Book Review: "Are We All Scientific Experts Now?"

Highly recommended.  Brief book with a very high level argument relying a lot on his experience but I think it has some deep insights into how science is done, our shifting conception of how it is done, and the way it is communicated. 

Three big ideas are covered in this book.  First, a three wave conception of how science has been conceived since the mid-20th century:

(1) idealistic deference to science focusing selectively on fairy tale versions of its history and overly focusing on the heroic successes,

(2) cynical deconstruction of science as nothing special and decloaking of experts by adopting a symmetry of explanations regarding what is true and what is false, making science just another storytelling activity and focusing selectively on failures and controversies and social and political influences on science, and

(3) a more realistic wave that accepts the messy processes of doing scientific work and the requirements for doing it well along with the ethos that makes sincere inquiry into nature legitimately special. This is where we need to be now in his view, and I agree strongly with him.
The second wave Collins associates with the problem of "default expertise," the idea that since it is nothing special we can all directly understand scientific ideas and primary sources, learn from them, and make competent and useful evaluations of them, without any specialist knowledge or skills.  He ultimately finds the concept untenable and a notion drawn from significantly overreaching the real insights that were drawn from the second wave that revolted against the privileged scientific priesthood.

Second big idea, a model of different kinds of expertise and its relationship to tacit knowledge, recognizing especially the difference between things we pick up ourselves and things we pick up by interacting deeply and systematically with other people.

Third big idea, distance lends enchantment.  The farther we get from being researchers directly discussing their work with each other in a field day to day, the more the conversation changes and becomes more idealized regarding how it might be applied and the farther we get from actually understanding it.

My summary from the review:

"We are all ubiquitous experts but we are not all scientific experts in the sense that not only are we not all domain specialists in the fields we want to think about but we don't even widely share the ethos of inquiry that is common to scientists. Even specialist scientists vary in how highly they value aspects of that ethos.

The conclusion is that it is vital to both protect the scientific ethos and have a more realistic understanding of the kinds of expertise and the messy processes that make it work and cloud our communications about it when we go to make decisions from scientific work.

This kind of nuanced, important thinking about science and expertise is a wonderful gift from Collins that I truly hope we don't squander."

Full review on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/review/R29W32NZEDCBIA/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Book Review:  Ungifted by Scott Barry Kaufman

Todd I. Stark  5/29/2013

Link to review on Amazon

Intelligence turns out to be a difficult topic, for reasons that aren’t at all obvious at first. Our understanding of mental ability has been captured in several independent threads of research that are surprisingly oblivious of each other for the most part.  Our stereotypes of the gifted and the ungifted often miss the details of what is going on.  The study of individual differences in general, while useful, doesn’t just de-emphasize, but actually systematically misses some of the most important things going on when people become exceptionally successful contributors.  

The author of Ungifted is well situated to make an important contribution to our understanding of intelligence.  He has made a deep academic study of a wide span of existing research programs, he has worked directly in collaboration with many of the leading researchers in several related fields and he has passionately engaged these ideas since childhood when he became  painfully aware of the academic sorting process for giftedness, and he himself is a wonderful example of many of the principles that emerge in his new book.  This is not another book that just starts out with a vague progressive vision of education and ability that everyone is a potential “genius” and then fills it in with wishful thinking.  No, this is a book that dives very deeply and realistically into the literature of psychometrics, heritability, cognitive neuroscience, and expertise.  It looks closely at patterns from the span of phenomena of human differences, including savantism, prodigy, autism, schizophrenia, personality, g factor, motivation, and creativity.

Ungifted is so compelling, rich, and significant a book for me that most of it was well worn by the end of the first day it arrived. What makes this book so rich is the unique combination of personal passion, strong but not intrusive scholarship, deep domain expertise, clear analysis, and all tied together with an original new and constructive perspective. Hard to ask for more than that from a non-fiction book. Every chapter is a stimulating lesson in an important topic that brings together a broad range of data, ever heading toward the book’s conclusion, nothing less than a complete rethinking of human intellectual ability, consistent with considerable evidence gathered along the way.

The most impressive and distinctive aspect of the author's thinking is his consistent and effective use of perspective-taking. In each case where a controversy is identified, each side is explored with great depth and sympathy to understand what its advocates understand that those on the other side seem to miss. It isn't difficult to do that for the side of an argument we agree with but it is an impressive achievement to do it for different sides and then to synthesize the perspectives into an overlapping understanding. This ability is particularly relevant to topics like IQ, giftedness, and learning disabilities, where sharp controversy shapes conversations at every turn.

Ungifted is about how we conceive of mental ability in general. Some people manage to accomplish much more with their mind than others do. There’s no escaping that basic observation, nor the fact that it has immense significance for political and educational thinking. What is the difference that makes a difference? The answers we get depend on the kinds of questions we ask.

Ungifted is in part the story of how the important questions have changed over time and why. There seem to be two tragic errors that we’ve fallen into historically. For one, we’ve often ignored the differences between us and tried to force everyone into cookie-cutter educational molds that well serve only a minority of the people they are intended to serve. Most of us appreciate this personal plight, as does the author in his "subjective" voice and personal experience throughout the book.

The other tragic error is ironically the reverse. In trying to appreciate the differences between people we’ve taken the opposite extreme of becoming obsessed with stable, predictive individual differences. We test ourselves and compare ourselves with each other and we look for the numbers that tell us who deserves what because we assume we are identifying potential. The author appreciates the motives and sometimes successes of this approach when done well, but the focus of Ungifted is on how we can do better.

It is the tragedy of our obsession with individual differences that Ungifted in the author's "objective" voice most eloquently addresses. We assume that testing people against each other will tell us how to best teach each person by identifying what makes people different. Ungifted describes in great detail and punctuated by the author’s own personal life story why that well-intended approach has failed us time and time again.

It isn’t simply as many politically motivated accounts would have it, that IQ has no meaning, or is too culture bound, or just measures test taking ability. IQ and similar kinds of tests when given and interpreted intelligently provide a useful and well-validated way of identifying the lion’s share of variation in human intellectual ability across a wide range of situations and this has some very real correlations with meaningful life outcomes. The problem is not that the tests are useless but that they have come to be misconstrued as if they measure a single stable ability that resides in each person and predicts what that person is capable of accomplishing. People who do well in IQ tests do tend to be smart people in general. But so are many people who do more poorly in IQ tests, and doing well in IQ tests doesn’t provide any guarantee that we also have persistence, motivation, or other qualities so important to making the best of our abilities.

A number of theorists have made useful additions to the body of well validated tests, but these are still tests of static abilities and they don't solve the most basic problem identified in Ungifted. The reasons the individual differences approach has failed us in the broad global sense that we have tried to apply it are that while effectively explaining variation between people in the same population, it has not taken broader environments into account, it has not taken the course of development into account, and it has not taken the dynamic differences into account that make the most difference in human lives over time.

A number of fundamental misunderstandings of heritability, genetics, development, and psychometric research have been exploited, often through politically motivated movements, to obscure the larger vision of intellectual ability. Ungifted makes a serious bid to help correct these fundamental misunderstandings.

Do some people have more of a critical trait or traits from the start, or do some people learn more from their experience, and in either case how much can we influence our abilities over the course of our life? The traditional dialectic of nature vs. nurture seems to have its own unavoidable groove in our thinking that we rarely manage to escape. Yet as long as we have been studying human ability scientifically, there has been evidence that the dichotomy is inadequate. 21st century research has given us some useful insights into the specifics. Ungifted summarizes the most important lessons from a wide range of data about human abilities, and the author is particularly careful to distinguish his subjective passion for the subject (which is often in evidence) from his more detached coverage of the data in the various fields.

Ungifted starts out with a concise summary of principles of the 21st century picture of development, setting the background for the rest of the book. The concept of traits is explored, and the patterns by which they develop.

Then we have a tour of the ways we have tried to measure human mental ability and our reasonable motivations for the various testing innovations over time. From the measurement of ability, we then see how measurement slides into the sorting of people into categories for practical purposes and the allocation of finite educational resources. We see the well-motivated practical reasons for labeling people, but we also get a sense of the often tragic real world limitations of that way of thinking.

We are introduced in an understandable but expert way to the real strengths and weaknesses of IQ testing, and to the best available model of how its scales map to specific cognitive abilities. This prepares us to begin to understand the different ways that "giftedness" has been defined and measured and why we are still so far behind where we need to be to cultivate the best in every individual. We also are given enough background to begin to appreciate the unique challenges of being different, whether perceived as higher or lower in ability than others around us. Ungifted artfully blends a sympathetic understanding of the needs of researchers and testers with those of teachers, and the diverse individuals just striving to do their best.

Then we are introduced to the core concept that distinguishes this developmental reframing of human mental ability, the concept of engagement. Engagement brings together the factors that distinguish the learnable, experiential aspects of intelligence from those that seem particularly stable. Engagement is the hinge that swings the big door to individual potential. Engagement is built on a number of factors that are particularly malleable and context-dependent, so it is of particular interest to the way education is done. Once we have a sense of what engagement is about, we take a fresh look at human abilities in terms of what is known about their development over time. The role of engagement over time in development begins to become clearer as we tour through the critical concepts of intelligence, creativity, talent, and expertise, and begin to see how they each relate to development over time. At the end, the key points learned along the way are summarized to give the outline of a new theory of intelligence.

For me the theory of intelligence introduced here is distinguished by two critical characteristics: (1) it emphasizes what happens in the individual over time rather than differences between people, and in so doing draws on different kinds of data, and (2) it is synthetic in spirit, emphasizing multiple ways of achieving the same outcomes by drawing on different resources, rather than looking for additional ways of distinguishing the abilities of different people. These two characteristics make this theory very different from most of the alternatives that are intended to address some of the same gaps in our intelligence models, alternatives such as “multiple intelligences,” “emotional intelligence,” and so on. Rather than just identifying more things that we think might be missed by IQ testing, and turning them into new sources of labeling and categorizing, the personal developmental theory of intelligence assumes that there are many different components to be identified, but places them into an overarching biological framework where ability is developed over time by identifying, selecting, modifying, and constructing niches suited to the thriving of the individual.

Several important shifts of emphasis emerge:

1.      Away from reliance on studying stable individual  differences and toward the details of person-centered development

We have focused primarily on measuring stable individual differences, whether “general intelligence” or other kinds of “intelligence” or personality in order to support research and allocate finite educational resources.  What this approach misses is the details of development within each individual over time.  It turns out that these two approaches, individual differences and person-centered, are not just different but produce incompatible results.  So this is a very important source of new information about how mental ability arises.  It is common for authors to point out that nature and nurture are an archaic dichotomy and that it is the interaction that matters, but the details are generally left vague.  There’s a need for specific research programs that focus on the development of ability over time.  The developmental approach is not just a detail, it is a separate source of crucial empirical data.

2.      Away from viewing the positive manifold of abilities on tests (“g”)  as a single ability in each person, and toward understanding its value in conveniently capturing most of the variation an array of mental abilities that collectively underlie many different kinds of tests.    

3.      Away from seeing intelligence as a number or even a trait, and toward seeing it as the adaptive fit between the individual and their environment by finding, selecting, shaping, and creating niches they can thrive in.

4.      Away from focusing on cognitive skills in isolation, and toward consideration of the motivations, strategies, and experience that turn those skills into practical abilities over time.

5.      Away from the focus on being able to measure abilities that represent potential in a brief test, and toward finding the best way to engage and cultivate each person.  Active engagement with the world and ability are inseparably intertwined in a mutual feedback process over time.

6.      Away from focus solely on controlled cognitive processes underlying reasoning, and toward better understanding of the role of both controlled and spontaneous processes in intelligence.  Being smart involves flexible use both controlled and spontaneous mental processes, and using the right resources when needed, rather than relying on one to the exclusion of the other.

7.      Away from fixed rules about how long it should take to become good at something or what special levels of ability provide thresholds, and toward seeing our “readiness for engagement” as a better indicator of potential.

8.  Away from seeing intelligence and expertise as independent (and one inborn and the other learned), and toward seeing the overlaps between them as cognitive abilities,personality, and motivation support the acquisition of expertise, and cognitive expertise is part of what shows up in testing for ability.  One of the most remarkable findings in the book that links intelligence and expertise is that chunking in memory, a key aspect of organizing knowledge in memory involved in expertise, activates the brain structures involved in fluid reasoning, a central component measured by tests.  

The resulting view of intelligence doesn’t see everyone as equal by any means, it seems unavoidable that some people will not be able to excel at some things relative to other people.  Stable individual differences do not somehow disappear because we shift emphasis to the person and their development.  However we do begin to see the real value of changing the nature of education to focus on the fit between people and niches rather than selecting people for special treatment via brief tests and subjective judgments of merit.  Several practical working examples of programs that successfully accomplish this change are described in the book.

I place this book alongside two others in a trilogy that for me represents a broad understanding of the nature of mental ability as it is best envisioned at the current time.

1. "Surpassing Ourselves" is about how outstanding performers learn differently.  It shows expertise as a distinctive way of learning rather than just an endpoint of domain specialization. By comparing the same person over time as they develop, rather than just comparing novices with experts, we get an understanding of the process by which people become smarter.  This is very similar to the shift made with intelligence in Ungifted, but applied specifically to expertise and shows again how the shift to a process perspective captures additional important information.  Surpassing ourselves also introduces  the reinvestment perspective, which looks at the growth of ability in terms of becoming more efficient over time and then reinvesting the saved time and energy in new learning, which seems to be a big part of how people who ultimately become exceptional learn differently from those who do not.
http://www.amazon.com/Surpassing-Ourselves-Inquiry-Implications-Expertise/dp/0812692055/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369837497&sr=1-1&keywords=surpassing+ourselves

2. "Outsmarting IQ" is about learnable intelligence.  It shows how experience, stable cognitive abilities, and strategies work together to navigate realms of knowledge and let us apply our knowledge.  It gives a good account of the role of strategies, including learnable strategies and cognitive expertise, in trading off between cognitive abilities in order to make the best of our existing stable cognitive abilities. 
http://www.amazon.com/Outsmarting-IQ-Learnable-Intelligence-ebook/dp/B001D1Y8Z8/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369837528&sr=1-1&keywords=outsmarting+iq

3. "Ungifted" combines the intrapersonal process perspective with a developmental model and an overall hierarchical model of cognitive abilities, consistent with the other two books in this list and yet going way beyond them to explain in much greater detail where “IQ” and other tests scores come from and what they tell us, and how stable cognitive abilities, expertise, creativity, and personality all interact to produce intelligence. 
http://www.amazon.com/Ungifted-Intelligence-Redefined-ebook/dp/B00B3M3UME/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1369837581&sr=1-1&keywords=ungifted+intelligence+redefined

Update 5/29/13 1PM:  Link to abbreviated GoodReads version of review:

Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined by Scott Barry Kaufman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars




View all my reviews

A New Look at Perception (Thank You, El Greco)

I'm struggling with your concept of "literal perception" vs. what people think they perceive. Or is it possible that this work suggests a different way of thinking about perception? That "literal perception" is not a useful way of thinking about how stimuli are interpreted, and that the process of creating interpretations of the sensory world does not involve a "literal perception" step? Perhaps beliefs don't affect "literal perception" because it just refers to the earliest stages of handling stimuli, and that they do affect later stages of interpretation. Then we assign special significance to early stages as "literal perception" because they seem so tightly constrained to us whereas cognition seems less constrained.



Is it possible that the way we intuitively assume perception to work may be what is misleading rather than the role of expectancy and belief on perception?
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Review of "Surpassing Ourselves" - A profound vision of a problem solving culture

My recent review of Carl Berieter and Marlene Scardamalia's wonderful 1993 book "Surpassing Ourselves" on Amazon. 

It is about how the underlying concept of expertise needs to be rescued from our inaccurate commonsense epistemology and  from the negative connotations of speciallization and elitism and instead applied more broadly to processes and groups to make our education and culture in general become more supportive of better thinking and problem solving.  It builds from the individual psychology of ability, creativity, and wisdom to the application of the same principles to groups and culture.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R35GNAAFEFWRF1/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

This is a remarkable book: deep in its insights, prophetic in its foresight, and profound in its implications. The most amazing thing is that this book was published in 1993, the same year the first commercial browser became available. That was long before science writers had popularized the research on expertise and long before most people had any idea what sort of thing a "social network" might be. Yet this book captures some of the most promising ideas of the modern information age, such as the use of technology to facilitate knowledge-building communities and the possibility of a wider problem solving culture. Having only the relatively limited technology examples of the time to draw from by today's standards, such as desktop computers with local databases, the authors express their vision in terms of concepts and processes rather than getting caught up in the details of technology. That turns out to be what makes this book most useful I think, because it makes the arguments very general.

A lot of my enjoyment of this book is admittedly because I had come to many of the same conclusions independently and felt reassured to see the same ideas expressed so eloquently. I do think they get a lot right here and that their core concepts have only become more plausible and more important over time since the book was written.

The driving themes of this book all revolve around a single idea: an expanded concept of expertise. I think this is a bigger leap of faith for most people than is at first obvious. Expertise has come to have very strong connotations in popular culture with specialization and elitism, which is exactly the opposite of the message in this book. The book is about how everyone can benefit from what we know about expertise, and how necessary it is to have schools and a broader culture suited to solving increasingly complex and difficult problems. It is not at all about specialization or elitism.

The disconnect between the expanded concept of expertise and the popular is not just about the politics and economics of specialization. It is also about how the research on expertise is interpreted. For practical reasons, most expertise research has focused on the difference between novices and high performers in a given domain and how much time and deliberate practice is required to make that journey. The authors recognize that body of work and draw from it, but they also recognize, critically, that there are other ways to look at expertise. We can also compare experienced high performers with experienced low performers. And we can compare novices who later become high performers with novices who later become experienced low performers.

The authors expand and elaborate on the concept of expertise in several ways:

1. Think of expertise not as an end state of ability but as an ongoing process of knowledge acquisition at increasingly high levels of performance rather than as an end state of high performing relative to other people.

2. Think of the expertise process as being a cycle of learning at one level until it requires less cognitive effort, and then reinvesting the surplus cognitive effort in reformulating the questions and addressing them at a higher level of difficulty and complexity, always working at the edge of our current ability.

3. Think of experts as people who actively engage in the process of expertise rather than as high performers, so we have expert (or "expert-like") learners even when they are novices.

4. Think of expertise as something that is done by groups as well as individuals.

5. Think of creativity as a particular kind of expertise, where we take greater leaps and risks in working at the edge of our competence and in building and drawing on our knowledge of what options are most promising.

6. Think of wisdom as another particular kind of expertise, drawing on our knowledge of human beings and what sorts of things are most promising in human lives.

The result is a vision of individual ability, education, and culture that is profoundly progressive in what it takes on, nothing less than creating the conditions for every student and citizen to either become or participate constructively with expert learners, to everyone's benefit, resulting in a broader culture of problem solving rather than one of stagnant political and philosophical stances. This is a 1993 vision for the challenges that beset us today, asking us to make better use of technology we already have available at this point, even though we did not at the time the book was written.

The authors recognize that even in 1993, most of these ideas were known and accepted by many educators, but they were very rarely put into practice effectively. The authors theorize that this is because of how self-sustaining the usual educational systems and in comparison how much constant vigilance and effort is required on the part of teachers and administrators to maintain a different sort of environment, what they call a "second order environment" that sustains the process of expertise for both individuals and groups.

One valuable prototype for second order environments is the research community, in which shared objectives and various intrinsic social rewards drive the team members to work together to increasingly more knowledge of their subject and tacking increasingly more difficult problems.

Compare this self-sustaining, actively learning expertise process with the simple use of technology to connect people to share knowledge. The difference is profound. Simply using technology to connect more people has some limited value, but it is a long way from the expertise process. The authors predicted this long before the "Personal Learning Network" became a promising but so often unimpressive reality. The gap between connecting people and knowledge bases, and people actually striving to make increasingly better use of available resources can be huge, and that is what the authors of "Surpassing Ourselves" identified in 1993, the way we use the technology and the way we communicate is critical as well, we can't just connect ourselves and our databases and expect to use all that potential effectively without facilitating and maintaining the process of expertise.

Does the term "expertise" itself limit our ability to make better use of these ideas because of its negative connotations? The authors point out how terms like "excellence" and "quality" have often been used for essentially the same idea, but those have their own misleading or easily abused connotations and limitations as well, and they lack the depth of individual psychological research found in the expertise literature. In the end, what we call it doesn't matter so much as whether we understand how it happens and how to create the conditions for supporting it.

Further Reading:

The books of David N. Perkins offer various proposals with a very similar and consistent vision to the one in "Surpassing Ourselves." "Outsmarting IQ" for example offers an expanded vision of individual expertise that in some ways builds on that of "Surpassing Ourselves" by providing a model of expertise as the process of navigating intersecting realms of knowledge, using the principles of far transfer to generalize expertise among domains and identifying some of the conditions for acquiring it. "Smart Schools" suggests a way to transform education along these lines. "Making Learning Whole" looks in more detail at the common process of expert learning at all levels of ability.
Outsmarting IQ: The Emerging Science of Learnable Intelligence
Smart Schools
Making Learning Whole: How Seven Principles of Teaching Can Transform Education

In "Rethinking Expertise," Harry Collins looks more specifically at the social dimension of knowledge underlying the group process of expertise.
Rethinking Expertise

In "Dialogue Gap," Peter Nixon elaborates on what is distinct about the sort of communication that brings out the different knowledge of each individual and in so doing facilitates what "Surpassing Ourselves" considers the group process of expertise, as opposed to simply arguing or conversing on a less constructive level.
Dialogue Gap: Why Communication Isnt Enough and What We Can Do About It, Fast

Maria Konnikova's "Mastermind" explores the role of a specific critical factor in individual process of expertise allowing us to work continually at the edge of our current ability. This is the ability to focus attention in a particular way in order to actively engage our thinking rather than just passively observe the same things in the same way. "Surpassing Ourselves" describes this only in the abstract as actively engaging higher levels of problems, but the concept of mindfulness offers a possible way of modeling the process in more detail.
Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes

How I Lost the Beach Ball

How I Lost the Beach Ball

This is how I got back into control of my weight, in case it might be of value to anyone else.

In my 30's my weight was stable at a dumpy but manageable 220 lbs.

My adult weight from late 20's to late 30's: 220 lbs

Sometimes in martial arts practice I would suspect that an injury was partly due to my excess weight, so I would try to lose a bit to lighten the load on my joints, but it never stayed off for very long, I dropped as low as 180 for a few months but I always came back to 220. 

In those days, the most successful technique I had found was relying on the prepackaged convenience foods from NutriSystem and combining that with a lot of low intensity activity.  Those were never permanent habits though and when I stopped them the weight came right back. 

Then in my late 30's, I started gaining steadily again beyond the previous 220 and when I hit about 260, all hell started breaking loose with my health.  My wife Sue would tell me my breathing was stopping during sleep, I had almost constant reflux sensations, and even more frightening, my feet started getting sores that weren't healing.  One night I woke up choking on my own reflux and it terrified me to the point that I pretty much assumed I was going to die soon if I didn't lose a lot of weight. I don't have a picture of myself at 260 and I'm not sure I want to see one.  Here is me at 240.  This is gross enough to give the sense of where I was headed.  I was 260 pounds in June of 2005 at the age of 46.

240 lbs.  20 pounds less than my heaviest 

Age 38: 240 lbs - I swallowed a Beach Ball and was still growing!

Being that obese and motivated that strongly, it wasn't terribly difficult to lose about 70 pounds over the next 4 months.  However my strategy this time was long term.  Based on the fact that I had been so successful with NutriSystem, I came up with a strategy based on what I thought was the principle that made NutriSystem so successful temporarily.  I combined convenient rationed meals with new activity habits. 

I came up with small set of convenient meals that I liked which I felt I could turn into permanent habits rather than a temporary weight loss strategy.  Things that I wouldn't mind shopping for, preparing, and eating indefinitely.  My criteria were that the portions had to be reasonable yet satisfying, and not things that triggered me to eat huge amounts, and other than a limit of about 400 cals per meal, the only nutritional guidelines I gave myself were to keep the overall glycemic load as low as possible and to include as much protein and fiber as possible.  These were intended as satiety factors that prevented me from being hungry while on a calorie deficit as well as being intended to help address the insulin resistance I was pretty sure was responsible for a lot of my health problems as well as being a factor in my weight gain. These rules still guide my every meal, they have become easier and easier to apply, and now I don't even think about them and I don't feel like I'm dieting.  I also splurge once a week on high glycemic foods just so I have a day set aside to break the rules and in theory maybe re-calibrate my leptin levels.  Mostly just so I have a day set aside for special treats and I strictly avoid hedonic or trigger eating at other times.

I established new sustainable eating habits, and started walking a lot in the park, which I love. I also fasted periodically because it gave me a motivational boost to realize I had gotten so much control over my eating habits and it gave me the sense that I could make the scale move virtually by force of will if I needed to.  That sense of control was I think one of the big success factors in the long run, not just the fact that I was fasting or just eating less. When I started adding exercises to my walks it also helped me feel like I was in a lot more control. I could see my strength and mobility improving as well as my weight diminishing.

Losing the Beach Ball:  June 2005 through December 2006

By the time the sleep apnea study I had scheduled came around, that problem was already gone and my dropping Hemoglobin A1C was evidence that my insulin sensitivity was probably improving.  My triglycerides and HDL also improved dramatically.  For me at least this pretty much cinched the conclusion that health and obesity were directly related and kept me motivated to maintain the habits I'd established if I found myself starting to drift from them.  Here's what I look like at 190, not exactly lean but I've at least lost the beach ball and my health is a world better. And still improving.

I've been continuing to track my bodyweight for the past few years to help maintain a longer range perspective.  These dramatically show the struggle of trying to bring bodyweight down when it is NOT terribly high to begin with.  It's a whole different problem.  You can see the constant fluctuations and the slow overall progress over time as well as the occasional slip ups.  But over time, the right sustainable habits keep dragging the weight down kicking and screaming.  It looks nothing like the dramatic progress I was able to see when I shifted from terrible habits to good ones and lost the beach ball.  But it still shows gradual progress.  And that's fine with me right now.

Here's a short term graph showing what my weight fluctuations typically look like when I have good control of my eating and activity habits for about a month and a half.  If I were focusing on the short term only, this would probably be pretty discouraging I think. However it is actually a progression.  

Short term relative stability over a month and a half

Watch what happens if I expand the graph out to about 9 months.  You still see the local stability and constant ups and downs, but you also begin to see the overall trend over time.  One of the reasons people give up is that they expect to keep making dramatic changes, they don't realize they are still making slow progress and they get discouraged.  Or they try radical changes rather than manageable new habits and they find them unsustainable.  This is actually a sustained degrading trend of about a pound a month on average.  It just isn't a continuous one, it has constant fluctuations in different time scales.  And there is plenty of backsliding.  But the trend never stops because the habits are maintained and altered over time experimentally to work better.  It isn't an optimal loss rate but it is a successful one in the long term because there is nothing about it that isn't permanently sustainable.

And here's what it looks like if I throw away the good habits for a few months.  My weight goes right back into the stratosphere.  A natural experiment that happened when I got involved in a particularly challenging project, and gave into the stress by minimizing my workouts and going back to eating whatever I wanted to comfort myself.

Lessons Learned

1.  Being fat as a result of poor eating and activity habits was rapidly, though not easily, reversed by creating new healthier habits.

2.  I deliberately devised a small set of convenient meals that I enjoyed but which also contained large amounts of protein and fiber and fluids for satiety, added reasonable amounts of fats (mostly unsaturated) while keeping total calories at about 400 per meal and kept overall glycemic load of every meal very low.

3.  I kept glycemic load low by avoiding breads and pastas almost entirely, except in small amounts along with protein and fiber.  

4.  When I need a snack, it is almost always lean protein or a small amount of nuts for friendly fats. Never sugars or starches, which I find makes me feel hungrier.  Sometimes if I'm really hungry between meals but I want to maintain a calorie deficit I'll have a "Zone" style snack of protein, low glycemic carbs, and friendly fats.  That usually satisfies me for a while.

5.  When I had a large calorie deficit all week, it seemed to help to add a cheat day a week, which put a few pounds back on but which were then quickly lost again the weight dropped even further.


6.  I added routine varied activities every day that I enjoy and whenever possible do them first thing in the morning.

7.     I remind myself that I'm in control of my habits by fasting for 24 hrs once a week.

8.  I don't fight myself, I leverage habits that I enjoy but also take me closer to my goals.

9.  I remember that the long term is what matters, not the daily fluctuations.  I don't let daily changes throw me off track once I establish new habits that work.  I track things on a daily basis but I don't react to them on a daily basis, and if I see a problem I adjust my routines every week or two based on the trend.  I use moving averages and trends to measure progress, and how my clothes fit, rather than reacting to the scale every day.


10.  Losing weight further became a different problem than initially losing massively excess weight.  Maintaining the same habits caused progress to slow but not stop.  I would probably have to create a new set of different habits to drop significantly more weight more rapidly.  My body eventually adapted to my initial changes.

Book Review:  You Are Your Own Gym

by Mark Lauren
Kindle edition available, review based on Kindle edition.
Text-to-Speech enabled on Kindle version.
165 pages.
Ballantyne Books (Random House)

Link to full review on Amazon

In a nutshell:  A lot of useful and clever exercise variations, good use of periodization for long term training goals, a number of good sample routines with progressions, very solid, practical advice for practical fitness through bodyweight exercise.  Straight to the point: exercises, protocols, and sample progressions.  A few tips of nutrition but mostly focuses on exercise.  Some of the protocols are tricky at first but the associated iPad app makes them a lot easier to learn if you can train with an iPad next to you.  A useful reference if you are interested in bodyweight training.  See the full version of the review on Amazon for more details.

Amazon review:  http://www.amazon.com/review/R2JDZTM4O5NCSH/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Book Review: The Blind Spot by William Byers

The Blind Spot: Science and the Crisis of Uncertainty

William Byers

Princeton University Press, 2011

Full review on Amazon.

Interesting food for thought, a reason for some humility, and an argument for perspectivism

I got some real value out of this book because it made me think more deeply about an important and fundamental philosophical problem, the problem of knowability.  How well do we directly know the universe we live in, and how well can even our best explanations really help us grasp it?  In the Western intellectual tradition, the question goes all the way back to the ancients, and we still frame it in much the same way they did.  The problem is fairly obvious to any reasonably reflective person I think, but I suspect most people tend to assume it is either an illusion or something of little consequence.
 
We have come to understand a massive number of details about our existence in various ways through science and we have discovered that with a bit of ingenuity, we can use mathematics to describe and predict the behavior of real things remarkably well.  This gives many of us the sense that we can grasp just about anything about our existence in the same way.  Afterall, from the modern humanistic point of view, what else is there besides our scientific causal explanations, our mathematical models, and our various superstitions? 

Byers seems to be playing something like the mischievous role of Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park here in some ways. He is telling us that we shouldn't be so certain that we really understand everything the way we think we do.  Nature will always surprise us.  And he is not saying this because he thinks we should believe in miracles or because science doesn't work as well as we think.  He is saying it because science and mathematics cover the universe as we experience it rather like a lumpy carpet covers a smooth floor.  You can push down the lumps, but they always pop up again somewhere else. 

Our ability to explain our existence doesn't quite map to the totality of that existence in any uniform way.  We end up taking different perspectives on the same things in order to understand what we perceive.  This need to take different perspectives is "ambiguity." Our sense of certainty about what we understand, the perception of smooth areas of carpet, is not an illusion, but neither is it absolute, perfectly generallizable, not even entirely objective.  We tend to ignore ambiguity when we see it because it makes us feel uncomfortable.  Byers claims this discomfort creates a permanent blindspot in our perception of our own existence. 

The central theme of the book is that there are many different expressions of ambiguity in nature, and that they are all expressions of the same underlying limitation in our ability to grasp nature in terms of concepts and symbols.  It isn't just that there are some problems more difficult than others, it may be, according to Byers, that some difficulties are impossible to resolve permanently, they will always appear again in another form whenever we grasp them.  Blindspot tells us that something about the territory makes it fundamentally unmappable in any complete and consistent sense.  This, for Byers, drives us to keep trying to explain by grappling with the ambiguity in nature.

 
Byers makes some fascinating points and uses a lot of good examples from mathematics and science to make his points.  Most of the examples will be familiar to avid readers of science and math.  They include the usual suspects such as Godel's Incompleteness, Heisenberg's Uncertainty, wave/particle duality, the problem of the objective and subjective perspectives, intentionality, self-reference, and so on. Byers also draws on his own field of mathematics for some less well trodden examples such as real number theory and differential vs. integral calculus. 

While this book is definitely worthwhile in my opinion, I don't quite share the same excitement as some of the other reviewers because I also found it very repetitive and for me personally it sometimes seems to jump from point to point without really taking on important points in the detail they deserve.  I think this impression I get comes from Byers background in mathematics.  He will often start to talk about something I find really interesting, like the problem of intentionality or the problem of mental causation, but quickly turn it back into a logical question instead of exploring the scientific or philosophical questions in more detail.  I suppose my criticism is that Byers seems to be a "math" but not a "polymath" and the ambitious topic he has taken on may require someone with deep understanding of many different fields, since the thesis is that the blindspot is not just a quirk of mathematics but of our symbolic and conceptual abilities in general.

Ultimately I think the claim Byers is making is basically that the perception of clear understanding of nature is a local phenomenon not a global one because we can never get rid of the problem of incompatible but valid perspectives.  We can make the carpet perfectly smooth in an area, but we can never make the whole carpet completely smooth.  The "consilience" of nature's laws will never have a final expression in one scheme because we can't ever reconcile the different viewpoints that: (1) accurately describe situations, (2) are each self-consistent, and (3) are not only different but incompatible with each other. 

From my perspective, I think Byers has identified the problem in a legitimate way, but his logical arguments don't really convince me that the problem of perspectives is forever irreconcileable.  I agree with him that we should take the problem(s) more seriously than we do, since we usually wave this sort of problem away through various tactics.  I also agree that we should incorporate the challenge of multiple perspectives in our thinking.  It is not clear to me that the lumps are an intrinsic part of nature, or that they are all manifestations of the same blind spot, and Byers doesn't seem to me to exhibit the depth and breadth of scientific knowledge across the various relevant disciplines to make that point stick, but it does seem reasonable to think of them that way until we have actually smoothed them out and to take Byers' claim seriously as at least a sensible policy and a reason for humility.

Book Review: The Highly Hypnotizable Person

The Highly Hypnotizable Person,
Edited by David A. Oakley , Michael Heap , and Richard J. Brown

This is the most authoritative and comprehensive summary of hypnosis research compiled in over a decade, so anyone interested in the subject should take note. Noteworthy contrubutions include Helen Crawford on the genetics and neuropsychology, Steve Lynn on clinical correlates, Judith Rhue on the development of the underlying abilities, Donald Gorassini on enhancing hypnotizability, Graham Wagstaff on the sociocognitive view of high hypnotizability, and two superb chapters by Amanda Barnier and Kevin McConkey exploring what we now know about what it means when we say someone is highly hypnotizable. The book finishes up with a unique sort of perspective chapter, an invited independent viewpoint on the field from a psychologist previously unfamiliar with hypnosis research.

This information is too important and too interesting to leave buried in the hypnosis research specialty journals.

My review on Amazon is here.

Book Review: The GenoType Diet

The GenoType Diet: Change Your Genetic Destiny to live the longest, fullest and healthiest life possible

By Catherine Whitney (Author), Peter J. Dr D'Adamo (Author)

[Review based on Kindle version]

From my Amazon review:

"... is it plausible in general that metabolic traits cluster along with personality traits, and that these clusters imply different health regimens? Of course it's possible. I'm strongly disposed from my own experience to think there are personality traits that lead us to construct particular rough kinds of niches, and it makes sense that these might have distinct metabolic patterns. But does the author get it right that eating Turkey vs. Chicken or Beef vs. Pork for a particular type really is a difference that makes a difference? That part needs more research."

The question this book raises in my mind is whether the author's GeneTypes significantly improve the guesses we make about the best nutrition for us as individuals, compared to just knowing our medical risk factors and knowing our rough somatotype.

This book takes off from the author's previous writings about how blood type can predict a cluster of traits that include individual response to nutrients, and modifies it into a 6 part theory of types. The 6 part model is given an evolutionary rationale and the author links metabolic differences, personality traits, and speculation about ecological niches where those traits and metabolic differences might be especially adaptive. The resulting categories are so clean and tell such a compelling sort of story that they seem to invite accusations of similarity to fortune telling. But if they're right, then this would a pretty cool system, wouldn't it? At least in theory.

• The Hunter: Tall, thin, and intense, with an overabundance of adrenaline and a fierce, nervous energy that winds down with age, the Hunter was originally the success story of the human species. Vulnerable to systemic burnout when overstressed, the Hunter’s modern challenge is to conserve energy for the long haul.

• The Gatherer: Full-figured, even when not overweight, the Gatherer struggles with body image in a culture where thin is “in.” An unsuccessful crash dieter with a host of metabolic challenges, the Gatherer becomes a glowing example of health when properly nourished.

• The Teacher: Strong, sinewy, and stable, with great chemical synchronicity and stamina, the Teacher is built for longevity—given the right diet and lifestyle. This is the genotype of balance, blessed with a tremendous capacity for growth and fulfillment.

• The Explorer: Muscular and adventurous, the Explorer is a biological problem solver, with an impressive ability to adapt to environmental changes, and a better than average capacity for gene repair. The Explorer’s vulnerability to hormonal imbalances and chemical sensitivities can be overcome with a balanced diet and lifestyle.

• The Warrior: Long, lean, and healthy in youth, the Warrior is subject to a bodily rebellion in midlife.With the optimal diet and lifestyle, the Warrior can overcome the quick-aging metabolic genes and experience a second, “silver,” age of health.

• The Nomad: A GenoType of extremes, with a great sensitivity to environmental conditions—especially changes in altitude and barometric pressure, the Nomad is vulnerable to neuromuscular and immune problems. Yet a well-conditioned Nomad has the enviable gift of controlling caloric intake and aging gracefully.

If the model is right, it is a pretty remarkable and perhaps revolutionary approach to making better guesses at how to improve our own nutrition based on our biochemical individuality. The evidence for its plausibility seems reasonable, but there is still little evidence validating the particular categories here.

Full review on Amazon here.

The argument for a SANE diet

This is the second in a series of commentaries on the ideas promoted in Jonathan Bailor's book "The Smarter Science of Slim."

This one presents my own spin on his argument for a SANE diet as an effective long term strategy for counteracting the trend toward obesity and obesity-related chronic illness.

In addition to recommendations for brief, infrequent, high intensity exercise to counter insulin resistance and reset metabolism, Bailor promotes what he calls a SANE diet. This is an acronym for satiety, "aggression", nutrition, and efficiency. Rather than duplicate his explanation, I'll just summarize by saying this refers to the quality of food rather than the quanitity, and takes a number of different quality factors into consideration. This note is intended to present my version of the argument for a mixed collection of quality factors in an anti-obesity strategy.

1. Human biology tends to regulate its body weight in a very narrow range for long periods under a wide range of natural and ancestral environments.

I came to understand this well over a decade ago and in my opinion the evidence base for it has grown rather than being seriously questioned in any significant way. This model does have a potentially misleading aspect to it in practice. Many people seem to assume that a body weight set point means different people are predisposed to different body weights. That is only partly true. The set point model does not assume a fixed value, it assumes that we tend to regulate our weight within a narrow range for long periods of time. It is obvious that the body fat set point changes over time, otherwise creeping obesity simply wouldn't happen. The issue is not whether the set point can change, but whether (and how) we change it in the other direction. The forces on it appear to be asymmetric.

My 1998 article on body fat regulation, showing the weak understanding I had at that point of the specifics but I think accurately depicting the concept and showing its historical origins and scientific rationale.

There have also been a number of helpful popular press articles expanding on the dynamic set point concept and its relation to weight loss plateau.

Obesity expert Arya Sharma discusses the set point concept and a unique theory of how it works.

2. Increasingly throughout the contemporary world, a combination of global economic drivers and local environments has created conditions that defeat the biology of weight regulation and cause body weight to creep upwards, resulting in an "obesity epidemic."

A recent Lancet special issue on obesity gave a summary of the current perspective on factors in obesity.


3. Clinical studies suggest a role for dietary glycaemic index (GI) in bodyweight regulation and diabetes risk.

There are a number of lines of evidence leading to the conclusion that glycemic index plays a central role in weight regulation through glucose homeostasis. I singled out this article because it also describes why some of the implications of that conclusion are controversial.

4. The effect of lowering GI is a dynamic change to metabolism, not a static linear dropping of weight because the body adapts to the loss of energy in order to maintain its set point. Static models of calories in vs. calories out do not take the effects of metabolism into consideration and therefore do not accurately predict weight loss.

Even though glycemic load is an important factor in obesity, we can't just cut out starches and sugars without making any other change and expect to keep losing weight. We will tend to compensate in other ways because of the significance of metabolism in weight regulation. As a result it is now considered essential to consider metabolism in predictions of weight loss rather than just calorie balance.

5. Solely manipulating GI in isolation has a diminishing return over time in weight loss because the reduction of calorie intake tends to slow metabolism and because of changes in potentially confounding dietary factors such as fiber content, protein content, palatability, and energy density.

This is a continuation of the previous claim, based on the evidence gathered from trying to control weight solely by reducing glycemic load.

6. CONCLUSION: An individual nutrition strategy that replaces high GI foods by taking energy density, palatability, fiber, protein, energy density, ad other factors into account can more successfully use a reduction in glycemic index to control body fat by improving fat metabolism, slowing or stopping the accumulation of insulin resistance, and reversing the upward creeping of the body fat set point..

None of that is particularly surprising scientifically as far as I know. The set point model of weight control has been standard in both human and animal research for a long time, it is not at all controversial among obesity and physiology researchers. You simply have to take metabolism into account when considering how the body absorbs, utilizes, and catabolizes nutrients and energy. You can't just assume that everything we take in minus some estimate of what we are "burning" is going to be an accurate model of body weight fluctuation.

The part where there is still room for argument is the specific causal sequence, and that has some additional implications. There's an old conundrum in psychology research: "do we cry because we are sad, or are we sad because we cry?" The answer seems intuitively obvious but it turns out that both causal models are partly right because there is a feedback look from our behavior to the way we feel.

There is a similar conundrum in obesity research. Do we get fat because we eat too much and don't move enough, or do we eat more and move less because of the effects of obesity. Again it turns out that both capture part of what is really going on. We do gain weight when we eat more and move less, at least in the short term before our metabolism starts to regulate our weight back to normal. But the thing that causes our weight to more permanently creep upward is the changes to our metabolism over time. And those hormonal and cellular changes make us less good at burning fat and better at absorbing it, changing our body fat set point over time.

Todd I. Stark
Nov 20,2011

Dietary fads, fictions, factions, and facts

This is my first post in a series of planned commentaries based on my reading of Jonathan Bailor's highly recommended book, "The Smarter Science of Slim."

This first commentary is my perspective on the history of the issues and how I perceive they have been resolved scientifically so far.

The Low Carb Revolution

Years ago, Dr. Atkins shocked popular culture and infuriated proponents of low fat diets with the claim that people could lose weight and reduce their risk of heart disease by minimizing the mainstay of the typical diet, carbohydrates, replacing them with proteins and fats.

This was a controversial claim not only because low fat diets were popular at the time but also because in emphasizing a low carbohydrate diet, Atkins was claiming that we could be healthy with minimal amounts of important dietary elements like fiber and the nutrition we get from vegetables. He was opposed by the people who promoted an ever higher proportion of vegetables in our diet and who encouraged us to minimize saturated fats, which were long widely thought to increase the risk of heart disease and obesity. At the same time, a lot of people argued that obesity can and should be sensibly addressed with the reasonable commonsense approach of eating a little less and moving a little more: get active and cut back a little on calories each day.

Two Battles Emerge

This turned into two polarized contests of opinion in popular culture.

First, there was a conflict between the folks who think quality of food is important in weight control and those who think that emphasis is misplaced, that we should just measure calories in and calories out. The implication of the food quality view: eating more of some things and less of others should affect our weight over time without making constant efforts to otherwise monitor and control our intake by counting calories. The implication of the calorie balance model: just eat a few calories less and move around a little bit more to burn a few more calories and you will lose weight consistently.

Second, among those who consider the quality of food to be important, there was the battle of the low-carb lobby vs. the vegetable lobby. Should you eliminate carbohydrates because of their effect on metabolism, or should you eliminate saturated fats because "fats make us fat" and raise blood cholesterol?

As is often the case in polarized positions it seems from our perspective today that both sides (in both contests) got some things right and both sides got some things wrong.

Calorie Balance vs. Metabolism: The Result

The standard and consensus view of obesity among researchers is that passive overeating is the best overall description of the cause. It is widely accepted, though not universally, that the amount of caloric energy we take in plays a causal role in obesity. Further the standard and consensus view is that this results from a combination of global economic factors and local environmental factors (the "obesogenic environment").

It is also a standard and consensus view among obesity researchers and physiologists that body weight is regulated by metabolic factors (via chemical messengers) that are not not related to the number of calories we take in and the number of calories estimated for the activity we perform.

What the calorie balance model captures: our biology doesn't violate the laws of conservation of mass and energy. Eating less and catabolizing body mass for energy does cause us to lose body mass. Eating more and demanding less energy utilization does cause us to gain body mass.

What the metabolism model captures: The calorie balance model clearly predicts that our body weight should consistently fluctuate according to the overall energy balance between what we take in and our activity. This is demonstrably not the case both from common experience and controlled studies. The prediction of the calorie balance model only apply for a short time and then our body changes internally to absorb food differently and to use it differently for energy. Our appetite and subjective energy levels are also changed. This is collectively expressed as the body regulating its mass in various ways around a relatively stable point.

The common experience of a "weight loss plateau" coincides with the concept of a "weight set point" around which our body maintains itself in a narrow range over time.

When we simply eat less, we lose weight for a little while and then the loss slows down and eventually stops and tends to reverse itself into return to baseline weight and sometimes even gain above that original level.

Further, the signficance of metabolism implies that quantity of energy taken in and demanded is only part of the causal model. Metabolism is affected differently by the specific foods we eat over time and the specific kinds of activities we engage in, not just or even primarily the total amount of energy involved. The metabolism model better captures the importance of food quality than does the calorie balance model.

Low Carb vs. Veggies: The Result

Given the consensus view that metabolism is an important factor in weight control and that the kinds of food we eat are an important factor in metabolism, we arrive at the second battle, over what it means to eat higher quality food more conducive to health and fighting obesity.

What the low carb lobby got right and the vegetable lobby got wrong: saturated fat isn't itself an important cause of heart disease and obesity. You can consume reasonable amounts of fat, including saturated fat from animal sources, and still have a very healthy diet.

What the low carb lobby got wrong and the vegetable lobby got right: The low carb lobby deals with the problems of insulin response in a gross and overly restrictive way by choosing proteins and fats over carbohydrates in general rather than balancing them and eliminating high glycemic carbohydrates. This makes levels of fiber too low and eliminates important sources of nutrients and often crowds out vegetable nutrition sources using animal ones. This is probably healthier than the typical high glycemic diet, but not nearly optimal. Minimizing carbohydrates is a bad strategy because we get many nutrients from carbohydrates, especially vegetables.

What both the low carb lobby and the vegetable lobby both got right from the start: Sugars and starches as a mainstay of our diet are killing many people. Insulin resistance is a precursor to type 2 diabetes and is associated with and exacerbated by a high glycemic diet as well as by obesity. Starches are high glycemic.

The low carb lobby recognizes the role of high glycemic foods in obesity and chronic illness but they generallize it too far to all carbohydrates as an overly restrictive and overly simplified strategy.

The vegetable lobby is too concerned with the role of animal fat in nutrition and focuses on that rather than the more important distinction of higher glycemic vs. lower glycemic carbohydrates and a more balanced diet.

Saturated fat doesn't itself cause heart disease or obesity. Combined with a high glycemic diet, saturated fat exacerbates the problems caused by constant massive triggering of the insulin response because of a combination of factors:

(1) fats plus sugars tend to increase appetite dramatically,

(2) fats have a high energy density compared to their nutrition,

(3) saturated fats in particular have no protective effect for heart disease compared to omega-3 from polyunsaturated fats.

People tend to lower their risk of heart disease when they switch from saturated to unsaturated fats. This is one of the strongest arguments for eliminating saturated fat from our diet. However it turns out that this benefit is probably not because saturated fats cause heart disease. It is more likely because unsaturated fats have a protective effect compared to saturated fats.

Lowering glycemic load allows us to use nutrients more effectively, to metabolize all fats more effectively, and tends to reduce the risk of heart disease and obesity far more than reducing saturated fats.

So what works?

What dietary strategy best lowers our risk of chronic illnesses and obesity? Do they all fail equally? Do different people respond differently to different regimens?

It turns out that individuality is a real factor, both biochemical and psychological, and learning to make the principles work in your own life and for your own biology is critical. Still, there are also some general principles that we can rely on as a very good start.

The low carb strategy often works for as long as people can manage to maintain it and is healthier than the typical diet but it is not optimal for health and most people find it hard to sustain and eventually have health problems or fail to sustain it. It is not balanced nutritionally, it is too severe in limiting valuable and healthy vegetable sources of nutrition.

A vegetarian strategy often works at least for a while and is also healthier than the typical diet but it is also difficult for most people to maintain and as a general strategy it is too severe in limiting valuable and healthy animal sources of protein and what for many people are satisfying sources of texture and flavor in animal fats.

Taking what they both get right and eliminating what each gets wrong, we end up with:

1. Avoid high glycemic carbohydrates as far as possible or only under very specific conditions.

As a mainstay of our diet are a primary cause of both obesity and chronic illnesses via their effect on our response to insulin and our ability to absorb and metabolize nutrients. In other words, these commonly accepted processed products of agriculture cause a "clogging" of our metabolism over time that defeats our evolved ability to regulate our own metabolism. High glycemic carbohydrates are not essential for health and we tend to become dependent on them in various ways so minimizing them is an important first step to better health. There are specific strategies you can use to minimize their negative effects if you want to use them for athletic reasons or because you can't bear to eliminate them from your life entirely, but you have to be wary of how often you do this and the timing of it.

2. Balance the remaining nutrients between proteins, low-glycemic carbohydrates, and fats.

Compared to high glycemic foods, these categories all contain many healthy and valuable sources of nutrition.

Why a balance? In addition to just having a variety of nutrients of different kinds as well as a variety of tastes and textures to make eating more satisfying, there are also some specific nutritional reasons.

A diet of too much fat and too little protein and carbohydrate fails because fat contains relatively little nutrition compared to its energy density and tends to crowd out our intake of fiber important to digestive health as well as various nutrients. A diet of too much fat also fails because we have to eat a lot of it to make us feel satisfied in lieu of protein, fiber and water because of its low nutritional density.

A diet of too much protein fails because it avoids fiber and avoids important sources of vitamins and minerals and because it requires us to limit our protein sources very severely. It is also unhealthy to take in extreme amounts of protein. You can live on a high protein diet for a while if it isn't too high, but it isn't optimal. Temporary protein-sparing fasts are effective and popular among some athletes.

A diet of too much low-glycemic carbohydrates (taken to an extreme this would basically be a vegetarian diet that not only minimizes starches and sugars, but also seeds, nuts, and soy) is not really something anyone seriously recommends or practices as far as I know, but if they did it would fail because it would not have adequate protein sources to sustain health and would be relatively unsatisfying. Even strict vegans eat vegetable protein and fat sources, they just avoid animal sources. A diet with a huge amount of low-glycemic carbohydrates is perfectly healthy and sustainable so long as it also includes a reasonable amount of plant fat and protein sources.

The lesson here is just to mostly eat natural foods while avoiding high glycemic carbohydrates rather than striving for extremes of individual components. Avoid high glycemic foods and otherwise eat to satisfy your hunger. The specifics of satisfying our hunger are important however, balance is important in order to get a good combination of fiber, protein, water, nutrition, taste, texture, and other factors to satisfy us.

3. Take advantage of the "Paleo" principle but don't be limited entirely by it

I think the principle behind "Paleo" diets is basically correct, that our metabolism seems to be tuned by evolution to process natural animal and plant sources of nutriton that we could hunt or gather, and has not adapted yet to our dietary preponderance of processed agricultural products. This is another way of saying that high glycemic carbohydrates (the main category of highly processed and cultivated foods in our diet: the wheat, corn, potato, and rice products) are a very bad thing to emphasize all of the time.

In general the principles behind paleo eating agree with those proposed here, however they also focus on a rationale that can be misleading, which is why I consider it a fad even though it gets things mostly right. Trying to guess what our ancestors might have eaten and in what amounts is not nearly as useful a way to figure out what is healthy as just applying general principles and nutritional research results. By all means it makes sense to look to Paleo recipes and products as candidates for making it easier to maintain good nutrition. Also it is convenient and useful to imagine whether something could be hunted or gathered to know whether it is a nutritional source likely to be compatible with our metabolism.

Just don't limit yourself to the principle that we can only eat what our ancestors ate or elaborate arguments about the Pleistocene lifestyle. You have more options which you can intelligently apply to use modern foods and still be healthy.

4. Don't expect restricting calories to help you in the long run if you are eating poorly.

If you stop eating competely, you eventually die because your body eats its own tissue to try to meet its energy requirements. So when we talk about calorie restriction we aren't talking about not eating. We are talking about changing the timing of when we eat and eating less in a given period relative to what we would normally eat. We might eat less in a given period than we otherwise would, or we might eat nothing for a specific period of time. There are many strategies for calorie restriction. Some of them have a place in athletic performance and some of them can also have a place in a health regimen, but we have to be careful about how we go about it and how much we rely on it.

Sometimes the most reasonable approach is not the best. Portion control and light or moderate exercise seem perfectly reasonable and have been long recommended as a treatment or prevention for obesity. But for the vast majority of people they don't work for this purpose. Our metabolism and appetite conspire to maintain a stable weight against our efforts to make small reasonable changes in how much we eat and how much we move. We have to more directly influence our appetite and metabolism to deal with obesity. Simply eating less of the same things we are eating does not neccessarily help because it does not address the metabolic causes of our problems.

Fasting, as opposed to portion control, is a more potentially valuable and effective health strategy. This is because it can help you learn how to better control cravings, and can help you get your body fat lower than you could reasonably get with frequent eating and for longer periods. Some evidence suggests that fasting itself might trigger healthy changes in the body, although these are hard to distinguish from just the benefits of controlling body fat and eating more healthy overall. Fasting is much more difficult to do effectively, much less sustainable, and much less effective and healthy when combined with a high glycemic diet.

Your best bet is probably to eliminate high glycemic carbohydrates and get the hang of eating well first, then try fasting as an additional strategy if you want to, to make it even more effective and sustainable.

5. Don't just load up on "low fat" foods. But do emphasize lean protein sources over fatty ones.

By the best evidence available now, it seems that reducing fat by itself plays virtually no role in controlling obesity or chronic illness. Nutritionally, fat should be considered "neutral" or "filler" compared to good nutritional sources like non-starchy vegetables and good protein sources like seafood, lean meats, and egg whites. The problem with a "low fat" strategy is that if you go out of your way to avoid fats, you will also tend to replace the missing energy with starches and sugars.

If you could eliminate fats without replacing them with high glycemic foods, this strategy would probably work a lot better. Lean protein sources are an important part of modern nutrition, not because fat is bad, but because protein is so valuable. Fatty protein sources are really fats, not proteins, so they should be considered filler in your diet, rather than assuming they are good sources of protein. You have to eat an unreasonable amount of fatty protein sources to get enough protein to be valuable for satiety and nutrition.

6. If you find yourself eating something high-glycemic, at least mitigate its effects with fiber and protein and avoid fat under those conditions.

The effect of food on our insulin levels is the primarily culprit in obesity and many chronic diseases. However this glycemic effect is not just a result of what individual foods we eat, it is result of their combined effect on the amount of glucose circulating in our blood. There is no way to simply counter-act the glycemic effect short of avoiding high glycemic foods entirely but you can reduce it by lowering the combined glycemic effect by increasing the amount of fiber and protein you eat along with high glycemic foods. If you are going to indulge in high glycemic food, you can reduce the damage it causes by avoid simultaneous eating of fats (which boost appetite strikingly when combined with starches and sugars) and eat lean protein and good fiber sources with the high glycemic foods instead.

Note: This article was inspired by Jonathan Bailor's highly recommended book, "The Smarter Science of Slim."

Todd I. Stark
Nov 20,2011

Book Review: The Smarter Science of Slim by Jonathan Bailor

My review of Jonathan Bailor's book, "The Smarter Science of Slim."

Highly recommended, he does a great job integrating a lot of research faithfully into an accessible picture and offers practical advice consistent with it.

I also mention some things I would have written a little differently, like expanding the discussion of exercise a little beyond just eccentric high resistance and popular but less well studied strategies based on nutrient timing, and perhaps incorporating some discussion of self-experimentation in that light.

My book review on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R3PZVSW9HQ89D8/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0983520801&nodeID=&tag=&linkCode=