PNTV: Go Wild by John Ratey and Richard Manning (#222)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes tv. Today, another great book, Go Wild. Go Wild by John Ratey and Richard Manning. Subtitle Free your body and MIND FROM the afflictions of civilization. Go wild. Great book. John Ratey wrote Spark. He is one of the world's leading experts on the science of nutrition. Fantastic book. We have an episode on that. I'll put a link to it below. Richard Manning wrote a great book called against the Grain. I think it's great. Haven't read it yet. Looks great. Flip through it. We'll do one of these episodes on that soon. But the basic idea here is that we have become tame, Humans have. And we need to go back to how we were when we were wild, when we were untamed. Anthropologists call that version of us hunter gatherers. But they say, let's just be direct. We were wild, we were wild animals at that point. What did we do? And the introduction of agriculture, which led to the introduction of civilization, has done a lot of amazing things. Obviously, we wouldn't be connecting right now if it wasn't for civilization and all the technology advances that came via agriculture. But it also took us out of our natural rhythms, out of our wild natural environments. And that if we don't pay attention to it, has the potential to make us sick and unhappy. So, philosopher's note, bunch of big ideas. Five of my favorite big ideas here on how we can go wild. First one is, and they walk through a number of different aspects of what life was like when we were wild. And with practical ideas and studies and all this stuff about how we can optimize. The first thing they look at is wild nutrition. And they say that the Industrial Revolution, the information age, pale in comparison to the agricultural revolution. The introduction of agriculture and producing essentially wheat and grains is what led to civilization, was the greatest move, most impactful event in the 2 million years of hominid history. And that affected our nutrition. So if you look at what we did back in the wild days, pre 10,000 years ago, we did not eat dense carbohydrates. They advocate a low carb approach, which I know some of you are excited about, others are not. But they emphasize the fact that no matter what you do, look at your sugar intake and look at your refined flour intake, that just doesn't make any sense. And they throw some stats out there. So in 1700, we consumed about five pounds. These are US numbers, right? Five pounds of sugar. Before that it was less and less and less and less. Today we consume over 150 pounds of sugar. Now, you don't need to think too hard to wonder, huh? I wonder if that's good. We consumed basically no sugar back in the day, artificial sugar, right? And now we have £150 of that a year. I wonder if that might be affecting us. And then in the note, I talk about the fact that you can look at the same numbers on wheat. So wheat back in the day, pre agricultural introduction, right, we're actually cultivating wheat back in the day, 10,000, 20,000 plus years ago, we had miniscule amounts of what they called Einkorn wheat. Right? Now today we have a very different version than what our ancestors ate. And we eat 133 pounds of it. So we went from close to zero to 133 pounds of wheat and 150 pounds of sugar. Now, you don't need to think very hard about that to kind of scratch your head and say, I wonder if that might be contributing to our current obesity epidemic and all of the other lifestyle diseases that we suffer from. Another point we make in the note is the fact that when you look at isolated cultures that don't have Western disease, and then you look at when Western disease comes, what changed? One of the first things that changes is in their nutrition. And these two things, sugar and flour. Sugar and flour are the easiest things to transport around the world, are the easiest things to introduce into an isolated population that has never had Western diseases. And suddenly those Western diseases come all part of a longer conversation. But that's our first big idea we wild nutrition. The second big idea. If you want to go wild, you need to move like we did back in the day. They talk about the fact that the American Psychiatric association, the APA, American Psychiatric association, in 2010 finally approved exercise as a viable treatment for depression. The research is unequivocal. Exercise is as effective as Zoloft in reducing depression. Unfortunately, exercise doesn't have quite the same marketing budget as pharmaceutical companies, but it's as effective. That's amazing. And they jokingly say that the APA has caught up to Hippocrates, who a couple thousand years ago said, if you're in a bad mood, go for a walk. If you're still in a bad mood, walk some more. And I reference John Robbins, who wrote a great book called healthy at 100, who talks about Vilcabamba. In Vilcabamba, when they have the blue mood, right, or a bad mood or whatever, they walk to go see a friend, they walk long distances and they jokingly say, that everyone has two doctors, your right leg and your left leg. So if you're in a bad mood, go out and walk. As Rady says in his book Spark Again, Fantastic book. I'll put a link to that. Great stuff on the science of exercise. He says book moving your body is like giving yourself a little bit of Ritalin to focus your attention and a little bit of Prozac to boost your mood. It's a good thing. Gets those neurotransmitters moving and optimized and all that good stuff. Third big idea. Another thing that we did when we were wild was we slept a lot more than we do now. In the episodes I have on rest and sleep, we talked about the similar stats. But rather than increasing our sleep, we've decreased it. Before Thomas Edison rolled out the light bulb in the 19th century, 1879 or whatever it was, the average American on the average night got 10 hours of sleep and that's now gone down to eight to seven. Wherever it is now, I think it's less than seven. Something crazy like that. That's maladaptive. We have circadian rhythms 24 hour cycles that the wild version of us were attuned to. We no longer are. They've done research, a ton of research on the effects of violating those circadian rhythms. One reference that I have in the note is the fact that they did work with nurses, research with nurses who worked a night shift who had a higher rate of breast cancer than those who didn't. When we violate our circadian rhythms, we're not putting ourselves in an optimal position. And they say, unequivocally referencing a sleep expert, that everybody needs eight hours of sleep every 24 hours. Everybody, period. You may think you can get by on west, but it's just sub optimal. And again, we all have our own experimentation, etc, etc. But if you aren't getting adequate sleep and you need your espresso shots in the morning to get going or the alarm goes off and you're feeling groggy, get more sleep. They say it's not complicated. If you're feeling sleepy, sleep. And I talk about an idea that we use in our family digital sunset where when the sun goes down, our electronics go off. And Rady and Manning talk about the fact that what's going on and why staying up late is so bad for us is we're being exposed to unnatural light. Our little gland in our head, our pineal gland is getting all jacked up in terms of when it's releasing and how it's releasing. Melatonin which helps us align with our circadian rhythms so it's tied to the sun. And if you are exposed to light that mimics the sun, then you're going to affect your melatonin in unhealthy ways. And they say, look, it only takes a hundred watt bulb. And when you look at these light emitting diodes, the LEDs in iPhones and TVs with all the blue light coming at us, completely disrupts our melatonin, gets our mind all hopped up, disrupts the melatonin and hurts our chances of having a good night of sleep. So what we do in our household is we turn off the electronics now if you don't want to do that. And we use these blue light absent lights, right, that don't have blue light in them. It's just like an Ambery Reddy kind of color. I'll put a link to that in the info as well. I have a link in the note. Then we also Alexandra, if she reads a little bit later on her Kindle will or her iPhone, she'll wear these goofy glasses, basically construction glasses that block blue light to help the melatonin. So think about your digital sunset. Get a proper amount of sleep if you want to go wild. That's our third big idea. Fourth big idea. Find your lever. Find your lever. So they talk about the fact that there's a lever that you can pull a key habit that you can change that if you changed that habit would have a ripple effect in the rest of your life. Charles Duhigg in the Power of Habit describes that as a keystone habit, a keystone habit. A keystone is what locks in an arch. So if you have an arch, there's a keystone that locks in all the other lock all the other stones in the arch and provides strength. You want to identify what your keystone habit is. They suggest either exercise or nutrition tend to have really powerful effects. So figure out what your lever is, what the most powerful habit is you can integrate into your life that would have the most beneficial effects in your life and go out and crush it. I'll put a link to the habits101 video so you can review that in terms of how to create great habits. But think about it. What's the number one thing you could do that would have the most positive benefit in your life? I come back to this question again and again in my own life and in these episodes for a reason. That's a huge way to create focused energy and pull levers to help us optimize. 5th Big Idea Exploring potential. So they make the point that you don't want to approach this whole process of optimizing our lives like you're playing whack a mole and just getting fatigued and just trying to keep up, or you're drudging through checking boxes of oh, okay, well, I ate this way. I exercised, I meditated. We don't want that attitude. We want to explore potential. We want to experiment. We want to iteratively test different things in our lives and get excited about it. I like to imagine putting on a lab coat and goggles and being an experimenter and see how you feel. If you reduce your sugar and your flour intake for a week or two, how do you feel? That's a test. You're exploring your potential. If you feel a little bit better after you exercise consistently for a week, well, what else could you do in your life to feel a little bit better and approach it with that level of enthusiasm and vitality and excitement, not like you have to go check things off your list. So there you go. Let's go wild. Explore our potential. Pull the levers of the key habits. Get your sleep. Think about Digital Sunset or how you can modify certain behaviors to get more sleep. If you're in a bad mood, move. If you're still in a bad mood, move some more. Remember, exercise is as effective as Zoloft in reducing your depression. But you got to do it. And then wild. Nutrition doesn't make any sense to consume the levels of sugar that we consume. Nutritionists disagree about a lot of things. They're not going to disagree about that. Reduce that. Reduce all your refined foods. Look at your flour intake and see what you can do to cut that back and have fun. Going wild. Hope you enjoyed. The book, was a great, fun read and I look forward to sharing more with you soon. Have another awesome day. See you.