Last weekend I attended the Ancestral Health Symposium at the University of California, Los Angeles, organized by Aaron Blaisdell, Brent Pottenger and Seth Roberts with help from many others. It was a really great experience and I'm grateful to have been invited. I was finally able to meet many of the people who I respect and admire, but knew only through the internet. I'm not going to make a list because it would be too long, but if you take a look at the symposium schedule, I think you'll understand where I'm coming from. I was also able to connect with a number of Whole Health Source readers, which was great. I recognized some of them from the comments section. Now I know it wasn't just my mom with 57 Google accounts.
The symposium was the first of its kind, and represented many facets of the ancestral health community, including "Paleolithic" diet and exercise patterns, low-carbohydrate diets, Weston Price-style diets, traditional health-nutrition researchers as well as other camps. For the most part they coexisted peacefully and perhaps even learned a thing or two from one another.
I was very impressed by the appearance of the attendees. Young men and women were fit with glowing skin, and older attendees were energetic and aging gracefully. It would be hard to come up with a better advertisement for ancestrally-oriented diets and lifestyles. I saw a lot of people taking the stairs rather than the elevator. I like to say I'll take the elevator/escalator when I'm dead. I think integrating exercise into everyday life is healthy and efficient. Escalators and elevators of course make sense for people with physical disabilities or heavy suitcases.
The first talk was by Dr. Boyd Eaton, considered by many to be the grandfather of the paleolithic diet concept. I was very impressed by his composure, humility and compassionate attitude. Half his talk was dedicated to environmental and social problems. Dr. Staffan Lindeberg gave a talk titled "Food and Western Disease", which covered his paleolithic diet clinical trials as well as other evidence supporting ancestral diets. I like Dr. Lindeberg's humble and skeptical style of reasoning. I had the great pleasure of having dinner with Dr. Lindeberg and his wife, Dr. Eaton, Pedro Bastos, Dr. Lynda Frassetto, Dr. Guy-Andre Pelouze and his son Alexandre. Pedro gave a very nice talk on the complexities of traditional and modern dairy. The following night, I was able to connect with other writers I enjoy, including Chris Masterjohn, Melissa McEwen, John Durant, and Denise Minger.
Dr. Pelouze is a french cardiovascular surgeon who strongly supports the food reward/palatability concept of obesity. We had a conversation the evening before the conference, during which he basically made the same points I was going to make in my talk. He is particularly familiar with the research of Dr. Michel Cabanac, who is central to the food reward idea. He eats an interesting diet: mostly raw, omnivorous, and extremely simple. If I understood correctly, he mostly eats raw meat, fish, fruit and vegetables with little or no preparation. He sometimes cooks food if he wants to, but most of it is raw. He believes simple, raw food allows the body's satiety systems to work more effectively. He has been eating this way for more than twenty years, and his son was raised this way and is now about my age (if I recall correctly, Alexandre has a masters and is studying for an MD, and ultimately wants to become an MD/PhD). Both of them look very good, are full of energy and have a remarkably positive mental state. Alexandre told me that he never felt deprived growing up around other children who ate pastries, candy et cetera. They woke up early and ran six miles before the conference began at 8 am.
I gave my talk on Friday. Giving a talk is not like writing a blog post-- it has to be much more cohesive and visually compelling. I put a lot of work into it and it went really well. Besides the heat I got from from Gary Taubes in the question and answer session, the response was very positive. The talk, including the questions, will be freely available on the internet soon, as well as other talks from the symposium. Some of it will be familiar to people who have read my body fat setpoint and food reward series, but it's a concise summary of the ideas and parts of it are new, so it will definitely be worthwhile to watch it.
We have entered a new era of media communication. Every time someone sneezed, it was live tweeted. There are some good aspects to it-- it democratizes information by making it more accessible. On the other hand, it's sometimes low quality information that contains inaccurate accounts and quotes that are subsequently recirculated.
It was a great conference and I hope it was the first of many.
