SHOCKING!!! Health Screening Vegetarian to Paleo Comparison

I have nothing against paleo, but I would like to ask a question I seldom hear addressed when people discuss paleo. It is my understanding that this planet is unable to support the current human population on a paleo style diet; if this is not currently the case, it will be within 20 years.

Your understanding that the "planet" is unable to support the current human population based on a paleo "style" diet is based on what evidence exactly? What foods would a paleo style diet entail for a person and in what physical quantities? How did you get to the 20 year projection?

This sounds suspiciously like a Malthusian catastrophe prediction and we all know how that panned out for the rather clever, but rather wrong, Thomas Malthus...

<<<< does not follow the Paleo / Primal paradigm but is not a fan of dodgy extrapolations either

There's no one "vegetarian diet". Eating pizza all day long is also vegetarian. I'm glad you're much healthier now, but if you were unhealthy before it more possibly means you weren't making very good choices then, not that not eating meat makes you unhealthy. I've been vegetarian for 14 years and my results are off the chart.

If you want to brag on yourself, start your own thread. She's saying she is healthier eating Paleo. Who cares about you? I'll never eat Paleo, because I won't give up cookies. I'll never eat vegetarian because I won't give up bacon. I'm healthy and my numbers are good. But this thread isn't about me. It's not about you. She didn't post to attack you. Get over it.

There's no one "vegetarian diet". Eating pizza all day long is also vegetarian. I'm glad you're much healthier now, but if you were unhealthy before it more possibly means you weren't making very good choices then, not that not eating meat makes you unhealthy. I've been vegetarian for 14 years and my results are off the chart.

If you want to brag on yourself, start your own thread. She's saying she is healthier eating Paleo. Who cares about you? I'll never eat Paleo, because I won't give up cookies. I'll never eat vegetarian because I won't give up bacon. I'm healthy and my numbers are good. But this thread isn't about me. It's not about you. She didn't post to attack you. Get over it.

Geez, someone got up on the wrong side of the bed! How is the post to which you replied an attack? It's merely a response and an alternate perspective.

and you gained a quarter of an inch in height

I think it all depended on what you were eating when eating vegetarian. You can exist on so much crap eating vegetarian compared to the Eat To Live nutrarian way of eating.

there is something to this I've been eating high glycemic carbs right before bed and losing weight, look up Carb Back Loading.

I have been doing keto for 3 weeks and feel great and have lost 31lbs in just over a month

I think it all depended on what you were eating when eating vegetarian. You can exist on so much crap eating vegetarian compared to the Eat To Live nutrarian way of eating.

If you read the thread, you'd see she's invited people to look at her food diary, which has everything logged on both sides. She's also stated that it was largely veggies, whole grains, legumes, and eggs.

There's no one "vegetarian diet". Eating pizza all day long is also vegetarian. I'm glad you're much healthier now, but if you were unhealthy before it more possibly means you weren't making very good choices then, not that not eating meat makes you unhealthy. I've been vegetarian for 14 years and my results are off the chart.

If you want to brag on yourself, start your own thread. She's saying she is healthier eating Paleo. Who cares about you? I'll never eat Paleo, because I won't give up cookies. I'll never eat vegetarian because I won't give up bacon. I'm healthy and my numbers are good. But this thread isn't about me. It's not about you. She didn't post to attack you. Get over it.

Geez, someone got up on the wrong side of the bed! How is the post to which you replied an attack? It's merely a response and an alternate perspective.

Did you intentionally misread my post and repost in your own words? I didn't say that the person posting attacked the OP. I said the person posting needed to get over herself, this thread isn't about her.

It's not an alternative perspective. The OP didn't say, Paleo is the only way to go and everyone should do it. She said, "look what works for me." This poster, then responded by saying "you probably just weren't healthy before (which the OP was) and I'm awesome."

Another person enlightened! Another person rejecting the lies of angelic carbs vs evil fat.

Fat does NOT make people fat. Carbs and your body's insulin response to carbs is what makes people fat. Period!

The science is clear. The government is trying to fatten us up just like the agricultural industry fattens livestock. Grains, grains, and more grains. Why would they want to fatten us up, you ask? Because inflammation based diseases, which are produced by excessive carbs over years and represents the majority of modern diseases, require expensive drugs to try and hold at bay. And we spend billions over billions on them every year. /EndRant

I'm so glad you've seen the light!

You're right, the science IS very clear, and the insulin hypothesis has been torn to shreds.

Extremely basic biology time. Insulin doesn't transport fat anywhere. Insulin also doesn't deposit glucose in fat cells (glucose is converted to fat in the liver, and fat travels directly in the blood on its own to wherever it is going.) insulin transports glucose into muscle cells and organs for immediate energy use.

So, knowing those incredibly basic facts about human biology, how exactly is it te insulin response that makes you fat? Especially once you add in the other basic fact that protein also causes large insulin spikes, and keeps insulin elevated in the blood, just like carbs?

Also, as others have pointed out, you are only one person, your results are not generalizable to other people.

Where did she say it was? She shared what worked for her, her preferences and her individual circumstances - nothing more.

The OP said:
So all that B.S. about eating eggs, bacon, fatty foods, red meat, and other things with lots of cholesterol is A TOTAL CROCK!!!

She doesn't explicitly state that it is "B.S." for everyone in all situations, but inferring such doesn't seem like too great a stretch.

Your understanding that the "planet" is unable to support the current human population based on a paleo "style" diet is based on what evidence exactly?

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/78/3/660S.full
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800905004994
These are two examples of many scholarly works that either explicitly state that a meat based diet is unsustainable, or that stress that we are able to feed far more people by allocating resources to the cultivation of grain, and even in so doing, will need to improve the yields of grain crops to feed a growing world population. This is the evidence upon which I have based my understanding.

What foods would a paleo style diet entail for a person and in what physical quantities?

You are correct to point out that "paleo diet" is never properly operationalized. For the purposes of this discussion, I was interpeting "paleo diet" to mean a meat based diet in which traditional Western animals, such as cattle, sheep, pigs, fowl, and fish comprised a significant portion of the caloric intake. I would not assume that this premise of unsustainability would stand if animal protein sources are expanded to include insects. I also think that if the process of "vat growing" meat is ever realized, the argument of unsustainability will likely not hold. Both of these are responses to the basic question of reconciling sustainability and the paleo diet that seem valid. I would also accept "I disagree with the scientists who say that a meat based diet is unsustainable," "I don't think about it," and "FU, got mine." I can come up with a number of possible responses that a person who believed in the paleo diet might give; I wanted to know what answer such a person would actually give.

How did you get to the 20 year projection?

I am unable to provide a source with a specific time frame expressed in numbers of years at this time, and will retract this part of my post.

This sounds suspiciously like a Malthusian catastrophe prediction and we all know how that panned out for the rather clever, but rather wrong, Thomas Malthus...

It also sounds like the population crisis fears of the 1960s and 19790s, perhaps most famously delineated in The Population Bomb by Paul R. Ehrlich, a book which has become the target of much (largely warranted,) derision since its publication. Obviously, those feared events did not come to pass, but it seems to me that much of the reason why the predicted famines did not come to pass was improvements in the cultivation of grains, most notably rice. Since grains are not part of the paleo diet as I understand it, this is part of what led me to ask my question about how paleo diet enthusiasts reconcile sustainability.

<<<< does not follow the Paleo / Primal paradigm but is not a fan of dodgy extrapolations either

<<<< does not dislike the Paleo / Primal paradigm and has a hard time knowing where to find the line between "offering an unsubstantiated argument" and "inundating people with so many words that it can only invoke a response of 'tl;dr'."

Some people are vegetarians and vegans because of the way animals are treated not to change certain aspects of their health. I still believe a plant based diet is best (but I do eat animal products, trying to reduce it as much as possibly)

That escalated quickly...



Seems to be a lot of the favorite defensive MFP response to a concept that contradicts their own personal beliefs/dogma: defend their own by tearing down someone else's.

It seems to me that many people are not defending a particular dietary style, but rather good reasoning and the scientific process.

Any attemp at good reasoning here will be dealt with by being labeled a "hater."

That escalated quickly...



Seems to be a lot of the favorite defensive MFP response to a concept that contradicts their own personal beliefs/dogma: defend their own by tearing down someone else's.

It seems to me that many people are not defending a particular dietary style, but rather good reasoning and the scientific process.

There's a difference between "good reasoning and scientific process" and going "I'm a vegetarian of X years and my numbers are better than yours!" and basically resorting to a pissing contest when that was never the point of the original post. (Note: I'm not saying you, specifically, did that. There are, though, several cases of that in this thread.)

The point that seems to keep getting missed, here, is that the results of the OP's bloodwork run contrary to the fear that eating eggs, red meat, and other sources of dietary cholesterol and saturated fat are going to clog your arteries, raise your lipid levels, and give you a heart attack. That point would hold true even if the OP's numbers hadn't changed at all between switching from vegetarian to paleo, because those numbers would have to rise in order for the artery clogging, heart attack scenario to happen.

Maybe I'm missing something here but it looks to me like someone got the bright idea to call "normal healthy nutrition" Paleo and made a billion dollars. Geesh, what a world:laugh:

Indeed.

However, I doubt there has been a "billion dollars" made from paleo yet...that will come once larger food manufacturers start labeling things as "paleo", "paleo approved", etc...and yet, these foods will be nothing like the current interpretation of "paleo". I'm seeing more and more people who formerly identified themselves as "paleo" distancing themselves from the label (but still adhering to the "lifestyle"), so perhaps that day is closer than I think.