Paleo Diet.

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424365

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Your right I no longer see it as a diet but a lifestyle. I can't see myself going back to how I was.
 

jaxvillemike

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Hey just thought I would weigh in with another data point.

I started eating "paleo" two years ago . . . started crossfit training at the same time (they sorta go hand in hand) . . .

I was 6' and 235 when I started . . . and 50 years old . . . within 6 months I had dropped 40 pounds . . . for more than a year I have held steady at 185 (down 50 total)

I cheat a little in that I occasionally eat a little bit of cheese and I put heavy cream in my coffee . . . I also eat string beans once in a while though technically they are off the list. And as a matter of principle, about every two months I have a total cheat day and eat pie and ice cream . . . think it keeps me from being nutty . .. but to tell you the truth I dont really even like that stuff anymore.

Never once have I been hungry. I have always eaten as much as I liked . . .and certainly as much fat as I liked . . . And I feel better, stronger, and more energetic than I did when I was 20 and in the military and tough as nails.

The weight loss was so immediate, so permanent, and so easy, that it became obvious to me that the way most of us eat is poisoning us . . . and that eating as our ancestors ate makes it virtually impossible to be overweight.

crossfit training is part of this, and I could write some pretty strong testimony for that, too.

For those who think it can't be done let me just say that it feels amazing to change your life so easily and quickly and after so many years of bad habits . . .
 
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jaxvillemike

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also should mention that I believe what Aquaeyes says above is true . . . I feel my experience has proven that my ancestors were carnivorous . . .but others I think come from more vegetarian lineage and might not find this diet as natural . . .
 

Phil Ayesho

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Hmmmm, I've always been wary of the Paleo diet for a couple of reasons; firstly while I know it works (because several acquaintances have adopted it and lost weight and swear by it) I think it undoubtedly deprives the body of a large number of vital minerals and vitamins and other nutrients which if you're losing weight and attempting to get fit are pretty essential. The lack of readily available calcium is just one example. Also it seems to be the lipid-haters carb-free diet if you see what I mean, and the body both needs fats and in fact in most cases (except where a genetic propensity to the contrary exists) is relatively good at regulating the intake of them.

The Paleo diet works because you get PLENTY of fats... both nuts and meat are dense sources of fats...so it is not lipid deficient.
Because fat intake is what triggers satiety, diets with significant meat are easier to stay on without feeling severe hunger.
Indeed, carb rich diets lead to obesity specifically because they lack the cues that cause us to stop eating.

As to vitamin deficiency... it is nearly impossible to live in a western nation and not get enough vitamins and minerals. So much of the food is enriched, and, frankly, a single multivitamin will provide you with more minerals and vitamins than your body can actually absorb. ( US waste water has enough vitamins in it to qualify as a supplement. )

The fact is that humanity evolved with this diet... and that the recent additions of cultivated grains forming the bulk of our intake is hard on the human physiology.

For example, our long time member and dear friend Jason Els... who suffered from long term heartburn and acid reflux, which eventually developed into esophageal cancer which claimed his life...

reflux is an epidemic in the west and is predominantly caused by Wheat.
if you have it, cut out wheat entirely, take one course of prilosec, and chances are you will never have it again.

Further... many genotypes are evolved for even lower levels of carbs... notably, Native Americans, Polynesians and others who never adopted cereal crops. These populations tend very severely toward fat because their physiologies simply have not had the thousands of years of adaptation that other cultures had in pursuing agriculture.
 

umami_tsunami

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Good job on losing weight and getting into a good exercise routine. There are lots of similar primal diets that deliver good short term results for many. Some of the benefit comes from the bigger energy expense to metabolize foods high in fat and protein. While this is good to build and repair body tissue and aid in accelerating metabolism, a growing number of nutrition and diet experts agree that the long term effects can be systemically detrimental and recommend less animal protein and higher proportions of unprocessed plant based foods.
 
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D_Tim McGnaw

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The Paleo diet works because you get PLENTY of fats... both nuts and meat are dense sources of fats...so it is not lipid deficient.

And yet in almost all instances the diet itself recommends only lean meat and low lipid bearing foods. And there's nothing "Paleo" about eating nuts all day long all seasons of the year.


Because fat intake is what triggers satiety, diets with significant meat are easier to stay on without feeling severe hunger.
Indeed, carb rich diets lead to obesity specifically because they lack the cues that cause us to stop eating.

I've been on one kind of low GI diet or another for years now. I'm aware of the claims these diets make on this and they do work, I'm living proof.

The problem is that in fact humans are designed to eat carbohydrates, and claims to the contrary are false. Lies in fact, in most cases. The problem isn't carbs tout court. The problem with the modern developed world diet is it contains far to much simple carbohydrate, we eat too much readily available sugars. This is a result of eating highly processed carbohydrates and sweet things.


However we absolutely need complex carbohydrates in abundance in our diets, and this from vegetables and fruits including grains. The very fact that we have evolved a specific enzyme, Amylase, to help us digest grains and similar forms of carbohydrate bearing foods is testament to this fact.

As to vitamin deficiency... it is nearly impossible to live in a western nation and not get enough vitamins and minerals. So much of the food is enriched, and, frankly, a single multivitamin will provide you with more minerals and vitamins than your body can actually absorb. ( US waste water has enough vitamins in it to qualify as a supplement. )

Though of course this is demonstrably false. The rates of vitamin deficiency in children in developed world countries are in fact increasing as their parents increasingly allow highly processed carbs, inferior meat and protein bearing foods, and junk food and sweets to predominate in their children's diets.

It's now believed that it's next to worthless to take vitamin supplements, and that the body simply does not absorb them unless they are contained in what the body recognises as digestible food. The reason there is such a high percentage of vitamins in US waste water is because the body excretes pretty much all such vitamins in urine unless they were absorbed into the body via food.

So it's basically impossible to artificially supplement a vitamin deficient diet, the only way to resolve the deficiency is to start eating the appropriate vitamin bearing foods in larger amounts.

The fact is that humanity evolved with this diet... and that the recent additions of cultivated grains forming the bulk of our intake is hard on the human physiology.

This simply isn't true, the so called "Paleo" diet bares only a passing similarity to the actual diet humanity evolved with. Claims like yours made on behalf of the Paleo diet have been completely scotched by evolutionary biologists.

Claiming that the Paleo-diet is the same diet that humanity evolved with is the same as me deciding to eat more Lark's tongues and exclude tomatoes and potatoes from my diet and then claim I was eating a "Roman" diet.


Besides even if the Paleo diet did in fact accurately replicate the diet of pre-neolithic agricultural revolution humans that still would not imply that the diet was actually all that good for you. Ancient human beings were almost always only surviving on the diet they ate, the degree of malnourishment observed in the bones of Pre-Paleolithic, Paleolithic and Mesolithic human beings is actually surprising until one realises that most did not live much older than their 30s and that to be in one's 40s or older was incredibly rare, that a huge number of ancient humans would have died of starvation, and the diseases caused by vitamin and mineral deficiencies and that the a very high infant mortality rate was in part a result of the paucity of the diet our distant ancestors ate.

What proves that the so called Paleo-diet is in fact not much like the actual diet of our pre-agricultural ancestors at all is that if you genuinely were eating the diet of those hunter gatherers you would be living on only the bare minimum required by the human body for survival to any age by which you might reasonably be expected to have reproduced.



reflux is an epidemic in the west and is predominantly caused by Wheat.
if you have it, cut out wheat entirely, take one course of prilosec, and chances are you will never have it again.

This is a completely unscientific assertion.

Further... many genotypes are evolved for even lower levels of carbs... notably, Native Americans, Polynesians and others who never adopted cereal crops. These populations tend very severely toward fat because their physiologies simply have not had the thousands of years of adaptation that other cultures had in pursuing agriculture.


This is also an assertion unsupported by science. The few thousand years in which humans have produced agriculturally derived carbohydrates is not a significant enough period of time in which it is probable that human evolution could have become divergent to the degree you claim. The evolution of the enzyme Amylase which exists to help us digest carbohydrates evolved hundreds of thousands of years before the neolithic agricultural revolution and long before human populations even colonised the Americas or Oceania.

There is some differentiation in the efficiency with which humans produce Amylase, and there is some evidence to show that this is genetic, but this doesn't imply that those who carry the more efficient amylase production genes come from ancient neotlithic carb eating stock. Nor does not having these genes imply that one's most ancient ancestors did not eat a carb rich diet. If they hadn't you wouldn't be here.

There is beginning to be some strong evidence that there may be minor genetic differences between those who have inherited genetics which come from human populations which lived for very long periods of time on or close to sources of marine foods and those who have inherited genes from populations whose diet was predicated on living inland and far from any marine food sources. But this distinction is not even recognised by the "Paleo" diet.
 
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424365

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Didn't realize I was starting a fire fight lol. My diet primarily consists of veggies and nuts with fish. I actually stay away from beef and the like
 

Phil Ayesho

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And yet in almost all instances the diet itself recommends only lean meat and low lipid bearing foods. And there's nothing "Paleo" about eating nuts all day long all seasons of the year.

Not really... nuts are not low lipid foods. neither are things like avocados.
And even lean meat has plenty of fat.

The problem is that in fact humans are designed to eat carbohydrates, and claims to the contrary are false.
Nobody claimed that... as omnivores we can eat anything... the problem comes in the fact that carbs have come to dominate our intake, wheras, our hunter gatherer ancestors, for millions of years, had a fairly modest intake of carbs...
further... those carbs were mostly in the form of sugars from fruits, and tubers, and other vegetable sources.
NOT cereal grains, which require civilization to process into edible foods.




However we absolutely need complex carbohydrates in abundance in our diets, and this from vegetables and fruits including grains. The very fact that we have evolved a specific enzyme, Amylase, to help us digest grains and similar forms of carbohydrate bearing foods is testament to this fact.
not all populations produce amylase in the same degree or even form as those harking from Persia, Egypt, China and Europe. It is a fact that people eating mostly carbs can keep eating well past the point of adequate calories.

ergo, although we certainly evolved the ability to eat complex carbs, we did not evolve that ability in an ecology where complex carbs formed our principle source of calories, as they do today.

It is fat intake alone that triggers the sensation that we have eaten enough, before our bellies become distended with surplus calories. This is why it is impossible to get fat eating an all meat diet.




Though of course this is demonstrably false. The rates of vitamin deficiency in children in developed world countries are in fact increasing as their parents increasingly allow highly processed carbs, inferior meat and protein bearing foods, and junk food and sweets to predominate in their children's diets.

Sure... the poor who do not take vitamins and eat almost entirely complex carbs might have some vitamin deficiency... and poverty is growing in the US... but, in fact, MOST Americans get more vitamins than they can absorb, and excrete the excess. Ask anyone managing waste treatment plants.

Milk, cereal and wheat are all fortified, as is salt, and many drinks.

More people in the US suffer from vitamin toxicity than from vitamin deficiency.
Anyone eating even a minimally varied diet in the US gets more than the recommended amount of vitamins and minerals.

However...
Human beings did not evolve to efficiently process dairy, nor cereal grains.

Not all people produce the necessary enzymes, and quite a large number simply do not produce nearly enough to compensate for their intake.
Native Americans, until very recently, had a diet that was 60% meat, for tens of thousands of years. They had almost no genetic tolerance for alcohol.

The changes in their diet have affected their health out of proportion to the White immigrants to this continent. Their obesity rate and diabetes rates were spiking 80 years before the rest of the country.





It's now believed that it's next to worthless to take vitamin supplements, and that the body simply does not absorb them unless they are contained in what the body recognises as digestible food.
this is absolute quackery... zero evidence to support such a notion.
Supplements ARE considered largely useless, but that is because people in the western world get More than enough vitamins from the rich diversity of foods available in the modern food distribution system. And because the staple foods, Like wheat, like dairy, are heavily fortified.




So it's basically impossible to artificially supplement a vitamin deficient diet, the only way to resolve the deficiency is to start eating the appropriate vitamin bearing foods in larger amounts.
nonsense.
pure poppycock and a total ignorance of food history.
Adding iodine to salt essentially ELIMINATED goiter in the US.
Scurvy, Rickets and berri berri are eliminated in populations taking supplements for C, and D and B, or getting foods artificially fortified with those vitamins.

Your suggestion that it is "impossible" would imply that Drugs, taken in pill form do not work, either? because MOST drugs are isolated and identified from food and plant sources?

really? you gonna stand by that notion?

Sorry. Clearly you have some very odd notions about how what we eat gets absorbed.
Your body digests food by soaking it in acid. Whether its a pill, or potato, your gut doesn't care.
People excrete most vitamins they take in pill form because their bloodstream is already saturated with those nutrients, and because vitamins come these days in such massive dosages... many times more than the recommended adult requirements.

food purist propaganda not withstanding... when you are in the hospital in a coma, they feed you fortified pure sugar thru an intravenous drip, and your body doesn't give a damn where it came from.


This simply isn't true, the so called "Paleo" diet bares only a passing similarity to the actual diet humanity evolved with. Claims like yours made on behalf of the Paleo diet have been completely scotched by evolutionary biologists.

Bull. First off, I did not claim the Paleo diet was the same as early human diets... I said it was intended to be more like early human diets.

In truth... different populations of humans have evolved different optimal diets based upon their environments. inuit can tolerate a staggering higher level of fat in their diet than most other peoples... Europeans, middle easterners and asians have lower incidences of alcoholism than populations that did not use alcohol for thousands of years.

And, of course, all of this is complicated by interbreeding and the mixing of these once geographically more delineated genes.

Lactose intolerance is NOT a myth. Keeping herds is NEW, only 7 thousand years or so old. Keeping cows, even newer.


Claiming that the Paleo-diet is the same diet that humanity evolved with is the same as me deciding to eat more larks tongues and exclude tomatoes and potatoes from my diet and then claim I was eating a "Roman" diet.
You're ignorance is astounding. You ARE eating a Roman diet. Heavy on wheat. yeasts. and imported foods.
We ALL are... the specific dish is irrelevant and a great example of a false analogy.


To eschew cereal grains and their byproducts, and to eat more fruits, berries, and nuts than canola oil and corn syrup is what it means to eat the way people did before agriculture.

Further, I am not claiming that the 'paleo diet' in particular is better. But many people who eliminate cereal grains, yeasts, and other products of the modern agricultural diet do feel remarkably better.

Based upon your genetic heritage, some foods you may have a better tolerance for than others.
But even something as common as cavities in your teeth, can be traced to populations switching to much higher complex carb diets.


What proves that the so called Paleo-diet is in fact not much like the actual diet of our pre-agricultural ancestors at all is that if you genuinely were eating the diet of those hunter gatherers you would be living on only the bare minimum required by the human body for survival to any age by which you might reasonably be expected to have reproduced.
You are not making any sense.
No one is suggesting that you LIVE like a cave man.
Its hard to find mammoth in the butchers section of the grocery store.
And no one is suggesting that you go out and actually pick and kill your food.

There is a difference between saying that the human digestive system evolved around a VERY DIFFERENT array of food sources, with very little time to adapt to modern agricultural food sources... and saying that you should suffer the exact same portions and tendency to starvation that primitive societies endured.

It is True that human beings underwent millions of years as hunter gatherers, and only a few thousand years as agriculturers... and even FEWER years as primarily consumers of heavily processed wheat and corn.


It is proven that the modern western diet makes people fat.

And, frankly, early humans did not eat the minimum... they ate EVERYTHING they could... they fattened up when the food was plentiful, because they would need it when the food was not.

In reality, MOST people balance their food intake remarkably well.
People seldom gain 50 pounds in a year... they gain 10 pounds a year, every year.
And the difference between gaining 10 pounds in a year, or not, is ONE pat of butter per day.
That is, if you are off in eating more calories than you burn by only one pat of butter a day... you will gain 10 pounds in a year.

That is actually hitting the mark pretty close.


This is a completely unscientific assertion.
Mine was an argument, not an assertion. It is Your response that is an assertion, and fails to present an argument....

I HAD GIRD. My Doctor told me that ALL evidence shows that the primary cause of GIRD is wheat.

Wheat is in everything. Wheat is delicious. Very hard to eliminate from your diet...
And I didn't really believe my doctor, either... until I spent time in China... where wheat is almost non-existant in the diet.

And guess what? Even tho, in china, I drank lots more alcohol and coffee ( two other suspects in GIRD) my GIRD disappeared within a week.

When I came back... and started in on wheat again... it reappeared.

Stopped eating wheat, even here in the US... and it went away again.


Now- this is not to say that I have given up wheat entirely... but if I eat as much of it as the rest of my fellow americans, I get GIRD. And so do many other people I know.
Severely Limiting my intake WORKS.

And if you imagine that GIRD is not associated with esophageal cancer... then you ought to look into it.
The evidence suggests it is,


BTW- a protein in dairy products called casein is the primary culprit in the wests very high breast cancer rate, as compared to asia, where dairy is not significant.

again. a relative newcomer to our diets that we CAN eat... but that causes negative health effects for many people.
 
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424365

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I said paleo and the fella started reading way too much into the name and not the actual diet I'm adhering to
 

ConanTheBarber

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I HAD GIRD. My Doctor told me that ALL evidence shows that the primary cause of GIRD is wheat.

Wheat is in everything. Wheat is delicious. Very hard to eliminate from your diet...
And I didn't really believe my doctor, either... until I spent time in China... where wheat is almost non-existant in the diet.

And guess what? Even tho, in china, I drank lots more alcohol and coffee ( two other suspects in GIRD) my GIRD disappeared within a week.

Mr. Atio, I think you mean GERD, gastrointestinal reflux disease.
I only point this out in case others try to google the acronym.

Basically, I agree with your post ... particularly the point that a paleo diet does not imply low fat intake.
I really like the way that saturated fat, in certain quarters, is getting quite a pass these days. The proponents concede that it increases the cholesterol count, but only by increasing the HDL count (which is good) and by producing "fluffier" LDL (which, they're finding, is also good). So the total count goes up, but the pernicious effects upon the arteries are vastly reduced.
Also, the idea that we are meant to take in a fair amount of carbohydrates is totally in accord with the fact that the paleo diet includes vegetables and fruit.
And vegetables are a very rich source of minerals and vitamins, so a paleo diet that includes a broad range of fruit and especially vegetables will not be mineral- or vitamin-deficient.
That said, as I don't suppose you will dispute, in the 400 generations since neolithic times, many populations have adapted quite well to consumption of grains. That leaves a certain, indeterminate number who are less well adapted, as well as the possibility that even those more or less adapted would prosper even better on a grain-free diet.
The jury's probably still out on this matter, but I find it all very intriguing.
I may well try the paleo diet.

In other news, some researchers believe that many humans ... not all ... in paleolithic times lived far longer than we have been assuming. The average lifespan, as conventionally believed, probably was 20 or so, but that's largely due to infant mortality. Those who actually lived to 20 had a good chance of living to 40, say ... and those who lived to 40 might well live to 60.
 

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And the difference between gaining 10 pounds in a year, or not, is ONE pat of butter per day.
That is, if you are off in eating more calories than you burn by only one pat of butter a day... you will gain 10 pounds in a year.

I believe that one pat of butter contains 4 grams of fat.
That makes 36 calories.
36 additional calories 365 times per year equals 13,140 calories, Phil.
Gaining a pound of body fat requires eating 3,500 additional calories.
Therefore, those 365 extra pats of butter would account for roughly 3.75 pounds of additional fat.
The calories in a bit less than three pats of butter a day would produce the 10 pound gain you mention.
Point of information only. It doesn't change the overall argument.
 

erratic

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Thanks for posting, Mr. Bulldog. I've been weaning myself onto a paleo-type diet ever since university when I learned how harmful the agricultural revolution was in many ways to humans - more humans in confined spaces, plague, shorter life spans, nutritionally deficient diets, and a decrease in average height have all been attributed to agriculture due to the sedentary nature of agricultural communities (that is, large numbers in small, permanent settlements) and their reliance on staple crops. I was doing it just sort of as an experiment - that is, eating mainly things that can be picked, hunted or caught - and I ended up putting on weight (I'd always struggled with being underweight), feeling healthier, sleeping better, and not needing caffeine to keep me going.

I'm a little dubious about following the paleo diet strictly, as I don't see any problem in eating some of the foods that are technically off the list, but I've been interested to hear how it's affected other people. I certainly agree that getting off of the modern reliance on grains as a staple food is a great idea.

As an added benefit, eating the way I have been has really gotten me onto eating locally and seasonally, so the food I'm eating is fresher, tastier, less chemically-treated, and not the same diet year-round.
 

LeeEJ

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The people I have heard on the Paleo diet all drink milk, eat yogurt, or drink/eat kaffir or similar products, Hilaire. They might not be following it at its strictest. But yeah this basically works because it's a diet that eliminates basically all the bad shit we eat (processed food and simple carbs) and replace it with good stuff (fruits, vegetables, meat, and nuts).

It makes a lot of sense to me, too. I can't say that I follow it, but since getting married, I've noticed that my wife buys nearly all of our groceries along the perimeter of the store. So, we're mostly eating unprocessed, natural foods.

The way I see it, the human body didn't spend millions of years evolving just to live off of Happy Meals and Wonder bread. It's designed to work best on foods that aren't created by machines and chemical mixers.

My own stats: 6'1", weighed 235 two years ago, down to the upper 180's these days. I've always exercised, but I'm eating smarter and better than ever, which is really where the difference came from.
 
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424365

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I graduated highschool at 300 lbs in 2007. Dropped to 215 then while out jogging got hit by a car and stopped exercising so I went back up to 245 ish then started my paleo eating lifestyle and as of today sit at 198 lbs.