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Wellness Musketeers
"Empowering Health, One Episode at a Time"
Unlock the secrets to a healthier, more balanced life with Wellness Musketeers. Join our dynamic trio—a medical doctor, wellness expert, and economist with over 120 years of combined experience—as they delve into the latest health and wellness trends that impact you and your loved ones. From physical and mental health to overcoming drug addiction and loneliness, each episode offers diverse perspectives from leading experts in health and business. Whether you're looking to enhance your personal wellness journey or stay informed about the broader implications of health trends, Wellness Musketeers is your go-to source for insightful discussions and actionable advice.
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For questions and to suggest topics and speakers for future episodes, please contact Dave at davidmliss@gmail.com.
Wellness Musketeers
Harnessing Ancestral Wisdom: Dr. Jenny Powers on Evolutionary Health and Wellness
Join us for an enlightening conversation with Dr. Jenny Powers, a former academic turned writer, as she reveals how evolutionary biology can unlock the secrets to modern wellness. Discover how societal structures might be at the heart of your burnout and how embracing our ancestral roots could be the key to reclaiming your health. Through the lens of her book "On the Origin of Being," Jenny invites us to rethink our relationships with sleep, nutrition, and nature, providing a fresh perspective on aligning our lifestyles with our biological design.
Ever wondered if the paleo diet is really all it's cracked up to be? Get ready to challenge popular misconceptions about ancestral diets with our exploration of evolutionary nutrition. From the diverse diets of ancient cultures to the impacts of the agricultural revolution, Jenny breaks down why whole foods are essential and how our bodies have adapted to different dietary needs. We also emphasize the importance of personalized nutrition, revealing why there is no one-size-fits-all approach to eating well.
As we wrap up, the conversation shifts to the profound power of nature in enhancing our well-being. Listen as we discuss the benefits of syncing our lives with natural light cycles and the stress-reducing magic of the great outdoors. Reflecting on cultural attitudes towards work and productivity, we look at how practices from different parts of the world can inform a more balanced and fulfilling lifestyle. Don’t miss this opportunity to gain practical strategies for navigating the complexities of modern life through a timeless, evolutionary lens.
- Learn more about the book and Dr. Dr. Jenny Powers here: https://www.ontheoriginofbeing.com/
- Origin of Being Book Trailer: https://youtu.be/O32XPxMSi5c
- Instagram: @ontheoriginofbeing
- Facebook: @ontheoriginofbeing
- Jenny’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenny-powers-terry-b8a5a658/
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And it's because we don't live in the present moment. We are not aware of the cues our bodies give us, we are not aware of the things that are going on around us.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Wellness Musketeers podcast, your guide to navigating the world of health, wellness and the art of living. I'm your host, dave Liss, a journalist and podcaster based in Washington DC, joined by my co-host, ketel Veeney, an economist with 35 years of experience, including 24 years with the IMF, and currently an adjunct lecturer in economics and politics at Sciences Po X in France. In a world inundated with wellness advice, we aim to provide actionable strategies to help you thrive. Today, we are delighted to welcome Jenny Powers, a PhD scientist, mom, writer and athlete from Colorado. Dr Powers holdsa bachelor's degree in chemical engineering and a PhD in immunology from the University of Colorado.
Speaker 2:After leaving academia to raise her two kids and pursue a writing career, she co-authored the book On the Origin of being with Luke Comer. This book delves into how evolution by natural selection can inform and enhance our modern lives. Luke Comer, although not joining us today, conceptualized the project and has a rich background in studying human, biological and cultural evolution. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in understanding how aligning with our evolutionary design can improve health and well-being. Jenny Powers, phd, will share fascinating insights from her book on the origin of being, revealing how our ancestors' lifestyles can guide us to better sleep, nutrition and overall wellness in today's fast-paced world. Before we begin, please remember to subscribe wherever you listen to this podcast and if you're there, please also leave us a review. Five stars do amazing things for the podcast, and with that, here's our conversation with Jenny Powers.
Speaker 3:Hello Dr Powers. I hope I can call you Jenny.
Speaker 1:Oh, of course, Please do.
Speaker 3:I read your book with great interest. It does go through quite interesting thing about the evolutionary mismatch and something called biohacking. Can you tell us a little bit about how you actually came about to actually spending a lot of time dealing with this and actually writing a whole book about it?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me on your podcast. I really appreciate it. So my whole life I was kind of an overachiever and perfectionist. So I, you know, had high grades in school and I was a basketball player and but my worth was always wrapped up in my achievement. Then I went to grad school. I had 70-hour work weeks. I was burnt out, I was depressed and I thought I was the person. I thought it was a personal failing of mine. I never really realized that it might have been something like our culture of work in this country that is causing me to feel these things. And I always wanted to be a writer, but again, wrapped up in my achievement is my worst. A PhD scientist, you know, is like a big achievement, whereas a writer might not, you know, be a good thing. Then, around the same time, in the early 2000s, climate change began to show up in scientific journals and news and I was feeling this agonizing, like distress Solastalgia is called why people weren't caring about our environment. But at the same time I was going through all this stuff, I was too depressed to do anything about it and I felt more of a failure. So I started a spiritual path and began to heal.
Speaker 1:And when my kids were born, I actually did quit academia and start being a writer and I met Luke.
Speaker 1:I was looking for writing jobs to do and I met Luke and he described his vision for this book, this vision that he'd had for many, many years, as he was researching nutrition and other things, and he was telling me all the ways that we aren't living in accord with our biology, with our evolved nature, all the ways that we aren't living in accord with our biology, with our evolved nature. And he started listing them off sleep, nutrition, work, nature, you know, child rearing, social groups. And because this is actually the first book of a three-part series, then it soon became glaringly obvious to me when I was talking to him that my two biggest pain points at that time in my life were work and the relationship with nature, and it just blew my mind and it totally opened up this new world of well, maybe I'm not doing it wrong, maybe our society is doing it wrong because we're not living how we used to live. And so that's how I became connected with the project and I researched and wrote it according to Luke's foundation and vision.
Speaker 2:What will the other two books in the series be?
Speaker 1:So this book focuses on kind of more of our basic needs our sleep, nutrition, work, relationship with nature, and then you kind of look at it as like a triangle, kind of like Maslow's triangle of needs hierarchy of needs. The next book will be more social groups, like social needs, so social groups, child rearing, the sexes, relationships, and then at the top of the pyramid will be more cultural needs, like how we evolved rituals and religion and the arts and ceremonies and things like that. So each book kind of builds on each other and hopefully will give a total of 10 things that people can start addressing in their own lives that might actually help them have better well-being.
Speaker 3:Interesting. So the top is a little bit the spiritual part.
Speaker 1:Yes, definitely.
Speaker 3:Okay, yeah, but let's not dive a little into what this is telling us, because I'm sure that a lot of the listeners are interested in knowing you know, how they might want to adjust their life.
Speaker 3:On the basis of this book there's a lot of talking about, you know, let's start maybe with diet, but it relates to other things as well. But you know about the paleo diet which is kind of raising up a similar story as what you are telling. It's basically far back. We ate a certain way. Our genome has not changed enough for us to deal with the rest. But how does this differ from a lot of what we read about the paleo diet around?
Speaker 2:Can we maybe go back a little bit just to explain, like, what is an evolutionary mismatch in biohacking? I think that's sort of a big theme of what we're going to be discussing here. Now that will tie into the dietary parts.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So environmental mismatch is the environment that we live in today is so radically different than the one that we evolved in, and our world, especially over the last hundred years, is changing so rapidly that we have not, unlike in other times in history, we haven't it's happened so fast. We haven't had the time to evolve and adapt to this modern world. So I like to say we're kind of running hunter-gatherer software in a world that looks nothing like our hunter-gatherer's world. And so when we were hunter-gatherers and we lived in accord with our evolutionary design, we had physical and mental health. But when you're in discord, when you have this mismatch between what your genes and what your body and mind need and the environment around you, we experience pathology. So these are like the diseases of modernity diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, obesity these are all diseases that didn't really affect our ancestors the way they affect us now, Because I think it's a huge lifestyle change and our lifestyle now is there's just this huge gap between what we need and what we're actually doing.
Speaker 3:So, when it comes to Princeton's diet, does it mean that we should eat like a caveman and cavewoman?
Speaker 1:Well, actually the paleo diet is a little bit of a misnomer because there is no one optimal paleo diet. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors a wildly different macronutrient ratios and a variety of plants and animals and different ratios depending on what they could acquire in what season in their environment. So if you think about the Inuit, 95% of their food came from animals and only 5% came from plants. But on the other extreme, in the desert, the Jihonzi and the Kalahari Desert, they had 65% plants and only 35% animals, and yet both groups adapted to survive in those environments. And if you think about where hunter-gatherers used to live before they were pushed to the extremes, I mean think of all of the fertile land in between these two areas and all of the different things that our environment would provide us to eat, and so I think the paleo diet is kind of a misnomer. But there are things that are very similar to all of our ancestors that did have to do with diet.
Speaker 2:What would you say? Those things are.
Speaker 1:Well, I think, no matter where we lived, we always ate the whole food. We ate the skin, the pulp, the seeds of plants. When we ate animals, we ate the connective tissue and the organs and not just the muscle meat. Nothing was up. Nutrients were not stripped from it, fiber was not stripped from it the way that it is in our modern world. So, I think, no matter where we lived, the one thing we did was we just we didn't just pick and choose like, oh, I'm only going to eat the sugar out of that plant and I'm only going to eat the flour out of that plant and I'm only going to eat the oil out of that plant, and I'm only going to eat the flour out of that plant and I'm only going to eat the oil out of that plant. We actually ate the entire plant and got all the nutrients, vitamins, minerals and everything else that we needed along with it.
Speaker 2:And so, even if it's a meat-based diet, it's still the same kind of considerations.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, so people that inuit and people who live more meat-based.
Speaker 1:So what's interesting is that the human body is very adaptive and so we have the ability to any nutrient that we don't get in our diet.
Speaker 1:That's not one of the essential nutrients. There are these essential nutrients that our body can't make, that we have to get in our diet. So, aside from those things, our body can make conversions so we can turn fat into carbohydrates, we can turn proteins into carbohydrates, but it also there has to be a little bit of care taken, because when we're doing a lot of conversions, it costs a lot of energy and we get byproducts that might build up in our system and might cause us to be pretty sick, might build up in our system and might cause us to, you know, be pretty sick. So there are ways for us to live in a variety of places because our body can convert them, but we need to make sure that, well, I think, ideally, if we can get in our diet all the things that we need and we don't need to do any conversions, then A it'll save energy and it'll help our bodies not have any kind of side products that might not be wanted.
Speaker 3:So then, about a whole period in between the cavemen or cavewomen and now this is the agricultural revolution. So then, a lot of things we eat now, including bread, milk, eat or drink milk products are things, and legumes, more generally beans, are things that were cultivated during the agricultural revolution. And consider the large part of today's diet. Should we cut out all that?
Speaker 1:No, well, I think so. For instance, with milk there is actually humans have adapted to eating dairy. Some humans or I don't know, I don't know the percentage but the persistent of the lactase gene that breaks down lactose. You know, by the time a lot of you know most animals, when they pass their childhood, their gene kind of gets downregulated, meaning the expression of the gene is kind of turned way down, and so that's why some people have trouble digesting milk, but in a lot of people their lactase gene doesn't ever get dialed down, so we still have the enzyme to digest lactose. Yeah, so I think it's going to vary from person to person, because someone might eat lactose, might drink milk and have really severe cramping and gas and things like that, but other people won't. So to me I feel like dairy needs to be a personal decision based on your personal physiology.
Speaker 1:As for legumes, well, I think that legumes are a great source of fiber and a very sustainable plant-based protein, and a lot of the reason people don't want them is because there's lots of lectins in them. So legumes like lentils and peas and chickpeas and soybeans and beans and peanuts, even things like raw potatoes If all of those things are eaten raw, it has lectin in them and it will cause digestion problems. However, it's very easily. The solution is very easy. Once you cook these things for five to 10 minutes, the lectin gets denatured and it doesn't have the same effect, so it's not going to affect your diet. So I feel like the way that we can process beans makes it safe for us to eat and again, it might be a personal thing Some people might be a lot more sensitive to maybe the smaller amounts that might still be left over.
Speaker 1:But this is what I think is so important to people to know that there's not one diet. There's not a carnivore diet. There's not, you know, vegan diet. There's not one diet that's going to fit everybody. So you need to take into account what makes you feel good and what doesn't Like. If being a carnivore makes you feel awful, then add some plants to your food. You know, if you're a vegan and you are lacking protein in your diet, you might need to add some animal products just to help boost your energy in your diet. You might need to add some animal products just to help boost your energy, your ability to build muscle.
Speaker 2:Oh, is a differentiator sort of that? You know, nowadays we have a lot of ingredients in food that don't grow in nature and can't be easily pronounced.
Speaker 1:That's exactly it.
Speaker 2:And that is something that our ancestors didn't have homogenized corn oil in their.
Speaker 1:Whatever it might be, yeah, so I think all the people who follow these diets. They might argue over what we should eat, but what they don't argue over is what we shouldn't eat, right, we ate whole foods. We didn't eat nutrients that were stripped or food that was stripped of nutrients and stripped of fiber. We didn't ever, like in our entire evolutionary history, we were never exposed to raw refined sugar, except for honey, maybe occasionally. But the abundance of just sugar we went from eating four pounds of sugar a year to over 150 pounds of sugar a year in like two 300 years. The flour, processed flour, ultra processed oils, vegetable oils, and then, like you said, the fake foods, artificial colors, artificial flavors, trans fats all of these things. We didn't encounter any of these when we were evolving, so our bodies don't know how to handle them.
Speaker 2:So how has your consideration of nutrition changed from when you were a basketball player at college and to now as a master's athlete and as a parent?
Speaker 1:part of our training. It wasn't. I mean, this is 30 years ago, you know we did weight training and we sort of had some, you know, healthy foods versus dorm foods, but it wasn't ever taught to us in the way that this is how you need to fuel your body. You need to eat these foods so you recover faster. It was never, never taught like that. We were also under a lot of pressure and there was a lot of body standards and actually there were a lot of eating disorders on our team. So the mental health aspect of that wasn't really talked about either. So happy to see the athletes nowadays, you know, like Simone Biles, they're really starting to address the mental health aspect, not just the nutrition and, you know, working out and things like that. So now that I'm older, you know I've had two kids, I'm going through perimenopause no-transcript. I feel like my overall inflammation levels because of the foods that I choose to eat. I'm really helping my body kind of just calm down Interesting.
Speaker 3:Maybe you can talk a little bit about sleep. This is another big chapter of your book and one of the again the way I'm thinking hours in the middle of the night doing all kinds of things. Apparently the summer night dream was during the middle of the night, but you're kind of saying there was a lot of sleep patterns that existed then. Some of these characterizations are a little bit too I mean a little bit wrong.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good question. So I feel like people look back in history and kind of have all these misconceptions about sleep, like you just said, and if people think about our hunter-gatherer ancestors are like, oh, they went to bed when the sun went down and they woke up when the sun came up and they got 12 hours of sleep a night and they were well rested. And that's simply not the case. The hunter-gatherers that survived into modern times were able to be studied and tracked and even with the influence of the outside world, all of the groups studied had very similar sleeping patterns. They slept for maybe seven hours to eight or nine hours, depending on the time of year. But the one thing that they had every morning they woke up at the same time every morning. They got bright sunlight in the morning and all throughout the day, and then when the sun went down, the only light they had was firelight.
Speaker 1:So this is important because sunlight is one of the best ways to entrain our circadian rhythms. These are the rhythms that tell our bodies, you know, when, to make certain hormones at different times of day, so we can wake up, so we can fall asleep. You know when are we going to digest, when are we going to repair? So all of these hormones that help our bodies function and repair are under the control of these circadian rhythms.
Speaker 1:And so what these indigenous and you know hunter-gatherer groups found, or what they found about them, is that they're so entrained with their natural environment that their bodies are always synced up with the cycle of day and night in the earth. And nowadays we live a twilight existence because when we wake up, most of us don't go outside. This is the peak of sunlight the hunter-gatherers are getting. We kind of hang out down here, you know, all throughout the day we have light, we have light, we have light, and when the light cuts off for hunter-gatherers, we still have the same level of light all throughout the day, all throughout the night, up until the moment we've tried to shut our eyes, to go to sleep.
Speaker 2:Oh, dr Huberman. He talked about how one of the things that's important for setting your mind right, so to speak, for the day is to get a few minutes of sunlight before you start your day.
Speaker 1:And that's exactly why he says that it's because we evolved to respond to the cues that the earth gave us. And this evolution to respond and have circadian rhythms went back to the very first cells of life. They needed to know when they needed to come up and do photosynthesis and they needed to know when was it okay to undergo cell division and cell cycle, because they didn't want to do that during the day, because the sun could cause UV damage and cause mutations, but they needed the sun to undergo photosynthesis. So even the very early cells of life had these mechanisms that entrained them or synced them to the natural light and dark of the day and night.
Speaker 3:So maybe go back to my story. My story is that you know I retired. I have then started napping. There's one issue there, of course, my naps might have been a little long. And second, I also have experimented a little bit with light. So by actually having a mask, I found that that is worth like three sleeping pills. Wow, yeah, I mean it's very, very powerful.
Speaker 3:And actually it's a little bit too powerful for the morning, because then the body wants to kind of start feeling the light probably. But you know, and again I can regulate it better. But in the evening, even though outside my bedroom there's a little bit of a light, it's not much, it's a street light, but that's enough. It really matters. Yeah, that's amazing and it's just how powerful that light is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, after I researched this book I started this is one of the things that completely changed. I would get up every morning and take the dogs for a walk in the morning and get lots of sunlight, and I would try to get outside as many as much as I can. I'd eat lunch outside, you know, just to get as much bright light as I can, and then at four o'clock all of my devices turn to that night shift or red shift that gets rid of the blue light.
Speaker 1:Because we are exquisitely trained, our brains are the circadian rhythms are entrained by blue light, interestingly because that is the wavelength of light that can penetrate the ocean. So it could have been any wavelength of light, but it's blue light because of the beginnings of life, and so I I turn everything. I have blue blocking glasses. I'm sure you guys have seen these very fashionable things that clip on.
Speaker 3:Every evening you work on like that.
Speaker 1:Well, if I'm not on a device that's turned down, it's blue light and red shift. Yeah, I can use this. So you're not. You know, we don't want to trick our bodies into thinking that it's not time for bed. Yet you know for every. You know half hour before bed that you have blue light. It postpones melatonin production for at least an hour.
Speaker 3:So what happens if you put that on when you watch TV? Will you actually notice it? Because there is this thing about when I, you, you wear different google ski masks, skis is that, yes, scheme yeah goggles and then colors, your brain kind of adjusts to it and recreates the same colors but it's interesting.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the same. It's the same thing. Your eyes do adjust, but if I'm on my computer at four o'clock when it shifts, it's like whoa you know, it's really obvious, but like a minute later I can't tell the difference between if it's on or off.
Speaker 2:So that's kind of is interesting how the brain kind of adjusts that we have talked to like different psychologists in the past, and they talk about sleep hygiene. You know the idea. I hadn't thought so much about the blue light at that hour of the day, starting at four, but you know that to power off your devices and to avoid stimulation and to, you know, change how you consume caffeine, you know, or?
Speaker 2:things like that, so, and that your bedroom should be where you sleep and maybe do one or two other things. That, for the most part, it's that you're recreating. And what's the second? Leave it to your imagination. But, but, but what do you? Is this all sort of sleep hygiene?
Speaker 1:Yeah well, yeah, this is sleep hygiene I mean. That is, people say, you know, don't look at screens before you go to bed. It's because of this evolutionary response that we have to blue light. But other things, like one of the sleep hygiene recommendations is to have your room set at a temperature like 68 degrees or lower, because another signal to our bodies is falling temperature. We are in our temperature-controlled homes. We don't get full sunlight, we get like a minimum of. We get light, but it's a very fraction of what sunlight is, and we don't feel any changes in the temperature either. We are temperature-controlled. So, again, turning down the thermostat is actually an evolutionary thing, because our bodies are tuned, are as needed, to the rhythms of, you know, getting cold, colder in the evening.
Speaker 1:It helps us relax, it helps us fall asleep, and so and of course, caffeine just messes with everything very late in the day. And alcohol too, alcohol too.
Speaker 2:Are your kids receptive to these kind of things?
Speaker 1:So we're working on them and I think it's hard when and I'm going to say this for all of the things it is really hard to make these lifestyle changes when you live in a society that doesn't support them per se. So I think you know, once they get a little older, you know we've put lots of things in place, you know their devices all go to redshift, they don't have screens an hour before bed, we're eating more and more whole foods. So, like, hopefully these habits will stick and hopefully, by the time they're my age, there'll be more support around them, more people choosing to live this way, more resources, more just support.
Speaker 3:So one thing about alcohol and sleeping. So one thing I thought you know, okay, you drink alcohol, you fall asleep, fine, but then you wake up and there's your own problem. But apparently there's another problem, and it's an interesting problem is that even a couple of drinks can affect you. So you reduce your REM sleep early part of the night and increase it later part. Therefore, you remember it better and they're a little more kind of vivid, they're maybe a little more traumatic.
Speaker 3:I don't know if it's always true, but it's kind of an interesting thing, because I haven't noticed any reduction in REM sleep from drinking alcohol, but that might just be a bias by the fact that you remember the things that happen early in the morning. With other stimulants, like weed, I think it's less studied, but it's a similar thing. That they think that it reduces REM sleep. And REM sleep, I do think, is, what I understand, very important for your mental what actually happened during the night. Because sleeping, as I've said earlier, is a pleasure, fun, but because you go through things that you might not even remember but they happen to you, right, the thing that you said about the importance of REM sleep.
Speaker 1:So humans have the most REM sleep of any primate and we also have the shortest. I mean other primates do fall asleep when the sun goes down and do wake up when the sun comes up. They do get these long hours at night. Humans actually evolved to have the shortest amount window of all primates because, well A, we were able to go to deeper sleep. Because of our intelligence, because of our social groups, we were able to be more protected from predation.
Speaker 1:We were able to be more protected from predators, like because of fire, because of sentinels, because of all these other things because of fire, because of sentinels, because of all these other things. But what's important, too, is that we needed more time. Our social structures and our intelligence there was just so. We needed more time to pass on knowledge. We needed more time to figure out how to live with each other, we needed more time to innovate, and so there's a hypothesis that that is another reason why our sleep cycle shortened and why our REM sleep is so deep because we needed more time to do things. And then we needed our sleep to become such that it gets. You know, our memories get recorded, our bodies and brains recover properly.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 2:What I think has been interesting to me is like I use a Fitbit or an Apple Watch is when I look at my sleep analysis, how little of my sleep is REM sleep. I don't know if how much of that is just. Is that something I need to worry about? Or just in general, even if it's what that means or how important it is? But at the same time, how little of your sleep, relatively speaking, is comprised of deep REM sleep?
Speaker 1:Yeah well, so I think because our REM sleep is so deep, we usually get our longest REM sleep, like kind of first thing once we fall asleep, and then our REM sleep cycles get a little shorter and shorter, and shorter until we wake up. I don't know the exact length of time, the ideal length of time that someone needs REM sleep in order to feel good. I'm not sure how accurate some of those trackers are in terms of REM sleep. If someone was really worried about it, I would go get a sleep study done where they put all these things on your head and they can really measure that, because I don't necessarily trust 100%. Like oh, oh, my gosh, I got such a horrible night's sleep last night. It sometimes generates a little bit of anxiety when there shouldn't be any.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just by knowing that. You don't want to have anything, something else to lose sleep over, because you're worried about how they're sleeping.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 3:But it's kind of interesting. Actually REM sleep is still, you know, as you say, is important for us humans. But apparently there are piece associated with post-traumatic stress disorder where actually they are kind of working on the REM kind of you know, the eye movements part of it, and kind of recreating a little bit of what is happening during the REM sleep. So I don't know much about it, but I know that there is a therapy like that. But I wouldn't worry too much, dave, it might be inaccurate. I think you probably have much more REM sleep than that.
Speaker 1:The question is how do you feel? Do you feel like you?
Speaker 2:get a good night's sleep. Sometimes I mean it's, you know, I guess not universally every day and I think I do notice, you know, if I have caffeine or something later in the day, like I think my body's okay after about noon you don't need to be drinking any caffeine.
Speaker 3:The half time is six hours, so I think something like that. You can correct me, but so if you drink at noon you might still be okay, but if you drink at four you're probably not okay. Yeah, that was me yesterday, unfortunately, Things that the cave people didn't have. They didn't have coffee, coffee is a custom revolution, if not later, right.
Speaker 2:The few words that I've heard you should use in diet or relationships are always and never. This is true, but you're always going to have that afternoon when you need something, at 3 in the afternoon or a donut, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah Well, and I also the people who are listening. You know a lot of this stuff. We don't want to be so rigid with our lifestyle changes that we fall off the wagon so easily.
Speaker 1:Like allowing myself. I knew I was going to have trouble sleeping, but I needed that cup of coffee. It was a social cup of coffee and it was worth it to me. You know eating. You know totally restricting yourself, never letting you eat, have any processed food or any treat at all. That's like the first thing you do if you want to not follow that diet anymore, because you'll just, you'll just crave it more and more. So a lot of these things are, you know, diet things 80% whole foods and give yourself 15, 20% to not have these rigid food controls and that's with everything.
Speaker 3:So I was thinking that that kind of relates to the whole studies about habits. So habits is something we use not to make decisions all the time, used not to have to make decisions all the time and in a way, for instance, if you all the time are being kind of in front of you, you make the decision. Should I eat a donut or not today, or a croissant, whatever is?
Speaker 3:your evil, your poison, then it's going to wear you down. I mean one thing where you don't and the only solution there is yeah, okay, don't put anything in front of me. I mean you cannot really choose that, but you can create habits that allow you not to make those choices. And that's a little bit of way to create good habits that allows you to follow a little bit of a healthier path.
Speaker 2:Because I know I've done some personal training with people and I think the first thing is you always never kind of thing and then you're good for a couple of days and then you have some family obligation you have a donut and your whole life is ruined. And then you have this guilt and you can go off your intentions from there.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so you're going to maybe talk about the next book for the social too. I mean, there's a lot of things linked with that donut that somebody offers you. Somebody offers you a donut. Saying no to that is hard and it has cost. It doesn't mean that you should necessarily accept it, but it means that you know it's not that easy to disavow from or to kind of disengage from all of these connections, and neither should we completely Right.
Speaker 1:Well, and that talks about what we were talking about before, you know how do you live this life in the world we live in, there has to be some flexibility and I think, ketil, you were saying at the beginning not to be down on ourselves when we're not doing these things.
Speaker 1:I think people who actually want to change and have these high lofty ideals are much harder on themselves than anyone else because they're like, oh I ate a donut now I have to go run three miles, when actually you just ate a donut. Don't eat one tomorrow or make a different choice. You know, don't walk by the common room on your way to the bathroom, because there's always donuts sitting there. You know, walk the other way.
Speaker 2:One thing I always thought was kind of interesting was some writing. I've done like this Every holiday season, most every magazine has something about holiday weight gain. Most every magazine has something about holiday weight gain. And maybe your Christmas dinner or your Thanksgiving dinner is 2,000, 3,000, 4,000 calories, but you don't eat generally that many calories in a meal or in a day other than those days. But I've met a lot of people and they feel like they've got to punish themselves or this feeling of guilt or, like you said, eat like that every day.
Speaker 3:It is tricky, I think, because reality is that we, as you explained very well, we are social beings.
Speaker 3:We sleep better together in groups. Actually I think that's in your book as well we eat together. That is something we do less, at least in this country. I've been actually quite shocked culturally by how people don't eat together. This is only from Europe to here, Because I think that and I might be wrong, but I don't think I'm wrong it's something every society since the beginning have been doing, and this is the first time we are not eating together. It's an important social thing.
Speaker 1:It is. Well, it also goes back to how we used to have food. We used to share food. Yeah, that's how we would all come. Everyone would come together as a group and what did you get today? What did you get today? And they'd share it. And, like you said, you were astute in thinking that this is something we address in the later books. Yes, I mean, food is a huge thing that people use, the cultures use, to celebrate, not only just to be together every night, but to celebrate what nature gave them, celebrate life, celebrate all kinds of things, and food's a central part of that. So I agree that we need to keep a lot of those things in our lives.
Speaker 2:You mentioned that modern work is out of sync with our evolutionary design. Can you talk about how adopting an in-the-present-moment mindset can enhance our work-rest balance, and what should we understand from that overall thought?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I think. So being in the present moment. This is something that I think is a thread that kind of goes through the whole book, and it's because we don't live in the present moment, we are not aware of the cues our bodies give us, we are not aware of the things that are going on around us, and we used to be in an immediate return economy. And that means we're hungry, we'd go get it, we'd eat it, we get our return immediately, we're tired, we go to bed. You know, we actually have this concept of time that's more circular instead of linear. But when the agricultural revolution came, we now changed into a delayed return economy Plant the seeds now, harvest six months later, do the work now, collect the paycheck at the end of the month. So time became very linear and we became very future-oriented. And so we became so future-oriented. Or some people are very past oriented. They can't let things go that happened, or they have so much anxiety of things that haven't happened yet or may never happen.
Speaker 1:Being able to be present and in the moment was really helpful for lowering your stress. I mean, that's such an easy thing. Well, mindfulness is such a popular practice because it lowers your stress, and if you lower your stress, you can decouple what you're working on from the future, like, okay, if you're so stressed about this deadline that you can't even write, you can't even get started, then of course it's going to be a struggle until the deadline. But if you can decouple yourself from the future and be like, okay, what do I have to do now? Deadline. But if you can decouple yourself from the future and be like, okay, what do I have to do now? What is the most important task that I do now? That will be very helpful in your work by focusing on the task at hand, so you're not overwhelmed looking at the entire list of things to do. You're just in the present, doing what you have to do right now. Does that make sense?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean like I've been reading a lot about stoicism also, and one of the things that came up was Seneca or Marcus Aurelius. He talks about how I feared most things that often never occurred. But you know, if you can, like you said, live in the moment. And, kel, was there something related to work that you were thinking as well?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so as you say in your book or write in your book the Princess Keynes he wrote, I think, just after the war, second World War. He kind of talked about what he thought was going to be the future of work and he basically predicted that we are going to spend a lot of time in leisure because productivity was increasing and giving maybe a productivity increase of one or two, even 1% per year over time should allow us to do that. Now we had the productivity at least 30 years after the war, but then maybe we've been falling down a little bit, but it's still been kind of every year on average productivity increase. Yet we just work more and that's a puzzle. And it was also picked up by Graeber about his very poignantly called book Bullshit Jobs. His idea is really that a lot of jobs are there just to kind of doing nothing really.
Speaker 3:And so what we are actually measuring as productivity increase might not be correct, but also that we are kind of so used to working that maybe we don't even have the imagination to take leisure seriously. Maybe you have some comments on that?
Speaker 1:and how we can solve it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I think our culture is not necessarily a unique American culture, but I think the American culture is spreading. But we have this individualistic I can do things by myself kind of a little bit of a meritocracy. The people who are successful are the people who work hard. So we have this mindset that the people who work hard, the people who are successful, the people who make a lot of money, have the most worth, and so we are trickles down that okay, well, now we have to work for work's sake. We don't work to meet our needs. We work for status work's sake. We don't work to meet our needs. We work for status. You know, we work to pay our bills, but we also work to buy things that we think that we need, you know. And so I feel like we're getting on this treadmill of work for work's sake, when, really, if we can simplify our lives, we will, you know, not buy as much stuff, not need as much stuff, be able to work less because we don't need as much money, we don't need that status. If we can disassociate our worth as human beings, if we can disassociate from what we do rather than who we are, I think that'll help our mindset to realize that work for the sake of work, we're just spinning our wheels and burning ourselves out and you're like, for what you know? Are we spending more time with our family? No, we're spending less time with our family. Are we enjoying being alive? Are we going on vacations? Are we, you know, getting together with friends and drinking coffee? You know, too late in the day so you can't sleep. And drinking coffee? You know too late in the day so you can't sleep. No, we're not doing those things.
Speaker 1:In fact, people have leave that they don't take. They don't even take lunch breaks. They eat at their desk because they're afraid of this perception that they're not worthy or they aren't working as hard as somebody else. And so I really feel like and this needs, this is something that kind of comes from the top down. The US is the only country that doesn't have any mandated leave as a government. There's no mandated leave required for employers to give their employees, and you contrast that with the European countries, and I mean it's amazing, and I think europeans actually take their breaks, they take their vacations. They're away for like a month at a time, you know, and it's mandated and it's not mandated, but they, it's required for people to have those kinds of time off yeah, some of this problem is not only american but the but some of these issues you mentioned are only Americans.
Speaker 3:For instance, the lunch break. That is not an issue in Europe. The vacation is taken. It was amended that the company give it to you and if you don't take it, that's actually the company has to give you that vacation and it's at least a month and it can be taken in one go. I do think it helps a lot. The company has to give you that vacation and it's at least a month and it can be taken in one go. I do think it helps a lot.
Speaker 3:It's one of the problems that a lot of economists are pointing to, to be kind of that economy and these are not doing as well in Europe, et cetera, et cetera. But I still kind of personally I think it's the better system. I see the country where you see you said the exporting of this way of working to the world. You see that a lot in England because in England they do have some restrictions on I mean basically regulations about vacation, but it's not as much as in Europe, the rest of Europe.
Speaker 3:But I just read recently about American law companies coming in and taking over in Britain and you could just imagine what kind of work goes there in posting. That's completely unseen amongst lawyers in Britain and they also work hard. But the American lawyers come in and they work around the clock, absolutely to the death nearly. And you know this is the competition that is happening in certain sectors the financial sector and in law in particular. But the bigger issue still is, in a way, the work and why we don't find there's a puzzle, why we don't find time, more time for leisure if you want. But even leisure is kind of opposed to work.
Speaker 1:So maybe it's the way we're thinking about work yeah, well, if we bring this back to our ancestors I talk about this in the book. So keynes, when he was talking about productivity, he envisioned a world where you or we would only work about 15 hours a week and then have leisure to do time. And people think that the life of a hunter-gatherer was hard work all the time. It was brutal and there were times when it was but studies of our ancestors or hunter-gatherers who survived into modern times. They work at getting food, so much less. They've actually met King's prediction and they had no technology and nothing to make them much less. They have actually met Keynes' prediction and they had no technology and nothing to make them more efficient. They were just the way that they saw that they integrated their life, and when they were working, they were telling stories, they were building things, they were dancing, they were celebrating. They were just living their lives.
Speaker 1:And so we have not evolved to work 80-hour work weeks. We have not evolved to sit in these chairs and look at a screen for eight hours a day without any breaks. And so we talk a lot about how we used to work and how we work now and trying to bring some of the things back into it Because, again, this is a culture, this is a system that we are working within. We are not getting support. There are some companies who are going to make the four-hour no, not the four-hour the four-day work week and they are finding that they're more productive and their employees are happier and they have less turnover. But this is definitely something that people. You can't just say, oh, I'm not going to work on Fridays, we have to work within the system. Then it's the system that kind of needs to change and, like you said, the mindset needs to change.
Speaker 3:There's another thing as well is that you know, my personal story is that I retired but my work was I mean, we worked hard in periods, but it's not like the 90 hours work week it's also but I think this is true for everyone it did provide a lot of social network. So when I retired I lost all the social network. I go into a slum, okay, and that kind of, but my blood pressure falls. It's just no. You take naps, but I was like a little bit too tired and maybe also depressed. And now, thanks to this podcast, amongst other things, I mean I'm kind of recouping, recoring some of that kind of activity. Also the network I, you know I'm kind of establishing that. But one of the issues obviously is also that, despite the poison that maybe work is, it's the social network for most people.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, that is something that we recommend trying to bring some of what our ancestors did into the workday, because they always went out in groups, they gathered in groups, they hunted in groups, they laughed, they joked. They were together in groups, they laughed, they joked, they were together. And so I think I work from home and I felt the same thing, kettle, where I've really missed social interactions with my co-workers. So it's something that we have to, logically, you know, make a decision, make a different decision. Okay, I'm going to go to lunch with my friend. I'm not going to work through lunch sitting here at my desk all by myself. So these are things that we just have to. We can change our behavior. The great thing about human beings is that we don't need our genes to evolve to change our behavior. We can use our intelligence and we can use our creativity and we can decide to change our behavior, and that's the good news. We just have to do it.
Speaker 3:It's kind of interesting. So what happened a little bit with the work from home thing is that these groups that kind of exist or existed in the workplace are a little bit kind of suffering from that and that's bad. But on the other hand, it allows you to have more time with the family, which is good, but those that don't have a family maybe it's not so good, and loneliness, of course, is a big issue. Oh yeah, so you know, you're a little bit damned if you do and damned if you don't. I mean, it's in a way, we're a little bit in a bind.
Speaker 1:Well, I also think it's always a work in progress. You know, individual people have different needs. So somebody who doesn't have a family, they need to find a social network that's outside of work. So it's an individualized thing. And I think again, we need to have people who are deciding to live a different way, are going against the current, and so it's hard right now to find these other ways to be. More people need to start swimming against the current, so the rest of society and corporations will be like oh, we can help them somehow rather than just go with the flow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that was one thing.
Speaker 2:Edel was working with one of the IMF with the International Monetary Fund was working to find ways to introduce mindfulness or to consider different. I mean, the whole thing, like the whole world, had to change without question. You know, once the pandemic started and most people the day before the pandemic started wouldn't have considered working from home as an option Then all of a sudden it's what you have to do. Then all of a sudden it's what you have to do. So how has the disconnection from nature affected our mental and physical health? We touched on some of this a little bit earlier. But what kinds of things should we do, or could we do, to reclaim a more engaged relationship with nature and the outdoors?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I like to say that we're the only species on Earth that doesn't live in our natural habitat, because we did not evolve. The majority of our evolution occurred when we were actually living in nature and we didn't evolve all these millions of years indoors eating processed food. So our connection with nature is I think some people feel like it is not as important. But, as Ketil was saying, I think, before we started, nature kind of wraps everything up. Entraining your circadian rhythms with nature helps you sleep. Eating the food that nature provides in season helps not only your health but also sustainability. Where do we get all of our resources? From nature. So I really feel like nature kind of brings everything together.
Speaker 1:Because we are nature, and I think there's this disconnect that people are like, well, I have dominion over nature or nature is to serve us, and they don't realize that destroying nature is going to actually destroy us and that's like the big extreme example.
Speaker 1:But being in nature lowers your stress, it decreases your blood pressure, heart disease, it bolsters your immunity. There are all these new studies coming out where you know one group goes into nature and one group walks in the city and then they test their cortisol levels and the people who went for a walk in nature had much lower cortisol levels. So I really feel like people don't realize how much we need nature and I think once people realize how much we need nature and how much nature does for us, it'll help them do the opposite. It'll help them realize that what we need to do for nature not what nature does, so nature does things, them realize that what we need to do for nature, not what nature so nature does things for us. And then we need to help nature so it can continue to do this, and we need to maintain our natural habitat, even though we don't live there.
Speaker 2:Is there a certain amount of time we should target to be outside on a daily, weekly basis? I mean, should we step outside every morning before we start our day in some way, or how should we? Incorporate.
Speaker 1:I mean, I don't think if we say, oh, you need to be outside for two hours a day, you know that's just not going to happen for a lot of people and people might say I'm going to forget it. I try to go outside whenever I can. It helps to have dogs to go for walks because they need to go outside every day. It helps to have kids to go to parks and camping and stuff. But you need to start not only just being out in nature so you could go for a walk and not be in nature. You can be in your head the whole time. To actually be in nature, you have to be in the present moment. You need to open your eyes and you need to observe what's going on around you Observe the leaf, observe the flowers, observe the sky, observe the wildlife that you run into.
Speaker 1:There is this theory. What is it called? It's stress reduction theory. So natural environments promote recovery because nature has low levels of information to process. If you compare walking on a hiking trail versus walking downtown on a city street, you know there's. It's no wonder that we're. You know we're walking on a city street, where it were there's cars coming in, there's people and there's smells and there's all this information coming at you and so your body's in this continuous state of fight or flight. But if you're in nature that can relax because there's a stress, because there's not as much information coming into you, you can be more in the present and actually not be overwhelmed by your senses. You can actually use your senses to become more present and become more relaxed.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I had like, at least during the pandemic. We want to do a podcast about walking and one of the things I felt again another culture shock by moving to the United States is that you know, I discovered that you don't walk unless you have a purpose. So you walk a dog, you walk a child, you run or you walk and looking at your Apple, your apple watch or your hike. You just don't walk to be outside. And this actually went, goes as far back as the romantics in germany days, kind of.
Speaker 3:It's true in the history we haven't really been walking in nature and looking at nature because we've been part of nature, but the romantics in Germany in particular were kind of putting forward the idea that you can go outside and observe the walk and going to the mountain, going to the Alps, and it also affected a lot of the idea about nature in Norway, because in Norway we basically it's nearly a quasi-religious thing, our nature is us and we go there to seek silence and seek connection. And then I feel that's hard. Here I was walking outside and I feel like people are looking at me because I'm alone, especially a guy. What is he out walking for alone, especially a guy. What is he out walking for? And then it really takes me. It kind of annoys me that how much people are kind of in a way, abusing nature by actually always having to achieve something in nature.
Speaker 3:I'm a little extreme, you know I have a thing you have to kind of run, even you know. Okay, it's maybe not nature. We go to a swimming pool and I see them. You know somebody's trying to swim faster than the other. I mean just being in the water is fantastic.
Speaker 1:You know we talk about competition versus cooperation a lot in the next book. Yeah, and how that's changed.
Speaker 2:I mean, I was just in Ireland a few weeks ago and one of the things that was really interesting was they built these steps that go down into the ocean.
Speaker 2:All this all over different places in ireland and it's not like, like, and I met this man. He's been doing it for 50, 60 years every day and he's not like going out swimming a half a mile or a mile. He's going out getting in the water and then he's just talking with everyone that he sees when he in and out of the. He he's his late 70s and there was an older man and there it's cold. I mean it is a cold plunge on a daily basis, like I mean, and then just, uh, socializing, but that is something like. On the one hand, it's there are probably people that are swimming laps or something, but I know, like when I go on the bike trail near where I live, I mean there are a lot of people alone or with couples or on bikes, or you know, looking ahead, what gives you hope for the future of health and wellness, as more people become aware of the importance of aligning with evolutionary design and the concept of your book or biohack.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, interestingly, we didn't start using the term biohacking until after we wrote the book and we were trying to figure out where this book fit in the health and wellness sphere. And that's where we realized that you know biohacking, when someone biohacks, they take small incremental changes in their life and then they see how it works. And we made the connection like, well, that's what evolution already did for us. Evolution is the original biohacker because it took our genes and made incremental changes and then whether or not those changes were passed on were totally dependent on the success of the change. You know, if it was a positive mutation and an adaptation to our environment, then it got passed on, but if it wasn't, then you know it wouldn't be passed on. So that's why we kind of entered the biohacking field, because most, if not all, of the recommendations in our book are things that biohackers and health and wellness, you know, functional medicine, doctors and coaches and all kinds of people that it's what they are telling their clients or their patients or you know whoever to do. And it actually I was off social media for 12 years and they just got back on in April for the purposes of this book and I was really, really worried because I'd never seen the good part of social media.
Speaker 1:I'd only ever really experienced the bad part. But now that I'm on social media and I'm following all of these amazing people who really want to help they want to help humans live better lives, and this is what I have I've had the most hope because I see it changing. I see more and more people becoming aware of our shortcomings, not only in the arenas of health and wellness, but in social issues and environmental issues and things like that. I'm seeing more and more people joining and becoming voices and influencing the people around them. So I still feel like we have a really long way to go, and we talked about this before several times.
Speaker 1:It's because we're the counter current. You know, there's not a whole lot of support for people who are trying to live a new way, and so we just have to be each other's support. You know, find the people who are the same, who want to do the same kinds of things that you are, and rely on those people to be your support, and then more and more and more people will hopefully join, and because once you start changing your lifestyle and you realize that it's working, it's easier to make more lifestyle changes. So when you're at the beginning and you're and you're miserable and you're sick and you're tired and depressed, you know it's really, really hard to start those lifestyle changes. But if you pick one or two and they start working, then it's like oh, I want more of this, please, you know. So it gets easier and easier to make other lifestyle changes. So, just like that builds on each other little, small incremental steps. I think, as a society, making small incremental steps together is how we're going to change it.
Speaker 2:What kind of takeaways do you have for people that are, if they know nothing else, about what this book is? About how they should start to think, about how they might want to make changes in their own lives? What are the core considerations that people should carry?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, I think Kettle talked about this a little bit before with habits. When I first started researching this book, I had been aware of some of the things that I personally, or our family or our society wasn't doing in accordance to our evolutionary design. But as the more I researched it, I actually got really overwhelmed and a little depressed of how far we are away from some of these things. And so I know, when you know people are wanting to change their life and they see, you know, at the end of every part we have kind of actionable steps that someone can take, and it can be really overwhelming, but it's so important that you start somewhere. So I would recommend that people can take, and it can be really overwhelming, but it's so important that you start somewhere. So I would recommend that people just take something that resonates with them, something they think is easy to do, and start with that, and then, like I'm saying, don't let it overwhelm.
Speaker 1:You Take one little step, make sure that's working Good. Okay, I'm going to try something else. That's more accord in my accord with my biology. Oh, that's working good. You're slowly but surely biohacking yourself by learning about how we used to live and trying these things on. You know we don't want to go back to living as cavemen. We don't want to go back 15 000 years. There's child mortality and no antibiotics and you know that we have so much comfort and you know so much we can do. That's more than back then. But we can bring some of the things back into our lives, just one at a time, in slow, incremental steps.
Speaker 3:Maybe more nature.
Speaker 1:Yes. Seek nature and nature will give the answer no. Yeah, I would agree. That's the first chapter that I wrote, or the first part that I wrote, and it's my favorite part that spoke to me the most.
Speaker 2:So I totally agree. So we're just rediscovering the path to health and wellness that we've had throughout our history, but bringing it into today's life. Exactly had throughout our history, but bringing it into today's life.
Speaker 2:Exactly Well. A huge thanks to our guest, jenny Powers, a PhD, and her co-author, luke Comer, for their book on the Origin of being Understanding the Science of Evolution to Enhance your Quality of Life. To learn more about their book, please visit their website on theoriginofbeingcom. Thank you for joining us for Wellness Musketeers. Tune in for upcoming episodes to learn how to live with a greater understanding of the world we experience together. Please subscribe, give us a five-star review and share this recording with your family and friends. You can make a contribution through a link provided in our program notes. To allow this podcast to grow, let us know what you need to learn to help you live your best life. Send your question and ideas for future episodes to davidmliss at gmailcom. You.
