We dream about achieving the best-case outcomes, but they are rare. We can’t forget to acknowledge all the other possibilities of what may happen if we want to position ourselves for success.

“Hoping for the best, prepared for the worst, and unsurprised by anything in between.” —Maya Angelou

It’s okay to hope for the best—to look at whatever situation you’re in and say, “This time I have it figured out. This time it’s going to work.” First, having some degree of optimism is necessary for trying anything new. If we weren’t overconfident, we’d never have the guts to do something as risky and unlikely to succeed as starting a business, entering a new relationship, or sending that cold email. Anticipating that a new venture will work helps you overcome obstacles and make it work.

Second, sometimes we do have it figured out. Sometimes our solutions do make things better.

Even when the best-case scenario comes to pass, however, it rarely unfolds exactly as planned. Some choices create unanticipated consequences that we have to deal with. We may encounter unexpected roadblocks due to a lack of information. Or the full implementation of all our ideas and aspirations might take a lot longer than we planned for.

When you look back over history, we rarely find best-case outcomes.

Sure, sometimes they happen—maybe more than we think, given not every moment of the past is recorded. But let’s be honest: even historical wins, like developing the polio vaccine and figuring out how to produce clean drinking water, were not all smooth sailing. There are still people who are unable or unwilling to get the polio vaccine. And there are still many people in the world, even in developed countries like Canada, who don’t have access to clean drinking water.

The best-case outcomes in these situations—a world without polio and a world with globally available clean drinking water—have not happened, despite the existence of reliable, proven technology that can make these outcomes a reality.

There are a lot of reasons why, in these situations, we haven’t achieved the best-case outcomes. Furthermore, situations like these are not unusual. We rarely achieve the dream. The more complicated a situation, the more people it involves, the more variables and dependencies that exist, the more it’s unlikely that it’s all going to work out.

If we narrow our scope and say, for example, the best-case scenario for this Friday night is that we don’t burn the pizza, we can all agree on a movie, and the power doesn’t go out, it’s more likely we’ll achieve it. There are fewer variables, so there’s a greater chance that this specific scenario will come to pass.

The problem is that most of us plan as if we live in an easy-to-anticipate Friday night kind of world. We don’t.

There are no magic bullets for the complicated challenges facing society. There is only hard work, planning for the wide spectrum of human behavior, adjusting to changing conditions, and perseverance. There are many possible outcomes for any given endeavor and only one that we consider the best case.

That is why the best-case outcomes are statistical outliers—they are only one possibility in a sea of many. They might come to pass, but you’re much better off preparing for the likelihood that they won’t.

Our expectations matter. Anticipating a range of outcomes can make us feel better. If we expect the best and it happens, we’re merely satisfied. If we expect less and something better happens, we’re delighted.

Knowing that the future is probably not going to be all sunshine and roses allows you to prepare for a variety of more likely outcomes, including some of the bad ones. Sometimes, too, when the worst-case scenario happens, it’s actually a huge relief. We realize it’s not all bad, we didn’t die, and we can manage if it happens again. Preparation and knowing you can handle a wide spectrum of possible challenges is how you get the peace of mind to be unsurprised by anything in between the worst and the best.

The post The Best-Case Outcomes Are Statistical Outliers appeared first on Farnam Street.

Amateurs tend to focus on seeking brilliance. Professionals often know that it’s far more effective to avoid stupidity. Side-stepping typical blunders is the simplest way to get ahead of the crowd.

Gaining a better understanding of probability will give you a more accurate picture of the world and help you make better decisions. However, many people fall prey to the same handful of issues because aspects of probability go against what we think is intuitive. Even if you haven’t studied the topic since high-school, you likely use probability assessments every single day in your work and life.

In Naked Statistics, Charles Wheelan takes the reader on a whistlestop tour of the basics of statistics. In one chapter, he offers pointers for avoiding some of the “most common probability-related errors, misunderstandings, and ethical dilemmas.” Whether you’re somewhat new to the topic or just want a refresher, here’s a summary of Wheelan’s lessons and how you can apply them.

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Assuming events are independent when they are not

“The probability of flipping heads with a fair coin is 1/2. The probability of flipping two heads in a row is (1/2)^2 or 1/4 since the likelihood of two independent events both happening is the product of their individual probabilities.”

When an event is interconnected with another event, the former happening increases or decreases the probability of the latter happening. Your car insurance gets more expensive after an accident because car accidents are not independent events. A person who gets in one is more likely to get into another in the future. Maybe they’re not such a good driver, maybe they tend to drive after a drink, or maybe their eyesight is imperfect. Whatever the explanation, insurance companies know to revise their risk assessment.

Sometimes though, an event happening might lead to changes that make it less probable in the future. If you spilled coffee on your shirt this morning, you might be less likely to do the same this afternoon because you’ll exercise more caution. If an airline had a crash last year, you may well be safer flying with them because they will have made extensive improvements to their safety procedures to prevent another disaster.

One place we should pay extra attention to the independence or dependence of events is when making plans. Most of our plans don’t go as we’d like. We get delayed, we have to backtrack, we have to make unexpected changes. Sometimes we think we can compensate for a delay in one part of a plan by moving faster later on. But the parts of a plan are not independent. A delay in one area makes delays elsewhere more likely as problems compound and accumulate.

Any time you think about the probability of sequences of events, be sure to identify whether they’re independent or not.

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Not understanding when events are independent

“A different kind of mistake occurs when events that are independent are not treated as such . . . If you flip a fair coin 1,000,000 times and get 1,000,000 heads in a row, the probability of getting heads on the next flip is still 1/2. The very definition of statistical independence between two events is that the outcome of one has no effect on the outcome of another.”

Imagine you’re grabbing a breakfast sandwich at a local cafe when someone rudely barges into line in front of you and ignores your protestations. Later that day, as you’re waiting your turn to order a latte in a different cafe, the same thing happens: a random stranger pushes in front of you. By the time you go to pick up some pastries for your kids at a different place before heading home that evening, you’re so annoyed by all the rudeness you’ve encountered that you angrily eye every person to enter the shop, on guard for any attempts to take your place. But of course, the two rude strangers were independent events. It’s unlikely they were working together to annoy you. The fact it happened twice in one day doesn’t make it happening a third time more probable.

The most important thing to remember here is that the probability of conjunctive events happening is never higher than the probability of each occurring.

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Clusters happen

“You’ve likely read the story in the newspaper or perhaps seen the news expose: Some statistically unlikely number of people in a particular area have contracted a rare form of cancer. It must be the water, or the local power plant, or the cell phone tower.

. . . But this cluster of cases may also be the product of pure chance, even when the number of cases appears highly improbable. Yes, the probability that five people in the same school or church or workplace will contract the same rare form of leukemia may be one in a million, but there are millions of schools and churches and workplaces. It’s not highly improbable that five people might get the same rare form of leukemia in one of those places.”

An important lesson of probability is that while particular improbable events are, well, improbable, the chance of any improbable event happening at all is highly probable. Your chances of winning the lottery are almost zero. But someone has to win it. Your chances of getting struck by lightning are almost zero. But with so many people walking around and so many storms, it has to happen to someone sooner or later.

The same is true for clusters of improbable events. The chance of any individual winning the lottery multiple times or getting struck by lightning more than once is even closer to zero than the chance of it happening once. Yet when we look at all the people in the world, it’s certain to happen to someone.

We’re all pattern-matching creatures. We find randomness hard to process and look for meaning in chaotic events. So it’s no surprise that clusters often fool us. If you encounter one, it’s wise to keep in mind the possibility that it’s a product of chance, not anything more meaningful. Sure, it might be jarring to be involved in three car crashes in a year or to run into two college roommates at the same conference. Is it all that improbable that it would happen to someone, though?

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The prosecutor’s fallacy

“The prosecutor’s fallacy occurs when the context surrounding statistical evidence is neglected . . . the chances of finding a coincidental one in a million match are relatively high if you run the same through a database with samples from a million people.”

It’s important to look at the context surrounding statistics. Let’s say you’re evaluating whether to take a medication your doctor suggests. A quick glance at the information leaflet tells you that it carries a 1 in 10,000 risk of blood clots. Should you be concerned? Well, that depends on context. The 1 in 10,000 figure takes into account the wide spectrum of people with different genes and different lifestyles who might take the medication. If you’re an overweight chain-smoker with a family history of blood clots who takes twelve-hour flights twice a month, you might want to have a more serious discussion with your doctor than an active non-smoker with no relevant family history.

Statistics give us a simple snapshot, but if we want a finer-grained picture, we need to think about context.

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Reversion to the mean (or regression to the mean)

“Probability tells us that any outlier—an observation that is particularly far from the mean in one direction or the other—is likely to be followed by outcomes that are most consistent with the long-term average.

. . . One way to think about this mean reversion is that performance—both mental and physical—consists of underlying talent-related effort plus an element of luck, good or bad. (Statisticians would call this random error.) In any case, those individuals who perform far above the mean for some stretch are likely to have had luck on their side; those who perform far below the mean are likely to have had bad luck. . . . When a spell of very good luck or very bad luck ends—as it inevitably will—the resulting performance will be closer to the mean.”

Moderate events tend to follow extreme ones. One area that regression to the mean often misleads us is when considering how people perform in areas like sports or management. We may think a single extraordinary success is predictive of future successes. Yet from one result, we can’t know if it’s an outcome of talent or luck—in which case the next result may be average. Failure or success is usually followed by an event closer to the mean, not the other extreme.

Regression to the mean teaches us that the way to differentiate between skill and luck is to look at someone’s track record. The more information you have, the better. Even if past performance is not always predictive of future performance, a track record of consistent high performance is a far better indicator than a single highlight.

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If you want an accessible tour of basic statistics, check out Naked Statistics by Charles Wheelan.

The post Common Probability Errors to Avoid appeared first on Farnam Street.

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Most of us try to make decisions intended to bring us greater happiness. The problem is that we misunderstand how our choices really impact our well-being and end up making ones that have the opposite effect. We buy stuff that purports to inspire happiness and end up feeling depressed instead. Knowing some of the typical pitfalls in the search for happiness—especially the ones that seem to go against common sense—can help us improve quality of life.

It’s an old adage that experiences make us happier than physical things. But knowing is not the same as doing. One area this is all too apparent is when it comes to choosing where to live. You might think that how a home looks is vital to how happy you are living in it. Wrong! The experience of a living space is far more important than its appearance.

The influence of appearance

In Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design, Charles Montgomery explores some of the ways in which we misunderstand how our built environment and the ways we move through cities influence our happiness.

Towards the end of their first year at Harvard, freshmen find out which dormitory they will be living in for the rest of their time at university. Places are awarded via a lottery system, so individual students have no control over where they end up. Harvard’s dormitories are many and varied in their design, size, amenities, age, location, and overall prestige. Students take allocation seriously, as the building they’re in inevitably has a big influence on their experience at university. Or does it?

Montgomery points to two Harvard dormitories. Lowell House, a stunning red brick building with a rich history, is considered the most prestigious of them all. Students clamor to live in it. Who could ever be gloomy in such a gorgeous building?

Meanwhile, Mather House is a much-loathed concrete tower. It’s no one’s first choice. Most students pray for a room in the former and hope to be spared the latter, because they think their university experience will be as awful-looking as the building. (It’s worth noting that although the buildings vary in appearance, neither is lacking any of the amenities a student needs to live. Nor is Mather House in any way decrepit.)

The psychologist Elizabeth Dunn asked a group of freshmen to predict how each of the available dormitories might affect their experience of Harvard. In follow-up interviews, she compared their lived experience with those initial predictions. Montgomery writes:

The results would surprise many Harvard freshmen. Students sent to what they were sure would be miserable houses ended up much happier than they had anticipated. And students who landed in the most desirable houses were less happy than they expected to be. Life in Lowell House was fine. But so was life in the reviled Mather House. Overall, Harvard’s choice dormitories just didn’t make anyone much happier than its spurned dormitories.

Why did students make this mistake and waste so much energy worrying about dormitory allocation? Dunn found that they “put far too much weight on obvious differences between residences, such as location and architectural features, and far too little on things that were not so glaringly different, such as the sense of community and the quality of relationships they would develop in their dormitory.”

Asked to guess if relationships or architecture are more important, most of us would, of course, say relationships. Our behavior, however, doesn’t always reflect that. Dunn further states:

This is the standard mis-weighing of extrinsic and intrinsic values: we may tell each other that experiences are more important than things, but we constantly make choices as though we didn’t believe it.

When we think that the way a building looks will dictate our experience living in it, we are mistaking the map for the territory. Architectural flourishes soon fade into the background. What matters is the day-to-day experience of living there, when relationships matter much more than how things look. Proximity to friends is a higher predictor of happiness than charming old brick.

The impact of experience

Some things we can get used to. Some we can’t. We make a major mistake when we think it’s worthwhile to put up with negative experiences that are difficult to grow accustomed to in order to have nice things. Once again, this happens when we forget that our day-to-day experience is paramount in our perception of our happiness.

Take the case of suburbs. Montgomery describes how many people in recent decades moved to suburbs outside of American cities. There, they could enjoy luxuries like big gardens, sprawling front lawns, wide streets with plenty of room between houses, spare bedrooms, and so on. City dwellers imagined themselves and their families spreading out in spacious, safe homes. But American cities ended up being shaped by flawed logic, as Montgomery elaborates:

Neoclassical economics, which dominated the second half of the twentieth century, is based on the premise that we are all perfectly well equipped to make choices that maximize utility. . . . But the more psychologists and economists examine the relationship between decision-making and happiness, the more they realize that this is simply not true. We make bad choices all the time. . . . Our flawed choices have helped shape the modern city—and consequently, the shape of our lives.

Living in the suburbs comes at a price: long commutes. Many people spend hours a day behind the wheel, getting to and from work. On top of that, the dispersed nature of suburbs means that everything from the grocery store to the gym requires more extended periods of time driving. It’s easy for an individual to spend almost all of their non-work, non-sleep time in their car.

Commuting is, in just about every sense, terrible for us. The more time people spend driving each day, the less happy they are with their life in general. This unhappiness even extends to the partners of people with long commutes, who also experience a decline in well-being. Commuters see their health suffer due to long periods of inactivity and the stress of being stuck in traffic. It’s hard to find the time and energy for things like exercise or seeing friends if you’re always on the road. Gas and car-related expenses can eat up the savings from living outside of the city. That’s not to mention the environmental toll. Commuting is generally awful for mental health, which Montgomery illustrates:

A person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40 percent more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office. On the other hand, for a single person, exchanging a long commute for a short walk to work has the same effect on happiness as finding a new love.

So why do we make this mistake? Drawing on the work of psychologist Daniel Gilbert, Montgomery explains that it’s a matter of us thinking we’ll get used to commuting (an experience) and won’t get used to the nicer living environment (a thing.)

The opposite is true. While a bigger garden and spare bedroom soon cease to be novel, every day’s commute is a little bit different, meaning we can never get quite used to it. There is a direct linear downwards relationship between commute time and life satisfaction, but there’s no linear upwards correlation between house size and life satisfaction. As Montgomery says, “The problem is, we consistently make decisions that suggest we are not so good at distinguishing between ephemeral and lasting pleasures. We keep getting it wrong.”

Happy City teems with insights about the link between the design of where we live and our quality of life. In particular, it explores how cities are often shaped by mistaken ideas about what brings us happiness. We maximize our chances at happiness when we prioritize our experience of life instead of acquiring things to fill it with.

The post Appearances vs Experiences: What Really Makes Us Happy appeared first on Farnam Street.

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The recent outbreak of the coronavirus is impacting people all over the world — not just in terms of physical health, but financially, emotionally, and even socially. As we struggle to adapt to our new circumstances, it can be tempting to bury our head and wait for it all to blow over so we can just get back to normal. Or we can see this as an incredible opportunity to figure out who we are.

What many of us are discovering right now is that the things we valued a few months ago don’t actually matter: our cars, the titles on our business cards, our privileged neighborhoods. Rather, what is coming to the forefront is a shift to figuring out what we find intrinsically rewarding.

When everything is easy, it can seem like you have life figured out. When things change and you’re called to put it into practice, it’s a different level. It’s one thing to say you are stoic when your coffee spills and another entirely when you’re watching your community collapse. When life changes and gets hard, you realize you’ve never had to put into practice what you thought you knew about coping with disaster.

But when a crisis hits, everything is put to the real test.

The challenge then becomes wrapping our struggles into our values, because what we value only has meaning if it’s important when life is hard. To know if they have worth, your values need to help you move forward when you can barely crawl and the obstacles in your way seem insurmountable.

In the face of a crisis, what is important to us becomes evident when we give ourselves the space to reflect on what is going to get us through the hard times. And so we find renewed commitment to get back to core priorities. What seemed important before falls apart to reveal what really matters: family, love, community, health.

“I was 32 when I started cooking; up until then, I just ate.” 

— Julia Child

One unexpected activity that many people are turning to now that they have time and are more introspective is baking. In fact, this week Google searches for bread recipes hit a noticeable high.

Baking is a very physical experience: kneading dough, tasting batter, smelling the results of the ingredients coming together. It’s an activity that requires patience. Bread has to rise. Pies have to cook. Cakes have to cool before they can be covered with icing. And, as prescriptive as baking seems on its surface, it’s something that facilitates creativity as we improvise our ingredients based on what we have in the cupboard. We discover new flavors, and we comfort ourselves and others with the results. Baked goods are often something we share, and in doing so we are providing for those we care about.

Why might baking be useful in times of stress? In Overcoming Anxiety, Dennis Tirch explains “research has demonstrated that when people engage more fully in behaviors that give them a sense of pleasure and mastery, they can begin to overcome negative emotions.”

At home with their loved ones people can reconsider what they value one muffin at a time. Creating with the people we love instead of consuming on our own allows us to focus on what we value as the world changes around us. With more time, slow, seemingly unproductive pursuits have new appeal because they help us reorient to the qualities in life that matter most.

Giving yourself the space to tune in to your values doesn’t have to come through baking. What’s important is that you find an activity that lets you move past fear and panic, to reconnect with what gives your life meaning. When you engage with an activity that gives you pleasure and releases negative emotions, it allows you to rediscover what is important to you.

Change is stressful. But neither stress nor change have to be scary. If you think about it, you undergo moments of change every day because nothing in life is ever static. Our lives are a constant adaptation to a world that is always in motion.

All change brings opportunity. Some change gives us the opportunity to pause and ask what we can do better. How can we better connect to what has proven to be important? Connection is not an abstract intellectual exercise, but an experience that orients us to the values that provide us direction. If you look for opportunities in line with your values, you will be able to see a path through the fear and uncertainty guided by the light that is hope.

The post What You Truly Value appeared first on Farnam Street.

What if you read enough to see patterns develop, to realize that when you stripped away all the confusing bits that maybe the skeleton underneath was actually pretty simple?

This is what happened to author Michael Pollan a few years ago when he started doing research to try and figure out what he should be eating.

Most of the time when I embark on such an investigation, it quickly becomes clear that matters are much more complicated and ambiguous — several shades grayer — than I thought going in. Not this time. The deeper I delved into the confused and confusing thicket of nutritional science, sorting through the long-running fats versus carb wars, the fiber skirmishes and the raging dietary supplement debates, the simpler the picture gradually became. I learned that in fact science knows a lot less about nutrition than you would expect – that in fact nutrition science is, to put it charitably, a very young science. It’s still trying to figure out exactly what happens in your body when you sip a soda, or what is going on deep in the soul of a carrot to make it so good for you, or why in the world you have so many neurons – brain cells! – in your stomach, of all places. It’s a fascinating subject, and someday the field may produce definitive answers to the nutritional questions that concern us, but — as nutritionists themselves will tell you — they’re not there yet. Not even close. Nutrition science, which after all only got started less than two hundred years ago, is today approximately where surgery was in the year 1650 – very promising, and very interesting to watch, but are you ready to let them operate on you? I think I’ll wait awhile.

The diet industry brings in billions and billions of dollars every year and some of the latest internet celebrities are food and fitness models/gurus. Is it any surprise? Our survival and well-being depends very largely on our health and (arguably) ours looks. The diet industry taps directly into one of our basic survival instincts. Food is cultural.

There is good money to be had if you can find the magical thing that will help people lose weight and feel better. Unfortunately, there is also good money to be had in treating people for illnesses that occur from poor diet and lack of exercise. In short, complexity is good for business. (This is a misaligned incentive problem of the highest order.)

… consider first the complexity that now attends this most basic of creaturely activities. Most of us have come to rely on experts of one kind or another to tell us how to eat — doctors and diet books, media accounts of the latest findings in nutritional science, government advisories and food pyramids, the proliferating health claims on food packages. We may not always heed these experts’ advice, but their voices are in our heads every time we order from a menu or wheel down the aisle in the supermarket. Also in our heads today resides an astonishing amount of biochemistry. How odd is it that everybody now has at least a passing acquaintance with words like “antioxidant,” “saturated fat,” “omega-3 fatty acids,” “carbohydrates,” “polyphenols,” “folic acid,” “gluten,” and “probiotics”? It’s gotten to the point where we don’t see foods anymore but instead look right through them to the nutrients (good and bad) they contain, and of course to the calories — all these invisible qualities in our food that properly understood, supposedly hold the secret to eating well.

But for all the scientific and pseudoscientific food baggage we’ve taken on in recent years we still don’t know what we should be eating. Should we worry more about the fats or the carbohydrates? Then what about the “good” fats? Or the “bad” carbohydrates, like high-fructose corn syrup? How much should we be worrying about gluten? What’s the deal with artificial sweeteners? Is it really true that this breakfast cereal will improve my son’s focus at school or that other cereal will protect me from a heart attack? And when did eating a bowl of breakfast cereal become a therapeutic procedure, anyway?

For Pollan, the picture actually got clearer the further he traveled down the rabbit hole.

While his research uncovered the fact the we don’t know a whole lot about nutrition — there’s a lot of pseudoscience here — one obvious fact seems to recur: populations that eat a Western diet are generally less healthy than those who eat more traditional diets.

What does Pollan mean by “more traditional diet”?

These diets run the gamut from ones very high in fat (the Inuit in Greenland subsist largely on seal blubber) to ones high in carbohydrate (Central American Indians subsist largely on maize and beans) to ones very high in protein (Masai tribesmen in Africa subsist chiefly on cattle blood, meat, and milk), to cite three rather extreme examples. But much the same holds true for more mixed traditional diets. What this suggests is that there is no single ideal human diet but that the human omnivore is exquisitely adapted to a wide range of different foods and a variety of different diets. Except, that is, for one: the relatively new (in evolutionary terms) Western diet that most of us now are eating.

Research has shown that moving away from the Western diet can reduce your chances of developing the chronic illnesses it causes. Pollan believes this shift is most easily done by coming up with a set of simple rules to govern how we eat and interact with food. (This idea reminded us a lot of Donald Sull’s work in Simple Rules. More specifically his decision rules which help us to set boundaries, prioritize, and know when to stop an action.)

No one is quite sure which parts of the Western diet are the most destructive. There are a lot of confounding variables here — one type of food or macronutrient is tough to isolate. Gary Taubes thinks it’s the easily digestible carbohydrates. Others disagree. And since we’re not quite sure, Pollan thinks we should stick with a set of heuristics to get as close as we can.

Pollan curated these rules into a book called Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual. Let’s take a closer look at some of our favorites.

Don’t Eat Anything Your Great Grandmother Wouldn’t Recognize as Food

Agriculture has come a long way since your great grandmother was born. Many chemicals have been created to both enhance the flavor of food and to help with its shelf life. While all these additives aren’t necessarily bad for you it’s still smart to avoid them most of the time. So if you think great grandma wouldn’t be able to pronounce or understand most of the words on that box of frozen lasagna you’re holding it’s best to pass it up. Speaking of that frozen entree …

Eat Only Foods That Have Been Cooked by Humans.

Pollan means buying raw ingredients and making the food yourself, rather than buying food pre-cooked and pre-packaged. Corporations use too much junk in cooking your food. This is the biggest predictor of a healthy diet.

Eat All the Junk Food You Want as Long as You Cook It Yourself.

This is an interesting rule because generally we are trying to either remove or go around obstacles and in this instance we are very purposefully adding one. If you have a sweet tooth there is nothing wrong with eating cake on occasion. The key here is to eat those unhealthful foods only occasionally. Taking the time to make the food means that you have to be incredibly motivated to have that cake. (And you’re probably not going to whip up a bag of Oreos or potato chips.)

If You’re Not Hungry Enough to Eat an Apple, Then You’re Probably Not Hungry

This is another obstacle style rule, but it also offers you the opportunity to get better in tune with your hunger. Are you grabbing that candy bar from the vending machine at two o’clock in the afternoon because you are hungry or because you do that same thing at two o’clock every day? There are many reasons why we eat and hunger is only one of them.

Stop Eating Before You’re Full

This probably sounds a bit crazy to the average North American. In our society we eat because we are hungry and we stop because we are full. This is our tradition, but in many other cultures the goal of eating is to simply stop the hunger, which is actually quite different. Try this experiment for yourself. Try to wait until you are hungry for your next meal. You want to be able to feel it. Then as you are eating try to be mindful of the moment you stop feeling hungry. You’ll notice that this moment comes quite a few bites before that full feeling comes.

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Food Rules feels like a succinct tool to help you navigate the confusing nutritional landscape. It’s a quick read that is packed with a lot of information. Imitate Bruce Lee and Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless and add what is specifically your own.

Still Interested? The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals is one of the best food books we’ve ever read.

The post Michael Pollan’s Simple Rules for Eating appeared first on Farnam Street.

As we concluded Part 1 of our exploration of Judith Rich Harris’s work on human personality, we had begun sketching out her theory by delving into the first of three systems that she believes carry the heavy lifting in determining how our adult personalities are formed.

The first system was the Relationship System, the “people information lexicon” we automatically begin building at birth to recall the details of the people we encounter throughout our lives. This mental Rolodex carries a lot of freight, but it’s only one cog in a larger system. The workings of the Relationship System start to impact us in a broader way as we begin computing statistics about all the people in our lexicon.

This leads us to start developing a second system: the Socialization System, which we use to figure out how we need to act to fit into the groups we’ll need to be a part of to become a member of society.

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Recall from Part 1 the definition of Socialization: “Acquiring the social behaviors, customs, language, accent, attitudes, and morals deemed appropriate in a particular society.”

When Harris says “particular society,” she also means “particular group” — we do not, of course, act the same around our parents as we do around our friends, our co-workers, our neighbors, or our own children. Each group has its norms, and we must learn them. Unless we are autistic or otherwise severely mentally challenged, we do just that! We do it by automatically using the information we’ve gathered, which is called implicit knowledge.

As Harris discusses in the book, even patients with severe dementia, Parkinson’s, or amnesia can recall all kinds of implicit or categorical knowledge. She refers to an amnesiac patient named Frederick who couldn’t remember that he’d played golf recently, but nonetheless didn’t forget anything about playing golf in general: He recalled all the mechanical knowledge, the lingo, the customs, and the rules. Just not his last round:

All memories are not alike; nor are all memory disorders. What Frederick had lost was his ability to form new memories of a sort called “episodic” — explicit memories of actual events, which can be consciously recalled and put into words. What he had retained was his semantic memories (factual knowledge, like the meaning of birdie) and his implicit or procedural memories (how to play golf). You may have episodic memories of being taught to play golf by your father, but your knowledge of how to play golf is procedural. Sad to say, you may lose your explicit memories of your father sooner than your implicit memories of how to play golf.

An Alzheimer’s patient may not remember meeting any specific man, but ask him what a man is, and he can describe one just fine. As we’ll see below, the systems are distinct from one another.

Thus, our collection of implicit social knowledge, what many people would call stereotypes but what are simply averages of our experience, end up being extremely useful to us. At an unconscious level, these averages give us the fodder for our “self-socialization” — our maturation into socially functioning individuals.

***

As we begin developing our categories by averaging out a large amount of information collected by our social intelligence systems, we become eager to figure out which categories we’re in and begin acting appropriately to become a part of that group. The term “peer pressure” is a misnomer — peers needn’t pressure us at all for us to want to become a part of their group. (Harris shows in The Nurture Assumption that even a little girl who only sees other little girls from afar, and does not interact with them, will start acting as they do in hopes of becoming more “little girl-ish.”)

Other species are capable of averaging out information about groups and creating categories, but humans have a unique problem: We all belong to many different categories. We touched on this above — we are at turns many different things — boy, male, student, child, etc. We must learn to navigate each of them uniquely, and we do:

Self-categorizations are exquisitely sensitive to social context and can change at the drop of a hat. Girls and boys in a school lunchroom or playground ordinarily categorize themselves as girls and boys, but the presence of a mean or bossy teacher can cause them to unite in a common cause and to classify themselves simply as children. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2011, Democrats and Republicans classified themselves, for a while, simply as Americans.

As that last example illustrates, humans can identify even with groups (such as Democrats and Republicans) composed chiefly of strangers. They can identify with groups even if they don’t know who is in them. The social psychologist Henri Tajfel told some boys, supposedly on the basis of a test, that they were “overestimators” and others that they were “underestimators.” That’s all it took to evoke what Tajfel called “groupness” in the boys. When they were given the opportunity to award monetary payments to other members of the overestimator and underestimator groups (identified by group but not by name), they not only awarded more of the members of their own group: they also made sure to underpay the members of the other group. The boys who participated in this study all went to the same school, but none of them knew which of their classmates were overestimators and which were underestimators. There was no opportunity for the relationship system to put in its two cents.

Social categorization operates independently of the relationship system, just as the system for generating the past tense of a regular verb acts independently of the system for retrieving the past tense of an irregular verb.

As a group-adapted species, like chimpanzees or ants, humans must successfully figure out how to “get along,” and evolution has given us the automatic ability to do so. That’s why the vast majority of people end up similar to the people they grew up around: Those are the people we had to become similar to in order to socialize successfully. As we grow up, we acquire the customs, habits, language, accent, types of goals and aspirations, and lots of other traits of the culture around us, and it continues on as we age, although less dramatically over time.

But of course, we aren’t all brainless zombies, mindlessly mimicking our friends and peers. Human beings are far more complex than that, and this is why we all turn out differently, besides our differing genetics.

The socialization system explains why we become similar to those around us. What explains why we remain quite different? Harris calls it the Status System, and it’s the final piece of the puzzle.

The Status System

The most speculative, and perhaps controversial, aspect of Harris’s theories might be her thoughts on how we compete for status within our self-identified groups. She believes, and the evidence she corrals does support, a theory that this competition for superiority is a major long-term modifier of human personality:

The purpose of this system is the baby’s Job 3: to compete successfully. I’m talking now about competition within the group, classic Darwinian competition. To compete with one’s groupmates is to strive for status; the goal is to be better than one’s groupmates. “Humans everywhere pursue status.” observed the evolutionary psychologist Donald Symons, and for good Darwinian reasons: higher-status individuals have access to more of the world’s goodies.

But in humans, striving for status is a complicated matter. There are no straightforward rules for how to go about it; no single set of tactics is going to work for everyone. The status system’s assignment is to work out a long-term strategy of behavior that is tailor-made for the individual in whose head it resides. 

Mental organs are specialized collectors of data; each is tuned to respond selectively to certain kinds of cues. The relationship system and the socialization system both collect information about other people. The status system has a more difficult job: it specializes in collecting information about the self. One of the important things that children have to learn while they are growing up is what sort of people they are. Are they big or small, strong or weak, pretty or plain? Without this information they would have no basis for deciding whether to try to dominate others or yield without a fight, to make suggestions or follow the suggestions of others, to turn down potential mates in hopes of doing better or take whatever comes along.

During childhood and adolescence, young humans collect information on how they compare with the others who will be their rivals in adulthood. Armed with this information, they make long-term modifications in their behavior. It is the status system that enables them to do this.

Again, these systems are often at odds with each other. We can, at the same time, feel well-accepted by a group in general and feel we have little status within it, and those things may affect us in different ways. A bully who has little group acceptance can nonetheless have perfectly healthy self-esteem due to their status.

We develop our sense of self slowly over a very long gestation period. We figure out if we’re strong compared to most, smart compared to most, funny, quick, good-looking, suave, tall, or svelte, or perhaps the reverse. And we begin tailoring our behavior in a way that plays to our strengths, as a way to compete successfully for attention and status.

One economic study explored the idea, for example, that height had an impact on income for adult males. But once the economists sussed it all out, they figured out that it wasn’t simply tall adults who were better paid: What mattered was their height when they were adolescents. If you became tall late, you weren’t making more money than average.

Cross referencing this with another study on adolescent height and personality traits, Harris figures that because height (and other related traits like strength and athleticism) generally affords some status when you’re young, they can have long-term effects on your personality, including self-assurance and leadership ability. As it is with height, so it goes with other traits — height and income are simply the easiest to measure.

***

So as we collect information about other specific people and other types of people to feed into our first two engines, the Relationship System and the Socialization System, we also collect information on the way we’re seen by the “generalized other,” which goes into System 3: the Status System. The use of that system enables us to design a personality that fits our particular situation.

This talk of “design” makes it sound more deliberate than it really is. All of this is happening with very little input from the “Head Honcho” upstairs. We can involve our slower, more deliberate “System 2” in the process, but the effect is dwarfed by what’s happening on its own.

Here’s how Harris thinks this whole Status System thing works its magic:

The status system, designed to collect and store information about the self, makes clever use of the features of the relationship system (the system designed to collect information about other people). The activities of the two systems dovetail like this: while your relationship system is gathering information about me and storing it on the page assigned to me in your people-information lexicon, my status system is trying to figure out what you’ve got recorded on that page. You keep the information you’ve learned about me separate–you don’t mix it together with information about other people–but I take that information I’ve gotten about myself from my page in your lexicon and put it together with similar information I’ve gotten from other people’s lexicons. What I need is a picture of myself from the point of view of the “generalized other.”

[…]

Unfortunately, this system doesn’t work perfectly–the picture is blurry…The reason we can’t read the page as accurately as we would like (or as accurately as we think we would like) is that the mind in which that page resides doesn’t want us to. It is to my advantage to know that you are thinking about me, but it may be to your advantage to keep me from knowing it.

The picture may be blurry but it’s nuanced and multidimensional. The status system uses this information to work out a long-term strategy of behavior tailored specifically for its owner. Using data collected in childhood and adolesence–How many people can beat me up? How often do other people look at me? Do people trust me to give good advice? — the system shapes and modifies personality in a way that takes account of the individual’s preexisting characteristics and the opportunities afforded by the environment.

From an evolutionary standpoint, this tendency for experience to modify long-term behavioral patterns, the tendency to use the self-knowledge obtained through the “mind-reading mechanism,” has increased the behavioral diversity among humans within our groups. While we do indeed seek to be part of a group, and will sacrifice for the success of that group, we also have deep self-interest. (Some of the most interesting worldly results come when those things are at odds with one another; see suicide bombers and kamikaze warriors.)

This drive to compete successfully and specialize as individuals makes us extremely well suited to live in large groups, something our species does uniquely well. In fact, Harris believes the modification of personality by way of social experience to be a unique human trait.

Denouement

So that’s it. As human beings develop, they collect vast amounts of social information and use it to form specific relationships and understand the specific details of the people around them, but also average out that information to create categories and groups, and to understand how to act to become part of the groups we think we belong in. We also seek to pursue our self-interest and, by figuring out what other people think about us relative to what they think about everyone else, we select strategies that we think will help us get ahead relative to the other members of our group or category.

The answer to the nature/nurture question is, of course, that both are hugely influential. Our genetics provide the blueprint by which we will interact with the world, and from there the specific course of our interactions and experiences with other people will determine how we turn out.

Harris admits that her theory needs rigorous testing to figure out whether she’s nailed it exactly or more refinement is needed. She suspects the latter will be true. As we dig into the details over time, we’ll figure out more specifically how these systems work and interact, where the lines blur between them, and how their relative effects take a toll on our long-term personality.

Regardless of the work that remains to be done, Harris’s work provides us with tremendous insight into what makes us who we are.

***

Still Interested? It’s highly recommended that you read both of her books in full: The Nurture Assumption and No Two Alike.

The post Why Are No Two People Alike? (Part 2) appeared first on Farnam Street.

 Judith Rich Harris

***

Becoming Human

What makes us…us? What makes one person open, honest, and enthusiastic, and another ornery and closed-minded? Why do some of us love risk-taking and some not? What causes us to be so alike…and yet so different?

The “nature versus nurture” debate is probably as old as modern humanity. There’s something related to our consciousness which makes us wonder whether our personality is pre-determined or perhaps whether our parents, peers, culture, nation, or experiences are the determining factor.

We still wonder, but thanks to Darwin and all that came after him, we don’t have to speculate as much as we once did. The modern study of behavioral genetics has shown us that the answer is, unequivocally, both. Our genes play an enormous role in how we turn out as children and full-grown adults, and the evidence is unmistakable.

In fact, oddly enough, we can see through carefully done research that about half of personality variation can be explained genetically. Take two identical twins and their personalities will be similar to the extent of their identical genes. This surprises no one.

The surprise is that two identical twins are so damn different! Think about it: They share all of their genetics, they probably grew up in the same house with the same set of parents, with the same books on the wall and the same TV watching habits, went to the same schools at the same time, had similar groups of friends…and yet two completely separate personalities emerge. How?

The Nurture Assumption

Judith Rich Harris may have the best answer, and it’s in her book No Two Alike, an amazing contribution to modern thought. What Harris — a former author of child development textbooks turned super-synthesizing social scientist — wanted to know was: Why do we all turn out with unique personalities? What really drives the differences?

She had begun to answer this in her deeply controversial 1998 book The Nurture Assumption. That book proposed her group socialization theory, the idea that children are mostly socialized by their peers, not their parents. By socialized, we mean — how do children learn the way to behave and operate within their culture? How to speak the right way, act the right way, play the right way, say the right things, and so on? The idea that parents had the primary influence had become fashionable in the 20th century Western world, thanks to Freud.

But contrary to popular belief, Harris explained, whether identical siblings were raised by the same set of parents or by two different sets, years of research proved they’d be no more or less alike than their genetic connection would predict. Likewise, two siblings put up for adoption end up no less alike, on average, than if they’d been raised in the same home. Identical twins are more alike than regular siblings in general, but the reason is ultra simple: They share more genes!

This meant, Harris explained, that parenting doesn’t have an effect on adult personality which isn’t already explained by genetic factors, any more than Chinese parents can give their child a Chinese accent if they raise him or her in Minnesota. It’s a bit hard to see on the surface, but many traits we think are due to parenting are simply due to the genetics shared between parent and child. Before behavioral genetics showed the genetic component, the two were regularly confounded, making much of the “research” on development worthless.

What does have an effect, besides genetics, is the peer group and culture children the child was raised in. And so besides genetics, it is the group, neighborhood, social group, and subculture of the child that matters, not whether their parents were kind or scolding, attentive or inattentive, soft or hard, or any other style of parent. Just like the child of Chinese immigrants would take on the Minnesota accent, they’d also take on the social behavior of their peers as well. Harris showed that people simply do not depend on direct input from their parents to become successful adults, as hard as it is to believe. (Although parents can have indirect influence in a number of ways, most obviously by moving the child to different areas and cultures.)

For this revelation and investigation into human development, the debunking of what Harris called the Nurture Assumption — that parents can mold the personalities of their children — Charlie Munger said that Ms. Harris “has not lived in vain.”

But that still left a big question: Since group socialization tends to make people more similar to others in their identified group, what accounts for personality differences, even among identical twins hanging in the same social circle? How do we end up with a group of “conforming individualists,” as Harris calls us? Why are some people trustworthy, and some not? Why are some more law-abiding and some less so? Why are some friendly and some mean?

***

The difficulty in figuring out the answer is illustrated by a story Harris tells about a pair of identical twins:

Conrad and Perry McKinney, age fifty-six, were featured in an article in the Boston Globe titled “Two Lives, Two Paths.” Born and reared in New Hampshire, the twins did everything together in their earlier years. They attended the same schools, sat in the same classrooms. Academically they were average students, but they were troublemakers. Eventually their teachers got fed up with their shenanigans and the twins were separated: Perry was held back in fifth grade, Conrad was promoted to sixth. That, according to the Globe reporter, was where their paths diverged. Conrad went on to graduate from high school; Perry dropped out in eleventh grade. Today, Conrad is a successful businessman–as it happens, he runs a private detective agency. Perry…well, Perry is a homeless alcoholic “who sleeps amid trash under a bridge,” by the Piscataqua River in New Hampshire.

Small changes in circumstance, many of which are random, can have dramatic effects on one’s life, making many experiments totally unethical. We can’t just sort out twins and send some of them to the ghetto and some to Palo Alto and see what happens — we’re reliant on what we can observe in natural experiments.

In No Two Alike, Harris does this by corralling information from a wide variety of sources including developmental psychology, evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and genetics, dispatching a number of popular red herrings in the search for a theory of why human personality turns out the way it does. By elimination and investigation, the theory she lands on seems not only plausible, but probable.

The Modular Mind

Her theory derives from what modern evolutionary psychologists have come to call the “modular mind” — the idea that the mind is made up of specific, useful, mechanisms to carry out a variety of functions, all put there through a long process of natural selection. Our mental tools allow us to see, hear, taste, feel, learn, speak, and do lots of other things that we need to survive and thrive. Some of these are present in other species and some are not: It depends how highly developed they are. (For example, ants can certainly see and taste, although crudely, but cannot speak or learn non-programmed behavior.)

As Harris sees it, from the perspective of human personality development, it doesn’t all happen in one simple way. Our modular minds have at least three separate but interrelated systems, working at turns separately and together to produce social success — one of the prime goals of a human being. (We are, after all, a highly social species.)

One passage illustrates why this is so important:

“Why,” asked the psychologist William James in 1890, “are we unable to talk to a crowd as we talk to a single friend?” Why do we shrug when we hear of hundreds of people killed in an earthquake but weep when we see a photo of one injured child? Why is it that getting to know and like someone doesn’t necessarily causes us to think well of the group to which he or she belongs–a disjunction revealed by the ineffectiveness of the protest, “Some of my best friends are Jews?”

The answer is that there are multiple systems in the mind for processing information. We have, I propose, two different mental mechanisms designed to process and store information about people. One collects data on individuals, the other on groups or social categories–types or classes of people. Criminal justice and law enforcement are (or should be) based on information processed by the first mechanism; war and bigotry are outcomes of the second. These mechanisms belong to different mental systems.

Besides the two systems that help us learn about others, we have a uniquely human third: A system that helps us learn about ourselves. Let’s take each in turn and see what we can learn and why they matter in the development of unique human personalities.

The Relationship System

Harris calls the Relationship System our “people information lexicon”. It’s how we know how to identify and deal with specific people. As humans, we need to know not just that girls at school tend to be mean if we don’t wear makeup, but that Jane will say something particularly nasty and that Sally will say something particularly nice. The mental system for categorizing the “girls our age at school” isn’t the same as the one that knows the difference between Jane and Sally.

We have a number of “modules” that roll up into a Relationship System: Our ability to recognize faces, voices, and scents; our ability to know what’s a familiar face — one that belongs to someone we know; the ability to put specific names to people and things and recall them, and hundreds more.

Harris uses the analogy of a Rolodex:

We have thousands and thousands of mental storage sites for people-information. Each is associated with a particular individual; each contains (or is linked to) other information we have about that individual. Picture a mental lexicon with a page for each individual you know, with slots for the face, name, and whether he or she is a close relative; plus other information such as occupation, plus memories of the experiences you’ve had with him or her.

There may also be an emotional marker, indicating how you feel about this person. The contents of some slots may be hard to read; other slots may never have been filled in. A page can be set up in the lexicon even if you’ve never set eyes (or ears) on the individual it refers to. You collect and store information on characters you read about in novels or hear about from other people. Folks you’ve never met may have a page in their lexicon for you!

This “lexicon” of information, constantly updated, gives us what we need to deal with individual people and figure out how to interact with them. Although we generalize and categorize people we don’t know, once we do get to know them specifically (even at a distance) we start filling in details and set up a page in the lexicon. We don’t have to be motivated to do this for a specific reason — we just do it automatically.

The evolutionary purpose of the people lexicon is as clear as the evolutionary purpose of pair-bonding: to enable us to behave appropriately toward different individuals, depending on what we have learned about them. To enable us to tailor our behavior to the nature of the relationship we have with each. The baby lifts up its arms to its mother but not to the stranger, even if the stranger is the right age and sex. The child learns to avoid the bully but to seek out other kids in the neighborhood. People stop doing favors for people who never pay them back, unless they are close relatives.

[…]

So the relationship system contains many intricately connected parts. There’s a people-information acquisition device that constructs and stores a lexicon of people and provides the motivation to collect the information. There are regulatory mechanisms that make use of the information stored in the lexicon to guide behavior in different domains of social life and that provide their own motivations, the sex drive being an obvious example. Other specialized modules deliver input to the relationship system: they include the face-recognition module, a device that assesses kinship, and the mindreading mechanisms I described in the previous chapter. Whatever you are considering doing with another person–help them, mate with them, engage in trade with them, pick a fight with them–it is extremely useful to have an idea of what their intentions are and what they are thinking about you.

And so it goes. From birth, our lexicon is ready to go, ready to be filled in. We spend a lifetime gossiping, learning, thinking, interacting with, and watching others so that we can have successful relationships with them.

But we also begin to categorize fairly early, based on a deeper analysis of our lexicon. We start putting people into groups — adults, children, teenagers, girls, boys, teachers, students, and a million others, depending on context. Importantly, we also begin to categorize ourselves, and this is where the socialization process occurs.

The Socialization System

Why is it that children “hive off” into groups and seek to differentiate themselves from other groups? The usual high school groups are not uncommon all around the world — they may differ in makeup and interests, but all young (and old) people form some group or another, if given the opportunity.  During this grouping process, the child is socialized:

In the old days, a human’s life, too, depended on remaining a member of the group. But because human groups differ in culture, the behaviors necessary for group membership couldn’t all be built in–much had to be learned. The baby’s Job 2, therefore, is to learn how to behave in a way that is acceptable to the other members of his or her society. This is the process that developmentalists call “socialization.” It consists of acquiring the social behaviors, customs, language, accent, attitudes, and morals deemed appropriate in a particular society. 

Socialization makes children more alike–more similar in behavior to others of their age and gender. Therefore, socialization cannot solve the central mystery of this book: why people (even identical twins reared together) differ in personality and social behavior. But the socialization system is an essential part of the solution, because one of the things I have to explain is why children become both more alike and less alike while they are growing up. The ways in which they become more alike do not consist solely of language and customs. There is evidence that children become more alike even in the sorts of things that are measured on personality tests. 

This process must happen as a child grows up — they must prepare for adulthood outside the home. And to do that, the child must learn what is acceptable in the groups they are a part of, and they will be part of many. A young boy from Texas will be at times a boy, a male, a student, an employee, an American, a Southerner, an athlete, and a child, among many more. These all require somewhat different actions and behaviors. So we start categorizing as best as we can:

The first step for the child is to figure out the social categories that exist in his or her society. This task is equivalent to that of learning other kinds of categories: for example, chairs and fish. Like chairs and fish, categories of people have fuzzy boundaries. Is a three-legged stool a chair? Is a seahorse a fish? Is this person a boy or a man? Traditional societies often provide rites of passage to sharpen the boundaries between age categories, but industrialized societies seem to manage pretty well without them. What we haven’t gotten used to yet is the blurring of the boundary between male and female.

An interesting thing about fuzzy mental categories is that, although they tend to be hazy around the edges, they’re clear at the center. We have an image of what the ideal or prototypical member of each category should be, and it’s somewhere in the middle. When I say “man,” you don’t think of an eighteen-year old or an eighty-year old and you probably don’t picture him wearing a dress. When I say “bird,” you think of a robin or a sparrow, not an ostrich or vulture. The prototypical chair has four legs, a seat, and a back.

We build up all kinds of implicit knowledge about the world, and we do it like the relationship system — automatically and without thought. We categorize people the same way we categorize chairs and birds, though the idea of stereotyping is certainly unpopular. Until we actually have a sheet set up in the lexicon for an individual person, all we can do is categorize them. Once we do start to learn about them specifically, the two systems begin interacting. Let’s say we meet a woman named Susan. At first, we might classify her as “White, middle-aged woman who looks like a mother.” (Again, not purposely — it happens instantly and automatically.)

Once we go on a date with her though, Susan becomes no longer just a member of a category: She becomes Susan. And although we don’t immediately remove the categories, we let her entry in the lexicon begin to develop and dominate our thoughts about her. Sometimes the two systems conflict. (I don’t usually like white middle-aged women, but that Susan is alright!)

***

Let’s leave it there for now. In Part 2, next week, we’ll explore the rest of Harris’s theory, and tie it all together to try to understand the mystery of human personality.

The post Why Are No Two People Alike? (Part 1) appeared first on Farnam Street.

The address is near and dear to our way of thinking, because Taubes raises a difficult and correct truth: In order to pursue new knowledge of the world, we must be confident that our ideas are correct, but because we are very susceptible to fooling ourselves, this tendency will lead us to believe lots of untruth as well. He calls it a tightrope walk: The thin line between being confident in an unpopular or yet unknown piece of knowledge and being a fool who buys into his cherished untruths.

Part of the speech is reprinted below, but be sure to check the whole thing out.

The idea is we’re always going to try to fool ourselves – that’s how our brains are wired — but here’s a way of thinking that will help us minimize the tendency. Another great philosopher of Science, Robert Merton, in the 1960s, put it this way: he said that Aristotle was right when he said “all men by nature desire to know” but then he added, what makes scientists different is they “desire to know that what they know is really so.”

Now here’s the catch: In science, as in life, you have to have faith in yourself and your ideas. You have to make decisions about what you’ll pursue, what you’ll continue pursuing despite times getting very tough, who you’ll do it with, who you’ll stay doing it with even after times get tough, where you’ll do it; why other people should do it with you and keep doing it with you through the tough times. You’ll make these decisions based on the assumption that what you believe is true really is. Without this belief we don’t do anything; it’s what drives us forward and allows us to act decisively. But if we fool ourselves, and we’re the easiest person to fool, we’ll make the wrong decisions – as individuals, as a society.

From this perspective, life becomes a tightrope walk in which you never actually see the rope. But it’s there. And, in all honesty, there’s almost invariably a net, too, so our missteps are rarely as damaging as we fear they’ll be while they’re happening. On this rope, we have to find the balance, time and again, between this need to think critically and skeptically about what we believe, and the need to have faith that what we’re doing and what we believe is right. Faith moves us forward; skeptical critical thinking keeps us balanced.

***

Still Interested? Check out a few other great commencement speeches or read up on Gary Taubes’ thoughts on Why we Get Fat.

The post Gary Taubes and the Exquisite Balancing Act of Getting it Right appeared first on Farnam Street.

Nutrition, as a scientific field, is reminiscent of psychology in its infancy — before Skinner’s or Pavlov’s ideas had made a dent, before there was Piaget, Kahneman, Tversky, Munger; before we had a field called “evolutionary psychology.” Heck, before biology itself had really come to grips with Darwin’s ideas about evolution through natural selection. (That didn’t happen until the modern synthesis in the 1940s.)

There were theories of mind, theories of self, theories of everything, but nearly all of them were incomplete and contradictory explanations of human behavior. Most were unscientific, in the Popperian sense. They couldn’t be falsified, and they claimed to explain too much, even patently opposite behaviors. It would be a long time before we started to pull the threads together and come up with coherent explanations of why we do what we do.

A similar pattern emerges as we survey the field of nutrition today. The ground is not steady. The most widely accepted and promulgated advice of the last fifty years is under attack: Maybe a calorie is not a calorie. Maybe the simple advice of “Eat less, move more,” nice as it sounds, is too simple, and frankly, wrong. (Reminding one of the second half of Einstein’s dictum: As simple as possible, but not simpler.) Maybe saturated fat is actually good for us. Maybe *gasp* salt is actually good for us.

These aren’t slight modifications of a prior theory but a 180-degree turn. (The visual metaphor is more literal than it seems: It’s not hard to argue, with the new evidence, that the old FDA food pyramid we’re familiar with should literally be turned upside down.)

As of late, this heretical thinking has been promoted most heavily by scientific journalist Gary Taubes, with his many articles, and his books: Good Calories, Bad Calories, and the slimmer and more easily digestible Why We Get Fat (And What to Do About It).

He and his intellectual partner, Peter Attia, call it the Alternative Hypothesis. It goes roughly as follows: We don’t gain weight and get modern diseases like heart disease, obesity, and hypertension because we eat too many calories or consume too much dietary fat, but because we are consuming carbohydrates, especially sugar and easily digestible starches, at a pace that nature never intended. The resulting insulin resistance is the main culprit.

In Why We Get Fat, Taubes lays out the modern epidemic:

Fifty years ago, one in every eight or nine Americans would have been officially considered obese, and today it’s one in every three. Two in three are now considered overweight, which means they’re carrying around more weight than the public-health authorities deem to be healthy.

This, in the face of a rise in recreational exercise, gym-going, health-consciousness, and food pyramids. (Not to mention fast food, increasingly sedentary lifestyles, and so on — all the things you’ve heard before. Taubes thinks those are red herrings, by the way.)

The Causality Problem

The premise of the book is relatively simple: Trying to explain the explosion of obesity, hypertension, and heart disease by focusing on overeating or under-exercising (consuming more calories than we’re using) is missing the boat. It’s explaining something causally by simply describing it. Of course, we’re storing more energy than expended. Why?

Step-by-step, detective-like, Taubes explores the current hypotheses and finds them wanting:

…(I will argue) that it is absurd to think about obesity as caused by overeating, because anything that makes people grow–whether in height or weight, in muscle or fat–will make them overeat. Children, for example, don’t grow taller because they eat voraciously and consume more calories than they expend. They eat so much-overeat–because they’re growing. They need to take in more calories than they expend.

We want to know what causes the overeating relative to energy expenditure. Why would any animal or human be driven to store more fat than they needed to function? Wild animals do not carry excess fat unless it has a useful physiological mechanism. (Whales keeping warm, squirrels preparing for winter, etc.)

Many have tried to explain this in psychological terms: Either we’re being manipulated into over-eating, or we’re too weak to resist the temptations of the modern age. Today’s food is just too damn yummy.

Taubes thinks this is the wrong way to approach the problem. What we really need to understand is the regulation of our fat tissue itself and why it would go awry. He calls it Adiposity 101:

The message of eighty years of research on obese animals is simple and unconditional and worth restating: obesity does not come about because gluttony and sloth make it so; only a change in the regulation of fat tissue make a lean animal obese.

The regulation of fat tissue is a bit different than we often imagine. Fat tissue is not like a savings account we add to and then pull from at an indeterminate time later. It’s more like the battery in a solar energy system: It stores excess energy when it is available, then releases it later when the energy isn’t available, at regular periodic intervals.

We’re constantly storing and releasing fat: During every meal, the body mobilizes its resources to store energy not immediately needed. Later, when we’re between meals or sleeping, the body breaks down the stored energy and uses it to fuel the cells. This is how a normally functioning body works. The principle of homeostasis tells us that the body wants to stay in balance: We should be storing only as much fat as needed to survive.

The problem comes when the body isn’t functioning normally, and the balance is lost. We tend to think this happens because we’re overeating. But what if that’s the effect, not the cause? It’s counter-intuitive, but so is the fact that the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth.

The culprit is resistance to insulin, a natural hormone which (among other things) encourages fat storage and discourages the release of fat stores while it’s circulating.

Remember, we depend on fatty acids for fuel in the hours after a meal, as blood sugar levels are dropping to their pre-meal level. But insulin suppresses the flow of fatty acid from the fat cells; it tells the other cells in the body to burn carbohydrates. So, as blood sugar returns to a healthy level, we need a replacement fuel supply.

[…]

(But) if insulin remains elevated, the fat isn’t available…as a result, the cells find themselves starved for fuel, and we quite literally feel their hunger. Either we eat sooner than we otherwise would have or we eat more when we do eat, or both. As I said earlier, anything that makes us fatter will make us overeat in the process. That’s what insulin does.

Taubes thinks we’ve gotten the causality backwards: Overeating doesn’t make us fat any more than overeating makes young children get taller; getting fat causes us to overeat. Our cells are literally being starved for energy by the selfish fat tissue, growing on its own accord in a tumor-like fashion driven by an abundance of circulating insulin. A isn’t causing B…B is causing A. This error has been the source of bad dieting advice.

Resistance is Futile

How do we become insulin resistant in the first place? Simple: We over-consume easily digestible carbohydrates, which causes heavy and constant insulin response in our bloodstream. This level of carbohydrate consumption was not available to our ancestors year-round, making it a modern problem. (One objection that’s been raised here is that our ancestors simply didn’t live long enough to contract modern disease. I hypothesize that there’s an error being made: Many earlier humans lived perfectly long lives, certainly long enough to get obese and hypertensive, but one major reason average life expectancy was low is because child mortality was so high.)

In any case, our cells eventually become resistant to insulin, and as more and more of the hormone is released in response–to keep our blood sugar down–our fat remains stored away tightly in the form of triglycerides (tri = 3 fatty acids, glycerol = a binding molecule; how our body stores fat for later).

The indicators for diseases we now associate with obesity, including hypertension, diabetes, and stroke, have now largely been lumped under the term Metabolic Syndrome. Because these indicators–high triglycerides, high blood pressure, low HDL cholesterol among them–are often associated with an expanding waistline, many have been led to believe that obesity causes the other associated diseases.

Not so, according to Taubes:

The simplest way to look at all these associations, between obesity, heart diseases, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, cancer, and Alzheimer’s (not to mention the other conditions that also associate with obesity and diabetes, such as gout, asthma, and fatty liver disease), is that what makes us fat–the quality and quantity of carbohydrates we consume–also makes us sick.

The insulin resistance is causing obesity and other problems. It isn’t that A causes B, it’s that C is causing A and B. Another important logical flaw.

What Now?

The implications are fairly obvious, from a diet perspective. We should cut our consumption of carbohydrates drastically, especially those that digest into the blood most easily and cause the most drastic insulin response.

Taubes smartly delimits himself from going beyond that advice, though:

It would be nice if we could improve on the foods to eat, foods to avoid, foods to eat in moderation. Unfortunately, this can’t be done without guessing. The kind of long-term clinical trials have not been undertaken that would tell us more about what constitutes the healthiest variation of a diet in which the fattening carbohydrates have already been removed.

Taubes admits that the right science must be done to prove that he’s right:

Our conventional dietary wisdom, as I’ve described in my books, is based on science that was simply not adequate to the task of establishing reliable knowledge — poorly-controlled human experiments, observational studies incapable of establishing cause and effect, and animal studies that may or may not say anything meaningful about what happens in humans.

That’s why he and Peter Attia created the Nutritional Science Initiative, or NuSi, with the idea of pulling together a range of scientists and researchers to perform more precise experiments. The goal is understanding whether a calorie is really a calorie, whether carbohydrate-restrictive diets are more effective (and why) and a host of other pertinent questions. Only good data will convince the public (and the health officials it turns to for advice) that things need to change. Their work is underway as we write.

Given the resistance most people have to admitting they were wrong, it’s an uphill battle.

***

What makes Taubes an effective thinker, and writer is that he’s pulling from diverse fields in his quest to solve the obesity problem. While nutritionists typically silo themselves, to a certain extent, in their own field, with some influence from psychology to explain why obese people tend to overeat, Taubes instead pulls from anthropology, biochemistry, endocrinology, epidemiology, and the field of nutrition itself. By asking the right questions of the right people, he gets better answers. He isn’t afraid to step on toes. He also uses careful induction, sorting point by point the problems with competing hypotheses. This is something that reminds us of all great thinkers, from Newton to Darwin to Holmes to Munger.

Nutrition is a field changing in real-time: It needs precise thinkers with a strong penchant for self-criticism, truth-seeking, contrarianism, and boundary-crossing. Whether or not Taubes’ Alternative Hypothesis ends up being the correct one, the job needs to be done right. Observational studies, on which most nutritional recommendations are based, are not science: They are hypothesis-generators. Correlation generators. Figuring out causality is a tougher task.

The good news is that this core problem is solvable, and we suspect, like psychology, the field will come together in time.

Article Summary

• There is no consensus on nutrition research.
• Despite the rise in gym-going and healthy eating, one in three Americans is considered overweight.
• The Alternative Hypothesis suggests that modern diseases aren’t because of too many calories but rather because of too many carbohydrates like sugar.
• According to Taubes, a better understanding of the regulation of fat tissue is the key to unlocking the mysteries of our body.
• We constantly store and release fat. When we become insulin resistant, the balance is gone and we gain weight.
• Overeating doesn’t make us fat any more than overeating makes young children get taller; getting fat causes us to overeat.
• Taubes recommends we cut our consumption of carbohydrates, especially those that digest into the blood most easily and cause the most drastic insulin response.

The post Gary Taubes on What Really Makes Us Fat appeared first on Farnam Street.

Concentration and mindfulness are distinctly different functions. They each have their role to play in meditation, and the relationship between them is definite and delicate. Concentration is often called one-pointedness of mind. It consists of forcing the mind to remain on one static point. Please note the word force. Concentration is pretty much a forced type of activity. It can be developed by force, by sheer unremitting willpower. And once developed, it retains some of that forced flavor. Mindfulness, on the other hand, is a delicate function leading to refined sensibilities. These two are partners in the job of meditation. Mindfulness is the sensitive one. It notices things. Concentration provides the power. It keeps the attention pinned down to one item. Ideally, mindfulness is in this relationship. Mindfulness picks the objects of attention, and notices when the attention has gone astray. Concentration does the actual work of holding the attention steady on that chosen object. If either of these partners is weak, your meditation goes astray.

Concentration could be defined as that faculty of the mind that focuses single-pointedly on one object without interruption. It must be emphasized that true concentration is a wholesome one-pointedness of mind. That is, the state is free from greed, hatred, and delusion. Unwholesome one-pointedness is also possible, but it will not lead to liberation. You can be very single-minded in a state of lust. But that gets you nowhere. Uninterrupted focus on something that you hate does not help you at all. In fact, such unwholesome concentration is fairly short-lived even when it is achieved— especially when it is used to harm others. True concentration itself is free from such contaminants. It is a state in which the mind is gathered together and thus gains power and intensity. We might use the analogy of a lens. Parallel waves of sunlight falling on a piece of paper will do no more than warm the surface. But if that same amount of light, when focused through a lens, falls on a single point, the paper bursts into flames. Concentration is the lens. It produces the burning intensity necessary to see into the deeper reaches of the mind. Mindfulness selects the object that the lens will focus on and looks through the lens to see what is there.

Concentration should be regarded as a tool. Like any tool, it can be used for good or for ill. A sharp knife can be used to create a beautiful carving or to harm someone. It is all up to the one who uses the knife. Concentration is similar. Properly used, it can assist you toward liberation. But it can also be used in the service of the ego. It can operate in the framework of achievement and competition. You can use concentration to dominate others. You can use it to be selfish. The real problem is that concentration alone will not give you a perspective on yourself. It won’t throw light on the basic problems of selfishness and the nature of suffering. It can be used to dig down into deep psychological states. But even then, the forces of egotism won’t be understood. Only mindfulness can do that. If mindfulness is not there to look into the lens and see what has been uncovered, then it is all for nothing. Only mindfulness understands. Only mindfulness brings wisdom.

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According to the excellent, Mindfulness in Plain English, there are three fundamental activities of mindfulness.

We can use these activities as functional definitions of the term: (a) mindfulness reminds us of what we are supposed to be doing, (b) it sees things as they really are, and (c) it sees the true nature of all phenomena.

Here are the three.

1. What You Should be Doing

In meditation, you put your attention on one item. When your mind wanders from this focus, it is mindfulness that reminds you that your mind is wandering and what you are supposed to be doing. It is mindfulness that brings your mind back to the object of meditation. All of this occurs instantaneously and without internal dialogue. Mindfulness is not thinking. Repeated practice in meditation establishes this function as a mental habit that then carries over into the rest of your life. A serious meditator pays bare attention to occurrences all the time, day in, day out, whether formally sitting in meditation or not. This is a very lofty ideal toward which those who meditate may be working for a period of years or even decades. Our habit of getting stuck in thought is years old, and that habit will hang on in the most tenacious manner. The only way out is to be equally persistent in the cultivation of constant mindfulness. When mindfulness is present, you will notice when you become stuck in your thought patterns. It is that very noticing that allows you to back out of the thought process and free yourself from it. Mindfulness then returns your attention to its proper focus. If you are meditating at that moment, then your focus will be the formal object of meditation. If you are not in formal meditation, it will be just a pure application of bare attention itself, just a pure noticing of whatever comes up without getting involved—“ Ah, this comes up… and now this, and now this… and now this.”

Mindfulness is at one and the same time both bare attention itself and the function of reminding us to pay bare attention if we have ceased to do so. Bare attention is noticing. It reestablishes itself simply by noticing that it has not been present. As soon as you are noticing that you have not been noticing, then by definition you are noticing and then you are back again to paying bare attention.

Mindfulness creates its own distinct feeling in consciousness. It has a flavor— a light, clear, energetic flavor. By comparison, conscious thought is heavy, ponderous, and picky. But here again, these are just words. Your own practice will show you the difference. Then you will probably come up with your own words and the words used here will become superfluous. Remember, practice is the thing.

2. Closer to Reality

Mindfulness adds nothing to perception and it subtracts nothing. It distorts nothing. It is bare attention and just looks at whatever comes up. Conscious thought pastes things over our experience, loads us down with concepts and ideas, immerses us in a churning vortex of plans and worries, fears and fantasies. When mindful, you don’t play that game. You just notice exactly what arises in the mind, then you notice the next thing. “Ah, this… and this… and now this.” It is really very simple.

3. The True Nature of all Phenomena

Mindfulness and only mindfulness can perceive that the three prime characteristics that Buddhism teaches are the deepest truths of existence. In Pali these three are called anicca (impermanence), dukkha (unsatisfactoriness), and anatta (selflessness— the absence of a permanent, unchanging entity that we call Soul or Self). These truths are not presented in Buddhist teaching as dogmas demanding blind faith. Buddhists feel that these truths are universal and self-evident to anyone who cares to investigate in a proper way. Mindfulness is that method of investigation. Mindfulness alone has the power to reveal the deepest level of reality available to human observation. At this level of inspection, one sees the following: (a) all conditioned things are inherently transitory; (b) every worldly thing is, in the end, unsatisfying; and (c) there are really no entities that are unchanging or permanent, only processes.

Mindfulness works like an electron microscope. That is, it operates on so fine a level that one can actually directly perceive those realities that are at best theoretical constructs to the conscious thought process. Mindfulness actually sees the impermanent character of every perception. It sees the transitory and passing nature of everything that is perceived. It also sees the inherently unsatisfactory nature of all conditioned things. It sees that there is no point grabbing onto any of these passing shows; peace and happiness cannot be found that way. And finally, mindfulness sees the inherent selflessness of all phenomena. It sees the way that we have arbitrarily selected a certain bundle of perceptions, chopped them off from the rest of the surging flow of experience, and then conceptualized them as separate, enduring entities. Mindfulness actually sees these things. It does not think about them, it sees them directly.

When it is fully developed, mindfulness sees these three attributes of existence directly, instantaneously, and without the intervening medium of conscious thought. In fact, even the attributes that we just covered are inherently unified. They don’t really exist as separate items. They are purely the result of our struggle to take this fundamentally simple process called mindfulness and express it in the cumbersome and inadequate thought symbols of the conscious level. Mindfulness is a process, but it does not take place in steps. It is a holistic process that occurs as a unit: you notice your own lack of mindfulness; and that noticing itself is a result of mindfulness; and mindfulness is bare attention; and bare attention is noticing things exactly as they are without distortion; and the way they are is impermanent (anicca), unsatisfactory (dukkha), and selfless (anatta). It all takes place in the space of a few mind-moments. This does not mean, however, that you will instantly attain liberation (freedom from all human weaknesses) as a result of your first moment of mindfulness. Learning to integrate this material into your conscious life is quite another process. And learning to prolong this state of mindfulness is still another. They are joyous processes, however, and they are well worth the effort.

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In Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain the authors explain how exercise can become your best medicine.

Aside from elevating endorphins, exercise regulates all of the neurotransmitters targeted by antidepressants. For starters, exercise immediately elevates levels of norepinephrine, in certain areas of the brain. It wakes up the brain and gets it going and improves self-esteem, which is one component of depression.”

“Another factor from the body that comes into play here is the atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP). Produced by the muscles of the heart itself when it’s really pumping, ANP travels through the bloodstream and into the brain, where it helps to further moderate the stress response and reduce noise in the brain. It’s a potent part of a cascade of chemicals that relieve emotional stress and reduce anxiety. Along with pain-blunting endorphins and endocannabinoids, the increase in ANP helps explain why you feel relaxed and calm after a moderate aerobic workout. When you talk about burning off stress, these are the elements at work.

We all know that chronically high levels of stress are very unhealthy but did you know that it can actually destroy the connections between nerve cells in the brain?

If mild stress becomes chronic, the unrelenting cascade of cortisol triggers genetic actions that begin to sever synaptic connections and cause dendrils to atrophy and cells to die; eventually, the hippocampus can end up physically shriveled, like a raisin.

But this process can also be reversed.

Studies show that if researchers exercise rats that have been chronically stressed, that activity makes the hippocampus grow back to it’s pre-shriveled state

It’s important to note that while a lot of stress is bad, a little stress can be very good. Physical fitness is one discipline that has always advocated introducing controlled stress to your system. That is, after all, how we break down and build up our muscles. The neurons in our brains benefit from a bit of stress in the same way our muscles do.

What’s gotten lost amid all the advice about how to reduce the stress of modern life is that challenges are what allow us to strive and grow and learn. The parallel on the cellular level is that stress sparks brain growth. Assuming that the stress is not too severe and that the neurons are given time to recover, the connections become stronger and our mental machinery works better.

To get the most mental benefit from your exercise program ideally, you need to spend some time pushing yourself and getting a bit outside of your comfort zone.

Psychologically, this is where you ‘confront the self,’ in the words of my colleague Robert Pyles … By going beyond where you thought you could, straining and stressing and lingering in that pain for even just a minute or two, you sometimes transcend into a rarefied state of mind, in which you feel like you can conquer any challenge. If you’ve ever experienced the phenomenon of runner’s high, it probably came in response to a near maximum effort on your part. The euphoric feeling is likely due to the mixture of extremely high levels of endorphins, ANP, endocannabinoids and neurotransmitters pumping through your system at this intensity. It’s the brain’s way of blocking everything else out so you can push through the pain and make the kill.

You also need to build a routine. The stability of a routine can have dramatic effects on your mood and motivation.

Exercise immediately increases levels of dopamine and if you stay on some sort of schedule, the brain cells in your motivation center will sprout new dopamine receptors, giving you new found initiative.

Lastly, exercising at a moderate intensity serves another important function; it helps take out the trash.

Inside your brain cells, the higher activity level triggers the release of metabolic cleanup crews, producing proteins and enzymes that dispose of free radicals, broken bits of DNA, and inflammation factors that can cause the cells to rupture if left unchecked.

Okay, maybe I won’t skip yoga tonight.

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Right now the front of your brain is firing signals about what you’re reading and how much of it you soak up has a lot to do with whether there is a proper balance of neurochemicals and growth factors to bind neurons together. Exercise has a documented, dramatic effect on these essential ingredients. It sets the stage, and when you sit down to learn something new, that stimulation strengthens the relevant connections; with practise, the circuit develops definition, as if you’re wearing down a path through a forest.

I’ve talked about how different I feel after yoga or a long walk; things become clearer and I become calmer. The fascinating book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, by John Ratey, explains biologically what accounts for these significant changes in our mind and body.

This is your brain on exercise.

… physical activity sparks biological changes that encourage brain cells to bind to one another. For the brain to learn, these connections must be made; they reflect the brain’s fundamental ability to adapt to challenges. The more neuroscientists discover about this process, the clearer it becomes that exercise provides an unparalleled stimulus, creating an environment in which the brain is ready, willing, and able to learn. Aerobic activity has a dramatic effect on adaptation, regulating systems that might be out of balance and optimizing those that are not – it’s an indispensable tool for anyone who wants to reach his or her full potential.

Exercise can have a dramatic affect on our ability to learn.

Darwin taught us that learning is the survival mechanism we use to adapt to constantly changing environments. Inside the microenvironment of the brain, that means forging new connections between cells to relay information. When we learn something, whether it’s a French word or a salsa step, cells morph in order to encode that information; the memory physically becomes part of the brain.

Exercise affects how primed our brain is to take on this new information and create these new connections. If you think of your mind as a garden, the more you move, the more you enrich the soil with positive neurotransmitters like dopamine (attention, motivation, pleasure), serotonin (mood, self-esteem, learning), and norepinephrine (arousal, alertness, attention, mood). More importantly you sprinkle the ground with something called ‘brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein produced inside nerve cells which Ratey has dubbed ‘Miracle-Gro for the brain.’

Researchers found that if they sprinkled BDNF onto neurons in a petri dish, the cells automatically sprouted new branches, producing the same structural growth required for learning.

Spark goes into detail regarding the types of exercise that best produce this cocktail of neurotransmitters and proteins for your brain to sip on but at the end of the day any movement is good, especially if it’s something you want to do.

“Experiments with lab rats suggest that forced exercise doesn’t do the trick quite like voluntary exercise”

So next time you get in a bit of a rut or you simply want to maximize your potential, get up and get moving.

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Atul Gawande is one of my favorite writers. Aside from the amazing work he did getting us talking about the power of simple checklists, he’s also pointed out why most of us should have coaches. Now he’s out with a new book, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, which adds to our ongoing conversation on what it means to be mortal.

I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them.

Although I was given a dry, leathery corpse to dissect in anatomy class in my first term, our textbooks contained almost nothing about aging or frailty or dying. The purpose of medical schooling was to teach how to save lives, not how to tend to their demise.

I had never seen anyone die before I became a doctor, and when I did, it came as a shock. I’d seen multiple family members—my wife, my parents, and my children—go through serious, life-threatening illnesses, but medicine had always pulled them through. I knew theoretically that my patients could die, of course, but every actual instance seemed like a violation, as if the rules I thought we were playing by were broken.

Dying and death confront every new doctor and nurse. The first times, some cry. Some shut down. Some hardly notice. When I saw my first deaths, I was too guarded to weep. But I had recurring nightmares in which I’d find my patients’ corpses in my house—even in my bed.

I felt as if I’d failed. But death, of course, is not a failure. Death is normal. Death may be the enemy, but it is also the natural order of things. I knew these truths abstractly, but I didn’t know them concretely—that they could be truths not just for everyone but also for this person right in front of me, for this person I was responsible for.

You don’t have to spend much time with the elderly or those with terminal illness to see how often medicine fails the people it is supposed to help. The waning days of our lives are given over to treatments that addle our brains and sap our bodies for a sliver’s chance of benefit. These days are spent in institutions—nursing homes and intensive-care units—where regimented, anonymous routines cut us off from all the things that matter to us in life.

As recently as 1945, most deaths occurred in the home. By the 1980s, just 17 percent did. Lacking a coherent view of how people might live successfully all the way to the very end, we have allowed our fates to be controlled by medicine, technology, and strangers.

But not all of us have. That takes, however, at least two kinds of courage. The first is the courage to confront the reality of mortality—the courage to seek out the truth of what is to be feared and what is to be hoped when one is seriously ill. Such courage is difficult enough, but even more daunting is the second kind of courage—the courage to act on the truth we find.

A few years ago, I got a late night page: Jewel Douglass, a 72-year-old patient of mine receiving chemotherapy for metastatic ovarian cancer, was back in the hospital, unable to hold food down. For a week, her symptoms had mounted: They started with bloating, became waves of crampy abdominal pain, then nausea and vomiting.

Her oncologist sent her to the hospital. A scan showed that, despite treatment, her ovarian cancer had multiplied, grown, and partly obstructed her intestine. Her abdomen had also filled with fluid. The deposits of tumor had stuffed up her lymphatic system, which serves as a kind of storm drain for the lubricating fluids that the body’s internal linings secrete. When the system is blocked, the fluid has nowhere to go. The belly fills up like a rubber ball until you feel as if you will burst.

But walking into Douglass’ hospital room, I’d never have known she was so sick if I hadn’t seen the scan. “Well, look who’s here!” she said, as if I’d just arrived at a cocktail party. “How are you, doctor?”

“I think I’m supposed to ask you that,” I said.

She smiled brightly and pointed around the room. “This is my husband, Arthur, whom you know, and my son, Brett.” She got me grinning. Here it was, 11 at night, she couldn’t hold down an ounce of water, and she still had her lipstick on, her silver hair was brushed straight, and she was insisting on making introductions.

Her oncologist and I had a menu of options. A range of alternative chemotherapy regimens could be tried to shrink the tumor burden, and I had a few surgical options too. I wouldn’t be able to remove the intestinal blockage, but I might be able to bypass it, I told her. Or I could give her an ileostomy, disconnecting the bowel above the blockage and bringing it through the skin to empty into a bag. I would also put in a couple of drainage catheters—permanent spigots that could be opened to release the fluids from her blocked-up drainage ducts or intestines when necessary. Surgery risked serious complications—wound breakdown, leakage of bowel into her abdomen, infections—but it was the only way she might regain her ability to eat.

I also told her that we did not have to do either chemo or surgery. We could provide medications to control her pain and nausea and arrange for hospice care at home.

This is the moment when I would normally have reviewed the pros and cons. But we are only gradually learning in the medical profession that this is not what we need to do. The options overwhelmed her. They all sounded terrifying. So I stepped back and asked her a few questions I learned from hospice and palliative care physicians, hoping to better help both of us know what to do: What were her biggest fears and concerns? What goals were most important to her? What trade-offs was she willing to make?

Not all can answer such questions, but she did. She said she wanted to be without pain, nausea, or vomiting. She wanted to eat. Most of all, she wanted to get back on her feet. Her biggest fear was that she wouldn’t be able to return home and be with the people she loved.

I asked what sacrifices she was willing to endure now for the possibility of more time later. “Not a lot,” she said. Uppermost in her mind was a wedding that weekend that she was desperate not to miss. “Arthur’s brother is marrying my best friend,” she said. She’d set them up on their first date. The wedding was just two days away. She was supposed to be a bridesmaid. She was willing to do anything to make it, she said.

Suddenly, with just a few simple questions, I had some guidance about her priorities. So we made a plan to see if we could meet them. With a long needle, we tapped a liter of tea-colored fluid from her abdomen, which made her feel at least temporarily better. We gave her medication to control her nausea. We discharged her with instructions to drink nothing thicker than apple juice and to return to see me after the wedding.

She didn’t make it. She came back to the hospital that same night. Just the car ride, with its swaying and bumps, made her vomit, and things only got worse at home.

We agreed that surgery was the best course now and scheduled it for the next day. I would focus on restoring her ability to eat and putting drainage tubes in. Afterward, she could decide if she wanted more chemotherapy or to go on hospice.

She was as clear as I’ve seen anyone be about her goals, but she was still in doubt. The following morning, she canceled the operation. “I’m afraid,” she said. She’d tossed all night, imagining the pain, the tubes, the horrors of possible complications. “I don’t want to take risky chances,” she said.

Her difficulty wasn’t lack of courage to act in the face of risks; it was sorting out how to think about them. Her greatest fear was of suffering, she said. Couldn’t the operation make it worse rather than better?

It could, I said. Surgery offered her the possibility of being able to eat again and a very good likelihood of controlling her nausea, but it carried substantial risk of giving her only pain without improvement or adding new miseries. She had, I estimated, a 75 percent chance that surgery would make her future better, at least for a little while, and a 25 percent chance it’d make it worse.

The brain gives us two ways to evaluate experiences like suffering—how we apprehend such experiences in the moment and how we look at them afterward. People seem to have two different selves—an experiencing self who endures every moment equally and a remembering self who, as the Nobel Prize–winning researcher Daniel Kahneman has shown, gives almost all the weight of judgment afterward to just two points in time: the worst moment of an ordeal and the last moment of it. The remembering self and the experiencing self can come to radically different opinions about the same experience—so which one should we listen to?

This, at bottom, was Jewel Douglass’ torment. Should she heed her remembering self—or, in this case, anticipating self—which was focused on the worst things she might endure? Or should she listen to her experiencing self, which would likely endure a lower average amount of suffering in the days to come if she underwent surgery rather than just going home—and might even get to eat again for a while?

In the end, a person doesn’t view his life as merely the average of its moments—which, after all, is mostly nothing much, plus some sleep. Life is meaningful because it is a story, and a story’s arc is determined by the moments when something happens. Unlike your experiencing self, which is absorbed in the moment, your remembering self is attempting to recognize not only the peaks of joy and valleys of misery but also how the story works out as a whole. That is profoundly affected by how things ultimately turn out. Football fans will let a few flubbed minutes at the end of a game ruin three hours of bliss—because a football game is a story, and in stories, endings matter.

Jewel Douglass didn’t know if she was willing to face the suffering that surgery might inflict and feared being left worse off. “I don’t want to take risky chances,” she said. She didn’t want to take a high-stakes gamble on how her story would end. Suddenly I realized, she was telling me everything I needed to know.

We should go to surgery, I told her, but with the directions she’d just spelled out—to do what I could to enable her to return home to her family while not taking “risky chances.” I’d put in a small laparoscope. I’d look around. And I’d attempt to unblock her intestine only if I saw that I could do it fairly easily. If it looked risky, I’d just put in tubes to drain her backed-up pipes. I’d aim for what might sound like a contradiction in terms: a palliative operation—an operation whose overriding priority was to do only what was likely to make her feel immediately better.

She remained quiet, thinking.

Her daughter took her hand. “We should do this, Mom,” she said.

“OK,” Douglass said. “But no risky chances.”

When she was under anesthesia, I made a half-inch incision above her belly button. I slipped my gloved finger inside to feel for space to insert the fiberoptic scope. But a hard loop of tumor-caked bowel blocked entry. I wasn’t even going to be able to put in a camera.

I had the resident take the knife and extend the incision upward until it was large enough to see in directly and get a hand inside. There were too many tumors to do anything to help her eat again, and now we were risking creating holes we’d never be able to repair. Leakage inside the abdomen would be a calamity. So we stopped.

No risky chances. We shifted focus and put in two long, plastic drainage tubes. One we inserted directly into her stomach to empty the contents backed up there; the other we laid in the open abdominal cavity to empty the fluid outside her gut. Then we closed up, and we were done.

I told her family we hadn’t been able to help her eat again, and when Douglass woke up, I told her too. Her daughter wept. Her husband thanked us for trying. Douglass tried to put a brave face on it. “I was never obsessed with food anyway,” she said.

The tubes relieved her nausea and abdominal pain greatly—“90 percent,” she said. The nurses taught her how to open the gastric tube into a bag when she felt sick and the abdominal tube when her belly felt too tight. We told her she could drink whatever she wanted and even eat soft food for the taste. Three days after surgery, she went home with hospice care to look after her.

Before she left, her oncologist and oncology nurse practitioner saw her. Douglass asked them how long they thought she had. “They both filled up with tears,” she told me. “It was kind of my answer.”

A few days later, she and her family allowed me to stop by her home after work. She answered the door, wearing a robe because of the tubes, for which she apologized. We sat in her living room, and I asked how she was doing.

OK, she said. “I think I have a measure that I’m slip, slip, slipping,” but she had been seeing old friends and relatives all day, and she loved it. She was taking just Tylenol for pain. Narcotics made her drowsy and weak, and that interfered with seeing people.

She said she didn’t like all the contraptions sticking out of her. But the first time she found that just opening a tube could take away her nausea, she said, “I looked at the tube and said, ‘Thank you for being there.’ ”

Mostly, we talked about good memories. She was at peace with God, she said. I left feeling that, at least this once, we had done it right. Douglass’ story was not ending the way she ever envisioned, but it was nonetheless ending with her being able to make the choices that meant the most to her.

Two weeks later, her daughter Susan sent me a note. “Mom died on Friday morning. She drifted quietly to sleep and took her last breath. It was very peaceful. My dad was alone by her side with the rest of us in the living room. This was such a perfect ending and in keeping with the relationship they shared.”

I am leery of suggesting that endings are controllable. No one ever really has control; physics and biology and accident ultimately have their way in our lives. But as Jewel Douglass taught me, we are not helpless either—and courage is the strength to recognize both of those realities. We have room to act and shape our stories—although as we get older, we do so within narrower and narrower confines.

That makes a few conclusions clear: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; and that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, culture, and conversations to transform the possibilities for the last chapters of all of our lives.

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

The post No Risky Chances: The Conversation That Matters Most appeared first on Farnam Street.

Especially the part where Durant explains how fasting can help fight infections.

One indication of this effect comes from the behavior of sick animals, including humans, who often lose their appetite until an illness has passed. Farm animals, pets, zoo animals, and wild animals often just stop eating altogether when facing an acute infection or a serious injury. The widespread nature of this phenomenon suggests it’s an adaptive response. Loss of appetite isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.

Like attacking the supply lines of an invading army, dietary restriction weakens pathogens while the immune system mounts a counteroffensive. Tiny pathogens don’t have large nutrient reserves and rely on the host for nutrition—therefore manipulating our nutrition is a way to manipulate their nutrition.

This may help explain why religious fasting became so prominent.

The benefits of fasting transcend chronic infections. It’s one of the promising areas of cancer research, especially in response to chemo.

“Fasting alters the playing field by activating ancient starvation defences in the cell. Fasting is a signal to the body that resources are scarce. Healthy, nonmalignant cells take the hint and stop dividing as often, focusing instead on cellular repair mechanisms that conserve resources. So even as chemo damages healthy cells, they are hard at work repairing chromosomal damage. But malignant cells don’t stop dividing; they’re “cancerous” because they refuse to do anything but grow and grow.

This part on gluten was also interesting.

In wheat, for example, gluten makes up the majority of wheat protein. Even though gluten is associated with the small percentage of people with celiac disease, it causes gut inflammation in over 80% of people. The gut is the digestive tract, which plays a central role not only in digestion, but in metabolism and immune function as well. Persistent gut inflammation can damage intestinal lining, and large molecules and bacteria can ooze out into the bloodstream—which initiates a reaction from the immune system. Autoimmune disorders occur when the body chronically attacks itself, and a wide variety—lupus, type 1 diabetes, and multiple sclerosis—are associated with a leaky, inflamed gut and wheat consumption.”

The book is broken into three parts. The first part is a brief history of humanity through five ages of existence—Animal, Paleolithic, Agricultural, Industrial, and Information. Each of these stages provides lessons for how we can be healthier today. The second part looks at how we can apply these lessons to “multiple areas of modern-day life: food, fasting, movement, bipedalism (standing, walking, running), temperature, sun, and sleep.” The book wraps up with a speculative vision of how our ancient hunter and gatherer roles can inspire us to build healthy lifestyles.

Durant started eating paleo in September of 2006 and some amazing things started to happen. After ten days

“I had much more consistent energy throughout the day. There was no more “head on the desk” after lunch. My mood improved, too. I felt more confident and optimistic. When something negative occurred in my life, I found that I was able to weather it with greater ease. The energy and mood gains in and of themselves were enough to tell me I was on the right track. … Due to the low sugar content in my diet, I stopped getting a thin filmy residue on my teeth. Industrial food started tasting way to sweet, and I came to enjoy natural flavors more. I lost the cravings for refined carbs — cookies, cupcakes, pasta, muffins, and bagels — and I found bready foods to be both salty and bland. My immune system improved dramatically.

…

Overall, it felt like walking up from a perpetual state of hangover. And once I knew what “good” felt like, it made “bad” feel a whole lot worse.“

When it comes to a healthy diet and overall lifestyle, here are Durant’s 5 recommendations.

1. What to Eat: Mimic a Hunter-Gatherer (or Herder) Diet

Stop counting calories. Eat the right foods: meat, seafood, roots and tubers, leafy vegetables, eggs, fruit, and nuts. Experiment with full- fat fermented dairy. Aim for a diet where the bulk of calories comes from seafood and animals, but the physical bulk comes from plants. Don’t be afraid of fat, eat nose to tail, and eat a variety of plants.

2. How to Eat: Follow Ancient Culinary Traditions

Respect ancient culinary wisdom. Follow traditional recipes. Eat fermented foods (sauerkraut, kimchi). Eat raw foods (sashimi, ceviche, tartare). Make broths and stocks. Cook at low heat, using traditional fats and oils (coconut oil, beef tallow, butter, ghee, olive oil). Eat your colors. Eat time-honored “superfoods”: liver, eggs, seaweed, cold water fish. Enjoy real butter. Salt to taste. Drink tea.

3. What Not to Eat: Avoid Industrial Foods, Sugars, and Seeds

Avoid processed foods of the Industrial Age, including sugar (sweetened foods, table sugar, dried fruit, plus artificial sweeteners) and vegetable oils (canola oil, soybean oil, corn oil, peanut oil). Avoid eating large, concentrated quantities of the seed-based crops of the Agricultural Age, such as grains (wheat, corn, barley, oats) and legumes (soy, beans, peanuts). If grains are eaten, go with rice.

Beverages: Drink water as thirsty. Drink traditional beverages in moderation, if desired (tea, coffee, wine, alcohol, milk). Avoid industrial beverages (soda, energy drinks, skim milk).

4. Make It Meaningful: Experiment, Customize, Enjoy

Use these guidelines as a starting point for your own experimentation. Modify according to your own health, goals, tastes and preferences, background, and budget. Make your diet meaningful (family recipes, ethnic cuisine). Be comfortable breaking away from it to enjoy life (celebrations, unique experiences).

5. Lead a Healthy Lifestyle

Sleep as much as possible. Move and exercise regularly. Stay on your feet (stand, walk, run). Get regular, moderate sun. Try some intermittent fasting. Try some hot and cold exposure. Make it meaningful in order to make it an ongoing lifestyle.

If you’re looking for diet tips, Durant personally follows the guidelines in Perfect Health Diet by Drs. Paul and Shou-Ching Jaminent.

No, this is not another paleo diet book; It is a lifestyle book full of ancient wisdom and practical advice on everything from diet and sunscreen to barefoot running and screen time. It just might change your life.

The post Ancient Wisdom For Lifelong Health appeared first on Farnam Street.

There is no doubt that human evolution has been linked to meat in many fundamental ways. Our digestive tract is not one of obligatory herbivores; our enzymes evolved to digest meat whose consumption aided higher encephalization and better physical growth. Cooperative hunting promoted the development of language and socialization; the evolution of Old World societies was, to a significant extent, based on domestication of animals; in traditional societies, meat eating, more than the consumption of any other category of foodstuffs, has led to fascinating preferences, bans and diverse foodways; and modern Western agricultures are obviously heavily meat-oriented. In nutritional terms, the links range from satiety afforded by eating fatty megaherbivores to meat as a prestige food throughout the millennia of preindustrial history to high-quality protein supplied by mass-scale production of red meat and poultry in affluent economies.

But is it possible to come up with a comprehensive appraisal in order to contrast the positive effects of meat consumption with the negative consequences of meat production and to answer a simple question: are the benefits (health and otherwise) of eating meat greater than the undesirable cost, multitude of environmental burdens in particular, of producing it?

Killing animals and eating meat have been significant components of human evolution that had a synergistic relationship with other key attributes that have made us human, with larger brains, smaller guts, bipedalism and language. Larger brains benefited from consuming high-quality proteins in meat-containing diets, and, in turn, hunting and killing of large animals, butchering of carcasses and sharing of meat have inevitably contributed to the evolution of human intelligence in general and to the development of language and of capacities for planning, cooperation and socializing in particular. Even if the trade-off between smaller guts and larger brains has not been as strong as is claimed by the expensive-tissue hypothesis, there is no doubt that the human digestive tract has clearly evolved for omnivory, not for purely plant-based diets. And the role of scavenging, and later hunting, in the evolution of bipedalism and the mastery of endurance running cannot be underestimated, and neither can the impact of planned, coordinated hunting on non-verbal communication and the evolution of language.

Homo sapiens is thus a perfect example of an omnivorous species with a high degree of natural preferences for meat consumption, and only later environmental constraints (need to support relatively high densities of population by progressively more intensive versions of sedentary cropping) accompanied by cultural adaptations (meat-eating restrictions and taboos, usually embedded in religious commandments) have turned meat into a relatively rare foodstuff for majorities of populations (but not for their rulers) in traditional agricultural societies. Return to more frequent meat eating has been a key component of a worldwide dietary transition that began in Europe and North America with accelerating industrialization and urbanization during the latter half of the 19th century. In affluent economies, this transition was accomplished during the post-WW II decades, at a time when it began to unfold, often very rapidly, in modernizing countries of Asia and Latin America.

As a result, global meat production rose from less than 50 t in 1950 to about 110 t in 1975; it doubled during the next 25 years, and by 2010 it was about 275 t, prorating to some 40 g/capita, with the highest levels (in the US, Spain and Brazil) in excess of 100 g/capita. This increased demand was met by a combination of expanded traditional meat production in mixed farming operations (above all in the EU and China), extensive conversion of tropical forests to new pastures (Brazil being the leader) and the rise of concentrated animal feeding facilities (for beef mostly in North America, for pork and chicken in all densely populated countries).

This, in turn, led to a rise of modern mass-scale feed industry that relies primarily on grains (mainly corn) and legumes (with soybeans dominant, fed as a meal after expressing edible oil) combined with tubers, food-processing residues and many additives to produce a variety of balanced feedstuffs containing optimal shares of carbohydrates, proteins, lipids and micronutrients (and added antibiotics). But it has also led to a widespread adoption of practices that create unnatural and stressful conditions for animals and that have greatly impaired their welfare even as they raised their productivity to unprecedented levels (with broilers ready for slaughter in just six to seven weeks and pigs killed less than six months after weaning).

Meat is undoubtedly an environmentally expensive food. Large animals have inherently low efficiency of converting feed to muscle, and only modern broilers can be produced with less than two units of feed per unit of meat. This translates into relatively large demands for cropland (to grow concentrates and forages), water, fertilizers and other agrochemicals, and other major environmental impacts are created by gaseous emissions from livestock and its wastes; water pollution (above all nitrates) from fertilizers and manure is also a major factor in the intensifying human interference in the global nitrogen cycle.

Opportunities for higher efficiency can be found all along the meat production–consumption chain. Agronomic improvements – above all reduced tillage and varieties of precision cropping (including optimized irrigation) – can reduce both the overall demand for natural resources and energy inputs required for feed production while, at the same time, improving yields, reducing soil erosion, increasing biodiversity and minimizing nitrogen leakage (Merrington et al. 2002). Many improvements can lower energy used in livestock operations (Nguyen et al. 2010), reduce the specific consumption of feed (Reynolds et al. 2011) and minimize environmental impacts of large landless livestock facilities (IST 2002). Considerable energy savings can also be realized by using better slaughter and meat processing methods (Fritzson and Berntsson 2006).

Rational meat eating is definitely a viable option.

Toward Rational Meat Eating

We could produce globally several hundred millions of tons of meat without ever-larger confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), without turning any herbivores into cannibalistic carnivores, without devoting large shares of arable land to monocropping that produces animal feed and without subjecting many grasslands to damaging overgrazing – and a single hamburger patty does not have to contain meat from several countries, not just from several cows. And there is definitely nothing desirable to aim for ever higher meat intakes: we could secure adequate meat supply for all of today’s humanity with production methods whose energy and feed costs and whose environmental impacts would be only a fraction of today’s consequences.

Meat consumption is a part of our evolutionary heritage; meat production has been a major component of modern food systems; carnivory should remain, within limits, an important component of a civilization that finally must learn how to maintain the integrity of its only biosphere.

The most obvious path toward more rational meat production is to improve efficiencies of many of its constituent processes and hence reduce waste and minimize many undesirable environmental impacts. As any large-scale human endeavor, meat production is accompanied by a great deal of waste and inefficiency, and while he have come close to optimizing some aspects of the modern meat industry, we have a long way to go before making the entire enterprise more acceptable. And, unlike in other forms of food production, there is an added imperative: because meat production involves breeding, confinement, feeding, transportation and killing of highly evolved living organisms able to experience pain and fear, it is also accompanied by a great deal of unnecessary suffering that should be eliminated as much as possible.

Opportunities to do better on all of these counts abound, and some are neither costly nor complicated: excellent examples range from preventing the stocking densities of pastured animals from surpassing grassland’s long-term carrying capacity to better designs for moving cattle around slaughterhouses without fear and panic. There is no shortage of prescriptions to increase global agricultural production with the maintenance of well-functioning biosphere or, as many of my colleagues would say, to develop sustainable food production while freezing agriculture’s environmental footprint of food (Clay 2011) – or even shrinking it dramatically (Foley et al. 2011).

The two key components in the category of improvements are the effort to close yield gaps due to poor management rather than to inferior environmental limitations and to maximize the efficiency with which the key resources are used in agricultural production. Claims regarding the closing of the yield gaps must be handled very carefully as there are simply too many technical, managerial, social and political obstacles in the way of replicating Iowa corn yield throughout Asia, to say nothing about most of sub-Saharan Africa, during the coming generations. Africa’s average corn yield rose by 40% between 1985 and 2010 to 2.1 /ha, far behind the European mean of 6.1 and the US average of 9.6 /ha, but even if it were double during the next 25 years to 4.2 /ha, the continent’s continuing rapid growth would reduce it to no more than about 35% gain in per capita terms. Asian prospects for boosting the yields are better, but in many densely populated parts of that continent, such yields might be greatly reduced, even negated by the loss of arable land to continuing rapid urbanization and industrialization.

At the same time, there does not appear to be anything in the foreseeable future that could fundamentally change today’s practices of growing livestock for meat. Indeed, many arguments can be made that after half a century of focused breeding, accelerated maturation of animals and improvements in feed conversion, these advances have gone too far and are now detrimental to the well-being of animals and to the quality of the food chain and have raised environmental burdens of meat production to an unprecedented level that should not be tolerated in the future. And neither the expanded aquaculture nor plant-based meat imitations will claim large shares of the global market anytime soon, and cultured meat will remain (for a variety of reasons) an oddity for a long time to come.

Consequently, it is very unlikely that the undoubted, continuing (and possibly even slightly accelerating) positive impact of the combination of higher productivities, reduced waste, better management and alternative protein supplies would make up for additional negative impacts engendered by rising meat production and that there would be discernible net worldwide improvement: the circle of reduced environmental impacts cannot be squared solely by more efficient production. At the same time, the notion that an ideal form of food production operating with a minimal environmental impact should exclude meat – nothing less than enacting “vegetarian imperative” (Saxena 2011) on a global scale – does not make sense.

This is because both grasslands and croplands produce plenty of phytomass that is not digestible by humans and that would be, if not regularly harvested, simply wasted and left to decay. In addition, processing of crops to produce milled grains, plant oils and other widely consumed foodstuffs generates a large volume of by-products that make (as described in Chapter 4) perfect animal feeds. Rice milling strips typically 30% of the grain’s outermost layers, wheat milling takes away about 15%: what would we do with about 300 Mt of these grain milling residues, with roughly the same mass of protein-rich oil cakes left after extraction of oil (in most species accounts for only 20–25% of oilseed phytomass), and also with the by-products of ethanol (distillers grain) and dairy industries (whey), waste from fruit and vegetable canning (leaves, peels), and citrus rinds and pulp?

They would have to be incinerated, composted or simply left to rot if they were not converted to meat (or milk, eggs and aquacultured seafood). Not tapping these resources is also costly, particularly in the case of porcine omnivory that has been used for millennia as an efficient and rewarding way of organic garbage disposal. Unfortunately, in 2001, the EU regulations banned the use of pig swill for feeding, and Stuart (2009) estimated that this resulted in an economic loss of €15 billion a year even when not counting the costs of alternative food waste disposal from processors, restaurants and institutions. Moreover, the ban has increased CO2 emissions as the swill must be replaced by cultivated feed.

At the same time, given the widespread environmental degradation caused by overgrazing, the pasture-based production should be curtailed in order to avoid further soil and plant cover degradation. Similarly, not all crop residues that could be digested by animals can be removed from fields, and some of those that can be have other competing uses or do not make excellent feed choices, and not all food processing residues can be converted to meat. This means that a realistic quantification of meat production potential based on phytomass that does not require any cultivation of feed crops on arable land cannot be done without assumptions regarding their final uses, and it also requires choices of average feed conversion ratios. As a result, all such calculations could be only rough approximations of likely global totals, and all of my assumptions (clearly spelled out) err on a conservative side.

Because most of the world’s grasslands are already degraded, I will assume that the pasture-based meat production in low-income countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America should be reduced by as much as 25%, that there will be absolutely no further conversion of forests to grasslands throughout Latin America or in parts of Africa, and that (in order to minimize pasture degradation in arid regions and nitrogen losses from improved pastures in humid areas) grazing in affluent countries should be reduced by at least 10%. These measures would lower pasture-based global beef output to about 30 t/year and mutton and goat meat production to about 5 t.

Another way to calculate a minimum production derived from grasslands is to assume that as much as 25% of the total area (the most overgrazed pastures) should be taken out of production and that the remaining 2.5 ha would support only an equivalent of about half a livestock unit (roughly 250 g of cattle live weight) per hectare (for comparison, since 1998 the EU limits the grazing densities to 2 U/ha, Brazil’s grasslands typically support 1 U/ha and 0.5 U is common in sub-Saharan Africa). Assuming average annual 10% off-take rate and 0.6 conversion rate from live to carcass weight, global meat production from grazing would be close to 40 t/year, an excellent confirmation of the previous total derived by different means.

At the same time, all efforts should be made to feed available crop residues to the greatest extent possible. Where yields are low and where the cultivated land is prone to erosion, crop residues should be recycled in order to limit soil losses, retain soil moisture and enrich soil organic matter. But even with much reduced harvest ratios of modern cultivars (typically a unit of straw per unit of grain), high yields result in annual production of 4–8  of straw or corn stover per hectare, and a very large part of that phytomass could be safely removed from fields and used as ruminant feed. The annual production of crop residues (dominated by cereal straws) now amounts to roughly 3 Gt of dry phytomass.

Depending on crops, soils and climate, recycling should return 30–60% of all residues to soil, and not all of the remaining phytomass is available for feeding: crop residues are also used for animal bedding; for many poor rural families in low-income countries, they are the only inexpensive household fuel; and in many regions (in both rich and poor countries) farmers still prefer to burn cereal straw in the fields – this recycles mineral nutrients but it also generates air pollution. Moreover, while oat and barley straws and stalks and leaves of leguminous crops are fairly, or highly, palatable, ruminants should not be fed solely by wheat or rice straw; rice straw in particular is very high in silica (often in excess of 10%), and its overall mineral content may be as high as 17%, more than twice that of alfalfa. As a result, the best use of cereal straws in feeding is to replace a large share (30–60%) of high-quality forages.

These forages should be cultivated preferably as leguminous cover crops (alfalfa, clovers, vetch) in order to enhance the soil’s reserves of organic matter and nitrogen. If only 10% of the world’s arable land (or about 130 ha) were planted annually with these forage crops (rotated with cereals and tubers), then even with a low yield of no more than 3 /ha of dry phytomass, there would be some 420 t of phytomass available for feeding, either as fresh cuttings or as silage or hay. Matching this phytomass with crop residues would be quite realistic as 420 t would be only about 15% of the global residual phytomass produced in 2010. Feeding 840 t of combined forage and residue phytomass would, even with a very conservative ratio of 20 g of dry matter/kg of meat (carcass weight), produce at least 40 t of ruminant meat.

Unlike in the case of crop residues, most of the food processing residues are already used for feeding, and the following approximations quantify meat production based on their conversion. Grain milling residues (dominated by rice and wheat) added up to at least 270 t in 2010, and extraction of oil yielded about 310 t of oil cakes. However, most of the latter total was soybean cake whose output was so large because the crop is now grown in such quantity (about 260 t in 2010) primarily not to produce food (be it as whole grains, fermented products including soy sauce and bean curd, and cooking oil) but as a protein-rich feed.

When assuming that soybean output would match the production of the most popular oilseed grown for food (rapeseed, at about 60 t/year), the worldwide output of oil cakes would be about 160 t/year. After adding less important processing by-products (from sugar and tuber, and from vegetable and fruit canning and freezing industries), the total dry mass of highly nutritious residues would be about 450 t/year of which some 400 t would be available as animal feed. When splitting this mass between broilers and pigs, and when assuming feed : live weight conversion ratios at, respectively, 2 : 1 and 3 : 1 and carcass weights of 70% and 60% of live weight, feeding of all crop processing residues would yield about 70 t of chicken meat and 40 t of pork.

The grand total of meat production that would come from grazing practiced with greatly reduced pasture degradation (roughly 40 t of beef and small ruminant meat), from feeding forages and crop residues (40 t of ruminant meat) and from converting highly nutritious crop processing residues (70 t chicken meat and 40 t pork) would thus amount to about 190 t/year. This output would require no further conversions of forests to pastures, no arable land for growing feed crops, no additional applications of fertilizers and pesticides with all the ensuing environmental problems. And it would be equal to almost exactly two-thirds of some 290 t of meat produced in 2010 – but that production causes extensive overgrazing and pasture degradation, and it requires feeding of about 750 t of grain and almost 200 t of other feed crops cultivated on arable land predicated on large inputs of agrochemicals and energy.

And the gap between what I call rational production and the actual 2010 meat output could be narrowed. As I have used very conservative assumptions, every component of my broad estimate could be easily increased by 5% or even 10%. Specifically, this could be achieved by a combination of slightly higher planting of leguminous forages rotated with cereals, by treatment of straws with ammonia to increase its nutrition and palatability, by a slightly more efficient use of food processing by-products and also by elimination of some of the existing post-production meat waste. Consequently, the total of 200 t/year can be taken as an unassailably realistic total of global meat output that could be achieved without any further conversion of natural ecosystems to grazing land, with conservative pasture management, and without any direct feeding of grains (corn, sorghum, barley), tubers or vegetables, that is, without any direct competition with food produced on arable land.

This amounts to almost 70% of the actual meat output of about 290 t in the year 2010: it would not be difficult to adjust the existing system in the described ways, eliminate all cultivation of feed crops on arable land (save for the beneficial rotation with leguminous forages) and still average eating only a third less meat than we eat today.

A key question to ask then is how the annual total of some 200 t of meat would compare with what I would term a rational consumption of meat rather than with the existing level. Making assumptions about rational levels of average per capita meat consumption is done best by considering actual meat intakes and their consequences. A slight majority of people in France, the country considered to be a paragon of classic meat-based cuisine, now eat no more than about 16 g of meat a year per capita, and the average in Japan, the nation with the longest life expectancy, is now about 28 g of meat (both rates are for edible weight). Consequently, I will round these two rates and take the per capita values of 15–30 g/year as the range of rational meat consumption. For seven billion people in 2012, this would translate to between 105 and 210 Mt/year – or, assuming 20/30/50 beef/pork/chicken shares, between 140 and 280 Mt in carcass weight. The latter total is almost equal to the actual global meat output in 2010, with the obvious difference being that the consumption of today’s output is very unevenly distributed.

If we could produce 200 t/year without any competition with food crops, then the next step is to inquire how much concentrate feed we would need to grow if we were to equal current output of roughly 300 t with the lowest possible environmental impact. Assuming that the additional 100 t meat a year would come from a combination of 10 t of beef fed from expanded cultivation of leguminous forages, 10 t of herbivorous fish (conversion ratio 1 : 1) and 80 t of chicken meat (conversion ratio 2 : 1), its output would require about 170 t of concentrate feed, that is, less than a fifth of all feed now produced on arable land. Moreover, a significant share of this feed could come from extensive (low-yield and hence low-impact) cultivation of corn and soybeans on currently idle farmland.

Roques et al. (2011) estimated that in 2007 there were 19–48 Mha of idle land (an equivalent of 1.3–3.3% of the world’s arable area), that is, land cultivated previously that can be planted again, most of it in North America and Asia. Using 20 ha of this land would produce at least an additional 60 t of feed. And when factoring in increasing crop yields, regular rotations with leguminous forages (producing excellent ruminant feed while reducing inputs of nitrogen fertilizers) and, eventually, slightly higher feed conversion efficiencies, it is realistic to expect that the share of the existing farmland used to grow feed crops could be reduced from the current share of about 33% to less than 10% of the total. Consequently, there is no doubt that we could match recent global meat output of about 300 t meat a year without overgrazing, with realistically estimated feeding of residues and by-products, and with only a small claim on arable land, a combination that would greatly limit livestock’s environmental impact.

Prospects for Change

Many years ago, I decided not to speculate about the course and intensity of any truly long-term developments: all that is needed to show a near-complete futility of these efforts is to look back and see to what extent would have any forecast made in 1985 captured the realities of 2010 – and that would be looking just a single generation ahead, while forecasts looking half a century into the future are now quite common. Forecasting demand for meat – a commodity whose production depends on so many environmental, technical and economic variables and whose future level of consumption will be, as in the past, determined by a complex interaction of population and economic growth, disposable income, cultural preferences, social norms and health concerns – thus amounts to a guessing game with a fairly wide range of outcomes.

But FAO’s latest long-range forecast gives just single global values (accurate to 1 t) not just for 2030 (374 t) but also for 2050 (455 t) and 2080 (524 t). Compared to 2010, the demand in 2030 would be nearly 30%, and in 2050 about 55% higher. When subdivided between developing and developed countries, the forecast has the latter group producing in 2080 only a third as much as the former. These estimates imply slow but continuing growth of average per capita meat consumption in affluent countries (more than 20% higher in 2080 than in 2007) and 70% higher per capita meat supply in the rest of the world.

Standard assumptions driving these kinds of forecasts are obvious: either a slow growth or stagnation and decline of affluent population accompanied by a slow increase of average incomes; continuing, albeit slowing, population growth in modernizing countries where progressing urbanization will create not only many new large cities but also megacities, conurbations with more than 20 or 30 million people, and boost average disposable incomes of billions of people; advancing technical improvements that will keep in check the relative cost of essential agricultural inputs (fertilizers, other agrochemicals, field machinery) and that will keep reducing environmental impacts; and all of this powered by a continuing supply of readily available fuels and electricity whose cost per unit of final demand will not depart dramatically from the long-term trend.

Standard assumptions also imply continuation and intensification of existing practices ranging from large-scale cultivation of feed crops on arable land (with all associated environmental burdens) to further worldwide diffusion of massive centralized animal feeding operations for pork and poultry. Undoubtedly, more measures will be taken to improve the lot of mammals and birds in CAFOs. Many of them will be given a bit more space, their feed will not contain some questionable ingredients, an increasing share of them will be dosed less with unnecessary antibiotics and their wastes will be better treated. Some of these changes will be driven by animal welfare considerations, others by public health concerns, new environmental regulations and basic economic realities; all of them will be incremental and uneven. And while they might be cumulatively important, it is unlikely that their aggregate positive impact will be greater than the additional negative impact created by substantial increases in the expected demand for meat: by 2030 or 2050, our carnivory could thus well exact an even higher environmental price than today.

I would strongly argue that there is absolutely no need for higher meat supply in any affluent economy, and I do not think that improved nutrition, better health and increased longevity in the rest of the world is predicated on nearly doubling meat supply in today’s developing countries. Global output of as little as 140 t/year (carcass weight) would guarantee minimum intakes compatible with good health, and production on the order of 200 t of meat a year could be achieved without claiming any additional grazing or arable land and with water and nutrient inputs no higher than those currently used for growing just food crops.

And it could also be done in a manner that would actually improve soil quality and diversify farming income. Moreover, an additional 
100 t/year could be produced by using less than a fifth of the existing harvest of concentrate feeds, and it could come from less than a tenth of the farmland that is now under cultivation and that could be used to grow food crops. Even for a global population of eight billion, the output of 300 t/year would prorate to nearly 40 g of meat a year/capita, or well above 50 g a year for adults. This means that the average for the most frequent meat eaters, adolescent and adult men, could be 55 g/year, and the mean for women, children and people over 60 would be between 25 and 30 g/year, rates that are far above the minima needed for adequate nutrition and even above the optima correlated with desirable health indicators (low obesity rates, low CVD mortality) and with record nationwide longevities.

Global inequalities of all kinds are not going to be eliminated in a generation or two, and hence a realistic goal is not any rapid converging toward an egalitarian consumption mean: that mean would require significant consumption cuts in some of the richest countries (halving today’s average per capita supply) and some substantial increases in the poorest ones (doubling today’s per capita availability). What is desirable and what should be pursued by all possible means is a gradual convergence toward that egalitarian mean combined with continuing efficiency improvements and with practical displacement of some meat consumption by environmentally less demanding animal foodstuffs.

Such a process would be benefiting everybody by improving health and life expectancies of both affluent and low-income populations and by reducing the environmental burdens of meat production. Although the two opposite consumption trends of this great transition have been evident during the past generation, a much less uneven distribution of meat supply could come about only as a result of complex adjustments that will take decades to unfold. In the absence of dietary taboos, average meat intakes can rise fast as disposable incomes go up; in contrast, food preferences are among the most inertial of all behavioral traits and (except as result of a sudden economic hardship) consumption cuts of a similar rapidity are much less likely.

At the same time, modern dietary transition has modified eating habits of most of the humanity in what have been, in historic terms, relative short spans of time, in some cases as brief as a single generation. These dietary changes have been just a part of the general post-WW II shift toward greater affluence, and the two generations of these (only mildly interrupted) gains have created a habit of powerful anticipations of further gains. That may not be the case during the coming two generations because several concatenated trends are creating a world that will be appreciably different from that whose apogee was reached during the last decade of the 20th century.

Aging of Western population and, in many cases, their absolute decline appear to be irreversible processes: fertilities have fallen too far to recover above the replacement level, marriage rates are falling, first births are being postponed while the cost of raising a family in modern cities has risen considerably. By 2050, roughly two out of five Japanese, Spaniards and Germans will be above 60 years of age; even in China that share will be one-third (compared to just 12% in 2010!), and, together with many smaller countries, Germany, Japan and Russia will have millions (even tens of millions) fewer people than they have today.

We have yet to understand the complex impacts of these fundamental realities, but (judging by the German, Japanese and even Chinese experiences) continuing rise in meat demand will not be one of them. And while the American population will continue to grow, the country’s extraordinarily high rate of overweight and obesity, accompanied by a no less extraordinary waste of food, offer a perfect justification for greatly reduced meat consumption. Beef consumption is already in long-term decline, and the easiest way to achieve gradual lowering of America’s overall per capita meat intakes would not be by appealing to environmental consciousness (or by pointing out exaggerated threats to health) but by paying a price that more accurately reflects meat’s claim on energy, soils, water and the atmosphere.

Meat, of course, is not unique as we do not pay directly for the real cost of any foodstuff we consume or any form of energy that powers the modern civilizations or raw material that makes its complex infrastructures. Meat has become more affordable not only because of the rising productivity of the livestock sector but also because much less has been spent on other foodstuffs. This post-WW II spending shift has been pronounced even in the US where food was already abundant and relatively inexpensive: food expenditures took more than 40% of an average household’s disposable income in 1900; by 1950, the share was about 21%; it fell below 15% in 1966 and below 10% (9.9%) in the year 2000; in 2010, it was 9.4%, with just 5.5% spent on food consumed at home and 3.9% on food eaten away from home (USDA 2012b). The total expenditure was slightly less than spending on recreation and much less than spending on health care. At the same time, the share of overall food and drink spending received by farmers shrank from 14% in 1967 to 5% in 2007, while the share going to restaurants rose from 8% to 14%.

These trends cannot continue, and their arrest and a partial reversal should be a part of the affluent world’s broader return to rational spending after decades of living beyond its means. Unfortunately, such adjustments may not be gradual: while the FAO food price index stayed fairly steady between 1990 and 2005, the post-2008 spike lifted it to more than double the 2002–2004 mean, and it led to renewed concerns about future food supply and about the chances of recurring, and even higher, price spikes. Increased food prices in affluent countries would undoubtedly reduce the overall meat consumption, but their effect on food security on low-income nations is much less clear. For decades, low international food prices were seen as a major reason for continuing insecurity of their food supply (making it impossible for small-scale farmers to compete), but that conclusion was swiftly reversed with the post-2007 rapid rise of commodity prices that came to be seen as a major factor pushing people into hunger and poverty (Swinnen and Squicciarini 2012).

In any case, it is most unlikely that food prices in populous nations of Asia and Africa will decline to levels now prevailing in the West: China’s share of food spending is still 25% of disposable income, and given the country’s chronic water shortages, declining availability of high-quality farmland and rising feed imports, it is certain that it will not be halved yet again by the 2030s as it was during the past generation. And the food production and supply situation in India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria or Ethiopia is far behind China’s achievements, and it will put even greater limits on the eventual rise in meat demand. In a rational world, consumers in the rich countries should be willing to pay more for a food in order to lower the environmental impacts of its production, especially when that higher cost and the resulting lower consumption would also improve agriculture’s long-term prospects and benefit the health of the affected population.

So far, modern societies have shown little inclination to follow such a course – but I think that during the coming decades, a combination of economic and environmental realities will hasten such rational changes. Short-term outlook for complex systems is usually more of the same, but (as in the past) unpredictable events (or events whose eventual occurrence is widely anticipated but whose timing is beyond our ken) will eventually lead to some relatively rapid changes. These realities make it impossible to predict the durability of specific trends, but I think that during the next two to four decades, the odds are more than even that many rational adjustments needed to moderate livestock’s environmental impact (changes ranging from higher meat prices and reduced meat intakes to steps leading to lower environmental impacts of livestock production) will take place – if not by design, then by the force of changing circumstances.

Most nations in the West, as well as Japan, have already seen saturations of per capita meat consumption: inexorably, growth curves have entered the last, plateauing, stage and in some cases have gone beyond it, resulting in actual consumption declines. Most low-income countries are still at various points along the rapidly ascending phase of their consumption growth curves, but some are already approaching the upper bend. There is a high probability that by the middle of the 21st century, global meat production will cease to pose a steadily growing threat to the biosphere’s integrity.

What do you think?

Let me know in the comments.

Still curious? Buy Should We Eat Meat?: Evolution and Consequences of Modern Carnivory

(via scientific america)

The post Vaclav Smil: Should We Eat Meat? Evolution and Consequence of Modern Carnivory appeared first on Farnam Street.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma was deservedly called one of the most important food politics books of all time. In the video below, Pollan and other prominent chefs and foodies weigh in on the current state of the American food industry.

The Omnivores’s Dilemma came from Pollan’s realization that Americans didn’t know where their food came from. Pollan wanted to do “a kind of detective story following the food back to the source.” The book explores the state of food in America by examining three different food chains: corn, grass, and the forest.

This book, along with Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, changed my relationship with food.

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As a culture, we’re cooking less and buying more prepared meals. Since the mid-sixties, the amount of time spent preparing meals has fallen by half. While the global trend is the same, Americans lead the way, spending less time cooking than any other country.

One thing we do more of, however, is talk about cooking. Celebrity chefs are everywhere with books and television shows. The sad reality is that we spend more time watching food shows than we do thinking about and preparing our own meals.

Food is Cultural

Michael Pollan’s book, Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, explores “how cooking involves us in a web of social and ecological relationships: with plants and animals, the soil, farmers, our history and culture, and, of course, the people our cooking nourishes and delights. Cooking, above all, connects us.”

Taking back control of cooking may be the single most important step anyone can take to help make the food system healthier and more sustainable.

Corporations cook very differently from how people do (which is why we usually call what they do “food processing” instead of cooking). They tend to use much more sugar, fat, and salt than people cooking for people do; they also deploy novel chemical ingredients seldom found in pantries in order to make their food last longer and look fresher than it really is. So it will come as no surprise that the decline in home cooking closely tracks the rise in obesity and all the chronic diseases linked to diet.

[…]

The shared meal is no small thing. It is a foundation of family life, the place where our children learn the art of conversation and acquire the habits of civilization: sharing, listening, taking turns, navigating differences, arguing without offending. What have been called the “cultural contradictions of capitalism” — its tendency to undermine the stabilizing social forms it depends on — are on vivid display today at the modern American dinner table, along with all the brightly colored packages that the food industry has managed to plant there.

While cooking has always been a spectrum, we’re getting further and further away from our food and our connection to it.

What constitutes “cooking” takes place along a spectrum, as indeed it has for at least a century, when packaged foods first entered the kitchen and the definition of “scratch cooking” began to drift. (Thereby allowing me to regard my packaged ravioli with sage-butter sauce as a culinary achievement.) Most of us over the course of a week find ourselves all over that spectrum. What is new, however, is the great number of people now spending most nights at the far end of it, relying for the preponderance of their meals on an industry willing to do everything for them save the heating and the eating.

[…]

This is a problem—for the health of our bodies, our families, our communities, and our land, but also for our sense of how our eating connects us to the world. Our growing distance from any direct, physical engagement with the processes by which the raw stuff of nature gets transformed into a cooked meal is changing our understanding of what food is. Indeed, the idea that food has any connection to nature or human work or imagination is hard to credit when it arrives in a neat package, fully formed. Food becomes just another commodity, an abstraction. And as soon as that happens we become easy prey for corporations selling synthetic versions of the real thing—what I call edible foodlike substances. We end up trying to nourish ourselves on images.

Cooking changes your relationship to food. Instead of consuming something, now you’re making it. Meals become achievements, expressions, discovery, and relationships.

I discovered there was much to learn from attempting, even if only just once, … more ambitious and time-consuming forms of cookery, knowledge that might not at first seem terribly useful but in fact changes everything about one’s relationship to food and what is possible in the kitchen. … By itself, this added increment of eating and drinking pleasure would have been enough to justify all the so-called work.

Of course, we never have time to cook. We reason that cooking, let alone baking bread or fermenting something, is probably not the best use of our time. We are so easily convinced that we’re better off staying at the office late and picking something up on the way home. This, after all, lets us do what we do best and lets other people do what they do best.

Here in a nutshell is the classic argument for the division of labor, which, as Adam Smith and countless others have pointed out, has given us many of the blessings of civilization. It is what allows me to make a living sitting at this screen writing, while others grow my food, sew my clothes, and supply the energy that lights and heats my house. I can probably earn more in an hour of writing or even teaching than I could save in a whole week of cooking. Specialization is undeniably a powerful social and economic force. And yet it is also debilitating. It breeds helplessness, dependence, and ignorance and, eventually, it undermines any sense of responsibility.

Our society assigns us a tiny number of roles: We’re producers of one thing at work, consumers of a great many other things all the rest of the time, and then, once a year or so, we take on the temporary role of citizen and cast a vote. Virtually all our needs and desires we delegate to specialists of one kind or another—our meals to the food industry, our health to the medical profession, entertainment to Hollywood and the media, mental health to the therapist or the drug company, caring for nature to the environmentalist, political action to the politician, and on and on it goes. Before long it becomes hard to imagine doing much of anything for ourselves—anything, that is, except the work we do “to make a living.” For everything else, we feel like we’ve lost the skills, or that there’s someone who can do it better. (I recently heard about an agency that will dispatch a sympathetic someone to visit your elderly parents if you can’t spare the time to do it yourself.) It seems as though we can no longer imagine anyone but a professional or an institution or a product supplying our daily needs or solving our problems. This learned helplessness is, of course, much to the advantage of the corporations eager to step forward and do all this work for us.

Dividing labour up in this economic way “obscures the lines of connection, and therefore of responsibility, between our everyday acts and their real-world consequences.”

When connections are not visible they are easy to forget.

Where were your clothes made? Where did your coffee beans come from? What conditions did the chicken you’re about to eat for supper enjoy? Most of these are hidden from us.

To butcher a pork shoulder is to be forcibly reminded that this is the shoulder of a large mammal, made up of distinct groups of muscles with a purpose quite apart from feeding me. The work itself gives me a keener interest in the story of the hog: where it came from and how it found its way to my kitchen. In my hands its flesh feels a little less like the product of industry than of nature; indeed, less like a product at all. Likewise, to grow the greens I’m serving with this pork, greens that in late spring seem to grow back almost as fast as I can cut them, is a daily reminder of nature’s abundance, the everyday miracle by which photons of light are turned into delicious things to eat.

Handling these plants and animals, taking back the production and the preparation of even just some part of our food, has the salutary effect of making visible again many of the lines of connection that the supermarket and the “home-meal replacement” have succeeded in obscuring, yet of course never actually eliminated. To do so is to take back a measure of responsibility, too, to become, at the very least, a little less glib in one’s pronouncements.

Pollan warns that within another generation or so, it’s possible that “cooking a meal from scratch will seem as exotic and ambitious— as “extreme”— as most of us today regard brewing beer or baking a loaf of bread or putting up a crock of sauerkraut.”

Cooked reminds us that food is so much more than what we read on the label.

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“Obesity is a disease of the environment.”

— Richard Jackson

Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, a cardiologist at the University of California Los Angeles, believes that her fellow human physicians have much to learn from their veterinary counterparts. These are not separate fields, she argues in her book, coauthored with science writer Kathryn Bowers, Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing.

Did you know that animals get cancer? heart disease? They also faint. Even diseases we think of as uniquely human, like depression, sexual performance, and addiction are found in the animal world. A lot of animals even self-injure when faced with stress or boredom.

When asked, “why should doctors listen to veterinarians,” in a recent interview she responded:

I can speak from my own personal experience. I had spent almost a couple decades being a human doctor, a cardiologist, and I had very little awareness about veterinary medicine. I, like most physicians, only interacted with veterinarians when my own animals got sick….I had this wonderful opportunity to help out at the Los Angeles Zoo, and through that experience I began seeing, both through the patients I was helping with and listening to the veterinarians on their rounds, that they were dealing with heart failure, and cancer, and behavioral disturbances, and infectious diseases, and really essentially the same diseases that I was taking care of in human patients.

Only a century or two ago, many humans and animals were treated by the same practitioner.

However, animal and human medicine began a decisive split around the turn of the twentieth century. Increasing urbanization meant fewer people relied on animals to make a living. Motorized vehicles began pushing work animals out of our daily life. With them went a primary revenue stream for many veterinarians. And in the United States, federal legislation called the Morrill Land-Grant Acts of the late 1800s relegated veterinary schools to rural communities while academic medical centers rapidly rose to prominence in wealthier cities.

Most physicians would never dream of consulting a veterinarian about human diseases.

Most physicians see animals and their illnesses as somehow “different.” We humans have our diseases. Animals have theirs.

Well that and the undeniable, and unspoken, medical establishments bias against veterinary medicine. Like all humans, doctors can be snobs. The unwritten hierarchy is based on a combination of factors but it’s pretty safe to bet that a veterinarian is below general practitioner.

“We do not like to consider [animals] our equals,” Charles Darwin once remarked. And yet we are animals. In fact, we share most of our genetic makeup with other creatures. Of course, we do learn from animals. Mice are commonly used to better understand human conditions.

Zoobiquity isn’t about animal testing. It’s about the fact that “animals in jungles, oceans, forests, and our homes sometimes get sick—just as we do. Veterinarians see and treat these illnesses among a wide variety of species. And yet physicians largely ignore this. That’s a major blind spot, because we could improve the health of all species by learning how animals live, die, get sick, and heal in their animal settings.”

One example of where we can learn from is why animals get fat and how they get thin.

Fattening in the animal world has enormous potential lessons for humans—including dieters looking to shed a few pounds and doctors grappling with obesity, one of the most serious and devastating health challenges of our time.

Millions cope with this life-threatening epidemic. Millions of domestic animals that is. These pets are “fatter than ever before, and steadily gaining more weight.” While hard to determine, studies put the number of overweight and obese dogs and cats somewhere between 25 and 40 percent. In case you’re wondering, that’s still, at least for now, well below the proportion of U.S. human adults who are now either overweight or obese, which is closer to 70 percent.

What sets domestic animals apart from their wild cousins? We feed them.

They are mostly or completely dependent on humans for every meal, and we regulate both the quality and the quantity of everything that passes their lips and beaks. Consequently, we can’t really blame them for their weight problems. … And so we’re left with one conclusion: we, the species that both manipulates food to make it more unhealthful and has the intelligence to understand that we shouldn’t eat so much of it, are to blame. We’re responsible not only for our own expanding waistlines but for those of our animal charges as well.

It’s easy and pleasing to assume that animals in their native environments effortlessly stay lean and healthy. That’s not the case.

Abundance plus access—the twin downfalls of many a human dieter—can challenge wild animals, too.

Although we may think of food in the wild as hard to come by, at certain times of the year and under certain conditions, the supply may be unlimited.

So wild animals get fat the same way we humans do: access to abundant food.

Of course, animals also fatten normally—and healthily—in response to seasonal and life cycles. But what’s key is that an animal’s weight can fluctuate depending on the landscape around it.

Learning from animals, call it the zoobiquitous approach, we learn that “weight is not just a static number on a chart. Rather, it’s a dynamic, ever-changing reaction to a huge variety of external and internal processes ranging from the cosmic to the microscopic.”

Richard Jackson says “Obesity is a disease of the environment.” In 2010 he explained what he meant:

One of the problems with the obesity epidemic is we too often blame the victim. And yes, every one of us ought to have more self-control and ought to exert more willpower. But when everyone begins to develop the same set of symptoms, it’s not something in their mind, it’s something in our environment that is changing our health. And what’s changing in our environment is that we have made dangerous food, sugar-laden food, high-fat food, high-salt food … and we’ve made it absolutely the easiest thing to buy, the cheapest thing to buy, and yes, it tastes good, but it’s not what we should be eating.

In a 2009 book, The End of Overeating, David Kessler made a similar point: excess sugar, fat, and salt “hijack our brains and bodies and drive cycles of appetite and desire that make it nearly impossible to resist certain fattening foods.” In a new book I’ve just started reading, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us, Michael Moss makes the same point. (In case you’re wondering, the calories in calories out argument is bunk.)

One of the lessons we can take away

If you want to lose weight the wild animal way, decrease the abundance of food around yourself and interrupt your access to it. And expend lots of energy in the daily hunt for food. In other words: change your environment.

Nassim Taleb makes a similar point in his book Anti-Fragile:

Perhaps what we mostly need to remove is a few meals at random, or at least avoid steadiness in food consumption. The error of missing nonlinearities is found in two places, in the mixture and the frequency of food intake.

The problem with the mixture is as follows. We humans are said to be omnivorous, compared to more specialized mammals, such as cows and elephants and lions. But such ability to be omnivorous had to come in response to more variegated environments with unplanned, haphazard, and, what is key, serial availability of sources—specialization is the response to a very stable habitat free of abrupt changes, redundancy of pathways the response to a more variegated one. Diversification of function had to come in response to variety. And a variety of certain structure.

Note a subtly in the way we are built: the cow and the other herbivores are subjected to much less randomness than the lion in their food intake; they eat steadily but need to work extremely hard in order to metabolize all these nutrients, spending several hours a day just eating. … The lion, on the other hand, needs to rely on more luck; it succeeds in a small percentage of the kills, less than 20 percent, but when it eats, it gets in a quick and easy way all these nutrients produced thanks to very hard and boring work by the prey. So take the following principles derived from the random structure of the environment: when we are herbivores, we eat steadily; but when we are predators we eat more randomly. Hence our proteins need to be consumed randomly for statistical reasons.

So if you agree that we need “balanced” nutrition of a certain combination, it is wrong to immediately assume that we need such balance at every meal rather than serially so. … There is a big difference between getting them together at every meal … or having them separately, serially.

Why? Because deprivation is a stressor—and we know what stressors do when allowed adequate recovery. Convexity effects at work here again: getting three times the daily dose of protein in one day and nothing the next two is certainly not biologically equivalent to “steady” moderate consumption if our metabolic reactions are nonlinear.

… I am convinced that we are antifragile to randomness in food delivery and composition—at least over a certain range or number of days.

We’ve all known that antibiotics are used to stop the spread of certain diseases. But, Zoobiquity, offers another explanation:

Antibiotics don’t kill just the bugs that make animals sick. They also decimate beneficial gut flora. And these drugs are routinely administrated even when infection is not a concern. The reason may surprise you. Simply by giving antibiotics, farmers can fatten their animals using less feed. The scientific jury is still out on exactly why these antibiotics promote fattening, but a plausible hypothesis is that by changing the animals’ gut microflora, antibiotics create an intestine dominated by colonies of microbes that are calorie-extraction experts. This may be why antibiotics act to fatten not just cattle, with their multistomached digestive systems, but also pigs and chicken, whose GI tracts are more similar to ours.

This is really a key point: antibiotic use can change the weight of farm animals. It’s possible that something similar occurs in other animals—namely, us. Anything that alters gut flora, including but not limited to antibiotics, has implications not only for body weight but for other elements of our metabolism, such as glucose intolerance, insulin resistance and abnormal cholesterol.

The diet and exercise dogma:

Even without an assist from 32-ounce sodas, the yellow-bellied marmots in the Rockies, blue whales off the coast of California and country rats in Maryland have gotten steadily chubbier in recent years. The explanation might lie in the disruption of circadian rhythms. Of the global dynamics controlling our biological clocks — including temperature, eating, sleeping and even socializing — no “zeitgeber” is more influential than light.

The cycle

Modern, affluent humans have created a continuous eating cycle, a kind of “uniseason.” … Sugar is abundant, whether in our processed foods or in beautiful whole fruits that have had their inconvenient seeds bread out of them and that “unzip” from easy-to-peel skins and pop open into ready to eat segments. Protein and fat are everywhere available—in eternal harvest the prey never grows up and learns to run away or fight us off. Our food is stripped of microbes, and we remove more while scrubbing off dirt and pesticides. Because we control it, the temperature is always a perfect 74 degrees. Because we’re in charge, we can safely dine at tables aglow in light long after the sun goes down. All year round, our days are lovely and long; our nights are short.

As animals, we find this single season an extremely comfortable place to be. But unless we want to remain in a state of continual fattening, with accompanying metabolic diseases, we will have to pry ourselves out of this delicious ease.

Check out the book

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We are ignoring the elephant in the room when we only talk nutrients — this way of eating is killing us.

For example by demonising fat in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s we ended up with margarine and a whole lot of low fat processed goods on the supermarket shelves (which are still there, by the way). It gave a ‘free pass’ to eat and drink as much as you want because it was low fat.

But instead we became fat.

It’s really hard to study food – it’s extremely complex. It’s not like studying pharmaceuticals. “There’s no placebo for broccoli.” Many food studies rely on surveying people (epidemiological surveillance type studies). There are no tight controls and it’s easy for people to forget what they eat or even lie on the survey. So the data has problems.

Nutritional ‘science’ is a young science “it’s where surgery was in the 1650s.”

So what facts do we know about food?

• Every time we remove a nutrient — so that we can just consume the nutrient — it doesn’t work like it should, as it does in the whole food.
• Populations that eat a Western diet (that is, processed foods) have a high prevalence of chronic diseases like obesity, heart disease, cancer and type 2 diabetes. (These are diseases of the West.)
• Populations that eat traditional diets, rarely get chronic diseases.
• People who get off the Western diet revert the markers of chronic diseases — which means they get better or totally heal themselves.

In the next 10 years, 1 in 3 kids will develop type 2 diabetes — unless we change the way we eat.

The best way to take control of our food — away from corporations — is to cook at home.

***

Still curious? If you haven’t read Pollan’s books In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, then you’re missing out on a lot of wisdom.

source

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