The next installment in the Sunday Seminar series from Positive Vector is a big one that every human being has a personal stake in: diet and nutrition.
Come join us on from 2:00-5:00pm on Sunday, December 11th at 850 Williams Way, Apt 4., Mountain View, CA.
One of the most consistently made points in the morass of diet research is that the way most Americans eat is ridiculously unhealthy. I feel overwhelmed even trying to find good links for that statement, because it’s made from a ton of different angles.
Here are a few of my favorite tidbits of confusion:
- Bad fiber. But they told us fiber was good for us!
- Good bad cholesterol. But they told us LDL was bad for us!!
- Good transfats. But they told us transfats were particularly bad!!!
- Headlines that look like this: Guess what? Eggs are good for you again
WTF.
Part of the problem is for the last hundred or so years, and particularly since 1977 and the first “Dietary Goals for the United States”, nutrition is political. And politics is the mindkiller.
But then…diet advice that’s completely wrong is the body killer.
By now you’ve probably all heard of the increasingly popular paleo diet.
Or is going paleo the exact opposite of a fad diet, since it claims to be eating what humans have eaten for tens of thousands of years? But then, tens of thousands of years ago, no one was eating dairy, so why are so many paleo dieters eating so much butter?
Get the answers to all these questions and more next Sunday at our diet seminar, led by William Ryan.
Will Ryan, driven to optimize his own health, dove headfirst into the diet research, armed with a passion for analyzing and making sense of complex systems, and came out the other end. His early diet experiments took off about thirty pounds of fat, but he didn’t stop there! He kept tweaking and researching, and lost about thirty pounds of fat in a few months for a second time. Putting on ten pounds of muscle in only a few weeks (details to be explained in a future presentation), he rounded out the optimization of his physical body.
Since then, he’s consulted with dozens of individually people on changing their diet, and has invited by the Thiel foundation to speak to the first class of 20-under-20 fellows on diet and rational self improvement.
Here’s what he has on the program:
- How we got here from there: He’ll take us through a guided tour of nutrition research, how the “conventional wisdom” about what to eat has changed over time and expose some of the biggest myths you’ve been taught about food.
- Data we can trust: Why anthropology and biochemistry can help us answer the crucial questions about how to feed ourselves.
- Healthy traditional cultures: It turns out there’s a whole cluster of health problems that populations eating traditional diets just don’t get. The traditional diets are superficially fairly different from each other—some of the peoples eat mostly meat, some eat mostly veggies, some eat lots of fish, others don’t have any—but we can look at what common factors all the healthy diets have in common.
- How to think about the body: A further look into the etiology of that cluster of health problems we call the Diseases of Civilization.
- The good, the bad, and the ugly of food: Where Will puts it all together and gives advice about which foods to avoid and which to enjoy.
- Practical low-hanging fruit: Not ready to completely overhaul your diet? That’s okay too. He’ll outline a handful of easy and useful changes you can make to become healthier and more energetic starting immediately.
- Q&A: We’ll leave plenty of time to answer any questions not covered in the presentation component.
We only get one body to last our entire lives—you want to be very thoughtful about what you put inside it! Give us three hours, and we’ll give you a clear idea of how to eat right to feel good now and avoid disease later. Hope to see lots of you there!
Suggested donation is $20-30.
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Prediction: “complex systems” is going to be the “quantum mechanics” of the mid 21st century–people will mention it to add an air of cutting-edge scientific legitimacy to vague, bullshitty self-help theories.
“There are many words that can skip over mysteries, and some of them would be legitimate in other contexts – “complexity”, for example. But the essential mistake is that skip-over, regardless of what causal node goes behind it. The skip-over is not a thought, but a microthought. You have to pay close attention to catch yourself at it. And when you train yourself to avoid skipping, it will become a matter of instinct, not verbal reasoning. You have to feel which parts of your map are still blank, and more importantly, pay attention to that feeling.”
-Say Not “Complexity”