How do you address the fact that your point is actively contradicted by the article? Did you even know your point is actively contradicted by the article? I'm not even saying that proves you're wrong; what bothers me is that you just ran off to post your own stuff with no apparent engagement of the topic. That's not a recipe for learning anything.

I'm not contradicting anything that he says. I used to lift weights in much the manner that he describes, and it'd be difficult to deny that it works.

The thing that he misses is motivation. Most people simply have none of it. I certainly don't for weight lifting.

In my experience, climbing rocks and surfing, while possibly suboptimal as workouts, will absolutely get you into great shape. And they have the added benefit of providing their own motivation.

The author's incentive for going to the gym was so that he could go climb or surf or ski or whatever and be both "fit" and injury-free. It's a critical distinction. There was probably a time when all he had to do was go out and make those activities a part of his existence, but I would wager that as he has aged and had different responsibilities come up just making that fitness a side effect wasn't possible. Instead, he probably tried to go ski X times a year, but got hurt the first time, and the subsequent trips never happened. He probably tried to go climbing weekly, but something tweaked and suddenly he was only climbing monthly. When it's harder to go out and run 5 miles like you used to, you're less inclined to go run 5 miles, and might slip to 3. When 3 is eventually harder than before, you might just not run at all.

I think the article is speaking more to concerns as you age and you can no longer get away as easily with just participating in the sport. Rob Shaul and his mtnathlete.com and militaryathlete.com sites address those problems quite directly, and unfortunately it involves a lot of painful work that is mostly gym based. He's designing the mtnathlete workouts to help skiiers stay healthy and be ready when the season arrives. He's training military personnel to be more durable and harder to kill. To explain, the site is a few years old, but when he started it it was as Crossfit was just starting to ramp up in popularity. Despite the advertising that it makes you better at everything athletic, Crossfit is usually all about Crossfit - there are Crossfit games now and it is in many ways its own sport now. Rob's site was very specifically geared to mountain athletes who wanted to perform their sport at a high level possible with less injury. It's not a gym program just for the sake of being a gym program.

There was a time when I could go out and make my life about doing whatever sport it may be - climbing, running, basketball, etc. - and recover quickly and easily from the activity. Now my body has aged a little, I sit in a chair too much, and suddenly a small nagging injury never goes away, and I'm less motivated to go run several miles or play basketball or climb. By incorporating durability training like the article discusses, I'm more able to avoid those prolonged periods of inactivity and keep motivation up.

Eh, I don't find rock climbing at all enjoyable. But I love running marathons. I've even been known to put in 22 miles _on a treadmill_. Different strokes for different folks.

If you love (insert sport/fit activity that you cannot stop thinking about) then do that and be super fit because you love it. That was the op's point.

All on their own supply. ;)

Find something fun to do that just happens to get you in shape.

I suspect they have basketball hoops, raquetball courts, swimming pools and Ironic Kickball leagues in your home town (and probably a climbing gym too). Go have some fun!

The article says, essentially, that a basic strength and conditioning program is the way to go. The GP says that picking a sport that makes you fit is the way.

To add another opinion, that ties the two together, to the mix: think of the fittest people you know. To a person, they're probably obsessed with their chosen sport (which may be soccer, or bodybuilding, or weightlifting, or running, or ...). These people live and breathe their sport, and when they're not doing it or training for it, they're thinking of how to get better at it.

At some point, thinking of how they can get better at it is probably going to lead them to doing, well, a basic strength and conditioning program. That's because squats and presses and the rest of what the article outlines are still about the best the exercise world can come up with for almost all the athletes out there.

(For what it's worth, I'd strongly second the recommendations of the article for Starting Strength and Olympic-Style Weightlifting. They're both fantastic books.)

For paragraph comparison:

NYTimes: font-size: 15px; line-height: 22px; width: 600px;

Men's Journal: font-size: 12px (small); line-height: 15px (tight); width: 800px (I lose which line I'm on);

And problem is???

Usually these folks' discussions are more interesting than the original article.

I value hn because it has a variety of quite interesting individuals. Somehow some percentage have interesting take on physical fitness and physical culture - I have talk movement classes professionally in between hacker gigs and find the hn's folks' idea interesting and challenging.

Fitness is a very individual thing. If talking about individual experience with it is evil, give me more evil, please.

You're right: there are always people crawling out of the woodwork suggesting one approach or the other. Whenever someone gets evangelical about something, it proves that it's working for them, for the moment at least. How else could they think that their mundane and unoriginal approach is "the" solution that will change lives? There are evangelists for everything from walking an hour a day on a treadmill to rock climbing. Ergo, almost anything works for some people sometimes. However, no new or old exercise idea has had widespread acceptance and staying power. Therefore, every idea fails for most people, either immediately or eventually.

Conclusion: Certainly educate yourself about all the options and their benefits, but right now, do whatever you find compelling right now. Don't worry about whether it will for someone else, or whether it will work for you next week. Just do what works for you right now.

For example, I thought I was bored with kettlebells (lately I've been trying to learn Olympic lifting) but one night last week for some reason I didn't want to leave my apartment, so I did a kettlebell workout. That worked for me on that particular night. For some people, that wouldn't work at all, because they like to have every workout scientifically planned out: exercises, reps, weights, etc. Sticking to the plan is what motivates them, so they would have dealt with the situation differently.

Some people really get off on the idea of having a "treat" occasionally. For them, maybe they can motivate themselves by signing up for a triathlon in some exotic location. Or they might take a day off and visit a national park, or treat themselves to a beautiful evening wandering around with a friend, splurging on a show and a nice dinner downtown. (Two or three hours of walking may not be challenging, but health-wise, it beats the hell out of sitting at home.) Or maybe they would sign up for an expensive activity such as riding lessons.

It all depends on your situation. Do you have outdoor recreation nearby? Do you live in a walkable or bikeable city? Can you afford Crossfit or an expensive gym? Do you have a garage where you can put a few hundred dollars worth of weight equipment? Do you have enough money to become an equestrian? Do you get off on consistency, or is boredom your bane? Does measurement of your progress motivate you or demotivate you? Do you like to geek out over your fitness, or relax and let your mind wander? Do you like it if your workout activities express your trendiness or your wealth and status, or would you prefer a "no bullshit" workout at a grimy gym surrounded by tattooed guys in sweat pants?

There's no answer that fits everyone all the time. Different people will thrive with different choices, and next month you may be a different person than you are now. Just do whatever works for you right now. (If that means forcing yourself to do something you don't want to do, well, that is a paradox. Best to just do it and not think about it.)

It's also important to keep in mind timing and the training cycle (break down, recover, supercompensation) as the author points out. If you really want to "optimize" your training, or at least take steps in that direction, doing the same thing over long periods of time will result in a longtime plateau. I think the way most people manage their fitness - do the same lifts at the gym or the same 45 minute routine on the treadmill, for years in a row - results in many people treading in plateau zones and generally underwhelmed by their fitness despite putting in the time.

Just imagine what primitive man would eat. He would spend most of his days eating what grew from the ground and when they finally hunted down meat, they would eat their catch as a group[2]. That doesn't mean you have to do exactly that, but try to keep your eating habits in sync with what it was originally adapted to consume not what hyper stimulates made you believe it wanted to consume[3].

Now don't go about forcing yourself to eat stuff you don't enjoy. In the same manner jasonkester engages in something he enjoys that have the "side effect" of being healthy (I still think these activities are something we were adapted to engage in the first place), find foods you find delicious but also happen to be something that isn't processed. I can assure you that there is plenty of "healthy" or "natural" foods out there that you would enjoy[4].

[1]http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_bittman_on_what_s_wrong_with_w...

[1.5]http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=eating-made...

[2]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3723678050599653349#

[3]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzN-uIVkfjg

[4]http://smittenkitchen.com/

You could argue that nature intended us to die from Malaria by the age of 30, I'm very glad that for most of the world that's no longer the case.

It has changed my life. When I follow the diet, it has been pretty impossible not to lose weight. That's with eating as many eggs, as much butter, and as much natural, delicious, other whole foods as I can stuff myself with.

However, the metabolic science is there if you read it, and I can't argue with the profound effect switching to a diet based on meat, eggs and other sources of saturated fats has had on my body.

I eat as much as I want, whenever I want, I'm never really hungry any more, and I've been losing fat and gaining muscle without thinking about it at all. It's pretty incredible.

Humans are no longer subject to natural selection. There needs to be significant culling pressure for real evolution to happen.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/33322719/Cochran-Gregory-10-000-ye... http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/science/11gene.html http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/12/humans-evolving/

What? Are you sure? Because we most certainly are subject to natural selection.

Evolution is a slow process. But there is no reason to believe that it is going any slower today than it ever did in the past - we're just being selected for different things than in the past. (For instance carelessness about birth control.)

Think of it this way: we used to be directly reliant our the environment for survival, like animals are. But now, we process our environment to such an extent that small variations in it are overcome by our intellect. Those variations in the past would constantly be exerting selective pressure on us in many different directions. Those pressures are processed out now.

A more obvious example of the sorts of changes we can still go through is sickle cell.

And anyway, I completely disagree that we're no longer subject to natural selection. We're always subject to natural selection. We're not immune to everything.

Anyway, I'm not discounting the underlying concept of your comment; I'm just saying that malaria wasn't a particularly apt comparison.

Ditto Europe, by the way.

Actually, an awful lot of us do. I see those fucking Anopheles mosquitoes on a regular basis, especially if I venture a bit north from here.

> If you and I were bit by an infected mosquito, there's a very good chance either of us would die in a relatively short period of time.

Actually, out of the 225 million cases of malaria per year, there are only about 1 million deaths.

I'm not discounting the underlying concept of your comment; I haven't gotten malaria yet because of public-health measures like draining swamps, because of cypermethrin on the walls, because of DEET on my legs and head, because of sleeping under a mosquito net or in a room without entrances for mosquitoes, because of sleeping during the day, and because I have enough leisure time to swat the mosquitoes that do land on me.

I'm saying there's no need to stick to some strict diet, just eat a wide variety of foods instead of just one subset. The whole "think like a primitive man thing" is just a helpful starting point to point you towards what kinds of food to look for, but I'm not advocating some strict following. I had three In and Out dinners this past week since I'm too short on time to hunt down a pigeon or pluck mysterious fruits from trees all day.

[Of course, whether a 'natural' life is desirable is debatable.]

Malaria, however, we attempted to evolve away from(sickle cell anemia).

We're not as fast as most animals out there, but I don't think that means we didn't run a lot in prehistory.

Ugh, I hate this concept. Primitive man also died in their 20s and 30s. No thanks.

You can see similar trends in other non-agrarian societies.

http://www.gapminder.org/world/#$majorMode=chart$is;shi=t;ly...,

There are studies that go along with your POV

http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/GurvenKaplan2...

but they are, to date, very much in the minority of research in the area.

The other component of that is of course that we're all fat and out of shape today because we eat foods that cavemen never had access to.

One measure of health is of course weight, but so is life expectancy. If we follow a life-plan where we're around some normal weight but die at 30 I'm not sure that's a great plan. We evolved to die around 30, most research into aging agrees with this (some say ~40), and that's "natural" I suppose, but I think I reject that notion that we should only do things in the modern world that fit what we were required to do a million years ago because it's what we evolved to cope with and eek out 3 or 4 decades of life.

Another is infant mortality, we evolved to reproduce pretty fast because we evolved to maintain population with lots of dead infants. We also evolved to produce slightly more males than females since men die faster, which is okay since fewer men can reproduce with more women.

We also evolved to be able to bear children in our early teens, to grow beards, hair and nails, and to have bad eyesight in some large percentage of the population. Should we lower the age of consent to 13? Not shave or cut our hair or nails ever and not wear glasses?

I'm not sure any of these notions work today, but extending the central argument out:

If we should eat like our ancient ancestors did since we evolved to eat like that and therefore it must be healthy, should we not live like our ancient ancestors did since therefore that must be equally valid by the "it's all natural so it's good" principle?

And I think it's a straw man to say that accepting a "caveman" or "hunter gatherer" diet means we need to accept -every- aspect of "primitive" life.

EDIT: http://www.anth.ucsb.edu/faculty/gurven/papers/pdrdraft04182...

"I think it's closer to the truth to say that cavemen...lived a natural lifespan closer to modern man." Test it! I honestly don't know the answer, the data I managed to find in 10 minutes of searching says that hypothesis is incorrect -- but as you rightly point out my data includes infant mortality in the averages (I believe). But if you can find data that says "excluding infant mortality, pre-agrarian cultures have an average lifespan of 70-80 years" I'll be more than happy to accept that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy

According to the entry above, there's a measure called e5 that should supply the relevant figures.

And I think it's a straw man to say that accepting a "caveman" or "hunter gatherer" diet means we need to accept -every- aspect of "primitive" life.

I'm not really attacking the diet per se, many of the recipes are actually pretty tasty and are generally pretty healthy. I'm attacking the faulty line of reasoning given as to why one should do this.

"it seems to be pretty healthy" is wishy washy, but okay

"You should eat this way because evolution made you to eat this way therefore it's healthy" is not, it present a long chain of reasoning that falls apart at almost every link, but it's presented as a kind of science, which it's not by this reasoning.

(Food diversity sucket in our grandparent's era. )

"Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.) There are a great many foodlike items in the supermarket your ancestors wouldn’t recognize as food (Go-Gurt? Breakfast-cereal bars? Nondairy creamer?); stay away from these."

All those foods that you mentioned, a 19th century mom would recognize as food. Just not her kind of food.

From here: http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/unhappy-meals/ (and his books of course)

Doubtful. I mean, the vegetables aren't cooked. That can't be healthy!

(Before anyone downvotes me: Look up how we used to cook vegetables. 'Boiled to a mush' just about sums it up. That's neither tasty nor healthy.)

I eat whatever's cheap and tasty, as much as I want, mostly meat— the literal antithesis of Pollan's catchphrase. If I've fallen into his trap, it's a very cunningly hidden one.

(serious question, though I appreciate the fact that I just asked the most base question in this entire comment page)

In seriousness, there was an adjustment period of "intestinal irregularity" when I first switched, presumably due intestinal flora etc. adapting from substantial amounts of carbs and fiber to all fats and protein. These days I'd say I'm on the infrequent end of normal, pooping once every day or two, which I think is pretty typical for paleo folks.

If I do end up eating a substantial amount of carbs, usually at a restaurant or dinner party, it does often give me the runs later, which is my primary reason for strictly avoiding grains moreso than health or philosopical concerns. And if I drink too much (which is easy to do when you eat low-carb) all bets are off.

The main issue with obesity is that people can easily afford to be obese and not too significantly impact their lives (aside from all health and social malaise of being overweight).

Eating how a caveman ate isn't a particularly bad diet, but misses out on the major aspect of a day filled with exercise.

Lack of money for food is not a cause of obesity. If your goal is to obtain 2500 calories (assuming that is what you need to maintain a healthy weight) for a little money as possible, you will consume 2500 calories of carbs. You will not become obese. If you instead consume 3500 calories and become obese, you are wasting money on 1000 extra calories. You are not constrained by cost. You could instead reduce consumption by 1000 calories, and spend the money on increasing the quality of the remaining 2500 calories.

There is no significant research that shows adding exercise to an overweight person's lifestyle will significantly reduce their weight - typically just increases their appetite.

Increasing exercise and holding consumption constant will reduce body fat. One of many studies:

http://www.duke.cardiologydomain.com/images/uploaded/dukeh/2...

Do a google scholar search. The only difficulty is that you'll find so many studies which measure additional benefits to exercise that some of the studies measuring only effect on body fat will be buried. (I.e., the majority of the articles have conclusions like "exercise reduces body fat AND increases muscle mass", "exercise reduces body fat AND breast cancer", etc).

I'm curious, did you hear this claim from Gary Taubes? The one time I read a blog post by him, I discovered him to be incredibly dishonest: http://crazybear.posterous.com/how-1-graph-reveals-what-3000...

If you're poor, odds are that you're eating fast food. The primary cost of fast food is not the cost of the raw ingredients, it is the time and effort to make the fast food. Furthermore many of the customers there see large portions as a value. Therefore fast food places have found it worth their while to offer large portions at a low price, and to inflate those portions with the cheapest foods that they can - french fries and soft drinks.

As long as fast food places do that, there is no real cost difference between 2500 calories and 3500 calories. Given how addictive most people find food that is high in sugar, fat and salt (which describes soft drink + fries), people tend to finish the portions that they are given. That will make you obese fairly fast, even if you don't "supersize" your portions.

Food banks often offer similar foods to fast food places because it is cheap and what their clientele is used to. This causes similar consequences. So in the USA even if you have no money at all, it is easy to get fat.

If there were cheap, convenient places to eat that made you pay according to calories and were willing to give realistic but smaller portions for significantly lower prices, then your reasoning would be absolutely correct in the USA.

Now you can argue that the underlying cause that makes this possible is that the country is rich enough that we can afford to be wasteful even on poor people. This is absolutely correct. But for practical purposes that detail doesn't matter. If you personally have little money and live in the USA, it is really easy to become fat.

An incidental note on exercise. Exercise burns calories. Obviously. However it takes very little extra food to offset the calorie expenditure from moderate amounts of additional exercise. Luckily exercise also affects appetite for many people, and muscle mass increases your basal metabolism. Therefore exercise is a win, but for moderate amounts of exercise not mainly because it directly burns off calories.

You might be right if the only meals available had 1750 calories. In that case, your only choices are 1 meal (underfed) or 2 meals (overfed). But that simply isn't the case.

It is easy to become fat in the US, rich or poor. The poor are more likely to take advantage of this, it is true. But it doesn't save them money.

Breakfast: Egg McMuffin (300 cals), Hash Browns (150 cals) and Coffee (0 cals).

Lunch: McChicken (360 cals), Fries (380 cals) and Coca Cola (210).

Dinner: Big Mac (540), Premium Southwest Salad with Chicken (320 cals), and Coca Cola (210).

2470 cals/day.

To become obese, you need to add this:

Afternoon Tea: Sweet Tea (150 cals) and McRib Sandwich (500 cals).

Desert: Hot Fudge Sundae (330 cals).

Now you are up to 3450 cals/day.

There is nothing about being poor which compels you to spend money on the McRib Sandwich, sweet tea and the Hot Fudge Sundae.

http://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en/food.html

Corn subsidy in the U.S.. Not much else to say.

They are skinny because they eat less. They cannot afford 2500 calories, so they consume 2000 calories (mostly rice or wheat, depending on region) and suffer adverse health as a result. They also get exercise working physical jobs rather than sitting at home and watching TV.

Of course, even if corn subsidies were unique, poverty still don't explain why the US poor waste money on 500-1000 extra calories. If they were optimizing for cost, they would eat only 2500 calories of cheap corn.

Because they're not eating extremely processed foods based on subsidized grains that make them cheaper than real food... yet.

When people say that obesity goes with poverty, they're noting that virtually everyone eats until they are sated, and if you eat until you are sated with high-quality, expensive food, you will be far less likely to be overweight than if you eat until you are sated with low-quality, inexpensive food.

High discount rate reduces the propensity for work (most poor don't work much, if at all), particularly work with a career path. Why work hard now just to have a middle class life in the future?

Similarly, a high discount rate cuts against a healthy lifestyle - why suffer through a run in the park and hunger right now, just for future health?

(Also explains correlation between poverty and: drugs, alchohol, unprotected sex, probably other pathologies I can't think of.)

High discount rate is the cause, everything else is an effect.

Of course, a high discount rate has nothing to do with the cheapness of carbs, fat and sugar relative to meat or veggies. Money is not the limiting factor. Willpower/preferences are.

No one is saying that poor people couldn't eat healthy if they wanted to more than they wanted to feel satisfied. They're saying that given two people with the same metabolic genes, exercise level, and discount rate, if one of these two people spends ten times as much on food as the other, they will be likely to be thinner. This is because being sated with more expensive food results in eating fewer calories and better nutritionally than being sated with less expensive food, and this point has everything to do with the cheapness of carbs, fat, and sugar (which taste good no matter how prepared, essentially) relative to well-prepared meat and veggies.

>Increasing exercise and holding consumption constant will reduce body fat."

I'm not sure you read the sentence you're responding to: "typically just increases their appetite."

Yes, if you lock a person in a room with the exact same meals every day, exercise will reduce their weight. A real world person who exercises though typically eats to compensate.

I'm not sure what your problem with Taubes is; your discovery of his 'incredible dishonesty' doesn't pass the smell test -- surely someone eating 7.5 extra strips of bacon per day would notice? There's a shot at his thesis being 'buy my book'; why is it more unreasonable to buy his cheap Kindle book than e.g. Tyler Cowen's to get the full scientific background? It's not like he's hawking some diet empire.

If you add exercise to a person's lifestyle without adding calories, they will lose weight. It's that simple. There is research to show this. I cited some of it.

your discovery of his 'incredible dishonesty' doesn't pass the smell test -- surely someone eating 7.5 extra strips of bacon per day would notice?

Go read Gary Taube's blog post. He spends thousands of words discussing that, according to the traditional calorie counting theory (which he is attempting to refute), the difference between a fat person and a thin person is "only" 20 calories above their respective maintenance levels. He then argues this must be absurd and incorrect, because how can "only a cube of sugar in your coffee" make you fat. This is an attempt at reducto ad absurdum.

He never, in his entire blog post, mentions the fact that the fat person is also eating 7 extra strips of bacon each day. If you read his article without being extremely careful, you will come away with the impression that the only thing the fat person eats that the thin person doesn't is an extra morsel of food each day.

That's great. There is also research that shows that acceleration due to gravity at sea level is 9.8 m/s^2, but that has little to do with what the OP said, which is that "exercise tends to increase people's appetites." You're refuting something he never claimed.

"He never, in his entire blog post, mentions the fact that the fat person is also eating 7 extra strips of bacon each day."

I'm guessing because that's not the case? You're begging the question by showing that his claims don't work out according to the calories in/calories out model.

From the original post: "There is no significant research that shows adding exercise to an overweight person's lifestyle will significantly reduce their weight - typically just increases their appetite."

I'm guessing because that's not the case?

If you take as given the cals in/cals out model (as Taubes does, in an attempt to refute it via reducto ad absurdum), they do.

1. The food was whole. 2. People were very active, particularly where my mother grew up(Shanghai), mothers usually got up at 5am to get the fresh produce from markets everyday, people walked around a lot, bicycles were a luxury item.

I think that the term "poverty" relates specifically to developed countries where fast food is the cheapest way for the poor to feed themselves off the dollar menu.

Poor people eat fast food. Good food is cheaper than McDonald's, but you have to be able to cook.

Again, good meat and produce (raw materials for cooking) are also accessible for less than it costs to eat out.

The grocery store (and I don't mean some specialty place like Whole Foods -- if we're talking about eating on a tight budget, something like Wal-Mart will be much more helpful).

What's wrong with cheese, or butter? Or sauerkraut and pickles? All processed food. Also, powdered mashed potatoes and puffed rice are just conveniently preserved starch. They're perfectly healthy.

The "processed food" and "mostly plants" stuff is just marketing psychology that taps into SWPLs' inner hippie. The real diet rules aren't mystical:

* Avoid sugar, especially fructose

* Avoid vegetable oils

* Don't be afraid of saturated fat

* Prefer rice and potatoes to wheat/rye/etc

* If you're fat, try cutting out starch, but don't worry about it if you're not fat.

Turns out it's virtually impossible to define it.

Here was one of the exercises we went through:

1) Take an orange, grown in the wild without being touched in any way by the hand of man.

2) If you eat that orange, are you eating something that's "all natural"?

3) If you squeeze that orange, and drink its juice, is it still "all natural"?

4) If you strain the juice to eliminate pulp, through a handwoven cloth (or a mat of grass or some other "all natural straining device") is it still "all natural"?

5) If you heat the juice and drink it, ie cook it, is it still "all natural"?

6) How about if you heat it long enough to boil off some of the water?

7) How about long enough to boil off all of the water?

8a) What if instead of boiling you simply dry out the juice in the sun?

8b) What if in addition to boiling it, you dry the remains in the sun?

9) What about drying it in an oven?

10) Suppose I take the dry particles left and through any conceivable natural operation sort them by density? Say, putting the particles into an all natural basket and shake it vigorously until my arms are tired?

11) Now how about I remove particles of a certain density? Is the remaining product natural?

12) Now suppose I add water to the remaining sorted particles, fresh from a mountain spring.

13) Suppose I do the same (#1-12) with other plant sources?

14) Suppose I mix the results into either a mix of powders or a mix of reconstituted liquids?

This is an actual replication of a process for producing an artificial sweetener (not with fruit, but a different plant source). That sweetener is generally not called "all natural" but the process is more or less the above.

At every point in the process we haven't done anything that's not natural. There's some analogy to every step that you probably have to do with any food source to make it edible. Nobody thinks squeezing, chopping, cutting, cutting plants creates a processed food. Or straining liquids or really any of the above. We've been doing all of the above as a species since before writing.

But many people think the result of the specific combination of the above, #14, is a "processed food".

How about cheese? Most cheese, even modern cheese is just milk and bacteria in a controlled spoilage environment. As natural as dirt. And in general the result of very few steps.

Defining "processed food" from "natural food" ultimately ends up trying to set some kind of arbitrary definition delineating the two -- "processed food is any food that has undergone more than 3 processing steps" I have news, chopping and peeling fresh picked garlic takes more than 3 steps.

1) Wash the dirt from the bulb

2) Dry the bulb

3) Remove the outer layers of onion skin

4) Separate the cloves out of the bulb

5) Cut the hard connective bits

6) Peel the layers of onion skin from the cloves

7) Chop to size

Now if I include it in a recipe I'm including it in even more processing steps. I may boil it, grill it, bake it, or some other cooking process.

I may strain it from a broth if all I care about is the flavor.

Before I can actually get the garlic into my mouth, through even an elementary recipe, I've had to process it at least 8 times, likely a dozen.

The In Defense of Food argument is not so much about whether or not the food is still "natural" at that point. The point is you are throwing out much of the orange, and there is probably stuff in the part you are throwing away that is good for you.

Pollan talks about how at one point a scientist thought he had isolated all of the necessary parts of nutrition: proteins, fats, and carbohydrates.

Then they discovered vitamins. Oops. If you actually believed what that first scientist said, you probably died of scurvy.

So, let's take our food stuff made from proteins, fats, and carbohydrates and inject some vitamins in them! Should be all good now, right?

Except, we continue to discover stuff in the food that grows out of the ground and on trees that turns out to be good for us. (I forget the more recent examples he mentions in his book, but you get the idea.)

So your choice is basically to take the chance that the scientists have finally found all the parts of plants and animals that are good for us, synthesized or extracted them, and injected them into that box of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs you are eating. Or you can just eat the actual plants and animals and be done with it.

Or you can just eat the actual plants and animals and be done with it.

You don't just grab a potato out of the ground and eat it whole. Or jump out into a field of cattle with a fork and knife ready to go. You can do that with some foods, not so much with others. If the metric is "you must be able to eat it right out of the wild with 0 processing" you're going to eat a lot of raw tomatoes and peppers and not a whole lot else.

In many cases, you have to process the food source to make it edible. Rhubarb for example has poisonous leaves that will kill you. The green bits of the tomato can surpress cardiac functions. For most animals you can't just start biting chunks out of them. You may have to remove internal organs that are inedible, bones (I don't see many paleo eaters advocating cracking open thigh bones to get at the marrow very often btw), etc.

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/news-10-poisonous-fruit...

In some cases, edible parts may contain bad stuff, pork meat for example is well known to be unsafe raw. I'm pretty sure cavemen ate pigs (or at least boar). Cow brains may contain prions. etc.

I do agree with you that food manufacture from chemical components on up is likely not complete, but there's not really much of that in the industry. Even highly "processed" foods like hotdogs or McDonald's chicken McNuggets are just ground up and cooked scrap meat and connective tissue (all paleo friendly!). They have all the stuff that's in meat anyways. The process to make imitation cheese doesn't generally fall under that kind of manufacturing process.

Many common and cheap foodstuffs also don't contain much nutrition. Vitamin fortified rice has probably improved the lives of a billion people.

People also get all kinds of scared when the chemical names for common food components are used. Should I use "salt" or "sodium chloride"? Should I avoid all foods with Monosodium Glutamate (good luck with that)?

But like anything it all just comes down to moderation. Nutmeg is great and natural, but if you eat too much of it you'll get have hallucinations and may die. Who knows what's in a clam, perhaps if you eat clams 3 times a day for a year (a completely possible scenario for a caveman) you'll have serious health problems like mercury poisoning or some other issue.

Who knows?

and there is probably stuff in the part you are throwing away that is good for you.

You may also be throwing out stuff that's very bad for you. It's all conjecture.

What Pollan actually advocates is eating a traditional diet that has been refined over centuries. He says that which one you pick doesn't matter that much.

The traditional diets of people living around the Mediterranean and people living near the Arctic circle have nothing in common, but according to Pollan, either will give you better health outcomes than a normal Western diet.

If people have been eating a certain way over a long period of time, they have probably learned to avoid the stuff that will kill or injure you, and probably have discovered foods that nutritionally complement each other, as well. (He gave examples of such complementary foods in traditional diets, which I can't remember right now.)

One thing I've definitely noticed time and again is how complete traditional diets tend to be. It's amazing, thousands of years ago, with no concept at all of nutrition, people managed to put together fantastically complete (and tasty) diets.

I can't tell if you're being really subtle here, but the causality is probably reversed - people ate whatever they could get away with, and over the course of many tens of thousands of years they evolved to process that food efficiently. Anatomically modern humans evolved approximately 200,000 years ago, and agriculture was only invented 10,000 years ago. And industrially produced processed food didn't become a staple of most Westerners' diets until 65 years ago.

The skills necessary to survive on the local available food in one place don't entirely translate someplace else. Somebody had to look at a squid for the first time and decide to eat it for example. Or that the rotting month old cabbage would be a good meal.

Traditional foods are often preagrarian foods in some cases. You can find expensive wild foods restaurants in South Korea for example that serve only food you can gather in the mountains, mushrooms, pine nuts, pine needles, ferns, wild onions, etc. These are things that people cobbled together before they had any knowledge at all of nutrition and amazingly, when we look at them today with the modern eye find out that they represent a fantastically complete diet, rich in essential nutrients. In Latin America you can still find plenty of pre-Columbian cuisine with similar characteristics. And I'd wager elsewhere as well.

Put another way, why didn't they just settle on say mushrooms? How come the entire diet for a people isn't just one food? Or a combination of foods that represent a diet lacking in a certain vitamin? Amazingly, wherever you go, the traditional foods tend to make up a complete diet.

It seems a modern curse that we can gorge ourselves on singular foods and grow fat and suffer malnutrition at the same time. Only today can somebody eat hamburgers and pizza 3 times a day for years.

He was the first to admit that nutrition sciences were largely confused. All of those years of studying cholestrol and various other substances in isolation had led to a ton of barely viable nutrition advice that didn't seem to work in practice.

He has come to believe that the research continues to point in a single direction. It's more or less what the OP said, with a bit of twist. The problem isn't processing in the traditional sense... it's processing in the industrial sense. Modern processed foods contain a whole litany of preservatives that seem to have a profound impact on food in two ways.

1. It often more or less removes much of the health benefit of actually eating. Vitamins, minerals, and a whole range of amino acids magically disappear. Post-processing foods tend to be left high in carbs and so called "empty calories". This is why, in his mind, McDonalds and the like are so damaging. It's why TV dinners (even the 'healthy' ones) are terrible for you. By eating more "whole" foods (as the OP suggested) you avoid so much of this.

2. Those preservatives themselves trigger body processes that cause all sorts of strangeness. Why can you drink Coke Zero everyday and not lose weight (or Stevia, Splenda, etc..)? Because your body has a natural metabolic reaction to the sweetness. It's still calorie-in/calorie-out, your just sabotaging the calorie out. The prevailing theory about this has something to do with energy storage back in our caveman days. When eating sweet fruits and the like, our bodies would go into energy storage mode for the coming winter. In those days fruits represented one of the few times that we would experience a calorie surplus. Apparently many common preservatives trigger that same response.

For the last couple of years I've essentially followed the OP's advice. I eat as close to "whole" as I can. I eat quite a bit more meat than he's advertising, but I try to make sure it as unprocessed as possible. I eat a lot of whole vegetables and a bit of fruit. Nuts and the like are a staple. I eat fewer refined carbs, but I don't necessarily try to stay far away from them either.

I'm healthier, fitter, and all around in better shape then I ever have been.

I think the poster you replied to was making the point that industrial mangling of our food likely has some detriment to our health. Sure, cheese and kraut are processed (we make both at home, btw), but they're more natural processes than, say, turning corn into corn syrup. In fact, the end products of these natural processes are often argued to be healthier (or at least offer more bioavailble/digestible nutrition) than the original material.

Look at the ingredients list of your average loaf of store-bought wheat bread. All of the continuant ingredients have been refined, had preservatives added, then re-mixed to make "bread". The list is typically a mile long! Take my wife's home-made bread, as a counter example: whole wheat flour (ground minutes before making, from home-grown wheat), salt, maybe a dash of sugar or honey, water, and our sourdough starter.

All of a sudden I even enjoyed planning my diet just on the chance that it would make me strong/faster in the next workout.

So, yes, like all in things in life, put the right incentives there (and just getting fit/healthy, obviously doesn't cut it for millions of Americans) and make it fun and it's a piece of cake.

And for those of you who haven't found your muse yet, I urge you to give crossfit a try. It lets your inner 5 year old run wild. You'll get to run/jump/climb/swing/throw heavy things until you crumble in a sweaty heap at the end. It is pure unadulterated fun. Plus, fat will run screaming from your body (but that's just a happy side effect).

That said I'm currently taking a break from it due to a jumper's knee that won't go away.

It's a bit opposite of what you are saying, in the sense that you want to do alternative/strength training next to your sport to improve your game. This mentality and way of training has radically improved my own game the last year.

That's my dream right there.

Book your flight for the end of November. Round trip to Bangkok before the peak will run you $600-$800 from the west coast. Make your way to Tonsai and negotiate yourself a good monthly rate for a bungalow. If you show up before the main tourist season and plan to stay until March, you can usually get them down to around $200/month.

Even with all the Beer Chang and Massuman Gai you can handle, you still won't be able to spend more than five grand all in.

Don't forget to send us a postcard!

Food was probably comparable in price, but a Bintang being slightly more expensive than an 80Baht Chang :)

It does, however has some truly amazing rock climbing on the beaches in Krabi Provence. That's why I spend every other winter there.

I think I took from your original post that you do both, hence my confusion. Regardless, congrats on the pursuit, its something I am very envious of!

I locked up my care for a summer and biked to the coffee shop and grocery store every day.Before long I was taking 5 mile bike rides on the spur of the moment. I lost about 35 pounds that summer. Unfortunately, I live somewhere that has a winter which makes biking impossible. I should have switched to cross country skiing or something I guess... if only they groomed ski paths on the side of the street.