5 ms·

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

by 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.
  - dalke 14y ago
    "Moderation in all things", says Aristotle. You've offered a different set of guidelines than the previous poster, but some of the same questions remain. What's "old" and what's "new"? Is corn new or old? What about almonds, which are toxic in the wild species, or taro which is toxic until processed? What about wheat? Wild apples are not that edible. They are too astringent; crabapples. It's only through grafting of the very occasional tree with edible fruit that we get new edible cultivars. The Gala apple has only been around since the 1970s. Does that make it new? (Interesting story: Johnny Appleseed brought apple trees to the western frontier for making hard cider and apple jack, and not for eating. They were grown from seed, and only grafting preserves the taste.) Domesticated sugarcane is older than most other plants we currently use. Should we prioritize sugarcane, because it's older? Or is it only foods species unchanged since 10,000 years ago that we should prioritize? If you, like I, haven't inherited genetics from the indigenous peoples of the Americas, then your personal genetics have had less than 500 years to evolve for pineapple, corn, tomatoes, and other New World plants. Should we avoid New World plants and only eat things found in East Africa? 500 years ago isn't that long. That's almost exactly the same time that the Reinheitsgebot (German beer purity law) has been in place. How long does it take for a new food to become old? Your genetics have certainly not adapted to eat macadamia nuts from Australia, because they've been a crop for less than 200 years, and only Australian aborigines would have had any adaptations for them. Does that make those new or old to our genome? Commercial production of macadamia nuts is about as old as Jack Daniel's. Should they have equal prioritization? Believe it or not, but beer making is at least 7,000 years old. You can't say "Drinking it on a regular basis is about as stupid as eating arsenic or lead salts for kicks" because for it has been a daily drink for several thousand years. During the Babylonian era, "a daily ration of beer was provided for all citizens, the amount depending on one's social status" and "it was sometimes used to pay workers as part of their daily wages." During the Middle Ages it was safer to drink than water. In fact, we've evolved in order to process alcohol better: "The studies on human ADH (alcohol dehydrogenase) gene have suggested Darwinian positive selection on the genetic variation of ADH1B His47 [52–54]. Alcohol consumption is a recent agriculture-related life style, and the adaptive selection has begun about 10 Kya" http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijeb/2011/484769/ http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijeb/2011/484769/ Even if you think that the genetics of the paleo era outweigh the genetics of the last 10,000 years, our monkey/ape guts tell us that we did not evolve with the expectation of eating "a relatively modest hunk of meat" for most of our meals. This tells me that you don't know the history of our food and your adjusting things up to fit your personal beliefs. Your last sentence is equally odd - my European genetic ancestry definitely co-evolved with animal husbandry to make it so I can drink cow's milk as an adult. You reject that genetic heritage because you're squeamish? That's all fine as a personal or moral belief, but it doesn't make good sense as a general "mandatory" consideration.
- Evgeny 14y ago
  What about all of the exceptions? The general approach to exceptions is that exceptions exist and yes, it is impossible to eat 100% foods that the paleolithic man ate. Obviously even modern cows or pigs did not exist 20K years ago. And one can argue that wild fish / game is also not the same cause they evolved somewhat. So, the approach is that while the ideal is 100%, the real goal is not to reach it, but to gradually come closer. I.e. eliminating sugars, white bread, sodas, vegetable oils is probably already ~70% of the way or more. 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? Well, my personal approach is that fresh/cooked is OK, and then, the more processing is done, the farther we are away from ideal. So, along the lines of fruit > fresh fruit juice > reconstituted fruit juice > fruit drink > water with dissolved fructose. That's not "scientific" and I'm not aiming to prove it. By your logic, you've given up on coffee, chocolate, and alcohol, right? No paleolithic person ever tasted a drop of whiskey. That would be ideal, though I haven't reached that point yet. I'm not even sure I will seriously try to eliminate all those by 100% - but any reduction will be beneficial.
  - dalke 14y ago
    It seems then that your scale is not what people of the paleo era could get (in an abstract sense, because until 500 years ago, no one on the planet could have had a slice of tomato with a leaf of basil on top), but rather that you want to minimize the number of processing steps involved in the food you eat. That latter goal is much easier for me to understand, and even support, though I wonder if corn, being the result of 5,000 years of directed evolution, is more processed than beer. Take for example alcohol. There's good genetic evidence that humans have evolved to better handle alcohol. Eg, "The studies on human ADH (alcohol dehydrogenase) gene have suggested Darwinian positive selection on the genetic variation of ADH1B His47 [52–54]. Alcohol consumption is a recent agriculture-related life style, and the adaptive selection has begun about 10 Kya" http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijeb/2011/484769/ http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijeb/2011/484769/ During the Babylonian era, "a daily ration of beer was provided for all citizens, the amount depending on one's social status" and "it was sometimes used to pay workers as part of their daily wages." During the Middle Ages it was safer to drink than water. And that's the point of the linked-to criticism - 20,000 years is long enough that our genetics are different than humans of the same era. We've evolved to better handle starch, to better handle drinking milk as an adult, and to drink alcohol. To choose a paleo diet on the belief that it better fits our genetics sounds like it denies the evidence that our genetics have changed since then.

by Evgeny 14y ago

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.
- dalke 14y ago
  "Moderation in all things", says Aristotle. You've offered a different set of guidelines than the previous poster, but some of the same questions remain. What's "old" and what's "new"? Is corn new or old? What about almonds, which are toxic in the wild species, or taro which is toxic until processed? What about wheat? Wild apples are not that edible. They are too astringent; crabapples. It's only through grafting of the very occasional tree with edible fruit that we get new edible cultivars. The Gala apple has only been around since the 1970s. Does that make it new? (Interesting story: Johnny Appleseed brought apple trees to the western frontier for making hard cider and apple jack, and not for eating. They were grown from seed, and only grafting preserves the taste.) Domesticated sugarcane is older than most other plants we currently use. Should we prioritize sugarcane, because it's older? Or is it only foods species unchanged since 10,000 years ago that we should prioritize? If you, like I, haven't inherited genetics from the indigenous peoples of the Americas, then your personal genetics have had less than 500 years to evolve for pineapple, corn, tomatoes, and other New World plants. Should we avoid New World plants and only eat things found in East Africa? 500 years ago isn't that long. That's almost exactly the same time that the Reinheitsgebot (German beer purity law) has been in place. How long does it take for a new food to become old? Your genetics have certainly not adapted to eat macadamia nuts from Australia, because they've been a crop for less than 200 years, and only Australian aborigines would have had any adaptations for them. Does that make those new or old to our genome? Commercial production of macadamia nuts is about as old as Jack Daniel's. Should they have equal prioritization? Believe it or not, but beer making is at least 7,000 years old. You can't say "Drinking it on a regular basis is about as stupid as eating arsenic or lead salts for kicks" because for it has been a daily drink for several thousand years. During the Babylonian era, "a daily ration of beer was provided for all citizens, the amount depending on one's social status" and "it was sometimes used to pay workers as part of their daily wages." During the Middle Ages it was safer to drink than water. In fact, we've evolved in order to process alcohol better: "The studies on human ADH (alcohol dehydrogenase) gene have suggested Darwinian positive selection on the genetic variation of ADH1B His47 [52–54]. Alcohol consumption is a recent agriculture-related life style, and the adaptive selection has begun about 10 Kya" http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijeb/2011/484769/ http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijeb/2011/484769/ Even if you think that the genetics of the paleo era outweigh the genetics of the last 10,000 years, our monkey/ape guts tell us that we did not evolve with the expectation of eating "a relatively modest hunk of meat" for most of our meals. This tells me that you don't know the history of our food and your adjusting things up to fit your personal beliefs. Your last sentence is equally odd - my European genetic ancestry definitely co-evolved with animal husbandry to make it so I can drink cow's milk as an adult. You reject that genetic heritage because you're squeamish? That's all fine as a personal or moral belief, but it doesn't make good sense as a general "mandatory" consideration.
Evgeny 14y ago
What about all of the exceptions? The general approach to exceptions is that exceptions exist and yes, it is impossible to eat 100% foods that the paleolithic man ate. Obviously even modern cows or pigs did not exist 20K years ago. And one can argue that wild fish / game is also not the same cause they evolved somewhat. So, the approach is that while the ideal is 100%, the real goal is not to reach it, but to gradually come closer. I.e. eliminating sugars, white bread, sodas, vegetable oils is probably already ~70% of the way or more. 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? Well, my personal approach is that fresh/cooked is OK, and then, the more processing is done, the farther we are away from ideal. So, along the lines of fruit > fresh fruit juice > reconstituted fruit juice > fruit drink > water with dissolved fructose. That's not "scientific" and I'm not aiming to prove it. By your logic, you've given up on coffee, chocolate, and alcohol, right? No paleolithic person ever tasted a drop of whiskey. That would be ideal, though I haven't reached that point yet. I'm not even sure I will seriously try to eliminate all those by 100% - but any reduction will be beneficial.
- dalke 14y ago
  It seems then that your scale is not what people of the paleo era could get (in an abstract sense, because until 500 years ago, no one on the planet could have had a slice of tomato with a leaf of basil on top), but rather that you want to minimize the number of processing steps involved in the food you eat. That latter goal is much easier for me to understand, and even support, though I wonder if corn, being the result of 5,000 years of directed evolution, is more processed than beer. Take for example alcohol. There's good genetic evidence that humans have evolved to better handle alcohol. Eg, "The studies on human ADH (alcohol dehydrogenase) gene have suggested Darwinian positive selection on the genetic variation of ADH1B His47 [52–54]. Alcohol consumption is a recent agriculture-related life style, and the adaptive selection has begun about 10 Kya" http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijeb/2011/484769/ http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ijeb/2011/484769/ During the Babylonian era, "a daily ration of beer was provided for all citizens, the amount depending on one's social status" and "it was sometimes used to pay workers as part of their daily wages." During the Middle Ages it was safer to drink than water. And that's the point of the linked-to criticism - 20,000 years is long enough that our genetics are different than humans of the same era. We've evolved to better handle starch, to better handle drinking milk as an adult, and to drink alcohol. To choose a paleo diet on the belief that it better fits our genetics sounds like it denies the evidence that our genetics have changed since then.