The biggest problem I have with Zuk is that the entire premise of this book is based on a straw man argument. The "Paleo" in paleo diet comes from the fact that there was a clear dip in human health once we entered the neolithic era (i.e. started farming). We are not emulating a caveman's diet per se, we are simply trying to find and remove what caused that original dip in health.
To anyone uninformed about the paleo diet:
The Paleo diet is not a crusade against anything that isn't a meat or vegetable and its certainly not trying to perfectly emulate some fictitious caveman's food diary. The paleo diet is a recommendation to avoid things that have anti-nutritional properties, things that may tax our liver or our insulin response or halt our ability to digest vitamins and minerals as effectively.
The critical takeaway from the paleo diet is that there are many foods that the average person may have a "tolerance" for, but why eat foods we simply tolerate when we can eat foods that we thrive on?
The Paleo Diet is based upon eating wholesome, contemporary foods from the food groups our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have thrived on during the Paleolithic era, the time period from about 2.6 million years ago to the beginning of the agricultural revolution, about 10,000 years ago. These foods include fresh meats (preferably grass-produced or free-ranging beef, pork, lamb, poultry, and game meat, if you can get it), fish, seafood, fresh fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, and healthful oils (olive, coconut, avocado, macadamia, walnut and flaxseed). Dairy products, cereal grains, legumes, refined sugars and processed foods were not part of our ancestral menu. The site makes constant references to "the mainstays of Stone Age diets" and advocates a high potassium/sodium ratio because "Stone Age bodies were adapted to this".
Another site early in the results: "Cut out all cereal grains and legumes, cut out sugar, eliminate dairy products" which I think covers everything outside of meat, fruit and vegetables.
PaleoDiet.com: "Paleo is a simple dietary lifestyle that is based on foods being either in or out. In are the Paleolithic Era foods that we ate prior to agriculture and animal husbandry (meat, fish, shellfish, eggs, tree nuts, vegetables, roots, fruit, berries, mushrooms, etc.). Out are Neolithic Era foods that result from agriculture or animal husbandry (grains, dairy, beans/legumes, potatoes, sugar and fake foods) "
If you object to people rebutting this 'straw man', then perhaps you should try and stop people from proposing it. You can't call something a straw man simply because it's not what you personally mean by the word.
Indeed, it's a review by someone with an axe to grind about a book by someone with an axe to grind.
I'm not a "Paleo" person, but the hinting in this article that folks trying to infer better living patterns from the past are loons is faintly preposterous. We have just mounds of evidence (which doubters are free to research themselves) that many pre-Agricultural societies had (and have, actually) far lower rates of the so-called "diseases of civilizations". More abstractly, evolution isn't magic. There is some rate of lifestyle change due to technology that will outstrip evolution's ability to accommodate it.
Hunters and gatherers weren't obese. We are. By irrefutable inference, some lifestyle difference explains this. One valid way to approach the problem of our accelerating obesity is to study what has changed. The theory that I consider most likely at this point is the one argued by Stephan Guyenet, a PH.D. neurobiology researcher who studies the link between obesity and the brain. He posits that modern industrial food is hyperpalatable, so we eat too much of it.
>there was a clear dip in human health once we entered the neolithic era
This statement seems hard to prove seeing as we didn't keep any health-records between 10,000 BC and 2,000 BC (I can see, however, that we currently live quite unhealthy).
Paleo to me is certainly not a historical reenactment. I also am not one trying to recreate the standard diet in almond flour and all that. Paleo people drive me crazy being so anti-dairy; cream is a wondrous fuel.
Disclaimer: I started reading on the paleo diet about a month ago, after friends recommended it as a support for my strength & conditioning routines. I've been loosely following the guidelines for the past 2 weeks. I do see an improvement in my sleep quality and in the past week have noticed a spike in my swimming endurance.
This article highlights one aspect of the scientific community that I abhor, the petty disputes. So on one side we have Cordain, who promotes a new diet that seems to carry some widely documented positive results, but who may be inaccurate in his notion that we haven't had time to adapt to changes in our nutrition in the past 10,000 years and may or may not be extrapolating a bit on other points. On another we have Zuk, hellbent at debunking the former's work, based solely on those arguments. Finally, we have Laura Miller, author of the article, who feels that Zuk's arguments are justification enough to dismiss proponents of the paleo diet almost as a fad.
Yes, crickets managed to adapt to their predator in 5 years, but what of the multiple examples of species that just disappeared, when another was introduced in their ecosystem? Cordain is probably wrong in some of his presumptions regarding evolution, but then Zuk just ends up pointing that out without proving anything of interest herself.
Does Miller really believe that people who eat paleo do so because the diet is from the paleolithic? Who cares when it's from? A month ago I had only a vague idea of when the paleolithic ended. If you asked me I would've said "hmm, 50k years ago?"
What convinced me was its simplicity and results. I read reports and testimonies of people getting better on it and athletes performing on it. Rather than telling me "actually, this isn't quite paleolithic" or "actually, we did have time to adapt", I would be much more interested in a study that debunks those reports, or at least attributes them to something else than the diet.
Also, I've not yet read enough on the diet in details, but from what I've garnered of its main lines, there are some specific reasons as to why certain foods should be avoided. How about looking at those arguments and then debunk them? I for one would love proof that the diet is wrong about cereals and legumes.
>> "I for one would love proof that the diet is wrong about cereals and legumes."
>> "I read reports and testimonies of people getting better on it and athletes performing on it."
I think this is the wrong way round. When people make claims that stuff we've been eating for thousands of years (bread, cereals, grains etc.) are actually really bad for us, the burden of proof is on them.
If anyone could actually prove that wheat causes weight gain and health problems (independent of other variables), they'd be a good candidate for the next Nobel in Medicine.
Most studies I've read show that Paleo is no better or worse than a normal healthy diet. In some cases e.g. when you're an athlete, it'll be actively worse, since carbs are a basic source of fuel. [1]
On top of this, Paleo promotes some claims that are ridiculous, e.g. that burning fat for fuel == burning carbs for fuel. They have totally different consequences.
Yes, eating lots of carbs is bad for you. So is eating lots of fatty food. Loads of calories and not enough exercise means your body stores fat. That's sort of obvious, and nothing to do with any special properties that 'carbs' have.
Just eat plenty of vegetables (esp green / strongly coloured ones), and make sure you get adequate amounts of protein & carbs. To lose weight, make sure calories in < calories out. That's the general pictures studies give us.
Be extremely sceptical of anything claiming otherwise. I'm not sure why intelligent people can get so caught up in fads - such as Paleo - that are backed up by pseudo-science. My theory is that they appeal to the contrarian in us - after all, they're delightfully counter-intuitive in some ways (eating lots of steak can be good for me?!).
You've got to have contrarian ideas to be really intelligent, but not all contrarianism is good.
[1] I say this as a semi-pro runner who has tried running on a Paleo diet and found it disastrous. You cannot burn fat with the same efficiency as you can 'burn' carbs (i.e. use glycogen). It doesn't work that way. And if you still think it does, look up the diets of the top 10 athletes in basically any sport & explain to me why none of them are on Paleo.
> Does Miller really believe that people who eat paleo do so because
> the diet is from the paleolithic?
With the recent eco-natural-organic-whatever fad I wouldn't be surprised that some do. Line of thinking would go roughly like this: long time ago->before current technologisation->natural->good.
> What convinced me was its simplicity and results.
Did you try anything else before without results? It is likely that just starting to care what and how much do you eat will provide results, no matter the name of the diet.
> Does Miller really believe that people who eat paleo do so because the diet is from the paleolithic?
People who are on the paleo diet tell me exactly that.
Anyway, they seem healthier than before they started, so taking an interest in healthier food consumption seems to work for them. As you say, the outcome is the important thing.
The Paleo diet may well have made the hunter-gatherers very healthy. However, as I have already passed their life-expectancy, there seems to be no data supporting whether it will work for my longevity ;)
> Cordain, who has a Ph.D in exercise physiology, assured Zuk that human beings had not had time to adapt to foods that only became staples with the advent of agriculture. “It’s only been ten thousand years,” he explained. Zuk’s response: “Plenty of time.”
We have documented measurable evolution in large mammals in timespans of only several hundred years.
"We have documented measurable evolution in large mammals in timespans of only several hundred years."
So, the good news is that in perhaps merely several hundred years, a diet consisting of lifetime unlimited quantities of regular Mt Dew, tv dinners, bacon, and potato chips will none the less evolve humans who successfully reproduce. Oh wait, whoops, all these people are medically crashing with lifestyle diseases at age 40 after having 10 kids. And meanwhile for those couple hundred years, any small segment of the population who avoids evolving will personally benefit..
There is also a horrific ethical component to evolving mankind for profit. So Monsanto, Dow, etc make a lot of money, at the cost of hundreds of years of humanity dying young in agony. Hmm. It sort of like saying we "should" evolve ourselves to tolerate lead in the environment, or tolerate any other poison. I don't think that quantity of human suffering because of the evolutionary process balances out with some megacorps making a couple extra bucks. I mean, if killing ourselves via diet educated us, or permanently improved the ecology of the planet, or sent us to the stars, or improved our culture, well, not definitely yes, but "maybe". But all that suffering merely for a goal of "some rich dirtbag will get richer", well, uh, "no thanks".
The "plenty of time" of time argument only shows that Cordain's reasoning is not bulletproof -- it doesn't refute it. Just because it's possible to adapt to a new condition doesn't mean we will, or that our adaptation will be complete. Lactase persistence may be evidence of evolution in a relatively short time, but by the same token lactose intolerance is evidence of its failure.
So while it's a fair point of criticism of the paleo argument, it's not enough to dismiss it. If you find a flaw in the proof of a theorem, you have not disproved the theorem.
I don't live a paleo diet[1], but I think the focus on fresh foods is good. Just like anything, there may be a kernel of extremely important wisdom that gets surrounded by a huge amount of marketing to make money off of it (think agile programming as another example).
I also have yet to meet[2] a scientist whose word I would trust as the last word on the way I should eat. On the other hand, I've met a lot whose words have influenced how I eat. And based on the reading I've done, we are still so far from really understanding how the body processes food that the only sane approach is to read a lot, experiment on yourself, and monitor the results[3]. Unfortunately, there are just far too many people trying to sell something[4] when it comes to food.
1. I've settled pretty close to Atkins. In fact, one of the things I really like about Atkins is the "on-going weight loss" phase where you literally experiment, journal and measure to find out what is working for you.
2. "Meet" in the "I've read" sense. I'm always looking for more to read on this topic. Due to lack to good information being available, I passed 350 pounds. It took surgery to have a chance to start again; then a lot of studying to take advantage of that start.
3. The scale may be the worst way you can measure your progress. Blood tests are good. A journal of the way you feel is also good.
4. It is sad that, even the best intentioned scientists, still need to "sell" their work to their funding agencies. I don't have a concern than anybody is outright faking things; the concern I have is that anything that doesn't match the current dogma as decided by the FDA, USDA, etc, is getting silently thrown away. Not just "not published", but not even submitted for fear of what a result that challenges the orthodoxy can do to one's career.
Now I have lost 12 kg for 2 months (114 to 102 on 180cm height) - from just cutting soda and anything with sugar, and limiting starches to minimum and eating unlimited amounts of raw nuts, eggs, meat, cheese, olives. I was obese and now my BMI scaled me into overweight.
There is no relation with the two arguments btw - "People adapt fast" - yeah but the ability to spike your blood sugar and insulin all day long into the stratosphere is recent, and because of the modern health system there is no evolutionary pressure. A guy with type 2 diabetes will have long life. Just crappy.
I think that every person could build a good diet for themselves following these rules:
1. Cut soda unless in the middle of a marathon or a brutal workout
2. Treat anything with added sugar as dessert and eat it in amounts suitable for dessert two times a week top.
3. Don't eat anything that has had its fibers removed.
4. Always start the meal with a big leafy salad.
5. Avoid overly processed meat products, products with too much salt and fats that have gone trough other processing than mechanical/thermal.
I'm a little confused by the "10,000 years is plenty of time" argument, particularly when the crickets in Hawaii or lactase persistence examples are used as evidence. To me, these were relatively minor evolutionary steps. I'd even go as far as to question whether crickets changing their singing might not be explained by culture or learned behaviour — at least partly? As for lactase, is it such a vast leap from drinking mother's milk in infancy to drinking the milk of other mammals?
Comparing these examples to completely rewiring the human digestive system, insulin response mechanism, and immune system to deal with digesting and utilizing foods (refined sugars, grains) in vast quantities which we rarely if ever encountered before seems like something that might take a bit longer to evolve.
The argument almost seems to say "evolution has been observed on shorter timescales, therefore any evolutionary leap is possible on shorter timescales."
The Amazon review is not by someone who is a verified purchaser of the item under review, nor does the reviewer appear to be, from the reviewer's other reviews I've quickly glanced at, someone who is deeply familiar with the science on the subject. So, yes, the topic is inflammatory, but I wouldn't think less of the book based on a "review" like that. I agree with you that it would be good to read reviews of the new book by scientists who research those issues.
(Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, after noticing that some "reviewers" of his first book seemed not to have actually read the book, added section headings in the table of contents of his second book designed to trip up lazy reviewers. He detected several of those, even among people who review books for professionally edited publications for mass audiences.)
There seem to be no reviews of any science bloggers that I can find - but from reading through the article it seems that the author and me share many grievances about the myths perpetuated by some of the paleo-diet-folks (I'm a biologist, myself).
Regarding that Amazon-review: It was posted on the 5th of March, but the book is only going to be published on the 11th. Did he/she get a preview-edition? I somehow doubt it, the reviewer doesn't seem to be the kind of person who receives copies for review.
One of the things that make me wonder is the idea that there are " diseases if civilisation" (accepted, look at increases in asthma etc) and that they are caused by diet
Of all the things that exist in the modern world, lead in atmosphere, weird fungicides in our furniture fire retardants, etc, why is it the one thing that is under individual control that is the main contributor to our malease - it seems far too linked to the common "if you are ill / poor then you aren't trying hard enough" meme that Oprah et al tend to fall for.
Anyway, as a set of nutritional guidelines it seems reasonable, if only because the avergage food obsessed westerner has aceess to a range of fruit veg and meat that our ancestors never dreamed of.
Now stop trying to persuade me to agree with you so that I can be saved - it smacks of religion
I don't see the diet as being universally applicable but the theory behind the diet is compelling. There's an overlap in risk factors for diabetes, cancer, and heart disease. There's also an overlap in medications(e.g statins/aspirin lowering cancer risk. metformin lowering cancer risk). It's possible that all these diseases share biomolecular cascades.
They studied what happened to people who switched to agriculture 11000 years ago, via the fossil record. Also you can watch what happens to people who lived in a traditional way and then entered society.
That way I think a lot of things you mention can be excluded - not that lead and fire retardants are not dangerous, but that is another area of problems.
I've recently came to the conclusion that the Paleo diet is beneficial for me not because it tells me what to eat.
No, it's because it tells me exactly what not to eat.
With respect to what people ate (especially how much meat), the only safe assumption was “whatever they could get,” something that to this day varies greatly depending on where they live.
Precisely. I can not tell exactly what and how much they could get, but I can know for sure what they could not get, regardless of where they lived, under any conditions:
- Sugar
- White bread
- Vegetable oils
- Soft drinks
- Any kind of packaged food
- Any kind of industrially processed food
etc.
For the rest - yes, one should be free to eat as much as they want vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, fresh nuts, berries etc ...
Can you eat corn (domesticated some 9,000 years ago), sugar cane (8,000), or bananas (8,000) Wild almonds are toxic, but safe domesticated varieties started appearing some 5,000 years ago. Also, macadamia nuts have a similar problem, and they were domesticated only some 200 years ago.
What about strawberries? Wild strawberries are edible, but tiny. It wasn't until about the 1400s that we started breeding them for size. Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, savoy, and Chinese kale are cultivars of Brassica oleracea, but no one 10,000 years ago would have been able to get them.
Olives are treated to make them less bitter. Is curing or fermenting permissible, or does one eat only the olives which can be eaten without processing? When does the food become too processed?
By your logic, you've given up on coffee, chocolate, and alcohol, right? No paleolithic person ever tasted a drop of whiskey.
I'm not saying that moderation or abstinence in the foods you list is a bad thing, only commenting that the logic behind it would preclude eating or drinking certain vegetables, fruits, nuts, and berries which were not available 10,000+ years ago.
There are two things at work: Paleo diet works (not much disputed here) and Paleo diet works because it's like what we ate 10k years ago and we haven't adopted to our "new food" yet (a lot of people dispute that).
3. Abundance. People didn't have to "limit themselves" 2000 years ago because they either were usually, or at best occasionally, starving back down to size, along with massive vitamin and mineral deficiencies (so you can eat 3000 calories per day as a sailor, but if you're also simultaneously dying of scurvy, they you don't have to worry so much about getting fat). In the shorter term, religious fasting seems to have died out although oddly enough we keep religious feast traditions alive pretty well. Also gluttony seems to have disappeared from the list of sins. Someone who wanted to eat until 400 pounds 2500 years ago could want all they want for free, but they simply aren't getting the food to do it, so... hungry and skinny even if their internal weight thermostat says 400 pounds is a great goal. No caloric intake limit for an entire lifetime in 2010s America.
4. Non-ag lifestyle beginning a century or so ago has lead to weird ideas about our diet, so "rediscovering" what farmers have always known seems new. So 98% of the population doesn't farm. People discover corn products can be yummy and start exploding waistlines. The 2% of the population who farm are like "duh, everyone knows corn is the best way to fatten up hogs and other mammal livestock, duh!" but we don't respect farming as a profession so we need scientists to "discover" hmm corn consumption seems to positively correlate with waistline, how curious I wonder if cutting back on corn would help obesity... naah the corn industry lobbiests would kill me if I said that... Pretty much if farmers slop the hogs with it to fatten them up, you probably don't want to eat that unless you need fattening up.
Does it matter that much if it is correct or not? Some amount of people are eating healthier because of it. That's a good thing, right? Whether that is due to a link to history or coincidence it seems like a good thing.
To me "is it doing something we know is bad" seems like something that would be useful to know. I don't care so much about "is it historically correct". I'd gladly trade that for even 100 people eating better. Pragmatically, it seems like a decent diet, so let's figure out how to get more people to eat healthier instead?
If I get this right, the idea is that we can't be adapted for a diet that changed only recently, so therefore we should eat the diet we are likely to be more adapted to. So this kind of makes sense, in a "sounds reasonable" way.
It's certainly true that switching to a system of agriculture resulted in a drop in nutritional health, in the short term.
But, equally, what about the argument that goes: when we used to eat this diet, we died a lot younger than now. ok, they were lots of reasons for that, but we died a lot younger, so it's not unreasonable to imagine that diet was part of the cause.
Both arguments seem reasonable without being rigorous. I don't see why you'd choose one over the other.
Having had friends who studied nutrition at a top UK university, and read a bit about it myself, it seems to me that we know very little about nutrition in general. The best advice appears to be "eat a well-rounded diet with plenty of fresh fruit and veg, and don't eat too much junk food."
The idea of switching to something as radically different as a paleo diet, compared to what we've been eating for thousands of years, without a full scientific understanding of what is best, seems a bit reckless to me. I think the burden of proof lies heavily on the paleo side. And that requires not just a handful of empirical studies; I read a bit about one of these studies [1], and was not well executed - it didn't even use a control group. People adopting the diet without substantial evidence in its favour might be gambling with their health.
Anyone recommend good books on the topic? I'd like to read more.
[1] Effects of a short-term intervention with a paleolithic diet in healthy volunteers. Osterdahl M, Kocturk T, Koochek A, Wändell PE.
"the fossil record of the Stone Age is so small and necessarily incomplete that its ability to tell us about paleolithic society is severely limited."
Actually there are still people who live as hunter-gatherers, or there were until a couple of years ago, and that is where a lot of the information comes from. It was also possible to watch what happened when such people entered civilization. There also apparently is a marked difference in the fossil record concerning health of hunter-gatherers vs agricultural societies.
I just read "The World Until Yesterday" by Jared Diamond, and he also touches on some of those health problems. Western people are actually less afflicted by them than those hunter-gatherers who entered 'civilization' in their lifetimes, so Diamond also says that Western people probably already evolved to some degree to deal better with the abundance of grains, salt and sugar.
That doesn't imply we are already perfectly adapted, though, especially if some diseases clearly don't seem to be prevalent in traditional societies.
Unfortunately he isn't very specific about the traditional diets, for example, and trying to look up paleo diets it seems to me a lot of time they are mostly an excuse to eat lots of meat and many books are not that well researched. In Diamond's books he mentions that many tribes actually ate mostly starches and meat only on special occasions - unfortunately he didn't mention the actual frequency, or I missed reading that (once a week? a month?). Also obviously humans adapted to lots of different environments, there are probably tribes who ate 100% meat, too (like in arctic regions where nothing grows?) - so maybe you can take your pick, or you just have to experiment...
That lactose tolerance seems to have increased fitness a lot certainly makes me wary of just accepting "pure paleo" as the best path.
The problem with the "paleo-diet" is that it's not really an area of knowledge (like for example, plant evolutionary biology). Judging from the published studies it looks like proponents of the diet make up the plans and then studies by actual scientists later confirm some of the positive (and negative) benefits.
There are some scientific studies on the "paleo-diet" as an actual dietary plan, searching pubmed for "paleo-diet", "paleo diet" or "paleolithic diet" reveals 77 results, a few of which are concerned with how modern man might benefit of an old diet. Some of the published stuff is positive about paleo:
> Furthermore, doubts have been raised about the necessity for very low levels of protein, fat, and cholesterol intake common in official recommendations. Most impressively, randomized controlled trials have begun to confirm the value of hunter-gatherer diets in some high-risk groups, even as compared with routinely recommended diets.
So it seems that the usual recommendations for nourishment and sports (that's always good) are pretty good, but the evolutionary science behind it is quite hokum.
A lot of this knowledge that has been published outside of academic circles in books is slightly contradictory and is, in the worst case, broscience [1]. The wiki-page for this diet has some great points: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_diet
Zuk is attacking a straw man here. Thinking about our diets from an evolutionary perspective gives us a framework in which to form educated hypotheses. The way an intelligent person applies paleo-based thinking is by forming theories, not by creating an absolutist belief system. Zuk does nothing to invalidate the application data we have about the past in a logical fashion.
If Zuk's point is that some people are applying evolutionary concepts blindly without verifying results or considering evidence, then her book title should have been: "Some People Are Stupid" and left it at that. If she wants to launch a counter to the paleo movement then I think she's fallen flat on her face.
To repeat myself from earlier: If you object to people rebutting this 'straw man', then perhaps you should try and stop people from proposing it. You can't call something a straw man simply because it's not what you personally mean by the word.
There are people who claim that homeopathy cured their cancer.
This is exactly the kind of bias that rational people should be scared of. This is exactly the kind of thing that we have double blind controlled studies to eliminate.
EDIT: Because if you do something, and it makes you feel good, well - that's fine. But don't go around telling other people that they're wrong and doing harm to themselves by not doing this thing.
> I know people who claim that eating a mainly paleo diet makes them feel better.
Well, there are people who claim fasting makes them feel better, too. Or living on allegedly nothing but sun light.
I am not sure this is very good proof since e.g. not eating for a couple of days makes you feel good because it's your body trying to make you more active to gather food... so, as logical as some correlations might sound it seems flimsy to me. The best way is probably to go by blood and medical exams, to see if you actually are healthier.
[+] [-] brd|13 years ago|reply
To anyone uninformed about the paleo diet:
The Paleo diet is not a crusade against anything that isn't a meat or vegetable and its certainly not trying to perfectly emulate some fictitious caveman's food diary. The paleo diet is a recommendation to avoid things that have anti-nutritional properties, things that may tax our liver or our insulin response or halt our ability to digest vitamins and minerals as effectively.
The critical takeaway from the paleo diet is that there are many foods that the average person may have a "tolerance" for, but why eat foods we simply tolerate when we can eat foods that we thrive on?
[+] [-] jacalata|13 years ago|reply
The Paleo Diet is based upon eating wholesome, contemporary foods from the food groups our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have thrived on during the Paleolithic era, the time period from about 2.6 million years ago to the beginning of the agricultural revolution, about 10,000 years ago. These foods include fresh meats (preferably grass-produced or free-ranging beef, pork, lamb, poultry, and game meat, if you can get it), fish, seafood, fresh fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, and healthful oils (olive, coconut, avocado, macadamia, walnut and flaxseed). Dairy products, cereal grains, legumes, refined sugars and processed foods were not part of our ancestral menu. The site makes constant references to "the mainstays of Stone Age diets" and advocates a high potassium/sodium ratio because "Stone Age bodies were adapted to this".
Another site early in the results: "Cut out all cereal grains and legumes, cut out sugar, eliminate dairy products" which I think covers everything outside of meat, fruit and vegetables.
PaleoDiet.com: "Paleo is a simple dietary lifestyle that is based on foods being either in or out. In are the Paleolithic Era foods that we ate prior to agriculture and animal husbandry (meat, fish, shellfish, eggs, tree nuts, vegetables, roots, fruit, berries, mushrooms, etc.). Out are Neolithic Era foods that result from agriculture or animal husbandry (grains, dairy, beans/legumes, potatoes, sugar and fake foods) "
If you object to people rebutting this 'straw man', then perhaps you should try and stop people from proposing it. You can't call something a straw man simply because it's not what you personally mean by the word.
[+] [-] ellyagg|13 years ago|reply
I'm not a "Paleo" person, but the hinting in this article that folks trying to infer better living patterns from the past are loons is faintly preposterous. We have just mounds of evidence (which doubters are free to research themselves) that many pre-Agricultural societies had (and have, actually) far lower rates of the so-called "diseases of civilizations". More abstractly, evolution isn't magic. There is some rate of lifestyle change due to technology that will outstrip evolution's ability to accommodate it.
Hunters and gatherers weren't obese. We are. By irrefutable inference, some lifestyle difference explains this. One valid way to approach the problem of our accelerating obesity is to study what has changed. The theory that I consider most likely at this point is the one argued by Stephan Guyenet, a PH.D. neurobiology researcher who studies the link between obesity and the brain. He posits that modern industrial food is hyperpalatable, so we eat too much of it.
http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/10/case-for-food-...
It wouldn't be the favorite theory in the Paleo community, I imagine, but it springs from the same intuition.
[+] [-] a_bonobo|13 years ago|reply
Do you have any proof for this statement:
>there was a clear dip in human health once we entered the neolithic era
This statement seems hard to prove seeing as we didn't keep any health-records between 10,000 BC and 2,000 BC (I can see, however, that we currently live quite unhealthy).
[+] [-] praxeologist|13 years ago|reply
I think Dr. Harris' blog is a great source and I follow his steps best I can: http://www.archevore.com/get-started/
[+] [-] mekoka|13 years ago|reply
This article highlights one aspect of the scientific community that I abhor, the petty disputes. So on one side we have Cordain, who promotes a new diet that seems to carry some widely documented positive results, but who may be inaccurate in his notion that we haven't had time to adapt to changes in our nutrition in the past 10,000 years and may or may not be extrapolating a bit on other points. On another we have Zuk, hellbent at debunking the former's work, based solely on those arguments. Finally, we have Laura Miller, author of the article, who feels that Zuk's arguments are justification enough to dismiss proponents of the paleo diet almost as a fad.
Yes, crickets managed to adapt to their predator in 5 years, but what of the multiple examples of species that just disappeared, when another was introduced in their ecosystem? Cordain is probably wrong in some of his presumptions regarding evolution, but then Zuk just ends up pointing that out without proving anything of interest herself.
Does Miller really believe that people who eat paleo do so because the diet is from the paleolithic? Who cares when it's from? A month ago I had only a vague idea of when the paleolithic ended. If you asked me I would've said "hmm, 50k years ago?"
What convinced me was its simplicity and results. I read reports and testimonies of people getting better on it and athletes performing on it. Rather than telling me "actually, this isn't quite paleolithic" or "actually, we did have time to adapt", I would be much more interested in a study that debunks those reports, or at least attributes them to something else than the diet.
Also, I've not yet read enough on the diet in details, but from what I've garnered of its main lines, there are some specific reasons as to why certain foods should be avoided. How about looking at those arguments and then debunk them? I for one would love proof that the diet is wrong about cereals and legumes.
[+] [-] nqureshi|13 years ago|reply
>> "I read reports and testimonies of people getting better on it and athletes performing on it."
I think this is the wrong way round. When people make claims that stuff we've been eating for thousands of years (bread, cereals, grains etc.) are actually really bad for us, the burden of proof is on them.
If anyone could actually prove that wheat causes weight gain and health problems (independent of other variables), they'd be a good candidate for the next Nobel in Medicine.
Most studies I've read show that Paleo is no better or worse than a normal healthy diet. In some cases e.g. when you're an athlete, it'll be actively worse, since carbs are a basic source of fuel. [1]
On top of this, Paleo promotes some claims that are ridiculous, e.g. that burning fat for fuel == burning carbs for fuel. They have totally different consequences.
Yes, eating lots of carbs is bad for you. So is eating lots of fatty food. Loads of calories and not enough exercise means your body stores fat. That's sort of obvious, and nothing to do with any special properties that 'carbs' have.
Just eat plenty of vegetables (esp green / strongly coloured ones), and make sure you get adequate amounts of protein & carbs. To lose weight, make sure calories in < calories out. That's the general pictures studies give us.
Be extremely sceptical of anything claiming otherwise. I'm not sure why intelligent people can get so caught up in fads - such as Paleo - that are backed up by pseudo-science. My theory is that they appeal to the contrarian in us - after all, they're delightfully counter-intuitive in some ways (eating lots of steak can be good for me?!).
You've got to have contrarian ideas to be really intelligent, but not all contrarianism is good.
[1] I say this as a semi-pro runner who has tried running on a Paleo diet and found it disastrous. You cannot burn fat with the same efficiency as you can 'burn' carbs (i.e. use glycogen). It doesn't work that way. And if you still think it does, look up the diets of the top 10 athletes in basically any sport & explain to me why none of them are on Paleo.
[+] [-] rimantas|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cromulent|13 years ago|reply
People who are on the paleo diet tell me exactly that.
Anyway, they seem healthier than before they started, so taking an interest in healthier food consumption seems to work for them. As you say, the outcome is the important thing.
The Paleo diet may well have made the hunter-gatherers very healthy. However, as I have already passed their life-expectancy, there seems to be no data supporting whether it will work for my longevity ;)
[+] [-] stcredzero|13 years ago|reply
We have documented measurable evolution in large mammals in timespans of only several hundred years.
[+] [-] wiredfool|13 years ago|reply
Not to mention the genetic changes that have occurred in the foods over those times.
[+] [-] VLM|13 years ago|reply
So, the good news is that in perhaps merely several hundred years, a diet consisting of lifetime unlimited quantities of regular Mt Dew, tv dinners, bacon, and potato chips will none the less evolve humans who successfully reproduce. Oh wait, whoops, all these people are medically crashing with lifestyle diseases at age 40 after having 10 kids. And meanwhile for those couple hundred years, any small segment of the population who avoids evolving will personally benefit..
There is also a horrific ethical component to evolving mankind for profit. So Monsanto, Dow, etc make a lot of money, at the cost of hundreds of years of humanity dying young in agony. Hmm. It sort of like saying we "should" evolve ourselves to tolerate lead in the environment, or tolerate any other poison. I don't think that quantity of human suffering because of the evolutionary process balances out with some megacorps making a couple extra bucks. I mean, if killing ourselves via diet educated us, or permanently improved the ecology of the planet, or sent us to the stars, or improved our culture, well, not definitely yes, but "maybe". But all that suffering merely for a goal of "some rich dirtbag will get richer", well, uh, "no thanks".
[+] [-] jonahx|13 years ago|reply
So while it's a fair point of criticism of the paleo argument, it's not enough to dismiss it. If you find a flaw in the proof of a theorem, you have not disproved the theorem.
[+] [-] SoftwareMaven|13 years ago|reply
I also have yet to meet[2] a scientist whose word I would trust as the last word on the way I should eat. On the other hand, I've met a lot whose words have influenced how I eat. And based on the reading I've done, we are still so far from really understanding how the body processes food that the only sane approach is to read a lot, experiment on yourself, and monitor the results[3]. Unfortunately, there are just far too many people trying to sell something[4] when it comes to food.
1. I've settled pretty close to Atkins. In fact, one of the things I really like about Atkins is the "on-going weight loss" phase where you literally experiment, journal and measure to find out what is working for you.
2. "Meet" in the "I've read" sense. I'm always looking for more to read on this topic. Due to lack to good information being available, I passed 350 pounds. It took surgery to have a chance to start again; then a lot of studying to take advantage of that start.
3. The scale may be the worst way you can measure your progress. Blood tests are good. A journal of the way you feel is also good.
4. It is sad that, even the best intentioned scientists, still need to "sell" their work to their funding agencies. I don't have a concern than anybody is outright faking things; the concern I have is that anything that doesn't match the current dogma as decided by the FDA, USDA, etc, is getting silently thrown away. Not just "not published", but not even submitted for fear of what a result that challenges the orthodoxy can do to one's career.
[+] [-] svedlin|13 years ago|reply
Post-pleistocene human evolution: bioarchaeology of the agricultural transition http://www.cast.uark.edu/local/icaes/conferences/wburg/poste...
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html
Health versus fitness: competing themes in the origins and spread of agriculture? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20642145
On the Early Holocene: Foraging to Early Agriculture https://depot.erudit.org/bitstream/002029dd/1/CIRPEE05-02.pd...
[+] [-] venomsnake|13 years ago|reply
There is no relation with the two arguments btw - "People adapt fast" - yeah but the ability to spike your blood sugar and insulin all day long into the stratosphere is recent, and because of the modern health system there is no evolutionary pressure. A guy with type 2 diabetes will have long life. Just crappy.
I think that every person could build a good diet for themselves following these rules:
1. Cut soda unless in the middle of a marathon or a brutal workout
2. Treat anything with added sugar as dessert and eat it in amounts suitable for dessert two times a week top.
3. Don't eat anything that has had its fibers removed.
4. Always start the meal with a big leafy salad.
5. Avoid overly processed meat products, products with too much salt and fats that have gone trough other processing than mechanical/thermal.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] disbelief|13 years ago|reply
Comparing these examples to completely rewiring the human digestive system, insulin response mechanism, and immune system to deal with digesting and utilizing foods (refined sugars, grains) in vast quantities which we rarely if ever encountered before seems like something that might take a bit longer to evolve.
The argument almost seems to say "evolution has been observed on shorter timescales, therefore any evolutionary leap is possible on shorter timescales."
[+] [-] dmix|13 years ago|reply
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007Q6XM1A/?tag=saloncom08-20
I'd be curious to see more scientific reviews of the book first before buying it.
[+] [-] tokenadult|13 years ago|reply
(Author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, after noticing that some "reviewers" of his first book seemed not to have actually read the book, added section headings in the table of contents of his second book designed to trip up lazy reviewers. He detected several of those, even among people who review books for professionally edited publications for mass audiences.)
[+] [-] a_bonobo|13 years ago|reply
There seem to be no reviews of any science bloggers that I can find - but from reading through the article it seems that the author and me share many grievances about the myths perpetuated by some of the paleo-diet-folks (I'm a biologist, myself).
Regarding that Amazon-review: It was posted on the 5th of March, but the book is only going to be published on the 11th. Did he/she get a preview-edition? I somehow doubt it, the reviewer doesn't seem to be the kind of person who receives copies for review.
[+] [-] jlgreco|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scotty79|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|13 years ago|reply
Of all the things that exist in the modern world, lead in atmosphere, weird fungicides in our furniture fire retardants, etc, why is it the one thing that is under individual control that is the main contributor to our malease - it seems far too linked to the common "if you are ill / poor then you aren't trying hard enough" meme that Oprah et al tend to fall for.
Anyway, as a set of nutritional guidelines it seems reasonable, if only because the avergage food obsessed westerner has aceess to a range of fruit veg and meat that our ancestors never dreamed of.
Now stop trying to persuade me to agree with you so that I can be saved - it smacks of religion
[+] [-] s_baby|13 years ago|reply
http://robbwolf.com/2012/03/09/paleo-diet-inflammation-metfo...
[+] [-] Tichy|13 years ago|reply
That way I think a lot of things you mention can be excluded - not that lead and fire retardants are not dangerous, but that is another area of problems.
[+] [-] Evgeny|13 years ago|reply
With respect to what people ate (especially how much meat), the only safe assumption was “whatever they could get,” something that to this day varies greatly depending on where they live.
Precisely. I can not tell exactly what and how much they could get, but I can know for sure what they could not get, regardless of where they lived, under any conditions:
- Sugar
- White bread
- Vegetable oils
- Soft drinks
- Any kind of packaged food
- Any kind of industrially processed food
etc.
For the rest - yes, one should be free to eat as much as they want vegetables, fruit, meat, fish, fresh nuts, berries etc ...
[+] [-] dalke|13 years ago|reply
Can you eat corn (domesticated some 9,000 years ago), sugar cane (8,000), or bananas (8,000) Wild almonds are toxic, but safe domesticated varieties started appearing some 5,000 years ago. Also, macadamia nuts have a similar problem, and they were domesticated only some 200 years ago.
What about strawberries? Wild strawberries are edible, but tiny. It wasn't until about the 1400s that we started breeding them for size. Cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, savoy, and Chinese kale are cultivars of Brassica oleracea, but no one 10,000 years ago would have been able to get them.
Olives are treated to make them less bitter. Is curing or fermenting permissible, or does one eat only the olives which can be eaten without processing? When does the food become too processed?
By your logic, you've given up on coffee, chocolate, and alcohol, right? No paleolithic person ever tasted a drop of whiskey.
I'm not saying that moderation or abstinence in the foods you list is a bad thing, only commenting that the logic behind it would preclude eating or drinking certain vegetables, fruits, nuts, and berries which were not available 10,000+ years ago.
[+] [-] Uchikoma|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VLM|13 years ago|reply
3. Abundance. People didn't have to "limit themselves" 2000 years ago because they either were usually, or at best occasionally, starving back down to size, along with massive vitamin and mineral deficiencies (so you can eat 3000 calories per day as a sailor, but if you're also simultaneously dying of scurvy, they you don't have to worry so much about getting fat). In the shorter term, religious fasting seems to have died out although oddly enough we keep religious feast traditions alive pretty well. Also gluttony seems to have disappeared from the list of sins. Someone who wanted to eat until 400 pounds 2500 years ago could want all they want for free, but they simply aren't getting the food to do it, so... hungry and skinny even if their internal weight thermostat says 400 pounds is a great goal. No caloric intake limit for an entire lifetime in 2010s America.
4. Non-ag lifestyle beginning a century or so ago has lead to weird ideas about our diet, so "rediscovering" what farmers have always known seems new. So 98% of the population doesn't farm. People discover corn products can be yummy and start exploding waistlines. The 2% of the population who farm are like "duh, everyone knows corn is the best way to fatten up hogs and other mammal livestock, duh!" but we don't respect farming as a profession so we need scientists to "discover" hmm corn consumption seems to positively correlate with waistline, how curious I wonder if cutting back on corn would help obesity... naah the corn industry lobbiests would kill me if I said that... Pretty much if farmers slop the hogs with it to fatten them up, you probably don't want to eat that unless you need fattening up.
[+] [-] jib|13 years ago|reply
To me "is it doing something we know is bad" seems like something that would be useful to know. I don't care so much about "is it historically correct". I'd gladly trade that for even 100 people eating better. Pragmatically, it seems like a decent diet, so let's figure out how to get more people to eat healthier instead?
[+] [-] randomsearch|13 years ago|reply
If I get this right, the idea is that we can't be adapted for a diet that changed only recently, so therefore we should eat the diet we are likely to be more adapted to. So this kind of makes sense, in a "sounds reasonable" way.
It's certainly true that switching to a system of agriculture resulted in a drop in nutritional health, in the short term.
But, equally, what about the argument that goes: when we used to eat this diet, we died a lot younger than now. ok, they were lots of reasons for that, but we died a lot younger, so it's not unreasonable to imagine that diet was part of the cause.
Both arguments seem reasonable without being rigorous. I don't see why you'd choose one over the other.
Having had friends who studied nutrition at a top UK university, and read a bit about it myself, it seems to me that we know very little about nutrition in general. The best advice appears to be "eat a well-rounded diet with plenty of fresh fruit and veg, and don't eat too much junk food."
The idea of switching to something as radically different as a paleo diet, compared to what we've been eating for thousands of years, without a full scientific understanding of what is best, seems a bit reckless to me. I think the burden of proof lies heavily on the paleo side. And that requires not just a handful of empirical studies; I read a bit about one of these studies [1], and was not well executed - it didn't even use a control group. People adopting the diet without substantial evidence in its favour might be gambling with their health.
Anyone recommend good books on the topic? I'd like to read more.
[1] Effects of a short-term intervention with a paleolithic diet in healthy volunteers. Osterdahl M, Kocturk T, Koochek A, Wändell PE.
[+] [-] Tichy|13 years ago|reply
Actually there are still people who live as hunter-gatherers, or there were until a couple of years ago, and that is where a lot of the information comes from. It was also possible to watch what happened when such people entered civilization. There also apparently is a marked difference in the fossil record concerning health of hunter-gatherers vs agricultural societies.
I just read "The World Until Yesterday" by Jared Diamond, and he also touches on some of those health problems. Western people are actually less afflicted by them than those hunter-gatherers who entered 'civilization' in their lifetimes, so Diamond also says that Western people probably already evolved to some degree to deal better with the abundance of grains, salt and sugar.
That doesn't imply we are already perfectly adapted, though, especially if some diseases clearly don't seem to be prevalent in traditional societies.
Unfortunately he isn't very specific about the traditional diets, for example, and trying to look up paleo diets it seems to me a lot of time they are mostly an excuse to eat lots of meat and many books are not that well researched. In Diamond's books he mentions that many tribes actually ate mostly starches and meat only on special occasions - unfortunately he didn't mention the actual frequency, or I missed reading that (once a week? a month?). Also obviously humans adapted to lots of different environments, there are probably tribes who ate 100% meat, too (like in arctic regions where nothing grows?) - so maybe you can take your pick, or you just have to experiment...
That lactose tolerance seems to have increased fitness a lot certainly makes me wary of just accepting "pure paleo" as the best path.
[+] [-] jclos|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kiba|13 years ago|reply
I note that my programming skill(in term of producing tangle results) and mathematics are probably the only thing I trust in absolutely.
[+] [-] a_bonobo|13 years ago|reply
There are some scientific studies on the "paleo-diet" as an actual dietary plan, searching pubmed for "paleo-diet", "paleo diet" or "paleolithic diet" reveals 77 results, a few of which are concerned with how modern man might benefit of an old diet. Some of the published stuff is positive about paleo:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21139123
> Furthermore, doubts have been raised about the necessity for very low levels of protein, fat, and cholesterol intake common in official recommendations. Most impressively, randomized controlled trials have begun to confirm the value of hunter-gatherer diets in some high-risk groups, even as compared with routinely recommended diets.
It also seems to be good for sufferers of Diabetes Type II: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20144375
So it seems that the usual recommendations for nourishment and sports (that's always good) are pretty good, but the evolutionary science behind it is quite hokum.
A lot of this knowledge that has been published outside of academic circles in books is slightly contradictory and is, in the worst case, broscience [1]. The wiki-page for this diet has some great points: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_diet
[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=broscience
[+] [-] awolf|13 years ago|reply
If Zuk's point is that some people are applying evolutionary concepts blindly without verifying results or considering evidence, then her book title should have been: "Some People Are Stupid" and left it at that. If she wants to launch a counter to the paleo movement then I think she's fallen flat on her face.
[+] [-] jacalata|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiggy2011|13 years ago|reply
Though I am tempted to think it is less to do with removing diary , pasta etc and more to do with them actually eating some damn vegetables now.
[+] [-] DanBC|13 years ago|reply
This is exactly the kind of bias that rational people should be scared of. This is exactly the kind of thing that we have double blind controlled studies to eliminate.
EDIT: Because if you do something, and it makes you feel good, well - that's fine. But don't go around telling other people that they're wrong and doing harm to themselves by not doing this thing.
[+] [-] kahawe|13 years ago|reply
Well, there are people who claim fasting makes them feel better, too. Or living on allegedly nothing but sun light.
I am not sure this is very good proof since e.g. not eating for a couple of days makes you feel good because it's your body trying to make you more active to gather food... so, as logical as some correlations might sound it seems flimsy to me. The best way is probably to go by blood and medical exams, to see if you actually are healthier.
[+] [-] ricardobeat|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s_baby|13 years ago|reply