First off, I’ve got to apologize for the lack of attention to this blog lately. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I hadn’t realized that changing the world would be such a time-consuming endeavor, but it really is. MD and I have been meeting ourselves coming and going over the past week and a half with no end in sight. At least the weather has been cooperating. As you can see from the photo on the left from our deck, we haven’t had snow at our house, but looking across the lake to Squaw Valley, you can see it has started there. I hope to have a couple of days to get caught up before the real onslaught on our time takes place starting at the end of next week.

I had hoped to have a new blog for The 6-Week Cure up by now, but our tech people have been working on other projects and unable to get to the blog. They have been working on the Sous Vide Supreme website, which just got up late last night in it’s full and operational form. Now they have one more Eades-related project to do, then they can do The 6-Week Cure blog. I hope it won’t be much longer.

I’ve had no end of comments stacking up that I will deal with as soon as this post is posted, so if you’ve had a comment languishing in ‘awaiting-moderation’ purgatory, it should be up soon. I’ve promised this before and failed, but my time commitments are now such that I’m going to have to stick to it: I can no longer answer specific comments. I’m going to post them as they come in, and if I feel the need to answer a specific one, I’ll do it as I did in in Tim Ferriss’s blog and do so with a comment of my own.

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The long-awaited announcement of what MD and I have been working on for the past couple of years is at hand.  We have developed (along with a team of engineers, designers, manufacturers, business people and a host of others) the first stand-alone sous vide unit made specifically for the home kitchen.  It’s called the Sous Vide Supreme and is pictured at left, getting ready to ship.  The Sous Vide Supreme is the first new category of kitchen appliance since the microwave, so we’re incredibly excited about our role in what we think is a world-changing event.  At least world changing in the same way the microwave was world changing.

For those of you unfamiliar with sous vide, it is a French term meaning ‘under vacuum’ and refers to a method of cooking in which vacuum-packed foods are cooked in a water bath creating a taste and flavor that can’t be replicated any other way.  Though many of you may never have heard of the term ‘sous vide,’ it’s a good bet that you have tasted food prepared using the ‘sous vide’ method, especially if you have eaten at a fine restaurant.

Why on earth would two physicians who made their reputations caring for overweight patients and writing books about diet and nutrition veer off in the direction of manufacturing a kitchen appliance?  As is always said in situations such as this one, it’s a long story.  But not really that long, so I’ll tell it.

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Meat eating made us human. The anthropological evidence strongly supports the idea that the addition of increasingly larger amounts of meat in the diet of our predecessors was essential in the evolution of the large human brain.  Our large brains came at the metabolic expense of our guts, which shrank as our brains grew.

In April 1995 an article appeared in the journal Current Anthropology that was an intellectual tour de force and, in my view, an example of a perfect theoretical paper.  “The  Expensive-Tissue Hypothesis” (ETH) by Leslie Aiello and Peter Wheeler demonstrated by a brilliant thought experiment that our species didn’t evolve to eat meat but evolved because it ate meat.

The ETH is an example of the kind of scientific detective work that I love.  In fact, this paper is one of my all time favorites.  (An amazing bit of trivia about this paper is that it almost didn’t get published.  I had the opportunity to talk with Leslie Aiello at a meeting a few months ago, and she told me that the journal was reluctant to publish the paper because they thought it too technical for their readers.  I suspect they also found it too controversial.  Now I’m sure they’re glad they published because I would imagine it is the most cited of all the papers ever published in Current Anthropology.)  The authors methodically lay the scientific foundation for their experiment, then, like Sherlock Holmes, progress step by step, accumulating little pieces of data until they reach the ineluctable conclusion that meat eating made us human. I would like to walk us all through their thought processes as laid out in their brilliant paper.

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I’m putting up another intermediary post just because I need to. I’m hard at work on veg vs meat part II, but I’ve had so many interruptions due to promotion of the new book that I’m having trouble being able to focus on the post at hand.

I’m getting a lot of comments on these last posts from people who have read our new book and have questions. I don’t want this blog to transmogrify into the blog for the 6-Week Cure, so after much consultation with the bride, we’ve decided to start another blog for the 6-Week Cure that we’ll both moderate. Problem is, we’re still in the throes of getting the current blog and website as it should be, so it may be a day or two before we get the thing up. On the 6-Week Cure site we will post the schedules for any media appearances and book signings we will be forced to do, so anyone interested can keep up there. We will also answer the questions that come in and use the questions to develop an FAQ. And we will use the blog to disseminate any messages or info we need to get out that is specific to readers of the new book.

Speaking of which…a journalist from First magazine is interested in talking to women who have done the 6-Week Cure, and who would be willing to give testimonials and allow their names and photos to be used in a magazine article. If you are interested, you can contact Lisa Maxbauer at lisamaxb (at) yahoo (dot) com. You can check out her Twitter site at twitter.com/FIRSTmagLISA as well.

I’ll have the meat-eater post up as soon as I’ve got a little consolidated time to finish it.

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