The Primal Blueprint (6 page)
Read The Primal Blueprint Online
Authors: Mark Sisson
I know that 100 percent of us will die from something, but personally, I’d prefer dying from old age. Physician and author Dr. Deepak Chopra estimates that perhaps only 1 percent of us will check this box when we check out and further asserts that organs and tissues have the ability to last 115 to 130 years before they fail due to aging. Of the one trillion dollars America spends annually on health care, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 70 percent of that is spent on lifestyle-related chronic diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. A surprising number of people accept all this as a normal part of life, believing that some of us are just fortunate to have “good genes” and the rest must cross their fingers against bad luck.
Sure, millions of modern citizens contributing to these woeful statistics are completely disconnected from what’s required to be healthy. It might be hard for you even to relate to this segment of humanity that hasn’t a clue. However, even the most health conscious among us often struggle. Despite a sincere commitment to do the right thing by Conventional Wisdom, we have experienced widespread failure to lose that last 5, 10, or 50 pounds. Injuries, fatigue, and burnout plague exercisers ranging from weekend warriors to professionals. We reflexively turn to prescription drugs to treat symptoms of distress, even though most conditions are minor and easily corrected by simple dietary and lifestyle changes. In the process, we interfere with normal gene-driven metabolic processes and thwart our innate ability to heal naturally—paving the way to one day join the masses on the wrong side of the stats.
The story is sad, but the good news is that your destiny for the most part is in your hands. By the time you complete this book, you will understand the big picture and all the necessary details of how to eat, exercise, and live in order to reprogram many of your genes to favor optimal gene expression. In the process, you will take control of your own body and your own life. This is really the only sensible way to counter the tremendous momentum pushing us away from health, balance, and well-being in our hectic modern world.
Be Like Mike—Your Genes Don’t Have To Be Your Destiny
If I pop off at this point in the journey and say something like, “It follows that a condition like arthritis is mainly caused by bad diet and insufficient exercise,” I might get a predictable comeback like, “Actually, Mark, rheumatoid arthritis runs in my family. My mother and grandmother both suffered from it.” This type of family lore passed through the generations does have a measure of truth to it—you may indeed be predisposed to arthritis, breast cancer, or other conditions that have strong genetic influences. However, it is more likely that some of your lifestyle choices (perhaps learned from your parents) have programmed your genes to respond in unfavorable ways, rather than some unseen hand of fate slapping you simply because you “chose your parents” unwisely.
We now know that you have far more influence on how your genes shape and mold you than anyone believed possible as recently as a decade ago. Accepting this reality might just turn a potential genetic nightmare into the best thing that ever happened to you. A heightened awareness of elevated genetic risk for heart disease, diabetes, or cancer has inspired many to take an alternate route and forever avoid these undesirable “fates.”
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Germany studied height variations among different hunter-gatherer cultures and discovered that body size can be related directly to population density; those living in large settlements are smaller than those living in wide open tundra, savanna, or desert regions. Combine this finding with the extensive research confirming that differences in nutrition can influence height, and it’s clear that lifestyle factors can significantly affect things that we generally believe to be hard wired. Evidence from identical twins raised apart with disparate lifestyle practices, and enjoying consequently varied levels of health, casts further doubt on the “genetic destiny” school of thought. A recent intensive study of identical twins concluded that poor diet and lack of exercise were far greater predictors of which ones would get diabetes than was heredity.
Experts in quantum physics and epigenetics are going even further, taking the buzz phrase “mind-body connection” out of woo woo land and into mainstream science. Dr. Bruce Lipton, Ph.D., a cell biologist, a medical school professor, and author of the acclaimed
The Biology of Belief
, leads a burgeoning field of scientific study (coined “new
biology”) asserting that our DNA is controlled by signals from outside our cells,
“including the energetic messages emanating from our thoughts.”
Certainly, depression is known to suppress immune function via hormones arising from negative thoughts. Is it preposterous to consider a basketball player growing to six feet six inches (even though his two brothers and father did not reach six feet), simply because he spent so much time and energy focused on being a basketball player—and needing to be tall—that he essentially willed himself to grow? Lipton would argue that it’s not only possible, but that comparable things happen, in one form or another, to each of us. Basketball legend Michael Jordan might also be amused with the question, because these facts are from his family. After being famously cut from his high school varsity team as a sophomore, he sprouted four inches in a single summer!
Surely you can relate to people who, without a second thought, blame a life of health problems and excess weight on genes. And surely we can all reference people with happy, positive dispositions who in turn seem to have more energy, less illness, and better health than average. Lipton declares, “It has been statistically established that one third of all medical healings (including surgery) are derived from the placebo effect as opposed to intervention.…We have all been endowed with an innate healing ability that has been with us since the evolution of our species….”
“
Genes (good or bad) + bad attitude + bad lifestyle behaviors = bad news
.
Genes (good or bad) + good attitude + good lifestyle behaviors = good news
.
Your genes don’t have to be your destiny!
”
1
Physiology of Sport and Exercise
, by Dr. David Costill and Jack Wilmore.
2
The Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook reports that the 2008 U.S. overall life expectancy at birth is 78 (75 for males; 81 for females).
3
The 2008 American Heart Association “Heart Disease and Stroke Statistics,” available for download at
americanheart.org
, reported that in 2004, 869,000 deaths were attributed to heart disease and 550,000 to cancer. 2005 CDC stats indicate the percentage references, but recent headlines suggest cancer has surpassed heart disease as the number one killer.
cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr56/nvsr56_10.pdf
The Ten
Primal Blueprint
Laws
(“Commandments” Was Already Taken)
In This Chapter
I introduce the “re:evolutionary” premise that we should model our diet, exercise, and lifestyle behaviors after our primal ancestors from 10,000 years ago, adapting them strategically to the realities of high-tech modern life. The inexorable technological progress of civilization has led us ever farther astray from the dietary habits and active, stress-balanced lifestyles that allowed our ancestors to prevail under the harsh competitive circumstances of evolution. However, we are genetically identical (in virtually all respects relevant to human health) to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, owing to the fact that evolution ground to a halt when the major selection pressures of starvation and predator danger (eat or get eaten!) were eliminated. Thus, we can achieve effortless weight loss, vibrant health, and boundless energy by living according to the
Primal Blueprint
.
Genes are more than just the largely inalterable inherited traits that we typically associate the term with. They are the traffic cops that direct the function of all the cells in your body, at all times. The central premise of this book is that your genes don’t have to be your destiny, that you can “reprogram” them with healthy lifestyle behaviors and thereby make even strong genetic predispositions to disease, excess body fat, and other adverse health conditions irrelevant.
The 10
Primal Blueprint
laws are:
1. Eat Lots of Plants and Animals
2. Avoid Poisonous Things
3. Move Frequently at a Slow Pace
4. Lift Heavy Things
5. Sprint Once in a While
6. Get Adequate Sleep
7. Play
8. Get Adequate Sunlight
9. Avoid Stupid Mistakes
10. Use Your Brain
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution
.
—
Theodosius Dobzhansky
The quote by Dobzhansky was also the title of a famous 1973 essay in which the noted evolutionary biologist and devout Russian Orthodox Christian acknowledged that, whether or not you believed in the existence of a higher power, you could not begin to understand even the simplest concepts in biology unless you understood how evolution had worked to shape and differentiate the genes of every single one of the several million species on the planet.
Within the past hundred years, tens of thousands of anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, paleontologists, epigeneticists, and other scientists have worked diligently to piece together a fairly detailed interpretation of the environmental and behavioral factors that directly influenced our development as a species. As a result, we now have a very good picture of the conditions under which we emerged as
Homo sapiens
.
Some seven million years ago, hominids (our prehuman ancestors) split from apes and branched out into various new species. Then, about two million years ago, the humanlike species
Homo erectus
began to take charge of the food chain with their large brains, upright stature, skilled use of tools and fire, and organized hunter-gatherer societies. Over time,
Homo erectus
branched into various species and subspecies (
Homo neanderthaensis, Homo habilis, Homo sapiens
, and others). Most researchers believe that the modern
Homo sapiens
species evolved in Africa between 200,000 and 100,000 years ago, prevailing over all other
Homo erectus
subspecies. Then, about 60,000 years ago, a small number of modern humans left Africa and began their great migration across the planet. Recent archaeological findings strongly support this “out of Africa”
1
theory: that the entire human population of the planet, amazingly, can trace their origins to a small pool of intrepid
Homo sapiens
in Africa. There were only an estimated 2,000 to 5,000 African humans at that time, and some scientists believe that only about 150 people crossed the Red Sea to begin the migration. Talk about six degrees of separation!
(Devo album cover, 1978)
I hope you are sitting down to absorb one of the most critical—and quite possibly mind-blowing—tenets of the
Primal Blueprint
:
Our primal ancestors were likely stronger and healthier than we are today
.
“How can this be?” you ask. It’s all about survival of the fittest. The human body is the miraculous result of millions of years of painstaking design by evolution. Through natural selection involving countless small genetic mutations and adaptations in response to a hostile environment, our ancestors were able to prevail over unimaginably difficult conditions and opponents and populate all corners of the earth.
Many anthropologists suggest that the human species reached its evolutionary pinnacle (in terms of average muscularity, bone density, and brain size) about 10,000 years ago. After that, we started to take it easy and get soft. Our physical decline was a natural consequence of a couple of things. First, we had already spent thousands of generations leveraging our increasingly proficient brain function to manipulate and tame the natural environment (with tools, weapons, fire, and shelter) to our advantage. The second factor was perhaps the most significant lifestyle change in the history of humanity: the gradual advent of agriculture. When humans began to domesticate and harvest wheat, rice, corn, and other crops as well as livestock (this happened independently around the globe, beginning about 10,000 years ago in the Mediterranean Fertile Crescent; North America was one of the last areas to adopt agriculture, about 4,500 years ago),
2
the ability to store food, divide and specialize labor, and live in close civilized quarters eliminated the main selection pressures that had driven human evolution for two million years—the threats of starvation and predator danger captured in the familiar term
survival of the fittest
.
When humans no longer faced these constant selection pressures, evolution essentially ground to a halt in conjunction with the flourishing of civilization. Consequently, many researchers assert that today we are genetically identical to our primal ancestors (at least for our purposes here, relating to human health; I’ll explain more later and also in the
Primal Blueprint
Q&A appendix at
MarksDailyApple.com
). This idea that human DNA—the genetic “recipe” for building a healthy, lean, thriving human that resides in each of our 60 trillion cells—is almost exactly the same today as it was 10,000 years ago has been most notably promoted by the work of Dr. Boyd Eaton, chief anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta and author of
The Paleolithic Prescription
, and the late James V. Neel, founder of the University of Michigan’s Department of Genetics, and supported by hundreds of other leading anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, and genetic researchers.