I’ve been experimenting for about two weeks so far with a superfood that appears to cure a ton of diseases, and at the same time makes it almost trivial to get a flat belly and stay thin and healthy. It’s very forgiving, as in if you eat this superfood most of the time, even if you get off track (say on the weekends you love to pig out with friends) it’ll bring you back very quickly. And at the same time it’s readily available and not super expensive.

There’s a lot of talk of super foods these days in the media, and lots of conflicting diet advice. But for me, the discovery of my superfood came after having a couple years of deteriorating health from poor nutrition and poor habits, and I started digging into the most basic fundamental workings of the human body. I slaved over research papers and books to get an understanding of all the most basic biological processes in the human body, from how the digestive system absorbs nutrients, to how the immune system kills cancer cells, to the molecules that create energy inside each and every cell in the body. Then over the past two years I’ve experimented with various diets to find out exactly what happens when I eat certain foods. I’ve also poured over research on what the human body most likely ingested during our 2.5 million years of evolution, as well as what our innate chemical processes could digest the most effectively.

The result is something that I’m extremely proud of, a conclusion to the age old question of what we should eat as humans to be healthiest. Over the past couple weeks I’ve felt amazing, and seen great improvements to my health and fitness in general. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting day-by-day descriptions of what I ate each day, and correlations with weight figures and photos of how I look the following day. This is truly revolutionary information, as I believe I’ve found the big picture theory of what we should eat, including all the fundamental reasons why we should be eating them. Imagine the Four-Hour Body by Tim Ferris, but in an organized overriding theory that isn’t just a bunch of random tactics to fix one thing here and there, but a grand theory of why things happen, how things work, and how one simple change will change your life and body forever.

Stick around for a few weeks and read up on exactly what this superfood is, why it’s amazing, and day-by-day posts of myself without a shirt on! … though I may wait another couple weeks to post them all up, in order to accrue more pictures of myself after more progress has been made, since I’m actually a little embarrassed by my body in the earlier pictures, but have confidence that the later pictures will redeem myself .

So I think there are 3 parallel tracks going on when I eat, the sugars, the fats, and everything else.

I have a fairly small capacity for sugar (carbs in general), and once my sugar capacity fills up to 100%, I start feeling sick and bloated and tired and I get unhealthy. In parallel, I have a capacity for consuming fat, and once that capacity is filled to 100%, I feel full, rejuvenated, and there’s a sense of satisfaction. At the same time, there’s a third track that consists of everything else, which doesn’t seem to affect my body to the same degree as sugars and fats. In the end, every meal is a race between the three tracks. If the meal has too much sugar, I will loose my appetite for what I’m eating and will feel gross. If the meal doesn’t have enough fat, I will never feel full and will keep on eating whatever it is, until my sugar capacity fills and I need to stop eating. It’s not a rule that’s strictly black and white but it’s a rough pattern, so it’s not always the case but usually can be used as a rough guide.

What I’ve discovered is that the average meal when eating out is way overloaded with carbs and has almost no fat (they keep cutting out and throwing away the fatty juicy morsels of meat!). So I’m never truly satisfied but I’ve overloaded my body with carbs. When I eat a proportion that’s more carbs and less fat, I start to gain unhealthy weight. When I’m eating lots of fat, I never need to resort to eating more, and end up much healthier. For me, a meal that’s extremely high in all sorts of fatty meat and cholesterol and basically no carbs seems to be what my body is made to eat (with possibly a little fruit). But I’m more on one end of the spectrum, and everyone’s body has evolved to eat a different breakdown to be at its healthiest, and may operate with a different pattern and have different tracks. E.g. Some have a strong need for their sugar track and that’s what keeps them healthy, and other people seem to really hate eating fatty things, etc.

I think there may actually be a good number of people who are on my end of the spectrum, and it seems like in a lot of Asian countries where people don’t purposely go for low-fat diets, people are ridiculously skinny. Especially when they eat fatty intestines and liver etc. Of course that may not be the cause, but seems like an interesting coincidence to keep in mind .

I think everyone you should figure out your own eating patterns too!

Mesh Fabric

This shirt breathes better than any other shirt available. Gone are the days of wearing a dress shirt that is hot and stuffy. Finely woven holes let the air breeze through to your skin, making it ultra breathable and cooling you to the core.

100% Cotton

Comfortable to wear in the office, kitchen, or bedroom. Carefully constructed with high quality cotton. Button up, and dress to impress.

Slim Fitting

This shirt has a modern fit that will make you look slim, but still fits most builds. The cut of the shirt gives you an understated masculine presence and at the same time the mesh instills a slightly more aggressive, edgy look.

Breathable Mesh Artic Shirt

The Perfect Dress Shirt for Summer Heat

This month, we’re going to be at two apparel shows, so it would be a good opportunity to come visit us and take a look at what we’re all about. First, we’ll be an exhibitor at Thread San Francisco in the Metreon on April 10, 2011. The very next week, we’ll be exhibiting at F3 at the Cotton Mill in Oakland. Both shows display a variety of the newest fashions and up and coming designers in Oakland, San Francisco, and the Bay Area. For both shows, we’ll have our booth set up to show you our suits (for both men and women), as well as take your measurements and take orders.

Here are a few cool things about our suits:

WEATHERPROOF

Our suits are impermeable to wind, rain, snow, and anything else that the elements can throw at you on your way to the top of the mountain (or food chain).

SPILL-RESISTANT

Next time, don’t worry about the coffee you just split on yourself rubbing shoulders with the man next to you on the subway. Just wipe it off and you’re good to go.

BREATHABLE, YET ADAPTABLE

Whether walking through the humid summer streets of New York or Hong Kong, you’ll stay in comfort wearing our suits, thanks to a one-way permeable membrane allowing heat and moisture to dissipate out (but never allowing water or wind in). For those chilly nights, the membrane closes its “pores” and ensures better insulation and heat retention.

COMFORTABLE LININGS

Our linings breathe well and are ultra-comfortable to the touch. Each has been selected to match perfectly with the outer wool shell it is paired with, to maximize comfort and performance.

SLIM-FITTING

We want to make you look as good as possible, and we adhere to the slim-fitting school of design in getting this done. No boxy, ill-fitting suits here – our style shows off a slimmer silhouette that’s both modern and stylish.

CUSTOM-MADE TO YOUR MEASUREMENTS

We believe every man should be able to wear something made specifically for him – that’s why every suit we sell is made only after your measurements are taken. To ensure consistency and quality, we insist on taking the measurements first-hand, through our free-of-charge fitting sessions.

QUALITY CRAFTSMANSHIP

Hand-tailored through a highly exclusive network of tailors, our suits are a labor of love. We’ve taken pains to ensure premium features such as a full floating canvas and functional sleeve buttons are included in each suit we make. It may take more time this way, but trust us, it’s well worth the wait.

If you can’t wait to learn more, head over to www.nakedsuits.com to take a quick look. We’re still working hard on the website, so check back often to see updates!

First of all let’s go back to a statement made a couple hundred years ago: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” This would be the First Amendment, protecting the freedom of speech, for both people and the press. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks should have the right to free speech, especially because what they are speaking is… the truth. WikiLeaks is, through their own description, an organization that “Publishes and comments on leaked documents alleging government and corporate misconduct.” They publish an inconvenient truth: each article on WikiLeaks is simply a document detailing actions that the government has done, but wants to keep secret. In this regard, all of WikiLeaks past actions are legal, while the politicians’ calls to mandate an execution of Julian Assange is illegal by the first amendment. By the way, assassinations are not legal either.

Next, let’s consider the mob mentality of the public’s reaction to accusations of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. Their immediate reaction is that WikiLeaks is a threat to national security of the United States. The politicians do not want documents about government behavior leaked out, and want to take forcible action against Julian Assange. What is wrong with this picture? The foundation of how this country is supposed to work, is through a democracy where all people should have the right to speak up about anything that grieves them, then policies and practices are changes to improve the way things are. Then why should the United States single Julian Assange out? Is it because he’s not a US citizen (Assange is an Australian citizen) and therefore does not have the right to publish facts to the public? The more practical answer of course is that the government finds WikiLeaks’ information to be very inconvenient for them, showing the public what corruption their is in the government. What is the correct reaction then? People really should look back on this situation and realize that corruption exists, and WikiLeaks is doing us a service by exposing this corruption. It is up to the government to feel bad about this corruption and take steps to fix it. After all, if you don’t want bad things to be said about you, then STOP DOING BAD THINGS.

I believe that there should be steps taken to encourage corrupted organizations to change for the better. There should be an open-source, P2P platform for publishing information for better organizational transparency. Practices and laws should be tracked in revisions, with each revision being peer reviewed by experts in the field, as well as with public opinion. An open discussion of policies should be fostered. One of the rewards, of course, for being a good company or government organization would be that leaked documents detail last week’s efforts to save endangered birds, instead of last week’s attempt to coverup war atrocities.

1) http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/12/meet-the-people-who-want-julian-assange-whacked.ars

Furthermore, the number of motile sperm has also dipped. Importantly, the sperm count has not declined in the less polluted areas of the world during the same time period.

From: http://www2.oakland.edu/biology/lindemann/spermfacts.htm

Here’s the food pyramid as we were taught in elementary/middle/high school:

Government food pyramid

We believed this food pyramid without questions when we were kids, but let’s take a chance to really think about its contents. The most important error in this pyramid is what was put at its base, the “breads and cereals”. Instead of going through all the details here, there’s an article that explains it better than I ever can (so read this before continuing to the rest of this article) : http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2010/09/19/paleo-diet-solution/#more-3109 (The author of Four Hour Workweek, Timothy Ferris, posted an excerpt from Robb Wolf’s book “The Paleo Solution“). Basically, all grains (wheat, rice, corn, and many others), have evolved chemicals that discourage animals from eating them, and since we as humans did not start eating them until 6000 years ago, we’ve never evolved to tolerate those poisons. The grains bore holes through the human intestinal lining, as well as triggering the immune system to start attacking itself, ending up in various diseases such as multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, diabetes, infertility, alzheimer’s, lupus, depression, and many more.

Interestingly, legumes (peanuts, soy, peas) and dairy (milk, cheese, yogurt) have the same effect, though to a lesser extent. Therefore, take out the portion of diary from the pyramid too. Candy and cake in the sweets on the top? The body isn’t adapted to the extreme amounts of carbohydrates either, so the top triangle should not exist either.

In recent years, many health “experts” have proposed revised food pyramids, such as this one:

Revised pyramid

Again, the grains are put as the staple, at the detriment of our health. Some legumes and and grains such as peanuts, soy, and corn are oddly bundled up with olive oil and added to the base of the pyramid as well. Legumes appears once again in the middle of the pyramid, somehow grouped with nuts. And calcium supplements are recommended at even larger quantities than meat. It should be immediately clear that man-made supplements taken at a larger quantity than natural foods eaten by humans for hundreds of thousands of years, should raise some alarms.

Now this is the ideal food pyramid that I, and a lot of researchers are proposing:

Paleo food pyramid

Notice how only natural foods are represented; nothing from cereal and bread companies promoting their products, nothing from man-made supplements. The key principle of this diet and lifestyle is based off evolutionary fundamentals. Basically, the body of homo sapiens has evolved over a million years during its history to consume a certain set of nutrients and operates best when the balance is what is expected. However, in modern history we’ve invented many foods that are absolutely unnatural and upset the balance of what our bodies expect to digest and use. Ten thousand years ago, people did not have calcium supplements, and they did not need calcium supplements. Instead, the magnesium found in the natural diet of meat and vegetables efficiently directed extra calcium out of the blood vessels (too much calcium in blood vessels causes heart disease and high blood pressure) and into the bones (improving bone density and preventing Osteoporosis and other bone diseases). This is only one example of how the Paleolithic diet helped us stay healthier. When the many systems of the body all get the rich blend of nutrients that we’ve evolved to eat, the complex processes in the body begin to align and develop amazing health.

I suggest that you give this topic a little more research to learn more about how it can benefit you. Also, it doesn’t hurt to give this diet a try, and stop believing so much in the old food pyramids that base their recommendations on studies that do not take into effect the fundamental mechanisms that govern how the body works as a complete system.

A recent “miracle” of modern science and medicine was recently (enthusiastically) described to me by a friend in the medical industry. An elderly woman came to the hospital complaining of long term diarrhea, which was soon diagnosed to be Clostridium difficile, a bacteria that normally lives in the body but can be toxic if growth is no longer checked by the good bacteria in the body. The bacteria had grown to a large population and led to Pseudomembranous colitis, basically diarrhea caused by over-use of antibiotics. Doctors analyzed the situation and decided that the elderly woman would be given antibiotics to treat the Clostridium difficile. After a period of time, it was determined that the antibiotics were not working, at which point the doctors decided that the woman would need a colectomy (have her colon removed), otherwise, she would die. After the colectomy, the woman recovered, and although she needed to plug a bag into her anal cavity at all times so that digested food articles would drop into the bag where her large intestine would have been, she was grateful for modern science to have saved her where she would have certainly died otherwise.

Let’s analyze what went wrong and what some possible alternatives would have been. Ignoring the fundamental definition of the bacteria, “can be toxic if growth is no longer checked by the good bacteria in the body”, and the first line of the definition of Pseudomembranous colitis on Wikipedia which says, ”also known as antibiotic-associated diarrhoea (AAD)”, the doctors decided to use antibiotics to treat the condition. Intestinal health is the balance of good bacteria to bad bacteria to complete the intestinal flora, where if the good bacteria wins in population growth, the colon (intestine) is healthy. The doctors’ treatment fundamentally misses half of the equation, by only focussing on killing the bad bacteria, and completely overlooking that if any treatment is to sustain its effects, the good bacteria must grow and sustain its population. There was a good chance that prescribing probiotics (foods and supplements that contain good bacteria), such as two servings of yogurt a day, in addition to a diet that supports good bacteria (garlic, broccoli, etc), would have solved the woman’s problem completely. Even if it does not fully solve the problem, it should at least have been attempted as support. After twenty minutes of hearing this story and thinking about it, I asked the doctor/friend, did the doctors consider giving her probiotics to solve the problem? She said, “it probably would have solved the problem, but you know, probiotics aren’t FDA approved, so whatever quantity it says on the bottle, it’s not absolutely guaranteed to have that quantity”.

It’s sad to think that the elderly woman could have kept her colon if she only changed her diet, took some probiotics such as yogurt, and did not listen to the doctors. In fact her bacterial infection of the colon only developed as a result of earlier decisions made by doctors to give her antibiotics for long-term use, and kept spiraling into bigger and bigger problems. No doubt, the lack of a colon and risky surgery could give her further complications in the future as well. What’s even more sad is that the woman was grateful for all the treatment that these doctors have done to her, having never been educated on the truth of the medical industry. In addition, this is not an isolated incident. The treatment decisions were made were by experienced doctors, and my friend was simply a medical student put into position to learn from these doctors as part of medical school. Generations of doctors are being trained to think a certain way, a limited way, instead of trying to understand how the human body works as a system and as a living creature.

Here’s a little background information on what causes motion sickness: “All motion sickness results from your body sensing a discrepancy between what you see (in this case, the inside of a car, which tells your brain that you’re sitting still) and what you feel (your body’s vestibular system, which senses balance from your inner ear, tells your brain that you’re moving). The conflict between what you see and what you feel triggers the production of a neurotransmitter, likely mistaken by your body as a signal of hallucinogenic poisoning, so your body tries to rid itself of whatever is causing the disorienting condition.” (1)

As a tangent, simply from the above definition of motion sickness, we can deduce that looking out the window at objects that are moving as expected (in the correct direction and speed, exactly opposite of the direction and speed that you’re traveling) when your body is in motion, can reduce motion sickness. Basically, stop looking at the inside of the car, and stop reading! Another way to reduce motion sickness is to sleep, during which you aren’t looking at anything, so the conditions for motion sickness cannot occur.

I’m actually fairly unfamiliar with the chemical properties of ginger that reduce nausea, but from a quick search any form of ginger will do. A lot of websites suggest ginger pills or supplements, or putting some in your food before a trip, but raw ginger cubes or slices could be a much more cost effective and natural way to reduce motion sickness. I especially like being able to occasionally grab a chunk of ginger to chew on as a snack on trips.

1) http://www.brooksidepress.org/Products/OperationalMedicine/DATA/operationalmed/Manuals/GMOManual/clinical/Motion%20sickness.html

So I happened on the thought of what happens when you’re killed in nature by another animal, and you die. You are no longer conscious. you no longer know the pain it was to have been killed. You forget everything. And this was a sudden shock to me, the true realization of what death is. It felt like the soul was taken out of me.

But the one thought that could console me was the fact that the molecules of my body would still exist, and they would nourish the rest of the world and all of its living things, and my molecules would help to sustain a whole ecosystem of living organisms, and I would technically still be alive, thriving in fact, though animal, plant, fungus, bacteria, I wouldn’t know which i’d be in.

Now I think that philosophers have so often thought about death and were extremely afraid of it, but really they are missing the next step, the realization that the amazing miracle of billions of molecules of this earth came together in just the right configuration to give them, even though it’s for such a short period of time, the valuable present of life and consciousness. It really is a present that you never asked for, and never did anything to earn it, yet extraordinary effort was put into aligning those billions of molecules to give you such a present, simply because. So we really should be very appreciative of this life that we hold, and be super thankful to whoever decided to put in such effort to give it to us.