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JOHN DURANT: Today I wanted to talk about paleo
as bio-hacking, which may be a little bit different than how
it's currently portrayed in the press.
A lot of the pieces on the paleo diet, or the cave man diet,
in the press are a little bit cartoonish.
I'm a little bit responsible for that.
But it often gets portrayed as the macho man eating raw meats
straight off the bone wearing a loin
cloth, which is pretty silly.
But that's sort of the way that a lot of journalists
portray it.
My book, and this approach, is actually about something
much bigger than paleo or the paleolithic or even just
diet, which is starting to take evolution, human evolution,
seriously when we think about human health.
The current state of health recommendations
in this country and the world is awful.
So many people want to be healthy,
but are confused by conflicting advice.
You know, should I do Atkins?
Should I go vegetarian?
Health issues, ethical issues, environmental issues.
For weight loss or autoimmune conditions?
Should I count calories?
Is fat evil?
Are there types of fat that aren't evil?
There's a lot of mass confusion out there.
And there are a lot of eating disorders, clearly obesity,
type 2 diabetes.
People are living a long time, but the question is,
are they thriving and being healthy?
So the broader concept that I want to talk about today
isn't just diet or isn't just the paleolithic,
but starting to use our evolutionary past
to generate really smart heuristics that are probably
pretty close to being right in pretty short order.
I'm sure you guys are very familiar with some principles
of hacking or bio-hacking.
And I just sort of want to do a comparison between principals
of hacking or bio-hacking, and what this broader paleo
sphere is doing in the health world.
So trial-and-error is very important--
hands-on, do-it-yourself, self-experimentation, n equals
1, experiments.
And speed-- move fast.
Embrace failure-- break things.
80% solutions-- don't let the perfect
be the enemy of the good.
Resourcefulness-- repurposing old features
for new uses, accidental discoveries.
I'm moving very quickly over these
because I feel like this audience is probably
very familiar with this type of stuff.
Simplicity-- keep it simple stupid.
Decentralization.
All these hacking principles.
What's also cool about these principles
is it's actually have evolution by natural selection works.
It's an amateurish process without
any overarching authority.
It isn't concerned with theory.
Organisms are always using whatever
a bits are lying around as material for new functions
and features.
It's sort of a blind, trial-and-error search process.
So when you actually look at this broader paleo movement,
whether you call it that word.
Maybe another word is better-- ancestral health,
evolutionary health, evolutionary medicine.
Again, you have a lot of similar features.
You basically have a lot of amateurs out there
who have said a lot of the top-down advice
that we're getting from health officials at the USDA
or in the government or my corporate health program
or my health insurance policy don't seem to be working.
And so maybe it's time to start treating your own health
as a do-it-yourself activity.
Because if you want to prevent chronic health conditions,
there's no magic pill you can take.
There's no surgery that you can conduct
to prevent the onset of obesity and type 2 diabetes
and Alzheimer's and things like that.
You actually have to take day-to-day in your daily life
to prevent all these things.
So in a sense, we're all bio-hackers
if we want to be healthy.
We have to do it yourself.
Over the last few years, this sort of paleo approach
has been pounding the pavement on things like saturated fat.
And that a lot of the science on saturated fat
has been distorted, or poorly conducted,
publishing biases to make saturated fat look bad.
But over the last couple years of iteration of people
experimenting with their own blood work,
with different levels of saturated fat in their diet,
people have very quickly realized,
wait a second, saturated fat is not this evil thing.
40% of all fats in human breast milk or saturated.
About 40% of all the fats in the human body are saturated.
We've had saturated fat in our diet for millions of years
from bone marrow and brains.
So our metabolism is well-adapted to metabolizing,
to harnessing it as an energy source.
So you see issues like that where
this bottom-up, open source community is moving much faster
than the conventional health authorities.
Embracing failure.
There are folks in the paleosphere who
get into fights about whether eating a legume
is going to kill you or not, or give you kidney stones.
Or rice or wheat.
A lot of people are talking about gluten-free.
Is having a little bit of gluten going to cause stomach problems
and digestive problems in any one?
Is this overblown?
So there may be some areas where this burgeoning
movement is wrong.
That's OK.
People are moving fast.
They're experimenting.
And they're going to see whether it works or not.
We don't have to go through all the rest of these.
So much my book actually isn't mostly about the paleolithic,
even though it uses the word paleo.
And so I want to introduce the structure
that I use to think about human evolution and any health issue
that you want to deal with-- not just food, not just
movement or anything.
So this is a typical singularity chart from Kurzweil
from life to today, the growth of complexity
or major transitions over that period of time.
And so I sort of structure my thinking
into five main buckets, as we think
about human evolution from the beginning of life to today.
What I call the Animal Age, or basically
from the Cambrian explosion to the beginning the Paleolithic,
pre-human essentially.
We can learn a lot from other species and our common ancestry
with other species about how to be healthy, whether it's food,
whether its movement.
Then you get the Paleolithic for about 2.6 million years.
That's when you get hominids and humans emerging.
Then you get the Agricultural Age.
After the agricultural revolution,
we domesticate plants and animals,
start living in cities.
Our lifestyles change dramatically.
The industrial age.
And the information age.
And we can use this simple five-age, five-era framework
to in really quick fashion get a handle, 80% of the way there
on pretty much any health issue.
And start to cut through a lot of noise that's
out there about how to be healthy.
Should we eat saturated fat?
How much sun exposure should we get?
How much should we move?
And in what ways are the best ways to exercise?
And all of these questions that just fill the bookstores
with diet books and health books and all this nuttiness.
It doesn't have to be this complicated.
So some of the heuristics that we
can learn when we look at other species
is any health dynamic you care about-- thermal regulation,
diet, movement, anything-- the best way
to learn about it is to completely forget human beings
and just look at other species.
And compare that dynamic across different species.
Because as soon as you start talking about humans,
everybody has preconceived notions about how to do it.
People have a lot of-- particularly in food,
food is like religion-- people have all these identity--
it's a source of identity for a lot of people.
And so you can't have an honest conversation about what should
I eat or what should I not eat?
So if you look at our common ancestry with other species,
you can be like, OK, well there are herbivores.
There are carnivores.
There are omnivores.
And if you go to a zoo, the basic approach
that the top zoos in the world take,
is they use modern science and medical technology
to keep the animals alive.
But then they mimic the natural habitat and lifestyle
of the species in relevant ways, in the most relevant ways.
And so it just depends on the species.
You want to feed red meat and whole prey
feeding to the lions and the carnivores.
And you want to feed grass to the herbivores,
or whatever plant species they're adapted to.
And omnivores have more dietary flexibility.
Immediately you can start to realize that, first of all,
there's no particular food out there that is necessarily
inherently unhealthy.
It depends on whether that species is adapted to it.
Plenty of species are adapted to eating grass.
And they have the microorganisms in their extensive stomach
to digest it all.
We don't.
A second thing that you can learn very quickly about health
from looking at other species-- and again looking
at zoos, because that's where we often have the best
access to them-- is the importance of habitat.
And starting to think about health
in terms of a holistic habitat-based
approach to keeping species healthy.
I talk about, in my book, a trip to the Cleveland zoo
where they had some obese gorillas.
Heart disease and heart failure is the number one killer
of male gorillas in captivity, just like heart disease
is the number one killer of male humans in civilization.
And so they were trying to figure out
ways to reverse or halt the progression of heart disease
in these Western lowland gorillas.
And it's kind of like, OK, so what should we do?
They don't really have any fat in their diet,
so low-fat doesn't work.
I guess what they could try to restrict their calories,
but that didn't seem to make sense.
So what they did was they were like, oh wait a second,
maybe we shouldn't be feeding these Western lowland gorillas
wheat, corn, and soy-based fiber bars that are essentially
reformulated dog food.
Of course it's not even dog food,
because that's not what dogs and wolves eat.
So they switched the gorillas to a bunch of leafy plants
and vegetables that they bought in the local Cleveland grocery
store.
McCullough lost 70 pounds.
Beback lost 35 pounds.
Their blood work improved.
Behavioral problems went away.
All sorts of things like that.
But all of these zoos realized that you
can use modern medical technology
to keep the animals alive for a long period of time,
but if you want to prevent the onset of chronic health
conditions to help them thrive, you
have to take a habitat-based approach.
Because there's no pill, there's no surgery
that can be done to reverse these conditions,
or at least not terribly effectively.
So that gives you your first-pass approach at, OK,
how does this dynamic work?
Forget human beings.
Then the next step is to say, OK well,
if we're talking about diet, now how
does this feature manifest in human beings
during a long formative period in human evolution?
During the paleolithic, this 2.6 million year period.
It's not the end of the story.
But it really is sort of the beginning of the story.
I don't think that paleo diets, and paleo this and paleo that
is the end of the conversation.
It's more like it's the appropriate beginning
of the conversation.
So if you were talking about diet, that's where you realize,
you talk to paleo anthropologists
and realize that humans have been eating
meat for 2.6 million years or longer.
There are cut marks on bones that we
have going back that long.
And so right off the bat, you're just immediately
skeptical of claims that veganism or vegetarianism are
the optimal ways for humans to be healthy because it's
like, wait a second, we've been omnivores
for millions of years.
There are no known vegan or vegetarian indigenous
populations.
And the introduction of meat into the human diet
is, does appear, to be related, in part,
to the expansion of our brains.
And so the paleolithic gives you this first-pass approximation
of what might be a healthy lifestyle, healthy diet,
temperature changes, circadian rhythms, sleep patterns, all
of this.
It gives you a first-pass approximation
of what might be a healthy pattern for human beings today.
It doesn't guarantee that there aren't
new ways of doing things that are better,
new foods that might be healthier or better.
But for the amateur trying to quickly arrive
at good heuristics, it's the right place to start.
Then after the agricultural revolution,
people start living in cities.
We become farmers and herders instead
of hunters and gatherers.
And so, then you take into account recent adaptations.
So just because a food is novel doesn't
mean it's bad or unhealthy.
So, for example, most people's favorite foods
come from fermentation, whether it's alcohol or cheese or bread
or a lot of things the harness microorganisms
and the process of fermentation to be created.
So we can take into account recent cultural adaptations.
We can also take into account genetic adaptations.
You look at alcohol, and populations
that have been drinking alcohol for 5,000 years
handle it better than indigenous populations that
have been drinking alcohol for three generations.
They're just not adapted to metabolizing alcohol well.
If you come from European or Middle Eastern ancestry,
our ancestors went through a process
where there were probably lots of people dying of alcoholism.
But it happened 5,000 years ago.
And I won't go too much into this,
but one of the heuristics that's very important
is realizing the importance of culture,
both culture in the forms of ideas and microbes
to human health.
So then you get the Industrial Age.
And the Industrial Age and the Industrial Revolution
over the last couple hundred years
is pretty much a warning of what not to do.
This is the simple heuristic.
The British Navy sends a bunch of sailors out on ships.
And they alter their food so that it doesn't perish,
and don't realize that these guys are going to get scurvy
because there's no Vitamin C in what they're eating.
Or people move indoors and they don't get any sunlight.
And then people get rickets.
So we started changing things in human lives
so quickly during the Industrial Revolution
that we weren't able to adapt culturally or genetically.
Rickets, pellagra, scurvy, even explorers
going in novel habitats during the Industrial
Age, a flight going undersea.
This industrial technology was literally
pushing human beings in habitats that we had never
experienced over eons of genetic and cultural evolution.
And we learned how to kill ourselves.
We killed ourselves at the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution through lack of sun exposure and rickets,
through missing micronutrients, changing our diet so quickly
and shifting to a diet of refined flour and sugar
and alcohol that we were missing key micronutrients
from our diet.
And then by the end of the Industrial Age,
we figure out that we need to add certain things back in
and fortified foods with them.
But we were just solving problems of our own creation.
So the big lesson from the Industrial Age
is learning how to not die basically.
And then today in the Information Age
we're now in a position to-- the last piece of this
is personal experimentation and customizing solutions to you.
Because everybody has a unique genome, unique gut bacteria,
allergies, injuries, tastes, preferences, budgets,
so we're all unique organisms.
We all live in a unique habitat.
We're all going to end up with somewhat unique diets
or lifestyles that work for us.
So let's take food.
A lot of people that hear about the paleo diet,
they just think of the paleolithic.
And the basic prescriptions are--
all the conventional health authorities pretty much
agree that too much industrial foods is bad for you.
So all their advice, from the Mayo Clinic
to Doctor Oz to Michael Pollan to everybody
is basically avoid industrial food.
Processed food-- Twinkies and Coca-Cola
and refined sugar and all that.
So it basically boils down to, eat
like we did before the Industrial Revolution.
Eat like you sort of grew up on a farm.
You had whole grain bread and milk and cheese and organic.
Everything was organic.
We were still poor.
But everything was organic.
So all of that health advice basically
boils down to eat like a farmer.
Eat like a herder-farmer.
And that may be enough for a lot of people.
Avoiding industrial food for a lot of people, particularly
young people, may be completely fine and sufficient.
But it's not for a lot of other folks.
And so what paleo adds to the mix is saying,
OK well, the Agricultural Revolution introduced
two huge food groups into the human diet
they basically hadn't been consumed
before-- grains and legumes and domesticated seeds,
basically, and dairy from domesticated animals.
I don't know if anybody here has milked a wild animal.
It's not easy.
It's possible, not easy.
So what this adds, a little more perspective,
and says OK, well people four hundred generations ago,
only started to eat tons of wheat and corn
and diets shifted from being very diverse,
lots of different animal species,
lots of different parts of the animal,
lots of different types of plants depending
on the geography and the season, to a diet heavily concentrated
in a few staple cereal crops-- wheat, corn, barley, oats.
And then products made from that, bread and beer and things
like.
So paleo adds that piece to the puzzle in food.
So what I recommend people do is-- first off,
if you feel fine with your health and the way
that you're eating, there may be no reason to change anything.
If you feel fine and there aren't any issues, then
what's the problem?
However, if eating an agricultural diet
isn't working for you, then what you might want to explore
is diets that were more common during this prior period
in human evolution-- so removing grains, removing dairy
for a time, and trying to mimic an approximation-- we realize
it's an approximation.
And then add back in novel modern foods
and see how you feel.
I know many people who are very strict on gluten and grains.
Many have to be.
Many just want to be.
And I know more people who are flex on dairy,
and when they eat it it'll be more
like full-fat traditional dairy.
And then just see how you feel.
And this is sort of the bio-hacking part of it.
You've got to experiment.
And based on your ancestry and your genome and your gut
bacteria and what you like, you just
have to craft your own diet.
Let me give you one more example,
and then maybe we can go to questions.
I don't know what time it is.
AUDIENCE: It's about 3:30.
JOHN DURANT: 3:30?
The paleolithic doesn't help you with all areas.
And this is why I get a little frustrated with the term paleo,
even though I use it and promote it.
So take sleep, as an example.
The big change in human sleep patterns
didn't happen between the paleolithic
and the agricultural revolution.
People still lived with their extended family
in fairly close quarters and had no indoor lighting and things
like that.
The big transition in sleep was between the Agricultural Age
and the Industrial Age when you get indoor lighting,
you get more stimulants like coffee and tea
to keep people up, more alco-- well
I guess alcohol was way before-- clocks, things like that.
And then people increasingly sleeping in isolation
from others, in their own rooms, on softer and softer bedding.
So most of the big key transition,
most of the key changes, when it comes to sleep,
have nothing to do with the paleolithic.
And you can actually get an approximation
of a healthy way of sleeping and sleep patterns
from looking at our agricultural era ancestors.
So the paleolithic doesn't always
hold the solutions to everything.
We don't always need it, depending on the issue.
But people focus on diet so much that that's
what it gets associated with.
Do I have anything else?
No.
So if people now have specific questions,
let's open it up to questions.
AUDIENCE: What do you mean exactly by [INAUDIBLE]?
JOHN DURANT: By what?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
JOHN DURANT: So people would sleep near a fire, usually.
There were lots of people around.
There wasn't very much privacy.
There are a lot of folks who think
that sleep was less less of a single uninterrupted stretch
of seven or eight hours and more broken up into two periods.
Or you'd sleep for a while, wake up, have sex,
go to the bathroom, chat with someone by the fire,
go back to sleep for a few hours.
Night was a long time.
And you couldn't do much when it was dark.
So that's sort of what it was like.
But it didn't change too much when people started farming.
And then they were living in little huts
with extended family scrunched together
around the fire for all night.
Other questions?
AUDIENCE: From on VC behind you.
You can't see me actually, I think.
JOHN DURANT: Hi.
AUDIENCE: When I was at [INAUDIBLE] from Hamburg,
Germany.
And thanks again for doing all this.
Paleo has done a lot for me.
Listened to you recently on Robb Wolf again.
It's just amazing stuff that you guys are doing.
JOHN DURANT: Thanks.
AUDIENCE: So my question is-- so [INAUDIBLE]
a lot of people around you there as well.
I have a lot of people, when you say,
you know when people say they are fine with what they're
eating and they way they're feeling, then [INAUDIBLE].
So the two questions that I have around that is, you know, A,
how do they know that they couldn't
feel much, much better, right?
I feel like we've been doing that sort of stuff
for a long time.
We don't even know.
[INAUDIBLE]?
JOHN DURANT: Right.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] basically.
All their lives.
So, that's the one question.
The other one is, I feel like-- so you
say a lot of young people especially,
I think what you mean is that a lot of people, their
their metabolism is much more forgiving than, for example,
later in time.
JOHN DURANT: Right.
AUDIENCE: What is [INAUDIBLE] that
is accumulating over this period that sort of, you know,
lifestyle, that could be prevented,
and would not even lead to issues in the 30s, 40s, 50s,
whenever.
JOHN DURANT: So, thanks for your questions.
For the first question, yeah, people
tend to accept their lives as normal.
They confuse the word normal with common.
I do it.
Everybody here does it.
Just because it's common in North America
to live a certain way doesn't mean
it's necessarily species typical in a biological sense.
So they have the same problem in zoos.
They run studies on the health of all the captive gorillas
in North American zoos.
But they actually can't conclude very much because they all
lead very similar lives and very similar circumstances,
eating very similar food.
And so if you actually want to see real differences in gorilla
help, you have to compare them with their wild counterparts.
But the reason why I say, however you're eating,
if you feel great, fine is partly because I
don't want to push people too much.
And we can eat novel foods, and we can live in new ways
and that's fine.
So I'm just trying to do more of the soft sell, I guess.
But I think people would be surprised
about how many conditions they accept as normal that
don't necessarily have to be.
You get teenagers that accept it as normal
that they will need braces and to get tons of acne.
And this causes like a lot of social anxiety,
and like self-esteem issues.
And we treat it as this normal rite of passage
through adolescence.
But the reason why our teeth are crowded
is because our jaws have gotten smaller
over the last some thousands of years because the food we eat
isn't very tough.
It's very soft.
And so our jaws don't grow as large
as they do when we had tougher foods.
And so our jaws aren't large enough to fit all of our teeth.
And some of those strong bite forces
are what the body uses to help your teeth come in straight.
When you look at these hunter gatherer skulls--
and I've gotten to examine some of them-- 80,000 years ago,
beautiful set of teeth.
Not perfect, but wisdom teeth came in,
there was enough room in the jaw for the wisdom teeth
to come in.
No cavities.
And straight.
So that's--
AUDIENCE: I'm sorry.
Are you saying that's an evolutionary change over 80,000
years, or is that a specific change
over the lifetime because an individual is chewing
less, that their jaw grows less.
JOHN DURANT: Individual chewing less,
though there are some lines of evidence
that maybe the human had has actually
gotten a little bit smaller over the last 10,000 years.
Our brains actually used to be a little bit bigger
than they are today.
Near the end the paleolithic.
I don't know what that means.
Your second question was about-- what was your second question?
Oh youth, youth.
So definitely young people can-- there's
very interesting evolutionary-- the evolutionary biology
of aging is a very fascinating area.
There's a guy named Michael Rose at UC Irvine who's probably
the preeminent guy in this field.
And a lot of people think of aging as sort of simply just
damage accumulating, like a car rolls off
the lot at wherever they sell cars--
AUDIENCE: Dealership.
JOHN DURANT: --at a dealership.
And then from then on out, it sort of just
accumulates damage.
But during the period of time before the typical first stage
of reproduction, we've basically evolved incredible repair
mechanisms.
So let me put it this way, if you get a genetic defect that
causes you to die when you're four or five,
your genes don't get passed on to the next generation at all.
Kaput.
You're out.
You're out of the gene pool.
But if you get that same genetic defect when you're 50,
you still have time to have offspring.
So basically, depending on the first typical age
of reproduction of a species, evolution
selects for incredible robust health.
We grow stronger as we get older.
We become more robust from birth to adolescence,
and then we start to accumulate damage.
So young people are actually pretty well adapted
to some aspects of an agricultural diet.
Young people are probably better adapted
to some of those foods than those same individuals later
in life.
It's a very counter-intuitive concept.
But there's been selection pressures for young kids
to be able to survive on these diets,
to make it to the age at which they reproduce.
There has not been the same sort of selection,
or as strong of selection, for older people.
So there are a lot of people, for example,
who end up getting Celiac later in life.
There was some traumatic event, or childbirth,
or just getting older.
Either Celiac or not being able to digest lactose.
They become lactose intolerant later in life.
You start to notice it among folks.
My grandmother developed Celiac late in life.
And it's possible that for some of these more novel foods,
we're better adapted to them when
we're young and less adapted to them when we're older.
So it may become more important to eat
more of a paleolithic diet the older you get.
Some of that is hypothesis.
AUDIENCE: Can I jump in on that just really quickly, sorry.
AUDIENCE: Well let-- OK.
AUDIENCE: Just because it's a very tangible thing.
[INAUDIBLE] a lot of money into keeping
Googlers healthy, right?
JOHN DURANT: Right.
Like free M&Ms and stuff like that?
AUDIENCE: They've reduced those.
AUDIENCE: And we get massages, and adjustable tables and gyms
and that sort of stuff.
And we have a lot of people that started around age, I
don't know, 20, 25 here.
And then as they continue working here,
they get out of shape, but they think
that's the natural course of life basically.
So what would you tell Google as a company to say, hey, look,
your people just don't have to get sick and fat, right?
[LAUGHTER]
JOHN DURANT: That's right.
Well, you could start to model workplaces
on little hunter gatherer tribes.
Less clothing and things like.
When you look at traditional people, indigenous folks,
living in traditional ways, they have health problems
of their own-- infant mortality, things
like that-- but they tend to live into their 60s, 70s,
and even the 80s in some cases in robust health.
The 70-year-olds, they're not bed-ridden with arthritis
and have Alzheimer's.
There like carrying pails of water into their 70s
and hiking up hills and things like that.
And if you were a hunter gatherer,
you had to, at a minimum, be able to move with your tribe
whenever it migrated.
And so it gives you a new sense of what's normal.
What I like about the way that Google thinks about health
is really thinking about the habitat.
Saying OK, your habitat has a big influence on whether you
eat something or don't.
If we put a cover on it and make it less visible,
fewer people eat the candy.
I think that's one of the changes that happened here.
And what's good about re-engineering your habitat
is it doesn't require as much willpower and discipline.
So many people, when they get into dieting,
they think they're changing themselves.
Like I have to change myself.
And I have to become a better person.
And I'm going to do this through willpower and discipline.
And that's part of the reason why everybody fails at it.
Because you can't-- nobody is perfectly disciplined over
a long period of time.
You have to find ways of using discipline
in a short period of time to change your habitat
so that it makes it easy to be healthy
even when you're not disciplined.
Or the way that you lead your life, the food you eat
and how you move, it has to be meaningful to you in some way.
Calories are not meaningful to people.
Most people are not motivated by calories.
Going to hunt a wild animal to bring back a lot of meat
to try to impress the girl in the tribe that you like,
that motivated people.
So you have to think about ways to either change your habitat
or make a healthy lifestyle meaningful to people
so that's it doesn't require discipline.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] when you said
there was a lot of danger in doing agricultural industrial.
And I'm asking but now I'm five days in [INAUDIBLE] all
the things that can happen if you make
a switch from the Information Age,
where I've been eating processed foods, breads,
but then I just stop.
Right?
And I just stop and start eating meant
and vegetables and some fruits.
And are there dangers going the other way?
Like, I read [INAUDIBLE] so there's obviously
a lot of fear factors, but like how real are they
for doing an abrupt change in diet?
JOHN DURANT: One thing people will
notice with abrupt changes is particularly around sugar.
People eat a lot of sugar today.
And if you eat a lot of sugar, and then you cut it out
of your diet, you're basically going
through withdrawal of a drug.
And it's not pleasant.
Lightheadedness, shaky hands, inability
to concentrate, anxiety.
So that can be difficult.
Unless somebody has some sort of specific, severe health issue,
I do tend to think that trying to go more or less whole hog,
for a short period of time, is the best way to do it.
And you just got a monitor how you feel.
You'll see better results.
Or you'll have a better validation
of whatever results you get.
And you can harness that period of discipline.
A lot of people can be disciplined
for a week or two weeks.
Few people can just be disciplined for two years.
So rather than trying to go sort of 5p% for a long period
of time, just going 100%.
Other risks-- with diet I don't think there are as many risks.
With exercise, yeah.
If people just like immediately jump into a hard CrossFit
workout without learning Olympic lifts,
you can injure your back.
But for most people, sugar is the biggest immediate obstacle.
AUDIENCE: So I'm vegan.
And I actually agree a lot with the paleo mindset.
I think there's a lot more in common than--
JOHN DURANT: I agree.
AUDIENCE: --as far as focusing on whole foods, et cetera.
And I think it gets overblown in the media how much meat you
do have to eat.
I think too much is bad.
I don't think necessarily [INAUDIBLE]
the only way to do things.
So I was just curious, kind of, I
guess you thoughts on diet, maybe your day-to-day diet.
JOHN DURANT: Well let me talk about the vegan/ paleo thing
for a second.
In the press, it's often portrayed as polar opposites.
I do tend to think of paleo and vegan as more like yin yang.
I have no problem with people eating however
they want to eat.
And I respect vegans and vegetarians
a lot for being conscious eaters.
Where it does grate on me a little bit is if people then
turn around and say, this is an optimal human diet.
That's where I become a bit more combative and disagree.
And here's the thing.
Any dietary approach-- Atkins, vegan, paleo,
whatever-- that gets people to eat less industrial food,
is going to work to some extent.
Less refined sugar, refined flour, high fructose corn
syrup.
Any approach that gets people to reduce that
will have some success at least for a time.
And then, I have much more in common with how vegans
eat than probably the average Western diet.
What was the last piece?
How do I eat on a daily basis?
AUDIENCE: Yeah what's your day-to-day?
JOHN DURANT: I often don't eat breakfast.
I don't wake up terribly hungry.
Sometimes, if I do have breakfast, I'll have some eggs
and spinach.
Or I'll have a bowl of heavy cream, because I
eat some dairy, and a sliced up banana, which is delicious.
Lunch-- sushi.
I don't worry about a little bit of white rice or anything
like that.
Sushi, sashimi, Mongolian barbecue, meat and vegetables,
a Cobb salad, something like that.
And then dinner would be a piece of fish, sweet potato,
and a side salad.
I mean, it's not that radical.
But it is radical over an extended period
when you realize that gluten and wheat and corn
are in everything in the grocery store
except for a few things around the outside.
AUDIENCE: Question from VC behind you.
JOHN DURANT: Hi.
AUDIENCE: So you mentioned white rice.
And I eat white rice myself because I think it
doesn't-- at least it doesn't feel as bad wheat does.
So, and I also read some studies saying that among grains,
you might actually be better off eating
white rice than brown rice even, in moderation.
So thought on that.
And I'm going to throw in a second question, which
is you mentioned metabolism as the damage analogy for aging.
So the simple logic is that the faster your metabolism
the faster you're going to age.
But then again, I find, for instance,
if I sleep on a cold, hard bed, I feel better in the morning,
and logically I feel like that's the better things to be doing.
But then part of me is thinking, isn't my body
trying to burn more fuel to stay warm during the night.
So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.
JOHN DURANT: Well, on rice first.
In my mental model of grains, wheat is the worst.
And rice is the least worst, or the best.
Let me give you the 10,000 foot view seeds.
And when I say seeds, I mean the reproductive organ
of the plant, and I'm including grains, legumes, nuts,
and seeds.
Seeds, as the reproductive organ of the plants,
have many nutrients in them because it's
to feed the next generation.
They also have defense mechanisms.
Sometimes a shell, which is nature's way of saying
stay out.
Or chemicals, toxins or naturally occurring pesticides.
Plants can't run away from predators.
They are not mobile.
So they have to use other mechanisms
to defend their offspring or the reproductive interests.
And they usually do that by making
seeds or the entire plant toxic in some way to insects
or herbivores.
They might be OK-- I'm giving them
agency metaphorically-- they might be OK with an herbivore
coming along, eating their seeds,
and then not digesting them and then letting
them come out in their feces.
But they're still then covered in a casing
to prevent them from being digested.
Wild almonds contain cyanide in them.
Apple seeds also have cyanide in them.
Many fruit pits are poisonous.
And every year some kid will eat like a peach pit
or a nectarine pit and have to go to poison control or die.
You basically go through seeds, and it's
a huge list of things that can irritate the stomach
or the reproductive system of the animals
that are consuming them.
Sheep in New Zealand and Australia,
you have to keep them away from certain pasture legumes
because if the ewes eat too many of them,
they have higher rates of miscarriage or become fertile,
which is an adaptation.
That's exactly what the legumes "want"
to do because any ewes that have a taste for them
don't have offspring.
So there's a general concern with eating diets
that are high in seeds, particularly the same seed
over and over, because they can cause a lot of health problems
in concentrated qualities.
And if they're not prepared in traditional ways.
Traditional ways of preparing nuts and seeds and grains
and legumes-- soaking, fermenting, baking, sprouting.
All of these traditional methods of preparing seeds
were ways of deactivating some of these problematic toxins
in them.
And we've sort of forgotten that.
And now we eat tons of wheat, corn, and soy prepared
in untraditional ways.
And so that's the main reason for being skeptical of them
from the outset.
White rice is basically carbohydrate.
If you want more carbohydrate in your diet, eat it.
If you want less, don't.
I like the texture of it.
So I eat it.
And I can handle the carbohydrate.
What was your other question?
AUDIENCE: It was about whether increasing metabolism
by wearing less clothing or exposure to the cold
is a good thing because then--
JOHN DURANT: Yeah I'm not sure I have
a very good answer to that question.
I don't know how much trying to slow down your metabolism
is feasible, and how much it might or might not
add to your longevity at the end of your life.
Is it an extra 20 days when you're 87 years old?
I don't know.
So I would do whatever.
If you get better sleep on a harder surface when
it's chilly, then I would do that.
And yeah--
AUDIENCE: I'm personally really glad I do paleo,
and I feel fortunate that I can, because there's
a farmer's market that I can go to.
And I have the wherewithal to buy expensive grass-fed beef.
And I live in a country that gives me an internet where
I can go and I read your blog and listen to podcasts.
Is there a future for paleo in Africa or in Southeast Asia?
Is there a future where billions of people around the world
are eating paleo?
And can be sustain that?
Is it just sort of like a fad that upper middle-class
people in America are going to embrace?
JOHN DURANT: Well, we can learn a lot about human health even
if everybody in the world does not adopt this diet,
which they won't.
Even if everybody had the capability to do so, everybody
wouldn't.
So first, the benefit of some people
experimenting with this is simply
learning about human metabolism and what makes folks healthy.
Right now, the early years of paleo-- people
are painting with broad strokes.
Grains are bad.
Well maybe it will turn out, over years of research,
that gluten grains are the worst.
But if you're dealing with non-gluten grains, quinoa
or something else, many people can digest that better.
Or maybe we'll learn that you just
need to introduce certain types of gut bacteria
into people's stomachs and then they
have fewer negative reactions to a particular grain.
So, there may be changes in how we think about paleo,
or how we think about different grains that
make it more accessible to people.
Or make aspect of paleo irrelevant.
You mentioned the insect company-- or the cricket
protein bar company that I'm helping out.
Insects are eaten as a nutritious and inexpensive
source of protein all over the world,
except for the Western world.
But even crickets, grasshoppers, and locusts
are fine under kosher and halal rules.
And there's really no good reason
other than a sense of discuss and tradition,
recent tradition, to avoid eating insects and taking
advantage of them.
The amino acid profile of insects
is beautiful, most of them.
You don't have to sort of mix and match protein sources.
They require fewer resources to raise, water in particular.
And for ethical reasons, they have a less well-developed
neurological system, and are adapted
to living in very close quarters.
So that's an area where paleo could actually,
in some respects, make healthy eating more sustainable.
But is everybody going to live off of grass-fed beef?
No.
But you have a small group of people making innovations,
and it also incentivizes the big players,
the big agricultural companies to start
to make changes to how they do things.
And they can make small tweaks in their supply chain,
or in their treatment of animals,
that can have a huge difference on the environment
and on ethical issues, simply because they're now responding
to a 2% of the market, 3% of the market, 5% of the market that
is profitable and growing that they want to get in on.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
JOHN DURANT: All right.
AUDIENCE: When you look at the line from paleo up,
the idea agricultural societies fare
better because they made cheaper [INAUDIBLE].
That's why.
It's an evolutionary process also--
JOHN DURANT: Right.
It's growth.
AUDIENCE: --but And so I guess like,
do you think the cricket thing is like-- I mean,
those calories are going to be more expensive.
It's more expensive than simple grains.
So it's less efficient, more expensive calories.
Is that the right thing to do when
throughout all these periods, and we're thinking about,
how are we going to get enough calories to feed everybody?
Like throughout these times, there
have been a hundred people who've
been like, oh my god, we're not going
to be able to feed all these people.
And they come up with some new way
of breeding some kind of corn, and then OK cool--
JOHN DURANT: Right, well right now, there
are enough calories to feed every one,
and the main impediments are institutions and infrastructure
and growth in poor parts of the world.
But if more people continue to eat meat,
that does take more resources and things like that.
The problem with corn or soy or any
of these grains as protein sources
is they're not very good protein sources.
They're incomplete.
And eaten in large quantities, they
can cause health problems too.
So I don't know all the details of the ins and outs
of the resources required to grow insects.
We're sort of exploring that right now.
But it's worth exploring, I think.
AUDIENCE: What's [INAUDIBLE] hacking
that this is predicated on.
I was wondering-- let's say my real estate
for my grandchildren [INAUDIBLE].
What about [INAUDIBLE] cheaper diet with fast food?
Then you move back towards an expensive diet
of very good quality food.
Wouldn't we want, a million years from now,
everyone to just get refined sugar
and be perfectly fine with it, and go on with their lives,
rather than everybody going back to--
JOHN DURANT: Well that will never happen.
AUDIENCE: How do you know?
JOHN DURANT: Well, I mean--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]?
JOHN DURANT: --evolution takes time.
It takes many, many generations.
AUDIENCE: I'm just wondering about the direction.
Why not move--
AUDIENCE: Bioengineering is faster.
AUDIENCE: Yeah, why are we not moving
in that direction [INAUDIBLE] perfectly fine [INAUDIBLE]?
JOHN DURANT: Well this is an area where I'm probably
in a little bit of tension with some of the folks here,
or the tech world.
Throughout history, you have engineers
who are very hubristic and think that they can centrally plan
and design things better than nature does,
or a better than a decentralized process does.
And many times they can, then occasionally they
fail magnificently.
So yes, we can produce more calories with wheat and corn,
and feed more people.
And we can adapt to that somewhat over periods
of generations.
But it also exposes you to famine.
You basically didn't have famine until we became heavily
dependent on a few cereal grains, and in a sense,
we put all our eggs in one basket.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] famine throughout
recorded and unrecorded history and various cultures going back
tens of thousands of years.
JOHN DURANT: Hunter gatherers tend
to have more diverse diets than other people.
And they're nomadic.
So when you have a more diverse portfolio,
you're less likely-- you're less dependent on any one food
source.
If it fails, it's not catastrophic.
And if you're nomadic, you can quickly up and move.
So it's well established among anthropologists
that-- it's not to say there weren't periods
when people ran out of food or went hungry.
But famine shot up when we started
betting on a few cereal grains.
And if you didn't get enough rain,
or if you didn't store enough grain, boom, you're done.
You're wiped out.
AUDIENCE: There was a lot more people to starve. [INAUDIBLE]
population controlled through agriculture.
But the Inuit, for example, starved regularly up
until they integrated into the modern day,
into the rest of the world.
JOHN DURANT: I don't know details on that.
But I bet I would disagree with you on that.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
JOHN DURANT: Like soylent, like than just raised--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] eventually the human organism
is going to adapt to it.
JOHN DURANT: No, no, no, no, no.
So you only get adaptation if people--
if there's differential reproductive success--
if some people are having more babies and other people aren't.
So you would need, over a very long period of time,
you would need the people that are thriving best
on heavily industrial diets to also have the most children.
I mean, maybe the Chinese are willing to do an experiment
like that.
But not in like a democratic society.
And it requires-- even lactose tolerance is only in about 30--
it's one gene that had enormous benefits.
One gene, enormous benefits, and it only moved to about 35%
of the population in a 6,000 or 7,000 year period.
That is like the most rapid example
that we have of something with one
gene that needs to be flipped, enormous benefits and even
over 7,000 years or whatever.
It's 35% of global population.
So it's not feasible to think that we're
going to change through--
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
JOHN DURANT: Well there are other mechanisms.
Bill Gates has been investing in artificial meat sources.
There are bioengineers working on-- there
may be ways of engineering bacteria,
or harnessing bacteria to basically digest inedible food
sources for us, and then we can digest the output.
So I think that's where the innovation will happen, not so
much in whether we change our own genome
or anything like that.
AUDIENCE: So we're actually overtime now.
Can you stick around a little bit?
JOHN DURANT: Sure, yeah, I can hang.
AUDIENCE: He'll stick around if you have any extra questions.
Thanks for coming, John.
The book's in the back. $10.00 subsidized by Google.
Check it out.
It's an awesome book.
Thanks John.
JOHN DURANT: Cool.
Thank you.