Fundamentally, I am a proponent of the Paleolithic diet. However, much depends on the specifics of the Paleo diet in question. The designation seems to be somewhat open to interpretation -- and thus the dietary devilry may reside in the details.
That, in essence, is the punch line for this piece -- and I provide it right away as a bow to a recent correspondent who reminded me that busy readers want the take away, right away. I do, however, hope you hang in there for the rest. Assuming so, let's start this tale at the beginning.
In June of this year, U.S. News & World Report published a ranking of diets for weight loss and health promotion. They circulated the contestants to a panel of 22 judges, all with relevant expertise, who scored each diet in multiple categories. Scores were tallied and winners declared. The overall winner for weight loss was Weight Watchers. The Paleo diet fared rather badly.
Shortly after the rankings were published, I was contacted by ABC News and asked to comment on why the Paleo diet had been scored so poorly and what I thought about it. My first comment was that I was one of the 22 judges, and that I had not scored the Paleo diet poorly. I went on to say that I considered a true "Paleo diet" -- with an emphasis on eating foods direct from nature and more plants than animals -- a good idea. I also noted that the name could mask a host of ills, such as a diet of hamburgers, hot dogs and bacon.
Apparently, the gist of my comments as quoted by ABC News suggested I was a general critic of the Paleo diet, and also conveyed my impression that our ancestors actually ate more plants than animals.
This resulted in correspondence from Loren Cordain, a Professor in the Department of Health and Exercise Science at Colorado State University, who has published extensively on our Stone Age diet and its implications. Prof. Cordain's note was very civil, but nonetheless a chastisement of my excessive emphasis on gathering over hunting, with a cc to a veritable who's who in paleoanthropology.
I explained to Prof. Cordain, and the others listening in, that I am a proponent of our true ancestral diet, while dubious about its many modern variants. The notion -- expressed in much of Prof. Cordain's own work -- that our ancestors ate a lot of meat, has invited modern carnivores to run up their "Paleo diet" banner and claim to be eating under it.
But they are not, because modern meat is not Stone Age meat. There were no wild corned beef, salamis or pastramis in the Stone Age, so processed meat is certainly off the Paleo diet menu. There were no grain-fed cattle; no pigs fed slop; and no domesticated feed animals raised without demands on their muscles, either.
The flesh of animals our ancestors ate was generally quite lean, often with fat content around 10 percent of calories or lower. That fat was far more unsaturated than the fat in most modern meats as well and even provided some omega-3.
Prof. Cordain noted that the flesh of grass-fed cattle approximates the Paleo experience, albeit imperfectly. Game does so even better. I concur -- but how much of this is there in the modern food supply? In my experience, many people who use the Paleo diet as justification for carnivorous preferences simply eat more of the kind of meat they tend to find. And generally, they are not finding antelope.
The issue of animal vs. plant foods remained, however, and I was fully prepared to simply respond with "mea culpa" (I know when I'm out of my weight class!), when Dr. S. Boyd Eaton of Emory University was gracious enough to contribute his views. While many papers examining the proportion of hunting to gathering are based on averages among modern-day hunter gatherers in diverse locales, Dr. Eaton has focused on African populations thought to most closely approximate the original human experience. Dr. Eaton's work suggests a plant:animal calorie ratio of 1:1.
Which, in essence, suggests that any apparent differences I had with Prof. Cordain were a bit about semantics (volume vs. calories), and a bit about which data to emphasize. Since plants tend to be energy-dilute and animals energy-dense, to get a 1:1 calorie ratio means a much greater than 1:1 ratio of plant food volume to animal food volume. It means quite a lot of gathering along with the hunting. Mostly plants, in other words, is not demonstrably wrong. Seemingly in the company of Dr. Eaton, I think my original assertion defensible.
Of course, the true beginning of a story about our Stone Age diet resides not with U.S. News & World Report, but in the Stone Age. The Paleolithic era, spanning our use of rough stone implements, extends some 4 million years into the past.
We may reasonably limit ourselves to the latter half of that span and focus on the emergence of our Homo erectus forebears, thought to be the first highly effective human hunters, roughly 2 million years ago. Our own species, sapiens, arose roughly 300,000 years ago and our particular subspecies, sapiens sapiens, roughly 30,000 years ago. Agriculture was not part of the human experience until roughly 12,000 years ago -- and once it was, nothing was ever the same. But that's a story for another time.
The Stone Age thus provided several thousand millennia to shape the adaptations of our genus, and several hundred to shape those of our species. We carry the genes of the well-adapted, because ancestors not well-suited to survive, reach adulthood and make babies ... make very poor ancestors. Like all modern creatures, we are the posterity of pre-modern creatures who "had the stuff," and paid it forward.
Among the stuff that mattered was the capacity to extract all necessary fuel from available foods. This is very easy to understand at the extremes: a person who required for their survival a nutrient not found on this planet, would not survive on this planet. A person who could not tolerate a nutrient essential for survival, such as water, similarly would not survive. While this is so obvious as to be trivial, it conceals a subtlety: food came first, physiology came after. There were plants before there were creatures that could survive by eating plants. There was water before there were creatures that needed to drink water.
And the same extends to every detail of dietary intake. We are adapted to survive on protein, carbohydrate and fat because those are the three kinds of macronutrients this planet provides. We "need" iron and calcium and essential amino acids and potassium and vitamin C -- because the food supply available to us on this planet provides them. If it did not, we could not possibly need them and be here to talk about it. Other creatures that needed what the planet did provide would be here in our place.
It just stands to reason that the diet that shaped our physiology in the first place would tell us something about the diet for which that physiology is best suited now. If you find that hard to swallow, consider how we decide what to feed animals in a zoo. To my knowledge, no clinical trials are involved in which the lions are tried on a diet of hay and the koalas on a diet of mackerel. Instead, the animals are all given food approximating what they were eating in the wild -- their native diet. If this is relevant to every creature on the planet, how likely is it that it would be irrelevant to us?
This, then, is the basic argument for the "Paleo diet." But there is more to consider. Throughout much of the Stone Age, mean human life expectancy was all of about 20 years and the life span extended only to about 40. While it makes sense that our native diet is apt to be good for us, we cannot conclude that a diet best suited to a two- to four-decade life is just as good for an eight-decade life.
Our Stone Age ancestors had a high caloric throughput, meaning lots of calories both out and in every day, due to the high energy demands of Stone Age survival. Perhaps consuming 4,000 or so calories a day -- and burning them all -- should be required before the "Paleo diet" label truly pertains.
Dr. Eaton among others suggests that our Paleolithic ancestors consumed as much as 100 grams of fiber daily, from a variety of plant foods eaten in large enough quantities to fuel that high energy demand. If 100 grams of fiber a day were required to defend a Paleo diet claim, there would be very few signed up.
In reality, virtually no one today practices anything close to a true Stone Age diet and no one at all practices such a diet perfectly. When was the last time you saw a mammoth?
When the Paleo diet label is used to justify a diet of sausages and bacon cheeseburgers, the concept has wandered well off the reservation. When used as guidance away from processed foods and toward a diet based on a variety of plants, nuts, seeds, eggs, fish and lean meats (preferably wild game), it is eminently reasonable, and no doubt a vast improvement, over the typical American diet. Stone Agers did a lot more running than we do and most certainly did not run on Dunkin'!
We don't know that even a well-practiced Paleo diet is the "best" choice for health, as compared to a Mediterranean diet, a traditional Asian diet, a mostly-plant diet, or a well-balanced vegan diet. We do know that a population of some 7 billion people cannot eat as much meat as a population in the millions did, without doing the irreparable harm to the planet that is already far advanced.
That our native diet is relevant to our health seems little less than self-evident. That we can't get back to the Stone Age from here is equally so. Exactly how we apply lessons from the past to our current dietary practices will decide whether effects on our future health, and that of our planet, are as hoped- or otherwise. So the details matter; let's chew on them carefully.
-fin
Dr. David L. Katz; www.davidkatzmd.com
www.turnthetidefoundation.org
Follow David Katz, M.D. on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DrDavidKatz
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As far as recommended daily consumption of fats go, there is evidence that the whole scare over saturated fat has been completely blown out of proportion. To nearly eliminate or greatly reduce saturated fat like many americans are doing today is likely very bad for long term health
Get rid of the grains, refined sugars, and industrial oils, and you can probably vary pretty widely between different levels of vegetable and meat intake without serious health consequences.
http://www.eatwild.com/
"Throughout much of the Stone Age, mean human life expectancy was all of about 20 years and the life span extended only to about 40. ...we cannot conclude that a diet best suited to a two- to four-decade life is just as good for an eight-decade life."
This somehow implies that the diet is inadequate for someone who wants to live longer than 40 years. The reason we died earlier back then has more to do with accident and infectious diseases (no medicine, vaccines, antibiotics etc). The evidence we have suggests that people weren't dying from heart disease and cancer, and diabetes, obesity and Alzheimers probably didn't exist (at least, at no where near the rates we have today).
Looking to the upper Paleolithic (30k ya - 10k ya) the life expectancy at birth was around 33. Evidence suggests that 50% of the population died before the age of 5, hence the low AVERAGE. But lets not confuse average with "how long they lived." There is evidence of people living well into their 60's and 70's.
Do you know why people do better eating paleo-ish? It's not a bunch of gluten phobic/sensitive people. People want to avoid eating too many grains(especially ones that have to be milled to death in order for humans to be able to metabolize them) because they cause unnecessary insulin spikes and have the same impact on our bodies as eating table sugar. You likely already knew this, but you sure did not show this in your post. How old are you by the way? If you are young, wait till you hit your late 30s and 40s and see how you feel about a more paleo-ish diet. To be primal or paleo, you don't have to go balls to the wall with your entire diet every single day for the rest of your life..
I'm 48 years old and have been fit and athletic my entire life. I eat beans and wheat and have zero problems maintaining my weight or my fitness. I played div 1 college soccer on a perenial top 20 team and continue to play and regularly run 5 and 10k races and place in my age group. I did this all enjoying some wheat and beans.
People feel better on a paleo diet usually because they exclude processed foods and lose weight by combining it with an exercise program. If I had a dollar for every overweight couch potato (oops only yams or sweet potatoes) pre paleo dieter who now preaches Grok in some grassfed meat I'd be rich. That's great, but some of us have been fit and healthy our entire lives by eating right and exercising and that eating included grains and beans along with other neolithic foods.
Exercise is important for specific fitness-related goals, but is not nearly as important to weight loss as a good, healthy diet.
I love this quote.
" If 100 grams of fiber a day were required to defend a Paleo diet claim, there would be very few signed up"
Truth ! :)
Yeah we do. A diet that requires supplementation from a pill, shot or fortified grain (aka supplements added to grains) in order to not die simply CANNOT be the best choice.
I'm guessing that, like my other comments that questioned the diet based on the beliefs of Veganism, this comment might not get approved, but I figured I'd try.
Cholesterol medication? Come on. Again, please do your research before commenting on things like this. First of all, we need dietary cholesterol, like from eggs, if we don't get enough, our livers might start producing too much of it, raising our bodies' cholesterol levels. Secondly, saturated fat, if simply existing in good food sources and eating more for survival rather than overeating, is not going to do anything bad for anyone's cholesterol profile, if anything, it would help.
Stay informed and educated! Weston A. Price Foundation is a good place to go. You need to look at people who present peer reviewed double-blind research and are completely unbiased, free of any heavily influential ideology. The only bias that is o.k. is the bias towards wanting optimal nutrition.
http://www.vegansociety.com/lifestyle/nutrition/b12.aspx
...but you're "heart" (emotional center) wants to keep telling you that the vegetarian myth is real.
a) studies of modern hunter-gatherers have found a range of diets in terms of macronutrients. Some groups get nearly all their calories from carbs and others very few, like Inuits. Humans are very adaptable.
b) the argument humans evolved to match a type of diet would mean that sub-populations within distinct areas have had different selective pressures and would evolve differently depending on available food supplies. The diet right for you today would depend on where your paleolithic ancestors lived.
c) Paleolithic man didn't live long due to disease and injury, natural selection would not favor a healthy long-term diet past 30 or 40 years of age. We would have evolved for optimum performance for a diet in our younger years with little regard for long-term health. There would be no evolutionary advantage to a diet that prevents heart disease in paleoman.
d) Evolution based on selection can happen very fast. DNA evidence has shown that the prevalence of the gene for lactose tolerance arose in European populations very quickly after cow domestication. If that's so, then there is nothing to say that paleolithic human diets are better for modern humans. We may have evolved away from our ancestoral paleolithic diet generations ago.
Here's how. Point d goes directly to the passing of genes. Those that are lactose tolerant are more likely to grow to adulthood and reproduce. That's natural selection at work. The rise of the genetic adaptation points to how quickly evolution can work. If, however, few people live past 30 or 40 and in the case of women, fertility goes down, then there is few if little natural selection to direct evolution.
Hey, I'm not saying the paleo diet is a bad diet per se. I'm saying the evolutionary based rationale for it, however, is flawed.
point c- is just ignorant. diseases like heart disease, diabetes, and the other 'diseases of civilisation' are not evident in native populations UNTIL flour and sugar are introduced into their diets. I'm afraid that facts trump your guess. It makes the incorrect assumption that heart disease is somehow a natural thing in our species, it is not, it is caused by our modern food. Without the modern food, there is nothing to 'prevent'.
"Fundamentally, I am a proponent of the Paleolithic diet. However, much depends on the specifics of the Paleo diet in question. The designation seems to be somewhat open to interpretation -- and thus the dietary devilry may reside in the details."
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The above is one of the most convulsed lead paragraphs I've ever seen. It causes the layman reader to think, "Oh, I'm dealing with a paranoid."
And it gets worse. Here's the paragraph that follows it:
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"That, in essence, is the punch line for this piece -- and I provide it right away as a bow to a recent correspondent who reminded me that busy readers want the take away, right away. I do, however, hope you hang in there for the rest. Assuming so, let's start this tale at the beginning."
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You see? He's announcing he's a weak writer. He's wasting our precious time. Get on with it, man!
Two paragraphs later he's talking about himself again:
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"Shortly after the rankings were published, I was contacted by ABC News and asked to comment on why the Paleo diet had been scored so poorly and what I thought about it. My first comment was that I was one of the 22 judges, and that I had not scored the Paleo diet poorly."
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