good eating habits for 14 year olds

longevity & why i eat once a daynutrition & our hybrid body in the 1950’s, my friend bill was a verygifted engineer who made an extraordinary car. the car’s main fuel source was electricity,and gasoline was to be put in whenever available. it was fine for the car to use gasoline everyother day or so, but the problem was that

good eating habits for 14 year olds, people ran it on gasoline nearly 90% of thetime. this resulted in the car breaking down frequently,all the while bill was trying to tell people "use it the way it was designed!” despite his advice, people continued to theorizeabout how to properly use the car.

bill went bankrupt and left the automotiveindustry soon after. this situation my poor imaginary friend billfound himself in is quite like our modern health environment. how did eating get so complicated? most of us just want to feel good, look goodand live a long life. you would think by now there would be a straightforwardconsensus on what our eating habits should look like, but we’re faced with countlesstrains of thought on the topic. maybe we’re supposed to be doing the abcdiet or xyz diet or something in between? one of the first “diets” was proposedby a man named george cheyne in 1724.

now, on amazon you can find over 50,000 differentbooks on the topic. like bill’s car, surely there is a simpleway we should be fueling our bodies that is most suitable for its design. obviously we’re not engineered, but we homosapiens emerged around 200,000 years ago and the majority of that time, the food environmentcould not have been anything like today’s food environment. agriculture didn’t even exist for a good190,000 years of that time. not even the fruits and vegetables we havetoday would have been similar as we hadn’t cultivated them to our liking.

just 700 years ago here’s what a bananawould have looked like. so what way of eating did we adapt to? the environment would have chosen our dietrather than us. your choices would have been to eat what wasavailable or be dead. the idea that our body must have adapted toa certain ratio of macronutrients available in the environment is not novel; and recentlyhas become quite well known due to the “paleo diet”. however, what i’m getting at is our bodywould have also had to have adapted to how often the food was available – there shouldbe a natural frequency of eating that promotes

health and longevity. where to start? the logic would be that more nourishment,more food would make you healthier and live longer. but let’s take a look at this from the firstprinciples method as described by elon musk: “it’s kind of mentally easier to reasonby analogy rather than from first principles. first principles is kind of a physics wayof looking at the world. and what that really means is you kind ofboil things down to the most fundamental truths and say ‘ok what are we sure is true?’and then reason up from there.

that takes a lot more mental energy.” so what do we know about longevity? other than exercise, the word “superfood”might come to mind. maybe more omega-3’s or some red wine ormaking sure to take supplements and drink less alcohol. there are a lot of things that contributeto longevity, but there is one method accepted by science that you can use to consistentlyincrease longevity. "if i take any organism on the planet earthfrom yeast cells to spiders, insects, rabbits, dogs... and i reduce their caloric intakeby 30%, they live 30% longer.

the only organism which has not yet been deliberatelytested by scientists are homo-sapiens!" let's start here. for some time, the conventional wisdom hasbeen that you need to get 3 balanced meals a day to stay healthy. ever since i was a kid, “breakfast, lunchand dinner” seemed as natural as sleeping or going to the bathroom. breakfast was the most important meal of theday, i needed a healthy lunch to focus the rest of the school day and being sent to bedwithout dinner was child abuse. the situation is basically the same in japanwhere i now live, as with the rest of the

world. if we want to reduce caloric intake to increaselifespan, the only choice then is to eat less at each meal, because we need 3 meals, right? but where did this 3 meals a day idea comefrom? as abigail carroll suggests in her book “threesquares: the invention of the american meal”: eating three meals a day was basically inventeddue to culture, when european settlers got to america, they found native americans werebasically just eating whenever they felt the urge to, rather than at specified times. the europeans took their lack of defined eatingtimes as evidence that they were uncivilized

and had them change. in short: the 3 meals a day paradigm is notbased off of our biological needs. how our environment designed usin a hunter gatherer culture it wasn’t surprising at all to feast on a big catch, then surviveon very little or no food for an extended period of time until they were in need ofanother big source of fat and protein. in fact, the environment up until now wouldsuggest that if we could not do that, we probably wouldn’t be alive to be reading about dieting. the pirah㣠people, an indigenous hunter-gatherergroup of the amazon rainforest was extensively studied by an anthropological linguist nameddaniel everett.

he found they do not eat every day or evenattempt to do so. they were even aware of food storage techniquesyet never used them except to barter with brazilian traders. when questioned about why they do not storefood for themselves they explained “i store meat in the belly of my brother”. until the advent of agriculture, eating 3meals a day and in some cases even eating every day was a near impossibility. some of you may be pointing to the fact thatthe life expectancy in the paleolithic era was much lower than now at around 33 years,as a sign that our modern eating habits are

healthier. however, infant mortality rate was a big factorin bringing that number down. you have to understand that one of the effectsof modern civilization and technology is that you can be unresourceful or made up of weakgenetic material and not die. as doug mcguff explains about the life expectancyback then: “it didn’t really have anything to do with anabolic catabolic balance or longterm health benefits because there were older survivors and the fossil evidence of thoseolder survivors based on ligamentous attachments and bony assessment and bone mineral densitywas: they were extraordinarily robust.” glucose metabolism & how “conventional wisdom”screwed us

the common misconception is that a stableblood glucose is necessary for survival, which would biologically justify 3 meals a day. bear with me through a bit of biochemistryto understand why constantly consuming carbohydrates to maintain blood glucose is not only unnecessarybut can be a detrimental and vicious cycle. so, after you eat some carbohydrates- bread,pasta, candy, whatever. glucose enters the bloodstream and insulinis secreted to distribute the glucose properly. via an insulin receptor, glucose enters thecells to produce energy. this can only happen at a certain rate, soto overload the cell with glucose or have glucose sit in the bloodstream, 70 grams canbe stored in the liver and 200 grams in the

muscle. so you have your morning bagel and some frappa-"whatever you want, some vanilla bullshit latte cappa thing, you know whatever you got,i don't care." and you’ve stored all the glucose you can store. so it has to go into your body fat. as well as storing it as energy, your bodyputs it in your body fat because the fat cells have less complex machinery as the other cells. too much glucose can bind to the proteinsand muck up the machinery of the cells in a harmful inflammatory process called glycation.

it's kind of like pouring pancake syrup intoa car engine. the problem here is that if your energy levelsstart to wane, you can't tap the energy out of your stored body fat because the hormonethat does that- hormone sensitive lipase is sensitive to insulin. insulin will not allow you to tap body fatfor energy. if you have a bunch of insulin sitting inyour blood from processing a bunch of glucose before and you need energy, you're going toget ravenously hungry and will need to jack your blood sugar up short term with a snackor something to raise your energy levels again. this is why if you’re following the recommendedamerican diet, you’re usually going to be

stuck in this loop of wanting to eat everytime your blood glucose drops and 3 meals a day will feel very necessary. even medical doctor peter attia fell victimto this: “despite exercising 3 or 4 hours every single day and following the food pyramidto the letter, i gained a lot of weight and developed something called ‘metabolic syndrome’“ ketosis to the rescueif you stop eating glucose for about 10 to 12 hours, your glucose stores will depleteand your body will start breaking down fat so that the liver can produce something calledketone bodies. ketone bodies produce energy for your cellsthrough similar pathways as glucose but are

much more stable, efficient and don't causecomplications like we just talked about. you may have heard of this ketosis state referredto as “starvation mode” in school, but this by no means suggests you are about tostarve. i particularly dislike this term because itsuggests that glucose/carbohydrates is our body’s primary fuel source, when in factit is possible to live entirely without carbohydrates. "humans have absolutely no requirement forcarbohydrate. not 1 gram do we require. we have this fabulous liver that producesas much glucose as you require." case in point: a 456 pound 27 year old manin scotland fasted an incredible 382 days

consuming only water and vitamin supplements. he lost 276 pounds and completed the fastwith no ill effects. he was technically in “starvation mode”this entire time and his body was using his stored body fat for energy. quick note: ketosis and diabetic ketoacidosisare not the same thing. several years back, when i first heard aboutlow carb diets, i was skeptical and frankly when i heard my close friend’s mother wastrying the atkins diet, i was worried for her. however, after understanding the biochemistrybehind it, i started doing the ‘paleo diet’.

i felt great in general, had a better physiquewith less effort and much more stable energy levels. the downside was it got kind of annoying tohave to plan my meals so much, so i would cheat a lot here and there. the benefits of fastingeven after people were in environments where they could eat much more frequently, the conceptof fasting for health benefits has been around for some time. an egyptian pyramid inscription from around3800 b.c. reads “humans live on one-quarter of what they eat; on the other three-quarterslives their doctor.”

plato apparently fasted for greater mentalefficiency, the “luther of medicine” philippus paracelsus called fasting “the greatestremedy” and mark twain suggested fasting to be more effective than any medicine. the romans even found that they cure peoplewho were possessed with demons by shutting them in a room without food. to simplify an incredibly complex process,aging in essence is the result of cumulative damage to your dna. professor of genetics, david sinclair andhis team found that not eating stimulates the sirtuin proteins which are directly responsiblefor dna repair.

professor of neuroscience mark mattson, atjohn hopkins university neuroscience showed how fasting promotes the growth of new neuronsin the brain. this explains why fasting has been linkedto the prevention of neurodegenerative diseases like parkinson’s and alzheimer’s. this information got me excited about intermittentfasting. with intermittent fasting you’re not eatingfor 16 hours of the day which gives your body time to deplete the glucose stores and startburning fat as well as reap the benefits discussed above. so many sources are pointing to the key herebeing that whether you are doing extended

fasting, intermittent fasting or simply eatingless, you are giving your body a chance to deplete its glucose stores and dip into ketosis,leading to the health benefits discussed. i was keen on the fact that i could get similareffects to paleo with more leeway in my diet. the problem with intermittent fasting wasi found with myself craving food outside of the 8 hour eating period, and i still hadto be somewhat strict with what i ate (although not as strict as my 3 meals a day regimin) upton sinclair who was born in the the late1800’s and lived to the swell age of 90, published a book in 1911 called “the fastingcure”. the book was inspired by the personal accountsof 250 people who cured some ailment with

extended fasting. the ailments ranged from colds, headaches,constipation to arthritis, valvular heart disease and cancer. dr. alan goldhamer spoke about how in 2012,a 42 year old patient cured her cancer (stage 3 follicular lymphoma) with a 21 day fast. all this opened me up to try my first weeklong fast... but i ended up around the 4th day even though i didn’t feel particularlybad. while i missed my goal and i didn’t reallyfeel all that different afterward, over the following days i started to notice something.

i used to enjoy eating some refined sugarcrap here and there, but after the fast i wasn't so interested. it was like it reset my eating preferences. around this time i came across a book called"kuufuku ga hito o kenkou ni suru" - by dr. yoshinori nagumo. the title means ”hunger makes people healthy”. and it provides an incredibly compelling argumentfor limiting yourself to one meal per day. it touched upon many of the things i’vetalked about here, some things i didn’t and it dispelled some worries i had like malnutritionand whatnot.

(also, it was easy to trust him since he’s30 years older than me and looks younger than i do.) i decided to try eating once per day for 2weeks. for 3 weeks prior to starting, i had beenshowing my little sister around tokyo while eating basically anything and everything thatlooked good. i started the nagumo plan the day after sheleft and the first three days were definitely the hardest. when the clock hit around 11am, i realizedi wasn’t getting the joy from eating that i was used to around this time of day andstarted really wanting to eat.

my stomach didn’t particularly hurt, itwas the equivalent of not being able to play video games when getting home from middleschool. around 4pm was when i was convinced that iwas really hungry and needed to eat. waiting another 30 minutes until 4.30pm toeat was like pushing through a last set of squats. the next two days were slightly easier, andcome the 4th day i realized i wasn’t looking at the clock thinking “ah...only 4 morehours to go!”. a week later i decided to put the diet tothe test by doing a 50 kilometer bike ride to atsugi from tokyo.

i hadn’t been working out all that muchand a usual bike ride for me was about 3 kilometers. it was unsurprisingly difficult, but i neverfelt really physically weak. i had hunger pangs earlier than normal, buti didn’t feel like i had less strength from a lack of food. this made me decide to stick with eating onceper day. it’s been a month since i started and ifeel great in general, my energy levels are very stable, i feel more focused and surprisinglyi have less problems with hunger compared to intermittent fasting. even if i don’t eat the healthiest meali can now feel confident that my body will

have more than enough time to empty out whateverexcess glucose or toxins i ingested. (the only time i do crave unhealthy food iswhen i’ve had some alcohol.) looking back, it’s hard to imagine havingto pile so much food into my stomach throughout the day. other than the health benefits, one otherreason i do this is the same reason steve jobs wore basically the same thing everyday:it makes choosing easier and it frees my brain up to focus on other things. at least for myself, the amount of new informationi get only changes my behavior by a small factor.

for example if i increase my knowledge aboutthe detriments of alcohol by say... 60% maybe i’ll cut my intake by 30%. with this article alone i’m not expectingyou to suddenly start eating once per day, but hopefully you can start giving your bodya break and eat when you need to, not when the clock says you should. if you liked this, be sure to subscribe. i'm trying my best to have a new video outat least every two weeks so stay tuned. you can see my last video here.