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“Paleofantasy”: Stone Age delusions

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Re: “Paleofantasy”: Stone Age delusions

#161

Post by jgj »

Goladus wrote: post #158
jgj wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paleo is not a "low carb" diet. The point of Paleo is not to reduce the number of carbohydrates you ingest; nor is it to enter ketosis; nor is the primary goal of Paleo to lose weight. You have been reading the wrong things, and I can't even imagine what lead you to believe that you could run at any serious level without ingesting carbs. The pop-fad elements of the diet that have been parroted by journalists are gene…

Paleo is a low-carb diet. By consequence rather than design, and it's certainly not an Atkins/ketosis diet, but the emphasis is on fish, meat and eggs. If you need to consume a standard ratio of carbs:protein:fat on the paleo diet you're going to have an oddball variation of what most people do on paleo and be eating lots and lots of squash, yams, and sweet potatoes. Some folks can handle dairy just fine and do so. S…

By consequence, Paleo is low carb if, while following the diet, you don't eat a lot of carbs. What you call an "oddball variation" is what some others might call "what works for them".

Re: “Paleofantasy”: Stone Age delusions

#162

Post by dalke »

VLM wrote: post #136
miles wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that grains and legumes cause obesity is absurd. Asians have been living largely on both for thousands of years [1,2] and have enjoyed incredibly low obesity rates [3] until recently. Consuming more calories than you expend is the culprit here, not grains and legumes. If we want to single out some of the leading causes for overconsumption, I'd point to refined sugar, oils (pure fat), junk food, and high fruc…

In a modern american diet is it possible to eat grains without your laundry list of "sugar, oils, junk food, HFCS"? It doesn't matter if you "can" eat grains although they're almost never available in a format that meets the other requirements. Don't try to tell me every american, especially fat ones, cracks open a can of creamed corn kernels every meal for a vegetable. In a modern fat american diet, grains = wonder…

"Is there any junk food out there made without dairy, soy protein extract, or wheat?"

Jell-O gelatin snacks? Its ingredients list is "WATER, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, SUGAR, GELATIN, CONTAINS LESS THAN 0.5% OF ADIPIC ACID AND CITRIC ACID (FOR TARTNESS), SODIUM CITRATE (CONTROLS ACIDITY), RED 40, ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR."

Fruit roll-ups also look like they foot the bill, but I can't copy&paste the ingredient list.

As you say, there are corn chips, like Fritos: "Corn, Corn Oil, and Salt".

Frito-Lay has a list of foods which contain neither gluten nor dairy, at http://www.fritolay.com/your-health/us-products-not-containi... and a list of foods containing soy at http://www.fritolay.com/your-health/us-products-containing-s... .

Putting the two together give: BAKEN-ETS® Fried Pork Skins, ... CHESTER'S® Butter Flavored Puffcorn Snacks, ... EL ISLENO® Maduro Sweet Plantain Chips, ... RUFFLES® TAPATIO® Limon Flavored Potato Chips ... FRITO-LAY® Cashews, ... SPITZ® Smoky BBQ Sunflower Seeds ... and more. (I mostly omitted flavor variations.)

That reminded me that banana chips are one of my favorite junk foods. "Bananas, Coconut Oil, Sugar, Natural Flavor" say the lists at http://www.walgreens.com/store/c/nice!-banana-chips/ID=prod6... and http://www.bulkbarn.ca/en-ca/products.html?product=2558 .

That's at least a couple more junk food options than "plain potato chips and some corn chips."

Re: “Paleofantasy”: Stone Age delusions

#163

Post by randomsearch »

I'm pretty new to this paleo idea.

If I get this right, the idea is that we can't be adapted for a diet that changed only recently, so therefore we should eat the diet we are likely to be more adapted to. So this kind of makes sense, in a "sounds reasonable" way.

It's certainly true that switching to a system of agriculture resulted in a drop in nutritional health, in the short term.

But, equally, what about the argument that goes: when we used to eat this diet, we died a lot younger than now. ok, they were lots of reasons for that, but we died a lot younger, so it's not unreasonable to imagine that diet was part of the cause.

Both arguments seem reasonable without being rigorous. I don't see why you'd choose one over the other.

Having had friends who studied nutrition at a top UK university, and read a bit about it myself, it seems to me that we know very little about nutrition in general. The best advice appears to be "eat a well-rounded diet with plenty of fresh fruit and veg, and don't eat too much junk food."

The idea of switching to something as radically different as a paleo diet, compared to what we've been eating for thousands of years, without a full scientific understanding of what is best, seems a bit reckless to me. I think the burden of proof lies heavily on the paleo side. And that requires not just a handful of empirical studies; I read a bit about one of these studies [1], and was not well executed - it didn't even use a control group. People adopting the diet without substantial evidence in its favour might be gambling with their health.

Anyone recommend good books on the topic? I'd like to read more.

[1] Effects of a short-term intervention with a paleolithic diet in healthy volunteers. Osterdahl M, Kocturk T, Koochek A, Wändell PE.

Re: “Paleofantasy”: Stone Age delusions

#164

Post by dalke »

Selfcommit wrote: post #154
dalke wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your metaphor of adding wet sticks to a fire is flawed, from a thermodynamics argument. Assuming that the fire is large enough, it will dry out the wet sticks through evaporation/boiling, and the wood's total contribution to the heat ("energy out") will be unchanged. Now, of course for the people sitting around the fire, some of the heat that would be warming them up or used for cooking is instead used to force a pha…

Thanks for the links on the Hacker diet, the rubber bag concept sounds interesting, I'll check it out. As for my metaphor - actually I think it holds very true to what you're saying. You pre-qualified that the fire be hot enough to overcome the dampness of the sticks. That's my exact point. Think of the water as insulin and the stick itself as the fat you want to burn. If you're consistently slamming yourself into in…

Now you're using the body's metabolism to explain the metaphor to explain the body's metabolism. I don't think it's supposed to work that way. :) To highlight some of the difficulties:

So, insulin shock is the specific heat of water and/or the heat of evaporation? Does fire "slam into" the water?

As a technical point, there's a distinction between heat and temperature. The fire does not need to be "hot", it just needs to have enough heat to evaporate some of the water on the new wood, and of course hot enough to catch the wood on fire. At that point the reaction becomes self-sustaining.

I don't know how to apply that heat/temperature distinction to the metaphor.

If the "fire is out" then what are we using to survive?

(These are rhetorical. I think I know the point you're trying to get across.)

Also, what does a "perfect machine" have to do with anything? Surely not from a thermodynamics viewpoints. I can't think of anyone who thinks of the human body as a perfect machine, and I have a hard time thinking of what that would even mean.

Re: “Paleofantasy”: Stone Age delusions

#166

Post by graeme »

jgj wrote: post #159
potatolicious wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The point of Paleo is not to reduce the number of carbohydrates you ingest; nor is it to enter ketosis" Having been curious enough to browse paleo forums (including /r/paleo most recently), this is how most adherents seem to define it. They may be wrong, but in that case it seems the majority of the paleo community is wrong. > "But please discontinue spreading misinformation about Paleo" It would be nice, then, if…

I agree with you that the community at large is full of individuals looking for quick-weight-loss diet magic and that ketosis can be a fringe benefit of Paleo if you intentionally limit your carbs. But the community is not the diet, and the _majority_ of the community are, as with most diets, people following a fad insomuch as it doesn't actually interfere with their current habits. /r/paleo was a good source for a h…

Mark's daily apple or Robb Wolf's site are probably more representative.

Re: “Paleofantasy”: Stone Age delusions

#167

Post by defen »

I agree that 10,000 years is sufficient time for evolution to affect the human genome. But the "diseases of civilization" that paleo worries about (cancer, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, etc) tend to kick in at 50+, don't they? So it seems like evolution's ability to influence those would be limited, at best.

Re: “Paleofantasy”: Stone Age delusions

#168

Post by [deleted] »

mekoka wrote: post #152
Sumaso wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what he is trying to say is you don't need any fancy rules except for: >> Yes, eating lots of carbs is bad for you. So is eating lots of fatty food. Or lots of anything. Just eat lots of green stuff, and make sure you get adequate amounts of protein & carbs. To lose weight, make sure calories in By agreeing with him, you have to come to the conclusion that following the above advice is what makes any diet good. T…

I can agree with him on that specific point, but beyond that there's the issue of people he calls pseudo-scientists (who are actual scientists that do actual academic research on the topic), that are linking degenerative diseases and grain consumption. http://thepaleodiet.com/published-research-about-the-paleo-d... . That and the accompanying evidence on actual people http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLjgBLwH3Wc .

[deleted]

Re: “Paleofantasy”: Stone Age delusions

#169

Post by graeme »

jbattle wrote: post #160
derleth wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have already passed their life-expectancy The reason life expectancies were 35 back then was due to horrible infant and early childhood mortalities. People lived on the close order of 100 years (70-80 or so) back long before we had anything like medicine. For example: > A saeculum is a length of time roughly equal to the potential lifetime of a person or the equivalent of the complete renewal of a human populatio…

First, the age of the Roman republic was a long way from the stone age. Second, by then grain was a HUGE part of the diet, so drawing conclusions about life expectancy from Roman traditions is probably not a great example. Third, Romans didn't live that long - here are a list of emperors I could find who died of natural causes... Augustus - 75 Tiberius - 77 Vespasian - 69 Titus - 41 Nerva - 67 Trajan - 63 Hadrian - 6…

I'm not sure why he brought up the Romans. But I think he wanted to illustrate how unintuitive life expectancy is.

According to Wikipedia, which cites brittanica (does anyone have a real source on this?), roman life expectancy was 28!

But if you survived to age 15, your life spam was expected to be much longer.

In this context the HG life expectancy of 33 is better than it sounds.

Re: “Paleofantasy”: Stone Age delusions

#170

Post by tokenadult »

dalke wrote: post #147
tokenadult wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Amazon review is not by someone who is a verified purchaser of the item under review, nor does the reviewer appear to be, from the reviewer's other reviews I've quickly glanced at, someone who is deeply familiar with the science on the subject. So, yes, the topic is inflammatory, but I wouldn't think less of the book based on a "review" like that. I agree with you that it would be good to read reviews of the new…

That sounds like an story I would like to read. I couldn't find details about it. I did find that Taleb's second book for mass audiences was "The Black Swan", but that knowledge didn't help. I did find that Taleb is quick critical of poor-quality reviewers, but did not find something which matches your description. I presume it's described in his third book?

Thanks for asking. I'll try a more complicated Google search to track that down. I see you've already looked at Taleb's website, right?

http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/

but he no longer has the same list of stories about reviews of his earlier books linked there from the home page.

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