By Matt Stone
I’ve had peculiar longings for a lifestyle overhaul of late. It’s a long story involving goats. And maybe sheep and dogs, too. Don’t ask. Okay, fine I’ll tell you. You are so nosey!
I’ve been doing extensive research on breeding animals. My interest in goats in particular stems back to my hardcore mountain man days when I had once had the idea to retreat into the backcountry for long stretches of time with some goats, including both pack goats and dairy goats, to carry my stuff, get me some fresh milk, and offer me an occasional meat feast if I found myself getting too short on calories. A little strange and extreme sure, but hey, that’s just me.
I never did it of course. But daydreams like that never fully get cleansed from the psyche. And lately I’ve been yearning to lengthen my laptop leash. Yes, that laptop keeps me on a leash. I know right. Totally not nice.
I’ve also been rather obsessive about football this season, which has been another flashback to my past. I spent basically my entire childhood from roughly age 5-19 hyperfocused on sports, watching them 20 hours a week or more, playing them 20 hours a week or more, and playing another 20 hours of sports video games. Screw Mario Bros. I’d rather play Super Tecmo Bowl.
And speaking of Tecmo, this brings me to where the latent revival of two former interests of mine converge–genetics. Back in the Nintendo Entertainment System’s heyday, one player reigned supreme. Bo Jackson. Anyone who played the game recognized immediately that Bo was superior, earning Bo the nickname of “Tecmo Bo” amongst sports video game nerds like myself. Only Bo could perform feats like this in Super Tecmo Bowl:
Bo Jackson managed to win ESPN Sport Science’s “Greatest Athlete of All Time” award.He is almost unanimously considered to be the greatest physical specimen the world has ever?known. He was?a two-time state champion in the decathlon, qualified for the Olympics in track and field, has state records for the high jump and triple jump in his home state of Alabama, ran the fastest 40-time in NFL history (all positions), was an all-star baseball player and pro bowl football player, and managed to be all those things without weight training and regarding practice as “a waste of time.” He would literally play baseball for half a?year, then’throw some football pads on and, without any training or preparation, walk onto the?field and be the most physically dominant player out there.It wasn’t that Bo was’such a refined?player. It’s just’that it was so abundantly clear that Bo had the most?incredible set of natural physical tools ever given to one human being. From being able to throw runners out at home plate from the warning track to sudden and surprising unrehearsed physical maneuvers thought to be practically impossible in a beastly 230-pound stocky frame, Bo was a once in a century piece of work.
Bo grew up poor as dirt and was the 8th of 10 kids in his family. One can hardly attribute Bo’s gifts to’the cuisine of impoverished 60’s black?Southerners split 10 ways. As far as I know, none of his other siblings were particularly athletic. Just Bo. He appeared, like most professional athletes, to have won the genetic coin toss.
And Bo, along with what breeders of animals like goats, dogs, and horses and such have known for centuries, is a product of pure genetics.
Sure, a mother and child must be fed enough quality food to be nourished sufficiently to fulfill such genetic potential. Nutrition certainly plays a role. But modern day health nerds and a man they frequently worship, one Weston A. Price in particular, have probably overdone the nutrition fetish. We are not all perfect genetic specimens that have been tainted with Hostess products, causing us to have crooked teeth, health problems, and other shortcomings. There’s a lot more to breeding certain qualities in animals than the food they are fed. Good food, good metabolism–these things help no doubt. But ultimately much of the?physical fortitude?of wild animals and primitive humans whose skeletal remains suggest they may have had superior?physical formation to us modern folk rests in the hands of?natural selection.
I was reading a website by a woman who lives in Texas and raises goats for their meat. What mattered most’to her was that her herd was maximally healthy and acclimated to the?climate, conditions, and pathogens on her ranch.Unlike many ranchers, she didn’t bust out’the antibiotics and de-wormers every time her?animals got sick. Instead, she demonstrated great patience in the future?of her investment, and allowed sick animals to die while the healthy ones went on to reproduce, which,?as I’m discovering, involves a’tremendous amount of golden showers.
And it worked. Her animals are now free of the parasites and other problems they had when she first began.
Anyway, in my early 20’s, I thought almost exclusively about genes and heredity in a breeder’s sense. With my crappy eyesight, severe health problems that might’ve killed me without emergency intervention as a child–I thought myself unfit to reproduce. As a hardcore “naturalist” for lack of a better word, I felt like I would be further watering down the human gene pool with my tainted seed. Then I came across the work?of Weston A. Price and others and began to think to the other end of the spectrum. I began to think that I and everyone else was a perfect little snowflake?if we could just eat enough of that mysterious nutrient in grassfed Swiss cow butter. Like most things I’ve intellectually explored in my life, I went deep into one polarized?direction only to swing to the far opposite, and now, finally, I have come back to the?gray middle.
I don’t know if livestock breeding is in store for me or not. If’so, I will?be able to go much further in my understanding of?how important nutrition?is in the overall picture compared to selective breeding. Either way, I?plan on all of my would-be goats being 2-sport all-star athletes with 4.12 time in the 40-yard dash by the way.But I have no doubt that, when looking at the big?picture, that nutrition is an important piece of the overall puzzle of human health, and adequate nutrition is an absolutely mandatory prerequisite, but there are many more factors involved in the?rather quick degradation of human health that I was so?eager to “turn 180 degrees” when I launched this site almost exactly 5 years ago.
The use of medicine, antibiotics, emergency surgery, and many more medical?marvels has certainly?weakened our genetic stock in the manner described?in one goat magazine I was reading recently?(man that’s weird to write), where the authors complained?of it taking years to cleanse out the crappy DNA that one lousy buck implanted into their whole herd. It is one of many inconvenient truths of modernity, though a’small price to pay for?being able to pull all-nighters playing Super Tecmo Bowl with my friends in my?youth. Despite this watering down, and despite what most nutritionists consider to be a woeful national diet, we do seem to keep churning out increasingly?freakish athletes. An unlimited supply of easily-digestible calories is?a powerful thing when it goes to the right places.So maybe all is not lost.
Well, that’s all. If you have any questions, ask Bo. He knows everything except hockey.
Matt Stone is an independent health researcher, author of more than 15 books, and founder of 180DegreeHealth. He is best known for his research on metabolic rate and its central role in many health conditions as well as his criticisms of extreme dieting. You can read more of his work in over 500?free articles on the’site?or in his books?HERE. ?
Tecmo Bo! That was incredible, like a Three Stooges bit.
First! Ok, I just had to do that…
Looked like this years Michigan defense…
Ok. Well, I took too long. Second then.
That said, this is a great reminder. I have been stuck over on the extreme “diet is everything” side for far too long….It also seems that my sister and I have inherited more of my mother’s side of things genetically, which is unfortunate, because my Dad is a tank at 70, his brother is a current 40+ age group fencing champion at 75 and their mom, my grandma, is 100 and hanging in there and was using the internet regularly up until 6 months ago when she had a stroke. My mom’s side of the family is a different story and my sister and I are much less robust.
As much as I am not a GAPS fan, I do think Natasha is onto something with the high childhood antibiotic use and also that flora that we inherit from our mothers. I was not a robust or healthy child and my health has always been high maintenance. Lots of antibiotics and junk food as a kid ( I do wish I had grown up eating a WAPF diet! at least in my growing years) probably didn’t help either…
That’s my dad too – the live hard what the heck if you die young type, working to burnout point – only, he’s just turned 85 and it’s too late for him to die young or learn to slow down. AND he smokes. Wish I had his genes – oh wait, I do! Just not those ones :( On top of that, I was fortunate enough to grow up with very few of the modern nasties. But I did grow up thinking I was fat, and we know where that leads …
The 30 for 30 on Bo was amazing as was the one on Marcus Dupree, but what’s interesting was how much weight those guys have gained later in life. I know i grew playing sports with a lot of healthy guys and what i’ve noticed is a big difference in their health and body weight at 40 yrs of age. I think those differences are much more related to diet/lifestyle. I agree that Vitamin Unobtainium from the the mother tree on Pandora is not going to let me dominate football while playing it as a hobby, but i do hope that diet and lifestyle will help us maintain much more of our youthful vigor and health.
I almost mentioned Dupree in there, too. I doubt he had much Activator X in his diet either. Just a freak genetic occurrence. But even Dupree had weight struggles even at 19.
True, Dupree had weight issues even while playing.
Related: ‘The Sports Gene’- http://thetalentcode.com/2013/08/20/talking-naturenurture-with-david-epstein-author-of-the-sports-gene/
Some dudes are just outliers. Allen Iverson famously didn’t care much about practice, and Shaq showed up overweight and out of shape each season but worked himself into insane dominance just because he’s that gifted.
On the other hands, MJ and Kobe both had/have high level natural talent, but heightened it due to a crazy work ethic.
I think i watched an episode of SuperNanny (i know, i know) once and they were working with a pro basketball player and they commented that he drank 6, 24-oz large Mountain Dew’s a day. I would love to see the rest of that guys diet. But there are a few ways to look at that:
1. His genetics are good enough he can get away with it
2. Its not as big a deal as health nuts would make us believe
3. HFCS is a miracle drug
4. He can get away with it for a while but this is not building his health
i’m guessing number two and four.
Was it Lamar Odom, the Candy Man? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdioWBJZ2EA
I remember reading something about how this guy was a Peatarian dream. Lots of sugar and gelatin every day and high level performance. Who knows?
Hahah. It was not. I’ve never seen anything like that guy. But Ray Peat would hate him. He said he eats bags of Hershey’s cookies and cream and the number one ingredient is vegetable oil (cheap white chocolate is always vegetable oil mix although its a mix of more saturated fats like palm oil and more PUFAs like sunflower). http://www.thehersheycompany.com/brands/hersheys-bars/cookies-n-creme.aspx
I would also give anything for Keebler Fudge Strips to be part of a healthy diet. Once again, i try to watch the PUFAs.
I was going to mention this book, too. I saw the author speak recently. It was so interesting.
I think it will always be a combo of nature and nurture. I come from pretty strong stock on both sides of my family but still have had some issues from antibiotic and other medicine use more than anything. In fact, I can attribute 98% of my issues to either medicine or my eating disorder, and that’s not an exaggeration. I was a pretty robust child before all that.
I’m skeptical of the idea that we could have totally mucked up the gene pool by allowing weak players to survive in the last 80 years since antibiotics came into play. If that were the only issue, we would have already weeded out the weak ones pretty effectively in the previous millenias before antibiotics were discovered, although immigration could interfere a bit
Homeopathy has some interesting perspectives on all of this, too, and their belief is that genetic weaknesses can be corrected.
It’s not just antibiotics. Life as a human with clothes, steady food supplies and food stores and roofs over our heads is much easier to survive than life in the wild in harsh conditions, and it has been that way for thousands of years. The selective pressures for humans are a lot weaker than the selective pressures for other creatures. It’s just been accelerated in the last century.
Homeopathy, like all healing arts, believes that it can cure every problem known to man. But that doesn’t make it so. Clearing up some sinus issues and morphing into a Bo Jackson are also two totally separate conversations.
Just to clarify, homeopathy does not believe it can make you morph into Bo Jackson. It does believe you can correct the genetic weaknesses that cause you to be susceptible to sinus infections. And yes, very different things.
are you talking about this homepathy? :P
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWE1tH93G9U
No one knows the mechanism by which homeopathy works, but when it works on you, you become a believer. I don’t really care what James Randi thinks. It does not work in the same way Western medicine does. I’ve taken remedies that do nothing at all (which means it’s not the right remedy) and remedies that make some amazing changes that are not explainable any other way.
I agree Amy. When my kids were young they would get really bad ear infections but homeopathic remedies would stop the pain and clear the infection up almost immediately. It was magic and they were far too young for it to have been a placebo. I have seen remedies work on animals as well. Interesting enough the ear infection remedy for my daughter was a totally different one than for my son. Different personality, different remedy.
Hm, I’m just skeptical because it sounds so much like bullshit. The research on it is very conflicting. I got the impression that properly controlled studies don’t find a difference with homeopathy vs placebo.
I also once tried a homeopathic remedy for better sleep but it didn’t do anything.
I don’t think these things are bullshit by definition. I’m even trying out acupuncture with herbs at the moment and I’ve noticed clear improvements in my sleep and chronic sinus infection (might be just the herbs or something totally unrelated of course). It’s just that so far I’ve gotten the impression that homeopathy doesn’t have much to offer.
I used to live with a dog who had a crazy allergic response to something one summer. It persisted and she was rubbing her face raw from itchiness, bruising and drawing blood around her eyes, looking like a raccoon. We tried oatmeals baths and gave her Benadryl and changed her diet and didn’t get any lasting effects.
Went to a vet who suggested a homeopathic remedy. Within a couple days, she cleared up. Now maybe the timing was coincidental or there were other factors I couldn’t identify, but it certainly seemed to have an impact on her.
The way homeopathy supposedly works is that you have to find the right remedy- there might be ten remedies that impact sleep. The specific constellation of symptoms is important though and you only one of those ten will be right for you specifically. The fact that nine don’t work is well accounted for by homeopathic principles and doesn’t disprove the system. According to practitioners, it’s different than allopathic medicine that has a generalized effect on specific symptoms regardless of who takes them. Homeopathy is very individualized.
I’m not a true believer, and I’m open to evidence that it’s BS. But I do care about integrity and would like to see testing for what its practitioners claim it can do rather than what skeptics imagine they’re claiming.
Yeah, I know it sounds like total BS. The mechanism isn’t known, and it sounds ridiculous. But there is some good evidence, and as others have pointed out it works on animals and babies so it’s not just placebo. There is no known mechanism for accupuncture either, but there is general acceptance in the mainstream now that it works for whatever reason. I suspect homeopathy works on some energetic level that science has not yet discovered.
Here are some rat studies using homeopathy to ameliorate arsenic poisoning (in this case, the remedy should be the same for all subjects, since they can pinpoint the substance that needs clearing – homeopathic arsenic treats arsenic poisoning).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17718811
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10444909
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10361568
Homeopathy is western medicine. It was invented by a German:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Hahnemann
Yes, you are correct. I meant conventional Western medicine.
I once dreamed of having a goat. Perfect pet: it would keep our backyard mowed by eating all the grass and supply is with fresh milk. I then realized I would have to milk it at the crack of dawn rain, sun, or snow and decided it was a bad idea.
So what do I do instead? Have a baby. Now I am the one being milked at the crack of dawn! At least my baby likes to eat inside the house.
LOL RACHEL!!!.too funny!!!!
Awesomely hilarious. As a mom of three, I know!
When s/he is old enough, s/he’ll still mow the lawn for you ;)
Actually, in Chinese medicine there is a lot of weight put on your inherited constitution. It wasn’t lost on them that those with natural vitality and robustness can often die young because they are constantly burning the candle at both ends or keep pushing things too hard. A lot of endurance athletes probably go that route. On the flip side, there are sagacious quotes that someone with a weaker constitution can actually live a long time if they understand the subtle laws of nature and how they apply to their own constitution. Understanding one’s own constitution becomes much more difficult when one is constantly bombarded with health advice, theories, fads, etc on the internet! De-programming one’s self can be very difficult with so much dogmatic theory floating around…
Very interesting comment, Sean! Resonated with me because I had a remarkably rocksolid constitution as a kid and young adult (no allergies, never cold, never tired, able to eat anything, etc), and consequently embraced work hard/play hard, I’ll-sleep-when-I’m-dead, rock-n-roll bravado until I finally pushed it too far at age 34. Two years of grueling overwork and undersleep absolutely wrecked my health.
I wonder if I had had even one difficulty, like hayfever, if I wouldn’t have known limits sooner.
I did have one Achilles’ heel, though, as SueW says above: I always mistakenly thought I was “fat” because I was sturdily built … as long as things were going fine, I ate plenty despite this nagging insecurity. But when the chips were down, I think this insecurity was the opportunity that health neuroticism exploited to get ahold of me.
I’ve been putting my health back together since that crash, with — as hinted at above — unfortunate missteps into overexercise, health-nut-ism and restrictive eating. Matt’s metabolism stuff really helped me because it allowed me to figure out what had strong to begin with and build on that using pure personal intuition, instead of second-guessing with esoteric restrictions and so forth. And realizing how lucky I had been to have a history to return to/build upon. With the “metabolism” insight, I decided that my original good health might have been partly because of, rather than in spite of, the high-calorie, high-processed-food, high-Dairy-Queen diet of my Midwestern upbringing. Putting ice cream back in its proper role as one of my personal major food groups has me turning the corner, I think.
Great comment and a great point that people often don’t think of. TCM makes so much sense to me.
The only way I can see to solve this argument is a twin study where adopted twins seperated at birth have followed very different diets.
Until then I will take Price’s work at face value. (Though I don’t believe in any single miracle ‘X’ nutrient.) I think epigenetics can have a more noticeable and pronounced effect from one generation to the next. Natural selection takes more time to weaken or strengthen a people.
There are studies like that Gabriel, prompting obesity researchers to claim that body composition at least, was somewhere in the neighborhood of 70-80 genetic, as twins separated at birth still typically have the same growth rate, end up the same height, have the same body fat levels, have it distributed in the exact same places, have similar balding patterns and rates of aging, etc. Of course, we don’t really know HOW different the diets were. Probably not much all things considered. As is lifestyle. So these studies may not be as relevant as researchers assume. Of course, eating grubs and yams and living in the jungle is equally hypothetical, as the world is not trending towards such a diet and lifestyle, and if that were a solution to modern problems it wouldn’t be a feasible one.
But genes and natural selection are of extreme importance, with a huge impact. See Chihuahuas and Irish Wolfhounds for an example of how powerful genes are completely aside from nutrition.
It would be cool to see a study like that done where one twin was raised as a hard-working farmer’s son on a homestead, and the other one raised in a city as a cube-farmed human.
#1 gets a ton of great food, much of which his family grew, along with daily physical exertion.
#2 eats whatever is at the grocery store and easily microwaved, sits around all day watching tv, playing video games and maybe messes around with some sport for an hour or two per day at most.
It would probably be very interesting to see the results.
Of course, if #2 decides to become a sports star and trains consistently with weights and in his sport, the results would be more even. But if he just does the general “city-born sloth” thing and doesn’t really pursue sports or lifting, I would bet that he would be much “softer” weaker and less enduring than twin #1.
By the way, if my country-raised twin is out there reading this, please get in touch with me so I can show you what a soft city-boy really looks like. :-)
It would be cool to see such a study. Right now I’m just focusing on getting some goats so I can experiment on them haha.
Are you moving out to the country to raise those goats, or are they going to live on the beach?
Inland Florida. Moving away from the beach if we do it. And migrating to the Rockies in the summers for some nomadic grazing. Should be really old school.
From personal experience, it does seem that most twins have similar body composition, but there are interesting counterexamples. There’s a documentary on obesity on youtube (The Weight of the Nation, I think it’s called) that profiles a couple of middle-aged twins, one with diabetes and one without. If I remember correctly, the thinner one (without diabetes) went on some kind of weight loss program that his brother opted out of, and that difference sent their lives on separate health trajectories. Their health and appearance were strikingly different, but the heavier one was starting the weight loss process.
I did see that scene, but I had to wonder how impermanent the starved brother would turn out to be once he went through a full weight loss/regain cycle. Many people can temporarily make themselves look fitter, but over the long haul there is somewhat of an equalizing effect I imagine.
Hopefully, the diabetic brother will lose weight to join the slimmer one, and that will be equalizing effect. From observing my own family, it doesn’t seem that weight gain always has to follow weight loss. My parents just celebrated their 40th anniversary this weekend, and I was looking back at some pictures from when I was growing up. They were both obese back in the 90s (my dad morbidly so), and today, although they are still a bit overweight, they’re a lot slimmer than they were, and it happened so slowly I hardly noticed it. I don’t think they dieted, but just tried to eat more sensibly. They also exercise regularly now, and my dad has been riding his bike every day for years. You could say he’s a metabolically healthy fat guy–because of all his exercise–but he’s not nearly as fat as he used to be.
The genes for weight gain are definitely in my family. My own brother has probably gained ten pounds every year since he was a teenager (and he’s 35), and my sister has also struggled with weight (though she’s had six kids). My point in all this is that I don’t think we’re completely at the mercy of our genes, and I thought the case study of the twins in The Weight of the Nation was a pretty inspiring example.
My husband has a similar story – he does not have diabetes, but his fraternal twin does. They are 39. The diabetes manifested about 8 years ago for his brother, when he gained about 15 pounds. However, my husband weighs about 80 pounds more than his twin. The twin guzzles diet soda all day long and eats low carb to keep his weight at 140, but still has to use insulin. Another interesting genetic aspect – their uncles are identical twins, and both uncles have diabetes. Probably the difference is fraternal vs identical.
What about epigenetics? Your environment, including food has the ability to switch genes off and on.
See Dave Asprey for a prime example.
Genetics and epigenetics are both major contributors to the finished product.
And specifically interesting to me at the moment, is our psychological environment. I’m reading this book called “When the Body Says No” by Dr. Gabor Mate, who thinks that attachment patterns learned in early development can potentially affect whether or not a specific disease will run in a certain family. Like say breast cancer runs in a family, yet there doesn’t seem to be clear genetic explanation for this. However, the same negative relationship pattern is followed by all of the breast cancer sufferers in this family. Thus, the idea is, that these unhealthy patterns might stress a part of the body relating to the emotional problem, if that makes sense.
And, if attachment theory is accurate, it would seem that learned attachment patterns are more are more likely to be passed down over many, many generations, than a diet would be.
I’m not saying this because I think the environment is more powerful than genetics. How should I know? This is just one aspect of health I neglected while aiming for perfection through diet, and now that I’m overcoming my skepticism, I’m considering looking into this a bit more closely. :P
I think that’s a great point, puddleduck. Often when I think of things being “genetic” I wonder how much of it is tendencies, feelings, ways to deal with (or not deal with) said feelings that are being passed down, rather than genes specific to disease. Same manifestation, but able to be modified or thrown out all together.
Didn’t Bo use steroids? Didn’t he end up with terrible hip problems? A nice nutrient dense Weston A. Price diet could probably help him with any lingering inflammation issues. Also, I’m not so sure that a poor black family in Alabama couldn’t put together a healthier diet than wealthier suburbanites. All those barbecued gristly ribs, black eyed peas, collard greens cooked in lard, pork rines, etc, have a lot of glucosaminoglycans which are excellent for building joints and connective tissues.
No doubt genetics plays a factor in health. However, we are at a time when genetics are OVER-emphasized as the cause of our health problems, and nutrition is under-emphasized as a solution (esp. with crap lies we’ve been told like the USDA food pyramid, or the new My Plate that doesn’t even allow for consumption of saturated fats.). Most of us are conditioned to be passive consumers of medical treatments and procedures because we’ve been told that our destiny is out of our hands, completely at the whim of fate and bad genetics.
On the other hand, I’ve been reading about Rh-negative blood types and what an oddity it is that a woman with rh- blood can become allergic to her rh+ babies, causing miscarriages and serious health problems, without medical intervention. According to Sarah Pope, the Healthy Home Economist, a mother with rh- blood can deliver healthy rh+ babies if she eats a nutrient dense diet. So even in a situation with genetic histo-incompatibility, complications can be minimized with proper nutrition.
That’s interesting about the Rh factor. My grandmother was O negative and gave birth to my dad who is A positive, back in the 40’s. She ate a farm-fresh, nutrient dense diet for sure, but he was born seriously jaundiced. He was very sick for the first week or two of his life.
Several folks in the 30 for 30 documentary suggested that he was not on steroids, but really was just an outlier. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQQQ161c4S4&feature=youtu.be&t=57m
You’re right on about the “poor people’s diet”. Thanks for pointing that out.
He didn’t have a hip problem, but a hip injury, which most hypothesize only Bo could have achieved because only he was able to generate enough force to dislodge his hip from the socket. I’ve rarely heard of a Weston A. Price diet helping with lingering inflammation issues. When I gave such a diet my best effort I had to discontinue it due to an increase in many inflammation issues. In retrospect it should have been expected with such a large intake of chicken skin, organ meats, and pork fat.
You’re right that poor black families could have put together a superb diet in that sense, but statistically poor blacks in the South are the shortest-lived, most health-problem ridden demographic in the United States. They also manage to produce some of the most naturally-equipped athletes on earth. Incredible physique and athleticism and health and disease resistance have never been thought to be congruent. Size is also a good predictor of longevity and health. Any dog breeder can tell you that. Heredity is usually a game of give and take. Almost all breeds of anything have strengths and weaknesses. Breeding for certain strengths yields weaknesses in other areas and vice versa.
Yes, except in his autobiography he talked about eating lots of junk food growing up.
Didn’t read the autobiography, but figured it was a safe bet to assume that Kraft and Frito Lay made a strong showing in the diet. Thanks for chiming in Kimmie.
The Healthy Home Economist’s claim about the Rh factor is complete BS. A nutrient dense diet won’t change the fact that your immune system sees your Rh positive baby as a threat and make antibodies against Rh + blood, which will most likely kill your second child and most definitely the third, fourth, etc. (The first child is usually okay unless mom and baby’s blood mix during the pregnancy somehow). Lots of babies died because of the Rh factor before Rhogam was invented. I hope women aren’t following that ridiculous advice and forgoing the shot thinking that diet will somehow prevent this.
Except that Sarah Pope claims her own rh- mother gave birth to seven healthy rh+ children with no rhogam but eating a nutrient dense diet. I don’t think I would forego rhogam as an rh- mother, but I would try to eat a “good” diet to improve my odds of having healthy kids.
He had a hip injury during a game (football) which essentially ended his career. Had a hip replacement afterwards. Nothing about steroids has come up in connection with Bo.
All of my chickens came from the exact same hatchery and lived in the exact same circumstances for their entire lives. They were conventional hybrids, same breed. they lived on a farm where the could free-range and have access to soy based organic layer feed. They were forced (by artificial lighting) to lay eggs over their first winter. I adopted them when they were 2.
One of the birds is named Porch Chicken because for whatever reason, she refused to roost in the barn at her first home with the other 49 hens. She lived on the farmer’s porch, much to his wife’s chagrin. She also has never been partial to feed. Even after I revised her diet from commercial hen feed to coconut, grains and seed, she has always preferred to go digging for worms and grubs and leafy greens. She has survived being hit by a car and an attack by a dog. In fact, all of her flockmates are all now dead, at least all the one’s whose fate I’ve known about. She is the last bird standing, as I knew it would be. But right now she’s down for the count, going through a really really hard molting process (losing her feathers) and it seems she has a little hen cold. Poor gal. We’ll see how it turns out, but I’m rooting for her.
Watching her and her preferences has made me consider a few things about nature and nurture. I don’t know that it’s so much Porch Chicken’s scrappy, rugged lifestyle that has given her the strength to be such an impressive specimen, but that she just turned out that way from the start, and because of her superiority, had no desire to sit in the barn and live off of domestic grains like her daft sisters. And then it all feeds into itself. She’s such a nut, she dislikes eating out of feeders even! She’s been coop bound today and the only way I can get her to eat is to put her worms and seeds and tomatoes on a chunk of sod I cut out of my lawn.
So who knows. Boy, I was excited to see a farm animal reference here! Let’s keep ’em coming!
She’ll be a lucky chicken to die of old age. How old is she? And maybe she chose the porch because she was bottom of the pecking order and getting pushed around. Currently I have a chicken-reared guinea fowl who thinks he’s a chicken. Genes say guinea fowl, conditioning and identity say chicken, result – chaos.
Me too, love to talk about animals!
Sapolsky believes that the top and bottom of the pecking order are usually the first to die. Those in the middle survive longer and are subjected to less stress. If you like reading about animals and health, Sapolsky is like crack cocaine.
I could read that stuff all day. I’ll look him up and then say bye bye to the world and my life! If you’re an animal behaviour watcher I recommend chickens because they’re funny, terribly silly, can be beautifully coloured, and searching for their eggs feels like easter egg hunts. And the chicks are so cute.
I’ll rock some chickens for sure. Probably absurd amounts. I’m planning on raising dogs, too, and feeding them mostly what comes off of the farm. Like the goats, sheep, and chickens with poor genetics :) As I read in one forum, “Breed the best and eat the rest.”
breeding stock applies to humans too. can u eat “the rest” ? It would solve some problems in this country
I don’t know if I would want to eat sick people. Too much PUFA. We’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way and feed them to pigs. They’ll eat anything.
Chickens are the best! I had no idea how much I’d love them, I took my girls in without any clue what I was doing. But they know their names, they follow you like a dog, they have amazing instincts, distinct personalities…trouble is, there won’t be any cut throat “breed the best and eat the rest” for me. No, compassion edges out and when my birds go weak, I tube feed them and heat lamp ’em and treat ’em like a family pet. No eating here. Not my precious poultry princesses!
Oh he’s the one who studied baboons in the Serengeti. Watching that doccie I was mostly consumed with envy about how much time he’s spent there! Interesting stuff too about aggression and alpha male behaviour. It stayed with me how the culture determined and policed the amount of aggression that was acceptable. Very ‘civilized’!
Yeah, I know that guy! I watched some awesome PBS thing with him. He was talking about how when you remove the most aggressive animals from a group, all the betas are just real nice to each other, cooperative and stuff. Everyone gets all zen and peaceful. I’ll have to look into him more.
Very true, I lost my rooster he was the top dog, I called him Rooster Cogburn cause he was a dick. I also lost my odd ball out chickens. I fixed the problem by introducing a lot of different birds. We have ducks, turkeys, chickens and multiple roosters, and geese three different breeds of each. I’m sure there is still a pecking order but it’s all confusing and fucked up so, all is good.
Oh no, she’s always been a hardcore motherfucker. Honest to god, there wasn’t a pecking order. Porch Chicken was clearly regarded as the strongest, but she wasn’t interested in using her power for evil. She just wanted to be a bad bitch, out on the terrain, prowling for worms. The others all kind of regarded each other pleasantly, I never saw any nastiness between them. Only benign preening assistance. Even when I’ve had sick birds, the others left them alone.
She is 6 years young. Yesterday she seemed down for the count, but a little heat lamp therapy and a hot breakfast seem to be doing her good. Today she was out running around, scratching for worms like her old self.
Why do you guys think people are developing these softcore allergies to so many things? Pollen, stone fruits, shrimp, cats, tomatoes… you name it. I developed the allergies, as a young person (probably 8 years old). And now, the adults in my life have developed them (twenty-somethings/thirty-somethings). Is this epigenetic?
I suspect it’s probably the preponderance of Arachidonic Acid in our food chain and thus bodies from all the grain in livestock feed over the past century-ish. This turns normal immune responses into exaggerated ones. But that’s probably not the only factor, because I’ve seen people under stress develop these allergies as well as overcome these allergies during rest and refeeding with little to no regard for the fat composition of their diets. So again, complex and multifactorial.
I did not have any allergies until this summer. After I had started an intense RRARFing period in June, I developed a cough, which I still experience daily. I’m allergic to grass or something.
I haven’t really eaten much omega-6 for like, probably eight years now. However, I suppose I naturally did start to eat a bit more of it this summer. But it wasn’t that much. Have been somewhat stressed though, I guess.
The rise of allergies correlates pretty well with the rise of antibiotics, too. Some people claim vaccines are a culprit since they can interfere with the gut, but who knows. Really severe allergies are considered to be auto-immune in nature, so probably whatever has caused the rise in other auto-immune conditions. Food intolerances (which are mistaken for food allergies) are more likely to be related to gut issues and stress and things, and you can reverse them much more easily.
Trying to pinpoint it to one thing is probably useless. Just look around. We are exposed to a gazillion substances, chemicals and situations that were unheard of a handful of generations ago. Our immune systems are probably going berserk trying to keep up. Our bodies are always on edge trying to cope, and it can make things go a lil’ screwy.
We often talk about genes vs. the environment in a traditional sense, or the environment turning on and off genes in the epigenetic sense, but consider that genes cause seeking behavior including food seeking. I read a book that was talking about how genes cause us not only to choose our environments, so for example, identical twins will choose the same environment: lifestyle, diet, sports, career, mate, etc. to the extent they can, even if raised in different families (and if they are raised in the same country, or even the same modern civilization this is not so difficult as it might seem. They even do crazy shit like choose first and second wives with the same name and name their children and dogs the same name).
But also your genes shape the way people react to you. For example, the author argued that the case might be that bad children create bad parents as much as bad parents create bad children. Children can reward parents for certain behaviors just as parents can reward children. Children who are genetically predispositioned to be good at sports may create parents who/ seek situations that nurture their sports stardom as much as the other way around. I don’t know what this means for goats exactly but it is kinda crazy to think about. Some athletes may be programmed to seek foods which enhance their athletic performance, which goes along with the idea of this site and eating what you crave.
When I was a kid I ate frozen hot dogs and called them meat-sicles. Perhaps my parents feeling rewarded by my quiet meat-sicle suckling behavior rewarded me with more meat-sicles. Perhaps that is why I am who I am today.
interesting comments. I was wondering about the genetic propensity for preferences of all kinds.
To be fair, I don’t remembering Weston A. Price ever saying that a perfect diet would turn all of our offspring into disease-proof super-athletes. Seems to be something spouted by the foundation and/or vocal followers; something I was just as guilty of believing at some point as well. Seems to be human nature in many things to take wild swings on the spectrum before equalizing.
I agree with the main point of this article (I think WAP would as well). What we are is a combination of environment+genetics.
To be fair, I don’t know of any members of the Weston A. Price group that don’t take genes/individuality and environment into consideration. They’re an intelligent, open-minded group. Everyone seems to have their health issues and I’ve never heard anyone claim to have perfect health. They all seem to know they live somewhere on the Pottenger’s Cats spectrum. However, they have experienced enough proof of improved health that they are believers in eating a certain way, and they are grateful for having discovered it. They’re no different than anyone on this site, searching for better health. And if that’s where they find it, all the better for them.
Price was pretty enthusiastic about the physical structure, physiques, and dentition of primitive people eating unrefined food. But those people were also fully under the pressure of natural selection, with no medical rescues for weak progeny. What he showed was that crappy diet could really mess people and their offspring up, something that any animal breeder understands and has understood for centuries. I don’t think anyone should disagree with that. But people often take it one step further and believe that nutrition is all powerful and put way too much “stock” into it.
Stock. LOLZ. xD
I was listening to NPR recently and they were talking about marathon runners from Kenya – regarding genetics, but also mental conditioning. Here is a link to the article:
http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/11/01/241895965/how-one-kenyan-tribe-produces-the-worlds-best-runners
I think we are weaker because life for us is too easy. My great grandfather lived through two major wars, ate out of cans, drank and smoke and still lived to be 94. He probably wasn’t eating PUFA, but still.
I’ve thought a lot about why Africans dominate racing when Americans, who have all the resources in the world, can’t break into the top 10 of many distance events. And the difference between us and them is for sure the mental aspects — they MUST win, and they are dedicated and motivated in a way lazy Americans simply aren’t.
Lazy or not, Kenyans couldn’t beat Mark Allen at his game (triathlons). Nor do they seem well-suited to any power sports or even cycling. They are probably the best because they are born with the ultimate middle distance to marathon frames. Tall, long strides, very low muscle mass, no body fat, and strong feet. Kind of like Rhodesian Ridgebacks are made for distance and bred nearby, and Rottweilers and Pit Bulls designed to deliver the most powerful bite.
Trace back Bo’s ethnic origins and I’m sure you’ll find yourself deep into West Africa, where the best power and speed athlete genetics originate. Trace these physical characteristics back to their origins and it makes perfect ecological sense why those physical characteristics took root in those areas. They were the most favorable physiques for the locale, and created unique physical strengths and weaknesses. Just found this interesting article…
http://run-down.com/guests/je_black_athletes_p1.php
I’m just waiting for Jimmy the Greek to start commenting on this blog LOL!
Not to mention, the Kenyan runners’ diet is one that most Americans would consider unsuitable for athletes. Their chief source of calories is just plain old corn meal, cooked into giant cakes called “ugali” and eaten plain. White table sugar, which they mix in their tea, accounts for 20% of their calories. The rest of their diet consists of whole milk and a bit of meat and vegetables. It seems that refined starches and sugars are ideal for endurance champions.
Listening to NPR was your first mistake.
Once someone has listened to NPR, it’s difficult for them to recover haha.
while it isn’t best too get all your info and entertainment from one source, NPR is far superior to all others. and yes, I’m a junkie. better than to be a junkie of any other site, station, etc…….
It’s all part of the whole picture.. Epi-/genetics, metabolism, microbiota, immune system, nutrition, stress, hormonal status. These are all major depending on the view you take. However all these can’t be seen apart and influence every aspect of each other significantly.
Like 180degree stands for go for desire and follow your heart! Nobody out there understands any of these interrelationships.
I agree. There are SO many factors and any good research has to take them all into consideration.
I highly recommend watching the video, Dr. Francis Pottenger, submitted by Paul Tijerina on youtube. It shows the Pottenger’s Cats research. Excellent research; speaks for itself.
I am as intrigued by the exceptions to the rule as anyone. However, I think it would also be valuable to study the health of the other 9 siblings who are assumed to have existed on the same quality of nutrition. Most of us would fit more into that category.
I hear you on the goats. Goatwalking: A Guide to Wildland Living [Jim Corbett]
Robustness and resilience- when you have them, you don’t notice them, when you don’t, you look everywhere for answers.
How important to do work, to move naturally and easily without it being a stretch.
Gets me thinking about finding the stability and sustainability of the little porch hen.
No program really, more like a goatwalk.
I recently read an article about fertility treatments and that the lab people or whoever fertilizes the eggs in Petri dishes, don’t just put the sperm and eggs together and hope for the best, but they take the best looking specimen and inject it. Turns our that the best looking to human eyes are not necessarily the best specimen. My own personal thought is that people who have good or bad genes can become healthier through lifestyle, which affects their fertility as well as the genetic health of their offspring and descendants. I think there is a good reason that some people have a hard time reproducing. Not trying to insult those who struggle with fertility, however I think it may be a sort of built in protection for the next generation, so that mostly only healthy genes be passed on. Just my uneducated musings!
Another farm animal reference- Pat Coleby has been farming in Australia for over 50 years, and puts much faith in remineralising soils. She claims that by maintaining the soil, and ensuring minerals are balanced etc. then the livestock and any produce grown in the soil is significantly healthier and much more pest resistant then conventionally grown livestock etc. She admits that different breeds of cattle, for example, have different nutrient requirements (dark coloured cattle have a higher need for copper, from memory). Surely humans in general would benefit from nutritional density- or should we all stop breeding except those few who eat nutritionless junk and somehow have the genetics to stay healthy and free from parasites?
I’m very excited if I do the goat thing to do exactly that with the soil they are raised on (plus I plan to forage them in wild places with presumably better soil). Minerals not medicine! I have seen with my own eyes what minerals can do for a plot of land and its produce and livestock and it’s all true. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfftzI3CWIU
Matt,
Do you still taking MinCol?
I am incredibly cautious about arguments that rely on genetics, anything can be explained away and medical atrocities are hidden. I totally agree with your caution about nutrition: it is not magic either. As for the crooked teeth, the move away from breast-feeding (directly from the tit) is probably more important than genetics or nutrition (as shown in this presentation: http://www.brianpalmerdds.com/occlusion.htm ) This is to say that the structural influences on development help flesh-out this mysterious grey zone.
Eating hard-to-chew foods is also supposedly an important stimulus to proper structural development.
What you see is that populations who have overbites also have a smaller percentage of underbites, which suggests that hard-to-chew foods are part of facial development regulation. There’s a myth that is sometimes thrown out that hard-to-chew foods stimulate growth, which was developed from cherry-picked epidemiological data. One of the major impediments, in my opinion, to a more sophisticated understanding of development is the use of epidemiological tools to explore phenomena better understood through a case study.
Yeah I dunno. When I was a kid my favorite food was roughage- the rougher the better. I mowed down whole carrots by the bagful because I was obsessed with having perfect eyesight. Those suckers are hard to chomp and my structure is certainly not properly developed.
For most people, the interruption in facial development is put into motion in the first year of life due to bottle-feeding and/or pacifiers, which can narrow the palette while making it deeper. There are multiple points in development where facial growth can become disrupted.
Carrots are still a lot easier to chew on than say, a dog’s chew toy or some bones.
The first time I ate venison from a deer my friend shot, I was amazed at how chewy it was. I cooked it like I would any other steak, and my jaw muscles were literally exhausted when I got done eating. Nothing I’ve eaten comes close to being as chewy as that venison.
That’s more what I was alluding to with the dog’s chew toy. Meat from way back when was more like shoe leather.
I don’t think there is any reason to believe that humans need to gnaw on bones for the face to develop properly: our dentation just does not support that. The problem with arguments that attribute the interruption in facial development to soft food is that the food supply is interpreted to fit the end result. So an underdeveloped jaw means not enough hard food, and an overdeveloped one means too much hard food (or pernicious genetics). The orthodontics field is steeped in these ideas and doctors tell them to patients. Here is the thing: the results of changing the food supply on development does not correct the interruption and can further interfere with facial development. The other problem is that food in the modern diet is always interpreted as not being hard enough (even though there are other more actionable areas to explore as the underlying cause). We don’t really get away from the WAP interpretation of the problem where your nutrition can never be good enough, or the Western idea that your genes are not good enough. Simply put, this is a reappropriation of a failed ideology: the food can never be too hard or chewy. If hard chewing was really the answer, than chewing gum should have a positive impact on facial development and again, that is just not the case.
Chewing gum offers little chewing resistance. That’s like saying that walking around in padded Nike’s will make your feet strong and tough. No, but walking 10 miles over dirt, rocks, and roots barefoot in the African sun will definitely make your feet tough with leathery skin and higher bone mineral density. I also acknowledge that it’s not just a matter of food’s chewing difficulty. But I do believe it to be a factor just like I believe running around barefoot is necessary to proper foot development in a young kid. Touch essential to developing proper emotional development. Exercise essential to proper muscle development. Mental tasks essential to developing stronger cognitive skills, and so on.
Chewing and swallowing are necessary acts for the face to develop properly. We are in agreement on this point. I take issue with how you are applying this idea however.
So for the sake of argument, let’s assume that you are right. The human face is no longer developing properly due to lack of grizzle and mutton in the diet of toddlers and children. So do we now recommend a highly unusual diet to remedy the problem? This argument represents a dead end in my opinion: the implications are not actionable or practical. Furthermore, your application in this case is not appropriate. Abnormal facial development is like a scar, the mechanisms of formation leave an indelible mark that can be read. Crowded teeth and a small jaw with a narrowed palette are indicative of bottle-feeding or abnormal sucking at an early age. Weak jaw muscles will result in a longer face, not necessarily with crowding.
Oh I was just pointing out that it is but one factor to take into consideration, along with nutrient status, bottle-feeding, and so on. I like many of the more “biomechanical” viewpoints on the origins of modern disease, such as the work of Katy Bowman. Nutrition obsessives often cannot see beyond diet. But it’s a whole other realm worth taking into consideration on any conversation pertaining to structural abnormalities.
I don’t know. I was breastfed for a whole year, no bottles, but my palate was too narrow. I had to get palate expanders in my top teeth (which had the nice effect of widening my whole face). I have a friend with perfect teeth, never needed braces, and she was bottle fed. I think there are probably several factors at play here, but I still think nutrients obtained in utero and during the first few years have a major effect.
My simplification of the factors for how interrupted facial development play out is directed here to describe one case. As John Mew describes, a switch to vertical growth often takes away from horizontal growth and this can happen at any time. The palette widens throughout childhood and so a disruption to the core relationship between the tongue, teeth and surrounding soft tissue at any point can interfere with this process. I consider bottle-feeding a risky act, on-par with mouth breathing: not everyone who engages in this behavior is deformed.
As for the nutrition in utero, I don’t doubt that having a strong foundation is part of solving this puzzle. Again, whenever someone has compromised facial development, we can attribute it to this magical factor that cannot be analyzed or explained. For soft tissue anomalies or birth defects, I find this to be a useful explanation. I don’t however find this to be particularly productive in explaining developmental anomalies of hard tissue that differentiate years after birth.
Yeah, I really have no idea why I had a narrow palate. I was breast fed for a year, I breathed through my nose, neither of my parents needed braces, I have wide hips, I ate a good, balanced diet. I suspect it was just that the minerals in the soil were lacking or something like that. I sucked my thumb, too, so maybe that did it.
With a direct structural interference known to narrow the palette (like thumb-sucking), there really is no reason to explore mineral density (which is supported by anecdotal evidence without a known vector of interference). The more meaningful area of research, in my mind, would be the cause of digit-sucking).
Natural selection wouldn’t have allow me, thats for sure :P
born too early, c-section and complete blood transfusion at birth. + a genetic disorder called hemochromatosis, yay :/
My mother is a perfect example of a genetic lottery winner. She was born in 1943 into the worst poverty you could ever imagine. She grew up enduring the freezing cold Canadian winters, living in a run-down shack in the middle of nowhere. She sometimes went weeks without any real food to eat. She survived on berries and fish during the summer, and not very much in the winter. She did not own shoes until she was 16 years old. Try walking through snow in bare feet. Despite the harsh living conditions and malnourishment, she was blessed with straight teeth, gorgeous face and robust health. At 70 years of age, after years of poor diet and heavy drinking, she continues to have stunning good looks, beautiful skin and excellent health. My father, on the other hand, was a health nut. His diet was ‘perfect’, took daily vitamin supplements, and did everything ‘right’. He got cancer in his forties and died at 53. Go figure.
Wow.
I feel the same way about circumcision too… My mom is full Navajo and it was totally out of tradition to have me circumcised. I wasn’t mutilated or anything, it just sucks finding out later in all my extensive research that the extra skin is there for a reason. Especially and I became older, now 30, that I feel something missing… when i was in my early 20’s i didn’t even care! My mom said the doctor talked her into it… damn that doctor.
On another note… my mom was raised up crazy too. She grew up on the reservation hitch hiking with her uncle all over the place, eating what ever they could work for or have given to them. This is after her mother died from being so sick she fell into a river and drowned. Her dad became an alcoholic and gave her to his brother. Her uncle would work on farms during the summer down in McElmo Canyon and they would live in a tent. She remembers waiting outside of bars for him eating hamburgers and fries listening to the jukebox echoing from the bar. She got put into one of the Catholic boarding schools on the reservation when they took her away from her uncle. Would get routinely slapped and all her traditions and anything to do with her culture stripped from her. She then got adopted into a white family(my gradparents) when she was 8. She excelled at sports. Became an amazing barrel racer. Won rodeo queen her senior year. Was so beautiful and the longest thickest black hair that she eventually cut to give to make a wig for people recovering from cancer. She still gets compliments from from dentists about her perfect teeth and bite. Hardly has any cavities… still soft supple skin. Played softball, volleyball, basketball, till she was in her 50’s… and now she bowls, and plays 18 hole disc golf courses regularly with me and my girlfriend. She is a crazy, optimistic, caring, athletic, awesome mom… and she is 65. I got a lot of her genes, but i can only hope to keep on living life like she is! Its amazing to see these kind of genes walking around everyday!
I think establishing healthy lifestyle behaviors for humans is important. Sharing examples will help make my point much more clearly than I could otherwise right now, so here are three that immediately come to mind, with corresponding references:
Proper oral posture, swallowing technique, and nasal breathing
-Dr. John Mew’s studies of orthotropics*, Dr. Buteyko’s work, “Buteyko Meets Dr. Mew” by Patrick McKeown, “Shut Your Mouth and Save Your Life” by George Caitlin
Squatting in the bathroom
-“Nature Knows Best: Health Benefits of the Natural Squatting Position” by Jonathan Isbit
Avoiding blue light at night; using blue-blocking glasses or amber/infrared bulbs/LEDs for lighting instead; install f.lux on the computer if you use it at night. Getting bright light during the day is also very important.
-“Great Sleep! Reduced Cancer! A scientific approach to great sleep and reduced risk of cancer” by Richard L. Hansler, Ph.D. Also, “Light is Right” on the Functional Performance Systems website:
http://www.functionalps.com/blog/2011/09/30/light-is-right/
*Dr. John Mew’s work in orthotropics is really fascinating. There is a big focus in facial attractiveness in that practice, and I think that’s a good thing — if kids are taught proper oral posture, they can change their faces for the better and when they become adults will have enough room in their mouths to accomodate wisdom teeth without crowding. If you Google “John Mew” or “orthotropics” you’ll find pictures of orthotropics patients and the success that they achieved is, to me, nothing short of amazing.
George Caitlin, who studied Native American tribes, observed in “Shut Your Mouth and Save Your Life” that the mothers would close their babies’ mouths while they slept if they happened to drop open. Even if the crooked teeth and mouth breathing problem is genetic, there’s a lot of evidence that rigorously adhering to a lifestyle change involving proper oral posture, swallowing, and nasal breathing can go a long way in reversing these problems. I sure wish me or my parents knew this when I was a kid.
On another note, this reminds me of an older post from 180 that I’ve enjoyed referring people to:
http://180degreehealth.com/2010/12/stress-vs-stress-response/
John Mew’s work is great, but the real problem is why should we need to learn proper oral posture? Why is this natural regulatory function now disrupted?
The work of Brian Palmer helps fill in some of the gaps of orthotropics. He documents the specific deformations associated with bottle feeding (which can permanently change tongue posture), the interruption to the swallowing pattern and the narrowing of the nasal passageways in the first year of life. He also has an interesting theory tying SIDS to bottle feeding due to the interference in the location of the epiglottis.
John Mew helped establish for me the physical mechanisms which drive facial growth, but he hasn’t connected the dots as to why faces are becoming longer in the first place and this I think every parent has a right to know.
Very good information, thanks for sharing. I wasn’t aware of this guy or his work. This definitely puts everything in context. I absolutely agree with you 100% that every parent has a right to know these things — and I wish they did.
I’m still upset about being circumcised, not being breastfed, and having my face change for the worse after I had all my wisdom teeth out, which would’ve been avoided by proper habits growing up. I’ve mostly accepted it, but it still gets to me once in a while. But above everything else, what I want the most is for society around the world to be aware of these things. It’s our birthright as human beings.
When I became aware of these things I couldn’t believe that genital mutilation, mercury fillings and tooth extractions are literally par for the course. If you want to include seated toilets and bottlefeeding, there’s *5* specific things that are probably silently causing huge problems across the board for a lot of people. 6 if you include the biological inefficiency of most modern lighting.
At the same time, it’s only 6 things. It’s interesting to imagine how much better off so many people could be if we just changed those alone.
After looking at Brian Palmer’s work, I started to think about the effect of bottle feeding: the change in swallowing pattern and the radically different shape in the childs mouth while pulling. Take note also that the flow from the bottle also does not change with the amount of force exerted by the infant. From his research, it is clear that the more vigorous the sucking the more extreme the palette narrowing. On a tit this would release more milk, but on a bottle there is no reciprocal relationship. I think this may be one of numerous mechanisms that results in greater interference in facial development for malnourished children.
Love finding others who know about Dr Buteyko. I bring this up often when people are looking for solutions for sleep apnea etc.. and no one pays attention at all. They are like “who?”. And then proceed to try to get acupuncture or something for it. (and I AM an acupuncturists. its doesn’t work for sleep apnea. nor does it work for asthma in the way that buteyko does)
This reminds me of what you said about Challen Waychoff during your RBTI adventures.
“If you want to judge someone’s diet, lifestyle, and mastery of manipulating human body chemistry for the better, then you should see how much healthier and attractive their KIDS are. I saw a picture of Challen and his oldest daughter tonight. Again, remarkable beauty. It was like looking at Regis next to Kelly Ripa, but his daughter is much prettier. Perfect grill.”
Now that your exploring animal science it would be interesting to use Reams’ methods on testing and improving soil quality since thats where he started.
I will definitely be doing some goat Reaming. Err wait, that didn’t come out quite right.
“Bo, you don’t know Peep!”
don’t forget that nutrition isn’t just what you eat during your lifetime but what your granparents ate and what your mother ate. pottengers studies proved that, and it is part of breeding.
why do you guys throw out price so easily? are women’s pevii also narrow because they didn’t have hard food to knaw on? did the primitives who started eating store food and saw their children’s faces narrow suddenly stop breast feeding?
Many of the symptoms of overexposure to vegetable oils, as well as the type 2 hypothyroidism described by Mark Starr interfere with the core structural relationships that catalyze facial development.
i never put those two things together and they make sense.
Matt,
Do you still taking MinCol?
Hi Matt. I’m wondering how all this goat theory applies to human genetics and the increase that we are seeing in things like pyroluria and MTHFR, and other genetic problems. Surely keeping everyone alive with anti-biotics has been woeful for human health???