One of the core ideas that the paleo diet rests upon is the concept of human evolution, and how it applies to agriculture and food sources.
The argument goes, since grains and other neolithic foods have only been a part of the human diet for a relatively short period (in evolutionary terms), the human body has not had sufficient time to fully adapt.
This lack of adaptation thereby increases the risk that these newer food sources pose to human health.
This theory is of course just a heuristic, and not really based on qualified experimental data. Matt Lalonde [1] made it quite clear that approaching nutritional science in this manner is bound to get you laughed out of the room by guys with Ph.D.’s behind their names. But, it at least serves as a good starting point for exploring the modern human diet. From there you perform controlled experiments to test this hypothesis, many of which are now being done on a regular basis.
Well, what if that theory is just flat out wrong?
Let’s get this straight. There are few things that we know for certain in science, and even those things could potentially change tomorrow. For instance, the theory of general relativity is in jeopardy because those guys in Geneva managed to make neutrinos go really fast [2].
In a similar manner, we might learn something new about human nutrition that will blow the paleo diet out of the water. I doubt it, but it could happen. And of course, we still don’t fully understand or have clear experimental data on things like gluten intolerance, obesity, and atherosclerosis. “Pretty sure” doesn’t really cut it when you’re actually serious about science.
Ok, so let’s play with around with a hypothetical. Let’s pretend like the paleo diet really is wrong, just like that lady at CNN told me [3].
I still think it’s a pretty damn good idea to eat a paleo diet. Why, you ask?
It’s a good idea because the modern industrial/corporate food system sucks, and most of the staple foods are tainted or unknowably risky to consume.
Modern wheat has been mutated to extremes to become something completely unlike what our ancestors ate even 100 years ago. Several strains of corn (maize) have been developed that have an innate insecticide produced by it’s cells. Soy has been engineered to resist herbicide, so it’s readily drenched in it. Dairy cows have had synthetic growth hormones and antibiotics injected in them to “enhance production capacity”.
All of these agricultural innovations might be innocuous, but the truth is we really don’t know for sure if they are. When companies like Monsanto pressure news organizations like Fox not to report damaging information about their products, and Fox actually complies [4], it becomes difficult to ascertain if these “foods” are actually safe for human consumption.
The difference between the U.S. and most other developed countries, is that the others (like some of those in Europe) have decided to err on the side of caution by refusing these products, primarily because they don’t know for sure if they are safe. In the U.S. the foods are readily approved because we can’t prove that they are dangerous. Of course, when the food corporations are pressuring journalists to not release evidence that they are dangerous, it’s difficult to challenge the status quo.
The really scary thing is that they haven’t limited themselves to just bullying billion dollar companies [5]. Eat our crappy food Europe, or else! Of course, Barack Obama promised [6] in 2007 to get GMO foods labeled, but so far nothing has been done
So, if you remove wheat, soy, corn, and dairy from your diet, what does that leave you with? Basically a paleo diet. The funny thing is, that it may turn out that part of the benefits of the paleo diet stem from removing exposure to these modern food hazards.
Round-up ready soy can’t be responsible for much of the modern ailments that have progressed even since the middle of the last century (since it is rather new), but it and other frankenfoods might have some connection to problems like the curiously rising increase in childhood food allergies [7].
Personally, I have nightmares sometimes that Monsanto has made a genetically modified radish, and wind-born pollen has infected my garden, forcing me to pay licensing fees to the corporation. Silly, yes. Possible one day? Maybe.
Until that day, it’s probably wise to seek culinary refuge in vegetables and crops that exist outside the targets of large agribusinesses. Thankfully, due to a need to grow plants at a large scale, less productive heirloom varieties and less conventional vegetables (like my radishes) are safe from their clutches. Avoid mass produced grains and legumes, where quality and sourcing is almost always suspect in the U.S., and focus more on colorful greens and tap root plants.
When it comes to meat and dairy, sourcing from a reputable pastured-based farm will be your best bet. In many cases you can go to these farms and talk to the farmers about their practices. You know what you are getting because you can see it. If you can’t find a local farm, U.S. Wellness Meats is a great option for grassfed meat.
In the end, I’m a bit concerned that the rest of the developed world finds the primary food crops of the U.S. to be too repulsive to eat. However, I’m even more concerned that more people in the U.S. aren’t bothered by that.
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25 Responses to Even if the Paleo Diet is Wrong, It’s Still a Good Idea
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Love this post! My wife and I only recently (last few months) began to realize the benefits of a paleo/primal diet. It is still taking quite an adjustment to rid our bodies of the unneeded high carb intake we ingest all the time. I really enjoy your style of writing and added you to my RSS feed. By the way I learned some great tips from your Vibram running techniques after having a seriously painful experience (pulled calves) Keep up the great work!
Tony´s last [type] ..The Top 10 Questions About P90X2
Thanks Tony, I appreciate the feedback – keep those calves in good shape!
I liked this post. Avoiding processed and franken- foods is undoubtably good advice. And if you work at a desk you don’t need that many carbs, to be sure, unless, perhaps, you work out for more than an hour a day. But do you need the Paleo Diet to understand this? I had already been following these prescriptions before I read a bit about the Paleo Diet. I also wonder at the purported paleo-history Paleo Diet advocates subscribe to. Surely before most foods were domesticated, they were consumed through hunting and gathering. How would one think to plant the seeds of something without already knowing that it’s comestible? Cooking has been around for 1.9 million years, so it’s conceivable that we been successful omnivores for a very long time. How strong is the proof that we are maladapted to grains anyway? I personally don’t have an adequate background in the natural sciences to evaluate the claims. Is the problem perhaps just that agriculture has made over-consumption of grains, etc., possible?
There seems to be a connection between adaptiveness to grain consumption and the degree of genetic material one has inherited from traditional grain producing areas like the Middle East.
For instance, Irish people have a very high incidence of celiac disease, probably owing to a higher degree of paleolithic neanderthal interbreeding and ancient Celtic bloodlines in that region.
Intolerances to different foods is going to be highly variable based on one’s own personal genome, but the rise of increasingly modified foods in the last 20-30 years seems to have made many of these foods bad for just about everyone.
Sorry, fourth-to-last sentence should read “we have been” …
Hey david!
Good post – I have *faith* in, rather than totally being convinced by the science of, the paleo diet, purely based on what it’s done for my husband over the last 6 months.
He’s gluten and dairy intolerant, outright allergic to wheat, soy & beans… Once we got all that sorted and turned mainly to grass fed meat – well, you can probably fill in the rest.
The kicker, is that I’m a mostly veg yogi. My experience is that you use yourself as your own personal science project. There are a lot of humans out there. One size does not fit all.
Paleo & veg eating has made a very interesting culinary division of labor here at our house, but both of us are doing great. Love your blog,
ST
Thank you Susan. I have a similar family life in my home. My fiancee doesn’t eat red meat, while I love a good steak. We make it work, as I’m sure you have.
David, that makes sense. Regional variations in available comestibles could influence gene selection and thus regional variations in tolerances to exogenous plants.
As an aside, I like starting off the day with whole-grained cereal with almond milk and OJ on the side. I don’t experience any problems with that, and it’s easy to serve, but do you have any suggestions for a more Paleo-friendly breakfast?
If you love your cereal, see if you can get a variety made from quinoa or some other grain not derived from generic wheat, corn, or soy.
Also, eggs are good any time of day but scrambled eggs and some bacon or ground meat just seems to me like the quintessential morning breakfast.
I mostly eat cereal because it’s easy and quiet to serve. I wake up 3-4 hours before everyone else and our bedroom is close to the kitchen, but I’ll see if I can find a way to make bacon and eggs quietly. Or maybe just fry ‘em the night before and reheat with a microwave. It would be awesome if the paleo diet licenses me to have bacon and eggs everyday! I used to consider that a weekend treat.
Oh, one more thing. As I mentioned, I don’t have the biological knowledge to evaluate many of the claims of the paleo diet, although, as a linguistic anthropologist, I am a bit skeptical of its reconstruction of paleolithic life (after all, there is plenty of documentation of hunter gatherers in the (neolithic) ethnographic record, so why not generalize about what those people eat/ate?). So if you have a minute, I’d be interesting in hearing your opinion about what Andrew Weil claims are some of the drawbacks to the paleo diet:
http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/QAA36527/eat-like-a-caveman-paleolithic-diet.html
Thanks, Erik
I don’t think there is any legitimacy to Dr. Weil’s claims, at all.
First of all the paleo diet doesn’t necessarily have to be low carb, but if it is, the body will preferentially run on ketones to preserve glycogen, or limit the need for glucose in the first place. Most people now-a-days aren’t very active, so glycogen depletion is hardly an issue for the average person.
Second, there is no scientifically proven need for excess amounts of fiber. There is actually a plausible theory that excess fiber is damaging to the colon, hence the overproduction of mucous.
Either way, a paleo diet is likely to provide superior amounts of fiber than the standard American diet anyway, so the point is moot. Of course, if all you eat is plants, then sure the paleo diet will provide less fiber. We aren’t cows though.
Finally, the bit about too much animal protein has long been debunked. The kidneys simply upregulate protein metabolism to compensate. Only people with deficient kidney function or kidney disease really need to worry about this.
Further he pulled out the ol’ lifespan argument to suggest that if hunter-gatherers lived longer they probably would have gotten heart disease. Averages are misleading when you account for high infant mortality. Hunter-gatherers routinely reached the age of 50-60 if they managed to avoid dying as a baby, or getting trampled by mastodons.
Weil basically pulled out the standard blah arguments against paleo that can easily be refuted just by searching on PubMed. I’m kind of disappointed he was so lazy.
Erik, you could make ahead little individual crustless quiches, that you can just pop in the microwave to reheat. And yeah, they could include bacon, or cheese, or anything else that strikes your fancy.
Thanks for the feedback David. I spotted the lifespan fallacy too, and generally take Weil with a grain of salt, because he’s a supplement shill and, as you pointed out, can often be lazy. It’s well documented that peasants live less well than hunter-gatherers, although that is partly because a good chunk of what they grow is extracted as tax or tribute to sustain urban populations and rural elites. Hunter-gatherers, besides getting more protein and living longer, also tend to have a lot more leisure time. Still, I wasn’t able to evaluate the bio-chemical info Weil gave, so it’s reassuring that you could easily respond to it. I didn’t understand very well what you said either, but thanks to you I’ll know how to frame an investigation into this matter when I have more time. Adopting some version of the Paleo diet shouldn’t be very hard, because I already eat a lot like that anyway. It’s mostly going to be a matter of cutting out grain-based carbs it seems.
I think the most important thing to recognize is, that traditional diets have been all over the board in terms of low-carb, high-carb, and in the middle. You don’t even have to eat tons of meat to be “paleo”. Macronutrient ratios are less important in this regard than overall food quality, in my opinion.
Thanks Angelyne, I’ll give that a try.
That last sentence is a great way to put it. And speaking to your second-to-last sentence, I read a long time ago that most known hunter-gathering societies are/were more gatherers than hunters in terms of average intake, something like an 80/20 ratio.
Great blog in general and I like this post a lot. When I talk to people who ask me about my way of eating I refrain from saying “paleo” and merely say I cook everything I eat and I don’t eat grains. That’s the point. Cook everything. This eliminates most of the bad stuff. Then stop grains and they’ll feel the difference. Even then, if they love their oats, go for it but at least cook it at home.
Excellent and thoughtful post. Thee thing that concerns me most is governmental interference in the menus of school children.
Edicts on what is health from the federal government into the mouths of 6 years old has the potential to make the current obesity trend look like the good old days.
And having some experience in this area, I know that this “help” is coming.
Oy vey! Keep writing, thanks for the thoughts and insight.
Do you think people like Jamie Oliver will be able to do any good in that regard?
Hello David,
First, I apologize for the tardiness. Apparently, I hadn’t clicked the follow-up and I have been a bit engaged
Second, thank you for writing.
Third, I am not familiar with Jamie but I am becoming so in short order.
Lastly, I am always wary when an industry/group/organization lobbies for a complete lack of transparency.
Lamar J´s last [type] ..Losing Weight With Exercise Alone
My thoughts exactly.
It must be said that processed foods need not be necessarily unhealthy. I know a few people in the industry and they, naturally, are able to read the ingredient labels properly. In other words, they know what’s missing as well as the actual meaning of what’s present. They have given me counsel on occasion regarding certain brands and products. Still, it might be interesting for you folk to know that, in general, their knowledge is highly specific to their line of business.
So, healthy or not, average people have no other valid solution than to take a step back. There is simply no way for most of us to walk through a supermarket and properly assess even 5% of the processed foodstuffs.
Like someone said somewhere. Stick to the edges of the supermarket and don’t venture down the aisles. The fresh stuff is on the periphery.
Txomin´s last [type] ..Measurements III
Good post. I reached a similar conclusion a few months ago after a long argument with a mostly-vegan friend. He doesn’t eat meat because he thinks the meat system is broken ethically and nutritionally so he eats a ton of grains and legumes to get enough complete protein in his diet. He didn’t buy my basic explainations of why we don’t eat grains/legumes (i.e., at best they don’t digest well, at worst they hurt you) and defended his eating choices on the basis that “many many cultures eat this way traditionally and live long healthy lives”. To preserve our friendship, we eventually managed to agree that by cooking for ourselves from ingredients that are products of nature, we’re agreeing on 99% of the important issues.
I appreciate the article, and the time you’ve taken to reply to responders. Can I point something out that might be worth editing? You appear to imply that Europe is a country. Yes, the EU functions as a bloc, but there are still nearly 30 countries within it, each with slightly different food rules.
Thank you for pointing that out Lauren. I actually thought about that when doing a final read over, but decided to ignore it. Maybe because it was late and I was tired!
But on second thought, I shall amend it like you suggest.