Ancestral Health Symposium, Part One

I've just returned from a trip to Los Angeles where I attended an exciting event: The first Ancestral Health Symposium. This was a gathering of experts in the fields relating to evolutionary biology and evolutionary medicine. There were 600 people in attendance from all over the world, including lots of low-carbers. Speakers were scientists, authors, and practitioners in the field, including Loren Cordain, Gary Taubes, Michel Eades, Robb Wolf, Robert Lustig, Mark Sisson, Tom Naughton, and dozens more.

What is Ancestral Health? It is the idea of getting lifestyle inspiration from our prehistoric ancestors -- that in the course of human evolution, the time since then is very short, and the way we eat and live has changed enormously. As keynote speaker Boyd Eaton (one of the leading lights of the Paleo movement) put it, our genes are out of synch with our lives - it's as if we are "displaced in time". Aaron Blaisdell, one of the event organizers, says the event was for people "interested in understanding the relationship between human evolution and human health and disease".

You may have heard of the Paleo or Primal Diet - this type of eating is part of this movement, which is just exploding right now, and there is a lot of overlap between their ideas and low-carb living. We can definitely learn from each other.

The main idea is there are many foods that we, as a species, just haven't been eating all that long, so Paleo folks exclude them from their diets. The main items would be grains, industrial seed oils (corn oil, safflower oil, and the like, which happen to chock full of omega-6 fatty acids), legumes including peanuts, and dairy (some eat some dairy). And, of course, any processed foods, including sugars (except sometimes small amounts of honey), and any artificial ingredients. Some eat tubers (e.g. yams), and they eat varying amounts of fruit, understanding that the fruits of today are very different from the fruits of our ancestors. Also, the animals we eat should also eat what they were "built" to eat, e.g. grass-fed cattle.

I heard many many stories of people regaining their health through eating this way. Robb Wolf, author of The Paleo Solution, told about how he had high blood pressure and many other health problems including ulcerative colitis and depression - and this was in his 20's. He ate a whole foods vegetarian diet, and then a whole foods vegan diet, and his health kept getting worse and worse. Finally, he tried paleo (read the book for the great story of how this came about) and within days began to improve. He finally completely recovered his health and is a vibrant person who just radiates energy today.

Over the next blog or two I'll talk about some of the fascinating things I learned at this conference, including how diet affects mental health, how our hormones (including appetite hormones) are affected, and how important it is not to turn your lifestyle into a religion. But the great news is, most of the talks will soon be up on the Web where you can see them for yourself!

Image Courtesy of Ancestral Health Society

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