Projection: 86% Overweight By 2030

Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine project that by 2030 some 86% of American adults will be overweight or obese. They project that healthcare spending resulting from obesity will double every decade and will top nearly $1 trillion by 2030.

This is the cost of eating cheap food. This is the pain and suffering that results when people eat for pleasure.

Obesity isn't possible on the Spartan Diet. No matter how much you weigh, you'll lose weight on the Spartan Diet until you're the right weight, then it will level off. This process is built into the diet.

There's a lot more to it, but here's an oversimplied look at how the Spartan Diet achieves this:

* Only the healthiest foods allowed -- with only healthy olive and flax oils, whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables and other super healthy foods, your body's metabolism works as it should, and all organs function at their best.

* Doctrine of hunger -- On the Spartan Diet, you eat three meals a day. If you're overweight, no snacking allowed. Once you're the right weight, snacking is OK, but only fresh, whole, raw fruit. You eat until you're satisfied, but never eat to "fullness."

* Drink only water -- some 25% or more of the calories taken by many Americans in the form of drinks, including soda, alcohol and juice drinks.

* Non-foods are on the diet -- The Spartan diet requires sleep, sun and excercise, which is required for optimum health and weight loss for the overweight.

There's a lot more to it, but this is a small glimpse at the Spartan Diet's total elimination of the possibilty of obesity and being overweight.

How to Lose Weight Without Dieting Or Doing More Exercise

The headline sounds like a pitch for some bullshit fad diet. But the truth is weight changes have more to do with simply the number of calories consumed compared with calories burned through exercise.

Most Americans gain some of their excess weight as the result of poorly functioning metabolism that results from factors other than calorie math.

Here's how to lose weight by giving your body what it needs for optimum health:

1. Get more sunshine

You eat when you're hungry and stop eating when you're full, right? Well that whole system -- where your brain talks to your stomach and visa versa -- needs the hormone vitamin D (it's called a vitamin, but it's a hormone), which your body makes when sunshine strikes your skin. People who don't get enough sun get the "stop eating!" message from the brain slower than people who do get plenty of sun exposure. Just catching some rays makes you lose weight.


2. Get more sleep

In addition to sunshine, your metabolism needs plenty of sleep -- eight hours for most people, more for children and athletes. Just add an hour per night to how much you sleep, and you'll lose weight.


3. Eat better food

Packaged foods, junk foods, fast foods, restaurant foods -- they all whack your metabolism and make you gain weight beyond what is natural. By simply replacing, say, 1,000 calories of white bread, mayonnaise and cold cuts with 1,000 calories of fresh, whole, raw, organic fruits, nuts, grains and other real foods, you'll lose weight. You'll get the same calories, but your body will function better with real food than it will with industrialized fake food.

4. Drink only water

Diet soda makes you gain weight, because the chemicals they add to fool your mouth into thinking it's drinking sugar messes up your metabolism. And regular soda is loaded with sugar, which causes other well-known problems. Alcohol gives you empty calories, which means you're displacing nutritional calories and messing up your body further. Even fresh fruit juice acts a bit like sugar on your system by giving you megadoses of juice beyond what nature intended (which is to eat the fruit, not just the juice). The best rule of thumb is to drink only water. And even if you replace the calories of what you might have drunk with food calories, you're still going to lose weight.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with reducing calories and getting plenty of exercise. But make sure you get what your body really needs: sun, sleep, and real food.

In ancient Sparta and the whole of the ancient world, all this came naturally. Spartans were in the sun every day, all day, often bare-ass naked. Without electricity to power lights, gadgets and alarm clocks, people slept until they got enough sleep. All the food was real. There was no junk food or convenience stores full of liquid candy (soda). And that's why obesity or even minor chubbiness was unheard of in Sparta.

Hunger Makes You Happy, Relaxed and Focused

If you're a lab mouse, that is, and probably if you're a human, too. Researchers have shown that hunger causes the body to increase the production of a hormone called ghrelin.

Ghrelin helps give you that hungry feeling, but also induces a clear-headed, relaxed state of mind that helps you cope and gives you motivation. It acts as a natural anti-depressant. It's also mildly addictive.

That explains why the very minor calorie restriction built into the Spartan Diet boosts energy, makes you feel better and why you end up enjoying hunger. The secret is that the food you do eat is the healthiest possible food, so you're getting complete nutrition.

The Spartan Diet is governed by something we call the Doctrine of Hunger, which is the 1) a little hunger every day is good for you; 2) perfect nutrition makes Spartan Diet hunger less intense than hunger felt by people on industrialized or, especially, junk food diets; and 3) you achieve it by tailoring your eating and exercise so that when you sit down to your three meals a day, you're a little hungry.

Two Ancient Grains Coming Soon to Market

Two ancient grains, untouched by centuries of health-compromising tinkering by humans, as are modern wheat and other grains, may soon go on sale. The grains, called devediti and harmani, grow in southeastern Turkey and are used by local villagers as winter foods and animal feed. The company, oddly unidentified on an English-laungage Turkish news site, hopes to reproduce the market success of an ancient Egyptian grain called Kamut.

Most grains eaten today -- including whole grains -- are the product of food science intervention, and tend to be lower in protein, fiber and nutrients in general -- plus, they're far more likely to cause alergies than ancient grains.

We'll keep an eye on devediti and harmani, and let you know when and where you can buy them. (Note that the photograph shows two varieties of wheat, and does not show devediti or harmani.)

Mediterranean Diet Research Deeply Flawed

A new study published in the British Medical Journal reports that the Mediterranean diet "helps reduce the risk of developing type 2 diabetes by up to 83 percent." The research uses a flawed "Mediterranean Diet Scale" developed a few years ago to determine just how "Mediterranean" a person's diet is. It's a nine-point scale, and test subjects get a point for each aspect of their diet that falls within range. For example, a male who eats a certain quantity of fruit per week gets a fruit point. If he eats an amount of whole grains above a certain amount he gets a whole grain point. Falling outside the scale results in a zero. Getting a nine means someone has a perfectly "Mediterranean" diet. The scale is horribly flawed for four reasons:

First of all, it concerns itself only with quantities of specific things, not quality. So nutrient-poor industrialized, toxin-compromised foods are given the same score as organic and nutrient-rich foods free from toxins.

Second, Mediterranean Diet research assumes that only diet, or only diet and exercise are factors in the superior health and longer lifespans of Mediterranean people, but as other research is showing, sunshine is another factor. This is a problem because Mediterranean diet research does not include advice to get more sun.

Third, with the exception of alcohol and saturated fats, the Mediterranean Diet Scale doesn't concern itself with consumption or over consumption of unhealthy foods. So it's possible to get a perfect 9 on the Mediterranean diet scale, and still consume huge amounts of cotton candy and Red Bull and every day.

Fourth, subjects get an alcohol point for consuming from one to three glasses of alcohol for men and slightly less for women. That means drinking zero alcohol -- the healthiest option, assuming the rest of your diet is healthy -- is treated the same as drinking a bottle of scotch every day. The upper end of this scale -- three glasses per day -- is enough to develop chronic alcoholism.

Also: The research presents Mediterranean food as a drug that "reduces the risk" of diabetes. In fact, the Mediterranean diet is simply closer to what people have eaten for millennia, and that our science-fiction industrialized modern diet *causes* diabetes and other diseases.

When scientists discovered that children were suffering from growth retardation and nervous system damage from eating lead paint, they didn't say that "switching to paint that contains lower amounts of lead can help reduce nervous system damage by 83 percent." No, they reported that lead causes the damage.

The same is true for industrialized diets: They *cause* diabetes, heart disease, obesity, cancer and other maladies.

How to Get Really Strong

Step 1: Find a partner you can lift in a squat.

Step 2. You get on the Spartan Diet.

Step 3. Put your partner on a conventional American industrialized diet.

Step 4. Squat with your partner twice a week. As the partner gets fatter, you'll get leaner and stronger.

Why Sunshine is On the Spartan Diet

The primary definition of "diet," according to one online dictionary, is "The usual food and drink of a person or animal" and the secondary definition: "A regulated selection of foods, as for medical reasons or cosmetic weight loss." However, the third and final definition isn't restricted to food: "Something used, enjoyed, or provided regularly."

That's why it makes sense that sunshine is a required part of the Spartan Diet.

Diets are normally restricted to food. However, many health foods require sunshine in order to be fully activated. So from a health perspective, you can't separate some food from the sunshine necessary to complete them.

Studies showing links between the Mediterranean diet and health and longevity tend to assume that food and exercise are the only factors. In fact, Mediterranean peoples get more sunshine, too, which turns out to also boost health.

Now researcher is proving all this. A new study at Aberdeen University in Scotland found a link between inadequate sunshine and obesity. Researchers there discovered that a vitamin D deficiency causes a hormone called Leptin to malfunction, preventing the brain from telling the stomach when fullness happens, and when to stop eating. Worse, they found, that fat absorbs vitamin D and the more fat someone has in their body, the less of the vitamin D in the body is available.

In other words, vitamin D deficiency promotes obesity, and obesity promotes vitamin D deficiency.

Yet another international study lead by a scientist at the Medical University of Graz in Austria found that vitamin D deficiency is also linked to heart disease and other causes of early death.

Yet another study published back in 2005 found that vitamin D defficiency contributes to osteoporosis, a degenerative bone disease.

Of course, in our hyper-reductionist medical culture, once a specific element is found that benefits health, everybody wants to isolate that newly discovered component and put it into a pill. But the best way -- by far -- to get vitamin D is to expose your skin to sunshine. That gives you the health benefits of sunshine that science has already discovered, plus those that will be discovered in the years and decades to come.

In ancient Greece, Spartans very likely got more sunshine than any other Greeks. The reason for that is threefold. First, Spartan men were all professional soldiers, who trained outside all day, every day. Second, unlike other Greek women, who were mostly required to stay indoors all day (Athenian women weren't even supposed to appear in the doorway), Spartan women were encouraged and even required to be outside for much of the day to train in sports, dancing and horse breeding and training. Finally, boys entered the agoge at 7, and girls entered a state-run school for girls, and much of this education took place outdoors.

There are three reasons why Spartans probably had very low incidents of skin cancer, despite all this sun exposure: 1) they were healthy overall; 2) their diet was radically anti-cancer (science is now proving this); and 3) their skin was adapted for their climate.

Modern people get skin cancer for a variety of reasons not present in the ancient Greek world, including air pollution, unhealthy diets and the fact that people are living in climates other than what their skin was "designed" for.

So, for example light-skinned and dark-skinned people live everywhere now. So an unhealthy light-skinned person (by definition adapted to Northern climates) is more likely to get skin cancer in the tropics. A dark-skinned person in very Northern countries is more likely to get rickets, a disease caused by inadequate sun exposure.

Recommendations:

1. Get plenty of exercise outside in the sunshine.

2. Favor the first four or the last four hours of the day for sun exposure, where sunlight has to travel through more of the Earth's atmosphere, which protects you better from any possible harmful effects of the sun.

3. Tailer sun exposure to your skin. If you're pale and freckle easily, you get more vitamin D from less sunshine, so avoid being in the sun all day. If you're more olive skinned or dark skinned, and live in cloudy climates, you probably need to spend a lot more time in the sun to get enough. Also: The amount of clothing you wear can also help you control the amount of sun your skin is exposed to.

4. Consult your doctor about how much sun you can tolerate without risk, and visit your dermatologist regularly to check for sun damage.

5. Stay on the Spartan Diet -- your risk of skin cancer may be reduced significantly with a health Spartan Diet .

Spartan Food Friday: The Spartan Sandwich

The Spartan Sandwich is a Spartan Diet take on an American classic: The peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The typical American version is a ticket to muscle weakness, obesity and ill health: white bread, junk peanut butter with trans fats and sugar added, and jelly consisting mostly of corn syrup and other garbage.

The Spartan Sandwich isn't really a variation on the traditional version -- it's the opposite. It's loaded with protein, fiber and good carbs, and is ideal energy food before workouts, hikes, runs or other training.

OK, you know how to build a sandwich. All you need are the Spartan ingredients:

Ezekiel English muffins
Ezekiel breads, made by a company called Food for Life, are among the most Spartan store-bought breads you can find. Like the Spartan Diet itself, Ezekiel bread recipes are inspired by, and improvements upon, ancient food culture. They have four kinds of English muffins, and several types of bread (they're also one of the few sources of whole-grain tortillas). It's all good. We like the English muffins, lightly toasted, for Spartan Sandwiches. We invented this recipe in Greece, and made them open-faced with organic, whole grain Cretan rusk (which bread baked a second time to make it hard and longer lasting). Go here to find out where to buy Ezekiel breads. You can also substitute home-made whole grain bread, or 100% whole-grain bread from your local bakery, farmer's market or health food store.

Peanut butter
Grind your own organic peanuts or grind them yourself at your local health food store. Don't add anything to it -- not even salt.

Honey
You have to be careful with honey. Make sure you get only raw, unfiltered and organic. Most honey available in the U.S. is from China, where pollution is widespread and health oversight of food industries is functionally non-existent. Buying good honey is also difficult because it's not certifiable as organic. The reason is that nobody can control where bees go. So it's best to buy honey from a known-good source that keeps bees in areas where industrial agriculture isn't happening. Try your local farmer's market and talk to the sellers.

Dried figs
Dried figs come in many varieties, so experiment to find the ones you like best. But, as always, buy only whole, organic figs without added preservatives or other junk. Slice the figs in quarter-inch thick slices before added to sandwich.


What makes it Spartan?

* Nothing is from a can or jar. Everything is organic and whole.

* The bread has 100% whole grain (not whole grain flour added to white flour) and, because it has sprouted grain, it has complete protein (a total of 18 amino acids, including the 9 essential ones) and other health-boosting benefits.

* Sweetness comes from fruit and honey (as in ancient Sparta itself, honey is the only acceptable Spartan Diet sweetener).

* It's well known that figs are loaded with vitamins and fiber. Less well known is that they have protein, too. The eating of figs was widespread in ancient Greece, but Spartans were more obsessed with them than most. Fresh figs were among common foods eaten at group dining halls, called messes. A Spartan named Charmis, who won the prestigious stadion race (200-meter sprint) at the 668 Olympic Games, trained on a diet of dried figs. Spartan soldiers took advantage of dried figs as a portable and quick source of energy while on the march.

Found: Hilarious 'Spartan Diet' YouTube Video!

The Spartan Diet: The Best System For Calorie Restriction

Yet another article came out today on the longevity benefits of calorie restriction, augmenting a mountain of press on the subject. These articles will tell you about the research, but they won't tell you how to realistically integrate calorie restriction into your life.

The Spartan Diet is the only system we're aware of for building lifelong calorie restriction into your daily routine. Best of all, you don't have to count calories. Just let your body do the math. Here's the Spartan way to achieve lifelong calorie restriction.

First of all, follow the Spartan Diet, which will give you complete nutrition (restricting calories while eating average industrialized foods can compromise health -- when you're cutting calories, every calorie counts.)

All you have to do is stick to the following Spartan Diet rules:

1. Eat three meals a day; snack only on fresh, whole, raw fruit.

2. Stop eating before you feel "full" -- learn to find that place between "satisfied" and "full."

3. Achieve hunger between each meal. If, on average, you fail to achieve hunger during most lunches, for example, reduce food at breakfast or exercise more or both. The hunger thing is something you need to "tweak" by monitoring your hunger level and adjusting your lifestyle accordingly.

It's that simple. Here are a few more things you need to know about Spartan Diet hunger:

* Our belief is that hunger is a natural condition that's as necessary for health as fatigue from exercise. Nature never anticipated that the human body would never experience hunger. We need hunger, and when you give your digestive system a break, you'll have more bodily energy for other things -- like building muscle.

* The hunger you feel on a standard or junk-food diet is a crazy, maddening, intense hunger. The reason for this is that industrialized food doesn't provide your body with adequate nutrition, and your body knows it. This lack of nutrition throws your metabolism into panic mode, and dials up the hunger. Spartan Diet hunger is much less intense, and it's something you can learn to actually crave.

* The Spartan Diet has something called the Doctrine of Hunger, which goes into detail on all this. We'll publish this information in the near future.

The Spartan Diet Perspective On Organic Food

Ancient Spartans ate 100% organic foods. So did other ancient Greeks. So did all ancient people, pre-historic people, medeaval people all the way up to the industrial revolution. Nevertheless, industrialized farming is called "conventional" by the people who want to sell you industrialized foods.

Organic foods are superior to "conventional" foods for the same reason that Spartans were superior soldiers: In order to become a Spartan soldier, one had to survive grueling hardships.

Pesticides, herbicides, artificial fertilizers, ripening agents, genetically modified grain, the use of radiation and other modern innovations definitely improve yields -- they benefit the growers, transporters and sellers. And they bring down the cost of food. Garbage has always been cheap.

However, these methods weaken the food, and that weakness is passed on to the person who eats them. Organic foods are strong, and this strength is passed on to the eater. Science is now proving how this works.

A recent study conducted by Rutgers University and the USDA "shows that organic blueberries contain higher values of ORAC (Oxygen Radical Absorbance Capacity) than conventionally grown blueberries." (Higher ORAC means higher cancer-fighting ability.) A previous study found that organic tomatoes are between 79 and 97 per cent higher in the flavonoids quercetin and kaempferol -- both antioxidants -- compared with conventionally grown. Yet another study confirmed higher rates of anti-oxidants in organic produce, and also found organic produce has more vitamins than conventional.

Why is that?

The Spartan Diet perspective is simply the observation that what doesn't kill us makes us stronger. "Conventional" growing benefits the grower because plants don't need to be strong in order to survive. Every organic fruit or vegetable is by definition a survivor. It has survived weather, pests and other hardships on its own, without made-made protection. These defenses show up (biochemically speaking) as antioxidants and other elements.

In other words, organic foods are stronger for two reasons: 1) weak plants and fruits die, and never make it to market; and 2) without man-made protection, plants must muster their own defenses to survive, and these "defenses" benefit human health when you eat them.

Again, organic foods are by definition stronger, and that strength is passed on to the eater.

UCLA Study Says Pomegranate Healthiest Juice

UCLA scientists have developed additional information about what we already knew: dark-colored fruit juices, such as grape, blueberry, black cherry and cranberry are healthiest. They discovered also that the dark-colored fruit enjoyed by ancient Greeks, including Spartans, is the healthiest of all. Pomegranate juice was found by the researchers to be the number-one healthiest fruit juice. The main reason dark fruits are healthier, according to the study, is their high antioxidant levels. In our view, however, there are three things wrong with the study, or at least how it's being reported in the mainstream press:

1. As is often the case, foods are discussed as "drugs" that help fight various diseases and other health problems. In fact, it's not natural, ancient foods that cure or prevent diseases, but the absence of those foods that cause disease and other health problems. Our bodies expect and need them in order to function properly.

2. Why juice? The Spartan Diet calls for drinking only water, and not drinking juice. The healthiest and best and most Spartan way to consume pomegranates (as well as grapes, cherries, blueberries and cranberries) is to eat them whole and raw. Organic is best. What's funny is that the researchers arbitrarily focused on juice -- a product made from the fruit rather than the fruit itself -- then warned people not to drink too much juice because of its concentrated amounts of sugar and high calories. And they don't warn againt "dead foods" (fruit or juice in cans or bottles) or praise "live" foods, such as fresh fruits. Spartans: Ignore the juice bit and just eat pomegranates as one of the many whole raw fruits you eat every day -- no warnings necessary.

3. They focus on the anti-oxidant part of the fruit, and ignore the many other qualities, including vitamins, fiber and the rest. Again, it's not a drug. It's a food, which should be eaten for all its health benefits, not just the ones scientists have decided are the important ones.

People Who Live Longest Follow Spartan Diet -- Almost

Forbes.com published this week a review of the incredibly well-researched book, "The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who've Lived the Longest." The book profiles people in communities where an unusually large percentage of the population lives well past 100. Those locations are: Barbagia region of Sardinia, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; the community of Seventh Day Adventists in Loma Linda, Calif.; and the Nicoya Peninsula in Costa Rica.

Unsurprisingly, all these communities eat diets that are nearly as healthful as the Spartan Diet. From the Forbes article:

"In Okinawa, Buettner met a woman in her 70s who whispers "hara hachi bu" before she eats, a reminder to consume only 80% of what's on her plate. While scientists have known for decades that animals can live longer when they eat less, researchers are just beginning to determine the extent of the impact caloric restriction can have on humans.

A study published in 2006 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, for instance, found that the hearts of people who followed a low-calorie, Mediterranean diet resembled those of younger people. Researchers compared 25 people who consumed 1,400 to 2,000 calories per day for six years to 25 similar control subjects eating typical Western diets of 2,000 to 3,000 calories per day, concluding that the Mediterranean diet could delay aging and increase longevity."

The Spartan Diet has elements of the "Mediterranean Diet," but it's not the "industrialized Mediterranean diet" you'll find in restaurants. The Spartan Diet imposes a ban, for example, on white pasta, white bread, domesticated animal meat and non-organic ingredients -- foods that in their modern form would have been totally alien to ancient Spartans and ancient Greeks. The Spartan Diet is much closer to the original Mediterranean diet, not the modern compromised one.

The Forbes article mentions the Seventh Day Adventists community in California, but does not mention that hard-core Seventh Day Adventists have very strict dietary rules for themselves that includes abstaining from meat and alcohol and junk food in general. They're also into eating nuts, beans and grains. All this is very Spartan (you can eat meat on the Spartan Diet, but not domesticated animal meat, and not every day).

The Spartan Diet also has what we now call "calorie restriction." The way the Spartan Diet achieves this is in three ways:

1. The Spartan Diet advocates what we call "The Doctrine of Hunger." The idea is to eat exactly three meals a day, and achieve a solid feeling of hunger between each one. If you find yourself sitting down to meals, and don't feel entirely hungry, then you need to eat less, exercise more or both. Hunger is a goal in the Spartan Diet.

2. There is no snacking on the Spartan Diet. Eat meals, achieve hunger between each one, and go to bed hungry.

3. The Spartan Diet calls for the formation of a habit: Never eat to what Americans would consider "fullness," but what many cultures would consider a feeling of being "stuffed."

This hunger is different from the hunger felt by someone attempting "calorie restriction" on a more conventional modern diet. The reason is that the Spartan Diet provides the body with all protien, vitamins, minerals, fiber, antioxidents and other components that body needs. So the "hunger" felt is the crazy "I'm starving to death" variety you'd feel if trying to cut calories on a conventional diet.

In Classical Sparta, boys in the agoge were often underfed, and all Spartans had to be comfortable with hunger and starvation for days on end. Their rational for this was that hunger makes kids grow taller (which is unlikely), but also that familiarity with hunger gave Spartans an advantage in war: They could fight on an empty stomach and not panic about it.

There you have it. People who eat even an inferior version of the Spartan Diet live very long and very healthy lives.

We've ordered the book, and we'll publish our own review on this blog, so stay tuned.

Mediterranean Diet 'Endangered?' It's Gone!

Italy, Spain, Greece and Morocco want UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, to list the "Mediterranean Diet" as an element of world heritage and "endangered." Meanwhile, the Mediterranean is in the news as the solution to a wide range of food-caused lifestyle diseases, including allergies, asthma, diabetes, cancer, osteoporosis and even death from all causes. However, this "Mediterranean Diet" that Mediterranean countries want to preserve and that doctors want to prescribe is a shadow of its former self. The "original Mediterranean" of centuries or millennia ago was superior to the standard modern bastardization, and included:

* wine watered down, not drunk straight (the Spartans avoided ever getting drunk)
* whole-grains, rather than processed "white" pasta
* organic fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, legumes, seeds and meats
* non-industrialized meats
* wild fish only, never farmed

So if we're going to preserve a diet as part of our world heritage, and if we're going to recommend it for health, why compromise? Let's do the real, the original Mediterranean diet, not the industrial modern version.