Please let’s not devolve into if paleo is healthy or not or the whole “calories-in vs calories-out” debate. I just want to focus on this one aspect.
According to Paleo, cheese is bad while fruit in moderation is good and one of the big reasons is that cheese has lactose - a sugar. But running some numbers a POUND of swiss cheese has one-third the sugar of a single apple. If the issue were sugar, cheese is absurdly low in sugar. So the “Holy fuck!!! It has sugar!!!” just does not make sense.
Yes apples have fiber and vitamins but cheese has protein. Searching around there are other things mentioned: dairy promotes leaky gut, dairy is made to promote growth so it is an anti-dieting food, we are physically not made to deal with other species milk, etc. and maybe there is some truth to those but it still comes across as woo until I see an actual scientific study showing what causes “leaky gut” and the effect on your body or that milk causes unnatural growth and fattening and that it is not the hormones dairy farmers are adding to the cows diets.
Yeah, but the science behind eating a paleo diet isn’t proven. It is an assertion, “We will be healthier if we eat what we evolved to eat” that isn’t proven. And aside from that, the things paleo people eat aren’t the same things in the same ratios as what we ate back then.
It’s useful, I think, as a rule that makes it hard to get fat. If you limit yourself to the set of food, you’ll probably be eating fairly healthy, as compared to McDonalds every day.
AFAIK “paleo” is all about avoiding manufactured foods. Cheese (and bread) would be “manufactured” because it takes significant work to make them, more than simply cooking them.
There are also different types of sugars, and your body copes them differently. Sucrose, fructose, dextrose, lactose, whatever, that the body converts into usable glucose. Most adults are lactose intolerant to some degree, except for some lucky ones of northern European descent, and that intolerance makes it worth avoiding. For some Paleo people, the fruits to eat are the ones lower in fructose, like berries, and to avoid fruits high in fructose, like apples.
Part of the problem with scientific assessment of any diet is that different body types respond differently. One man’s meat is another’s poison, and all that. Even the same person can eat different foods at different times of life.
Some of have evolved since paleolithic days. From a recent study by Daniel Bradley, Trinity College, Dublin:
Although I’ve been warned to avoid mentioning “calories-in vs calories-out”, I’d suggest that our ancestors spent more time hunting & gathering than working desk jobs with internet access & streaming Netflix on the couch…
And most of those people died in childbirth or infancy. Subtract out violence and disease, and it’s not at all certain that modern people are healthier, diet and lifestyle-wise.
Of course, more to your point, it’s not at all certain that “paleo” people were healthier, either. It’s a hopeful guess on the part of its proponents.
