 All right, well, good morning everybody. Good morning. My name is Stephanie Welch, and my talk for this morning is titled Energy Management, the Common Theme in Ancestral Health and Evolutionary Medicine. For those who don't know me, I have a broad background that includes academic degrees in classics and art history, a decade of hands-on body work experience as a clinical massage therapist. I'm a coach in a non-hierarchical organizational self-management system called Helocracy, and I also train professional cutlers in Austin, Texas. Although I first became an ancestral health advocate through the gateway of nutrition in 2010, and at a board gaming convention, I gave one of my first ancestral health talks called Give Me Butter or Give Me Death. This was just the tip of the iceberg for me. My past contributions to AHS have covered the mismatches created in the modern world by shoes, by circumcision, and by the use of the nuclear family model as the basis for organizing our domestic environments. These days, I've combined it all into a system that I call re-civilization, which is my way of encompassing all of these different elements of human health and organizing strategies to improve them. Today, we'll be covering subjects that fall most directly under pillars, one, with respect to nutrition and agriculture, and two, with respect to physical development and vision. But there are countless other examples like brain health and sexuality and multi-generational living, which also have energy optimization features that I didn't have time to cover all of today. So I'd like to talk for a moment about why energy management is important for us to consider. In ancestral health, we focus on identifying and reducing the mismatches that occur when we are confronted with conditions and behaviors in the modern world that work against adaptations we developed over millions of years and which persist as part of our inherent biological and psychological programming. The universal human adaptation that I argue that we have most catastrophically failed to incorporate into our health interventions is how carefully our bodies and brains were honed to maximize our ability to acquire and conserve energy to be directed toward our reproductive success. Worse, these adaptations have been actively exploited to drive consumerism by marketers of food and other products and even conventional medicine itself, exacerbating mismatches in ways that we'll discuss throughout this talk. Now, conventional medicine and evolutionary medicine take two very different approaches here. Conventional medicine inherently overrides the body's natural processes, and it costs us fortunes in money and energy to create and implement. It does so through offering us external solutions in the form of pharmaceutical, surgical, and other technological interventions, which allow us to take the path of least individual exertion, further capitalizing on our drive to conserve energy. Although this feels like we're using less energy in the short term, we're actually just externalizing these costs and using methods that require immense amounts of money and energy to produce. This is not a sustainable way to address human health needs in the long term. Prioritizing the approach of evolutionary medicine, on the other hand, emphasizes true preventative care and maintenance, giving us sustainable solutions that channel the body's energy toward maintaining its own health. And because we're relying on the body's own internal mechanisms, they cost vastly fewer external resources to implement. And it matters how much energy we're utilizing to address our health problems, because we're still deriving so much of it from the very limited pool of fossil fuel energy, accomplishing a volume of work that mere humans could not come close to through our own bodily exertion. In his course, Reality 101, Professor Nate Hagins of the University of Minnesota helps put into perspective how much energy is actually being exerted. If one horse represents one horsepower by being able to do the work of literally one horse, humans individually can do the work of only about an eighth of a horse, whereas a utility vehicle can do the work of 45 horses, a truck 300 horses. And he states, if you ride in a commercial jet, imagine 100,000 invisible horses pulling that airline across the sky. That's how powerful jet fuel is. So utilizing external resources, we can accomplish with just one barrel of oil for a cheap price around maybe $60, the equivalent of four and a half years of human labor. And he calls this exosomatic consumption or expenditure of energy outside the body. At prices like this, facilitated by the availability of fossil fuels, we vastly underestimate the actual costs represented to solve our problems technologically. This is not just something to assume we can rely on for the future of humanity. Professor Hagins refers to the moment we're currently in as the carbon pulse, a brief window in time in which we will very soon have exploited all the non-renewable fossil energy we can easily burn, and we'll have to turn to other methods to meet our energy needs. Perhaps we will replace this huge and temporary spike in energy availability before it runs out. But should we really be focusing on how we can continue to maximize our energy consumption? Or should we start looking at how to improve efficiency, reduce that dependency, and become more self-sufficient with our health? I would argue that improving our health is an area in which we should strive for efficiency to reduce costs, using the body's innate evolved mechanisms to promote health with a minimum of external interventions would take a huge load off of our energy requirements of having to counteract our health problems technologically. Not to mention that having fewer health problems would improve humans' ability to direct our own daily activities and that one-eighth of a horsepower we have at our disposal toward productive activities and engagement with society instead of battling chronic disease. So let's review the evolutionary optimization pressures that helped shape human physiology and that we can consider when designing evolutionarily appropriate health interventions. First, we know that evolution is driven by maximizing reproductive success so that one's genes are represented more heavily in the population gene pool locally as well as globally. In humans, it's especially key to note that this does not equate to the level of individual reproductive events. First off, for example, if I as a woman give birth 20 times, but all my offspring die in infancy, I won't have contributed anything lasting to the global gene pool. Secondly, because we evolved to be socially interdependent, our impact is multi-generational. Our presence within a community that includes our descendants, kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids continues to impact them and their reproductive success to the extent that we provide either a positive or negative energy and resource contribution to the community. In fact, the female human post-menopausal life stage only makes sense in terms of reproductive fitness by understanding that the exponential effect of contributing to one's descendants outweighed the benefits of reproducing as an individual, also known as the grandmother hypothesis. Now, to that end, reproduction and investment in one's community requires a lot of energy. So before outside fuels came into the picture, we developed adaptations to help us acquire as much energy in the form of food as possible. This is mitigated by the costs and limits of one's ability to process dietary input using a digestive system and the ability to utilize and store the digestive outputs. Finally, the third key pressure is to conserve energy, or in other words, to spend as little energy as necessary, to accomplish the first two tasks. Furthermore, to the extent that environmental conditions and needs can differ, there's an advantage to delaying decision-making when it comes to determining how much energy a body and brain should spend on building and maintaining itself. To this end, we also possess adaptations to conserve energy by waiting until environmental clues indicate the necessity of that energy expenditure. To get a sense of how broadly applicable these principles are across the spectrum of human health needs and how key they are to understanding how to solve our health problems in less energy intensive ways, we're going to dive into some of my favorite talks from past years at the Ancestral Health Symposium. These include Rob Wolf from AHS 17, in It's Not Your Fault, How Your Wire to Eat. Diana Rogers from AHS 18, It's Not the Cow, It's the How. Chris Loring from AHS 19, Building Your Baby from the Ground Up. And Todd Becker from AHS 14, Myopia, A Modern Yet Reversible Disease. Of course, there are countless others I would love to include, but we're just going to take a brief look at some highlights in our limited time today. So in the first subject, we'll look at nutrition. And Rob Wolf provides us with our case study on nutrition at AHS 17 in It's Not Your Fault, How You're Wired to Eat. The energy optimization pressures he highlighted were those of optimum foraging strategy and palette fatigue. Acquiring food energy does require us to spend energy in the process of hunting or gathering. So optimal food strategy encourages us to seek foods that are the most rewarding in terms of energy density for the least energy expenditure, so that we net as much gain as possible. I also want to include a nod here to Mickey's talk from AHS 18 that isn't in here about the potential of us being carnivores, specifically that we increased our stomach acidity over time to the level of scavengers, such that we could continue to extract nutrition from rotting carcasses, the larger and fattier, the better, to maximize the return on individual hunting success. And then palette fatigue is a feature that causes us to get tired of eating the same thing, such that we're motivated to spend more energy acquiring a variety of foods. Thereby diversifying our nutrient intake and reducing the toxicity load from eating too much of any one thing. The modern mismatches that occur because of these adaptations, which originally served us in our evolutionary environment, are that foods can now be engineered for hyperpalatability, capitalizing on our attraction to high energy density things like sugar, while introducing continuous novelty that inhibits us from ever achieving palette fatigue. As a result, we eat more without ever reaching satiety. As Rob puts this, therefore, if you are fat, sick, and broken, you are a biological success story. You've done nothing wrong. You've done everything right. Medically, what can conventional interventions offer when people just can't solve this themselves? Well, they include many things like pharmaceuticals to suppress appetite, surgical interventions like gastric bypass surgery to reduce physical capacity for consumption, or liposuction to extract fat tissue directly, or technologies like cool sculpting to freeze fat cells and cause the body to break down and reabsorb them. So speaking to a more evolutionarily appropriate opportunity, Rob offers us something like his food matrix. This allows you to choose from a robust selection of species appropriate food sources, which provide a wide variety of nutrients, mixing and matching them in order to still experience enough enjoyment for food to combine pleasure with satiety. Very little additional energy investment in making choices like this. Then in terms of agricultural sustainability, we need to consider how we produce the food that we need to be able to consume healthfully. For this, we'll go to Diana Rogers, HS18 talk. It's not the cow, it's the how. For humans, agriculture allowed us to have a great deal more control over energy production in terms of the foods we could cultivate to meet our energy needs. Furthermore, this allowed us to stay in place, increasing our ability to store excess food for the future, since we would not have to carry it with us. And we could streamline production of the most favorable crops to improve efficiency. This was a huge benefit to improving our energy acquisition. However, it actually takes a lot of energy to impose this control on the natural environment, especially when we don't understand the complexity of the system in which we're trying to intervene. Originally, all this biodiversity on earth co-evolved naturally into complex ecosystems, which provided niches and opportunities for success for all the organisms that evolved together. Plants, animals, fungi, microorganisms, and soil are all highly interdependent. Specifically, grasslands relied on grazing animals exhibiting predator-driven behaviors. And what have we done to honor this? Well, we've created vast monoculture crop enterprises and concentrated animal feeding operations. As a result, this has led to soil depletion, lack of water retention, reduced biodiversity, and poor nutritional outputs in our food, not very helpful. So conventional interventions have provided us with pharma technologies, such as massive industrial equipment to cultivate isolated crops and animals on a vast scale, chemical fertilizers to replace the natural soil regeneration process, and having to add enormous amounts of water because the environment and local rainfall no longer provide adequate water input. We've even gone to the extraordinary step of trying to grow meat, not in cows, which do all the growing themselves, but in labs, where we have to replicate biological processes with technology and rely on these monocrops as the medium to create the meat alternatives. None of this is, in any way, regenerative. If we are looking to spend as little energy on agriculture as possible, it's through well-managed livestock using holistic grazing methods. These naturally evolved systems involve biodiversity. That is what allows grasslands to regenerate and flourish. And in order for us to count on sustainable food access and acquire energy across a diet that can meet all of our nutrient needs, we need an agricultural system that is diverse and resilient like this. We can stick to growing meat in cows, not labs. Cows provide an excellent source of human nutrition, and most of the inputs in this system, aside from the grazing management efforts, are free. Sun, the rain, the grass, the urine and manure that the cows provide that goes back into the soil. So lots of free things instead of having to import all of it. Then let's look at some of what our bodies do to use that energy into developing our physical bodies. In Chris Lorang's AHS-19 talk, Building Your Baby From the Ground Up in Defense of Baby Lead Movement, he encouraged us to allow babies to learn movements naturally. Unlike plants and some animals such as stationary marine invertebrates who feed on whatever passes by, we generally need to engage in locomotion in order to acquire food, such as through hunting and gathering, which requires a lot of energy expenditure. To improve efficiency and adaptability, having certain movement reflexes programmed in the body and later learning how to translate those into complex movements is one of the ways that a body can conserve energy by delaying the decision-making until environmental input indicates that it's necessary. So our bodies rely on cues from the environment without interventions to provide the feedback and challenge us to help us develop. If you want to think of an extreme example outside of what Chris talks about, think of someone born without arms, who still has the ability to learn many alternative movement possibilities because of this delay in decision-making and the cues from their direct experience of life. As Chris describes it, utilizing inherent neurological patterns to engage the whole kinematic system and struggle through positions they can attain on their own, which is a desirable difficulty that Todd talked about yesterday. While receiving sensory input from the environment, is how infants develop motor and mechanical output and incredible core stability. Chris argues that using what he calls infant orthotic devices, such as seats and walkers or caretaker-assisted movements, which place infants in positions they cannot attain on their own, alters their sensory input and thereby the motor output. I will also add that shoes, which often get introduced as orthotic devices even to infants, but which persist throughout our lives, work similarly to disrupt the sensory input and our ability to learn. Chris gives examples of problems that this leads to, including rib flaring, scapula winging, and valgus knee patterns, which we see reflected into adulthood because neurons that fire together, wire together, and persist. So how do we treat these things in the modern world? Well, again, pharmaceuticals, such as pain relievers, steroids, including cortisone injections to reduce inflammation, surgical interventions, such as soft tissue repairs and joint replacements, and external technologies, including ever fancier chairs and orthotics designed to make up for poor posture and movement over a lifetime. So what is the evolutionary opportunity here? Well, we can focus on allowing natural movement learning by recognizing that our babies have motor reflexes built in and that they rely on sensory input to help them translate early movements into later complex movements, going through the desirable difficulty of struggling toward positions they can attain on their own until they finally succeed. We can place them on hard surfaces where they can get real sensory feedback, like Ivy climbing the concrete steps at AHS-14 in Berkeley with Daryl Edwards chastising all of us adults at not being so nimble and resilient as her on the concrete. And we can minimize the interference of devices that put infants in two positions that they can't attain on their own, as well as give them as much opportunity to interact with the ground barefoot as possible. Next up, we will look at vision health. And in his AHS-14 talk, Myopia, a Modern Yet Reversible Disease, Todd Becker leads us through how the use of the eye can actually change its shape. Eyes have very interesting jobs when it comes to the precision of needing to focus light at many different distances in order to see clearly under many different circumstances. Now, some organisms have involved many sets of eyes for different purposes, however, in humans, we've got two to work with. This requires less investment than, say, conceivably, having a separate set of eyes for every focal distance. That might sound absurd, but at the same time, it would be one other way of solving the problem. However, it's also one way of conserving energy to have an organ that can be more flexible in its use, so you don't need to duplicate its function. So instead of predetermining a focal length, our eyes are adaptive to environmental needs based on what we actually ask them to focus on. Once upon a time, distance gazing across the plains for hunting and tracking purposes could have optimized for distance vision. However, we have a different situation in the modern environment. Instead of spending time looking out across the plains, now we mostly only focus on things that are at close distances. Most of our activities are now indoors and we're constantly reading and looking at device screens with our computers and phones. So unsurprisingly, our eyes have become more and more trained for close up vision and myopia has vastly increased in prevalence. And because we now have this tendency toward myopia, of course we've tried to solve it with the same manner of external interventions in conventional medicine. We use the technology of ever intensifying corrective lenses, which rather than solve the problem, actually exacerbated over time. And surgical interventions that have become commonplace with improvements in Lasik types of surgery, which actively and invasively reduce our eyes ability to adapt in the future. Fortunately, Todd offers us some hope for more evolutionary interventions, including his examples are print pushing, which is a method of placing your reading material at a distance at the edge of blur where you progressively allow your eyes to adapt to greater distances. Simply wearing weaker lenses when viewing at a distance in order to give you a similar opportunity for your eyes to adapt back in the reverse direction at farther distances. And a method of fusing ghosted images when the vision is really bad to slowly train your eyes to change their shape and distance capacity. So aside from needing to replace lenses, which he offers an inexpensive website to order from, none of these interventions have any cost either. And I would love to cover many, many more examples of excellent talks, but in the interest of time, I think you get the picture. So as we've seen for many different aspects of health, conventional medicine has chosen the most costly interventions which require a tremendous amount of external energy to be exerted into the system to correct problems, while working against the existing physiology and even exacerbating the mismatches they're attempting to correct. Examples include in nutrition, appetite suppression drugs, gastric bypass surgery, cool sculpting, in agriculture, industrial technologies, chemical fertilizers and lab-grown meat, in physical development, infonorthotic devices, shoes, pain relievers, steroids and surgeries, and in vision, corrective lenses and surgery. On the contrary, evolutionary solutions are primarily either free or very low cost. They work with the existing physiology and they work to actively reduce the mismatches to produce better holistic outcomes over time. Examples on this side include nutritionally using a food matrix to plan meal variety, agriculturally using regenerative practices like holistic grazing management and growing meat in cows, not labs, physically allowing for baby-led movement and barefoot activities and with respect to vision, Todd's methods of print pushing, wearing weaker lenses and fusing ghosted images. For me, as I mentioned earlier, I've encapsulated principles like this into a system I call re-civilization, which actually fuses seven aspects of ancestral health, which include food, fitness, focus and feelings, feminine Indian masculinity, fornication, family and faith, along with the seven chakra system and across eight archetypes of healthy, masculine and feminine expression to attempt to take a comprehensive approach to reducing mismatches in the modern world. In conclusion, I suggest that, if we take a re-civilized approach like this, which favors evolutionary medicine as an approach that considers both our body strategies for energy optimization and how we can best optimize our expenditure of energy in pursuit of health, we will improve our health outcomes by directly reducing mismatches, we'll be able to effectively address complex interdependent systems instead of attempting to treat problems in isolation in ways that further confound the systems and employ cost-efficient, preventative and actually sustainable solutions to do so because the future of humanity depends on us. So, thank you. Thank you. Let's open the microphone for Q and A. I'm taking notes on everybody's talk like yesterday and today and I've run out of room of things that are similar to what I'm gonna talk about so that was great. Are you aware of any medical schools that are actually incorporating the evolutionary medicine framework into their curriculum? I wish I was just emailing Erin about this recently. There are a few, there are a handful of, I don't know that it's medical schools, just programs with certificates, essentially. UCLA has a minor and is it in life sciences? I believe so. Yeah, it's not at the level of like medical school so we need a push for that. We do. Then at dental schools too. Yeah. Hi Stephanie, thank you for your talk, that's fantastic. I couldn't help but notice that your dichotomy, their conventional versus evolutionary is also following the economic incentives. So right, so if you do conventional, like that's where the money is and that's why we go there so, I mean it seems like nobody's really come up with a better alternative to capitalism so what do we do about that? Well, I actually am interested in this subject because this goes to my perspective on male and female reproductive strategies and how it leads towards a male tendency toward capitalist motivations and a female tendency towards socialist motivations. And one of my other goals is to try to bring these together using that holocracy system that I was mentioning earlier. So I don't have an exact answer for that yet but it's actually something that I'm thinking a lot about. I'll let you know once it's over about it, thank you. Well, I thought on answering this last question. As the ancestral lower energy ways of solving our health and environmental problems, there's actually a cost savings and a higher health output. So that's the motivation versus profit for the few companies producing products, pharmaceuticals and hospitals. There's the lack of need of hospitals and pharmaceuticals and a higher health. Anyway, my purpose in mentioning something is to the room of thinkers and information seekers. Fortunately, there's a worldwide concentration of presentations at an organization called AcresUSA.org. They're a farming organization that brings people around the world and they are talking about regenerative farming techniques, seeding the farmers who are receptive to this information. So if there's another conference that you all wanna go to in November, I think it's in Cincinnati this year, we'll be going, but AcresUSA is all about farming technology and how to produce food and it's got a fantastic bunch of participants and speakers, this FYI. Thank you. Yeah, what was the first part of your comment again about the cost? Right, right, that this gentleman mentioned that the incentives drive the system towards higher profit because of drugs and hospitals and then the allopathic system that if we just review what is more beneficial to us as health seekers as opposed to health providers or drug providers that the health seekers actually have a self-incentive, just that Americans haven't taken charge of their own bodies to make those decisions. If we could look at the long-term outcomes a little more closely, it's really obvious which is the better solution. So we're just stuck with the short-term outcomes that we're trying to achieve. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Great talk, Stephanie. I just wanted to mention that that reality 101 talk is really brilliant. It puts our species in the context of the last 10,000 years, highly recommend it. But one of the outcomes of that is that as we move out of the carbon pulse, yes, we're moving into solar and all that sort of stuff, but the amount of energy we've had access to is astonishing. It's basically been unlimited. When you can get 4.5 human years of labor per one barrel of oil and we're going through 92 million barrels of oil every day, that's a lot of energy. He puts in, he says like calorically speaking, like endosematically within the body and average human uses like six Big Macs worth of energy in a day, but exosematically with everything else that we use to run our lives, it's like 407 Big Macs, so it's however many calories that's a lot. Right, so the part B of that is we're naturally our species, as we move out of the carbon pulse, we'll have to contract so that we won't be able to feed as many people and this is the science that shows that we're in a carbon pulse and then so from our perspective, what are these very sophisticated structures socially and all these buildings and universities? What's gonna happen to them as we contract? Are we gonna go back to more ancestral ways? Okay, because it's gonna reverse. We specialized more as time went on and as we had access to this energy, but then every time you take a look at an economy whether it's Argentina or Russia that has some sort of contraction, what goes first? It's the higher education and then you get professor selling pencils on the street of Moscow like what happened in 1992. So as we move out of the carbon pulse, maybe there's an opportunity to reintroduce some ancestral things because this world is going away in my opinion. Yeah, it sure would be better if we could have a fresher start with like getting ourselves back into gear before we hit that point to where we're all on life support anyways and yeah. Okay. Thank you so much and we can start our break and be back here by 9.40.