WP_Query Object
(
[query] => Array
(
[category__in] => Array
(
[0] => 25
)
[post__not_in] => Array
(
[0] => 7268
)
[posts_per_page] => 50
[ignore_sticky_posts] => 1
[orderby] => desc
[_shuffle_and_pick] => 3
)
[query_vars] => Array
(
[category__in] => Array
(
[0] => 25
)
[post__not_in] => Array
(
[0] => 7268
)
[posts_per_page] => 50
[ignore_sticky_posts] => 1
[orderby] => desc
[_shuffle_and_pick] => 3
[error] =>
[m] =>
[p] => 0
[post_parent] =>
[subpost] =>
[subpost_id] =>
[attachment] =>
[attachment_id] => 0
[name] =>
[pagename] =>
[page_id] => 0
[second] =>
[minute] =>
[hour] =>
[day] => 0
[monthnum] => 0
[year] => 0
[w] => 0
[category_name] => nutrition
[tag] =>
[cat] => 25
[tag_id] =>
[author] =>
[author_name] =>
[feed] =>
[tb] =>
[paged] => 0
[meta_key] =>
[meta_value] =>
[preview] =>
[s] =>
[sentence] =>
[title] =>
[fields] =>
[menu_order] =>
[embed] =>
[category__not_in] => Array
(
)
[category__and] => Array
(
)
[post__in] => Array
(
)
[post_name__in] => Array
(
)
[tag__in] => Array
(
)
[tag__not_in] => Array
(
)
[tag__and] => Array
(
)
[tag_slug__in] => Array
(
)
[tag_slug__and] => Array
(
)
[post_parent__in] => Array
(
)
[post_parent__not_in] => Array
(
)
[author__in] => Array
(
)
[author__not_in] => Array
(
)
[search_columns] => Array
(
)
[suppress_filters] =>
[cache_results] => 1
[update_post_term_cache] => 1
[update_menu_item_cache] =>
[lazy_load_term_meta] => 1
[update_post_meta_cache] => 1
[post_type] =>
[nopaging] =>
[comments_per_page] => 50
[no_found_rows] =>
[order] => DESC
)
[tax_query] => WP_Tax_Query Object
(
[queries] => Array
(
[0] => Array
(
[taxonomy] => category
[terms] => Array
(
[0] => 25
)
[field] => term_id
[operator] => IN
[include_children] =>
)
)
[relation] => AND
[table_aliases:protected] => Array
(
[0] => wp_term_relationships
)
[queried_terms] => Array
(
[category] => Array
(
[terms] => Array
(
[0] => 25
)
[field] => term_id
)
)
[primary_table] => wp_posts
[primary_id_column] => ID
)
[meta_query] => WP_Meta_Query Object
(
[queries] => Array
(
)
[relation] =>
[meta_table] =>
[meta_id_column] =>
[primary_table] =>
[primary_id_column] =>
[table_aliases:protected] => Array
(
)
[clauses:protected] => Array
(
)
[has_or_relation:protected] =>
)
[date_query] =>
[request] =>
SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS wp_posts.ID
FROM wp_posts LEFT JOIN wp_term_relationships ON (wp_posts.ID = wp_term_relationships.object_id)
WHERE 1=1 AND wp_posts.ID NOT IN (7268) AND (
wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id IN (25)
) AND ((wp_posts.post_type = 'post' AND (wp_posts.post_status = 'publish' OR wp_posts.post_status = 'acf-disabled')))
AND ID NOT IN
(SELECT `post_id` FROM wp_postmeta
WHERE `meta_key` = '_pilotpress_level'
AND `meta_value` IN ('','employee')
AND `post_id` NOT IN
(SELECT `post_id` FROM wp_postmeta
WHERE `meta_key` = '_pilotpress_level'
AND `meta_value` IN ('' )))
GROUP BY wp_posts.ID
ORDER BY wp_posts.post_date DESC
LIMIT 0, 50
[posts] => Array
(
[0] => WP_Post Object
(
[ID] => 3815
[post_author] => 3
[post_date] => 2014-03-04 11:54:51
[post_date_gmt] => 2014-03-04 19:54:51
[post_content] =>
When I sit down to write an article, I often feel like I’m having a conversation with you, the reader. Except that it’s a one-sided conversation, in which I never ask you about yourself and I just monopolize the whole exchange. So. . . how about a little more about me? I grew up building robots, programming my own video games, and distributing surveys on bizarre topics around my high school. In the enneagram system of personality analysis (remotely like Myers-Briggs), I’m what’s known as a “number five” – AKA “The Investigator” or “The Scientist.” I have spent many a night jumping from one Wikipedia article to the next, or curled up with a thousand page book on herbs.
One of the topics I like investigating the most is major historical shifts in human health, behavior, and life expectancy – i.e., big changes in small periods of time. If you were to follow the trend of human life expectancy over the course of our existence, you’d see a very, very gradual slope upward and then a sharp jump in just the tiniest, most recent slice of time. This sharp upward jump began at different times in different parts of the world, but in the United States, as recently as 1850 the life expectancy at birth for a white male was just 38. Today it’s about 76.
It’s really a profound thing. Modern humans have been around for about 200,000 years. This 150 year revolution of life expectancy has occurred in just the last 0.00075% of our existence. Incidentally, a historical graph of world population shows a similar trend. It increased very, very slowly, and took a few massive hits, especially during the fourteenth century. (As centuries go, the 1300s were pretty much the crappiest ever. They were marked by famine, plague, crime, and general idiocy.) After that, the population continued to grow again, but still rather slowly compared to what began to happen around 1800. In 1800, the world population was 1 billion. In March of 2012, it hit 7 billion.
An anthropologist from another planet looking at a graph of these trends would probably point to that last slice of time and ask, “What the hell happened there?” Well, there are two very important words I used in a sentence about life expectancy a couple paragraphs ago: “at birth.” At birth, a white baby boy in 1850 was expected to live to 38.3 on average. But if he survived to age ten, his revised life expectancy would be 58 – a huge improvement.
At birth, a white baby boy in 2011 was expected to live to 76.3. If he survived to age ten, his revised life expectancy would be 76.9. There’s barely a difference.
If that child from 1850 made it to age 50, his life expectancy would then be 72. Today’s white boy at age 50 would have a life expectancy of 79.6. Again, there’s barely a difference. So, as you can see, the narrowing of the gap has occurred almost entirely in the early years of life. And there are two important conclusions to be made from this.
First, the tremendous increase in life expectancy at birth can be attributed primarily to three things - better sanitation and cleaner living conditions, better safety standards, and better medicine, including vaccinations. Whatever issues we may have with vaccines (and there certainly are some), it’s undeniable that they’ve hugely decreased child mortality.
Second, we’ve made a much smaller dent in the maximum human lifespan. As an adult British aristocrat in the 1200s, you could expect to live to age 64. By the 1500s, if you made it to age 21, you’d probably live to be about 71. And in the past several centuries, these numbers have barely changed.
Nowadays, if we want to live longer we need to take the long view, since most of us won’t die of infections or accidents. The things old people die of are often decades in the making. The primary killers are coronary heart disease (disturbance in blood supply to heart muscle) and stroke (disturbance in blood supply to the brain), both of which are blood vessel issues. Blood vessels don’t just get hard, clogged, or weak overnight, so there’s a huge opportunity to make a positive difference in this process.
As I see it, there are three main interventions that have the most impact. The first is nutrition, and my nutshell recommendation is to strictly limit consumption of sugars and flour, moderately limit red meat and dairy consumption, and have plenty of vegetables, herbs and spices, fruits and fish. The second is exercise, and the best exercise is a form you enjoy and that you can happily do every day. The third is connection – connection to people, connection to nature, connection to whatever you call the greater power that keeps it all going.
I’ll be writing more about these trends and, in particular, the nutrition factor, this month. Meanwhile, I encourage you to choose one of these areas of positive intervention to focus on each day this week – food, exercise, or connection.
Be well,
Peter
[post_title] => Big Changes in Small Periods
[post_excerpt] =>
[post_status] => publish
[comment_status] => open
[ping_status] => open
[post_password] =>
[post_name] => big-changes
[to_ping] =>
[pinged] =>
[post_modified] => 2014-03-04 11:54:51
[post_modified_gmt] => 2014-03-04 19:54:51
[post_content_filtered] =>
[post_parent] => 0
[guid] => http://www.thedragontree.com/?p=3815
[menu_order] => 0
[post_type] => post
[post_mime_type] =>
[comment_count] => 0
[filter] => raw
[webinar_id] => 0
)
[1] => WP_Post Object
(
[ID] => 3963
[post_author] => 3
[post_date] => 2014-04-01 13:18:04
[post_date_gmt] => 2014-04-01 20:18:04
[post_content] =>
In the past month's series on nutrition, I explained how the manner in which we eat can affect us as much as our food choices can. We looked at the vital roles that cooking and chewing play in digestion, and the importance of eating slowly and not too much. And I described the digestive tract from the mouth to the stomach. I think it’s important that everyone understands at least the basics of how their organs work, so let's look at the rest of the digestive tract this time.
Although we may have teeth and reality TV, we’re more like worms than we like to think. We’re all just a bunch of cylinders, with a tube of the outside world running through us. Worms put dirt in theirs, we put marshmallows in ours.
After the mouth, esophagus, and stomach, food enters the small intestine, which is about 23 feet long. It's where most nutrient absorption takes place, and all the value of good nutrition hinges on good absorption. At the beginning of the small intestine, a bunch of gastric juice is injected from the pancreas and gallbladder, which neutralizes the acidic food coming from the stomach, and makes the nutrients more absorbable. The pancreas produces a blend of digestive enzymes that break down the different components of food - fat, carbohydrates, and protein. The gallbladder squirts out bile (which is produced in the liver) to make fats absorbable.
The lining of the small intestine is composed of many folds, covered with tiny hair-like protrusions called villi (which are further covered with tinier hairs called microvilli). These greatly increase the surface area of the small intestine to maximize nutrient absorption. Some inflammatory conditions, such as celiac disease (gluten intolerance) and bacterial overgrowth of the small intestine (SIBO) can damage this membrane, leading to malnutrition.
The small intestine is followed by the much shorter but wider large intestine (most of which is called the colon). Food spends a very long time in the large intestine, where water and some remaining nutrients are absorbed, and stool is compacted and waits to be liberated. Finally, the stuff we can’t digest, along with waste products from throughout the body, leaves the rectum as stool. About 60 percent of its dry weight is bacteria.
Where does it come from? Riding along with us in our intestines are about 100 trillion microorganism passengers. There are about 500 different kinds, most of which are bacteria. They’re known as our “gut flora,” and they do all sorts of useful things for us, such as helping us digest things, protecting us from harmful microbes, synthesizing some vitamins, stimulating growth of intestinal cells, and assisting the immune system. We acquire these microscopic pals by eating food that’s contaminated with them or deliberately cultured with them (like yogurt and sauerkraut), and by taking them in supplements known as probiotics.
So, as we’ve seen, our environment (what we select from it based on taste) literally passes through us. We make the outside world into ourselves. It’s a practice worth taking seriously. Besides the healthy eating practices I discussed previously, some of the main factors in good absorption are having enough gastric juice, having healthy gastric membranes, having a strong and healthy population of gut flora, and having a relaxed nervous system.
Cultivating a relaxed nervous system has many additional benefits, so spend time in nature, eat in a calm environment, get massages, meditate, do whatever works for you to become peaceful. As for gastric juice, insufficient enzyme secretion is pretty common. Consider a good digestive enzyme complex, taken at the beginning of a meal. I’ve had at least a hundred patients who have overcome longstanding digestive problems just by supplementing for a while with digestive enzymes. Some people who have trouble digesting fat do well to take a product that also contains ox bile. Finally, promote healthy gut flora by eating live, fermented/cultured foods on a regular basis, and occasionally taking a course of probiotics (especially after using antibiotics).
If you’re interested in learning more about the big picture of eating and nutrition, check out the four week course I developed for The Dragontree, called How to Eat.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
[post_title] => Basic Vehicle Maintenance, Part Three: Know Your Insides
[post_excerpt] =>
[post_status] => publish
[comment_status] => open
[ping_status] => open
[post_password] =>
[post_name] => basic-vehicle-maintenance-part-three-know-insides
[to_ping] =>
[pinged] =>
[post_modified] => 2014-04-01 13:18:04
[post_modified_gmt] => 2014-04-01 20:18:04
[post_content_filtered] =>
[post_parent] => 0
[guid] => http://www.thedragontree.com/?p=3963
[menu_order] => 0
[post_type] => post
[post_mime_type] =>
[comment_count] => 0
[filter] => raw
[webinar_id] => 0
)
[2] => WP_Post Object
(
[ID] => 3643
[post_author] => 3
[post_date] => 2014-01-21 10:15:09
[post_date_gmt] => 2014-01-21 18:15:09
[post_content] => Most people’s health goals could be simplified to something like:
a long life and the good health to enjoy it. And long life we have. The biggest-ever jump in life expectancy, which occurred from around the mid 1800s to the mid 1900s, can be mostly attributed to the reduction in deaths by infection. Infectious disease has been well managed by improved hygiene, better quality of food and water, antibiotics, vaccines, and more effective emergency medical care. Now that infection is a relatively minor concern in the developed world, it’s worth looking at the factors that degrade health in our later years. These factors – things like diabetes, obesity, and the cardiovascular disease that goes along with them – can be dramatically influenced by diet.
Unfortunately, the mainstream medical world is plagued by some very significant misunderstandings about human nutrition, and it barely recognizes the profound psychological factors involved in how we feed ourselves. It’s time for a revolution in nutrition … and luckily, it’s well on its way.
A few months ago, Marc David, founder of the Institute for the Psychology of Eating asked me if I would be one of 50 thought leaders to be interviewed for an online conference called The Future of Nutrition. I am honored to be part of this – and in the company of some very impressive researchers. I strongly encourage you to check it out. It’s free.
Note: This is an old article and the recordings of this event are no longer available. However, all of what I discussed in my interview and much more can be found in my online course
How to Eat.
Be well,
Dr. Peter Borten
[post_title] => The Future of Nutrition
[post_excerpt] =>
[post_status] => publish
[comment_status] => open
[ping_status] => open
[post_password] =>
[post_name] => future-nutrition
[to_ping] =>
[pinged] =>
[post_modified] => 2020-08-03 19:54:03
[post_modified_gmt] => 2020-08-03 19:54:03
[post_content_filtered] =>
[post_parent] => 0
[guid] => http://www.thedragontree.com/?p=3643
[menu_order] => 0
[post_type] => post
[post_mime_type] =>
[comment_count] => 0
[filter] => raw
[webinar_id] => 0
)
)
[post_count] => 3
[current_post] => -1
[before_loop] => 1
[in_the_loop] =>
[post] => WP_Post Object
(
[ID] => 3815
[post_author] => 3
[post_date] => 2014-03-04 11:54:51
[post_date_gmt] => 2014-03-04 19:54:51
[post_content] =>
When I sit down to write an article, I often feel like I’m having a conversation with you, the reader. Except that it’s a one-sided conversation, in which I never ask you about yourself and I just monopolize the whole exchange. So. . . how about a little more about me? I grew up building robots, programming my own video games, and distributing surveys on bizarre topics around my high school. In the enneagram system of personality analysis (remotely like Myers-Briggs), I’m what’s known as a “number five” – AKA “The Investigator” or “The Scientist.” I have spent many a night jumping from one Wikipedia article to the next, or curled up with a thousand page book on herbs.
One of the topics I like investigating the most is major historical shifts in human health, behavior, and life expectancy – i.e., big changes in small periods of time. If you were to follow the trend of human life expectancy over the course of our existence, you’d see a very, very gradual slope upward and then a sharp jump in just the tiniest, most recent slice of time. This sharp upward jump began at different times in different parts of the world, but in the United States, as recently as 1850 the life expectancy at birth for a white male was just 38. Today it’s about 76.
It’s really a profound thing. Modern humans have been around for about 200,000 years. This 150 year revolution of life expectancy has occurred in just the last 0.00075% of our existence. Incidentally, a historical graph of world population shows a similar trend. It increased very, very slowly, and took a few massive hits, especially during the fourteenth century. (As centuries go, the 1300s were pretty much the crappiest ever. They were marked by famine, plague, crime, and general idiocy.) After that, the population continued to grow again, but still rather slowly compared to what began to happen around 1800. In 1800, the world population was 1 billion. In March of 2012, it hit 7 billion.
An anthropologist from another planet looking at a graph of these trends would probably point to that last slice of time and ask, “What the hell happened there?” Well, there are two very important words I used in a sentence about life expectancy a couple paragraphs ago: “at birth.” At birth, a white baby boy in 1850 was expected to live to 38.3 on average. But if he survived to age ten, his revised life expectancy would be 58 – a huge improvement.
At birth, a white baby boy in 2011 was expected to live to 76.3. If he survived to age ten, his revised life expectancy would be 76.9. There’s barely a difference.
If that child from 1850 made it to age 50, his life expectancy would then be 72. Today’s white boy at age 50 would have a life expectancy of 79.6. Again, there’s barely a difference. So, as you can see, the narrowing of the gap has occurred almost entirely in the early years of life. And there are two important conclusions to be made from this.
First, the tremendous increase in life expectancy at birth can be attributed primarily to three things - better sanitation and cleaner living conditions, better safety standards, and better medicine, including vaccinations. Whatever issues we may have with vaccines (and there certainly are some), it’s undeniable that they’ve hugely decreased child mortality.
Second, we’ve made a much smaller dent in the maximum human lifespan. As an adult British aristocrat in the 1200s, you could expect to live to age 64. By the 1500s, if you made it to age 21, you’d probably live to be about 71. And in the past several centuries, these numbers have barely changed.
Nowadays, if we want to live longer we need to take the long view, since most of us won’t die of infections or accidents. The things old people die of are often decades in the making. The primary killers are coronary heart disease (disturbance in blood supply to heart muscle) and stroke (disturbance in blood supply to the brain), both of which are blood vessel issues. Blood vessels don’t just get hard, clogged, or weak overnight, so there’s a huge opportunity to make a positive difference in this process.
As I see it, there are three main interventions that have the most impact. The first is nutrition, and my nutshell recommendation is to strictly limit consumption of sugars and flour, moderately limit red meat and dairy consumption, and have plenty of vegetables, herbs and spices, fruits and fish. The second is exercise, and the best exercise is a form you enjoy and that you can happily do every day. The third is connection – connection to people, connection to nature, connection to whatever you call the greater power that keeps it all going.
I’ll be writing more about these trends and, in particular, the nutrition factor, this month. Meanwhile, I encourage you to choose one of these areas of positive intervention to focus on each day this week – food, exercise, or connection.
Be well,
Peter
[post_title] => Big Changes in Small Periods
[post_excerpt] =>
[post_status] => publish
[comment_status] => open
[ping_status] => open
[post_password] =>
[post_name] => big-changes
[to_ping] =>
[pinged] =>
[post_modified] => 2014-03-04 11:54:51
[post_modified_gmt] => 2014-03-04 19:54:51
[post_content_filtered] =>
[post_parent] => 0
[guid] => http://www.thedragontree.com/?p=3815
[menu_order] => 0
[post_type] => post
[post_mime_type] =>
[comment_count] => 0
[filter] => raw
[webinar_id] => 0
)
[comment_count] => 0
[current_comment] => -1
[found_posts] => 25
[max_num_pages] => 1
[max_num_comment_pages] => 0
[is_single] =>
[is_preview] =>
[is_page] =>
[is_archive] => 1
[is_date] =>
[is_year] =>
[is_month] =>
[is_day] =>
[is_time] =>
[is_author] =>
[is_category] => 1
[is_tag] =>
[is_tax] =>
[is_search] =>
[is_feed] =>
[is_comment_feed] =>
[is_trackback] =>
[is_home] =>
[is_privacy_policy] =>
[is_404] =>
[is_embed] =>
[is_paged] =>
[is_admin] =>
[is_attachment] =>
[is_singular] =>
[is_robots] =>
[is_favicon] =>
[is_posts_page] =>
[is_post_type_archive] =>
[query_vars_hash:WP_Query:private] => e5a10b0424d9dd65cdcb6a52789b639c
[query_vars_changed:WP_Query:private] =>
[thumbnails_cached] =>
[allow_query_attachment_by_filename:protected] =>
[stopwords:WP_Query:private] =>
[compat_fields:WP_Query:private] => Array
(
[0] => query_vars_hash
[1] => query_vars_changed
)
[compat_methods:WP_Query:private] => Array
(
[0] => init_query_flags
[1] => parse_tax_query
)
)
Thank you for this article – altho I thought there could have been a more substantive discussion of the pros/cons of being carnivore vs. herbivore. Until August 2017, I had been a carnivore and I had a philosophical “aha” moment for the reasons you mentioned above to change my diet. I chose, as a compromise, to be a pescatarian. There are pros and cons to that as well for some of the same reasons mentioned above. I did lose about 25 pounds (which didn’t go un-noticed from my friends and family and motivated some of them to follow suit), feel much better and my cholesterol numbers have significantly improved – to the point I’m no longer on Rx. But, my main motivation for remaining a pescatarian is for the philosophical reasons. I am a firm believer we eat too much meat and the dis-eases from which most Americans suffer can be linked to the amount of meat consumed.
Many years ago, while in cooking school, I made a deal with myself. My school was all about knowing where your food comes from (that ensures quality among other things). One of our tours was a slaughter house.
The deal I made was – if I couldn’t stand what I saw – I had no business buying or eating meat. As it happens, the part that disturbed me, wasn’t the killing (that was extremely fast an humane). It was the wholesale killing without a flinch from anyone involved and no thanks to the animal for providing sustenance for others.
I found myself going through the “plant” constantly whispering “Thank you, thank you, thank you…I won’t take this for granted”.
So, I continue to eat meat. However…I changed my buying habits. I only buy from ranches and farms that give the animal a good life, do not use antibiotics or hormones and take the animals lives in humane ways. I gave up on buying from companies who practice factory farming.
It’s more expensive, certainly. But that also ensures I buy less meat; healthier meat and locally sourced meat. We’re one of the few countries with a friendly growing climate, that choose to make meat a main dish and other foods side dishes. A substantial part of the world practices just the opposite.
Important to note that a completely plant based diet, requires land too (though not as much). In the case of soybean and palm oil farming, the global impact to habitat loss (certainly in the Amazon) is astronomical…as is palm oil farming.
I think it behooves us to see where *all* our food is coming from and make better choices across the board.
I am still on this journey of discovery of what works for me. I think at some point we’ll understand more about the interplay between genetics and diet. Who our ancestors were and what their diet probably played a role in what is good for us, but even they were not able to eat an ideal diet for their body. I don’t think a vegetarian or vegan diet would be the best for me, given my experience and ancestry but some read meat, some other types of animal and vegetable protein probably would be ideal. I am 3/4 Latinx with a fairly good concentration of Native American who relied on the three sisters: corn, beans and a starch to provide the complete protein that was for them, the staff of life. My Irish ancestors relied on fish and seaweed. (BTW: Potatoes were a much later addition by the English who thought they were helping to feed them to disastrous results).