The 4-Hour Body_ An Uncommon Guide to Ra - Timothy Ferriss [5]
I can give you every popular diet in four lines. Ready?
• Eat more greens.
• Eat less saturated fat.
• Exercise more and burn more calories.
• Eat more omega-3 fatty acids.
We won’t be covering any of this. Not because it doesn’t work—it does … up to a point. But it’s not the type of advice that will make friends greet you with “What the #$%& have you been doing?!”, whether in the dressing room or on the playing field.
That requires an altogether different approach.
The Unintentional Dark Horse
Let’s be clear: I’m neither a doctor nor a PhD. I am a meticulous data cruncher with access to many of the world’s best athletes and scientists.
This puts me in a rather unusual position.
I’m able to pull from disciplines and subcultures that rarely touch one another, and I’m able to test hypotheses using the kind of self-experimentation mainstream practitioners can’t condone (though their help behind the scenes is critical). By challenging basic assumptions, it’s possible to stumble upon simple and unusual solutions to long-standing problems.
Overfat? Try timed protein and pre-meal lemon juice.
Undermuscled? Try ginger and sauerkraut.
Can’t sleep? Try upping your saturated fat or using cold exposure.
This book includes the findings of more than 100 PhDs, NASA scientists, medical doctors, Olympic athletes, professional sports trainers (from the NFL to MLB), world-record holders, Super Bowl rehabilitation specialists, and even former Eastern Bloc coaches. You’ll meet some of the most incredible specimens, including before-and-after transformations, you’ve ever seen.
I don’t have a publish-or-perish academic career to preserve, and this is a good thing. As one MD from a well-known Ivy League university said to me over lunch:
We’re trained for 20 years to be risk-averse. I’d like to do the experimentation, but I’d risk everything I’ve built over two decades of schooling and training by doing so. I’d need an immunity necklace. The university would never tolerate it.
He then added: “You can be the dark horse.”
It’s a strange label, but he was right. Not just because I have no prestige to lose. I’m also a former industry insider.
From 2001 to 2009, I was CEO of a sports nutrition company with distribution in more than a dozen countries, and while we followed the rules, it became clear that many others didn’t. It wasn’t the most profitable option. I have witnessed blatant lies on nutritional fact panels, marketing executives budgeting for FTC fines in anticipation of lawsuits, and much worse from some of the best-known brands in the business.3 I understand how and where consumers are deceived. The darker tricks of the trade in supplements and sports nutrition—clouding results of “clinical trials” and creative labeling as just two examples—are nearly the same as in biotech and Big Pharma.
I will teach you to spot bad science, and therefore bad advice and bad products.4
Late one evening in the fall of 2009, I sat eating cassoulet and duck legs with Dr. Lee Wolfer in the clouds of fog known as San Francisco. The wine was flowing, and I told her of my fantasies to return to a Berkeley or Stanford and pursue a doctorate in the biological sciences. I was briefly a neuroscience major at Princeton University and dreamed of a PhD at the end of my name. Lee is regularly published in peer-reviewed journals and has been trained at some of the finest programs in the world, including the University of California at San Francisco (UCSF) (MD), Berkeley (MS), Harvard Medical School (residency), the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (fellowship), and Spinal Diagnostics in Daly City, California (fellowship).
She just smiled and raised a glass of wine before responding:
“You—Tim Ferriss—can do more outside the system than inside it.”
A Laboratory of One
Many of these theories have been killed off only when some decisive experiment exposed their incorrectness … thus the yeoman work in any science … is done by the experimentalist, who must keep the theoreticians honest.
—Michio Kaku (Hyperspace), theoretical