SHOCKING!!! Health Screening Vegetarian to Paleo Comparison

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.

Will this help me lose weight? I'm going to find a fence after work... will post pictures later

You go, girl!

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:

My company, Hilcorp Energy Company, is awesome for many reasons one of them being our free annunal health screenings. Since I started working with them last April, I've had two screenings to date. The interesting thing is that I changed my diet from Vegetarian to Paleo just after last year's screening so the change in the numbers from 2011 to this year is 100% attributed to diet!

2011 2012 Healthy Range
Diet Vegetarian (2 years prior) Paleo (Beginning Oct. '11) n/a
Height 67 inches (5' 7") 67.25" (5' 7.25") [+.25"] n/a
Weight 160 154 (!!!) [-6 lbs!!!]
BMI 25 24 [-1] 18.5-24.9
WaistCircumference 29.5 29 [-.5] <35
Blood Pressure 128/75 mmHg 122/74 [-6/-1] <120/80
Total Cholesterol 198 mg/dl 190 [-8] 100-199
HDL (healthy) Cholesterol 87 mg/dl 99 [+12!!!] >50
LDL (bad) Cholesterol 95 mg/dl 79 mg/dl [-16!!!!!!!!] <100
Triglycerides 75 mg/dl 57 mg/dl [-18!!!!!!] 45-149
Risk Ratio 2.3 1.9 <4.4
Fasting Glucose 92 mg/dl 95 mg/dl [+3*] 50-99
*I took my daily multivitamin this morning which contains 5g of sugar

You lost 6 pounds in a year? Uhm...sorry, that's .5 pounds a month. Not all that impressive. Even 1 pound a month isn't that impressive at your weight. The more you have to lose, the easier it is to initially lose weight. It's that last 20lbs that's a b!tch.
The difference is, you're probably eating a LOT more animal based protein than before.

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.

Seriously? Who has the time of day to read 6 pages worth of posts in a thread? I read the initial post and I responded based on what I read. And I wasn't dissing how the person is eating. Nor did I say anything about how I am eating. I was pointing out that the post did not indicate what they ate while eating vegetarian, and how poor eating could be in comparison to a cleaner way of eating.

Thank you to the OP for posting this topic. I too am enjoying AMAZING health benefits from eating a fat/meat/veggie based diet. A huge list of health problems have vanished and, bonus, I'm losing fat like crazy. It's amazing to me that people are posting trying to refute your personal experience. If I hear one more time that eating a diet based on healthy meat/fat and veggies is a "fad" I think I'm going to scream. Forget the names "paleo" and "primal"; it just makes sense to eat as close to what our ancestors were eating (and I don't mean 50 years ago). Since I live in an Inuit community the difference between a grain-based diet and a fat/meat based diet is so very obvious because the change is happening right now. The health differences are absolutely alarming but the government is still telling Inuit to eat bread and Crisco. (BTW most Inuit can't eat legumes, it makes them sick. I'm Caucasian and they make me sick, but legumes are supposedly healthy?!)

Our ancestors ate a higher carb (50%,) moderate fat (30%,) moderate protein (20%) diet. Not anything like the supposed "Paleo" diet being pushed by these books lately. The Mediterranean Diet is much closer to how our ancestors ate.

No. The Inuit eat/ate like my ancestors too, and I'm Caucasian.

Admittedly, the Mediterranean diet is better than the Standard American Diet, but it is not close to a human ancestral diet (i'm talking pre-agriculture which was developed very recently in the scope of human development). You can disagree all you want and you have your own facts to go by, just as I base mine on my own research of reputable sources. I suspect that you don't fully understand the Paleo diet because it is NOT necessarily low carb. Some of us choose low carb for the amazing health benefits. Look at my food diary, I eat LOTS of vegetables and I base my diet on fat. But I suppose it's just a coincidence that all of my health problems (there's a huge list) have mysteriously vanished in a very short time after changing my diet.

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'."

This is kind of off topic, but an interesting discussion anyway, so I'd like to respond.

Is attempting to support 7+ billion people (and growing) a good thing to do, anyway?

Additionally, the problem I have with the whole "the world can't support everyone doing X" thing is that it doesn't really matter what X is. If everyone did the same thing, we probably wouldn't be able to sustain everyone, anyway (at the very least, not without destroying pretty much everything else on this planet), due to the sheer amount of total resources it would take to do so.

This site mentions 200 square yards (~.04 acres) to feed one person on just grain - http://www.quora.com/How-much-farmland-would-be-required-to-sustain-10-000-people-on-a-balanced-vegetarian-diet

It's oversimplified, but let's assume it's true. At an estimated 7 billion people (source: Google "current world population"), that's 1.4x10^12 square yards, or roughly 289,256,198 acres, required to feed everyone on grain.

According to this site, there are 7.68 billion acres of arable land, and arable land is being lost at a rate of 24.7 million acres per year, due to things like global warming (rising water levels due to glacial melting), local climate changes (turning moist areas dry, etc), and urban sprawl, and in 300 years be depleted entirely - http://one-simple-idea.com/Environment1.htm

In other words, if everyone were to go vegetarian (and nothing else changed), it would buy us a couple of centuries, at best. And I'm not even sure whether that assumes the farming practices are actually sustainable (which is a completely different issue, regardless of whether the crop is plants or animals). The problem, in my opinion, isn't so much that farming practices of diet X are unsustainable and therefore diet X won't support everyone eating it, but rather that our population, and its growth, as a whole are (or are becoming, depending on who you ask) unsustainable, regardless of food sources.

That said, there's also the fact that we got to this level of population in part precisely because everyone didn't eat exactly the same way. The fact that we are omnivores has allowed our population to grow outside of the tropical areas where plants are abundant year-round and into the arctic regions where plants aren't available at all. It also allowed us to do things like start growing grains. In other words, the Inuit and northern Scandinavians have a vastly different diet from the Africans and Amazonians when living off of their local foods, and both are vastly different than the SAD.

Regarding the sustainability of meat - I agree that when one's meat choices are as narrow as fish, beef, pork, sheep, and chicken, it's not going to be very sustainable on the large scale or in the long run. Personally, I try to expand my options to things like game (venison, rabbit, small game) and bison, both of which are local and abundant where I live (not to mention that raising bison and buffalo are actually beneficial to US soil, due to this being their ancestral land, and therefore the land is adapted to the animal and vice-versa), whenever I can, which makes the sustainability of meat quite a bit more realistic (it's amazing what you can do when you work with the land, instead of against it).

But again, it comes back to sheer volume of population. Just like with every other creature, when the population expands beyond what the environment can hold, resources become scarce and famine starts to set in. High population densities also support the rise of disease, and war among the species that do it. These factors usually reduce the population back down to a sustainable level, resulting in an overall equilibrium, but we've artificially short-circuited that with a number of things, including medicine, global food transportation, housing, agriculture, and the various other technological advances unique to our species. Eventually, something's got to give, and our population on this planet will get decimated by something.

<<it's all right there ^^^ and it's huge. I'm not quoting all of it.>>

But again, it comes back to sheer volume of population. Just like with every other creature, when the population expands beyond what the environment can hold, resources become scarce and famine starts to set in. High population densities also support the rise of disease, and war among the species that do it. These factors usually reduce the population back down to a sustainable level, resulting in an overall equilibrium, but we've artificially short-circuited that with a number of things, including medicine, global food transportation, housing, agriculture, and the various other technological advances unique to our species. Eventually, something's got to give, and our population on this planet will get decimated by something.

Thank you for giving a serious and well-reasoned response. Any discussion of paleo diet (whatever that actually means,) always makes me wonder how other people see all the pieces of this nutritional system fitting together. I really appreciate you explaining your perspective.

(I just want to reiterate that I was not asking as some misguided rhetorical attempt to lead others to some particular conclusion. I was just trying to explain what I saw in considering paleo and sustainability, and wanted to know how others thought about it.)

The Paleo diet has been found to be healthier on every parameter of blood chemistry. The key is that it reduces blood sugar and thus excessive insulin, high triglycerides, and other things as a consequence--such as reducing high levels of cortisol, bad LDL cholesterol and raising good HDL cholesterol. I'm surprised that your fasting blood sugar went up---most people find that theirs' go down. You could have it tested again just to make sure that there was no lab error.

I have lost 14 pounds since I went on Paleo and have been able to nearly get off my blood pressure medications. I was taking two medications at the maximum dose for each and now I take a quarter dose of one I am confident that I will be able to get off of that when I lose a bit more weight and become even more active. My arthritis is better than it has been in a long time and I feel so much more energetic! I will never go back to eating sugar and grains! It is fairly certain that high consumption of sugar and grains, combined with sedentary lifestyles, is responsible for the obesity and Type II diabetes epidemic that Western nations are currently experiencing.

Good post! I know several people who have done Paleo and also South Beach as a remedy to blood chemistry issues and their numbers have all greatly improved.

Congrats to anyone and everyone who finds something that works for them! Being healthy, eating right and exercising is a real struggle for a lot of people, so stick to what works for you, as long as you're healthy doing it.