Rethinking Autism

Posted August 6th, 2012 – 46 Comments

By Rob Archangel, 180DegreeHealth.com staff writer The topic of autism came up recently on the Facebook page, and I thought back to an article I’d read several years ago, The Truth About Autism: Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know. The radical idea at the time was that autism is not a dysfunction or disorder, but instead an expression of human diversity. And this doesn’t mean just the “savants” like Dustin Hoffman counting cards in Rain Man, but perhaps all autistic individuals. What if their condition and experience of the world was just difficult for us to understand, but not necessarily tragic? This article makes a good case for that. One of the feature players is a woman named Amanda Baggs, a young non-speaking autistic who can nonetheless communicate through typing… Read more »

Nutrition Minutiae Got Ya Down?

Posted August 3rd, 2012 – 33 Comments

By Rob Archangel, 180DegreeHealth.com staff writer Hey everyone- know how y’all think Matt is crazy for suggesting that fast food can be the ticket to health for some people? That in the right context, junk food really can be therapeutic? Here‘s an elaboration on some of that, and why many people can’t see the forest for the trees. Kendahl at Our Nourishing Roots is featuring Matt in a guest post entitled ‘Nutrition Minutia Got Ya Down?’ Go check it out and see if Matt really has lost his marbles, or if he’s still playing with a full deck. Also, on or around Tuesday of next week, Matt will share the conclusions of the McXsperiment and some great video footage. And early next week I’ll have some thoughts to share about… Read more »

Metabolism, Weight Loss and Getting Rid of Health Dogmatism

Posted August 2nd, 2012 – 16 Comments

By Rob Archangel, 180DegreeHealth.com staff writer Just a quick heads up here- Matt offered a nice introductory description of what 180 Degree Health is about in an interview with Tom Corson-Knowles for his podcast show. Listen to the interview below and pass it on. Full podcast page available here. Don’t forget to pay Tom a visit as well. He’s always searching for new ideas and approaches to health and wellness, and offers a lot for readers to chew on. Matt wrote recently about the benefits of being outdoors, including the upside of direct contact with the ground, and Tom has a nice recent post of the topic, a review and write up of Earthing: The Most Important Health Discovery Ever? Another recent post describes the Japanese philosophy of Morita, which… Read more »

Free eBook

Posted July 31st, 2012 – 42 Comments

The email I get most often is one inquiring about the “free ebook.” In October of 2011, the free ebook that I used to give away was revised, expanded into a full-length book, and released as Diet Recovery: Restoring Hormonal Health, Metabolism, Mood, and Your Relationship with Food. There is also now a Diet Recovery 2. This book lays out all of the major concepts regarding the health issues that can stem from an impaired metabolism, how the metabolism becomes impaired in the first place, and clear instructions on the most high percentage methodology (without drugs or supplements) for raising metabolic rate back to normal and beyond. I decided to do this post for those searching for information about the free ebook at 180DegreeHealth. You can read more about Diet Recovery HERE … Read more »

The McXperiment

Posted July 30th, 2012 – 47 Comments

Today is the beginning of a brief but hilariously fun McDonald’s experiment – dubbed the “McXperiment (pronounced – ‘mickspeariment’)” I can tell you right now, I shoulda started dating women with kids years ago. This is awesome. Why play with mice or guinea pigs when you can do it with a real, live human??!! My girlfriend’s daughter turned 7 yesterday. “Where do you want to eat for your birthday?” “McDonald’s! Yay!” We’ve spent the last couple of weeks with her nonstop, and she loves that Mickey D’s – mostly for the lame toys. This week it’s Spongebob playing basketball, which makes it even more fun as you will see in a minute. We both think that it’s important that a child has a balanced perspective about certain things. My GF’s daughter… Read more »

10 Health Reasons to Spend Time Outdoors

Posted July 26th, 2012 – 29 Comments

This summer I toured around the Rocky Mountains with my girlfriend and her daughter, showing them many of the remarkable places and doing many of the remarkable things in the outdoors (like crapping in a hole) that I’ve been extremely privileged to experience. In the past I have reaped many health rewards from spending a lot of time in the outdoors (I’ve experienced some health detriments as well, from overdoing it with physical exertion and underdoing it on food). I think the near-miraculous health benefits I have experienced from spending a lot of time outdoors in the past was one of the major catalysts for my interest in health. The only problem was that the quantity of time spent outdoors to achieve that effect was extreme – not something any “normal” person… Read more »

How to Get Better Sleep

Posted July 23rd, 2012 – 58 Comments

By Rob Archangel, 180DegreeHealth.com staff writer Recently, Matt’s been riffing on the topic of childhood obesity and possible causes of it. One of the factors is getting enough sleep. According to this article, both obese kids and lean kids tend to get insufficient sleep during the week (around eight versus nine or ten hours per night), but lean kids sleep in and make up some of their sleep debt on the weekends, whereas obese kids don’t. The researchers in the mentioned study say that just about all kids would be better off with more and more regular sleep. I’d say that goes for adults too. So what to do about it, for both kids and grownups? I want to offer a few strategies and outlooks that have been helpful to… Read more »

Childhood Obesity

Posted July 19th, 2012 – 46 Comments

By Matt Stone Recently I had an interview tentatively set up on the topic of childhood obesity. As soon as I knew about the interview I started thinking about what I wanted to say and got really excited. Then the interview got canceled. Well, I had too much that I wanted to say floating around in my head to just let it die. Below is a faux interview on the topic. For those that don’t have the time to listen, some of the main points covered are…. Most factors that control a person’s susceptibility to store excess fat when entering into the modern environment is set in motion during the first few years of life and BEFORE life. Most think purely in terms of genetics, but I’ve always thought of genetics as a misleading term, because there is a great deal that… Read more »

The Specific Carbohydrate Diet, and Why Vegetarians Can’t Get It Up

Posted July 16th, 2012 – 47 Comments

By Rob Archangel, 180DegreeHealth.com staff writer Well, time to wrap up kiddos! The Real Food Summit ends today, and this will be my last roundup. On deck: Jordan Reasoner and Steven Wright talking about the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, and Kaayla Daniels talking about enhancing fertility. First up, Jordan and Steve talking about poop. They have an engineering background and take a pretty methodical approach to helping people deal with digestive disorders. Jordan was diagnosed with Celiac disease several years ago, and Steve experienced undiagnosed digestive distress. Going on a specific carbohydrate diet seemed to help them regain their lives. The idea behind SCD is that unhealthy guts can’t tolerate complex carbs well, and so you avoid them either permanently or provisionally to allow your gut to heal. You can still… Read more »

Fermented Foods and Weight Regulation

Posted July 15th, 2012 – 22 Comments

By Rob Archangel, 180DegreeHealth.com staff writer Today at the Real Foods Summit, I listened to Jenny McGruther talk about the practice and benefits of fermentation. This is a topic near and dear to me. Around six years ago, I stopped eating a vegan diet and found the Weston A Price Foundation. Through them, I found a guy named Sandor Katz. Sandor is awesome. He wrote a book called Wild Fermentation, and it inspired me to get into the practice of making things like sauerkraut, kimchi, sourdough bread and kombucha. Maybe it was psychosomatic, but I also found that as I started eating meat, especially fatty meats like sausages, having a like bit of ‘kraut or kimchi helped my belly like me more afterward. A year or so later, I left the… Read more »

Erectile Dysfunction, Tooth Decay and Traditional Fats- Oh My!

Posted July 14th, 2012 – 17 Comments

By Rob Archangel, 180DegreeHealth.com staff writer Today on the Real Food Summit, I listened to Kim Schuette and Rami Nagel. Both were big boosters of traditional fats like butter, coconut oil, and animal fats. Kim spent a little time talking about how traditional fats can be helpful for erectile dysfunction, and Rami describes dietary ways to combat tooth decay and some of the problems with modern dental practices. First, the *big* question (haha) – how do fats in our diet help with ED? If you eat low in fat (and cholesterol), your body’s ability to synthesize hormones like testosterone and progesterone goes down. This is a bad thing. These hormones are the hormones of youth and fertility ( progesterone= pro-gestation), and also aid in other health benefits like building lean… Read more »

More Low-Carb Craziness

Posted July 13th, 2012 – 47 Comments

By Rob Archangel, 180DegreeHealth.com staff writer Still listening to the Real Food Summit, and today caught two talks, Zoe Harcombe and Barry Groves. I wanted to bang my head against the wall for some of the wacky stuff I was hearing, especially from Groves. I won’t give a point by point breakdown, but some quick and dirty thoughts. Groves repeatedly misrepresents facts to fit his preferred low or no-carb diet. He says traditional human diets were heavy on animal fat and featured few or no carbs, ignoring the many, many human cultures that did eat starch-heavy diets (probably in fact, the majority did). And even those groups which ate lots of fat valued plant foods. As Melissa McEwen points out, it’s a myth that Inuit ate zero carbs. (As an… Read more »

Do These Genes Make Me Look Fat?

Posted July 12th, 2012 – 7 Comments

By Rob Archangel, 180DegreeHealth.com staff writer Welcome back to the Real Food Summit roundup. Today, I spent a couple hours listening to Gray Graham of the Price Pottenger Nutritional Foundation talk about epigenetics and the hereditary aspects of illness. That dude really doesn’t like high glycemic foods. He mentioned their alleged dangers probably a dozen times or more, and targets them for messing up our self-regulating good health. As Matt mentioned in a recent video, glycemic index is a lousy way to determine what you should eat or what sort of impact a given food is likely to have on you. Even if a given food spikes our insulin really high and really fast, it is our insulin sensitivity that determines whether this is problematic. If we’re insulin resistant, we… Read more »

Primitive Wisdom, Raw Dairy & Why We Are Not What We Eat

Posted July 11th, 2012 – 14 Comments

By Rob Archangel, 180DegreeHealth.com staff writer Back again with today’s Real Food Summit Roundup. I listened to part two of superstar Chris Masterjohn’s talk about Weston A. Price and what his research can tell us about how to live today. I like Chris because he’s a man of science, and measures his words and conclusions deliberately. And while he certainly is on board with the Weston A Price Foundation, I never get the sense that he’s twisting data to meet his (or the Foundation’s) preconceived dogma. A couple quick comments from today’s talk: Price never said that it all “primitives” had the wisdom to avoid modern ills, though some did. So it’s wrong both to assume primitives are necessarily dumb, and to adopt a hard-line paleo stance that always valorizes… Read more »

Paul Chek Yo Self Before You Wreck Yo Self

Posted July 10th, 2012 – 3 Comments

By Rob Archangel, 180DegreeHealth.com staff writer … ’cause Paul is good for your health. Welcome back for another quick take on the Real Food Summit. Listened to Paul Chek yesterday, and as several folks forecasted, dude was out there. I usually dig that stuff, and Chek is obviously a bright and thoughtful guy, so I’m not hating. My approach with those esoteric sorts of fields is to never get caught up or convinced of the rightness or wrongness of any of them, but let those perspectives illuminate new ways of thinking about things. If those ways offer some functional benefit for me, if say, it’s useful to believe in an etheric body in order to hep accomplish some goal or live in a more satisfied way, then groovy. But I… Read more »

Real Food Summit Roundup

Posted July 9th, 2012 – 17 Comments

By Rob Archangel, 180DegreeHealth.com staff writer Party people, what’s happening? Rob here again. As Matty mentioned in the comments of the last post, he’s finishing up a project and on the road until July 16th, so I’ll be stepping in for a few days giving a roundup of the Real Food Summit. Caught Joel Salatin’s talk, and as usual, Salatin was pretty rad. I used to live in The Shanandoah Valley of Virginia, about 30 miles from PolyFace Farm, and he’s a big deal down there. People love him or hate him. Given that that region is home to lots and lots of industrial food processors, and a huge chunk of the local economy goes through companies like Purdue, he strikes a lot of people as threatening. He makes some… Read more »

Fat Is Officially Incurable Response

Posted July 8th, 2012 – 52 Comments

By Rob Archangel, 180DegreeHealth.com staff writer Hey crew, Rob here with my first post at 180 Degree Health. A couple times in the last few days, I’ve had the chance to articulate my thoughts around obesity. One of them was the highly trafficked Cracked.com article Fat is Officially Incurable (According To Science). Vigorous debate rages there and on the 180D Facebook page, and I’ve participated some. I thought I might try to consolidate some thoughts here, in question and answer format. What is obesity and is it dangerous? Technically, it’s having a BMI (body mass index) over 30. It’s not necessarily bad for you. In some cases, it’s protective as we age. On an individual level, health and obesity are not the same. You can be fat and fit, or… Read more »

Real Food Summit

Posted July 5th, 2012 – 16 Comments

Sean Croxton is up to his usual extreme interviewing prowess, and is at it again with another online summit featuring nearly 30 interviews. His eardrums must be made of some kind of titanium alloy. None of that Paleo stuff this time. This summit is the REAL FOOD SUMMIT. The speakers look good. If you have never heard Joel Salatin speak, who is first in the lineup, I promise you it is worth your time. I’m particularly excited about his talk, not necessarily because of his beliefs but because he is just such a rare character that tricks you into thinking deeply while you’re having a ton of fun. In 2008 I seriously contemplated spending a year apprenticing at his farm to learn about his revolutionary ”polyculture.” But then I came to my senses and remembered… Read more »

1811 Eastlake – Revolutionary Addiction Treatment

Posted July 3rd, 2012 – 66 Comments

Many years ago I classified myself as a “sugar addict.” For nearly a decade, spanning my mid-teens to my mid-20’s, I put forth a daily struggle to consume fewer foods that I “knew” were unhealthy. I had many victories, but within a week I would almost always cave in and eat something really “unhealthy,” and would do so in ever-greater amounts. In other words, in an attempt at junk food abstinence, I set up a repeated cycle of binging, followed by starving, followed by binging again – harder and harder with each round. And each round became more frustrating and shameful. The more I failed, the more guilt, shame, and self-loathing I experienced. So I lived with a song of self-punishment playing in the background of my life. This came… Read more »

Early Age of First Menstruation

Posted June 28th, 2012 – 61 Comments

I used to be pretty far out, man. At least, I went through a phase of several years in which I was pretty far out. I wore wooden jewelry and really tried to believe in dumb things with no real proof, evidence, or logic, like fairies or Astral travel. I noticed during that time, the people I encountered, and the ideologies I came across – there wasn’t a large requirement for much proof, evidence, or logical thought. It’s almost if it was more valid if it just came to you from somewhere out in the cosmos. Neale Donald Walsch said so! I spoke in Grass Valley, California last weekend, one of the great American meccas for the alternative, New Age, and all things in between. Only a few minutes into my talk about how a high… Read more »