Paleo people... wth is the whole BEAN thing about?

Annie120484

The to-bean-or-not-to-bean debate is seriously divided. Personally I don't get it. The "leaky gut" thing sounds especially suspect. I don't believe that a plant food can be so damaging as to actually cause damage to our intestinal walls. Paleo people, seriously, what do you have against beans? I'm curious to hear all sides. Thanks in advance.

tomg33

It's pretty simple marketing actually. You have to differentiate your product from the rest some how. All diets do this. In the nutrition world we see that in the form of food exclusion, "phases" and other types of arbitrary limits. Does the overwhelming majority of nutrition science refute most such claims? Usually.

So, this I would like to see.

wolfchild59

I don't follow a paleo diet, but I've read about it (as I have with many other diets out there, still haven't done any of them). And the idea of the paleo diet is to not eat anything that ancient ancestors/cavemen/hunter-gatherers wouldn't have had readily available. They would have needed to have been harvested and cooked in a very specific manner to have been edible and likely weren't at that time. How many cavemen had pots of boiling water under their spits of dead animal?

Also, many of the people that follow paleo are doing it because it supposedly helps gestational health by removing foods that are difficult to digest. And beans are notoriously difficult to digest and often cause bloating and gas in most people. Heck, there's even a little song about the issue.

But, if the option came down to having to choose between a grain product and a bean, the paleo person would most likely choose the bean as the lesser of two evils.

And keep in mind that it's also not just beans, it's legumes as a whole. So peanuts, chickpeas, peas, soybeans, etc, all fall into the same category.

neandermagnon

I'm not sure why beans are not included in a paleo diet, wild beans existed in Asia (at least) prior to the neolithic era. Neolithic people cultivated foods that were important in the palaeolithic diet. It's a bit ridiculous to suggest that they'd start cultivating and relying upon foods for survival, that were not eaten prior to cultivation.