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This looks like nothing but BS to me, there's a reason this is in the NYT's Style section. The most telling quote from the article is “I didn’t want to do some
by andrewvc 17y ago
This looks like nothing but BS to me, there's a reason this is in the NYT's Style section.
The most telling quote from the article is “I didn’t want to do some faddish diet that my sister would do,” Mr. Durant said. This just reeks of pathetic insecurity, I'm not surprised the conclusions he came to were ridiculous.
Apparently, there's not even much of a consensus about what people used to eat back then. According to Wikipedia: However, there is little direct evidence of the relative proportions of plant and animal foods.[94] According to some anthropologists and advocates of the modern Paleolithic diet, Paleolithic hunter-gatherers consumed a significant amount of meat and possibly obtained most of their food from hunting.[95] Competing hypotheses suggest that Paleolithic humans may have consumed a plant-based diet in general,[58] or that hunting and gathering possibly contributed equally to their diet.[96] One hypothesis is that carbohydrate tubers (plant underground storage organs) may have been eaten in high amounts by our pre-agricultural humans.[97][98][99][100] However, the relative proportions of plant and animal foods in the diets of Paleolithic peoples probably varied between regions. For instance, hunter gatherers in tropical regions such as Africa probably consumed a plant-based diet, while populations in colder regions such as Northern Europe most likely obtained most of their food from meat.[101]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic#Diet_and_nutrition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic#Diet_and_nutrition
This whole thing smacks of a silly trend among a small group of NY hipsters to sound cool and eat a shit load of meat.
- n8agrin 17y agoI think the "paleos", as it were, are quite serious and don't think of this as just a "silly trend". That said, whether or not there truly is any nutritional benefit over eating, say 80% vegetables, and going to the gym is probably hard to prove. I'm willing to bet that most of the benefit these people see is from the commitment to a regimented diet and exercise program, and not the specific diet they are eating. But that's just my uninformed, naive guess.
- andrewvc 17y agoWell, there are two issues in my post. 1.) Is the Paleo diet legitimate, and 2.) Is it attracting some douche bag followers. The answer to the question of whether the movement is attracting idiots is, as evidenced by this article, a clear yes. This is shown in silly comments like: “Another caveman trick involves donating blood frequently. The idea is that various hardships might have occasionally left ancient humans a pint short.”. The answer to whether the diet is legitimate is I don't quite know. My suspicion is there are things to learn from it, but let's not forget, we aren't cavemen anymore. The big question for me is does the caveman diet (and there are more than one at this point) work without the caveman lifestyle, and that really would require long term studies, not anecdotes, which is all we see so far. That being said, it's almost certainly better than the highly processed food most Americans eat right now, but that hardly makes it a first choice for a diet.
- wisty 17y agoRegular blood donations? Yep, that's crazy. People who lost a lot of blood tended to get infections, then die. Which is why the average life expectancy was about 30.
- tokenadult 17y agoRegular blood donations? Yep, that's crazy. I'm up above nine gallons donated, lifetime, and I'm ready to give more as the occasion allows. I'm much above the age of thirty, considerably above the model age of most readers of HN. https://www.givelife.org/ https://www.givelife.org/
- nradov 17y agoThere is some evidence that high blood iron levels increases the risk of heart attack and stroke. So donating blood regularly may actually be good for you. http://www.webmd.com/news/20001025/too-much-iron-may-lead-to-heart-attack http://www.webmd.com/news/20001025/too-much-iron-may-lead-to...
- jenningsjason 17y ago"Average" life expectancy is deceiving. Much of the gains in human life expectancy have come from reductions in infant and childhood mortality, which alters the average substantially.
- nunb 17y agoAs for #2, imho, the article is deliberately written to caricaturize, which may well be appropriate for a mainstream lifestyle section of a newspaper. IIRC, an earlier article in the same paper on the crossfit exercise plan was quite alarmist (implied neophytes would by dying like flies) and dismissive. Vegan and yoga are the accepted modes of the NYC healthy lifestyle :-) > we aren't cavemen anymore In behavior and lifestyle, no. But in terms of the evolutionary stage of our digestive systems? Lactose tolerance [Lactose], for example is quite new (and beneficial enough that it spread rapidly). The mechanisms described in the "Expensive tissue hypothesis" still apply. [Eades] has a nice description. [Eades] http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/low-carb-library/are-we-meat-eaters-or-vegetarians-part-ii/ http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/low-carb-library/are-we-m... [Lactose] http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090827202513.htm http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090827202513.ht...
- tlack 17y agoSo you're saying human evolution (what our bodies have evolved to digest and process over the past half million years) should have no bearing on what we eat today? I think that's the silly part.
- baddox 17y agoDo you think paleolithic man researched their own distant ancestors to figure out what to eat? I personally doubt it. Why should we?
- nunb 17y agoPrecisely because paleo man was more animal-like. Less cerebration was involved in deciding what to eat. Animals don't synthesize textured protein from soybean, they eat what is natural (instinctive) for them to eat, to the extent that Amazonian parakeets (and many other species) eat a particular kind of clay to neutralize the toxins they ingest in their fruit-based diet. If we do synthesize our food, and process it more than any other animal, we should consider whether what we're doing is good for us.
- andrewvc 17y agoWow, you completely misread what I wrote. I wrote that these particular people are eating what they believe is a caveman diet, though in fact it is no more than their own wishful food fantasy, with almost no grounding in history or science.
- Retric 17y agoWe are omnivores like raccoons, we can and did eat just about anything from plants and fresh kills to rotting meat and insects. We gorged on fruit when in season and starved when we could not find anything. We even eat each other and feces like dogs from time to time. Which is why we can still eat just about anything for long periods of time and survive.
- kingkongreveng_ 17y agoYes we can digest fructose. And when people found honey (basically pure fructose) I'm sure they gorged on it. But as a few links on the front page of this site have explained in recent days, fructose is borderline toxic. Anthropological research in conjunction with modern medical research convincingly indicate several foods cause disease. The fact that we can digest all kinds of things is irrelevant. It pretty much all boils down to avoiding sugars, grain products, and certain oils. It's a very easy case to buy if you read into it.
- wisty 17y agoJared Diamond drew an analogy between New Guinea tribes and paleo diets. If modern hunter-gatherers are similar to paleo hunter-gatherers, the women gather most of the calories (tubers, some fruits, grain) and the men hunt a little meat if they are lucky. Colder regions might have had more meat consumption (look at modern Inuit), but those were the last holdouts of the Neanderthals (by some accounts). Humans won the cold regions by becoming smart technical hunters, not Spaaaartans.
- kingkongreveng_ 17y agoNew Guniea tribes are post agricultural. They indicate nothing about "paleo" tendencies. There are no living or even especially recent hunter gatherer models to look at. People sometimes point to african bushmen, but they're stunted refugees scraping by on marginal wasteland. They don't match up with the consistently strong and healthy native american hunter gatherer skeletons.
- TheSOB88 17y agoWhat about the Amazon? They've remained untouched for a while.
- mtts 17y agoPresumably Jared Diamond was talking about the New Guinea tribes in the lowlands that are in fact rather "paleo" and not about the inhabitants of the mountain ranges of the interior who practice agriculture and where the men don't, in fact, hunt very much.