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Calling activity that raises your heart rate exercise makes it seem like something you have to go out of your way to do, like to join a gym or buy a machine. I
by spodek 13y ago
Calling activity that raises your heart rate exercise makes it seem like something you have to go out of your way to do, like to join a gym or buy a machine.
It seems we benefit from having a healthy lifestyle -- like walking or biking to work, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, playing sports for fun, playing with our kids, running around with pets instead of just walking them, gardening, and so on. Our evolutionary ancestors probably lived like (though I can't cite sources) that and led our bodies to evolve to thrive best with that kind of activity.
So many people are big on paleo diets. I wonder when a paleo lifestyle will become popular.
- acangiano 13y agoThe paleo lifestyle actually goes further than just diet. For example, the 'Primal' approach is very popular: http://www.marksdailyapple.com/primal-blueprint-101/ http://www.marksdailyapple.com/primal-blueprint-101/
- leobelle 13y agoI studied anthropology as an undergrad and learned that hunter gathers actually eat very little meat, so that link seems incorrect about eating lots of meat. Animal protein was/is at best something like 30% of their diet. A lot of us have had agriculturally active ancestors for many, many generations. I don't doubt that many modern diets are completely unhealthy, but this paleo diet stuff seems a bit silly. Although if the evidence is contrary to what I think, I'll be convinced. I'm not yet though. It just strikes me as the latest fad.
- pachydermic 13y agoI don't really have any training in this area (I didn't study anthropology, history, biology or nutrition in school), but while the implementation of paleo might be flawed the principle makes sense to me - eat what we evolved to eat, exercise like we evolved to exercise. At least that's how I see it. I'm not all to familiar with what it's actually like. I think that we could probably all go for eating less meat and a lot more fruits and vegetables. The flesh of other animals tastes so good though! Whenever I've been in shape I haven't stuck to any diet or strict regiment. It's pretty easy to loose weight (in principle, not in practice) if you do some moderate exercise (like take a run a few times a week, take the stairs, etc) and avoid restaurants and processed foods. I think when you start cooking for yourself, you'll end up eating a lot more raw "real" food and will find it hard to cook the really unhealthy stuff you might feel totally fine about ordering. It just kind of works itself out.
- dllthomas 13y ago"will find it hard to cook the really unhealthy stuff you might feel totally fine about ordering" Yeah, that doesn't work for me. If I'm not thinking about health, I'm happy loading up on the cheese and fried things to a probably unhealthy degree - especially when I'm making it myself.
- jfoutz 13y agoHumans survived because we evolved to eat literally everything. From the tiniest of seeds to whale blubber. Fruit, bugs, cows, wheat, ocelots, cactus, pufferfish. If it moves or grows humans likely survived on it at one time or another. There are clearly diets that allow for more than survival. Just be careful saying we evolved to do X. It's easy to get your causal arrows mixed up.
- dllthomas 13y agoWe evolved to eat very few parts of the pufferfish, as I understand it.
- cadr 13y agoIs the number of generations our ancestors have been agriculturally active enough to have an evolutionary effect on how our bodies metabolize food? At most is seems it has been 14000 years, whereas we've been around for several hundreds of thousands of years. I don't know the answer there.
- dllthomas 13y agoI suspect it's enough to have small effects but not enough for complex adaptations (requiring multiple mutations to stack). Actually, I think I read that adult lactose tolerance evolved during that time? I'd also guess that it's plenty of time for a lot of evolution to have gone on in our gut flora.
- leobelle 13y ago14,000 years is about 700 generations. That's not a little bit.
- thesimpsons1022 13y agoeven hunter-gatherers ate mostly roots and tubers and nuts.
- trouserpants 13y agoWhat about the hunter gatherers that don't have access to as many non-meat options? Inuits, for example, ate mostly meat (with up to 75% of their calories coming from fat) because they were limited in what plants they could gather. I think the more likely answer is that humans are capable of surviving on all sorts of foods, not "there is one hunter gatherer diet and it contained very little meat."
- sophacles 13y agoTo build on this - there are a lot of things that can be low impact exercise and worked into normal life. For me, a big one is dancing. Nothing formal, just going to a club or hanging out at freinds' places and having a dance party. It's fun for me (which is the point) - I don't think of it as exercise normally, just some socializing. Doing that once or twice a week regularly had a noticeable impact on my overall level of happiness and my diet plan. If I don't get to do it, I miss it and feel overly energetic, like too much coffee. (You know the "i didn't get enough exercise feeling). Another is playing with dogs and kids. I am responsible for neither, but have friends with one or both, so I get lots of access. It's a fun time, just being silly and bonding with people I think of as family. And as a benefit I get some exercise. Finally, as spodek mentions above - working in some manual versions of daily tasks can help a heck of a lot. Example: I live in the midwest, so lately I've been shoveling a lot of snow the old fashioned way. Sure I could use a snowblower, but doing it with a shovel is better exercise. Besides, the days I need to do it I know the roads will be crappy and slow, the gym may not even be open, and generally getting exercise via normal channels may be hard, so spending 50% more time on snow removal pays off overall, since I'll have more time to do things anyway. Other times where the slow manual way of doing something to sneak in some exercise are abundant and should be considered with similar "TCO" style reasoning.
- shas3 13y agoIt is fallacious to say 'just because our ancestors lived that way, it is good'. There is seldom sufficient evidence to back up such claims. Paleo diets [1] are not necessarily good. Nor are paleo-lifestyles [2]. Even several claims of paleo-enthusiasts like Christopher McDougal ('Born to Run') and Jared Diamond are disputed and contradicted by research [3]. A posteriori, there may be 'evolutionary'-type reasons for say, our body's over-eagerness to eat sugary stuff [4]. That doesn't mean that you can attribute everything to evolution without sufficient evidence. The truth is what it is: lack of exercise and poor diet both contribute to increased risk of diseases. You can appeal to 'our ancestors' lifestyle' as reliably as you can appeal to say, the benefits of 'biblical diet'. Both are identically fallacious. (As an aside, there are several comments on different posts in HN that wrongly apply evolutionary principles to everything from coding practices to behavioral traits [5]!) [1] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-paleo-diet-half-baked-how-hunter-gatherer-really-eat/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-paleo-diet-hal... [2] http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/is-barefoot-style-running-best-new-studies-cast-doubt/ http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/05/is-barefoot-style-r... [3]http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/09/history-society http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jan/09/history-society [4]http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/opinion/evolutions-sweet-tooth.html http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/06/opinion/evolutions-sweet-t... [5]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7050286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7050286
- faster 13y agoZuk's critique of the paleo diet has itself been soundly criticized, e.g. [1] and [2]. Of course she's gotten many details right; the food that is available today doesn't resemble Paleo-era foods very much, so how can we truly recreate their diet? She cherry-picked studies though, just like Ancel Keyes did when he declared that dietary fat was killing us. As for barefoot running, the barefoot shoes are seen as a magic bullet, and of course that's not the case. They can be a guide to suggest that you fix your gait but if you don't want to do the work, you can harm yourself as much in Vibram Five Fingers as in Nikes or Adidas. Paleo-izing everything is in fashion. That doesn't mean it's all wrong though. [1] http://philosophyandpsychology.wordpress.com/2013/03/01/defending-paleo-a-response-to-marlene-zuks-critique-of-paleofantasy/ http://philosophyandpsychology.wordpress.com/2013/03/01/defe... [2] http://www.marksdailyapple.com/is-it-all-just-a-paleofantasy/ http://www.marksdailyapple.com/is-it-all-just-a-paleofantasy...
- dhughes 13y agoThe 5,000 year old "ice man" scientists have named Otzi had heart disease so I'd call the paleo diet healthy is misinformation.
- joelthelion 13y agoYou can't draw any conclusions about something as random as heart disease based on a sample size of one.
- dhughes 13y agoNo but it seems paleo diet enthusiasts indicate any heart disease was non-existent due to a paleo diet. The so-called "LOREN CORDAIN, PH.D., THE WORLD’S LEADING EXPERT ON PALEOLITHIC DIETS AND FOUNDER OF THE PALEO MOVEMENT" claims: Decades of research by Dr. Loren Cordain and his scientific colleagues demonstrate that hunter-gatherers typically were free from the chronic illnesses and diseases that are epidemic in Western populations, including: Obesity Cardiovascular disease (heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, congestive heart failure, atherosclerosis) Type 2 diabetes Cancer Autoimmune diseases (multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, etc.) Osteoporosis Acne Myopia (nearsightedness), macular degeneration, glaucoma Varicose veins, hemorrhoids, diverticulosis, gastric reflux Gout
- joelthelion 13y agoYou forgot to take into account the word "typically".
- dhughes 13y agoOK then, but that works both ways if I can't prove it's not totally good paleo diet proponents can't prove it's super healthy.