philosophy

 Have you guys heard of Paleo 2.0 yet? If not, I recommend reading about it. Dr. Kurt Harris says that Paleo has become polluted by dumb ideas like:

• Hominin ancestors ate only lean meats and little saturated fat
• A paleolithic diet is characterized by plenty of cultivated nuts
• A paleolithic diet has plenty of sweet fruit year-round - fruits that did not even exist until they were artificially bred a few hundred years ago
• A Hunter-gatherer diet always had a precise balance between “acidic” and “basic” foods and failure to maintain this precision would lead to calcium being “leached” from your bones, resulting in osteoporosis.
• A paleolithic diet has plenty of grilled salmon and skinless chicken breasts.
• Eating fish is essential to brain growth and general health.
• Milk and cheese are causes of cancer.
• Eggs can be eaten, but you should throw away the yolks to avoid too much cholesterol.

I agree, but I'd add a few more:

• leaky gut is the case of most illnesses
• X neolithic foods cause leaky gut
• X food is bad because of some botantical "fact" like it's from the "new world"

I've noticed this quite a bit since Chris Masterjohn has two new posts on Gluten Sensitivity which attack the first two bad ideas: 

Gluten Sensitivity -- Promises and Problems

How to Properly Interpret Ex Vivo Studies

Maybe I am sensitive because Chris is my boyfriend, but mostly I am amused by the comments he gets. I have thus dramatized a few of them from various authors in this video for your amusement:

As for the last point, I will just say that every time I read a blog post by a paleoautomaton recommending "yams" (sweet potatoes) and condeming the evils of white potatoes, I just chuckle at the botanical ignorace.

Overall, at this point I'm annoyed enough with the whole thing that I'm almost embarrased when people call me paleo. When I think about things that are important to me, are they really paleo? Is it worth being associated with this whole nonsense? But then I remember that Chris isn't even paleo and he still has to endure it :) 

So, what's important to me at this point?

• Grass-fed local meat from good farms
• elimination of crap ingredients like soybean oil
• that people stop fearing good fats

And these three things, while they have been shaped by my involvement in paleo, aren't paleo per se. 

I was getting quite disappointed today reading Art De Vany's new book, which is out on Kindle. He's one of the godfathers of the paleo movement and it was though his essay and blog that I discovered this way of eating. A couple of years ago he put his blog behind a paywall and as a poor undergrad I didn't have the money to spare for it. I keep meaning to subscribe now that I have a "real job," but haven't gotten around to it. Apparently since our parting, my conception of this diet has diverged. Reading his book and Cordain's new cookbook I can't help but think "I don't eat like this at all...am I even paleo?"

The food section of Art's book kind of breaks my heart and make me not want to read the rest:

• "Red meat is fine, in moderation, but (white-meat) poultry is generally healthier."
• "because the truth is that no fat is particularly good for you."
• "But most common kitchen oils—canola, vegetable, corn, palm—are unnecessary. If you must cook in oil and want to do so at a higher temperature than permitted by olive oil, then use canola oil (made from rapeseed but called “canola” because it is a more felicitous name)"
• "The occasional beet or raw carrot is fine, too."
• "It goes without saying that butter and lard should be avoided completely."
• "Make four hard-boiled eggs, but don't eat two of the yolks. Eggs are healthy, but you should skip the yolks now and then."

It's like we don't even eat the same diet. My diet is centered around the idea of fat being something good— a bearer of vitamins and good energy. The idea of restricting beets, egg yolks, red meat, or butter is horrifying to me. As is the idea of using canola as anything but a industrial shoe-cleaner (it works OK for this). Besides, where are the mentions of organ meats? If we are going to be orthodox, let's at least go all out. A commenter on my Cordain post posted out a study that Cordain did on game fat content. Sorry, turkey breast and olive oil are a lame substitute for bacon, but they are also a lame substitute for elk marrow. 

Luckily for Art, he doesn't seem to follow this diet himself too badly, as he describes many meals of ribs, which aren't a heralded lean meat by any stretch. Whatever he's doing he looks great, but as a woman who is planning to bear children, I think his fat and carbohydrate restriction is unnecessary and I'm going to look towards a diet a little more nourishing. Furthermore, it's hard for me to recommend something unnecessarily restrictive to a newbie. Robb Wolf's book gives targeted restrictions and biochemical reasoning behind them. 

In the end his views are colored by how he got into this, which was through a loving effort to help his diabetic son and wife. So carb restriction is probably a residual of that.

But I suspect is that too much interest in our paleolithic past is blinding because we can't know that much about it, so we get locked into just-so stories based on VERY limited datasets and the ultimate premise that we haven't changed much since on a genetic level. But we have.

In the end, my diet is based on my essentially conservative nature, which leads me to put more stock in living traditions than in bones. I'm more interested in Kitavans than I am in cro-magnons. We can learn more, on a holistic level, from them than from our paleolithic ancestors. Yes, "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution," but I'm interested in evolution as a light to gain more insight rather than as a diet in itself.

Really, how much can you get from paleolithic remains? That we ate animals and fish. What else did we eat? How did we eat them? There are little glimpses here in there in the hearth fires from eons ago, but we mostly have guesses.

It doesn't make sense for carbs to be suboptimal in the light of the Kitavans. Or for red meat, butter, beets, or egg yolks to be suboptimal in light of traditional cultures that eat them. If these things were behind diseases of civilization, we'd see such diseases in traditional cultures eating them. But we don't.

Nassim Taleb rises above this dietary din in his essay in the book, espousing a rather odd diet that seems to be amalgam of evolutionary principles and his own heritage. Apples are OK as long as they are an old variety. "No carbs that do not have a Biblical Hebrew or Doric Greek name (i.e. did not exist in the ancient Mediterrean)." His writing and persona are about the three traditions that formed him: "Greek Orthodox, French Catholic and Arab." His version of the diet seems to meld evolutionary principles to such living traditions, which has always been my own goal. It's interesting because the fasting/feasting traditions of Orthodoxy seem to fit in quite well with intermittent fasting.

As an aside, I love the stubborn complexity of his essay in contrast to Art's writing in the book, which seems to have been watered down for mass consumption by an editor. Taleb's writing has always said to me "I'm not going to dumb this down for you."

More on this matter later...

Let's get this clear: The Humane Society of The United States is an organization devoted to animal rights. Animal rights does not mean being nice to animals, it means eliminating ALL animal use from pets, to pork, to scientific animal testing that saves millions of lives. Unfortunately, many people associate The Humane Society with being nice to kittens rather than outlawing all meat consumption. While I don't agree with everything they post, Humane Watch has done a great job demystifying HSUS's true intentions.

But many people are still fleeced. Maybe it's just me, but if you want to support small family cattle or other meat farms, why would you ally with a group whose ultimate goal is their elimination? HSUS is being rather sneaky, much to the ire of more honest AR groups, and has participated in "animal welfare" campaigns, but that doesn't change their animal rights agenda.

That was clear last week in NYC when AR groups confronted a backyard chicken keeper at a food event. It's hard to peg an organization that has "sanctuary" or "mercy" in its name. Unlike PETA, such organizations do have a generally positive reputation. But they showed their true colors by bashing small scale farmers and advocating world veganism. I love on the blog post how the Mercy For Animals guy says he is concerned about male chicks and the transportation of laying hens. Get real, even if those things stopped, these organizations would campaign against eggs. The truth is that these organizations and their agenda are very much threatened by nice small farms. When consumers visit these farms they know that not all animal product consumption is anything like what's portrayed in AR propaganda videos.

I think it is kind of silly how people think egg production is better than meat production though. In my experience, grassfed meat production is more respectful of an animal's true nature than egg production is. Chicken farmers typically order their chickens from these factory hatcheries and slaughter their layers at the end of the season. Most free-range chickens don't really range that much. Contrast that with cattle, who are often bred on-farm and often range over several acres. The benefit with chickens is that they are cheap, easy to keep, and are quite efficient at feed converters, though for us paleos they aren't the greatest food because they are almost always fed grain.

As everyone knows, I am a passionate advocate for small farms, but I think allying with organizations like HSUS to punish factory farms is NOT the way. I think that improving the infrastructure for local meat farmers and educating people about the health benefits of grassfed meat is the way to go. I'm pretty disappointed with Chipotle for supporting HSUS's efforts in Ohio for more food fascism. I sometimes used to eat there, as it's a pretty decent and consistent paleo option, but I think I will boycott. Whole Foods got a lot of hate from the local meat movement for pushing a vegan agenda in their stores, but at least they weren't trying to push for laws. Stocking your shelves with The China Study is distasteful, but on a different level than passing regulations that make life hard for your opponents.

I had a great time at Jackson Lander's deer hunting workshop, but I will write a post on it later since I'm still...ruminating...haha! But John Durant already beat me to it and has some great picture, so you should check them out.

I've been getting some questions about the paleo foods section...actually a lot of questions. I created that section with the idea of showing my own diet and showing the costs and benefits of each food.

But it's really not as simple as non-paleo and paleo. Really, most foods aren't "paleolithic." If a museum curator put a domestic chicken in the prehistoric human diorama in the Museum of Natural History they would be fired. But paleolithic eating isn't about reenactment, it's about emulating the nutritional intake of our ancestors- no African baboon meat required.

That's why I include butter/ghee in my diet. Paleolithic hunters ate the brain, which is very rich in fat. I don't eat that because it's hard to buy and when hunting there are concerns about prion diseases (which I think are largely exaggerated and I plan to do some of Fergus Henderson's brain recipes whenever I finally get ahold of brain). But hunter-gatherer cultures like the Hazda seem to love the brain.

Onwas then reaches into the fire and pulls out the skull. He hacks it open, like a coconut, exposing the brains, which have been boiling for a good hour inside the skull. They look like ramen noodles, yellowish white, lightly steaming. He holds the skull out, and the men, including myself, surge forward and stick our fingers inside the skull and scoop up a handful of brains and slurp them down. With this, the night, at last, comes to an end.

But why are sesame seeds not-paleo on my list and cumin is? Well, it's actually not as simple as that. As an astute reader pointed out, there is evidence that prehistoric hominids ate small amounts of seeds, grains, and even legumes. Note the small amounts- it's pretty hard to gather enough wild grains to make a rice pilaf or tahini. Personally I DO eat sesame seeds. They are a tasty garnish on raw tuna sashimi. I put maybe 10 on. In small quantities they are like cumin, which is also a flavoring/garnish. Both of these used as garnish are tasty, but probably inconsequential either way for someone with a healthy digestive system.

Contrast that with hummus, which contains large amounts of chickpeas and ground sesame seeds in the form of tahini. It's used as a food, but as a food it provides inappropriate nutrition, particularly in the form of excess omega-6 fatty acids. Something people don't think about is that seeds and grains used as foods displace better foods. If I eat a cup of white rice at a Korean place I'm not going to get sick, but it's going to fill me up and I'll eat less blood stew or squid, which are much more nutritious.

When I'm at a nice restaurant sometimes pork will come with a teeny tiny side of beans. I'll eat those. Since my digestive flora has been rebalanced by eating paleo, they honestly don't bother me and beans cooked in pork fat are mighty tasty. I'm ultimately a foodie and taste means a lot to me.

I stick with my guns that your staples should be grass fed meat from ruminants, fish, coconut, and other sources of saturated fat. Go ahead, season with cumin or sesame seeds, but if you eat them by the bag-full, it's just not evolutionarily appropriate.

Sticking with my guns

What about taste? Is our sense of taste a useless piece of baggage that leads us to fruit rollup and fried chicken perdition? No way! Our tastebuds are shaped by evolution to help us survive. It's our environment that messes them up and allows them to be used for choosing crap instead of choosing tasty nutritious fat. Do them a favor and strip your eating environment of junk. The best use for them in a paleo diet is that they tell you when to eat more fat, which particularly if you are doing a meat-only fast, is very very useful.

One thing optimal foraging theory misses out on is that humans have a sense of taste that often trumps "efficiency," which is why you will find cultures all over the world going after things like berries and nuts that provide little in the way of calories but much in the way of flavor. Perhaps they provide something else? Honestly, cutting nuts out of my diet has been easy because I no longer crave them. Perhaps there is something in my offal, seafood, and fat-rich paleo diet that I wasn't getting when I was a nut-crazed (hehe) faileo.

As an aside, I'm more likely to respond to your comments nicely if you use the contact form rather than posting comments unrelated to the post you are commenting on.