Parkour Visions Summit and Talk

On August 13-15th, my friends Rafe Kelley and Tyson Cecka are hosting a parkour summit at their Seattle gym Parkour Visions. For those of you not familiar with the sport, here's a description from the Parkour Visions site:

"The essence of Parkour can be stated simply: it is the art of overcoming obstacles as swiftly and efficiently as possible using only your body. The fundamentals include running, jumping, and climbing, and we build on these fundamentals to improve our ability to pass over, under, around and through obstacles with more complex movements. Parkour is a system of fitness training that improves strength, speed, agility, co-ordination, stamina, endurance, and precision. It offers a full-body workout at any level of experience, and improves your ability to move, to harness your confidence, to change how you see the world. Parkour practitioners are called traceurs."

The summit will include seminars on strength training, injury prevention and rehab, and nutrition, as well as parkour jams, a roundtable and a dinner. I'll be giving a talk titled "Natural Eating for Sustainable Athletic Performance" on Saturday, August 14 from noon to 1:00 pm.

Registration is $40 for the whole summit. You can read a description of it here, and find a link to the registration system at the bottom of this page.

Speaking at Wise Traditions 2010

I'm happy to announce that I'll be presenting at the Weston A. Price foundation's 2010 Wise Traditions conference. The conference will be held in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, Nov 12-14. The theme is the politics of food.

Sally Fallon Morell has invited me to give a talk on the diet and health of Pacific islanders. The talk will be titled "Kakana Dina: Diet and Health in the Pacific Islands", and it will take place on Sunday, November 14th from 4:00 to 5:20 pm. In preparation for the talk, I've read eight books and countless journal articles. Although some of the material will be familiar to people who follow the blog, I will not be rehashing what I've already published. I have nearly an hour and a half to talk, so I'll be going into some depth on the natural history and traditional food habits of Pacific island populations. Not just macronutrient breakdowns... specific foods and traditional preparation methods.

Learn about the health of traditional Pacific island populations, and what has changed since Western contact. Learn about traditional cooking and fermentation techniques. See unpublished photos from the Kitava study, courtesy of Dr. Staffan Lindeberg. Learn about the nutritional and ceremonial role of mammals including pork... and the most gruesome food of all.

I hope to see you there!


Kitava photo courtesy of Dr. Staffan Lindeberg

My TEDx Talk, "The American Diet: a Historical Perspective"

On October 21st, I spoke at the Harvard Food Law Society's TEDx conference, Forum on Food Policy.  The conference kicked off with three talks on nutrition, by Drs. Walter Willett, David Ludwig and myself.  My talk is only 17 minutes long as per TED format, but it's packed with research on both quantitative and qualitative changes in the US diet over the last two centuries.  It contains surprises for almost anyone, and I can guarantee you've never learned this much about the history of the US diet in 17 minutes.  The talk was titled "The American Diet: a Historical Perspective"; you can access it by following that link.

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Ancestral Health Symposium 2012

I recently returned from AHS12 and a little side trip to visit family.  The conference was hosted at Harvard University through the Harvard Food Law Society.  Many thanks to all the organizers who made it happen.  By and large, it went smoothly.

The science as expected ranged from outstanding to mediocre, but I was really encouraged by the presence and enthusiastic participation of a number of quality researchers and clinicians. The basic concept of ancestral health is something almost anyone can get behind: many of our modern health problems are due to a mismatch between the modern environment and what our bodies "expect".  The basic idea is really just common sense, but of course the devil is in the details when you start trying to figure out what exactly our bodies expect, and how best to give it to them.  I think our perspective as a community is moving in the right direction.

Read more »

AHS11 Talk Posted

After a one-year delay, my talk from the 2011 Ancestral Health Symposium is online with slides synched.  The talk is titled "Obesity: Old Solutions for a New Problem", and it's an overview of some of the research linking food reward to food intake and body fatness.  This is the talk that introduced a fundamentally new idea to the ancestral community: not only does the chemical composition of food matter, but also its sensory qualities-- in fact, the sensory qualities of food are among the primary determinants of food intake.  I didn't come up with the idea of course, I simply translated the research for a more general audience and put my own evolutionary spin on it.

The talk would be a bit different if I were to give it today, as my understanding of the subject has expanded, and my speaking skills have improved.  However, the central message remains as true today as it was a year ago.  You can find the talk here.

The slide synching was done by an extremely generous man named Ben Fury.  As you can see in the video, he did an excellent job.  Without Ben, this video would have remained in internet limbo forever.

Below, I've published a message from Ben explaining the interesting work that he does.  Please contact him if you think it's interesting.

A Message from Ben Fury

I was writing a book on health, fitness and diet in 2009 when my house burned down in the Station Fire, along with 165,000 acres of my beloved Angeles National Forest. Since then, I've had a series of people needing help come through my life, that have upgraded and morphed my talents...

Seniors with chronic pain, falls, brittle bones, and stiff shrunken muscles.
Diabetics with out of control blood sugars, going blind, and having limbs lopped off.
Neurologically challenged people with spastic limbs and foggy brains.
Fat, listless, unhappy people with no idea how they got that way, seeing no way out of the darkness.
Each of them needing help in different ways, but all with an underlying theme of what works to help heal our conditions:

•     Remove flour, sugar, beans, and heavily processed oils from our diet. Eat real food.
•     Get strong.
•     Get flexible.
•     Stop ceding health responsibility to outside forces, and take charge of our own wellness.
•     Only use truly evidence based medicine. Don't just pop the latest pill or get the latest surgery all the other people are doing. Be wary of the disease mongers in both the conventional and alternative camps.
•     Find our "happy thoughts." Use the simple restoratives of sleep, play, and reflection, to let go of pain, find inner peace, and let in joy and purposeful outer direction.

The methods to accomplish these goals are varied, and I have both non-profit and for-profit ventures to share them.
Their websites are currently in development.
The for-profit is BenFury.com
The non-profit is PainRelieversUSA.org , whose mission statement is:

To move beyond pain management...
and learn to live pain free.

Feel free to write to me  at: ben [at] benfury dot com

Speaking at AHS13

The 2013 Ancestral Health Symposium will be held in Atlanta, GA, August 14-17.  Last year was a great conference, and I look forward to more informative talks and networking.  Tickets go fast, so reserve yours now if you plan to attend!

This year, I'll be speaking on insulin and obesity.  My talk will be titled "Insulin and Obesity: Reconciling Conflicting Evidence".  In this talk, I'll present the evidence for and against the idea that elevated insulin contributes to the development of obesity.  One hypothesis states that elevated insulin contributes to obesity, while the other states that elevated insulin is caused by obesity and does not contribute to it.  Both sides of the debate present evidence that appears compelling, and it often seems like each side is talking past the other rather than trying to incorporate all of the evidence into a larger, more powerful model.

There's a lot evidence that can be brought to bear on this question, but much of it hasn't reached the public yet.  I'll explore a broad swath of evidence from clinical case studies, observational studies, controlled trials, animal research, physiology, and cell biology to test the two competing hypotheses and outline a model that can explain all of the seemingly conflicting data.  Much of this information hasn't appeared on this blog.  My goal is to put together a talk that will be informative to a researcher but also accessible to an informed layperson.

On a separate note, my AHS12 talk "Digestive Health, Inflammation and the Metabolic Syndrome" has not been posted online because the video recording of my talk has mysteriously disappeared.  I think many WHS readers would be interested in the talk, since it covers research on the important and interdependent influence of gut health, inflammation, and psychological stress on the metabolic syndrome (the quintessential modern metabolic disorder).  I'm going to try to find time to make a narrated slideshow so I can post it on YouTube.

AHS Talk This Saturday

For those who are attending the Ancestral Health Symposium this year, my talk will be at 9:00 AM on Saturday.  The title is "Insulin and Obesity: Reconciling Conflicting Evidence", and it will focus on the following two questions:

1. Does elevated insulin cause obesity; does obesity cause elevated insulin; or both?
2. Is there a unifying hypothesis that's able to explain all of the seemingly conflicting evidence cited by each side of the debate?

I'll approach the matter in true scientific fashion: stating hypotheses, making rational predictions based on those hypotheses, and seeing how well the evidence matches the predictions.  I'll explore the evidence in a way that has never been done before (to my knowledge), even on this blog.

Why am I giving this talk?  Two reasons.  First, it's an important question that has implications for the prevention and treatment of obesity, and it has received a lot of interest in the ancestral health community and to some extent among obesity researchers.  Second, I study the mechanisms of obesity professionally, I'm wrapping up a postdoc in a lab that has focused on the role of insulin in body fatness (lab of Dr. Michael W. Schwartz), and I've thought about this question a lot over the years-- so I'm in a good position to speak about it.

The talk will be accessible and informative to almost all knowledge levels, including researchers, physicians, and anyone who knows a little bit about insulin.  I'll cover most of the basics as we go.  I guarantee you'll learn something, whatever your knowledge level.

Speaking in Lisbon on October 5

My friend Pedro Bastos graciously invited me to speak at a conference he organized in Lisbon on October 5 titled "Food, Nutrition and the Prevention of Chronic Diseases".  I will give two talks:

• "Ancestral Health: What is Our Human Potential?"  This talk will explore the health of non-industrial cultures in an effort to understand how much of our modern chronic disease burden is preventable, and it will briefly touch on one major aspect of non-industrial life that may protect against the "diseases of civilization".  This presentation will focus on age-adjusted data from high quality studies.  
• "Why Do We Overeat: a Neurobiological Perspective."  This talk will attempt to explain why most of us consume more calories than we need to maintain weight-- a phenomenon that is a central cause of morbidity and mortality in the modern world.  It will touch on some of the brain mechanisms involved in ingestive behavior, and outline a framework to explain why these mechanisms are often maladaptive in today's environment.

Pedro will speak about dairy consumption, vitamin D, and chronic disease.  

The conference is targeted to health professionals and students of nutrition, however it's open to anyone who is interested in these topics.  It's sponsored by NutriScience, a Portuguese nutrition education and consulting company.  Sadly, I don't speak Portuguese, so my talks will be in English.  

Access the full program, and register for the conference, using the links below:

Program

Registration

Recent and Upcoming Appearances

Smarter Science of Slim

Jonathan Bailor recently released an interview we did a few months ago on the neurobiology of body fat regulation, and the implications for fat loss.  It's a good overview of the regulation of food intake and body fatness by the brain.  You can listen to it here.

Super Human Radio

Carl Lanore interviewed me about my lab's work on hypothalamic inflammation and obesity.  I'm currently wrapping up a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Michael Schwartz at the University of Washington, and the interview touches on our recent review paper "Hypothalamic Inflammation: Marker or Mechanism of Obesity Pathogenesis?"  Dan Pardi and I are frequent guests on Carl's show and I'm always impressed by how well Carl prepares prior to the interview.  You can listen to the interview here.

The Reality Check podcast

Pat Roach of the Reality Check podcast interviewed me about the scientific validity of the "carbohydrate-insulin hypothesis" of obesity.  The Reality Check podcast "explores a wide range of controversies and curiosities using science and critical thinking", and a dash of humor.  This one should be very informative for people who aren't sure what to believe and want a deeper perspective on the science of insulin and body weight regulation.  You can listen to it here.

Obesity Society conference

Next Thursday 11/9, I'll be speaking at the 2013 Obesity Society conference in Atlanta.  My talk is titled "The Glial Response to Obesity is Reversible", and it will be about my work on the reversibility of obesity-associated hypothalamic neuropathology in mice.  My talk will be part of the session "Neuronal Control of Satiety" between 3:00 and 4:30, specific time pending.  See you there!

Public Talk at the University of Virginia on Friday, January 17

This Friday, I'll be giving an invited lecture at the University of Virginia, my undergraduate alma mater.  I was kindly invited by a medical student named Robert Abbott, and it worked out well because I was already traveling to Charlottesville.

The talk will be titled "Why Do We Overeat?  A Neurobiological Perspective".  Here's the teaser:

Obesity is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality in industrialized nations, yet this is a relatively recent phenomenon.  In the United States, increasing obesity prevalence has paralleled a gradual increase of daily energy intake.  Why do most Americans eat more than we used to, and more than we need to maintain a lean state, despite negative consequences?  This presentation will touch on the neurobiology of action selection, the neurobiology of energy homeostasis, and why our central nervous system hardware may not be up to the task of constructively navigating the modern food environment.

The talk will be attended by medical students, but I also hope to have some doctors and researchers show up, as well as people from the broader Charlottesville community.  It will be a thought-provoking talk regardless of your background, and it will touch on some of my own work.

The talk will be held in the main medical school auditorium, MEB 3110, on Friday, January 17 at noon.  You can find driving directions and parking information by following this link.  You'll probably have to park in a parking garage, either the Lee Street or Central Grounds garage (directions in the link).

For a map of the UVA health system, follow this link.  The Medical Education Building is number 44 on the map, and the talk will be in room MEB 3110 on the 3rd floor of the building.

See you there!

Why Do We Overeat? A Neurobiological Perspective

I just posted a narrated Powerpoint version of my talk "Why Do We Overeat? A Neurobiological Perspective" to YouTube.  Here's the abstract:

In the United States, the "obesity epidemic" has paralleled a gradual increase in daily calorie intake.  Why do we eat more than we used to, and more than we need to remain lean-- despite negative consequences?  This talk reviews the neurobiology of eating behavior, recent changes in the US food system, and why the brain's hardware may not be up to the task of constructively navigating the modern food environment.

This is the same talk I gave at the University of Virginia this January.  I had a number of people request it, so here it is:

 

Why Do We Overeat? A Neurobiological Perspective

 

This is one of my favorite talks, and it was very well received at UVA.  If you find it informative, please share it!