I want to expand a bit on the passing reference I made the other day to people taking food too seriously.
A lot of bloggers I read are trying to reduce carbs in their diet. Some have discussed the merits of the Paleolithic diet, which is supposed to replicate the food humans ate before the advent of agriculture. The reasoning is that humans have not physically adapted away from that diet, and that newer food such as grains, refined sugars, dairy, and processed oils are not digested or metabolized easily (or in some cases, properly), causing all manner of health problems. “Good” foods include meat, vegetables, fruit, roots, and nuts.
The paleo diet happens to be a very low carb diet, compared with the FDA recommended diet – you know, the old Food Pyramid, with grains being the foundation. (I can’t link to the FDA’s web site about the Food Pyramid – it seems to be down…hmmmmm.)
My position on the paleo diet is that it is a fad based on anti-man premises. The idea that man might not yet have adapted to grains and dairy is an intriguing hypothesis, but the champions of the paleo diet (not the bloggers I read, I want to emphasize) do not act as if this is something to be studied. They act morally righteous about their eating habits and seem to be on a quest to condemn particular foods because they are man made. I’ve done enough reading to convince me that there is no evidence or reason to follow the paleo diet, as such. The promoters of the diet lose all credibility with me when they start claiming that every single health problem can be solved by changing one’s diet.
However, I also believe, based on first-hand experience, observations of the eating habits in our culture, and a little bit of science, that there is a “grain” of truth in the paleo diet, in that that the Standard American Diet (the Food Pyramid) is way out of whack. I’ll just talk about my personal experience here. I have read much more about this subject than this post might indicate, but a lot less than some of the people I’m criticizing. I don’t think you need to judge every study about food to use common sense and to catch on to the fact that we still really don’t know much about proper diet.
To me, grains are not “real food.” First of all, they have almost no flavor. I’ve never understood why people love rice, bread, cereal, and pasta. Even pastries leave me cold. I’ll eat these things, but only as carriers for something that has flavor and substance. Bread is great for holding meat and mayonnaise, but the less of it, the better. Sweet, sugary deserts are nice sometimes, but again, I never used to crave them and I don’t think of them as real food. (I use the past tense because under my husband’s influence I’ve been eating more chocolate and sweets, and the more I eat them, the more I crave them.)
When I first started cooking (instead of eating frozen dinners or soup for almost every meal) I made a lot of pasta. I like making sauces, and it was an easy way to get started: add some meat, vegetables, and sauce to a bunch of pasta. Cooking steaks or fish was intimidating. Even though I had always been thin to normal weight and I was exercising, I gained a lot of weight on this diet.
I also seem to be sensitive to blood-sugar dips. My father calls it being hypoglycemic, but I’m not sure if that is really accurate. What I do know is that if I eat carbs with no protein, especially in the morning, I crash within an hour or so. I start to shake and sometimes come close to blacking out. I can go much longer eating nothing at all that eating something like a bagel first thing in the morning.
It takes effort to reduce the grains and carbs in your diet, especially at breakfast. We all were told to stop eating bacon and eggs because of cholesterol (which I think is a huge mistake) and told to eat cereal with skim milk or a whole grain muffin. I’m sorry, but those things just have no “meat” in them – they do nothing to sustain me. My body knows this. Some people don’t have the strong reaction I do to eating pure carbs, but I suspect they suffer in the long-term for it.
So I’m making a conscious effort to reduce carbs and add protein to my family’s diet, but it’s not always easy. Most convenience food is based on grains. If you want to make a quick, easy dinner, there is spaghetti, macaroni and cheese, etc., or you can order a pizza. Grains last much longer than meat and vegetables, so it’s easy to keep them handy on the shelf for emergencies. I still use these types of foods in a pinch, but I try to plan meals of meats and vegetables for most dinners, and I make enough so that we can eat some leftovers for breakfast and lunch.
But there is no way that I’m going to have steamed mussels without bread, or curry without rice. Those grains are great to sop up the yummy sauce. And that leads me to my original point, which is that I think a lot of people are way too uptight about carbs in the same way they used to be uptight about fat and cholesterol. I think moderation is the key, along with a healthy dash of skepticism about anything the government recommends. This article talks about how kids are being affected by this latest food fad. Whether you believe that “orthorexia” is a legitimate new diagnosis or not, it’s pretty easy to see that eating disorders can take many forms, one being obsession with “health” food. I think it’s a shame when adults are so consumed with eating the “right” foods that they give their kids a complex.
I also think it’s a shame to outlaw any particular food in your home, labelling it “unhealthy.” This includes cake, cookies, ice cream, and even candy. These foods are fun, and fun is good.
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As the only member of the family in which I grew up who does not have diabetes, I’ve tried to understand the contributions of the foods we eat to our overall health. There is a lot of conflicting information out there about fats, particularly – including what has come from my primary care physician – and new results from studies are reported almost daily.
With all this information, I think there are at least two things which are not controversial: your nutritional intake affects how your body operates on all levels; and you gain more nutritional value from whole foods.
While I can’t see my cells partying under the influence of a good piece of beef, I can certainly feel the sluggishness setting in after indulging in pasta, bread, or even – yes – Thin Mints (not whole foods) without protein or fat to slow down the absorption of the carbohydrates . I am able to now mostly avoid these temptations by thinking of the cellular-level damage which must be occuring in order for me to feel so crappy. I have been trying to increase the intake of protein by my carbohydrate-loving children.
I’m not sure I’ve outlawed any foods in the house (maybe Tootsie Rolls which pull out our fillings), but I have found the fewer prepared treats we keep, the more the children are willing to learn how to cook (or make Jello – an interesting foodstuff) for themselves. That, at least, is a good thing.
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Good question – you can see a big description from Wikipedia. I think of it as food closest to its natural form – food without fuss. This does not mean that there is no preparation involved – au contraire! – but rather that the processing is done in the cooking, not the stabilization of the food product.
Eggs, cheese, and yogurt are the big hitters for snacks here, too (and fruit in moderation). I actually like to keep some cooked ground turkey on hand – it’s very convenient to add to what I’m eating. The youngest will make her own mini pizzas with whole wheat English muffins and can talked into adding some of this extra protein. And we usually have some terrifically prepared meats on hand for leftovers thanks to Stephen.
Avocados are a real challenge!
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Hear, hear! I’ve been meaning to do a blog entry about this very subject but I don’t feel comfortable arguing extensively on the subject because I am not well-versed in nutrition and I don’t keep up on the literature.
I will say that I am extremely dubious about the “eat like our ancestors” proposition. I see the same anti-man and environmentalist premises that you do. I believe the key to a good diet and healthy living is moderation and variety. Those seem like the only uncontroversial points common to all diets. Gussying it up with arbitrary rules and biological explanations does not alter the fundamental kernel of truth–it just gives it the air of pseudo-science.
The best, most effective diet I’ve ever been on (and I lost a lot of weight) is the No-S Diet. Why did it work so well? Because it was easy to follow and enforced moderation at its core.
Our ancestors exercised moderation because of the inherent privation of their lives. If there’s any evolutionary aspect to diet, it’s that you eat until you’re full as often as you’re able because you never know when the next lean time would come. But we’ve eliminated the limits imposed by a hand-to-mouth existence and this evolutionary directive has resulted in gluttony.
So to tie this back to parenting, here’s what we do in our household. We limit our children to three meals a day plus interstitial snacks. They may have anything they want for snack but we encourage healthy options (sold as “if you want to grow big, you should eat this sort of food”). If they don’t eat their meals, they don’t get snacks. (We tried the other way, but we have at least one member that could subsist entirely on snack time.) They’re active and don’t have big appetites period, so we have yet to confront the problem of overeating. (Except in the parents, unfortunately.)
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My husband and I are both overweight and it’s certainly due to too many carbs. (There are other factors involved, of course.) I find that when I eat protein with my carbs, and limit grains, I feel better–so that’s what I’ve been doing for the most part. I can’t eat a really carb-limited diet right now because I’m nursing a baby, but I will once he is a little less dependent on me.
As far as the kids go–there is only one banned food from our house, and of course, that’s peanuts. (Avoiding that food actually results in many, many diet restrictions in terms of the food we can buy.) In a way, having that enormous restriction makes it easier for me to buy healthier–we do buy candy, but usually only have it on hand for special occasions–like holidays and birthdays coming up–because it’s expensive to buy peanut-free chocolate. I think if I didn’t have to be so careful, it would be much easier to have candy and other crap on hand.
We have really gotten away from food restrictions in terms of when and what you can eat. I want my kids to learn to understand the hunger cues of their bodies. Eat when you want, from our mostly-crap-free selection, as much as you want, stop when you’re feeling full. This is important to me because it’s something I never learned how to do–we always had to have a “clean plate” and were rewarded when we had one, and shamed when we didn’t.
Now I do try to hold the kids off from filling up if we’re going out to dinner in 5 minutes, or we’re about to leave the park, etc. But for the most part, I let them be independent about choosing their food. Incidentally, last spring I rearranged our pantry to make it easier for them to get their own food–and it was the best idea I ever had!
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“I guess ground meat counts as whole food?”
Only when you raise and kill the turkey and grind the meat yourself. All right, we don’t do that – but we could if we wanted to!
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Other protein suggestions: bacon and pepperoni. I make tons of bacon all at once and then the kids snack on it for a couple of days. Pepperoni is always a hit, though not exactly “whole” and beef jerky is good when I can find decently made jerky without tons of chemicals. And of course eggs, cheese, and yogurt (and kefir) too!
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Hi Amy — needless to say, I disagree with quite a bit of what you’ve written here.
Personally, my diet isn’t “paleo.” I drink milk and plain on adding some sprouted legumes or grains back into my diet eventually. And I don’t think that’s at all at odds with evolutionary logic. Cordain might, but I’m sure we could have an intelligent and fruitful discussion about it.
To call the paleo diet sensu Cordain a low-carb diet isn’t really correct. I’m sorry to be harsh, but that alone tells me you really haven’t done your reading.
That diet (if that is the paleo diet you’re referring to, since you did link to it) has around 35% caloric intake from carbohydrate — hardly what low carb advocates call low carb. We can argue about whether that’s a true representation of the paleolithic diet our ancestors ate, but since you linked to Cordain’s version of a paleo diet, I assume that’s the diet you’re referring to.Also, a diet that we evolved to eat, and have only deviated from in the past 10k years, a veritable blip on the evolutionary radar screen (with excessive deviations in the past 150 years) is not a fad. Not when we consider the entire range of human evolution and our genetic adaptations. There’s no doubt we’ve begun adapting to grains. I can think of about three genes that might be involved. I don’t know paleo advocates who wouldn’t welcome inquiry into this. The problem is that unless you get such genotyping done, you don’t really know until the end of your lifespan or without some significant trial and error throughout your life (in terms of weight gain, monitoring Hb1Ac, HDL, LDL size, triglycerides, etc.), whether you have those adaptive genes. There’s NO doubt that certain people handle such products better than others. However, all the studies done to date (about three on the paleo diet, more for the low carb diet) that are worth their salt and well-controlled show significant weight loss and improvement in blood parameters for a paleo-style or low carb diet over a Mediterranean or higher carb diet. No science? You must be joking.
The Food Pyramid is not a construct of the FDA. It’s a construct of the USDA and exists to promote the products of subsidized agriculture.
Bill, I’m absolutely alarmed by this statement: “Gussying it up with arbitrary rules and biological explanations does not alter the fundamental kernel of truth–it just gives it the air of pseudo-science.”
Finding scientific explanations (i.e. doing controlled clinical trials, which have been done) to justify observations consistent with evolutionary theory, or non-controlled observational studies, is not “arbitrary” nor pseudo-science.
Amy, you say that you’ve done enough reading to be convinced that there’s no scientific reason to eat a paleo-style diet. I’m curious as to what you have read in this regard. Have you read Good Calories, Bad Calories? Mike Eades’ blog? Nutrition and Physical Degeneration? Any of Cordain’s writing? Have you read what is quite possibly the most intelligent and informed commentary on nutrition out there (not paleo), written by neurobiologist Stephan Guyenet? Do you know anything about leptin/insulin resistance and what causes it? Do you know what the effects of excess n6 intake are?
I’m sorry to bombard you with these questions, but I’m pretty puzzled by your take that there’s no science behind the reason why people eat low-carb, paleo, or semi-low carb (I would class myself in this latter category) or that the proponents of such diets don’t welcome scientific research. In fact, I see a huge amount of discussion of the actual science (i.e. peer-reviewed research papers) on all the low carb and “paleo” style blogs I follow. Would you care to name the paleo advocates that you think are being pseudoscientific about their eating? That would be helpful in aiding my understanding of where you’re coming from on this.
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Further, Bill, let’s be fair and honest about who all the environmentalists are when it comes to diet. Environmentalists come in many different classes and shapes. There are rational and irrational concerns about the environment when it comes to our food. Some of the real environmentalists are plant breeders and biotech companies bent on the idea that the earth can’t provide enough meat for everyone, and that most of the world’s population has to subsist on grains. And many of the environmentalists are vegans.
It stretches the imagination a bit to hear someone say that advocates of the paleo diet, which calls for more meat protein than the standard American diet recommends sensu USDA, are environmentalist or anti-man. And to the extent that anyone thinks their particular diet is more healthful (that would even some of the vegans) and thus, *promoting human life*, they don’t adopt anti-man premises.
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What’s “anti-man” about advocating that men eat what men have eaten for 99.99% of their history?
If everyone sprung for the Paleodiet, sure, the First World would no longer be able to feed the Second and Third Worlds, but it sure would be able to feed itself. All of the land that is currently devoted to carbohydrate production for human consumption would be consumed by likestock.
Or, if that wasn’t the solution (alot of Paleodieters who know more about biological science than I do say that eating grain-fed meat is still bad for you), then that land would be converted into ranch land. In fact, if this were to happen, it would probably require even more land for agricultural uses than are currently available. So much for the notion that Paleodieters are environmentalists.
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Hi Amy — thanks for indulging me in a response.
Cordain is the author of “The Paleo Diet.” He’s pretty much responsible for bringing the paleo diet to the forefront of nutritional research.
The reason I asked those questions (thanks for answering) is that practically all the people I know who have investigated the issue in depth come away convinced that a more primal (for lack of a better term, since I don’t follow a strict paleo diet myself) foodway is better for the health of every human on the planet, hands down. I do have differences from the paleo diet, and differences from others I respect. However, my similarities to the paleo dieters are far greater than my differences with them. I’m always on the lookout for rational people who disagree with me. So your conclusion that “My position on the paleo diet is that it is a fad based on anti-man premises” raised my eyebrows, I admit. I asked about your reading because I wanted to know if you had serious *scientific* objections to a paleo-style diet that I haven’t come across. If you did, I’d definitely want to be aware of them since I don’t consider my nutritional knowledge complete, and my goal is to live a better, stronger, healthier life. (Food is an important part of that goal since there’s very intense evolutionary selection pressure on diet. We can see that by looking at the archaeological record.)
I’ve not heard of Al Sears. He looks familiar and might be someone I saw in a trailer for Fat Head, but otherwise I’ve not heard him associated with the paleo diet. I agree that his site is a bit sketchy and some of the stuff is dead wrong (particularly the saturated fat hamburger thing — grain fed beef is higher in monounsaturated, not saturated, fat). That said, there is some sound science behind some of what he is presenting there wrt diet. I don’t want to be presumptuous but I presume you’re coming to the conclusion that he’s anti-man because he rails against the corporations. OK. But rejecting a lot of the processed foods isn’t necessarily irrational or anti-man when you look at the chemical composition of those foods and understand how the particular chemicals affect health. I agree that it’s not an evil conspiracy on the part of food corporations. But it is a difference in motivation. They are motivated to provide the tastiest products they can at the lowest common denominator of cost to increase their profit margin as much as possible. There’s nothing wrong with that, but those products (filled with stuff we didn’t evolve with and with known adverse effects like HFCS, carelessly processed white flour full of lectins, n-6, etc.) are often extremely unhealthy. For everyone. As such, there’s nothing wrong with me, or anyone else, avoiding such foods like the plague as a routine health measure.
I do get what you’re saying about the snooty attitude, and I’ve seen it. And perhaps displayed it myself at times. There’s a reason for that, though.
I will grant you that certainly it’s not comforting or easy to believe that paleolithic man ate, or that modern, isolated hunter gatherers eat, better than the average American does and has for the past 50 or so years, from a *nutritional* standpoint. That is, one that best supports their biological life, not merely one of an immense variety of tasty produced goods or momentary enjoyment, though those are both important to some people. It’s also not comforting to think that certain hunter gatherer cultures studied more than 100 years ago, when disregarding infant mortality, had just about as long of a lifespan as we do in 2009 — all without modern medical care. I used to personally have some resistance to these facts, too — but they are facts. After you get over your disbelief and accept the facts, you get mad that vital truth regarding nutrition has been withheld from you in the name of promoting commodity agriculture and environmentalism. Then you start to go on a crusade informing everyone you know of your new-found knowledge. Soon your friends and internet acquaintances are avoiding you, the nutritional zealot spreading the “good news”.
I offer this bit of humor, Amy, because I do get what you’re saying. It’s annoying when people think they know better than you or try to re-arrange your value hierarchy. But seriously, let’s consider something or at least open our minds to the possibility. – We have superior medical knowledge and technology in the west, but the hunter gatherers have superior knowledge about diet that’s been lost in the west. And maybe foods produced in a factory (in fact, most such foods) do not support human life. Maybe they destroy it. (Why not combine these two great things, good food and good medicine, so that modern medicine can move on to some more important goals — like helping us live 150 or longer?) If you search the sources I mentioned above, you’ll discover that it’s true that culture after culture after culture eating a hunter-gatherer diet lacks diseases of civilization. Suffice it to say that many modern foods (not on the market even 40 years ago, let alone 100) were never adequately tested for their health effects before being put onto the market. (I’m not saying they should have been or that it requires regulation, only that this is a plain fact. Look into good reviews of the medical research on omega 6 heavy oils and HFCS.)
Everyone has different standards and value hierarchies. Based on my value hierarchy, I would never tell someone they shouldn’t eat a cookie and yes, perhaps they should resent me telling them that. You’re absolutely correct that eating a cookie can be fun. On the other hand, I resent people implying that my avoidance of only the occasional cookie is uptight. And of course there are paleo dieters who would say that you shouldn’t eat even one cookie, ever. That seems extreme until you consider that their assessment is based in the fact of a long-term controlled study of how even slightly elevated blood sugar affects long-term mortality. Once you look at the literature, you realize they’re right. (I could link but I don’t want to overwhelm.) The snootiness, arrogance, and disdain for others’ behavior comes from the fact that they’re confident that they’re right. That may be a bad attitude, and they’re wrong to presume others’ values. (But it’s unsurprisingly also often the same attitude seen in Ayn Rand advocates for the same reason. They know they are right.) So, for people that place their health and longevity extremely seriously, I don’t think it’s a mistake for them to forego cookies most or all of the time. For people that want to enjoy life a little bit more right now and perhaps pay the health consequences of frequently elevated blood sugar later on, it’s fine for them to have a cookie every day. (However, I shouldn’t have to pay for their healthcare or the government-sponsored research that’s been studying diabetes, heart disease, and cancer for 50 years. And I’m completely justified in being outraged about it.)
You mentioned skepticism at the belief that diet can cure ailments. I would never claim that a more natural diet is capable of curing every ailment. However, it’s a fact that Type II diabetes can be totally reversed without a drop of insulin and that those patients could add a decade or more to their life by not increasing their insulin resistance. Eades has treated hundreds of patients this way, it is something every doctor should be telling their adult onset diabetic T2 patients, and it’s not happening. That’s an *outrage*. It’s also a fact that a low carbohydrate diet can shrink tumors, even in terminal cancer patients beyond hope of using radiation or chemo, and that’s been known since WWII and recently re-documented by a new study in the med. lit. Yet terminal cancer patients are left to die when their chemo fails to work. Even though there is a valid, *proven* option they could try that their doctor should know about (reducing dietary carbs to zero), they are left for dead. If you were to mention that diet can cure cancer to practically anyone on the street in the US, you’d be dismissed as a quack, even though it’s in the medical literature (it was a German group that recently studied this).
I used to live in constant fear of getting cancer (my mom came down with three cancers at age 25). Thanks to the dissemination of the work of true nutritional heroes, I no longer think of cancer as an almost inevitable disease that I have 40% chance of getting as I age. Same for diabetes. I can say with confidence that my chance of getting Type II diabetes now is pretty much zilch … and the medical literature backs me up (Type I is a different situation). I’m not so sure about cancer, but the idea that I can bolster my immune system that fights cancer by eating the right diet, and that if I happen to come down with cancer, I might have a viable alternative from chemo or radiation – well, wow. How else to put it. That’s incredibly liberating and life-affirming. (I wouldn’t have believed that even last year, but I’ve learned a lot.)
Good Calories, Bad Calories is an excellent source. It’s a pretty intense review of the medical literature re: nutrition. It has a strong low-carb slant and I do disagree with some of the conclusions but do feel it is an extremely honest review of the nutritional science to date.
Cordain (the person most responsible for bringing the paleo diet to the forefront), Eades (low carb advocate and friend of Cordain) and Taubes (science journalist who wrote GCBC) all know and respect each other. I do know that Eades and Cordain have some serious disagreements on saturated fat, and I would bet that Cordain has disagreements with Taubes on the healthy role of carbohydrates in the diet. But all of these things are miniscule with respect to what these guys have in common: a pursuit of the truth, the ongoing process of scientific discovery or validation of evolutionary logic with modern studies (which has already happened), and immensely improving the health and longevity of anyone who will listen. That’s heroic. Advocates of the paleo diet do seek to validate evolutionary principles with modern controlled trials. In fact Cordain just authored a study of a controlled trial of his version of the paleo diet. And all of them are intellectually honest and open to questioning their assumptions, which I’ve seen personally in all of their writing. Please excuse me for getting touchy when I see the paleo diet (advocated by people I regard as heroes) simplistically labeled as “anti-man” based on dubious associations with people I’ve never heard of who may or may not even be paleo (I’ve been studying this pretty intensely for over a year now so I’m familiar with the names).
Amy, this has gotten very long so at this point I’ll just say thanks for listening. I do hope you read GCBC. You’ll be blown away!
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Monica, diet is an optional thing. The principle is that man needs to eat in order to live. But does that mean that you must eat the most optimal, nutritious food possible or you’re acting against your interests? Am I immoral because I drink *a lot* of Diet Mountain Dew? Am I an evader because I do not pay one iota of attention to the labels on the foods I eat? From what I can gather of you and your ilk, I am both and probably anti-life and anti-science to boot. From what I can gather, you would regard my food choices as essentially deciding to eat poison.
But I’m not. Sure, our bodies are “designed” to process foods that our ancestors hunted and gathered. So what? Given my diet, my body seems to be doing a pretty capable job of processing what I eat and drink. I only qualify it with “seems” because I can’t say that I know how my organs look but I am healthy, of normal weight (not overweight), and in decent condition. Could I be in perfect health if I worked out three times a week, drank only water, ate only meat and other health foods, studied nutrition, pored over food labels, maximized my vitamin intake, and slept eight hours a night? Definitely, but *my* quality of life would suffer in so many respects.
That’s the rub. It’s optional once you get past the basic needs of life. But you don’t seem to regard it as such and so you take *every* opportunity to correct anyone who doesn’t follow a low-carb diet and browbeat them with talk of “serious scientific literature” touting the benefits of your approach. I’m sure that there’s ample support for your position and I’d be just as certain that it exists for the exact opposite of your diet. Because being conscientious about moderation, variety, and exercise will get you awfully far in being healthy. In the prehistoric times and in the Third World, one needn’t be conscientious because the facts of reality force a confrontation. In the First World, though, immoderation is prevalent and that leads to obesity and its concomitant problems.
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