Art De Vany's "Evolutionary Fitness" paper

On a plane from Boston to LA, I recently re-read DeVany's "Evolutionary Fitness". A precursor to his book, the New Evolution Diet, it's essentially a shorter, more concise version of the same thoughts on human health and nutrition. The fundamental point is that our bodies and minds are healthiest when we eat and exercise as humans did 40,000 years ago. We weren't meant to be sedentary or (notably) to work out regularly in a gym. We weren't even meant to eat three square meals a day, let alone rice and wheat. Our bodies were meant to adapt to scarcity and to be exposed to high intensity and short workouts. It really is a different way of viewing our place in the world, so it's understandable why so many people are reluctant to look at things this way.



Some quotes that struck me:

"The real point is to embrace randomness and variety within the context of structured repetitiveness. Good intuitive models of power law variation are the movements of the wild lion or the music of Bach or Mozart"

"Males among hunter-gatherers do not carry the large game our ancestors did, so they are not a good model of power walking for males. Consider this instead as a model. A historical source reports that 5 Indian braves drove 5 bison into a pit. After they killed these 2000-pound bison, they pulled them out of a pit more than 10 feet deep, lined them up and skinned and butchered them. Then, they carried as much as they could back to camp to get others to return for the rest. What a wonderful model of fitness, combining speed, power, strength, and stamina. You can be sure this successful hunt was followed by plenty of rest and play and feasting. This model is always on my mind when I think of what fitness means."

"The fact that you are alive is a remarkable thing. The odds against it are great. The genes you carry contain information from a continuous strand of surviving organisms that extends 2 billion years back in time. You are an improbable event and your existence is testimony to the toughness and adaptiveness of the ancestral line from which you come. You are a survivor, well equipped to live and be successful in the world for which your body and mind are adapted. Recognize, however, that the world for which your genes encode a successful design is not today's world; it is the world of some 10,000 to 40,000 years ago."

"By keeping your work outs brief and exhilarating you won't get bored. By adding lots of outdoors activity and play, you will enjoy the power and fitness you are achieving. If you start a new sport, or pick up one long neglected as you begin evolutionary training you will see how the power you gain improves your play. The feedback between the training and your new power in the sport will be habit forming. I fail to see how anyone can train 5 or 6 days a week in the gym and for hours at a time. That is factory or agricultural work, not anything human beings were evolved to do. And the paradox is that you will gain less strength and fitness if you over train. And you will join the thousands who quit out of sheer boredom."

"Aging is a slow form of lean body mass loss. What we call aging is sedentary aging and carbohydrate abuse. The accumulation of damage from hypoexertion and hyperinsulemia over a longer time scale is what aging is in Western countries. Adults lose about 5 per cent of their lean body mass per decade after they enter their thirties. Most of the muscle they lose is FT fiber, for they cease by some age to live in the FT region. They settle into the ST region and, consequently, as they age their muscle fibers atrophy. The 40 per cent rule may hold here too. Progressive aging and deterioration resulting in a 40 per cent loss of lean body mass may be a precursor or mediator of the dying process. The aging just die over a longer time scale than do acutely ill individuals. The aged lose lean mass and most of it is FT fiber. Because they do not and cannot stress their skeletons, they lose bone density. Their skeletons are vulnerable to falls and their muscles are not strong or quick enough to keep them from falling because their FT fibers atrophy. Keeping your FT fibers is the best way to stay young."

For more on DeVany and Evolutionary Fitness-
http://www.artdevanyonline.com/1/category/evolutionary%20fitness/1.html