Adults behaving badly

I am not a lawyer. I am also not a doctor. I am also not a mechanic nor am I a beautician. If I offered to rebuild your engine or cut your hair for a nominal fee, you'd be stupid to take me up on it. I would make a giant mess of things and you'd be out a few dollars.

If I offered to represent you in court or operate on your appendix you'd be extremely stupid to let me. You'd end up in jail. Or dead.

I trust that rational, thinking adults can see that there is a difference there - and that there are probably some shades of grey in between.

***

It is pathetically easy to get the "paleosphere" into a giant frothing stew of hysterics. There's been enough stupidity in the past few months that I now like to metaphorize the paleo community as one of those ridiculously high strung poodles.

I can haz conniption?

The latest issue to get everyone in an uproar is the recently announced case of "Cooksey v. Futrell, et al." I feel like I need to comment because this is all going down in North Carolina WHICH IS WHERE I LIVE TOO.

Here's the short version: Obese, diabetic guy nearly dies, gets scared, gets his life together by eating a paleo style diet and getting some exercise. He starts a blog about it and attracts a readership. Pretty great, right? Well, then he then decides to start a paid consulting service to help other diabetics treat their (medical) condition as he has. North Carolina government calls foul and says he isn't qualified to offer these services. Everyone freaks out and the law suits begin.

The Institute for Justice, which is spearheading the case, has released a video "explaining" the situation. I find the childish cartoon aesthetic appropriate because the video should seem overly simplistic to anyone with a 3rd grade education.

This is not a cut and dry case of "Big Gub'ment taking teh freedoms away!" Steve Cooksey was accepting money to dispense medical advice on a very complex disease - without any kind of formal education or credentials. That, in my opinion, is irresponsible (even though I agree with most of what he says!)

So am I on the side of North Carolina here? Well, no... I think the State has gone too far in their attempts to completely dismantle Cooksey's efforts. They are using a cluster bomb where they should have used a scalpel. Or a handshake, ideally. In my opinion, everyone here is behaving badly.

While I guess it'll be interesting from a legal perspective to see what kind of precedent the court sets on balancing the issues of 1st amendment freedom of speech vs. licensing, I think this could be all worked out way more quickly and easily in mediation or arbitration. Maybe Cooksey needs to include a more robust disclaimer on his website and/or find a business partner who has the appropriate credentials. That seems easier than a lawsuit, but all I really know is that this seems like a solvable problem - solvable outside the court system in a way that benefits everyone. Cooksey should have planned his business more responsibly - that way he'd be spending his time now making money vs. spending it. But North Carolina should work with him to find a way to make this work...more tax revenue for them in the long run. One lesson I've learned is you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar. They should have talked to each other. This is all now a big festival of Stupid.

So, for better or worse, Paleo is going to court. I feel the need to remind everyone that there is not a single piece of solid science that backs up the Paleo diet as of right now. I think that kind of stuff might matter during litigation, but, as I stated in the beginning, I am not an expert. I just worry that there may be unforeseen consequences both in terms of public opinion and written law. 

The red (meat) menace

Did you hear? Did you?? Red meat is now 100% officially really bad for you. No, like, seriously this time. I've now been sent this New York Times article by several people - apparently there's a new study out in the Archives of Internal Medicine on the results of two big observational studies. You can read the full study here.

So there it is. Red meat causes all kinds of damage to human bodies. You know what else does? Breathing. Metabolism causes damage and eventually that damage accumulates enough to cause pathology. Clearly, the solution is to stop breathing.

Rather than take the time to point out all the issues with the study, I will simply direct you to two people who have already done so much much better than I could.

First, via Mark's Daily Apple, I give you Denise Minger's Will Eating Red Meat Kill You?

Second, Robb Wolf tells it like it is in his Red Meat: Part of a Healthy Diet?

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Here's my take. Context is everything. You cannot make a snap judgement about the value of a food in anyone's diet without first understanding the rest of his/her environment. You wouldn't have a hard time convincing me that an overweight sedentary 75 year old man might not want to eat a diet of steak and ice cream. On the other hand, let's take a purely hypothetical 30-year-old Parkour instructor who is extremely physically active and needs a hell of a lot of food just to keep going. Some red meat would probably be a good thing for him to eat.

Contexts change. If I ever get old and slow down (doubtful, but possible) I'll need to adjust my diet. Everyone's needs are different and they all change with time. Listen to your body and you'll do pretty okay.

The great bread experiment

Did I ever tell you guys the story of how I invented the paleo diet? No? Well, have a seat and let ol' Colin here tell you a thing or two about the past. Wayyyy back in 2005 to be precise.

This was before Web 2.0 and social media had taken off.  No Facebook, No Youtube - you know, the Dark Ages. I had been working on ways to improve my fitness and grappling game, while working a full time office job for the first time in my life. I was already a big believer in self-experimentation, having come off a 2 year vegetarian experiment with a new appreciation of meat and what has become a lifelong aversion to soy products. I had recently been playing with this new idea of "functional fitness" after my very standard weight training routine had ceased to provide performance gains. I was mixing jump roping with swimming, yoga, and some barbell work. There was this new thing called Crossfit that seemed pretty interesting.

So, there I was, thinking about how I could tweak my diet to perform better. I began to reflect on my childhood struggles with allergies and decided that maybe I should try to eat less wheat and less dairy. I'd also just read Ishmael and had seen some documentary about Native American life. It got me thinking about our days prior to agriculture and what we ate. Less wheat and dairy to be sure, and much less focus on avoiding fat... quite the opposite in fact. I bought my first jar of coconut oil and stopped eating pasta every night.

Needless to say, I started feeling great. I thought I was the smartest guy in the world. I went on the internet to see if anyone else was as clever as I was and, of course, immediately found the Weston A. Price foundation and a little book by Loren Cordain called "The Paleo Diet." Guess I wasn't so smart after all...

(The Permian diet is all mine though. My greatest achievment, and possibly the greatest achievement in all of Science, Medicine, and Gastronomy)

***

The Paleo Diet and I have always had a very casual relationship. As anyone who has ever seen me demolish a blueberry pie or a pint of haagen daaz knows, I'm not too concerned with "cheating." But, for the most part, I've been happily eating paleo for a good 6 years now. It's been extremely interesting to watch the community grow and develop. Interesting and at times a little (lot) maddening. There is now so much noise and contradictory information that it's getting hard to make sense of it all. A month or so ago, I was pretty sick of the whole community and decided it was time for another experiment. This time, the experiment would be "What would happen if I totally stopped caring about the paleo diet?"

This was fueled in large part by the fact that Julia had started a bread baking experiment and there was all this fresh, homemade bread everywhere. Here is the first thing I learned from the experiment: Homemade bread is F&%king delicious.

It's been about a month now and I'm ready to deliver some reports. How do I feel? Almost exactly the same. The only real difference is I'm a little bit more gassy on the nights I single handedly eat an entire loaf of bread. My athletic performance has neither suffered nor gone into overdrive. As for my weight... I have no idea. I don't own a scale. My weight has never really interested me. Whenever the subject comes up I tell people I weigh 1 Standard Colin. (A Standard Colin is whatever my current weight is, in kilograms) My sleep is the same, my skin looks the same... um... yeah... nothing's really changed at all.

***

I think the big lesson here is there are a ton of "diets" that will work, but the big underlying factor is how you relate to your food. I've said it before and I'll say it again: If you stress out about your diet, it will fail, no matter how diligent you are. If you relax and enjoy your relationship with food, from growing/foraging/shopping to cooking to eating, you will thrive... as long as what you're eating is actually food and not an edible foodlike substance.

Now, who wants a grilled cheese sandwich? I'm real good at them.