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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

by 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...
  - a_bonobo 14y ago
    Thank you for these numbers! It seems that some of the cited stuff is still too inconclusive to fully draw the conclusion farming -> decreased "body fitness", but there definitely seems to be some tendency there.
  - sid6376 14y ago
    Previous discussion on hn regarding the link in the post. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2446752 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2446752
  - praccu 14y ago
    If you're seriously interested in the anthropology, this is your guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Nathan_Cohen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Nathan_Cohen EDIT: He's quoted in the article you linked, actually.
  - tomrod 14y ago
    How are confounding factors such as more children + crowd diseases accounted or?
- stcredzero 14y ago
  > 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). Much can be done with forensic anthropology. There is one North American area in present day Mississippi that was inhabited across the adoption of agriculture, and the decline in health is documented in the teeth and bones.
- michaelkeenan 14y ago
  The Wikipedia article on the Neolithic Revolution[1] says: "nutritional standards of Neolithic populations were generally inferior to that of hunter-gatherers, and life expectancy may in fact have been shorter, in part due to diseases. Average height, for example, went down from 5' 10" (178 cm) for men and 5' 6" (168 cm) for women to 5' 3" (165 cm) and 5' 1" (155 cm), respectively, and it took until the twentieth century for average human height to come back to the pre-Neolithic Revolution levels." The citation is to a Michael Shermer book. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution#Consequences http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution#Consequenc...
ellyagg 14y ago
Indeed, it's a review by someone with an axe to grind about a book by someone with an axe to grind. I'm not a "Paleo" person, but the hinting in this article that folks trying to infer better living patterns from the past are loons is faintly preposterous. We have just mounds of evidence (which doubters are free to research themselves) that many pre-Agricultural societies had (and have, actually) far lower rates of the so-called "diseases of civilizations". More abstractly, evolution isn't magic. There is some rate of lifestyle change due to technology that will outstrip evolution's ability to accommodate it. Hunters and gatherers weren't obese. We are. By irrefutable inference, some lifestyle difference explains this. One valid way to approach the problem of our accelerating obesity is to study what has changed. The theory that I consider most likely at this point is the one argued by Stephan Guyenet, a PH.D. neurobiology researcher who studies the link between obesity and the brain. He posits that modern industrial food is hyperpalatable, so we eat too much of it. http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/10/case-for-food-reward-hypothesis-of.html http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/10/case-for-food-... It wouldn't be the favorite theory in the Paleo community, I imagine, but it springs from the same intuition.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- tjogin 14y ago
  Diseases of civilization are a function of congregation, not eating grains. Obesity is the result of a caloric surplus. Cavemen didn't have that luxury.
  - kbenson 14y ago
    > Cavemen didn't have that luxury. Do we know that? I thought there was some research indicating the hunter-gatherer societies actually had to devote rather little (comparative) time to gathering sustenance.[1] Is there some research I should be aware of that refutes this, or at least asserts more information as to a likelihood one way or the other? [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society
jacalata 14y ago
google "The Paleo Diet", first result http://thepaleodiet.com/ http://thepaleodiet.com/: The Paleo Diet is based upon eating wholesome, contemporary foods from the food groups our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have thrived on during the Paleolithic era, the time period from about 2.6 million years ago to the beginning of the agricultural revolution, about 10,000 years ago. These foods include fresh meats (preferably grass-produced or free-ranging beef, pork, lamb, poultry, and game meat, if you can get it), fish, seafood, fresh fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, and healthful oils (olive, coconut, avocado, macadamia, walnut and flaxseed). Dairy products, cereal grains, legumes, refined sugars and processed foods were not part of our ancestral menu. The site makes constant references to "the mainstays of Stone Age diets" and advocates a high potassium/sodium ratio because "Stone Age bodies were adapted to this". Another site early in the results: "Cut out all cereal grains and legumes, cut out sugar, eliminate dairy products" which I think covers everything outside of meat, fruit and vegetables. PaleoDiet.com: "Paleo is a simple dietary lifestyle that is based on foods being either in or out. In are the Paleolithic Era foods that we ate prior to agriculture and animal husbandry (meat, fish, shellfish, eggs, tree nuts, vegetables, roots, fruit, berries, mushrooms, etc.). Out are Neolithic Era foods that result from agriculture or animal husbandry (grains, dairy, beans/legumes, potatoes, sugar and fake foods) " If you object to people rebutting this 'straw man', then perhaps you should try and stop people from proposing it. You can't call something a straw man simply because it's not what you personally mean by the word.
- brd 14y ago
  If you take a very black and white approach to it I'd concede that you are correct and that there is a genuine argument being presented that you should eat like a caveman and that Zuk has a point. However, what you are copying/pasting here is marketing copy. Diets tend to fail because people fail to adhere to them. People fail to adhere to them because they are complicated. These sites are trying to convert visitors by providing a simple, palatable message. When you get past the sales pitch there is real science behind the paleo diet. The paleo diet started out as a hypothesis based on a paleolithic diet but the paleo diet is well supported by modern nutritional concepts and is advocated for those reasons, not simply because a caveman ate it. edit: if the paleo diet were simply based on the premise "a caveman ate it" it would be nothing more than a fad diet that died out in the 70s.
praxeologist 14y ago
Paleo to me is certainly not a historical reenactment. I also am not one trying to recreate the standard diet in almond flour and all that. Paleo people drive me crazy being so anti-dairy; cream is a wondrous fuel. I think Dr. Harris' blog is a great source and I follow his steps best I can: http://www.archevore.com/get-started/ http://www.archevore.com/get-started/
- jsmeaton 14y ago
  Doing some basic research regarding dairy and paleo - the message I got was "if you can eat it, then eat it". Lots of people do not tolerate dairy very well, which is the main reason it has a generic black mark against it. But if you can tolerate it, then go for it. I began eating a quasi-paleo diet at the beginning of February including the removal of all dairy. I reintroduced dairy to see if it had any noticeable impact and it didn't, so I kept it in.

by brd 14y ago

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...
- a_bonobo 14y ago
  Thank you for these numbers! It seems that some of the cited stuff is still too inconclusive to fully draw the conclusion farming -> decreased "body fitness", but there definitely seems to be some tendency there.
- sid6376 14y ago
  Previous discussion on hn regarding the link in the post. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2446752 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2446752
- praccu 14y ago
  If you're seriously interested in the anthropology, this is your guy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Nathan_Cohen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Nathan_Cohen EDIT: He's quoted in the article you linked, actually.
- tomrod 14y ago
  How are confounding factors such as more children + crowd diseases accounted or?
stcredzero 14y ago
> 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). Much can be done with forensic anthropology. There is one North American area in present day Mississippi that was inhabited across the adoption of agriculture, and the decline in health is documented in the teeth and bones.
michaelkeenan 14y ago
The Wikipedia article on the Neolithic Revolution[1] says: "nutritional standards of Neolithic populations were generally inferior to that of hunter-gatherers, and life expectancy may in fact have been shorter, in part due to diseases. Average height, for example, went down from 5' 10" (178 cm) for men and 5' 6" (168 cm) for women to 5' 3" (165 cm) and 5' 1" (155 cm), respectively, and it took until the twentieth century for average human height to come back to the pre-Neolithic Revolution levels." The citation is to a Michael Shermer book. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution#Consequences http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution#Consequenc...

ellyagg 14y ago

Indeed, it's a review by someone with an axe to grind about a book by someone with an axe to grind. I'm not a "Paleo" person, but the hinting in this article that folks trying to infer better living patterns from the past are loons is faintly preposterous. We have just mounds of evidence (which doubters are free to research themselves) that many pre-Agricultural societies had (and have, actually) far lower rates of the so-called "diseases of civilizations". More abstractly, evolution isn't magic. There is some rate of lifestyle change due to technology that will outstrip evolution's ability to accommodate it. Hunters and gatherers weren't obese. We are. By irrefutable inference, some lifestyle difference explains this. One valid way to approach the problem of our accelerating obesity is to study what has changed. The theory that I consider most likely at this point is the one argued by Stephan Guyenet, a PH.D. neurobiology researcher who studies the link between obesity and the brain. He posits that modern industrial food is hyperpalatable, so we eat too much of it. http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/10/case-for-food-reward-hypothesis-of.html http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/10/case-for-food-... It wouldn't be the favorite theory in the Paleo community, I imagine, but it springs from the same intuition.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
tjogin 14y ago
Diseases of civilization are a function of congregation, not eating grains. Obesity is the result of a caloric surplus. Cavemen didn't have that luxury.
- kbenson 14y ago
  > Cavemen didn't have that luxury. Do we know that? I thought there was some research indicating the hunter-gatherer societies actually had to devote rather little (comparative) time to gathering sustenance.[1] Is there some research I should be aware of that refutes this, or at least asserts more information as to a likelihood one way or the other? [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society

jacalata 14y ago

google "The Paleo Diet", first result http://thepaleodiet.com/ http://thepaleodiet.com/: The Paleo Diet is based upon eating wholesome, contemporary foods from the food groups our hunter-gatherer ancestors would have thrived on during the Paleolithic era, the time period from about 2.6 million years ago to the beginning of the agricultural revolution, about 10,000 years ago. These foods include fresh meats (preferably grass-produced or free-ranging beef, pork, lamb, poultry, and game meat, if you can get it), fish, seafood, fresh fruits, vegetables, seeds, nuts, and healthful oils (olive, coconut, avocado, macadamia, walnut and flaxseed). Dairy products, cereal grains, legumes, refined sugars and processed foods were not part of our ancestral menu. The site makes constant references to "the mainstays of Stone Age diets" and advocates a high potassium/sodium ratio because "Stone Age bodies were adapted to this". Another site early in the results: "Cut out all cereal grains and legumes, cut out sugar, eliminate dairy products" which I think covers everything outside of meat, fruit and vegetables. PaleoDiet.com: "Paleo is a simple dietary lifestyle that is based on foods being either in or out. In are the Paleolithic Era foods that we ate prior to agriculture and animal husbandry (meat, fish, shellfish, eggs, tree nuts, vegetables, roots, fruit, berries, mushrooms, etc.). Out are Neolithic Era foods that result from agriculture or animal husbandry (grains, dairy, beans/legumes, potatoes, sugar and fake foods) " If you object to people rebutting this 'straw man', then perhaps you should try and stop people from proposing it. You can't call something a straw man simply because it's not what you personally mean by the word.

brd 14y ago
If you take a very black and white approach to it I'd concede that you are correct and that there is a genuine argument being presented that you should eat like a caveman and that Zuk has a point. However, what you are copying/pasting here is marketing copy. Diets tend to fail because people fail to adhere to them. People fail to adhere to them because they are complicated. These sites are trying to convert visitors by providing a simple, palatable message. When you get past the sales pitch there is real science behind the paleo diet. The paleo diet started out as a hypothesis based on a paleolithic diet but the paleo diet is well supported by modern nutritional concepts and is advocated for those reasons, not simply because a caveman ate it. edit: if the paleo diet were simply based on the premise "a caveman ate it" it would be nothing more than a fad diet that died out in the 70s.

praxeologist 14y ago

Paleo to me is certainly not a historical reenactment. I also am not one trying to recreate the standard diet in almond flour and all that. Paleo people drive me crazy being so anti-dairy; cream is a wondrous fuel. I think Dr. Harris' blog is a great source and I follow his steps best I can: http://www.archevore.com/get-started/ http://www.archevore.com/get-started/

jsmeaton 14y ago
Doing some basic research regarding dairy and paleo - the message I got was "if you can eat it, then eat it". Lots of people do not tolerate dairy very well, which is the main reason it has a generic black mark against it. But if you can tolerate it, then go for it. I began eating a quasi-paleo diet at the beginning of February including the removal of all dairy. I reintroduced dairy to see if it had any noticeable impact and it didn't, so I kept it in.