Hencredible Casanova 
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Paleo: How Our Stone Age Bodies Struggle To Stay Healthy In Modern Times
I've been following a mostly paleo diet recently (which along with my workout regimen has been great). I heard this interview today on NPR with Daniel Lieberman; he's an evolutionary biologist who teaches at Harvard and has a new book out. Very cool insights about how our bodies are out of sync with modern foods.
Pretty long so I'm just going to highlight the part about paleo.
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Quote:LIEBERMAN: I'm not a - a bit of a skeptic about the Paleo diet. One of the things that's interesting about the health movement today is that just as there is a lot of polarization in American in terms of politics and class, that's also happening with how we use our bodies. And it used to be that only rich people could afford to be unhealthy and overweight and inactive, and now it's, it's almost reversed and there are a lot of well-off educated people who are now really interested in using their bodies better and they're exercising and they're running marathons and they're trying various kinds of diets.
And one of them that's become very popular recently, of course, is the Paleo diet. And I think that the Paleo diet has some germs of truth to it. It is true that an evolutionary perspective does help us understand that there are certain foods for which we're better adapted and they're other foods for which were less adapted. But the Paleo diet also has a kind of simplistic approach to this question, almost creating a bunch of rules that don't necessarily make any sense from an evolutionary perspective. After all...
GROSS: So before you describe some of those roles, what's the diet?
LIEBERMAN: So, people who eat the Paleo tend to, they avoid all cereals and grains. They eat a lot of fat and meat because they have a, there's a notion that lots - our ancestors ate huge amounts of meat.
GROSS: And then there is the pre-farming era, so there's no grains yet.
LIEBERMAN: That's right. Which is actually not true, because we know from various archaeological sites that hunter gatherers, when they had grains available to them, did eat grains in probably very large quantities - although not, of course, as much as farmers. They tend to avoid milk products because after all, we evolved to drink milk only when we're young and not to drink milk when we're older after weaning. Many of them avoid legumes - things like peanuts, etcetera, which were not eaten by hunter-gatherers. At least so they think.
So it's a kind of diet by analogy. If hunter-gatherers ate it, it must be good and if we eat it - if it's more recent than hunter-gatherers, it must be bad. And you can, of course, quickly appreciate that some of that logic is a little bit flawed because just because something is recent doesn't mean it's bad. And just because something is old doesn't mean it's good. And furthermore, hunter-gatherers didn't evolve necessarily to be healthy. They evolved to have lots of babies and health was only selected for in so far as it helped people have more babies. That's after all, what natural selection's really about.
And hunter-gatherers, in fact, aren't always healthy. There's I think a kind of a little bit of romanticism applied to hunter-gatherers. And there's also no one kind of hunter-gatherers. After all, our ancestors who are hunter-gatherers lived in environments as diverse as the African savanna to and rainforests and in the Arctic and everywhere else, they managed to eke out a living in all kinds of different habitats. And there was no one Paleo diet, there were many Paleo diets. And so it's a complex problem.
GROSS: And probably they didn't live to celebrate their 80th birthdays very often.
LIEBERMAN: Well, actually, you'd be surprised.
GROSS: Really?
LIEBERMAN: So hunter-gatherers have very high infant mortality rates. You know, it varies from population to population and the data aren't great, but maybe between 30 and 50 percent rates of infant mortality. But once they survived childhood, they actually tended to live reasonable long and healthy lives. And it was - actually the origins of farming that caused health to really decline in that respect. So farmers also have high infant mortality rates. But farmers also have high mortality rates in general and people started dying younger and becoming shorter. So farming really was initially a very bad thing for the human body in terms of longevity and nutrition and health. Of course, it was great for increasing the number of offspring people were able to have.
But to return to the Paleo diet, the thing about the Paleo diet is that there was also some truth to what some of the Paleo diet proposes. I mean, it is true that much of what we eat and do in our modern life we're poorly adapted for and the Paleo diet does go some of the way toward correcting that, but I'm not sure I agree with everything they say.
GROSS: Well, because it's going too far?
LIEBERMAN: In some respects. For example, there's a big debate going on about fats and what kinds of fats are healthy and we've been hearing for years now that saturated fats are evil and unsaturated fats are healthy. But some hunter-gatherers eat a lot of saturated fats. And so some Paleolithic diet proponents believe that you should just have as much saturated fat as you want. And there are various arguments for and against that but that's an experiment that I, for example, am not willing to undergo, is to eat as much saturated fat as I'd like. There are still scientific arguments about what ratios of fats are the best and what's the right fat. And in fact, I think even asking what's the best is often problematic because again, what's the output parameter you're interested in? You know, are you interested in living longest or being more vigorous or having more offspring? Remember, that what natural selection cared about the most was how many offspring you had who then survived to then have offspring themselves. So just because hunter-gatherers may eat certain diets doesn't mean that they're going to, that's the same kind of diet that's going to promote health in a modern context.
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| 09-30-2013 08:33 PM |
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Aliblahba 
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RE: Paleo: How Our Stone Age Bodies Struggle To Stay Healthy In Modern Times
My ancestors came from the Garden of Eden so the Paleo diet won't work for my body. We eat dairy, honey, grain, and beans. Proper foods. If you guys want I'll start proper nutrition thread for those that believe we didn't come from monkeys.
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| 09-30-2013 09:26 PM |
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JayJuanGee 
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RE: Paleo: How Our Stone Age Bodies Struggle To Stay Healthy In Modern Times
Rio: Have you ever been allergic to eggs in the past?
Eggs has been a go-to food for me b/c they are so nutritious. You can get nearly all the nutrition that you need just from eating eggs - though that may get boring eating only eggs after a while. BTW, you should be eating the whole egg, not just the egg whites as some people do.. eat the yolk and the whites together. Raw or slightly cooked or boiled .. a lot of ways to make eggs, and yummy.
I think that there are some variations in the definition of paleo, and i personally think that it means to eat whole foods in their natural states. Of course you can deviate once in a while after you get used to the dietary changes.
I have been low carb / paleo for more than two years, but i have never been zero carbs. Although sometimes, all i eat for several days is various kinds of meats and eggs, and i make sure that i eat the meat with the fats. I have been doing pretty well on this. You may want to keep some raw almonds or walnuts or something for snacks.. oh yeah, coconut is really good too... both the oils and the meat of it and the liquid.
If you exercise quite a bit, then some carbs before and after a workout can be acceptable, but i would not over do it, but there can be some personal variance. I do agree with MikeCF - especially if you are having some issues that really seem related to food, then it may be easier to trace your symptoms with a food diary.
(This post was last modified: 10-01-2013 03:14 PM by JayJuanGee.)
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| 10-01-2013 03:08 PM |
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dasher 
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RE: Paleo: How Our Stone Age Bodies Struggle To Stay Healthy In Modern Times
(10-01-2013 12:27 PM)RioNomad Wrote: Been trying to do paleo. I have crazy stomach problems, and I think an egg allergy. I have very little energy during the day after eating. Feel sluggish and fatigued. Get headaches and mad brain fog after I eat, and I have to eat something sugary like fruit or a pb and j to get rid of them. Then they come back an hour later. Super irritable and moody like a woman. Bloating, feeling full after a few bites of food, gas, etc.
In short, I'm a fucking mess. Takes a huge toll on my life. After I eat I can not concentrate to work st all due to brain fog and fatigue.
I read paleo helps many people with my problems. I just need to get a meal plan down and keep my fridge stocked so I don't revert to eating a pb and j when I'm hungry, like I'm doing right now.
These are largely normal keto-flu symptoms. Usually the first time you do a low-carb diet you'd want to have a week free so you can lounge around at home while this is happening.
It's because your body is still used to using primarily carbs for energy, but when you eat low-carb you body produces ketones which you haven't adapted to using yet, hence the fatigue, brain fog and etc.
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| 10-01-2013 03:33 PM |
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John Galt2
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RE: Paleo: How Our Stone Age Bodies Struggle To Stay Healthy In Modern Times
I think people who constantly debate the historical context of the "Paleo Diet" are missing the point. Whether a caveman ate "a lot" of meat or "a little" meat doesn't really change my day. To me, the paleo diet is very simple - "Eat plants and animals as close to nature as possible", so yes, similar to a caveman and how we evolved but no need to obsess about the particulars. So forget about the macro-nutrients, calories, etc. and look at the big picture. What does that mean?
- Eat a bison ribeye vs CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feed Operation) hamburger meat.
- Eat pasture raised eggs vs mass produced eggs by sickly chickens
- Eat organic kale vs mass produced fertilizer laced iceberg lettuce.
- Cook in unrefined coconut oil vs processed vegetable oil.
- etc, etc
All the above are "closer to nature", or less processed, however you want to describe it.
This new (old?) way of thinking and eating literally changed my life. Lost 35 lbs (in 10 weeks!) and kept it off, back to high school weight (when I was a varsity athlete) from over 20 years ago, and dont need to workout to maintain my weight (though working out clearly has benefits). I think eating this way is just common sense.
- John
(This post was last modified: 10-01-2013 04:10 PM by John Galt2.)
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| 10-01-2013 04:08 PM |
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Paleo: How Our Stone Age Bodies Struggle To Stay Healthy In Modern Times
