Dear Mark,

I’m a little confused. I get the animal fat, the meat, the veggies, and the lowish sugar fruit recommendations, but what about nuts? I love nuts, don’t get me wrong… I’m just a bit paranoid about the Omega 6 content. You recommend nuts in the book. If you (and pretty much all other Primal bloggers) tell us to avoid Omega 6 fats, should we still be eating them?  I’m having trouble reconciling the two bits of advice and there seem to be mixed messages out there. Thanks.

Is there a place for nuts in the Primal Blueprint diet? Let’s take a closer look.

Omega-6 Content Various Nuts (1/4 cup)

Walnuts – 9.5 g

Almonds – 4.36 g

Cashews – 2.6 g

Macadamias – 0.5 g

Brazil nuts – 7.2 g

Hazelnuts – 2.7 g

Pistachio – 4.1 g

Pine nuts – 11.6 g

Pecans – 5.8 g

The basic takeaway is that quite a few nuts are fairly O6-intensive (with several, like macadamia nuts, being extremely low). A diet high in these nuts, then, would presumably skew the vaunted tissue O6-O3 ratio toward pro-inflammatory bodily processes… right? I mean, if you were to eat food fried in high-O6 vegetable oil at some restaurant, that would be pro-inflammatory. If you were to eat cheap Chinese food stir-fried in cheap, high-O6 soybean oil every day for lunch, you’d expect a good amount of oxidized LDL at your next lipid test. And if you were to supplement your diet with a few daily tablespoons of unheated corn oil, there would be markedly negative effects (besides gagging and/or vomiting) on your body. How are nuts any different?

For one, nuts aren’t just “bags of linoleic acid” (as Stephan Guyenet recently pointed out in a comment board I’ve misplaced). Isolating Omega-6 fatty acids and then exposing them to air or heat is bad dietary policy. I don’t care where it is – in your body, in your cupboard, or in the skillet. But nuts are much more than linoleic acid. In fact, a nut is a pretty complete nutritional source. After all, it’s the seed of a tree, a sort of arboreal egg. Contained within is everything that tree needs to start growing from scratch – fats, carbohydrates, even protein, plus natural antioxidants like Vitamin E and plenty of minerals. We have to remember that antioxidants in foods exist, first and foremost, to protect the food from damage. That linoleic acid in the walnut isn’t meant for you to consume (we’ve adapted to it, not the other way around); it’s there to provide energy for the budding tree. A damaged, oxidized fat is no good to any tree, and Vitamin E helps prevent oxidation. When we strip a nut of everything but the liquid fat, we’re asking for trouble, but if we eat the whole nut, the fat remains protected by the natural antioxidants, at least to a point (eating burnt, damaged, or rancid nuts isn’t the same as eating raw or soaked nuts). In other words, extracting, refining, and isolating a highly unstable Omega-6 fatty acid in oil form is entirely different than eating the odd handful of pistachios every other day or so. If you roast your nuts to the point of burning, then, yeah, you’re probably eating damaged fats, and that could be a problem. But eating a quarter cup of nuts every few days isn’t going to hurt you – even if they’re high-O6 walnuts (the horror!).

Even if the Omega-6 fat in nuts is bad, the positives of the nut seem to weigh more heavily. Whole nut intake seems to reduce markers of systemic inflammation, and inflammation is linked with a wide range of ailments and afflictions (obesity, insulin resistance, heart disease, excess cortisol, etc.). The study’s (PDF) authors hesitate to isolate and praise a single component of the nut, referring to them as “complex food matrices containing diverse nutrients and other chemical constituents.” I think that’s an accurate appraisal of the humble, irreducible nut.

What’s the Downside?

Problems arise with steady year-round access to foods whose historical availability was seasonal and intermittent. If you were a hunter-gatherer, you probably weren’t gathering bushels of nuts on a daily basis – at least, you weren’t finding enough nuts in the wild to eat eight ounces a day. Nuts should never comprise the bulk of your diet, anyway. A quarter cup as a snack every now and then isn’t going to kill you. It’s not even going to compromise your progress. I mean, they’re nuts. They aren’t meals, and they’re not meant to be. They’re snacks, basic supplements to an already nutritious diet replete in animal fat, protein, and vegetables. And in a high Omega-3 diet like the Primal Blueprint they definitely have a place.

Just make sure you treat your nuts as delicious snacks, rather than staple cornerstones of a meal. Don’t burn your nuts, and don’t cook with the oil. The safest bet is to buy them raw and soak or roast them yourself. That way, you control the heat and you can mediate the oxidation.

Overanalyzing your food intake is a good way to stress yourself out and make every little dietary choice an internal struggle. Avoid falling into this trap. Be vigilant of your food choices, but pick your battles wisely. Making sure you ask the waiter to cook your omelet in butter rather than vegetable oil is worth the trouble; stressing over the Omega-6 content of the twenty walnuts in front of you is decidedly not.

This is a fairly contentious topic in the community, with a ton of bloggers weighing in. Richard Nikoley (last I heard) opts for the harvest-and-gorge nut consumption style, going regular periods of time where he eats none at all. He’ll avoid buying any “for 2-3 store visits in a row.” Remember, Grok didn’t have around the clock access to nuts.

Stephan Guyenet and Don Matesz go back and forth in the comments section of Don’s recent post on walnuts, in which Don offers very sound evidence in favor of walnut consumption. Definitely check it out.

My general take, as I see it, is that nuts shouldn’t make up the bulk of your caloric intake. It’s not that Omega-6s are inherently dangerous, especially bound up in whole food, nut form; nuts may even be beneficial to heart health, probably by decreasing systemic inflammation. It’s that they’re often too available, too plentiful, and way too easy to consume in excess. What drew our ancestors to nuts – the caloric density and the fat content – is what makes them “dangerous” to modern man. Most seeds, including grains, were passed over because the labor involved in their gathering and their refining was prohibitive with inadequate payoff. Nuts are meaty, though, and they’re dense and (somewhat) filling. It makes sense that we easily snack on them all day, because our ancestors probably gorged themselves on nuts when they were available. We should eat them, too, but it’s important to stick to reasonable, evolutionarily realistic amounts.

Care to weigh in with your thoughts on nuts? I know a lot of forum members have reservations about them, so I’d love to hear in the comments section.

Get Free Health Tips, Recipes and Workouts Delivered to Your Inbox

Related posts:

1. Dear Mark: Nuts
2. Dear Mark: Omega-3s and Fish Allergies
3. Dear Mark: Seasons for Nuts and Seeds?

Fat is a flavor, says science. And me. Yum.

What’s the difference between a fish and a goat? Hunt. Gather. Love talks about the role emotion plays in our food choices.

A new study shows studies are flawed! Read the LA Times piece on how medical studies rarely compare drugs to existing treatments.

Want to know where your milk is from? Find out here.

For the Twitter folks, Primal Chat held a real-time #PrimalChat event last Wednesday. The conversation inspired Insurgo In Apparatus to share his journey to Primal living. More than 140 characters. And worth it.

Before the internet, before Grok, before Homo sapiens, before life, before Earth, there were billions and billions of stars… Carl Sagan fans rejoice, the Cosmos can now be seen on Hulu.

Recipe Corner

• Here’s a cheese recipe using an….unconventional source of dairy, courtesy of chef Daniel Angerer. Or more accurately, courtesy of Daniel’s wife. (via DietBlog)
• Fish Tacos. So hot right now. Cosmopolitan Primal Girl makes them tasty and healthy.

Time Capsule

One year ago (March 7 – 13)

• How to Relieve Sore Muscles – You try out a new exorcise. It feels great. Easy as pie. Then two days later your muscles are sore as hell. It’s called DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness); this post explains why DOMS happens and what you can do about it.
• Pepper and Salt: Not So Basic After All – Learn the difference between all the colors of peppercorn, and discover a few new “gourmet” salts for finer dining.

Comment of the Week

Just explain eggs in the way my astute kindergartener (who has chickens) did to another student today:

Student 1: You eat the baby chickens in the eggs?
Student 2: No, see there is no rooster. Without the rooster, the hen can’t get married and the eggs don’t have babies in them. The eggs need a daddy rooster to become a chicken.
Student 1: oh!

by Marissa from Dear Mark: The Semmelweis Reflex

Get Free Health Tips, Recipes and Workouts Delivered to Your Inbox

Related posts:

1. How to Relieve Sore Muscles
2. Weekend Link Love
3. Weekend Link Love

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.

Get Free Health Tips, Recipes and Workouts Delivered to Your Inbox

Related posts:

1. Roasted Pork Loin with Apples, Onions and Sauerkraut
2. Pork Loin with Mango Salsa
3. Crock Pot Pork-Stuffed Peppers

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.

Get Free Health Tips, Recipes and Workouts Delivered to Your Inbox

Related posts:

1. DIY – Butter, Yogurt, Kefir, Oh My!
2. Crazy Burger Mania! It’s Crazy!
3. Top 10 Junk Foods in Disguise

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.

Related posts:

1. How to Improve Your Posture
2. Meet Grok
3. The “Grok Crawl”

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!

Get Free Health Tips, Recipes and Workouts Delivered to Your Inbox

Related posts:

1. Urban Gardening
2. Urban Areas Becoming Supermarket “Deserts”
3. Workout Suggestion: Planned Spontaneity

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!

Get Free Health Tips, Recipes and Workouts Delivered to Your Inbox

Related posts:

1. Social Wellness, or Why Friendship Should Be a Health Priority
2. The Primal Blueprint For Busy People – Part 2: Social and Naturalistic Wellness
3. Did Humans Evolve to Be Long-Distance Runners?

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!

Get Free Health Tips, Recipes and Workouts Delivered to Your Inbox

Related posts:

1. Dear Mark: Healthy Body Weight?
2. Dear Mark: Primal Personal Products?
3. Dear Mark: How to Stay Healthy in College

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

Get Free Health Tips, Recipes and Workouts Delivered to Your Inbox

Related posts:

1. Weekend Link Love
2. Weekend Link Love
3. Weekend Link Love

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.

Get Free Health Tips, Recipes and Workouts Delivered to Your Inbox

Related posts:

1. Mediterranean Stuffed Pork Loin
2. The Allure of Crock Pots
3. Smart Fuel: Sweet Peppers