I have two questions for proponents of the Paleo diet.

One is about the importance of meat and fish in the diet. How do you square this with the fact that vegetarian lifestyle is beneficial as well, specifically as far as obesity and cardiovascular diseases are concerned? (My tentative answer is simple, we seem to be surprisingly flexible animals as far as diet is concerned. I suspect any diet that is not completely one-sided (like radical forms of fruitarianism) and that excludes highly processed foods will be found beneficial.)

The other question I have is a completely practical one. Assuming the Paleo diet is the way to go, if everybody ditched grains and legumes from their diet, how do we feed the global population?

katja z wrote:
The other question I have is a completely practical one. Assuming the Paleo diet is the way to go, if everybody ditched grains and legumes from their diet, how do we feed the global population?

We don't. At the very root of modern society is agricultural production of grains. Palaeolithic people were disparate kin groups who spent their lives moving from site to site, taking what was seasonally available. While agriculture is at the root of many of the world's problems, especially with respect to the mammoth growth rate of human populations, we can't be so coldly analytical to pretend that it isn't also directly necessary for the well being of millions of people, and without it, they would starve.

While I can agree with many of the points made by someone like Apollonius with respect to ways to improve our diet, the argument that it is natural therefore it is good is fallacious. Our modern varied diet (taking the best interpretation) promotes healthy brains, full growth, strong bones and teeth, better immunity to diseases, and many other benefits. The 'we evolved to eat X' ignores previous iterations of our ancestors that subsisted off very different foods yet managed to thrive just the same.

Taken from another thread where it wasn't being treated due to it being off of the core topic.

My queries regarding Palaeo diet aren't focused on whether the conclusions are right - they may well be, and I am certainly open to the idea that we can improve our diets by minimising types of food, and obviously, of cutting out heavily processed foods.

My queries are about the premises on which it is founded. As I mentioned in the other thread:

The term 'palaeo diet' hinges on a series of falsehoods because the proponents of this diet don't actually know what they're talking about with regards to what early Homo sapiens populations ate: but it sounds good.

The premises appear to be (and please feel free to correct me if you think I am misrepresenting them)

1) Human populations evolved to eat specific food types.
2) The advent of agriculture was recent and changed those food types.
3) Humans haven't had sufficient time to adapt to those new types of foods.
4) Therefore we should return to eating what we ate for the millenia preceding the advent of agriculture.

Basically, every line there is flawed.

1) Early Homo sapiens populations radiated out across a significant chunk of the world and adapted their diets to the locally available food sources. They were also nomadic and collected seasonally available foods which means their own diets changed over the course of a year. Trying to claim a particular homogenous set of foods is a fantasy, and one which ignores the major element of our historical success - our adaptability to local conditions, including food acquisition.

2) While the percentage of cereal content of our diet undeniably increased considerably with the advent of agriculture, we had already been eating cereal produce for millenia prior to the advent of agricultural cultivation. Agricultural cultivation is grounded on the fact that human populations had been unconsciously/artificially selecting grains for millenia as they were seasonably available. The major change that lead to agriculture was climatic; the changing climate permitted the spread of cereal plants, and consequently their availability, resulting in the economic worth of them as a staple becoming sufficient to stop traipsing around the countryside and to settle down to cultivate them.

3) Humans have had sufficient time to (more than once) evolve lactose tolerance in a far shorter time than we've had agricultural societies. All the vegetable plants we eat today are barely recognisable to their wild origins. How is it that the plants have had time to make monumental adaptations, but we haven't?

4) The last is simply not practical in the modern world - unless we revert back to a global population of 1 million the world simply will not support this diet. The 'palaeo' diet is simply untenable with respect to the modern population and the world's ability to present sufficient nutrition without using cereals. Given the figures of global population of Homo sapiens up to the time of the advent of agriculture, and today's population of 7 billion, 99.9% of the world's population is reliant on agricultural produce for the majority of their nutritional requirements. While this doesn't make the conclusions false, it is naturally a serious problem that proponents have to address.

E. Samedi wrote:Spearthrower, while I usually agree with your posts, I didn't think you made a strong case here against the Paleo diet. I don't know whether it is valid or not, but I don't find it obviously implausible. Other animals have evolved to eat certain kinds of things, and I don't see why human would be an exception.

Ok, so can you tell me what we're evolved to eat?

How far back do we go? To just beyond our modern agricultural societies? To H erectus? To australopithecines?

Where do we draw the line? Why is one line meaningful and another not? The earliest branches of our hominid line were herbivores, eating heavy plant matter like roots and tubers that we simply do not have the biological faculties to manage today. If they, our ancestors, evolved to eat that... how is it that we made a transition to being omnivores?

Further, the most significant part of human dominance over the world is their adaptability. There really are not very many things we can't eat. Thus we could live anywhere and everywhere. Even if you just go back past the agricultural/pastoral divide, you have numerous hunter societies that live almost exclusively on meat - the Lapps who still live a traditional lifestyle today eat a pound of meat a day and practically zero vegetation! During the last Ice Age, in much of the world, plant matter was scarce and diets consisted of far more meat than anyone eats today. We have changed so many times, and we are so changeable; it's at the core of our success.

My point was and is that this whitewashing of a specific diet we evolved to eat is a fantasy. No such thing exists.

E. Samedi wrote:As to your 4 points...

1) Early Homo sapiens populations radiated out across a significant chunk of the world and adapted their diets to the locally available food sources...

I think it would be more accurate to say that that human diet varied within certain defined limits. No human groups that I am aware of ate grass or wood.

I think we need to be very specific before proceeding. When you say 'human groups' are you talking only about modern H sapiens? If so, can I ask why, given that the Palaeo argument is about what we allegedly evolved to eat and our evolution must therefore include preceding diets.

E. Samedi wrote:

2) While the percentage of cereal content of our diet undeniably increased considerably with the advent of agriculture, we had already been eating cereal produce for millenia...

Your argument here seems to be that because humans have been consuming X for a long time (millennia) that X must be healthy.

No, that's not remotely what I said - in fact, that's precisely the opposite. I am arguing against the claim that because we 'evolved to eat X, X must be good'... when we didn't actually evolve to eat anything specific, we evolved to be adaptable; it's the not-so-secret secret of our success!

How is it that we colonised the greater portion of the world where very different food sources are available? We have populations living off blubber animals, populations living off fish, populations living off dairy produce, populations living off grains.

What is 'good', in evolutionary terms, is what provides us sufficient nutrients and calories to make it worthwhile to collect/hunt that resource. That, in my opinion, is the actual factor with respect to a healthy diet - calories are far too easy to come by. Pop to the shops, pick up hundreds of thousands of calories, then sit at home scoffing it on one's arse. If we had to physically work for those calories, if there was a trade of energy spent for energy consumed, modern diets wouldn't be so problematic. I realise that's in part an over-simplification, and I raised other points elsewhere with respect to particular types of food being far too readily available, such as 'luxury' goods that require a heavy investment of labour, but are still relatively cheap and available.

E. Samedi wrote:Well, we have been consuming alcohol for a long time too, and though enjoyable, cannot be called healthy.

In moderation, I don't see why it's unhealthy. Resveratrols, for example, are medically shown to have a range of health benefits.

E. Samedi wrote:Still, given enough time (and I don't know what the magic number is) humans could adapt completely to the consumption of grains. Maybe we already have, I don't know.

I have been quite honest about this throughout: I do not know either. It's a proposition. However, I find it strange that we would not have evolved to when the grains themselves have evolved far more in that time than we're supposed to have been able to. There appears to be some kind of special pleading in this argument. The conditions even 10kya, and the animal and plant matter we had to hand are not the same as today. That goes for further back too. So this convenient application of an 'evolved' nutrition seems like an artificial construct.

E. Samedi wrote:

3) ...How is it that the plants have had time to make monumental adaptations, but we haven't?

Artificial selection. See, also, for example, the polymorphism of dogs.

So we have managed to artificially adapt other species to far greater levels of difference, but we haven't managed to artificially select ourselves in the process? It appears that some kind of magical barrier is being invoked that stops us achieving the same thing we achieve on others. I don't see how this can be the case.

E. Samedi wrote:

4) The last is simply not practical in the modern world...

This point is not relevant to the question at hand.

Actually, if you read my post again you will see why it IS relevant, and that it was part of the premises I set out as being the core argument of Palaeo dieters.

Point 4 = Therefore we should return to eating what we ate for the millenia preceding the advent of agriculture.

We cannot. Full stop. So even if all this were true, it's moot as we are simply not able to return to these food sources, which mostly don't exist anymore anyway as they've been changed by artificial selection (i.e. all the fruits and vegetables), as the world simply will not support 7 billion people living off the produce of a Palaeo diet.

Which one is 'better for you' - a diet that causes a percentage of people to be obese and get heart disease, or one that requires 99% of the world's population to die of starvation?

E. Samedi wrote:The question of whether the Paleo diet is or is not the most healthy diet for humans is entirely separate from the question of wether or not mass adoption is practical. It is certainly in my interest to possess a large fortune but that does not mean it must be practical on a mass scale.

You need to look at the premises I set out as being part of the argument Palaeo dieters present. As I said there, you are free to disagree with them if you think I am misrepresenting them, but your argument isn't addressing the fact that this is a claim made by Palaeo dieters.

E. Samedi wrote:(As an off topic aside, the modern agriculture system isn't a good metric anyway since it is highly fragile and entirely unsustainable given that it depends on external energy inputs from oil.)

I very much agree that our civilisation is perched on the top of a stack of cards. However, it is actually required for now until we find a better way as the majority of our population growth throughout history has occurred in the last century consequent to these developments in modern agriculture. As such, whether it's fragile or not, it is the only metric at present.

E. Samedi wrote:Finally, isn't there some experimental evidence to favor or disprove the Paleo diet? I read the debate about whole grains but that didn't seem conclusive one way or another.

As I have honestly admitted throughout, I do not know and from what I have read it's not clear cut. I have many times said that I am not in a position to judge the merits of the health claims. Quite expressly I said that while the conclusions might be right, the premises are faulty. My post was specifically addressing those faulty claims made by Palaeo dieters as reasoning towards their conclusion. I still maintain that this is a fantasy - it is not based on a knowledge of our culinary history, and is massively over-simplifying the actual facts to fit into the construct. It is, in essence, a myth.

A good example of one of these false claims that contribute to this myth is from the other thread where a palaeo diet proponent claimed that we are evolved to run short sprints. The actual fact is that we're evolved for endurance running, hounding the target animal over many hours, forcing it to exhaust itself.

My objective is to share my knowledge with respect to early human society and behaviour. I don't have a dog in the race as to whether a diet that reduces or eliminates grains is actually more healthy, and if sufficient studies resulted in this becoming commonly accepted, I have no ideological barrier to accepting it to. What I do have an ideological barrier to is quietly accepting the presentation of false ideas about our evolutionary history.

Ricky Reen wrote:

The Paleolithic diet has been criticized on the grounds that it cannot be implemented on a worldwide scale. According to Loren Cordain, if such a diet were widely adopted, it would compromise the food security of populations dependent on cereal grains for their subsistence. However, he says that where cereals are not a necessity, as in most western countries, reverting to a grain-free diet can be highly practical in terms of cutting long-term health care costs. Barry Bogin, a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan, states that less intensive farming techniques, such as pasture-grazed cattle, will not produce sufficient meat to feed the world’s population. On another level, critics have argued that "exclusion diets" such as the Stone Age diet "can be highly restrictive, socially disruptive, and expensive."

I found this one a while ago. what do you guys think about the diet's sustainability? Thanks

Sustainable for 10m people? Sure. 100m people? Sure. 1 billion people? Erm... 7 billion? I think we're going to need a bigger boat planet!

sirdoug2002 wrote:The Paleo Diet is contradictory at its root logic.

Most of the Paleo Diet sites I looked at in my recent search to find a good weight loss plan stated or implied that the Paleo Diet was a diet we, as human beings, were "meant" to eat for optimal nutrition. The theory is that we evolved from cavemen who hunted wild prey and ate meat as a primary dietary element.

The logic that we were "meant" to eat a certain way implies a plan, not an evolution. If you believe in a plan, like most of the world who believes in some form of god who created humans, then you might better accept the Bible view that God created man and placed him in a garden and told him to eat freely of the various plants (except one tree).

If you believe in creation and original sin and the story of Adam and Eve and their offspring being the first humans and the origin of human life on Earth (as I do), then you also believe that God only gave man permission to eat meat after man sinned and that even then he warned man not to eat certain "unclean" meats and encouraged man to eat "clean meats". You would also believe that agriculture/horticulture was, literally, one of the first occupations and that when man was expelled from God's garden, man took up farming both plant-based foods and clean animals for food as well as clothing and other needs.

If you believe in the later global flood (as I do) then you also understand that God instructed Noah to bring only 2 of most animals (minimum number to survive as a species) and 7 of clean animals such as cattle (allowing for those animals to repopulate more quickly and perhaps allow the 8 people on the arc to eat one).

If you ignore the Bible and other creation-based explanations of how we came to exist and what we were meant to eat and you believe we evolved from some form of lower life form, then you must believe that our diet has changed many times during our evolution. Looking at our current teeth and digestive system we are not designed to eat meat as a main source of nutrition. We are designed to eat grains and other plant-based products. So, either by design or by evolution, I have concluded that he Paleo Diet is not a healthy or sustainable way for me to lose weight and not the way I was "meant" to eat. I think I will stick with the proven "eat less, move more" plan while taking a green and/or vitamin and mineral supplement to cover any nutritional holes in my imperfect diet.

Yeah but, if I can be frank: if you believe in fairy tales like The Global Flud, then you might as well trust whatever website you happen to read, because you're clearly not displaying the same level of skeptical scrutiny to the motivations for your trust.

I mean... come on? You really believe there was a global flood regardless of the complete absence of geological evidence for it? Even though the Egyptians, Assyrians, Sumerians, to name but a few, apparently managed to carry on quite happily while under a mile of water? Do you really think that a population consisting of just 7 individuals would have the genetic diversity to survive a virus? Cattle in particular are subject to nasty pandemics. Regardless of invoking God's divine Cattle Protection - we'd be able to see it in their genetic markers, just like we can with cheetahs whose population dropped to possibly lower than 100 individuals - and the markers are perfectly clear and indisputable. Why aren't they in ALL animals, including humans?

If you want - we can make a new thread to discuss this as it's clearly going to go off-topic!

One thing we can agree on is the diet: eat small portions, more frequently, and be active - that's good for people regardless of what they believe in.