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As someone who has lost around 40 pounds of fat switching to the high fat paleo diet I'm not at all surprised that the current state of the conventional wisdom
by jswinghammer 14y ago
As someone who has lost around 40 pounds of fat switching to the high fat paleo diet I'm not at all surprised that the current state of the conventional wisdom on food is wrong in any number of ways. It is funny that we really have no idea what we should be eating naturally at all.
Grains were making me sick and I didn't notice for years. It wasn't until I read a book listing side effects of grain consumption that I considered that the grains were the cause of my problems.
- mkoivuni 14y agoAgreed, nutritional "science" and conventional wisdom has become a joke.
- frankc 14y agoIt should be noted that the author of the linked article is Gary Taubes, who is best known for Good Calories, Bad Calories, a book that seeks to turn the conventional wisdom of nutrition on its head.
- jere 14y agoI loved GCBC, but unfortunately Taubes goes a little bit too far near the end in condemning carbohydrates. It's really hard to recommend the book because of that overreaching. http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/08/carbohydrate-hypothesis-of-obesity.html http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/08/carbohydrate-h...
- psykotic 14y agoA little too far is an understatement. I read GCBC when it came out and found its arguments compelling at the time. After learning more, I've reversed my opinion almost completely. James Krieger's critique of the core chapter of GCBC is very worthwhile reading: http://weightology.net/?p=265 http://weightology.net/?p=265. His blog also has other articles addressing the core Atkins-Taubes thesis of the link between insulin, carbs and obesity. Alan Aragon's Research Reviews had an Editor's Cut on Taubes, as well as pieces specifically on the role of insulin and carbs in obesity and weight gain, but unfortunately all that is subscriber-only. Lyle McDonald (who literally wrote the book on ketogenic diets) has also written a lot on that whole orbit of ideas--never an article against GCBC directly, though he has certainly expressed his negative opinion of it on many occasions.
- jere 14y agoI could be wrong, but I don't think we disagree. However, I think most of the book is still worth reading, especially the history behind the demonitization of fat and the uselessness of "calories in, calories out." Taubes is at his best as a science historian and, obviously, not a scientist.
- psykotic 14y ago> the uselessness of "calories in, calories out." There's nothing useless about energy balance. It can be misinterpreted and misapplied, but Taubes throws the baby out with the bathwater and pretends it doesn't apply at all. For example, classical low-carber mythology is that on a low-carb diet you can eat virtually unlimited calories (as usually defined) and maintain weight, if perhaps not lose weight outright. As an example, there's an old post on Michael Eades's blog where he talks of a small woman allegedly eating 5000 calories and maintaining her weight. As explained in James Krieger's article, people's reports of their own calorie intake for studies have consistently been found to be way off the mark, to the point of being useless. When you actually measure what is being eaten under clinical conditions, the result is in line with the conventional theory of energy balance. The main benefit of low-carb diets for weight loss is that they spontaneously reduce calorie intake by cutting out whole groups of foods (by looking at studies it's been shown that any diet that restricts food choices like this will tend to induce weight loss but is usually unsustainable), and especially lots of highly palatable foods (to use Guyenet's terminology). But most longer-term comparative studies of diets that look at the performance past the 12-month mark show that low-carb diets don't fare any better on average than other standard weight-loss diets. The one exception is a study the low-carbers like to hold up as a vindication of their views; Lyle McDonald addresses that one here: http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/research-review/comparison-of-the-atkins-zone-ornish-and-learn-diets.html http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/research-review/comparison-.... Two other pertinent articles by McDonald are http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/is-a-calorie-a-calorie.html http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/is-a-calorie-a-cal... and http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/the-energy-balance-equation.html http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/the-energy-balance....
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- juliano_q 14y agoThere is a long debate over this post. I personally found the best answer to the matter here: http://paleohacks.com/questions/49970/how-do-we-reconcile-stephan-guyenets-latest-comment-with-the-insulin-story-in#axzz1wx1QtSjU http://paleohacks.com/questions/49970/how-do-we-reconcile-st... Taubes also responded to Guyenet: http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-%E2%80%93-the-ancestral-health-symposium-food-reward-palatability-insulin-signaling-and-carbohydrates%E2%80%A6-part-iic/ http://garytaubes.com/2011/11/catching-up-on-lost-time-%E2%8...
- psykotic 14y ago> Taubes also responded to Guyenet Guyenet also responded to Taubes: http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/11/brief-response-to-taubess-food-rewad.html http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/11/brief-response...
- jere 14y agoIt's a long running debate in general and I think I followed the whole damn thing (it officially started at the Ancestral Health Symposium 2011): http://youtu.be/4hzoFgwFeMQ http://youtu.be/4hzoFgwFeMQ I find Guyenet's arguments much better researched and more convincing. Taubes usually admits he doesn't have time to keep up with the research lately.
- juliano_q 14y agoI follow Taubes, Sissons and Robb Wolf approach (paleo in general) because it just works for me and I love the food. I am thinner, stronger and with much better health eating tasty food and doing minimal exercise. I think Guyenet's approach may work too (maybe there is not only one right answer) but I think low-carb is easier to me and I dont see a reason to change it. My life is much better after limiting (almost banning) grains and refined sugar.
- drostie 14y agoI just wish we could see more directly a sense of how little we know about good nutrition. My favorite example is Vitamin B12, mostly because I learned the story when I reduced my meat consumption to about once a month. So there's this family of massive molecules containing the metal cobalt which we can't make on our own because we're not adapted to eat cobalt, and they're all called "Vitamin B12". It helps in the last step of making the protein building-block called methionine; if you get malnourished in this way your body just basically fills up with "almost finished" methionine which is useless and might even be poisonous. There can also be a slight risk of nerve damage although as I understand it we don't actually understand why the hell that would be. The biggest cause of malnutrition in this sense is simply being old -- you can't absorb Vitamin B12 so well in the first place because it is huge and weird, and old people have even more trouble either because their gut is slowly dying or because they're infected with H. pylori, which is a safe bacteria more than 80% of the time and might even be important for a well-functioning stomach, but might sometimes cause a chronic tummy-bug. Okay, so that's the problem, but what do we know about how much of the B12s we need and get? We know very little. The US Recommended Daily Allowance of B12s is 2.4 μg, but the US Daily Value for B12 is 6.0 μg. How much do you get in your food? You get almost none from vegetables, and vegans are basically all ipso facto suffering from B12 deficiency unless they take supplements or eat enriched cereal -- but most of them are quite healthy and see no problems from it. As for vegetarians like (almost-) me, the exact range for milk and eggs to get to this limit is imprecise because the limit itself varies by a factor of 3, so you might need to eat three eggs per day or else ten; so you might need to drink two cups of milk per day or else five, to live up to those numbers. So in theory there are lots of vegetarians also who come in at half or one-third their daily requirement, and never notice anything. Meanwhile there are people over 60 who eat plenty of meat but are starting to feel the effects anyway. We actually don't even know how well you absorb it. A USDA researcher named Lindsay Allen did a 2011 study where she marked Vitamin B12 in eggs so that she could detect it, and then fed those eggs to 10 people. She found that the body absorbed 50% of a 1.5 μg dosage but only 20% of a 2.6 μg dosage. Let me repeat that. She found that, in absolute value terms, eating more B12 led to less of it being absorbed, 0.75 μg versus 0.5 μg. It's probably not statistically significant with 10 people, but still. We don't even know that eating more leads to you absorbing more of it. (I also wonder whether RDAs are "amount absorbed" while DVs are "amount eaten", as this is pretty much never reported, but I will assume that they aren't crazy and that it's always "amount eaten.") I wouldn't use the scare-quotes around "science" when talking about nutrition science, as I think there is potential for real research here and I think people do indeed do it -- but it's a lot of work before we have a firm understanding, and most of that work hasn't been done yet, and yet you hear these confident conclusions. I would just like to hear people publish standards in the form, "you might need this much, or that much, we don't really know." The engineer in me craves error bars. Where are the error bars?
- merlincorey 14y agoI always knew salt and vinegar chips were good for me!
- heretohelp 14y agoHigh-fat paleo diets avoid starchy/carby foods like chips fyi.
- jswinghammer 14y agoYeah I haven't touched a chip in 6 months maybe.
- rubashov 14y agoWell Loren Cordain, godfather of "paleo", remains convinced that salt is bad. He claims the chloride does some bad stuff (I forget) and also the sodium screws up potassium and magnesium levels somehow.
- jswinghammer 14y agoI avoid processed foods as a rule so it's hard for me to get a lot of salt anyway. I really don't worry about it one way or the other.
- DeepDuh 14y agoAvoiding processed food might be what's keeping you healthier in general. Not because processed food has bad nutrition but because the additives are tricking our bodies. I feel that if you stick to basic ingredients (at least nothing with taste additives) you can pretty much go on cruise control and let your body decide.
- einhverfr 14y agoI don't there can be much doubt that improper ratios of sodium in the body can be bad. In particular I'd look at the ratio of sodium to potassium. But the same goes the other way too. Being sodium-deficient is really not fun. I know from experience. Sodium and potassium have a significant number of important roles in the body and they are balanced against eachother. Too much sodium will mess up the potassium functions and vice versa.
- Panoramix 14y agoWhich book was it?
- wusher 14y agoMost likely The Paleo Solution. That's the one that turned my diet around.
- juliano_q 14y agoThe Primal Blueprint by Mark Sisson is also great and changed my life. Reading 'Good Calories Bad Calories' now from Gary Taubes (the author of the op) and it is awesome too.
- Panoramix 14y agoThanks for the references. Are they solid science? all I have personally come across about the paleo diet is unconvincing and does not stand up to scrutiny. "I want to believe" would be my stance.
- juliano_q 14y agoIf you look for more references and science debate, I suggest 'Good Calories Bad Calories' from Taubes. 'The Primal Blueprint' has some references but it is more focused on the practical matter. I can say that it worked very well for me and 2 other friends that tried it.
- xyzzyb 14y agoIf you want to go old school you can check out the Hacker's Diet (free online, and recently got an epub version): http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ After a lifetime of thinking that diets had to be permanent and results were only possible through hours of exercise this book turned me around. I lost 50 lbs in eight months and haven't looked back.
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- mark_l_watson 14y agoI believe that we all have unique metabolisms and the real "science" is the personal study of how we feel physically correlated with what we have been eating, amount of exercise, lack of tension, etc. I ended up as a vegetarian (with a little fish) because I kept track of how I felt and compared with recently eaten food. I have friends who thrive on high meat diets. We are all different.
- jswinghammer 14y agoI believe it. For me wheat really messes me up but white rice is fine. I eat it now and then because I like it so much. Whatever works.
- rubashov 14y agoA lot of people "feel" fine but blood work shows they're insulin resistant, have various deficiencies, or are loaded with cortisol. Going by "feeling" really doesn't work. Also, the evidence against a vegetarian diet is overwhelming.
- subsection1h 14y agoAlso, the evidence against a vegetarian diet is overwhelming. If the totality of evidence currently available clearly indicates that vegetarian diets result in premature death, it should be very easy for you to link to a dozen or so clinical studies that have produced such evidence. Please proceed.
- ktizo 14y agothe evidence against a vegetarian diet is overwhelming Someone better warn the Buddhist monks, they've been at it a while and if only they'd known they might have lived a bit longer.
- gurkendoktor 14y agoThere are many vegetarian Buddhists here in Taiwan and their food is sadly well-known for being overly greasy (as to add flavor). It doesn't help that the local Buddhists avoid onion and garlic, two staples in non-vegetarian local food. It's considered normal to eat supplements, but that's of course a recent phenomenon. I'm not saying it's all bad (I'm mostly vegetarian), but the studies are all over the place as with everything in nutrition :)
- conradfr 14y agoWhile researching a bit about the interaction between ADHD and food, I stumbled on articles about that kind of diet. My (real) question is : what do you eat and how do you keep pleasure in eating ? From breakfeast to super, how can you even avoid bread (and cheese), the best thing on Earth ? It seems so impossible to me.
- bad_user 14y agoI am not on a paleo diet. Instead I'm on a dissociated diet and I lost 42 pounds since February. I do not avoid diary products. I do avoid bread, but when I do eat bread, I prefer bread that's made of whole grains. And so I'm making my own bread. In general I follow these 2 rules: (1) I stopped eating refined carbohydrates or preprocessed crap (entirely, no exceptions ... all the sugar I want comes from fruits) (2) I never combine food rich in carbohydrates with meat or diary (I eat potatoes for instance, but without meat) As to your question on how can you give up bread: refined carbohydrates give you a dependence, just like nicotine. The more you consume, the more you crave for more. When you stop eating bread daily, you simply will stop carrying about bread.
- conradfr 14y agoI guess I could make some lengthy tests. But I'm French and you know ... baguette (which, to stay on topic, contains lots of salt).
- jswinghammer 14y agoI find things that work for every meal and try new recipes. Bread tastes great but I avoid it because if I eat it then I will pay a heavy price. Try the primal blueprint for 60 days and see what happens. I noticed a huge change in 24 hours but my results are not typical.
- einhverfr 14y agoOne of the most interesting things is how many sciences inform archaeology, and how few sciences are willing to be informed by archaeology. High grain diets archaeologically are associated with increased tooth decay and tooth loss rates and lower life-expectancy than high-meat and high-dairy diets. Overly high dairy diets are associated with anemia (probably because cow milk decreases the ability of humans to absorb iron from foods). The Vikings were eating butter smeared on dried fish for breakfast and living significantly longer (and with very low rates of dental caries) than the grain-eating Continental Europeans of the same time. Indeed a Scandinavian living to 5 could expect to live to an older age than a Frenchman living to 20 despite the fact that life expectancy was so heavily slanted by childhood deaths in both cases. Our conventional wisdom of nutrition is basically plausible hypothesis... if you ignore anything interdisciplenary. I think the archeologists know more about the effects of nutrition on the human body today than anyone else.