The New Evolution Diet
Just started reading Arthur De Vany s' book on diet and health. I also ordered Garry Taubes' "Good calories bad calories" and "Why we get fat, and what to do about it". Diet is not the only thing al these books have in common, there is a more exhilarating topic in al these works and it's this major misconception the medical establishment brought to live some 30 years ago: "overeating causes obesity and that undereating cures it"
Taubes says this: "Obesity causes overeating"! Both De Vany and Taubes see Carbohydrates and Sugars as major contributors to this obesity epidemic (it is important to see it is an epidermic and not something that happens to some, caused by lack of self control). It is what we eat, not how much! Also our sedentary lifestyle doesn't help either, De Vany sees this as a second pillar of his diet (which is actually more a philosophy or a way of living than it is a diet as such). He suggests a caveman would get active when food was scarce and "lazy" when food was abundant and so resting after eating seems logic, he suggests we should eat when we feel like it and be guided by a natural hunger. The activities of a caveman in search of food or on a hunt would be short in duration but with high intensity and rather tough, he also recommends not to wear to much cloths and to expose ourselves more often to cold and wind. Our bodies are open systems and they should be approached in a more random way, a quote from N.N.Taleb:
Another way to view the connection to the Black Swan ideas is as
follows. Classical thermodynamics produce Gaussian variations, while
informational variations are from Extremistan. Let me explain. If you
consider your diet and exercise as a simple energy deficits and excesses,
with a straight calorie-in, calorie-burned equation, you will fall into the
trap of misspecifying the system into simple causal and mechanical links.
Your food intake becomes the equivalent of filling up the tank of your
new BMW. If on the other hand you look at food and exercise as
activating metabolic signals, with potential metabolic cascades and
nonlinearities from network effects, and with recursive links, then
welcome to complexity, hence Extremistan
Some interesting articles and other stuff on this subject: