 Please take your seats. We're going to start in a couple of seconds. OK, the next speaker, I believe, needs no introduction, but I'll introduce him anyway. Paul Jaminé of the Perfect Health Diet, and also one of the three editors and chief of the Journal of Evolution and Health, which you'll be hearing increasingly more about in the future. I will turn it over to him. All right. Thanks, Aaron. OK, so I'm going to be talking about weight loss today. And this talk and the work behind it really grew out of two positive surprises that I got. One was after we first published our book in 2010, I got hundreds of emails from people saying, oh, I've tried your diet, and hunger has totally gone away. And I used to have cravings and binges all the time, and I don't anymore. And it's really easy to fast, and it's really easy to lose weight. And my wife and I wrote the book in order to help people become healthy. We hadn't had weight problems ourselves. We'd had health problems. And so I thought that was really interesting that what people are writing to me about is it's eliminating hunger. And I should start thinking about why that is. And then a year ago, we had the opportunity to start testing our ideas, again, as a health improvement program in the form of a retreat where we would have control over the food and the environment. And I thought that was a really exciting opportunity because we could actually test an ancestral diet and lifestyle and see what the health effects are. And one of the things that came out really quickly was it turned out to be super for weight loss. And again, it wasn't designed to be a weight loss program. You could eat as much food as you wanted. And yet we had great weight loss results. And so I started thinking more about, all right, why is this working so well for weight loss? And I started thinking about the obesity problem. And when I started thinking about things, I like to try to get to the most important issues first. And so usually that comes in two types. And one is what are the most puzzling issues? The riddles that people have a really hard time explaining. And so I'll present two of those. And then I always like to know sort of a big picture of you, what are the most important facts? If you were surveying the problem from a really high elevation, what would you see? And so I'll tell you three big picture things that I noticed that to me were important clues about weight loss. So the first part of the talk is gonna be about those two puzzles and those three clues. And then I'll get into a few things related to that. So the first puzzle, we've had this recent obesity epidemic. Why? It's difficult to explain. And the second puzzle, it seems like weight gain, it should be a pretty obvious what's causing it. You're eating more food than you're expending an energy. You have an excess of energy. And it seems like the obvious solution would be to eat less food and move more potentially in order to burn more energy. And this was actually the analysis, it's a very old analysis that dates back at least to Hippocrates. And we know what the advice of Hippocrates was. We have it in this quote from Paul Abbas, his son-in-law. You should use exercise and intermittent fasting. Eat only once a day. Eat only just enough to satisfy hunger. And that was actually, you know, at the time that may have been really effective advice. We don't have clinical trial data from ancient Greece. But if it worked then, it has ceased to work. So lots of people have tried the eat less, move more advice recently. And the general experience is they can lose weight for a time but only at the cost of increased hunger. And the hunger gets worse and worse and then they have to start eating. And then their weight comes back up often higher than it was before. And dieting, the long-term outcomes of dieting, worsened health, higher weight, the more time someone has dieted, the higher their weight is, and higher rates of disorder-deeding. So why is dieting damaging health and increasing weight instead of what it was intended to do, reduce weight? So my goals here enumerate some key observational facts about obesity that give us clues to what's causing it to do some of those likely causes, propose a better remedy than eating less food, and then present evidence that the proposed remedy can work. And the place where we gathered the evidence is in our retreat, which we now operate on a beautiful beach in North Carolina. And so I'd encourage you, if you wanna learn about generally health improving ancestral diet and lifestyle to come there. All right, so some clues about obesity. Well, the first clue, obesity has been increasing everywhere in the world. This isn't an American issue. It's not a Western issue. You'll often see the Western diet. It's also a pan species pandemic. So it's affecting every species that is associated with humans, including our pets, including our zoo animals, including wild animals that live near humans in cities, and including laboratory animals in controlled environments. So any animal that gets its food from humans or that eats human waste and that lives in an environment established by humans is experiencing the obesity epidemic just like we are. All right, and so what can we infer from the ubiquity of the obesity epidemic? Well, it strongly points to environmental causes of obesity and causes that affect the whole world, including the animals that share space and food with us. And so that leads us to suspect things like food that humans eat or that animals that we feed eat. Things in our human environment, like light, possibly other factors, like we've recently added a lot of radiation from cell phones, Wi-Fi, 60 Hertz power lines, other things. And there's various other environmental factors that have changed in the industrial era. And then microbes are a very crucial part of the environment and there have certainly been big microbial changes. All right, a second clue. And to me, this was very significant. So I'm a former physicist and distributions are actually a very powerful clue about generative processes. So there are certain key distributions. Many of you have probably heard of the normal distribution or the Gaussian distribution. And there's another one that is actually just as common in nature, it's called the log normal distribution. And that's what the weight distribution has. And it turns out that the weight distribution is log normal in every species, even unicellular species. All right, so this plot on the left is from a paper showing that over multiple, many orders of magnitude in species size, ranging from unicellular species to mammals. All species have a log normal distribution. And the one on the right is a figure from the first paper following the first end-hane study showing that the distribution of weight in humans is log normal. It's actually log normal up through the first 98% or so. And then at the very obese end, it's truncated probably with a power law distribution. And that basically represents people with diabetes or relatively severe diabetes. And in this particular image, a log normal, the way this is plotted, log normal distribution is a straight line. And you can see that the weight distribution falls pretty close to that line. And here's some images. If we just plot them the normal way, this is the end-hane's data. This time it shows BMI and frequency. And you see the mean is around a BMI of 25 or so. Take a look a couple of places. Take a look at that 2% line. On the underweight side, there's been very little change from 1991 to 2005. But if you go over, follow that 2% line over to the obese side, and you'll see there's been a pretty significant shift in that line. And if you look toward the mean, if you look at the peak of the curve, the peak has shifted to the right a little bit. All right, so you see the underweight side is hardly moving at all. The mean is shifting a little bit and then the obese side is shifting quite strongly to the right. And that's the nature of the obesity epidemic. Here's a few views from some very different countries. Here's Egypt. And again, in Egypt, there's been a little bit of a decrease in the underweight side, but there's been a quite large increase on the obese side. Egypt, a highly obese third world country. Here's Bangladesh. This is the most extremely underweight of the third world countries. And you can see there's been very little change in the rate of underweight. That's the left side of the distribution, but on the right side, there's been a significant increase in the obese population. And if you look at 37 countries in this study, plot the change in mean BMI and the change in standard deviation, then what you see is that the mean has increased in about 90% of countries. The standard deviation has increased in every country. All right, so it's mostly the right end of the distribution that is changing. All right, so I mentioned log normal distributions very significant. What do they mean? Well, if you think about what a normal distribution means, if you take some dice, if you roll one die, all right, then you'll be equally likely to get numbers one through six. If you roll two die, then seven becomes the most likely outcome and as you go away from it, it's actually a triangular distribution. Seven is most likely and as you go to the extremes, two and 12, they're the least likely. And as you keep adding more dice to the roll and you sum up the number that comes up, it begins to approach a Gaussian distribution. And that's actually a very general phenomenon and it's captured in a theorem called the central limit theorem. For a very wide range of possible distributions, if you take a sum over a bunch of different things and you add them up, then the sum will tend to approach a Gaussian or a normal distribution. All right, now, how does the log normal come about? That happens if you take the product of a bunch of things. So if you take, if you roll a bunch of dice and you multiply all the numbers on the dice, then as you go to large numbers of dice, you end up with a log normal distribution. And why does that happen? Well, if you take the product, which here I've represented with a W and you take the logarithm of both sides, you transform it into the same problem as the generative function for a normal distribution. And if the logarithm has a normal distribution, then the function that you're looking at has a log normal distribution. And one way to interpret that, you can think of addition as like an or and multiplication as an and. So in order to generate log normal distributions, you need to have a whole bunch of causes. And in order to get a high value, like obesity, you need to have a high value for every one of the inputs. All right, so if you think of the dice example that I gave, if the inputs are around the mean, like whether they're three or if you roll a three and a four and you multiply them, and you get 12, if you roll a one and a six, you get six. Either way, it's sort of a middling number, all right, like a BMI of 25. But if you roll a six and a six, then you get a 36, that's a big number, an obese number, all right, the equivalent of obesity. And so what this log normal distribution for obesity is telling us, it's actually telling us a number of things. First of all, it's telling us obesity is a polyfactorial condition, all right? There are many causes that contribute to obesity. It's not a single cause, it's not like one of those infections that, you know, like tuberculosis, where it's caused by one germ, and if you get rid of that one cause, the condition goes away, no. There's no magic bullet cure for obesity because there are many causes generating it. But, very interesting, the log normal distribution, there's one generative process, and it's the same for all of the weights, including the underweight, the normal weight, the overweight, the obese weights, all right? So all that's happening to generate obesity is you've got the same inputs going into every person and the same physiological process, but there's different values of the inputs. And obese people are the ones who are drawing from the obesogenic values of all the different inputs. And what that means is it's really not that easy to become obese, all right? Like the dice case, you have to draw high numbers on all of the factors contributing to obesity in order to get into the obese situation, all right? So, you know, if you're only drawing a high number on some of them, then you're still gonna have a middling normal weight, all right? And what that finally leads us to is that the key to resolving obesity is to change the inputs, not the physiology, because until you get up to that diabetic extreme where the physiology is actually broken, you're in entirely normal physiology, all right? The bottom 95 to 98% of the weight distribution is all physiologically normal. There's no metabolic damage or anything like that that needs to be cured medically. Rather, you need to change some kind of inputs and that leads us toward this ancestral concept of adjusting the external factors of diet, lifestyle, environment, and potentially the microbial environment, okay? Now, third clue, the obesity epidemic is actually quite a long-lasting phenomenon. And if we look back historically, weight has been increasing since 1880, all right? And actually the jump in mean BMI, it took just as big a jump in the early 1900s as it took in the 1980s, which what most people would call the first decade of the obesity epidemic, all right? And if we look at weight deciles, you can see I've drawn a line at a BMI of 30, which is often used as a marker for obesity. This is American white males since 1882. And you can see, you know, every one of those deciles was increasing throughout this period, but for the first 50 years or so, you only had a few percent of, you know, the obesity rate was increasing from 2% to 3% or something like that. And so in some sense, the recency of the obesity pandemic is partly an illusion as the weight distribution, we've been going into meteor parts of the weight distribution. Instead of being out in the tail, the obese range has been moving into the middle part of the weight distribution. And so it looks like there's a huge epidemic. Now I don't wanna undersell the recent part of it because some things did go wrong recently, but it's important to remember some of the factors that generate obesity have been in place and becoming more obesogenic for at least 130 years, okay? And that's crucial because one thing we can notice immediately is that for most of those 130 years, health was improving, all right? So life expectancy was increasing dramatically and mainly through reductions in infectious disease mortality and a stature was increasing. There were other health improvements, for instance, IQ was increasing, that's called the Flynn effect. And so it looks like we had various health improvements including enhanced immunity, helping to contribute to the lower infectious disease mortality, higher IQ, better stature, faster growth, longer lifespan, all right? And those were going in parallel with higher body weight and higher rates of obesity. And so the natural influence is that some causes of obesity are health improving. So we know there's many causes of obesity that multiply together. Some of them are health improving, some are health damaging. And for at least the first 100 years, 1880 to 1980, the main obesogenic things going on were health improving things, all right? More recently it looks like most of the things that have been increasing are the health damaging things, all right? And the next point this leads us to is that an intervention which is good at reducing weight is not necessarily going to be a health improving thing, all right? One of the most effective ways to lose weight may be to take away all of these health improving causes of obesity. And if the health improving things were better nutrition, you can just take away better nutrition by eating less food, all right? That's a very easy way to take away nutrition. But that can easily backfire. And that may account for some of the negative effects that we see from dieting. When people diet, they may be taking away the health improving causes of obesity, but leaving all the health damaging causes of obesity. All right? So the three inferences. The ubiquity leads us to suspect things like food, things in the environment like light, and microbes. So the microbial environment is ubiquitous. The log normal distribution leads us to say weight is generated through a single physiological process. It's a normal healthy physiological process, but it works on multiple inputs that are exogenous to the body, this food, environment, microbial cues. And depending on what you draw from in terms of food, environment, and microbes, you'll end up underweight, normal weight, overweight, or obese depending on those inputs. And the Historical Association of Obesity with Better Health means that some of the causes of obesity are health improving, and you'd better be careful if you wanna lose weight, you'd better choose some of those health damaging causes of obesity and fix those, not the health improving ones. All right, so let's look at some of the key factors in the obesity epidemic. And the three I'm gonna focus on, I'll just go quickly through some of these. Food, the circadian rhythm environment. So at last year's talk, I spoke about circadian rhythms, and those turn out to be crucial not only for health, but also for weight, and then the microbial environment. Okay, so first let's look at food. I talked about this in our book. Now there's actually many ways in which food and nutrition can influence obesity. I'm only gonna talk about one aspect. And that gets to this original positive surprise that I mentioned that people would tell us on our diet, hunger goes away. And so I wanted to think about why is that? Well, why do we get hungry? Why did we evolve hunger in the brain? It's because the brain wants to encourage us to get the nutrition that we need. You know, bring in all the nutrients, including micronutrients and macronutrients. And so if you haven't been able to get enough food and you're undernourished, then your brain is going to make you hungry. It's going to say, go get more. All right, now if the goal of appetite is to make us well nourished, then what's going to be the minimum food diet? You know, the diet, the way of eating that gets us to eat the minimum amount of stuff? Well, it's if you get exactly enough of every nutrient to satisfy the brain's desires, you know, the, our evolved appetite for that nutrient. And you do that for every single nutrient. Once you've satisfied that hunger will go away and you won't have an excess of any of them. And if you think about what happens, so we'll call that a balanced diet. If you think about what happens if you eat an unbalanced diet, that means you're getting low levels of some nutrient and high levels of some other nutrient. So I've drawn that here. And now what can happen is hunger can be driven by the few nutrients that you're eating too little of. All right, and nutrients that you're eating an excess of, they may do very little to suppress hunger. All right, and if you look at all of the diseases of nutritional deficiency or nutritional excess, one thing you'll notice is that many of the deficiency diseases are fatal diseases. So think of things like berry berry, pelagra, scurvy, rickets, those are fatal vitamin deficiency diseases. There are many fatal mineral deficiency diseases. But if you look at diseases of nutritional excess, well, first of all, you may need to go to 10 or 20 or 50 fold higher than normal intakes to get a disease of nutritional excess. And also the symptoms tend to be very benign. I think I removed the table from my talk, but typical symptoms are enacting like rash, diarrhea, drowsiness, things like that. So a nutritional excess is just not that dangerous, at least in the short term, whereas nutritional deficiencies are potentially fatal very quickly. So it's natural that nutritional deficiencies will drive appetite. And if those things that you're eating in excess are the macronutrients, meaning nutrients bearing calories, and you're eating in excess of them, then you're going to be eating an energy excess diet, a potentially obesogenic diet. And so what we ought to expect to see is that one thing that's driving energy excess obesogenic diets are diets that are micronutrient depleted. And when they look at obese people and measure nutritional status of nutrients that we can measure nutritional status for, we almost always find that the obese are depleted. And so nutrients that the obese have been shown to be depleted in are vitamin D, magnesium, iron, zinc, copper, vitamin C, and selenium, a lot of minerals especially. And there is at least one Chinese trial that showed that micronutrient supplementation in the obese leads to weight loss. All right, so it looks like it's quite possible that eating a micronutrient depleted diet is, and a macronutrient rich diet is a leading cause of obesity. And if we think about, all right, what was our ancestral diet? It was a natural whole foods diet like the one on the right. That's actually a very micronutrient rich diet. If you're eating those animal food, seafood, plants, and vegetables, you're going to be rich in micronutrients and minerals. But look at what's happened in our industrial food era. How do food companies put together cheap food for us? Well, they purify out the macronutrients and they reassemble new foods. So they're missing most of the micronutrients in natural whole foods and they reassemble them. And often the first three ingredients are starch or flour, sugar, and oil, all right? And so here's a relatively healthy back-to-nature organic natural cookie, but you still see that the first ingredients, and I got this off Sarah Pope's website, but it would be easy to go through the aisles of a supermarket and you see these foods that are macronutrient rich, but they've got very little micronutrition. And so I would say clearly this is one major change that has happened in food. And it's not just our food. In our book, we talk about the food, the gorillas in the Cleveland Zoo ate that gave them heart attacks and obesity. And once they started eating lots of fiber-rich foods, then they lost weight. And unfortunately, these purified macronutrient rich foods are just everywhere and they're affecting our animals as well as our humans. And so what's the essence, the single most important dietary step you can take? Well, you should eat our diet, of course, but the general principle, you should eat natural whole foods. It should be a nutrient-dense diet. We have a list of supplemental foods, which are rich in nutrients, but not just any nutrients, the ones that people are most deficient in. And those are things like liver, egg yolks, bone and joint materials, seafood, carotenoid-rich vegetables, and plant foods, fermented foods, things like that. And then you should eat a balanced diet because that's what's going to be calorie minimizing. Whenever you go to an extreme diet, the thing that it's low in is going to be driving appetite. That will be the scarce nutrient that will drive appetite. And so you'll tend to eat more of the things that are abundant in the diet and you'll have an energy-excess diet. All right, next factor I wanna talk about circadian rhythm and training. There are five major zeitgebers or time-givers to the circadian rhythm system. Those are light, ambient temperature, social interactions, exercise and meal timing. And every single one of these has been connected to obesity. And every single one of them are important environmental factors. And now it doesn't really matter which way you disrupt circadian rhythms. If you do it, you get the same collection of diseases. So here's a comparison of the diseases that are elevated in people who have sleep loss either due to night shift work or sleep apnea. And on the right, people who aren't in training their circadian rhythms because they don't engage in physical activity during the day. And what are the diseases you get? Well, they're exactly the same and you get elevated rates of metabolic disease. And they both actually, they even have the same life expectancy cost about six years, all right? And that's because they're working through common mechanisms. There's been lots of gene knockout studies. What happens when you knock out in animals like mice, circadian rhythm genes? Probably the most important circadian rhythm gene is that first column, BMAL-1. And what happens when you knock it out? You get reduced activity. You get twice the fat mass. You get metabolic impairment. You get prediabetes. Other genes will also inhibit weight loss and lead to metabolic impairment. We know that in animals, circadian rhythm disruption precedes obesity. In humans, night shift work increases BMI by 15% and increases the odds of being obese by 40%. We know that sleep loss leads to weight gain. That's been reproduced in many studies. Sleep loss is a very reliable indicator of circadian rhythm disruption. I mentioned meal timing as one of the circadian rhythm zycobers. Food is meant to be eaten in the daytime, all right? It's not good for us to eat at night. And night eating is strongly associated with weight gains and with obesity and gains in waist circumference. There have been a lot of studies that have observed that skipping breakfast leads to bad outcomes. It turns out good news for us intermittent and faster. Skipping breakfast is not bad in and of itself. It's only bad if it leads you to eat at night, all right? So skipping breakfast is fine if it doesn't lead to night eating. The trouble is most people who skip breakfast end up getting hungry at night and eating. And you really want to, if you can, focus the bulk of your calorie intake between noon and 3 p.m. would be the optimal time to eat. All right, let's look at night. One of the things that has changed dramatically in the last 120 years. And so it used to be people burned oil, you know, lamps and candles for light at night. And that produced a red yellow light which did not disrupt nighttime rhythms. But nowadays, Thomas Edison, unfortunately, for us invented the light bulb. And now you can see what the earth looks like at night. There's light all over the place. It tends to be blue light. And that's a big circadian rhythm disruptor. It turns out light exposure at night is highly correlated with obesity. So if you get relatively little light at night, then you're 24% less likely to be obese. Social interactions, this is an honor. I included this slide in honor of my friend, Seth Roberts, who passed away. Very original thinker. And he had some circadian rhythm disruption issues. But one of the things he showed was that social interactions, and this has been known elsewhere, but his work really brought it to my attention, that social interactions are really important circadian rhythm time giver. But we need to have them in the daytime. If we get social interactions at night, it disrupts our rhythm. Why is television viewing associated with such harmful health outcomes? Because most people are watching social dramas. They're looking at human faces, hearing human voices, thinking about human relationships as they watch movies or television shows at night. And if you go back in the 1950s, why were soap operas so popular in the middle of the day? Well, there was a large population, mostly female, who was alone at home. And they needed social interactions. So those soap operas were probably very health improving because they gave that social stimulation during the day. But nowadays, when people watch television at night, they're harmful, all right? And night television viewing has been linked to obesity. So people who watch TV at night, this was over a 10-year period, gained twice as much weight as people who don't. I mentioned ambient temperature is a zeitgeber. We're meant to be exposed to warmer temperatures in the day, cooler temperatures at night. But what happens if you go to hot places like the American South? Everywhere you go in the daytime, they have the air conditioning on and it's frigid, all right? And people go to their offices, it's cool. They go to the shopping malls, it's cool. And then what happens? They go home and they wanna save money. So they turn the air conditioning off and at night it's warm. And so they've reversed the normal cycle. And it's also been shown, even if you keep it on at night, if the temperature is always the same and it's always comfortable, then people tend to gain weight. And they've shown this in animal studies too. And all right, so what should be the strategy for avoiding all of the circadian causes of obesity? Well, you should expose yourself to bright natural light in the day. But as soon as nighttime comes, basically as soon as you finish eating, you should turn off all white lights and all lights with a blue component, have red yellow lights around your house and turn on all the red yellow lights. You should get exercise, but only during the day. You shouldn't exercise at night. You should do intermittent fasting. You should constrain your food intake to a daytime feeding window of about eight hours. It's very important feeding only in daytime, not at night. You should expose yourself to warm temperatures in the day, cool temperatures at night while you're sleeping. And the body temperature actually has a rhythm where your body temperature decreases at night. You should get social interactions during the day. And if you can't get actual interactions with actual people, you should either get a dog. So it turns out dogs are good substitutes for people in terms of training the social component of our circadian rhythms. And if you can't get a dog or a person, then get a television or get what Seth Roberts did, pictures so he could look at human faces and hear human voices. So get YouTube. You should arrange to have everything stressful in your life happen in the daytime. No stress at night. Okay, so if your spouse wants to have an argument, then do it in the daytime. All right, the microbe is very important. Adipose tissue is an immune organ. It is in some ways a master controller of the immune system. It releases a lot of cytokines that manage immunity and white blood cells migrate to the adipose tissue in order to influence it. So there's a reciprocal influence. Gut microbes have a huge influence on obesity. What's called metabolic endotoxemia, the influx of lipopolysaccharides from the gut, induces metabolic syndrome and obesity. Gut microbes influence your appetite. Low microbial diversity is a major driver of obesity. And it's interesting and germ-free mice are relatively lean and mice with rich gut flora are relatively lean, but mice with low microbial diversity become obese and the same happens in humans. And when we look at obese people, they have generally non-diverse gut flora. And it's been observed that low dose antibiotics promote obesity by reducing gut flora diversity and they've been used for that purpose in agriculture. So best strategy for shaping the gut microbiome, don't take antibiotics, eat a natural whole foods diet that's rich in fiber, diverse fiber sources, including resistant starch from eating starchy foods, cooking them and then cooling them, eating a diversity of vegetables, fruits. But you also need to support immunity, support circadian rhythm and training. All right. So what's the remedy now? It's going to be adjusting our food to an ancestral diet, adjusting our lifestyle to an ancestral lifestyle that entrains our circadian rhythms. And if you do those things, you'll also tend to naturally adjust your microbial environment. And all right, so what do we do at our retreats? Well, you can see the daytime environment, very bright light, the nighttime environment. We close the blinds, close the drapes. We switch all the lighting, so it's red, yellow light. There's no blue light. People get sufficient exercise during the day. We do restful activities at night. So we do things like meditation, night yoga, stress relief, massage. Get great food. There's no limit on how much food people can eat, but there's a limit on when they can eat it. So we do intermittent fasting, 16 hours a day. There's an eight-hour feeding window. Eat as much as you want in the eight hours. Go back for seconds at both meals. Eat as many snacks as you want in between meals. And people are instructed to eat enough so that you're never hungry, all right? And the food is delicious. It's a nourishing, balanced diet. All right. This was an initial result that got me excited enough to put in my proposal for this talk. What were the original outcomes? So we did things in two stages. We did sort of a pilot retreat in Austin, Texas in 2013. And because that was located in a residentially zoned area, people had to come and stay for at least 30 days, which was inconvenient. And the fellow who was running that didn't want to serve alcohol, and so they could eat as much food as they wanted, but didn't drink. And you can see the weight loss figures were actually quite spectacular. And the people, I can tell you, the people who lost that weight were extremely surprised. They were never hungry, but they lost, in some cases, spectacular amounts of weight, 24 and 25 pounds in 30 days. And everybody lost weight. And then we did a two-week retreat in May. Now, most of the people who came were normal weight or close to it. And this time I was running it, so we served wine at dinner. And now I've left out one woman who, unfortunately, her mother died the day before the retreat. And she came, she stayed five days, and then she went back for the funeral. And she was our biggest alcohol consumer, but a lovely woman. And anyway, she gained three pounds. She actually didn't weigh herself until a week after returning home. And so that included the funeral and people were giving her lots of food and things. But so I excluded her as an, and you can see only one person gained weight. That was a man at a BMI of 25. He lost half an inch from his waist circumference, so I think it was muscle. In general, we had very good weight loss results again. So in conclusion, I think the sort of theoretical arguments that I gave at the beginning suggest that the things that have been driving the obesity epidemic have been a shift away from our ancestral diet and our ancestral lifestyle toward a much more obesogenic diet and lifestyle. And all that may be needed to normalize weight in everyone who's non-diabetic is simply to revert to an ancestral diet and lifestyle. And some major elements of that lifestyle I show in this figure. And so there's my talk. Thank you very much. So the next talk is gonna start in five minutes and we're gonna take time to set it up. But in the meantime, you can ask a couple of questions while we're setting up the next one. Could you comment on compounds, obesogens in the environment? Do you think that's much of a component and I know there's a Blumberg down at UCI has done some work on that. Okay, so when you say obesogens, I think, oh, it's, all right. Well, there are things like certain pesticides that can cause obesity and the chrind disruptors are known to be able to cause obesity. I think the significance of them is much harder to judge. So I think they're probably not the most significant things. The most significant things are industrial food and these circadian rhythm disruptors and microbial changes, which I didn't talk a lot about. Okay. Is the blue light a problem through the eyes or is it through the skin as well? Do you need to? Yeah, blue light affects you through the eyes. Yeah, that's enough. But remember, it also depends on what you're watching. If you're watching faces on television, then you can disrupt rhythms by another channel. Well, the best thing to do is set up your own artificial day and night with a 12 hour day, 12 hour night. So what I use is 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. I try to finish eating by 7 or 7 30 p.m. except for a little dessert right at 8 p.m. Transition all the lighting at 8 p.m. Go to sleep at like 11 p.m., wake up at 7 a.m. And then, again, do some non-daytime rhythm and training things like checking email and taking a shower in the dark red yellow lit environment. And then at 8 a.m. switch, you know, bring in all the sunlight, turn on all the white lights and start doing all the stressful daytime things. Yeah, well, if you consistently, all right, so he's asking about, what's my opinion about biphasic sleep? So it wasn't uncommon when people had actual 12 hour nighttime environments, you know, only lit by candlelight for people to often go to sleep early, then wake up, do a little work, and then go back to sleep and wake up again. But we don't really know what the frequency of that pattern is compared to sleeping through the night. And, you know, I think the key thing is actually get to that 12 hour nighttime. It doesn't matter so much when you get your sleep in the pattern. Okay, thank you very much, Paul.