Breast Cancer Breakfast

john durant: today iwanted to talk about paleo as bio-hacking, which may be alittle bit different than how it's currentlyportrayed in the press. a lot of the pieces on the paleodiet, or the cave man diet, in the press are alittle bit cartoonish. i'm a little bitresponsible for that. but it often gets portrayed asthe macho man eating raw meats straight off thebone wearing a loin cloth, which is pretty silly.

but that's sort of the waythat a lot of journalists portray it. my book, and this approach,is actually about something much bigger than paleo orthe paleolithic or even just diet, which is starting to takeevolution, human evolution, seriously when we thinkabout human health. the current state ofhealth recommendations in this country andthe world is awful. so many peoplewant to be healthy,

but are confused byconflicting advice. you know, should i do atkins? should i go vegetarian? health issues, ethicalissues, environmental issues. for weight loss orautoimmune conditions? should i count calories? is fat evil? are there types offat that aren't evil? there's a lot of massconfusion out there.

and there are a lot of eatingdisorders, clearly obesity, type 2 diabetes. people are living a longtime, but the question is, are they thrivingand being healthy? so the broader concept thati want to talk about today isn't just diet or isn'tjust the paleolithic, but starting to useour evolutionary past to generate really smartheuristics that are probably pretty close to being rightin pretty short order.

i'm sure you guys are veryfamiliar with some principles of hacking or bio-hacking. and i just sort of want to doa comparison between principals of hacking or bio-hacking,and what this broader paleo sphere is doing inthe health world. so trial-and-erroris very important-- hands-on, do-it-yourself,self-experimentation, n equals 1, experiments. and speed-- move fast.

embrace failure-- break things. 80% solutions--don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. resourcefulness--repurposing old features for new uses,accidental discoveries. i'm moving veryquickly over these because i feel like thisaudience is probably very familiar withthis type of stuff. simplicity-- keepit simple stupid.

decentralization. all these hacking principles. what's also coolabout these principles is it's actually have evolutionby natural selection works. it's an amateurishprocess without any overarching authority. it isn't concerned with theory. organisms are alwaysusing whatever a bits are lying around asmaterial for new functions

and features. it's sort of a blind,trial-and-error search process. so when you actually look atthis broader paleo movement, whether you call it that word. maybe another word isbetter-- ancestral health, evolutionary health,evolutionary medicine. again, you have a lotof similar features. you basically have a lotof amateurs out there who have said a lotof the top-down advice

that we're getting fromhealth officials at the usda or in the government or mycorporate health program or my health insurance policydon't seem to be working. and so maybe it's time tostart treating your own health as a do-it-yourself activity. because if you want to preventchronic health conditions, there's no magicpill you can take. there's no surgerythat you can conduct to prevent the onset ofobesity and type 2 diabetes

and alzheimer's andthings like that. you actually have to takeday-to-day in your daily life to prevent all these things. so in a sense, we'reall bio-hackers if we want to be healthy. we have to do it yourself. over the last few years,this sort of paleo approach has been pounding the pavementon things like saturated fat. and that a lot of thescience on saturated fat

has been distorted,or poorly conducted, publishing biases to makesaturated fat look bad. but over the last coupleyears of iteration of people experimenting withtheir own blood work, with different levels ofsaturated fat in their diet, people have veryquickly realized, wait a second, saturatedfat is not this evil thing. 40% of all fats in humanbreast milk or saturated. about 40% of all the fats inthe human body are saturated.

we've had saturated fat inour diet for millions of years from bone marrow and brains. so our metabolism iswell-adapted to metabolizing, to harnessing it asan energy source. so you see issueslike that where this bottom-up, open sourcecommunity is moving much faster than the conventionalhealth authorities. embracing failure. there are folks inthe paleosphere who

get into fights aboutwhether eating a legume is going to kill you or not,or give you kidney stones. or rice or wheat. a lot of people aretalking about gluten-free. is having a little bit of glutengoing to cause stomach problems and digestiveproblems in any one? is this overblown? so there may be some areaswhere this burgeoning movement is wrong.

that's ok. people are moving fast. they're experimenting. and they're going to seewhether it works or not. we don't have to go throughall the rest of these. so much my book actually isn'tmostly about the paleolithic, even though it usesthe word paleo. and so i want tointroduce the structure that i use to think about humanevolution and any health issue

that you want to deal with--not just food, not just movement or anything. so this is a typicalsingularity chart from kurzweil from life to today, thegrowth of complexity or major transitionsover that period of time. and so i sort ofstructure my thinking into five mainbuckets, as we think about human evolution from thebeginning of life to today. what i call the animalage, or basically

from the cambrian explosion tothe beginning the paleolithic, pre-human essentially. we can learn a lot from otherspecies and our common ancestry with other species about how tobe healthy, whether it's food, whether its movement. then you get the paleolithicfor about 2.6 million years. that's when you get hominidsand humans emerging. then you get theagricultural age. after the agriculturalrevolution,

we domesticateplants and animals, start living in cities. our lifestyleschange dramatically. the industrial age. and the information age. and we can use this simplefive-age, five-era framework to in really quick fashion geta handle, 80% of the way there on pretty much any health issue. and start to cut througha lot of noise that's

out there abouthow to be healthy. should we eat saturated fat? how much sun exposureshould we get? how much should we move? and in what ways are thebest ways to exercise? and all of these questionsthat just fill the bookstores with diet books and healthbooks and all this nuttiness. it doesn't have tobe this complicated. so some of theheuristics that we

can learn when welook at other species is any health dynamic you careabout-- thermal regulation, diet, movement,anything-- the best way to learn about it is tocompletely forget human beings and just look at other species. and compare that dynamicacross different species. because as soon as youstart talking about humans, everybody has preconceivednotions about how to do it. people have a lot of--particularly in food,

food is like religion-- peoplehave all these identity-- it's a source of identityfor a lot of people. and so you can't have an honestconversation about what should i eat or what should i not eat? so if you look at our commonancestry with other species, you can be like, ok, wellthere are herbivores. there are carnivores. there are omnivores. and if you go to azoo, the basic approach

that the top zoosin the world take, is they use modern scienceand medical technology to keep the animals alive. but then they mimic thenatural habitat and lifestyle of the species in relevantways, in the most relevant ways. and so it just dependson the species. you want to feed redmeat and whole prey feeding to the lionsand the carnivores. and you want to feedgrass to the herbivores,

or whatever plant speciesthey're adapted to. and omnivores have moredietary flexibility. immediately you can start torealize that, first of all, there's no particular foodout there that is necessarily inherently unhealthy. it depends on whether thatspecies is adapted to it. plenty of species areadapted to eating grass. and they have the microorganismsin their extensive stomach to digest it all.

we don't. a second thing that you canlearn very quickly about health from looking at otherspecies-- and again looking at zoos, because that'swhere we often have the best access to them-- is theimportance of habitat. and starting tothink about health in terms of aholistic habitat-based approach to keepingspecies healthy. i talk about, in my book,a trip to the cleveland zoo

where they had someobese gorillas. heart disease and heart failureis the number one killer of male gorillas in captivity,just like heart disease is the number one killer ofmale humans in civilization. and so they weretrying to figure out ways to reverse or halt theprogression of heart disease in these westernlowland gorillas. and it's kind of like,ok, so what should we do? they don't really haveany fat in their diet,

so low-fat doesn't work. i guess what they could tryto restrict their calories, but that didn'tseem to make sense. so what they did was theywere like, oh wait a second, maybe we shouldn't be feedingthese western lowland gorillas wheat, corn, and soy-basedfiber bars that are essentially reformulated dog food. of course it'snot even dog food, because that's not whatdogs and wolves eat.

so they switched the gorillasto a bunch of leafy plants and vegetables that they boughtin the local cleveland grocery store. mccullough lost 70 pounds. beback lost 35 pounds. their blood work improved. behavioral problems went away. all sorts of things like that. but all of these zoosrealized that you

can use modernmedical technology to keep the animals alivefor a long period of time, but if you want to preventthe onset of chronic health conditions to helpthem thrive, you have to take ahabitat-based approach. because there's nopill, there's no surgery that can be done toreverse these conditions, or at least notterribly effectively. so that gives you yourfirst-pass approach at, ok,

how does this dynamic work? forget human beings. then the next stepis to say, ok well, if we're talkingabout diet, now how does this featuremanifest in human beings during a long formativeperiod in human evolution? during the paleolithic, this2.6 million year period. it's not the end of the story. but it really is sort ofthe beginning of the story.

i don't think that paleo diets,and paleo this and paleo that is the end of the conversation. it's more like it's theappropriate beginning of the conversation. so if you were talking aboutdiet, that's where you realize, you talk to paleoanthropologists and realize thathumans have been eating meat for 2.6 millionyears or longer. there are cut markson bones that we

have going back that long. and so right off the bat,you're just immediately skeptical of claims thatveganism or vegetarianism are the optimal ways for humansto be healthy because it's like, wait a second,we've been omnivores for millions of years. there are no known veganor vegetarian indigenous populations. and the introduction ofmeat into the human diet

is, does appear, tobe related, in part, to the expansion of our brains. and so the paleolithic gives youthis first-pass approximation of what might be a healthylifestyle, healthy diet, temperature changes, circadianrhythms, sleep patterns, all of this. it gives you afirst-pass approximation of what might be a healthypattern for human beings today. it doesn't guaranteethat there aren't

new ways of doingthings that are better, new foods that mightbe healthier or better. but for the amateurtrying to quickly arrive at good heuristics, it'sthe right place to start. then after theagricultural revolution, people start living in cities. we become farmersand herders instead of hunters and gatherers. and so, then you take intoaccount recent adaptations.

so just because afood is novel doesn't mean it's bad or unhealthy. so, for example, mostpeople's favorite foods come from fermentation, whetherit's alcohol or cheese or bread or a lot of things theharness microorganisms and the process offermentation to be created. so we can take into accountrecent cultural adaptations. we can also take intoaccount genetic adaptations. you look at alcohol,and populations

that have been drinkingalcohol for 5,000 years handle it better thanindigenous populations that have been drinking alcoholfor three generations. they're just not adapted tometabolizing alcohol well. if you come from europeanor middle eastern ancestry, our ancestors wentthrough a process where there were probably lotsof people dying of alcoholism. but it happened 5,000 years ago. and i won't go toomuch into this,

but one of the heuristicsthat's very important is realizing theimportance of culture, both culture in the formsof ideas and microbes to human health. so then you getthe industrial age. and the industrial age andthe industrial revolution over the lastcouple hundred years is pretty much a warningof what not to do. this is the simple heuristic.

the british navy sends abunch of sailors out on ships. and they alter their foodso that it doesn't perish, and don't realize that theseguys are going to get scurvy because there's no vitaminc in what they're eating. or people move indoors andthey don't get any sunlight. and then people get rickets. so we started changingthings in human lives so quickly during theindustrial revolution that we weren't able to adaptculturally or genetically.

rickets, pellagra,scurvy, even explorers going in novel habitatsduring the industrial age, a flight going undersea. this industrialtechnology was literally pushing human beings inhabitats that we had never experienced over eons ofgenetic and cultural evolution. and we learned howto kill ourselves. we killed ourselves at thebeginning of the industrial revolution through lack ofsun exposure and rickets,

through missing micronutrients,changing our diet so quickly and shifting to a diet ofrefined flour and sugar and alcohol that we weremissing key micronutrients from our diet. and then by the endof the industrial age, we figure out that we needto add certain things back in and fortified foods with them. but we were just solvingproblems of our own creation. so the big lesson fromthe industrial age

is learning how tonot die basically. and then today inthe information age we're now in a positionto-- the last piece of this is personal experimentation andcustomizing solutions to you. because everybody has a uniquegenome, unique gut bacteria, allergies, injuries, tastes,preferences, budgets, so we're all unique organisms. we all live in a unique habitat. we're all going to end upwith somewhat unique diets

or lifestyles that work for us. so let's take food. a lot of people that hearabout the paleo diet, they just think ofthe paleolithic. and the basicprescriptions are-- all the conventional healthauthorities pretty much agree that too much industrialfoods is bad for you. so all their advice,from the mayo clinic to doctor oz to michaelpollan to everybody

is basically avoidindustrial food. processed food--twinkies and coca-cola and refined sugar and all that. so it basicallyboils down to, eat like we did before theindustrial revolution. eat like you sort ofgrew up on a farm. you had whole grain bread andmilk and cheese and organic. everything was organic. we were still poor.

but everything was organic. so all of that healthadvice basically boils down to eat like a farmer. eat like a herder-farmer. and that may be enoughfor a lot of people. avoiding industrial food fora lot of people, particularly young people, may becompletely fine and sufficient. but it's not for alot of other folks. and so what paleo addsto the mix is saying,

ok well, the agriculturalrevolution introduced two huge food groupsinto the human diet they basicallyhadn't been consumed before-- grains and legumesand domesticated seeds, basically, and dairy fromdomesticated animals. i don't know if anybody herehas milked a wild animal. it's not easy. it's possible, not easy. so what this adds, alittle more perspective,

and says ok, well peoplefour hundred generations ago, only started to eattons of wheat and corn and diets shifted frombeing very diverse, lots of differentanimal species, lots of differentparts of the animal, lots of different typesof plants depending on the geography and the season,to a diet heavily concentrated in a few staple cereal crops--wheat, corn, barley, oats. and then products made fromthat, bread and beer and things

like. so paleo adds that pieceto the puzzle in food. so what i recommendpeople do is-- first off, if you feel fine withyour health and the way that you're eating, there maybe no reason to change anything. if you feel fine and therearen't any issues, then what's the problem? however, if eatingan agricultural diet isn't working for you, thenwhat you might want to explore

is diets that were more commonduring this prior period in human evolution-- soremoving grains, removing dairy for a time, and trying to mimican approximation-- we realize it's an approximation. and then add back innovel modern foods and see how you feel. i know many people who are verystrict on gluten and grains. many have to be. many just want to be.

and i know more peoplewho are flex on dairy, and when they eatit it'll be more like full-fat traditional dairy. and then just see how you feel. and this is sort of thebio-hacking part of it. you've got to experiment. and based on your ancestryand your genome and your gut bacteria and whatyou like, you just have to craft your own diet.

let me give youone more example, and then maybe wecan go to questions. i don't know what time it is. audience: it's about 3:30. john durant: 3:30? the paleolithic doesn'thelp you with all areas. and this is why i get a littlefrustrated with the term paleo, even though i useit and promote it. so take sleep, as an example.

the big change inhuman sleep patterns didn't happen betweenthe paleolithic and the agricultural revolution. people still lived withtheir extended family in fairly close quarters and hadno indoor lighting and things like that. the big transition in sleep wasbetween the agricultural age and the industrial age whenyou get indoor lighting, you get more stimulantslike coffee and tea

to keep people up,more alco-- well i guess alcohol was way before--clocks, things like that. and then people increasinglysleeping in isolation from others, in their own rooms,on softer and softer bedding. so most of the bigkey transition, most of the key changes,when it comes to sleep, have nothing to dowith the paleolithic. and you can actuallyget an approximation of a healthy way ofsleeping and sleep patterns

from looking at ouragricultural era ancestors. so the paleolithicdoesn't always hold the solutionsto everything. we don't always need it,depending on the issue. but people focus ondiet so much that that's what it gets associated with. do i have anything else? no. so if people now havespecific questions,

let's open it up to questions. audience: what do you meanexactly by [inaudible]? john durant: by what? audience: [inaudible]? john durant: so people wouldsleep near a fire, usually. there were lotsof people around. there wasn't very much privacy. there are a lotof folks who think that sleep was less less of asingle uninterrupted stretch

of seven or eight hours andmore broken up into two periods. or you'd sleep for awhile, wake up, have sex, go to the bathroom, chatwith someone by the fire, go back to sleepfor a few hours. night was a long time. and you couldn't domuch when it was dark. so that's sort ofwhat it was like. but it didn't change too muchwhen people started farming. and then they wereliving in little huts

with extended familyscrunched together around the fire for all night. other questions? audience: from on vc behind you. you can't see meactually, i think. john durant: hi. audience: when i was at[inaudible] from hamburg, germany. and thanks againfor doing all this.

paleo has done a lot for me. listened to you recentlyon robb wolf again. it's just amazing stuffthat you guys are doing. john durant: thanks. audience: so my questionis-- so [inaudible] a lot of people aroundyou there as well. i have a lot ofpeople, when you say, you know when people say theyare fine with what they're eating and they way they'refeeling, then [inaudible].

so the two questions that i havearound that is, you know, a, how do they knowthat they couldn't feel much, much better, right? i feel like we've beendoing that sort of stuff for a long time. we don't even know. [inaudible]? john durant: right. audience: [inaudible] basically.

all their lives. so, that's the one question. the other one is, ifeel like-- so you say a lot of youngpeople especially, i think what you mean isthat a lot of people, their their metabolism is much moreforgiving than, for example, later in time. audience: what is[inaudible] that is accumulating over thisperiod that sort of, you know,

lifestyle, thatcould be prevented, and would not even lead toissues in the 30s, 40s, 50s, whenever. john durant: so, thanksfor your questions. for the firstquestion, yeah, people tend to accept theirlives as normal. they confuse the wordnormal with common. i do it. everybody here does it.

just because it'scommon in north america to live a certainway doesn't mean it's necessarily speciestypical in a biological sense. so they have thesame problem in zoos. they run studies on the healthof all the captive gorillas in north american zoos. but they actually can't concludevery much because they all lead very similar lives andvery similar circumstances, eating very similar food.

and so if you actually want tosee real differences in gorilla help, you have to compare themwith their wild counterparts. but the reason why i say,however you're eating, if you feel great, fineis partly because i don't want to pushpeople too much. and we can eat novel foods,and we can live in new ways and that's fine. so i'm just trying to do moreof the soft sell, i guess. but i think peoplewould be surprised

about how many conditionsthey accept as normal that don't necessarily have to be. you get teenagers thataccept it as normal that they will need bracesand to get tons of acne. and this causes like alot of social anxiety, and like self-esteem issues. and we treat it as thisnormal rite of passage through adolescence. but the reason whyour teeth are crowded

is because our jawshave gotten smaller over the last some thousands ofyears because the food we eat isn't very tough. it's very soft. and so our jawsdon't grow as large as they do when wehad tougher foods. and so our jaws aren't largeenough to fit all of our teeth. and some of thosestrong bite forces are what the body uses to helpyour teeth come in straight.

when you look at thesehunter gatherer skulls-- and i've gotten to examine someof them-- 80,000 years ago, beautiful set of teeth. not perfect, butwisdom teeth came in, there was enough room inthe jaw for the wisdom teeth to come in. no cavities. and straight. so that's--

audience: i'm sorry. are you saying that's anevolutionary change over 80,000 years, or is thata specific change over the lifetime becausean individual is chewing less, that their jaw grows less. john durant: individualchewing less, though there are somelines of evidence that maybe the humanhad has actually gotten a little bit smallerover the last 10,000 years.

our brains actually usedto be a little bit bigger than they are today. near the end the paleolithic. i don't know what that means. your second question was about--what was your second question? oh youth, youth. so definitely youngpeople can-- there's very interesting evolutionary--the evolutionary biology of aging is a veryfascinating area.

there's a guy named michaelrose at uc irvine who's probably the preeminentguy in this field. and a lot of people think ofaging as sort of simply just damage accumulating,like a car rolls off the lot at whereverthey sell cars-- audience: dealership. john durant: --at a dealership. and then from then onout, it sort of just accumulates damage.

but during the period of timebefore the typical first stage of reproduction, we've basicallyevolved incredible repair mechanisms. so let me put it this way, ifyou get a genetic defect that causes you to die whenyou're four or five, your genes don't get passed onto the next generation at all. kaput. you're out. you're out of the gene pool.

but if you get that samegenetic defect when you're 50, you still have timeto have offspring. so basically, dependingon the first typical age of reproduction ofa species, evolution selects for incrediblerobust health. we grow strongeras we get older. we become more robustfrom birth to adolescence, and then we start toaccumulate damage. so young people areactually pretty well adapted

to some aspects ofan agricultural diet. young people areprobably better adapted to some of those foods thanthose same individuals later in life. it's a verycounter-intuitive concept. but there's been selectionpressures for young kids to be able to surviveon these diets, to make it to the ageat which they reproduce. there has not been thesame sort of selection,

or as strong of selection,for older people. so there are a lot ofpeople, for example, who end up gettingceliac later in life. there was some traumaticevent, or childbirth, or just getting older. either celiac or not beingable to digest lactose. they become lactoseintolerant later in life. you start to noticeit among folks. my grandmother developedceliac late in life.

and it's possible that forsome of these more novel foods, we're betteradapted to them when we're young and less adaptedto them when we're older. so it may becomemore important to eat more of a paleolithicdiet the older you get. some of that is hypothesis. audience: can i jump in on thatjust really quickly, sorry. audience: well let-- ok. audience: just becauseit's a very tangible thing.

[inaudible] a lot ofmoney into keeping googlers healthy, right? like free m&ms andstuff like that? audience: they've reduced those. audience: and we get massages,and adjustable tables and gyms and that sort of stuff. and we have a lot of peoplethat started around age, i don't know, 20, 25 here. and then as theycontinue working here,

they get out ofshape, but they think that's the naturalcourse of life basically. so what would you tell googleas a company to say, hey, look, your people just don't haveto get sick and fat, right? [laughter] john durant: that's right. well, you could startto model workplaces on little huntergatherer tribes. less clothing and things like.

when you look at traditionalpeople, indigenous folks, living in traditional ways,they have health problems of their own-- infantmortality, things like that-- but they tendto live into their 60s, 70s, and even the 80s in somecases in robust health. the 70-year-olds, they'renot bed-ridden with arthritis and have alzheimer's. there like carrying pailsof water into their 70s and hiking up hillsand things like that.

and if you were ahunter gatherer, you had to, at a minimum, beable to move with your tribe whenever it migrated. and so it gives you a newsense of what's normal. what i like about the way thatgoogle thinks about health is really thinkingabout the habitat. saying ok, your habitat has abig influence on whether you eat something or don't. if we put a cover on itand make it less visible,

fewer people eat the candy. i think that's one of thechanges that happened here. and what's good aboutre-engineering your habitat is it doesn't require as muchwillpower and discipline. so many people, whenthey get into dieting, they think they'rechanging themselves. like i have to change myself. and i have to becomea better person. and i'm going to do this throughwillpower and discipline.

and that's part of the reasonwhy everybody fails at it. because you can't-- nobodyis perfectly disciplined over a long period of time. you have to find waysof using discipline in a short period of timeto change your habitat so that it makes iteasy to be healthy even when you'renot disciplined. or the way that you leadyour life, the food you eat and how you move, it has to bemeaningful to you in some way.

calories are notmeaningful to people. most people are notmotivated by calories. going to hunt a wild animalto bring back a lot of meat to try to impress the girlin the tribe that you like, that motivated people. so you have to think about waysto either change your habitat or make a healthy lifestylemeaningful to people so that's it doesn'trequire discipline. audience: [inaudible]when you said

there was a lot of danger indoing agricultural industrial. and i'm asking but now i'mfive days in [inaudible] all the things that canhappen if you make a switch from theinformation age, where i've been eatingprocessed foods, breads, but then i just stop. right? and i just stop andstart eating meant and vegetables and some fruits.

and are there dangersgoing the other way? like, i read [inaudible]so there's obviously a lot of fear factors,but like how real are they for doing an abruptchange in diet? john durant: onething people will notice with abrupt changesis particularly around sugar. people eat a lot of sugar today. and if you eat a lot ofsugar, and then you cut it out of your diet, you'rebasically going

through withdrawal of a drug. and it's not pleasant. lightheadedness,shaky hands, inability to concentrate, anxiety. so that can be difficult. unless somebody has some sort ofspecific, severe health issue, i do tend to think that tryingto go more or less whole hog, for a short period of time,is the best way to do it. and you just got amonitor how you feel.

you'll see better results. or you'll have abetter validation of whatever results you get. and you can harness thatperiod of discipline. a lot of peoplecan be disciplined for a week or two weeks. few people can just bedisciplined for two years. so rather than trying to gosort of 5p% for a long period of time, just going 100%.

other risks-- with diet i don'tthink there are as many risks. with exercise, yeah. if people just like immediatelyjump into a hard crossfit workout withoutlearning olympic lifts, you can injure your back. but for most people, sugar isthe biggest immediate obstacle. audience: so i'm vegan. and i actually agree a lotwith the paleo mindset. i think there's a lotmore in common than--

john durant: i agree. audience: --as far as focusingon whole foods, et cetera. and i think it gets overblownin the media how much meat you do have to eat. i think too much is bad. i don't thinknecessarily [inaudible] the only way to do things. so i was justcurious, kind of, i guess you thoughts on diet,maybe your day-to-day diet.

john durant: well let me talkabout the vegan/ paleo thing for a second. in the press, it's oftenportrayed as polar opposites. i do tend to think of paleo andvegan as more like yin yang. i have no problem withpeople eating however they want to eat. and i respect vegansand vegetarians a lot for beingconscious eaters. where it does grate on me alittle bit is if people then

turn around and say, thisis an optimal human diet. that's where i become a bitmore combative and disagree. and here's the thing. any dietary approach--atkins, vegan, paleo, whatever-- that gets peopleto eat less industrial food, is going to work to some extent. less refined sugar, refinedflour, high fructose corn syrup. any approach that getspeople to reduce that

will have some successat least for a time. and then, i have much morein common with how vegans eat than probably theaverage western diet. what was the last piece? how do i eat on a daily basis? audience: yeah what'syour day-to-day? john durant: i oftendon't eat breakfast. i don't wake up terribly hungry. sometimes, if i do havebreakfast, i'll have some eggs

and spinach. or i'll have a bowl ofheavy cream, because i eat some dairy, and a slicedup banana, which is delicious. lunch-- sushi. i don't worry about a littlebit of white rice or anything sushi, sashimi, mongolianbarbecue, meat and vegetables, a cobb salad,something like that. and then dinner would be apiece of fish, sweet potato, and a side salad.

i mean, it's not that radical. but it is radical overan extended period when you realize thatgluten and wheat and corn are in everythingin the grocery store except for a few thingsaround the outside. audience: questionfrom vc behind you. audience: so youmentioned white rice. and i eat white ricemyself because i think it doesn't-- at least it doesn'tfeel as bad wheat does.

so, and i also read some studiessaying that among grains, you might actuallybe better off eating white rice than brownrice even, in moderation. so thought on that. and i'm going to throw ina second question, which is you mentioned metabolism asthe damage analogy for aging. so the simple logic is thatthe faster your metabolism the faster you're going to age. but then again, ifind, for instance,

if i sleep on a cold, hard bed,i feel better in the morning, and logically i feel like that'sthe better things to be doing. but then part of me isthinking, isn't my body trying to burn more fuel tostay warm during the night. so i don't know if youhave any thoughts on that. john durant: well,on rice first. in my mental model ofgrains, wheat is the worst. and rice is the leastworst, or the best. let me give you the10,000 foot view seeds.

and when i say seeds, imean the reproductive organ of the plant, and i'm includinggrains, legumes, nuts, and seeds. seeds, as the reproductiveorgan of the plants, have many nutrientsin them because it's to feed the next generation. they also havedefense mechanisms. sometimes a shell, whichis nature's way of saying stay out.

or chemicals, toxins ornaturally occurring pesticides. plants can't runaway from predators. they are not mobile. so they have to useother mechanisms to defend their offspring orthe reproductive interests. and they usuallydo that by making seeds or the entire planttoxic in some way to insects or herbivores. they might be ok--i'm giving them

agency metaphorically-- theymight be ok with an herbivore coming along,eating their seeds, and then not digestingthem and then letting them come out in their feces. but they're still thencovered in a casing to prevent themfrom being digested. wild almonds containcyanide in them. apple seeds alsohave cyanide in them. many fruit pits are poisonous.

and every year some kidwill eat like a peach pit or a nectarine pit and have togo to poison control or die. you basically gothrough seeds, and it's a huge list of things thatcan irritate the stomach or the reproductivesystem of the animals that are consuming them. sheep in new zealandand australia, you have to keep them awayfrom certain pasture legumes because if the eweseat too many of them,

they have higher rates ofmiscarriage or become fertile, which is an adaptation. that's exactly whatthe legumes "want" to do because any ewesthat have a taste for them don't have offspring. so there's a generalconcern with eating diets that are high in seeds,particularly the same seed over and over, because they cancause a lot of health problems in concentrated qualities.

and if they're not preparedin traditional ways. traditional ways of preparingnuts and seeds and grains and legumes-- soaking,fermenting, baking, sprouting. all of these traditionalmethods of preparing seeds were ways of deactivating someof these problematic toxins in them. and we've sort offorgotten that. and now we eat tons ofwheat, corn, and soy prepared in untraditional ways.

and so that's the main reasonfor being skeptical of them from the outset. white rice isbasically carbohydrate. if you want more carbohydratein your diet, eat it. if you want less, don't. i like the texture of it. so i eat it. and i can handlethe carbohydrate. what was your other question?

audience: it was aboutwhether increasing metabolism by wearing less clothingor exposure to the cold is a good thing because then-- john durant: yeahi'm not sure i have a very good answerto that question. i don't know how much tryingto slow down your metabolism is feasible, and how muchit might or might not add to your longevityat the end of your life. is it an extra 20 dayswhen you're 87 years old?

i don't know. so i would do whatever. if you get better sleepon a harder surface when it's chilly, theni would do that. and yeah-- audience: i'm personallyreally glad i do paleo, and i feel fortunate thati can, because there's a farmer's marketthat i can go to. and i have the wherewithal tobuy expensive grass-fed beef.

and i live in a country thatgives me an internet where i can go and i read yourblog and listen to podcasts. is there a future for paleo inafrica or in southeast asia? is there a future where billionsof people around the world are eating paleo? and can be sustain that? is it just sort of like afad that upper middle-class people in americaare going to embrace? john durant: well, we can learna lot about human health even

if everybody in the worlddoes not adopt this diet, which they won't. even if everybody had thecapability to do so, everybody wouldn't. so first, the benefitof some people experimenting withthis is simply learning about human metabolismand what makes folks healthy. right now, the earlyyears of paleo-- people are painting with broad strokes.

grains are bad. well maybe it will turnout, over years of research, that gluten grainsare the worst. but if you're dealing withnon-gluten grains, quinoa or something else, manypeople can digest that better. or maybe we'lllearn that you just need to introduce certaintypes of gut bacteria into people'sstomachs and then they have fewer negative reactionsto a particular grain.

so, there may be changes inhow we think about paleo, or how we think aboutdifferent grains that make it moreaccessible to people. or make aspect ofpaleo irrelevant. you mentioned the insectcompany-- or the cricket protein bar companythat i'm helping out. insects are eaten as anutritious and inexpensive source of proteinall over the world, except for the western world.

but even crickets,grasshoppers, and locusts are fine under kosherand halal rules. and there's reallyno good reason other than a sense ofdiscuss and tradition, recent tradition, to avoideating insects and taking advantage of them. the amino acidprofile of insects is beautiful, most of them. you don't have to sort of mixand match protein sources.

they require fewer resourcesto raise, water in particular. and for ethical reasons, theyhave a less well-developed neurological system,and are adapted to living in veryclose quarters. so that's an area wherepaleo could actually, in some respects, make healthyeating more sustainable. but is everybody going tolive off of grass-fed beef? but you have a small groupof people making innovations, and it also incentivizesthe big players,

the big agriculturalcompanies to start to make changes tohow they do things. and they can make smalltweaks in their supply chain, or in theirtreatment of animals, that can have a hugedifference on the environment and on ethical issues, simplybecause they're now responding to a 2% of the market, 3% of themarket, 5% of the market that is profitable and growingthat they want to get in on. audience: [inaudible].

john durant: all right. audience: when you lookat the line from paleo up, the idea agriculturalsocieties fare better because they madecheaper [inaudible]. that's why. it's an evolutionaryprocess also-- it's growth. audience: --but andso i guess like, do you think the cricketthing is like-- i mean,

those calories are goingto be more expensive. it's more expensivethan simple grains. so it's less efficient,more expensive calories. is that the rightthing to do when throughout all these periods,and we're thinking about, how are we going to get enoughcalories to feed everybody? like throughoutthese times, there have been a hundredpeople who've been like, oh mygod, we're not going

to be able to feedall these people. and they come upwith some new way of breeding some kind ofcorn, and then ok cool-- john durant: right,well right now, there are enough caloriesto feed every one, and the main impediments areinstitutions and infrastructure and growth in poorparts of the world. but if more peoplecontinue to eat meat, that does take more resourcesand things like that.

the problem withcorn or soy or any of these grainsas protein sources is they're not verygood protein sources. they're incomplete. and eaten in largequantities, they can cause health problems too. so i don't know all thedetails of the ins and outs of the resourcesrequired to grow insects. we're sort of exploringthat right now.

but it's worthexploring, i think. audience: what's[inaudible] hacking that this is predicated on. i was wondering-- let'ssay my real estate for my grandchildren[inaudible]. what about [inaudible]cheaper diet with fast food? then you move backtowards an expensive diet of very good quality food. wouldn't we want, amillion years from now,

everyone to justget refined sugar and be perfectly fine with it,and go on with their lives, rather than everybodygoing back to-- john durant: well thatwill never happen. audience: how do you know? john durant: well, i mean-- john durant:--evolution takes time. it takes many, many generations. audience: i'm just wonderingabout the direction.

why not move-- audience: bioengineeringis faster. audience: yeah, whyare we not moving in that direction [inaudible]perfectly fine [inaudible]? john durant: well this isan area where i'm probably in a little bit of tensionwith some of the folks here, or the tech world. throughout history,you have engineers who are very hubristic and thinkthat they can centrally plan

and design thingsbetter than nature does, or a better than adecentralized process does. and many times they can,then occasionally they fail magnificently. so yes, we can produce morecalories with wheat and corn, and feed more people. and we can adapt to thatsomewhat over periods of generations. but it also exposesyou to famine.

you basically didn't havefamine until we became heavily dependent on a few cerealgrains, and in a sense, we put all oureggs in one basket. audience: [inaudible]famine throughout recorded and unrecorded historyand various cultures going back tens of thousands of years. john durant: huntergatherers tend to have more diversediets than other people. and they're nomadic.

so when you have amore diverse portfolio, you're less likely-- you'reless dependent on any one food source. if it fails, it'snot catastrophic. and if you're nomadic, youcan quickly up and move. so it's well establishedamong anthropologists that-- it's not to saythere weren't periods when people ran out offood or went hungry. but famine shotup when we started

betting on a few cereal grains. and if you didn'tget enough rain, or if you didn't store enoughgrain, boom, you're done. you're wiped out. audience: there was a lot morepeople to starve. [inaudible] population controlledthrough agriculture. but the inuit, for example,starved regularly up until they integratedinto the modern day, into the rest of the world.

john durant: i don'tknow details on that. but i bet i woulddisagree with you on that. john durant: like soylent,like than just raised-- audience: [inaudible]eventually the human organism is going to adapt to it. john durant: no, no, no, no, no. so you only getadaptation if people-- if there's differentialreproductive success-- if some people are having morebabies and other people aren't.

so you would need, over avery long period of time, you would need the peoplethat are thriving best on heavily industrial diets toalso have the most children. i mean, maybe the chinese arewilling to do an experiment but not in like ademocratic society. and it requires-- even lactosetolerance is only in about 30-- it's one gene thathad enormous benefits. one gene, enormous benefits,and it only moved to about 35% of the population in a6,000 or 7,000 year period.

that is like themost rapid example that we have ofsomething with one gene that needs to be flipped,enormous benefits and even over 7,000 years or whatever. it's 35% of global population. so it's not feasibleto think that we're going to change through-- john durant: well thereare other mechanisms. bill gates has been investingin artificial meat sources.

there are bioengineersworking on-- there may be ways ofengineering bacteria, or harnessing bacteria tobasically digest inedible food sources for us, and thenwe can digest the output. so i think that's where theinnovation will happen, not so much in whether wechange our own genome or anything like that. audience: so we'reactually overtime now. can you stickaround a little bit?

john durant: sure,yeah, i can hang. audience: he'll stick around ifyou have any extra questions. thanks for coming, john. the book's in the back.$10.00 subsidized by google. check it out. it's an awesome book. thanks john. john durant: cool. thank you.