it's March 20th 2012 and we're here at the special with BA 3rd Rob wolf we're here with division chief city Rodino fire Tirana Tammy lurks and the police chief from the city uh Steve Pitts and today is gonna be a very special day we're gonna talk with Rob about his book the Paleo solution some of his views about human disease and and Rob we thank you we thank you very much for huge honor it was pretty cool showing up in Reno and finding a bunch of friends basically that were interested in all this material so it's been very cool well we were excited too because we were we were aware of your work you were living up in Northern California and we were aware of your work and we liked your work and then when we heard that you would move to Reno then we got really fired up we've met several times we like what we're seeing very much and so uh you know the feeling is mutual that's all that's for sure one of the things that I'd like to do just for starters this is I'd like for people who who don't know about paleo did you to give us an overview about paleo what that really means and I'd like to point out that Tanny the gave me an incredible article that you're mentioned in and our friend Gary Taubes is mentioned in and you and Gary your friends I know so things are fitting together nicely and the article is addressing the epidemic of obesity in the United States fire service this is this is a wonderful article it's it's it's it's an indication that I think things are changing things are changing in a positive direction especially as we address the the obesity epidemic and III just think that's desperately needed because of the last 30 years what we've seen in our country and now in the rest of the developed world is a disaster right with obesity increasing increasing increasing and type 2 diabetes following right along with it we're we're dis paleo fit into this issue and the solutions what's your you know the the whole concept is just this idea of genetic or evolutionary discordant you know that we have some genes that were forged living as hunter-gatherers that we've had some sort of a qualitative shift that is kind of antagonistic to the health that we had as hunter-gatherers it's kind of interesting if you go to a an anthropology department you ask them hey how you know what was the health of hunter-gatherers what was it like how long did they live and typically it was very very good obviously there was a lot of early death due to infection and injury and stuff like that but then beyond that both archaic and then contemporarily studied hunter-gatherers are very healthy and then when we start seeing this adoption of Agriculture and more grains and more refined carbohydrates changing in sleep patterns changing in activity patterns we start seeing disease and that that's kind of the the overall orientation is that any organism living anywhere you know I mean cows eat grass Chipmunks to chipping stuff you know and if you start moving them away from the the kind of genetically imprinted ways that they've become very successful doing what they're doing there's an opportunity that that could be beneficial but there's also an opportunity that that could be very detrimental and so for for us this kind of Paleo diet or paleo template is trying to look that for me the the most effective way to look at this isn't trying to look at hunter-gatherers and emulate what they did it's look at modern diseases and try to retro engineer what is the evolutionary discordance with this problem what is it that we're doing now there's potentially problematic like--we're we'll talk about sleep I know and we have certain populations police military fired that are and and medical obviously that are horribly impacted by sleep debt and historically we've just kind of said well you need to tough it out this is just part of the job and what we're discovering is that approach is incredibly costly both in human lives and in the amount of money that we deal with the collateral damage associated with that so for me it's it's taking this you know paleo is this opportunity to apply evolutionary medicine Darwinian medicine to creating a hypothesis why is this disease state happening can we look at the evolutionary history of an organism being being us in this case and then retro engineer what the problem is and then maybe offer a solution and the cool thing about is that these solutions are incredibly effective and inexpensive you when we deal with biological systems if we do things correctly it doesn't cost us a lot of money to fix it because we're dealing with things in a multifactorial fashion when we deal with sleep deal with exercise deal with food things kind of come into the rightness rather quickly are you with the idea that about ten thousand years ago that's when we stopped being hunter-gatherers per se and agriculture it depends you know if you look at the Native American populations of the United States it maybe was a couple of hundred years ago if that and we see this kind of time ordering northern Europe certain parts of northern Europe the Middle East if people eat in a more agricultural kind of way we don't tend to see metabolic derangement insulin resistance type-2 diabetes obesity and stuff like that we don't see that until maybe the fourth decade fifth decade when you start heading in to create Britain or or you know it basically you see a time when people adopted agriculture the the more early that they did they tend to have a little bit of you know buffering against the these metabolic effects Native Americans have absolutely no buffering against that at all we're seeing type 2 diabetes in children under 10 years old in these populations they're waylaid by this this problem so you know when this happened is a little bit variable on where you were on the planet and and then also some genetic factors from that and it's pretty clear from the archaeological record when agriculture hit an area there was a massive increase in infant mortality it was in evolutionary biology they call it a selection pressure it was not a healthy thing and it created it did force some genetic adaptation so we are different today than what we were 10,000 or 20,000 years ago because we you know evolution has been trying to push us into a net adaptive state but there's a lot of collateral damage with that and now that we're at a spot where we can intervene with medical practices we will not really see adaptation beyond where we are at we are just going to see problems so you're not gonna see somebody adapt to a 7-eleven you know 64-ounce big gulp and a bag of you know chips they're just going to get sick and we'll keep them long enough to reproduce and then their children will have problems something that we are seeing though is that we have a to two issues with genetics we had the genetic you know bag of tricks that we carry with it and then the phenotypic expression that we have a genome and then the epigenome the epigenome genomic part is how we interact with the environment and it looks like how mom and dad eat how mom and dad live changes the way that the chains get turned on and off so we we do have some adaptation that occurs more quickly but what we're finding is that if mom was type 2 diabetic kids are more likely to be type 2 diabetic and that is something that's a very very cryptic because we are it's not changing the genetics but it's changing how these little switches get flipped on and off and that is is feeding forward into multiple generations into subsequent generations you .
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