my article

Now that the concept of cold training for cold adaptation and fat loss has received scientific support, I've been thinking more about how to apply it.  A number of people have been practicing cold training for a long time, using various methods, most of which haven't been scientifically validated.  That doesn't mean the methods don't work (some of them probably do), but I don't know how far we can generalize individual results prior to seeing controlled studies. The studies that were published two weeks ago used prolonged, mild cold exposure (60-63 F air) to achieve cold adaptation and fat loss ( 1 ,  2 ).  We still don't know whether or not we would see the same outcome from short, intense cold exposure such as a cold shower or brief cold water plunge.  Also, the fat loss that occurred was modest (5%), and the subjects started off lean rather than overweight.  Normally, overweight people lose more fat than lean people given the same fat loss intervention, but t...

This is the cover of the paperback edition of the Condon Report. The final book by Major Donald E. Keyhoe (USMC Ret.) Aliens from Space (1973) includes a description of the circumstances involved in what became known as the Condon Report, the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (1968) commissioned by the Air Force at the University of Colorado at Boulder. A s reported in chapter 8 of Aliens from Space , the Colorado University study was announced on October 7, 1966.  The project administrator was Robert J. Low. Naming Dr. Edward Condon as the CU Project director, the AF declared that he would conduct a serious, objective, scientific investigation. Within twenty-four hours Dr. Condon brushed aside this reassuring picture and revealed himself as a tough-minded disbeliever in UFOs. "It is highly improbable they exist," he was quoted in the New York Times and scores of other papers.  "The view that UFOs are hallucinatory will be a subject of our investigation...

I just returned from the 2013 Ancestral Health Symposium in Atlanta.  Despite a few challenges with the audio/visual setup, I think it went well. I arrived on Thursday evening, and so I missed a few talks that would have been interesting to attend, by Mel Konner, Nassim Taleb, Gad Saad, and Hamilton Stapell.  Dr. Konner is one of the progenitors of the modern Paleo movement.  Dr. Saad does interesting work on consummatory behavior, reward, and its possible evolutionary basis.  Dr. Stapell is a historian with an interest in the modern Paleo movement.  He got some heat for suggesting that the movement is unlikely to go truly mainstream, which I agree with.  I had the opportunity to spend quite a bit of time with him and found him to be an interesting person. On Friday, Chris Kresser gave a nice talk about the potential hidden costs of eradicating our intestinal parasites and inadvertently altering our gut flora.  Unfortunately it was concurrent with Chri...

Twyla Eller snapped a photo of 'Michael' and me during my visit to Centrahoma in August 1995. My longtime readers may remember that it was eighteen years ago, August 1995, when I went to rural Oklahoma to interview a family experiencing what had been reported to be a 'talking poltergeist' haunting.  The predominant manifesting entity was known as 'Michael' in a case encompassing some UFOlogy aspects. This reflective article begins with considering a somewhat humorous instance of flying saucers and 'The Nine Pattern' , keeping in mind previous blog articles when I reflected about aspects of human creativity and mentioned circumstances of the movie "2001: A Space Odyssey" and of the popular song "Hotel California" . During the 1950s when Frank Scully, Donald E. Keyhoe, Truman Bethurum, Daniel Fry, Meade Layne, Orfeo Angelucci, Bryant and Helen Reeve, and others published books about flying saucers, the makers of many American movies co...

For those who are attending the Ancestral Health Symposium this year, my talk will be at 9:00 AM on Saturday.  The title is "Insulin and Obesity: Reconciling Conflicting Evidence", and it will focus on the following two questions: Does elevated insulin cause obesity; does obesity cause elevated insulin; or both? Is there a unifying hypothesis that's able to explain all of the seemingly conflicting evidence cited by each side of the debate? I'll approach the matter in true scientific fashion: stating hypotheses, making rational predictions based on those hypotheses, and seeing how well the evidence matches the predictions.  I'll explore the evidence in a way that has never been done before (to my knowledge), even on this blog. Why am I giving this talk?  Two reasons.  First, it's an important question that has implications for the prevention and treatment of obesity, and it has received a lot of interest in the ancestral health community and to some extent amon...

The fourth UFOlogy book by Major Donald E. Keyhoe (USMC Ret.) is Flying Saucers: Top Secret (1960).  His first book on this subject The Flying Saucers Are Real had been published ten years earlier.  The books chronicle how the mysterious UFO events were delegated to military jurisdictions and provoked conflicting responses among officials about what information should be presented to the public.  A sequence of bureaucratic secrecy protocols was formulated.  The fact that these orders entailed lies would continuously undermine the top secret cover-up as new witnesses observed UFOs and realized the importance of this knowledge. Since the publication of his previous book in 1955, Keyhoe had joined and eventually been made Director of National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena ( NICAP ).   He wrote in the Foreword: Publicly, the official attitude is still one of debunking the "saucers" and explaining away sightings—a policy made possibly by militar...

This week's lucky "winner"... cola! Thirsty yet?  Visual cues such as these are used to drive food/beverage seeking and consumption behavior, which are used to drive profits.  How does this work?  Once you've consumed a rewarding beverage enough times, particularly as a malleable child, your brain comes to associate everything about that beverage with the primary reward you obtained from it (calories, sugar, and caffeine).  This is simply Pavlovian/classical conditioning *.  Everything associated with that beverage becomes a cue that triggers motivation to obtain it (craving), including the sight of it, the smell of it, the sound of a can popping, and even the physical and social environment it was consumed in-- just like Pavlov's dogs learned to drool at the sound of a bell that was repeatedly paired with food. Read more »

In his 1955 book The Flying Saucer Conspiracy , Major Donald E. Keyhoe (USMC Ret.) professed his unwillingness to consider the testimonial of so-called flying saucer 'contactee' Daniel Fry, the subject of several previous blog articles.  Keyhoe referred to Fry when he commented in 1954 that a period of media speculation about Mars "had raised serious questions when a humorous 'space man' story gave the Air Force a break."  He wrote further: According to the author, he had seen a saucer land at a remote spot in New Mexico.  As he cautiously walked toward it, a voice came out of nowhere. "Don't touch the hull, pal, it's still hot." Guided by the unseen voice, the author said, he had gone aboard and been whisked to New York and back at 8000 miles an hour.  During this time the operation of the saucer was explained to him by the unseen space man—who said he was talking by remote control from a mother ship outside our atmosphere. Reading this fant...