And just a personal note: I met a zillion amazing people while at AHS – from people I draw information and inspiration from to Evolvify readers. I definitely didn’t get to spend enough time with everyone, and my friends are already tired of me name-dropping y’all, but oh well.

While I had the good fortune to have talked with other attendees about various talks right after seeing them in person, this collection isn’t meant to be some sort of barometer on the consensus of attendees. The list is my subjective list of areas of inquiry in the evolutionary health and fitness realm that I feel have the most room for exploration and application. That isn’t to say that these talks necessarily contained the most important information of the Ancestral Health Symposium. Oh and… this definitely isn’t a pure “Best Of” list because I still haven’t had a chance to watch all the talks.

AHS 2011 Awards

Best Tip of the Economics Iceberg

“Sustainability of paleo diets” by Matt Metzgar, PhD
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27926609 w=640&h=480]
Comments
This topic is so massive that it’s impossible to cover it in a < 50 minute talk. Dr. Metzgar lays out a framework for quantifying and analyzing paleo in terms of sustainability and economics. The talk is both oversimplified in terms of economics and overly detailed in terms of systemization, and will probably lose some people. However, the project is ambitious and important. This should be viewed as what it is: a work in progress that has plenty of room to progress and find broad application by synthetic thinkers.

Extending the Idea

• The feasibility of a Paleolithic diet for low-income consumers [full-text PDF]

Best Obvious Sounding Title that Applies to Depths of Life You Don’t Yet Realize

“The Lost Art of Play” by Mark Sisson
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27648777 w=640&h=480]
Comments
Yeah, “play more”,  it sounds so simple. The implications of play lost to the regimentation and systemization of agriculture and industrialization are many. This isn’t just a touchy feely concept, but something that influences our individual psychology and social interactions in ways nobody fully understands.

Extending the Idea

• Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga
• Play as a Foundation for Hunter-Gatherer Social Existence [full-text PDF]

Best Primatology Informs Anthropology

“Great Apes and the Evolution of Human Diet” by Craig Stanford, PhD

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27678635 w=640&h=480]
Comments
Since we don’t have video footage from the Paleolithic, sometimes the best we can do is attempt to triangulate truth from whatever data points we do have available. The morphology and behavior of our closest relatives is one of the best avenues to pursue knowledge about our evolutionary past. I would have liked to replace a few of the speakers who talked about sugar/carbs with more applied evolutionary theory and anthropology.

Extending the Idea

• The Evolution of Hominin Diets
• Dr. Craig B. Stanford’s books on Amazon 

Best Stealth Introduction to the Best Academic Field You’ve Never Heard of: Ethology

“Wild animals, zoos, and you: The influence of habitat on health” by John Durant

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27935632 w=640&h=480]

“Ethology is a combination of laboratory and field science, with a strong relation to certain other disciplines such as neuroanatomy, ecology, and evolution. Ethologists are typically interested in a behavioral process rather than in a particular animal group, and often study one type of behavior (e.g. aggression) in a number of unrelated animals.” –Wikipedia

Comments
For anyone who’s into applying evolutionary theory, but happens to be afraid of evolutionary psychology, ethology is a fruitful alternative. For those who are into evolutionary psychology, ethology can help clarify ideas and incite new lines of thought. In other words, ethology is powerful for anyone who desires to level-up their understanding of evolution as it pertains to behavior.

I don’t remember John explicitly mentioning ethology, but it’s an implicit bridge between his talk and Erwan’s “zoo humans” concept. Rats in cages have smaller brains than rats in “enhanced environments” which have smaller brains than rats in the wild. It’s infinitely naive to think our modern environment doesn’t impact us in very real ways (beyond diet) as well.

Extending the Idea

• Journal of Ethology
• Human Ethology by Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt

Best Potential to Leverage the Paleo Health & Fitness Message in the Business World

“Resilliency: Human-Friendly Pathways to Optimal Physical and Mental Health” by Emily Deans, MD and Jamie Scott

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27669824 w=640&h=480]
Comments
Institutional interfaces with health and fitness practitioners is much more prevalent and has much more impact than many of us realize. Because of the efficiency of paleo concepts, this may be the next level in increasing global health through better engagement with the paleo community.

Best “I Wish I Had Tucker’s Research Notes So I Could Get to the Bottom of the Psychology of This” and Ascertain its Myriad Implications

*Talk starts at 21:35
“From cave to cage: Mixed martial arts in ancestral health” by Tucker Max

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27930992 w=640&h=480]
Comments
One of the emergent properties of modern civilization can loosely be characterized as “status ambiguity”. Hunter-gatherers tended to always know where they stood with respect to individuals in their lives. Our conceptions of self are largely influenced by indirect comparisons to abstracted archetypes of humans at the extreme long-tails of the further abstracted economic spectrum. Further, our “real” interactions are also in relation to a disproportionate number of strangers who also exist in a state of their own status ambiguity. The multiple, nested levels of abstraction result in a reality in which has very intersection of the real as it pertains to what our genes expect. Physical training and combat provide a channel to a different reality than our world tends to provide otherwise.

Best Integration of Applied Evolutionary Health, Fitness, and Science

“Body by science” by Doug McGuff, MD

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27962168 w=640&h=480]
Comment
There are moments at which I think Dr. McGuff is totally wrong, and moments I’m totally wrong about him being wrong. A lot of his stuff makes sense on a level that likely dovetails with the concepts in Tucker’s talk and Mark’s talk (both above). I’m not sure the pieces are fully connected, but my brain can’t help but weave the concepts together.

Extending the Idea

• Body by Science book by Doug McGuff

Miscellaneous Important Ideas

As I said, the above videos don’t necessarily contain all of the important topics. There were a lot of ideas that are much more important to people who aren’t me. For the most part, the talks hammering the fringes and overlap between carbs and obesity and disease are mostly lost on me… as are the general talks about paleo that seek to convince newbies or fence-sitters that all of this is a good idea. As such, I’ve unfairly left out a lot of great talks.

Talk that I Already Pretty Much Agree with and Therefore Wished Was More Philosophical

“MovNat: evolutionarily natural fitness” by Erwan LeCorre
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27930009 w=640&h=480]
Comments
Erwan’s talk is a nice introduction to MovNat. It kind of felt like a promo video for something I’m already sold on. That isn’t meant to be a slight at all. I’m just pretty confident that there’s a lot of interesting conceptual underpinning bouncing around in Erwan’s head that the world (and I, in particular) would appreciate. This reference won’t have the gravity it needs without an explanation deeper than I have time to present here, but there’s value in Simon Sinek’s (TED Talk) “Start With Why” (Book) concept that’s overlooked in the talk. It’s not a matter of quality (there’s plenty), but of resonance.

Talk that I Didn’t Watch Because I Know I Already Pretty Much Agree with It, But Think Is Still Super-Important

“The Trouble with Fructose: a Darwinian Perspective” by Robert Lustig, MD
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27563465 w=640&h=480]
Comments
Much like lactose intolerance, it’s surprising to me that so many people are quick to rubber stamp consumption of fructose. Especially when some regional populations have 14%+ rates of fructose malabsorption. Clearly there are individual differences, and qualifiers such as delivery vehicle. Primates lost the ability to synthesize vitamin C because of excessive fruit intake, it’s possible that populations lost the ability to readily metabolize fructose because of minimal fruit intake… and the biochemistry provides some support for this concern.

Talk Other than Mat Lalonde’s that I’m Most Conflicted About

“Self-experimentation: the best science” by Richard Nikoley
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27798705 w=640&h=480]
Comments
Okay, I’m not really conflicted about Richard’s talk, but I’m conflicted about the concept of self-experimentation and the whole n=1 “meme”. The conflict is simple: It’s a brilliant and important concept, but I don’t think most people are capable of executing it in a meaningful way. I too often see people talking about self-experimentation in terms of how they “feel” after doing something or changing something, or whatever. Unless the measure is objective (time, distance, etc.), it’s likely so influenced by cognitive bias that it’s either totally useless, or counter-productive. This is particularly true when talking about dietary compounds that have a short-term psychoactive effect on the brain (neurotransmitters, etc.), in longer durations that introduce stealth and unexpected confounds, or otherwise decouple inputs from outputs or experience. Poorly executed, then continuously recited, N=1 experimentation is an endless fountain of misleading anecdotes that are assigned more value than they warrant.

In other words, watch the talk and practice self-experimentation. But if, and ONLY IF, you pay close attention to the parts about scientific method, and are religious about using only [more or less] objective measures. Even if you manage that, you’re still exposed to a range of biases and need to temper and discount the reliability of your findings more than you’ll want to.

Example of almost totally useless “objective” measure… weight. Throw away your damned scale. You’re better off with a digital camera.

Uncategorized

There are three talks that I really appreciated, but don’t really have much to add to, and are proving hard to categorize along the same metrics as the above videos, so… just watch ’em:

• “Heart Disease and Molecular Degeneration” by Chris Masterjohn
• “Clues from the colon: How this organ illuminates our digestive evolution and microniche” by Melissa McEwen
• “Primal mind: nutrition & mental health—improving the way you feel & function & cultivating an ageless mind” by Nora Gedgaudas

What were your favorite talks? What kind of speakers and topics do you hope to see at AHS 2012 next August at Harvard?

I’m not exactly sure how I’d answer that, but I have a vision of some sort of mega applied evolutionary theory conference. Something between the Ancestral Health Symposium‘s focus on health and fitness, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society conference, and the Applied Evolutionary Psychology Society‘s conference. Since that framework doesn’t exist, I do wonder to what extent the behavioral/psychological research from evolutionary theory would integrate with future AHS events.

It has been amply demonstrated that there is no shortage of arguments about how to reconcile the problem of health care within the bounds of market capitalism. Likewise, great lengths have been taken to demonize certain options as socialist in nature. I assert that all such arguments arranging possible solutions into a capitalist versus socialist dichotomy obscure the fundamental issue on the side of the problem. In other words, arguing about “who pays” is irrelevant because the “what we’re paying for” side of the equation doesn’t qualify as capitalism (or socialism for that matter). This is true for [at least] two reasons.

Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated for a private profit; decisions regarding supply, demand, price, distribution, and investments are made by private actors in the free market; profit is distributed to owners who invest in businesses, and wages are paid to workers employed by businesses and companies. –Wikipedia

To call something market capitalism, it must conform to [at least] two criteria:

1. The private actors involved must be making a[n uncoerced] decision.
2. The supply, demand, price, distribution, and investments must be subject to market forces.

The health care system exploits evolved human nature

Rational choice ends where questions of health and survival begin. This is true of food and exercise choices. Evolution has a nasty habit of biasing organisms to weight their immediate impulses much higher than future probabilities. The classic example of this from behavioral economics is giving people a choice between receiving $100 today or $110 tomorrow. Then, ask the same people to choose between receiving $100 dollars in 30 days or $110 in 31 days. For our purposes, the number of people who choose $100 today or $110 tomorrow isn’t important. What is important is that almost everybody chooses $110 in 31 days in the second case, including the people who chose $100 today in the first case. From a rational standpoint, the absolute difference in waiting is identical in both scenarios, but people value the future 1-day wait as much less painful than the time from now to tomorrow. That’s some insight into why we’ll make unhealthy nutrition and fitness decisions today even though we’ll pay for it in the future, but it isn’t all we need to know in our discussion of health care.

The Darwinian imperative of all things is to survive to reproduce. In humans, we have not only similar survival instincts as other animals, but also an extra layer of conscious awareness that allows us to imagine the future. We don’t just act to avoid death, we engage in conscious mental gymnastics to avoid death. Despite zero empirical evidence, many humans go so far as to believe in a ghost that survives their body at death. Our dual levels of instinct and thought about instinct puts us in a remarkable category of death avoiders. How does this influence our ability to make health care decisions?

In short, our survival bias negates anything that might resemble a decision or choice when matters of life and limb are ate stake. When asked the question, “how much is it worth to save my legs,” what is the answer? I suggest the answer is “however much I have to give”. Taken from the other direction… When presented with the information that, “to save your legs will cost $70,000, are you willing to pay it?”, what is your answer? I suggest that the question you answer is not, “are you willing to pay”, but “do I have (or can I come up with) the money?” If that is possible, the answer is yes.

There are limits to the value of limbs of course. When Aron Ralston was faced with the scenario, “how much are you willing to pay to survive?”, the answer was: “my arm”. However, to give a value to that choice, we would have to know the dollar value placed on his life, AND whether he would have been willing to also give his other arm, or two legs, et cetera. Ultimately, survival is the most important, but we “know” that losing a limb is bad for survival/reproduction probability. We know because we can picture the difficulties of missing limbs, and we know because of the physical pain that provides a direct signal.

No, there is no effective decision involved in the evaluation of serious medical care. The price is almost infinitely variable depending on a subjective ability to arrange funds, and not an objective utility valuation; the answer is always yes if the funds can be arranged. To capitalize on individuals with no effective decision is the very definition of extortion.

There is no free market for health care services

We must be careful to resist seduction by the illusion of market forces. It is true that there is a sort of quasi-market in health care services. In some instances, insurance companies influence prices, and the prices insurance companies are willing to pay impacts the market to some extent. However, this is merely inverted extortion in that medical service providers are coerced by the threat of payment refusal. The nuances here are irrelevant because this dynamic merely represents the price fluctuations of a quasi-market.

Two conditions must be met for a free market to exist. One, there must be price competition between providers. Two, the private actors ostensibly making the decisions must exert choice influence on the service providers.

Neither of  the above conditions are met in the health care “market”. In most situations, service providers are chosen by geographic necessity. Further, competition between providers is largely based on reputation and referral, not price. Thus, the first condition fails on either of two counts. Typically, prices for procedures are not known until after they have been performed. Upon admission for a procedure, an effective blank check must be agreed upon by the consumer of services. Options may be given, but they are typically framed in cost-benefit terms revolving around probability of success or failure, and various side-effects or discomforts to be expected. Again, not in terms of price.

To compound the lack of the market meeting conditions to be called a free market, all of this is amplified by the characteristic non-decision of the previous section. When there is no effective decision, there is no mechanism through which the consumer of health care services could exert choice influence even if there was a functioning market.

The business of health care is fundamentally anti-capitalist

I haven’t introduced anything novel. I have merely laid out the definition of capitalism and pointed out that health care meets none of the requirements of a system that can be defined as capitalism. The only thing resembling market capitalism is the flow of money. If the health care business does not qualify as capitalism, what is it?

It’s safe to say that it isn’t socialism. No, the lack of customer influence upon the pricing mechanism in combination with the extortionate property of de facto non-decision most closely resembles a point somewhere between authoritarianism and totalitarianism.

With no real influence on price, and no real choice, why should we be content to discuss the capitalist or socialist ramifications of who will pay for the services. Whether payment is from individuals, or the collective, true capitalists should be outraged at the unquestioned authoritarian monolith that’s willing to take money from anyone and everyone who agrees to be subject to its predatory tendencies.

Note: I don’t find it necessary to delve into conspiracy theories or the specter of “evil” insurance companies to explain this. While those things are interesting discussions, all of this can be a true outgrowth of emergent properties in the system without invoking them. I hope it goes without saying that doctors and other workers in the health care system don’t create the systemic problems either.

The following chart was assembled primarily for fun. I don’t really think the events shown caused the correlated drops in wheat prices. However, if gluten was as widely scorned as it is in the realms of celiac disease and the paleo diet world, we’d see headlines like “Worries by Paleo Dieters Cause Fall in Global Wheat Demand”. Such is the nature of financial reportersl

Make no mistake about it, the anti-gluten play has the potential to inflict devastating damage. Should the science and sentiment reach critical mass, the decline of wheat consumption would be a palpable global-macro event. The prices of wheat, and related grains, would suffer dramatically. Farmers would suffer dramatically. Farm equipment manufacturers would suffer dramatically. Agricultural companies would suffer dramatically. Producers of related products would suffer dramatically. Kellog’s essentially be reduced to Rice Krispies and Corn Flakes. Apparently, Nabisco would be left selling empty boxes. Sure, Nabisco is a subsidiary of Kraft, but it’s a high-margin division that would put a huge dent in Kraft’s profit and revenue.

The implications to the rest of the economy are nearly endless. Significant portions of revenues from chemical companies and petroleum companies have a stake in fertilizing and transporting the crops in question.

Is there a trade here I can recommend today? Not really. But in the long-run, investors should keep at least one eye on the rising battle on gluten. It may not mean the complete death of wheat, but the worlds of health and diet trends wield power that is hard for producers to resist. In this case, paleoanthropology is already on their side. The rest of science could easily reach the conclusion that wheat is a poor source of food for humans.