Freedom, not Diet
This is How Evolution and Nassim Taleb Made Me Rethink Keto
I tested out the ketogenic diet more than 2 years ago. It worked for me. I increased my productivity and stopped having those weird colds that afflicted me almost monthly.
Seeing its power, I doubled down on nutrition, exercise and sleep. I estimate that half of the content I consumed in the past couple of years had to do with these three topics, especially nutrition.
I naturally changed my mind on some matters as I learned more. Here are the top ones. If you are planning to try out keto or any other nutritional approach, you might find these useful.
Real food as risk mitigation for a body designed through evolution
I used to think of the human body as a machine and food as its fuel. To me, keto was simply a way to activate a feature in this machine: ketosis, that state in which your brain is fueled more with ketones and less with glucose.
Last December, I studied a couple of textbooks on evolution (I wrote about it here). The evolution of species is guided by its environment. Surprisingly, one of the human body’s greatest interactions with its environment is through its gut.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s way of thinking about risk suddenly made more sense in terms of health. Hyper-processed food is risky because the human body has not had time to adapt to it (it takes a looong time). Because I was doing keto, I avoided sugar and grains. Now, I also avoid seed oils (soybean, canola, margarine, fake butters, etc). Here’s a list of reasons why these are bad. Here’s the mental shortcut: they are recent inventions made possible through industrial machinery, and the human body is ill-equipped to process them.
Olive oil and coconut oil appear to be okay. They are simply squeezed from olives and coconuts (in contrast, seed oils need high temperatures and special chemicals to extract).
Butter also appears to be okay. But I’ve stopped taking it (and other pure fats) in isolation — “bulletproof” coffee, for instance. Our bodies have the same design as our hunter-gatherer ancestors. The fat they ate almost always came with protein or fiber (eg, animal meat and nuts).
If you want the nerdy mechanistic explanation, here’s an overview of studies on food processing and how it impacts the body:
So my meals now are essentially traditional food minus rice, bread or pasta — essentially meat and vegetables — made fattier with eggs, olive oil, coconut oil, peanut butter, mayonnaise, butter or full cream yogurt. I don’t count calories. Fasting gets me into ketosis without having to be precise with macronutrients.
Antifragility and fasting
Nassim Taleb has a concept called “antifragility.” Objects and systems could be one of three kinds:
- Fragile — broken by minimal stress. For instance, a tea cup made of china versus gravity and a concrete floor.
- Robust — needs a lot more stress to break. Imagine if the tea cup was made of metal instead.
- Antifragile — becomes better with stress. Imagine a tea cup that becomes stronger the more falls to the ground.
Not sure if this material actually exists. Antifragility is rare among man-made objects, thus Taleb had to invent this term. But for systems built through evolution, antifragility is very common.
Take the human body for example. The stressors through most of its evolution included the weather, nutrition, predators and other humans. Evolution eliminates fragile variants. And with constantly changing levels of stress across dimensions, antifragile systems will win over robust systems.
Eventually, evolution produces systems that takes advantage of stress. The stress of not having food for long stretches of time was a constant in human evolutionary history. Not only did the human body evolve to survive this; it has taken advantage of this cycle of feast and famine.
It turns out the processes of cell death and regeneration are key parts of maintaining good health (rabbit hole warning: autophagy and apoptosis). These only happen during a fasted state. We fast between meals, the longest of which normally happens during our sleep, between dinner and breakfast. The optimal length of fasts appear to be longer than this.
Fasting is another topic I geeked out on in the past couple of years. For healthy, non-pregnant adults, it is super low risk with lots of upside. Aside from health, it has given me more productive time. I became consistent with writing daily only when I replaced breakfast with a daily writing session, before I start my work.
Fasting sounded insane to my pre-keto self. I imagine it still does with a lot of people. It is our good fortune to have been born in a time and place of relative prosperity. For many of us, food is always available. But for most of human history, fasting was as natural and as unavoidable as breathing.
Keto makes fasting easy. Fasting makes keto easy.
It turns out the human body has multiple modes of converting food into energy, and multiple modes of storing that energy. This is another outcome of evolving through an environment with a variation of food sources.
One mode that tends to get left unused in the modern world is the fat-burning mode. This is only activated when your food intake is low or zero, or you restrict your carbohydrates. In other words, fasting, caloric restriction or a low-carb diet.
When my body started to get used to keto, it was as if it realized that it had a much larger gas tank. On a diet with the usual carbs, I needed to eat every few hours to avoid hunger and brain fog. On keto, I can easily fast for 24 hours with minimal hunger or impact on cognition or mood.
The reverse also became true. Fasting made it easier to get into ketosis. It seems the most powerful activator of ketosis is the depletion of glycogen in your liver (how carbs are stored as energy). Keto does this by restricting carbs. Fasting does this by restricting food.
Freedom, not diet
The “ketogenic diet” became defined by macronutrient ratios: 70%-90% of calories coming from fat and around 5% from carbs. This simple rule was a great entry point for me and for many people. But this is just a start.
Rather than a “diet” — a form of nutritional restriction, I see keto as a form of freedom. When I learned to swim, my freedom to explore the sea expanded. When I learned to get into ketosis, my brain was freed from dependence on carbs and my time was freed from dependence on frequent meals.
