INTRODUCTION

Americans will always do the right thing—after they’ve exhausted all the alternatives.

—Winston Churchill

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM VS. THE PRIMAL BLUEPRINT

In the Primal Blueprint (PB), we reframe these major elements of conventional wisdom (CW). Consider these alternatives with an open mind; we will discuss each in detail throughout the text.

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Weight loss does not have to involve the suffering, sacrifice, and deprivation we’ve been conditioned to accept.

I’m going to ask you to forget most everything you thought you knew about diet, exercise, and health. There is a distressing amount of flawed conventional wisdom that confuses, misleads, manipulates, and complicates even the most devoted efforts to do the right things: eat healthfully, exercise effectively, control weight, and avoid common health conditions like digestive issues, arthritis, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

In The Primal Blueprint, you will learn why eating a low-fat diet rich in whole grains such as bread, pasta, and cereal can easily make you fat and malnourished. You’ll learn why millions of joggers and gym-goers put in the time and effort to lose weight yet routinely compromise their health and accelerate the aging process as a direct result of their (exhausting) devotion to fitness. You’ll learn why your cholesterol level and saturated fat intake are not the major risk factors for heart disease that we have been led to believe, and why a comparatively high-fat diet (of primal-approved fats that is!) promotes health, longevity, and reduction of excess body fat. I’ll show how weight loss does not have to involve the suffering, sacrifice, and deprivation we’ve been conditioned to accept, but instead is a matter of eating the right foods (plants and animals), avoiding the wrong foods (processed carbs like sugars and grains, along with highly refined, oxidized industrial vegetable/seed oils), exercising strategically for far fewer hours than you might assume, and finding ways to move more during everyday life.

All the answers are found in a set of 10 simple, logical eating, exercise, and lifestyle practices—my Primal Blueprint “laws.” Modeling your 21st-century life after our primal hunter-gatherer ancestors will help you greatly reduce or eliminate almost all of the disease risk factors that you may falsely blame on genes that you inherited from your parents. Unfortunately, too many of us narrowly define genes as largely unalterable inherited traits—height, body type, eye color, physical or intellectual traits, and a “family history” of health conditions and diseases. While some genes are indeed responsible for traits that are largely unaffected by your behavior, many more interact with lifestyle to play a bigger role in your health than you might realize. As coming chapters explain in detail, your genes—guided by what you eat, how you move, and even how you think—are the traffic cops that direct the functioning of every single cell in your body, every moment of every day.

Instead of falling victim to your genetic vulnerabilities, you can control how your genes express themselves in constantly rebuilding, repairing, and renewing your cells.

Whatever you throw at them, your genes are going to respond in an effort to promote survival and, beyond that, homeostasis (the balanced and synchronistic functioning of all systems in the body). After all, this is the essence of human evolution. When you are sprawled on the couch late at night chowing down on Cheetos and Dr. Pepper, your body will still valiantly pursue homeostasis regardless of whether or not it benefits your long-term health. In the example of a junk food binge, your body will respond by releasing insulin and stress hormones into the bloodstream to remove excess glucose, which would otherwise kill you. In the short term, this is adaptive. In the long term, chronically flooding your bloodstream with these hormones will lead to a whole host of other problems.

The idea that you can reprogram your genes through your behavior is the central premise of this book. It represents a clear departure from today’s fatalistic conventional wisdom, which suggests that our genes, for better or worse, determine our destiny and that we have little say in the matter... unless prescription drugs or discoveries by the Human Genome Project come to the rescue. True, you might have a genetic tendency toward alcoholism, accumulating excess body fat, or contracting type 2 diabetes like others in your family, but you’ll only express these predispositions when you make poor lifestyle choices and send the wrong signals to your genes. Instead of falling victim to your (very real) genetic vulnerabilities, you can control how your genes express themselves in constantly rebuilding, repairing, and renewing your cells. Briefly, here are the most critical, life-altering elements of the Primal Blueprint:

Become a fat-burning beast by eliminating processed carbohydrates from your diet to minimize insulin production. This means ditching not only sugars and sweetened beverages, but also grain products, including wheat, rice, pasta, cereals, and corn. A diet that emphasizes meat, fish, fowl, eggs, nuts, seeds, and colorful natural carbs from vegetables and fruits, is the primary way to improve your general health, control your weight, and minimize the risk of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, arthritis, and other diet-influenced medical conditions.

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If you are carrying excess body fat, it will disappear without you having to work at it when you focus on eating the delicious, filling, nutritious foods that have nourished humans throughout the course of evolution. Seriously, it’s as simple as breaking free from a lifetime of wildly excessive insulin production thanks to a Standard American Diet (SAD) rich in grains and sugar and choosing the right foods to moderate insulin production and enable your body to mobilize stored body fat and burn it for energy. You do not have to struggle and suffer with calorie restriction and exhausting exercise to shed excess body fat—you simply have to reset your appetite and the metabolic hormones that have been dysregulated by a lifetime of wildly excessive insulin production.

Optimize your exercise program by engaging in frequent, low-intensity, energizing movement (such as walking, hiking, structured cardio workouts conducted at low-level aerobic heart rates, and complementary fitness activities like Pilates, yoga, tai chi, dancing, and dynamic rolling/stretching/therapy work). Avoid prolonged periods of inactivity by making a general effort to move more and take regular movement breaks throughout the day. Include regular brief, intense strength-training sessions (one to two times a week max) and occasional all-out sprints (once every seven to ten days) to improve body composition and delay the aging process.

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This strategy is far superior to the conventional wisdom advocating for a regimented schedule of frequent medium-to-difficult-intensity sustained workouts, such as running, cycling, cardio machines, or group classes. This workout strategy, which I refer to as “chronic cardio,” places excessive and prolonged physical stress on your body—because workout intensity is slightly too difficult, making it stressful rather than energizing—and leads to fatigue, injuries, compromised immune function, and burnout. Furthermore, the hype surrounding the fitness craze disregards the importance of general everyday movement. Even a devoted fitness regimen, with daily visits to the gym or miles on the road, is not enough to be truly fit and healthy—especially with the many sedentary forces present in modern life (commuting, office work, digital leisure time, etc.)

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Manage stress with plenty of sleep, play, sunlight, and fresh air. Pursue creative, intellectual pursuits, and avoid making stupid mistakes. Rebel against the modern cultural tendency toward a sedentary life and excessive artificial light. Opt for more sleep by reducing digital stimulation after dark. In short, honor your primal genes by slowing down and simplifying your life. Your ancestors worked hard to survive, but their regular respites from stress gave them the peace of mind and body that are so highly coveted today.

IS DYING OF OLD AGE GETTING OLD, OR WHAT?

As you will soon discover, our genes are designed through evolution to keep us healthy. The biological mechanisms that work synchronistically to maintain a state of homeostasis within each of us are imperative to our survival. Thanks to the hectic pace of our high-tech, modern world, many of us struggle to maintain our health. The confusion and often-repeated failure that results from our efforts to do the right thing by conventional wisdom leads many of us, whether overtly or deep down inside, to simply give up. Experience has taught us how difficult, if not impossible, it is to be lean, fit, energetic, and healthy by following conventional wisdom. Instead, we succumb to the forces of consumerism that are designed to placate our pain with silly shortcuts, comforts, conveniences, and indulgences. Consequently, the popular “Hey man, life is short!” rationalization becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Seventy percent of today’s health care expenditures are for lifestyle-related chronic diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.

Eating processed foods, exercising excessively (or, conversely, being inactive), and making other poor lifestyle decisions undermines your genetic mandate for health. At the very least, you can expect adverse lifestyle practices to very quickly lead to excess body fat, subpar fitness results, aching joints, gastrointestinal problems, frequent minor illnesses, sugar cravings, energy level swings, and recurring fatigue.

That sounds bad enough as it is, but continuing to misdirect your genes with bad choices over years and decades will likely result in lifelong insidious weight gain or obesity (depending on how lucky you are with genetic predispositions), diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and/or one or more of the degenerative conditions that require a doctor’s care or medication. A huge percentage of all doctor visits today are a direct consequence of lifestyle choices that are misaligned with the environmental and survival conditions that shaped our primal genetic makeup.

These consequences are painfully obvious to most everyone, and our collective interest in doing the right thing has driven a booming fitness industry, incredible advancements in medicine, much greater awareness of healthy foods and lifestyle choices, sharp declines in smoking, and sharp increases in healthy restaurants and food stores. Ironically, though, Americans’ collective health—and that of people in other countries that match our fast-paced culture—is worse than ever. A study released in 2008 by Johns Hopkins University predicts that by the year 2030, 86 percent of all adults in the United States will be overweight or obese (up from the estimated 65 percent of Americans who are overweight or obese today). What’s more, some researchers predict that by the year 2230, all Americans will be obese.

We reluctantly accept as fact that a normal human life span consists of growing up to reach a physical peak in our twenties, followed by an inevitable steady decline caused by the aging process. Under this faulty belief, we allow ourselves to gain an average of one-and-a-half-pounds of fat (two-thirds of a kilo) per year starting at age 25 and continuing through age 55.1 We also lose half a pound of muscle per year, resulting in adding an extra pound of weight per year as we age. Our last decade or two (until we reach the average American life span of 76 for men and 81 for women)2 is commonly characterized by inactivity, diminished muscle mass, excess body fat, assorted medical conditions, and a host of prescription drugs to alleviate the pain and symptoms of chronic disease. Twenty-three percent of us will die from cardiovascular disease, and another 23 percent will die from cancer.3 I know that 100 percent of us will die from something, but personally, I’d prefer to actualize a motto I crafted in honor of our hunter-gatherer ancestors: Live Long, Drop Dead!

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Yes, many primal humans succumbed to primitive hazards (e.g., death by predator or infection from a minor wound) before they hit today’s voting age, but many of those who avoided misfortune could live six or seven decades in exceptional health and fitness. In almost all cases, primal humans were healthy and strong for their entire lives, until they met their sudden demise. There was simply no such thing as today’s abysmal decline into old age. In general, every individual hunter-gatherer was required to make a contribution to the clan, and there was no ability to support those who, for whatever reason or misfortune, were unable to support themselves. By any modern measure this is pretty harsh, but this was the reality of life-or-death selection pressure in primal life.

While 21st-century longevity stats are vastly superior to those of any other time in human history, these increases are largely attributable to science, not healthier lifestyle behaviors. Furthermore, modern longevity is often undesirably inflated by scientific advancements that keep us alive but do not improve quality of life: hospital machinery, pharmaceuticals, and the ability to reel in the years doing little more than putting spoon to mouth and thumb to remote control.

Of the 2.5 trillion dollars America spends annually on health care, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that more than 75 percent is spent on lifestyle-related chronic diseases, such as obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. A surprising number of people accept all this as a normal part of life, believing that some of us are just fortunate to have “good genes,” and the rest must cross their fingers against bad luck.

Sure, millions of modern citizens contributing to these woeful statistics are completely ignorant about what is required to be healthy. It might be hard for you even to relate to this segment of humanity that hasn’t a clue or a care about this stuff. However, even the most health conscious among us often struggle. Despite a sincere commitment to do the right thing by conventional wisdom, we have collectively failed to lose that last 5, 10, or 50 pounds. Injuries, fatigue, and burnout plague exercisers ranging from weekend warriors to elite competitors. We have been programmed by the health care establishment to reflexively turn to prescription drugs to treat symptoms of distress, even though most conditions are minor and easily corrected by simple dietary and lifestyle changes. In the process, we interfere with normal gene-driven metabolic processes and thwart our innate ability to heal naturally—paving our way to joining the masses on the wrong side of the stats.

The story is sad, but the good news is that your destiny for the most part is in your hands. By the time you complete this book, you will understand the big picture and all the necessary details of how to eat, exercise, and live in order to reprogram many of your genes for lifelong health. In the process, you will take control of your own body and your own life. This is really the only sensible way to counter the tremendous momentum pushing us away from health, balance, and wellbeing in our hectic modern world.

CHAPTER ENDNOTES

1 Physiology of Sport and Exercise, by Drs. W. Larry Kenney, Jack H. Wilmore, and David L. Costill.

2 These data are from a Centers for Disease Control 2013 report, which can be found at cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf. The Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook estimates that in 2015, average American life expectancy was 79.7 years (77 for men, 82 for women).

3 The American Heart Association reports that heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide. In 2013, cardiovascular-related deaths accounted for 31 percent of all deaths (worldwide), and over 800,000 Americans died from heart disease, cardiovascular disease, or stroke. Data released by Centers for Disease Control confirms that heart disease was the number one cause of death for Americans in 2014 (the most recent data available), followed by cancer.