The Primal Blueprint (11 page)
Read The Primal Blueprint Online
Authors: Mark Sisson
While you might argue that we use our minds plenty to navigate and make a buck in today’s world, the reality is that many of us are stuck in unfulfilling or rote jobs or are otherwise disconnected from continued intellectual challenge and stimulation. Numerous studies of general intelligence qualities identify curiosity as one of the most profound markers and nurturers of intelligence. Opportunities for intellectual stimulation are everywhere in daily life. Commit to some personal challenges, such as learning a new language, playing a musical instrument, or taking an evening college class. Research indicates that risk of devastating mental conditions including depression, dementia, and Alzheimer’s can be reduced by keeping your brain active as well as your body.
Learn Them, Know Them, Live Them!
Law #1: Eat Lots of Plants and Animals
. Enjoy the natural, satisfying foods that fueled two million years of human evolution.
Law #2: Avoid Poisonous Things
. Avoid processed foods (sugars, grains, and chemically altered fats) that are foreign to our genes and make us fat and sick.
Law #3: Move Frequently at a Slow Pace
. Enhance fat metabolism and avoid burnout by keeping active but taking it easy.
Law #4: Lift Heavy Things
. Short, intense sessions of functional, full-body movements support muscle development and delay aging.
Law #5: Sprint Once in a While
. Occasional all-out sprints trigger optimal gene expression and beneficial hormone flow.
Law #6: Get Adequate Sleep
. Avoid excessive digital stimulation and sync with your natural circadian rhythm for optimal immune, brain, and endocrine function.
Law #7: Play
. Balance the stress of modern life with some unstructured, physical fun!
Law #8: Get Adequate Sunlight
. Don’t fear the sun! Adequate sun exposure helps synthesize vitamin D to ensure healthy cellular function.
Law #9: Avoid Stupid Mistakes
. Cultivate hypervigilance and risk management to avoid the stupid mistakes that bring “avoidable suffering” to modern humans.
Law #10: Use Your Brain
. Engage in creative and stimulating activities to nurture your mental health and overall well-being.
Aside from—ahem—the reproductive act, I challenge you to name any other significant behavior that shaped our genes and today plays a critical role in our health and well-being. Could it really be this simple? Could the prevention of and cure for obesity, diabetes, heart disease, physical decline, most cancers, and the general overstressed existence of the modern human be contained in a list of ten
Primal Blueprint
laws? While you may be able to find detractors to extract bits and pieces of this blueprint and offer up a critical view, the premise is absolutely unassailable: our genes are suited for a hunter-gatherer existence, because that is how we
Homo sapiens
have evolved and spent the great majority of our time on earth.
The same genes that can get the signal to turn against you to develop heart disease, diabetes, atherosclerosis, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, arthritis, and everything else on the list of conditions that might afflict you and your loved ones can also be triggered to unlock your potential to enjoy more energy, a leaner, fitter body, a substantial slowing of the aging process, and a low risk of illness, injury, and burnout. The secret is to do the right thing: follow lifestyle habits that promote desirable gene expression and avoid those that promote negative outcomes.
That statement alone—to do the right thing—is no revelation. The revelation here is how easy, natural, and fun the lifestyle behaviors are that will help you build your ideal body. Now you can enjoy natural, delicious, nutrient-dense foods that promote good health and effortless weight management by moderating insulin production. Now you have permission to back off from uncomfortable workouts and regimented schedules and instead enjoy an active lifestyle with regular low-intensity aerobic movement punctuated by occasional brief and very intense efforts. You can even hang out in the sun and take a nap in the name of health!
“
When I wrote The Origin of the Species, and for some years afterwards, I could find little good evidence of the direct action of the environment; i.e., food, climate, etc., independently of natural selection. Now there is a large body of evidence.
—
Charles Darwin
”
You will notice the benefits of the
Primal Blueprint
program in a matter of days, not weeks or months. Your genes are active all the time, either helping you build, regenerate, and maintain homeostasis or unintentionally tearing you down. It’s all based on the environmental signals you provide them: food choices, activity levels, and even your thoughts. Hence it is critical to understand the impact on your genes—and overall health—when you select what food to eat, workout to do, or pill to swallow.
Chapter Summary
1. Grok:
Survival of the fittest drove two million years of evolution to create the ultimate human being…10,000 years ago!
Grok
is the nickname for our primal human lifestyle role model, who was stronger and healthier than us. Soon after Grok’s time, the advent of agriculture across the globe eliminated the main selection pressure on humans: starvation. With agriculture and civilization making selection pressure irrelevant for thousands of years up to the present day, evolution ground to a halt, and we have gone soft as a consequence. However, because our DNA is virtually identical to Grok’s, we can adapt his evolutionary-based lifestyle behaviors into our 21st-century lifestyle to pursue optimum health. The overall functioning of your body is primarily dependent on how your genes respond to their immediate environment. The
Primal Blueprint
is an instruction manual consisting of 10 simple behavior laws that trigger our genes to build a healthy, energetic, happy, lean, strong, bright, productive modern human.
2. Diet:
Eat natural sources of plants and animals and avoid processed foods (sugar products, grains, chemically altered fats and other processed foods). Grains, while a global food staple long believed to be healthy, should be avoided because they stimulate an excessive release of insulin and are far less nutritious than vegetables, fruit, nuts, seeds, and animal foods. A diet emphasizing grains inhibits fat metabolism, precludes us from eating more nutritious plant and animal foods, and also paves the way for serious disease.
3. Exercise:
Move frequently at a slow pace (walking, jogging, hiking), lift heavy things (regular strength-training sessions that are intense and brief), and conduct occasional allout, short-duration sprints to stimulate growth hormone release, build muscle, reduce fat, and delay the aging process.
4. Lifestyle:
Get adequate sleep (restores muscles and rejuvenates the brain), find time in your busy schedule for unstructured play (relieves stress and improves emotional and mental well-being on a chemical level), get adequate sunlight (stimulates production of important vitamin D and helps balance the negative effects of spending excessive time confined indoors, avoid stupid mistakes by practicing hypervigilance and risk management for today’s hazards, and use your brain for creative, passionate outlets to balance the often repetitive or intellectually rote elements of your existence.
5. Blueprint for Success:
The
Primal Blueprint
laws are simple and intuitive, unlike many elements of Conventional Wisdom that suggest you have to struggle and suffer to attain your fitness and weight-loss goals. You will notice the benefits of
Primal Blueprint
living immediately—more stable energy, better immune function, more enjoyable eating and exercising—as your genes direct your cells to function optimally at every moment.
1
Origin of Man
The “out of Africa” theory is also known as the Recent Single-Origin Hypothesis (RSOH), Replacement Hypothesis, or Recent African Origin (RAO) model. The theory, originally proposed by Charles Darwin in his
Descent of Man
, modernized by Christopher Stringer and Peter Andrews, and strongly supported by recent studies of mitochondrial DNA, says that anatomically modern humans evolved solely in Africa between 200,000 (first appearance of anatomically modern humans) and 100,000 years ago, with members leaving Africa 60,000 years ago and replacing all earlier human populations, including
Homo neanderthalensis
and
Homo erectus
.
2
Origin of Agriculture
Dr. Jared Diamond, evolutionary biologist, physiologist, and Pulitzer Prize–winning professor of geography at UCLA, is the author of
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
, which discusses the advent of agriculture and its effects on civilization and human health.
Chapter 5
of
Guns, Germs and Steel
details agriculture’s origin (including which crops were cultivated) in several locations around the globe.
The Emergence of Agriculture
by Bruce Smith details the great transition of humanity from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture and thus civilization.
Guns, Germs and Steel
and Richard Manning’s
Against the Grain
detail the negative aspects of humankind’s shift to agriculture, blaming it for large-scale disease, imperialism, colonialism, slavery, and an inexorable progression to global warfare. All this thanks to the abuse of “free time” resulting from the specialization of labor and the importance of power—over resources, humans, and geography—previously irrelevant in the largely egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies.
3
Primal Human Life Span
The estimate of 94 years is from Dr. Richard G. Cutler, molecular gerontologist and longevity expert, who has produced more than 100 papers on the subject. Dr. Cutler was a research chemist at the Gerontology Research Center at the National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health for 19 years. Dr. Cutler’s estimate of “maximum lifespan potential” from
Homo sapiens
15,000 years ago of 94 is actually higher than the corresponding figure attached to modern humans of 91! The estimate is derived from laboratory analysis of skeletal material, with particular emphasis on the ratio of body weight to brain size. Other factors involved in making accurate life span calculations are age of sexual maturation to life span ratio (a 5:1 ratio is common among humans) and rates of caloric intake and expenditure.
4
Grok
In
Chapter 2
we talk about Grok as the patriarch of a primal family. However, in the interest of political correctness and ease of reading, you can view Grok as a not-necessarily gender-specific euphemism for primal ancestor(s) whom we aspire to emulate in lifestyle behaviors. For example, “Grok never ate sugar, and neither should you.”
Grok and Korg
From Indigenous to Digital: One Giant Step (Backward) for Mankind
In This Chapter
We will examine the contrasting daily lives of Grok and his primal family with their modern-day antithesis, the Korg family. No, not to see who can travel 20 miles quicker (the Korgs’ SUV beats Grok’s bare feet with a few hours to spare…although the story might be different if it were a footrace!), but to examine the benefits of adapting primal behaviors to the modern world and the damage caused by living in conflict with our genetic predisposition to be fit, healthy, and happy.
The extremely unhealthy saga of the Korgs might seem embellished, but it’s actually a statistically accurate indicator of many lifestyle trends today: hectic schedules compromising quality family time; processed foods emphasized in place of natural foods; prescription drugs used in place of lifestyle change; digital entertainment replacing physical activity; and overly stressful exercise programs that cause even the most devoted to fail with weight loss and fitness goals.
While the story is distressing, the good news is that with some simple, enjoyable lifestyle modifications, the momentum can turn immediately in the direction of better health (including freedom from dependence on prescription medications), higher energy, successful long-term weight loss, and a more enjoyable life for you and your family.
A man’s health can be judged by which he takes two at a time—pills or stairs
.
—
Joan Welsh
As we contrast a day in the life of our primal and modern families, we must refrain from the common knee-jerk rationalizations about the superiority of today’s technological world. While infant mortality rates and death from tiger attacks are way down (notwithstanding that 2007 taunting incident at the San Francisco Zoo), it is sobering—pardon the pun—to consider that motor vehicle accidents (heavily influenced by alcohol use) are the leading cause of death for youth ages 15 to 24, followed by suicide and homicide. While no one is arguing that we should disavow our worldly possessions and go back in time to mud huts and spears, we must take a hard look at our lifestyles and absorb some powerful lessons offered by the legacy of our ancestors.