5 ms·

As someone who's been paleo for over 6 years, this makes me very happy. I believe the paleo community had a lot to do with raising awareness of beneficial fats,

by shanev 11y ago

As someone who's been paleo for over 6 years, this makes me very happy. I believe the paleo community had a lot to do with raising awareness of beneficial fats, promoting pasture-raised meat, and coconut oil and butter over industrial seed oils like canola.

DiabloD3 11y ago
Thanks to Paleo, I went from 340 pounds to 214 in exactly one year, and I'm now down to 190. People who've been part of Paleo already know the FDA avoids science as long as possible as not to piss off large Congressional lobbying groups. I expect to get downvoted, and honestly, I don't care. Downvoting doesn't change the fact I lost all this weight by purposely ignoring the FDA's recommendations.
- Laforet 11y ago
  Notwithstanding the "fat-free everything" fad, the best epidermiological data we have so far suggest that fat consumption is highly correlated with coronary heart disease and all sorts of late-life complications. This could be wrong or out-dated, but FDA is only acting on the mainsteam scientific opinion that fat should be limited in a typical diet. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/o/cochrane/clcentral/articles/216/CN-00133216/frame.html http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/o/cochrane/clcentral/articles... USDA, on the other hand, has been deeply troubled by the public's distaste of fat as they have an obligation is keep dairy farmers afloat. To this day they have been trying all sorts of things to promote fat consumption without much thought to the health consequences. South Park touched on the subject in the episode "Gluten Free Ebola", but I guess most people missed that point. New York Times have done a good article explaining the economic and politics between the FDA-USDA feud. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/us/07fat.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/us/07fat.html Finally, one must note that individual idiosyncracies play a major role in how we respond to external inputs such as diets, exercise and medication. I am glad that paleo diet worked out for you, however please bear in mind that it may and may not work for everyone when you push it.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - raverbashing 11y ago
    As from the article quoted: "dietary intake at total and saturated fat" I wanted to see a study comparing the average fat intake of Paleo practitioners with the target of that study. Oh by the way, trans fats are poly-insaturated (good for you! - and sold as such). Until it wasn't.
    - shanev 11y ago
      I'd love to see a study like that as well. And you're right, not all trans fats are bad. There’s a good trans-fat called conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) that is mainly found in meat and dairy from pastured ruminants. Grass-fed cattle produce 500% more CLA than grain-fed [2]. Only man-made industrial trans-fats are bad. [1]: http://chriskresser.com/can-some-trans-fats-be-healthy http://chriskresser.com/can-some-trans-fats-be-healthy [2]: http://www.journalofanimalscience.org/content/78/11/2849.full.pdf http://www.journalofanimalscience.org/content/78/11/2849.ful...
  - tzs 11y ago
    > Notwithstanding the "fat-free everything" fad, the best epidermiological data we have so far suggest that fat consumption is highly correlated with coronary heart disease and all sorts of late-life complications. This could be wrong or out-dated, but FDA is only acting on the mainsteam scientific opinion that fat should be limited in a typical diet Yet if we look at other peoples and cultures around the world we can find several with high fat diets without the coronary heart disease and other problems that seem to plague high fat consuming Americans. Some examples are the natives of many South Pacific islands, the Inuits, and the Maasai. Components of a diet do not act in isolation. It really has to be looked at as a complete system. If reducing fat in the American diet reduces coronary heart disease, that does not mean fat is bad or fat is causing coronary heart disease. It could be that if some one component instead of fat were removed the same reduction in coronary heart disease might occur (carbohydrates might be a good candidate, since the traditional high fat Inuit diet was very low in them, and they have much lower coronary heart disease than mainstream Americans do). For nearly every rule, supposedly backed by the then current science when the rule was published, it is usually possible to find some place where the traditional diet breaks that rule yet the people there are doing fine, not suffering from the afflictions we've been told will befall is if we violate the rule. The tendency to look at things in isolation doesn't just show up in unjustly declaring particular things bad. It also sometimes declares things good without sufficient justification. People look at, say, traditional Mediterranean diets and see that they have good outcomes, and figure it must be due to their heavy use of, say, olive oil. So then they start slathering olive oil over everything and expect they are going to get healthy no matter how crappy the stuff they are drowning in olive oil. In reality, there is probably no magic ingredient in the Mediterranean diets...it is the totality of their diet that is good. What should be a simple task--regularly eating in a healthy way--is ridiculously complicated and requires way more research than it should in the US. And that's without getting into processed foods, and how the goals of processed food providers don't necessarily align with the goals of those trying to eat healthy. I read somewhere (don't remember where, so can't give a good cite) that biochemists say we only understand about 10% of the chemical processes in our bodies. We know some things various nutrients are used for, but there are many we don't know. We often don't understand exactly how particular nutrients go from being part of our food to being being available at the places they are used in a form usable to our cells. So it looks like the only reasonably effective way to eat healthy is to find some group of people whose traditional diet is known, and who have or had good outcomes in the health areas you are interested in, and had those good outcomes for a long time, and eat like you are one of them. What I've not seen discussed is whether or not you can mix different diets this way. For instance, if you like the outcomes of traditional Mediterranean culture diets, and the outcome of traditional South Pacific Island diets, and so on for several cultures and their traditional diets, should you expect good outcomes if one day you eat like a South Pacific islander, and the next day like someone from a Mediterranean culture, and so on? Or do you need to stick with each culture's diet for some kind of extended period?
- justwannasing 11y ago
  My son went from 320 to 210 in nine months while I went from 263 to 188 in the same amount of time so I can verify it certainly helps though overeating is possible on paleo, too. However, I should note that we were working out in a gym three times a week and, after quitting that due to boredom and quitting paleo cause I love bread and ice cream, I went to 208 pretty quick. So Paleo is not a cure all. Being a programmer who sits on his butt all day doesn't help at all.
  - DiabloD3 11y ago
    I chronically under-exercise. I did so during that first year, I still do. My weight loss is explained by change in diet alone.
jensen123 11y ago
I've looked at a bunch of paleo blogs. It surprises me that almost all of them include coconut and olive oils. As if hunter-gatherers in the paleolithic era could drop by a grocery store and buy themselves a jar of oil. Now, it seems likely that whole coconuts and other nuts are healthy, but oil??? Isn't oil basically like other foods that are not whole, such as refined sugar (consists of only sugar and no other nutrients) and refined grains (almost only starch)?
- GordonS 11y ago
  I don't know for a fact, but I'd it's possible that rendered animal fat might have used for cooking (and potentially other uses too) in paleolithic times - so no need to buy a jar of oil, they'd just make their own :)
- shanev 11y ago
  You bring up a very good point. I guess it's important to understand that paleo isn't an attempt to copy a hunter-gatherer diet as that would be impossible today. It's an attempt to get as close to it as we can with today's domestically available food. Coconut oil and olive oil are suggested as replacements for PUFA (polyunsaturated) oils such as canola and vegetable oil that oxidize easily and cause inflammation. It's similar to how honey is suggested as a replacement for refined sugar.

by shanev 11y ago

DiabloD3 11y ago

Thanks to Paleo, I went from 340 pounds to 214 in exactly one year, and I'm now down to 190. People who've been part of Paleo already know the FDA avoids science as long as possible as not to piss off large Congressional lobbying groups. I expect to get downvoted, and honestly, I don't care. Downvoting doesn't change the fact I lost all this weight by purposely ignoring the FDA's recommendations.

Laforet 11y ago
Notwithstanding the "fat-free everything" fad, the best epidermiological data we have so far suggest that fat consumption is highly correlated with coronary heart disease and all sorts of late-life complications. This could be wrong or out-dated, but FDA is only acting on the mainsteam scientific opinion that fat should be limited in a typical diet. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/o/cochrane/clcentral/articles/216/CN-00133216/frame.html http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/o/cochrane/clcentral/articles... USDA, on the other hand, has been deeply troubled by the public's distaste of fat as they have an obligation is keep dairy farmers afloat. To this day they have been trying all sorts of things to promote fat consumption without much thought to the health consequences. South Park touched on the subject in the episode "Gluten Free Ebola", but I guess most people missed that point. New York Times have done a good article explaining the economic and politics between the FDA-USDA feud. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/us/07fat.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/us/07fat.html Finally, one must note that individual idiosyncracies play a major role in how we respond to external inputs such as diets, exercise and medication. I am glad that paleo diet worked out for you, however please bear in mind that it may and may not work for everyone when you push it.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- raverbashing 11y ago
  As from the article quoted: "dietary intake at total and saturated fat" I wanted to see a study comparing the average fat intake of Paleo practitioners with the target of that study. Oh by the way, trans fats are poly-insaturated (good for you! - and sold as such). Until it wasn't.
  - shanev 11y ago
    I'd love to see a study like that as well. And you're right, not all trans fats are bad. There’s a good trans-fat called conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) that is mainly found in meat and dairy from pastured ruminants. Grass-fed cattle produce 500% more CLA than grain-fed [2]. Only man-made industrial trans-fats are bad. [1]: http://chriskresser.com/can-some-trans-fats-be-healthy http://chriskresser.com/can-some-trans-fats-be-healthy [2]: http://www.journalofanimalscience.org/content/78/11/2849.full.pdf http://www.journalofanimalscience.org/content/78/11/2849.ful...
- tzs 11y ago
  > Notwithstanding the "fat-free everything" fad, the best epidermiological data we have so far suggest that fat consumption is highly correlated with coronary heart disease and all sorts of late-life complications. This could be wrong or out-dated, but FDA is only acting on the mainsteam scientific opinion that fat should be limited in a typical diet Yet if we look at other peoples and cultures around the world we can find several with high fat diets without the coronary heart disease and other problems that seem to plague high fat consuming Americans. Some examples are the natives of many South Pacific islands, the Inuits, and the Maasai. Components of a diet do not act in isolation. It really has to be looked at as a complete system. If reducing fat in the American diet reduces coronary heart disease, that does not mean fat is bad or fat is causing coronary heart disease. It could be that if some one component instead of fat were removed the same reduction in coronary heart disease might occur (carbohydrates might be a good candidate, since the traditional high fat Inuit diet was very low in them, and they have much lower coronary heart disease than mainstream Americans do). For nearly every rule, supposedly backed by the then current science when the rule was published, it is usually possible to find some place where the traditional diet breaks that rule yet the people there are doing fine, not suffering from the afflictions we've been told will befall is if we violate the rule. The tendency to look at things in isolation doesn't just show up in unjustly declaring particular things bad. It also sometimes declares things good without sufficient justification. People look at, say, traditional Mediterranean diets and see that they have good outcomes, and figure it must be due to their heavy use of, say, olive oil. So then they start slathering olive oil over everything and expect they are going to get healthy no matter how crappy the stuff they are drowning in olive oil. In reality, there is probably no magic ingredient in the Mediterranean diets...it is the totality of their diet that is good. What should be a simple task--regularly eating in a healthy way--is ridiculously complicated and requires way more research than it should in the US. And that's without getting into processed foods, and how the goals of processed food providers don't necessarily align with the goals of those trying to eat healthy. I read somewhere (don't remember where, so can't give a good cite) that biochemists say we only understand about 10% of the chemical processes in our bodies. We know some things various nutrients are used for, but there are many we don't know. We often don't understand exactly how particular nutrients go from being part of our food to being being available at the places they are used in a form usable to our cells. So it looks like the only reasonably effective way to eat healthy is to find some group of people whose traditional diet is known, and who have or had good outcomes in the health areas you are interested in, and had those good outcomes for a long time, and eat like you are one of them. What I've not seen discussed is whether or not you can mix different diets this way. For instance, if you like the outcomes of traditional Mediterranean culture diets, and the outcome of traditional South Pacific Island diets, and so on for several cultures and their traditional diets, should you expect good outcomes if one day you eat like a South Pacific islander, and the next day like someone from a Mediterranean culture, and so on? Or do you need to stick with each culture's diet for some kind of extended period?
justwannasing 11y ago
My son went from 320 to 210 in nine months while I went from 263 to 188 in the same amount of time so I can verify it certainly helps though overeating is possible on paleo, too. However, I should note that we were working out in a gym three times a week and, after quitting that due to boredom and quitting paleo cause I love bread and ice cream, I went to 208 pretty quick. So Paleo is not a cure all. Being a programmer who sits on his butt all day doesn't help at all.
- DiabloD3 11y ago
  I chronically under-exercise. I did so during that first year, I still do. My weight loss is explained by change in diet alone.

jensen123 11y ago

I've looked at a bunch of paleo blogs. It surprises me that almost all of them include coconut and olive oils. As if hunter-gatherers in the paleolithic era could drop by a grocery store and buy themselves a jar of oil. Now, it seems likely that whole coconuts and other nuts are healthy, but oil??? Isn't oil basically like other foods that are not whole, such as refined sugar (consists of only sugar and no other nutrients) and refined grains (almost only starch)?

GordonS 11y ago
I don't know for a fact, but I'd it's possible that rendered animal fat might have used for cooking (and potentially other uses too) in paleolithic times - so no need to buy a jar of oil, they'd just make their own :)
shanev 11y ago
You bring up a very good point. I guess it's important to understand that paleo isn't an attempt to copy a hunter-gatherer diet as that would be impossible today. It's an attempt to get as close to it as we can with today's domestically available food. Coconut oil and olive oil are suggested as replacements for PUFA (polyunsaturated) oils such as canola and vegetable oil that oxidize easily and cause inflammation. It's similar to how honey is suggested as a replacement for refined sugar.