My 2¢:
Probably much more significant than grain, dairy and other agricultural foods is the tremendous amount of sugar in modern diets. Even if one avoids sweets and non-diet beverages, sugar is added to so many products that avoiding it is challenging. Sugar is added to most bread, cold cereal, cured meats, sauces, peanut butter, prepared meals and snack foods.
Never mind a paleolithic diet, we could use to go back to a pre-industrial diet.
My father forwarded me this article. I’m basically copying here my response to to him.
Thanks…yes, interesting, but not uncommon response from nutritionists and industrial food advocates (Particularly ones who recommend grains as the largest caloric portion of a diet.)
The Paleo diet isn’t eating what cavemen ate, it’s eating the way cavemen ate. The biggest complaint from nutritionists is that without the grains, people are not getting the vitamin and mineral nutrition from those grains…the problem with that argument is that the ground grown fruits, vegetables and nuts all have more of those nutrients than the grains ever did…grains are very calorie to nutrition weak.
Another common complaint from nutritionists who don’t bother looking at the details of the diet, is the meat, fish and egg content (not a point in this article thankfully). Because so many nutritionists are being trained to embrace vegetarian diet, or vegetarian leaning diets these days, the fact that anyone would promote meat is an insult to them. The problem with that argument is, the amount of meat recommended in the paleo diet are tiny compared to even the normal mainstream diet.
The amounts of meat recommended are 45% to 55%…but it’s by calorie…not by mass. How much salad do you think you’d have to eat to equal the calories in a single serving of meat? It’s huge!
(example: Spinach 7 calories per cup…to equal 250 calorie 6 oz cut of pastured steak, almost 37 cups of spinach would be required)…the diet is mostly vegetarian. Plus, pastured and wild meats (which is what Cordain recommends) don’t have the high fat content and do have higher Omega acids content, so they actually repair muscular and tissue rather than damaging it.
The problem with grains is that humans did evolve to respond to them…we respond to them pretty much the same way we respond to sugar.
People get upset when you tell them they have to give up bread and sugar to be healthy. What’s more interesting is how fast the nay sayers are converted when they try it. Going on 4 years for me and still have not had a single sick day since I started…and I used to catch every virus that came down the pike.
In the end, the paleo diet is a catchy name to wrap around a diet constructed of the primary elements of evolution based eating…hunter gathers hunted and gathered…the balance wasn’t always there, but the way our bodies respond to our food is a good indication of what that balance would have been. It would be a little different for everyone, but one of the first things I noticed after I got the grains and sugars out of my system was that when I got hungry, it was a very specific craving…very very specific… for instance eggs and chard with dill and basil.
By the way…the splurge meals on the diet can be filled with grains and dairy. Even paleo man stripped heads from live grain stalks and killed the occasional buffalo or elk carrying milk. It’s a good way to help bump up the weight you lose when on the diet.
Yep. I suspect that paleo diets suffer from the same side-effect as things like the blood type diets where the actual restrictions are irrelevant. The success comes from the fact that you’re taking an active role in monitoring and controlling what you eat.
MODERATOR NOTE: This was a response to Lumpy, the flow got goofed up with I merged threads. – CKDH
What does he mean by ‘raw fats’? If you’re eating game you’re probably eating raw fat. Does he just mean uncooked?
Raw fat as in an avocado.
Wouldn’t “fruit and berries, vegetables and nuts” cover that?
MODERATOR NOTE:
caveman.smile, welcome to the Straight Dope Message Boards and thanks for your comments. Since there was already a thread on this topic, I’ve merged your post into the existing thread. Hope you don’t mind, it’s just helpful for readers if everything about a single topic is together in one thread. And, as I say, welcome and I hope you’ll look around a post some more!
shrug It’s possible Cecil and I are using different definitions. My experience with the paleo world is that when people say raw fats they mean things like avocados, olives and cold pressed oils.
Ok, I don’t know anything about paleo diets. That’s a reasonable explanation.
Cecil:
This is in response to your article on the paleo diet, found here:
Will a Paleolithic diet do me any good? - The Straight Dope.
Unfortunately, I don’t think you did a very good job representing what the paleo diet really is. Some of this is not your fault as like in all things related to diet, religion, politics, and Beyoncé, there is a lot of wishful thinking and misinformation out there to sort through.
To have a more sober and thoughtful discussion on the merits of the paleo approach I’d recommend the book “The Paleo Manifesto” and the documentary “The Perfect Human Diet.” I think both do a good job of explaining and supporting the thesis in a reasonable way. At any rate, I would consider that to be a more balanced approach the simply googling “paleo diet skeptic” skimming a few articles and then writing a quick 1,000 words or so.
The basic thesis of Paleo, is that organisms tend to thrive in environments similar to the ones in which they adapted to through evolution. This is why goldfish have failed to successfully colonize arid grasslands, and it should be an intrinsically obvious and agreeable proposition. Organisms may survive and through evolution eventually adapt to new environments. For example, if we continue to raise gorillas in confined spaces in zoos and feed them gorilla biscuits instead of the diet they eat in the wild, I have no doubt gorillas will eventually adapt to a sedentary lifestyle of munching on gorilla biscuits. In the meantime though, gorillas in captivity fed this diet suffer from a variety of maladies that their wild kin do not. Admittedly zoo animals have some advantages, too and are less likely to suffer from parasitic infections, etc.
I use the paleo diet because, because, quite simply, I want the best or both worlds to maximize my health and enjoyment of life. I want to thrive. If I spend the next five or six decades, eating highly processed foods, being sedentary, and feeling shitty all the time, and then eventually falling victim to modern day health problems of obesity, diabetes, hypertension etc it will be small consolation to know that my suffering will result in more adapted descendants millennia hence. I want to feel good now.
The fact is that human diet changed very dramatically with the onset of the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, and that we are still adapting to those changes. For example, we are still adapting to eating dairy as adults, and that is a relatively new change. As a result some people are lactose intolerant. They lack the mutation that began to spread as dairy consumption in adulthood became more prevalent.
There are foods that humans are well adapted to, ones we are partially adapted to, and ones to which we are not adapted. Eating the latter doesn’t necessarily mean we get sick or die, but if we want to stay healthy, feel good and thrive we should try and maximize the ones to which we are well adapted (recognizing of course that their are variations within populations, and individuals, I.e. Lactose)
Contrary to your article we do have a very good idea of what the diet of ancient man was like, both through archeology and chemical analysis of human bone fragments. It is possible to analyze strontium levels, calcium, collagen, and the makeup of human remains, and tell in great detail what that person ate. Combining that with analysis of enamel, tooth wear, and the general archeological record and a very detailed and clear picture of those diets is available.
Here is one such article on Latin American populations I found in about 10 seconds:
http://luna.cas.usf.edu/~rtykot/PR39%20-%20Enrico%20Fermi%20isotopes.pdf.
There are many more easily available to the interested reader. A detailed discussion can be found in both the sources I listed at the top of this post.
The bottom line is that up until about 10,000 years ago, our ancestors ate a lot of protein, nuts, berries, fruits, some vegetables and a lot less (if any) dairy, grains, legumes than we do now, and they didn’t eat any of today’s very highly processed foods.
Today’s food pyramid, or “plate” is designed by committee, lobbyists, politicians and may not really represent what is healthiest for us. Livestock diets are less controversial because the livestock really don’t get a say. Animals on a feed lot are fed a diet specifically designed to fatten them up, to make them eat past the point of satiation. It bears little resemblance to their adapted diets, and they suffer health consequences and often require supplementary medication to keep them alive while they are on that diet. The composition of the feed lot diet is virtually identical to the FDAs recommended food plate. No thanks.
Food today is a business, a product that is designed specifically to make us crave and consume it. It is designed to make us choose it and to maximize our consumption of it. It is not designed to help us thrive.
I don’t think it’s foolish to think that as a whole we are only partially adapted to our current diets and lifestyle and that it has changed faster than our ability to adapt to it, and that this created some modern health issues. If we are suffering due to that maladaptation it makes logical sense to adjust our diets and lifestyles to the degree that enables us to thrive.
That is what paleo is about, and if it’s a fad it’s one that’s at least five million years old.
Wow. A little over two years since you last posted. Great post, as usual.
When I think about the good lucky cavemen, I cry like a baby.
The problem for me is: do we have to call it paleo and insist on the “back to caveman” reasoning?
As Cecil pointed out, this diet has many things in common with high-fiber, high-vegetable, low glycemic index diets. I’ve eaten like that for some years and feel better for cutting out the junk food. Sure. But will cutting out the lentils (one my my faves) really help me, and (if so) is that really because my ancestors didn’t run into it? Can we really say that? Or is this just that these are pieces of a good diet however you label it, and the paleo reasoning (and thus the dairy and grain hate) is entirely post hoc?
I am dissatisfied with Cecil’s article, but not for your reasons, but because he could have delved more into scientific findings on this than he did.
As Scylla pointed out, there is a range of variables and mutations both between populations and between individuals.
I, for one, intend to continue utilizing my mutant genes that allow me to digest dairy products a half century past weaning. It’s an adaption my lineage has made and I see no reason to disregard it. On the other hand, my body doesn’t play nice with legumes. I’ve met people who are the other way around. No big deal from my viewpoint. It’s normal variability.
Paleo diet intrigues me as a concept because it considers what we are evolved to eat. When done well, it acknowledges that different populations were under different pressures and in different environments with different diets. It can make people be more thoughtful about what they eat. These can be good things. It can be paid if taken to excess, the woo-woo takes over or people use it to beat other people over the head.
This is the hole in the Paleo diet theory as I read it, we haven’t stopped evolving.
No one has mentioned the amounts of food we eat. Seems to me, if we want to eat like cave-peoples ate … we need to eat a lot less … and work much much harder to get what little food we could. In light of the fact that humans basically covered the globe by 10,000 years ago, I’d say we evolved to eat a wide variety of foods … we’re just an adaptive type of critter. Oh, and veggies don’t grow in Eskimoland
Yeah, I read an interesting book a few years ago talking about both the Paleo diet and the Mediterranean diet, in their current faddish forms, leave out the massive periods of fasting inherent to both actual diets. Hunter-gatherers often go several days at a time with negligible amounts of food, and the Greek islanders studied for the Mediterranean diet belonged to an orthodox church with tons of fast days.
^ This is along the lines of what I was thinking. How much of pre-historic man’s health was attributable to diet, versus the amount of physical activity they were required to output every single day in order to just survive?
Does current thought on the “paleo” diet address physical activity? Is this another case of where people want to eat their way to health and fitness?
Today one barely has to expend any calories at all, yet has easy and cheap access more than ever before to conveniently located groceries and quik-marts.
Personally, I want to eat what my ancestors that decided to give up hunting and gathering and became civilized ate…I’m adapted by thousands of years of bread, cheese and the like for my current lifestyle and have no desire to go back to hunting and gathering and periodically starving and such. 
Seriously, though, humans ate a bewildering variety of things. That’s what allowed us to move out of Africa and pretty much colonize the entire planet. There are very few environments that humans haven’t been able to adapt too, and mainly that’s because we could eat just about anything…we could and we DID. Trying to nail down a ‘paleolithic diet’ is going to vary depending on which paleo population one feels we were ‘best’ or optimally adapted too (well, that, and then trying to extrapolate what we ate based on the archeological clues still out there). IOW, it’s going to be a lot of guessing and setting arbitrary targets of which paleo population best epitomizes humans. Does one pick a paleo population in a coastal region? Island region? How about mountains? Deserts? Semi-arid? Tundra? Jungle? Plains? Which one is optimal? Or do you pick and choose based on your own preference? And why wouldn’t you pick foods that took us from hunting and gathering to civilization? I mean, somehow we were able to expand our population (and from an evolutionary perspective our chances to mate) by changing our diet…a diet that we might not have been bred in the wild for, but one that obviously we thrived on enough to take us from a fairly small population of wandering hunters and gatherers to, well, what we have today.
Alternating between binging and starving? Or eating whatever you can find or catch, like a coyote or raccoon?
Please don’t take this wrong, but I hate you. 
And I had no idea until after he died that the Alex Chilton all the indies swooned over was that gravel-voiced kid from The Box Tops.