 Well, thank you guys so much for being here at this, well, semi-early hour in the morning on the weekend. It's always such a special honor to be presenting at AHS to all of you. So my subject today is all about the central role of dietary fat in forging the human brain. Now, I'm curious, how many of you have already read my book, Primal Fat Burner? All right, awesome, so a few of you, that's great. So the title makes it sound a little bit like a weight loss book, when actually the title is a bit of a double entendre, and actually goes well past that focus to present a couple of unique hypotheses within the genre of both ancestral health and ketogenic perspectives. Now, so in your book, I make the case for the idea that dietary fat isn't simply not as bad as we once heard, or that it's OK as long as it's olive oil and avocados and the occasional foray into coconut oil. And it's not even necessarily saying that more fat is always better. What it is saying is that dietary fat, and especially dietary animal fat, of uncompromising quality, grass-fed, finished, in other words, exclusively, either from Wild Game or 100% pasture-fed and finished animals. And as well as similar sources, by the way, of fat-soluble nutrients. It's not only central to human health. It's literally central to what made us human in the first place. So my original manuscript for this book, by the way, supplied over 300,000 words and over 3,000 peer-reviewed references as what was supposed to be irrefutable evidence to support this sort of bold hypothesis. But unfortunately, the nature of the mainstream publishing industry does not allow for exhaustive analysis and endless peer-reviewed evidence, unfortunately. Just the same, I do believe I made a very good case for all this in my book in a highly accessible way. And the final version, and I urge anybody here who hasn't read it to pick up a copy and read it for yourself. Again, I brought plenty with me, and I'm happy to sign one for you. And I think you'll find it pretty compelling and full of highly useful and practical information. But I digress here a little bit. And I digress again. So one quick thing before I continue. I have a free giveaway for anyone that's here, that's interested in maybe reading a pretty thorough, actually, and extremely, very newly updated and very well-referenced document, a PDF that's debunking many of the popularized concerns around sort of fat-based ketogenic approaches to eating, including taking on some of the very popularized and rather problematic trends that I see. It's well-referenced, excellent adjunct to this talk, and it's free. All you need to do is text me at that phone number and plus with your email address. And I'm going to make sure that you receive a PDF plus one other gift, and you don't have to worry about me spamming you or selling your email to anyone. I really, really respect that privacy. And if you have trouble doing this quickly right now, keep your cell phone ready. And I'm going to show this slide again at the very end. So I think you'll be really happy you did that. For now, I've got a lot to get to, not a lot of time to get to it. So here we go. So the first question we need to ask here is, what distinct characteristic is it that best exemplifies our humanness? The quick answer, you guessed it, are unusually large and sophisticated brains. Now, more than any other human characteristic, it's our large and sophisticated brains that are our calling card in the natural world. As the most distinctly human characteristic of all, I think most of us would probably agree with that. In fact, our brains are potentially the single most biologically sophisticated structure in the universe, or at least the known universe. And this rather extraordinary organ is ultimately, quite arguably, what best defines us as a species. It's also more than any other aspect of our health. The part of us is the part of us that relative to its function or dysfunction, that most readily determines our quality of life. Now, our astonishing brains consist of about 100 billion neurons and even 10 times more glial cells. And our human brain has allowed us not only to develop extraordinary technological achievements, for better or worse, but they also allow us the capacity for things like self-awareness, unbridled creativity, and this capacity to comprehend abstract concepts and so much of what's so unbelievably complex in both this world and in the seen and unseen universe. It allows us to contemplate ourselves, create transcendent poetry and music, and both literally and figuratively allows us to reach for the stars with this infinite range of potential for soaring achievement. It's an amazing, amazing organ. And oh, by the way, our brains are also constructed from the very fats that we supply them with, with what it is we choose to eat. They're made up of roughly 80% fat by dry weight. But let's just say that our brain capacity ancestrally wasn't always this grand, and we've come a long ways. So our supposedly closest primate cousin, the chimpanzee, has a brain volume of only about 275 to no more than maybe 500 cubic centimeters. And unlike ours, the chimp's brain really hasn't changed at all in 7 million years. So what's up with that? Well, for one thing, chimps really haven't changed their diets or lifestyle habits in all those years. They stuck to whatever of their comfortable habitats that they could find. And they kept gnashing on those bananas, right? But somewhere in there, we had a slightly more intrepid primate cousin that decided to try something different. So somewhere along the way during a period of dramatic climate change, one of these intrepid knuckle dragging relatives of ours decided to swing out of the trees and emerged onto the African savannah. And then it did something remarkable. It stood up on two legs, which in turn freed up their hands. And with developing opposable thumbs, right? And opened up this entirely new world of evolutionary possibility for this curiously and irrepressibly determined evolving new species of primate known as the hominid, or hominin, as it's more properly called now. Now we traded leaves and bananas for scavenging carcasses and learning to hunt and kill increasingly larger and fattier prey. Fat helped us survive longer between meals, which added a huge survival advantage. We developed a very real taste for fat early on, very early on. And even Lucy, who is pictured here, I'm sure you've all heard of Lucy, among the first ever species of hominin who was, she was Australopithecus afarensis, down a slightly different evolutionary hominin nonetheless, she'd already figured out how to use stone tools to cleave meat and marrow from the carcasses of animals for nourishment like three and a half million years ago. And we have done this from the very beginning of our foray into this sort of strange and more challenging new habitat on two legs. Now mind you, all chimps typically get about 20% of their nourishment from proteins from various sources, including a small amount of meat, which makes up anywhere from two to 13% of its total calories, but they get an estimated 50% or more of their actual daily caloric intake, not from the carbs that they're mostly eating all day long, okay? And are designed, by the way, to eat all day long. But from the short chain saturated fat, generated by the microbial activity from the breakdown of all of that fiber. And they're much, much bigger, by the way, in much more fermentative-based GI tracts. So the essential fatty acid profile in the non-human primate brain, by the way, is way more predominated by omega-6s, while ours is way more dominated by DHA, right? Because hexanoic acid, this elongated form, an animal source of omega-3 fats, and it's essential for what we now have is human cognition. But in fact, it's worth pointing out here that all large mammals, actually, including herbivores, cows, sheep, goats, whatever, are actually designed to get their primary caloric intake from fats, including, you know, all of the rumen and everything. So in other words, even obligate herbivores are meant to rely on fat as a primary source of fuel, not glucose. We, only we humans, have actually managed to develop a greater taste for dietary animal fat, made of a much greater kind of plethora, if you will, of brain-building fatty acids than any other mammal. Also, the adult human brain utilizes an estimated 20 to 30% of our total energy expenditure. And making it very, very expensive, you know, in energy terms, while other primates brains use no more than, okay, of their total caloric energy demands. In other words, it's easier for them to get by on bananas, right? And our human colon makes up only about 20% of our GI tract, which is overall not, just over half of what would be expected in a typical primate of our similar size. Chimps have a colon that make up a whopping 52% of their gut, okay? It's like a great big honkin' fermentation bat. They look like they've got beer guts. It's worth pointing out, by the way, that all great apes, with the exception of one, regularly eat meat, mostly from small animals. The exception being herbivorous gorilla, which are a bit of an outlier on our primate family tree as they have a smaller brain-to-body ratio than would be expected for their size. In fact, a gorilla weighing about the same as a human has a brain, only about a third of the size. I'm just saying. So in addition to overall brain size alone, the studies of neuroanatomy of living primates show that the human neocortex is also significantly larger than would be expected for a primate of our size. Oh, pretty interesting. So our earliest hominid ancestor of the genus Homo, Homo erectus, had an estimated brain size of about 900 cubic centimeters, right? That was about 1.8 to 2 million years ago. And that's already almost double that of the biggest brain of a chimp. And from there, we radically increased our brain size to about 1500 cubic centimeters to become Homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago, and that relatively brief span of evolutionary time. That's just an enormous degree of brain expansion or encephalization, as they call it. And at a speed, the speed at which that occurred is wholly unprecedented in all of nature. Now I'm sure most of you have heard of the expensive tissue hypothesis, right? Initially advanced by Leslie Aiello, paleoanthropologist. She is a professor emeritus at University College in London way back in 1994. And it's not a fringe concept. In fact, it's very widely accepted today within the realm of paleoanthropology. And as partially sort of recapped by another anthropologist from the university, or RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, Dr. Neil J. Mann, he says, and I quote, the gut is the only organ which can vary in size sufficiently to offset the metabolic cost of the larger brain. Diets high in bulky food of low digestibility require relatively enlarged gut size with volumous fermenting chambers, rumen and secum. Diets consisting of high quality foods like meat and fat are associated with relatively small gut size with simple stomachs reduced colon size but a proportionally long, small intestine is seen in carnivores. And make no mistake, you know, our gut is far more similar to an obligate carnivore than it is of an obligate herbivore. In other words, this was our trade-off and it was a good one, I like to think. So our heavy consumption of animal fats would have provided us with a way bigger, much wider variety of fats than otherwise allowed through our primate cousin's limited diet or capacity for gut-based synthesis of short chain saturated fats through bacterial fermentation, including particularly those fatty acids that we require for human cognition, namely arachidonic acid and to gozaxanoic acid, the very essential fatty acid that makes our human brain the most unique. Now our shift to primarily hunting-based economy was already in full swing about two million years ago. And we were in pursuit of large, fat and sassy herbivores, you know, which by the way was our preference when we could get them. And this unleashed that unprecedented rate of rapid encephalization, you know, brain development in other words in our species which ultimately opened the floodgates to our almost unlimited human potential. Now this is an article published just last month in Science News. Researchers in the new study being discussed were able to determine through some advanced isotopic analysis that, and I quote, just like the Neanderthals, our ancestors had mainly mammoth and plants on their plates. The researchers were unable to document fish as a part of their diet. So, you know, we often forget that throughout the entire place to see an evolutionary history from about 2.6 million years ago, clear up to 10,000 years ago, we coexisted on this planet with at least another 120 species of massive megafauna, herbivores, like woolly mammoths and a whole bunch of other freakishly ginormous animals that became rather abruptly extinct about 10,000 years ago. And the bigger they were, the fatter they were, the more avidly we hunted them. And by the way, they estimate that the body fat of a woolly mammoth was no less than about 50%, okay? And they're extrapolating this from the known body fat of elephants. And it was likely more than that. So we weren't hunting for just meat, we were hunting for fat. If they'd only known about bacon, right? So, here's an illustration from that actual study and which was published in the journal Scientific Reports, again, just last month. So you can see how mammoth meat actually dominated the diets of our oldest anatomically modern ancestors. While the second most popular item on the menu in this geographic location at the time was also the second fattiest type of animal they had available, namely, you know, red deer and horses. They probably ate more hair than Saiga antelope, mainly because rabbits were undoubtedly a lot more plentiful and also basically easier to catch by trap or snare, I'm guessing. Rabbits and antelope both, of course, are much, you know, leaner animals. Now, even in the more prehistoric Mediterranean region, the most recent, more recent prehistoric Mediterranean region, where one might imagine that very easily gotten seafood would have probably very much predominated the diet. According to Dr. Michello Manino, research scientists and archeologists at the Department of Human Evolution at the Max Planck Institute says, and I quote, the source of the dietary protein consumed in the late prehistoric Mediterranean region mainly originated from the meat of medium to large terrestrial herbivores and mainly giant oryx, red deer and wild boar, not fish. And he's referring to the late place to seem, by the way, you know, following the major postglacial changes and this widespread extinction of woolly mammoths and other megafauna. And in other words, even where fish was readily available, we still tended to prefer and go after fattier red meat. And this research, by the way, was published in 2012 in clause one. But, you know, most people like to call fish brain food. I'm inclined to call 100% pasture-fed red meat the ultimate and very first and most important brain superfood. So, despite the fact that everyone likes to refer to fish as somehow the ultimate brain food, we simply didn't get all the way from there to here by eating a bunch of salmon, right? I also don't recall seeing too many cave paintings, you know, of fish at Lascaux or Chauville or Altamira either, I'm just saying. So, you know, it's important to point out that fat to our unique human physiological makeup literally means survival. And when it comes to what your body prioritizes, survival's gonna trump everything else every time. Now, dietary and body fat certainly provide us with highly efficient extra calories that we can draw on whenever we need them even in the absence of regular meals, right? But fat is not just about calories, folks. I mean, this isn't about macronutrients, right? It also supplies this portable superfood pantry of critical fat-soluble nutrients and fatty acids that we require for structure and function that play an unimaginable range of roles in virtually every aspect of our health. You know, our brain and nervous system, our cellular structure, mineral absorption and utilization, organ protection, endocrine and immune function, I mean, on and on. So nutrient density would have always been absolutely paramount to us as an evolving species and primitive hunter and would have absolutely set the criteria for most highly coveted sources of nutrition. Now, there are a plethora of critical fat-soluble nutrients that we absolutely require in significant quantities for optimal health and that our ancestors, at least according to Weston A. Price, whom I know you guys are all familiar with, and likely got at least 10 times or more the amounts that any of us do today. And he was saying that in his own time. I can only imagine how much more we need today. Many of which are just simply not available through plant-source foods in the way that we need or can optimally make use of them, right? We're not herbivores. And this is allowed for the development of so many strikingly unique human characteristics, our brain not being the least of them. And from an evolutionary standpoint, I might add something called ketones, right? These water-soluble energy molecules formed in the liver from the breakdown of stored fat are and have always been an incredibly important fuel. And I submit that ketosis. In other words, the process by which the body makes use of that fuel was more essential than not for humankind's early survival in our rapid and cognitive brain development. Now Richard Veach, who's a medical doctor, a PhD, who's one of the world's best recognized, by the way, metabolic experts, and as National Institutes of Health Lab Chief, he states that, and I quote, ketosis is the normal physiological state. I would argue that it is the normal state of man. Well, and of woman. Richard. So I mean, I've said this before. I know you guys have seen this before probably, but something's very repeating. That we were literally born to rely on fat as a primary source of fuel. Again, the Journal of Neuroscience Research states that once the onset of suckling takes place, ketones become the major fuel for brain development. Not glucose, right? So if we're effectively born in the state of ketosis with a fat-based, fat-burning metabolism, and 20 and 22 carbon animal-sourced fats are so critical to human brain development and function, why should the macronutrient requirements of the adult human brain be appreciably different than that of human infants? Well, the quick answer to that question is, they're not. I mean, essential fatty acids like DHA, critical fat-soluble nutrients and ketogenic fat-burning are just as potentially beneficial, if not more so, and absolutely utterly important to us as adults as they ever were during our early formative neurological development. In fact, the aging brain may be every bit as vulnerable as the infant brain, if not more so, for entirely different reasons altogether, obviously, and may benefit from this even more. Now, here's another research paper published in February of 2012 with another telling title. Dietary ketosis enhances memory in mild cognitive impairment. And the researchers here concluded that these findings indicate that very low carbohydrate consumption, even in the short term, can improve memory function in older adults with increased risk for Alzheimer's disease. Other mechanisms associated with ketosis, such as reduced inflammation and enhanced energy metabolism, also have contributed to improved neurological function. Close quote. So in metabolic researcher, Dr. Richard Beach, also telling quote, ketone bodies from dietary fats and ketogenic diets may not only treat, but also prevent Alzheimer's disease, which of course is a uniquely and increasingly epidemic modern day affliction, I might add. Nothing, folks. I mean, you look at the list of what this type of metabolism does for the average person, and I could probably fill three or four slides with all of the things that have been shown and just reams of scientific research to benefit us. Nothing that advantageous for the body and brain would have been intended by nature as a strictly alternative fuel source. Glucose was meant to be our alternative and auxiliary fuel source. Not that. Now, a lot of you guys already know me well enough to know that I spent time in the high arctic studying and living among wolves there, and I was able to spend time over the course of an entire high arctic summer, closely observing all their daily behaviors, including hunting. And I think it's especially interesting to point out that wolves and other hunting carnivores, unlike us, habitually go for typically the youngest or oldest or more weak and vulnerable prey when they hunt. And it's not that they don't like eating fully healthy, fat and sassy animals. It's that way simply because these vulnerable animals are the easiest for them to catch. Makes sense. I mean, wolves are incredibly smart. They're really cunning. But let's face it, they lack opposable thumbs and sophisticated technology that would allow to be a bit more selective with their hunting. But we humans develop the technological means to hunt in a way more sophisticated manner, allowing us to be way more selective of larger and healthier and fattier prey. Even when the selection may have been less convenient, more difficult, and certainly far more dangerous for us to catch. This says a lot about the importance of our early preference for fat, and it is this early preference that shaped us in ways I think we have yet to fully appreciate. So according to all the available paleoanthropological data, our human paleolithic ancestors consistently chose to hunt fully mature animals like bulls and females in their prime, where fat levels in them would have been highest, even again as these animals would have been by far the hardest, riskiest and most challenging for us to hunt. And it tells you something about the rather extreme value that we placed upon dietary fat. It was apparently every bit worth the risk for us to go after it. The fact is that our uniquely voracious appetite for fat as an evolving primate species basically served to potentiate the development of our large and astonishingly sophisticated brains. And with that improved sophistication came the capacity for greater innovation, greater technology in a very creative, in a strategizing for hunting these fat and sassy animals successfully even more. We didn't need fire by the way in order to make dietary fat available as a nutrient for a rapidly expanding intelligence. And I think that's an incredibly important overlooked point to make about this. Too much is made of fire and cooking. So without this metabolic adaptation, homo sapiens could not have evolved such a large brain. Now this graphic came from a paper published in a much larger compendium of scholarly research that was related to dietary fat and human evolution. In it, we're looking at a plot of brain size in a large variety of primates, including humans versus dietary fat content essentially. Now here are the authors state and I quote, among living primates the relative proportion of energy allocated to brain metabolism is positively correlated with what they call dietary quality. Contemporary humans fall at the positive end of this relationship having both a high quality diet and a large brain. Thus high costs associated with the human brain are supported in part by energy rich diets unquote. And then they went on later to say that quote, consumption of a high quality diet, meat and especially fat was likely a prerequisite for the evolution of a large energetically expensive brain and hominids. And by the way, not only does fat provide double the calories of either protein or carbohydrates, it actually has the potential for creating four times the amount of actual energy. In this graphic in the fine print here, that you may have difficulty seeing, it says that humans represent the positive extremes for both measures, having a large brain to body size and a substantially high quality diet than expected for their size. Now our human brain makes up maybe two to five percent of our total body weight, right? And yet as adults it uses a whopping 20 to 30 percent or so of our total caloric energy demands. In babies this number is as high as 85 percent and in older children 45 to 50 percent. And this is in contrast to the great apes who use no more than 8 percent, whose brains use no more than 8 percent of the total caloric energy demands. That makes our human brain extremely expensive in energy terms and that fundamentally demands a diet rich in nutrient density, in other words, fat. According to anthropologic researchers, William Leonard, Marsha Robertson, they say, quote, the shift to a more calorically dense diet was probably needed in order to substantially increase the amount of metabolic energy being used by the hominid brain. And again, they're referring mainly to dietary fat. The human brain growth is utterly dependent on dietary fats, especially these 20 to 22 carbon fatty acids, because of hexanoic acid and arachidonic acid. In other words, dietary animal source fats. So we allocate the substantially larger share of our daily budget to our brains than do other primates or other mammals. And compared to large body apes, we have this enhanced capacity to digest and metabolize higher fat diets and we still need to do that folks if we wanna have an optimally functioning brain. Now one thing I was more recently gobsmacked by and unfortunately only after I turned in my manuscript was the realization that in virtually all cave paintings involving depictions of animals that we once hunted, regardless of where the paintings originated, all of the prey animals were depicted. Have you ever noticed this as unnaturally fat? I mean, we're talking Macy's Day Parade, you know? And interestingly, human males, there you can see right there, they depicted a human male there. So, and even females for the most part are not depicted in this way, saving fertility totems, which says a lot too, but a whole other subject, and neither are predators. So cave paintings have been way more recently understood by those that study them as being shamanic in nature. In other words, depicting that which is sacred or that which prehistoric peoples may have sought as most desirable. Kind of something like a prehistoric vision board, right, if you will. Make no mistake, these were amazing artists, but they were fully capable of depicting animals accurately. And yet they chose to portray the ones that they might have sought to hunt for food as being disproportionately fat. Isn't that interesting? The rational implication here is that this was the most desirable characteristic in food animals, and that they hoped to successfully hunt. And looking through hundreds of cave paintings in rock art from locations all over the world, it's a theme that comes up again and again. I mean, maybe this is what they were dreaming about, right? They certainly weren't depicting horses as something being ridden by anyone as some mode of transportation, so, you know. So once the majority of the megafauna were gone at the end of the last Ice Age, Neolithic hunter-gatherer humans were left with way smaller and leaner prey that was far more fleet of foot. And most of the early so-called paleo diet research was focused on data from Neolithic hunter-gatherer societies, completely failing to recognize that for most of our long history as evolving hominids, the world was a very, very different place as were the animals that we preferred to hunt. And once the megafauna were gone, that fat was no less important to us than it ever was, but we simply were forced to become saddier at getting it. An anthropologist, Jack Brink, here had the following to say, quote, not only did the hunters know the natural patterns the bison followed, they also learned how to spot fat animals in a herd. An experienced hunter would pick out the pronounced curves of the body and the sheen of the coat that indicated a fat animal. Now, I know that there's a popular cooking hypothesis that suggests that cooking was the thing that ultimately made us human. The whole cooking hypothesis was basically supposed to be some answer to our human inability to digest and turn into large amounts of fiber into energy as is the case with herbivores and also our inability to make use of raw starch. Yeah, probably gonna go over. It automatically presumes that sugar is meant of necessity to be our primary cognitive fuel too. I'll just quote Josh Snodgrass, William Leonard and Marsha Robertson here. Three of the most accomplished and respected anthropologists specializing in this question from a paper of theirs back in 2009. And they said quote, although cooking is clearly an important innovation in hominid evolution that served to increase dietary digestibility and quality, there is very limited evidence for the controlled use of fire by hominids prior to one and a half million years ago. The more widely held view is that the use of fire in cooking did not occur until considerably later in human evolution probably closer to 200 to 250,000 years ago, although possibly as early as 400,000 years ago. In addition, nutritional analysis of wild tubers used by modern foragers suggest that the energy content of these resources is markedly lower than that of animal foods even after cooking, close quote. And by the way, much more recently published paper concerning the development of our controlled use of fire at Will in 2014 suggests by the collective evidence available that our ability to make full use of fire as a cooking tool was probably much more recent anywhere from 75 to 100,000 years ago. Also, it's worth pointing out that genes that may allow us the capacity to detoxify things like tuber glycosides and other toxic alkaloids have appeared only much more recently and only among agricultural populations that habitually consume domesticated tubers. I go into this quite a bit more in my book. So, look, cooking or fire did not make us human and neither did starchy grains or potatoes. That did. So anyway, by 11,600 years ago, we'd been evolving as this nearly pure meat and fat for over 100,000 generations or more. And then everything suddenly unexpectedly and cataclysmically changed. The vast ice sheets, thousands of feet thick in some places that covered most of Northern North America and extreme South America suddenly and even abruptly just sort of vanished. So whether it was fragments of a comet which is the currently most accepted theory at hand with the most evidence to back it up or a giant meteor or something like a magnetic reversal paired with a huge solar flare or something that caused these ice sheets to melt so rapidly or some combination thereof, it's clear that our world changed abruptly, violently and decisively in what amounted to possibly be the single greatest extinction event since the demise of the dinosaurs. And these massive, fat-rich megafauna, these huge animals like woolly mammoths and mastodons and oryx and giant sloths and woolly rhinos and huge numbers of others vanished pretty much in the blink of an eye. And suddenly we're faced with this critical survival emergency in a need to adapt to changing circumstances. And of course, being the innovative and enterprising species we were, we did. So suddenly we shifted from this three hour work day of a hunter-gatherer to one where we're basically busting our backsides working eight plus hours in the field and we suffered way poor health as a result, which is very well documented. A good paleoanthropologist doesn't have to do more than just look at a set of skeletal remains. They can tell you what those are pre-agricultural or post-agricultural skeleton. Still the civilization thing allowed us to stay put in greater population centers and gave us greater safety in numbers, but also gave us things like ruling class hierarchies and nation-states with an unprecedented appetite for war. So hey, good deal. This new version of civilization had its trade-offs and it still does. By the way, once we adopted agriculture, our average human life expectancy actually dropped in half as compared to the life expectancy of our supposedly short-lived prehistoric ancestors. And it was there that we began to develop what we now refer to as the diseases of Western civilization. And these plant-based foods gave us nothing for the structural integrity of our brain, for the fats needed for our brain, for the nutrients needed for our brain at all. And it all started there at the beginning of the agricultural revolution where basically, carbohydrate-based foods became much more our staple and not simply with the industrial revolution, which of course shoved us down a slipper or slope. Okay. So, by the way. Do you want to keep time? Yeah. Let it go on. Yeah, yeah. Like I say, I'll answer questions during the book signing. All right, cool. So this whole brain evolution thing, by the way, is not happening in an entirely sequential manner in as we like to think it is or as is popularly advertised, at least in a consistently upward direction, brain-size-wise. Chromagnin humans 20,000 years ago actually had bigger brains than we do today. Let's just say evolution may be not moving in the direction that we like to think it is. So it also turns out that human, and I quote, human populations during the last 10,000 years have undergone rapid decreases in average brain size as measured by endocrineal volume or as estimated from linear measurements of the cranium. And what's been happening with us between 10,000 years ago and today, we lost the ability to hunt the largest, fattiest species of megafauna and adopted instead an unprecedented dietary dependence on grain, starchy foods, and legumes. Foods to which humans are very poorly adapted, which supply literally nothing toward brain structure, key brain nutrients, which contain poor nutrient density and in excess of anti-nutrients that lead to actual nutrient deficiencies and which contain high levels of metabolically-disregulating starch, something new in any significant way to our species. And some of these new agricultural foods also frequently contained addictive morphine-like compounds and many invariably contain a variety of potentially immune reactive compounds leading to chronic inflammatory states. And that impact both our body and brain. I mean, yeah, and once we figured out that we could take some of this stuff and ferment it into beer, the dye was cast. You know, we're dumber now, but at least, we're malleable, right? So there are some out there shuffling around in academic circles that like to rationalize that the reduction in our brain size has something to do with improved brain efficiency. These, of course, are naturally people who like to think that size doesn't matter, which, you know, we sometimes it does. I would point out, though, that even if they were right, which they're not, size is only part of the equation. You know, it's more than that. Our unique intelligence also has to do with our unique brain composition, right? And it needs to be pointed out again that our brains are constructed from the very fast that we supply it with, with what we choose to eat. If DHA is in your diet, folks, it's not in your brain either. And also, though it may be possible, just maybe, to synthesize extremely small amounts of cognitively critical arachidonic acid, you know, evil arachidonic acid, from plant-based substrates, a large percentage of the human population lacks the ability to do that all together. And even among those capable of doing so, the ability to do it is severely limited, energy intensive, and it also compromises the omega-3 pathways. Now, this study just released in May of this year, 2017, reports that though vertebrate brains differ in size, composition, and abilities, evolution of overall brain size accounts for most of these differences, while, according to the study, and I quote, putting other theories to rest. In other words, larger brains do lead to greater capabilities. And according to Science Daily, they said that quote, this new study settles the score. So yes, the verdict is in, size does matter. Now we humans are also unique in the mammalian kingdom, and that our brains also tend to shrink as we age. And maybe the fact that we're also speech, habitually chooses to eat foods to which we are poorly adapted to, physiologically and genetically, has something to do with it, you think? But we also know that high carbohydrate diets invariably lead to measurable brain shrinkage over time through the process of glycation, and changes, adverse changes, pathophysiological changes in Alzheimer's regions of the brain. You know, through the whole process of glycation. So we also know that the combination of sugary and starchy foods is especially bad. And the combination of sugary and starchy foods with fat is especially bad. Somewhat akin to putting a lit fuse on a powder keg metabolically, which of course hasn't helped us any either. So our lower intake of animal source foods, coupled with digestive compromise, and in part due to high carbohydrate diets, have also led to subpar B12 levels in the general population, which is additionally known to be an impetus for brain shrinkage. So what's the moral of this story? Well, hello, we're supposed to be fat heads, not potato heads or grain brains. So getting to winding it up here, Albert Einstein once wisely said, we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we use when we created them, right? Well, not the second guess, Albert, but I would also submit that we can't solve our problems with the same dysregulated brains that we use when we created them, all right? If we're gonna actually survive this age as a species, then we need to make sure that we're optimally nourishing the brains that we use to make the clear-headed decisions that we need to make as a species going forward. Neurodegenerative, neuroinflammatory disorders, they're epidemic now, and psychiatric disorders are similarly flourishing in a world, all you have to do is turn on the news, where food is treated less as a source of nourishment and more as a source of entertainment. And I'm telling you, there is a connection. And all too frequently, we're talking about nutrient-devoid entertainment. So brain health and mental health go hand in hand, folks. There is no mind-body connection, that's a total myth. The last I looked, most people's heads are screwed onto their bodies, right? Both are inexplicably intertwined, and you can't separate out brain health from physical health. We need to restore dietary fat and fat-soluble nutrients from animal-sourced foods of uncompromising quality in order to nourish these poor, beleaguered brains of ours. And I have no illusion about the fact that it's gonna take way more than just that to reverse this compromise-tied writing. It's not about evolution anymore, people. It's about survival. But it's never too late to become a primal fat burner and feed our brains. And then all we have to do after that is try to figure out how to think, right? So I'll give George Bernard Shaw the last word here. He says that no diet will remove all the fat from your body because the brain is entirely fat. Without a brain, you might look good, but all you can do is run for public office. So for more information, check out my books, Primal Body, Primal Mind, and Primal Fat Burner, and my main website. I also want to point you guys, I have a new weekly educational program called Primer Restoration, simply loaded with all kinds of cutting-edge stuff you're not gonna hear about anywhere else. And I'll have information about that at the book signing for you. It also offers CEUs to nutritional therapists. It will soon offer CEUs to those certified and holistic nutrition through the National Association of Nutrition Professionals. So, thanks so much. And there's that number again. Okay. Thank you.