Hunter Gatherer
“Brimming with ideas and a fascinating read.” –STEVEN PINKER, Johnstone Professor of Psychology, Harvard University
If you’re anything like me, you care deeply about food – but you also shop on a budget.
If I could afford to eat wild salmon and organic blueberries every day, I would – but I’m not a grizzly bear and I can’t afford to eat like one. Grassfed jerky, almond butter, and raw honey are expensive, and many of my favorite brands aren’t stocked at the grocery store.
That’s why I’m excited to shamelessly shill for my new favorite company: THRIVE MARKET.
Thrive Market is like “Whole Foods meets Costco online.” Over 4,000 of your favorite healthy products – including tons of paleo brands – all at 25% to 50% off retail. The annual membership costs only $59.95.
My most recent order just arrived at my door. Here’s what I got:
In that one order alone, I saved about $25 relative to what I usually pay at the store. So for me, that means the annual membership pays for itself by my third order.
And I got it all in one place. Conveniently delivered directly to my apartment. The brands I love and want to succeed — plus tons of non-paleo products available for people of different stripes (organic, gluten-free, raw, vegan, etc.).
Now step back from the dollars and cents and think about the big picture for a sec.
A couple years ago I was talking to my friend Mark Sisson about the future of the food movement.
“Knowing what to do isn’t enough. Information isn’t enough.”
Popular paleo blogs and bestselling books are great – and I’m glad that high profile athletes like LeBron James are now eating paleo – but we have to do more if the food movement is going to change the world.
“We need an ecosystem of companies doing it right. We need good entrepreneurs to succeed.”
Mark and I are both proud to be involved with Thrive Market – as investors and advisors – along with Robb Wolf, Michelle Tam, Chris Kresser, Dr. Mark Hyman, celebrity trainer Jillian Michaels and many more. And we are blowing the roof off this thing.
I want you to be a part of this movement.
I shop at two markets: my farmer’s market and Thrive Market. I get my fresh produce and meat at my local farmer’s market, and I get everything else at Thrive Market.
If you click the link below and register, you’ll get:
After two months, you’ll have a choice to buy an annual subscription for $59.95 (about $5 per month). If you don’t think it’s worth it, then don’t subscribe. Try it out and judge for yourself.
I love it, and I know you will too.
PS – Feel free to share and forward the link!
I’m honored to be included by Greatist on their list of The Top 100 Most Influential People in Health & Fitness. Thank you!
The NYT Style section ran two nice pieces on paleo. Basically, it’s not going away:
…the time has passed when it could be written off as a fringe movement…
It’s spawned an ecosystem of businesses, plus is gaining a celebrity following:
Actors like Megan Fox, Jessica Biel and Matthew McConaughey have reportedly taken the plunge.
And it’s not just about diet:
“You start thinking, ‘Wait a minute, if I can fix my diet from ancestral health principles, what else can I fix through ancestral health principles?’ The list is endless.”
Oh yes, and Michelle Tam of the wonderful NomNomPaleo has been dubbed “something of a Martha Stewart of Paleo.” And products promoted in the paleosphere often take off:
As Bloomberg Businessweek reported last fall, Indow Windows, the Portland, Ore.-based manufacturer of her window inserts, said traffic to its site tripled after Ms. Nam tweeted that she was “the happiest zombie on the planet” thanks to the company’s product.
Nice quote from my book:
As John Durant, a founder of Paleo NYC and Barefoot Runners NYC, put it in his 2013 book, “The Paleo Manifesto: Ancient Wisdom for Lifelong Health,” “other animals don’t ‘exercise’ so much as they either play or just do what is required to survive. Birds fly. Fish swim.”
Read the whole thing: “The Paleo Lifestyle: The Way, Way, Way Back.”
They also have a second article: A 10-Step Paleo Immersion Plan. A pretty good summary, with some excellent reading recommendations:
9. Reading There is no shortage of Paleo bibles, including “The Paleo Diet,” by Loren Cordain, Robb Wolf’s “The Paleo Solution” and John Durant’s “Paleo Manifesto.”
This comes four and a half years after the original NYT Style section piece on paleo. Nice to receive some validation that it’s not as much of a fad as some people speculated.
I was deeply saddened to learn that Seth Roberts suddenly passed away. Many people knew Seth better or longer than I did, but I’d like to share a few thoughts.
I met Seth a few years ago at a conference. We ended up walking and talking at that conference, walking and talking at other conferences, walking and talking in NYC. Many people who knew Seth have fond memories of walking and talking with him. Seth was hiking when he died.
Let’s celebrate Seth Roberts for what he was: an idiosyncratic and peculiar man.
These are not things that “normal” people do.
Seth didn’t care. He was unconcerned about looking weird or low status.
Even though Seth didn’t care what people thought, he cared an awful lot about what you thought. He was an excellent listener. He gave people his full attention. And, as Ben Casnocha recalls, Seth was a master of appreciative thinking – searching for and finding the value in what a person is saying.
Seth will be remembered for his work in self-experimentation. More than just his quirky findings – faces on TV, honey at bed, flaxseed oil – Seth taught that anyone can be a scientist.
This wasn’t simply the saccharine sentiment that every child has the potential to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (organic chem is hard enough).
This wasn’t based on the false notion that science is easy (quite the opposite: good science is so difficult that the professionals often get it wrong).
Seth showed that there are parts of the scientific method where everyone can participate, where everyone should participate. He demonstrated the value of amateurish self-experimentation to both scientific progress and personal improvement.
Self-experimentation doesn’t just bring science out of the laboratory; it turns your world into a laboratory.
Unfortunately, formal education often teaches the opposite: that science requires beakers and Bunsen burners; agar plates and AP Calc; expensive degrees and exceptional test scores. As every scientific field has grown increasingly technical and specialized, there is a sense that science is a pursuit best left to professionals. The notion of “Science” itself has morphed into something incomprehensible and irreproachable; mighty and magical — a distant deity that dictates true and false, right and wrong from an unassailable position of authority.
Seth brought science down to earth. Even as he publicly attacked professionals who published papers containing falsified data, Seth empowered amateurs. He showed that science is messy and practical and fun. Ever-curious, he was always tinkering and hacking, breaking and building.
Self-experimentation holds an eminent place in the history of science, and Seth Roberts unassumingly continued that great tradition. Long before fitness trackers and wearables, genomic sequencing and personalized medicine, biohacking and Quantified Self, Seth was quietly taking notes with pencil and paper.
Seth Roberts was an idiosyncratic and peculiar man.
That’s what made him one a kind.
He will be missed.
I don’t know anyone who who’s told the story of time like Mr Durant. Breaking down biblical interpretation as nobody I’ve ever heard or read…Moving from the dawn of our existence to modern day in a way all of us can understand and interpret.
I have more or less lived by the principles this book has discussed for almost a decade, and have never been happier…
You can find Brian at CrossFit Endurance.
It’s not every day you get invited to a salon held in the basement of the Museum of Sex. Here’s a fun hour-long interview with John Tierney, science journalist with the New York Times, hosted by Reason Magazine.
We talk diet, libertarianism, why Jesus didn’t wash his hands, veganism, and more.
I enjoyed talking with Mark Frauenfelder, co-founder of Boing Boing.
We spoke about
I just did a fun interview with Kettlebell Kitchen, including my top three predictions for health trends over the next three years:
Microbes. Microbes are hot a topic right now — gut health, fermented foods, probiotics, chronic infections — and that will only continue as we learn how many more health conditions (cancer, mental disorders) are influenced by bacteria, viruses, protozoa, and other tiny critters. It will one day become commonplace for doctors to prescribe a course of probiotics after a course of antibiotics.
Habitats. People will shift away from trying to change their bad habits through willpower and discipline — like New Year’s resolutions — and increasingly focus on changing their physical habitats (bedrooms, kitchens, offices, and gyms) in ways that make it easier to be healthy without requiring discipline. That’s how they do it in zoos.
Habits. Biohacking will shift away from simply tracking our behaviors to actually motivating us to create new habits.
Read the full interview, which also discusses:
Here’s an interesting part on differences between women and men:
You can’t separate popular writing about health and diet from the enormous industry that already exists and is mostly geared toward women -– and that this industry is connected to the proliferation of images of tall, white, slender women. With your background, how do you contextualize yourself within the health and diet industry?
I, thankfully — probably in large part because I am a man — was not exposed to the diet world growing up. I ate a conventional midwestern diet. I didn’t have body or weight issues. And so when I first stuck my toe into the diet world I thought, “Holy cow, what is going on here? Everyone is saying contradictory things.” Many of the approaches seem wacky. “Only eat foods that begin with the letter A today.” Who thought this was a good idea?
I think women have been damaged more than men by the bad dietary advice that has been pushed over the past 20 or 30 years. Two things in particular: low fat and counting calories. Those have been very damaging. If you take a low-fat approach where you’re counting calories, you’re hungry all the time but still trying to use discipline to restrict how much you eat. In my mind that seems like a recipe for an eating disorder. You’re trying to exert control on what you’re eating, but you’re finding that your body isn’t allowing you to exert control easily.
I have female friends and relatives who have had various eating disorders and there are a ton of women who have come to Paleo because it’s like, “Okay, I’m not counting calories or weighing the food I eat. I’m not vilifying fat. I can be satiated.”
One of the nice things about Crossfit — and sometimes yoga — compared to how a lot of people work out today, is there are no mirrors. People aren’t focused on whether you have a perfect six-pack or a bit of fat on your sides. When you focus on functional movement or having fun, a goal besides better body image, you get good results and it’s a lot healthier.
There’s a stigma around the word “diet” for both men and women. For women the word is often associated with failure and lack of discipline. For men it’s like, “Men don’t go on diets!” It’s a macho thing. Neither group is really happy with the diet world.
You can read the full interview here.
John Durant is author of The Paleo Manifesto and founder of Wild Ventures. He has been featured in the New York Times, The New Yorker, NPR, and interviewed on Colbert.
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