There are two main principles:
- Avoid toxins
- Eat metabolically stimulating things
Secondary things include:
- Exercise
- Get restful sleep
Generally, historical things shown to be harmless are a great thing to bet on. It’s optionality: all upside and little downside. Think of mineral water, which Europeans have drank from springs for centuries. On the other hand, things that are relatively new such as man-made vitamins, drugs prescribed by doctors, supplementation, hydrogenated vegetable oils, and vegetarianism should be viewed with suspicion.
Being a fast adopter of technology is good for its productive capabilities. Being a first adopter of new drugs like Ozempic is sure to lead to bad results, as many have found out with stomach paralysis.
I am not confident of the modern technique of statistical studies, where someone can go look for any study that supports their viewpoint, or that someone considers something only in isolation, as a complex system like the body is not easily pulled into cause-effect, much like the relations between countries and people, where 2nd and 3rd order effects can be catastrophic.
Avoid Toxins
Plants don’t want to be eaten
All of life: plants, fungi, animals, and bacteria are in a battle within and between their respective groups. Plants frequently have fine, gossamer hairs that give fiberglass splinters to any grazing animal’s tongue or even sharp, barbarous thorns. Who would eat a pinecone or graze on a rose bush? Coconut trees love their young, maybe not in a mammilian way, but they do protect their seeds with hard shells. Studies show that one plant being grazed causes other plants to increase their production of insecticide.
Penicillin (from fungi) was harnessed by humans to fight against bacteria. However, it would be a mistake to think these antibiotics don’t also harm us. Fluoroquinolones, a class of antibiotics, are notorious for giving people nerve issues and have a black box warning. Antibiotics used after surgeries often destroy people’s gut microbiome, leading to bacterial overgrowth and digestive troubles.
Seeds and nuts contain some of the most potent antinutrients that plants have. Think of how a potato turns green as it becomes ready to sprout. Or cutting into ginger, garlic, and onion being spicy. All of these are protective for the plant. Any plant without the capability to survive in the wild quickly gets eaten into extinction.
These plant defense chemicals come in many forms and names: cyanogenic glycosides, tannins, lectins, solanines, alkaloids, and so on. If you integrate this theory into your worldview, then you realize the worst thing to eat are improperly processed seeds such as beans and nuts. This theory is pessimistic on nut milk.
In a 1917 study, “THE SUPPLEMENTARY DIETARY RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LEAF AND SEED AS CONTRASTED WITH COMBINATIONS OF SEED WITH SEED” by E.V. McCollum, N. Simmonds, and W. Pitz, they tried feeding rats variations of plant-based diets. Those fed some combination of raw beans died the fastest. Oats/wheat and alfalfa leaves were a good combination. The leaf is rich is calcium and sodium, deficient in the seed.
Wheat
All wheat in the United States is bleached with some combination of:
- Oxides of nitrogen.
- Chlorine.
- Nitrosyl chloride.
- Chlorine dioxide.
- One part by weight of benzoyl peroxide mixed with not more than six parts by weight of one or any mixture of two or more of the following: potassium alum, calcium sulfate, magnesium carbonate, sodium aluminum sulfate, dicalcium phosphate, tricalcium phosphate, starch, calcium carbonate.
- Acetone peroxides complying with the provisions of § 172.802 of this chapter.
- Azodicarbonamide
Almost any bread gives me diarrhea. And bleaching of wheat was originally done not for the color but because doing it under the sun reduced the antinutrients. I try to not eat beans or nuts either due to their high antinutrient content.
If you take a look around Title 21 (Food and Drugs) of the Code of Federal Regularions (CFR) you can find some ridiculous things such as:
§ 172.250 Petroleum naphtha.
Petroleum naphtha may be safely used in food in accordance with the following conditions:
The whole thing reads like a chemistry textbook. The scientific justification is all of these are “generally recognized as safe and within guidelines”, but a look at the health of any average American (go to a supermarket) and you can think otherwise.
Vile Advertising
Humans should hone their natural senses for what is bitter in the foods they eat. I recently saw some Cacoa Water available from Whole Foods. I was interested in trying it out, and the bottle said it was full of vitamins and minerals such as magnesium. It was the most bitter and vile thing, which was obvious to me when I closed my eyes and really tuned into my emotions instead of the packaging, and I spit it out and dumped it.
The moral of that above story is how companies have found a way to sell vile waste products as they once did with cottonseed oil and how the media and advertising industries influence people to believe in it.
Bitter things are poison
Any compound that is bitter is considered toxic. It is of course only with copious amounts of sugar, cream, and mental gaslighting that humans are made to drink it. Chocolate is in fact toxic to dogs, but not as much to humans due to X. There is an interesting database of bitter chemicals written by Dutch scientists. On there, I noticed quinine, an anti-malarial drug derived from the bark of a tree was on there. Studies in the early 1900s have associated pregnant mothers taking quinine with deafness in their children. Truly we can see that many of these antibiotics and antiparasitic drugs are stopping just short of severely harming us.
Take a look at BitterDB for more compounds.
Vitamin A
See my other article for more information about Vitamin A.
Cookware
Don’t use non-stick. Google “Teflon kills birds,” as non-stick coatings off-gas and end up killing them. There’s a documentary on YouTube about babies born at the Teflon factory as well.
Don’t get a “novel non-stick coating” made of some chemicals. I think anodized coatings would be safer since it’s just metal etching. It seems whenever humans replace something toxic (such as PFAS with GenX), they end up creating something as equally toxic.
Anyone that thinks non-stick coatings are safe to use despite these facts is welcome to do so.
Cooking acidic things in copper may lead to copper poisoning.
I’m not personally a fan of cast iron as I believe the polymerized oils will leach into the food. However, the Chinese method of seasoning by just heating up the pan super hot apparently works because it creates iron nanoballs.
As far as stainless steel goes, here’s an 87 page report. Studies show inconsistent results with regard to chromium and nickel leaching. This study is positive for leaching. This study shows tap water leaches heavy metals, but not vinegar. Amounts of the metals tend to be in micrograms.
The safest afiak are stainless steel, glass, and clay cookware. I’m not sure about ceramic.
Read more centurylife.org for cookware recs and information.
Plastic
If you can smell it, it’s in your food. Occurs from heating up frozen foods (airplane food is notorious for this) and plastic containers and water bottles.
Transportation
There are three main sources: interior off-gassing in a hot day, automobile exhaust, and tire particles. If you live in a hot climate, all the time you spend in a car is breathe-ing (breathing is not pronounced how it is spelled) in the plastics and glues used to manufacture the car. In many locales, there is little alternative to driving. I’d recommend letting the gas in a car air out a bit or letting the windows down.
When riding a plane, the air comes through the jet engines and can sometimes contaminate the inside with smoke.
Generally, those who live near airports, cities, major roads, chemical plants, superfund sites, and so on are at heightened risks.
Water
Most of the water in the USA is chlorinated and fluoridated, probably too much. You have to close your eyes and really pay attention to the smell of the water that comes out of the faucet. When I was younger, I didn’t notice it. In Germany, the tap water is much higher quality. I’ve experienced bad water smells in both Georgia and Cambridge, MA. I don’t remember the water smell well enough from other places around the US.
Because of microplastics, bottled water isn’t a great alternative either. I think distilled water isn’t a great option as it lacks minerals and is more likely to cause brain swelling; I clone my own mineral waters. Food grade salts are buyable from hobby brewing stores, but you’ll need a precise scale (0.1 or 0.01 grams).
Still analyzing water filtration options. Brita works for now, I guess.
Housing
Carpets cause allergies. There is also a cheap foam backing layer underneath it which may cause off-gassing.
Skin Absorption
You don’t want any contact or inhalation with paints, chemicals, and so on. Water has chlorine and other chemicals in it, so it may be best to limit hot baths. You might think the skin is a barrier, but it’s not against many fat-soluble things. Imagine putting your hand into alcohol or acetone.
Eat Metabolically Stimulating Things
Do not eat vegetable oils
There are enough arguments in favor of this already.
- Protons theory
- Fat absorption theory
- Ray Peat article
- Historical observation
- Vegetable oils are new. Much of the heart disease in the 50s and 60s can be explained by trans fats in hydrogenated crisco. Saturated fats and animal fats were unfairly blamed.
If you follow this rule, you’ll end up being unable to eat >90% of the things that other people eat. Most restaurants fry things in canola oil. Eating out will become difficult; maybe you could just order a steak.
The more saturated a fat is, the higher the melting point is. That’s why coconut oil and tallow tend to be saturated due to being in warm climates and warm-blooded animals. Fish, seals, and other aquatic life are mostly polyunsaturated fat. If they were saturated, they would not be able to move in the water due to their fat being solid.
The chemical properties are because saturated fats supposedly ”stack” on top of each other easier, as saturated fats are straight. Trans fats are also straight, but somehow their double bond and the slight difference in their shape causes all sorts of bad health effects.
Eat ruminant meat instead of pig and chicken
Pigs absorb the fats that they eat, leading to increased storage of PUFAs. It’s likely they’re also fed Vitamin A. Chicken is the cheapest meat and factory farmed. You can get it for 50 cents a pound wholesale. If money was not an objection, would you eat the shitty chicken meat or the 4-5 dollar grass fed lamb/cow?
Rice is the safest grain
White rice has the least antinutrients. When dogs have an upset stomach, it’s recommended to feed them chicken and rice. Dogs, like humans, have increased salivary amylase as populations have evolved and gone elsewhere.
What’s up with coconut oil?
The defining feature of Ray Peat Twitter seems to be coconut oil. It’s commonly noted for its “negative calories” effect. Eating a spoonful of it makes you breathe heavier. I was concerned about the phytosterols (a plant equivalent of cholesterol), but a study showed that it doesn’t seem to be absorbed so well. However, fats in the body do end up becoming replaced with medium-chain saturated fats, which may be bad.
Eat a ton of calories
Humans in the past were known for eating 3000-4000 calories. If you’re metabolically stimulated and don’t have gut dysbiosis, you could easily burn through food like a furnace.
Unknown remaining questions for me:
- Natto or no natto?
- Coconut oil: what are the downsides?
- What type of fiber? (some fiber is definitely important to bind toxic things in bile)
- Starch or no starch? (vs sugar)
- Fructose or glucose?