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“Paleofantasy”: Stone Age delusions

176 points by tangue 14y ago

dmix 14y ago
Based on the single review for the book on Amazon and the "15 of 52 found helpful", this seems to be an inflammatory topic: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007Q6XM1A/?tag=saloncom08-20 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.
- a_bonobo 14y ago
  Goodreads has only two written reviews with positive scores and two negative scores without written reviews: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13707578-paleofantasy http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13707578-paleofantasy 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 14y ago
  As is often the case with controversial reviews, the comments on that review are fairly eye-opening.
- tokenadult 14y ago
  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.)
  - dalke 14y ago
    That sounds like an story I would like to read. I couldn't find details about it. I did find that Taleb's second book for mass audiences was "The Black Swan", but that knowledge didn't help. I did find that Taleb is quick critical of poor-quality reviewers, but did not find something which matches your description. I presume it's described in his third book?
    - tokenadult 14y ago
      Thanks for asking. I'll try a more complicated Google search to track that down. I see you've already looked at Taleb's website, right? http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/ http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/ but he no longer has the same list of stories about reviews of his earlier books linked there from the home page.
      - dalke 14y ago
        Yes, I did. The closest I found was http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/fake.htm http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/fake.htm . Oh! Perhaps archive.org? Nope. It's the same.
kiba 14y ago
Interesting review and idea, although I have no idea if it's true. Makes me wonder what other area of knowledge that is filled with garbage. 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 14y ago
  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: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21139123 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 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_diet [1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=broscience http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=broscience
timmm 14y ago
Yep eating natural food is all bs. Please go back to your regular diet of ice-cream and cheetos.
- bigiain 14y ago
  There's a wide gap between a "paleo diet" and modern junk food. One of my local science broadcasters[1] often uses the phrase "don't eat too much of anything your grandmother wouldn't recognise as food" - and I suspect that's pretty much the same good advice as the paleo movement's, the marginal difference health-wise between eating common 1950/1960s food attempting to re-create some idea of paleo diet is almost certainly tiny. High fat/sugar/salt junk food, high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated vegetable oil - there's no doubt that they shouldn't form the basis of your diet. But the paleo movements arguments against agricultural societies grain-heavy diet, with it's several thousand year ongoing trial, doesn't seem to be quite so real. [1] Karl Kruszelnicki - http://www.drkarl.com/home/ http://www.drkarl.com/home/ Another one of his food/diet related phrases is "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
  - kleinsch 14y ago
    "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." is a Michael Pollan quote. Definitely recommend his books if you're interested in nutrition.
    - com2kid 14y ago
      The funny part here being that with Paleo, this becomes "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly meat."
      - graeme 14y ago
        Depends on what you mean by mostly. If the quotes are meant calorie wise, then there is disagreement. If the quotes refer to volume, then they agree. Most paleo authorities say that plants should fill most of the plate. Anyone know what Pollan meant?
brd 14y ago
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?
- a_bonobo 14y ago
  That sounds interesting! 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).
  - kiba 14y ago
    Usually, they used the height of specimen. Heights are good proxy for health. I am not an anthropologist.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - graeme 14y ago
    I do not know the literature well enough to cite anthropological studies. But as far as I understand it, this is a relatively uncontroversial claim within the field. Jared Diamond's article is a good introduction: http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html Edit: As others have mentioned below, the main evidence is a decline in the height, bone density and tooth health of skeletons of pre and post neolitic humans. Average lifespan also declined, from 33 --> 20 according to Wikipedia. (I don't know if the studies cited are good sources) Keep in mind that these lifespan figures include infant mortality. This explains why they remain so low up until very modern times. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy_variation_over_time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy...
stcredzero 14y ago
> 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.
- wiredfool 14y ago
  What's more, we have evidence that the lactose processing gene has become widespread in humans in the last 7000 years. Not to mention the genetic changes that have occurred in the foods over those times.
  - a_bonobo 14y ago
    Here's my new favourite example for this recent evolution, a paper showing that when we domesticated dogs, their genetic makeup changed to accommodate for a starch-rich diet as shared with humans. >The genomic signature of dog domestication reveals adaptation to a starch-rich diet [1] >Nineteen of these regions contain genes important in brain function, eight of which belong to nervous system development pathways and potentially underlie behavioural changes central to dog domestication6. Ten genes with key roles in starch digestion and fat metabolism also show signals of selection. [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11837.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...
  - joemaller1 14y ago
    Lactase persistence is simply a gene we're born with failing to turn off. Hardly a radical evolutionary change. Animals which eat plant or grain-based diets have completely different digestive systems than humans.
- jonahx 14y ago
  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.
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
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.
ricardobeat 14y ago
Where's the science?
- s_baby 14y ago
  http://robbwolf.com/2012/03/09/paleo-diet-inflammation-metformin/ http://robbwolf.com/2012/03/09/paleo-diet-inflammation-metfo...
  - mbq 14y ago
    Doesn't seem science.
awolf 14y ago
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.
- jacalata 14y ago
  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.
  - awolf 14y ago
    Right, let me go do that. While I'm at it I'll make sure everyone who Googles "healthy diet" or for that matter "republican", all come away learning exactly the same meanings for those terms. My point in the above post was: Zuk is positioning herself as if she were attacking Paleo as a concept, but all she's really attacking is the mis-application of information by some members in a larger group. I call that a straw man.
    - nbouscal 14y ago
      It's not a straw man if the views being ascribed to the movement at large are the views being conveyed by the movement at large. If you were to try to learn about the paleo diet from the perspective of someone who had never heard of it, you would find views that align quite closely with the views that Zuk is critiquing. Look at the Google results. The fact that your interpretation of the paleo "concept" does not square with those views does not make her critique a straw man.
    - 14y ago
CleanedStar 14y ago
"It is striking how fixated on the alleged behavior of our hunting-and-foraging forbearers some educated inhabitants of the developed world have become....happier and healthier if we lived like 'cavemen'" The posters on this web site who are not part of the "1%" are often at the top of the middle class under the 1%...white, male, American, educated at college in CS, living in nice metropolitan areas in the US. What kind of work hours do we often see posted here? 50, 60, 70 hour weeks, or more. I know, I have done so myself - working for a Fortune 100 company. Imagine what hours a truck driver, or a Bangladeshi factory worker works, or some Chinese factory worker making iPads. In Marshall Sahlins "The Original Affluent Society" he looked at how much the still existing hunter-gatherers in places like Africa worked, and did research trying to figure out what was the case 20 thousand, 30 thousand years ago. It seems hunter-gatherers often work less hours than many of the people on this site do, or truck drivers do, or Chinese factory workers do, or a lot of people do. They also have no rent payments to make and the like. Hunter-gatherers, pastoral tribes and farmers tend to have to get forced more or less by gunpoint to the cities, including in our modern day. Why should the rural Mexican farm laborers forced off their farms by "NAFTA" come to modern America, because the unemployment rate is no longer above the 1984-2009 high like it was last month? As the desire of the current hegemony is to pretty much ignore history completely, of course any people who look at history from ancient history to now, you want to paint them as loonies. This writer sounds like one of the apes in Planet of the Apes deriding people who want to go to the forbidden zone. And sure, it's easy to deride anyone curious about history, the economy, politics and so forth, and to say anyone interested in that old stuff is some Berkeley hippie eating the latest fad diet. She's the secular equivalent of the Christian fundamentalists who say the world was created in 4004 BC. A new thing was introduced into the world 10000 years ago alongside farming - slavery. Read the Epic of Gilgamesh, or the bible, or modern anthropology. The "left"/"post-left" investigation of these things is mostly serious. But if Salon sees fit to point to a few wingbat hippies eating some faddish diet as a way to paint the whole study with a brush, well, I'm not surprised the website John Warnock and William Hambrecht bankroll is doing that.
svedlin 14y ago
A few background links on the global decline in human health following the transition to agriculture around 10 kya: Post-pleistocene human evolution: bioarchaeology of the agricultural transition http://www.cast.uark.edu/local/icaes/conferences/wburg/posters/cslarsen/larsen.html 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 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 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.pdf https://depot.erudit.org/bitstream/002029dd/1/CIRPEE05-02.pd...
deleted 14y ago
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scotty79 14y ago
"The reason caveman were skinny is that before they could eat meat they had to chase it for three days and kill it with a stick."
lifeisstillgood 14y ago
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
- s_baby 14y ago
  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. http://robbwolf.com/2012/03/09/paleo-diet-inflammation-metformin/ http://robbwolf.com/2012/03/09/paleo-diet-inflammation-metfo...
  - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
    My skepticism antennae are twitching Firstly it has the tang of religion - we have found the answer, it requires certain rites and adherences and we must now persuade you to believe Secondly it is highly highly unlikely an actual Stone Age person had access to the range of meat and vegetables currently in wegmans and so the question is which Stone Age diet? The one where they lived near a lake and had fish, the one where they had lots of vitamin C rich berries but few fish? Thirdly evolution is slow but not glacial - 2.6m years is a long time, and frankly why go back that far and not further? At what point has evolution not caught up and how does that overlap with 'out of africa'? Finally and th biggest question to me, is why assume that so many maleases are solely or primarily diet related. Obesity is pretty obvious but asthma? Cancer even?
juskrey 14y ago
I am really stunned, how rigorously people protect their right to disease, premature aging and unnatural death. Do not question so called fruits of progress but require immediate proofs of mechanisms that have successfully worked for millions of years.
- rbanffy 14y ago
  Because, of course, we know cavemen had very long lives.
  - juskrey 14y ago
    Of course, we know the difference between arithmetic average and life expectancy upon achieving some age, do we?
    - rbanffy 14y ago
      You do understand there is no proof eating like a caveman (table manners excepted) will prolong your life. At least not unless your alternative is the suicidal diet many people have. Also, the argument based on evolution and selection is ludicrous. We have not stopped evolution. I strongly suggest you ingest more fiber and avoid sugar, but I also remind you the plural of "anecdote" is not "evidence".
    - rimantas 14y ago
      Yes. Do you really claim, that the latter is now shorter? If yes—source, please. And if not,then what's your point then?
jib 14y ago
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?
venomsnake 14y ago
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.
- deleted 14y ago
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oelmekki 14y ago
I'm not a evolution scientist, so I would love to have some educated response to that : Now that we are over 6 billion humans on earth, with migration way easier and common place than before, shouldn't on the contrary human evolution been speeded up ? EDIT : I know evolution is not progressive but happen by sudden steps, but I suppose it still stands.
- lutusp 14y ago
  > Now that we are over 6 billion humans on earth, with migration way easier and common place than before, shouldn't on the contrary human evolution been speeded up ? Evolution speeds up as a result of either an increased natural mutation rate or extreme environmental challenges (lots of death produced by unfitness) -- or both. But we're not seeing either in modern times. > EDIT : I know evolution is not progressive but happen by sudden steps ... No, this isn't true as a rule. In evolutionary theory, the overall rate of change,and the presence or absence of abrupt changes, is entirely dependent on what produces greater fitness. In other words, the rate at which evolution happens, and the shape of the change curve, are themselves driven by considerations of fitness and natural selection.
- lmm 14y ago
  Migration would slow down many kinds of evolution. Lots of interesting evolution happens when you get divergence in island (literal or metaphorical) populations. Migration does mean that any clearly beneficial changes will spread quickly, and a large population gives more chances for them to arise - lactase persistence is probably an example of this. So humanity probably does adapt quicker than it otherwise would to changes in the environment, if those changes affect most of humanity. In the short term I'd expect to see humanity getting better at a lot of things as races intermingle and previously separate gene pools combine - a lot of things like height or fitness or intelligence seem to be combinations of many genes where "perfect" is in some sense the default; how good you are is a question of how many "bad" genes you've picked up (and most of the bad genes are recessive). I've seen anecdotal suggestion that mixed-race children are healthier (would be interested to hear if there's any proper studies of this). I suspect in the immediate term this will be a bigger effect than that of new mutant genes.
- 14y ago
woe 14y ago
As depicted in the review, the argument boils down to "a lot can change in 10,000 years". I'm happy to agree that this is true, but it doesn't mean that a lot must change in 10,000 years. The fact that evolution can move quickly does not indicate that it always will. Nothing in this article refutes the proposition that we may be evolutionarily maladapted to the typical modern western diet dominated by highly refined sugars and gluten grains. Is paleo maybe a somewhat precious and slightly extreme reaction? Maybe. But that doesn't invalidate the core insight: that we're filling our pieholes with vast amounts of crap our bodies aren't optimized for. And given that the metabolic syndrome of disorders thought to be associated with this diet tends to develop later in life, often after the prime reproductive years, it's perfectly plausible that an evolutionary adaptation to this diet might be particularly slow to develop.
Tichy 14y ago
"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.
mekoka 14y ago
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.
- nqureshi 14y ago
  >> "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.
disbelief 14y ago
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."
jiggy2011 14y ago
I know people who claim that eating a mainly paleo diet makes them feel better. 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.
- kahawe 14y ago
  > 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.
- DanBC 14y ago
  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.
Evgeny 14y ago
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 ...
- dalke 14y ago
  What about all of the exceptions? 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.
  - VLM 14y ago
    If I had to invent a new diet with a simple short list of dietary requirements, I would only have two: forbid binary thinking/lists and require mandatory prioritization. Nothing wrong with a slice of birthday cake at grannie's 80th. Something hugely (lol) wrong with two packs of twinkies every lunch. The "newer" it is, the worse it probably is to eat, and the older it is, the better it probably is to eat. Do your weekly/monthly meal planning based on that. I intentionally eat roughly 100 times as much apple by weight as chocolate. That doesn't mean I only eat apple or never eat chocolate. Most of my meals look something like a large salad, a large vegetable side dish, a relatively modest hunk of meat, and some citrus / fruit / berries for desert. I'm hardly starving or restraining myself. I'm actually something of a gourmet glutton. I just eat "old school" instead of modern stuff. BTW in the olden days not every piece of fruit was supermarket scale picture perfect, as anyone who's hand picked their own strawberries probably knows? You're hungry, the somewhat fermented grapes still taste OK-ish... your liver evolved to clean up the poison... Ethanol is not supposed to be a primary source of calories, its a moderately toxic systemic poison which your body is fairly tolerant of, well at least compared to cyanides or organomercury compounds. Drinking it on a regular basis is about as stupid as eating arsenic or lead salts for kicks. Another good comparison is getting buzzed drunk is about as intelligent as sniffing carbon monoxide until dizzy. None the less as per the granny example above a glass of booze once in an occasional while is OK. Just as long as most of the time, lets say 10000 to 1 ratio, you drink water instead of chugging a beer. I actually like beer, I just don't drink 12 per night or even 1 per week. How often would you be comfortable drinking anti-freeze? I drink booze a little more often than that, but not much. In a similar way there's nothing really wrong with an occasional pack of twinkies, as long as your lifetime average is running around 1000 carrots (or equiv) per twinkie. I have noticed long term that tastes and physical reaction changes... I used to like jello, but now it kinda grosses me out. I mean I could eat some once in awhile, but I really don't want to anymore. Or ice cream, once you're not carb addicted anymore, lets be realistic, its sickly sweet combined with a mouth feel and texture like cold olive oil pouring down your throat, eww thats just gross, like sugar mixed with crisco shortening or "equal" artificial sweetener mixed with lard. Once in awhile I have some anyway and remind myself why I don't miss it anymore. This is before I start thinking about how it comes out of a cow and is designed to fatten up a calf, but I'm not a baby cow nor do I need any more fattening up.
kahawe 14y ago
Reading about any type of nutrition research has become beyond frustrating to me. There are constantly new results doing away with old truisms only to have those results, in turn, questioned and overturned by other studies and then there are basically opposing theories being found as valid, too. To make matters worse, there is an overwhelming abundance of less-than-scientific literature following the latest "fad" scientific results, plugging some diet "silver bullets" and to top it off, most "professionals" in that area are nothing but gym rats that payed lots of money for some training on a specific diet fad and then that is the only thing they will in turn plug to their customers. And the actual professionals, as in doctors, well mostly they appear to not be up-to-date with the latest-and-greatest "proven" theories so I always feel like I am missing out some of the good stuff that the latest fads are promising me. All I wanted was a REALLY, actually healthy diet. Do I eat mostly wholemeal bread and rice as is common where I am from? Paleo and Atkins tells me this is literally poisoning and destroying my body and THE worst thing I could do next to shooting myself in the stomach. So only lots of fat, meat and vegetables? But "everyone knows" lots of meat is bad and one should only eat meat maybe twice a week, says the official generals statement here. Of course there are the different shades of vegetarians and vegans who all have discovered the one truth and the ONLY ethically correct way of living and they have the studies to back them up on the "healthy" side but e.g. the legumes they are eating are supposed to be literally poison according to the paleo crowd... yet beans are healthy, says another group, also backed by studies. Oh and fish, we all should eat more fish right? Yet we keep hearing how polluted the oceans are and how fish are full of mercury and probably nuclear waste from dumping it into the north sea. And I could go on and on and on.... For practically each diet recommendation or "fad" backed by studies you can easily find at least one opposite or contradicting study and at least two other, even more "true" and new diet fads. Ultimately, this means I have no idea what I should actually, really really be eating and it leads me to the conclusion that: diet and health are the educated masses' modern equivalent to religion. Everyone is following their one true savior and will launch into borderline religious flame wars against the "infidels" of the other fads and theories. Yet actually definitive answers seem to be missing. And I am sorry if this seems like an incoherent rant, somehow it is, but I assure you with all the best intentions. Maybe it is just the tech inside me that wants a clear and definitive answer.
- 14y ago
Uchikoma 14y 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).
- VLM 14y ago
  1+2 are good. Also: 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.
  - Uchikoma 14y ago
    +1 "but we don't respect farming as a profession"
randomsearch 14y ago
I'm pretty new to this paleo idea. 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.
jclos 14y ago
I don't care for magic diets but if it stops people from eating non-nutritional, processed garbage then I'm all for it.
defen 14y ago
I agree that 10,000 years is sufficient time for evolution to affect the human genome. But the "diseases of civilization" that paleo worries about (cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, etc) tend to kick in at 50+, don't they? So it seems like evolution's ability to influence those would be limited, at best.

176 points by tangue 14y ago

dmix 14y ago

Based on the single review for the book on Amazon and the "15 of 52 found helpful", this seems to be an inflammatory topic: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B007Q6XM1A/?tag=saloncom08-20 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.

a_bonobo 14y ago
Goodreads has only two written reviews with positive scores and two negative scores without written reviews: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13707578-paleofantasy http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13707578-paleofantasy 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 14y ago
As is often the case with controversial reviews, the comments on that review are fairly eye-opening.
tokenadult 14y ago
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.)
- dalke 14y ago
  That sounds like an story I would like to read. I couldn't find details about it. I did find that Taleb's second book for mass audiences was "The Black Swan", but that knowledge didn't help. I did find that Taleb is quick critical of poor-quality reviewers, but did not find something which matches your description. I presume it's described in his third book?
  - tokenadult 14y ago
    Thanks for asking. I'll try a more complicated Google search to track that down. I see you've already looked at Taleb's website, right? http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/ http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/ but he no longer has the same list of stories about reviews of his earlier books linked there from the home page.
    - dalke 14y ago
      Yes, I did. The closest I found was http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/fake.htm http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/fake.htm . Oh! Perhaps archive.org? Nope. It's the same.

kiba 14y ago

Interesting review and idea, although I have no idea if it's true. Makes me wonder what other area of knowledge that is filled with garbage. 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 14y ago
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: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21139123 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 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleolithic_diet [1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=broscience http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=broscience

timmm 14y ago

Yep eating natural food is all bs. Please go back to your regular diet of ice-cream and cheetos.

bigiain 14y ago
There's a wide gap between a "paleo diet" and modern junk food. One of my local science broadcasters[1] often uses the phrase "don't eat too much of anything your grandmother wouldn't recognise as food" - and I suspect that's pretty much the same good advice as the paleo movement's, the marginal difference health-wise between eating common 1950/1960s food attempting to re-create some idea of paleo diet is almost certainly tiny. High fat/sugar/salt junk food, high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated vegetable oil - there's no doubt that they shouldn't form the basis of your diet. But the paleo movements arguments against agricultural societies grain-heavy diet, with it's several thousand year ongoing trial, doesn't seem to be quite so real. [1] Karl Kruszelnicki - http://www.drkarl.com/home/ http://www.drkarl.com/home/ Another one of his food/diet related phrases is "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
- kleinsch 14y ago
  "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." is a Michael Pollan quote. Definitely recommend his books if you're interested in nutrition.
  - com2kid 14y ago
    The funny part here being that with Paleo, this becomes "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly meat."
    - graeme 14y ago
      Depends on what you mean by mostly. If the quotes are meant calorie wise, then there is disagreement. If the quotes refer to volume, then they agree. Most paleo authorities say that plants should fill most of the plate. Anyone know what Pollan meant?

brd 14y ago

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?

a_bonobo 14y ago
That sounds interesting! 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).
- kiba 14y ago
  Usually, they used the height of specimen. Heights are good proxy for health. I am not an anthropologist.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- graeme 14y ago
  I do not know the literature well enough to cite anthropological studies. But as far as I understand it, this is a relatively uncontroversial claim within the field. Jared Diamond's article is a good introduction: http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html http://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html Edit: As others have mentioned below, the main evidence is a decline in the height, bone density and tooth health of skeletons of pre and post neolitic humans. Average lifespan also declined, from 33 --> 20 according to Wikipedia. (I don't know if the studies cited are good sources) Keep in mind that these lifespan figures include infant mortality. This explains why they remain so low up until very modern times. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy_variation_over_time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Life_expectancy...

stcredzero 14y ago

> 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.

wiredfool 14y ago
What's more, we have evidence that the lactose processing gene has become widespread in humans in the last 7000 years. Not to mention the genetic changes that have occurred in the foods over those times.
- a_bonobo 14y ago
  Here's my new favourite example for this recent evolution, a paper showing that when we domesticated dogs, their genetic makeup changed to accommodate for a starch-rich diet as shared with humans. >The genomic signature of dog domestication reveals adaptation to a starch-rich diet [1] >Nineteen of these regions contain genes important in brain function, eight of which belong to nervous system development pathways and potentially underlie behavioural changes central to dog domestication6. Ten genes with key roles in starch digestion and fat metabolism also show signals of selection. [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature11837.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...
- joemaller1 14y ago
  Lactase persistence is simply a gene we're born with failing to turn off. Hardly a radical evolutionary change. Animals which eat plant or grain-based diets have completely different digestive systems than humans.
jonahx 14y ago
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.

SoftwareMaven 14y ago

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.

ricardobeat 14y ago

Where's the science?

s_baby 14y ago
http://robbwolf.com/2012/03/09/paleo-diet-inflammation-metformin/ http://robbwolf.com/2012/03/09/paleo-diet-inflammation-metfo...
- mbq 14y ago
  Doesn't seem science.

awolf 14y ago

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.

jacalata 14y ago
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.
- awolf 14y ago
  Right, let me go do that. While I'm at it I'll make sure everyone who Googles "healthy diet" or for that matter "republican", all come away learning exactly the same meanings for those terms. My point in the above post was: Zuk is positioning herself as if she were attacking Paleo as a concept, but all she's really attacking is the mis-application of information by some members in a larger group. I call that a straw man.
  - nbouscal 14y ago
    It's not a straw man if the views being ascribed to the movement at large are the views being conveyed by the movement at large. If you were to try to learn about the paleo diet from the perspective of someone who had never heard of it, you would find views that align quite closely with the views that Zuk is critiquing. Look at the Google results. The fact that your interpretation of the paleo "concept" does not square with those views does not make her critique a straw man.
  - 14y ago

CleanedStar 14y ago

"It is striking how fixated on the alleged behavior of our hunting-and-foraging forbearers some educated inhabitants of the developed world have become....happier and healthier if we lived like 'cavemen'" The posters on this web site who are not part of the "1%" are often at the top of the middle class under the 1%...white, male, American, educated at college in CS, living in nice metropolitan areas in the US. What kind of work hours do we often see posted here? 50, 60, 70 hour weeks, or more. I know, I have done so myself - working for a Fortune 100 company. Imagine what hours a truck driver, or a Bangladeshi factory worker works, or some Chinese factory worker making iPads. In Marshall Sahlins "The Original Affluent Society" he looked at how much the still existing hunter-gatherers in places like Africa worked, and did research trying to figure out what was the case 20 thousand, 30 thousand years ago. It seems hunter-gatherers often work less hours than many of the people on this site do, or truck drivers do, or Chinese factory workers do, or a lot of people do. They also have no rent payments to make and the like. Hunter-gatherers, pastoral tribes and farmers tend to have to get forced more or less by gunpoint to the cities, including in our modern day. Why should the rural Mexican farm laborers forced off their farms by "NAFTA" come to modern America, because the unemployment rate is no longer above the 1984-2009 high like it was last month? As the desire of the current hegemony is to pretty much ignore history completely, of course any people who look at history from ancient history to now, you want to paint them as loonies. This writer sounds like one of the apes in Planet of the Apes deriding people who want to go to the forbidden zone. And sure, it's easy to deride anyone curious about history, the economy, politics and so forth, and to say anyone interested in that old stuff is some Berkeley hippie eating the latest fad diet. She's the secular equivalent of the Christian fundamentalists who say the world was created in 4004 BC. A new thing was introduced into the world 10000 years ago alongside farming - slavery. Read the Epic of Gilgamesh, or the bible, or modern anthropology. The "left"/"post-left" investigation of these things is mostly serious. But if Salon sees fit to point to a few wingbat hippies eating some faddish diet as a way to paint the whole study with a brush, well, I'm not surprised the website John Warnock and William Hambrecht bankroll is doing that.

svedlin 14y ago

A few background links on the global decline in human health following the transition to agriculture around 10 kya: Post-pleistocene human evolution: bioarchaeology of the agricultural transition http://www.cast.uark.edu/local/icaes/conferences/wburg/posters/cslarsen/larsen.html 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 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 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.pdf https://depot.erudit.org/bitstream/002029dd/1/CIRPEE05-02.pd...

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

scotty79 14y ago

"The reason caveman were skinny is that before they could eat meat they had to chase it for three days and kill it with a stick."

lifeisstillgood 14y ago

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

s_baby 14y ago
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. http://robbwolf.com/2012/03/09/paleo-diet-inflammation-metformin/ http://robbwolf.com/2012/03/09/paleo-diet-inflammation-metfo...
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  My skepticism antennae are twitching Firstly it has the tang of religion - we have found the answer, it requires certain rites and adherences and we must now persuade you to believe Secondly it is highly highly unlikely an actual Stone Age person had access to the range of meat and vegetables currently in wegmans and so the question is which Stone Age diet? The one where they lived near a lake and had fish, the one where they had lots of vitamin C rich berries but few fish? Thirdly evolution is slow but not glacial - 2.6m years is a long time, and frankly why go back that far and not further? At what point has evolution not caught up and how does that overlap with 'out of africa'? Finally and th biggest question to me, is why assume that so many maleases are solely or primarily diet related. Obesity is pretty obvious but asthma? Cancer even?

juskrey 14y ago

I am really stunned, how rigorously people protect their right to disease, premature aging and unnatural death. Do not question so called fruits of progress but require immediate proofs of mechanisms that have successfully worked for millions of years.

rbanffy 14y ago
Because, of course, we know cavemen had very long lives.
- juskrey 14y ago
  Of course, we know the difference between arithmetic average and life expectancy upon achieving some age, do we?
  - rbanffy 14y ago
    You do understand there is no proof eating like a caveman (table manners excepted) will prolong your life. At least not unless your alternative is the suicidal diet many people have. Also, the argument based on evolution and selection is ludicrous. We have not stopped evolution. I strongly suggest you ingest more fiber and avoid sugar, but I also remind you the plural of "anecdote" is not "evidence".
  - rimantas 14y ago
    Yes. Do you really claim, that the latter is now shorter? If yes—source, please. And if not,then what's your point then?

jib 14y ago

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?

venomsnake 14y ago

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.

deleted 14y ago
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oelmekki 14y ago

I'm not a evolution scientist, so I would love to have some educated response to that : Now that we are over 6 billion humans on earth, with migration way easier and common place than before, shouldn't on the contrary human evolution been speeded up ? EDIT : I know evolution is not progressive but happen by sudden steps, but I suppose it still stands.

lutusp 14y ago
> Now that we are over 6 billion humans on earth, with migration way easier and common place than before, shouldn't on the contrary human evolution been speeded up ? Evolution speeds up as a result of either an increased natural mutation rate or extreme environmental challenges (lots of death produced by unfitness) -- or both. But we're not seeing either in modern times. > EDIT : I know evolution is not progressive but happen by sudden steps ... No, this isn't true as a rule. In evolutionary theory, the overall rate of change,and the presence or absence of abrupt changes, is entirely dependent on what produces greater fitness. In other words, the rate at which evolution happens, and the shape of the change curve, are themselves driven by considerations of fitness and natural selection.
lmm 14y ago
Migration would slow down many kinds of evolution. Lots of interesting evolution happens when you get divergence in island (literal or metaphorical) populations. Migration does mean that any clearly beneficial changes will spread quickly, and a large population gives more chances for them to arise - lactase persistence is probably an example of this. So humanity probably does adapt quicker than it otherwise would to changes in the environment, if those changes affect most of humanity. In the short term I'd expect to see humanity getting better at a lot of things as races intermingle and previously separate gene pools combine - a lot of things like height or fitness or intelligence seem to be combinations of many genes where "perfect" is in some sense the default; how good you are is a question of how many "bad" genes you've picked up (and most of the bad genes are recessive). I've seen anecdotal suggestion that mixed-race children are healthier (would be interested to hear if there's any proper studies of this). I suspect in the immediate term this will be a bigger effect than that of new mutant genes.
14y ago

woe 14y ago

As depicted in the review, the argument boils down to "a lot can change in 10,000 years". I'm happy to agree that this is true, but it doesn't mean that a lot must change in 10,000 years. The fact that evolution can move quickly does not indicate that it always will. Nothing in this article refutes the proposition that we may be evolutionarily maladapted to the typical modern western diet dominated by highly refined sugars and gluten grains. Is paleo maybe a somewhat precious and slightly extreme reaction? Maybe. But that doesn't invalidate the core insight: that we're filling our pieholes with vast amounts of crap our bodies aren't optimized for. And given that the metabolic syndrome of disorders thought to be associated with this diet tends to develop later in life, often after the prime reproductive years, it's perfectly plausible that an evolutionary adaptation to this diet might be particularly slow to develop.

Tichy 14y ago

"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.

mekoka 14y ago

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.

nqureshi 14y ago
>> "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.

disbelief 14y ago

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."

jiggy2011 14y ago

I know people who claim that eating a mainly paleo diet makes them feel better. 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.

kahawe 14y ago
> 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.
DanBC 14y ago
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.

Evgeny 14y ago

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 ...

dalke 14y ago
What about all of the exceptions? 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.
- VLM 14y ago
  If I had to invent a new diet with a simple short list of dietary requirements, I would only have two: forbid binary thinking/lists and require mandatory prioritization. Nothing wrong with a slice of birthday cake at grannie's 80th. Something hugely (lol) wrong with two packs of twinkies every lunch. The "newer" it is, the worse it probably is to eat, and the older it is, the better it probably is to eat. Do your weekly/monthly meal planning based on that. I intentionally eat roughly 100 times as much apple by weight as chocolate. That doesn't mean I only eat apple or never eat chocolate. Most of my meals look something like a large salad, a large vegetable side dish, a relatively modest hunk of meat, and some citrus / fruit / berries for desert. I'm hardly starving or restraining myself. I'm actually something of a gourmet glutton. I just eat "old school" instead of modern stuff. BTW in the olden days not every piece of fruit was supermarket scale picture perfect, as anyone who's hand picked their own strawberries probably knows? You're hungry, the somewhat fermented grapes still taste OK-ish... your liver evolved to clean up the poison... Ethanol is not supposed to be a primary source of calories, its a moderately toxic systemic poison which your body is fairly tolerant of, well at least compared to cyanides or organomercury compounds. Drinking it on a regular basis is about as stupid as eating arsenic or lead salts for kicks. Another good comparison is getting buzzed drunk is about as intelligent as sniffing carbon monoxide until dizzy. None the less as per the granny example above a glass of booze once in an occasional while is OK. Just as long as most of the time, lets say 10000 to 1 ratio, you drink water instead of chugging a beer. I actually like beer, I just don't drink 12 per night or even 1 per week. How often would you be comfortable drinking anti-freeze? I drink booze a little more often than that, but not much. In a similar way there's nothing really wrong with an occasional pack of twinkies, as long as your lifetime average is running around 1000 carrots (or equiv) per twinkie. I have noticed long term that tastes and physical reaction changes... I used to like jello, but now it kinda grosses me out. I mean I could eat some once in awhile, but I really don't want to anymore. Or ice cream, once you're not carb addicted anymore, lets be realistic, its sickly sweet combined with a mouth feel and texture like cold olive oil pouring down your throat, eww thats just gross, like sugar mixed with crisco shortening or "equal" artificial sweetener mixed with lard. Once in awhile I have some anyway and remind myself why I don't miss it anymore. This is before I start thinking about how it comes out of a cow and is designed to fatten up a calf, but I'm not a baby cow nor do I need any more fattening up.

kahawe 14y ago

Reading about any type of nutrition research has become beyond frustrating to me. There are constantly new results doing away with old truisms only to have those results, in turn, questioned and overturned by other studies and then there are basically opposing theories being found as valid, too. To make matters worse, there is an overwhelming abundance of less-than-scientific literature following the latest "fad" scientific results, plugging some diet "silver bullets" and to top it off, most "professionals" in that area are nothing but gym rats that payed lots of money for some training on a specific diet fad and then that is the only thing they will in turn plug to their customers. And the actual professionals, as in doctors, well mostly they appear to not be up-to-date with the latest-and-greatest "proven" theories so I always feel like I am missing out some of the good stuff that the latest fads are promising me. All I wanted was a REALLY, actually healthy diet. Do I eat mostly wholemeal bread and rice as is common where I am from? Paleo and Atkins tells me this is literally poisoning and destroying my body and THE worst thing I could do next to shooting myself in the stomach. So only lots of fat, meat and vegetables? But "everyone knows" lots of meat is bad and one should only eat meat maybe twice a week, says the official generals statement here. Of course there are the different shades of vegetarians and vegans who all have discovered the one truth and the ONLY ethically correct way of living and they have the studies to back them up on the "healthy" side but e.g. the legumes they are eating are supposed to be literally poison according to the paleo crowd... yet beans are healthy, says another group, also backed by studies. Oh and fish, we all should eat more fish right? Yet we keep hearing how polluted the oceans are and how fish are full of mercury and probably nuclear waste from dumping it into the north sea. And I could go on and on and on.... For practically each diet recommendation or "fad" backed by studies you can easily find at least one opposite or contradicting study and at least two other, even more "true" and new diet fads. Ultimately, this means I have no idea what I should actually, really really be eating and it leads me to the conclusion that: diet and health are the educated masses' modern equivalent to religion. Everyone is following their one true savior and will launch into borderline religious flame wars against the "infidels" of the other fads and theories. Yet actually definitive answers seem to be missing. And I am sorry if this seems like an incoherent rant, somehow it is, but I assure you with all the best intentions. Maybe it is just the tech inside me that wants a clear and definitive answer.

14y ago

Uchikoma 14y 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).

VLM 14y ago
1+2 are good. Also: 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.
- Uchikoma 14y ago
  +1 "but we don't respect farming as a profession"

randomsearch 14y ago

I'm pretty new to this paleo idea. 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.

jclos 14y ago

I don't care for magic diets but if it stops people from eating non-nutritional, processed garbage then I'm all for it.

defen 14y ago

I agree that 10,000 years is sufficient time for evolution to affect the human genome. But the "diseases of civilization" that paleo worries about (cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, etc) tend to kick in at 50+, don't they? So it seems like evolution's ability to influence those would be limited, at best.