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

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

I'm reading "you're all mean for questioning my unfounded beliefs".

Well I don't know about you all but if I get stranded on an island some time you can bet I'm going to follow the birds to those legumes so I can soak them for several hours or overnight to TRY to get rid of as much of those lectins (plant toxins) as I possibly can then boil them for hours, then rinse them and boil them some more in the hopes I can make them edible and they won't rip up my intestines with gas too bad! Oh wait, nope, I think I'll just go for some eggs or meat or vegetables instead! :happy: :laugh:

Let me know how it goes trying to make some almond flour muffins too.

LOL. Don't forget the brownies either. Cocoa powder is so very easy to process. At least if you are on an island you can probably make some coconut flour. Doubt it will be very quick though.

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

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.

The bolded section is the part that I think is incorrect. I do not believe you'll find anyone in the field of nutrition that will say legumes are unhealthy (outside personal allergy or intollerance).

I doubt you'd find anyone to say that whole grains are not heatlhy, though you could probably find some that think gluten needs a closer look.

I've personally read multiple studies on the downsides of legumes AND grains, whole or not (actually, especially whole in some cases), and ones that had nothing to do with personal allergies or intolerances.

Again, off topic. While I do not believe there are many (if any) studies showing legumes to be unhealthy, I think we already agreed that there is always back and forth in research. You can cherry pick a study or two on ANY topic to fit an argument.

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.

A food containing a toxin =/= that food being unhealthy. MANY healthy foods contain toxins. That's why we have organs to remove those toxins. We humans are remarkable machines. We can eat food, use the good and expel the bad.

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.

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.

I can't see how it would even be logically right to do so. It says most or all of the toxins can be eliminated by cooking, so we don't even need organs to get rid of them.

In for round 2.

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.

Yeah, this is another thing that always gets thrown out there in Paleo discussions. You have symptoms you don't even know about. You feel wonderful, you have healthy medical tests and exams, but there is some mysterious malady going on inside your body that can't be detected by tests and doesn't make you feel bad. Not really any way to argue one doesn't have the invisible disease, now there is there?

But my question would be, why should I care about some undetectable symptoms if they don't affect my heatlh or make me feel bad?

These are not my own words. This is from an interview between Chris Kresser and Mat Lalonde. I paraphrased to make it more concise. I think it is a fairy reasonable way to look at the whole paleo thing...

"There is really no such thing as a “paleo” diet because the foods are not available anymore.  The best you can do it try to mimic it.  So… a diet that’s meat, vegetables, tubers, and fruits… that’s what I call it.

Typical arguments go like this:  Our ancestors and modern hunter-gatherers, who were virtually free of diseases of civilization, consumed a diet that was mostly devoid of grains, legumes, and dairy. People then make the invalid inference that consuming a diet mostly devoid of grains, legumes, and dairy will thus allow us to be free of diseases of civilization.  Why is this invalid? Because it is observational and full of confounding factors (a variable that was not observed).

You can’t observe everything, so there’s almost always going to be, especially when it comes to human beings that are very complex and multivariate that live in a very complex and multivariate environment.  You are never going to see everything.  So observational epidemiology is great for formulating hypotheses and asking questions, but it doesn’t answer any questions.  The same is true about this statement.  You know, it’s just an observation.  It’s just a correlation.  You can’t say for sure that, yes, it is the case that if we eat like that we’re going to avoid the diseases of civilization, so you have to be very, very careful with that.

But there are some folks who are coming from different fields, and really all they’re grasping on is this evolutionary thing, and they don’t realize that all it is really at the end of the day is a great way to formulate hypotheses. We have to be careful not to assume that correlation equals causation. That said, it is reasonable to use that as a starting place, to do some further investigation and see whether or not there is any truth to it.

Another typical argument goes like this: We evolved over millions of years without consuming the foods that became readily available only after the advent of agriculture.  Hence, we’re not adapted to these foods.  But this assumes that a species isn’t adapted to a food because it’s never consumed it.  And if you look at the evolutionary record, that’s incorrect.  There are plenty of examples throughout evolution where species discover novel sources of food and thrive on them. Like humans and meat? Humans started out by eating fruits, plants and insects.  Then they scavenged marrow from bones and also brains from skulls, and eventually became some of the meanest, baddest hunters on the planet.

Thus a better statement would be… There has been insufficient time and evolutionally pressure for complete adaptation to seed consumption to arise in homo-sapiens."

But my question would be, why should I care about some undetectable symptoms if they don't affect my heatlh or make me feel bad?

You shouldn't care if you don't want or feel the need to. Others see and hear enough correlation to "see what happens" when certain foods are removed. The problem arrises when someone removes a food, feels better and then goes on to assume everyone should do the same.

I agree with this, but... While I won't tell anyone they SHOULD follow "paleo", I do recommend it as a trial if things are not going well, i.e. someone is constantly getting sick with respiratory stuff (dairy could be the culprit), someone has continuous IBS related issues, someone can't lose weight no matter what they do, constant tendonitis that won't go away no matter what... I suggest they try it for 30 days and see how they feel at the end. If they don't like it, they can always go back to eating like they were.

In for round 2.

Ditto

The sequel is never as good as the original.

Shrek 2 thinks you need to cut it out with the absolutes

These are not my own words. This is from an interview between Chris Kresser and Mat Lalonde. I paraphrased to make it more concise. I think it is a fairy reasonable way to look at the whole paleo thing...

"There is really no such thing as a “paleo” diet because the foods are not available anymore.  The best you can do it try to mimic it.  So… a diet that’s meat, vegetables, tubers, and fruits… that’s what I call it.

Typical arguments go like this:  Our ancestors and modern hunter-gatherers, who were virtually free of diseases of civilization, consumed a diet that was mostly devoid of grains, legumes, and dairy. People then make the invalid inference that consuming a diet mostly devoid of grains, legumes, and dairy will thus allow us to be free of diseases of civilization.  Why is this invalid? Because it is observational and full of confounding factors (a variable that was not observed).

You can’t observe everything, so there’s almost always going to be, especially when it comes to human beings that are very complex and multivariate that live in a very complex and multivariate environment.  You are never going to see everything.  So observational epidemiology is great for formulating hypotheses and asking questions, but it doesn’t answer any questions.  The same is true about this statement.  You know, it’s just an observation.  It’s just a correlation.  You can’t say for sure that, yes, it is the case that if we eat like that we’re going to avoid the diseases of civilization, so you have to be very, very careful with that.

But there are some folks who are coming from different fields, and really all they’re grasping on is this evolutionary thing, and they don’t realize that all it is really at the end of the day is a great way to formulate hypotheses. We have to be careful not to assume that correlation equals causation. That said, it is reasonable to use that as a starting place, to do some further investigation and see whether or not there is any truth to it.

Another typical argument goes like this: We evolved over millions of years without consuming the foods that became readily available only after the advent of agriculture.  Hence, we’re not adapted to these foods.  But this assumes that a species isn’t adapted to a food because it’s never consumed it.  And if you look at the evolutionary record, that’s incorrect.  There are plenty of examples throughout evolution where species discover novel sources of food and thrive on them. Like humans and meat? Humans started out by eating fruits, plants and insects.  Then they scavenged marrow from bones and also brains from skulls, and eventually became some of the meanest, baddest hunters on the planet.

Thus a better statement would be… There has been insufficient time and evolutionally pressure for complete adaptation to seed consumption to arise in homo-sapiens."

I actually agree with basically everything in this. The Paleolithic era/caveman/ancestral lifestyle thing is more like some of the ideas behind the plan; it's not the whole plan in and of itself. You see these correlations, go 'huh, that's interesting...I wonder...' and then test it out, or research it, etc. etc. For a lot of people it seems to have helped them achieve a healthy happy life. Doesn't mean it's the only way, or will work for everyone, but it obviously works for some people, and nothing about the plan is, as far as I can tell, unhealthy, so what's the problem.