New Evolution Diet Review

So Who is the New Evolution Diet suitable for?

The New Evolution Diet is perfect for anyone who has struggled with maintaining health goals and juggling a busy lifestyle. Finally this book shows you how to work smarter not harder and achieve various health goals with minimal impact to your lifestyle.

I’m motivated to write this New Evolution Diet review as this book is way different to any health and fitness book I have ever read! It would be foolish to brand this book another hyped health book claiming to reveal the best methods. This book is far more than that! Art presents his material in a kind of “this is how I did it, and you can too fashion” rather than guaranteeing results or making bold claims. The New Evolution Diet contains data that Art has collected from a huge volume of research and personal experimentation.

What has author, Art De Vany achieved?

Naturally anyone who is interested in health, fitness and well-being may wonder what the background of the author involves. Well that is a difficult question. Anyone who has read any of of his work understands that Art De Vany is a thought leader and a true intellectual. He started developing the material in the book after his son was diagnosed with diabetes.   As he looked in to the causes and remedies of the disease, it turned out that his unique background allowed him to understand the issue in a unique way.  De Vany was an economist and had studied complex systems while working on natural gas prices and the prediction of Hollywood movie success.  It turned out that these two areas offered a unique understanding of how complex systems- such as metabolism- behave.

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How is The New Evolution Diet Different To Other Health/Lifestyle/Fitness Books?

Where the New Evolution Diet really stands out from the other similar books on the market is the way Art approaches traditional concepts. You can guarantee most of Art’s methods will force you to go against the grain and unlearn basically everything you have already learnt about a given subject and this book is no different. The material inside the book details how to achieve amazing results in a variety of areas.

What does the book cover?

Some of the more fascinating topics that are covered the book:

• How Art got here- a history of the ideas
• How to measure your progress
• How not to eat, the worst foods you can eat
• A month on the New Evolution Diet
• The Metaphysics behind the diet
• How to increase testosterone and human growth hormone through exercise and diet
• How to practice Evolutionary Fitness for men and women
• How to reverse permanent injuries
• How to exercise the Evolutionary Fitness way
• How to this approach to Fitness delays aging
• Afterword: When the Human Body Needs (Extreme) Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

So Is the New Evolution Diet Worth Buying?

I hope you have found out a little more information in this New Evolution Diet review. In a nutshell this is the must have manual for almost any health related goal. It’s easy to pick up and read and provides small actionable solutions to a vast range of problems you can easily relate to. Even if you cant, some of the methods are mind blowing and Art De Vany has really managed flip the health world on it’s head and offer host of contrary to conventional wisdom ideas that almost everyone will want to follow!

As you might have figured the book appears to be very practical, almost structured like a how to manual at times. It is difficult to throw this book into the fitness pile. This book will probably appeal to most people, not just health junkies.

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From Dennett (1996)

It is not because of the optimality of evolution, but instead entirely for epistemological reasons:  As an engineer I have learned that for tackling hard problems (such as the insanely complex human body) the right level of abstraction is an essential first step towards making the problem tractable.  Borrowing from Daniel Dennett, I often find that  ”The Design Stance” is the right level of abstraction to make a complex system (ie the interaction of human bodies and the environment) with opaque causal links and complicated interactions approachable.  And in the case of human health, fitness, and interactions with world around us, evolutionary arguments provide the perfect way to view these otherwise almost bottomless topics.

Many readers might ask what the heck the preceding paragraph actually means.  Here’s another way to think about it…If you can have only one basic guiding idea to help as a heuristic when thinking through ideas surrounding health and fitness, it ought to be “Evolutionary Fitness”.  Understanding the conditions, the environment under which our bodies were designed is the simplest, most straight forward, most often correct way to understand what is “good” and what is “bad” for us.

Over at PaleoGarden, there is a great and comprehensive review of Art’s new book. Be sure to check it out!

Before I started an evolutionary lifestyle, meaning choosing a diet and lifestyle that takes into account the random patterns of nature, I often thought of campfires.   I’d imagine which people I’d want around my campfire in my tribe if I lived in a world without internet streams and cell phone apps.  I especially do that now.  It was my attempt to take into account those who had shaped my thinking, from the past or present.  And, perhaps, whom would I want to invite over the BBQ for a campfire chat.  healthcare epistemocrat gave me a more enhanced way to look at it with a great post about the writing of Joseph Campbell, the mythologist extraordinaire, and his book The Hero With 1,000 Faces.

Over the last 10 years or so, I have assembled quite the guest list that I would want to invite around this campfire.  Among many others, perhaps at the top of the list would be the late Richard Feynman the physicist, Richard Feinman the biochemist, Benoît Mandelbrot the recently deceased mathematician, Mike Mentzer the late bodybuilder empiricist, the late Friedrich A. Hayek of the Austrian economic school, and the thriving Nassim Taleb, for whom I will not create any descriptor.  Joining them all would be Arthur De Vany.  And in case none of them could make it, Art De Vany’s conversational skills and philosophy would fill in any prolonged silences in the course of such a dinner party, as he would be able to engage with any of them as a peer regardless of their respective fields.

After all, De Vany’s cognitive map of Evolutionary Fitness which has now been published as The New Evolution Diet does not consider any false separating barriers between physics, biochemistry, fractal mathematics, physical culturist philosophy, economics and epistemocracy.  The natural spontaneous order of our world (e.g., not centrally planned) provides an understanding that life may be enjoyed by embracing ambiguity and the unknown, rather than by trying to dictate the outcome and consequences of your human actions.

For the last 20 years plus, Arthur De Vany has been applying these “stochastic ideals” to aspects of the human experience that most of us incorrectly believe are utterly and completely in our absolute control.  Since the rise of agriculture 10,000+ years ago and the industrial revolution over the last 200 years, mankind has changed its topographical, dietary, and physical landscapes to render how we lead our lives nearly unrecognizable to that of the Paleolithic man.  The indisputable and desired beauty with which we define the world today with our understanding of mathematics, the stars, and the magma beneath our feet is sweeping and colossal.  Our modern collective intelligence, such as it is, we inherently believe is superior to the ostensible simplicity of our ancestors.

But the palm trees “understand” that they cannot survive in the alpine regions of the north.  The mighty redwoods of California comprehend that they would perish in the sandy beaches of Tahiti.  Squirrels don’t jog down your street with sweatbands, and a Cro-Magnon would avoid toxic unprocessed soy and grains (though they’re not much better when they’re processed).  We may understand intuitively how ridiculous it would be to expect an organism to thrive if it was taken out of its environment to be placed in a setting far out of its evolutionary adapted range, but somehow when it comes to us humans, it’s as if we believe the laws of nature don’t apply.

Professor De Vany began investigating how diet relates to disease by caring for his first wife and son both of whom were diagnosed with Type I diabetes 25 years ago.  He began to question the common wisdom diet recommended to diabetics at the time.  It’s interesting to note that after the rise of the evolutionary inappropriate lowfat dogma in the 1970’s  so much of the accumulated research showing the relationship between a high sugar/grain diet and disease went down the Orwellian memory hole.  Only researchers like Dr. Richard Bernstein, a contemporary of Dr. Atkins, continued to champion what would have been obvious to anyone actually looking at cause and effect.

That is, excessive sugar and grains provide an elevated glucose load that causes your pancreas to excrete high volumes of insulin to regulate blood sugar/glucose.  These high levels of insulin over time will cause your cells to become insulin resistant, and your cells will need more insulin to accept glucose.  Thus, your pancreas must excrete ever more insulin while the fashionable high sugar/grain diet continues the abnormally high levels of blood glucose.  Eventually, Type II diabetes ensues, as well as the motley crew of Metabolic Syndrome.

But De Vany went further.  He surmised that in addition to evolutionary inappropriate foods such as grains, legumes, sugars, corn syrups, and other processed chemical food additives, a metronome-styled energy intake of 3 meals a day of X number of calories per meal, etc., was far from how are metabolisms were designed to function.  De Vany appeared on a televised PBS show on health and longevity 10 years ago long before the rise of the Paleo movement that has been burgeoning over the last couple of years.  On this show what was striking was that De Vany was not only the only non-medical professional, he was also the lone panelist talking about aging and disease as a function of dysfunctional hormonal crosstalk caused by living our lives chronically outside of evolutionary norms.

Intermittent fasting (IF), a very common practice now among paleo lifestylers, was a topic of Dr. De Vany’s lecture at the Calorie Restriction Society long before IF became a subject bandied about on Paleo Hacks or other great sites out there.  De Vany gained popularity on his university website, through his groundbreaking Evolutionary Fitness essay, and going back over 10-15 years ago in the classroom where he sometimes moonlighted teaching health and fitness, though he was a tenured economics professor.  For over a decade and long before the Paleo movement combusted into the awesome spontaneous order it is now, De Vany warned about chronic cardio, the danger of marathons, excessive training volume in the gym, the hazard of overdeveloping slow twitch muscles via oxidative cardiovascular exercise at the expense of atrophying your fast twitch fibers.

So, that’s more than a bit about my take on De Vany’s philosophy and some paleo history, but what about The New Evolution Diet, the book.  Before I got to commenting on the book, I thought it was important to go over what led up to this publication.  The book represents a primer and introduction to Art’s philosophy.  This may still be summed up as Evolutionary Fitness, which if you are a student of both evolution and a physical culturist, you know this term has a triple meaning.  Evolutionary Fitness could be thought of as a toggling between emphasizing and/or choosing the different meanings of “Evolution” and “Fitness.”  It’s human physical fitness & health better understood through evolutionary constructs.  It’s evolution understood through the biological meaning of “fitness” as defined by phenotype and gene propagation.

It was my intent to review The New Evolution Diet in a total vacuum.  With my current high tempo work schedule, and my wife’s growing psychology practice (which embraces many concepts of The New Evolution Diet working with her clients), I have had little time to keep up with the paleo community over the last couple of months.  But I couldn’t resist looking up whether any reviews had already been done.  I skipped other hits I got other than reading the quick review by Dr. McGuff.  The word that Doug used that stood out for me as to how to describe Art’s writing was “elegant.”  Indeed, elegant.

De Vany has successfully distilled down his prolific body of work into an accessible book that shines like a diamond after years of honing raw coal.  This book could have been 500 pages, but it wasn’t meant to be an exhaustively detailed textbook.  It was meant to be a guidebook for a manifesto of an elastic philosophy.  On the other hand, it is not dumbed or watered down.  The notes and additional reading sections of the book provide a huge stepping stone for the person who may be embracing paleo living for the first time with this book perhaps providing an assurance to give it a try.

For those paleo practitioners, who perhaps like I, fall into the habit of drinking too much of our bathwater, there may be some points of disagreement regarding dairy consumption or a phrase or two regarding fat.  What I mean to say is that once you’re into this lifestyle a language akin to Inside Baseball is used by us which often has us splitting hairs.

I don’t mean to deemphasize these very legitimate points of disagreement about dairy and fat that I know by scanning some other paleo and lowcarb sites people take very seriously, but going with Bruce Lee’s motto (and of course going back to the ancients) “Absorb what is useful from any source, discard what is not from even the most revered of sources”, given that 99% of what is now being written and spoken about in the paleo community was first expressed by De Vany over a decade ago, there is indeed much to absorb, and little if anything to discard.

There are other Evolutionary Fitness fans who may object to the word “diet” in the book’s title.  In some ways I compare this “The New Evolution Diet” title to Drs. Eades’ “Protein Power”, which by the way along with “The Protein Power Lifeplan” are a constant on my nightstand even as I type this.  According to Mike Eades inserting the word “protein” into these books’ titles by publisher recommendation didn’t agree with him at first.  However, in hindsight given the lipidphobes and the neutrality of the word “protein”, I couldn’t imagine these Eades publications by any other name.  For those of you who are big fans of De Vany’s works like I am, the inclusion of the word diet didn’t affect this book’s quality content.  The New Evolution Diet should open concepts of evolutionary fitness and the wider paleo movement to an even broader audience than the current core adherents who are more comfortable around a gym and Crossfit.

There are now countless paleo and evolutionary fitness inspired blogs.  There is input from doctors, medical researchers, physical trainers, physical culturists and laymen of all types.  Practically each line of The New Evolution Diet could be the subject of an entire blog post and could be further discussed in countless paleo forums.  Indeed, many of the points originally discussed by De Vany have now become “common knowledge” in the growing paleo movement.  It is not inconsequential that paleo luminaries such as Robb Wolf, Loren Cordain, and Mark Sisson, to name but a few, acknowledge De Vany’s contribution in the development of their own paleo cognitive maps.

There are many others however who simply don’t understand or perhaps never heard of the role that De Vany played in the synthesis of ideas that emerged into a movement to reexamine our ancestors’ energy intake and expenditure patterns.  This is to be expected because after all what percentage of NBA and college basketball players know who is Dr. James Naismith?  And in the grand scheme of things, a desire for every member of the paleo world to give him a blue ribbon just isn’t what motivates De Vany in the first place.  Don’t expect De Vany to publish any pieces like Ice Cube’s “Child Support” anytime soon (ahem, strange comparison, perhaps, but in case you actually click on this Child Support link understand Ice Cube is talking about current rappers not acknowledging his role in the emergence of gangster rap… better yet, just skip over this link).

So, along with the other leading lights out there, like Eades, Taubes, Gedgaudas, Cordain, Sisson and Wolf (I have all of their great books, along with others, by the way), it is time for De Vany to also enter into the published paleo Parthenon, which he himself in many ways largely constructed more than a decade before The New Evolution Diet hits the street next week.  There are many points of entry back into a life that makes evolutionary sense.  Art was one of the original voices out there that spoke to me.  This book not only was a good review for someone like me who is now I dare say more sophisticated in my paleo understanding, but Art’s writing still provided new insights and continuous rediscoveries.

Ultimately, I believe this book is accessible to those who need it most, the sickly amongst us surviving on the Standard American Diet and counting away hours at the gym on the dreadmill (or on the couch watching TV).  Basically, those that don’t know any better.  I have already purchased multiple copies of The New Evolution Diet for friends and family who I’d like to see have a kairos moment, and return to a world where palm trees grow in the sand, redwoods grow in the mountains, squirrels don’t jog, and humans live in physical and mental good health like we were evolved to be instead of carrying out a slow demise in disease and disappointment trying to control life.

In the pantheon of Paleo hackers, Erwan Le Corre is right up there with Art De Vany.  I’ve personally attended one of Erwan’s seminars and I can tell you that it was special.  My workouts today are heavily inspired by what Erwan taught me- MovNat is the real thing.  I can’t wait for MovNat to gain a wider following- I look forward to training with others when it catches on.

Anyway, outside.com has the single best write up on Le Corre that I’ve read to date.  The very best starting point to learn about Le Corre, MovNat, and dive generally deeper in the the Paleo and Evolutionary Fitness world.

“We live like zoo animals!” he continues that morning, pronouncing it “ah-nee-mahls.” It’s an idea Le Corre borrowed from the British zoologist Desmond Morris, author of the 1967 classic The Naked Ape, and it’s central to his worldview: that we are essentially wild creatures ill-suited to desk jobs and processed foods. “We have become divorced from nature, trapped in colorless boxes,” Le Corre says. “We have lost our adaptability, and it’s threatening our health and longevity.”

via Paleo Fitness | OutsideOnline.com.

Astonishing as it may be, it’s a fact that human DNA has evolved very little since our Paleolithic
ancestors roamed the earth. But while our genes may be similar, the environment in which they express themselves has changed radically. Living in an age when activity was mandatory and food was scarce, our ancestors thrived. Early man did not suffer from heart disease, high blood pressure, or obesity. In fact, a good deal of what we describe as “normal aging” is more akin to disease than any natural aging process.

Disease free and strikingly fit, 72-year-old Arthur De Vany—grandfather of the “Paleo lifestyle”
movement—is living proof that it pays to live like a caveman. In The New Evolution Diet, De Vany
offers you a roadmap back to better health. The plan is built on three principles:
- eat three meals a day made up of nonstarchy vegetables, fruits, and lean proteins
- skip meals occasionally to promote a low fasting blood insulin level
- exercise less, not more, in shorter, high-intensity bursts

By cutting out modern foods—including carbohydrates, dairy, and all processed foods—anyone can
lose weight, gain muscle, and enjoy a longer, better life.

Arthur De Vany was born in Davenport, Iowa in 1937. He graduated from Montebello High School in 1955 and signed to play professional baseball for the Hollywood Stars. Having been a competitive Olympic weight lifter, Art was one of the very few pro baseball players to lift weights, a now-universal practice, which led scouts to give him the nickname of Superman in their scouting reports. The name stuck and recently the Times of London called Art Superman’s slightly fitter granddad. Dr. De Vany went on to earn his Ph.D. in Economics at UCLA and to become a respected scientist who is known over the world through his articles and books. He is listed in Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the World and is the author of the acclaimed Hollywood Economics, the first book to bring sophisticated statistical and economic reasoning to the motion picture businss. He received the Mallen Prize for motion picture research and is Principal and Chief Scientist of Extremal Film Partners. Art is Professor Emeritus of Economics of the University of California, and is a member of their acclaimed Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences and is an affiliate of the Evolution, Complexity and Cognition group of the Free University of Brussels. A lifelong student of metabolism and fitness, Art has lived as a Paleo/Athlete for some 30 years and is called a patriarch of the Paleo movement. He has blogged on the subject since the 1990s and continues to blog on the subject on his Evolutionary Fitness blog at www.arthurdevany.com.

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