Ancestral Health Symposium
I just got back from the Ancestral Health Symposium down in Los Angeles. It was awesome! All the top Paleo bloggers and authors were speaking. There were about 600 participants and it was completely sold out. The audience looked amazingly fit, healthy, happy, and energized. It was great to hear so many people whose blogs I read. One woman said it was like being physically in the internet! I bought some great Paleo cookbooks, got my copy of “The Perfect Health Diet” autographed, and sampled the fantastic Pemmican from US Wellness Meats.
Tons of great content in the talks. They were filming them so hopefully they will become available online. A fantastic talk by the Swedish doctor Andreas Eenfeldt about the dramatic improvements in Sweden adopting an LCHF (low carb, high fat) diet. There the medical establishment is supporting it and people have dramatically increased their consumption of butter, etc. and obesity and disease are dropping rapidly.
Robert Lustig added some great new ideas to his now famous viral “Sugar, The Bitter Truth” video. There’s lots of evidence that fructose increases fat and causes damage much more than glucose. But I’ve always wondered “Why?”. Fruits have been a part of our diet for a long time, why would a major constituent of them cause problems? His new theory which feels right to me is that in many of the environments we evolved in, fruit would only have been available a couple of months in the year and it would have been at “harvest time” when food was plentiful. We don’t hibernate like bears, so we need to stock up on energy when times are good to make it though the lean times. Fructose is a good signal to do that. So getting fatter with fructose is intentional! The problem is that now we get fructose all the time, so we just get fatter and fatter. His slides are here and the video of his talk is here.
I had a great dinner with Seth Roberts and Tucker Max. Tucker wrote the books “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell” which is also a movie and “Assholes Finish First”. He’s super smart and really into Paleo. He’s been able to create a huge brand and make tons of money doing it. But he’s really interested in changing the power structure of media creation and distribution. We had a great discussion about new internet business models and radical change in the structure of commerce.
The event was just the begining. They have formed the Ancestral Health Society to promote evolutionary health ideas and are planning to make the conference be an annual event and to start a journal among other things:
