PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

Get daily sunlight

Dr. Mercola has some interesting new advice on sunlight, at Shocking Update -- Sunshine Can Actually Decrease Your Vitamin D Levels.

• Showers (with soap) interfere with Vitamin D production, because it takes a while for the oil soluble Vitamin D produced on the skin to be absorbed, and showers can wash it off first.
• Sunlight through glass windows (which has more UVA than UVB) actually lowers ones Vitamin D levels.
• Statins and other cholesterol lowering drugs lower ones Vitamin D levels, because cholesterol is a precursor for Vitamin D.

[rogermexico]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

Grains and other starch rich foods do provide something that vegetables do not...ENERGY. For those of us that are big into high intensity exercise, how do you suggest that we fuel for our activity?

Hello aps

Not a lot of energy in vegetables alone, that is why animal products with fat and protein should generally should be the core of your diet. Despite current nutritional dogma, and the belief in carbo-loading since the 70's, carbohydrate consumption is completely unnecessary for your energy (or any other) needs. Fat is the way we store energy in our own bodies, and eating fat is the evolutionarily preferred food source in a food-abundant environment.* During aerobic exercise, the predominant fuel source is fatty acids, supplemented by glycogen stores.

It is 100% possible to never eat any carbohydrate whatsoever and still do lots of physical work. Any carbs needed not provided from glycogen or food can be produced in abundance via gluconeogenesis. Glucose provided this way makes you literally burn fat, and keeps your insulin levels low.

Yo have about about an hour or more of exercise in your liver and muscle glycogen.

If you are a lean runner, you have enough energy in your body fat to walk about 800 miles.

You simply don't need carbs to exercise.

Try this:

Once you are adapted to low carb intake (it may take 6 weeks or more, so go slowly) your mitochondria, including in your muscles and your brain, will literally proliferate and be more energy efficient. Gradually start doing your workouts with less and less carb consumption prior to exercise, to the point where you are solely working out in the fasting state. By fasting state I mean no food for at least 12 hours. Now, most people think I am a lunatic when I suggest this, but hear me out.

I have talked about intermittent fasting as a complement to low carb eating to keep your insulin levels low. One reason they are complementary is once you are off the glucose/insulin hormonal yo yo, your ability to tolerate fasting is increased immeasurably. On a very low carb diet you are literally never hungry, in that desperate way you are when you are carb-dependent. Intermittent fasting is absolutely the best way to keep your insulin levels as low as possible (more on why that is good in the future)

Working up to fasting workouts slowly, you will find that your performance (running time, max lifting) eventually equals or exceeds what you could do before with a meal 2 hours before, as your body becomes more adapted to fatty acid metabolism and less dependent on glucose .

I have proved this through self-experimentation, and then found plenty of published literature that supports it. My business partner who is the marathon kayaker and the real athlete trains this way and he is spreading it to fellow athletes. You can google and find info on it now as well.

Now here is the cool part. When you race, you have new mitochondria and your newly efficient fat-preferring metabolism. Add a moderate carb load and some GU bars if its a long race, and you will be faster than you were before. Glucose is now your nitrous oxide, not your primary fuel.

When you want to climb K2, train in Leadville, Colorado, not Santa Monica.

*When food was abundant in paleo times, it was because there were large mammals rich in fat stores. Humans ate the fat, and it was adaptive for them to be satiated because food was abundant. No insulin response to make them store the fat, just use it for fuel and waste the rest. Conversely, when fruits were most abundant at the end of growing season, winter was approaching, and it may have been adaptive to store fat for the coming winter. That is why fructose has a strong insulin response and in fact, is sent straight to the liver to be converted into triglycerides. Eating lots of sugar year round is not something we were adapted to

Diet is not the only way to manipulate insulin sensitivity...exercise is the other biggie, and I would argue the more important of the 2 (diet/exercise) when it comes to increasing insulin sensitivity.

I used to think so too, but now I believe strongly it is the reverse. Insulin sensitivity is improved by exercise for sure, but not nearly as powerfully as with diet. With exercise, you are driving glucose directly into skeletal muscles, functionally "bypassing" the insulin-regulated glucose pump. As the same glucose load can now be handled with less insulin, you secrete less insulin, and as your cells see less insulin, they up-regulate their sensitivity.

This is occurring while you exercise, but not so much the rest of the time you are carb-loading or just eating the typical diet of 40-60 % carbs. Get carbs down to 20% or so, and the round-the-clock stabilization of low insulin levels will do much more to decrease the amount of insulin those cell receptors see, and they will be made much more sensitive than with just exercise.

I think the more important take home message is to eat for your activity. If you are very sedentary, carbs are not nearly as necessary as if you are big into resistance training or sprinting or other high intensity sports. Trying to get in the necessary fuel with a fat/protein/veggie diet is next to impossible.

Fats and proteins and whatever carbs come with your vegetables is all you need, whatever your activity.

Right now, I am going for a 4.5 mile run, followed by 45 minutes cross-fit workout. I had cup of decaf this morning but have eaten no food since 8 pm yesterday.

Thanks for your comments.

[raja]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

Roger,

It seems to me you have made two reversals concerning the paleo diet.
You now admit that: 1) Grains were used, at least to some degree, and 2) carbohydrate-rich diets were consumed by some cultures.

In a prior post, you said,

We are also not adapted to eating grass seeds, to which we have been exposed for only about 10,000 years.

That is not entirely true, as you said in your last post. "Clearly, at some point in or around mesopotamia, there was a technological transition to cultivated grain." In other words, humans were grain-eaters prior to 10,000 years ago. This is not a minor point, since a long history of grain eating by humans has allowed them to adapt to this food.

You qualify your statement by claiming that grain eating was "at most an incidental or small part of the diet" and not "predominant". I know of no evidence to support that statement. In fact, grain grows almost everywhere, and it can be gathered and stored for future use. Why would paleo people not exploit this food source, then exploit it further by the development of agriculture?

I agree with you that grains did not exist in the diet in the same quantities that they do today. However, I pointed out that, "carbohydrate-rich tubers were a large part of the pre-agriculture diet." Granted, grains are not tubers, but grains were able to take the place of these foraged carbohydrate sources because they are nutritionally similar in macronutrients." You responded, "Were there times and places of high carb consumption in addition to low like the Masai, the Inuit and The Plains tribes in north america? - With tubers I am sure there were, but I have not seen evidence of predominant grain- eating before agriculture. I believe the tribes with higher carb intake had levels of energy expenditure and enough food scarcity to keep insulin levels lower than if modern humans in cities ate the same way."
You are now admitting that high-carbohydrate intake did exist in human history. You qualify this by saying it was not harmful because of high energy expenditure and food scarcity.

There were times of food scarcity, but probably less so for the carbohydrate-rich foods. Starchy tubers are available most of the year protected in the ground, while animal prey and fresh green vegetables may have been much harder or impossible to obtain in the winter season.
Second, there is no question that pre-industrial societies got more exercise than modern people. But if we are adapted to a diet with ample carbohydrates, surely the answer for modern people is to continue that type of macronutrient-proportioned diet, and just eat less and get more exercise.

. . . we are trying to duplicate paleo metabolic conditions. Low carbs, fewer meals, intermittent fasting all keep insulin levels low.

Is this really the paleo diet?

Pre-industrial people were hunters and gatherers. They sought out food wherever they could find it. Judging from remote tribes living today, the men spent their time hunting, while the women foraged with their children and babies strapped to their backs . . . gathering nuts, grains, tubers, vegetables and berries.
Use of fire for cooking has been around for 125,000 years by some estimates, and we can assume that many of the foods collected were cooked. Cooking is beneficial . . . why else would cooking have evolved if there were not some evolutionary advantage? Why go to the trouble of gathering wood and preserving fire if people could just eat all their food raw? (The scientific answer is the enhancement of nutrient availability and destruction of anti-nutrients resulting from cooking.)

The fact is that we don't know how much of the paleo diet consisted of starchy carbohydrates (grains and tubers), and we will probably never know. So duplicating the paleo diet is impossible with any degree of certainty. The best evidence of what might have been is the research of Dr. West A. Price, who studied the health and diets of non-industrialized people in many remote locations around the world back in the 1920s and 30s. Of the groups he studied, some were eating more animal foods (e.g., Masai), while others were eating more vegetal foods. He found that those peoples eating in the middle of this animal-vegetal spectrum spectrum were the healthiest, and they all ate some form of starchy carbohydrate.

Nutrition is such a complex subject and scientific analysis can result in very bad advice (e.g., doctors' margarine recommendations). I put my faith in epidemiological studies that examine the health and diets of large groups of people from the macro perspective. I also pay attention to my body's intuitive wisdom -- from among natural foods, I let my instinct guide my selection and proportions. I often run across people on extreme diets who suffer from extreme cravings . . . like those on a high-meat diet who dream of eating a loaf of fresh-cooked bread which their theory prevents them from otherwise enjoying.

No grains, in addition to reducing the probabilty of coeliac disease and immune dysfunction because of our incomplete adaptation, eliminates the majority of the excess carbohydrates to the point where I can say, "eat all the nuts and other vegetables you want". Do you see the advantage here for efficacy?

Is celiac disease caused by grains, or does it result when unhealthy people eat grains?
It is well known that resistance to disease is partly determined by the health of the immune system. Wouldn't this also be true, at least to some degree, when it comes to allergic responses?
How many people with celiac disease have ruined their intestinal health by a diet containing sugar and refined flours, and are now unable to eat grains? Do these people need to avoid grains, or would it be better for them to get their intestinal health back in shape. I think that temporary cessation of grains is helpful, but that may not be the ultimate solution in most cases. Of course, this is just speculation on my part, since no long-term research has been done on healthy diets because the myopic medical profession cannot see the forest for the trees and doesn't even know what a healthy diet is :eek:. However, we do have this: "Celiac disease is the most common genetic disease in Europe. In Italy about 1 in 250 people and in Ireland about 1 in 300 people have celiac disease. It is rarely diagnosed in African, Chinese, and Japanese people." Why do the Africans, Chinese and Japanese people rarely have celiac disease? Is it because their diets are more traditional resulting in better health? Or is it that rice is a better grain than wheat in some respects?

If I am wrong it is at least completely harmless - I have yet to encounter a single benefit to eating wheat that I cannot get from eating asparagus, green beans, broccoli, wild mushrooms, romaine lettuce, etc. I think it is fair to ask grains advocates -what do they offer in compensation for the risk of coeliac disease, that we can't get elsewhere? Just because we needed them to form cities, are we bound to keep at it as a 10,000 year old tradition?

There are no long-term studies done on what you call the paleo diet. How can you flatly state that it is completely harmless?
What you can't get from vegetables that you can get from grains is adequate carbohydrates. In order to duplicate the actual paleo diet, you probably need 50% carbohydrate in your diet (admitted speculation), and the only way to do that is with starchy tubers and/or grains.

Clinically, I have had success in treating allergic rhinitis, asthma, irritable bowel syndrome, rheumatoid arthritis eczema, and Type II diabetes. Many of these subjects reported rapid improvement in these disorders that they were surprised by, as they were only trying to lose weight

Roger, I don't doubt that removing refined sugar and carbohydrates from anyone's diet will result in improved health. But that doesn't prove that your recommended diet as a whole is sound, or healthy in the long term.

I am as critical of science as a privileged sphere of inquiry as you are. Although we disagree, I hope you would grant that my views are certainly not mainstream and are even quite at odds with a variety of government and professional medical organizations. I agree with your point that we much use all levels of inquiry in addition to our reason to make sense of the world.

We actually agree on many things:

Eliminate refined sugars and grains
Use healthy fats (animal and mono-saturated)
Get daily sunlight
Eat grass-fed meat (I grow my own )
Adequate exercise

Where we disagree:

What is the true paleo diet
Are grains healthy or harmful

I would also add some things to your Dietary To Do list:

Avoid industrially grown and processed foods -- agricultural corporations don't care about your health, only their bottom line
Soak grains overnight before use to remove mineral-binding phytins
Eat the whole animal, not just the muscle meat -- consume organ meats and bone broths. (It's just a psychological aversion, get over it)
Eat food from one's climate zone
Eat food according to its season, using traditional techniques such as drying to preserve foods out of season
Eat whole foods
Use unrefined salt
Don't use vitamin and mineral supplements except as short-term medicines
Use high-vitamin cod liver oil if you can't get enough sun
Strive for disease prevention and treatment through lifestyle modification. Use convention or alternative medicine as a last resort (or the former if in need of trauma care). If you require a doctor, you've made a mistake in how you eat or live. Figure out what it is and correct it.

[rogermexico]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

The Japanese lifespan is the longest on the planet. Much longer healthy lives than USicans. Almost no obesity. They eat mostly fish, rice and veg. Almost no meat. Now they are adding meat to the diet they are getting taller, bigger, fatter and unhealthier.

Again, we are somewhat confounded by the term, "meat". Fish and eggs are animal products eaten by the japanese. If by meat, you mean beef, i don't doubt that as beef consumption increases, health indices decline. As I have pointed out elsewhere, you can't assess what you don't measure. Generally, absolute carbohydrate consumption and especially refined sugar consumption (including HFCS) increases even more than beef consumption or animal protein in general with increasing industrialization/wealth. That is, meat and sugar consumption are covariate, and as most of this research has not considered sugar the culprit they often don't look at that. Also, when total carb consumption is assessed in surveys, often they are not separated into unrefined/refined. Once again, well covered by Gary Taubes.

There is no doubt that although there is no nutritional requirement for carbs whatever (a simple metabolic fact people find hard to believe) some carbs are definitiely more potent than others. Sucrose/HFCS are definitely worse in term of insulin effect than other carbs sources, which is why I say you are more than half way there if you just totally eliminate all sugar and HFCS. As Americans eat about 160 lbs a year of refined sugar, if you tell them to just avoid it, I find it is clinically impossible for most regular people to do that unless yo give them something that subsitutes for it. That is why healthy fat substitution is step 2.

Observational studies are tricky because of the unknown variables as we have discussed earlier on he thread - but there are a couple of observations about Japan that counter the "Eat rice not meat" spin.

1) I believe the longest lived japanese are the Okinawans - who eat the most animal products of any japanese.

2) When the Japanese were "healthier", they ate more rice as a percentage of calories but possibly not so much more on an absolute level, that is their total calories were lower. Calorie restriction and extremely hard physical work can both keep your insulin levels low despite high carb consumption, but are not the healthiest or most comfortable ways to do it, IMO.

More importantly, their refined sugar consumption was just about zero.

3) When the japanese were healthier in terms of diseases we all worry about and study, they had periods of not so desirable diseases absolutely related to their high rice consumption. The advent of polished rice (which is what you get with your sushi) with mechanization probably increased availability, but polished rice has had important vitamins removed with the bran, and there were epidemics of BeriBeri (paralysis) until thaimin supplemention. White rice s probably not as bad as wheat for antinutrients, but its still a grain. Why eat something as a staple that has to be fortified?

I have seen Japanese come to the UK or US and *explode* in size due to the change in diet.

No doubt. North americans regardless of genetic origin tend eat a lot of sugar

Japanese food is reasonably portioned. And the key point is: they don't eat crap.

Yes, sugar is crap

I should also point out that the same foods are different in different places. Rice in the US is different from rice in the Punjab from rice in Japan.

Milk is a particularly notable example. The cow's milk in the UK is not that great. I drink goat's milk here. In the states it's undrinkable and actually makes me feel ill. In Norway the cow's milk actually tastes good and feels like it's doing you good. The rancidity level is lower. No doubt you can get good food in the states but in my observation by and large people don't.

Milk of any kind is not really paleolithic - there may be immune problems related to casein. That said, I don't think dairy is as bad as grains.

Then there is the factor of eating food suitable to your environment. Cold countries require more meat. The North Italian winter diet is different from the North Italian summer diet for example. So to characterise it as 'pasta' is to caricature and misunderstand.

I am not sure they require more meat, but certainly in environments with long winters and short growing seasons, large animals are an adaptive food source (scandinavia)

Here is Taubes commenting on asia from Eades' website:

"The Asian question first. I do address this in the book and I address it again in the afterward of the paperback. There are several variables we have to consider with any diet/health interaction. Not just the fat content and carb content, but the refinement of the carbs, the fructose content (in HFCS and sucrose primarily) and how long they’ve had to adapt to the refined carbs and sugars in the diet. In the case of Japan, for instance, the bulk of the population consumed brown rice rather than white until only recently, say the last 50 years. White rice is labor intensive and if you’re poor, you’re eating the unrefined rice, at least until machine refining became widely available. The more important issue, though, is the fructose. China, Japan, Korea, until very recently consumed exceedingly little sugar (sucrose). In the 1960s, when Keys was doing the Seven Countries Study and blaming the absence of heart disease in the Japanese on low-fat diets, their sugar consumption, on average, was around 40 pounds a year, or what the Americans and British were eating a century earlier. In the China Study, which is often evoked as refutation of the carb/insulin hypothesis, the Chinese ate virtually no sugar. In fact, sugar consumption wasn’t even measured in the study because it was so low. The full report of the study runs to 800 pages and there are only a couple of mentions of sugar. If I remember correctly (I don’t have my files with me at the moment) it was a few pounds per year. The point is that when researchers look at traditional populations eating their traditional diets — whether in rural China, Japan, the Kitava study in the South Pacific, Africa, etc — and find relatively low levels of heart disease, obesity and diabetes compared to urban/westernized societies, they’re inevitably looking at populations that eat relatively little or no refined carbs and sugar compared to populations that eat a lot. Some of these traditional populations ate high-fat diets (the Inuit, plains Indians, pastoralists like the Masai, the Tokelauans); some ate relatively low-fat diets (agriculturalists like the Hunza, the Japanese, etc.), but the common denominator was the relative absence of sugar and/or refined carbs. So the simplest possible hypothesis to explain the health of these populations is that they don’t eat these particularly poor quality carbohydrates, not that they did or did not eat high fat diets."

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

The pasta looks overcooked. American style. Steak looks ok. I couldn't run five yards after eating both of those however. Legs would get all saggy. I know Metalman is back when I start seeing lots of big technicolor pictures plastered up all over these pages.

stayed out of this until this one... bravo, aps1087!

i'm a runner and before i run i need fuel!



after... meat!

[*T*]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

double post

[*T*]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

Hi Jimmy

Average lifespan of paleolithic peoples is confounded by early mortality. Child mortality was very high and young males in some places had up to 25% percent mortality rates due to trauma (homicide/ warfare)
The relevant thing is if you can compare similar groups that differ mainly in diet.

As you have observed, for north americans at least, total elimination sugar and white four is half or more of the effect.

The Japanese lifespan is the longest on the planet. Much longer healthy lives than USicans. Almost no obesity. They eat mostly fish, rice and veg. Almost no meat. Now they are adding meat to the diet they are getting taller, bigger, fatter and unhealthier.

I have seen Japanese come to the UK or US and *explode* in size due to the change in diet.

Japanese food is reasonably portioned. And the key point is: they don't eat crap.


I should also point out that the same foods are different in different places. Rice in the US is different from rice in the Punjab from rice in Japan.
Milk is a particularly notable example. The cow's milk in the UK is not that great. I drink goat's milk here. In the states it's undrinkable and actually makes me feel ill. In Norway the cow's milk actually tastes good and feels like it's doing you good. The rancidity level is lower. No doubt you can get good food in the states but in my observation by and large people don't.
Then there is the factor of eating food suitable to your environment. Cold countries require more meat. The North Italian winter diet is different from the North Italian summer diet for example. So to characterise it as 'pasta' is to caricature and misunderstand.

[rogermexico]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

Well...what does turd research suggests? Sorry, forgot the scientific name for human leftovers found in the 'outhouses' in old caves. Did these folks consume a large diet of wild grains and/or wildlife? Are there any conclusions that can be reached about their health based on diet? Or...are there too few DNA dead bones and ancient turds around to come to a conclusion. On the other hand, we have a number of these on wall street we could do that should suffice for some comparative research.

Post to follow soon. Thanks for your patience. "Coprolith" = turd fossil

[rogermexico]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

Roger,

Thank you for posting your views and experience.

Thank you also those who also have contributed in this long thread.

I must say that most of my 1st order questions were addressed in the previous 5 pages of posts, but I still would ask one:

While humans indubitably were evolved to be omnivorous, studies of omnivorous monkeys like chimpanzees show that consumption of meat is not a daily occurrence.

http://www-rcf.usc.edu/~stanford/chimphunt.html

This seems to show that even for highly evolved, community social, and tool using chimpanzees, meat comprises only 3% of total diet. The link also seems to indicate high seasonality of meat consumption.

Secondly I also note a previously endemic problem in rich people in the Middle Ages: gout. This was I believe due to a diet mostly meat and wine.

Lastly the point about grains is somewhat unclear to me. The point about insulin is an interesting one - certainly it is at a convergence point between the refined sugar/processed food and caloric restriction regimes. However, the real problem isn't necessarily the grains so much as it may be the ease of processing.

While it is quite possible to eat huge amounts of calories via other foods - it is damned hard work. The scientist who went around eating what chimpanzees ate experienced this - foods in nature are very low density in terms of calories vs. weight without cooking. It may well be that the problem is due to the combination of (cooking and modern processing) and grains allowing greedy humans to eat too much too easily and too often.

The point of all this may simply be moderation.

While eating meat itself isn't necessarily bad, it seems that too much of anything is the problem. I don't fad diet, but my friends who've tried Atkins have told me that they just end up eating less over time as meat with no grains is simply distasteful after a short while.

The changes in Italian diet vs. health may not be so much a quality as a quantity issue. Ditto for South Asians at home vs. the US - though a breakout of rich Indian women in India vs. the US would be fascinating (unlike most of Asia, big is beautiful there).

My personal motto is: everything in moderation, including at times moderation!

Chimps are omnivores and we share a common anscestor -we are not evolved from them - not saying you thought that but just wanted to make that clear. Chimps are certainly more towards the herbivore scale than we are, Using the comparative anatomy reasoning I used in a post on the original thread, we can compare the gut volume to the body mass of the animal for a clue to the carnivory/herbivory ratio. I made the comparison with dogs, large cats, humans and gorillas, and bovines and stated that the ratio was pretty concordant with the eating behavior observed in the wild. Gorillas are very herbivorous and have gut/body ratio like more like a cow than the dogs or cats that we know are carnivores. The gut/body ratio for man was closer to that of a predatory cat than the gorilla, showing that genetic kinship is not the determinant of food adaptation. For the chimp to man comparison, the gut/body mass ratio is about 4 times higher for the chimp, consistent with observed greater vegetarianism in the chimp and greater carnivory in homo sapiens. I do find it inspiring, though, that even relatively vegetarian chimps eat eggs, my favorite food.

Different primates have evolved differently under different food sources. If there were no genetic drift in food source we would all require nothing but glucose like primitive cells (and cancer cells, I'll expand on that later) and could never metabolise fatty acids, a major evolutionary leap in energy utilization that allowed longer term energy storage in animals.

It is indeed held by some researchers, and I agree, that it was necessary for hominids to evolve the ability to kill and eat large mammals in order for homo sapiens to develop. Large mammals were probably first exploited by humans as scavengers, who used tools to smash the bones to get at the bone marrow and brains rich in monounsaturated fats and O3 fatty acids respectively. Toolmaking eventually allowed hunting with spear, atlatl (an amazingly efficient primitive weapon) and bow. The pursuit of large game animals is considered to be significant as it is hugely efficient in resource expenditure, allowed greater mobility than strictly foraging, and larger mammals have much more fat than say, rodents. This is believed to have been (and still is) crucial to brain development in humans, both phylogenetically and ontogeneticlally.

The Brain mass to gut mass ratio of humans relative to chimps is about 12:1. It would be hard to feed infant humans with rapidly growing brains and mature adults without large mammals, and humans could not have moved from the tropics to fruit and vegetable sparse ice age europe with out substantial adaptation to carnivory.

Regarding gout - anytime you hear rich food blamed for something - the bias has been to blame the meat or alcohol. I was taught in med school that gout had something to do with meat. I was never given good evidence for this, though, and clinically it just seemed to correlate with being fat.
Recently, I came across an interview with Gary Taubes who was asked if there were anything he regretted leaving out of his massive book, GCBC.
He said he had exhaustively reviewed the literature on gout and it is 100% related to fructose intake. Fructose causes hyperuricemia which causes gout. Fructose is the simple sugar that is 1/2 of sucrose and is the predominant sugar in "natural candy bars", fruit. Of course, as much as I ridicule today's sugary fruit for being overrated - it is excess refined sucrose that the rich are screwing themselves up with, not beef or gin or oranges.

I'll comment on Atkins later, but one problem I have is that it treats carbs from white bread adn nuts like theya re the same. That said, who thinks whole wheat bread tastes better than asparagus sauteed in butter? My favorite poisonous carb was always pancakes, which actually taste like crap without sticky sweet syrup. If you get rid of the sugars, most carb dishes that aren't veggies taste terrible, IMO. The reverence for grains is like driving an unsafe car that brought you where you are today, but is ready to be junked. 10,000 year old survival traditions die hard.


I will post in more detail soon on both "What's wrong with grains" and "Insulin, the evil messenger we can't live without"

The degree of refining with industrialization and roller mills is probably more than half the battle, but not all of it.

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

Your "troll" is having a whale of a time pointing out the inherent conceits in the Paleo dietary thesis for the world, old sport. The implicitly elitist nature of this paleo-dietary wild-animal-rich consumption ethos in the 21st Century is as large and tenderly available an ethical target as a rare, ivory-tusked elephant's rump. We need to stress test it in Chad, or Angola or Bangladesh for general robustness and applicability beyond the gated, enfranchised communities of 2030.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

I'm working on a longer post - What is the problem with grains?

I hope to have it ready in a day or so - it will address the glycoprotein question -thanks for your patience.

RM

I look forward to reading your further posts. Thanks for your insight and diligence.

[rogermexico]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

I'll have to give them a try. I have eaten plenty of other canned sardines over the years, but not found one that was all that delicious. Thanks.

And thanks again for the detailed and considered response.

I'm working on a longer post - What is the problem with grains?

I hope to have it ready in a day or so - it will address the glycoprotein question -thanks for your patience.

RM

[rogermexico]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

Thanks for the reply, and for bringing the topic up. It's been an interesting discussion.

I was going to make a suggestion to you that might also improve your health, but in reviewing your posts over the last couple of days it appears you may have discovered it yourself. I find if I avoid feeding trolls my stress level goes way down, and I believe my blood pressure improves dramatically.

Cheers.

Sometimes I'm a slow learner but starving the troll is working great.

Many are now passing on this bridge unmolested

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

I grew up with beans and semolina (on the humble end) of the diet. Fantastic stuff. You can go out and conquer the world if you have to after one of those simple meals. Metaphorically speaking, that is.

Luke,

I don't disagree that there is alot of fuel in vegatable fats. What I said was the NECESSARY fuel. Fat is not the fuel used in high intensity exercise...glycogen is.

Your example of "Mediterranean diet - lots of bean dishes with semolina pasta" is exactly what I am saying. You need these starch and carb rich foods to fuel high intensity exercise.

[aps1087]

Re: PaNu - The paleolithic nutrition argument clinic

Luke,

I don't disagree that there is alot of fuel in vegatable fats. What I said was the NECESSARY fuel. Fat is not the fuel used in high intensity exercise...glycogen is.

Your example of "Mediterranean diet - lots of bean dishes with semolina pasta" is exactly what I am saying. You need these starch and carb rich foods to fuel high intensity exercise.