Paul Jaminet - 11 Dec

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Dedicated
to the memory of
Annette Marie Jaminet,
Pauls mother, who died of cancer at age 33,
and
Tei-Kuang Shih,
Shou-Chings father, who died of stroke at age 62,
and to the hope that
disease and premature death
will soon be eradicated.

I n writing The Primal Blueprint, my goal was to improve the overall health of the general populationthe folks who just want to be healthier, happier, stronger, fitter, and more productive. Most of the complaints, the aches and pains, and the concerns that your mom, your dad, your friends, your grandparents, your coworkers, and you worry about arent inevitable. Most health issues can be avoided with just a few simple tweaks to your lifestyle.

I try to help guide people toward these changes by showing them whats worked for me and countless others. Im a generalist, and thats how Ive always been. The world needs generalists. But the world also needs people who delve deeply into the medical and scientific literature, probing for knowledge that can address the specific illnesses and health issues reducing the quality of lifeand life spanof people today.

Paul and Shou-Ching Jaminet, both trained scientists, are perhaps the finest examples of the type of experts we need. Their book and blog, Perfect Health Diet, represent the culmination of a half decade of rigorous research. Theyve combed the relevant literature for clues, hints, and knowledge they needed to address their own rapidly deteriorating health. What they found healed their ailments and changed their lives. And what began as a highly specific approach to their own health issues quickly became a more general, overarching approach to good healthfor everyone. Anyone and everyone will benefit from their dietary recommendations, but the Jaminets advice is particularly relevant for those suffering from health issues that traditional medicine has been unable to treat or improve.

If youre reading this book, youve likely had some personal experience with the failings of conventional medicine. Now, I dont want to sound antimedicine. Im not. Conventional medical professionals are fantastic technicians and mechanics; they can patch you up, keep you alive, put in new equipment and take out old malfunctioning stuff. They wield an array of powerful drugs with specific applications, many of them helpful. They have an immense amount of technology at their behest. And yet many in the world of conventional medicine are missing the big pictureor at least a large part of it.

With Paul and Shou-Ching, you have the missing piece. They bridge the gap between the philosophical, broad-based, almost intuitive ancestral approach to health and the hard-core data hounds who need to see proof at every step. The authors are scientists through and through, an astrophysicist and a molecular biologist, who deftly wield the scepter of cold, hard science while paying homage to the inescapable wisdom of traditional, ancestral, evolutionary health.

While we wait for the medical community to catch up and get with the big picture, were lucky to have a pair of minds like the Jaminets to read, absorb, and learn from in the meantime. This is the future of medicine, of health. It has to be, because its the right way to do things, a way of thinking about food and nutrition that helps us to heal and live better lives rather than making us suffer.

If history is any indication, eventually we do get it right. A consensus forms and is broken; this process might repeat several times over many decades (or longer), but it eventually coalesces behind what is truly right.

Were reaching that moment. We started as a fledgling group of athletes, scientists, doctors, patients, parents, and skeptics who found something that seemed to work really, really well. And so we shouted it from our keyboards. We wrote books. People read our words, implemented the advice they advocated, and saw their health transform before their eyes. Now, Im not sure were quite yet out of the fledgling stage, but were growing. You cant deny that.

This, the newest edition of Perfect Health Diet, is helping lead the charge. By reading this book, you are taking part in a new (yet ancestral), radical (yet reasonable) movement toward better health. For that, I thank you, and I look eagerly toward what lies ahead.

Mark Sisson

Author of The Primal Blueprint, publisher of Marksdailyapple.com

W e are two scientists who ate poorly and ignored a gradual decline in our health. By age forty, we had developed disturbing health problems:

Paul had neuropathy, memory loss, impaired mood, physical sluggishness, and rosacea.

Shou-Ching had painful endometriosis, ovarian cysts, and uterine fibroids; hypothyroidism; allergies; constipation, acid reflux, and bloating.

Doctors were of little help. Nothing we tried worked; surgery made Shou-Ching worse. Medical professionals couldnt even offer a reason why we were experiencing these problems. Yet, every year, we were a little worse than the year before.

Then, in 2005, we tried Chinese herbal medicines: twigs, bark, seeds, and leaves prepared at home like a tea. They seemed to work, but we both developed allergic reactions to the medicine and had to stop.

That planted an idea: if medicines had no effect but a tea made from plants did, perhaps the path forward lay in what we were eatingin our diets.

Paul was then developing a new approach to economics, a theory of relationships and social networks (see relationshipeconomics.com). Through the economist Craig Newmark, Paul learned of the low-carb Paleo diet of the economist Art de Vany.

The Paleo idea is that we evolved for 2.6 million years eating hunted We were persuaded to give the Paleo diet a try.

Paul became leaner and stronger. Shou-Chings allergies and digestive problems cleared. Clearly there was something to this diet.

But new problems appeared. Paul developed a systemic fungal infection; over the next year his cognitive and neuropathic issues worsened, and after a year of very-low-carb dieting, he developed scurvy, which caused his weight to drop to a mere 145 pounds.

The scurvy was a wake-up call: if we were malnourished in one nutrient, we were probably malnourished in others. As scientists, it was natural to us to turn to the biomedical literature for answers. Since the quality of our lives was at stake, we undertook to scour the literature, fine-tuning our diet to provide the optimal amount of each nutrient. This occupied the next five years.

In 2009, Paul traced his neurological problems to a chronic bacterial infection; a course of antibiotics cleared it. Our health kept getting better; we began to feel as though we were in our twenties again.

Five years of arduous research had finally led us to a healthful diet. We were convinced that our work could help others and felt obliged to share what we had learned. So in June 2010 we started a blog and self-published a book spelling out our ideas and the reasoning and evidence that had led us to them.

Thanks to a glowing review (titled My new favorite book on nutrition and health) on the popular blog of the naturopathic healer Chris Kresser, we quickly gained hundreds of readers, many with chronic health problems. Soon they were sending us reports of health improvements.