hi I'm Sarah Acula and I'm here at the University of California San Diego the ancestral health summit today were with Anthony basically he's a PhD student studying evolutionary biology and we're going to look how we can learn evolutionary health and medicine and take elements of your health in the modern world but what I like to do is start with talking about your story what got you into ancestral health yeah so I don't know almost nine years ago I was trying to figure out basically I was trying to lose some weight and get healthier so I did the typical switching over to whole bread taking a multivitamin type thing and barely had any success with it and then someone I was working with at the time a pharmacist recommended the Paleo diet to me and I was like that sounds ridiculous no way she convinced me enough to finally try it and I had a lot of success with it and lost a lot of weight and left my full-time cushy job to go back to school and study nutrition and fast forward seven years and here we are today and you also the secretary of balance mr. hell yeah I'm a board member of the ancestral health Society yep so can you explain exactly what the Paleo diet is so the Paleo diet is mainly based off of eating a diet that our ancestors had of food groups that our ancestors had access to so that would be food groups prior to the Agricultural Revolution where we had more evolutionary history and exposure to these food groups so food groups that are not on the diet would be grains legumes and dairy and alcohol would be on there as well and then food groups that do make up the diet would be your meat seafood fruit and vegetables nuts and seeds or whole foods like that and did you find it hard to transition of it because what did you eat before you went payday oh just your standard American diet I don't know for me I was very motivated at the time to do it so I didn't have too much trouble I know other people who have tried the diet and had trouble adopting it and like fully switching over to it but for me highly motivated at the time and then I saw success pretty quickly so as soon as I saw change on that scale I was pretty much sold and haven't looked back since and now then the weight loss what are the benefits to experience for Paleo diet for me pretty much instantaneously acne cleared up like in just a couple weeks and then I never realized until somebody else asked me about it but like just more greater like mental clarity yeah and I've heard a lot of people mention that too like yeah that's like secretary but the focus and energy you have is like wow it makes you feel like a different path better will finally take charge of their diet and they start to change it you know it's just amazing how many people don't know how good they can feel change your diet it's not think about they actually even like it's like a whole new world for them I've heard so many people say and over time that they pick up new diets or thinking about what they eat and feel great so what do you mean an average day then I yeah for me it's some eggs in the morning with some typically spinach and some fruit and then some more fruit throughout the day I eat offered I don't know apples bananas oranges trying to do a lot of berries as well blueberries and then yeah lunch is usually just I snack throughout the day I'd I don't need three meals a day but snacking will just be some bananas and almond butters and dark chocolate everybody loves the dark chocolate and then yeah dinner is just fish or meat a bunch of veggies so it's very simple on the ingredients and one of the things I'm stressing about ancestral eating is that you're eating food that looks like what it is yep and then if you know if it looks like what it is then as in not a cop-caller or something like that if it's an animal and you're eating fish and it looks like a fish and you've got a vegetable there and it looks like the vegetable that's eating don't grow on trees nothing is princess essentially but what you're doing now is really impressive in ancestral health and evolutionary medicine but can you explain what that is yeah so evolutionary medicine is applying modern evolutionary theory and one of the best perspectives that you get out of it is thinking more about the why think about what causes obesity it's an you know sippin surplus intake of calories or food but instead of blood causes obesity why do we have the ability to develop obesity is a completely different question that will allow you to think differently about this and you can apply that perspective just about anything what is cancer and how does cancer come about but why do humans and all life have the ability when is it when a sweet side this kind of comes about there's highly debated of course but one of the idea is to see like a 50 genotype thrifty phenotype hypothesis and this is the idea that mammals being able to store energy it's a good thing yeah feast or famine you don't know when you're gonna get your next meal so storing energy is a good thing but mismatched in today's environment where we have a surplus of energy we are just continue to store it because we don't need to work raw food anymore we do not need to work for food anymore yeah pick up your phone and get thirty three hundred calories delivered to you at any time mmm I saw that feast or famine like our bodies are designed for that and it takes us fourteen thousand four hundred thousand years to evolve but yet we've not adapted to this new diet of highly princess feeds mainlining princess sugar mr. grated fat oh yeah we do comes out when it looks like I'm eating perspective would have had things like veganism and vegetarianism are they ancestral what are your thoughts on that so there hasn't been a hunter-gatherer Society so we use one together in societies not a model we'll think our ancestors actually been active do when they eat how they live their life and there hasn't been a hunter-gatherer society that's been studied that hasn't been seen animals in some way shape or form whether it's a very small amount of their caloric intake or all the way up to such a large amount as people think of like the traditional Inuit population eating a lot of seafood and way longer like that veganism and vegetarianism is very interesting to think about because vegetarians very interesting also because people have all sorts of different types of vision vegetarianism Xin this lacto-ovo pescetarian but they all kind of fall under the vegetarian umbrella but the idea of removing all animal products it really restricts the dietary variety that you have specifically in terms of the nutrients that you get so some of the first things that people think about with vegan or vegetarian ISM is vitamin b12 which is only found in animal products we know now though that you can still regret it - b12 in your body for a long time almost 10 years so what percentage of a diet has to actually come from me it's kind of still up for debate so if someone wants to not eat me for whatever reason you know they could still have a healthy diet if they're smart and they have to be really careful about their nutrient intake on a vegan or vegetarian diet but also I mean if someone's eating meat once a week and getting access to the nutrients that's available in them and then they don't eat meat for the rest of the week is that a vegetarian diet or not so it's a question of how much meat when how frequently you want to eat it or not and what about a carnivore diet would you see that as being an ancestral diet I don't think so no we've never seen a hunter-gatherer society that ate only meat and got all their energy and nutrients for me so I think that's just taking it to the extreme side Hebei the equally extreme that equally yes exactly equally humans are you know definitely omnivorous animals and our nutrient needs reflect that all right so then people sum up the human diet is being omnivorous with a lot of animal products and a lot of whole plants well and what do you think about starches as well just be potato potatoes yeah so just in comparison if you were to take all the starch groups together potatoes bread strains lagoons and compare them to other food groups specifically meat and fruits and vegetables they're way more on nutrient poor so fruits and vegetables and meats are the two most nutrient dense food groups that we can and when we think about nutrient density we're talking about the amount of micronutrients in it usually per a set amount of calories and when you run all those numbers you see that fruit and vegetables are always number one in terms of nutrient density so starches you know they can be in the diet but I I would me personally recommend that as long as your diet is based predominantly in vegetables you're pretty much all set is my recommendation so more vegetables then meat products then okay say like a plant-based diet with with some meat do you think it's important to have pastures and grass-fed meats yeah yeah I think you know either I just saw a whole talk on you know sustainability and how we treat animals and everything but you know we do know that the better raised your animal products are the better quality the more nutrient density there is in them for sure all right and if you could change one thing about how people eat to improve that health how people what or what people eat either either either what would it be what people eat I would just say eat more vegetables that's really the best thing you can do for yourself and then how people eat start cooking no go in the grocery store and look in look in the produce aisle and say I don't know what that is I've never tasted it if I go home and try it and eat with people it's also another good thing to do yeah human diet we're omnivores and we need to be plant products and vegetables 3:00 in morning that one is debatable depending on port but that would guide you for the Rings yeah and you will say your ancestry I think that has a big big impact one thing that a lot of people talk about all the time is phytochemicals these are molecules that are found in plant products and you know if we look at an apple there's still hundreds if not thousands of molecules in there that we have no idea what they do same thing goes for animal products there's oil chemicals as well that we just have no idea and most likely we're gonna find that you know all of the plant foods and animal products that we have there are going to be more beneficial phytochemicals and toooo chemicals that we just have no idea how they function in our body yet because what most people and businesses do nowadays is so isolated phytochemical turn it into some sort of pill and say that it's gonna cure everything but really when you eat that whole food you're getting all sorts of things that we don't even know about yet that if we were to spend the time to study them are most likely going to have beneficial effects on their physiology yeah because you know food is medicine but it can also be a toxin but if you isolate just one ingredient or one vitamin or mineral and you have it separate food you're not necessarily going to absorb it the same way and you're gonna miss out on all the other benefits that come with eating the whole food so there are supplements that are fantastic but they're supplementary and really you should get everything yeah you should get everything that you need from eating real food plants and animals well thank you very much for your time today and good luck with your talk later thank you so much yeah it's been great thank you thank you so much you .
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