A pork loin is a fine cut of meat, tender and easy to cook, but because it’s the leanest cut of pork it also tends to be the least flavorful. This is where Jane steps in with a perfect solution: stuffing. Breadcrumbs are nowhere to be found in her rich and flavorful filling that evokes the best of Mediterranean cooking. Her ingredients add fat (nuts), flavor (garlic) and smart fuel (spinach).

Red pepper is no slouch in the nutrient department either, and adds bright color that matches the bright, bold flavor the stuffing brings to the pork. Jane suggested the addition of feta cheese and we suggest adding Kalamata olives. Either will give the stuffing a briny burst of acidity that heightens all the other flavors.

The hardest part about this recipe is holding back and not putting too much stuffing inside the loin. If you do, you won’t be able to roll the meat up completely. If you’re worried about over-stuffing, your best defense is pounding the loin as thin as possible so it rolls easily and if needed, secure the meat with some toothpicks or kitchen twine while it cooks.

Ingredients:

• 1-2 pound pork tenderloin
• 1 red pepper, finely chopped
• 1-2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
• 6 oz spinach
• 1/4 cup chopped nuts (any kind that sounds good)
• Pitted kalamata olives
• Olive oil or butter for sautéing
• Optional: 1/4 cup crumbled Feta cheese

Instructions:

Drizzle some olive oil or butter in a frying pan over medium heat. Add red peppers and garlic to the pan. After a few minutes add the spinach and cook until it wilts. Remove from heat.

Butterfly cut the pork tenderloin (cut vertically down the middle until almost through, but not quite through the pork).

Place saran-rap over the butterflied pork and pound it as flat as you can without breaking through the pork (use a meat tenderizing hammer for best results).

Once the pork is thin then add the ingredients from the pan on top of the pork, spreading it all over. Add the nuts, and optional feta cheese and olives.

Gently roll the pork into a tube/roll. If you are using a smaller pork loin, or were not able to pound it very thinly, you may just be folding the loin over rather than rolling it. In this case, securing the loin with toothpicks or kitchen twine will be necessary.

Drizzle the pork with olive oil and butter and bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for about 40-60 minutes (depending on the size of the pork roll).

When the pork is cooked to your liking, let it cool slightly and then slice.

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Yoplait and Dannon are responsible for injecting more culture into our lives than Warhol, The Smithsonian, The New Yorker, and ancient Athens combined. I love the way those two superpowers ultra-pasteurize their yogurt so as to rid it of any naturally-occurring, unpredictable, rogue probiotic cultures (unfettered bacterial growth? – no thanks) before supplanting them with nice, orderly probiotic cultures (and not too much of them, thanks). Mother nature? Natural selection? Ha! As if natural foods could improve my immunity and digestive health better than multi-national corporations. You think sauerkraut has your best interests in mind?

There are downsides to the addiction, though. And it is an addiction. Make no mistake about that. The cravings can hit me hard, fast, and without warning. My blood sugar drops, my knees weaken. Visions of Danimals dance about my tormented psyche, laughing and pointing and beckoning. Normally, I rush to the nearest grocer, head straight to the healthy dairy section, and thrust my probing tongue through the foil seal and into the soothing bath of HFCS, whipped skim froth, carrageenan, and single-file probiotic formations. Normally, all is well, but I’m not always within range of a Dannon/Yoplait distributor. Like last week.

I was driving through LA, just south of Hollywood, when I got the cravings. It wasn’t pretty, and my options were extremely limited. Check cashing places and carnicerias abounded, but there were no grocery stores. I needed my Activia, and I needed it immediately. My wild eyes betrayed my intent; even the fidgeting methamphetamine enthusiast (with whom I sensed a strange sort of community) gave a wide berth. Next thing I knew, I was across the street, apparently having successfully navigated traffic. A Greek market lay before me, a small, unassuming ethnic grocer full of olive oils, labna and mediocre red wine. I entered, approached the counter, and inquired as to their yogurt selection. Greeks are supposed to make yogurt, right? (In the Yoplait online forums, the “Upcoming Product rumors” thread made mention of a “non-fat, Greek-style yogurt coming soon,” so I knew there was some precedent.) They did, and the clerk produced a small nondescript tub of white yogurt, which I immediately purchased. Don’t worry – I made sure to ask if it was low-fat. The clerk, a stout man with an impressive white mustache, just laughed off my silly question. What was I thinking? No one makes full-fat (ugh, the thought just makes me sick) yogurt, I told myself. He was right to laugh at me.

So I popped the top and grabbed a spoon. It smelled pretty sour, and it didn’t even smell like vanilla (but what other flavor could white yogurt be?), but I was desperate. I was about to take a massive spoonful of the stuff when, luckily, the clerk chimed in once again.

“Best yogurt in all of Los Angeles! It’s made from raw sheep and cow milk in Greece, then shipped directly to us! You will like!” I just looked at his bristly ‘stache.

Raw milk? This stuff wasn’t ultra-pasteurized. It was probably teeming with barbarian hordes of probiotic cultures. Ferocious little milky versions of Gauls, Thracians, Ostro-goths, and Visi-goths running rampant over the pristine splendor of Rome, with Yoplait Caesar’s mighty praetorian guard nowhere to be found. I was at an impasse. I needed yogurt in my body, but I didn’t want to face the uncertainty of consuming rogue probiotic cultures. What was I to do?!

Then I remembered my recent pharmacy pick-up: antibiotics. (I’d gone in for a nasty cold; the doctor really didn’t want to write the prescription, citing some nonsense about the cold being a virus and therefore unaffected by antibiotics, but I just slipped him my favorite malpractice lawyer’s card, and he got the idea). I figured antibiotics could counteract the nasty probiotics in the dangerous Greek yogurt, so I tossed a handful of pills down on the counter, crushed them with my Purell aerosol canister, and immediately insufflated the powder. Once I could feel the tell-tale signs of antibiotic powder penetrating my nasal membrane and reaching my blood stream, I tossed down the yogurt. I distinctively heard several dozen death knells signifying the probiotic cultures’ complete assimilation into my body. Sure, it may not technically be assimilation if they’re dead, but this ain’t no melting pot.

This definitely wasn’t vanilla. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they forgot to add the flavoring. But, I’ve gotta say – it was the best damn non-fat yogurt I’ve ever had. It was so rich, so creamy, and so filling. I’ve never had a full-fat item in my life – I avoid direct eye-contact with cartons of whole milk and I’ll spend as long as it takes to whip enough air into skim milk to get it to stand up on its own and solidify into cream (1:1:1 ratio of skim milk to powdered sugar to cornstarch) – but if they taste as good as this yogurt did, I think I understand why people are willing to risk obesity, heart disease, and diabetes just for a shot of half-and-half in the morning coffee…

In case it isn’t abundantly clear to my regular readers (or if you’re new here and your worried about my sanity) I’m just having a little fun with this article. Functional yogurt fans may not be quite that crazy, but you wouldn’t know it by the sales figures of these probiotic-enhanced brands of sugar slurry. They’re billed as the healthiest, simplest choice for people on the go, growing children, women interested in slimming down, and folks with digestive troubles. The kids love it because it’s got funny cartoons on the carton and it’s loaded with sugar. Hell, everyone loves the sugar. And because it’s “healthy,” low-fat, and “packed with probiotics,” people don’t feel bad slurping down all the sugar.

It’s nonsense, people. Probiotics are indeed healthy and helpful members of any digestive system, and consuming them in supplement or fermented food form is a good move with many potential benefits, but wasting your money on fortified processed food (food should never require “fortification”) and its obscene packaging and advertising campaign is silly. Those probiotic-enchanced sugary yogurts are stripped of their natural bacteria via pasteurization. Even the “natural” full-fat yogurts, however delicious they are and whatever other benefits they confer, are usually pasteurized with probiotic cultures added afterward. There’s nothing magical about Yoplait or Dannon.

Regular yogurt has probiotics, too. The clinical doses of probiotics – the amounts that have shown promise in trials – are far higher than anything you’ll get in a tiny 80 calorie container of Key Lime Yoplait yogurt. I’m talking at least 20 billion cfu (colony forming units). If you want the real benefits of probiotics, make fermented foods a regular part of your daily diet. Eat sauerkraut, kimchee, full-fat Greek yogurt (Fage is a good one, or look for a local Greek market), or kefir (if you tolerate dairy). Naturally fermented foods will have good levels of bacteria. You may not get a label listing all the strains, but you’ll know that they’re the same probiotics people have been consuming for thousands of years. Obtaining probiotics this way is generally safe, but if you want a bit more precision, a good supplement will have a label listing the specific strains (and in greater numbers). I regularly use this method for a number of reasons: for its convenience, because I don’t generally do dairy, and to ensure I’m getting precise amounts of certain strains in my system. As my upcoming Primal Flora supplement (30 billion cfu) nears release, I’ll discuss this more at length. Whatever you do, just don’t rely on sugar-filled functional yogurt products to get your probiotics.

What about you guys? Any ridiculous yogurt hyperbole sightings in the wild? Share in the comments section.

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Maya has graciously written the following guest post for Mark’s Daily Apple readers. Read on to learn why posture is an integral part of health and wellness and how you might be doing something as simple as sitting or standing all wrong.

_________________________________________________________________________

We all know that Grok ate well, moved frequently, and sometimes engaged in strenuous physical activities. One other piece that Grok had going for him was excellent form and optimized body mechanics. If you really want to live a long, healthy life, and not end up with back pain, joint pain, and a spine that looks like a question mark, you need to know about posture.

If your idea of good posture involves holding yourself upright rigidly, get rid of that idea. If you think that good posture is useful only for curing back pain, get rid of that idea too. Grok’s naturally upright posture allowed him to avoid musculoskeletal ailments and stay active well into old age, to mostly avoid and quickly recover from acute injuries, to be alert and ready to deal with challenges (physical and psychological), to enjoy good circulation and high blood oxygen levels from full, deep breaths, and to feel and look happy and confident. How do I know what natural posture for our species is? Because the norm for humans, until very recently, was terrific structure. Whereas diet changed for the worse about 10,000 years ago with the explosion of agriculture, posture changed only about 100 years ago. We have photographs and scientific evidence that our ancestors until early in the 20th century used their bodies well in everyday positions and movements. And in fact, there still exist populations in much of the pre-industrial world where everyone has beautiful posture and strong, graceful physiques.

The flapper age in the 1920s, the breakdown of kinesthetic transmission across generations with family members no longer living close to each other, and the poor design of most modern furniture have all contributed to the disastrous habit that most of us have of tucking the pelvis (curling our tails under us). Realizing this was causing people to hunch, someone came up with the idea of lumbar support and lumbar curvature. Well, terrific – now we have two problems instead of one. Now not only are most people still sitting with a tucked pelvis (which is damaging for the L5-S1 disc and indirectly leads to a whole host of other problems, including hunched shoulders, forward head, misaligned legs, and muscle imbalances), but they are also ending up with swaybacks. Conventional wisdom has come up with all sorts of devices and exercises to promote the S-shape spine, which is now considered the normal shape for the spine. Well, just because S shape is the norm in our culture does not mean it’s healthy! We have to stop mistaking average for normal. And we certainly have to stop mistaking average for ideal! After all, would you settle for the average body fat percentage in our culture? I didn’t think so.

So what is the natural shape for the spine and what does good posture mean? Mark touched on this the first time he wrote about posture and the Gokhale Method (How to Improve Your Posture). For a really clear in-depth explanation and hundreds of photos showing good posture and how to get there, check out Esther Gokhale’s book, 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back. It is much more than just a way to get rid of back pain, just as the Primal Blueprint is much more than a weight loss program. Gokhale’s book has extremely valuable information for anyone who wants to optimize his or her health.

This photo from her book is one of my favorites, as it epitomizes fantastic posture:

These hunter-gatherers are about as close to Grok as we can find today. Note the J-shaped spine (straight all the way to the sacrum, with just the bottom angled back – not exaggeratedly stuck back, but rather naturally back due to a healthy balance between gluteus tone and abdominal relaxation (yes, strong doesn’t mean tense!) The Ubong tribesmen are long, lean, upright and relaxed simultaneously. Their amazing structure and alignment puts their muscles into mechanically advantageous positions – this allows the muscles to relax during standing, sitting, and lying positions, to engage effortlessly for simple movements like bending, walking, and reaching, and to quickly activate strongly for challenging activities like lifting, carrying, and of course, the occasional all-out sprint.

The Ubong tribesmen (as well as tribal Africans, rural Brazilians, village Indians etc.) do not have to consciously learn healthy posture – they have all the right environmental influences – their parents hold them the right way as babies, they have very basic but healthy sitting arrangements, they have good role models to copy – and they never un-learned natural habits. We are all born with excellent structure. Check out the perfect J-shaped spine of this baby:

The bottom line is that posture counts. Not only does it significantly decrease your risk of pain and injuries and deterioration of your musculoskeletal system as you age, it sets you up for optimal athletic performance, it allows for proper blood circulation and more powerful breathing, it promotes emotional well-being, and it looks relaxed, confident, and strong. In our society where we have so many factors working against us, it takes some awareness and re-learning good habits until they become your default.

I will be attending PrimalCon 2010 as a guest speaker and will be leading a breakout session on healthy, natural ways of sitting, standing, and walking. It is never too late to learn – the right body mechanics are patterned into your genes; but you need to learn how to best express them in our environment that promotes such poor patterns. And for those of you who have young children, in addition to improving your own structure, you will take with you important tips that will help promote healthy form in your children. I will also be happy to address questions and concerns about proper form during exercises.

For those of you who are not able to make it to PrimalCon 2010 (and those of you who are, for that matter), I encourage you to check out the free download of Chapter 5 of Esther Gokhale’s 8 Steps to a Pain-Free Back on the home page of EGWellness.com. That chapter, entitled “Inner Corset” describes the best way of using the abdominal muscles to protect your spine. It involves using the right muscles in the right way, especially during activities like your Primal sprints and Primal lifts. And it’s not about just tightening your “core” – I avoid using the word core because so often people over-engage the rectus abdominis muscle and don’t use the deeper abdominal muscles – the transverses abdominis and the internal and external obliques) enough when working their abdominal muscles, and they usually end up tucking the pelvis. Using the abdominal muscles as needed in everyday activities and strongly during physical exertion will give you the strength and tone you need. You can also watch Esther Gokhale’s Authors@Google talk about the Gokhale Method and natural posture on YouTube here.

Maya’s Bio

Maya White is the lead certified Gokhale Method instructor in Palo Alto and the Bay Area. She also teaches intensive posture courses across the United States.

Maya received her B.S. in Biomechanical Engineering at Stanford University in 2008. She is a member of the Tau Beta Pi Engineering honors society. While at Stanford, she developed an interest in nutrition, gait and other aspects of the human body and decided to pursue a career in medicine. She will be starting medical school this coming fall, and plans to focus on preventive medicine. Maya has been involved in athletics since childhood. She played for the Stanford Women’s Rugby team and won the Division I national championship in 2008.

As the daughter of Esther Gokhale, founder of the Gokhale Method, Maya has received informal training in posture since age two. She has traveled extensively to Thailand, India, Mexico, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic and Europe. Her formal training in the Gokhale Method began in 2005; she received her certification in 2007.

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I live in Malibu, just outside of LA proper, and it’s not exactly an urban environment. LA itself isn’t a classic urban landscape; it’s more urban sprawl than anything else. We’ve got hundreds of miles of wilderness – mountains, beaches, trails, canyons – to climb, run, crawl, or hike, but very little skyscraper to scale or subway turnstile to hurdle. We give a ton of attention to the great outdoors, partly because of my affinity for it and partly because it fits the Primal theme really well. For today, though, I want to address the urban warriors among us. If you’re lucky enough to live in a vibrant, bustling cityscape teeming with ledges, poles, fences, staircases, and tall buildings, you owe it yourself to expand your workout regimen to encompass your (un)natural environment.

Whenever I visit a new city, I like to go for a walk. Cities are meant to be traversed by foot, in my opinion. Sticking to taxis or buses erects a barrier. You gotta put foot to pavement and really connect with a city, especially if you’re just visiting (no time to spare). On my walks, I invariably find myself scoping out the scenery for possible workout “equipment.” I do this everywhere I go, in fact, not just in cities. It may mean I annoy my wife with my roving eyes (hey, at least I’m just scoping out park benches to jump, rather than beds to lie in!), but it also means I’m never unequipped for an impromptu workout.

There are no immutable laws governing urban workouts, because every environment is different. In LA, for example, an urban workout probably means climbing a fifteen-foot tree in front of some suburban house, doing pull-ups at the top branch, and running from an eventually pound-bound pit bull that’s broken loose. Or hitting the Venice drum circle for a bout of Primal dancing. But there are certain features that every urban environment should offer to the intrepid, kinetic explorer, and these include:

Ledges, overhangs, horizontal overhead poles – Perfect for pull-ups and muscle-ups. Hit some knees-to-elbows if there’s room to swing.

Vertical poles – Climb these. Pigeon droppings make for a worse payoff than wild coconuts, but at least you’ll build great grip and pulling strength. Traffic lights are pretty easy to climb (plenty of handholds).

Benches, turnstiles, weird public-owned stone cubes masquerading as art – Leap these. Box-jump them. If the bench is mobile, lift it. If you’ve got stones, try to lift the stone.

Hills – Sprint them. Grok crawl up them, then back down. Don’t worry; you can wash your hands after.

Stairs – You can also sprint these, but I like climbing them hand over hand (if there’s room to grab, that is) from underneath, ninja style. Just don’t let go at the top.

Construction sites – Sure, they’re slightly dangerous and it’s probably illegal to trespass, but there’s so much to do! Heavy slabs of metal to drag and deadlift, shards of concrete to hurl, structures to climb, and if you’re unwilling to go all the way in, you can usually find sandbags lining the perimeter.

Cars – Outrun them. Yes, I’m serious. No, I don’t mean in the street, neck-and-neck with the hulking metal beasts, but on the sidewalk, using the cars as motivation. And if you see a pregnant mother trapped beneath a wrecked one, you can always call upon your ATP and lift the back end.

Dumpsters – Push and pull them, treat ‘em like big stinky weight sleds.

Buildings – Scale them, if you dare. Enter them to reveal massive staircases (see “Stairs” above).

Little old ladies trying to cross the street – Carry them! It’s much faster than simply lending them an arm and walking them to the other side. Plus, it works your core.

And that’s just what I could think of off the top of my head. There are plenty of other options, many of which are just waiting to be discovered. The key is to keep your eyes open and your mind fixated on exactly how this feature or that object could be used to exert force or manipulate resistance. It may mean thinking outside the box or looking at the environment from a totally different perspective – you’ll have to see the urbanity as something to be accosted, assaulted, and conquered, rather than avoided or merely walked past. It’ll probably also have you end up looking a bit crazy, but if you’re eating Primal, you’re probably used to the weird stares from passers-by.

Just have fun! Living in the city doesn’t mean you have to work out at the gym… just ask Blair, who seems to get along okay without one.

Last, I’d be remiss not to remind you to be careful! Injury avoidance is top priority with Primal Blueprint Fitness, so take caution with your urban workouts just like you would any other.

Any Primal urbanites got workout tips to share? Do so in the comments!

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Yet it’s clear that there are physical limits to our minds. The consensus on short-term memory, for example, is that most people are limited to retaining just seven items at once, or seven chunks of data – a physical limitation, hard wired into our brains. What if we were similarly hard-wired to effectively manage a limited number of personal relationships? It seems plausible. If memory has a corresponding physical capacity, why wouldn’t other functions of the brain?

Dunbar’s Number

Primatologists have often noted that non-human primates live in “grooming cliques,” tight-knit social groups of varying sizes where grooming is the means by which the members socialize and stay tight-knit. The number of members in a non-human primate grooming clique aren’t randomized, but rather dependent on the size of the particular primate’s neocortex region of the brain. Greater volume is associated with a higher companion threshold. Primate species with bigger brains tend to have larger social groups.

A British anthropologist named Robin Dunbar figured the same principle ought to apply to all primates – human and non-human alike. In 1992, using the predictive value of neocortex size, he was able to accurately predict average group size for thirty-six species of monkeys and apes. He then followed suit (abstract) for human primates and came up with a human maximum “mean group size” of 150 and an “intimate circle size” of 12. Hypothesis in hand, he then compared his prediction with observed human group sizes, paying special attention to the anthropological literature and reports from hunter-gatherer societies. The homo sapien brain developed around 250,000 years ago, so looking at hunter-gatherers was his best bet for approximating the social behaviors of Paleolithic ancestors.

For the most part, his predictions held true. The upper limit for human social cohesiveness was groups of about 150, and this tended to occur in situations involving intense environmental or economic pressure – like war (Roman maniples contained around 160 men) or early agriculture (Neolithic farming villages ran about 150 deep, and 150 members marked the point at which Hutterite settlements typically split apart). Any higher, and it’d be too costly and require too much social “grooming” to maintain the group.

The hunter-gatherer existence self-regulates tribal size, really. Too few members make hunting unfeasible (as fit as he was, Grok wasn’t taking down a buffalo by himself, let alone lugging it back to camp), and foraging becomes more effective the more hands you commit to the task. A HG group had to be mobile and lean, able to follow the game when it moved. It had to be socially cohesive; people had to coordinate hunts, forage outings, and divvy up food. A large, ranging, sloppy group would mean more weak links, and in a social framework where every member was integral to the success of the whole, it simply wouldn’t work out. As we see with the Hutterites, a hunter-gatherer tribe that got too big for its britches would simply become two hunter-gatherer tribes rather than languish and fail.

(Overstepping Dunbar’s number might also increase stress. We clearly see that in farm animals. Increasing group size past optimal levels increases damaging behavior indicative of stress: feather pecking in hens and tail biting in pigs. No, we are neither pigs nor chickens, but we’re still sensitive to our environments.)

Okay, so there appears to be a limit to the number of people with whom a single person can maintain stable, rewarding relationships based on the size of the neocortex. This isn’t a time constraint thing here. If Dunbar is right, it’s an actual self-limiting brain mechanism forged 250,000 years ago that persists today. Agriculture no doubt pushed the limits by forcing us into crowded villages, but it’s only recently that our social networks have undergone another, even more drastic shift in size and composition: social media.

Facebook, Twitter, even regular old email are all forcing us into novel areas of social networking. We aren’t living in villages or tribes or bands. We’re running into childhood friends from thirty years ago. We’re getting text messages from twenty different acquaintances on a single day. Are we equipped to handle this sort of thing? Are we negatively impacting the quality of our social interactions? Are we spreading ourselves too thin? (See Dunbar’s take here.) Or does the new media allow us to transcend, or tinker with, previously immutable biological limitations? Maybe. I’m reminded of how working memory (a theoretical concept that’s beginning to replace short-term memory in some circles, working memory describes the temporary storage of information for immediate cognitive tasks like learning, reasoning, and calculating). As with short-term memory, most people are limited to seven or so “chunks” of working memory data. A chunk might be a single digit, a single word, or even a concept, but a few people can use advanced encoding techniques to expand the scope of each chunk. Where one person might be able to repeat seven digits from normal working memory, another might encode each chunk to include sequences of four or five numbers. This allows them to remember seventy numbers instead of seven, and they’re using the same brain stuff as everyone else. The neurological bandwidth hasn’t increased – their brains don’t physically grow larger – but they utilize the available bandwidth with greater efficiency.

Maybe Facebook and other social media offer the chance to make greater use of the available “socializing chunks” in our brain. Like with working memory, the seven chunks of available bandwidth are always going to be there, but it’s what you put inside that matters. Perhaps tools like Facebook allow us to “store” information on friends and family without taking up valuable mental real estate. I don’t think that’s “good” or “bad.” Hell, the reason we developed the written word was to avoid having to remember minutiae.

Maybe we still adhere to Dunbar’s number without really paying attention. I mean, it’s easy to tally Facebook friends into the thousands without actually knowing them. Adding a friend is almost an afterthought; is it really harmful, stressful, or contrary to our evolutionary social framework if we add an old acquaintance to our friend list and then never speak to them?

Problems arise, I think, when the virtual social network displaces the tangible one. Chatting online or through email is different than face-to-face interaction. Everything is calm and measured. There’s little room for incidentals, mistakes, or awkward pauses. You lose the physical contact and the body language cues. Emoticons can never replace emotive expression. As long as we maintain physical contact with friends, family, and loved ones, using online or virtual tools to augment the “real” relationships can only be helpful. Last week, for example, I met up with Brent Pottenger and Aaron Blaisdell, two regular commenters, in person. We established an online relationship, which has transitioned into an “actual” real world social network. PrimalCon is another great example. Without MDA there wouldn’t be a PrimalCon to bring this virtual community together in person. The Primal Blueprint is all about merging evolutionary truths with modern technology; it’s about cherry picking the best stuff from past and present.

Social media allows us to overstep our neurological social sphere boundaries. When it comes to diet, sunlight, sleep, stress, and physical exertion, I think we agree that sticking to ancestral, evolutionary precedent is the best policy, but that doesn’t have to apply to social networks. I guess I’m cautiously optimistic about the use of “social supplements” like Facebook or email. Overstepping our natural bounds is essentially what makes us human, after all. We just have to be smart about it.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Hit me up with a comment and thanks for reading!

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Dear Mark,

I’ve been following the PB for a year and a half now and am proud to consider myself a diehard. I’m stronger, fitter, leaner, and for the first time in years feel energized throughout the day. My problem is this: I have a brother who’s an MD and seems to take my bucking of conventional wisdom personally. Whether it’s dogging my diet or my workout, he’s never got a shortage of offhand comments every time we get together with the family. I stopped arguing with him a few months ago because it just seemed useless and I frankly don’t want to make tensions worse for my family. Care to show up at one of these dinners to take on my brother’s resentments? Barring that, do you have any advice for getting him off my back? Thanks and Grok on!

In early 19^th century Vienna, one of the world’s largest and most well-known clinics in the world was among the worst institutions plagued by a widespread and puzzling “childbed fever” epidemic. The aggressive disease at one point killed 1 in 6 delivering mothers in his clinic. Pregnant women came in perfectly healthy but following childbirth were dead within a few days or less. For decades, the pandemic panicked women and eluded hospital staff, who responded to the continuing scourge by increasing ventilation and treating patients with practices like blood letting, leaching and mercury tonics (the discovery of germs not having been made yet).

Finally, an obstetrician and assistant administrator of the hospital, Ignac Semmelweis, made a startling connection. The proverbial light bulb went off when a colleague at the clinic died with the same fever symptoms after cutting himself while performing an autopsy. Semmelweis theorized that the professor’s cut was invaded by harmful “particles” from the corpse and eventually died from their effects. He then made the connection that medical students participated in autopsies the same days they helped deliver babies in the clinic. From there, he examined the rates of the adjoining midwife clinic, where the staff didn’t conduct postmortem examinations. The mortality rate in the midwife clinic was only a third of the mortality rate in the medical student wing. Upon investigating his theory with the implementation of new sanitation requirements, the mortality rate in the medical student clinic fell to that of the other clinic in only a month’s time. Clearly, hand washing and sanitization with a chlorine solution was the key to preventing the spread of disease. The discovery instilled a sense of relief but also the shocking revelation that doctors themselves had unwittingly caused so many patients’ deaths.

However, what happened afterward was the most surprising. A head administrator, Johann Klein, took Semmelweis’s discovery personally and renounced his findings. Klein believed Semmelweis’s argument was an attack on him, since he had instituted medical students’ participation in autopsies and had changed vaginal examination guidelines for obstetric patients. Semmelweis, a man whose efforts and scientific scrutiny had in essence discovered germ theory in its rudimentary parts and saved thousands of women’s lives, was discredited and pushed out of the clinic. His career continued for a time in Pest, Hungary, but never fully rebounded.

Semmelweis, for his part, had done relatively little to publicize his discovery. Although he and his students sent letters to well known obstetricians throughout much of Europe, he didn’t publish his findings until years later and only then attached to scathing personal criticisms of particular physicians and administrators. Victim to developing psychosis in his later years, Semmelweis was eventually institutionalized through his wife’s efforts and died from physical trauma after being beaten to death in the asylum.

It’s a dramatic story, to be sure, but an instructive one I think. This man had statistical evidence, scientifically sound support on his side, but the politics of the situation stalled progress. The threat of questioning authority and compromising professional reputations was finally too much to swallow. Semmelweis’s findings not only diminished the stature of the hospital administration, it brought down to earth the position – and astuteness – of physicians themselves. History has frequently revealed a sacrificial pattern when one person’s discovery takes on accepted wisdom. In short, it’s a game of kill the messenger.

In this reader’s case, I imagine it’s a similar phenomenon. Clearly, his brother has invested countless hours, thousands of dollars and invaluable credibility in his conventional medical education. He’s personally invested in the standard mindset of the medical establishment. Whether it’s a conscious realization or not, his professional integrity and authority are being questioned by his brother’s example – by his success, by his willingness to discern and embrace a health philosophy that diverges from conventional teaching.

My advice to Evan and all of us who meet with this kind of resistance is this: have patience and don’t take the bait. We don’t have to take the tension as personally as the other person does. Understand that our success upends their thinking, their lifelong efforts and maybe their sense of professional or personal expertise.

That said, let’s not make the same mistake as Semmelweis did in being overly modest in publicizing our genuine health discovery. There’s a difference in arguing to protect one’s own turf or pride and illuminating and sharing practices that can mean better health and well-being for people we know and love. Let your success and vitality speak for themselves, but by all means share your secret.

How do all of you share the love, so to speak? Tell your stories and offer your advice for Evan and others in the same boat. As always, thanks for the great questions and comments and keep ‘em coming!

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You may have read my post on P90X and Crossfit earlier this week. For a little more perspective, read Sterling Advice’s article: Can a person be Primal while following P90X?

If I ran network television, I’d fill up all the prime time slots with TED speeches. You’ll find a couple gems this week in Jamie Oliver’s food speech and Daniel Kahneman’s discussion of two versions of happiness.

What does a Primal kitchen look like? Mike Meire at Apartment Therapy bends the norm to create the Farm Project Kitchen.

Weight Watchers and McDonald’s are teaming up; what a perfect match! Now you can eat McNuggets and watch your weight… go up.

What do G.I. Joe, Mr. T, and the New Kids on the Block have in common? They’re all coated with high fructose corn syrup! Now That’s Nifty rounds up almost a hundred retro breakfast cereals – the stuff that kids have been raised on for years. Here’s part 1, part 2, and part 3.

Recipe Corner

• Yes, you can absolutely use coconut in your enchiladas, according to Son of Grok.
• Girl Gone Primal makes chicken liver pate. Warning: Bacon is involved.
• Food Renegade teaches you how to make beef broth. Start by melting cow bones.

Time Capsule

Two years ago (February 28 – March 6, 2008)

• Dear Mark: Vegetarian Protein Possibilities – If you just won’t eat meat, here are a few ways to get protein (note, fish is on the list, I’m not sure what kind of vegetarian you are, but I implore you to be the fish eating kind)
• Getting Canned: Is Canned Soup Really – You can probably guess I’m not a fan of Campbell’s chicken with stars. Besides talking canned goods, this post offers up a few tasty soup recipes including Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi’s Crab Bisque, which is quite Primal!

Comment of the Week

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Crock Pot recipes shouldn’t be too complicated or they defeat the whole purpose of using a Crock Pot. They should, however, contain a variety of ingredients so you can get all the flavor and nutrients you need out of a one-pot meal. The recipe for Crock Pot Pork-Stuffed Peppers that Katerina Shchyelkunova submitted to the Primal Blueprint Cookbook Challenge easily meets this unofficial Crock Pot criteria. Most importantly, her recipe satisfies a craving for unfussy but extremely satisfying comfort food.

The green peppers will hold their shape while cooking and become individual little serving dishes filled with a mild but flavorful blend of ground pork and vegetables. Grated cauliflower seamlessly blends in and the carrots add a burst of color and a little bit of sweetness. Katerina uses dried tarragon in her recipe, but we tried fresh and loved the subtle anise flavor it added.

If you don’t have these exact ingredients in your kitchen, don’t sweat it. The Crock Pot is very forgiving – yet another one of its attributes that we love. Katerina sometimes uses ground beef or a combination of different ground meats. We can also imagine using diced tomatoes instead of paste and a bold combination of spices for those with a more adventurous palate. Left as is, however, this recipe will greet you at the end of the day with its comforting aroma, and a provide a meal that the whole family will love.

Ingredients:

• 2 pounds ground pork (or a combination of pork and beef)
• 4 large green peppers
• 1 large onion
• 2 carrots
• 4 cloves of garlic
• 1/2 head of cauliflower
• 6 ounce can of tomato paste
• 1 tablespoon dry oregano
• 1 tablespoon dry or fresh tarragon
• Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions:

Cut the tops of the peppers and clean the seeds out.

Arrange peppers in the Crock-Pot standing up and make sure they fit securely.

Grate onion, carrots, garlic and cauliflower in the food processor. You can also just chop them into small pieces with a knife if you don’t have a food processor.

In a big bowl, combine ground pork, shredded vegetables, seasonings and tomato paste.

Add salt and pepper to taste. Stuff the peppers with the mixture and arrange leftover meat between the peppers. Add half a cup of water, cover and cook on low for 8-10 hours.

If you don’t have a slow-cooker, the dish can be cooked in the oven, covered, for 1-2 hours.

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It’s often said that any movement is better than no movement, that simply getting up and being active is better than sitting on the couch and stewing with guilt and self-reproach. For the most part, I agree with this assessment. It’s imperative that everyone be active, even if it’s just taking nightly walks or using the treadmill at the gym. But “just any old movement” isn’t ideal. Ideally, we should be performing movements that support, enable, and enhance quality of life. Our exercises should make us stronger, faster, and more capable of accomplishing just about any physical feat the world throws at us. They should be enjoyable (pleasure-giving), brief (without sacrificing effectiveness), sustainable (lifelong), immediately accessible (to young, old, and untrained), and infinitely scalable (from beginners to elites). A fitness program, then, should meet these benchmarks.

Do P90x and CrossFit qualify as good fitness programs?

Absolutely, yes; they’re better than 95% of the other stuff out there. They both include high-intensity interval training, full body resistance work, endurance development, and mobility. They’re very clearly laid out for trainees who need structure to make progress. Buy the DVDs and you get the full P90X package; log onto CrossFit every day and you get access to the daily workouts free of charge. Tony Horton (of P90X) is one of my best friends, and I’m the guy who showed him the beauty of interval workouts. I also designed the P90X recovery drink, which, I’m told, is more addictive than crack (too sweet for me). The PB eating plan works perfectly with CrossFit, which is probably why we have so many supporters from that camp. All in all, there is definite kinship between the PB and the other two programs. There are many mutually shared interests, directions, and focuses. There’s a lot of crossover. Both programs get people up and moving – and amidst our culture of sedentarism and sloth, I can’t get upset with that.

P90X promises a beach-ready body: defined upper body, ripped abdominals, reduced body fat. For many people, it delivers on each. If you’re interested in building muscular endurance (not necessarily raw strength), or if you’re a former athlete with a good amount of muscle underneath a couple years’ worth of flab, P90X might be right for you. If you want an ass-kicking workout that leaves you panting and heaving and sore all over the next day, P90X will provide it. You’ll certainly be able to do more push-ups and pull-ups by the end of it.

CrossFit promises to forge hybrid gymnasts, powerlifters, and runners – all around athletes who can perform Olympic lifts, complex gymnastic moves, then get up and run a 10k (and make a respectable finish). CrossFit generally doesn’t produce elite, specified athletes, but it produces guys and girls who are stronger, faster, and more powerful than almost everyone else. Some people think that’s a criticism of CrossFit, while I think it’s one of its strengths.

As I noted above, I get a ton of reader emails about both CrossFit and P90X; in the Primal world, they’re probably the two most popular programs out there. Some people are pleased with their results. They get stronger, fitter, healthier, and better-looking by following them. But others aren’t so happy. These other readers talk about being burnt out, overworked, overtrained, or even injured. As much as I admire both programs and their creators, I think both could be improved upon.

Now, is it the program, or is it the user? Who do we blame?

As usual, there’s a little from column A, a little from column B. Assigning the totality of blame to either CrossFit/P90X or the trainee is silly. Acknowledging both the limitations of the programs and of the users is the far better option. CrossFit isn’t a perfect fit for every possible trainee, nor is P90X guaranteed to work for absolutely everyone who tries it – and that’s totally fine. But it also means that neither CrossFit nor P90X are ideal paths to fitness. In my book, remember, a fitness program should be lifelong and accessible to everyone. (Note that accessible doesn’t mean one size fits all.)

It’s commonplace for online discussions of fitness to descend into screaming matches laced with profanity and hyperbole, buttressed by rigid ideological stances that refuse to budge. This won’t be that.

You’ve heard why I like CrossFit and P90X – and I do like them, believe me – but this is where we diverge:

Sustainability

A program you can’t keep doing is hardly a program worth doing. Fitness should be a lifelong endeavor. It’s not just for the young bucks with limber limbs and supple, indestructible ligaments. It’s for the oldsters, the washed up athletes, the wide-eyed beginners, the moms, the dads. As it’s actually practiced, I think P90X is probably too much to do as a lifelong program. It isn’t even advertised as such, to Tony’s credit; it’s billed as a crash program designed to get you lean in 90 days (which it does well). To anyone currently doing P90X – do you expect to be repeating the cycles into your twilight years? Over an hour a day, six days a week? I just don’t think I’d have the stomach for that for very long.

Overtraining

I harp on the overtraining issue all the time. Next to inadequate or nonexistent training, overtraining is the biggest issue plaguing most trainees. If you don’t give your body enough downtime to recuperate, you’ll find it very difficult to get stronger/faster/quicker/more powerful. You may see some improvement over doing nothing at all, but you could just as easily undo any progress. Both CrossFit and P90X prescribe near daily high intensity training. Certain individuals relish the workload and even thrive on it. Some people can bounce back from a day’s workout and be ready to demolish their body all over again the next day. I think the 3 on, 1 off CrossFit schedule and the 6-days-a-week P90X schedule have their place in a training regimen, but they can easily lead to overtraining – especially if you go 100%. Intensity is important in training, but I worry that six days a week of over an hour of daily high intensity training will venture into diminishing returns territory for many trainees.

Injury avoidance

I hate injuries. I hate downtime. I work out in order to fuel the fun stuff – the Ultimate Frisbee, the hikes, the paddleboarding. As such, if my fitness efforts result in an injury that prevents me from playing, those fitness efforts are counterproductive. I love CrossFit, but people do get injured. Either they don’t have their forms locked in, or they’re going too hard for too long, but injuries do occur. CrossFitters will plainly admit that there is an inherent danger to going all out, day in and day out, and that’s actually part of the appeal. But at my age, I’m not interested in pushing my limits. Judging from plenty of reader emails, there are other people that feel the same way. If you’re a relative newbie and decide to do CrossFit, don’t just launch into the complex Olympic lifts, especially at high reps. I’ve seen overeager beginners do this, and they often mess themselves up.

The Need for Glycogen Replacement

Because my business background is in supplement design, I was brought on the P90X team (7+ years ago) to create a recovery drink that fit their demographic and the recovery requirements to allow someone to go hard nearly every day for 90 days. Simply put, if you’re doing P90X as prescribed, your body is going to need to replenish depleted glycogen. I am no longer associated with the company that markets P90X (although my likeness is shown on all the in-home products talking about replenishing glycogen) and, of course, my own ideas about how much we ought to be working out are different from P90X. If you work according to the PB, you don’t need to replenish glycogen with post-workout feedings of sugar. And you shouldn’t.

So, what makes my upcoming Primal Blueprint Fitness program better?

I suppose the honest answer is that we’ll have to wait and see. I announced my plans to launch Primal Blueprint Fitness later this year just this Wednesday. It won’t be until the program is in the hands of users and they’ve had a chance to incorporate it into their lifestyle that we’ll be able to make a fair assessment. That said, PBF is being designed to be a comprehensive, full-body fitness program that focuses on brevity without skimping on intensity. Primal Blueprint Fitness is CrossFit for the rest of us; it’s P90X without the massive time commitment. It’s about getting the best results with the least amount of input. See, I’m interested in helping as many people as I can, so I’ve designed it with everyone in mind. I’m sick of watching people hobble around with canes or old injuries. I want to see seniors bounding up stairs. I want to see people get six packs without actively trying to. More than anything, I want people to get stronger, fitter, and healthier. The athletes can scale things up and increase weights or reps, while the less advanced can just use bodyweight, but everyone will be doing the same movements that our bodies are designed to perform. Best of all, you’ll be able to follow this program for life, under any circumstance fortune throws at you. You get injured? There are workarounds. Growing older? You can simply scale things down. Out of town and away from equipment? Use your bodyweight. Beginners can instantly jump in. You get plenty of rest, coupled with plenty of intensity, for the best results with no overtraining. You get plenty of instruction on the more complex movements, to avoid injury. And, of course, it’s designed specifically with the PB eating plan in mind.

While you await the release of PBF follow the Primal Blueprint Fitness principles, use the specific workouts listed here on MDA as a guide, and if you’re looking to make your P90X and CrossFit workouts more Primal break things up with more rest, more play, and more low-level aerobic activity.

I greatly admire CrossFit and P90X, and they’ve produced some excellent athletes. If you’re a CrossFitter or P90Xer and it’s working for you, keep at it! I just think that a lot of people could benefit from a slightly different approach – a fitness program geared toward sustainability, functionality, and overall health. Fitness based on Primal movements, on the precise activities that comprised Grok’s day-to-day existence, distilled down to maximize effectiveness and minimize time commitment. Stay tuned!

Let me know what you think. What are your experiences with P90X and CrossFit? Are you ready to give Primal Blueprint Fitness a try? Thanks for reading and Grok on!

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Yes, light, or the lack thereof, plays an enormous role in the regulation of our cycles, especially our sleep cycle. For millions of years, light was an objective, exogenous measure by which organisms established behavioral patterns, hormonal fluctuations, and sleep cycles. Depending on the seasons, the position of the global axes, and the weather, you could pretty much count on light, bright days and deep, dark nights. Nocturnal hunters and scavengers took the lack of light to mean “eatin’ time,” while other animals (including humans) sought shelter and slumber when night fell. Daylight meant activity and safety (since we could, you know, see everything). Fire, then, wasn’t just about cooking and providing warmth; it also allowed humans a small sliver of daylight’s safety and security at night.

Before I go on, I need to make something clear. My regular readers will have already grasped this concept, but I think it’s a good idea to reiterate it. Though it’s tempting to place us humans on another plane of existence, apart from the mindless flora and fauna that share this world, we are animals. Sure, we’re smarter and more complex than the others, but we’re still subject to these exogenous zeitgebers worming their influential fingers into our subconscious and fiddling with our circadian rhythms. Our tendency to get sleepy when night falls isn’t a cultural relic; we didn’t consciously decide to start sleeping at night because it was too dangerous to be out in the dark. The culture of standard bedtimes arose organically, if you can even call it culture. Does the chirping of birds in the morning reflect cultural tendencies? Is “the early bird gets the worm” a standard axiom in avian academia? No – the early bird’s evolutionary niche decrees that it wake up bright and early in order to get food. It’s basic natural selection, and humans are the same way. We don’t decide to get up early. We get up early because of a complex pattern of environmental cues telling us to get up. Throughout our evolutionary development, handling business during the daytime was simply how we survived. We can’t escape nature.

But boy do we try.

The zeitgeber (can’t get enough of that word) with the biggest impact on our sleep cycle is light. Period. And it’s not just natural light that affects our sleep cycle, but also unnatural, manmade lights. That’s kinda how we operate, actually, as instinctual beings who often misinterpret “unnatural” because, well, our physiology isn’t exactly intelligent. It’s not sentient. It’s purely reactive. Blue light from a 10:00 AM sky, blue light from your computer screen at midnight – it makes no difference to our circadian rhythms. It’s all the same to our bodies, because for millions of years blue light meant daylight, not a late night blog comment section or reruns of The Daily Show. And it’s the blue light specifically that appears to monitor our sleep patterns the most.

Like insulin and inflammation, blue light is integral to our health – in the correct amounts. When we’re exposed to levels of anything in excess (or too little) of what we would have experienced for the bulk of our evolutionary history, problems arise. Blue light regulates our secretion of melatonin, the sleep hormone. Exposed to blue light, we limit the production of melatonin, and we stay alert and awake; in the absence of blue light, melatonin production ramps up, and we get sleepy. This system worked quite well for a long time. Reddish light from fire (our formerly primary source of nighttime illumination) has little to no effect on melatonin production, so sleep wasn’t disrupted when we relied on fire. These days, though, we’re subject to a steady barrage of blue light. During the day, blue light (natural or unnatural) isn’t much of a problem because we’re supposed to be awake, but at night, when we’re “supposed” to be getting ready to sleep, we tend to sit in front of blue light-emanating appliances, and our sleep suffers for it.

(An interesting note on how we respond to blue light. For years, scientists assumed circadian rhythm was set by sight (of light) alone. Person sees sky/LCD screen and the same visual system that allows colored vision determines the hormonal, behavioral, or other physical reactions to the light. It makes sense, but that’s not how it works. It turns out that there exists a second, more dominant system responsible for setting circadian rhythm based on light input. If a person’s sleep cycle depended purely on traditional color vision, we’d expect the blind to universally suffer from disrupted sleep. They do not, however, and this is explained by optical cells that express a photopigment called melanopsin. Unlike the standard rod and cone opsins, melanopsin doesn’t help us see. Instead, it reacts most strongly to blue light, and scientists think it’s the primary regulator of the biological clock and production of melatonin. In otherwise blind patients with intact melanopsin systems, blue light has a strong effect on their sleep cycles.)

Blue light has its place, of course. A British study found that blue light-enhanced white lights in the workplace improved alertness, performance, and even nighttime sleep quality in employees. That’s during the day, though, when blue light exposure is normal and expected. Nighttime exposure to blue light disrupts our sleep hormones. Television, computer screens, even digital clocks with blue numbers – they’re all common sources of late night blue light that can affect our production of melatonin.

Is blue light the only issue? It certainly appears to be the primary driver of circadian rhythm, but it’s not the only one. In a recent study, researchers found that while monochromatic blue light suppressed melatonin production via melanopsin stimulation, polychromatic white light (which includes blue light) stimulated melanopsin equally while suppressing melatonin to an even greater degree. Clearly, it’s not just blue light’s effect on melanopsin affecting our sleep cycles.

Still, blue light is the low-hanging fruit, and there are some simple steps you can take to mitigate its late-night effect on your sleep.

• Keep electronics usage to a minimum or completely eliminate blue light (alarms, TVs, laptops) after dark.
• Go to sleep earlier.
• Use candlelight (read how a fellow MDA reader gave this a try for 30-days).
• Keep your room as dark as possible and your sleeping quarters pitch black.
• Install F.lux (totally free) on your computer to cut down on blue light emissions.
• If you want to try a somewhat extreme experiment you could even wear orange safety glasses at night.

(Thanks to this thread on PaleoHacks for the last two tips.) Also, don’t forget to expose yourself to blue light during the day so that your cycle normalizes – it goes both ways, you know.

Does anyone have experience cutting out blue light exposure to great effect? Let the world know in the comments.

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