How to stay physically and mentally young till the end.

23 min readFeb 12, 2021

Too many people live with allergies, low-level aches, auto-immune diseases, arthritis, pre-diabetic sugar levels, obesity, cancer, mental fog, and dementia. Too many people die early.

Why?

Out of the top causes of death, most are related to diet and lifestyle choices.

Top causes of death, data source: cdc.gov

Please note that accidents are only 9% of them.

My current career is dedicated to preventing injuries from automotive accidents, but as a fellow human, I cannot ignore the remaining 91%. I have a long-standing relationship with a healthy lifestyle including helping in the development of the Vitality apps and developing my own fitness application.

This article is an analysis of who we are, where we come from, what our ancestors became adapted to. It is essential to understand our roots in order to live in optimal mental and physical health for the rest of our time.

The right lifestyle and matching diet, can not only prolong life, but it can make life youthful till the end. Only by living right, we have a high probability of living well past 100. With advances in medical acute care, lifespan could extend to 120. Imagine if you could give yourself 30 more years of an active and happy life. Whether this life is to be illness-and-pain-free play with grandchildren, a sharp and productive scientific mind, challenging hikes in the mountains, or long strolls on the beach in retirement, it is all possible. But to achieve that you have to become an anthropologist, studying the happiest and longest-living communities, and to know yourself.

Blue-Zone living, image: linknutrition.com

I am on purpose NOT starting with recommendations, I want us to build opinions and derive conclusions together.

Here are a few benefits, proven by generations of active centenarians, from the apparently trivial, to profound:

Not having heartburn. This, for me, was a significant change.
Looking younger with better and brighter skin. Your skin is a testament to your health, you could look decades younger than your aged, neglected peers. The following are preventable: lack of skin elasticity caused by low collagen production (i.e. wrinkles), dark bags under the eyes, pigmented age spots, acne.
Getting a 6-pack, not that from the grocery, but the one you always meant to have. Most people look at the height-age-weight chart and if they do not exceed the maximum number they think they are fine. The reality is, that within that “normal” weight range unless you are a high-sport performer, you carry 15 to 30 pounds of extra fat. For example, for my height the weight range is 145 to 185 pounds, depending on age. So at say 180 pounds, this would make me believe I am in the “normal” weight range. The reality is I would be carrying extra 20 pounds of fat on top of my optimal weight. I know that for a fact, I was in the Marine Corps, and I know my weight is supposed to be ~165 pounds. If your BMI index is higher than 24, you are overweight, stop kidding yourself, get to 23.5 if you can.
Not being hungry between the meals. With the right diet, you will be easily able to go a day, or two without feeling any hunger. You cannot imagine how much easier and happier your life will become if you eat for enjoyment, and not as a necessity. Intermittent fasting has been proven as a health benefit for ages, do not listen to what the food lobbying companies tell you, the “3 square meals a day” will slowly kill you.
Mental clarity. No more foggy mornings, nor any need for coffee, no more afternoon food coma. This alone is worth the effort.
Beautiful teeth. You can brush 3 times a day and floss religiously, with the wrong diet you are still not binding calcium and developing cavities. Studies show that the right diet can prevent cavities, even repair teeth. The feeling of dirty teeth will go away, too.
General rejuvenation of all body cells. Every 3 months most of the cells of our body are recycled, it is called autophagy. This includes removing sick and old cells, such as skin age marks, tumors, etc., and growing new cells instead. The degree of autophagy is influenced by diet and lifestyle. In the next few months, you could become the healthier, newer you.
The food and lifestyle help the immune system to fight bacterial and viral infections, which is so important now, during the Covid-19 pandemic.
At 50 being as fit as the 21-year-old U.S. Marine self. That is my personal standard.
Being 100 and doing daily mountain hikes. This is not hypothetical, but a well-documented behavior of centenarians in the so-called “blue zones”.
The right diet will help you in fighting any potential cancer. It is well documented scientifically that micro-tumors and cancerous cells are being created in our bodies all the time. Depending on the level of harmful elements and stress, our body is usually able to remove them and we keep on living without ever knowing. It is also well documented that cancer thrives and accelerates on all types of sugars (blood glucose).
The right lifestyle and diet can revert many auto-immune heart diseases.
The right lifestyle and diet can prevent and revert mental degenerative conditions (dementia) such as Alzheimer’s.

Wow, I hope the above list will at least make you curious enough to follow the study with me.

Preamble (food-for-thoughts)

We are all born out of a unique genetic lottery, some are luckier than others, but once we survive early childhood, there is an incredible power given to us via epigenetics.

Epigenetics is the ability to turn on and off the inherited genes. Studies show that genetically identical twins manifest different development when raised in different conditions.

Parents have an obligation to their children: fruit-loops, macaroni-and-cheese, or pasta-and-catchup are easy to serve and often preferred by our kids, but we are their “parents”, not their college “buddies”. Parents need to understand what to feed their kids. Obesity, insulin resistance, early maturation of young girls, and generally high levels of estrogen in children do lead to future problems.

We are constantly exposed to various external pathogens: bio-chemical, bacterial, and viral, our body continually develops many micro tumors and cancers. Yet, our body is almost always able to heal itself, given a chance.

If I have an illness and something is hurting, I ought to find the cause first. There is no reason to live with an illness, or pain at any, even very advanced, age.

Before I make any lifestyle and dietary choices, I need to understand who we are. Choosing what to eat is hard as there is a spectrum of recommendations ranging from vegans, vegetarians, high-carb, low-carb, high-fat, low-fat, CRON, paleo, keto, all the way to carnivores.

In this discourse, I am trying to explain WHY I choose to eat certain things.

The Hippocratic oath

I am not a medical doctor, government-accredited dietician, nor a medical practitioner, if I were, I would probably not give you any good advice.

Today’s medical establishment addresses symptoms, not the causes.

In my experience, it is very rare to find a local doctor who deeply cares about our diet, lifestyle, and immune system. I have been to numerous practitioners for sinuses, tightening esophagus, and joint pain, all caused by the auto-immune dietary response, and all doctors offered very invasive procedures, basically, scalpels, probes, and needles, and none offered any guidance. It was a crime what the doctor was doing to my sinuses when I was a child, in retrospect, I am a perfectly healthy person who was just fed the wrong things.

A nightmare memory of giant needles and sinus fluid pumping as a child.

It is literally a conflict of interest for doctors to provide preventive care.

Yet, they all made the oath of Hippocrates which can be translated to:

“I will apply dietetic lifestyle (Greek: διαιτήμασί ) to help the sick to my best ability and judgment; I will protect them from harm and injustice.”

There are a couple of messages here: a “diet regimen” that should be prescribed, and doctors should protect people from the harm occurring (in the future), not just treat the existing diseases.

I will list exceptions, specifically Dr. Gundry, M.D., top cardiologist, who turned from surgery to auto-immune practice to actually cure his patients. So far, I cannot find any fault in his teaching, and I am a devoted follower of his advice.

I would also give a shout-out to my brother, Dr. Konrad, who is quite a specimen of good physical health, and his healthy diet makes me envious.

The Audience

This post is NOT for you, at least statistically speaking, but if this discourse positively affects even a single person, then it will be definitely worth the time I spent writing (and constantly re-writing) it.

As with my other writings, I write to formulate my own thoughts. I use the pronoun “I” on purpose, as this is not meant to tell “you” what to do. My writing shows me where I am today, and remains me of where I have been when I wrote in the past.

This particular post I write despite the knowledge that nearly nobody cares. To make the point:

I have a decent following on social media and when I post about anything inconsequential, I get plenty of likes. Yet, when I post about important topics such as health, academic topics, or financials, there is near silence, maybe some sarcasm, especially from family and “friends”. I tested this repeatedly, it is unfortunately true.

The number of adults that are currently overweight tips at 75 percent. That is 3 out of 4 people! A century ago, this number was 1 out of 10. This is real statistical data and it is not getting any better.

Obesity is correlated with depression, low physical ability, and low activity, diabetes, heart disease, rheumatoid degeneration, auto-immune, and degenerative mind diseases such as Alzheimer's and cancer. This does not mean you cannot get the auto-immune disease if you are skinny, it is very common, too. Most of these problems can be prevented and reversed with a diet. And, when I write “most” I really mean almost all of them.

A bit of very important history

For decades now, we have been told lies such as “Eat many regular meals consisting of sugar-loaded, fat-free yogurt, the whole grain cereals, bread with margarine, skinny chicken breast, and have your dinner fried on canola oil.” Pretty much everything in that statement is bad advice and it is killing people at a higher rate than any psychopathic murderer would dream of.

I have been postponing to write on this topic since 2004, at that time I have been extensively discussing with a friend an idea of a book on a “caveman diet”. I know, I have missed the boat, starting in 2007 the idea of the “paleo diet” exploded into one of the most successful trends and everything is the history. Yes, I have my regrets, but then, I have learned a lot of new things, too, including the fact that many paleo and keto practitioners are also making big mistakes. It is only recently I have learned about lectins in foods.

Nevertheless, the Corona pandemic, my own health issues, the subsequent recovery, and the health problems I see in my family have pushed me to write what I am thinking.

Human evolution

The idea has started when as a kid, I had a passion for biology and evolution (OK, there you go, “EVOLUTION”, I have lost most of the remaining readers).

Later, I have studied anthropology (the study of human cultures), I was gobbling books and articles on the subject and I was imagining the transition of the great apes from the equatorial rainforest to the savanna near the lakes of the Great Rift Valley in East Africa about 6 million years ago. I imagined how they lived, what they ate, and how they changed from occasional scavengers to stone-tool-wielding hunter-gatherers.

Modern humans fully evolved about 200,000 years ago.

The first fact about the modern human is that we are built to walk long distances. In the savannah, food is very scarce and people would typically walk for 15 to 20 miles a day on uneven terrain to gather the necessities. This is the first lifestyle change hint.

I feel I need to mention that Humans are also excellent long-distance runners and we can out-run almost any animal, therefore, wounding now extinct Gazella praegaudryi, and following it for days until it drops dead of exhaustion was feasible for this sweaty, naked ape. The studies of native inhabitants of such regions however show that it is not the preferred way of obtaining food as the energy expanded may not match the caloric gain of the quarry. Long-distance running is also very taxing on the organism.

I have genes that favor short-distance sprinting, an adaptation that helps to reach the nearest tree when chased by a bison.

Volcano Toba

About 75,000 years ago, a climatic disaster caused by the eruption of the volcano Toba in Sumatra almost destroyed the human race.

The eruption of Toba caused at least a decade of worldwide volcanic winter and a thousand-year cool period, it was about 12 times more powerful than that of the explosion of Tambora, also in Indonesia, which caused 1816 massive food crisis and “Year Without a Summer”.

At the time of the Toba explosion, 75,000 years ago, only a small group of few thousand humans have survived on the coast of Africa and possibly elsewhere by the lakes of the rift valley.

The semi-aquatic ape

Living on the coast became the human preference. Even today, most of us prefer vacationing by the sea, rather than in the open prairie of South Dakota. On the coast, we could hunt the land animals, collect verdant coastal plants, and enjoy the nutritious seafood. Humans are the only partially-aquatic ape that loves to swim. Human infants are naturally fat, do not sink, they naturally hold their breath underwater and swim to the surface when submerged, it takes little training, but all 3 of my daughters could swim as infants. Try that with a chimp or gorilla.

A human baby has a pre-disposition to swim. Picture: news.softpedia.com

Rapid coastal expansion

The coast, however, is only a narrow strip of livable space, therefore as the population grew in numbers, people started rapidly (10 km a generation) moving along the coast of Africa to the Red Sea, the Mediterranean basin, the Black Sea, passing the Caucasus, Dnieper river to the north and Danube river to western Europe. I am focusing on my own ancestry, however, I encourage you to trace your own path based on your genetic heritage.

Another major route was to the coastal Indian subcontinent, Indonesia, and as far as Australia as early as 60 thousand years ago.

Coastal route to central Europe, GoogleMaps.

Neanderthals

Modern humans reached Europe in waves between 60 and 45 thousand years ago, once there, they started to interbreed with Neanderthals, the archaic humans, who populated Eurasia for the past 430,000 years.

Despite the popular depiction, the Neanderthals were well adapted, had brains larger in volume to our own, they were making tools, glues of resin, medicine, clothing, woven blankets, sewing needles, and even forms of primitive water-crafts on which they spread throughout the continent. They were even capable of some form of language, however, we might never know how complex. And, importantly to cultural anthropologists, they buried their dead.

In the end, as Modern Humans pushed into Europe, the Neanderthals disappeared, but their genes echo in many of us with sometimes as much as 3% which is a very large amount considering the time passed.

Please consider you get 50% of genes from each parent, 25% from a grand-parent, ~12% from a great-grandparent, ~6% from 3x-grandparent, and ~3% from a 4x-grandparent, and that person is only 100 years removed, not 40,000 years. The add-mixture of Neanderthals genes must have been very significant and some scientists question if they really disappeared or just merged with modern humans, adopted their brains, slender posture genotype, and culture.

The interbreeding of modern humans with Neanderthals might have given the early people an adaptation and a kickstart in the new environment of colder Europe.

This is of course where my personal story may slightly diverge from that of a native inhabitant of Australia, Oceania, or Subsaharan Africa. People are genetically mostly exactly the same. In my life, I came to admire individuals from as diverse places as Japan, Korea, North, and Central America, India, Middle East, Africa, and Europe. However, as far as environmental adaptations go, I am a north-central European.

What are the differences specific to north-central Europeans?

Milk, kefir, and cheese

I can drink fresh milk all day long without any ill effects. Between the fresh milk, buttermilk, kefir, butter, and cheese I could probably survive for months. In fact, this is exactly what ancestral highlanders from my home regions did. The men would take a herd of sheep into high mountain meadows for the whole summer and subsist on milk, kefir, and cheese while adding mushrooms and berries they collected along the way. They did not hunt much and would very rarely kill the sheep they were in charge of. Sheep or goat kefir is one of the elixirs of health and I know I should drink it every day.

Cheese has definitely helped Europeans survive the long winters.

I cannot, however, recommend drinking milk from Holstein cow, prevalent in the USA, which unlike most European cows, Holstein milk carries the A1 casein protein which, once ingested, releases beta-casomorphin 7 (BCM7) which is an opioid, which negatively affects our gut micro-organism and might be co-related with auto-immune diseases, autism, and schizophrenia.

Pale bodies and vitamin D

We rarely get enough sun where I live, my skin is pale, so any chance we get, we sun-tan which used to be a symbol of good, if rural, health. Suntanning produces vitamin D, in particular, D3 which is essential in the Calcium cycle and for general mental well-being. The idea of suntanning might sound crazy and outright dangerous for anyone living south of the Alps, in Africa, Australia, Florida, or India, yet, without the sunlight, in northern climates, we get depressed and our bones get weak (a disease called rickets).

Interestingly, a lot of green leaf plants include natural sunscreen that works in summer when the sun is strongest. I would encourage you to look up studies on the toxicity of the sunscreens on the market today.

Large nose

My large, narrow nose is an adaptation to a cold climate. The purpose of my nose is to humidify and warm up the incoming air so I do not get a brain freeze. My good Indian friends in high-school called me a “big-nose” in Hindi, let’s not mention it again.

My friend has asked me why Inuit have smaller noses and darker pigmentation than Europeans. The most likely answer is that they arrived in the Arctic relatively recently, within the last few thousand years, from warmer East Asia.

Iron accumulation

Northern Europeans, especially men, store excessive amounts of iron. Today’s culture of frequent steak dinners might cause Hemochromatosis which may manifest in adults as joint pain, weakness, and fatigue. The early northern Europeans cured it by broad-ax wielding and later by surgical bloodletting. My father maintained that he likes to donate blood because he feels much better afterward. Go figure.

Brown fat

People from up north, especially those who work physically outside, store brown fat. The brown far is a great fuel to produce body heat, in fact, infants have plenty of it and this is a reason why they almost never freeze to death. Today, you will not find any brown fat on an office worker, or on an adult person from subtropics. However, it is quite common to see someone here, in Michigan, or Scandinavia, or Northern Russia sporting a T-shirt and shorts in 2 feet of snow and taking a snow bath in the morning outside a wall tent in the freezing dead of winter.

I would recommend anyone to look into traditional cold-hardening (Polish: “hartować się”, Russian: “закалить себя”) promoted by the “iceman” Wim Hof.

The evolutionary premise of what we should eat.

People 200,000 years ago were fully human, probably barely distinguishable from your bearded hunting campmate after a week of trekking in Montana.

To understand this, it is worth realizing that people as far as 45,000 years ago created beautiful art, probably better than I am capable of, both as wall drawings and sculpture, and created musical instruments such as bone flutes.

Font-de-Gaume, France, artist restored: artdiscovery.info

prehistoric flutes as old as 42,000 years ago

Diet adaptation timeline

If I was to estimate, I am adapted for (dates in thousands of years ago):

~200,000: coastal diet (fish, shellfish, Red Sea, and Mediterranean climate plants)
~45,000: northern hunter-gatherer diet (herbs, nuts, berries, animal fat)
~2,000: agricultural/farmer diet (grains, fruits, milk, cheese)

The amount of time we have lived in an agricultural society is an eye-blink of time comparing to the ancient times when humans formed. The 4,000 years since we started to eat agricultural products in Europe is about 0.005% of the history of humanity. In another word, our current agricultural civilization could have developed and collapsed 200 times since we started to migrate north from Africa. If you consider Neanderthal genetic add-mixture, the agricultural age is even less relevant.

My conclusion is that my body is adapted mostly to the coastal diet with some level of adaptation to local variation for a northern European hunter-gatherer and a very little adaptation to the agricultural and industrial products.

This time-perspective is however not quite correct, because even if, as humans, we do not get frequent hardware updates in form of new genes, we do update the technology of cooking and rapidly change the plants we grow to make them less toxic. For example beans, some mushrooms, potatoes, and grains that would like to kill us in their raw form, become edible, and even healthy when partially fermented, cooked or otherwise processed.

Having said that, I am not a big fan of highly processed food, so I prefer to err on the side of my original anatomy.

The life of my pre-agricultural ancestor.

Let’s start by saying that the biggest influence on ancient life had seasons. It is hard to imagine that today because we can buy pretty much the same food year-round in a supermarket, but in ancient times we ate berries for a couple of weeks every year, and that is all.

Yes, our ancestors could have stored dried berries for winter, but by far more efficient way was to put them away as fat. Fruits contain fructose sugar, fructose is extremely rare in nature and highly seasonal. When you find berries you usually find a lot of them. In the mountains where I grew up, there were literally square miles of them, but for a very short time.

Please note that in ancient northern Europe there were no sweet apples, which came from the caucasian mountains about 4,000 years ago. There were no oranges, bananas, squash, tomatoes, potatoes, corn, nor pretty much any other high-calorie plant.

Burning fructose for energy makes absolutely no sense, you do not need that much energy unless you are running away from a bear who also likes berries. So our bodies adopted to immediately store any fructose as fat.

Think about the effect of that daily 32-ounce bucket of Coke worth 393 high-fructose-syrup calories with your Big Mac.

Sugar in popular drinks, image: HolisticallyLoved.com

In the 10-month-long seasons between berries, our ancestors ate the young sprouts of edible and medicinal herbs, mushrooms, nuts (hazel, walnut, pine), roots, and tubers which made for the vast majority of meals. The only sources of sugar were the rare finds of wild-bee hives which probably provided some dose of sugar, however it was minuscule to what is available today.

The winter is coming

Then, there were the 8-month winters. Dieting was not a past-time hobby, but a necessity. Humans can easily survive for 3 weeks not eating anything and for well-rounded individuals that period can be months.

Our ancestors were not only gatherers, they were hunters, although I already mentioned that gathering provided most of the food.

The hunting query was mostly fish, shellfish, and small animals such as squirrels and rabbits. The successful hunts for animals bigger than a deer or a wild boar were rare, maybe once a week at best, and most likely monthly, per a family group. Hunting a large animal such as a horse, a mammoth, or wooly rhino was a highly coordinated group activity. Smoked meat and fat (bacon) were probably the most common food for long winter months. Bacon is still by far the most coveted part of the European diet today.

Health benefits and harm of dietary choices.

Leafy greens

There is no question that early humans ate a lot of greens when they were available in the warm season. I should be careful about lectins, but generally, greens are good for us.

Fish and shellfish

I believe our ancestors always preferred to live by the water and naturally ate a lot of fish. I have a preference for whole, small, wild-caught ocean fish that provides me with minerals, including iodine, selenium and calcium, and healthy fats. Large predatory fish like tuna is unsustainable and contains a lot of toxic heavy metals such as mercury.

Nuts

Our ancestors ate a lot of nuts, in northern Europe it was specifically hazelnut and pinenut. I also eat walnuts in large quantities that provide me with healthy fats.

I started to avoid peanuts (although I love Reese's peanut butter cups) and cashews which can be toxic and are not nuts anyway.

Soups

Soups are essential. We know that even the most ancient cultures used cooking stones and often a large suspended raw-hide, or ceramic bowl (as old as 14,000 years ago) filled with water to make a soup.

If you were a caveman in the middle of winter with a store of dried herbs, dried mushrooms, dried meats, dried berries, and fat, soup is a natural way to combine them into a nutritious meal. Cooking small animals such as birds (chicken soup), rabbits and squirrels gives you much more nutrients than trying to eat them alone. Chicken soup is still a preferred cold remedy.

Mushrooms

Mushrooms are highly appreciated in Europe and virtually ignored in the USA. You can get the standard white button variety, shitake, portabella, and oyster, but the really good varieties are unknown here in Michigan and have to be imported from Europe.

I love mushrooms, but I have to process them by frying in the high-heat, boiling in the soup, or marinating in vinegar. Mushrooms are incredibly healthy and I hope to write more on the subject in the future.

Onions and garlic

These two deserve a place by themselves, first of all, both have been cultivated very early, secondly, there is a ton of wild alternatives. I use both in daily cooking, practically in everything.

The early spring forest Up North of Michigan explodes in the number of wild leaks and it is virtually impossible to walk without smelling it all around.

Fats

If you limit eating carbs, you will derive energy via burning fats, I am trying to stay in the state of ketosis. The largest source of fat is in our own blubber, but I also add a lot of fats (mostly olive oil) to my diet.

The major reason that I add fats to my meals is to feel full after the meal. I use plenty of extra virgin olive oil, I know olives are the Mediterranean, not northern-European, but it was one of the first things my ancestors ate and cultivated.

I started to add coconut oil because it is proven to be healthy even if it is not native to our region.

I have already mentioned nuts and fish, especially wild-caught smoked mackerel.

Picked and fermented foods

One of the oldest ways to preserve foods for winter is to pickle them.
Pickling and fermenting also may reduce lectins.

I eat mostly pickled cucumbers, sour-kraut, but my family eats picked tomatoes (no skin), watermelon, onions, peppers (no skin, nor seeds), and more.

Japanese fermented soy into miso. Inkas fermented quinoa before cooking it, something we often forget.

Pickled foods are incredibly healthy pro-biotic and it tastes good if done well. I have a preference for the Polish style and I am quite picky about the subject.

Intermittent red-meat proteins

I love a good, fatty, medium-rare steak, however, I realize meat was also a scarce treat. I eat it, but I try to do it rarely, think of an idea of a tribal “feast”.

No carbohydrates

I do not think I need to convince anyone that sugars, or carbohydrates, are bad for health when eaten daily.

My biggest scare is insulin intolerance and cancer which feeds on sugar, Alzheimer’s, and mental dementia follow closely.

I have removed any sources of sugar from my diet, however, I allow for occasional feasts, such as birthdays, holidays, local fruit season.

Up North of Michigan, we have acres of wild raspberries, blackberries, blueberries as well as ancient apple trees that produce small, homely, but tasty fruits. It is perfectly healthy and natural to get out of ketosis for a period of time in the late summer and fall, eat a lot of fruits and gain some, say 15 pounds of fat. Thanksgiving, my favorite and most meaningful holiday, should be the end of that feast.

I have also removed non-obvious sources of carbs, such as supermarket fruits (apples, oranges, bananas, pineapple) which did not exist in pre-historic Europe, I do not have any problem eating them, I just do it very rarely.

I removed potatoes (my previous staple), all grass grains (wheat, barley, oats), pasta, including bread, which is quite painful as my wife is an artisanal baker.

In my family, we allow ourselves a weekly meal for my all-time favorite, an old-fashioned homemade sourdough bread. This bread is raising for at least 14 hours and the home-grown yeast has enough time to ferment sugars. Below a listed a study that shows that sourdough fermentation lessens the negative effects of gluten lectin. I realize it is not the best choice, but I wanted to be transparent to my readers about this subject.

Homemade sourdough bread, culinary.nata on Instagram

Examples of dishes

Below, I will give you some examples of dishes. Hopefully, you will see that my diet is rather rich and very fulfilling, I never feel hungry after the meal.

Leafy greens, olive oil, vinegar, pine nuts, and walnuts, pickles, mushrooms, butter, Himalayan salt, wild fish, cheese, and herbs.

Avocado, sardines, leafy greens, nuts, olive oil, vinegar, Himalayan salt, soft-boiled eggs, mayonnaise (egg, online oil).

Pickles, leafy greens, olive oil, nuts, vinegar, anchovies in olive oil, mushrooms marinated in vinegar.

Leafy greens, nuts, olive oil, vinegar, steak, sweet potatoes (limited amount).

Dietary rejuvenation

Finally, I would like to talk about the “promise” of a healthy, well-balanced diet.

Thruout my adult life, I was generally very healthy. I was a competitive sprinter, I practiced karate, I did alpine skiing, climbed mountains, I was a U.S. Marine, I scuba-dived, never broke anything, never had surgeries, the worse I had was the flu. That was true is for almost half a century.

Last summer, I was building a small cabin Up North of Michigan and did some extreme amount of physical exhaustion. Long story short I developed joint pain in the upper body and a condition called “frozen shoulder” which gave me acute pain and prevented me from lifting my arm.

Naturally, I freaked out and started to look for causes and decided that it might be partially caused by inflammation caused by a bad diet. At that time, it was a fall and winter, I was no longer going Up North, but I ate a lot of pasta, pierogi (Polish dumplings) made by visiting grandma, and bread made by my wife. I knew my body does not handle grains (gluten) well so I started an elimination diet, eventually, I started the keto diet.

At the time of this writing, the pain is gone, the physical therapist is stretching my frozen shoulder and I am on the way to recovery.

To illustrate the difference, just a couple of months back I was not able to do a single pushup, not even from my knees, now I am back to sets of 15 or 20 in the decline position (feet higher than hands). I still cannot do pullups because of the frozen shoulder, but I can swing 35 lbs kettlebell.

I am planning to fully recover, return to a peak physical and mental condition, and if lucky keep that health for another half-a-century, or longer.

TO BE CONTINUED, THIS IS JUST A START.

I understand this subject is controversial, please message me directly on LinkedIn with your thoughts and suggestions.