The goal of this website isn’t to preach, but to raise discussions on what’s nutritionally good for your health – does it make the CUT or not? I also leave each post open for debate, thus giving options of proving any data incorrect or if new data surfaces, leaving my compiled data no longer valid.
A perfect example is the article linked at the bottom of this post by Medical Doctor Kurt Harris who had this to say:
So “paleolithic nutrition” seemed like good shorthand for what we should be eating to avoid the diseases that came with civilization – the DOCs.
The problem came when I started to read what others before me were characterizing as key features of the “paleolithic diet”.
Some of these ideas -like avoiding eating wheat and other gluten grains – struck me as reasonable, but some were weakly supported, some were just silly, and some of them directly contradicted what I felt to be the most scientifically sound arguments.
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.
These ideas all seemed questionable to me at best, and so far have not withstood the scrutiny of either sustained pubmed searches or informed reasoning.
In the penumbra of the paleo internet and blogosphere, there seemed to be even nuttier ideas. Admittedly, most of the “paleo” movement does not embrace these, but their existence proves there is hardly a licensing system to prevent bizarre speculation about the natural human diet, without any reference to what is actually known about ancestral diets.
Hence we get:
We did not evolve to eat cooked food, and to do so is to invite disease.
We did not evolve to eat any plant food at all.
We did not evolve to eat any animal food at all.
(You all know this one – The vegan menace. Killing infants and robbing adults of their vitality is the ultimate denial of biology. Endorsed by countless brainless celebrities)
And then the inevitable combinatorial madness of:
The natural human diet is all raw plant food.
The natural human diet is nothing but ground beef and water.
The natural human diet is nothing but raw meat and water.
The natural human diet is nothing but raw fruit.
You get the picture
It seemed that the only commonly agreed-upon element among those claiming to invoke what we are “evolved” to eat, might be that cereal grains should not be a predominant part of the diet.
But then I spent some time reading at the Weston Price Foundation. WAPF is inspired by, naturally enough, Weston Price, a polymath dentist who made extensive studies of traditional foodways and modern hunter- gatherers, and attempted to identify the common elements that made them all healthy. I found that although WAPF advocated consumption of grains treated using traditional preparation methods (something I do not advocate) that on the health status of virtually every other available food I agreed more with them than with most of the paleo movement luminaries at the time – the ones claiming to be basing their recommendations on what we were “designed” to eat.
Click on the block quote above to read the full article – Paleo 2.0 – A Diet Manifesto
Stay Primal!
Christian
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