“It wasn’t until we added those carbs that we got all those other changes, including those changes in body fat,” said Anthony G. Comuzzie, who helped create an obese baboon colony at the Southwest National Primate Research Center in San Antonio.

We just took the kids to see the movie “Chimpanzee”. I love primates because everything they do seems so human… of course Darwin would have something to say about that.

As they were foraging for food I was reminded just how diverse the primate diet can be. Unlike their human counterparts the chimps didn’t think about their food or analyze their calories, they just ate what was readily available.

They ate quite a bit of fruit (if they could find a tree) but they would polish this off fairly quickly. They ate green leafy veggies rarely and it soon became apparent that their foods of choice were nuts and if they could get their hands on it…. meat. This happened only once in the movie when they hunted together as a team (quite amazingly I might add) and were able to catch a monkey. Yes, the chimps hunted and ate a monkey.

The majority of this protein rich diet was consumed by the females who were caring for the infant chimpanzees. It was fun to see the big burly males step aside, but you could tell they were a bit frustrated by this. I felt their pain thinking back to all the times we have been on trips and my wife withheld snacks for her “starving husband” claiming that “they are for the kids”. Maybe next time I will beat my chest.

Fasting was a big part of their lives, but of course it was never intentional. When things got bad they would seek out honey and small invertebrates such as ants. Not yummy but hey what is a hungry chimp to do?

The Primal Diet

The entire Paleo movement seems pretty strait forward to me…. Just pay $7.50 and see the movie “Chimpanzee”. Here you have the original human diet.

What is interesting is that most chimps I have seen in captivity appear lean. I assume it is because their diet is controlled. Thinking about this question more of course led me to do a bit of research.

And yes, not to my surprise, they are researching the standard American diet all over the world on poor unsuspecting Rhesus monkeys.

Despite a diet high in calorically dense and nutritionally vacant carbohydrates, about 40 percent do not put on a lot of weight.

According to this wonderful article in the NY Times:

“Fat Albert, one of her monkeys who she said was at one time the world’s heaviest rhesus, at 70 pounds, ate nothing but an American Heart Association-recommended diet”.

The studies also found something else that could be important for people — that eating a healthy diet during pregnancy reduced troubles in the offspring. That suggests, he said, that the diet of a pregnant woman matters more than whether she is obese.

Check out the article, it really is interesting.

The Primal Being

The best part of the movie Chimpanzee is the fact that the big burley alpha male (Freddy) ends up adopting Oscar: a baby chimp that lost his mother. The other thing I found interesting is just how much time the “CEO” spent attending to his tribe. Doing basic things like picking tics of his fellow tribe-mates and responding to his blog commenters.

In the end this smaller, more united tribe, dramatically wins back a part of its territory not because they were the biggest, but because they knew how to work together.

In my mind this is an important point: To be a great leader you must care for those in your tribe that need it the most and pay attention to the little things.

It really is the little things that matter most…. And the diet? Probably not so much!

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Too Little? Too Late? Too Optimistic?

In the last chapter of their second groundbreaking book SuperFreakonomics Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner provide some real solutions to global warming.

They also reason that when it comes to global warming our efforts may be:

To Little:

Means that typical conservation efforts simply won’t make much of a difference. If you believe there is a problem worth solving then these solutions won’t be enough to solve it.

To Late:

The half life of atmospheric carbon dioxide is roughly one hundred years, and some of it remains in the atmosphere for thousands of yeas. So even if humankind immediately stopped burning all fossil fuel, the existing carbon dioxide would remain in the atmosphere for thousands of years.

To Optimistic:

A lot of things that people say would be a good thing probably aren’t. As an example they point to solar power. Although a widespread conversion to solar power might seem appealing, the reality is tricky. The energy consumed by building the thousands of new solar plants necessary to replace coal burning and other power plants would create a huge long term “warming debt”. Eventually, we’d have a great carbon free energy infrastructure but only after making emissions and global warming worse every year until we’re done building out the solar plants, which could take thirty to fifty years.

Are we facing the same grim truth when it comes to the Obesity Epidemic?

Is it reasonable to also assume that when it comes to the obesity epidemic our efforts may be:

To Little:

Means the typical efforts to change the way people eat won’t make much of a difference. If you believe there is a problem worth solving then these solutions won’t be enough to solve it.

To Late:

The modern grocery store and the financially incentivized economy that drives it isn’t going anywhere. Fast food chains, frozen dinners, high carbohydrate snacks, inexpensive school lunches and fast easy “food type” substances are ingrained into our society.  Not to mention we have an addiction, one that is part of our genetic predisposition to crave fat, sugar and salt. When these items are ubiquitous we stand little chance to reason.

To Optimistic:

A lot of things that people say would be a good thing probably aren’t.  Let’s look at converting the global population to meat eaters for example.  As people like Gary Taubes, Rob Wolff and even Tim Ferriss claim.  Switching to more meat may seem like a wonderful solution to the obesity epidemic but at what cost to the environment? In terms of fuel, energy, sustainability etc. etc?

Who Pays the Price?

Unfortunately, as with pollution, being obese is what Stephen Dubner refers to as an externality – that is, the people who generate pollution or chose to eat unhealthy foods generally don’t pay the immediate cost of their actions and therefore don’t have strong incentives to pollute and/or eat less.

At present the rewards for limiting consumption are weak, as are the penalties for over-consuming. Al Gore and other environmentalists are pleading for humankind to consume less and therefore pollute less, and that is a noble invitation. But as incentives go, it’s not a very strong one.

And collective behavior change, as beguiling as that may sound, can be maddeningly elusive.

–SuperFreakonomics

If You Cant beat them Join Them

Gary Taubes in Good Calories, Bad Calories, as well as in Why We Get Fat provides extremely convincing evidence that the ingestion of simple carbohydrates and the compensatory release of insulin is what is making us fat.

This is also a theme of this blogs obsession: The The 4-Hour Body and Tim’s Slow Carb Diet.

Probably most of you who are still reading this blog post believe that carbohydrates are one of (if not the) greatest contributor to the obesity epidemic. Also, maybe like myself you are making a steady attempt at decreasing the consumption of carbohydrates in your diet. But  just as we know the earth is warming and the oceans are rising it doesn’t mean we all started riding bikes to our place of work.

As much as I respect Gary Taubes for identifying a problem with our diet he doesn’t actually provide a realistic solution to the problem.

In Superfreakonomics Dubner and Levitt provide just this: A solution to global warming. One that takes into account the realities of human nature.

The one that seems the most implementable involves the intentional release of sulfur dioxide into the earths atmosphere at several specific locations around the globe, subsequently providing a (supposedly) harmless and non-toxic “shade” to the earth.

This would result in a GLOBAL drop in the earths temperature.

Dubner and Levitt were criticized for suggesting such a fix but should they be?

Sulfur Dioxide = Metformin for the Masses?

Carbohydrates in our diet, just like petroleum are a global addiction. I commend anyone who is in the process of developing healthy alternative fuel sources for the globe and for human ingestion.

But, I am a realist and I also work in the trenches. Convincing your neighbor (or yourself) to fork over the money to make an investment in solar energy is just about as realistic as everyone changing their table sugar to Stevia.

Convincing profit driven companies to stop selling crap to the masses will be nearly impossible. If it was easy cigarettes and Phillip Morris would be long gone.

But giving up carbs is just as difficult as cutting calories, or stopping smoking, or teaching Tiger Woods that sex with a ton of women might be enjoyable at the moment but could potentially hurt his image, destroy his family and ruin his golf game.

What we need then are three things:

1. Knowledge of the facts:
   That most fats are healthy and simple carbohydrates are most likely the number one cause of not just obesity, but other health problems that plague modern society such as cancer, coronary artery disease, of course diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease.
2. A movement to change our infrastructure:
   Significantly decreasing the amount of simple carbohydrates in our diet and convincing the world that this is important. Just as we are building electric cars, transitioning to newer forms of power, alternative fuels and sustainable transportation.
3. A Potential “Nuclear Option” (Metformin for the Masses)
   Is it horrible to have a backup plan? I don’t think so. I think sometimes we need to accept humans as predictably irrational. I feel better knowing that as my house and family sits on the cusp of being engulfed by the pacific ocean that we have an out. Maybe we just need to swallow our pride (or a pill) and give up on changing the world?  Food science got us into this mess maybe it is science, genetics and technology that will get us out of it.  Is it possible to have our cake and eat it too?

If you believe that the scary stories of global warming or the obesity epidemic could be true or even possible, then you should also admit that relying on only reducing carbon dioxide emissions or “simply” converting to a low carb lifestyle is not a very good answer.

In other words: it’s illogical to believe in a carbon-induced warming apocalypse or an insulin induced obesity epidemic and believe that such an apocalypse can be averted simply by curtailing carbon emissions or curtailing carbohydrate ingestion.

The scary scenarios could occur even if we make herculean efforts to reduce our emissions or change our diets, in which case the only real answer is geological or biological engineering.

Al Gore in the Inconvenient Truth, has countered with his own logic “If we don’t know enough to stop putting 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the atmosphere every day,” he says, “how in God’s name can we know enough to precisely counteract that?”

But if you think like a cold blooded economist instead of a warmhearted humanist, Gores reasoning doesn’t track. It’s not that we don’t know how to stop polluting the atmosphere. Or that we don’t know how to lose weight and get healthy.

We don’t want to stop or aren’t willing to pay the price.

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Books You Really Should Read:

1. SuperFreakonomics: By Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
2. Good Calories, Bad Calories: By Gary Taubes
3. Why We Get Fat: By Gary Taubes