PNTV: The Paleo Manifesto by John Durant (#240)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome Back to Philosopher's NodeTV. Today, another great book, the Paleo Manifesto. The Paleo Manifesto by John Durant. Subtitle Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health. Now, if you had told me about this book, it was only written a couple years ago, but if you told me about this several years ago, three to maybe 13 years ago, when I was vegan and pretty much vegan Jellicoe, I would have laughed. Not interested. Right? Would make no sense. I've since opened up, adopted more of a Paleo approach, and I'm excited to share some of my favorite big ideas from the book. I honor and respect everyone's approach. I think we need to experiment and figure out what makes sense for us. And I also think the basic underlying idea of this book, that we can learn a ton of from the millions of years of evolution that preceded the agricultural revolution, is a really valid point. So whatever your approach, I hope you enjoy and I look forward to sharing more. Philosopher's Note. Bunch of big ideas. Here are five of my favorite ones. Let's start with Paleolithic. What does that mean? Paleolithic literally means old stone. Paleolithic, Old stone. Kind of cool. Now he breaks the book down. He starts by talking about our origins and says we went through five different ages. There's the Animal Age, the Paleolithic Age, the Agricultural Age, and then we have the Industrial Age, and then we have the Information Age. Right? So really quickly, the animal age started 530 million years ago. If we want to understand how to live optimally today, the idea here is we want to understand each of these ages. We got to integrate wisdom from each of these phases of our evolution. Animal age 530 million years ago. How they know that the footprints on some sand dune somewhere were 530 million years old? Whole other discussion that blows me away. Paleo began 2.6 million years ago. Paleolithic, old stone. Why does that matter? Because that's the first time we discovered stones that had clearly been crafted by our ancient hominin ancestors. All right, 2.6 million years ago in the Serengeti. And that lasted until 10,000 years ago, when the agricultural revolution began, right? 8,000 BC roughly when we started integrating more cereal grains into our lives. Then the Industrial Revolution began in about 1769, and that lasted until about 1946, when we entered the Information Age. Again, basic idea here is it would be wise to understand how each of these ages influenced who we are today. Take the best from these and see some of the drawbacks in all of them. And go from there. First, big idea. Second big idea. Poisons. We'll go into some practical stuff now. Poisons exist in nature. Fountains of youth do not. Durant makes the brilliant point that if you go out into nature and you get lost, you could eat something that kills you immediately, but you're not going to find a food or a drink that could significantly and sustainably make you super healthy. You're just not going to find that. You can find poisons, but you're not going to find a fountain of youth. And he makes the point that almost all dietary approaches will initially work for the primary reason that they're focused on removing common poisons. They're removing things like sugar and refined flour and vegetable oils and stuff like that. So if you haven't removed those things from your diet, think about getting rid of them. Sugar has no place in our diet. If you go back here, we weren't consuming any sugar even in the 18th century. The modern or the average American in the 18th century had about five pounds of sugar a year. Fast forward to today, and that average American has 150 pounds of sugar. That makes no sense. It's warping you in ways that are bigger than you may imagine, right? So if all you did was get rid of your sugary soda, you'd go a long way in boosting your health. Remove the poisons first. You can't make up for eating three pieces of pizza by having a side of broccoli. It's not going to do it. You got to remove the poison. And this applies to every aspect of our lives. It's not just nutrition. If you have habits in your life that are toxic, that are poisonous, it doesn't matter. All the nice things you do if you're meditating, but you're doing all these other things, you know, just aren't serving you. Quit doing these things. Get rid of the poison. That will have the biggest impact on your life. Poisons, get rid of them. Third idea here is to reduce industrial foods. So when we think about the Industrial Revolution, obviously a ton of amazing things happened. Cheez Whiz wasn't one of the great things, right? So when you look at foods that you want to remove from your diet that are poisonous, start with industrial foods. If you can't pronounce the names in the ingredients, you probably don't want to put that in your body. That's an industrial food. And John makes a distinction between processed foods and industrial foods. So we've been processing food for a long time. We started cooking a million Years ago. Well, that's a form of processing. Before that, we would tenderize meat by pounding it. That's processing. So it's not processing that's the issue so much as it is the industrial nature of food. So basic rules of thumb. Don't eat things that have ingredients that you can't pronounce. Don't eat things that never spoil. Think about that. A foodstuff or a quasi foodstuff that never goes bad. That's insane. That's industrial food. And don't eat anything that's made in a factory or on a factory farm. Those are some basic ideas to reduce industrial food. Fourth, big idea. Meaning matters. So when we want to adopt a new lifestyle, we've got to make it meaningful. And we talked about this in Michelle Seeger's great book, no Sweat, no Sweat. She's one of the leading researchers on the science of healthy behaviors. We have a great episode on that in an interview that I'll put below. And she basically talks about a research study that she did with her colleagues. I believe she did this with her colleagues. The research went like this. She asked people, what's your motivation for exercising, for taking care of yourself, right? And 75% of them said something abstract, like they wanted to get healthier in general or they wanted to live longer goal. 75% of the people had an abstract goal. 25% of the people said, because I want to feel good, I want to feel centered, a very immediate goal, right? So abstract goal. 75% of the people, right, I want to live longer, I want to feel better in general. And then the 25% had a very concrete, immediately gratified desire to feel better right now, right? To feel centered. Well, the group that wanted to feel better now exercised 32% more than the group that had abstract goals. So. So what that means is we want to make your meaning immediate. You need to make the connection between when you eat Cheez Whiz, you don't feel great the next day. If you're eating a ton of sugar, you're not going to feel great. What would it feel like for you if you ate well for a week or two or three? If you haven't done that, try it out. If you have, you know what it feels like, you feel way better. What does it feel like for you when you get a great night of sleep? My hunch is you feel great the next day, you feel considerably better. When you do that one or two or three days in a row, you need to connect that, that there's an immediate benefit. After you work out, how do you feel? I feel better every single time after I work out. No matter how good I was feeling before, after I work out, I just feel even more alive. That's my motivation to work out. It's not to achieve some abstract goal long term, per se. Of course, that's nice, but that's not my focus. My focus is I want to have a great day today. And I know that working out is going to help me create more powerfully every single time. Before I do these, I do my workout. That puts me in a mental state that I know is optimal. I know I'm going to feel great. It makes it easy to work out because the benefit is immediate. So make your meaning matter and make it immediate. That's our fourth big idea. Fifth big idea. Alarm clocks. So John talks about a lot of different facets of what we can learn from the Paleolithic era. One of them is our circadian rhythms. Obviously, back in the day, we weren't staying up looking at our iPhone in a cave. We went to bed shortly after the sun went down. We got up shortly before the sun came up. Right. And as I've said a number of times in different episodes, right before Edison launched his commercially viable light bulb in the 19th century, the average American slept 10 hours a night. In the 20th century, that went down to eight hours and then it went down to around seven hours in the last 15 years. That's crazy. 30% reduction in that brief of a time. But anyway, he talks about alarms and he says, look, we're getting fancier and fancier alarms to help us wake up more conveniently by matching it to our sleep cycles or a vibrating band that will wake us up and not wake our partner up. He says all those are nice, but we need to put more attention on getting to bed, not waking up, but getting to bed. If you want to have a great night of sleep, you need to go to bed at a good time. And he says you shouldn't think so much about setting your alarm for when you want to get up, as you should for when you want to go to bed. So figure out when you want to go to bed so you can get up feeling refreshed and then set your alarm clock for an hour before that time at night. Your PM rituals. I talk a lot about digital sunset. I turn everything off when the sun goes down. Now I'm a little out there. Some of you may want to be up a little bit later. That's great. But identify the time you want to go to bed and set your alarm for an hour before so you can turn everything off, computer off, iPhone off, lights that are unnecessary are dimmed or turned off. And you're going through your PM ritual so that you can unwind and have a great night of sleep and get up without an alarm clock ideally. And you can easily do that over the long run as you dial it in. So that's the alarm clock idea again. Set meaning for that associate going to bed early with feeling great the next day. That's the way you get yourself to do it. Immediate gratification, eat less industrial food, cheese whiz, other stuff that never goes bad. We don't want in our body poisons exist. The fountains of youth. Do not focus on removing poisons from your life even more than adding things that will benefit you. And then we had old stone, Paleolithic, we had our five ages, the animal age, Paleo, agricultural, industrial information, each of which informs us in different ways. And we can learn a lot from this big chunk of time, 2.6 million years to 10,000 years ago. That's a long time. I didn't go off on cereal grains and all that stuff. Check out the book for more. We talked about that in other notes as well, and we'll talk about that more going forward. But there you go. Super quick look. I hope you enjoyed and I look forward to sharing more soon. Have another awesome day. See you. Hi, this is Brian. I hope you enjoyed that PNTV episode. 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