so so i just started doing this paleo diet thing - feels like it should be bullshit. is it?

teetotalers are ok

cavemen ate what they were given! and they liked it!

I was buying some kind of supplement at Whole Foods - fish oil or something and the clerk started giving me shit about how supplementation is horrible in any form and I should watch Fat, Sick and Nearly Dead and try a juice fast maaaaaaaan.

i'm on the halalfoodcart diet

fruitarian is a fun word

I <3 Bananas but http://www.30bananasaday.com/ makes me feel ill

The whole "wheat is bad for you" evangelism strikes me as the equivalent of someone with Type A blood alerting everyone in the world not to have a transfusion of Type B blood, because a transfusion of Type B will KILL YOU! After all, there is science to back this up.

30 bananas a day makes me feel ill..and the website gives me a migraine

thanks a lot milo

but try giving up grains and then tell me how you feel.

did it for a month and a half, felt exactly the same, but then again i have never been somebody who "craves" bread or sugar (though I consume plenty of both in my normal diet) and maybe people who do experience bigger changes when they eliminate those foods?

like I said, I have a whole host of issues, so giving up bread/grains/etc improved them a lot.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/its-a-part-of-my-paleo-fantasy-its-a-part-of-my-paleo-dream/

The "we haven't had enough time to evolve to adapt to this diet" line of reasoning is basically Lamarckian. Unless you believe a diet rich in grains is going to actually kill off a significant number of people prior to reproductive age, or otherwise prevent them from reproducing.

god i think i am becoming one of you ppl

xxxp: Shakey - its basically impossible to get less than 10% of calories of any of the three macronutrients unless the bulk of your diet is taro, cassava, or junk food. Which makes a "no protein" diet, like a "no carb" or "no fat" diet basically impossible. That said, assuming fixed and adequate total calorie intake, there seem to be adverse longevity and disease effects from getting more than 10% of calories from complete proteins; from added oils; or from added sugars, though not from complex carbs w/ fiber, which makes something like a calorie restricted 80/10/10 diet (the 80% from whole food starches & fruit sugars) an interesting longevity diet proposition. Which is a rather different thing from a "looking ripped" diet.

Of late I've been reading every full text on methionine restriction research I can find. Aside from being used clinically as an antiproliferative adjunct to chemo, it basically entails veganism and is my candidate for the next fad.

this is a serious questions: if a diet that is 80% complex carbs (even if it wasn't calorie restricted!) makes you feel like SHIT why bother living until you're 100. like that would be ok if you didn't have a job i guess, maybe. if you didn't need energy for anything. i used to eat no meat and a lot of beans and whole grains and i was constantly thinking about food, and tired. i also felt that i had to eat a lot not to be hungry, but it really didn't work. i don't think cancer is cool but 100 more years of tired hunger is not attractive to me.

so anyone remember ~THE ZONE~ diet? i think it was a 30-40-30 deal (30% of your calories should be high-quality, lean protein; 40% from complex carbs - mostly veggies, some fruit, and whole grains & legumes as tolerated; 30% from "good" fats: nuts, avocados, EVOO, etc). supposedly this sweet spot would prevent inflammation, normalize glucose levels, etc. BUT iirc the 30-40-30 was specifically for athletes in training, and reg folk were instructed to modify the fat & protein components, say 10-15% for fat, ~25-30% for lean proteins.

my cousin's husband lost a good deal of weight in the 90s on it and has managed to maintain very well. he was kind of militant about the portions & calorie intake for a year or so, but has just been using it as a rough framework since. every meal consists of a protein roughly the size of a deck of cards, a veggie side that's twice that, and then fat used as flavor ,etc.

Crossfit still pimps the Zone Diet when it isn't pimping Paleo.

https://twitter.com/capricecrane/status/314853532329209856

The average American diet as of 2008 is 47.9% carbs, 15.9% protein and 33.6% fat, and we've got epidemics of obesity, metabolic disorder etc. The traditional Okinawan diet is 85% carbs, 9% protein, and 6% fat, and the elders that still eat that way are longest lived, most disease free cohort on the planet. Wish I liked sweet potatoes that much.

xp harbl: it takes time to adjust to any radically different diet as the gut and its microbiome adapts. Eg, I had constant diarrhea for about 3 weeks when I dropped all animal foods from my diet. Now I bullseye the Bristol scale and after 2 1/5 years still feels like I have significantly more energy than when I ate the SAD. There's no shortage of others who have had similar responses. Sorry it didn't work out for you. As an aside that may apply to others, no vegan diet is complete or safe without B-12 supplementation.

I've read the side-effects occuring adapting to low-carb diets as well, nausea, irritability, halitosis, constipation, fatigue, and neurological deficits. Outside ongoing ketosis, though, most of that goes away on maintenance macronutrient rangers, though disease and mortality remains higher, if its a high animal protein diet.

My hemoglobin numbers are going up, so I am feeling good about that.

I've been having a whole avocado, heavy cream, ice and cocoa blended for breakfast. It's delicious.

More on some of the more outrageous paleo claims

http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2013/03/25/paleo-and-woo-bad-company-until-they-day-they-die/

Oh, thanks for that. I wasn't familiar with the Marlene Zuk book (to be fair, its only been out for 7 days).

Also, HII, I came across an article you might find useful: The paradox of anemia with high meat intake: a review of the multifactorial etiology of anemia in the Inuit of North America Figure 1 and some other spots might offer some insights.

http://robrhinehart.com/?p=298

http://robrhinehart.com/?p=424

oh but i should explain those links. this guy came up with a concoction that he drinks and he stopped eating food. he's never felt better! the second link is the breakdown of what's in his concoction. people are really into it and he got a million comments. he wants to sell the drink apparently. he calls it soylent.

for some reason that reminds me of
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIufLRpJYnI

guy with his batch-bought vitamins and minerals is nuts but i loved reading that, like it's practically dystopian sci-fi

"Soylent beige is chemicals!"

like, the natural evolution of human beings is to drink the perfect beige nutritional compound each day, and in this way, unrestrained from the tyranny of food and food preparation, we will know ourselves, our vitality, our infinite possibility.

xp lolll

i was always kinda hoping for pills. but all we got were clif bars.

One of my fave alt future of humankind books has us all infected with awesome little nanobots that let us extract all we need by lying in mud and sunshine :)

Oh wait I think I have that one. Is it about the kidnapped girl?

Hm, don't remember kidnapping. It's Nancy Kress's Beggars trilogy with the Sleepless and Supersleepless.

Oh, it's not the same one. Same idea, though.

blood music is the one where nanobots turn everyone into goo.

Only the rich eat food, everyone else has photosynthetic hair. Most of the world lives in poverty and near-starvation and enslavement by warlords, who, as punishment for their minions, can have someone's head shaved so they starve to death.

By Light Alone

i guess soylent green was the least dystopic out of the possible food futures to name a drink after.

omg i love the sci-fi concept of photosynthetic hair

i'm having a real hard time believing that a mixture of water and minerals/vitamins tastes "delicious"

Look at the ingredients. The bulk of it is heavily glucose sweetened soy protein isolate plus olive oil - most of the micronutrients are in such small amounts they'd have negligible impact on the flavor.

Soylent looks pretty much like the synthetic research animal feeds used to purge rats of serum antioxidants etc. Eliminating harmful parts of the diet (and his pre-Soylent diet was pretty bad) probably has short term benefits, but the whole enterprise is based on a naive idea that Nutrition is a complete, exhausted science. The bulk of my reading in the field seems of late to be on some of the 1000s of phytochemicals with evident benefits but no known deficiency disease or RDA.

Maybe he'll read Whole when it comes out and discover his error.

And he isn't saving much money. $160 / mo for his concoction is more than I'd spend in the produce & dried bean/grain section for actual food.

yeah i was kinda wondering where he got his info on "this is all the body needs to thrive", considering how little scientists really know about nutrition.

he does say in the comments that he thinks this could be a good SUPPLEMENT to a healthy diet. and not the entire diet. but that he wanted to test the effects of living on nothing but his cocktail just to see what it did to him. like a healthy super-size me experiment.

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1fa2xs/i_spent_20yrs_and_250k_to_hack_my_own_biology_i/

Bulletproof guy did an AMA on reddit today, apparently didn't expect to be repeatedly called a charlatan.

http://hells-ditch.com/2012/08/archaeologists-officially-declare-collective-sigh-over-paleo-diet/

Marlene Zuk's Paleofantasy book is good.

still eating this way, and I still like it. I feel like I have a lot of freedom from food woes. Also, 32 lbs down.

The scientists in the article I linked say the diet is probably healthy, just the evolutionary/physiological/biological claims behind it are bunk (cavemen didn't have bread therefore we're not evolved to eat bread etc.)

love this

“Look at that British girl who lived off of chicken nuggets for almost eighteen years, ” Wenkel continued. “The fact that her body was able to utilize the meager nutritional value of those things and get her to reproductive age is an incredible feat. It shows exactly how effective our versatility has been in human development. In a strict evolutionary framework, all your body needs to do is keep you alive until you breed. After that, you’re just living on borrowed time.”

Wenkel stressed that personal health is too often confused and conflated with evolutionary fitness, a fact that has become more pronounced with the popularity of the Paleo Diet. Roddy Collins, a colleague of Wenkel’s, drove the point home: “It’s like, even my barber is suddenly an expert in evolutionary physiology. A seventeen-year-old kid at my gym give me a ten minute lecture on how my Clif Bar was poison because humans can’t metabolize soy. I’ve been studying human evolution for thirty years.”

I'm basically still doing paleo and feel good but should probably get my cholesterol checked.

so many lolz

”You really want to be paleo? Then don’t buy anything from a store. Gather and kill what you need to eat. Wild grasses and tubers, acorns, gophers, crickets- They all provide a lot of nutrition. You’ll spend a lot of energy gathering the stuff, of course, and you’re going to be hungry, but that’ll help you maintain that lean physique you’re after. And hunting down the neighbor’s cats for dinner because you’ve already eaten your way through the local squirrel population will probably give you all the exercise you’ll ever need.”