Well I think Paleo diets aren't scientific in terms of 'this is what prehistoric people ate and we should too!'. I'm sure prehistoric peoples weren't eating chicken breasts and the leanest meat possible. I'm also sure they weren't eating grain fed livestock or even animals that were domesticated and didn't have to worry about prey. They also weren't eating mercury tainted fish. It is just a different world today
A lot of "Paleo" eating is a kind of sick cult of history worship. I've known many Paleos who take it to the extreme. But, those give the system a bad name. The idea is, at the core, to eat the types of foods we would have eaten before the rise of agriculture. Wherever you are in the world, the fruit is basically the same (aside from a difference in vitamin content), so a human being that can digest a pomegranate can digest an apple - or so the theory goes. I freely admit I haven't looked up the science, if any exists, behind the idea.
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What does it mean for us today with choices we have? It means that we have a lot of options available for us and no matter what studies show, they always seem to show that increasing the amount of whole foods in our diet can lead us to be healthier and even lose weight in the process.
Yes. Yes. Yes. There is debate over the idea that 10,000 years isn't enough time to adapt our bodies to digest grain (or dairy). Some people seem to have the necessary enzymes and some don't. Whether you eat the two comes down to personal preference, but, no matter what, you're far better off eating stone-ground hard wheat than processed white wheat (or honey/fruit juice over refined white sugar, as a sweetener).
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I also haven't kept up with Paleo diets so I'm not sure if they are really trying to define themselves as what prehistoric people ate or if someone gave them that name and others just went along with it to describe a generic diet. If someone follows those style of diet and it works for them, then I say go for it but I know it wouldn't be the diet for me personally.
This is where it gets into cultism. Some off-shoots of Paleo entail eating what your ancestors ate. So...do I follow the diet of a primitive Celts? Which diet? When they migrated to the British Isles, from Europe, from Scandinavia? Or do I follow the diet of my Cherokee ancestors?
In the more general sense, the main idea is to identify things that are (or would be) naturally available to you. If there were no grocery stores, I'd subsist largely on a diet of lean game (rabbits, deer and squirrel), foul (geese, duck), local fish (carp, catfish), nuts (mainly black walnuts), fresh greens (dandelion), roots (onions, carrots) and berries/fruit (raspberries, strawberries, apples and pears). It's limited, but it really doesn't sound like a terrible diet. :P
It just seems the most simplistic metric is to ask if it can be eaten raw. If I can't eat it raw, then I just won't eat it. It removes any question of whether or not my body is adequately prepared to handle it.
Altari - I was thinking about some of my recent ancestors who actually ate very basic but I wouldn't follow them. They ate corn but a large part of their diet was berries, ground acorns (this kind of fascinates me), some fish and small game (squirrel, rabbit). Of course they had eaten like that for hundreds, potentially thousands of years. I personally wouldn't want to follow them but it is interesting.
And I think we obviously get a lot of messages about diet and what to eat but I actually didn't think we were being fed 'eat low fat or else' in the past 10-15 years. I think that was a big part of the 80s but it seemed to have dropped out of 'fashion' so to speak. For me personally, it took me a bit to rediscover a low fat diet and I do like a low fat whole foods diet and it makes sense for me. It is hard to differentiate from the 80s low fat junk food diet to a truly healthy low fat diet which can occur. Not to say that anyone has to eat that way as really calories are calories.
I don't care what diet you do, eliminating any food group is not going to make maintenance easier. I do not see anything wrong with including dairy and grains in a reasonable amount. I do avoid processed foods and junk food and desserts. There is also an increased risk of kidney disease from eating too much protein.
I don't think that is true. They have to be cured, don't they?
Anyway, I was just trying to learn more about paleo, as I had read some about it lately and found it interesting, as I had indicated. But questions are not going over well. I was rather interested in how it's decided which foods are appropriate and which are not, but that's seems to be very touchy if you don't already perfectly understand. But then what's the point of asking or discussing?
Hey JulieJ08! I was going to ask the same question about olives... I don't think anyone would like eating them in their raw form.
Here's what I think. I think that for tens of thousands of years, maybe hundreds of thousands of years, humans were eating anything they could get their hands on. That included insects, worms, and grubs, btw, but I don't see anyone clamoring to eat this wonderful source of protein.
Once we had fire, we learned that many more things could be made edible/palatable that way, as well as being preserved. Once we had agriculture, we learned more tricks for keeping ourselves alive. I'm not sure I agree that this was the "wrong" way to go.
Much as I admire Jared Diamond, his article seems pretty speculative to me and not too relevant. Plus he's known to be a grumpy guy...
My ancestors were all northern European, and so I presumably would do a lot better eating coldwater fish and wild deer. Rice--not so much! But everyone is different in this regard. If you like an idea, try it, that's what I think.
I don't think that is true. They have to be cured, don't they?
Anyway, I was just trying to learn more about paleo, as I had read some about it lately and found it interesting, as I had indicated. But questions are not going over well. I was rather interested in how it's decided which foods are appropriate and which are not, but that's seems to be very touchy if you don't already perfectly understand. But then what's the point of asking or discussing?
The curing process makes them taste "better." Otherwise, they're still edible but don't taste "good" to our palate (bitter, mainly).
As far as deciding which foods are appropriate, it all depends on who you ask. Some say that you need to identify what would have been available to "paleolithic" man and when, and eat on that cycle. Of course, that brings up the ethnicity issue. How can we actually "know" what they ate? Travel back in time and ask them?
Some will say eat only meat (therefore ignoring the purpose of molars). Others will say eat only produce (therefore ignoring the purpose of incisors). Others will say eat only what's available in your local area (therefore ignoring migration). The most balanced approached (read: the one that most people could stick to) that I've read is to cut out processed foods entirely.
I'm all for progress, you know? Perhaps science one day will show that electricity is bad for us and it is healthier to live without it but I wouldn't personally go that route. Science has suggested a link between the amount of ambient light at night and near-sightedness, but I'll take a well lit street at midnight over a dark alley any day. Bugs and grubs and carrion may have been primo choices in years gone by, but I'll take a nice single small piece of bruscetta with fresh roma tomatoes, mozzerella buffala, basil and olive oil with a nice glass of red wine every time.
Sometimes I think dieting and eating is over-thought -- moderation, cutting out clearly negative foods 90 percent of the time (i.e. Chef Boyardee, store-bought cupcakes with frosting, and so on), and lots of exercise will do the trick. Optimizing health through any rigid eating plan is dodgy at best since every study out there that says "don't eat from this food group" can be proved or disproved by another. I just wanna live my life, enjoy a few things on the odd occasion, and spread my risk so to speak by eating a wide variety of foods. Not to disrespect others choices and beliefs, so don't read that into my post! Just that all studies saying "eat dairy" are countered with "avoid dairy" and so on. Placing faith in studies like these are just not my bag, baby.
Interesting thread, though.
Last edited by misskimothy; 12-03-2009 at 08:54 PM.
I know cutting out grains is often thought of as cutting out a food group, I would argue that it is not.
The "food groups" to a degree are arbitrary, even "fictional" constructs (fictional in terms of being invented by humans to classify the unclassifiable).
For example, the "dairy" group - All other mammals do perfectly fine drinking only their own mother's milk only until weaned in early childhood. So why do humans "need" dairy. The fact is they do not, as long as they get sufficient calcium in other foods. Dairy is another food that we managed to do without until modern agriculture was invented. So for 95% or more of our species existence, we did ok without dairy. Many cultures do without adult-dairy, and seem to do fine, even today. So, why do Americans need it now (if indeed we do - it's because we're avoiding "food groups" we once included regularly - such as bone and insect foods).
If it's true (and there's some pretty compelling evidence) that homo-sapiens have only been eating a significant amount of grains (and dairy) for about 10,000 years (with the transition to agriculture), while our species has been around 195,000 years or more. So if we've gone virtually grainless for 95% of our known history, I think calling grain foods a "required food group," doesn't seem to hold much water.
There are also food sources, though that modern humans avoid, that primitive peoples (and even modern civilizations in other parts of the world) take advantage of - such as insects.
Insects contain so many nutrients, that to some peoples, it is entirely appropriate to classify insects and insect eggs as a food group (argueably separate from other proteins, because of the many unique micronutrients they contains). And unlike grains, humans have been eating insects, for as long as humans have existed.
Yet no one (well, virtually no one) in the USA is being criticised for eliminating the "entire food group" of insects.
There are other "food groups" that we ignore in the US, because we find them unpalatable (but that our ancestors ate regularly, and many modern peoples still do) - animal and fish bones, skin, organ meats, egg shells, insects...
We don't "group" these foods, only because we don't eat them.
Nature does not divide foods into food groups, humans do that - and since we've been doing it (only about 100 years in the USA), we've done and do it many different ways (so who and when is "right"). Depending on the time and place, there can be four groups, five groups, six groups, seven groups, sixteen food groups, thirty-two food groups (I didn't make this up, these have all been used, and many are still in use today).
While food groups are a convenient way to look at nutrition - it's more psuedo--science than science, as the divisions are rather arbitrary. While it's true that foods are lumped together based on similar micro- and macro-nutrient profiles, many foods overlap groups or fit into multiple groups, or don't fit well into any group.
I'm bumping this thread because it was the best discussion of paleo dieting I could find here. Nice job to all who participated. I've just spent several days studying a wide variety of diets and looking at some pretty heady peer reviewed research in an effort to make this next run at weight loss my last run at weight loss. Lord willing, of course.
While I agree the romanticizing of cavemen feels cultic in the many blogs, I am fairly convinced that this very low carb, grain free diet is the right one for me. This thread is titled "Reason to avoid grains" and I am convinced that I have very good reason to do exactly that.
Paleo dieting is far from unique. There's probably over a hundred low carb diet plans out there if you really look but a few things appeal to me about the paleo community. The scientific debunking (by a long list of doctors) of several (fat related ) myths really struck home with me. I believe I can craft a lifestyle, not a diet, on the principles I've been reading. They sure have.
Anyway, I wanted to bump this to see if it kick started the conversation. If not, I will start a new paleo thread (the others are pretty stale), and report my results and experiences. I'm pretty excited to give this a lifestyle a chance. I'm pre diabetic in need of a 150 pounds of weight loss. Cutting carbs has always been something key for me because of the family predisposition to diabetes, but doing so in addition to cutting fat has just been a complete failure for me. Some highly educated and sincere doctors are unpacking the research that suggests cutting the fat is simply not necessary. We'll see how this goes, but I have a feeling I have found my way.
I feel like, really, the paleo diet relies so heavily on meat - it really does not take the environment into consideration. This troubles me. Grains became popular because we needed to really find a filling way to feed mass numbers of people.
Instead we are going to feed all of our grain to the cows and chickens - then we will eat those?
I think the philosopher Immanuel Kant would say, according to his ethical system, that we have to find a healthy diet that we can honestly say is best for us and for the world....
Dr Stephan Guyenet (PhD, not MD) is blogging about this right now. I check back every day to see what comments are made, also. Plus, he said he will have a follow up in his next blog post:
