Ah, well, yes, then there are those heathens who like white chocolate. Death is too good for them.
Why wouldn’t our ancestors eat eggs?
Well, domesticated chicken eggs might be out. I may have been wrong on that point.
You’re wrong on both the egg and beef thing, Paleo includes a bunch of both, especially free-range, grass fed beef and pastured eggs.
I’ll admit to not being very familiar with the paleo thing and I’m probably about to strawman it, but it seems kinda hopless. I imagine the vast majority of the animals and plants our ancestors ate are extinct. That, or they dramatically changed due to domestication. Most of the stuff we eat now probably didn’t even exist 11K+ years ago. AFAIK the only way to get a good mammoth burger would be to grab some shovels and go to Siberia.
And even that assumes that what our ancestors ate is what’s best for our bodies. That seems like a huge step right there.
Yeah, I think beer is a no-no.
I’m no expert on the subject, but the real point is to eat natural and whole foods. Also, types of food (and quantities of them) that would have been easily foraged for, as opposed to factory farmed foods that came about as a result of modern agriculture.
The assumption there is that our ancestors evolved over millennia to eat such a diet, so that’s what our bodies are designed for. Part of the support for this idea is that obesity and diet-related health problems are exceedingly rare in wild animals. Only humans and domesticated animals have widespread problems as a result of diet.
There is Michael Pollan’s advice…
- Eat Food
- Not too much
- Mostly plants
Its really a complex question though. Whole grains are great for cheap calories - calories aren’t much of a problem in the American diet, but calories are the first necessary thing. Add in allergies, diseases, food intolerance, the various amount and types of work and exercise different people do in a day - and you don’t get a “one size fits all” solution. But the above is pretty consistent across most mainstream advice.
(By food, Pollan means 'things your grandmother would recognize as food that have a fairly simple ingrediant list" - Twinkies and Nacho Cheese Doritos do not qualify as food).
Paleo is basically the avoidance of industrial, processed food (including industrial seed-oils), and grains. Eat meat, vegetables, fish, fruit, nuts, and try to have the meat you eat come from animals that live as naturally as is practical in our society (grass-fed beef, for example, rather than feed-lot beef). It really isn’t that radical.
like this thread? this is why I usually don’t take part in them; threads about diet/nutrition inevitably devolve into a bunch of people who have no knowledge of nutrition or medicine advancing what they think is “correct” based on what sounds good to them. As it is this thread already contains at least one poster advancing the notion of eliminating grains, many fruits, and centering on animal fats; and at least one other poster advancing the philosophy of eating mostly grains and fruits and minimizing animal foods.
How in the hell do you reconcile this?
I reconcile it with the notion that different people are different - there is indisputable proof that some people can digest lactose as adults and some can’t, and that is based on genetics. I think it’s possible there are other gene-based dietary tolerances which could account for why some people do better with one diet and some with a different one.
That, and there’s probably more than one “right” way to eat. Humans can eat an enormous variety of foods, and it’s not beyond reason we have more flexibility in diet than some other species.
There’s also the fact that different people have different needs. Most of us are pretty sedentary, and food is abundant, so getting calories isn’t an issue, getting nutrients - vitamins, minerals, etc. - is the big deal for us. For our ancestors, typically more active, and particularly during times of food scarcity, getting just enough calories alone was the big issue in which case fats and sugars would have absolutely been needed in quantity. The nutritional needs of a toddler are different than those of a pregnant woman which are different than the needs of a 80 year old man. In other words, the diet that works best when you’re 12 might not be suitable at 35 or 90.
That said, I think Pollan’s advice - eat food, not too much, mostly plants - is a pretty good guideline. In general, the less processed the food, the less altered, the better it is (although some foods, such as cheese, inherently are processed). Even our Mighty Hunter Ancestors weren’t always successful on the hunt, so they ate a lot of plant food in between successful hunts. And not eating to excess, regardless of what you’re eating, avoids obesity which isn’t good for you.
One of my issues with the idea of a “paleo diet” is that a lot of authentic wild foods actually aren’t that healthy. In the hunter-gatherer days meat was NOT an every day food (unlike Atkins and a lot of the “caveman” diets I’ve seen). A lot of wild foods require detoxification to be edible, nor is that a problem for just humans - wild birds have been documented eating various types of clay after eating berries and fruits containing toxins, and primates have been known to eat charcoal after consuming some irritating foods, and both clay and charcoal can absorb some of those toxins (hence their use in human stomach/diarrhea remedies for ages). A lot of what agriculture has done is remove the naturally occurring toxins from our food crops, making them healthier/easier to consume. Paleo meats - the real ones - were full of parasites, and no one checked the hunter’s kill for possible transmissible diseases.
Yes, some hunter-gatherers lived to a healthy, vital old age - those that didn’t succumb to less than perfect bodies, accidents, periodic starvation, parasites, and the occasional hunted animal fighting back. They avoided cancer and heart disease in part by dying young (by our standards), before they could acquire the diseases of old age.
Yes, it makes all the sense in the world to eat healthy, exercise, and take care of yourself. But it’s like arguing one can only be healthy by running - no, there are plenty of other exercises one can do that will give you the same benefits, and some folks may do better with, say, swimming than running and someone else may get better results from a bicycle.
(btw, to clarify my post above- I’m not specifically referring to SDMB in my gripe, this topic trends the same way on any message board and IRL.) with that out of the way.
Broomstick, I don’t disagree. I think (key word) that in the general case, a diet somewhere between Pollan’s recommendations and Atkins’ can work well in general. The one thing to keep in mind is that Atkins is not and to the best of my knowledge has never been about “eating all the meat you want all the time.” That notion came out of brain-dead news/media outlets that would start off any piece they did on Atkins with a shot of eggs, sausage, and bacon sizzling away on the griddle of some greasy-spoon. The core tenet of Atkins is “fat is not evil, don’t obsess over minimizing it. Refined sugar and processed carbs are actually the bad stuff.” It does not say “gorge yourself silly on ribeyes and pork bellies.”
yeah, this. and realistically, this is the philosophy of a lot of the “new” diets (atkins, Pollan, south beach, etc.) they’re all alternative approaches to the core of getting empty processed junk out of your life.
ETA: I think one big step would be for people to stop drinking so damn much soda. I’ve seen people who drink enough that in terms of calories from sugar they’re practically eating the equivalent of 8 or 9 candy bars a day!
I do not know if nutrition is a science or not, but few doctors have any training in it. Where can you get the truth on it? Turn on the TV and the quack of the month is telling you what to do. Next month , somebody new contradicts while claiming great expertise.
I suppose we should all listen to Susan Summers.
I like reading scientific studies saying ‘minor lifestyle change X can reduce your chances of type 2 diabetes, depression or heart disease by 40%’. Those are interesting because they are scientifically validated (hopefully neutral, but many of those studies also seem to be funded by groups that stand to gain by promoting them), they are realistic lifestyle changes and they treat alterations in diet/exercise as good things in and of themselves, not as tools to achieve weight loss (meaningful long term weight loss requires draconian changes in lifestyle that are not realistic for most people).
I don’t know if anyone has invented a list of lifestyle changes based on the above criteria. But they should.
I think Michael Pollan would be seriously dismayed to see his name in this grouping, or his thoughts on food characterized as either “new” or a “diet”!
not sure that I care.
You don’t care about his feelings, or about your own understanding?
the former. it was an off the cuff grouping, not a comparison or value judgement.
Nice to see the old “Nobody can lose weight! Can’t be done!” excuse. keep telling yourself that if it gets you through the day. The billions of people who eat regular, smallish, balanced meals and are minimally active (20 minutes 3X weekly is hardly draconian) somehow manage to do it and are generally both slim and healthy.
Everyone is looking for a system. They want someone else to take responsibility for their choices. You guys are looking for a single answer for a question that experience show doesn’t have one. We all know healthy 80 year olds who got that way with any number of diets.
But don’t use the fact that there is no one answer to abdicate your own responsibilities. You KNOW the basic principles. You know being lazy screws up your metabolism. You know if you eat too much, you get fat, and all things equal that can bring bad things in your life that usually don’t some to slim people so quickly. You know soda and white bread don’t add anything good and that spinach and blueberries do. You can’tjust throw up your hands and say “There is no system! So I might as well eat cake and bologna by the pound.”
For goodness sake, you go shopping every week or so, right? If you are sluggish, fat and/or unhealthy, at least you know for sure that one system doesn’t work. Put something else- anything else- in your basket. Repeat until you find something that works. Boom, there is your personal perfect diet.
Doubtful, as for starters that would require a diet eliminating all those nutrients which can produce allergy or intolerance. We’d end up eating pills.
Right. Keep in mind that, at the start of Atkins – the induction phase, which is what most people think of when they think of the diet – you are getting 20g or less of carbs per day. Most people get the majority of their calories from carbs, and all a sudden, you’re at near-nil rates (basically enough to get in green vegetables and some kinds of dairy). Calories start to come from fat. I know it’s weird to think of dieters eating butter, cheese, and oils with relative abandon, but it’s actually pretty hard to get enough to eat without doing so. It’s also pretty hard to overeat on fat alone, since there are limits on protein as well. For what it’s worth, it varies on weight and gender, but around 6oz of protein per meal is typical. That’s not “lots of meat”.
People look at dieters eating fried eggs and coffee with heavy cream and go “well, that’s obviously stupid”, forgetting that the same person is cutting out the grains and sugars that compromise the bulk of most diets. They’re also ignoring that the diet heavily emphasizes the importance of the vegetables. It’s not uncommon for me to go through a couple of bags of salad mix per day eating low-carb. Salad’s a great vegetable choice, has lots of fiber, and is a good fat-delivery system that doesn’t require a lot of prep time.
Low-carb is still reasonably contentious, but most nutritionists today would agree that the push to create low-fat foods has created a lot of really bad “diet” choices. Replacing fat with sugar is not an improvement.