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Tom Ough unleashes his inner caveman
Brad Kearns, a leading figure in the ‘primal movement’, tells Tom Ough why we should all follow a paleo lifestyle
Our Paleolithic ancestors did not spend their days sitting down indoors, not least because doors had not yet been invented. They did not wake up to alarm clocks, they did not eat ultra-processed food and they did not attempt to burn off excess body fat by heading down to a Stone Age spin class. They already had enough stress on their hands, what with the threat of starvation and the danger of predators. These twin menaces slowly prompted innovation.
“And then,” says triathlete-turned-writer-and-podcaster Brad Kearns, “when we had storage for bread and corn and rice, we could live in close quarters and progress as a society, with technology and specialisation of labour. But in terms of health and dietary quality, we suffered a huge drop due to the reliance on processed food, especially grains.”
By “processed food”, Kearns means products as seemingly benign as bread. And that was well before the postwar avalanche of ultra-processed foods: ready meals, packaged foods, junk food and so on. According to the physiologist Loren Cordain, 71 per cent of the calories in the modern human diet come from foods that did not exist in the Paleolithic era, a term used to describe the 99 per cent of human history that preceded complex toolmaking and agriculture.
Therefore, says Kearns, “71 per cent of the calories are highly deficient in nutrients and highly dense in calories. Then we’re talking about a population that’s going to get fat and sick and tired and progress into accelerated ageing and disease, because you’re eating what we call the “big three” toxic modern foods: refined grains, sugars and industrial seed oils.”
Hence what has been called both the paleo and the primal movement, of which Kearns and Cordain are leading members. The thesis is pretty much as follows: our genome is almost identical to those of our ancestors in the preagricultural era. We are evolved to live in paleolithic conditions, and many of our modern maladies have arisen at least in part due to our deviation from those conditions. We can live happier, healthier lives, say Kearns et al, by recreating key elements of the paleolithic lifestyle.
What are those key elements? Movement is hugely important; rather than sitting at a desk all day before going on a half-hour run, we’re advised to move throughout the day: walking lots, doing naturalistic exercises such as jumps, squats and sprints, and adding the odd bout of resistance training. Less mobile people could try getting in and out of a chair 10 times in a row.
Being outdoors is important too; sunlight gives us many benefits, not least the timing of our circadian clock. Kearns, an American who lives by Lake Tahoe, which straddles California and Arizona, also advocates cold water exposure, low technology use, doing challenging activities as a group and much else.
And then, of course, there’s food. Kearns is the co-author, with his former athletics coach Mark Sisson, of Two Meals a Day. The book makes the case for an ancestrally-themed diet eaten within a framework of a two-meal day, the three meal-day being a relatively modern invention. In its quest to turn each reader into “a fat-burning beast”, the book provides strategies, recipes and intriguing detail, explaining that frequent movement increases one’s levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor, a molecule important for learning and memory. Processed and carbohydrate-rich foods and drinks, meanwhile, flood your dopamine pathways and bind with opioid receptors to create that familiar feeling of being unable to put down the Pringles tube. Rather than Pringles, eat the foods our ancestors ate. “It’s a very short list,” says Kearns, who is a wiry 56-year-old. “Meat, fish, fowl, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds.”
And what do Kearns’s meals look like? In general, he says, his eating schedule is pretty flexible, but “the main go-to meals are anything with pasture-raised eggs, and I eat a lot of steak, and I’m trying to eat more and more animal organ meat, things like bone broth and liver, because these are the real nutritional superstars. Same with oily cold-water fish.”
Kearns considers himself fitter now than his triathlete days. Since then, he says: “I’ve kind of recalibrated my athletic goals toward events that are explosive and short duration in nature, because those are much more aligned with health and anti ageing than extreme endurance pursuits.”
“We’re obligated to take care of ourselves,” says Kearns. “One great way is to clean up that diet. I don’t care if you’re 62, 72, 77, you’re going to get an immediate impact and immediate boost in health. And you can reverse disease risk factors in as little as a few weeks of dietary intervention.”
Little is agreed on in nutrition, and many scientists and nutritionists question certain beliefs common in the paleo movement. Living as our ancestors did, though, even if it’s an approximation, is a matter of common sense.
The paleo world-view seems a useful and revealing heuristic through which to view human wellbeing, a topic about which much remains to be discovered. Our knowledge will continue to evolve, even as our genome remains the same.