This blog is about the intersection between evolutionary biology and food. But also about practical applications, sustainable agriculture, and general tasty things. I originally started eating this way to heal from chronic health problems and...it worked!
Melissa McEwen
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09/06/2010 - 19:31
It's easy enough to stop eating crap and start eating a diet closer to what evolution intended. Other evolutionary disconnects are harder to remedy. As a young woman, I can say one of the hardest is childbearing. Most middle-class young women in developed countries cannot afford to have children during our prime childbearing years. Furthermore, having children often means relying on two incomes and leaving the childcare to someone else outside the family. American children start school young (Swedish children start school at 7, American at 4-5) and our schools generally do a terrible job at providing an evolutionarily-appropriate environment. Think about hunter-gatherer children: lots of play, mixed age groups, and spending time and learning from relatives.
What are the consequences of this evolutionary disconnect? I think we are just starting to see them. One alarming trend is that the age of puberty is falling. Some blame diet, others blame pollution, but it's probably all that and more. Here is an interesting study on how social factors might influence puberty. It suggests that poor mother-child bonds might lead to early puberty. The unfortunate thing about these studies is that it's often hard to tease out social issues like that fact that children whose mothers have to work long hours often live in environments that are poor in many other ways.
The evolutionary disconnect goes so much deeper than just eating inappropriate foods for our species like bread....it goes into how we work, move, and raise our children. The problem here is that the disconnect is so deep that it's hard to remedy it unless you want to run off and become Amish. And that the disconnect is psychological and social as well. How many 24-year-old women want to spend their days taking care of children anyway? How many of us have the extended family to help us?
Comment?: 10
09/01/2010 - 09:45
Recently Overcoming Bias had a post about how men are evolved to hunt, women to gather. It then went on to speculate about how most sports are based on hunting instincts:
"Now sports let us show off many kinds of physically-expressed abilities. But it seems to me that most sports emphasize hunting skills, such as chasing, evading, throwing, and hitting, far more than gathering skills, such as visual search and fine finger control. Now it makes sense for men to prefer hunting sports, but oddly females also seem to prefer them; pretty much all sports emphasize hunting more than gathering skills. Why don’t women prefer sports designed to show off the skills for which female bodies were designed?
Sorry, but there is a "sport" that uses exactly these "gather" skills--it's called hunting! Perhaps our ancestors did persistence hunt and our most popular sports are based on those skills, but the persistence hunt only works in certain environments.
Modern hunting really isn't much like persistence hunting, even when practiced in open plain environments that would be suited to persistence hunting using ancient methods. There isn't much chasing, that's for sure, in waiting all day in a tree blind for a deer to walk by. Visual search and fine finger control are extremely important in modern hunting.
Besides that, I think anthropological studies have been heavily clouded by modern ideas of "the hunt" that are only relevant to academics who have probably never hunted themselves. They seem to think that all hunting involves chasing animals around. For example, in some ethnographies, net hunting, trapping, and spear fishing are counted as "gathering." This has led to two erroneous ideas now embedded in pop culture: that women squatted around gathering leaves all day, and that such leaves made up most of the diet.
The real truth about the study posted on Overcoming Bias that showed that women in rural Mexico are better foragers for mushrooms is that mushrooms aren't exactly the most important food in the world. They are of very little food value, but have high culinary value, and the more hours you put into learning to forage for them, the better yields you get. I have zero experience with this myself, and in Sweden I got zero mushrooms, while my male Swedish roommate got several bucketloads.
But this is not all to throw away the idea of gender roles in evolution. A recent NYTimes article about the challenge of building a decent sports bra reminded me of the biggest foil to the "born to run" idea of human locamotion. Maybe men are born to run, but women happen to have breasts: jiggly protusions that are often quite large. When running they can be rather painful. Modern women get around this obstacle by using sports bras, but when was the last time you saw a hunter-gatherer with a bra? This explains quite well to me why women who hunt in those tribes utilize traps, nets, and bows. But maybe women get used to the "bounce" after awhile?
Elite female runners often experience amenorrhea which can lead to infertility and low bone density (and it's not associated with low body fat, it's associated with running). Do male elite runners experience such reductions in reproductive "fitness?"
But it is an interesting question: what do you think? Were all humans born to run? Or just men?
Comment?: 12
07/31/2010 - 20:07
This article asks why children are hitting puberty earlier and earlier, with some girls menstrating at 6 or younger! Scientists say that some consequences of early puberty include obesity, reproductive cancer, depression, and anxiety. The average age of puberty for American girls has gone from 17 in the 19th century to about 8.
To contrast, the average age of sexual maturation in hunter-gatherers is from 15-18 years.
Possible causes outlined in the article include phytoestrogens, chemical contaminants, and obesity. I think looking at obesity as a cause is missing the point here.
Last week I found this interesting study of foragers who reach early sexual maturity, the Pume. The word "foragers" is misleading here because the Pume practice agriculture and trade. They still eat some wild foods, but manioc and corn provide much of their calories. They trade for pasta and rice. They reach menarche at the average age of 12, which is usually considered maladaptive because it increases the risk of dying in childbirth.
Not once does that article mention insulin. It says girls who undergo early puberty are more likely to develop type 2 diabetes. Hmmm...maybe all there issues mentioned here are a result of a high-carb diet that causes insulin resistance? Here is a great study that shows that girls undergoing puberty tend to have insulin issues. Doctors would be wise to screen girls who get their period at 6 for this condition...
Comment?: 3
07/22/2010 - 14:12
The paleo diet is primarily about applying evolutionary principles to nutrition. But nutrition is certainly not the only subject evolutionary science can lend its wisdom to. Long before I had heard of the paleo diet, I had a keen interest in the controversial science of evolutionary psychology. In high school, Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate fueled plenty of arguments with my family and in classes.
Here is another evolutionary psychology book that seems to be designed to start arguments, since it’s about something nearly everyone seems to have an opinion about. Sex at Dawn, written by psychologist Christopher Ryan and psychiatrist Cacilda Jethá, is snarky and perhaps intentionally provocative, but no matter your opinion, it will probably make you rethink some long-held assumptions about sex.
I come from a culture where growing up, I was preached that the ideal was that you would only have sex with one person and they would only have sex with you. As an adolescent I was assaulted with books extolling the evils of animal-like promiscuity. Surely it caused ye to be dishonored and blighted with syphilis and live destitute with 14 children in a trailer. Having one true love was ordained by God and temptations otherwise were certainly of the Devil. It’s kind of a miracle that I’ve been able to move on and have normal relationships, but intrinsic human desire tends to win out when confronted with freedom.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that humans have a tough time following such a doctrine. A pastor in my own church growing up was one of those who struggled and his divorce almost broke up the congregation.
It’s no wonder we have such a tough time— evolutionary speaking, we are a hypersexual species with marked physical adaptations for promiscuity. Sex at Dawn presents some interesting evidence for this, as well as a romp through human history. Paleo dieters will be familiar with the idea that hunter-gatherers were healthy and happy, which gets several chapters here. I did learn one new fact, which is that one of the techniques used to estimate age of bones, dental eruption, only says that the person was over 35, but some idiotic studies have underestimated lifespan because they took these studies and recorded 35 as the age of death.
But back to sex, since that’s probably what you were thinking about anyway. There has certainly been ample speculation about Paleolithic sex, with the general narrative being that women have always sought to procure a stable man to help with children and bring home wooly mammoth kabobs, while hooking up with the hot jerk on the side. Meanwhile men have always just tried to knock up as many women as possible while trying valiantly to only provide meat to their own offspring. Jethá and Ryan dismantle this frankly stupid just-so story well. It just doesn’t make sense in light of anatomy or how hunter-gatherers actually live. It requires that every culture be organized around marriage, fathers provide mainly for their own children, that sex is connected to paternity and that men are somehow able to discern paternity, and that hunters could refuse to share their meat with others. In reality, while sex habits seem to vary, hunter-gatherers almost always share meat (and raise children) communally and several cultures do not even recognize paternity in the modern sense of the word.
Unfortunately, numerous evolutionary scientists have operated under this errant view and it remains fairly mainstream.
So where is the evidence otherwise? The authors look at comparative anatomy with other apes. Our closest true-monogamous relatives are gibbons, which share very little in common with humans otherwise. Our closest living relatives are bonobos, who are hypersexual and promiscuous, but as I’ve pointed out in nutritional anthropology posts, they aren’t that close (though it’s interesting that even they hunt for and prize meat). One interesting thing we have in common with bonobos is a repetitive microsatellite important to the release of oxytocin, which is absent in chimps and important for pro-social feelings like love and eroticism. Bonobos also share the unusual habit of copulating throughout the menstrual cycle, lactation, and pregnancy. Like us, their vulva is oriented towards the front of the body, rather than the rear as in chimps.
Next the authors examine studied hunter-gatherers. There are certainly no tribes practicing the ideal of one lifetime sexual partner. In face, most seem to enjoy lots of sex with many people— “Anthropologist Thomas Gregor reported eighty-right ongoing affairs among the thirty-seven adults in the Mehinaku village he studied in Brazil.” They also take down the ideal of the “nuclear family”- which no hunter-gatherer culture practices either. In tribal cultures the extended family (which is often the entire village) is where children are raised.
But as post-agrarian hunter-gatherers are an imperfect reflection of the Stone Age, so the anatomy information is even more interesting. In terms of several important anatomical markers, humans show evidence that we engage primarily in sperm competition, which has huge implications. Some men I know seem to think men evolved to be promicious, but women didn’t, which would make us similar to gorillas. These giant herbivorous apes engage in battles over harems. However, our sex organs and our body size dimorphism (the sex difference between males and females) are nothing like gorillas and women’s bodies seem to have evolved as a sperm battleground. Instead of mostly competing via physical strength contests like gorilla males, our sperm is made for a race that involves competing against other sperm from other men and the human vagina is apparently a formidible racetrack able to store and sort sperm to some degree.
Unfortunately the legacy of the agricultural revolution has been STDs, pregnancies woman can’t support, lower sperm counts, and sexual repression. Condoms and birth control have solved some problems, but there is evidence that people who have sex without condoms are happier (I sometimes wonder if people promoting condoms as a solution to the world’s sexual ills have actually used them, but the authors also cite research that shows that women can aborb chemicals from sperm and get a mental boost from them) and that birth control affects woman’s ability to chose biologically compatible partners (and there is evidence that the children from these poor biological matches have reduced birth weight and impaired immune function). As far as abstinence education, data seems to show that expression of adolescent sexuality is associated with lower levels of violence. Paleos may also be familiar with the association between vegetarian grain-pushers like John Kellogg and sexual repression, but I was surprised to learn how he openly mutilated children to “protect” them from masturbating.
Gee? I wonder why high-fiber low-fat whole grain diets are so popular considering that many were developed to lower libido…unfortunately Ryan and Jethá don’t seem to get that part of the picture and repeatedly mention our ancestor’s healthy “low fat” diet. They also keep harping on a study that showed men eating massive amounts of beef have lower sperm counts, when that study was on the effect of eating feedlot beef pumped with hormones. To their credit, they also mention the ball-busting effects of soy, which are present no matter how it’s grown.
The book also point to some evidence that humans have adapted to deal with civilization’s demands on our sexuality. While it may seem laughable, apparently there is some truth to err… ethnic differences in penis and testes size for example, which they hypothesize might be related to cultural practices, though they admit this hasn’t been studied very well.
As for women’s sexuality being lesser than men’s, an idea that has been popular among evolutionary scientists since Darwin, with his own frigid wife, wrote “the female…with the rarest exception, is less eager than the male…” As a woman, you don’t have to convince me that this is untrue, but there remains a legion of men welded (and perhaps even attracted to) the idea of the chaste woman and, unsurprisingly, unable to locate the part of a woman’s body that would persuade them otherwise. If women are so uninterested in sex, why did physicians of yore devote so much time trying to stamp out the evil of female masturbation, even in the US resorting to female genital mutilation up until the 20th century. Luckily, some doctors changed tactics and the vibrator was born, but not as a cure for female dissatisfaction, but as a medical device to cure “hysteria.”
So what do humans want out of sex? It seems like we do enjoy intense pair bonds with other individuals…that eventually wane. The bane of marriage seems to be that sexual novelty is immensely exciting for humans. Ryan and Jethá seem to imply that swinging clubs might be a good solution for having an emotionally satisfying pair bond AND fulfilling sexuality. I suppose, but it underlines the difficult fact that humans have Paleolithic sexual desires in a world where children are expensive, women expressing themselves sexually are called “sluts,” and gonorrhea and other worse STDs are a real risk. The picture of modern sexuality painted in the book is a bleak one- of sexless marriages between men popping sperm-deforming antidepressants and hooked on internet porn paired with women with frustratingly low libidos struggling to juggle their career and children. Such marriages are not only bad for people's health because of the psychological effects; apparently sex with a new woman is one of the few tried and true ways to boost middle aged men's flagging testosterone. Fun.
I personally wonder how much low libido is connected with the inadequate diet and physical activity levels of modern humans. Evolutionary health aims to ask how we can use such science to make life better. In terms of sex I think our sex lives would certainly better if we would eat well, exercise, and be realistic about human nature. The authors don't really offer a solution and on their FAQ they say:
6. So you’re recommending the everyone should have an open marriage or not get married at all?
Definitely not. We’re not recommending anything other than knowledge, introspection, and honesty. In fact, as we say in the book, we’re not really sure what to do with this information ourselves. We hope Sex at Dawn advances the conversation about human sexuality so people can focus more on the realities of what human beings are and a bit less on the religious and cultural mythologies concerning what we should be and should feel. What individuals or couples do with this information (if anything) is up to them.
This book, while an excellent tour of human lustful behavior, is lacking on the murkier matter of love. But I definitely recommend reading it. It’s certainly fascinating, if anything.
Comment?: 17
07/02/2010 - 20:45
From the NYT article about studies that are raising the possibility that exercise studies on men might not be completely relevant for women:
Why women respond differently seems obvious. Women are, after all, awash in the hormone estrogen, which, some new science suggests, has greater effects on metabolism and muscle health than was once imagined. Some studies have found that postmenopausal women who take estrogen replacement have healthier muscles than postmenopausal women who do not. Even more striking, in several experiments, researchers from McMaster University in Canada gave estrogen to male athletes and then had them complete strenuous bicycling sessions. The men seemed to have developed entirely new metabolisms. They burned more fat and a smaller percentage of protein or carbohydrates to fuel their exertions, just as women do.
As a fat-fueled woman, I can honestly say that fat is the best fuel I've ever tried...
Comment?: 4
05/24/2010 - 19:38
While the MacLeans article on paleo was one of the better ones, I think the illustration they chose (above) is indicative of what's wrong with paleo media coverage. While there have been exceptions, nearly every reporter I've talked to about paleo has asked me ridiculously sexist questions pulled out of some sort of pulp caveman fantasy. "Do do the guys doing the paleo diet club women and bring them back to their caves?" was one of the worst.
It's fiction people.
It doesn't help that there are more than a few paleo dieters willing to go along with this and frame paleo as a way to pick up hot chickz and to reclaim a ridiculous idea of masculinity. Guess what? While evolutionary psychology has some lessons, it's been distorted to justify disgusting behaviors that have nothing to do with being human. Real hunter-gatherers are diverse: some have rigid gender hierarchies and others don't. But such men don't want to hear about the complexities of human cultures, they just want to cover up their own very-real inadequecies by spouting nonsense about how manliness is being oppressed by modern society.
Nevermind that it's women who are the ones consistently shamed away from eating meat, hunting, and fishing, among other things. The wimpiness of our culture cuts across the gender divide. Did you know the foragers have LOWER testosterone than studied hunter-gatherers? American men are crash and burn- high testosterone when young probably leds to stupidity and aggression, which quickly fizzles out into viagra-popping territory.
In the media's stupidthropology, men in the Stone age hunted while women pattered about with children on their backs gathering the makings of an organic argula-walnut salad. Guess what? Gathering is a dumb word that demeans the role of women, because in the anthropology world it includes fishing, trapping, and hunting game- often with complex traps and nets. But this is consistently ignored, even by female writers.
And guess what- the Stone Age wasn't an era of hot muscular men having sex with a zillion ladies while the wimps were beaten into the jungle. Humans are not bonobos. We are wired for "monogamy," though this biological term has little to do with the modern Christian fantasy of having one partner for the rest of your life. Rather, it seems humans bear biological marks of serial monogamy with some furtive extra-pair copulation....with as all things human, quite a bit of diversity in terms of sexual preferences.
Comment?: 7
05/23/2010 - 13:23
One of the most interesting conversation I've had about food was with a Pirahã. It occurred when I ate a salad in the village for the first time.
Rice, beans, fish, and wild game, smothered under copious amount of Tabasco sauce, can keep one's culinary drive satisfied up to a point. But if you like the crunch of fresh lettuce, then after a few months you might begin to dream about eating a salad.
The missionary plane visited us every eight weeks in the jungle to bring mail and supplies. It was our only contact with the world outside the Pirahãs. On one trip, I sent out a note to a fellow missionary and asked if he would do me the tremendous favor of sending some salad makings on the next flight. Two months later, our salad arrived.
That evening I sat down to my first taste of lettuce, tomatoes, and cabbage in six months. Xahopati walked up to watch me eat. He looked bemused.
"Why are you eating leaves?" he asked. "Don't you have any meat?"
The Pirahãs are very particular about foods, and they believe, as we do to some degree, that the foods you eat determine the person you become.
"Yes. I have a lot of canned meat," I assured him. "But I like these leaves! I have not had any for many moons."
My Pirahã friend looked at me, then at the leaves, then back at me. "Pirahãs don't eat leaves," he informed me. "This is why you don't speak our language well. We Pirahãs speak our language well and we don't eat leaves."
This is from Daniel Everett's Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes. I first heard about him through this New Yorker article. He was sent as a missionary to convert the Pirahã tribe in the Amazon by learning their seemingly-impossible language. In the process he was turned from a pious missionary to non-theist linguistics professor. To a linguist, the Pirahã are fascinating because they have no numbers or recursion in their language. To anthropologists they are also fascinating because their culture values immediacy and first-hand experience above everything. They are resistant to Christianity because they do not believe in anything that they themselves have not experienced. They have no formalized religion or religious rituals, but they firmly believe in spirits and often consort with them.
The Pirahã are no longer hunter-gatherers, though they were until very recently. Their diet is still mainly wild fish and game, but it's amazing how far foods of civilization have traveled into the depths of the Amazon. Wheat, sugar, and whiskey in particular seem to have had a large negative effect on this tribe. Socially they have some elements of the tribe in The Continuum Concept, but Everett seems less prone to romanticization, though some is definitely present. I personally find it strange that he would describe the tribe's social structure as being non-coercive when there are mentions of murder, gang-rape, and marginalization of women. It's impossible to say much about whether those are "natural" for humans based on this tribe and other tribes that represent the last of the world's foragers. Almost all such tribes have been removed from their original homelands, pushed into the world's harshest habitats, and subject to the negative effects of trade for things like alcohol.
But that doesn't mean they should be dismissed. Everett recognizes negative aspects of their culture, but is eternally grateful for what he learned about life from the Pirahã.
Reading the book, I took away most lessons about what we don't need. The title itself is what Pirahã say as a greeting at night and alludes to the fact that for them a good night's sleep is a dangerous thing. People sleep lightly at night and there is always someone awake by the fire, sometimes many talking and laughing. People in the US act like a good night's sleep is essential, but perhaps it's not. However, one major difference is that the Pirahã have the ability to nap whenever they want during the day.
The Pirahã also scoff at the idea of regular meals. They have no food preservation methods and simply eat when they have made a kill. Apparently being hungry is no obstacle to exerting themselves: "I have seen people dance for three days with only brief breaks, not hunting, not fishing, or gathering -- and without stockpiled foods."
Children are kept close to their mothers during the nursing period, but after weaning they are treated as full members of the community. According to studies by psychologists, the Pirahã spend more time than any other known culture laughing and smiling. This is despite the fact that loss and hardship are a daily part of life. A breech birth or an infected wound is a death sentence.
Reading this book and its descriptions of how different the Pirahã mindset is from the Western, it reminded me that paleolithic hunter-gatherer cultures would have been more diverse than we give them credit for. We have these stereotypes of chieftains, ritualized dances with painted faces, elaborate myths, trading using shells... the Pirahã have none of these things.
In a world of homogenizing agents like trade and monotheistic religion, the fact that the Pirahã exist is amazing. Most such tribes have simply been wiped out. The paleolithic was a world of fairly isolated tribes that may have had cultures completely different from anything around today.
Comment?: 3
05/11/2010 - 19:33
What is the most common non-paleo indulgence? In my experience, it seems beer is the vice of choice. Don't get me wrong- I love beer and it was one of the hardest things to give up, especially since craft beer was one of my big hobbies in college. But in the end, I did notice that the effects of it on my digestive health were very negative. But there is something else about beer.
It's funny because no paleo dude would be caught dead with a carton of soy milk or a tofutti cutie, partially out of fear of soy phytoestrogen.
Mmmm would you like some omega-6 and a bucket of sugar with your estrogen?
But did you know that hops have even more phytoestrogen? "We have identified a potent phytoestrogen in hops, 8-prenylnaringenin, which has an activity greater than other established plant estrogens." Ouch... so much for some foods being intrensically manly. Conspiracy theorists blame the church and say that the Reinheitsgebot beer laws that mandated hops in 1516 (and similar laws in other countries) were to suppress the sexuality of men. It's true that in the past it was common to use other bittering agents. But the truth is that beer made with hops simply keeps better.
BUT this does highlight the fact that it is possible to make beer without hops. If gluten doesn't bother you, they might be worth checking out. Dogfish Head has been making some ancient beers recipes lately, one of which I tried before giving up gluten. Midas Touch is a recipe recovered from analysis of residues of clay vessels from the 8th century BC and is unusual, but richly flavored. I've also heard good things abou the Finnish Sahti made with Juniper berries.
Another set of beers I've tried are these Scottish historic ales made by Williams Brothers. The hop-less options are Fraoch made with heather and Alba made with Scots Pine (my favorite). Both are dark flavorful malty beers that anyone who enjoys craft beer will appreciate.
Man-boobs not included
The history of beer as a healing herbal elixir is explored in Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers, which you should check out if you want to brew your own.
Comment?: 19
04/23/2010 - 23:24
Perhaps this post officially launches me into crazy territory, but hear me out- while this may seem trivial, it has made a difference in my life and perhaps it could in yours. I would hope this issue gets more attention in the future so more studies can be done.
Why am I doing a post about bras? Well, a few months ago I was hit by terrible neck and back pain. Coincidentally, at this time my friend confessed to me that just doesn't wear a bra, which I never even noticed because of the type of clothes she wears. I did some research and found that they can cause back and shoulder strain.
OBJECTIVE: To determine the part played by drag on the pectoral girdle muscles of women in the production of pain in these muscles from breast weight being carried at the shoulders through the brassiere straps. DESIGN: When patients presented with pain in the pectoral girdle musculature, breast weight was recorded. The sites of pain and tenderness were also recorded because tenderness in the trapezius has been shown to correlate well with muscle ischemia. The patient was then asked if she would be willing to remove breast weight from the shoulders for two weeks, as a trial, to see whether pain was relieved. The Student t test was used to determine whether breast weight was significant in producing symptoms and signs in the pectoral girdle musculature and, if so, where these sites were located. SETTING: Private surgical practice with patients initiating the consultation randomly. INTERVENTION: Removal of breast weight from the shoulders for a period of 2 weeks. The choice of method was left to the patient. Most chose brassiere removal; only one patient chose a strapless brassiere. RESULTS: Presence or absence of muscle pain after the trial period. Long-term outcome was presence or absence of muscle pain and tenderness. Seventy-nine percent of patients decided to remove breast weight from the shoulder permanently because it rendered them symptom free.
With my sedentary job, the last thing I need is extra strain. So I pretty much just stopped wearing them. I'm a 100 lb woman and well...let's just say I'm not really hanging out much (unlike some lucky people, when I lost weight on paleo I lost much of it in my breasts). I also own some shelf bra tanks and dresses and figured those were OK since they don't seem to prevent me from moving naturally. Thinking back, my old bras did. When I was slightly overweight I started wearing bras with tight straps, tough protective cups, and hard under-wires. I don't really need them any more, if I ever did. They made me look great in a t-shirt, but I don't wear much of those anymore.
My back pain is totally gone and I actually feel much more comfortable overall. My body seems to cool itself better too and this is very important to me because I don't do well in hot weather. I own some shirts that look...umm, questionable without a bra and am considering buying some minimalist cover ups so that everyone in the entire world doesn't see my nipples (most of Austria and Finland has already seen them thanks to their obligatory nude saunas).
In some ways the breasts are like testicles- they hang away from the body and in a state of nature would naturally be cooler than the rest of the body. Plenty of research has linked tighty whities to testicular issues. The NYTimes was really dismissive of the idea that bras could be linked to cancer, but there really isn't much research on the subject.
Some studies show sports bras prevent tenderness during exercise, but maybe having breasts that are like delicate hothouse flowers is a BAD idea. In Ancient Bodies, Modern Lives author Wenda Trevathan theorizes "Excessive breast tenderness and associated pain with breast feeding may well be products of modernization and the over-protection of women's breasts from exposure. It seems unlikely that this would have been a problem in the past when women wore nothing across their breasts or covered them loosely." Many modern women have pain when they try to breastfeed and give up. In the paleolithic this would have been maladaptive to say the least, since it wasn't like they could go to the grocery store and pick up some formula for the poor starving baby.
There is also NO evidence that not wearing a bra leads to ptosis, AKA breast sagging, although it can certainly mask it.
If you can wear a camisole with just a little support instead of a giant super duper protection system, why not? I understand many women have, um, larger issues at hand, and I do have the luxury of working at a place where half the women are braless... but if you are having back/shoulder pain, it's an option to explore. Thinking evolutionarily to solve health problems is an approach I strongly believe in, but in the end it's about making your own life better, not following any rigid "paleo" principles.
Comment?: 17
02/15/2010 - 17:07
A girl who used to live in my apartment left behind a subscription to Self magazine. Self actually used to be one of my favorite magazines when I was in high school and my early college years. I even did the "Self Challenge" to lose weight. It challenged you to go the gym and eat lots of healthy whole grains. Not surprisingly, my daily servings of Kashi honeyed cereal and treadmill plodding did nothing to fix the spare tire I had around my waist and my chronic stomach aches. These days when I read Self I want to laugh at all the plugs for skim milk, yogurt smoothies, egg white omelets, and whole grain cereals...but really, this is a magazine hundreds of thousands of women take seriously, so I just feel sad. I was even sadder to see an ad for a weight loss product that supposedly "cleanses" you from the toxins you supposedly acquire from eating unhealthier.
Uh, nothing makes me angrier than the "dirty" narrative many vegans particularly in the raw community subscribe to. According to it, meat and other naughty foods "putrify" in your colon, making it a toxic environment and causing pretty much every single problem you can think of. To atone you most scour your intestines with copious amounts of fiber to remove any traces of it and eat only "clean" and "pure" plant juices and salads. If you are sick it's YOUR fault for eating dirty foods. These myths, which have absolutely no science behind them, are perpetuated in popular books like Skinny Bitch.
The idea of the wrong diet being both physically and spiritually "unclean" has its roots in religion. Early pioneers of vegetarianism like cereal magnate Dr. Kellog used high fiber grains to cleanse the body of supposed impurities. It makes sense that such plenty proponents of vegetarianism also proscribed sex. Their mission was to separate people from their dirty Earthly bodies and desires. One of the reasons Kellog recommended vegetarianism was to reduce sexual desire.
Contrast that with the paleo paradigm, which simply exhorts people to eat foods that are appropriate for us evolutionarily. The paleo approach embraces things shunned by Kellog and his ilk, from dirt and bacteria (which help modulate our immune system) to bone marrow. Cleansing? Guilt-mongering pseudoscience. The hilarious things are that meat doesn't ferment in the digestive system at all! It's starches and other foods that the body can't immediately utilize that ferment. Diets like the Specific Carbohydrate Diet for people with digestive ailments like colitis prohibit those foods because they are part of a vicious cycle.
Bacteria isn't bad, but modern sugary diets can alter the gut flora and upset the gut ecosystem by feeding some bacteria that may not be good to have too much of. Grains and other food that is not what the human body evolved to digest can muck things up, but that doesn't mean you are dirty and toxic. So called "toxic" fat is actually digested very easily and turned into energy by our bodies. Probably the best diet you can eat if you have IBS is one that's the opposite of gut-abrading raw vegetable and grain diets being pushed by making of the quackelite: fermented veggies and plenty of easily-digested fat. Notice how many people promoting particularly raw diets for digestive stuff are still consuming blended fruit goo and complaining about how important fussy food combining is despite being on the "right" diet for so long. Talk about skinny bitch...I found such a diet made me bony and irritable from hunger and malnourishment.
I found that the diet of fermented veggies and healthy fat put my IBS-attacked digestive system in good enough condition to eat normal foods within months. It both nourishes your digestive tract with important nutrients and stops the cycle of damage induced by inappropriate amounts of gut fermentation and irritating plant fibers and chemicals.
The truth is that the colon isn't full of toxic plaque...ask anyone who has actually worked on a human body instead of someone who wants to sell detox products:
Congratulations! You've just necrosed the mucosal layer of your intestinal lumen (English translation: you killed off the layer(s) of cells that line the inside of your intestine). I've been a paramedic for 16+ years, and am now in nursing school, and I've seen what mucosae looks like when it's been chemically abraded with, say, Drano: kind of brown/yellow, stringy, "mucusy," and looks a little like chicken fat. When intestinal mucosa is damaged/killed, it's not uncommon for it to slough off in strips or large sections, and to come out looking as described. Our bodies have mucosae and produce mucus for a reason. While it may be trendy to chemically peel it off and admire it in the collander in which you caught it, you've just screwed with the interface between your nutrients and your body, not to mention that you've given all the bacteria that inhabit your colon a great way to enter your blood and lymphatic fluid. Better hope your immune system is functioning well for the next few days.
As far as I'm concerned, as soon as I see loaded unscientific words like "toxin" and "putrid" I pretty much know the writer is pushing a agenda that has little to do with how the human body actually works. As a free thinker and as a woman, I want to reject this sort of quasi-relgious dogma that makes women feel like their problems are caused by being "unclean" and that the way to cleanse themselves is to torment their bodies with sugary juices and calorie-lacking salads.
Paleolithic people didn't need to stick hoses up their asses to feel good and digest properly...we don't need these things either.
Postscript: I also find it hilarious when people brag about going number two 4X times a day or more, like that's a good thing. As far as I'm concerned that's a bad thing to spend so much time in the toilet and have your insides depleted. Eades has a good take on this.
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