Tag: validation

• How Cooking Changed Us

  Richard Wrangham is a Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University. He is also the curator of Primate Behavioral Biology at the Peabody Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a director of the Kibale Chimpanzee Project in Uganda.

  Wrangham began his career at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania as a member of Jane Goodall's chimpanzee research team.

  The standard view of evolution is that by eating meat, humans were able to evolve the larger brains that distinguish us from other primates. Wranghams’s view is that cooking food is a fundamental activity that transformed humans and our society. He is not the first to propose this view but has developed the concept.

  Cooking increased the value of our food. It changed our bodies, our brains, our use of time and our social relationships.

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  20 March 2016

• Tim Kaufman – Disabled to Ironman

  Walking out of the doctor’s office, reality had finally sunk in. I was not going to be around for another year. My wife and kids would very likely not have a husband or father within the year. My blood pressure was 255/115, and I was on three medications to bring it down. My cholesterol (300 mg/dL, 7.8mmol/L) and triglycerides (279 mg/dL, 3.15mmol/L) were off the charts. Aside from a heavy load of prescribed medications, I was also self-medicating and struggling with addictions of all kinds.

  My weight became so out of control that the doctor could no longer weigh me in his office. I had trouble breathing and suffered from severe sleep apnea.

  I was born with a genetic disorder called Elhers-Danlos syndrome, and my joints are very loose and hypermobile. The excess weight was too much for my already destroyed joints to handle. I was constantly on crutches, canes, and immobilizers. I was cast and fitted for very expensive leg braces that would hold my legs from buckling. My wife was actually putting my socks and shoes on for me in the morning. Nothing was working, and my life was spiraling out of control.

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  1 July 2013