The Quickstart Guide to Fasting

It is no secret that I am a huge proponent of fasting, which has been well documented across most cultures throughout history. My belief in its benefits come from a convergence of anthropology, biochemistry, complex systems theory, medical case studies, (low quality) scientific studies, and personal experience. This post is meant to be a practical introduction to fasting, not intended as a comprehensive literature review or justification. Read on if you would like some advice on how to get started and troubleshoot the initial adaptation period! [Read more…]

Some Indian Recipes

These won’t be particularly well-formatted, and I don’t have any pretty pictures to go with them at the moment, but I’ve had a few requests over the years for the Indian recipes I regularly cook, so here they are!

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Low Hanging Fruit for Health and Wellness

Include in Diet

Fish or cod liver oil: excellent source of omega-3 fats which most people are severely deficient in, take 1-2 tsp/day.  These fats are fragile molecules and can go rancid easily, so store them in the refrigerator.  If you buy capsules, bite into one occasionally to test for bitterness.  I buy the oil in translucent glass bottles online, sealed with vitamin E and nitrogen – I recommend Carlson’s or Nordic Naturals, check before you buy!

Liver: the most potent single food in terms of vitamin and mineral content, in a form that is easily absorbed by the body (much better than a multivitamin).  Eat at least 4 oz/week for optimal health.  You can find grass-fed liver at local farmer’s markets, or frozen liver in most grocery stores.  If the taste of beef liver is too strong, switch to calf or chicken liver, or soak it in milk for at least 30 minutes before cooking.

Grass-fed butter: excellent source of healthy fats unique to dairy products, and fat-soluble vitamins.  Kerrygold is the most commonly-available brand of grass-fed butter.  Grass-fed ghee is often available in specialty ethnic stores.

Coconut oil: the medium-chain triglycerides are metabolized by the body in a unique way, and promotes cellular repair mechanisms.  You can buy in bulk online, for instance at Tropical Traditions.

Remove from Diet

Sugar: probably the least controversial thing on this whole list!  In general, cutting back on sweets means you will lose the taste over time.  Liquid sugars like soda and fruit juice are the worst offenders, drink coffee or tea or flavor water with fruit instead (diet soda may not have calories but it maintains that sweet craving).  Pure solid sugar like candy can be replaced with fruit, which has water and some vitamins in addition.  For replacements, try using the natural non-caloric sweetener stevia, or buy dextrose powder (a fructose-free sweetener) online.

Vegetable oil: primary source of inflammatory omega-6 fatty acids, unfortunately it is very common in the food supply.  First, avoid deep fried foods entirely, because heated omega-6s are highly unstable.  Avoid margarine or vegetable shortening, which contain trans-fats.  When eating out, ask for your food to be cooked in butter.  When eating salad, stick to olive oil and vinegar, as most dressings have a vegetable oil base.  Never use this in your own home!

Grains and legumes: your mileage may vary on these foods, if you want starch then try to mostly eat root vegetables like (sweet) potatoes.  Many people have problems with gluten, found primarily in wheat, barley and rye – stores will often have a gluten-free section with alternatives.  Most people tolerate rice and corn well, so substitute rice pasta and corn tortillas.  Opt for sprouted or sourdough-fermented bread over white or whole wheat.  With legumes, see how your GI tract responds.  Soaking, sprouting, fermenting and cooking all improve digestibility.  Soy is particularly bad since it has chemicals that mimic estrogen. Peanuts are also strongly immunogenic.

Non-Dietary Measures

Vitamin D: ideally produced from sunlight, but more practically supplemented.  To get enough from sun you need a UV index above 3, which happens in the tropics and during spring and summer noonday sun in temperate regions.  For someone with pale skin, 15 minutes front and back of full-body exposure between 10 AM – 2 PM gives you the maximum dose.  When not exposed to this amount of sunlight, supplement at least 2,000 IUs/day (and no more than 10,000 IUs). Ideally, get your blood levels tested regularly and find out what dose keeps you in the optimal range.

Sprinting: anaerobic exercise gives you all the benefits of aerobic exercise and then some, releasing beneficial fat-burning hormones and encouraging mitochondrial proliferation.  Sprinting requires no equipment, and only minutes of work!  Alternate 20 seconds of max-effort sprinting and 10 seconds of rest for 8 intervals, twice/week.  This will be very difficult at first, but it gets easier each time – if 10 seconds of rest is not enough, you can rest for longer periods between each interval and sprint harder.  You don’t need any more exercise than that to see benefits, unless you want to build muscle or have fun!

Sleep: the second-least controversial thing on this list, chronic sleep deprivation has numerous health consequences and acute sleep deprivation just doesn’t feel good.  Go to sleep early enough that you don’t need to wake up to an alarm clock.  If you are not getting tired at night, try eliminating sources of blue light from your bedroom (or wear Uvex orange glasses before bed), and take 300 mcg melatonin an hour before sleep.  If your mind is racing, try writing those thoughts down on a piece of paper, or go talk to a friend!

Intermittent fasting: useful to get your body into fat-burning mode, encourage cellular repair, and generally give your body a break from metabolism.  This will be much easier once you have transitioned to a high-fat diet, since fasting through hypoglycemia is unpleasant.  Due to the hormone ghrelin we get hungry around habitual meal times, but this effect fades within days.  The easiest way to create a longer fast is to skip one of the meals around sleep, either breakfast or dinner, whichever is easier for you.  Work your way up to a 16 hour window daily – and longer if you feel like it!

Hypothetical Apostasy on Nutrition

As many of you know, I am a major proponent of paleo/primal/ancestral/etc type diets. At this point the term “paleo” has come to be applied to many very different diets, but for the record my own personal beliefs coincide most strongly with the Perfect Health Diet. Whatever you want to call it, it is certainly outside of conventional wisdom and mainstream scientific/medical opinion. This has been a point of contention between me and others who put more stock in mainstream opinion. I have spent many hundreds, or maybe thousands, of hours doing research into human metabolism, and as a result my ideas are starting to get sticky.

Periodically I like to subject my beliefs to one of my all-time favorite techniques, the hypothetical apostasy by philosopher Nick Bostrom. The basic idea is to produce a good faith effort at destroying your currently held position. This process has helped me improve my thinking on a number of topics, including the original mind-killer itself: politics. Given my particularly strong beliefs about diet, it is long past due for me to try this exercise. Below the fold is my best attempt to undermine the paleo position:

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Religious Fasting Traditions

If you’ve ever talked to me about nutrition, you would know that I’m a huge proponent of fasting. I knew that cultural and religious traditions throughout the world had incorporated some form of fasting practice into their doctrines, though I had not systematically tried to document it myself at the time. There may be a decent review article on this somewhere, but I decided to sit down and do a little research myself last year, and these are my notes from that exercise.

tl;dr: there are lots of different kinds of fasting. Some commonalities include the use of sunrise/sunset, fasting as a spiritual practice (opposed to mere starvation) including prayer and charity, proscribed feasting days/periods, and not drinking water either. Longer-term fasts usually restrict eating during daylight hours and/or restricted types of food during the night, and these appear to be the most common. Fasts of 1-2 days can involve complete cessation of both food and water. The strictest fast is 2 meals over 5 days. Fasting is at most 250 days/year, and 1-2 times per week or month is very common. Exceptions for the young, the old, the sick, pregnant and breastfeeding mothers, laborers, and travelers are relatively common. Not every religion has a fasting tradition.

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Preventing Peanut Allergies

My default position when I started looking into peanut allergies was that exposure to potential allergens (particularly the ones outside our evolutionary heritage) would sensitize children to that allergen in the future. Eliezer once described changing your mind as the penultimate technique of rationality, and I always enjoy the opportunity to stretch that particular muscle. But I’m getting ahead of myself here…

Peanut allergies are one of the most common, and yet also most severe, food allergies. It tends to begin very early (unlike seafood allergies), and persist throughout life (unlike milk and soy allergies). The incidence is hard to measure, but potentially up to a few percent of the population will suffer from them over time. This may not seem large in an absolute sense, but it is one of the more common diseases, and is potentially fatal, requiring extensive lifestyle modification to avoid exposure. Allergies themselves, in one form or another, are much more common and often annoying, so if any underlying mechanism can be revealed and averted, so much the better.

I am involved with a small rationality and parenting mailing list, and in one thread I casually mentioned that we planned to exclusively breastfeed through 6 months, in part because of allergies. The benefits of (in some cases exclusive) breastfeeding are well established, and the WHO recommends exclusive breastfeeding up through 6 months. Furthermore hunter-gatherers don’t seem to supplement food until at least 6 months of age. That part is not so controversial. But I offhandedly said I’d heard the advice to avoid allergenic foods until two years of age. That prompted a response. Particularly a link to this paper.

To summarize the methodology, the researchers sent out surveys to a few thousand Jewish families in Israel and the UK, asking them about their weaning behavior and incidence of various allergies and other atopic disease. They had some very stark findings.

[Update: the randomized controlled trials I mentioned were coming have finally started to arrive – and the LEAP study from the UK finds a dramatic 81% decrease in peanut allergies from early exposure.]

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