The Health Edge: translating the science of self-care
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We believe the explosion of life science research from many disciplines had catapulted ahead of our capacity to process, integrate, understand, and apply. We are interested in translating all that is out there as news to use. A fundamentally different understanding of human biology has emerged. The implications from the perspective of self-care are profound. We are rapidly moving away from the debate of nature versus nurture toward an understanding that life emerges from a dynamic landscape of nature via nurture.
We are passionate about the science. We are passionate about the implications. We believe in the capacity and possibility made possible by being alive here and now! We are beautifully designed to be on the African Savannah, living fully integrated with our planet, and in the context of social relationship. Our modern environment is not well designed to promote human health and the capacity to thrive. Many are struggling to maintain balance and traction in lives that often feel overwhelming and frightening.The challenge is to better leverage our superb ancestral adaptation for a different and radically challenging modern environment. Everything that touches us today has the potential be be very familiar or totally foreign. The less aware one is of the day to day distance between what we are biologically , as a species, “familiar with” and what we actually encounter, the fewer the possibilities for more effective alignment.
Leaving one’s health trajectory to chance in our modern environment is a very risky proposition. We are interested in holding the science to the light with an open and humbled mindset. Like you, We are intrepid explorers interested in how we emerge in the midst of our relationship with the environmental inputs of our lives…how we eat, how we move, how we sleep, how we navigate the mind fields of conflict in our lives, how socially connected we are, how we manage the burden of environmental toxins in our lives, how much meaning we cultivate in our work, love, play and how we interpret and respond to stress in our lives. We will drill deep, share all that my experiences has taught and do all that we can to create value for you as you seek to find your health edge. We always welcome your feedback.
Mark and John
The Health Edge: translating the science of self-care
Paleo Deficit Syndrome
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Chronic disease didn’t suddenly become “normal” because our genes got worse. Our genes largely stayed the same, but our world changed fast and our bodies are still trying to keep up. Mark Pettus and Dr John Bagnulo unpack Paleo Deficit Syndrome (PDS), a powerful framework in ancestral health and evolutionary medicine that helps explain why obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, autoimmune issues, and neurodegeneration keep rising even as healthcare gets more sophisticated.
We zoom out beyond the usual reductionist lens and pull in evidence from anthropology and real-world populations that still live closer to ancestral patterns. We talk about the Hadza, research from the New Guinea Highlands that challenges the “aging equals decline” storyline, and why old photos from the early 1900s can look more like hunter-gatherers than today’s sedentary norm. Then we connect the dots with epigenetics, showing how quickly the environment can reshape outcomes, sometimes within a single generation.
To make it visceral, we walk through Robert Sapolsky’s observations of “junk food monkeys” and the striking health shifts seen in the Pima people after a rapid change in food and lifestyle environment. We also get candid about why these insights stay niche, and why “lifespan” is a distraction if healthy lifespan is collapsing.
We’ll post the papers and slide deck on our website so you can follow along, and we’ll continue this as a two-part series. If this perspective helps you rethink your own health trajectory, subscribe, share this with a friend, and leave a review so more people can find the conversation.
Slides and open source references can be found at www.thehealthedgepodcast.com
Welcome And The Big Question
SPEAKER_01Welcome to the Health Edge, translating the science of self-care. I am Mark Pettis. Glad to be with you. And I'm with my friend, colleague, Dr. John Bagnulo. John, good morning, buddy.
SPEAKER_00Good morning, Mark. It's great to see you, and I'm excited to talk about probably my favorite overall topic in the health and wellness field.
SPEAKER_01Great to see you. And uh this morning, and probably next week, I think we're uh thinking this will be a two-part series, are going to look at this topic of paleodeficit syndrome. Paleodeficit syndrome, PDS, we'll add another acronym to the alphabet soup out there. But this is such an awesome topic, John, because it while it continues to be theoretical in its uh foundation of humans um evolving in modern environments that are no longer that compatible with the biology that drives us, a biology that hasn't changed over many, many, many generations. Um while it would seem to be relatively obvious that these changes are wreaking havoc in our quality of lives and in our life expectancy, it still is a context that I don't see or hear discuss that often, John. You know, why it is that we we're so sick and why it is that we feel so poorly, and why it is that the modern medical enterprise, as sophisticated as it is, continues to struggle to find answers and identify root causes and um focuses pretty much on trying to put out a fire without having any real insight into what the origins of the fire are. And and here we are, it just continues um in a way that um I think is uh well to the writing's on the wall, we can all see that, certainly here in America and around the world. Um and yet, so it it I love the context for this, John. And um there's so much good research that we've talked about through the years, much of it coming from the field of anthropology. And um, while the health sciences um applaud themselves for uh their sophistication, uh many fields like anthropology tend to get excluded um from modern medical thinking, much in the same way that we've talked recently, John, right, about physics and quantum physics and how you know the the this field of physics and quantum physics really has not in any meaningful way been integrated into the into the life sciences. And so we have these deficits. And what we're talking about today, I think can um add a lot of clarity uh to how we've gotten to where we are. And uh I think it'll be a really good discussion, John.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I couldn't think of a better one that explains more of the you know, explains more of the health issues that challenge the modern human being. It's um I think you described it, Mark, when we were talking offline. It's a unifying theory to a large extent. Because you can look at every system in the human body and you can find within those systems, you can find issues that arise from this gap in how our ancestors lived for several hundred thousand years and how we live now. Um, you know, and I it's unquestionably, unquestionably, in my, you know, and everything I've looked at, it is far and away the most unifying theory to, you know, to put it, you know, the way you did, which I think is is perfect. And I for me, it was a, you know, 1997, I believe it's a 1997 paper by Lauren Cordain, was an absolute game changer for me. Um, as a graduate student, when I saw his origins and evolution of the human diet implications for the 21st century, when I read that paper, I don't think I've ever read a paper that has resonated the same way with me on just about every level. And, you know, to your point, anthropology and so many other courses that might be looked at as like on the fringe of medicine, physiology, biology, let's say, so many of those courses I, you know, I drew some of the same conclusions that you and I are going to talk about now this morning. And they were most valuable classes that I that I took. Zoology, for instance. I mean, just like anthropology provides us a lot of answers in terms of what mammals should what mammals should eat, what the physical composition of our cells should look like. And you know, so I I think for me it's just a it's an incredible topic because of how it integrates so many of the different things that you and I talk about over the course of a year.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and it really takes one out of this material reductionist mindset.
SPEAKER_00100%.
SPEAKER_01It forces you to step it back and to look at things from a very high altitude over very long timelines. Um I'm often struck, John, not to digress too much here, but uh there's a tendency, I think, and and what comes to mind for me is like climate science. Um you look at data over the last couple of generations and then draw conclusions that may accurately reflect what you're observing over those last few generations, but the context is this blink of an eye uh relative to the timelines over which everything on this planet evolved, whether it's uh climate uh uh or whether it's uh human health uh and evolution. Uh and so we we do tend to, even if we consider these fields, uh, apply a very limited timeline over which we extrapolate conclusions that if we were to really look back uh at a very high altitude over the origins of our species, origins of health, um, you would start to see things very differently. And the beauty of this reality that we're in is is the ability to adapt. And um uh and so we'll we'll look at some of this research, John, and some of the anthropology. And uh I'm gonna bring up a few slides here.
Lifespan Versus Healthy Lifespan
SPEAKER_00While you're bringing that up, I I think I'll I'll probably get right to the point here because one of the counter-arguments I hear repeatedly sometimes when I have discussions with you know colleagues and uh you know people that are interested in this area of medicine, let's call it ancestral medicine, paleo there's you know, and now there's like what we call paleo medicine, right? Just trying to bridge some of those gaps between how our ancestors lived. You know, what I hear repeatedly is well, people are living longer than ever before. And, you know, I you can understand that. I can see where that's coming from, but what I try to say to those folks, Mark, is well, let's talk about healthy lifespan. Let's try to separate those two, you know, right? Lifespan versus healthy lifespan and quality of life at any given age. What are people capable of doing now at age 30, age 40, as opposed to what our ancestors were capable of doing, not even, you know, 50,000 years ago, but 5,000 years ago, 500 years ago. Lifespan has increased due to, you know, due to basically our ability to curb infectious disease, right? To our ability to, you know, repair a broken bone. But when we really get down to it and you look at the true health of an individual's systems, I mean, there's no comparison.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and there's no shortage of contemporary research looking at cultures today that still embrace ancestral lifestyles that um um really evade what we would consider in most Western developed worlds to be inevitable outcomes of aging. And so there's so much to be uh considered here.
Defining Paleo Deficit Syndrome
SPEAKER_01So we um you know, this this concept of paleo deficit syndrome, and we'll look at the paper that we pretty much took this um uh phrase from that that was published uh several years back, uh, really starts from this place of seeing chronic disease, chronic complex disease. We might call that uh diabetes, we might call it cancer, we might call it cardiovascular disease, we might call it autoimmunity, uh Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, uh, you know, there there are lexicons of uh chronic diseases that uh healthcare professionals use in their coding. These are like New York City telephone books of modern diseases and and codes that are attached to them for the purposes of billing and et cetera. So we you know, we've just seen this explosion of what we would call modern disease. And it's pretty clear that our ability to adapt um um can only go so far, depending on the challenges of the environments that we're in, and our ability to choose and discern more more wisely in in those modern environments. And some of this work that we'll look at, John. I th this I think was a photograph from Jeff Leach. Yeah, it's the Hadzs. Uh these are the Hadza. Jeff Leach is uh I think Jeff was an anthropologist, uh who's done, it's harder for researchers to do field work to really go to where things are happening and study them. They, you know, most academics now are in their labs, offices, institutions, and uh Jeff spent years uh visiting with the Hadza and learning about them. Uh and so so we um write, we this is a slide I know we both have used through the years, John, of how we have this um, uh even though we're modern humans, our our book of life, our DNA, our our our biology, our playbook is still very ancient. It's been written over over uh many millennia and uh written to perfectly adapt to the environments that we were in, which um uh uh hadn't changed that much really until the last maybe four or five generations. And and as we say, from a from a human evolutionary biologic perspective, that's a blink of an eye. You uh you can't look back at the last few generations and draw conclusions about why humans have become so sick and slow uh and uh fearful uh without without extending that that perspective over longer periods of time. But you know, foods that we we grew up on that we would have never thought of as unusual from an evolutionary biologic perspective are very much new to our species. And that these are not trivial observations.
SPEAKER_00No.
SPEAKER_01And this is the paper. This is a beautiful two-part paper. I think one of our favorites. Uh yeah, that's a great one. Uh and um uh this uh review of natural environments, ancestral diets, microbial ecology. Uh these are all fascinating uh uh uh dimensions of human life and human health, and uh this this theory, that uh thesis that um we have lost our ability to adapt adequately to so many aspects of our modern environment. And and so this paper reviews the research around this, and we were talking offline, John, about how the modern medical enterprise um tends to exclude uh certain fields that could very much change the way we think about um health in modern life. And anthropology is one example of that. Uh you see it in physics, particularly quantum physics. Uh you you uh many aspects of um uh climate science, and you know we've talked a lot about light and changes in our environmental, uh, you know, the environmental sciences, and you know, these are all obviously huge um dimensions and drivers of of our modern experience of life. And so this does just a beautiful job of looking at this through more of an anthropologic lens.
Anthropology As A Missing Lens
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's a really comprehensive paper, and there's two parts to it. I highly recommend that our listeners take a look at this. Um I think it's a great uh I guess you'd say it's about a 20-year follow-up to Lauren Cordain's paper because it's all really on the same cord, so to speak.
SPEAKER_01Aaron Powell Yeah, exactly, John. And I'll I'll um upload both of these open source papers to uh the Health Edge uh website. Uh it's it's a great read. And I love this quote, which was in this paper by uh Renee Dubot, who was a turn of the 20th century um uh scholar, uh an author. Uh and um, you know, now yeah, I look at 1970, John, and part of me feels like that was yesterday. And now I have to kind of remind myself that this was, you know, 55 plus years ago. Human beings can almost certainly survive and multiply in the polluted cage of technological civilization. But we may sacrifice much of our humanness in adapting to such conditions, and the maintenance of biological mental health requires that technological societies provide in some form the biologic freedom enjoyed by our Paleolithic ancestors.
SPEAKER_00It's an amazing, amazing quote.
SPEAKER_01That is an amazing biological freedom.
SPEAKER_00Think about that. The biological freedom.
SPEAKER_01Right. Uh and and and you know, our sovereignty, right? This human humanness. Uh and so I, you know, you see humans, many humans today that are unable to walk or you know, ambulate uh an incline, uh, or maybe lift um um, you know, a bundle of of groceries, or uh maintain enough uh awakeness uh later in the day to be able to engage, you know, those those fundamental um aspects of our humanness have become more elusive. And um this this too, I know, John, is a slide that we we've shared often through the years.
Epigenetics And The Modern Phenotype
SPEAKER_01And uh, you know, the does stress of our of our present diet, uh, and what could just substitute diet with with environment create an epigenetic change in our in our health. So while you know, we've made note of this growing mismatch between modern environments and sort of ancient um well-preserved ancestral biology, uh, we had the emergence of epigenetics over the last decade or two, and the mechanistic discoveries that these changes in the environment are interacting with our book of life uh and in a way that's starting to change, right? That the phenotype. This is a phenotype, right? It it looking at this graphic reminds me of of the old Sesame Street uh tune, right? One of these things is not like the other. Yeah. One of these things just doesn't belong. Well, you know, this is this is uh Homo sapiens just didn't look like this or function like this.
SPEAKER_00Uh and just to remind our listeners, Mark, again, this is the last 30, 40 years or so of the human experience. I mean, I think you could even argue that prior to let's just use 1970, for instance, you know, because of the Rene Dubois uh quote, let's just go back 50 years, this was far less common, that phenotype than we have today. So this is a very, very modern phenotype.
SPEAKER_01You're right. The warrior uh is now the couch potato. Yeah. And um and so coming back to some of the research that has been done, and you know, some of these slides I may have gotten from you, John, through the years. Um uh, you know, we talked a little bit about um the Hadza in Tanzania. Um, but you look at any of the of the small remaining ancestral um cultures that continue to live the way their ancestors did hundreds, even thousands of years ago, you know, you do see a very different uh phenotype. Um from from Jeff Leach, who who, as we referenced, did a lot of work with the Hadza, and and um, you know, they uh they can do things that that if we were to try some of this, we probably would get very sick. But they've become so adapted to the environments that they're in that you see uh what I think Jeff would would characterize as this incredible resilience um at every level. And um I I I find these photographs um they they take my breath away. Um and again, uh this, you know, no one's wearing shoes, right? They're they're they're not there's no sunscreen or sunblock on these young children. Um they're um it's a different a different lifestyle.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I I think for for some folks, they, you know, they would look at these images, they would listen to this conversation, and I think that they would have a hesitation to kind of buy into the importance of a Paleolithic lifestyle because they would say to themselves, or for whatever reason, well, this is in a very different ecosystem, it's a very different population. I don't think that necessarily applies to, let's say, someone living in an urban area in North America. Like it's just so different. And you know what I say to those folks, I say, okay, well, look at a 1920, 1930, 1940 black and white photo of Coney Island or a beach somewhere. You see the same thing. You see the same phenotype, right? And so it's, you know, and you know what we're I think what you and I are really trying to drive home here today is like, you know, we have this constant, almost incessant look at everything through genetics. Well, you know, genetically, this is what I'm predisposed to have. This is this is the blueprint that I get. And that's just not the case. That you we all have a similar blueprint for thriving in this Paleolithic type of or set of conditions. And now we dream on these, you know, these handfuls of modern cultures like the Hadzes, uh, you know, or the New Guinea Highlanders, you know, again, unfortunately, not so much recently with that population because of all the changes there. But, you know, again, it's it it doesn't, you don't have to look, you don't have to look at, you know, some really Remote, almost exotic place in the world where people are still hunter-gatherers. We could look at a population 100 years ago and find just as eye-opening of an image.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's such a great point, John. You look at uh some old uh film or photographs in New York City back in the 30s. And and we're certainly not suggesting that you have to uh you know live in a in a cave, you know, uh to realize uh what we're talking about by way of benefits. There are so many we we have the luxury of being able to integrate um modern advances in our lives uh while at the same time preserving many of these, at the end of the day, simple, yeah, um, fundamental um um paleo properties of living. And that really captures the essence of the of the paper of what does it mean to be in paleo deficit, and and we'll we'll come back to that. But uh, you know, it's uh these are these are all from Jeff. Yeah, and um you know the the again uh these um hunter-gatherers, they were just well equipped. I mean, look, and I and I know many uh of you listening to this can't see the uh slides that we're sharing, but uh this fellow has hardly a stitch of clothing on. He's in this uh uh wetland, this marshland. Uh right, he's got a couple of spears, he's got a boomerang, he's looks like he's got his knife there. I mean, this these are the tools of of living. And uh and I love this a little sweat band he's got, right? He's created this, you know, he's not gonna let sweat interfere with his ability to throw a spear uh into uh uh uh uh a marshland and and you know uh come away with uh an animal or a fish to consume from that.
Ancestral Cultures And Aging Resilience
SPEAKER_01Um and this to the point that you made, John, I think this this slide I may have gotten from you originally, looking at the Papua New Guineans and um and again this sort of Yeah, that's from a research project um where researchers from several institutions, Harvard being one of them, traveled to the New Guinea Highlands to try to explain.
SPEAKER_00It's around 30 years old now, though. Um To try to explain the uh the physiology of aging in that population where systolic blood pressure continued to decrease as people grew older and as bone density continued to increase as they grow grew older. And so researchers were really baffled by this. How can this happen? You know, again, in their context, it was limited to what they were observing in their patients and in research here in the U.S., which is where obviously blood pressure typically to continues to increase as uh as one gets older, and bone density typically is much less at any given age than it was at age 30. So they traveled there, and you know, you know, much to the claim and the observations of those who had gone before them, it was true. And they walked away again, just with, I think, what could have been really um compelling statements about the relationship between diet, lifestyle, and these amazing uh this resiliency to aging. But that's not what came out of that paper. It was again on it's like you were just mentioning about the lack of appreciation for anthropology in this topic overall. It was it was portrayed as more of a function of an anomaly. Like this, you know, this population is more of an anomaly. Um, still not quite sure why, but you know, there's only a handful of variables that really explain um, you know, what was being measured there. So it's always um, you know, it's always it's interesting, and it's hard to say. The cynic in me would say, you know, a lot of these researchers maybe don't want to acknowledge the power that people really have over the trajectory of their health or aging, and I, you know, for a variety of reasons, but it's a the topic comes back time and time again. Look at how these populations live, look at how what such a small amount of time sitting, they have no time under artificial lights, they eat the diet that our ancestors would have eaten 10 or 15,000 years ago. And look at the look at the in that effect. Yeah, look at the outcome. Look at the outcome.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, this guy looks like he could be working with a personal trainer or every other person. He's a personal trainer, yeah, pounding the weights. Um this is we we've referenced uh Lauren Cordain, and this is from some of his original work.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, this is good stuff.
SPEAKER_01Looking at uh body mass index in um hunter-gatherers and other non-Westernized populations, and from Australian Aborigines to the Inuit to uh the Maasai, you know, New Guineans, as you just referenced Sean, you just do not see uh obesity. Uh, you know, it's rare to see uh in the absence of Western infiltration and and and influence, it's rare to see a BMI uh uh outside a normal range. Yeah, never. It doesn't happen.
SPEAKER_00It doesn't happen. It doesn't. And I know you're gonna get to like Weston Price and his observations in a little in a little while, but we know from just the last 25 years that if we went to places like New Guinea, Papua New Guinea, excuse me, and you look at this most recent generation who have adopted more of a refined diet. There's rice, right? There's more time sitting, they have cell phones now. That population is very different than the image of the man you saw, you know, whose waistline was being measured. That there are changes that happen very quickly when you get that discord between the ancestral way of life and the modern ones. So, you know, that again, that as sobering as that is to see how fast things can change and how fast or rapid those BMIs can can start to increase, it speaks to this being like these are not genetic conditions, these are environmental conditions.
Junk Food Monkeys And Fast Decline
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's a beautiful segue, John, to this uh sequence of images here that um uh I essentially borrowed from uh Robert Sapolsky, Dr. Robert Sapolski, who's pictured here. He's a neuro uh uh biologist at Stanford, and uh for many years um would study primates in Africa and spent a lot of time with these with these primates um and able to measure many uh biometrics and uh explore their way of living. And it and it speaks to what you were commenting on, John, how w we now know through epigenetic um insights that um profound changes in the environment can in very short timelines alter the biology of the organisms and ultimately you know their biology becomes their biography, as we like to say. And so Polski uh made these observations uh in the in the primates he he studied. And um, like um like ancient humans, um, you know, these primates uh were in tribes, they you know, there were families of them, they um um traveled together, they uh hunted together, they defended themselves uh together. And um, you know, you can see them out in the uh savannah here. They would groom each other, uh, you know, well known. I mean, grooming is probably one of the more um health-promoting and uh in in terms of social psychology and human influence. The best way to get someone to say yes to a need that you have is to groom them. Um and uh these primates very much uh understood that. And when there was a threat, uh, you know, they would they would uh communicate and all find higher ground uh to evade the threat. And these primates were as one would have found them probably over the last uh millions of years, right? Right. Um and then something happened that Sapolski said, you know, he could have never anticipated, and as ecotourism um really started to take off, um these um reserves that were well protected started to see human trash and waste uh from where these uh you know tourists would would uh stay and gather, and uh and they would end up uh throwing this stuff into um uh land areas that these primates uh then had access to. And in a very short period of time, uh Sapolski found what he referred to as junk food monkeys, literally within a few years of having access to human garbage, food that was thrown away, most of it, you know, what you'd expect from a hotel, right? A lot of process, a lot of sugar.
SPEAKER_00Very comparable to what the what the modern, I'll just say with confidence, the modern American would eat over the course of a day. Very comparable.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. Uh all these primates start to become heavier, they've got more body fat, they develop metabolic syndrome. Uh and these are measurements. Sapolsky had blood work, you know, had uh measurements on on these animals. And, you know, insulin, they were insulin resistant, uh, they moved a lot less, they socialized and played a lot less, their infertility rates were off the charts, and they started to die at very young ages. So you could see how an alteration in an environment could take the uh a species that's been around for millions of years, probably without much change, and inside uh a few years you can begin to completely alter the the biologic trajectory of those animals. Pretty striking. And I and I thought, wow, this is this I you know I uh this is a perfect uh unintentional study of of what happens when the gene environment mismatch changes abruptly.
Pima Diabetes And Systemic Blind Spots
SPEAKER_01And of course, we saw the same thing, right, John? When when we look at the Mexican Pimas, Pima Indians, uh, and this this is a paper now 20 years old, but it it was really groundbreaking in its um revealing how a very hardy uh um uh culture uh upon rapid and profound and unhealthy change in the environment can totally change the health and character of that culture. So here they looked at um Mexican Pimas who migrated across the border uh into Arizona, and the prevalence of diabetes uh five times higher inside a generation uh and the Mexican Pimas who migrated to Arizona compared to those that stayed behind, sort of your control group, uh if you will. I mean, really, I mean a five hundred times five hundred percent increase. Um that's how how powerful epigenetics can be. And so, right, this is this is Sopolsky's observations apply to humans in this example, um, just migrating across the border into an ecosystem that made available less healthy food, less healthy lifestyle, and the um ancient warrior Pimas uh now have kids that are morbidly obese, um, adults that are less healthy than any generation of Pima before them has ever been, dying of chronic complex diseases at young ages. And um, this is um this is the human equivalent of the junk food monkey that Sapolski uh right, John?
SPEAKER_00I mean, this is Mark, you you you think about these different examples, and you say to yourself, if anybody is still looking for further evidence or feels that we need a double-blinded placebo-controlled clinical study, you know, then that's just complete denial. And and and and complete lack of interest in truly understanding the root cause of chronic disease. Exactly, John.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And I, you know, I hear really uh well-known scientists, yeah, clinical people that scratch their heads and say, where, you know, we don't really understand where type 2 diabetes are. If you go to the if you go to the ADA website, you know, they'll describe diabetes as a genetic disease.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um and hopefully you're not holding those cards. And when it does manifest, you know, we're here for you. Um, and and we'll help guide you toward the meds that can best. It it's stunning, John, how it's unbelievable. How puzzling modern diseases for so many that have spent their lives. And I and I can't help but come back to, and and I can say this because you know, I've I've I've come through the fire. Uh, there's so much programming in our education that you you have to be programmed um away from what is obvious. Uh it to be asking those questions, to be scratching one's head, uh speaks to the power of programming that so many modern clinicians have that you know, there's so much history there, but you know, certainly big pharma and the way that education has been hijacked by the uh uh medical industrial complex and the you know the power players that really drive it, which is largely uh the the food industry, big pharma. And we look in this puzzling way at how can it be that uh you know uh an eight-year-old kid could be morbidly obese and have type two diabetes uh, you know, let's let's let's get more money toward genetics.
SPEAKER_00It's it's stunning. It's unbelievable, Mark. And I'll add to the programming. I I had a a colleague uh several years ago who I won't name because uh you know I this person is in a position of great responsibility and is is looked at really closely because of their role for different institutions. But he basically told me, look, it comes down to the three P's programming, to your point, profit, and power. If you can't profit from a solution, it's not gonna be looked at as the solution. It's gonna be looked at as something that's oh, isn't that interesting? Or these are just associations. I love that one when people say with the Pima Indians, well, that's that's just associations, right? Well, okay. They're associations, but to your point, a 500% increase with the exact same genetics, there's more than an association there. Yeah. So he he he basically said it came it came down to programming profit and power, that you know, certain individuals, organizations want to have control over the way diseases are treated, the way we look at things. And if if it weren't that way, then this entire topic would be mainstream mark. It wouldn't be just a small percentage of clinicians that look at health this way.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_00I mean, I again, you're I I think you're so much more integrated into the ancestral medicine field. Like you understand that they're out there, but if we put all of those clinicians that are part of the ancestral medicine kind of group or this paleo, this growing group of paleo uh type physicians, you know, it's a drop in the bucket, right? It's less than 1%. It might even be less than a tenth of a percent of the clinicians out there. So it's just still looked at as so niche when it's it's the real deal. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Spot on, John. Let's um, I want to be mindful of the time, John. How are you doing? Yeah, we'll be time wise.
SPEAKER_00I have around five more minutes or so, but we I'm uh I want to come back to this if we can next week.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So let me uh let me just see where we're at with the slides here, and uh we'll we'll kind of wrap this up um and and continue. Yeah, this is a good place to to
Finding Balance And Next Week Preview
SPEAKER_01pause. Um next week we'll talk about the Weston uh A. Price and the amazing work he did, uh, anthropologic field work that that he did um uh back you know decades. 1930s. 1930s. Yeah. I have I have his original first edition book of um uh the origins of degenerative disease. Uh I mean this it was so ahead of its time. Um we'll look at that. So just to bring this first part into um sort of a conclusion, John, you know, paleodeficit syndrome, what we're suggesting is that there are so many opportunities in modern life to examine and to implement very modest lifestyle behavioral changes that bring that individual closer to more of an ancestral compatibility without having to um compromise all of the benefits of modern life. And so what we're trying to bring home here is a balance uh to re-examine where that that that focal point, that that fulcrum is, so that one can obviously enjoy all the benefits of modern life, but to be mindful that many of these benefits have unintentional consequences of undermining what our ancestral biologic principles and to sort of find that balance gives you the best of both worlds because what's what's the point of being in a technologically advanced society with many modern conveniences if you're just too darn sick and feel too darn poor. Exactly. Um great great intro, John.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so much fun. And I look forward to next week, Mark. You know, and I know you'll you'll have fun with this as well, you know, giving our listeners a top 10 list of those greatest Discords with really simple solutions.
SPEAKER_01Yes. Indeed. Uh it'd be a lot of fun to bring that home. And um, I think we would um uh recommend to our listeners that uh this is really the foundation, what we're talking about.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01There are many ways that one can build the house on that foundation, but but um part of part of this challenge is is um re-examining your beliefs in in modern life and and and and and asking the question, who am I? Where have I come from? And uh uh that bring can bring you to a very different place. And John, there's no one, no one on the planet that I know who brings more um firsthand insight and experience to this topic than you do. So it's such a joy to share this.
SPEAKER_00Um it's a joy to talk about this with you, Mark. It's uh because I just think it's so empowering to people. It's so empowering. Even if you can only apply five, four, you know, again, like and again, I know we're under time constraint here, but I know you're gonna talk about you know ancestral medicine. It doesn't have to be paleo is maybe ideal, but even eating a more ancestral diet or living a more ancestral type of life with respect to the light you're exposed to, the movement in your day, you got everything going in the right direction if you get back a hundred years from now, right? I mean, it doesn't have to be 10,000 years ago. It could be the lifestyle of 100 years ago. And I know for a lot of people that's like daunting for them to think about it, but it can be fun. It can be really fun, I think, for our listeners to look at their life and say, what are the areas? Is it with my movement? Is it with light exposures, with what I'm eating? Is it with the window of time I create during the day to be present? It doesn't have to be through meditation. It can be through other activities that really force you to be present, but all of those different dimensions of a more ancestral life take our health in the right direction.
SPEAKER_01Perfect, perfect to note to conclude on, John. I'll upload uh the the pay the two-part paper series that we're talking about, as well as the slide deck. So if those listening to this want to examine those, they'll be on our website and they can get a bit of a jump start on what we'll continue to cover next week. And so um great to see you, John. Well, wishing an awesome few days. Yeah. Um, stay dry. I will. And uh more to come soon, buddy.
SPEAKER_00All right, man. I love you. Enjoy this.
SPEAKER_01Thanks.
