compliance

Are YOU on the Faileo Diet?
02/20/2010 - 17:03

 You've heard about this great thing called the paleo diet and you decide to try it. Lean meat, salads, fruit, some mixed nuts, some fasting...how hard can it be? Unfortunately, a few days later you are sick with hunger. You crave some delicious potato chips and give in. You end up back where you started. You decide the paleo diet is bunk.

Unfortunately, you never were on the paleo diet. You were on the faileo diet. It's unfortunate because certain people have been plugging this diet as THE paleo diet, when really, it's not.  

 

WHAT? Why are leafy vegetables, lean meats and seeds in the middle? It's simple- they are a total waste of any true forager's time. Think about optimal foraging theory: how much time does it take to collect 500 calories of leaves, seeds, or lean meat? How easy are they to digest? 

Well, it takes a freaking long time and any forager would say...why bother? (unless the particular leaf or seed has some prized medicinal quality). The amount of protein in lean meat is hard to digest. Inuits threw the lean meat to their dogs! Seeds and leaves aren't that easy to digest either. Humans, unlike many other apes, can't extract much energy from leaves. 

Foragers spend their time looking for energy dense foods- coconut, yams, and of course...the king...ANIMAL FAT! It's easy to digest and has tons of calories. If you are in a scarce environment, calories are simply king. Eat enough calories should be the number one rule of the paleo diet. Foragers that didn't eat enough calories died. If you are utilizing intermittent fasting, doesn't forget to feast too! Also, when you are fasting you should NOT feel hungry. If you do, you probably aren't ready for IF and you need to nourish and heal your body to be ready. A doctor in NYC that uses the paleo diet to treat illness has his patients fast before a physical. How hungry they were is a good indicator of health. The practicing paleo dieters typically don't experience hunger at all. 

Furthermore, how bad are those less-evolutionarily appropriate foods like butter? They probably aren't as good as pork belly, but plenty of agrarian cultures thrived on them. Don't fall into an obsessive purity trap- figure out what foods actually drag you down, and don't sweat the rest. Gluten grains upset my stomach, but butter doesn't hurt me as far as I can tell. 

As far as I'm concerned salads aren't really food. It's hard to get enough calories from them without resorting to oils, which aren't really that paleo. They are maybe medicine, maybe dessert...I've had some enjoyable ones, but relying on them as meals has led to many an episode of hungry angry irritability. 

Try counting your calories. If you are eating salads, chicken breast, lean reindeer jerky, salmon filets, or Planter's mixed nuts...no wonder you feel sick! These foods are fine in moderation, but they aren't truly nourishing from a caloric perspective without some fat or carbs or both. Eat some freaking pork belly....a lot of pork belly maybe in some mashed tubers...and some fatty lamb cooked coconut milk...and some short ribs cooked in tallow...and a bunch of shrimp cocktails. Eat that stuff until you aren't hungry and then tell me whether the paleo diet works for you. 

I don't think lean meats or greens are BAD, there just aren't meals in themselves. Don't eat greens unless they have bacon on them is a rule I personally follow :)

PS: Someone pointed out that nuts probably don't belong on that second tier in terms of logical foraging because most are really more trouble to open than they are worth. Mongongo nuts are an exception. Most others like butternut are impossible to open and have almost no flesh to reward you with, or are easy to open but hard to detoxify like acorns. 

Comment?: 23
Simple Steps For A Better Diet
02/16/2010 - 13:02

Outside Magazine recently had one of their reporters try the Paleo Diet for Athletes. His cholesterol improved, but he felt hungry and irritable, which caused him to ultimately dismiss the diet. I think one of the problems with The Paleo Diet for Athletes is that is doesn't do a complete paradigm shift. Eating lots of lean protein and continuing to fear fat is actually not a paleo diet.

I don't believe that paleo diet is a magic diet that I want everyone to follow. However, I do believe thinking about diet in terms of human evolution is extremely valuable. Many of my close friends and family members aren't going to be paleo any time soon either whether it's because they oppose eating animals or because they can't imagine breakfast without oatmeal. Luckily, I think there are simple steps anyone can take to improve their diet using evolution as a lense.

  • Rethink fat. So many people think saturated fat is the villian and soybean oil is going to save us from heart disease. Reading Gary Taube's Good Calories Bad Calories is a good way to allay your fears that fat is the problem. Follow up with Fat: An Appreciation of a Misunderstood Ingredient by Jennifer McLagan to learn about the health and culinary benefits of fat. Learn about how real food nourishes and fake foods kill with Nina Planck's Real Food. If you are interested in the health of your brain, skin, and other vital organs you can read about the importance of omega-3 fatty acids in The Queen of Fats by Susan Allport.This is also a good time to look at the vegetable oils on your shelves as elucidated by this post in Mark's Daily Apple and deciding which ones are industrial junk and which ones are
  • Banish junk! Whether you are a committed vegetarian or interested in paleo, you can benefit from ditching doughnuts, candy, cookies, chips, and other junk. Sugar Shock by Connie Bennett is a good primer on the problems with sugar. The Whole Soy Story tells you why boca burgers and soy milk might not be such great choices. Explore the drawbacks of grains, particularly gluten, in Going Against The Grain by Melissa Smith. Learn about the consquences of industrial food in The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan.

  • Think about food evolutionaily! Rethink your perception of paleolithic peoples and hunter-gatherers by reading Jared Diamond's essay The Worst Mistake(FREE) and Weston A. Price's Nutrition and Physical Degeneration(FREE). Learn about and try the paleo diet. There are many good books that you can start with like The Primal Blueprint or Neanderthin. Plus there are tons of free web resources ranging from blogs to Paleohacks. Question whether "inevitable nuisances" in life like acne, heavy periods, stomach upset, constipation, etc. are inevitable or caused by diet. Try the paleo diet if you can and see if your health improves, maybe you can ID foods that cause problems.

  • Hmm....I don't think this diet is for me, since grains/dairy does't bother me enough, I don't want to eat much meat, etc.. That's OK: you can still benefit from thinking about food evolutionarily. Reducing junk is one big step, but you can go further by reudcing the potential hazards of neolithic foods and unlocking their full nutritional potential through traditional preparations like fermentation and culturing . Learn more about this in the great cookbook Nourishing Traditions or the more vegetarian-friendly Full Moon Feast and Wild Fermentation (more here). You can also simply benefit by improving food quality- eating more nutritious foods like kale, yams, bone marrow, seaweed, grass fed meat, and wild fish. Get rid of boneless skinless chicken breasts and eat pastured pork belly or oysters instead. If you chose to eat grains, then ditch the plastic packaged store-bought bread and learn about fermenting and soaking traditional grains to unlock their nutrition. Follow blogs that promote traditional nutrition like Kelly The Kitchen Kop or The Nourishing Gourmet.

I write this from personal interest. While my boyfriend is interested in health, he doesn't see the need to go paleo and he really doesn't like eating meat. But it's very easy for us to eat nourishing meals together with things like pumpkin soup, sauteed mushrooms, buttered yams, pickled carrots, and garlic kale. Admittedly, I try to steer him away from things like Boca Burgers/soy milk and towards alternatives like homemade fermented dosas, properly soaked beans and farro, and traditional sourdough bread, but those things are delicious, so it doesn't take much convincing.

Comment?: 7
De gustibus non est disputandum
02/12/2010 - 21:34

 

Occasionally I will hear from someone who does badly on a paleo diet or whose health improved when they gave up meat. It's very interesting to me. I guess I' shouldn't really surprised then by Matt Stone's latest post which is a rant about how paleo kills your sex drive (WTF?????* Lierre's assertion that paleolithic is a diet for a smaller population is about economics, as obviously grains allows us to feed more people) and also a letter from a woman who experienced horrible digestive and other problems on paleo. It's so bizarre because paleo cured the exact same problems for me. 

But then again, I've rarely been 100% paleo. I have this fantasy that if I were I would suddenly become super woman or something, but the errant bowl of grits with butter never has made me feel terrible enough to make me stop having cheat meals. I know people who are 100% and honestly they seem no healthier than people who eat butter or an occasional beer. 

But I also see a pattern in people who don't do well on paleo. I'm not blaming people...it's hard to do a paradigm shift and admittedly my first foray into low carb wasn't so successful either. I think it started working only when I stopped thinking low-carb and started thinking about food quality. Some Purdue chicken beasts and steamed broccoli isn't quality in my opinion. Grass-fed beef, oysters, seaweed, purple yams, blueberries, kale...these sort of things form a nutrient-dense nucleus for my diet. When I'm really craving grits or bacon lentils, I personally don't sweat it. Gluten, vegetable oil, and sugar free + high nutrient density seems to solve most of my own problems, the rest was just tweaking. So my own experiences can't refute Matt's assertions. 

But I just don't buy that low carb is dangerous. Plenty of arctic peoples ate low carb their entire lives and reproduced and didn't keel over and die! I think people should work on removing the worst offenders like sugar from their diet and simply do what works for them. 

*In Robb Wolf's podcasts he talks about many women in his gym getting pregnant while doing paleo, but he has also had some questions from people who lost their period...I would be curious to know the nutrition intake numbers of people who that happens to. 

Comment?: 11
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