’s not like you’ll be missing out on too much activity tracking in those few minutes of the morning anyway. Though, we did notice that the black rubberized band³ attracts dirt pretty quickly, so wearing it into the shower may not be a bad idea after all.

As far as bendability goes, the UP has to be somewhat bendable to get it on and off. But that’s only for the “ends” of the band, and the bendability is temporary. In other words, you can’t bend the UP into a different shape, or make it larger or smaller.

There’s really not much in the way of moving parts here; there is a button at one end that is used for switching modes (more on that later), and the opposite end has a cap that is pulled off to reveal the 3.5mm male jack that is used to sync the device with your mobile phone (currently iPhone-only, but Android “coming soon”).

The one thing we don’t like about the UP is that the button on one end, as well as the cap, is painted silver. We’d much rather have these match the main band colour, as we don’t expecially like the accent color. The cap is only silver on one side though, so if you put it on backwards, it appears black to all but the closest observer. A backwards cap also means you’re not proudly displaying “Jawbone” written on your jewelry; we don’t need to advertise for the company we already supported by buying their product. Depending on how much we dislike the button on the other end being an “off” colour, we may end up painting it black down the road.

One really great feature in regards to sleep is that the bracelet can be used as an alarm clock using vibration. Even better, it supposedly will wake you up out of a light sleep instead of a deep sleep by getting you up a little earlier if it can (by looking at your deep vs. light sleep somehow).

This feature worked well for us this morning, though to be fair, we didn’t sleep all that great last night anyway, and noticeably tumbled around a bunch. In this case, we were quick to feel the pulsing vibration of the alarm, but we wonder if it will wake us on days that we have a deeper sleep. Today, it woke us up 15 minutes early. We’re considering doing a side-by-side test of the UP and Sleep Cycle iPhone app to see how consistent the two are, or if one tends to go off before the other. For now, though, we expect the UP to handle our alarms equally well, if not better, with the only concern being whether the vibration is strong enough to rouse us from a deep sleep.

One of my favorite feature of the device is found in this area. You can set your bracelet to remind you to be active if you are sedentary for too long. The time range is user defined. This is great as it can remind us programmers to get out of our chairs once an hour

We’re rather fond of this feature also. We have it enabled during business hours, and its a great reminder to get up and do something, even if it’s just to pee or get some fresh water.

I do not own another pedometor, Fitbit or anything else along those lines so I cannot speak for the accuracy of the UP. It feels like the numbers are too high though.

Whether they’re too high or not, all we can say is that the “lightly active” category is cake during an average weekend, and that’s not even with workout scheduled. From noon until night yesterday, we scored over 8k steps taken, which means we can easily up our steps goal to the next level. We’ll have to see how our weekend activity compares to the average workday to see whether it’s worth adjusting our goals at this time, though.

The food diary portion of the application is well… a little underwhelming in my opinion.

We haven’t played with this feature too much yet, and honestly, we’re not too tempted considering there’s no way to count calories. We’ve used other apps to compare our caloric intake to our ideal goal (at least 3k calories a day), and the fact that such a simple feature is missing makes us feel like we’d gain little from the UP app’s inclusion of a food log. Maybe once this feature becomes more robust, we’ll be more likely to keep up with it.

Game mechanics are a huge portion to an offering such as the UP, and I feel they currently fall a little short.

We agree with Shawn here, and don’t like how simply accepting a challenge means others who accepted the challenge can suddenly see your progress. We’d prefer “private” challenges that don’t involved any reporting, or at the very least, allow users to select a username instead of their registered (true) name. Sure, the public feed only uses first names, but we’d still prefer a nickname.

The problem of the food log and the game mechanics points at the one flaw the UP currently has, and that’s a very simplistic piece of software. If Jawbone maintains a regular release schedule of updates and bug fixes, however, we can truly see the pair being a useful lifestyle assistant for some time to come.

More thoughts to follow as we spend more time with our new bracelet.

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Firstly, Jawbone products are good. Sure, we had problems with the Jawbone 2 earpiece because of a particular weak link, but overall their products are stylish and innovative. We don’t use a bluetooth headset at the moment, but we did receive the Jawbone Jambox as a birthday gift this year, and we love it. When we heard about Jawbone’s Up device, which tracks lifestyle actions, we were immediately intrigued, because we knew the engineering behind it would be good, and better than devices like the FitBit that the Up challenges for market space. Which brings us to our second point: the Up is a bracelet, which means there’s no need to hang it from your belt, waist, or pocket. Instead, it sits on your arm where, unless you’re a bracelet aficionado, is likely bare at the moment anyway; a perfect place for a device that tracks what you’re doing.

Scary Orwellian conspiracy theories about user tracking aside, the Up is the perfect N=1 logging system. Not only does it track your movement, but you can configure it to ensure you’re getting enough of it by having the Up remind you to move. This follows Cornell’s findings about sitting and standing at work. We use a standing desk at home, and tried one at work for several weeks, and while we believe it definitely has its merits, there’s something to be said for simply moving more; standing around, while perhaps beneficial in certain areas, is simply not as good as getting the opportunity to move. Regardless of what desk type you use, the Up can remind you to get more movement in, as it will vibrate to alert you when it senses minimal movement for a particular amount of time.

At night, we’ve relied on the iPhone Sleep Cycle app as our alarm clock for well over a year. The concept is simple: the app tracks movement in the bed using the iPhone’s hardware, and will set off your morning alarm up to half-an-hour before your alarm was set to go off, based on your movement patterns. In other words, if it senses movement 30 minutes before your alarm is supposed to go off, indicating that you’re likely no longer in a deep sleep, the alarm will go off. Otherwise, it will wait within that 30-minute window and sound the alarm when it does notice movement. Worst case scenario, the alarm will go off at the time you set it to, but in our use, we’ve rarely run into that problem, and always hear the alarm a little early, suggesting that the app is working as intended.

The problem with Sleep Cycle is that it requires the iPhone to be sitting on the bed, so it’s detection of movement isn’t as precise as if the iPhone were attached to your body. Some people may also not like the idea of their iPhone sitting next to their head all night, what with all those radio waves. More practically, the iPhone can be pushed off the bed, or your bed is too small for you, your partner, your cats, and all those pillows. Or maybe, -something- iOS 5 will cause Sleep Cycle to crash, or you’ll somehow accidentally exit the app by pushing the Home button. In any case, Sleep Cycle is obviously not perfect, and much of these faults are addressed by the Up, since you wear it 24/7. And, like Sleep Cycle, the Up will track your natural sleep pattern based on your movement at night, and wake you up with a vibration once it notices you’re no longer fast asleep.

Available Sunday in the basic colours,¹ the Up will replace Sleep Timer for us, and hopefully serve to better track our sleep. The software also offers “challenges”, which are novelty proposals to get you to do something you otherwise might not, whether that’s simply moving more, or getting enough sleep.² And further, the Up software includes a food log, which we hope that Jawbone expands to include calorie tracking. We hope to pick up the Jawbone Up this weekend, and write more about our experiences with it in the upcoming weeks. If we can tie this experiment in with paleo/primal living, even better.

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Over at Naturally Engineered, David Csonka gave a brief rundown of important take-aways from the 2011 Ancestral Health Symposium. We found several of these thoughts particularly interesting. Per Dr. S. Boyd Eaton, for example:

During the paleolithic, male and female equality was greater than anytime since.

This is the second time we’ve heard this. The first was in The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, in which Thom Hartmann doesn’t specify the paleolithic era exactly, but describes the equality between genders are being far greater in “Older Culture” (which is reflective in hunter-gatherer societies). We’d love to hear more from Boyd on this topic, and gain a better understanding of how he’s sourcing this determination, as we weren’t wholly convinced by Hartmann.¹ It seems that every major society from history was lead by men, and while women’s lives may have been comparatively better than women’s lives in more recent history as far as freedoms are concerned, it would seem that subservience to men is a longstanding tradition. Just how much greater was the equality between genders in the paleolithic?

Csonka goes on to mention Dr. Kevin Boyd and Dr. Michael Mew:

• Diet isn’t the only culprit in poor jaw and teeth development, mandibular muscle usage shapes the growing face.
• Use it or lose it, the massive modern reduction in masticatory effort is maladaptive for jaw development.

We keyed in on these points since we finally finished Them Us, in which Danny Vendramini talks about Neanderthal predation. Among his theories is that Neanderthals looked very different than the common stereotype, resembling something more like sasquatch than Cro Magnon man. Vendramini asserts that Neanderthals had no real chins to speak of, but the aforementioned points about jaw development makes us question this notion further. If we assume that Neanderthals were primarily meat eaters, and so more commonly ate foods that required greater bite strength, we can assume that Neanderthals developed jaws at least as developed as our own. Our ape cousins, for example, lack such jaw definition because they tend to eat softer foods, since they are more herbivorous than humans. As omnivores that evolved on a diet containing plenty of meat, it makes sense that we developed jaws capable of rending flesh, since we didn’t cut our food into bite-size pieces using utensils until much later in human history. Why should we not say the same of Neanderthals, who likely ate more meat than homo sapiens sapiens?

Chris Masterjohn wrote a summary similar to Csonka over at the The Daily Lipid, and even reflected on similar points:

[Tucker Max] argued that getting in touch with the violent part of our nature can help reduce violence. He gave as an example the fact that police with training in martial arts are much less likely to engage in brutality, because they do not panic when they face a violent situation.

It’s probably also because police with martial arts training know from practical experience how much force is necessary to neutralize someone, whereas a lack of such training may result in excessive force being used because the police don’t realize it’s excessive. And while we agree with the notion Tucker Max is aiming for here, the suggestion breaks down when we distance ourselves from violence. One extreme example is that of Adolf Hitler, who despite knowing the horrors of war from his experience in WWI, waged a campaign many times worse because he was so far removed from the suffering the average person was going through in WWII.

It’s also not clear if presenting the average person with violence (e.g. MMA) will help curb violence overall. Where an untrained individual might have fled confrontation, the same individual with a background in MMA may very well choose confrontation instead.

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Over the past couple months, we talked to several people about blood tests, and what exactly to test for. Most people place the subject squarely in the hands of their doctors, and care little about delving into the subject themselves. But as we’ve come to learn, many doctors base their findings on conventional wisdom, which can be a dangerous thing; what constitutes a “good” or “bad” value in a blood test is often subjective, and when it comes to certain factors, the recommended value may very well be sub-par even if it’s above-average when compared to the populace at large, because the populace at large is not exactly healthy.

There are several baseline blood tests that people can get, and which tests to choose is based in part on a specific individual’s situation, which a doctor can help advise about. Yet, what we’ve learned is that there are still certain tests that most everyone should get in order to establish a baseline to build from, so you know where you stand before making any significant lifestyle changes.

Comprehensive metabolic panel.

This is the generic blood test most people get when looking at things like cholesterol and, more importantly, fasting glucose. It contains several other values that may be indicators that something is wrong, but the fasting glucose test is significant because it tells you whether you’re on the road to Type II Diabetes, and are becoming (or are already) insulin resistant.

The VAP cholesterol test.

The comprehensive metabolic panel will report “basic” cholesterol information, such as total cholesterol, HDL, LDL, etc. If, by conventional wisdom, everything looks good, then your doctor likely won’t make you follow up with a VAP test, but if things do look questionable based on conventional wisdom, then getting a VAP follow-up is likely in your future. The problem with this line of thinking is that conventional wisdom is based on several theories about cardiovascular disease that are receiving a lot of criticism. In short, the argument comes down to a matter of correlation vs. causation; many argue that high cholesterol in itself is not an indicator of heart disease risk. That said, there are certain flags to look out for, and you won’t catch them unless you get a VAP test.

Of chief importance in the VAP results is the specific type of LDL you may have. “Pattern A” LDL is often described as “large and fluffy”, while “Pattern B” LDL is described as “small and dense”. It’s the former that is of concern, such that regardless of your total cholesterol value, you know something is amiss if your LDL is predominantly Pattern B. This means that even if the comprehensive metabolic panel comes back with a total cholesterol score that is within the threshold defined by conventional wisdom, you’re still missing a key indicator of health if you’re not also getting the VAP test. This is why you should get the VAP test right away, as it compliments the comprehensive metabolic panel.

25-hydroxy (Vitamin D).

Typically, vitamin D levels are not tested for when people get blood tests, and yet most people are deficient in vitamin D. Most people believe they get adequate vitamin D from dairy products, but that’s hardly true. Liquid milk is typically fortified with vitamin D,¹ and much of that isn’t absorbed by the body. Other dairy products are not fortified at all, and contain low levels of vitamin D to begin with.

The reality is that people are designed to get most of their vitamin D from the sun, but in 2011, most of us in the western world aren’t getting outside enough. By some estimates, you’d need to have 80% of your body exposed in direct sunlight for at least 30 minutes a day in order to get adequate vitamin D. This wasn’t difficult for our ancestors who spent most of their days outdoors, but is rather difficult for most office-dwelling homo sapiens today.

What the 25-hydroxy test will tell you is where you stand in regards to vitamin D, so you know how to adjust your sunlight exposure accordingly. Failing that, it will allow you to estimate how best to supplement with vitamin D so you can get your levels up. A score over 70 is ideal, which is higher than the “recommended” value conventional wisdom suggests.

C-Reactive protein.

Your C-Reactive protein score is a flag for internal inflammation. If it’s high, typically above 1.0, then something bad is going on inside you. If this flag comes up red after your blood test, then you know for sure that you need to make a lifestyle change. In many people, that means cutting out gluten, or avoiding some other food.

Testosterone.

It’s rather amazing how many men have sub-par testosterone levels brought on by poor lifestyles, and beyond the obvious effects, low testosterone can result in several other health issues. At minimum, a low testosterone count may indicate high levels of stress. Low testosterone is typically easy to fix by cutting back on the booze, chronic cardio, and increasing your sleep. It’s worth getting it checked, especially for older men who may be going through -manopause- andropause.

While we say testosterone here, for the ladies, getting hormone levels checked may also be worthwhile. Men don’t need to specifically test for estrogen levels, but there are obvious indicators of estrogen increases (and testosterone drops) just from a physical inspection (e.g. man-boobs and a beer gut).

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The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight introduced us to Thom Hartmann’s concept of Older and Younger Cultures, the differences between the two being rather stark. In Hartmann’s view, Older Cultures embody sustainability and peaceful existence, which Easy to be Green summarizes thusly:

• Political Independence
• Egalitarian Structure
• Getting their resources from renewable local sources
• Having a unique sense of their own identity
• Respecting the identity of other tribes

Compare this to the synopsis of Younger Culture, which is the culture that modern humans subscribe to:

• Political Dominance
• Established hierarchy: clear authority structures
• Acquiring resources through trade and conquest
• Absorbing other cultures into their own identity
• Genocidal warfare against others

Hartmann obviously idolizes Older Culture, and for good reason: there are many benefits to following an Older Culture lifestyle, which is realized by some Younger Culture members who decide to live greener, steer clear of commercialism, focus on eating “real food,” etc. But a major component of Hartmann’s differentiation between Younger and Older Cultures is the emphasis on war and conflict, which Hartmann minimizes when he describes Older Culture. To be fair, it’s common to see our ancient ancestors painted in this light: being close to the natural world, respecting all living things, and only occasionally being involved in conflict with neighboring tribes. But something about Hartmann’s portrayal that such conflict was usually non-fatal doesn’t sit well with us. Perhaps it’s a pessimistic view of human nature on our part, but while we acknowledge that Younger Culture may inherently be more violent than Older Culture, we don’t accept that Older Culture was somehow lacking these elements.

We’re currently reading Them Us by Danny Vendramini, which thus far is an excellent read. Without going into too much detail, Them Us details a theory of human evolution that relies on what Vendramini calls the Neandertal Predation Theory, wherein Vendramini describes our Neandertal cousins as apex predators that early homo sapiens ran into during our early settlement of the Levant. Vendramini points out that other primates (also typically painted as generally peaceful) are not without violent intent, as they participate in both coalitionary killing (group-based, violent encounters) as well as lethal raiding (targeted violence at a neighbor’s location). Vendramini points out that Neandertals were likely to share these traits with modern primates, just as we humans possess them today.

The take-away is that Hartmann may be correct in saying that warfare as we know it today was not practiced in Older Cultures¹, as the notion of a standing army simply doesn’t make sense in such a setting. But to disavow extremely violent behavior in Older Cultures is a disservice to what we are: animals. That’s not to say that this behavior is necessarily logical in the sense that we may think it from a “civilized” perspective, but it’s still instinctual behavior that stems from something, and similar behavior can be seen in animals today, primates included. That something can be as simple as basic survival, such as fending off predators or even to provide food in a time of limited resources. Other times, that something may be more complex, because when we see the behavior in modern primates or even wolf populations, lethal raiding doesn’t always make sense, and the targets of violence can appear isolated from previous interactions with the aggressor. Regardless, it seems that limited violence is at the core of our species, however unethical our minds tell us it is.

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We intended to write a comprehensive review of the one-day MovNat workshop we recently participated in, but realized that others have already done so, and that our overall impression isn’t much different¹. In short, the experience was fantastic, despite the fact that we started the day with relatively cool weather and a rainy forecast. (This hampered a couple of the planned activities, but as the purpose of the workshop was to present MovNat fundamentals, we were still able to get an understanding of the basic concepts and techniques behind the MovNat philosophy.) We don’t want to echo back every other review out there, but would still like to focus on some points that we find particularly notable about the experience, and general idea behind MovNat.

For those who have no idea what we’re talking about, MovNat is, at its core, a workout philosophy based around the idea that humans evolved a range of movement abilities that helped us to prosper and evolve over thousands of years. Unlike typical gym workouts, working on these movements is the ideal method for preventing injury and developing truly functional fitness². If we practice the basic movements that humans have evolved to perform well over time (the same movements that are foundational to all human activities), then we can argue we’re developing overall fitness in an ideal, safe manner. There are 12 of these core movements: walking, balancing, climbing, jumping, moving on all fours, running, lifting, carrying, throwing, catching, swimming, and defending³.

You can gather considerable appreciation for these movements when you consider that many individuals, who may be able to do, say, a dozen pullups, are not able to climb atop a horizontal bar. This illustrates the notion that many people may have appreciable strength in some areas, but are woefully lacking the ability to properly utilize that strength. In a sense, that strength development is wasted, because it succumbs to considerable weakness that exists in other areas. MovNat is about addressing these weaknesses and developing an overall fit person⁴, akin to those of our ancestors who, in order to survive, needed to fully master the aforementioned 12 movements.

MovNat is not about reenactment, though. The 12 movements aren’t practiced purely because they are important in an evolutionary context, but because they continue to be important today⁵. Just as martial arts address the potential for a fight, so too does MovNat prepare us for the potential circumstances that we might encounter, be they natural disasters, accidents, or other worst-case scenarios. More importantly, MovNat teaches us not only how important the 12 movements are, but how to perform them correctly, so as to not injure ourselves when executing them. Further, these 12 movements are taught to be efficient, so as to expend as little energy as possible when doing them.

It’s also worth pointing out that despite MovNat meeting our inherent need to be outdoors, MovNat itself is not restricted to parks, forests, and other outdoor play-spaces. Indeed, many of the 12 movements can easily be practiced indoors, to include the local gym⁶. A good thing to remember, though, is that a MovNat workout needn’t contain every, or even most, movements in a single session; just work the movements you can, when you can. So if you’re limited to indoors spaces because of inclement weather, there are still workouts you can explore.

MovNat is still in its infancy, and with only three “official” trainers, the movement (no pun intended) is still growing. Founder Erwan Le Corre is in the process of writing a MovNat book, and MovNat coach certification is coming later this year. Only recently, a MovNat alumni group was started on Facebook, which may become an avenue for distributing training materials summarizing workshop lessons to those who’ve already attended a MovNat event. All of these things are excellent, and we continue to look forward to how MovNat evolves.

Is the workshop worth it? If you’re new to the concept of natural movement, you’ll have plenty to learn, and even those of you who’ve explored things like barefoot running or Parkour⁷ in the past, will have plenty to look forward to. The one-day workshops aren’t cheap, but considering the travel required by the instructor, and the lack of other good source material out there, it’s a small investment in one’s future fitness, especially considering that one doesn’t need a gym membership or store-bought equipment to continue doing MovNat workouts. Those considering participating in a workshop in the future needn’t be worried about being too unfit, either; the day’s exercises are illustrative (albeit hands-on), and only a short portion of the day is what could be described as “intense.” Still, you’ll be surprised at how sore you’ll end up just doing seemingly simple exercises.

It’s hard to walk away from the one-day workshop without looking forward to future MovNat workouts; looking at the world differently is an expected outcome. It’s not so much that a new world opens up to you, but rather that you rediscover a world you forgot about as you left childhood. It’s a world you’re happy to have back.

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Since switching to a “paleo” diet, we’ve increased our consumption of beef, and a common criticism we’ve heard as a result is that eating beef is not sustainable. Specific arguments include:

1. Raising cows is a direct cause of desertification.

2. The massive demand for beef promotes slash-and-burn of rain-forests.

3. By some estimates, 2500 gallons of water are needed to produce a single pound of beef.

4. The amount of methane produced by cows is a large contributing factor to the production of CO2 in our atmosphere, thus contributing to global warming. Plus, some of this methane seeps into groundwater, which poisons the earth.

At first glance, these arguments may seem valid, until you realize that they are primarily aimed at Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO), and not towards grass-fed, pastured livestock. That’s an important difference, because the paleo community’s emphasis on meat consumption is all about the latter. This then begs the question as to how we can respond to the aforementioned points from a paleo perspective, seeing as grassfed, pastured livestock doesn’t come with all the issues that meat derived from CAFO does.

Desertification.

Ethically-raised pastured cows have been shown to reverse desertification in several instances, thanks to the cow’s natural fertilizer that re-energizes the ground. In fact, it’s been shown in Africa that land previously devastated by agriculture (in which the land was no longer fertile enough to support further vegetation for agricultural purposes), could drastically change after the introduction of livestock. Livestock ate remaining grass/weeds, re-fertilized the earth with their feces, and ultimately restored the soil to support agriculture. Proper land management in which livestock and agricultural fields are iteratively rotated through grazing areas allows for a sustainable environment. Only when livestock are not rotated, or when restricted by CAFO, is there an issue of desertification. In fact, without livestock, the only way to prevent desertification in an agricultural environment is to rely on chemical fertilizers or less efficient crop rotations.

Slash-and-burn.

Destruction of rain-forests in order to propagate CAFO is an unethical practice that is counter to grass-fed meat production. The issue here is that corporate greed establishes poor practices that are bound in the CAFO philosophy. Arguably, there’s a lot of land that could be used domestically for animal grazing, a lot of which has undergone desertification due to poor agricultural practices. The destruction of rain-forests in order to support the meat industry is less an argument against meat, and more an argument against corporate greed and unethical animal treatment.

Water use.

Estimates for water use required to produce beef varies considerably. It’s not clear, however, which factors are involved in each computation. While they imply that the water use is based on what an animal needs to drink in its lifetime before it’s butchered, it actually includes the irrigation needs of corn crops.

There’s no indication that these studies differentiate between CAFO and grazing operations, and we have to assume they refer to the former, since that’s the conventional meat-producing method. While CAFO relies on large corn crops to feed animals, grass-fed, pastured operations do not, so we can deduct those water values from the equation. Further, since many small, independent farms slaughter their animals on-sight, we can further reduce water needs because the vast amounts of water used in commercial slaughterhouses is no longer relevant¹.

Methane.

Some argue that cow production of methane may pollute as much as a car, daily. However, this is in great part due to what we’re feeding cows; natural pasture does not result in the same amount of methane production, whereas ryegrass and other chemically-fertilized pasture is not as nutritious, and results in increased methane production.

As per our response to the issue of desertification, the concern over ground contaminants (ammonia, etc) is a non-issue as long as proper grazing rotations are utilized; cow fertilizer actually benefits the earth, and the resulting soil actually traps more carbon than the cows create. Obviously, this relies on proper herd and field management, but that’s the very practices that we need to support, instead of sourcing our meat from CAFO.

Eat grass-fed meat.

Many of the arguments about beef not being sustainable is in regards to conventional cow rearing, and not necessarily applicable to grass-fed cows. CAFO needs to be eliminated, even if that means not eating at McDonalds, or getting access to other cheap sources of meat.

But in the end, even if we begin replacing CAFO with grass-fed operations, is the system sustainable? It is insofar as as the production of nutritious meat goes, but ultimately, there’s no diet that’s both healthy and sustainable for the current human population. Growing grains to support the 6+ billion people on the earth today is only damaging the environment, and results in a growing autoimmune epidemic.

From the perspective of healthy eating domestically, however, there’s no reason that we can’t eat sustainable grass-fed beef at home, without worrying about negative environmental impact.

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