A (Grainy) View to a Kill

In the previous article (‘Primal Primer’*) we saw that around 10,000 years ago there was the beginning of a revolution, one that would become almost entirely global in the millennia to follow; that revolution was agriculture.

Agriculture caused probably the biggest change in the diet of the human population, a change whose consequences we are currently reaping from what was sown.

As we have seen in previous articles your DNA code was laid down over millions of years on a fairly limited diet of wild foods; at this time there was no agriculture or food processing. In the 10,000 years since we have had agriculture, we have corrupted the amount and form of our food supply so that it no longer expresses our DNA correctly.

It takes about 50,000 years for a new environmental stimulus to change DNA to suit, so the 10,000 year period is far too short for the DNA code to change. Scientists call this the ‘genetic lag’. We are still essentially 40,000 years short of being able to adapt to this new nutritional environment. And that’s if it (our DNA) will change, as the food we eat now doesn’t kill us outright or prevent us from bearing children, so it may not be a strong enough selective pressure to cause us to adapt.

Although it’s not killing us immediately, it is shortening lives, and reducing the quality of those lives, even though many of us do not realise it. Our current diet keeps us alive, but it doesn’t keep us lively.

In subsequent pieces we will explore specific components of our diet, how they have been changed from their original form by selective breeding and how this has impacted human health, but for now I’d like to introduce you partly to how your current nutrient recommendations have come to be.

In 2007 the ‘EatWell Plate’ was launched to replace the old ‘Food Pyramid’ and, to be honest, nothing much changed. The old pyramid had a base of Bread, Cereal, Rice, and Pasta, whereas the EatWell Plate now suggests that a third of your plate should now be starches which essentially is the old suggestion of Bread, Cereal, Rice and Pasta plus the addition of Potatoes from the vegetable group. In fact if you read the documents that accompany the visualisations of the EatWell Plate, they always begin with promoting the starch group. This is not as innocuous as it appears.

The promotion of this group has nothing to do with human health; in fact it is probably, apart from purified sugar, the group that can be entirely avoided without detriment. But if this is so, why then would it form the base of the old pyramid, and an overwhelming large percentage of the new representation of the governments food policy? Like many features of human society it has to do with power, and in our current rendition of civilisation, money, and the industries that feed it are the basis of power.

Although there is a little debate over the details, agriculture was thought to have first reached the British shores around 5,000-4,500 BCE, and then spread fairly slowly throughout the country taking around 2,000 years to do so.

Prior to this time, the British inhabitants who had been living on the British Isles for approximately 35,000 years, lived as hunter-gatherers, as they would have throughout their exodus from the African motherland throughout this period. Although agriculture had been in the Middle East since approximately 11,000 BCE, ancestors of people from British or European descent had been absent from the area for about 30,000 years, so missed a good 5,000-7,000 years of exposure to this new environmental influence. (This will become more relevant in later articles)

So although agriculture has been adopted in Britain for about 5,000-7,000 years, it was a little different from what you will see today. We will re-visit this as we explore the significant components of our diet.

Until the middle of the last century farmers returned essential nutrients back into the soil by three main methods – mulching, manuring and crop rotation; which ensured soil fertility. These methods were the culmination of thousands of years of advancement in agriculture. However, the advent of the industrial revolution, with its growing populace whom with increasing alacrity now worked in factories instead of farmsteads, presented a problem (and an opportunity) - how to feed them (and profit from doing so).

To understand the problem we need to look at a vital component of soil fertility – Nitrogen. Life depends on nitrogen, the element that Nature uses to assemble amino acids and proteins. To do so, the nitrogen (found in the air) has to be “fixed”, that is, joined to atoms of hydrogen, and is the essential rate limiting step in plant growth. Until 1909, soil bacteria fixed almost all nitrogen on Earth, benefiting from the methods listed above. Then Fritz Haber of the University of Karlsruhe in Germany developed a method to do it synthetically in the laboratory; for this he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1920.

This discovery impacted human health in three major ways. The first is that Haber went on to use this technology to invent poison gases for war, directly in World War 1 and then developed upon by the Nazis in World War 2. The second is that the technology is also used to make explosives along with phosphate and potassium. It’s fairly easy to see how poison gas and explosives are fairly incompatible with human health.

The third impact is a lot more subtle, but has a much wider influence – fertilisers. It was known that plants will grow on a mixture of just three minerals – Nitrogen (N), Phosphorus (P) and Potassium (K). After the war the huge stockpiles of raw materials produced for explosive manufacture were re-marketed as (NPK) fertilisers, which were cheap – compared to the labour and time intensive old methods, and effective – in terms of yield. You can grow a lot more with less investment.

Although these fertilisers produce impressive yields of crops that look every bit as healthy as crops grown using the older methods, this isn’t the case. As I’ve shown previously** your body requires a mix of nutrients to constantly re-construct your body and allow for optimal DNA expression, if any nutrient is missing then this cannot occur effectively.

Each crop grown on NPK uses the other available nutrients in the soil to grow, which is not replaced after harvesting; so each successive yield further strips and depletes the soil. If the nutrients aren’t in the soil, they can’t be in the plants, or the animals grown on these plants, and by virtue of this process, not in you. Your food, and you, are thus empty.

Synthetic fertiliser now dominates the agricultural business worldwide. About one-third of the modern population of the entire world depends on synthetic fertiliser in order to eat; it’s a particularly concerning situation in China (population as of 2013 approximately 1.3 billion) not only as a means to support the population, but as a consequence the greenhouse gas emission from its use. As Michael Pollan puts it we’ve moved from eating sunshine to eating (crude) oil.

The crops that benefitted most from synthetic fertiliser was the grains (we’ll address the impact of this in respect to the individual foods in future articles), which, by freeing the farmers from many natural limitations, changed farming from an essentially rural occupation to an industrial monoculture operation, essentially converting oil and coal into food.

The incorporation of cereal grains into the Human diet, which were a rare item in our pre-agricultural diet, increased in the time since agriculture came about, first as a result of learning how to use it to our advantage and at a much more accelerated rate since the industrial revolution which brought us means to amplify production and creative methods of using the resulting product. The processed cereal grains today not only deplete our diet of minerals, vitamins and fibre, but also create a detrimental change to the mix of macronutrients (carbohydrates, proteins, fats) on which humans thrive by adding a grain load that was never before experienced in our evolution.

As we will see in future articles, this completely changed the makeup of our diet in ways that we are only just beginning to understand. It’s a tricky situation as, despite its inherent problems, without this mass production the current world population could not be sustained. So this article, and many like it, is not for everyone. If you are dependent upon cheap (it’s not as cheap as it appears, another issue that we’ll address) food to survive, unfortunately this will likely be the basis of your diet (again, another issue we’ll cover – it’s not just about the grains themselves). If however, you do have the luxury of being able to remove yourself from this situation, even just a little bit, your health will reflect this step manyfold.

Despite advances in science and technology that allows us to avoid certain diseases of our past and which still afflict less advanced civilisations in the world, we seem to have traded one set of ailments for another. We now suffer far less from communicable diseases but rates of what are termed ‘diseases of civilisation’ or alternatively ‘diseases of lifestyle’ such as cardiovascular disease, certain cancers and neurological disease have exploded. The evidence is now rapidly growing that a big driver of these diseases is our relatively new adoption of grain and grain products as the basis of our diet.

Being a factor of lifestyle, if you have the means to choose one over the other, I’d wholeheartedly encourage you to at least consider the evidence that is available, and choose wisely.

www.hpc-uk.net

* http://wel-paleo.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/primal-primer.html

** https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=645782065439961&l=ad378b973a

Primal Primer

The Ancestral Health model which is often, unfortunately in some regards, coined ‘paleo-’ is based upon the idea that our body (and mind) is, for want of a better word, designed as a consequence of our environment. Over the course of Human evolution certain environmental factors were sufficiently strong enough to put pressure on our species to cause a culling of the population (‘thinning of the herd’), so much so that only those who had specific favourable traits for those conditions were able to survive and propagate, and thus certain sub-lines of Human populations died out leaving us as the solitary remnants of this, at one time, varied species. There is, however, evidence that there was interbreeding between homo sapiens and these other lineages most notably the Neanderthal and Denisovans, but regardless of this fact, what we see today as modern Human beings are a homogenous mix of ancestral genomes.

There were many environmental changes throughout our history, one of the most pivotal was the receding forests that pressured our ancestors to leave their, at one time, home of the tree-tops and begin to make the ever expanding savannah their new habitat; but that and the huge change it made in our physiology and mind is a story for another time. Another pivotal moment came, in evolutionary terms, only a blink of an eye ago, when man began to change from being at the peril of the environment to understanding how to manipulate it. This was the agricultural revolution.

Agriculture began about 11,000 years ago in what used to be called the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East. It was composed mainly of Iraq and many of the surrounding regions such as Iran, Turkey, Cyprus and other lands depending on the time period. Because of the change in climate over the years the area waxed and waned and today it is mostly desert, but at this time in history it had, relative to the surrounding areas, rich soil fed by the major rivers of the area (Tigris, Euphrates and to a lesser extent the Nile) that made successful propagation possible. This stability, amongst other factors, allowed the Humans populating the area to develop many traits that we now consider to be common place such as writing and arithmetic to be realised, which is why this area is also known as the cradle of civilisation (not the only one, but the most commonly known).

The idea and implementation of agriculture afforded the population a stability which enabled the rise of civilisation in these areas. This then led onto various facets of current civilisation such as economies, governance and militaries amongst other key features, and as we know, all of these things like to scale, so the civilisation began to spread, sometimes by mimicry, more often however, by aggressive negotiations. The end result of this expansion was the eventual ‘adoption’ of the agricultural model almost worldwide today.

This spread didn’t happen overnight, in fact agriculture did not become entrenched in most countries until about 2,000 years ago; and this is where part of the issue lies. Up until this point Humanity had only been exposed to a hunter and gatherer diet. This diet was based upon chemicals that have been part of the Earths environment since life began on this planet. These chemicals that we now call nutrients are the only keys that precisely fit the locks of our genome. The advent of agriculture changed the landscape, which introduced foods of types and quantities that our genome had very little exposure to, and therefore hadn’t developed mechanisms with which to deal. We’ll cover this in later pieces, as genomic adaptation, especially since the realisation of epi-genetics, which created a new layer of intricacy, has made an already sophisticated picture even more complex, albeit elegantly.

Over time not only did our recent ancestors learn to successfully propagate crops and breed animals, they began to genetically engineer these organisms through selective breeding to encourage certain properties to emerge. So specific signals that enticed our distant ancestors such as sweet (sugar) and fat to seek out and consume certain foods were made more abundant, which as we’ll see has a massive impact on physiology and behaviour. And this brings up an important point, even if we strictly adhered to the types, proportions etc of foods that our distant ancestors consumed, it would still not be an exact facsimile of the diet, as the foods are vastly different to what was available in our long past history.

However this is where many of the critics (and even some proponents) of the ancestral model get the wrong idea. People such as Loren Cordain aren’t suggesting that we need to eat or live identically to how our ancient ancestors did; they (individuals like Loren) are simply suggesting an elegant premise of basing your nutrition and activities on the signals that our genome developed upon. These signals (which we’ll cover in more detail in subsequent pieces) are the precise information codes that instruct our genome to express itself optimally. Signals that were not part of our evolutionary environment, especially so since the industrial age, do not interact optimally with our genome and thus either cause an inadequate expression which limits our ability to thrive, or in the worst case scenario cause degeneration and disease. These signals, if at all possible and pretty common sense really, should be avoided.

In simple terms it’s about optimally feeding your DNA. Who wouldn’t want to do that?

www.hpc-uk.net

Evolutionary Fitness ~ Addendum

In the previous article in this series we saw that our evolution as modern humans was hinged upon a particular adaptation, which was the development of our extraordinarily large bums. This enabled us (or rather our ancestors) to become the only species capable of true upright posture and bi-pedalism which at moderate speeds of locomotion only cost ¼ of the energy as quadrupedalism. This adaptation plus a few other benefits of upright posture led us along the path towards our development of larger brains and with it, the brains particular requisite needs and amazing abilities. We also saw that, at the time the most efficient method of providing the nutrient and energy dense food for our growing brains was through the consumption of animal tissues which required the use of hunting; particularly the persistence hunting that requires phenomenal endurance.

However, this is one tiny snippet of our ancestral past that largely dictates our physiology today. If you read that piece and began to realise the gulf between many of our lives today and the physical environmental stress of our forebears, then bear with me as we explore the rabbit hole a little deeper.

I’m sure you can appreciate that our evolution occurred over a fairly expansive period of time in which the environment that our ancestors lived changed considerably, both from the natural change in the landscape and climatic conditions, but also due to the migration necessitated for survival. So please appreciate that there is no single specific activity or type of diet to which our ancestors would have been exposed; it would’ve been a variable environment to which our ability to adapt was our saving grace, but there are some generalisations we can infer from the evidence.

Let’s look at the physical activities in which our ancestors had to engage to survive. We have already seen that persistence hunting required travelling distances of up to 20km per day in order to cause the heat load and exhaustion of the prey which made it easier to kill. This was mainly performed by males; the females however were not simply maxing and relaxing back at the shelter waiting for the male to return with sustenance. They were involved in very vigorous activity, arguably more vigorous than the males.

From the available evidence it is proposed that compared to the average distance travelled by males (15-20km) per day during hunting expeditions, females often covered 45-60% of the distance (9km). As you may have surmised already we still haven’t introduced the word gathering yet, and this is where the real action is at. The 9km covered mainly by females was not a contemplative stroll around the grounds before heading home for tea and scones. It was an extremely labour intensive essentiality that was a crucial source of nutrition that buffered the intermittent nature of the more nutrient dense animal food.

We will visit the food element of this arena in a later article, but for now we need to appreciate the physical effort needed to gather sufficient and appropriate non-animal foods was not akin to a day at a ‘pick your own’.

The principle non-animal foods were shoots, roots and leaves. The second non-animal item would’ve been nuts and to a much lesser extent, seeds, with fruit eaten seasonally. The roots, especially the root tubers, are the most annually available food as they are protected from the changes in above, or shallow, ground changes in environment, but this causes a problem for the gatherer. What problem? They are usually buried 5-6 feet deep in the ground. I don’t know about you, but in a previous life I worked in construction and digging holes 5-6 feet deep, even with modern tools, is tough going. To do this with either your hands or rudimentary tools would be an imposing task to put it mildly.

And you’d probably be engaging in the 9km digging-fest filled trek, with a minimum of 7kg in tow. Why this additional weight? It’s likely that you would be carrying a baby concomitantly, and also useful materials such as firewood with which to return to the shelter. While on the subject of returning with essential items, please bear in mind the males were not simply going for a walk/ run, wearing down the animal prey and killing them…job done; they also had to bring the animal back to the shelter and process the kill, both of which would’ve been fairly monumental tasks.

So both males and females would’ve been engaged in, on a daily basis some sort of lower (not low) intensity activity for fairly long durations and also fairly intense activities for slightly less duration, but still a prolonged period of time. This is in addition, as mentioned in the previous article, to the acts of shelter creation and maintenance, tool making, food preparation, climbing and periods of very high intensity physical activity such as evasion of predators aka running away…fast.

So, am I saying that we, as modern humans, need to be covering 9-20km per day, while resistance and/ or gymnastic training for multiple hours. Not at all. Our ancestors ‘had’ to engage in this level and type of physical activity for survival. We now have the ‘luxury’ of not even needing to have to move out of a 10m radius to exist, should we choose to go that route; our genome, however, doesn’t thrive in that condition. Our body does require a certain amount of stress in order to express the genes that create pretty optimal conditions for a healthy, high performance body and mind. But that doesn’t mean we have to engage in the exact type and amount of activity, nor as we shall see the exact food intake, of our ancestors. Both in physical activity and diet there is scope for a range of nuances, although there are fundamentals that do need to be acknowledged.

The key point addressed in the previous article, still remains true, our genome evolved in a very active environment, where nutrition was hard come by, and it still requires this stimulus today, except we continue to have to kowtow to our environment, albeit today not so much dictated by Nature, but certainly culturally. This cultural demand generally mandates that we are cooped up inside, sat at work stations for a minimum of 8 hours per day, with an additional 2 hours or so, spent in similar conditions commuting to and from our places of work. This leaves 4 hours per day maximum, outside of sleep, in order to do all of the other activities required in life which includes cooking meals and supporting our families; especially the very young and old members. This leaves very little time to fit in the significant amount of physical activity we have just covered.

So you can’t realistically replicate your ancestral past exactly, nor would you want to either. I’ve shown previously that our genome is so amazingly adaptive that if you begin to ‘up the ante’ for a short period, especially in the face of food restriction, our genome has no problem in accounting for this via a metabolic shift; it evolved to deal with this exact environment. If you set up this situation and then go back to your old lifestyle then this metabolic shift will bite you in the a*se. So be careful with the eat less/ exercise more concept, especially if it’s a self imposed temporary situation of increased activity combined with nutrient deprivation; you’ll probably end up achieving the opposite result of the one you nebulously set out to accomplish.

A better way to go about it is to determine the lowest amount of activity you can honestly sustain long term and then feed yourself sufficient high quality food so that you can perform this activity to a high level. I like this phrase to sum up the idea, and it’s a useful question to ask yourself daily ‘Have I taken my MED’s* today?’ This seemingly simple question will, if you do it, literally transform the lives of the majority of people. Will it create elite performers? Unlikely, that would take a little more of a precise approach, although surprisingly, not too much more. But for the greater part of the population a MED approach would result in a massive improvement in the health, performance and happiness of the nation. Make sure you get yours.

*Minimum Effective Dose (MED) required to produce a healthy body and mind.

www.hpc-uk.net

Evolutionary Fitness

In the 2013 release of the Statistics on Obesity, Physical Activity and Diet (England), the key findings were that 65 percent of men and 58 percent of women in England were Overweight (with over a 1/3 of these men and nearly ½ of the these women classed as Obese). This has increased from the figures published in 1993 of 58 and 49 percent of men and women being Overweight, respectively. Although it doesn’t make great reading, if we include the Obesity figures, it’s even more telling. Between 1993 and 2011 the percentage of the population who are classed as Obese has risen from 13 to 24 percent in men and from 16 to 26 percent in women.

This situation is reflected in other measures of our health as a nation too. I covered the state of play as of 2007 in an article which you can find here: http://humanperformanceconsulting-uk.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/elixir-of-life.html

As suggested in the previous pieces in this series, it is becoming increasingly obvious that our environment is at odds with our ancestral genome. The genes that make up our genome were ‘selected’ to be able, at a minimum, to allow us survive, but also thrive in a particular set of conditions. These conditions are the precise keys that fit the locks of our amazing, but woefully under-realised genomic potential.

One of the key features of our past was physical activity, and due to our unique ability to utilise true bipedal movement, this allowed us to develop in a seemingly very remarkable way; that development being the size of our brain.

We don’t know the precise details of how our evolution actually occurred, but from the limited fossil record that we do have we are able to approximate a very good working model. So far it seems that, sometime between 7-9 million years ago our common ancestor, an ape-like species called ‘Oreo’ (Oreopiticus Bambolii) was the first of our progenitors that was making the transition to upright posture. This was a pivotal moment in our evolution. By initiating this change in our anatomy Oreo and the descendents that followed which included ‘Ardi’ (Ardipithecus Ramidus ~ 4.4 million years), ‘Lucy’ (Australopithecus Afarensis ~ 3.2 million years) and another Australopithecus Afarensis called Kadanuumuu (‘Big Man’) who co-existed at the same time as ‘Lucy’, but had a more optimal structure for bipedal gait, set the scene for our already increased brain size to become larger…much larger.

The ability to stand upright gave us two huge advantages; it freed up our hands, which allowed us to utilise them for development of technology and to communicate more effectively, especially over distance and time. This further increased our already expanding brain capacity via an interplay between our emerging intelligence and the new found ability (thanks to our liberated hands) to harness extelligence. But that in itself is a whole other story, what we need to address here especially in regards to the benefits that bipedalism provided, is energetics.

To be able to grow and maintain such a large brain requires energy, a lot of energy. Although it is less than 2% of your entire weight, your brain uses 20% of all your energy. To feed this brain power, the human form has made some amazing adaptations, and it is these adaptations that we are neglecting in current society.

Humans are not unique in all ways among the apes, like us Chimpanzees will not only gladly eat meat, but will go hunting for it; with the usual target being monkeys, but they have been known to take down larger prey such as Gazelles too. However, to provide sufficient meat, which is much more efficient means of obtaining quality nutrition, for a family of energy hungry human brains, the occasional snared monkey will not cut it. However, this is where we ran into trouble, or rather ran out of it.

Compared to other animals, humans are relatively puny, we are slower, weaker, and less agile than the many quadrupeds. That’s okay you say, humans didn’t need to be physically dominant as we had weapons such as spears and bows and arrows. Well yes we did, but we didn’t have sharp stone tipped spears until about 300-400,000 years ago, and bows and arrows a good while later. Our ancestors were hunting a long time prior to this technological leap.

So how did we do it? Well Oreo set us on a path, from which we evolved a deciding specialism that enabled us to hunt down and kill even the largest and most powerful of game; that specialism was endurance. Whereas bipedalism reduced our ability to produce powerful agile movements, when applied to endurance, it is a boon. At faster speeds over shorter distances quadrupeds have a distinct physical advantage, so it’s unlikely we could catch our prey simply by outpacing them, and even if we did, unlike a chimpanzee who has the strength to body-slam a gazelle, humans simply don’t have the physical strength to over-come most larger animals. But if we pursue them for long enough our unusual anatomy comes to the rescue.

It’s hopefully apparent that when we move we generate heat as a by-product of metabolism. In order to regulate temperature many animals pant to dissipate the heat load, however at faster speeds they cannot do this as effectively, so need to take regular breaks in order to cool down. Humans have no need for this, as we radiate heat via our exposed bare skin and via sweating, so although we can’t quite keep pace when the animals are galloping we can force them to continue moving until they overheat and become exhausted, at which time we can kill them by stabbing them with sharp pointy sticks or clubbing them with blunt, heavy instruments.

In addition to thermoregulation, bipedalism is a surprisingly efficient means of locomotion. At lower speeds our legs act as a pendulum which costs approximately a ¼ of the energy of quadrupedalism, but it’s when we pick up the pace just a touch that our ace card becomes apparent. At speeds above walking pace our legs act similar to springs. Each step forward stores elastic strain energy which is returned with remarkable efficiency upon toeing off, so much so that although we are moving at speeds approximately double that of walking, the energy cost is roughly the same. At higher speeds when we transition into sprinting once again the quadrupeds have the advantage, but for the needs of persistence hunting where humans pursue larger game in the hottest part of the day at speeds of 4-6 mph for 3-5 hours, we have the upper hand.

This is just one example of our evolutionary past in which our genome was set. The genome still to this day requires these same environmental demands in order to express itself optimally. In the next part we’ll take a look at the types of demanding activities in which we evolved to meet, but just for this introduction I wanted you to begin to appreciate that our current lifestyle although culturally stressful, has nowhere near the physical demands of our past.

How much more demanding? Well, consider the fact that our ancestors would often travel 9-15 km per day to hunt down prey in the above manner alternating between walking and running in the midday sun of the increasingly arid African/ Asian continents, that’s pretty demanding. 9-15km is roughly 12,000-20,000 steps; if you’ve got a pedometer wear it on a normal day, the average person is said to take around 5,000 steps, see how you measure up.

Remember this is just part of the basic numbers regarding the hunting behaviours of our ancestors. Add onto this rudimentary and totally incomplete analysis, our other behaviours such as foraging, shelter creation/ maintenance and other day to day survival needs, and you can see that our genome is not receiving anywhere near the stimulus it evolved upon.

Our genome is phenomenal; we see glimpses of it from the elite performances of our champion academics, athletes and artists. The majority of us though just don’t ask it the right questions, so is it any surprise that we’re getting the answers we are?

 www.hpc-uk.net

Who am I? Addendum…

In the previous article I showed you how you are inextricably tied into ‘your’ genetic heritage, and that this inescapable feature absolutely determines who you are…

Except it’s not entirely true.

From the recesses of your memory, dredge up your previous response to the question ‘Who am I?’ In light of the knowledge from the previous article, you may currently be thinking that you are ‘the expression of a 20,000-40,000 year old genome’. If this is the answer you have in your mind, then you aren’t wrong. But you are also far from right too.

We, as ‘Humans’, have this pesky mental process that gives us the illusion of separation from the rest of the Universe. So even if you’ve advanced your mental model of yourself to incorporate the human genome, you’d still only be appreciating a tiny fraction of the big picture. Let’s expand our viewpoint.

You may think of yourself as a ‘human’, however, this ‘label’ doesn’t reflect the actuality of what a ‘human’ is. Within the human body there are approximately a trillion human cells, but, you also have approximately 10 trillion bacterial cells within you or on you. So, the actual ‘human’ component of you is only 10%. You are 90% bacteria.

And that’s if we stop at the cellular level. Remember Life is really an expression of information that is manifest as physical features. As we saw in the previous article our human information code is the ‘DNA’ patterns written into our genome and it’s pretty vast, weighing in at just under 25,000 genes. However, the bacteria also has a genome and since there are 10 times as many bacterial cells as human, you may think that there would also be 10 times the amount of genomic information; nope. There are in fact about 8,000,000 bacterial genes within you or on you; that’s more than 300 times the amount compared to the human genome. So from a genomic standpoint ‘you’ are actually more than 99% bacteria.

This understanding of who you ‘really’ are is vital. If you approach the situation from a parasitic point of view, we (the human element), in opposition to common thought, seem to be the parasite in a vast multi-cultural colony of bacteria. However, this certainly isn’t the case. The relationship is symbiotic; that is an intricate relationship called the microbiome that mutually benefits both organisms. And we’re just beginning to appreciate how beneficial it is for ‘us’.

The microbiome, and the bacteria that form it, give ‘us’ life.

95% of all of your energy is processed by a structure within your cells called the mitochondria. Although today it is viewed as an organelle; a structure within a cell that performs a specific function, millions of years ago it was a discrete bacteria that formed a symbiotic relationship with the cell line (eukaryote) that includes human cells. Mitochondria still has its own DNA and are produced from parent mitochondria, although over the millions of years of symbiosis it has lost its ability to be entirely self-reliant. The mitochondrion allows us to respire aerobically (a very efficient means of processing energy) and our human cells provide it with protection (shelter) and nutrients (food). The mitochondria also play a huge role in the functioning of our immune system and cellular processes, but that is way beyond the scope of this article.

The other bacteria within the microbiome are still discrete and unmodified, but play just as vital a role.

When the microbiome becomes imbalanced; called dysbiosis, the entire organism declines in health. New research has shown that an imbalance in the type of bacteria found on the skin can influence whether a person has severe acne or blemish-free skin (1). Now while this seems superficial (I guarantee it’s not to those who suffer with acne) it illustrates a bigger point. The beneficial bacteria provide a defence system against external threats, and this is not just happening outside of your body.

Within your body the beneficial bacteria play a similar role, plus many more. Thanks in part to Edwina Curry everyone in Britain was made aware of Salmonella and also, unfortunately, by association scared off of eating eggs. Researchers have recently demonstrated that the probiotic organism Lactobaccilus reuteri - a natural resident of the human gut, produces an antimicrobial substance known as reuterin, which may protect intestinal epithelial cells from infection by the food borne bacterial pathogen (Salmonella).

Your blood pressure is also regulated in part by the bacteria within your gut, and it happens in quite an amusing manner. Many blood vessels in your body possess a receptor normally found in your nose, which is responsible for detecting the presence (smelling) of a particular odour (really the chemical that is a component of the odour). These specialised receptors in your blood vessels sense small molecules which are created by specific microbes in the intestines, and respond by modifying blood pressure. (2)

The research within this field is rapidly expanding and to name but a few there are implications for obesity, diabetes, kidney disease, arthritis and cardiovascular disease.

In addition to the influence on your physical body, the microbiome may also influence your behaviour and even your most private thoughts. A recent study demonstrated that mice fed with Lactobacillus rhamnosus JB-1 showed significantly fewer stress, anxiety and depression-related behaviours than those fed with just broth. It was also found ingestion of the bacteria resulted in significantly lower levels of the stress-induced hormone, corticosterone. (3) Now it’s somewhat obvious that mice are not men, so it doesn’t always follow that the same process will occur across species, but we do know that people with gut issues such as colitis often also have concomitant psychological distress, and certain psychological states such as autism also sometimes co-present with gastrointestinal issues. So although it hasn’t been definitively mapped, the link is certainly a route worth investigating.

Far from the disease promoting perception that we have of bacteria in which we are ‘advised’ to eradicate it at all costs, this could actually be the biggest problem. Our arrogant notion of humans being a separate and dominant species could spell our downfall. The key to our survival and ability to flourish is to, as we have done for millennia, become more humble and re-learn the wisdom of ancient man that not only are we ‘not’ the centre of the Universe, but we are totally dependent upon the entirety of a balanced and harmonic biosphere. Unless we drop our ego-driven image of ourselves and become aware of our true place within the whole, then our stay on this amazing planet could be brutish, painful and short.

In upcoming articles I’ll show you how our ancestors forged this relationship and how we can re-foster this connection so that we can begin to explore the vast potential that lies within us.


www.hpc-uk.net





References:

1. Sorel Fitz-Gibbon, Shuta Tomida, Bor-Han Chiu, Lin Nguyen, Christine Du, Minghsun Liu, David Elashoff, Marie C Erfe, Anya Loncaric, Jenny Kim, Robert L Modlin, Jeff F Miller, Erica Sodergren, Noah Craft, George M Weinstock, Huiying Li. Propionibacterium acnes Strain Populations in the Human Skin Microbiome Associated with Acne. Journal of Investigative Dermatology, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/jid.2013.21

2. Rosemarie De Weirdt, Aurélie Crabbé, Stefan Roos, Sabine Vollenweider, Christophe Lacroix, Jan Peter van Pijkeren, Robert A. Britton, Shameema Sarker, Tom Van de Wiele, Cheryl A. Nickerson. Glycerol Supplementation Enhances L. reuteri’s Protective Effect against S. Typhimurium Colonization in a 3-D Model of Colonic Epithelium. PLoS ONE, 2012; 7 (5): e37116 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0037116

3. Javier A. Bravo, Paul Forsythe, Marianne V. Chew, Emily Escaravage, Hélène M. Savignac, Timothy G. Dinan, John Bienenstock, John F. Cryan. Ingestion of Lactobacillus strain regulates emotional behavior and central GABA receptor expression in a mouse via the vagus nerve. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1102999108

Who am I?

I’m not having an existential crisis, but indulge me for a moment and ask yourself this seemingly simple question.

If you began searching your soul for the answer about your identity and started going through an Oprah Winfrey-esque process of self discovery, then bear with me for just a smidgeon of your time, and entertain the idea presented below. It may ignite within you a more secure understanding of ‘whom’ you really are and your place in the Universe.


Evolutionary Principle

Essentially you are still the same as a Human from 50,000 years ago. This single fact underlies the entire manner you need to approach diet, physical activity and life in general. We’ll get to why in a moment, but for now you need to understand one key point

‘Human DNA has not significantly changed in the last 50,000 years’

So in order for us to have the greatest effect (hopefully positive) on our body and mind we need to use this concept as a basis for everything we do, and that is what I attempt to do with all things HPC-UK.

You may have heard or even adhere to what has now become known as a ‘Paleo-‘ diet or lifestyle. At HPC-UK we definitely use some of the ideas that have come out of that school of thought, but we also use modern day approaches as long as they are compatible with our genetic heritage. HPC-UK is based upon a ‘modified ancestral approach based on the Human genome.


Why live in this Way?

To understand why we should live in this manner we have to take a quick look inside the very blueprint of your body. This blueprint is known as the Human Genome which is composed of Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA).

Your DNA code is made up of over 3,000,000,000 nucleic acids which instruct the body to make more than 100,000 proteins that make up you and me. Each protein has a precise code sequence, written in your DNA.

As well as the code in our body, every item you come into contact with either by eating, drinking, inhaling or allowed to get onto your skin also has a code sequence (not always a DNA sequence). The DNA code for any particular protein in your body is expressed in response to the flux of chemicals within the body i.e. something that enters your body, something you do to change your chemistry or something that leaves your body. This chemical flux determines your physiology, behaviour and even your most intimate thoughts.

The DNA code that you have inside you was laid down over millions of years during a time of very particular conditions, such as physical environment, food availability and the physical activity that was dictated by these factors. Prior to 10,000 years ago this environment was based around a hunter/ gatherer lifestyle. Then things changed…drastically.

Approximately 10,000 years ago Humans shifted from a hunter/ gatherer lifestyle to a lifestyle based around agriculture. This was the beginning of huge reforms in the physical and social environment to which Humans were exposed; an environment we are rapidly furthering today.

This 10,000 year period, however, is far too short for the DNA code to change. Scientists call it the “genetic lag”. It takes about 20,000-50,000 years for a new environmental stimulus to change DNA to suit. So we’re still 10,000-40,000 years short of being anywhere near able to suit our current lifestyle; we’re still 99.9 percent the same as 50,000 years ago but our environment is not. Our modern environment is increasingly in conflict with our genome.

As advanced as this (genomic) knowledge is, the next advancements are already on the horizon. This next huge step is figuring out how ‘epi-genetics’ and ‘proteomics’ all tie into the picture.

So, in light of this brief introduction ask yourself the question again ‘Who am I?’ Already it should be slightly different to the answer you responded with at the beginning.

However, what I’m going to show you in future articles is how your current perception of ‘who you are’ is both hugely exaggerated in one sense, and totally understated in another.

It has profound implications on your health, performance and your ability to realise your immense potential.

www.hpc-uk.net