Metabolic Typing Gets in the Mix, Finally

Before I even kick this motherfucker off, I enjoy you people to reread my shit on Biological Individuality, as all of this shit is intertwined, and the very basis of Metabolic Typing lies within the central concept of Biological Individuality.

Assuming you’ve done so, let’s move on. This shit is fairly heady, but if I lose some of you along the way, google is your friend, as is Amazon. Don’t be a bitch and bail because the concepts are too weighty for you to wrap your arms around. First off, all me to point out exactly how my conception of nutrition works.

This pretty much lays it out in simple chapter and verse.  The basis of the whole philosophy is Paleolithic nutrition.  Paleolithic people, however, had widely varied diets, depending on where in the world they called home, and what flora and fauna was available to them at the time.  That’s where the rest of the ChAoS and PAIN nutritional considerations come in.

Roger Williams, the father of the modern concept of Biochemical Individuality, claimed that “every individual organism that has a distinctive genetic background has a distinctive nutritional need which must be met for optimal well-being.” (BI 190)  The American Medical Association, supplement companies, and your doctors will have you believe differently- we’re all exactly the same organic machines propelled through life utilizing the exact same nutritional regimen, and requiring precisely the same fuel for our biological powerplants.  until recently, most in the scientific community refused to even acknowledge the need for differing nutrition in elite athletes, believing instead that a Centrum was nutritional overkill, and that everyone needed the precise 60-30-10 ratio of carbohydrates, protein, and fat to achieve optimal health.  If that makes sense to you, consider this- the Roman philosopher Lucretius, who was a student of Epicurus (the founder of the eponymous school of philosophy based on the belief that pleasure is the chief good in life), stated 2300 years ago that “what is food for one man may be fierce poison to others.”(MM 185)  Thus, practitioners of modern medicine have actually regressed in their understanding of human nutrition, much like the astronomers’ adoption of geocentrism and abandonment of heliocentrism in the Dark Ages.

Super fucking sweet, right?  When it comes to the issue of nutrition, most people in the medical science and nutrition communities are like mongoloids with horse blinders on- about as useful for advice in the extreme strength athletics community as that bitch from Precious.

I suppose, at their core, they’re partly right- deep down, we’re fundamentally the same biological organism, in that we all share similar nervous, endocrine, and hormone delivery systems.  As such, we’re kind of like paper snowflakes- we might be cut from the same material, but we’re all remarkably different thereafter.  What similarities do you share with Gabriele Sidibe?  I hope not many… that bitch is barely even a human being.

So, we’ve established that doctors know fuck-all, and that we need a modern-day Captain Ahab to off that pig pictured above.  Getting back to the point at hand, though, Paleolithic nutrition is still the basis of any sane dietary prescription due to the fact that the human genome has changed less that .02% in the last 40,000 years.(PD 9)  In the grand scheme of things, that seems unimportant, as homo sapiens have been around for around a million years.  They, however, didn’t diverge from Neanderthals, who were almost exclusively carnivorous, until around 250,000-500,000 years ago, however.  That means that as recently as 250,000 years ago, humanity was as carnivorous as tigers.  Cro-magnons, who sort of briged the physical gap between neanderthals and homo sapiens sapiens didn’t even arise until 36,000 years ago, so the fact that we’ve only had a deviation of .02% of our genetic code since before Cro-magnons arose is significant.(TPG 157-158)  Given our similarities to pre-modern humans, it would stand to reason we share many of the same dietary requirements as our pre-modern ancestors.

There’s more to our dietary requirements, however, than simply genetics.  Change can occur within a generation due to ontogenic biological alterations.  Blending inheritable traits between populations constantly introduces new variants to a gene pool(TPG 2), as do utero conditions (temp, water, O2 supply), leading to a wholly different biological makeup and subsequent nutritional requirements than preceding generations.  Thus, it’s a combination of heredity and environment that create vast biological individuality in each individual, which makes determining an ideal diet somewhat difficult, and necessitate a method by which you can determine your specific nutritional requirements.

I told you motherfuckers it was about to get heady.  Chew on that shit, and I’ll hit you guys with a history of the search for accurate means of determining metabolic type next time. 

Bibliography
Cordain, Loren, Paleo Diet. Hoboken:  John Wiley and Sons, 2002.  (PD)
Slatkin, Montgomery and Michael Veville, Ed.  Modern Developments in Theoretical Population Genetics.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2002.  (TPG)

Williams, Roger.  Biochemical Individuality.  New Canaan:  Keats Publishing, 1956. (BI)

Wharton, Charles Heizer.  Ten Thousand Years From Eden:  Metabolic Man.  Orlando: Winmark Publishing, 2001.  (MM)