Mark Sisson's Blog, page 160

The Future of Healthcare Is Health Coaching

I’ve been spreading the word about the primal lifestyle for over a decade now, and while the information on this blog and in my books has reached millions, I wonder how many of these millions have actually been able to live some version of a primal life consistently and confidently. My guess is, not as many as I’d like.

Of course not. Because changing the way we live, think, eat, move, is one of the greatest challenges of the human experience. Behavior change is TOUGH, my friends, but the future of the world’s health depends on it.

I’m watching more and more of my colleagues put out terrific, research-backed health information, and I’ve certainly been trying to do the same, but despite the growing wealth of knowledge available, Americans overall appear to be getting unhealthier.

I think it’s safe to say, it’s not because they don’t know better. It’s more likely because they don’t know HOW to apply the knowledge to their lives on a long-term basis. This is where health coaching comes in, and this is why I started the Primal Health Coach program.

How Healthy Are We?

You’re here for a reason. You’re interested in living a healthy lifestyle and are either looking deeper into the Primal Blueprint laws, or have been practicing them faithfully for while. You are an anomaly. You are a revolutionary. Congratulations!

If we look at America as a whole, however, we see a much different profile.

Eating habits: The typical American diet consists of way too much refined grains, added sugars, and trans fats. As of 2013, Americans ate fruit 1.1 times a day, and vegetables 1.6 times a day—far below standard dietary guidelines and Primal Blueprint recommendations. Do we know the importance of eating our veggies? Sure. But the average intake shows a gaping hole between knowing and doing. I’d love to blame it on the fact that there are twice as many fast food restaurants tempting us as there were in the 1970s, but we’re the ones pulling into the drive-thru and there’s accountability to be had.

Physical activity: We still aren’t moving as much as we should, even though fitness offers a new fad for exploration almost every day. Nearly 80% of adults aren’t meeting the Physical Activity Guidelines for both aerobic conditioning and strength training. And if we don’t move, we’re at a higher risk for life-threatening, chronic conditions, such as heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, depression, and some cancers.

Then there’s the obesity epidemic, which keeps rising steadily with each new estimate. A snapshot of fast facts from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), 2013–2014 says it best:

More than 1 in 3 adults were considered to be overweight.
More than 2 in 3 adults were considered to be overweight or have obesity.
More than 1 in 3 adults were considered to have obesity.
About 1 in 13 adults were considered to have extreme obesity.

We’ve been made well aware of the dangers of obesity-related conditions, including heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and certain types of cancer. We also know the right lifestyle conditions can help stave off these preventable diseases. Still, the statistics climb unfavorably.

Unfortunately, much of America and the world aren’t following the Grok life and living in accordance with the 10 Primal Blueprint Laws. And education is just the first part of the solution.

Enter the Health Coach

To understand just how difficult behavior change is, as well as the necessity of health coaches, we merely need to look at the disastrous success rate of New Year’s resolutions, apropos for this time of year.

At the start of this year, Statistic Brain Research Institute surveyed 1,562 people to determine the Top 10 New Year’s Resolutions of 2017. The #1 resolution was weight loss and healthy eating, with 21.4% of people surveyed making a rededication to their health.

It’s the end of the year, so let’s check in. How many of that 21% are still committed to their New Year’s resolutions as 2017 reaches an end? University of Scranton research suggests that just 8% of people stick to their New Year’s goals. So, that would be just 26 people out of 334, if Statistic Brain’s numbers are accurate. Either way, a very small number of people are successful when it comes to sticking with new eating, exercise, and lifestyle plans, even when they know what’s good for them, and even if they have a desire to change.

Health coaches have been trained to take that desire and turn it into value-based goals and corresponding actionable steps. They motivate, they inspire confidence, and they encourage self-awareness and accountability. Health coaches know how to actively listen, reflectively question, and build lasting behavior change that takes clients to the finish line of their goals and beyond. I’d bet that if more people had health coaches directing their desires, setting agendas, creating accountability, and fostering commitment, that 8% could easily become a solid 88%.

What’s especially exciting to me is that health coaching is a field fit for inspirers of all kinds, not just the scientifically inclined. You can pursue a career in wellness without having to go back to grad school and accrue debt. It helps people live healthier, and provides a prosperous living to those wanting more from a career.

Health Coaching in Action

Of all my professional endeavors, the Primal Health Coach program keeps me directly tapped into my global mission to transform the health of millions. I’m truly passionate about the work we’re doing. As the program continues to develop and grow, I’m getting an even clearer picture of how important health coaches are to the future of healthcare. I’d like to share this progress with you, my community of Primal enthusiasts—because it’s important information to have for personal edification and for those of you interested in sharing the Primal way of life with others. I think you’ll really appreciate how far we’ve come!

Let’s go back to the very beginning—2014. We’d made incredible strides in the ancestral health movement, but we were still on the outskirts and reaching only those who dared venture outside mainstream lines. We’ve woven a vast network of Primal devotees through Mark’s Daily Apple, changed hundreds of thousands of lives, but I didn’t want to plateau there. I wanted to help even more people take control of their health and well-being, especially in the face of a broken healthcare system and a cesspool of misinformation too readily available to the masses. Why not start a health coaching program centered on the Primal philosophy? And so I did.

The Primal Health Coach program kills several birds with one stone. By training a network of health coaches, I’m reaching far more people than I could alone, and I’m also helping others build the careers of their dreams. The growth of the network since 2014 has been amazing. Thousands of folks who are passionate about health and wellness have joined the program, and are embarking on careers that make a real difference in the world.

Our health coaches are going deep into the belly of the Primal Blueprint, learning the guts of evolutionary biology. It has been so incredibly rewarding to watch them take all they have learned and help others regain control of their health, circumventing the broken healthcare system and getting tremendous results.

Like Carolyn Coffin, physical therapist turned health coach:

The Primal Health Coach program is exactly what I needed to take my health coaching business to the next level. For the past 5 years, I’ve been health coaching without even realizing it’s a “thing,” but simply because I’ve felt a calling to do so. I’ve gone from feeling like an imposter to feeling like I belong in this amazing community of like-minded people who are on a similar mission. But most of all, I’m far more confident in my ability to create lasting change for my clients and finally enjoy a fulfilling and profitable career doing exactly what I love.

And Dana Leigh Lyons, Doctor of Oriental Medicine:

The Primal Health Coach program expanded my access to and credibility with people who embrace primal principles but who may not have considered holistic medicine, enhancing my practice and extending my professional reach. The modules offer a wealth of knowledge…plus expert guidance for turning that knowledge into a livelihood.

Then there are aspiring health professionals like Jeff Dougherty, who are launching into an entirely new field!

I started this adventure to simply further my education on this way of life. As a result I have become extremely passionate about helping people in their wellness journey. There is a massive amount of information online, and being able to help clients filter through the noise and focus on relevant steps toward achieving optimal wellness has been rewarding. This is not a fad! I am not a trainer, degreed nutritionist or gym manager. I am just a guy who loves helping people and this course has allowed me to pursue that dream.

We’re keeping close tabs on all our graduates. You can check out some of their success stories here.

While the course is self-paced and online, we’ve been very focused on community building and outreach, encouraging connections between students and graduates through our lively private Facebook groups and special events.

This year we took Primal Health Coach to Paleo f(x) and the CrossFit Games, co-hosted a Los Angeles Meetup, and held our Inaugural Masterclass, where a small select group of students and graduates joined me and Christine Hassler for a weekend retreat. We met at my house in Malibu and brainstormed the most effective ways to break down barriers and confidently move forward to the career of their dreams. I love being able to meet our students and grads in person. We had a blast, and I can’t wait to do it again in 2018.

The Inaugural Primal Health Coach Masterclass. Held at my home in Malibu, CA in July, 2017.

Speaking of 2018, we have big plans for next year, so if you’ve been thinking of exploring a career in health coaching, I recommend getting in now before the year’s end to lock in the existing rate.

I can’t unveil what’s coming in 2018 (yet) but I can tell you we’ve made significant investments to the program throughout 2017. We implemented a brand new learning center platform to improve the overall learning experience. We updated and expanded coaching coursework, so our grads not only have all the Primal knowledge they need, but also have the coaching expertise to communicate effectively with clients and inspire lasting transformation.

We also developed a brand new Business Resource Center to give our coaches all the tools required to build a successful business upon graduation.

Health Professional Michael Kaye summed his experience with the program up nicely:

The Primal Health Coaching program has been extremely helpful to me, my family and to my patients. The PHC program is an excellent gateway to those who want to begin their path in the health coaching field and the program is also a wonderful adjunct for the professional who would like to enhance their education as Mark provides excellent resource material and references to support his recommendations and concepts. I am currently enjoying their new business coaching module(s) as they provide you with forms, recommendations and guidance to building your coaching business. Since people have different learning styles (auditory, visual, etc.) Mark provides you with the ability to learn through recordings, video, and/or reading text material. Most importantly, I enjoy their Facebook community as everyone is willing to share their knowledge and experience. I look forward to growing my relationship with the Primal Health Coaching community and I am sure they will continue to provide additional guidance and new products to help not only ourselves but our clients as well.

Yes, Michael…we most certainly will! There’s a lot more on the horizon.

In the meantime, check out my webinar with Christine Hassler that’s all about how to make a lucrative living as a health coach. Just click here to sign up. If you think it’s a good fit, give us a ring at 844-307-7662 (or 310-579-6596) and join our community.

And if you need a coach of your own, don’t hesitate to contact one of ours. You can find the best of the best here to support you with your personal health and wellness goals—whatever they are. As always, thanks so much for your support and for a terrific year, everybody!

 

The post The Future of Healthcare Is Health Coaching appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Will Saturated Fat Kill Your Cells?

No matter what kind of evidence comes out to the contrary, the anti-saturated fat sect won’t relinquish its dogma. Whenever its advance is rebuffed—perhaps by an observational study showing the lack of relations between saturated fat intake and heart disease, or a study showing the beneficial effects of saturated fat on multiple health markers—they regroup and try another route. The latest is a study that several readers sent to me, worried that the attack had finally made it through the defenses. In it, researchers purport to show that saturated fat increases the solidity and rigidity of cellular membranes, reducing membrane fluidity and eventually leading to cell death.

Is it true? Have we finally lost? What was this study all about?

First, there’s this. They weren’t dealing with live humans or even whole animals fed butter or coconut oil. They extracted living cells and bathed them in solutions of different fatty acid concentrations to see how it would affect the lipid concentration of the cell membranes.

This study focused on the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), which takes up about half of the cell membrane and has high metabolic activity. The ER produces lipids and hormones and contains ribosomes that synthesize proteins. It’s an important part of the cell, and it needs the right amount of fluidity to perform its tasks. Not too rigid, not too liquid.

The setup sounds a bit silly—are our cells really “bathed” in fatty acids?

Before you claim certain victory, this wasn’t an entirely convoluted scenario that would never happen in nature. They weren’t just brute forcing saturated fat into the membranes. They actually found that exposing the cells to different fats had different effects on cellular lipid synthesis—the creation of fats—in the membranes. With more saturated fat (palmitic acid, in this case), for example, the cells synthesized more saturated fat and incorporated it into the membranes.

What happened?

The more palmitic acid a cell was exposed to, and the longer the exposure persisted, the more saturated and less fluid the cell membrane became. This wasn’t good. A cell membrane needs to be fluid for it to perform its functions. Solid membranes will eventually kill the cell.

So, saturated fat is bad again?

Not quite. We must keep in mind that more fluidity isn’t always desirable. In some Alzheimer’s patients, for example, platelets and brain cells are excessively fluid.

And finally, this wasn’t a diet study. They weren’t feeding fat sources to animals or humans and studying the effects of cell membrane fluidity. There’s no indication that the cellular environments they created bear any relation to the cellular environments we create by eating different fats. When you do that in actual humans, the fluidity of the dietary fatty acids consumed has no relationship to stroke or heart attack risk. The fluidity of the plasma, which is a more similar scenario to the one examined in this study, does. The next phase of this study would need to look at how the foods we eat affect the fluidity of our membranes.

I don’t think it will show what they expect.

All that said, it’s a good idea to eat a mix of fatty acids. Many studies show that the incorporation of monounsaturated or polyunsaturated fats into saturated fat-rich cellular membranes normalizes their function. We need both. We need them all. Hell, the study featured in this post got the same results by adding a little oleic acid or DHA to the palmitic acid soup. It completely normalized membrane fluidity and, in their words, was able to “rescue the cytotoxicity” of palmitic acid.

We see this pop up in other studies. Isolated palmitic acid has a number of dastardly effects on health, while adding different fats changes the game entirely:

One example is that pure palmitic acid reduces LDL receptor activity, which can increase the concentration of LDL particles in the blood and increase the chance that they’ll become oxidized and damage the endothelial walls. But if you add a little bit of oleic acid, the LDL receptor activity normalizes.
Another is that palmitic acid is toxic to muscle cells, impairing glucose uptake and increasing insulin resistance. But if you add a little arachidonic acid (an omega-6 found in most animal foods), the lipotoxicity goes away.
Pure palmitic acid also triggers an inflammatory cascade that disrupts insulin signaling and looks an awful lot like pre-diabetes. Good thing that adding a little oleic acid blocks the inflammation.

That’s a more realistic situation for our cell membranes. And while it’s easy to get caught up in scary research results, we have to understand that the situations they contrive are not representative of waking, eating, walking reality. We don’t eat pure palmitic acid. We eat food containing dozens of different fatty acids. About the only time we get a huge influx of pure palmitic acid is when we eat too many carbohydrates and our liver converts the excess into palmitic acid. Thus, olive oil isn’t “rescuing” us from the palmitic acid we eat. It’s all just food. The “rescuing” comes built in, as long as you’re eating food.

Unless you’ve got a fatty acid fractionator for isolating your own palmitic acid which you then inject directly into your blood, don’t worry about this one. Not yet, anyway.

Just keep eating your Primal diet—and the diverse fats in it:

Your avocado oil and olive oil.

Your butter and cheese and yogurt.

Your red palm oil.

Your meat, your eggs, your fish.

And keep doing all the other good things you’re doing.

All will be well.

Thanks for reading, everyone. What do you think? Still worried? Share your thoughts down below.

Want to make fat loss easier?

Try the Definitive Guide for Troubleshooting Weight Loss for free here.

The post Will Saturated Fat Kill Your Cells? appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Introducing The Gut Healing Protocol—With a Don’t Miss Deal!

Greetings readers, as you know, gut health has become the hottest of topics in ancestral health circles, and is also getting increased attention in mainstream medicine. More and more science is validating how a healthy gut microbiome has wide-reaching impact on general health, and that a damaged gut can set you up for all kinds of downstream health challenges. There are several helpful primers on gut health published here (1, 2, 3).

Today’s message, however, is something a little different and more personal. It comes from a dynamic young health expert from Australia named Kale Brock. We are pleased to bring his wildly popular grassroots gut health book, The Gut Healing Protocol: An 8-Week, Holistic Program to Rebalance Your Microbiome, to the U.S. market. Kale became an expert on gut health not from formal medical training, but rather the hard way. Like many thought leaders in the ancestral health community, Kale’s obsession with gut health was triggered by a serious health setback that was poorly addressed by traditional medicine.

Through diet and lifestyle modification, including special attention to nourishing a healthy gut, Kale was able to correct a condition that his cardiologist insisted would require surgery.

Kale’s story that he is about to share is his own, and of course must not be construed as medical advice. After all, few if any cardiologists would enthusiastically support the idea that a dietary protocol to heal an inflamed gut might positively benefit a heart condition!

While the details of Kale’s story are unusual, his message of pursuing holistic health and healing is one that many people can relate to. I cannot emphasize enough the urgency in looking beyond the flawed “disease care” model of medicine that is entrenched in modern society today, and to explore the boundaries as Kale has with his own healing journey.

I’m feeling a little testy about this subject, for I had a bizarre health scare myself this year that landed me in the hospital for several days. A routine procedure (that it turns out I didn’t really need!) went seriously awry, causing a life-threatening infection. The whole experience was highly disturbing to say the least. It’s one thing to rail about the flaws in conventional sick care approach and preach about taking responsibility for your health, and quite another to become an unwitting victim of the system.

Kale’s immersion into gut health has been all-consuming. On the heels of self-publishing and promoting his book throughout Australia, he traveled to remote area in Namibia to live with the San tribe and study their gut microbiomes in search of the perfect gut. The documentary of his journey, The Gut Movie (preview and link below), has screened to sold-out audiences throughout Australia. This guy is the real deal, and full of enthusiasm and a fresh, simple, sensible approach to gut health.

Without further ado, here’s our newest Primal Blueprint Publishing author, Kale Brock, to share his message:

I was diagnosed with Supra Ventricular Tachycardia when I was 16 years old. I remember the cardiologist announcing this long, strange sounding diagnosis and thinking to myself; well that’s it, 16 years is not a bad slog old chap, time to hang the boots and give up. But my story went in a different direction. I am an author and filmmaker from Sydney, Australia, and I have specialised in research on the gut and microbiome for the last five years. My journey into health started with the aforementioned diagnosis. I was a young, avid surfer at the time – that’s all I cared about – and the challenges I faced, as far as I was concerned at the time, could result in two outcomes. First, I would continue to experience intense arrhythmia attacks to the point of fainting and would probably have to give up surfing, or anything interesting and exciting for that matter. Second, I would have to find a way to overcome the issue permanently so that I could continue to do the things I loved without fear of drowning, fainting, or coming to another form of demise.

The cardiologist gave me one option at the time. He said I would have to undergo an ablation – a procedure where my heart would be operated on, more specifically my sino atrial node would be burned away – in order to fix the problem. I was curious as to why we would need to attack the part of the heart which wasn’t working, and voiced my concern. He said it was the only option which might work, but was not guaranteed. I asked about any potential influence of nutrition, to which he responded with a quick dismissive wave, as in: it’s got nothing to do with it. In all fairness, I don’t think he was lying per se, but rather demonstrating the education he had been given throughout medical school, in which there is no recognition between nutrition and the optimal electrical signaling of the heart.

I decided to investigate whether there indeed was a nutritional aspect to what I was experiencing. After all, everything we put in our mouths builds and nourishes the human body. That was all I knew at that point, but boy did I have a lot of questions to ask! It was roundabout then that one of the more fortuitous events of my career, and my life, took place. I was introduced to an incredibly well trained naturopath in Australia who, in a very short amount of time, was able to point me in the right direction with some diet and lifestyle factors which she, obligingly, suggested might be influencing my condition.

Using the principles recommended by my naturopath, I was able to turn around my condition naturally within about six months. I went from experiencing serious arrhythmias once or twice per week to just once or twice per year. I can’t even remember the last time it happened. My efforts focused on the area of gut health; that is, rebalancing the population of gut bugs using all the relevant knowledge available in, at the time, a minimally understood field of nutrition and health science.

Over the next six years I went into research overdrive. I sat in on consultations with practitioners, I read every book I could get my hands on, and I interviewed dozens of incredible practitioners whose focus had turned to the gut and microbiome. The message was clear: heal the gut to heal the body. Speaking with these incredible experts outweighed any other information gathering – these guys were putting in the hard yards and seeing the results first hand!

Throughout this time I was learning as much as I could about not only about food and nutrition, but also the pain points people experienced when it came to implementing this information into their life. I saw sick people with serious conditions who couldn’t, for the life of them, begin to change the way they ate or lived. It was bizarre. I realised that no matter how much information I gathered, it didn’t make a difference unless people applied it in their life. And that’s when my role as a storyteller came to light.

With a journalistic background, two years experience in TV and extensive online publishing, I knew that I could tell a story about health in a way that not many others could. There was so much information being uncovered about the microbiome and its impact on our health and wellbeing. Crazy things like affecting and even reversing neurological conditions, influencing our immune system, metabolic systems and our overall health in extremely fascinating ways that even still we’re only just beginning to understand. But there was a gap. The information was there, but people didn’t understand it, and because they didn’t understand it they didn’t act on it. That became my role. I became the middleman between the science and the every day human being.

My new book, The Gut Healing Protocol, focuses on the science of the gut microbiome. It expands on and supports the work of various of the world’s best gut-centric practitioners and ties it all up into a gentle, holistic framework on which great gut health can be based. With a heavy emphasis on using a long-term, sustainable dietary approach to cultivating a healthy microbiome unique to your body, this book is written for you and me, the every day guy or gal who wants to understand and apply all this ‘gut health stuff’ coming out on the news. Inside we have recipes, scientific studies, a short term gut healing program and a long term gut nourishing program which focus on individuality, empowering you to take the driver’s seat.

I don’t pretend to have all the answers. In fact, one thing I’ve learned through all this research, writing the book and making my first feature documentary The Gut Movie, it’s that we don’t have all the answers when it comes to the gut just yet. It’s still being worked out. Practitioners are still refining their approach based on the science and, importantly, based on the symptomatic feedback they get from patients. But I do believe we know enough to get started.

Many people ask me, what’s the number one thing someone can do to improve their gut health? And the answer is very simple, and unanimous across the board. Start with a whole foods diet.

Everybody is unique, each microbiome signature contains different populations of different microbial species however the research seems to be quite clear in that when we eat a varied, whole foods diet, our gut bugs begin to thrive. Within the framework of eating from nature exists your perfect diet, but ultimately that can only be determined by you, the individual. My goal with The Gut Healing Protocol is to give you the tools to feel empowered when making that decision. The decision on what you put on your plate, and what you don’t.

Good luck on your journey, and much love (all the way from Australia!),

Kale Brock

As you know, a Primal Publishing book release just wouldn’t be complete without a deal for MDA. You can probably guess what kind of promo we’ve cooked up to entice you to order Kale’s amazing book (not to mention help implement his practices). What could be more fitting?

The Ultimate Promo Pairing: The Gut Healing Protocol and Primal Probiotics!

That’s right, a piggyback with our acclaimed high potency supplement, Primal Probiotics. Order a book now and we’ll throw a bottle of Primal Probiotics into your shipment for free!

At $29.95, the bottle is worth more than the book, making this one of the craziest giveaways I’ve ever approved. (Just use code GUTHEALTH at checkout.)

The official release date for The Gut Healing Protocol is January 2, 2018, but a limited number of advance copies have arrived at our Oxnard, CA headquarters and are ready to ship. I recommend you take advantage of this offer immediately. We’ll honor the promotion until December 21, but you may have a wait time if we run out of books and need to back order.

Kale’s right, the centerpiece of gut health is a whole foods diet. I made a great effort to promote this message, recommending foods like fermented dairy (yogurt, kefir), sauerkraut, kimchi, pickles, kombucha, fermeted soy products (tempeh, miso) and even high cacao percentage dark chocolate to support gut health.

However, today’s food options and stressful lifestyle patterns often leave our guts vulnerable to bad bacteria winning out over healthy bacteria. This is where a high potency probiotic supplement can also play a wonderful supporting role in the process of both healing an inflamed gut and keeping healthy bacteria predominating over harmful bacteria on a day-to-day basis. Primal Probiotics contains a concentrated dose of four different strains of bacilli bacteria, along with bifidus and saccharomyces. This is some high potency, long-lasting stuff, with 10 billion colony-forming units per capsule (check the product page on our website for details about the product). A healthy intake of probiotics improves not only digestive health, but immune function, antioxidant production, fat metabolism, mood and cognitive function, and hormone balance.

Finally, here’s the preview to his incredible film, The Gut Movie. Just like his book, it offers fascinating insight into the conditions that support essential gut health.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you take advantage of our awesome offer, enjoy Kale’s groundbreaking book, and get your gut functioning at peak levels!

The post Introducing The Gut Healing Protocol—With a Don’t Miss Deal! appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Dear Mark: Delving Further Into Dopamine

For today’s edition of Dear Mark, I’m delving more deeply into dopamine. Readers asked some great questions and made some interest comments in the comment board of last week’s post on dopamine, and today I’m addressing three of them. First, how does caffeine related to dopamine? Second, what’s the deal with all my mention of pornography in the last post? And finally, is MDA just providing dopamine hits?

Let’s go:

David wondered:

I’ve often wondered about caffeine and its affect on the dopamine pathway. I’ve heard, but don’t know with total certainty, that it does, Does it increase dopamine production in the short term or just cell sensitivity (or some other mechanism?). And then have a resulting desensitizing result with long term use?

Yes. Caffeine affects the dopaminergic pathway. It stimulates the release of dopamine in the brain. It increases dopamine receptors in the striatum (the movement region) of the human brain. But unlike the false pleasures of getting the “likes” on Facebook or spending three hours a day having every sexual whim satisfied through virtual space, caffeine is context-dependent. Caffeine is what you make of it.

When I wake up well-rested after a good night’s sleep, a strong cup of coffee fills me with what I can only describe as productive optimism. I not only have more energy and am able to focus on the task at hand, I am excited about what the task at hand can lead to. I feel optimistic about life and that optimism increases my productivity. For that reason, I think caffeine when used appropriately as a boost to productive optimism rather than a replacement for sleep can really enhance our life and if anything improve our dopamine function. Consider where the French and American revolutions were planned: in coffee houses.

Of course, you can waste that window of dopaminergic productivity.

There’s probably some bias at play here. I love coffee and I’ve only ever found it to be a boon to my life and my health. But the preponderance of evidence supports my bias. Coffee just seems to be really really good for us, or at least not bad. Whether it’s randomized controlled trials or observational studies of a population, coffee consumption is consistently associated with protection from diseases like diabetes and dementia, reductions in oxidative stress, and improved mental performance.  It even compares favorably to most of the fancy new nootropic supplements out on the market; just recently, the creators of a nootropic supplement had to concede when an efficacy trial showed that caffeine was more effective than the product.

Ronda pointed out:

An awful lot of info about porn

You’re right. I did mention porn a lot, and I was a little trepidatious about doing so. In today’s climate anything sexual is characterized as wholly good and unimpeachable. I agree to a point—sex between people who care about, love, or at least consent to each other is great. There’s nothing wrong with that. And the evidence is quite clear that a healthy sex life leads to a healthy life in general. But something seems off about the idea of an entire generation of men and women satisfying their completely natural sexual urges not through actual sex but through watching other people doing it on the computer or their smart phones.

Some people throw out the fact that we’ve had porn forever, that you could find ancient Greek frescoes showing people in all sorts of sexual contortions. That’s true, but let’s be honest: an abstract fresco isn’t quite the same as 3-D VR porn. The porn today is a super normal stimulus in its intensity, its vividness, its realism, and its ease of access. Nobody’s sneaking their dad’s Playboys into the bathroom, looking over the shoulder, hoping not to get caught. No one’s scanning through the blocked cable channels straining to see a breast amidst the static. They’re getting anything they want, whenever they want, as often as they want. In many cases, it’s easier and arguably better than having to work for it and maybe coming up short or getting rejected. Porn is certainly more reliable than the real thing.

On the extreme end, you’ve got addiction to Internet porn, a real condition mediated by dopamine. Naltrexone, a medication that, among other things, inhibits opioid-induced augmentation of dopamine release, can successfully treat porn addiction.

But you don’t have to be clinically addicted for porn to have a negative effect on your life. You can choose it over real life.

And that’s my main objection to over-reliance on pornography, one that can affect anyone: it’s the easy way out, it lets you avoid the hard work.  Hard things are what make us humans. They shape us, teach us, make us stronger and more resilient. Ultimately, they make us happier. Porn is a poor substitute for all those things, but on a superficial level, in the immediate moment, it can seem good enough. And therein lies the danger.

Somewhat cheekily, HealthyHombre asked:

So my daily MDA fix is causing dopamine desensitization? ?

Actually, you’re not too far off. Coming to MDA every morning and getting some actionable advice, then telling yourself, “Oh, that sounds great. I’m going to do that/start that new workout/start getting more sleep/incorporate more colorful produce. And it feels damn good, and the dopamine flows, because that’s the first win.

The way any kind of lifestyle change works is that you first decide to do it—you hear some information, you read a book, something changes your mind—before you alter your course of being. So every change, every positive life change, every dietary improvement, starts with the mental decision. It’s necessary—but it’s not sufficient. And when we read self-improvement blogs or fitness blogs like Mark’s Daily Apple, we get the opportunity to make those those first changes every day. If we don’t follow up that initial blast of dopamine, it’s all for naught. Nothing happens and we end up chasing the dopamine high.

Keep reading MDA. Just make sure you’re not just reading it. If something I write appeals to you, something speaks to you, then try living it. Try doing it—and let me know how it turns out for you.

Thanks for reading, everyone. Take care!

The post Dear Mark: Delving Further Into Dopamine appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Weekend Link Love — Edition 481

Research of the Week

Canola oil worsens memory and learning in mice with Alzheimer’s disease.

When the Inuit began “markedly increas[ing]” their sugar and refined carb intake, diabetes and heart disease shot up.

Keto without exercise beats standard American diet with exercise.

In only 24 hours, just by playing games against itself, a new AI learned chess, go, and Japanese chess from scratch and destroyed world-champion expert computer programs in each game.

Playing Super Mario 64 increases grey matter in the brains of older adults.

The Tsimané people of Boliva are definitely not helicopter parents.

Cheese consumption linked to lower death rates.

Kids born during the temperance movement ended up with greater educational attainment.

New Primal Blueprint Podcasts

Episode 199: Dr. Ken Berry: Host Elle Russ chats with Dr. Ken Berry about his new book, Lies My Doctor Told Me. Turns out the medical industry is rife with myths and falsehoods, even though most doctors mean well.

Each week, select Mark’s Daily Apple blog posts are prepared as Primal Blueprint Podcasts. Need to catch up on reading, but don’t have the time? Prefer to listen to articles while on the go? Check out the new blog post podcasts below, and subscribe to the Primal Blueprint Podcast here so you never miss an episode.

Why Aren’t We Talking About the Cognitive Health Crisis?
21 Books to Begin 2018

Interesting Blog Posts

People shouldn’t “just accept” that loss of neurons is an inevitable part of aging.

Why “not even wrong” pseudoscience gets published.

Media, Schmedia

Are fitness classes the new religions?

NPR covers light therapy for bipolar.

Everything Else

Alaskan wood frogs take cold exposure extremely seriously.

The Asian restaurant chain PF Chang’s is coming to China… as an American bistro.

Art isn’t optional.

How a low-carb/high-fat diet might actually be lower in fat than a standard American diet.

Things I’m Up to and Interested In

I’m not surprised: Nootropic supplement loses to caffeine.

Study that I found very interesting: Among Filipino hunter-gatherers, the best storytellers have the most children.

Question I’m pondering: Should authors of nutritional studies declare their personal dietary beliefs?

I’m wondering the same thing: Is it time to retire conventional cholesterol tests?

Always a good read: Richard Lehman’s reviews of the BMJ.

Recipe Corner

Good old meatza.
Beef enchiladas over coconut crepes.

Time Capsule

One year ago (Dec 10– Dec 16)

14 Weird Plant Bits and Where to Find Them: Foraging Ethnic Markets – Branch out, get weird.
The Importance of Balance—and 15 Ways to Enhance and Preserve It – How and why you should learn to not fall.

Comment of the Week

“I choose not to believe the this thing about the yetis.”

– I’m of the same mind, wildgrok. The kid in me really wants to believe.

Want to make fat loss easier?

Try the Definitive Guide for Troubleshooting Weight Loss for free here.

The post Weekend Link Love — Edition 481 appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Instant Pot Pork and Kale Salad

This salad is a riot of flavors. Shredded pork is tossed with cool, crunchy veggies (like kale, cabbage, cucumbers and mint) and dressed with tangy coconut-lime dressing. It’s a salad that is many things at once: rich, light, meaty, fresh, filling and healthy.

The pork is so easy to make—just throw pork shoulder in an Instant Pot and let it do its thing. It’s complete comfort food. You can make this pork shoulder again and again for different meals. But when you’re in the mood for a really flavorful salad, then toss the pork into this super-bold blend of raw veggies and bold, funky dressing. Lime juice, fish sauce, coconut milk and avocado oil whisk together in a dressing that’s like no other.

Time in the Kitchen: 25 minutes, plus 90 minutes to cook pork

Servings: 6

Ingredients

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Instant Pot Pork

3 to 4 pounds boneless pork shoulder, cut into 3 pieces (1.3 kg to 1.8)
2 teaspoons salt (10 ml)
3 teaspoons granulated garlic (15 ml)
Zest of 1 lime
1 to 2 tablespoon avocado oil (30 ml)
3 /4 cup coconut milk (180 ml)
3 tablespoons fish sauce (45 ml)
1 tablespoon lime juice (30 ml)

Salad Ingredients

1/3 cup coconut milk (80 ml)
2 tablespoons lime juice (30 ml)
2 teaspoons fish sauce (10 ml)
2 teaspoons finely chopped shallot (10 ml)
1/3 cup avocado oil (80 ml)
Pinch of salt
1 head Lacinato kale, leaves torn from stem into small, bite-sized pieces
½ red cabbage, thinly sliced
2 Persian cucumbers, thinly sliced
Fresh mint leaves, for garnish

Instructions

Cut 1-inch/2.5 cm deep slits all over the pork. Mix together salt, granulated garlic and lime zest. Rub the pork all over with the mixture. Ideally, let the seasoned meat sit out 30 minutes before cooking.

Set Instant Pot (or other brand of electric pressure cooker) to sauté and add avocado oil. Add pieces of pork and sear until browned on all sides, about 2 minutes a side.

Add coconut milk, fish sauce and lime juice. Put lid on pressure cooker, and set to cook for 90 minutes on high pressure. Manually release steam when cooking is complete. Remove the meat from the broth.

The broth left in the Instant Pot can be refrigerated and used for another meal. Reheat the liquid and use it as a sauce for pork or other meats, or use it to enhance soup broth or stew.

When the pork is cool enough to handle, shred into small pieces or larger chunks.

For the salad, whisk together coconut milk, lime juice, fish sauce and shallot. Add a pinch of salt. Slowly add avocado oil, whisking constantly to emulsify.

In a large bowl, toss kale, cabbage, cucumber and mint. Add pork and dressing before serving.

The post Instant Pot Pork and Kale Salad appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Overcoming Addiction Included Changing My Diet

It’s Friday, everyone! And that means another Primal Blueprint Real Life Story from a Mark’s Daily Apple reader. If you have your own success story and would like to share it with me and the Mark’s Daily Apple community please contact me here. I’ll continue to publish these each Friday as long as they keep coming in. Thank you for reading!

I don’t often receive video success stories, and when I do it doesn’t always work out to share them on the blog. That said, today’s video fits the bill in every way. I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I did. These stories always make my week.

Hi Mark, I know you have a thousand success stories a day, however I just thought you might enjoy this one today. I firmly believe that part of overcoming my addiction to alcohol and drugs was changing my diet through the Primal way of eating. The video below is my story of how I beat the odds, overcame addiction and prison, and now help others to adopt this “awesome” way of living.

Currently, I’m a personal trainer in the Fayetteville AR area, also a Nutrition educator for Natural Grocers—teaching keto and low carb and doing online nutritional consulting as well. I hope to be a Primal Health Coach soon as I pursue my next certification.

I’m hoping that others will see, if nothing else, the power that nutrition and lifestyle have over brain function to overcome addiction and addictive behaviors.

You rock bro, thanks for your time!

Zach Johannsen, Muscles and Veggies Fitness

 

The post Overcoming Addiction Included Changing My Diet appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Ancestral Sleep Breathing

Today’s article is a guest post by Dr. Mark Burhenne, the #1 bestselling author of The 8-Hour Sleep Paradox. As an authority on dental health, he is also on a mission to help shift the conversation about sleep from quantity to quality as the foundation for primal living. As a member of the American Academy of Dental Sleep Medicine, Dr. Burhenne blogs about the mouth-body connection on his website, AsktheDentist.com.

As followers of the Primal Blueprint, we talk a lot about blocking blue light, for example, to mimic the sleep of our ancestors. But there’s another big thing that we’re missing when it comes to sleep that is drastically different from our ancestors—and that’s how we breathe during sleep. Our sleep breathing faces many modern challenges that Grok never faced. In this article, we’ll cover what those are and how to overcome them for the best sleep of your life.

Modern humans are developing with smaller jaws and smaller airways than Grok did, and it’s preventing us from reaching and sustaining deep restorative sleep. It all starts with the airway. Modern humans’ airways develop differently from Grok’s airway. As you can see in these photos, Grok didn’t have crooked teeth or a small chin. He enjoyed a broad, symmetrical face, and proper jaw growth. Because of this, he didn’t need to have his wisdom teeth taken out as he had proper jaw growth. Grok’s children also ate the right foods which stimulated the jaw to grow down and out—leaving plenty of room for the airway at the back of the throat.

Your airway development as a child was different from Grok’s. Chewing on soft foods doesn’t stimulate the jaw enough to grow down and out to its full potential. In today’s world, food allergies and other epigenetic factors, cause nasal congestion which further impede proper jaw and facial development.

When the jaw and face do not grow to their full potential, the airway is compromised. A jaw that grows down and out leaves plenty of room at the back of the throat for the airway. Additionally, an underdeveloped jaw reduces space at the back of the throat, further compromising the airway.

Smaller airways mean less deep restorative sleep in which the body is able to repair itself. As Grok approached the deepest stages of sleep, and his body went limp, his jaw fell back and his tongue relaxed. The jaw and tongue didn’t block his airway, though, because of the ample room created by his fully developed jaw, wide arch, and proper swallow reflex.

This is the main reason we struggle to get good sleep. Every time you toss and turn, talk in your sleep, kick your legs, grind your teeth, or snore—these are signs your body is making an attempt to reopen the airway for more efficient breathing. These interruptions prevent you from remaining in this stage of deep restorative sleep.

Why is interrupted sleep such a big deal? Because it is a contributing factor to the chronic diseases of our modern age such as Alzheimer’s, cancers, heart disease, diabetes, ADHD, mood disorders such as depression, and cognitive learning disorders.

And, forget what you’ve been told about sleep apnea being reserved for obese, older-aged men. I am currently treating more young, thin, 20-something patients for small airways more than the older stereotypical sleep apnea patient.

Tips to Make Sure Your Kids Have Facial Growth Like Grok

Learn about orthotropics.
Know that getting braces to straighten teeth—especially headgear—can compromise the airway. Work with a dentist who understands this – most likely someone who practices orthotropics.
Feed your child foods rich with Vitamin K2, like natto, or consider a supplement. I recommend reading The Calcium Paradox by Dr. Kate Rheume-Blue.
Breastfeeding is key in facial skeletal development, which is a key influencer of the size of the airway.
Have your pediatric dentist check for tongue tie—especially in newborns.
Feed your children whole unprocessed foods that they can chew
Don’t use sippy cups and pacifiers as they can also impede optimal facial skeletal development.

You’ve heard Mark say it before: A good night’s sleep is the foundation for a healthy, happy, productive existence. Quality sleep keeps us lean and thinking clearly. Without it, we go through life in a fog and become susceptible to disease, and age faster. We know this intuitively because we’re not really ourselves if we haven’t had restorative sleep.

So why is eating dinner before 6pm, not drinking alcohol anywhere near bedtime, dimming the lights and shutting off screens before bedtime, or even donning your orange goggles to block out blue light to protect your circadian rhythms from being altered by our modern lifestyle not enough? Because a compromised airway negates the benefits of all of the above.

Check the box and move on? Not quite. All of these sleep hygiene suggestions get us closer to what Grok might have experienced through the night, but miss one key element—few of us today possess the same airway that Grok had—and this can make all the difference in the world when achieving perfect deep sleep.

Why Grok Only Needed Six Hours & We Barely Get By on Eight

When it comes to having an airway just like Grok’s, the cards are stacked against us: allergies, food sensitivities, chronic nasal congestion, and asthma all cause us to breathe through our mouths instead of our noses. This mouth breathing changes how our faces develop—instead of the wide, symmetrical faces of our ancestors, we develop longer faces, receding chins and weaker profiles. Easy-to-chew packaged foods don’t encourage the jaw to develop properly, so there isn’t enough room for the teeth, so they come in crowded. Prolonged bottle-feeding and sippy cup usage doesn’t allow for a proper tongue and swallow reflex.

When children have to breathe through their mouths instead of noses, the tongue is no longer in the right position to keep teeth straight and act as nature’s braces. Your exposure to all of these modern factors changed how the lower third of your face developed during childhood. But the real concern isn’t crooked teeth—it’s that the crooked teeth indicate you have a small airway. If the lower face does not develop properly, you won’t be able to breathe at night and sleep without interruption.

As we approach deep stage sleep, the muscles that normally keep our airways propped open are turned off and go limp. The tongue, also a muscle, goes from toned and firm to a spread-out, floppy lump at the back of the throat, falling back into and blocking the airway. In MRIs of people sleeping, the tongue in its flaccid state looks like a squash ball sitting on top of the airway. Moreover, the deeper stages of sleep cause the airway to narrow and become too flaccid to support effortless breathing. In extreme cases, the airway becomes so narrow that breathing stops completely. This is the condition referred to as obstructive sleep apnea.

Every time breathing slows or is interrupted, the brain has to figure out a way to get you breathing again, at any cost. The brain stops what it’s doing in deep sleep to tense up your muscles so they support the airway again. You don’t have to wake up when this happens, but your brain does have to bounce out of deep sleep into a lighter stage of sleep for the airway to be saved. In healthy people, the airway remains open even when the muscles become paralyzed. But for most of us, this isn’t possible. Our airways have gotten smaller so we’re left with bodies that aren’t equipped to keep breathing while in deep stage sleep. It’s not your breathing that suffers with these interruptions; it’s your sleep. Each time the brain has to deal with a breathing interruption, it can’t pick up where it left off— it has to start over. This means your body isn’t able to fully complete stages of deep and restorative sleep.

How to Find Out if your Airway is Like Grok

So how do we acquire the airway of our ancestors? Even as modern humans, we’re not doomed to a modern airway. Here are things you can do to obtain Grok’s efficient airway.

Consider your sleep breathing. When you optimize your sleep quality (sleep hygiene), all the sleep hygiene tweaks mean nothing unless you consider breathing to be the foundation. Have that frame of mind.

Assess your breathing. Record the noises you make with an app on your smartphone. Snoring means your airway is collapsing. But don’t let “no snoring” lead to a false sense of security as it may mean your airway collapses to such a degree that you can’t make a snoring noise. Get a sleep study polysomnography (PSG). Your primary care provider usually prescribes this test but there may be resistance due to insurance. Better yet, there are very accurate alternatives to the conventional sleep studies, such as Knit Health. They give you a 21 day sleep assessment that is as good as the PSG in your own home for $99 deep-stage knithealth.com. Verify your sleep ability, and do it often. Your quality of life depends on it.

Refer to a specialist. See your primary care provider to get a referral to a specialist who can help you.

Ensure proper development with Vitamin K2, orthotropics, and breastfeeding.

Most importantly, don’t assume you don’t have a sleep issue. Even in light sleep stages, we are not the best at assessing our own sleep.

Deep restorative sleep is innate if you are Grok, but it is not guaranteed if you are living in modern times.

—Mark Burhenne DDS

Sources:

Gandhi Yetish, Hillard Kaplan, Michael Gurven, Brian Wood, Herman Pontzer, Paul R. Manger, Charles Wilson, Ronald McGregor, and Jerome M. Siegel, “Natural Sleep and Its Seasonal Variations in Three Pre-industrial Societies,” Current Biology, (2015) doi: http:// dx.doi.org/ 10.1016/ j.cub. 2015.09.046
Davidson, Terrance, “The Great Leap Forward: The Anatomic Basis for the Acquisition of Speech and Obstructive Sleep Apnea”
Dr Steven Park podcast 39 drstevenpark.com

Thanks to Mark Burhenne, DDS, for the informative post today. You can follow him at AsktheDentist.com and check out his other guest post on MDA. 

What questions do you have regarding sleep breathing or ancestral versus modern dental health? Share your thoughts below, and have a great day, everyone.

The post Ancestral Sleep Breathing appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

The Modern Hijacking of Dopamine: Supernormal vs. Ancestral Stimuli

Scientists recently discovered a major difference between humans and apes. It’s not the body hair, or the prehensile feet, or the propensity to fling poop with less-than-perfect accuracy. It’s actually the TH gene, one that directs the production of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Humans express the TH gene in the striatum, a part of the brain involved in movement, and in the neocortex, which conducts higher-order thinking. Chimps and other apes do not.

Why is this so important?

Most people think of dopamine as the pleasure neurotransmitter. Dopamine is a major regulator of the reward pathway, which involves pleasure, but it doesn’t directly influence the sensory or mental experience of pleasure. Dopamine is a wanting chemical. It compels us to seek, to do, to move. Ultimately, dopamine triggers reward pathways as a way to motivate the organism to do the things that improve fitness, survival, and genetic proliferation. That it’s most active in the parts of the human brain that control movement and higher order thinking illustrates this fact nicely.

When you “win,” you get a hit of dopamine. The hit of dopamine is intended to perpetuate the action that got you the victory. It’s supposed to keep you pushing forward to greater wins and greater rewards. Dopamine itself is not the reward. Dopamine is the nudge that pushes you through the pain, misery, and hardship required to achieve something great and monumental. Consider getting stronger in the gym, faster on the track, more skilled on the field; dopamine increases the fatigue threshold during exercise. Not just starting your business, but having it succeed. Getting the promotion. All these accomplishments require hard work and pain. Dopamine helps you grin and bear it.

Without a healthy dopamine response, we won’t accomplish or even do much. In Parkinson’s disease, the neurons in the striatum responsible for dopamine production are degraded. This retards movement and motor control. In depression, dopamine function is often dysfunctional, leading to a distinct lack of motivation (to exercise, socialize, get out of bed). These are extreme examples. What about the rest of us?

Consider what dopamine is designed to do: achieve and progress through hard work and persistence. That humans express it in those specific regions of the brain and less intelligent apes do not suggests it may have made the difference between hanging around in the jungle nibbling leaves and digging for grubs and making complex tools and building advanced civilizations.

Now consider what kind of dopamine triggers we experience nowadays.

Porn. Getting an email in the inbox. Logging onto Facebook and seeing all those red numbers in the notifications. A text from a friend. Nothing too monumental, nothing too out of the ordinary. Right?

There are big problems with dopamine triggers common to modern life.

They’re easy to come by. You don’t have to work for social media likes. You don’t have to wine and dine or even get to know the pornography actor. You just click a few buttons and type a few keys and the “win” is deposited in your lap.
They don’t give real rewards. A “like” isn’t real. It doesn’t result in material, spiritual, or even emotional accomplishments. It’s just a wisp that dissipates into the past the second you regard it. They’re empty wins.

What does this do to us?

One consequence is dopamine desensitization. Internet addicts (a real thing, yes) express fewer dopamine receptors than non-addicts. They effectively have “dopamine resistance,” meaning their body needs higher levels of dopamine to feel anything. The easiest way to produce more dopamine is to indulge in more of the same thing that led to your desensitization. So, the Internet addict spends more time mindlessly browsing the web, the porn addict searches for increasingly depraved flavors of pornography. This only deepens the problem.

Constant small hits are probably worse than infrequent large hits of dopamine. That’s why smoking is more addictive than cocaine. Nicotine and cocaine both give similar dopamine hits to the reward center of the brain, but you can smoke more often and maintain the elevated levels longer with tobacco than you can with cocaine.

Another consequence is that we get locked into the dopamine cycle. After all, there’s no limit. We can post a baby picture and be reasonably confident that within the hour we’ll have twenty new notifications. We can bounce texts back and forth between friends, every response a small win. And here’s the sneakiest part: We don’t know when those notifications or responses will come, so we get the extra dopamine boost of anticipating the unknown. 

What can we do?

Work for your dopamine and make your dopamine work for you. That means favoring difficult dopamine triggers that provide real lasting benefits. Limit convenience.

Woo your lady. Surprise your man. Don’t rely on porn.

Kill it in the gym. Sprint up hills. Lift heavy things. Carry something bulky, heavy, and awkward with you on a hike or walk around the block.

Inject novelty into your life. Explore the world. Walk through a completely new part of town. Hike out to that secret beach no one knows about but you. We process new experiences via the dopamine pathway.

Read a book, a long-form article, or even a good blog post over a five minute scan of your Twitter feed.

Avoid the self-improvement trap. It feels good to read a book (or chapter of a book) on self-improvement. You get jazzed up about all the changes you could make to your life, and for that moment, day, or week, you’re riding high on the wave of dopaminergic optimism. But then nothing happens. You don’t follow through. You don’t embody the changes you’ve been reading about.

Limit your access to easy dopamine triggers that require no work from you. It’s too much, too quickly, with too little effort.

Don’t drink a six pack every night while arguing with idiots on Twitter. Enjoy a glass or two of wine with a close friend after a long, delicious dinner full of rich conversation.

Don’t spend hours in Pinterest fantasy land, mentally inhabiting the cool DIY environments other users have actually created. Instead, get off the couch and make something yourself. Build a garden bed. Paint your room. Learn a new song on an instrument you play.

Use social media to segue into real dopamine triggers. If you use Facebook, follow-up by making plans to meet in meatspace. Your friend from college has “liked” every picture you ever posted of your new baby. Set-up a dinner party at your house so she can meet him face-to-face.

Okay, Sisson, this sounds good in theory, but won’t life be less enjoyable without the constant drip of dopamine?

No. It’ll be better. Way better.

You’ll be more productive and present. Dopamine is required for optimal focus and concentration. The much-desired flow state of “total absorption, optimal challenge, and non-self-conscious enjoyment” that enables deep work and peak performance operates along dopaminergic pathways.

You’ll derive greater enjoyment when you do trigger dopamine. On a biochemical level, you’ll be more sensitive to dopamine’s effects. On a psychological level, you’ll know that you’ve truly earned this dopamine and won’t have the guilt of having taken the easy way out hanging over your head.

This is a big problem. And it’s going to be extra hard to beat because our dopamine-addled brains will fight us every step of the way in our quest to restrict the addictive chemical. But trust me: It’s worth the effort. Just imagine the dopaminergic payoff you’ll bask in once you beat it.

Take stock of your dopamine triggers. Which ones are unhealthy? Which are healthy? How do you propose to reclaim more of an ancestral setting in this regard?

Thanks for reading, everyone. Take care!

The post The Modern Hijacking of Dopamine: Supernormal vs. Ancestral Stimuli appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.

Dear Mark: Glycine as Collagen Replacement; Debt as Disease of Civilization

For today’s edition of Dear Mark, I’m answering two questions. First, since glycine is often cited as the main reason to consume gelatinous meats and take collagen hydrolysate supplements, couldn’t we just take supplementary glycine? Are we missing anything if we go that route? And second, I riff off a great comment from last week’s post on financial security.

Let’s go:

Daniel asked:

Any thoughts on isolated glycine vs collagen/gelatin for supplementation? You can get a kilo of glycine from BulkSupplements.com for about $20, so in terms of grams of glycine per dollar it’s much cheaper than collagen. Glycine is also very sweet, almost as sweet as sucrose, so it would seem to be an excellent healthy sweetener.

That’s a good compromise, though. If I were really strapped for cash, I’d take glycine in a heartbeat.

Pure glycine is great for things like balancing your intake of methionine. In case you’re not aware, muscle meat is high in an amino acid called methionine. Methionine metabolism depletes glycine, so the more meat you eat, the more glycine-rich connective tissue, bone broth, and collagen supplements you should be eating to balance out the amino acids.

But balancing methionine for longevity and health isn’t the only reason we’re eating collagen. Collagen is the most abundant protein in the body, providing tensile strength to our bones, teeth, ligaments, tendons, and cartilage. It’s an important structural component of the skin, lungs, intestines, and heart. And as far as the evidence so far available suggests, eating the amino acids that make up collagen separately doesn’t have the same effect on those collagenous tissues as eating them together in a collagenous matrix.

One reason is that the collagen matrix can survive digestion more or less intact.

In one study, rats with osteoporosis ate collagen hydrolysate that scientists had marked with a radioactive signature to allow them to track its course through the body. It survived the digestive tract intact, made it into the blood, and accumulate in the kidneys. By day 14, the rats’ thigh bones had gotten stronger and denser with more organic matter and less water content.

Another study found similar results, this time for cartilage of the knee. Mice who ate radioactive collagen hydrolysate showed increased radioactivity in the knee joint.

The fact is that collagen is more than glycine. When you feed people collagen derived from pork skin, chicken feet, and cartilage, many different collagenous peptides appear in the blood. You don’t get any of those from isolated glycine.

All that said, pure glycine can be a helpful supplement. It’s great for balancing out methionine intake from muscle meat consumption. It’s also been used in several studies to improve multiple markers of sleep quality. Those aren’t minor results. They’re big.

Collagen is ideal, but glycine isn’t a bad option. In fact, I’d argue that perhaps collagen plus supplementary glycine could offer the best bang for your buck.

Ryan Parnham mentioned:

Great article full of truth! Financial debt is definitely not a Primal thing, I mean, I doubt Grok was borrowing money for some rare fur loin cloth or whatever!

That’s a great point, Ryan, one that I didn’t explicitly mention in the post. Financial debt is one of the great diseases of civilization. Before money and credit, it just didn’t exist.

People were indebted to each other, sure. You come up short hunting one season and your pal spots you and your kin some meat, you’d feel like you owed him. The sensation of owing something to another person for services rendered is universal, requires no formal currency system, and spans all of human history and prehistory.  It’s about the give and take of personal relationship—and community. It promotes cooperation and is probably part of what made us so successful. That’s foundational human psychology. 

But that isn’t same as crushing debt hanging over your head. Being indebted to someone is based on material reality. Debt is more abstract. It follows you. It’s in your head, all the time. It’s almost like a deity, an entity that exists outside of normal temporal reality. It isn’t bound by physics or cold hard material existence. Debt looms. The debt resides.

What this means is that we don’t have a lot of psychological or physiological tools to deal with the stress of debt in a healthy manner. Just like sleep deprivation, excessive omega-6 seed oils, too many refined carbs, a lack of social contact, and being sedentary are all evolutionarily novel inputs that we simply can’t deal with and result in a ton of health issues, financial debt is an aberration to the human psyche. We’re better off avoiding it altogether, as I recommended last week.

Hopefully today’s riff has emphasized the importance of the message.

Okay, that’s it for today, folks. Now let’s hear from you. Ever try glycine by itself? How’d it compare to collagen? And I’m curious to get your take on the idea of financial debt as a condition of civilization.

Thanks for reading.

Want to make fat loss easier?

Try the Definitive Guide for Troubleshooting Weight Loss for free here.

The post Dear Mark: Glycine as Collagen Replacement; Debt as Disease of Civilization appeared first on Mark's Daily Apple.