Ancient history

So by now you’ve all heard about the 105,000 year old grain processing and I know what you are thinking – so much for the grain-free Paleo-diet as a product of evolution theory. Well I decided to dust off my 5 years of post-secondary training and investigate these claims.

The first thing I noticed is that the evidence in question consists of starch residues on ancient tools. The source of the starch was determined to be Sorghum grass a plant food currently in wide use in the area. Albeit one that requires a lot of processing.

The Achilles heel of the Big Grain conspiracy in my opinion is the drill. Starch residue on the drill implies to me that the Sorghum grass was probably being used as tinder. One could probably also presume being used as bedding and even basket weaving are uses much less complex than processing the Sorghum as food. I’d be more inclined to buy into the assertion of Sorghum as a part of the ancient diet if they could turn up some likely grain processing specific tools with grain starch residue –like the grinding stone that pushed the grain date back to 20,000 years ago.

In a nutshell (ha ha) I agree with these guys:

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sciencenow;2009/1217/2

A search for meaning

It occurred to me that I don't really know what those numbers off the scale mean so I decided to be industrious and look them up. For a man of my advanced years a healthy body fat would be 11-17% - on the low end of that range if I wanted to call myself fit. My current water content should be 57%, anything less and I’m dehydrated. So far I’m fat and dehydrated which goes a long way to explaining the next result.

The Metabolic age is the age of a healthy person in your condition. At my age I want it to be lower than my actual age - 39 is not.

I also calculated an adjusted for frame size BMI using elbow width measurements. That too says I am overweight at 27.13. To get my BMI down to the heavy side of the healthy range I need to lose 20 pounds. That’s 10% of my body weight. If I can manage to exclusively lose fat that should lower by body fat percentage to 11%.

So the maximum healthy BMI is the same as my minimum acceptable body fat? Is it just me or does this seem odd? The only answer I can come up with is that for a large framed, physically active, adult male human I am at the maximum healthy muscle content. If I was any more muscular than I am now it would be bad for me.

It sure isn’t my hair tipping the scales…

Baseline

The Boss has a fancy magic scale. It measures how unfit you are so this morning I decided to take some baseline measurements as tonight the Holiday season of gastronomic debauchery begins. Then I'll take some post Holiday measurements as we set out on the Paleolithic diet adventure. During the diet I will try weekly updates.

So here are the baseline measures:
Weight: 199.6 pounds
% body fat: 21.8 (!)
% water: 53.2
muscle mass: 148.4
BMR*: 2075
Metabolic Age: 39 (!)
Bone Mass: 7.8

* BMR somehow means the number of calories it takes to maintain my system each day.