The Primal Blueprint (8 page)

Clearly, your lifestyle behaviors can either destroy or support many aspects of your health and can often be far more relevant than inherited predispositions to allergies, diabetes,
or even more serious conditions. Not to make light of the serious genetically influenced health challenges that many face over their lifetimes, I would argue that we are
all
predisposed to heart disease, cancer, arthritis, and today’s other leading lifestyle-related health problems if we mismanage our genes with the wrong diet, exercise, and myriad other lifestyle behaviors.

Obviously, you cannot grow your kids seven feet tall simply by feeding them healthy food and making sure they get plenty of sleep; we all have profound limitations in how our genes can express our unique individual potential. For confirmation, just take a look at the physical marvels in the Olympic 100 meter dash or on an NFL or NBA roster, collections of the most physically gifted athletes on the planet. These athletes might be one in a million genetically, but their specific behaviors have resulted in
optimal gene expression
. The choices they have made—the foods they’ve eaten, how they’ve trained, even how they’ve thought—have all helped them make the most of their natural-born talents to rise to the top of very competitive arenas. This is all you ought to be concerned with—making the most of your own genetic recipe to enjoy a long life of excellent health and peak performance through the 10
Primal Blueprint
laws.

The chapters that follow will explore in great detail the rationale, benefits, and practical suggestions for living according to the 10 simple
Primal Blueprint
laws. These laws represent the specific behaviors that led directly (shaped by two million years of evolution) to the genetic recipe for a healthy, lean, fit, happy human being. Almost nothing has changed in this recipe since preagricultural times—except the way we have unwittingly chosen to program our genes for less-than-optimal health. By understanding how these behavioral laws shaped our genome, we can reprogram our genes to express themselves in a direction of health. And when I say simple laws, I really mean it. If you read just this following section and never opened the book again, you’d have all the information you need to live a long, healthy, disease-free life. Here then is a brief description of the laws of living 10,000 years ago and a quick primer on how to adapt them to a healthy 21st-century lifestyle.

“
We are
all
predisposed to disease if we mismanage our genes
.
”

Plants and animals encompass everything our ancestors ate (from a huge list of individual foods) to get the protein, fats, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, phenols, fiber, water, and other nutrients necessary to sustain life, increase brain size, improve physical fitness, and support immune function. Ironically, the primal human diet differs greatly from what Conventional Wisdom recommends. Because the various diet camps passionately argue conflicting positions to a confused public, it’s essential to reflect on how profoundly important and logically sound it is to model our diets after the diets of our ancestors, whose bodies evolved to survive, reproduce, and thrive on these foods. Talk about a lengthy and severely scrutinized (as in, “life or death”) study protocol!

Primal humans across the globe ate widely varied diets due to environmental circumstances, such as climate, geography, seasons, and activity level. Notably, they also ate sporadically—mostly due to the lack of consistent availability of food (not a big issue in the developed world these days, eh?). Consequently, we became well adapted to store caloric energy (in the form of body fat, along with a little bit of muscle and liver glycogen) and burn it when dietary calories were scarce. You may be disturbed out about possessing the genetic trait to store extra food calories efficiently as fat. However, by simply eating the right kinds of foods, you can leverage this bank account “savings and withdrawal” mechanism to your advantage—maintaining ideal body fat levels and stabilizing daily appetite and energy levels.
Hint:
it’s all about moderating your insulin production.

Today similar principles apply for healthy eating. Focus on quality sources of animal protein (organic, free-range, or wild sources of meat, fowl, and fish), an assortment of colorful vegetables and fresh fruits, and healthy sources of fat (nuts, seeds, their derivative butters, certain oils, avocados, etc.). Realize that a significant amount of Conventional Wisdom about healthy eating is marketing fodder that grossly distorts the fundamental truth that humans thrive on natural plant and animal foods or that relies on gimmicks to support dogma of questionable validity. For example, eating at particular intervals (three squares or six small meals a day), combining food types at meals, severely restricting certain nutrients, following purification or detox diets, getting colon cleanses, replacing meals with processed formulas, striving for specific calorie ratios, aligning food choices with your blood-type, or keeping score of your portions and weekly treat allowances are all gimmicks that have no credibility in the context of evolutionary biology.

Furthermore, regimented programs are virtually impossible to enjoy and stick to over the long term, because they run counter to human nature. We humans thrive on
eating an ever-changing variety of natural foods that satisfy and nourish us, in times and amounts that fluctuate according to moods, environmental circumstances, activity level, and many other factors. I suggest you enjoy eating as one of the pleasures of life and reject everything you’ve ever heard mandating when and how much you should eat. Instead, eat when you are hungry and finish when you feel satisfied. Realize that natural foods are intrinsically the most delicious, because they satisfy your cravings and distinct tastes, stabilize mood and energy levels, and promote health and well-being.

The ability of humans to exploit almost every corner of this earth was partly predicated on consuming vastly different types of plant and animal life. Primal humans developed a keen sense of smell and taste, along with liver, kidney, and stomach function, to adapt to new food sources and avoid succumbing to poisonous plants that they encountered routinely when foraging and settling new areas. For example, the reason we have a sweet tooth today is probably an evolved response to an almost universal truth in the plant world that anything that tastes sweet is safe to eat.

While we have little risk of ingesting poisonous plants on walkabouts today, the number of toxic agents in our food supply is worse than ever. By
toxic
I mean human-made products that are foreign to your genes and disturb the normal, healthy function of your body when ingested. The big offenders, including sugars and sodas, chemically altered fats, and heavily processed, packaged, fried, and preserved foods, are obvious.

What’s less accepted and therefore more insidious as a dietary “poison” are processed grains (wheat and flour products, such as bread, pasta, crackers, snack foods, baked goods, etc., as well as rice, corn, cereals, etc.). You heard right—these staples of diets across the globe are generally inappropriate for human consumption for the simple reason that our digestive systems (and our genes) have not had ample time to adapt to both the unfamiliar protein structure of grains and the excessive carbohydrate load of all forms of cultivated grains, including even whole grains. Essentially, the advent of grains and civilization has eliminated the main thing that’s made humans healthy: selection pressure to reach reproductive age—and to care for ourselves, and others, beyond!

Ingesting grains and other processed carbohydrates causes blood glucose levels to spike (both simple and complex carbs get converted into glucose—at differing rates—once they enter the body; we’ll use the accurate term
blood glucose
to convey what many call
blood sugar
). This spike is a shock to our primal genes, which are accustomed to natural, slower-burning foods. Your pancreas compensates for this excess of glucose in the
bloodstream (too much glucose is toxic to the body—hence the importance of timely insulin shots for diabetics) by secreting excessive levels of insulin. While insulin is an important hormone that delivers nutrients to muscle, liver, and fat cells for storage, excessive insulin released in the bloodstream causes glucose to be removed so rapidly and effectively that it can result in a “sugar crash”: mental and physical lethargy and (because the brain relies heavily on glucose to fuel it) a strong craving for quick replacement energy in the form of more high-carbohydrate food. This leads to a vicious cycle of another ill-advised meal, another excessive insulin response, and another corresponding blood glucose decline.

Because insulin’s job is to transport nutrients out of the bloodstream and into the muscle, liver, and fat cell storage depots, its excessive presence in the bloodstream inhibits the release of stored body fat for use as energy. Insulin’s counterregulatory hormone, glucagon, accesses carbs, protein, and fat from your body’s storage depots (muscle, liver, fat cells) and delivers them into the bloodstream for use as energy. When insulin is high, glucagon is low. You don’t have fuel in your bloodstream, so your brain says, “Eat now! And make it something sweet so we can burn it immediately!” Unfortunately, the mobilization of stored body fat has been humans’ preferred energy source (and weight-control device) for a couple of million years. It’s as simple as this: you cannot reduce body fat on a diet that stimulates excessive—or even moderately excessive—levels of insulin production. Period.

“
The mobilization of stored body fat has been our preferred energy source (and weight-control device) for a couple of million years. It’s as simple as this: you cannot reduce body fat on a diet that stimulates excessive levels of insulin production
.
”

Beyond the weight-loss frustrations, overstressing your insulin response system over years and decades can lead directly to devastating general system failure in the form of type 2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease (thanks to vascular inflammation, peripheral oxidative damage, and other insulin-related troubles we will learn more about later), and diet-related cancers.
Chapter 5
will explain in detail that even whole grains (brown rice, whole wheat bread, etc.) are not particularly healthy, because they still trigger excessive insulin production and can interfere with mineral absorption as well as displace the far more nutritious plants and animals from being the caloric emphasis of your diet.