PALEO: pros, cons and whatever else you may think?

I'm reading "I've literally never read a peer reviewed scientific journal article."

PROS:

It can work well and quickly for weight loss
No need for the hassle of calorie counting
Can help regularise cravings
Can help with digestive discomfort

CONS:

Restrictive food choice
Lack of cake
Can be expensive
Can be hard to implement into day to day life
Did I mention lack of cake?

Without cake the world, just seems darker! :noway:

well the calories you expend hunting and gathering your food from the countryside will mean you probably won't have any problem with obesity.

the whole concept of not being able to eat without catching/finding your food first is a great way to beat obesity

Paleo. Because eating like a caveman is healthy... Cavemen only lived to be 25.

some of them lived into their 40s and 50s. a high infant mortality rate brings down the average age of death.

anyway, here's my rundown of the paleo diet: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/1123546-the-pros-and-cons-of-the-paleo-diet

Paleo. Because eating like a caveman is healthy... Cavemen only lived to be 25.

Cavemen had high mortality rates due to a number of factors that had nothing to do with diet or lifestyle and everything to do with a lack of medical advancement. High infant mortality rates, the fact that if you got injured at all the chances were good you'd die of infection/being too slow to outrun a predator/inability to gather food or get to shelter, etc. There've been suggestions that they were in fact some of the healthiest human beings and that they weren't suffering from a lot of the maladies later societies commonly did.

Human life expectancy has increased not because of changes in diet but because of advances in medicine, sanitation, etc.

Which could explain the disease rates going up independent of diet... we are just plain living longer. To quote (I may be paraphrasing) Brad Pitt from Fight Club, "On a long enough time line, the life expectancy is zero".

What I am saying is that I do not believe you will find a nutrition scientist (aka one that studies ALL the research) who would say that legumes are unhealthy.

Agreed but looking at the preponderance of the evidence seems to be a novel concept.

Take this for example:

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/11/4/281.abstract

Literally took me 5 seconds to find. I could, if I was so minded, spin a convincing argument that legumes should not be consumed based upon it. Would it be ethically right to do so however? No.

This is why personally, I like the Whole30 idea better than Paleo. Maybe legumes are bad for you, maybe they're healthy. Rather than making it my new full time job to read studies and see what the latest word is on every type of food out there, I can stop eating foods that might bother me for 30 days and then reintroduce them one at a time and see if I feel better or worse.

Studies are great for the big picture and the average person but I want to know what's best for my individual body. And for me this is a really effective way to determine how different foods affect me personally.

I agree with this for those that have some type of symptoms. But, if one has no problems, then there is no need to eliminate foods.

I started reading about Paleo after a family member did the 30 day challenge. Last night I looked at the ingredients on my "reduced-calorie bread" and my land of lakes "light butter" and almost fell to the floor. Today, I begrudgingly ate my Emerald cinnamon roast almonds that I thought were healthy prior to reading the ingredients of modified food starch, soy lecithin, and two other ingredients I cannot even pronounce. It's super scary what all is being put into our foods that we believe are "healthy" because they are reduced fat/calorie.

This is why personally, I like the Whole30 idea better than Paleo. Maybe legumes are bad for you, maybe they're healthy. Rather than making it my new full time job to read studies and see what the latest word is on every type of food out there, I can stop eating foods that might bother me for 30 days and then reintroduce them one at a time and see if I feel better or worse.

Studies are great for the big picture and the average person but I want to know what's best for my individual body. And for me this is a really effective way to determine how different foods affect me personally.

I agree with this for those that have some type of symptoms. But, if one has no problems, then there is no need to eliminate foods.

These are just short-term eliminations to help people determine which foods cause problems for them. The theory is that we've been eating these potentially problematic foods for essentially our whole lives, so we've come to assume the reactions we get from them are just normal (anecdotes vary as to what these symptoms are). The idea is to eliminate them for a short time, long enough to get them out of your system, and then slowly reintroduce them one at a time and see how you react? No problems? Then you know you personally don't react badly to that food. There've been tons of anecdotal evidence showing people's surprise improvement after eliminating foods they never knew they had issues with.

And a lot of ancestral lifestyle plans have similar elimination diets or advocate self-experimentation like this to determine how you personally react so that you can tailor your lifestyle to your own needs. This is especially true with the fringe foods like dairy, rice, etc. that there is less of a definitive stance on.

There've been suggestions that they were in fact some of the healthiest human beings and that they weren't suffering from a lot of the maladies later societies commonly did.

Well, that myth is fading, too, as it turns out these marvellously healthy specimens had "modern" diseases like degenerative arthrirtis. And those are in people who were lucky to get past 30, god only knows what bad shape they'd be in if they found a way to stagger to 60.