Art De Vany on Aging, Training and Evolution (Interview)

This podcast is proudly brought to you by MaximusMark.com and Enterprise Fitness. And of course, you can find other great interviews like this at MaximusMark.com or by searching iTunes Maximus Mark. Hey folks, it's Maximus Mark and welcome to the show that punches you in the face with information, but in a good way. It's Maximus Radio. And today I'm super duper psyched for today's show. It's what I would call a cracker of an episode. We've all heard of the paleonutrition nutrition movement, well, today's guest is one of the kings and original thinkers of the whole Paleo movement. Today's guest is Dr. Art Devaney. Art graduated from Montebello High School in 1955 and signed to play professional baseball for the Hollywood Stars. He was one of the very few pro baseballers at the time to actually lift weights, a now universal practice, which led scouts to give him the nickname of Superman. Well, that nickname actually stuck, and recently the Times of London called Art Superman's Slightly Fitter Granddad. What an awesome nickname. Dr. Art Devaney went to earn his PhD in economics at UCLA and to become a very respected scientist who's known all over the world for his articles and books. He's listed in the Who's Who America and the Who's Who in the World and is the author of the acclaimed Hollywood Economics. A lifelong student of metabolism and fitness, Art has lived as a paleoathlete for some 30 years and is called the patriarch of the paleo movement. He has blogged on the topic since 1990 and continues to blog on the subject on his Evolutionary Fitness blog at www.arthurdovanyi.com. He's the author of The New Evolution Diet, which you can purchase from Amazon. It is my absolute pleasure that I welcome today Dr. Art Dovanyi to the show. Welcome, Art. How are you going today?

It's going very well, Mark, and thanks for having me on the show.

Absolute pleasure to have you on. The first question that we have, it's kind of the question that we always start with. How did you become the patriarch of the paleo movement? I mean, you were an economics professor, you know, through your, I guess, university life. How'd you really get into the paleo lifestyle?

Well, you become a patriarch by merely being old. But actually, I was into health and fitness far before I became an economist. I was into weightlifting by the age of 14. Started with a 90-pound weight set in my parents' garage and did a little Olympic lifting and competitive, one competitive bodybuilding contest that the owner of my gym pushed me into. And then of course I decided I didn't like professional. I did sign to play professional baseball, but I didn't care that much for that. Life. I really was a professor even then. In fact, they called me not only Superman in those days because I was the only guy who lifted weights in professional sports, perhaps, to my knowledge at least, and I had horn-rimmed glasses and looked rather like Clark Kent.

All righty.

The old Superman shows. But the thing is, economics and metabolism are essentially the same thing. They're both about allocating scarce resources to competing ends, and in the case of human metabolism, every cell is an independent agent that's only cooperating to sustain life through some kind of complex feedback loops, and the dance of life is one that's completely controlled by decentralized processes, with each cell trying to maximize its own nutrients. and its own DNA. Somehow or other, that whole complicated process is sustained as life, very far from equilibrium, as Prigogine said. And economics is exactly the study of that kind of process, decentralized allocation processes. So actually, my economics equipped me extremely well to understand. But the real turn was when my my young son, my 2-year-old son developed Type 1 diabetes when I was at the University of Chicago for a visit. Now Type 1 diabetes, of course, is an interruption of the insulin secretion process from the pancreas, and I— as soon as that happened, I went right down to the University of Chicago library and just bought all the books I could find on metabolism and diabetes and and so forth. So I plunged into the study of metabolism out of necessity many, many years ago.

Right, okay. So I guess, can you just kind of set up the frame for the listeners? Is, can you tell me how we actually lived 40,000 years ago? Now I know that you make more reference to 40,000 years ago opposed to 10,000 years ago before rational industrial farming. You just kind of want to set it up and get the scene in the listeners' minds.

Well, yes. Remember we— well, I don't know if you know this, but we went through, humans went through a genetic bottleneck about 70,000 years ago. That was when there was this massive eruption. We were in the depths of the Ice Age and there was a massive eruption of a volcano in Indonesia, Philippines actually, and the temperatures plunged. About 70,000 years ago, and from that period until about 40 or 50, really about 30,000 years ago, there were just a handful of humans even alive. It's estimated that there may have been from 2,000 to 8,000 humans left. They were living through not only the depths of the Ice Age, but through essentially a volcanic winter on top of that. During that time, this is a period of time when modern humans emerged. They actually emerged maybe 70,000 years ago, right during that critical period. 40,000 years ago, we start to see truly complex human thought. It's left in the art and the symbolism that we see. 30-some-odd thousand years ago, we see the magnificent cave art that that still really can't be topped. You see jewelry and human decoration and burial and social organization. It's clear that something happened to allow humans to survive during that almost nuclear winter, if I can use a bad phrase for it. It had to be the use of symbolism and cooperation. In addition to that, the brain developed prodigiously right around that time, beginning about 100,000 years ago, but peaking probably 50,000 to 32,000 years ago. The reason for that is we were pushed to the seashores by the intense cold, and foraging along the seashores— By the way, you see evidence of seafood exploitation about 185,000 years ago on the southern tip of Africa. Even before that, you see that in the Rift Valley of Africa where modern humans were born, and all humans were born, and their prototypes, you see exploitation of freshwater streams and lakes. The Rift Valley is full of lakes from the folding of the earth, from the fact that India and Africa are colliding and pulling apart in different places, and so there are a lot of rips and deep valleys there. So we lived on seafood for a very substantial— even crocodile, by the way— for a substantial period of time, and that allowed the polyunsaturated fatty acids that are essential for the construction of the modern, very large, metabolically active human brain. So it's a critical time, plus it's the title of one of my favorite Rock Hill Welsh movies.

Righty, righty. So I've also read other things like different cultures who didn't have as much saturated fat and didn't have the resources in their diets just simply weren't as smart. I remember someone referencing something about the Kenyans. They didn't develop the bow and arrow, and some people have correlated it to the saturated fats in their diets. Can you provide any comments on that one?

[Speaker:DR. GARY JOHNSON] Yes, I think they would have had far fewer fatty acids than people living along seashores, but what did happen was there were many migrations in and out of Africa, as we know now, and the seashore and freshwater sources definitely provided probably about half the calories that humans ate 32,000 years ago. In fact, they know that from looking at the dentition, the teeth and bones of Cro-Magnon humans who were found. They were higher on the nitrogen chain, which means they were eating meat and seafood, even than the wolf. And in fact, they were pure stone cold carnivores when you include, in carnivory, you include the flesh of sea and the freshwater fish. The atlatl, I don't know where that was created, but that was the precursor to the bow and arrow. That was the throwing stick with a dart-like spear that really completely transformed human hunting technology and became the basis for humans killing off many of the megafauna, many of the large animals that couldn't breed fast enough given their size. Relative to the rate at which humans could kill and eat them. But anyway, free fatty acids, a book by Crawford and Marsh, for example, The Evolution of Human Nutrition, I think is something to that effect is the title. I cite it in my book. They do credit the availability of the polyunsaturated fats, particularly the omega-3 and 6 fats, and and others of long-chain fatty acids with the evolution of modern human cognitive ability and brain size. And also cooking coincided with that. Richard Wrangham has written this book on the importance of fire, something like fire is in the title. He's a professor at Harvard, and he credits the development of cooking which allows us to trade stomach tissue for brain tissue. So we develop smaller stomachs, which is metabolically active tissue equivalent to brain. By the way, it turns out that stomach is part of your brain. Yeah. You probably know that, and that's why when you feel it in your gut, you really do. You have brain You've got a lot of brain tissue down there in your gut. Anyway, by making the stomach smaller through the use of cooking, you're basically using the external environment to preprocess food, and so that tissue can be traded for more brain mass up in the cranium. So cooking was a very important feature there in addition to the availability of fresh water and seafoods.

Let me ask you on that. I had a couple of months ago, uh, Jonas von der Plaat and another guy by the name of Josh— I can't pronounce his last name— Trenavalli, I think it is. And we spoke about a lot about raw food. And Jonas particularly has told me that he's lived outdoors for extended periods of time, and, you know, he's definitely in the school of thought that raw food is superior and that, I guess, uh, you know Ancestrally speaking, we, we did eat more raw food, but then there was that point where we developed fire and we started to cook the meat. So I wanted to get your thoughts on, number one, what's your thoughts on raw meats? And then number two, what's your thoughts on raw vegetables?

Okay, well, um, raw meat is a lot harder to process, and I don't think Reingmann would agree that eating raw meat would have been a basis for the development of modern humans. Certainly it was the basis for life among all predators, and humans are way up on the predatory chain from that point of view. But here we are, we live in this modern world, and the modern world is full of pathogens and meat processing. As long as you eat, you know, meats that are grown on free range and are properly cared for, if you can tolerate raw meat, why not eat it? But for example, sashimi and other Japanese raw foods I simply avoid now. I don't trust the oceans and the handling of food in modern restaurants.