Arthur De Vany on Steroids, Baseball, and Evolutionary Fitness

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 29 March 2010

⏱️ 66 minutes

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Summary

Arthur De Vany, of the University of California, Irvine, and creator of Evolutionary Fitness, talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about performance-enhancing drugs in baseball and Evolutionary Fitness, De Vany's ideas about diet and fitness. In the first part of the conversation, De Vany argues that there is little physiological or statistical evidence that steroid use increases home run totals in baseball. The second part of the conversation turns to De Vany's theories of diet and exercise. De Vany argues that our diet and exercise regime should take account of our evolutionary origins, an earlier time when we ate no grains and our exercise was a mix of intense activity punctuated by much milder activity. He argues that jogging is unhealthy and that we would live longer and feel better if we followed a different exercise routine than most Americans do today.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you. Today is March 23rd and my guest is Arthur Davaney, Professor Emeritus
0:42.6	of Economics at University of California Irvine, and the creator of Evolutionary Fitness, a novel
0:47.8	approach to diet and fitness, art welcome to Econ Talk. I usually start off an interview
0:54.2	saying that our topic for today is, and then I fell in the blank, but art is such an interesting
0:59.1	thinker, that our topic for today is really what art finds interesting, which is a pretty
1:03.6	diverse group of stuff. Baseball, fitness, movies, I hope we can get to all three, and I want
1:08.8	to start with baseball, given that the start of the season is just around the corner, and also
1:14.1	because you have a forthcoming paper at Economic Inquiry on the relationship between steroid use
1:21.0	and home run hitting, and you are skeptical of the mainstream view that steroid hitting has had a
1:26.4	big, and steroid use has had a big influence on home run hitting. So I'd like you to start off by
1:31.6	telling me why you're skeptical. Well, the data made me do it is my old professor, Armin Alton,
1:38.0	you tell me all the time. The theory that the home run hitting is enhanced by steroids, or that,
1:47.8	in fact, more generally, that there are any things such things as performance enhancing drugs
1:54.3	is largely a myth. It's not supported by any really strong evidence. Other than some dehydration,
2:05.0	which tends to increase the number of red blood cells in the blood, which helps endurance
2:11.8	but otherwise there are no performance enhancing drugs. So let's let me start with the most obvious
2:17.4	question, which is the most publicly identified users of steroids, which are performance enhancing
2:25.0	drugs generally like, and let's use that term because of course there's besides steroids, there's
	...

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